The Chrestomanci Series

by Jones, Diana Wynne

  Anthea said cheerfully, “Hallo, Mother. This is Anthea.”

  My mother said, “Good heavens!” which was not surprising. It had been four years. “I thought you’d left here for good,” she added.

  “I have really,” Anthea said. “But I thought you ought to know when your daughter gets married.”

  “I don’t believe it,” my mother said. “No daughter of mine would ever even think of enslaving herself to a male ethic—”

  “Well, I am,” Anthea said. “He’s wonderful. I knew you’d disapprove, but I had to tell you. And how’s Conrad?” There was a blank pause on the other end of the line. “My little brother,” Anthea said. “Remember?”

  “Oh,” said my mother. “Oh, yes. But he’s not here now. He insisted on leaving school as soon as he was old enough and he took a job right outside this district. I…”

  “Did Uncle Alfred tell you that?” Anthea interrupted.

  “No, of course not,” my mother said. “You know as well as I do that Alfred is a compulsive liar. He told me Conrad was staying on at school. I even signed the form, and then Conrad went off without a word, just like you did. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve two children like you.” Then, while Anthea was trying to say that it was not true about me at least, my mother suddenly snapped, “Who is this wonderful man who has lured you into female bondage, Anthea?”

  “If you mean marriage, Mother,” Anthea said, “it’s Count Robert of Stallery.”

  At this, my mother uttered something that sounded like “That impostor!” though it was more of a strange, wailing yelp, and dropped the phone. We heard it clatter on to a hard surface. There was some kind of distant commotion then, until someone firmly put the phone back and cut us off.

  As Anthea hung the whirring receiver back on its rest, I had the hardest job in the world not to burst into tears. Tears pushed and welled at my eyes and I had to stand rigid and stare at the shelves of books in front of me. They bulged and swam. I felt utterly let down and betrayed. Everyone had lied to me. By now, I didn’t even know what the truth was.

  Anthea put her arm round me, hard. Christopher said, “I know how you feel, Grant. Something a bit like this happened to me too once.”

  Anthea asked him, “Is our mother under a spell, do you think?”

  “She just doesn’t care!” I managed to say.

  “No, Grant, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,” Christopher said. “Think of it as a mixture of lies and very small spells done by someone who knows her very well and who knows she’ll go where she’s pushed if she’s pushed often enough and gently enough. It sounds as if much the same was done to you, Grant. What’s this Walker you were supposed to summon? Why don’t you try summoning it now, and see what happens?”

  The same dry-mouthed fear seized me that I had felt in the Magicians’ Circle. I was horrified. “No, no!” I cried out. “I’m not supposed to do that until I know!”

  “Know what?” my sister asked.

  “The – the person who’s – the one who I should have killed in my last life,” I stammered.

  I felt Anthea and Christopher look at one another across my head. “Fear spell,” Christopher said. “And you don’t know, do you, Grant? Then it’s much safer to summon the thing now, before there’s any real danger.”

  “Yes, do that. Do it at once, Conrad,” Anthea said. “I want to know what he’s making you do. And you,” she said to Christopher, “if you really are an enchanter, you can stand guard on the door in case that butler comes back with a computer.”

  Christopher’s face was such a mixture of surprise and outrage that I nearly laughed. “If I am an enchanter!” he said. “If! I’ve a good mind to turn you into a hippopotamus and see how Count Robert likes you then!” But he went and stood with his shoulders against the door all the same, glowering at my sister. “Summon away, Grant,” he said. “Do what the hippopotamus tells you.

  Anthea still had her arm round me. “I won’t let it hurt you,” she said, just as if I were six years old again and she was putting a plaster on my knee.

  I leaned on her as I took the wine-blotched cork out of my waistcoat pocket. I still felt miserably ashamed of myself for believing all those lies, but the dry-mouthed fear seemed to have gone. And the cork was so ordinary. It had Illary Wines 1893 stamped on it and it smelt faintly sour. I began to feel silly. I even wondered if the Magicians’ Circle had been playing a joke on me. But I pointed the cork at the end wall of the library and said, “I hereby summon a Walker. Come to me, and give me what I need. I think it’s a hoax,” I added to Anthea.

