This argument seemed to be making an impression. “I’m going to have to blow this Temple up before long, if you don’t let me go,” Christopher said. “If I’m not back before morning, someone in the Castle is going to come in and find only one life of me lying in bed. Then they’ll tell Gabriel de Witt and we’ll both be in trouble. I told you he knows how to get to other worlds. If he comes here, you won’t like it.”
“You’re selfish!” the Goddess said. “You aren’t sympathetic at all – you’re just scared.”
At this Christopher lost his temper. “Let me go,” he said, “or I’ll blow the whole place sky high!”
The Goddess simply ran from the room, mopping at her face with a piece of her robe.
“Is something wrong, dear?” asked a Priestess outside.
“No, no,” Christopher heard the Goddess say. “Bethi isn’t very well, that’s all.”
She was gone for quite a long time after that. Probably she had to distract the Priestesses from coming and looking at the white cat. But soon after that, smells of spicy food began to fill the air. Christopher grew seriously alarmed. Time was getting on and it really would be morning at the Castle soon. Then he would be in real trouble. More time passed. He could hear people in the yard behind counting the cats and feeding them again. “Bethi’s missing,” someone said.
“She’s with the Living One still,” someone else answered. “Her kittens are due soon.”
Still more time passed. By the time the Goddess reappeared, desperation had forced Christopher’s mind into quite a new tack. He saw that he would have to give her some kind of help, even if it was not what she wanted, or he would never get away before morning.
The Goddess in her ruthless way was obviously meaning to be kind-hearted. When she came in this time, she was carrying a spicy pancake thing wrapped round hot meat and vegetables. She tore bits off it and popped them into Christopher’s mouth. There was some searing kind of pepper in it. His eyes watered. “Listen,” he choked. “What’s really the matter with you? What made you suddenly decide to make me help you?”
“I told you!” the Goddess said impatiently. “It was what you said when I was ill – that I wasn’t going to be the Living Asheth when I grow up. After that I couldn’t think of anything else but what was going to happen to me then.”
“So you want to know for certain?” Christopher said.
“More than anything else in this world!” the Goddess said.
“Then will you let me go if I help you find out what’s really going to happen to you?” Christopher bargained. “I can’t take you to my world – you know I can’t – but I can help you this way.”
The Goddess stood twisting the last piece of pancake about in her fingers. “Yes,” she said. “All right. But I can’t see how you can find out any better than I can.”
“I can,” said Christopher. “What you have to do is go and stand in front of that golden statue of Asheth you showed me and ask it what’s going to happen to you when you stop being the Living Asheth. If it doesn’t say anything, you’ll know nothing much is going to happen and you’ll be able to leave this Temple and go to school.” This struck him as pretty cunning, since there was no way that he could see that a golden statue could talk.
“Now why didn’t I think of that!” the Goddess exclaimed. “That’s clever! But—” She twisted the piece of pancake about again. “But Asheth doesn’t talk, you know, not exactly. She does everything by signs. Portents and omens and things. And she doesn’t always give one when people ask.”
This was annoying. “But she’ll give you one,” Christopher said persuasively. “You’re supposed to be her, after all, so it only amounts to asking her to remind you of something both of you know already. Go and tell her to do you a portent – only make her put a time-limit on it, so that if there isn’t one, you’ll know that there isn’t.”
“I will,” said the Goddess decisively. She stuffed the piece of pancake into Christopher’s mouth and dusted her hands with a determined jangle. “I’ll go and ask her this minute!” And she strode out of the room, chank-chink, chank-chink, sounding rather like the soldiers at that moment marching round the yard behind Christopher’s back.
He spat the pancake out, shut his eyes to squeeze the water out, and wished he was able to cross his fingers.
Five minutes later, the Goddess strode back looking much more cheerful. “Done it!” she said. “She didn’t want to tell me. I had to bully her. But I told her to take her Very Stupid face off and stop trying to fool me, and she gave in.” She looked at Christopher rather wonderingly. “I’ve never got the upper hand of her before!”
“Yes, but what did she say?” Christopher asked. He would have danced with impatience if the wall had not stopped him.
