A Sudden Wild Magic Read online

  “Really?” Joe said. “You have to sleep sometime. I can work on your head then.”

  “So do you have to sleep,” she said. But her spirit sank. She was so weary. There was a sort of hollow weakness under her breastbone that she suspected was despair. “It seems to be deadlock,” she said, and seated herself grimly facing him at the other end of the sofa. He gazed at her jeeringly. And she realized what the odd thing was about his face. There were all sorts of foreign thoughts in it. She could see the alien consciousness behind his face pushing the features she had thought she knew well into a completely new shape. She tried to tell herself that this did not scare her—not at all. She was just so tired.

  * * *

  IV

  Arth

  * * *

  1

  « ^ »

  Tod was not happy. It did not make him feel any better to know he had not expected to be happy in Arth. He was only there because his father had insisted on it.

  “It’s your legal obligation, I’m afraid, son,” the Pentarch told him. “I wouldn’t bother you with it if it wasn’t. Hated my stint in the place. Stupid rules and out-of-date notions. They say it’s even more of a back number these days. Lost its point, to my mind, as soon as all the new technology came in. But the law still says that the heir to a Pentarchy has to have his year in Arth. If you don’t, you don’t qualify as my heir, son, and the king could roll me up as well as you. He might, too. I’ve had several polite inquiries from the Royal Office about you. You’ll have to go.”

  Tod liked and trusted his old father. He got on with him, even though the old man behaved like a swine to Tod’s mother. So he did not make the fuss he might have done. He gave up his lovely, happy, easygoing life—his expensive car, his good-looking girls, his racing and antiques collecting, his first-class food—he was an adult, for the gods’ sake, and could afford to have these things!—and entered the austere regime of Arth without doing more than grumble savagely to himself.

  Now, nearly two months later, Tod kept wondering how his father had been able to stand it, even as a young man. Poor old August! he kept thinking. How had he stood the soldierly bunk rooms, for a start? Not to speak of the food. Drink—forget it! Anything but weak passet beer was against the rules because it disturbed the vibes, so they said. There was a rule against almost everything enjoyable on these grounds. It irked Tod almost to fury at times, even though he had been prepared for it.

  What he had not been prepared for was to find his fellow servicemen were—with two exceptions—complete louts. Stupid louts, too. That had surprised Tod, because he had heard that only the best young men qualified for Arth. But these were not only stupid, but the kind of louts who resented Tod for his high birth and got at him for it whenever they could. They did not seem to grasp that Tod’s birth was nobody’s fault, or that Tod could have melted them to little pools of body fat if he’d wanted. So far Tod had refrained from doing anything to them. But it was severe temptation—all the more so because the servicemen were never out of one another’s company. The cadets and the qualified Brothers kept themselves priggishly separate and would barely speak to Tod and his like.

