by Paul Collins
At various points the nib had pierced the parchment, as if the writer had paused as she wrote, perhaps lost in thought.
Midnight came, andjelindel slumped back in her chair, defeated.
‘Were I the witch, what would I do?’ she muttered, her mind exhausted.
It would be simple enough to write nonsense, knowing that her captors would not know the difference. On the other hand, what if there was an important message to pass on to someone who was less stupid than her captors?
Jelindel wondered why the document was called the Star Testament. True, it was the testament of a witch who had visited the stars. But what did that mean? Jelindel glanced up at the night sky. The diamond-bright pinpricks of light reminded her of something she had seen recently ... very, very recently. She caught her breath.
There was a secret code after all! She held the scroll up to the meagre light issuing from her foul smelling lamp. The places where the quill had punc tured the parchment formed a diagram cipher. The long-dead witch had been smart. There was just a bunch of random-looking holes, the kind of mistakes one always found on parchments! The difference was that these mistakes had been made with exquisite care.
Jelindel began to read what was woven into the words, rather than the words themselves. What she saw filled her with horror.
It was a spell that travelled through time, erasing whatever you wanted to erase. Don’t like somebody? Send the spell back through time and stop them from ever being born. Detest an entire town, guild, a country? Erase it from history, as if it had never existed in the first place! If you didn’t want to annihilate it completely, you could just sponge away the memories of the people.
The morejelindel thought about the spell’s power, the more frightened she became. She felt as if she’d removed the lid from a basket and discovered an angry snake that was about to leap up at her face.
But she’d discovered something else, too. Slowly, fearfully, Jelindel began to whisper the spell of oblivion ...
Tired yet invigorated, Jelindel arrived at the stall where Zimak slept. She roused him by snatching his blanket away. The youth bounded to his feet, assum ing that someone was attacking him.
‘You owe me a favour,’ said Jelindel, tossing the youth’s blanket back to him.
‘Favour? What favour?’
‘I rescued you from a week in the stocks.’
‘What do you mean? Why would I be m the stocks?’
‘You’re not in the stocks because I erased the memories of some very angry men who bet lots of money that you would win today’s kick-fist fight - the fight that you threw.’
‘I never threw any fight!’
‘Keep your voice down and only we two will know. Get dressed, then come with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I need a criminal, someone good at lying. You have the right qualifications. Oh, and best you act like an oaf for the rest of the day. You’ll enjoy that.’
Zimak approached the fortress temple. He had Jelindel in tow. She was clutching a scroll and a sheaf of other papers, and looked confused. As expected, the guards challenged them.
‘I’m his bodyguard,’ explained Zimak. ‘I received instructions to bring him here and ask for Stands Waiting if something went wrong. Well, something did.’
‘What went wrong, Zimak?’ askedjelindel. ‘Why are we here? What are these papers?’
‘Simpletons,’ growled one of the guards, but his companion noticed the Maelorian royal seal on the scroll.
‘I’ll fetch the master.’ The guard glared atjelindel and Zimak. ‘Be it on your heads if this is a lark.’ Stands Waiting arrived moments later. His usual passive expression seemed feverish with excitment.
‘You have accomplished your task?’ he said to
Jelindel.
‘Yeah, well, me scribe friend said he’s worked out a secret,’ began Zimak.
Stands Waiting turned to Zimak. ‘Continue,’ he said impatiently.
‘Well, I asksjaelin what he discovered, an’ he says some words that sounds like a goat being sick. Then he says he wishes he could forget about the past two days, and then wham! He’s forgot the past two days.’
‘It’s the spell, you blithering fool!’ exclaimed Stands Waiting. ‘Guards, keep this boy here at the gate. Scribejaelin, come with me.’
Benign Fist was meditating on a balcony of a tower facing out to sea when Stands Waiting entered with Jelindel. ‘Ah,’ he said, standing. ‘Our young market scribe whose life hangs in the balance. Welcome, child.’