“Oh, nothing yet,” said the Goddess. “But I promise faithfully I’ll let you go when she does. She said she couldn’t manage it at once. She wanted to wait till tomorrow, but I said that was far too long. So she said that the very earliest she could manage a portent was midnight tonight—”
“Midnight!” Christopher exclaimed.
“That’s only three hours away now,” the Goddess told him soothingly. “And I said she had to make it on the dot, or I’d be really angry. You must understand her point of view – she has to pull the strings of Fate and that does take time.”
With his heart sinking, Christopher tried to calculate what time that would make it back at the Castle. The very earliest he could get it to was ten o’clock in the morning. But perhaps the maid who came to wake him would simply think he was tired. It would take her an hour or so to get worried enough to tell Flavian or someone, and by that time he would be back with any luck. “Midnight then,” he said, sighing a bit. “And you’re to let me go then, or I’ll summon a whirlwind, set everything on fire and take the roof off the Temple.”
During those three hours, he kept wondering why he did not do that at once. It was only partly that he did not want to lose another life. He felt a sort of duty to wait and set the Goddess’s mind at rest. He had started her worrying by making that remark, and before that he had made her discontented by bringing her those school stories.
He had a lot of fellow-feeling for her in her strange lonely life. And of course Papa had told him that you did not use magic against a lady. Somehow all these things combined to keep Christopher sagging in a half-sitting way in the wall, patiently waiting for midnight.
Some of the time the Goddess sat on her cushions, tensely stroking the white cat, as if she expected the portent any moment. Much of the time she was busy. She was called away to lessons, and then to prayers, and finally to have a bath. While she was away, Christopher had the rather desperate idea that he might be able to get in touch with the life he knew must be lying in bed at the Castle. He thought he might be able to get it to get up and do lessons for him. But though he had a sort of feeling of a separate piece of him quite clearly, he did not seem to be in touch with it – or if he was, he had no means of knowing. Do lessons! he thought. Get out of bed and behave like me! And he wondered for the hundredth time why he did not simply blow up the Temple and leave.
Finally the Goddess came back in a long white nightgown and only two bracelets. She kissed Mother Proudfoot goodnight in the archway and got among her white cushions with her arms lovingly round her white cat.
“It won’t be long now,” she told Christopher.
“It had better not be!” he said. “Honestly, I can’t think why you grumble about your life. I’d swop your Mother Proudfoot for Flavian and Gabriel any day!”
“Yes, maybe I am being silly,” the Goddess agreed, rather drowsily. “On the other hand, I can tell you don’t believe in Asheth and that makes you see it quite differently from me.”
Christopher could tell by her breathing that she dropped off to sleep then. He must have dozed himself in the end. The jelly-like wall was not really uncomfortable.
He was roused by a strange high cheeping noise. It was an oddly
desperate sound, a little like the noise baby birds make calling and calling to be fed. Christopher jumped awake to find a big bar of white moonlight falling across the tiles on the floor.
“Oh look!” said the Goddess. “It’s the portent.” Her pointing arm came into the moonlight, with a bracelet dangling from it. She was pointing at Bethi the white cat. Bethi was lying stiffly stretched out in the bar of moonlight. Something tiny and very, very white was crawling and scrambling all over Bethi, filling the air with desperate high crying.
The Goddess surged off her cushions and on to her knees and picked the tiny thing up. “It’s frozen,” she said. “Bethi’s had a kitten and—” There was a long pause. “Christopher,” said the Goddess, obviously trying to sound calm, “Bethi’s dead. That means I’m going to die when they get a new Living Asheth.”
Kneeling by the dead cat, she screamed and screamed and screamed.
Lights went on. Feet flapped on the tiles, running. Christopher struggled to get himself as far back in the wall as he could. He knew how the Goddess felt. He had felt the same when he woke up in the mortuary. But he wished she would stop screaming. As skinny Mother Proudfoot rushed into the room followed by two other Priestesses, he did his best to begin a levitation spell.
