A Sudden Wild Magic Read online

  A Sudden Wild Magic

  Diana Wynne Jones

  * * *

  * * *

  A 3S digital back-up edition v1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  * * *

  Contents

  I: Earth

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|

  II: Arth

  |1|2|3|

  III: Earth

  |1|2|3|

  IV: Arth

  |1|2|3|4|5|

  V: Arth

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|

  VI: Earth and Arth

  |1|2|3|4|5|

  VII: Arth

  |1|2|3|

  VIII: Earth

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|

  IX: Arth and Pentarchy

  |1|2|3|4|

  X: Arth, Earth, Pentarchy

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|

  * * *

  An AvoNova Book

  William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York

  * * *

  Our world has long been protected by “The Ring”—a benevolent secret society of witches and conjurers dedicated to the continuance and well-being of humankind.

  Now, in the face of impending climatic disaster, the Ring has uncovered a conspiracy potentially more destructive than any it has ever had to contend with. For eons, the mages of a neighboring universe have been looting the Earth of ideas, innovations and technologies—all the while manipulating events and creating devastating catastrophes for their own edification. And unless the brazen piracy is halted, our planet is certainly doomed.

  Aboard a modified city omnibus, a raiding party of adepts is dispatched to Arth, the stronghold of the interfering Pentarchy—a world ruled by magic, ritual and unbending tradition. And while the Inner Ring on Earth battles spies, traitors and the terrifying sendings of an evil, would-be queen, a motley group of commandoes launches a cynical attack on the virtue of the great citadel of Arth—determined to conquer the mighty fortress through internal dissension, psychological sabotage and kamikaze sex.

  But ultimately the destiny of two separate universes is in the hands of a trio of unlikely champions: a dotty old Earth woman, caretaker to many cats and a bizarre, simianlike familiar…a rebellious heir to the Pentarchy, whose birthright enables him to perform astonishing feats…and Zillah, a beautiful but troubled young mother who unknowingly possesses the wildest, strangest, and most powerful magic of all.

  A SUDDEN WILD MAGIC is a breathtakingly original, consistently delightful blend of fantasy and SF—a surprising, funny and warmly human adventure of wars, worlds and otherworlds that signals the dazzling emergence of a major new talent in the literary field of the fantastic.

  * * *

  a sudden wild magic is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1992 by Diana Wynne Jones

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-10860

  ISBN: 0-688-11882-8

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Avon Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

  Jones, Diana Wynne.

  A sudden wild magic / Diana Wynne Jones, p. cm.

  ISBN 0-688-11882-8 : $22.00

  I. Title.

  PR6060.0497S84 1992 92-10860

  823'.914—dc20 CIP

  First Morrow/AvoNova Printing: October 1992

  AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  ARC 10 987654321

  * * *

  I

  Earth

  * * *

  1

  ^ »

  The magical activities of Britain have always been highly organized. Anyone who doubts this should consider the Spanish Armada and the winds that so conveniently dissipated it—and perhaps further consider why even the most skeptical of historians accepts this convenient hurricane so calmly, as a perfectly natural occurrence. Or the doubter might also consider why Hitler, or Napoleon before him, never got around to invading Britain, and why we accept these facts, too, so easily.

  A moment’s unclouded thought should persuade anyone that these things are too good to be true. But of course, no one’s thought is unclouded, for the very good reason that the organization has, for centuries, devoted itself to clouding it and making sure that most people perceive its activities as messy, futile, and mainly concerned with old ladies astride broomsticks. In fact, the organization is so ruthlessly secret that even the majority of those engaged in the various forms of witchcraft are unaware that their activities are being directed by a ruling council—which we shall call the Ring—carefully and secretly selected from the ranks of practitioners all over the country.

  This council has had to work increasingly hard this century. Its activities have, more and more, been forced to encompass the whole world. Most of its members agreed that this was a natural result of improved communications. The only person who disagreed was the one man of the Inner Ring.

  * * *

  2

  « ^ »

  His name was Mark Lister, and his actual title is a secret. He made his living with computers. It always pleased him that he should work at something so unrelated to witchcraft, and make good money at it too, without more than occasionally invoking his powers as magician. He dressed the part of a businessman, in expensive charcoal gray suits, kept his pale face meticulously clean-shaven and his pale hair most conservatively cut, and, since he was of average height and neither fat nor thin, he looked almost unremarkable. This pleased him too. He made just one concession to his secret activities: he always wore a wide-brimmed hat as a covert allusion to the Magician in the tarot pack. It did not worry him that, apart from the hat, most people found him both humorless and colorless. What did worry him was certain current trends in the world.