  “No, it isn’t,” Anthea said, sounding sharp and stern. Her arm went tight round my shoulders.

  There was a sudden feeling of vast open distances. It was a very odd feeling, because the library was still all around us, close and warm and filled with the quiet, mildewy scent of books, but the distances were there too. I could smell them. They brought a sharp, icy smell like the winds over frozen plains. Then I realised I could see the distance too. Beyond the books, further off than the edge of any world, there was a huge curving horizon, faintly lit by an icy sunrise, and winds that I couldn’t feel blew off it. I knew those were the winds of eternity. And real fear gripped me, nothing to do with any fear spell.

  Then I realised that I could see the Walker coming. Across the huge horizon, lit from behind by the strange hidden sunlight, a dark figure came walking. He or she walked in an odd, hurried, careful way, bending a little over the small thing it carried in both hands, as if whatever it was might spill or break if it was jogged in any way. So it walked smoothly but quickly in little steps, and the winds blew its hair and its clothes out sideways – except that the hair and the clothes never moved at all. On it came, and on. And all the time, I could see the shelves of books in front of me, in ordinary daylight, and yet I could see the distance and the Walker just as clearly.

  Anthea’s arm was clamped around me. I could feel her trembling. Christopher’s shoulders thumped against the library door as he tried to back away and I heard him mutter, “Gracious heavens!” We all knew there was nothing we could do to stop the Walker coming.

  It came nearer and nearer with its strange, pattering strides, and the winds blew its clothes and its hair and they still never moved, and it still bent over the small thing in its hands. When it was only yards away, and the room filled with gusts of arctic scent that we could smell but not feel, I could have sworn the Walker was taller than the library ceiling – and that was two storeys high. But when it came right up to me, it was only a foot or so taller than Anthea. It was properly inside the room then and I was numbed with the cold that I couldn’t feel, only smell. It sort of bent over me. I saw a sweep of dark hair blown unmovingly away from a white face and long dark eyes. The eyes looked at me intently as it held out one hand to me. I had never seen any eyes so intent. I knew as I looked back that this was because the Walker was bound to get whatever it gave me exactly right. Exactly right. But I had to give it the cork first in exchange.

  I put the cork into the hand it was holding out. That hand closed around the cork and the other hand came out and passed me something else, something cold as ice and about twice as long and a good deal heavier. My face felt stiff and numb, but I managed to say, “Thanks,” in a mumbling sort of way. The intent white face in front of me nodded in reply, once.

  Then the Walker walked on past Anthea and me.

  All our breaths, Christopher’s, Anthea’s and mine, came out in a “Whoosh!” of pure relief. As soon as the Walker had gone past me, it had gone. The icy smell and the horizon of eternity had gone too, and the library was once more an enclosed, warm room.

  Christopher said, in a voice that was trying not to sound too awed, “Was it a man or a woman? I couldn’t tell at all.”

  “I’m not sure that applies to a being like that,” Anthea said. “What did it give you, Conrad?”

  I looked at the thing in my hand. It felt quite warm now, or only cold the
way metal always feels. I looked at it and puzzled. It seemed to be a small corkscrew – very like the one I used to struggle with when the Magicians’ Circle wanted a bottle of port opened – one of those with an open handle that you hook two fingers through, with little curls at either side for two more fingers. But there was a key sticking out from the top of the handle. If I held the thing one way up it was a corkscrew, but if I turned it round the corkscrew became the handle of the key.

  I held the thing up to Anthea and twiddled it at Christopher. “Look. I’m supposed to need this. What do you think I do with it?”

  Anthea leaned over me to look. “It could be the key to a wine cellar.”

  Christopher slapped the side of his velvet breeches. “That’s it! The hippopotamus has got it in one! I knew it was important to get into that wine cellar! Come on, Grant. Let’s go and do it before we have to go back on duty.”

