A Sudden Wild Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

“No, it couldn’t be then,” Edward said, in his most apologetic way. “It had to be here.” He was hovering beside a more distant bunk that reeked of stasis mage-work, and he seemed to be concealing something in one hand. “She’s in healing trance,” he said, seeing the High Head’s attention on the woman. “I didn’t realize how upset she was when her friend died. My fault. But I think I’ve discovered the reason for those deaths now. Will you come over here?”

  The High Head approached the further bunk and found himself staring down at a true corpse, a fair young man lying lifeless and, oddly enough, looking in death much less deathlike than the unconscious woman. A nice young lad. The pity of this death wrung him, like a pain in his chest.

  “Look at him carefully,” Edward said. The High Head did not want to, but for Edward’s sake, he looked. “Does he remind you of anything?” Edward asked.

  “Death,” said the High Head. “Life. Waste.”

  “No, I meant does he make you think of anyone?” Edward said. “Anyone you know?”

  Now Edward mentioned it, the face of the dead lad did seem familiar, a little, but the High Head could not, for the life of him, place the face. Was it Edward as a youngster? No. Edward’s face was longer and his features smaller. “Not—that I can think of, I’m afraid.”

  “Then does this ring a bell?” Edward said. Eagerly, precisely, he let unfold the thing in his hand. It was an irregularly shaped sheet of purplish plastic—probably the backing from a dressing—with random holes cut in it. Edward spread this with great care over the right half of the young corpse’s face. “Now look.”

  Suddenly the young man was mottled with purple dapples that extended into his hair.

  “Great Goddess!” said the High Head. “The centaur—Galpetto!”

  “Yes,” said Edward. “And no proper cause for death. He’s the centaur’s analogue in whatever world they come from, and I’m afraid the two of them couldn’t exist together in the same universe. The centaur was nearly killed at about the same moment that capsule got into Arth. I’m willing to bet that the analogues of all the other corpses had bad accidents at that instant too. I’m going to tell her.” He gestured toward the unconscious woman. “It might make her feel better about her friend.”

  The High Head had certain difficulty with some of this. “But most of the corpses are women, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Their analogues will be people over in the Pentarchy, I think,” Edward said.

  Not a good thought. “I’d always supposed Arth was better separated from the world than that,” the High Head said ruefully.

  “So had I, but I think we must be more closely connected than we’d realized,” Edward said. “Anyway, this means I can enter the correct cause of death in my records.”

  * * *

  11

  « ^ »

  Supper that night was unusually and surprisingly good.

  * * *

  VI

  Earth and Arth

  * * *

  1

  « ^ »

  I canceled the milk,” said Joe. Maureen jerked awake, very much amazed that he had attacked her only with this. “But there’s enough milk in the fridge to keep us going,” he said. “Do you want some cocoa?”

  “No,” she said, and yawned ostentatiously. She needed to yawn anyway, so the only thing to do seemed to make it look like boredom. She was so tired.

  “And of course, I cut off the telephone,” Joe continued, “though not physically. Don’t imagine British Telecom’s going to come here wanting to repair it. No one’s going to find anything wrong with it, but anyone who tries to get in touch with you is going to get wrong numbers—unless they persist, in which case they’ll get your answering machine with your voice saying you’ll be away for a while.”

  Maureen blinked at him. He was lounging at the other end of her sofa, creasing the chaste oatmeal cushions with his weight and looking extremely smug. “Very clever,” she said, “to think of taking all the obvious precautions.” She could not understand why he had not attacked her while she dropped off into a doze there for a moment. Or—she met his eyes. They were heavily, almost pruriently surveying her. Could it be that what she had here was a hunter getting a buzz off entering into the feelings of his prey? She thought so. It would be just like Joe. He wanted to play cat and mouse for a while. If so, could she use it? Keep him occupied while she counterattacked or called for help. There were several Names that should answer her call.

