Deep Secret (19 page)

“Is Thurless generally such a pain?” I asked Maxim, with some anxiety.

“Nearly always,” he told me. “The trouble is, he’s not that good a writer and he thinks he
is
. I’ve never known him quite this dreadful, though. There must be something else biting him. I’ll get someone to— Oh, Zinka! You’re the very person! Have you heard about Mervin Thurless?”

Zinka is not that common a name. I turned stiffly on my stool, unbelievingly. And there, coming up to about my waist, stood the well-known crimson-robed lovely ample shape of Zinka Fearon. Fellow Magid. One-time lover. Last heard from messaging me about Koryfos several worlds Ayewards from the Empire. I couldn’t think what she was doing here. While Maxim was ordering her the pint of cider she always drinks, I bent down and asked her.

“And I love you too, Rupert,” she said. “I’m here on holiday. I always have my holiday here at PhantasmaCon. I close down. I put everything on hold, and I have a rest. Your brother Si’s handling any emergencies out there for me. Are you here working? Yes, I can see you are. It’s not exactly quite your usual scene, is it?”

“I’m beginning to enjoy it rather,” I admitted.

“Oh good,” she said. “If I ever knew anyone who needed to unbend…! But don’t ask me to lift a hand to help you in any way. I’m off duty. I mean it.”

Maxim turned back with her cider then, and we had the tale of Thurless all over again, including the way he had made an ass of himself at the Opening Ceremony.

“Male menopause,” Zinka said decidedly. “I’ll sort him out.”

I sincerely hoped she could, or I was one candidate short. Thinking this, I raised my eyes to the mirror, and saw Maree Mallory bent back in her chair, trying to avoid the great beaky gabbling face of an appalling female dressed apparently in an orange tent.

“Who is that dreadful creature in orange?” I asked.

Zinka looked in the mirror too. She slammed her tankard down on the bar. “Damn! Tansy-Ann’s caught a neo again. Back in a moment.”

She was. The woman in orange fled yelling, Mallory vanished too and Zinka was back, unruffled.

“Tansy-Ann?” I asked her apprehensively.

“Fisk. American,” she told me. “Not exactly nasty – just a well-known pain. Can you lend me ten pounds?”

“Probably,” I said. Damn. There, by the looks of it, was another candidate down the drain. “Why?”

She looked, to be sure Maxim was safely talking to someone else (and he was: bellowing into a hearing-aid) and muttered hurriedly, “I’ve almost no Earth currency until I sell some stuff in the Dealers Room.”

So I gave her a tenner. It is a problem a Magid can face quite often. All in all, it was a very pleasant evening, except that before it ended I seemed to be two candidates short. I went up in the lift knowing that my spirit rebelled at the thought of having Fisk for a pupil – unless she turned out to be one hundred per cent more reasonable than she looked, of course. Of the two women, I almost preferred Mallory. Which was saying something. Mervin Thurless, I hoped, might be still possible, if one supposed that he had been unbalanced by having the sort of gifts that make a person a potential Magid. It is bad, having those gifts and not knowing how to use them. I know I was pretty difficult myself as a student because of this. My brother Will has described me then succinctly as “a little shit” and I suspect I was. But then, I thought glumly, the same could apply equally well to the dreaded Fisk.

I had walked round at least one mirrored corner on the nearest way to my room before I realised that I had not yet reached it. It was literally not where I left it. It should have been just beyond the lifts. But, according to the numbers on the walls, rooms 555–587 were somewhere round the next corner. My room was 555.

I stopped. I thought. Then I turned round and retraced my steps to the corner just beyond the lifts. It was extraordinarily hard going, because I was now walking clockwise, and whoever had been using the power node had set about it anti-clockwise – widdershins, the direction of bad magic. I was not happy about that at all. I had to strive around yet another corner before I came in sight of the lifts too. Someone had set something going and not bothered to stop it. Sloppy practice. In this case you could even end up with a vortex. This node was powerful. I stood at the corner and considered it.

The node was centred on this hotel. It spread through quite a bit of the town too, but the strong centre was almost where I stood. That ought to have meant that things were relatively calm here – like the eye of a storm – but someone had come along not long ago and disturbed it, violently. Two someones, in fact. I could detect two different sets of recent activity from where I stood. And the node had responded violently to violence because it was so exceptionally strong. The Upper Room had been right to feel concerned.

