Chrestomanci sneezed. “Because of your own folly,” he said. “You gods of Theare have had everything so well worked out for so long that you can’t see beyond your own routine.”
“I shall blast you for that,” Zond announced.
“Not if any of you wish to survive,” Chrestomanci said.
There was a long murmur of protest from the other gods. They wished to survive. They were trying to work out what Chrestomanci meant. Zond saw it as a threat to his authority and thought he had better be cautious. “Proceed,” he said.
“One of your most efficient features,” Chrestomanci said, “is that your prophecies always come true. So why, when a prophecy is unpleasant to you, do you think you can alter it? That, my good gods, is rank folly. Besides, no one can halt his own Dissolution, least of all you gods of Theare. But you forgot. You forgot you had deprived both yourselves and mankind of any kind of free will, by organizing yourselves so precisely. You pushed Thasper, the Sage of Dissolution, into my world, forgetting that there is still chance in my world. By chance, Thasper was discovered after only seven years. Lucky for Theare that he was. I shudder to think what might have happened if Thasper had remained three years old for all his allotted lifetime.”
“That was my fault!” cried Imperion. “I take the blame.” He turned to Thasper. “Forgive me,” he said. “You are my own son.”
Was this, Thasper wondered, what Alina meant by the gods blessing her womb? He had not thought it was more than a figure of speech. He looked at Imperion, blinking a little in the god’s dazzle. He was not wholly impressed. A fine god, and an honest one, but Thasper could see he had a limited outlook. “Of course I forgive you,” he said politely.
“It is also lucky,” Chrestomanci said, “that none of you succeeded in killing the Sage. Thasper is a god’s son. That means there can only ever be one of him, and because of your prophecy, he has to be alive to preach Dissolution. You could have destroyed Theare. As it is, you have caused it to blur into a mass of cracks. Theare is too well organized to divide into two alternative worlds, as my world would. Instead, events have had to happen which could not have happened. Theare has cracked and warped, and you have all but brought about your own Dissolution.”
“What can we do?” Zond said, aghast.
“There’s only one thing you can do,” Chrestomanci told him. “Let Thasper be. Let him preach Dissolution and stop trying to blow him up. That will bring about free will and a free future. Then either Theare will heal, or it will split, cleanly and painlessly, into two healthy new worlds.”
“So we bring about our own downfall?” Zond asked mournfully.
“It was always inevitable,” said Chrestomanci.
Zond sighed. “Very well. Thasper, son of Imperion, I reluctantly give you my blessing to go forth and preach Dissolution. Go in peace.”
Thasper bowed. Then he stood there silent a long time. He did not notice Imperion and Ock both trying to attract his attention. The newspaper report had talked of the Sage as full of anguish and self-doubt. Now he knew why. He looked at Chrestomanci, who was blowing his nose again. “How can I preach Dissolution?” he said. “How can I not believe in the gods when I have seen them for myself?”
“That’s a question you certainly should be asking,” Chrestomanci croaked. “Go down to Theare and ask it.” Thasper nodded and turned to go. Chrestomanci leaned toward him and said, from behind his handkerchief, “Ask yourself this, too: can the gods catch flu? I think I may have given it to all of them. Find out and let me know, there’s a good chap.”
THE MASTER
This is the trouble with being a newly qualified vet. The call came at 5:50 A.M. I thought it was a man’s voice, though it was high for a man, and I didn’t quite catch the name—Harry Sanovit? Harrison Ovett? Anyway, he said it was urgent.
Accordingly, I found myself on the edge of a plain, facing a dark fir forest. It was about midmorning. The fir trees stood dark and evenly spaced, exhaling their crackling gummy scent, with vistas of trodden-looking pine needles beneath them. A wolfwood, I thought. I was sure that thought was right. The spacing of the trees was so regular that it suggested an artificial pinewood in the zoo, and there was a kind of humming, far down at the edges of the senses, as if machinery was at work sustaining a man-made environment here. The division between trees and plain was so sharp that I had some doubts that I would be able to enter the wood.