‘She has suffered a foolish accident,’ Stands Waiting offered. ‘Perhaps a failed experiment with the Star Testament.’
‘Has she now?’ Benign Fist said. He cupped Jelindel’s head with his hands and performed a probe spell. Shortly he stepped back from her. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘She has indeed had the memory of the two days past sponged away.
‘And what are the papers that she carries? Let me see . . . notes, scribblings, words crossed out. Here! This passage here. Words in the ancient Yurlish tongue - no, this second last word is loksig, the Astradis word for anchor.’
‘From what her monkey of a bodyguard said, you speak these words, then say what you wish to have obliterated.’
Benign Fist looked up from the parchment. ‘Then let us perform a test. That filthy port city of D’loom is an insult to my eyes. I would have it sponged from history.’ Benign Fist held the page up to the lamp light then began reading. ‘Qsllio innaculus d’arthier . ..’ Stands Waiting had a feeling that something was not quite right, but Benign Fist demanded absolute obedience, so he held his tongue. The only problem with having followers with absolute obedience is that you must always make good decisions. In his eager ness to use this doomsday weapon from the dim, forgotten past, Benign Fist had allowed himself to be swept away. He had made a bad decision.
Benign Fist reached the end of the spell.
‘... vati kelloksig slarsh.’
He never got a chance to say ‘D’loom’.
For one terrible, terrible moment Stands Waiting realised what had happened. Vati kel was ‘this thing’ in Yurlish. Slarsh was Yurlish for ‘obliterate’. Benign Fist had just obliterated the Astradis word for anchor, and the anchor spell that protected the fortress tem ple was in Astradis. Deprived of the word anchor, the anchor spell that had protected Maelor for centuries collapsed.
An attack by Katrusi brigands many centuries ago had not been beaten off with the aid of the spell for it had now never existed. The temple and what was then the new sect of Maelor had been wiped out in the attack.
Jelindel found herself falling, and before she even had time to be afraid she crashed into thick bushes that were growing in the ruins of the ancient for tress temple of Maelor. Hearing the noise, Zimak came hurrying across the piles of overgrown rubble. Jelindel was not hurt, apart from cuts and scratches.
‘At the risk of sounding a bit simple, what are we doing here?’ asked Zimak.
Dazed,Jelindellooked about. ‘It’s the ruins of the
Maelor temple.’
‘I know that. But why are we here?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Zimak. Maybe you were teaching me to climb walls and burgle buildings.’
‘Out here?’ exclaimed Zimak.
‘Makes sense. If we practised on buildings with people in them, they’d set the city guards after us.’
‘Look, answer me one thing,’ said Zimak. ‘You fell into those bushes, right?’
‘I think so,’ Jelindel agreed.
‘From what? This tower was destroyed hundreds of years ago. It’s no higher than a midget’s gallows.’
‘Maybe some ancient magic lingers here, and it threw me up into the air,’ suggestedjelindel. ‘Maybe it plays tricks with our memories, too.’
‘You
know what?’
‘What?’
‘I think coming here was a bad idea. We should go back to the market and get some sleep. It’s Haggling Day tomorrow.’
‘Haggling Day is still two days away,’ saidjelindel firmly.
‘You like to bet on that?’ asked Zimak, tossing a coin in the air.
And so the two young heroes returned to D’loom, unaware that they had saved the city, the past, the future, and the world. Behind them some sheets of paper that had fallen withjelindel had been found by a rat that lived among the ruins. It began shredding them to build a nest.