  Thinking about these trends, Mark Lister started to feed certain data to computers in his office. It was idly done at first, in a spare moment, just to make him feel he was doing something to control something that had long gone beyond anyone’s control. The answers he got back added up to something that so startled him that he set about designing a special program of inquiry. When this was done, he stayed in his office all night to run it.

  His absence took careful planning. His wife, Paulie, was no mean witch herself, and Mark was not at this stage prepared to trust anyone, let alone Paulie. Halfway through the morning he phoned her with his excuse: an unexpected conference in Birmingham. This gave him time to set up a simulacrum of himself and send it to dine with another colorless simulacrum in Birmingham, in case Paulie—or an unknown—decided to check; and he had the rest of the day to recoup the considerable energy it took to do that. In the evening, as soon as his partners and staff had left, he set to work. First he had to bespell the office so that no cleaner or security man would be tempted to enter while he was there, and to make it seem as if the place were empty. He had to block telephones and fax machines so they would not distract him during the more delicate magic to come. All simple enough stuff, but if what he feared was true, he could not afford to put a finger wrong. By the time the office was silent and looked to any possible observer like the usual empty space lighted by greenish striplights, he was already shaking and sweating. He had to compose hi
mself magically, before he started on the complex of tiny sendings to prevent anyone—anyone—from noticing the sort of data he would be receiving. Since his program was going to access a number of very secret files, further sendings were necessary to make what he filched invisible. He was not going to trust to technology alone in this.

  “And all for nothing if it turns out to be my overactive imagination,” he murmured. But he did not think it would, and he cast at his gentlest, strongest, and most careful.

  When it was done, he walked about waiting for the excess ambience of power to die away. He did not want that to influence the computers. Even then, after he had at last tapped in the instruction to run the program, he found he was walking about still, in terror of accidentally influencing the running of it. It was absurd. He had worked with power ten years now. He knew how to control it. But he was still scared. He stopped and grasped a tubular steel chair with both hands—not precisely cold iron, he thought ruefully, but it should serve to negate anything wild he was putting out—and stood leaning on it whenever he was not needing to monitor the program.

  Results gathered. Mark took his hands from the chair, intending to take printouts before asking for forecasts, and felt the tubular steel crunch and seem to crumble under his fingers. He looked down at it rather irritably. And stepped away in dismay. The steel portions were reverting to some kind of red iron-bearing sandstone speckled with crusty black granules. The plastic of the seat was curling into feathers of something yellowish and dry, which had a strong chemical reek.

  Rather grimly, he dusted redness off his hands. The chair was surely only a symbol of his state of mind—he hoped—but it looked as if his worst fears were being confirmed, even before he had asked the final question.

  He asked it. He took his printouts. He erased everything and went by careful, gentle stages back up his tracks, making sure that no trace of him, magical or technological, remained in any of the places he had tapped for data, or in the office either. Around dawn he picked up his briefcase and turned to the once tubular steel chair, ready to deal with that now. It stood in the middle of the space as an impossible curved framework of red earth, although the black nodules were now a pale sickly green. Mark frowned at them. Then, as an experiment, he spread a gently imperious hand toward the nearest green blob. It obeyed him by bursting. Twisting and writhing, it enlarged and threw out two round green leaves as it grew upon a white thread of stem.

  “Hm,” he said. “I seem to feel more hopeful than I think. All the same, you have to go.” He gestured again, making it a stiff push from the elbow, and succeeded in teleporting the entire strange mess from the office building into the nearest skip, where he felt it crumble away. After this he was very weary. He rubbed his face and longed for coffee. “On the station,” he decided. He also longed for his car. But that had to be left out in the parking lot in Surrey for verisimilitude. A man traveling by train was much harder to trace, too.

  In the station buffet, over a large polystyrene mug of coffee, he allowed himself to wonder whether he had chosen the right member of the Inner Ring to take his discovery to. A lot hung on his deciding right. His first impulse had been to convene the entire Ring, but he still rejected that idea. The nine of the Outer Ring were all adepts and none of them was stupid, but there were those among them who came from walks of life that gave them rather too much in the way of downright common sense. These few were likely to pooh-pooh every one of his notions. He could hear Koppa Taylor or Sid Graffy now: “You can make computers prove anything! You only have to feed them the facts you want.” True. And he had. Then he knew so little about any of them, beyond the most obvious things. Take Koppa, whom he knew best of all the nine. All that amounted to was knowing she had been born in California fifty years ago. He knew much the same sort of things about the other eight, and that was all. Secrecy was important. Personal details were supposed not to count when they communed together as the Ring. Disguises apparently dropped away at the higher levels where they were At One. Mark gave a small sarcastic grunt. If they were up against what he thought they were, then disguise and shielding at every level was entirely to be expected. He could not trust one of the nine not to be a spy.