  He rushed off to the gallery staircase. I followed him slowly, feeling upset and puzzled and let down. I had expected the Walker to give me something much more dangerous than a key or a corkscrew.

  “Get a move on, Conrad,” Anthea said. “That butler…”

  So I hurried a bit, and lucky that I did. I had only just climbed into the gallery when the door below opened again. Mr Amos came importantly in, followed by a line of footmen carrying a viewscreen, a tower, a keyboard, drums of flex, armloads of disks, a stack of power cells, a printer, boxes of paper and a load of other accessories.

  “I shall supervise the setting up of the equipment personally, miss,” Mr Amos said to Anthea.

  Christopher dragged me through the door at the back of the balcony. “Good,” he said, when we were safely out in the corridor. “If he’s busy in there, he can’t possibly be in the wine cellar. Let’s go, Grant!”

  We galloped downstairs, and down again to the undercroft. “Funny,” I said to Christopher as we tiptoed towards the stairs that led to the cellar. “I didn’t know any of those footmen with Mr Amos. Did you?”

  “Hush,” he said. “Utmost caution, Grant.”

  Actually, there was no one about and it was quite safe. Christopher was just being dramatic because it was all so easy. There were nice broad steps curving down to the cellar and a light switch beside the door at the bottom so that I could see to put the corkscrew-key into the keyhole. The keyhole looked far too big, but the key went in, fitted exactly, and unlocked the door when I turned it. The door swung open easily and silently, and lights came on in the cellar as it opened.

  “Lock it after you,” Christopher said.

  “No,” I said. “We may need to get out quickly.”

  Christopher shrugged. I pushed the door shut and we walked on into a set of low, cold rooms lined with wine racks and barrels. There were dusty bottles and shiny new bottles, rank on rank of them, little kegs labelled cognac in foreign letters, bigger barrels labelled jerez that Christopher said meant sherry, and whole walls of champagne.

  “One could get awfully drunk here,” Christopher remarked, surveying a dusty wall of bottles marked Nuits d’été 1848. “I have quite a mind to drown my sorrows, Grant. I saw Millie. I talked to her. Do you know how to open champagne?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” I said. I pulled him away and led him on, and on, past thousands of bottles, until we came to another locked door in a wall at the end.

  “Ah,” said Christopher. “This may be it – whatever it is. Does your gadget work on this door too?”

  I tried the corkscrew-key again, and it worked. This door creaked a bit as it opened, as if it were not used very much, and we saw why as soon as we were inside. Lights came on and showed another, newer-looking staircase that led to a trap door in the ceiling. Christopher looked up at the shiny new metal of the trap door very thoughtfully.

  “I do believe,” he said, “that we may be right under the butler’s pantry here, Grant. In which case, the important stuff is just round this corner.”

  The walls here were of quite new brick. It looked as if an extra room had been built, off at an angle to the main cellars. We edged round the corner to it. There we both stopped, quite bewildered. This room was lined – as closely as the wine cellars were lined with bottles – with lighted, flickering viewscreens. From floor to ceiling they were stacked in rows. Most were covered with green columns of figures that ran and jumped and changed all the time; but about a third of them, mostly on the end wall, were full of strange swirlings or coloured jagged shapes. The jumping and flickering made me seasick. Worse than that was the peculiar buzzing of magic in the room, electric and alien and feeling like metal bars vibrating. I had to look at the floor for a while, until I got used to it. But Christopher walked up and down the room watching the screens with interest.

  “Do you understand this, Grant?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “I almost do,” Christopher said, “but I’m going to need your help to be sure.” He pointed to a screen of jumping numbers. “For instance, what does Coe-Smith mean?”

  “Stock market,” I said. “I think.”

  “Right!” Christopher said triumphantly. He pointed to another screen, where blue columns of numbers raced so fast that I couldn’t read them. “What’s Buda-Parich?”

  “That’s a city,” I said, “over in the middle of the continent. It’s where all the big banks are.”