She recognised him from the holovids and nuscan bites as soon as she was ushered into his office. Tall and handsome, electric blue eyes, a great eccentric mane of white-blond hair and a smile that seemed just a little too bright and wide in real life. William Reichler was fleshier than in the vids, but the visual slimdown might not be vanity. Cam crews always shaved off podge, claiming it was aesthetically unappealing and therefore bad for ratings. When he rose and held out his hand to her, she noted his pupils were dilated. She told herself hers were probably dilated, too, after the stimutabs and coffee, and so what if he had slipped a couple of uppers? Everyone used them in corporate cities. Her parents disapproved of using drugs to pep up or calm down, yet current thinking said it was savvy to make your mind and body serve your will and needs. Her parents were old-fashioned in their attitude to chems, but she suspected she had absorbed their bias, because she always found herself making excuses to rationalise why she would not take a pill or a hotshot.
You can take the girl out of a Tipodan freetown, but you could not take the freetown out of the girl, she thought wryly. That was what her friend and co worker, Eva, had warned on the way to the airport.
Eva had also told her she was a fool to give up her apartment, sell off her furniture and books and shift halfway round the world to Uropa to take part in research so new it was on the crackpot edge of science, all on the say-so of someone she had never met. But William Reichler had not been a stranger. Discovering his book had changed her life. Before reading it, she had thought of herself as a lone freak. For all their liberal inclinations, her parents’ minds had been full of blind spots and guilt because she had been a very late child conceived by in vitro fertilisation. They never openly acknowledged what she was, and for a long time she had tried desperately to change herself, to be normal. Then a day came when she had accepted she could not stop being what she was. So she had made an art of hiding it.
Then William Reichler’s book made her see she might not be an aberration, but the next tentative step in human evolution. Her first e-send to him had been a girlish outpouring of admiration and excite ment, and she had received a polite note from his personal assistant acknowledging it. Soon after, she stumbled onto an article whose author observed that humans co-evolved with their technology, and this had given her the focus for her own work. Years later when she had sent articles about her work, published in Tipoda Tomorrow, to William Reichler, he responded personally with interest and encouragement. After that they had corresponded intermittently until his offer of an internship at the Reichler Clinic.
His letter did not say there would be a job at the end of the unpaid internship, but it was implied. And Hannah was good at what she did. Better than good, according to her workmates and supervisors, though their opinions mattered less to her than her own feelings. You had to have a realistic idea of what you were worth or else you would be forever at the mercy of other people’s opinions, which most often would depend on their level of liking for you. You had to know yourself and, above all, you had to be honest with yourself.
‘Ms Seraphim, it is a real pleasure to meet you in person, at last,’ William Reichler said, his big pink manicured hand encompassing hers in a warm, slightly clammy grip. ‘Your last paper on the way some humans adapt to the speed of technological development was very fresh. Young woman, you have a brilliant mind, though I must say it is a shock to see how very young you are.’ He gave an avuncu lar chuckle.
‘My age ...’Hannah stammered, overwhelmed by the way he had leaned towards her, still holding her hand.
‘Is no problem,’ he concluded firmly. He sat on a soft fat sofa, drawing her down with him, and shifted smoothly to talking about the work of the Reichler Clinic with an easy familiarity that made him sound glib. It was a natural consequence of him having to say the same thing over and over, she supposed, and she told herself it would be no surprise if his brain just wandered off in another direction completely, leaving his mouth to run on auto-pilot.
It was a mistake to think about his thoughts, she realised a split second too late as her mind peeled open.
. . . like them young ... good hands and legs and great hair .. . probably reach her waist if she let it down ... like a woman with a good head of hair ... pity about the neck to knee retro-frump freetown threads . . . transpo gel tube would make the most of her breasts ... too small, but bump them a size or two and she’d be specky ... give her a year or two and she’d get over her outmoded freetown attitude to augmentation ...
For one shocked and disorientated second, Hannah thought she must be picking up the mental thread of the only other man in the room, an older, white-coated scientist who had yet to be introduced, except her mind was too well disciplined to open itself to more than one thread at a time and risk being mentally bludgeoned. No, the stream of crude speculation was flowing from William Reichler’s mind. The physical contact and the eager razzle dazzle of his personality, combined with the dual hype of nerves and stimutabs, had broken through her carefully constructed mind-shield.