  That left the inner three. Damn it, he simply did not want to take his briefcase full of trouble to the old woman. He and she thought along such different lines. But he tried to leave his personal feelings out of it and consider them each dispassionately. Young Maureen? He smiled. Personal feelings were very much there. Every time he thought of her, he remembered the exact, scented, animal smell of her and the long-legged shape of her sharing that bed with him in Somerset. That had been some night! It had almost made up for Zillah. But he still felt Maureen was too—flimsy? flighty? There was no exact word for what he knew of her. It just meant he was not, after all, going to consult Maureen first. He needed a steady mind, and a keen one. Amanda? She had a mind, all right—too bloody right she had! He found himself wincing at the mere thought of her curiously luminous dark eyes. Oddly enough, at forty she was still considerably better-looking than Maureen and could pass for almost the same age. Mark was scared to death of her (in his secret soul where he hoped nobody knew), and he knew she would either reject his fears out of hand or pat him kindly on the head and take charge. So…

  “The old woman then,” he muttered, and with resignation, got up and bought a ticket to Hereford.

  * * *

  3

  « ^ »

  It was a muddled old farmhouse with a verandah on the front of it that somehow melted into a porch with a green door. A garden spread from it in successive waves of overgrowth—grass first, then longer grass containing leaves of long dead daffodils, then bushes, then higher bushes, several waves of those, including laurels—and finally a row of trees that generally flowered in spring, but were liable to be untidily in bloom most of the year. The house was quite hidden from the road. On the other hand, if you knew where to position yourself in the garden, you could have an excellent view of the road without anyone knowing you were there.

  The old woman knew exactly where. She had been sitting there all morning, at various tasks, with Jimbo scratching diligently beside her and the cats stalking hither and yon in her orbit. Around her, the muddled house seemed to have spread into the grass, manifesting as flowerpots, tipped-over mugs of coffee, cane chairs, a basket or so, a colander, a kettle, a few cushions. All the day’s work, the old woman thought, shunting a row of peas with her broad thumb along their pod and into the colander.

  A car engine caught her ears. “Ah,” she said. “At last!” And she raised her head to watch the local taxi decant a passenger at her decrepit gate. Her squabby eyebrows rose at the sight of the pale young man in the sober gray suit who climbed out and turned to pay the driver. “It’s him!” she remarked to Jimbo. “And here was I expecting someone about that poor girl! Must have got my wires crossed. Do people like me get their wires crossed, Jimbo? Well, there’s a first time for everything, they say. And whatever he wants, it’s trouble. The poor boy looks all in.”

  She watched him wait for the taxi to drive away and turn to the gate, carrying that absurd hat he affected. She watched him have the usual problems people had with her gate. She grinned when it finally fell down flat in the mud and he had to pick it up and prop it on the bushes. But the look on his face sobered her as he came on up the path, still carrying that hat and an expensive briefcase with it. She quietly replaced the gate behind him and waited for him to get to the place where visitors usually found they could see her.

  “Hallo, Mark,” she said. “Important, is it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very.” He stood and surveyed her, a fat and freckled old woman wearing a red dress and pink ankle socks, squashily embedded in a floral plastic garden chair and busy shelling peas or something. Her hair had been dyed a faded orange and fussily curled. Her cheeks hung around her lax mouth, white where they were not freckled, and her garden was strewn with objects and aswarm with cats. As usual. He
had forgotten all those cats. The place reeked of cat. His foot pushed aside a saucer of cat food lurking in the grass, and he was unable to avoid fanning at the smell with his hat. And on top of all this, her name was Gladys. It was hard to believe she was any good. “Expecting me, were you?”

  Gladys looked up. Until you saw her eyes, Mark emended. Her eyes knew most things. “Expecting someone,” she said. “I’ve been waiting out here all morning. It’s been trying to rain. Nuisance.” As if to prove this, a few warm drops fell from the overcast sky, splashing his hat and pinging on the colander. Gladys looked skyward and frowned. The drops instantly ceased. “A real nuisance,” she said, and possibly grinned briefly. “What’s the matter, Mark? You look like death. Take a seat before you fall down.”

  Her fat hand, with a peapod in it, gestured to the nearest cane chair. Mark walked over to it and settled himself, creaking, with his hat over his knees. Instantly he was in a ring of cats. They appeared silently from clumps of grass, from under bushes and from behind flowerpots, and sat gravely surveying him, a circle of round green and yellow eyes. Her ritual. He sighed.

  “What can I get you?” she asked. “Have you had any breakfast?”

  “Not really,” he said. “There was no buffet car on—”

  “They always forget it,” she said, “on trains out this way. Jemima, you and Tibs.”

  Two of the cats disdainfully got up and walked toward the house.

  “I’ve a lot to explain,” Mark said.

  “So I see from the size of that briefcase,” she said. “Eat first. Get some coffee inside you at least.”