I put everything back and stilled it as gently as I could. Then I went to bed.

[2]

From Maree Mallory’s

Thornlady Directory, file

twenty-four

Thornlady dream again. Biting moonlit comments about my antisocial nature. Why don’t I ever dream I bring matches and set fire to her damn bush?

Got up feeling disgruntled and went to see after Nick. I do this most mornings, particularly on schooldays. Janine is usually happy enough to leave him to me. Nick really is a total, genuine, sleep-walking zombie for at least an hour after he gets up. I have never met anyone quite as bad. Nick is capable of putting clothes on, more or less, but it stops there. I don’t ask if he washes or cleans his teeth.

When I went into his room, he was sleep-walking into walls with his sweater on backwards. He could only speak in a blurred sort of blaring mumble. I turned his sweater right way round, found his room key and led him to the lift. He had still not opened his eyes when we got to the ground floor. This had its advantages. I couldn’t find the place where they were serving breakfast, but Nick could. His nose flared to the smell of bacon and toast and he shambled along that way, dragging me.

A bright young waiter-man met us at the entrance. “Two, miss?” he says. “Not much room at the moment, I’m afraid. This way.” He gave us both menus and Nick promptly dropped his. This alerted the waiter-man to Nick’s condition. He peered at Nick’s face. Then he retrieved the menu and gave it to me, looking Nick in the face again in a sort of hushed, respectful way, as if he thought Nick might be dead. He led the way past tables where most of the fat people were already eating, and quite a few of the shy middle-aged ladies too – you could see these ladies had been trained all their lives to eat breakfast punctually at eight – and over to a table near the window. It was the only semi-empty table in the room.

I don’t believe this! I thought.

The Prat Venables was sitting at one end of it reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. He twitched the paper aside as I sat Nick down, saw it was us, and put it up again like a shield. Too bad. I got on with ordering us both breakfast.

“To start?” says the waiter-man, pad poised.

“Ner – yah!” said Nick.

“He means not yoghurt,” I said. “Cornflakes for both of us, please. And to follow—”

“Ner – bah – bah – ez – bay!” Nick stated.

“He doesn’t like beans, but he does like eggs and bacon,” I translated.

“How about sausages, tomatoes or mushrooms?” the waiter asked courteously. I swear he was experimenting to see what noise Nick would make for these. Nor was he disappointed.

“M’sha, m’sha, m’sha,” Nick went.

“Mushrooms, but he doesn’t want sausages,” I explained. “He wants tomatoes. Fried bread, Nick? Toast?”

“N’fee,” said Nick.

“He says toast but not fried bread,” says I. “To drink—”

“WOOORF – EEF!” Nick proclaimed.

“Yes, we want the biggest pot of coffee you’ve got,” I explained hastily. “It’s urgent. His mind’s working perfectly, you see, but he can’t see or speak properly until he’s had at least four cups of coffee.”

The waiter peered respectfully at Nick’s face once more. Nick’s eyes were still shut and sort of bloated. “And for you, miss?”

“The same,” I said.

He wrote it all down and whizzed off, whereupon Nick blared, “
M’feeyert
.”

“Oh God,” I said and raised the table cloth to look at his feet.

“M’bertowswash!” Nick wailed.

“It’s all right, you fool,” I said. “You’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet again, that’s all.” I got down under the table and changed his shoes over. As I went to my knees, I thought I heard newspaper crackle. When I backed out from among the chairs and got the cloth off my head, I caught a glimpse of a gold-rimmed lens hastily retreating behind the
Telegraph
again. The Prat, like the waiter, was fascinated, but pretending not to be.

I’d just got sat down again when the waiter dashed back with a coffee-pot half the size of a gasometer and poured some of it out for both of us, with reverent curiosity. “Milk, miss?”

“Thanks,” I said. “No,
he’ll
have the first four cups black.”

The waiter stood and watched and poured and watched while Nick drained the necessary four cups, still without opening his eyes. The newspaper in front of the Prat noticeably shifted so that he could watch too.