But I stepped inside with no difficulty. Under the trees it was cooler, more strongly scented, and full of an odd kind of depression, which made me sure that there was some sort of danger here. I walked on the carpet of needles cautiously, relaxed but intensely afraid. There seemed to be some kind of path winding between the straight boles, and I followed it into the heart of the wood. After a few turns, flies buzzed around something just off the path. Danger! pricked out all over my skin like sweat, but I went and looked all the same.
It was a young woman about my own age. From the flies and the freshness, I would have said she had been killed only hours ago. Her throat had been torn out. The expression on her half-averted face was of sheer terror. She had glorious red hair and was wearing what looked, improbably, to be evening dress.
I backed away, swallowing. As I backed, something came up beside me. I whirled around with a croak of terror.
“No need to fear,” he said. “I am only the fool.”
He was very tall and thin and ungainly. His feet were in big, laced boots, jigging a silent, ingratiating dance on the pine needles, and the rest of his clothes were a dull brown and close-fitting. His huge hands came out to me placatingly. “I am Egbert,” he said. “You may call me Eggs. You will take no harm if you stay with me.” His eyes slid off mine apologetically, round and blue-gray. He grinned all over his small, inane face. Under his close crop of straw-fair hair, his face was indeed that of a near idiot. He did not seem to notice the woman’s corpse at all, even though he seemed to know I was full of horror.
“What’s going on here?” I asked him helplessly. “I’m a vet, not a—not a—mortician. What animal needs me?”
He smiled seraphically at nothing over my left shoulder. “I am only Eggs, Lady. I don’t not know nothing. What you need to do is call the Master. Then you will know.”
“So where is the Master?” I said.
He looked baffled by this question. “Hereabouts,” he suggested. He gave another beguiling smile, over my right shoulder this time, panting slightly. “He will come if you call him right. Will I show you the house, Lady? There are rare sights there.”
“Yes, if you like,” I said. Anything to get away from whatever had killed that girl. Besides, I trusted him somehow. When he had said I would take no harm if I was with him, it had been said in a way I believed.
He turned and cavorted up the path ahead of me, skipping soundlessly on his great feet, waving great, gangling arms, clumsily tripping over a tree root and, even more clumsily, just saving himself. He held his head on one side and hummed as he went, happy and harmless. That is to say, harmless to me so far. Though he walked like a great, hopping puppet, those huge hands were certainly strong enough to rip a throat out.
“Who killed that girl?” I asked him. “Was it the Master?”
His head snapped around, swayingly, and he stared at me, appalled, balancing on the path as though it were a tightrope. “Oh, no, Lady. The Master wouldn’t not do that!” He turned sadly, almost tearfully, away.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His head bent, acknowledging that he had heard, but he continued to walk the tightrope of the path without answering, and I followed. As I did, I was aware that there was something moving among the trees to either side of us. Something softly kept pace with us there, and, I was sure, something also followed along the path behind. I did not try to see what it was. I was quite as much angry with myself as I was scared. I had let my shock at seeing that corpse get the better of my judgment. I saw I must wait to find out how the redheaded girl had got herself kil
led. Caution! I said to myself. Caution! This path was a tightrope indeed.
“Has the Master got a name?” I asked.
That puzzled Eggs. He stood balancing on the path to think. After a moment he nodded doubtfully, shot me a shy smile over his shoulder, and walked on. No attempt to ask my name, I noticed. As if I was the only other person there and “Lady” should be enough. Which meant that the presences among the trees and behind on the path were possibly not human.
Around the next bend I found myself facing the veranda of a chaletlike building. It looked a little as if it were made of wood, but it was no substance that I knew. Eggs tripped on the step and floundered toward the door at the back of the veranda. Before I could make more than a move to help him, he had saved himself and his great hands were groping with an incomprehensible lock on the door. The humming was more evident here. I had been hoping that what I had heard at the edge of the wood had been the flies on the corpse. It was not. Though the sound was still not much more than a vibration at the edge of the mind, I knew I had been right in my first idea. Something artificial was being maintained here, and whatever was maintaining it seemed to be under this house.