  “Don’t even think of it,” said Joe. “I’ve got it fixed so that not even your pet entities are going to hear you. Take a look.” He gestured with his can of lager.

  Maureen looked. He had brought his wards to visibility: there was no doubt that he was a truly skilled operator. They hung all around the room, tenuous as cobwebs, roiling a little like clouds, and hard as concrete. She reached up to the nearest. Her fingers met a chilly hardness that she knew she had no hope of penetrating while Joe was awake and aware. She trailed her fingers across its rough, icy surface and thought. He had to sleep, too, in the end. She only had to wait it out. She only had to wait until the raiding party released that virus-magic into Laputa-Blish, and then Joe’s precious bosses would all be disabled, and anything Joe learned would be no use to anyone. It would give her great pleasure to tell him that when the time came. So, how long before it came?

  Maureen let her hand trail back into her lap, hopelessly. Keeping the look of blank dismay on her face, she felt for her precognitive powers and let them fill her, gently and surreptitiously. What she found chilled her worse than Joe’s clammy wards. It had gone wrong—would go wrong. There was—would be—death. Future or present death, she had no means of knowing because—this was the fact that truly dismayed her—there was a time difference between the two worlds. The difference might be years, or months, or only minutes. It was not regular. Now she saw this, Maureen remembered Gladys muttering something about time not running the same in Laputa-Blish. She had not paid much attention then.

  Gladys had muttered in her most senile manner, something about “Long or short, short or long, who knows?” and nobody attended to Gladys when she went like that. Now it occurred to Maureen that this was a mistake. When Gladys was acting fretfully gaga, it could be that she was functioning at a level none of the rest of them could reach.

  Death, delay, things gone wrong, but still a blink of hope. Someone was—or would be—still trying, though Maureen could also see opposition and great evil from a quarter no one expected. This could ruin everything: it would certainly cause further delay. Good God! It could be that she would be shut up with Joe, never daring to sleep, for the next year! There was no question of waiting it out. She would have to defeat him, and soon. And how was she to do that when she was so goddamn tired?

  * * *

  2

  « ^ »

  Gladys paid off her faithful taxi driver and shambled up her path, muttering fretfully in the foggy white of coming dawn. “Tired, Jimbo. I’m too old for this all-night ritual stuff.” Around her were the mushroom scents of wet garden. Things grew. A trill of birdsong swept across the trees. “Thanks,” Gladys muttered. “Pretty. Too tired to appreciate.” Jimbo clinging to her skirt was as draggled as she was. She stumbled over him slightly as she went into the house, which was unusual; but then an unusual effort had been put out by both of them. And the capsule had gone off safely and the Wards of Britain were up, so it had been worth the effort. “Tea,” she mumbled, shuffling among the jungle plants to the kitchen. “Hot. Wet.”

  She had it brewed. She had her hands wrapped around the warm belly of the mug. She was sniffing its fragrance and putting it to her mouth to drink when the phone rang.

  “Curse. Thought I’d disconnected.” She took the tea with her and shuffled off to hunt through the jangling jungle for the phone and answer it.

  It was Amanda’s voice, high with agitation. “Zillah’s gone! She hasn’t slept in her bed. So’s Marcus. Gladys, she’s taken Marcus and gone! I can’
t feel where she is. All I get when I try for her is nothing. Gladys, where is she?”

  Gladys held the tea mug against her ear, warming it against Amanda’s insistence. “Lovely bell-like voice,” she muttered. “Clear and high. Like a damned carillon or an alarm clock.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Amanda said without much contrition. “You must be so tired after last night—but, Gladys, can’t you try for Zillah? Can you get any idea where she is?”

  “Just a moment.” Gladys sighed and took a warm, warming gulp of tea. Zillah. Amanda’s younger sister, the one with the little boy—Mark’s child, Gladys had always suspected. “Damn it, Amanda, I only met your sister twice.” Reddish hair. Sense of unrealized abilities about her that could be even stronger than Amanda’s. In fact, Gladys recalled, where Zillah’s abilities were concerned, the sky was the limit, if only the silly girl could bring herself to realize it! At least someone with that kind of strength ought to be fairly easy to trace. She drank more tea and put her mind to it. The trace was there. It led—“Oh, all the powers, Amanda! She went in that capsule and took the child!”