But the Goddess kept her promise. Still screaming, she backed away from Bethi’s pathetic corpse as if it horrified her, and flung out one arm dramatically, so that her dangling bracelet flipped Christopher’s invisible nose. Luckily the bracelet was silver.
Christopher landed back in his own bed in the Castle with the crash he was now used to. He was solid and visible and in his pyjamas, and, by the light, it was nearly midday. He sat up hastily. Gabriel de Witt was sitting in the wooden chair across the room, staring at him even more grimly than usual.
Gabriel had his elbows on the arms of the chair and his long knob-knuckled hands together in a point under his eagle nose. Over them, his eyes seemed as hard to look away from as the dragon’s.
“So you have been spirit travelling,” he said. “I suspect you do so habitually. That would explain a great deal. Will you kindly inform me just where you have been and why it took you so long to come back.”
There was nothing Christopher could do but explain. He rather wished he could have died instead. Losing a life was nothing compared with the way Gabriel looked at him.
“The Temple of Asheth!” Gabriel said. “You foolish boy! Asheth is one of the most vicious and vengeful goddesses in the Related Worlds. Her military Arm has been known to pursue people across worlds and over many years, on far slighter grounds than you have given her. Thank goodness you refrained from blowing a hole in her Temple. And I am relieved that you at least had the sense to leave the Living Asheth to her fate.”
“Her fate? They weren’t really going to kill her off, were they?” Christopher asked.
“Of course they will,” Gabriel said in his calmest and driest way. “That was the meaning of the portent: the older Goddess dies when the new Living Asheth is chosen. The theory, I believe, is that the older one will enrich the power of the deity. This one must be particularly valuable to them, as she seems to be quite an enchantress in her own right.”
Christopher was horrified. He saw suddenly that the Goddess had known, or at least suspected, what was going to happen to her. That was why she had tried to get him to help her. “How can you be so calm about it?” he said. “She’s only got one life. Can’t you do something to help her?”
“My good Christopher,” said Gabriel, “there are, over all the Series of all the Related Worlds, more than a hundred worlds, and in more than half of them there are practices which horrify any civilised person. If I were to expend my time and sympathy on these, I would have none left over to do what I am paid to do – which is to prevent the misuse of magic here. This is why I must take action over you. Do you deny that you have been misusing magic?”
“I—” said Christopher.
“You most certainly have,” said Gabriel. “You must have lost at least three of your lives in some other world – and you may, for all I know, have lost all six while you were spirit travelling. But since the outer life, the life you should have lost, was lying here apparently asleep, natural laws have been forced to bend in order to enable you to lose it in the proper way. Much more of this, and you will set up a serious singularity throughout Series Twelve.”
“I didn’t lose one this time,” Christopher said defensively.
“Then you must have lost it last time you went spirit travelling,” Gabriel said. “You are definitely one short again. And this is not going to occur any more, Christopher. Oblige me by getting dressed at once and coming with me to my office.”
“Er—” Christopher said. “I haven’t had breakfast yet. Can I—?”
“No,” said Gabriel.
By this Christopher knew that things were very bad indeed. He found he was shaking as he got up and went to the washroom. The door of the washroom would not shut. Christopher could tell Gabriel was holding it open with a strong spell to make sure he did not try to get away. Under Gabriel’s eyes, he washed and dressed quicker than he had ever done in his life.
“Christopher,” Gabriel said, while he was hurriedly brushing his hair, “you must realise that I am deeply concerned about you. Nobody should lose lives at the rate that you do. What is wrong?”
“I don’t do it just to annoy you,” Christopher said bitterly, “if that’s what you think.”
Gabriel sighed. “I may be a poor guardian, but I know my duty,” he said. “Come along.”
He stalked silently through the corridors with Christopher half running to keep up. What had become of his sixth life? Christopher wondered, with the bit of his mind that was not taken up with terror. He was inclined to think that Gabriel had miscounted.
Inside the twilight office, Miss Rosalie and Dr Simonson were waiting with one of the younger men on the Castle staff. All of them were swathed in a shimmering transparent spell.