Ordinarily her ethics would have made her with draw immediately, but William Reichler’s thoughts made it all too painfully clear that Eva had been right. Hannah had not known him. The revelation of his arrogant disrespect for her dispelled any guilt she might have felt as she delved through what tran spired to be a superficial, atavistic sensuality crusted over a vast and rapacious, self-centred hunger for glory and the social power that came with it. Her heart sank into her new gel boots, for not only was William Reichler a lecher, he was a liar. One look into his deeper mind made it clear he did not have the ability or knowledge to have undertaken the research upon which his book and articles were based. He had cribbed the science from raw data, spinning it into brightly accessible rhetoric.
It did not comfort Hannah to find he had every intention of offering her an employment contract at the end of the internship. The only reason he had not done so already was because he believed an unpaid internship would establish an advantageous power structure between them, ensuring she was locked into a subordinate and subservient role. He had no fear she would go elsewhere because of her blatant hero worship of him.
How it rankled to remember she had gazed into those brilliant blue eyes in vids, reading in them sincerity, intelligence and sensitivity. She felt ashamed because she ought to have known better than to expect truth from vid and nuscan spinners, or even to take the things that William Reichler had written in e-notes to her, as any indication of his character or ethics. How many times in life had her abilities revealed that a bland or smiling face could hide anything from deep neurosis and fear to loathing or boredom? It was the bitterest kind of joke that these abilities, which had brought her halfway round the world to this meeting, now revealed the brilliant, charismatic William Reichler as a charlatan.
Her disappointment and despair did not show in her expression or manner any more than her shock and outrage had done. She had learned the hard way not to react obviously and openly to the things she learned from people’s minds, and in this case, she was very glad because a man with an interest in paranormal abilities might very well jump to the right conclusion. Instead, she managed to nod and smile as the interview progressed, and even to talk enthusiastically about working at the Reichler Clinic; though the second she left the building she was determined to re
turn to the hotel, pack and leave, after dispatching a bland little e-note expressing contrition and regret at her decision to refuse the internship because she was homesick for Tipoda.
Then William Reichler introduced the other man in the room.
‘This is my cousin, Axel Reichler,’ he said. ‘He is the head of the laboratory here at the Clinic and he will conduct you on a tour of the facility so that you can see what you will be getting into.’
The white-coated man rose and bowed slightly from his waist. He was older than his cousin by a good decade and as strikingly ugly as William Reichler was handsome. That he should remain so in a world where no one had to be ugly intrigued Hannah, despite herself, as he ushered her, with William trailing behind, from the reception room. She did not hesitate to access his thoughts. She almost gasped in relief to discover that this was the mind behind the research, though she had never heard Axel Reichler’s name anywhere in the public ity about the Clinic, or seen it on the articles or books it had produced. Delving deeper as she followed him from laboratory to laboratory and through rooms full of the latest technological tools for brain and mind research, she was looking for the hold that William Reichler had over him, that had allowed the theft of his work. Instead, she was astonished to learn that Axel Reichler had no objection to William absorbing the limelight by putting his name and face on the books and articles that had resulted from his work. He knew his cousin craved power and visible success and appreciated the social skills that were honed and sharpened by that hunger because they served his own ends. He did not care at all that his name was unknown. He cared nothing for fame or power, or for money, save that it would buy him the equipment and materials he needed to continue his research.
Hannah might have admired his single mindedness, except that he had no more notion of what it would be like to be a person with the abilities they were so hungrily researching than his cousin. To Axel it was all theory and to William it was an angle to be played out like bait on one of those ancient fishing poles that people used to dangle in water. William didn’t even believe paranormal abilities existed. It was all smoke and mirrors to him. What he did understand was that people wanted to believe their minds held a potential that might be woken. There were dozens of sponsors paying good creds to the Clinic, in the belief that when the breakthrough came, they would be first in line to receive the serum or pill that would unleash that potential.