  “And here’s Ludwich,” Christopher said, at another screen. “I know that one. More big banks and a stock exchange in Ludwich, am I right? But there can’t be a city called Metal Futures, can there? This lot of screens must be stocks and shares then. Yes, Chemics, Heavy Munitions, Carbon Products—it sort of makes sense. And…” He paused at a clump of screens where green and red lines zigzagged, bent and climbed. “These lot have to be graphs. But the really puzzling ones,” he went on, moving round to the end wall, “are these. They just seem to be patterns. What do you think this one is? The one that’s all jagged moving shapes.”

  “Fractals?” I suggested.

  “I wouldn’t know a fractal if it jumped up and bit me,” Christopher said. “Which it almost looks as if it could do. Oh, look. These must be the controls.”

  Under the possible fractals there was a sloping metal console. Rows of buttons took up the top half of it. The bottom part held a very used-looking keyboard. The lights from the screens painted winding coloured patterns on Christopher’s attentive face as he leant both hands on the edge of the console and stared at the rows of buttons.

  “Interesting,” he said. “When controls are used a lot, you can see which the important ones are. This keyboard-thingy is quite filthy with finger grease. Used every day, I should think. And this one on its own at the top has been used almost as much.” His thin white finger pointed to a square button up on the right above all the others. The metal around this button was worn shiny and ribby, with a ring of grease around the shiny part. The label under it was all but worn away. As far as I could see, it said SHIFT.

  “That must be…” I began, but Christopher turned to me, looking almost unholy in the coloured lights.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Dare we, Grant? Dare we?”

  “No, we daren’t,” I said.

  Christopher simply grinned and pressed the used, square button firmly down.

  We felt the shift like an earthquake down there. Our feet seemed to jerk sideways under us. All the screens blinked and began to flicker away madly in new configurations. Above the console, the strange patterns wove and writhed into quite different shapes and colours.

  “Now you’ve done it!” I said. “Let’s get out.”

  Christopher made a face, but he nodded and began to tiptoe away from the console. I had just turned to follow him, when a voice spoke. It was a woman’s voice, very cultivated and rather deep. “Amos!” it said, and stopped both of us in our tracks. We stood, bent and on tiptoe, craning to look up at the round grid in the ceiling where the voice had come from. “Amos,” it said. “Do pay attention. I don’t think we can affo
rd to make changes at the moment. We may have trouble this end. I told you about the ratty little fellow we caught sneaking around the office. Security locked him up, but he must have been some kind of magic user because he got away in the night. Amos! Are you listening?”

  Christopher and I waited for no more. I clutched his arm and he grabbed my shoulder and we bundled one another round the corner and out through the door. I could scarcely turn the corkscrew-key in the lock for giggling. Christopher giggled too. It was the silly way you behave when you feel you have almost been caught.

  As we sped back past the ranks of wine, Christopher said in a giggling whimper, “That was never the Countess, was it?”

  “No,” I said. “Mrs Amos?”

  “A bit lah-di-dah for that,” Christopher said.

  We were still laughing when we came to the outer door and I locked that after us, and we didn’t really get a grip on ourselves until we came to the lobby of the undercroft and I tried to fit the corkscrew-key into my waistcoat pocket. It wouldn’t go. It was more than twice as long as the wine cork and it stuck out whatever I did.

  Christopher said, “Here. Let me.” He whipped a piece of string out of thin air, threaded it through the corkscrew handle, knotted the ends together and hung the lot round my neck. “Under your shirt with it, Grant,” he said.

  While I was stuffing it out of sight under my cravat, Miss Semple came into the lobby, full speed ahead, striped skirts flying. “I’ve been looking all over for you two!” she said. “You’re eating in the Middle Hall from now on, with the new Staff…” She stopped, went back a step and put her hands up in horror. She was the sort of person who did that. “My goodness!” she said. “Go and get into clean uniforms at once! You’ve got two minutes. You’ll be late for lunch, but it will serve you right.”

  We fled up the undercroft steps and dodged into the Staff toilets at the top. Christopher sagged against the nearest wall inside. “This has been quite the busiest morning of my life,” he said. “Damned if I go all the way up to the attics again!”