  Well, that was no loss. Except that it probably made the days in Arth even more boring—though nothing could be more boring than the mageworks servicemen were required to perform. Take this very moment. They were all ranged along the wide window of the lowest observation room, sighting the specula for patterns in the ether. This was something Tod had been trained from the cradle to do, like almost everything else in the curriculum. Old August, having made sure that his son indeed carried the birthright, had had him tutored by experts from the moment he could walk. But nobody took any notice of that. The reverse, in fact. Their Mage Instructor, a po-faced fellow called Brother Wilfrid, told Tod on the first day, “We’re going to treat you just like everyone else.” When people said that, in Tod’s experience, they meant worse than everyone else—and so it had proved. Brother Wilfrid, just like the louts, resented Tod’s birth and smugly punished him for it. While the louts struggled with mageworks that ought, in more intelligent hands, to have been at least slightly interesting, Tod was stuck with base calculus and childish observations like the ones he was making at the moment. These were so easy that Tod could do the whole thing in his mind without the help of specula. He could even spot a growing disturbance in the ether, off to one side, troubling several bands of the Wheel, which nobody else seemed to have noticed. He was going to have to render himself odious to the louts by pointing it out soon. Brother Wilfrid would, of course, regard this as showing off. Tod sighed, and bent over the instrument he did not need. Dreary, boring days of schoolboy exercises and mass rituals, and still ten months to go. The rituals were perhaps not as bad as Tod had expected. This latest High Head—little as Tod liked him—seemed to have done quite a bit of work bringing the ritual side of things up-to-date, even though he had done nothing at all to change the archaic rules of the Brotherhood. Take the celibacy rule, now. That was idiotic, because no one had any chance to break it. Tod had expected to find that particular rule the hardest of all, but in fact, without any girls passing daily before him, he found he missed them far less than he had supposed he would. It was not as if he had left behind someone he was passionately in love with—that would have hurt. No, the irksome part of that rule was the inevitable advances one got from mages and brethren alike. Ridiculously, Tod had not been prepared for that; but he had, from very early on, learned to carry in his aura the message I am heterosexual at all times, day and night. It was a pity Philo, the gualdian boy, could not seem to learn to do that too—or maybe Philo’s incredible politeness stopped him—anyway, Tod suspected that Philo was building up a horribly large list of senior folk out to get him, either because Philo had politely told them no, or because they were scared rigid that Philo was going to report the passes they had made to higher authority.

  All right, Tod thought. So I’m not the only one having a hard time. I still don’t have to like it.

  He had been rather thrown together with Philo and Josh, the centaur lad. They were the three different ones, and they were all finding it tough here. Poor Josh—he went around perpetually bewildered. Up to now, Tod had not realized how much centaur magework and teaching differed from human. The Arth system was human-based, and Josh could not grasp it at all. Everyone thought he was stupid. The louts made fun of him all the time. They were laughing at Josh at the other end of the room at the moment. It sounded as if there was another practical joke starting.

  Ah gods! Tod thought savagely. This was all I needed! He had many times tried to conjecture why in hellspoke’s name the law required him to come to this armpit of the universe. It was a very archaic law. The only modern justification he had been able to come up with was that all this adversity was supposed to toughen his soul. To Tod’s mind you did not make a soul tough by walking all over it: you just made dents.

  And all the time he had this nagging anxiety. The time rate was so much slower in Arth that nearly three years would pass before he could get home, years in which his father would get even older. August Gordano was not young: he had been nearly sixty when Tod was born. Tod was terrified he would get home to find his father dead. Then…

  Yells and laughter erupted at the other end of the room. Tod looked. There was poor Josh inside a ring of louts, the ringleader as usual being Rax with the broken nose. Josh was standing helplessly up to the withers in a pile of horse manure—or it looked like horse manure, but it was evidently as hard as concrete. Josh was trying to buck his way out, but much to the mirth of his tormentors, the stuff was holding him fast. As Tod looked, someone took the joke further, picked up a ball of the stuff and flung it at Josh. Josh was quite unprepared. He screamed and put both arms over his face. The next second he was being pelted, bowed over, with blood streaming down his face. It looked as if one of his eyes was smashed. Tod left his instrument and ran. Philo, who was nearer, ran ahead of him. Tod shouted to him not to, but he
saw Philo plunge up the pile of concrete dung and try to spread himself out in front of Josh. Tod heard the thud of concrete hitting his body.

  “Right! That bloody does it!” Tod said. Still running, he called up his birthright. It was intensely strong, here in Arth, as they had warned him it would be. He took hold of the big, dynamic rhythms of the citadel and used them to thrust Philo away to the far wall. Then he hurled that concrete dung in all directions in a near-explosion, scoring a hit on a lout with almost every ball. Josh burst loose from the pile and staggered about with his hands to his face, only half-conscious. Tod took further energies, formed them into spears of healing, and beamed them at Josh in strong thrusts. But at this point the other servicemen turned on Tod in a pack, and he had to leave off to defend himself.