In this house, I thought, as Eggs got the door open and floundered inside ahead of me. The room we entered was full of—well, devices. The nearest thing was a great cauldron, softly bubbling for no reason I could see, and giving out a gauzy violet light. The other things were arranged in ranks beyond, bewilderingly. In one place something grotesque stormed green inside a design painted on the floor; here a copper bowl smoked; there a single candle sat like something holy on a white stone; a knife suspended in air dripped gently into a jar of rainbow glass. Much of it was glass, twinkling, gleaming, chiming, under the light from the low ceiling that seemed to come from nowhere. There were no windows.
“Good heavens!” I said, disguising my dismay as amazement. “What are all these?”
Eggs grinned. “I know some. Pretty, aren’t they?” He roved, surging about, touching the edge of a pattern here, passing his huge hand through a flame or a column of smoke there, causing a shower of fleeting white stars, solemn gong notes, and a rich smell of incense. “Pretty, aren’t they?” he kept repeating, and, “Very pretty!” as an entire fluted glass structure began to ripple and change shape at the end of the room. As it changed, the humming, which was everywhere in the room, changed, too. It became a purring chime, and I felt an indescribable pulling feeling from the roots of my hair and under my skin, almost as if the glass thing were trying to change me as it changed itself.
“I should come away from that if I were you,” I said as firmly and calmly as I could manage.
Eggs turned and came floundering toward me, grinning eagerly. To my relief, the sound from the glass modulated to a new kind of humming. But my relief vanished when Eggs said, “Petra knew all, before Annie tore her throat out. Do you know as much as Petra? You are clever, Lady, as well as beautiful.” His eyes slid across me, respectfully. Then he turned and hung, lurching, over the cauldron with the gauzy violet light. “Petra took pretty dresses from here,” he said. “Would you like for me to get you a pretty dress?”
“Not at the moment, thank you,” I said, trying to sound kind. As I said, Eggs was not necessarily harmless. “Show me the rest of the house,” I said, to distract him.
He fell over his feet to oblige. “Come. See here.” He led me to the side of the devices, where there was a clear passage and some doors. At the back of the room was another door, which slid open by itself as we came near. Eggs giggled proudly at that, as if it were his doing. Beyond was evidently a living room. The floor here was soft, carpetlike, and blue. Darker blue blocks hung about, mysteriously half a meter or so in the air. Four of them were a meter or so square. The fifth was two meters each way. They had the look of a suite of chairs and a sofa to me. A squiggly mural thing occupied one wall, and the entire end wall was window, which seemed to lead to another veranda, beyond which I could see a garden of some kind. “The room is pretty, isn’t it?” Eggs asked anxiously. “I like the room.”
I assured him I liked the room. This relieved him. He stumbled around a floating blue block, which was barely disturbed by his falling against it, and pressed a plate in the wall beyond. The long glass of the window slid back, leaving the room open to the veranda. He turned to me, beaming.
“Clever,” I said, and made another cautious attempt to find out more. “Did Petra show you how to open that, or was it the Master?”
He was puzzled again. “I don’t not know,” he said, worried about it.
I gave up and suggested we go into the garden. He was pleased. We went over the veranda and down steps into a rose garden. It was an oblong shape, carved out from among the fir trees, about fifteen meters from the house to the bushy hedge at the far end. And it was as strange as everything else. The square of sky overhead was subtly the wrong color, as if you were seeing it through sunglasses. It made the color of the roses rich and too dark. I walked through with a certainty that it was being maintained—or created—by one of the devices in that windowless room.
The roses were all standards, each planted in a little circular bed. The head of each was about level with my head. No petals fell on the gravel-seeming paths. I kept exclaiming, because these were the most perfect roses I ever saw, whether full bloom, bud, or overblown. When I saw an orange rose—the color I love most—I put my hand up cautiously to make sure that it was real. It was. While my fingers lingered on it, I happened to glance at Eggs, towering over me. It was just a flick of the eyes, which I don’t think he saw. He was standing there, smiling as always, staring at me intently. There was, I swear, another shape to his face, and it was not the shape of an idiot. But it was not the shape of a normal man either. It was an intent, hunting face.