  A sharp silence on the other end was followed by an even sharper cry of horror. “Gladys! Are you sure? Are you still in contact with the capsule?”

  “No.” Gladys sighed again and tried to explain. “They went out of contact as soon as they crossed over, Amanda. All I know is that the trace leads to the capsule and stops.”

  “But she was inside the capsule the other day—and so was Marcus. Mightn’t that be what you’re feeling? I mean, she definitely wasn’t there, or in the warehouse, when I left the team there. I know she was at home with Marcus. I could feel. There was no way for her to get there. The team wouldn’t have let her on board if she did go there.”

  Hope, Gladys thought, was a heavy thing and would do no good here. “Amanda, I’m sure. I don’t know how Zillah did it, but that is what she did.”

  “Really sure? Gladys, please try and trace her further! I have the strongest precognitions of disaster for the capsule anyway!”

  So had Gladys. Some of the foreknowledge was, to her regret, the result of calculations she wished she had not had to make. “I can’t try to trace her now. For one thing, I’m tired to death. For another, I know I was lucky to make contact with the Laputa-Blish thing anyway. I got in on them when they were exchanging messages and people with their home universe, and I’m going to have to wait for them to start doing that again before I can see anything clear about our folk. Don’t worry. I’ll keep trying. I’ll let you know as soon as I find them again.”

  “And can we fetch her back? Gladys, I don’t know what Zillah thought she was doing, but if she did go there—! Gladys, she hasn’t a clue—really. She didn’t know it was supposed to be an attack.”

  “Well, obviously, or she wouldn’t have taken Marcus. Amanda, do try to get some sleep. There’s nothing you can do until we know more.”

  It took a while to persuade Amanda. Gladys put the phone down at last and made her way back to the kitchen, rolling like a badger from foot to foot out of weariness. “Nothing we can do,” she repeated to herself, pouring more tea. It had gone strong and orange and tepid by then. She drank it all the same, full of guilt and sorrow. Cats were appearing, on windowsills, on the draining board, out of cupboards, treading warily with sympathy. “Don’t tell Amanda,” she said to them guiltily. “Nothing we can do.” It was something Maureen had accepted—but then Maureen was like that—but they had both tacitly agreed that there was no point in telling Amanda that the only way for the raiding party to get back was to force the inhabitants of Laputa-Blish to tell them how. Which meant they had to win first. Now, with this feeling of disaster she had, winning did not seem likely. “Did it ever?” she asked Jimbo, crouching beside her aching feet. Never had she felt so weary and old.

  “I’ll get onto it first thing tomorrow,” she said. “Not now, not now.”

  * * *

  3

  « ^ »

  For two days, life on Arth proceeded in its usual pattern, apparently undisturbed by the survivors from the capsule. The capsule itself had been consigned to Housekeeping and Maintenance, who could use the metal, and it was almost as if the women had always been there. When the High Head, as part of his routine duties, sampled the vibrations, they seemed normal and healthy. There was, it was true, the occasional accelerando in the rhythms, in which everything seemed to pulse several degrees faster, but he was able to discount that. A small tide was coming up, when communication would once more be possible between Arth and the Pentarchy, and these sudden quickenings were quite often associated with tides. The High Head was able to discount the phenomenon—in fact, he would readily have forgotten the tide if he could, since the opening would certainly bring renewed demands from Leathe to hurry up the work in otherworld. And here was a mystery. The experiment had succeeded: he was sure of it. Otherworld had done its usual lateral thinking and taken action of some kind, quite recently too. But of his three main sources, only one was reporting, and that in the vaguest terms. The agent watching the young female had cut off completely. And, to his exasperation, so had his wild native contact. He had to conclude, after unprofitable hours spent trying to raise both, that otherworld had become aware of them and taken steps to silence them. It was imperative to get another agent on the scene as soon as possible. But this was going to take time and planning.