  He didn’t dare kill them. He fought them instead. He felt like a fight anyway. He made sure each one he hit got a fair voltage of electricity with the blow. For a joyous few seconds he was inside a pandemonium of fighting bodies, blows, screams, and swearing, with stinking cobbles rolling about underfoot and electricity crackling and arcing all over the place. Then, as was to be expected, Duty Mages and Senior Brothers stormed into the room from all directions. A fair amount of stasis was cast. Tod could have broken it, had he tried, but someone had hit him in the stomach the instant before, and he did not feel like trying anything just then.

  When he felt more himself, he was—as he supposed he should have expected—being blamed for everything. Rax had run the street gangs of Praslau before coming to Arth. He was an expert in shifting blame. Besides, after the healing Tod had thrown at Josh, nobody thought there was too much wrong with his eye, and Philo, though dazed, was only bruised. They were marched off to Healing Horn. Tod, licking a swelling lip, had to stand and endure a po-faced lecture from Brother Wilfrid. He stood. He endured, wondering anxiously throughout whether he had been in time to save the sight in Josh’s eye, and controlled his temper while Brother Wilfrid lectured on about the damage done to the vibrations of Arth. Tod might have got away merely with that lecture had not Brother Wilfrid then said, “And thanks to your folly and aggression, Galpetto could well lose an eye.”

  “I saved his eye, you fool!” Tod roared at him. “Don’t give me that po-faced rot!”

  Brother Wilfrid’s breath went in. His eyes and his mouth became vicious lines. “You don’t speak to people like that here. No one here is your servant.”

  “No, thank the Goddess,” said Tod. “If you were my servant, I’d sack you for sanctimonious stupidity. Plus incompetence.”

  That did it. Tod was marched off in disgrace before the High Head himself. And naturally the system was that Brother Wilfrid nipped in through the veil and had his say before Tod got near the High Head.

  “Well, what have you got to say?” the High Head asked. He was in worn blue fatigues at that moment, and his office was spread all over with tide charts, but Tod found him unexpectedly impressive even so.

  “As what I’ve got to say is probably the opposite of everything Brother Wilfrid told you,” Tod said angrily, “I think I’ll pass on that.”

  The High Head surveyed Tod’s incipient black eye and swollen lip, his disordered hair and aggressive anger, and tried to conquer his prejudice against Tod and be equitable. “Servicemen are always brawling,” he said. “I’m prepared to believe your cause was just. But you’re not here for fighting, or the damage to the centaur’s eye.” Tod ground his teeth audibly at this. “You are here for causing acute disturbance in every band and spoke of the Wheel. Can’t you feel what you’ve done? If not, look.” The High Head gestured to his large mirror, which was boiling and tumbling with the mixed rainbows of a large cosmic disorder. “You did that, Gordano, by raising wild magic.”

  The injustice of this was almost too much for Tod. “With respect, sir, I did not do any such thing. First, I did not use wild magic, because I have been very well trained from as far back as I can remember. What I did was to draw on my birthright in the ways I have been taught. Second, sir, that cosmic storm was brewing at least an hour ago. I saw it on the speculum quite clearly.”

  “Then why did you not report it?” asked the High Head.

  “Because I assumed Observer Horn is full of highly trained Brothers who would report it long before I did,” said Tod.

  “There is no need to be insolent,” said the High Head.

  “Yes there is,” said Tod. “If I speak normally in this damned joyless place, some po-faced prat ups and tells me I’m being insolent. So if I’m insolent, it ought to work the other way round. Sir.”

  They stared at each other with considerable dislike, while the High Head wondered which of twenty scathing things to say. And which of thirty condign punishments to order. None of them seemed nasty enough for this nasty piece of work, who could nearly put a serviceman’s eye out and then show no contrition whatsoever, who refused to acknowledge he had caused a cosmic storm, who—

  The upper off-center mirror spoke, blazing the sigil of Observer Horn. “Sir, there appears to be a supply capsule out of control outside the atmosphere.”