Next moment he was surging inanely forward. “I will pick you a rose, Lady.” He reached out and stumbled as he reached. His hand caught a thorn in a tumble of petals. He snatched it back with a yelp. “Oh!” he said. “It hurts!” He lifted his hand and stared at it. Blood was running down the length of his little finger.
“Suck it,” I said. “Is the thorn still in it?”
“I don’t know,” Eggs said helplessly. Several drops of blood had fallen among the fallen petals before he took my advice and sucked the cut, noisily. As he did so, his other hand came forward to bar my way. “Stay by me, Lady,” he said warningly.
I had already stopped dead. Whether they had been there all along or had been summoned, materialized, by the scent of blood, I still do not know, but they were there now, against the hedge at the end of the garden, all staring at me. Three Alsatian dogs, I told myself foolishly, and knew it was nonsense as I thought it. Three of them. Three wolves. Each of them must have been, in bulk, if not in height, at least as big as I was.
They were dark in the curious darkness of that garden. Their eyes were the easiest to see, light wolf-green. All of them staring at me, staring earnestly, hungrily. The smaller two were crouched in front. One of those was brindled and larger and rangier than his browner companion. And these two were only small by comparison with the great black she-wolf standing behind with slaver running from her open jaws. She was poised either to pounce or to run away. I have never seen anything more feral than that black she-wolf. But they were all feral, stiff-legged, terrified, half in mind to tear my throat out, and yet they were held there for some reason, simply staring. All three were soundlessly snarling, even before I spoke.
My horror—caught from the wolves to some extent—was beyond thought and out into a dreamlike state, where I simply knew that Eggs was right when he said I would be safe with him, and so I said what the dream seemed to require. “Eggs,” I said, “tell me their names.”
Eggs was quite unperturbed. His hand left his mouth and pointed at the brindled wolf in front. “That one is Hugh, Lady. Theo is the one beside him. She standing at the back is Annie.”
So now I knew what had torn redheaded Petra’s throat out. And wh
at kind of woman was she, I wondered, who must have had Eggs as servant and a roomful of strange devices, and on top of this gave three wild beasts these silly names? My main thought was that I did not want my throat torn out, too. And I had been called here as a vet after all. It took quite an effort to look those three creatures over professionally, but I did so. Ribs showed under the curly brownish coat of Theo. Hugh’s haunches stuck out like knives. As for Annie standing behind, her belly clung upward almost to her backbone. “When did they last eat?” I said.
Eggs smiled at me. “There is food in the forest for them, Lady.”
I stared at him, but he seemed to have no idea what he was saying. It was to the wolves’ credit that they did not seem to regard dead Petra as food, but from the look of them it would not be long before they did so. “Eggs,” I said, “these three are starving. You and I must go back into the house and find food for them.”
Eggs seemed much struck by this idea. “Clever,” he said. “I am only the fool, Lady.” And as I turned, gently, not to alarm the wolves, he stretched out his hands placatingly—at least it looked placating, but it was quite near to an attempt to take hold of me, a sketch of it, as it were. That alarmed me, but I dared not show it here. The wolves’ ears pricked a little as we moved off up the garden, but they did not move, to my great relief.
Back through the house Eggs led me in his lurching, puppet’s gait, around the edges of the room with the devices, where the humming filled the air and still seemed to drag at me in a way I did not care for at all, to another brightly lit, windowless room on the other side. It was a kitchen place, furnished in what seemed to be glass. Here Eggs cannoned into a glass table and stopped short, looking at me expectantly. I gazed around at glass-fronted apparatus, some of it full of crockery, some of it clearly food stores, with food heaped behind the glass, and some of it quite mysterious to me. I made for the glass cupboard full of various joints of meat. I could see they were fresh, although the thing was clearly not a refrigerator. “How do you open this?” I asked.
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