The waiter had obviously spread the news of Nick to the rest of the staff. A waitress arrived with cornflakes for both of us. She and the waiter, and the Prat (with a corner of his newspaper bent back for the purpose), all watched fascinated while Nick ate a whole bowlful and absorbed two more cups of coffee without looking at any of it. His eyes were open in slits by then, but he was still at the state of staring ahead at nothing when another waitress rushed up with two plates of cooked breakfast. Another waiter arrived with a rack of toast, and the four of them stood there expectantly while I put a knife into one of Nick’s hands and a fork into the other and said to him, “Eat.”

Nick obeyed. They watched wonderingly while Nick somehow managed to spear a brisk slippery mushroom he couldn’t have known was there and get it into his mouth. Then they watched him cut bacon and eat that. Their eyes turned to the egg. I wondered if they had a bet on that Nick couldn’t eat an egg without spilling some of it. if so, they lost. Nick put the whole egg in his mouth at once, dangling perilously from the fork by one corner. Not a drop got away.

Here the Prat stopped pretending he wasn’t watching. He folded his paper and asked me, “What happens if you put another plate of breakfast in front of him when he’s finished this one? Would he eat that as well without noticing?”

The waiters and waitresses looked at him gratefully. I could see they had been dying to know this too.

“Yes, he would, just like a zombie. I’ve tried,” I told them.

“Eyenose cuzzedin lyebins,” Nick added.

Everyone looked at me for a translation. “He’s saying he noticed what I’d done when he discovered he was eating beans for the second time,” I explained.

“Dinlye furstye,” Nick agreed.

Before I could translate this, I was swept aside by Janine and Uncle Ted. I mean literally swept aside. Janine cried out. “Oh, my poor Nick!” and pushed me off on to the chair opposite the Prat’s, while Uncle Ted said, “Morning, morning,” as he sat down by Nick, and both waitresses and one waiter fled. The first waiter fetched out his order pad, rather sadly.

“Order for me, Ted,” Janine said. “Poor Nick’s helpless in the morning.” She began tenderly buttering toast for Nick. She had a new sweater today. The shoulder of it that was turned to me had a golden splash on it, as if someone had broken an egg over her. I wish someone had.

The Prat looked as disappointed as the waiter. But he politely pushed the marmalade nearer Janine and said to me, “Can’t he butter his own toast by now?”

“I usually let him try,” I said. “Some mornings he butters the plate and tries to eat it.”

“He looks rather to have reached that stage,” the Prat said. Shrewd of him. Nick always makes his worst mistakes when he’s almost awake.

But this conversation caused Janine to notice the Prat. She leant forward and read his badge. So did I. It said R
UPERT THE
M
AGE
. “Rupert the Mage,” Janine said. “You must be one of Gram White’s esoteric circle in Universe Three.”

“Strictly freelance,” he said. “I believe we met in Bristol the other day, Mrs Mallory.”

I never heard how this not very promising conversation developed – or even if it developed at all – because Uncle Ted shouted at me. “Maree!” he shouted imploringly from the other side of Nick. “Maree! I’ve been put on a panel at twelve today. What do I
say
?”

“That depends what it’s on,” I said soothingly. “What’s it about?”

“God knows,” he said, despair all over him. “Promise me you’ll come along and nod intelligently at me from the front.”

“Senzyou murrain fanzy,” Nick said.

“Eh?” said Uncle Ted. He never could understand Nick’s morning talk.

“He’s telling you about the panel,” I explained. “He says it’s on—”

Then we got interrupted again. This time it was a long thin fellow dressed like a soldier who came up and loomed over Uncle Ted. His tall cheekbones loomed too, over his hollow cheeks, as he said, “Mr Mallory. Sir.”

His teeth showed under a fierce black moustache after that. I
think
it was a smile. I
hoped
it was, for Uncle Ted’s sake. Uncle Ted sort of sank down in his chair and looked as if he hoped so too. “What can I do for you?” he asked the man.

“I come to embrace you,” the man said. Uncle Ted flinched. “I am—” The man said some foreign name none of us could catch. He was too tall for any of us to read his badge. Then he said, “I come from fighting for my country. From Croatia. I come to say that you have saved my life and my sanity, sir. The guns would have killed my mind. But by reading your great book daily, I kept my courage and fought for my country.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said my uncle. “Er – which book?”

“Your so great history of King Arthur, his riders and the saintly Grail,” said the man.