  The Observer sigil was almost instantly joined by sigils in every other mirror. That of Housekeeping blazed, Defense, Maintenance, Observer again, Healing, Calculus… Each sigil brought a new voice, speaking in crisp sequence.

  “Housekeeping here, sir. There’s a capsule outside the air that’s definitely not one of ours.”

  “Defense Horn, requesting permission to explode a strange capsule, sir. We divine some kind of foreign life aboard it which could be dangerous.”

  “This is Maintenance, sir. There’s a capsule plunging straight at our atmosphere. If it gets any closer, it could breach us, sir.”

  “Sir, we are now in contact with a mind in distress inside the supposed supply capsule. Person seems human and says the controls don’t answer.”

  “Healing, Healing. Be wary. There are dead humans aboard a capsule outside. Be wary. It could be plague.”

  “Calculus Horn reports, sir, with some shame, that the cause of the current cosmic storm appears to be a rogue capsule that entered Arth from elsewhere in the multiverse some twenty seconds ago.”

  “Ritual Horn, sir. Be wary. Alien magework is affecting our efforts to damp the storm.”

  Tod gazed from sigil to sigil, almost admiringly. What a display of order and efficiency. No sigil occupied a glass already in use by another. The voices spoke precisely in turn. It was all so cool that he had to force himself to realize that this must be an emergency, that there must be people in bad trouble outside the citadel.

  The High Head snapped an order to Defense Horn to hold off their attack for a while and drew in the air the symbol for the emergency rescue of a transport. As artificial elementals sped howling down the corridors, screaming their orders to the heads and other ranks of the Horns involved, he swung around to Tod again. What those people out there thought they were doing in this capsule, he had no idea, but Edward’s message had not been lost on him. Corpses. Possibly plague. Good. “Gordano, you go to the upper rescue port and tell them to put you into a safety suit. I want you to be first man to board that capsule. Your punishment is to deal with whatever you find inside it.”

  * * *

  2

  « ^ »

  They had not expected the weightlessness. It happened after the second heavy jolt. Zillah found herself rising above her seat and grabbed for Marcus as he floated away from her, still asleep. The space ahead of her was full of floating bodies, lying in the air at all angles, some threshing about, some clinging to seats. Something was on fire down there, in four different places. People were making frantic efforts to beat flames out with hands that suddenly worked to different rules, and rebounding to the ceiling—which was now a side wall to Zillah—with the force of their efforts.

  “I told them—I told her so!” Roz Collasso was crying out. “The place does have defenses! They’ve gone and burnt our virus-magic! Now what do we do?”

  Along the
sideways ceiling Zillah had an upside-down glimpse of Judy’s arm, ridged with straining tendons, shaking and shaking at the woman beside her. It was Judy’s voice doing all the screaming. “Something’s wrong with Lynne! Somebody help me! None of these controls work!”

  A small, energetic person swooped down to Judy. Flan Burke, Zillah thought. Judy’s screams redoubled. “Flan, Flan, Lynne’s dead! I don’t know what to do! Somebody hel—!” There was the sound of a smacking blow. Flan’s body came arcing up again with the force of it.

  “Shut up, Judy!”

  The fires must have gone out. The metal space was murky with smoke, and a lot of people were coughing, including Judy, who was coughing and sobbing together, but there were no flames anymore. Everyone was sinking slowly toward what had been the right-hand wall. Some small pull of gravity seemed to be coming from there.

  “We’re falling,” said the big black girl, among coughing and retchings.

  “Falling where?” demanded Roz.

  Judy’s voice was now low and grinding. “How the hell should I know? You can hit me all you like, Flan, but it won’t do any good. This screen’s no use at all. Look, if you don’t believe me!”

  Among the crowding bodies, Zillah had a slowly rotating view of a screen over the two empty drivers’ seats, alight with meaningless colored whorls. Whatever they were receiving, it was not in the usual manner of VDUs, but in wide-spaced, wavy bands which changed width perpetually.

  “And our viruses are gone,” Judy said dully. “And we don’t know where we are.”