Christopher’s eyes flicked anxiously from them to the leather couch in the middle of the dark floor. It reminded him of a dentist’s chair. Beyond it was a stand holding two bell jars. The one on the left had a large bobbin hanging from nothing inside it, while the one on the right seemed to be empty except for a curtain ring or something lying at the bottom.
“What are you going to do?” Christopher said, and his voice came out more than a little squeaky.
Miss Rosalie stepped up to Gabriel and handed him some gloves on a glass tray. As Gabriel worked his fingers into the gloves, he said, “This is the severe step I warned you of after your fire. I intend to remove your ninth life from you without harming either it or you. Afterwards I shall put it in the Castle safe, under nine charms that only I can unlock. Since you will then only be able to have that life by coming to me and asking me to unlock those nine charms, this might induce you to be more careful with the two lives you will have left.”
Miss Rosalie and Dr Simonson began wrapping Gabriel in a sheeny spell like their own. “Taking a life out intact is something only Gabriel knows how to do,” Miss Rosalie said proudly.
Dr Simonson, to Christopher’s surprise, seemed to be trying to be kind. He said, “These spells are only for hygiene. Don’t look so alarmed. Lie down on this couch now. I promise you it won’t hurt a bit.”
Just what the dentist said! Christopher thought as he quakingly lay down.
Gabriel turned this way and that to let the spell settle round him. “The reason Frederick Parkinson is here,” he said, “and not patrolling the World Edge as he should be, is to make sure that you do no spirit travelling while your life is being detached. That would put you in extreme peril, Christopher, so please try to remain in this world while we work.”
Someone cast a very strong sleep spell then. Christopher went out like a light. Dr Simonson turned out to have told the truth. He felt nothing at all for several hours. When he woke up, ravenously hungry and slightly itchy deep inside somewhere, he simply felt
rather cheated. If he did have to have a life taken away, he would have liked to have watched how it was done.
Gabriel and the others were leaning against the black desk, drinking tea and looking exhausted. Frederick Parkinson said, “You kept trying to spirit travel. I had my work cut out to stop you.”
Miss Rosalie hurried to bring Christopher a cup of tea too.
“We kept you asleep until your life was all on the bobbin,” she said. “It’s just winding down into the gold ring now – look.” She pointed to the two bell jars. The bobbin inside the left hand jar was almost full of shiny pinkish thread, and it was rotating in a slow stately way in the air. In the right hand jar, the ring was up in the air now too, spinning fast and jerkily. “How are you now, dear?” Miss Rosalie asked.
“Can you feel anything? Are you quite well?” Gabriel asked. He sounded quite anxious.
Dr Simonson seemed quite as concerned. He took Christopher’s pulse and then tested his mind by asking him to do sums. “He does seem to be fine,” he told the others.
“Thank goodness!” Gabriel said, rubbing his face with his hands. “Tell Flavian – no he’s out on the World Edge, isn’t he? Frederick, would you put Christopher to bed and tell the housekeeper that he’s ready for that nourishing meal now?”
Everyone was so nervous and concerned about him that Christopher realised that no one had ever tried to take someone’s spare life away before. He was not sure what he felt about that. What would they have done if it hadn’t worked? he wondered, while he was sitting in bed eating almost more chicken and cream puffs than he could hold. Frederick Parkinson sat by him while he ate, and went on sitting by him all evening. Christopher did not know which irritated him most: Frederick or the itch deep down inside him. He went to sleep early in order to get rid of both.
He woke up in the middle of the night to find himself alone in the room with the gaslight still burning. He got out of bed at once and went to see if the slit in the Castle spells had been mended. To his surprise, it was still there. It looked as if nobody had realised how he went to the Anywheres. He was just about to go through the slit, when he happened to look back at his bed. The boy lying there among the rumpled covers had a vague unreal look, like Tacroy before he was firmed up. The sight gave Christopher a most unpleasant jolt. He really did have only two lives left now. The last life was locked away in the Castle safe and there was no way he could use it without Gabriel’s permission. Hating Gabriel more than ever, he went back to bed.
The Chrestomanci Series Page 74