  Meanwhile, the women seemed to be settling down to wait for Arth to send them home—as if Arth could, when they were all so ignorantly vague about where they had come from! At least they were causing surprisingly little trouble. There had been one complaint, from Brother Instructor Cyril of Ritual Horn, that the woman Flan Burke had attempted to undermine his authority. But when the High Head asked High Brother Nathan to investigate, Nathan reported that Brother Cyril now unreservedly withdrew his complaint, saying that the young woman was sent by the Goddess to perfect Her rituals.

  If the High Head was inclined to think Brother Cyril’s retraction was rather suspiciously fulsome, his doubts were set at rest when he interviewed Flan. He questioned the women once a day at first, trying to sift their vague answers for clues to their home universe, though he became increasingly sure that he was going to have to rely on Calculus to find it.

  “Brother Cyril and I had what you might call an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation,” Flan told him. “And,” she added cheerfully, “he came around to my point of view.”

  As for the others, Brother Gamon of Calculus Horn soon asked for permission to interview Sandra himself so as not to interrupt the work he was doing with her. He fancied he was close to discovering a new and improved procedure. Observer Horn made a similar request about Roz. She was, they said, giving them some aspects they had found they were missing up to then, and they wished to continue working closely with her.

  Very commendable, the High Head thought, although he wished the other one whose name he always forgot—Helen, that was it—had not decided to work closely with Kitchen. Mealtimes were steadily becoming a distinctly sensual experience. The High Head, who preferred to eat in the same way that one stoked an engine, and then forget the matter, found this distracting. It surprised him that so few Brothers agreed with him. Even Brother Milo raised no objection. He said, rather obscurely, that Helen was a challenge to himself and his Oath.

  “Don’t you at least…” the High Head asked Edward, as the two of them breakfasted on little fish from the reservoirs, mushrooms, and honey pancakes, “don’t you at least miss passet for breakfast?”

  “No, I don’t,” Edward said heartily. “I don’t mind if I never taste the stuff again.”

  The High Head sighed and stared at the blue wall of his private dining room. It was becoming clear to him that he must be the only person in the citadel who actually liked passet. “How is the woman you had in the trance?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “Coming along very nicely.” Edward poured himself more of the excellent coffee—the best thing, in his opi
nion, that ever came out of Azandi. “As soon as she came out of shock, I discovered she was a natural-born healer. So of course, I asked her to stay and help us in Healing Horn. But,” he added, with an odd, wistful little smile, “I’d still much rather have had the pretty one.”

  “Zillah,” said the High Head. There was somehow no doubt which woman Edward meant. He knew a sudden surge of annoyance, even actual anger, that Edward had presumed to want Zillah, when it ought to be obvious she was—was what? In some discomfort, the High Head realized that he had been, in some odd way, regarding the woman Zillah as his. He seemed—he could not think how—to know her extremely well, in a special way, and he was certainly not going to let any other Horn Head take over the job of interviewing her. No, this was absurd. He should not be thinking this way. He had better let someone else (provided it was not Edward) speak with her in future. But he still thought he should ignore Brother Wilfrid’s complaint that Zillah was harming the vibrations by corrupting the servicemen. Brother Wilfrid was, in his way, a fanatic. Nor was there anything amiss with the vibrations. “I do, of course, lock their quarters with the strongest possible wards every night,” he said, possibly changing the subject again.

  “I’m sure,” Edward said rather dubiously, “that is very wise.”

  * * *

  4

  « ^ »

  The women knew perfectly well they were locked in at night. “I can tell a ward when I see one,” Roz said, “even if I hadn’t tried to get past the veiling and found I couldn’t.” She paced up and down past the rows of sleeping cells. “What I don’t know is if they listen in on us or not.”