Deep Secret (22 page)

“Knarros is a
centaur
!” I exclaimed. Then there
had
been a clue in the graphics.

Dakros laughed joyously amid the static. “Yes, no wonder all the humans were frauds. As I said, I’m on my way to Thalangia in a cruiser, with as many men as I can spare. We’ll be at the farm by tomorrow evening. Can you join us beside that hill, Magid?”

“Well, I’ve got rather pressing business—” I began.

“If he’s a centaur, it’s going to take a Magid,” Stan put in, in my other ear. “Tell him yes, and put things on hold for an hour or so here.”

“All right,” I told Dakros, sighing a little. “Give me node points and references for the hill. “What hour?”

We settled on six in the evening and I hung up. “What do you mean, it’s going to take a Magid if he’s a centaur?” I asked Stan.

“If you know centaurs,” he said, “it stands to reason. This one’s in a position of trust and he hasn’t come forward. That means he’s promised not to, or probably only to come forward under certain conditions. Centaurs like that are real sticklers. You’re going to have to convince him the conditions are met. They listen to Magids, if they listen to no one else. And he could be a magic user himself. That would make sense in the—”

“All right. I’m convinced. I’m not a centaur,” I said. “I’ll go and argue with Knarros tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’d better make some arrangements here.”

I got out of the car, into the stinging snow, and hurried to the Dealers Room again. I was not about to do as Gram White seemed to have done and leave a major working set up unattended in a strong node like this one in Wantchester. I had four people’s fatelines woven into the Hotel Babylon – no, more like seven, if you counted my own and Andrew’s and, as I strongly suspected, Maree Mallory’s too – and there was no way I could wind all that down before Saturday night. I had intended to spend most of the following week doing it.

Zinka had finished her hot dog by then and was drinking tea. Luckily there were very few other people in the room. I had panted out my problem to her in a hoarse whisper.

“No,” she said. It was quite pleasant. It was also like running full-tilt into an iceberg. “Leave the Empire to stew, Rupert. Word’s out that it’s Intended to fall apart anyway. I’m on holiday. I told you.”

“But you said you would in an emergency,” I pleaded.

“This,” said Zinka, “is not an emergency. This is you trying the kiss of life on a week-old corpse. I repeat: no.”

“I can’t leave a full-scale working unattended!” I more or less wailed.

“Then don’t,” she said. “Or get someone else in. What’s wrong with Stan?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Dead and disembodied in my car at this moment.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then I am sorry. I hadn’t heard.”

The signs were that the iceberg would have melted then, except that, unfortunately, my Croatian candidate came and loomed over us. Suddenly, before I could say any more. His hollow, haunted face bent down between us. Zinka and I both drew back from it. “You two have the wrong smell,” Gabrelisovic said. His large mauve hand, marked with lumps and white nicks, came between us also, forming one of the more violent of the signs against witchcraft. “Such as you,” he said, “have I killed with the bare hand and buried in the mass grave many times in the mountains of my country.” He stood up and retreated. “I hunt by smell,” he said. “Beware. You disgust.” And he strode away.

“Gosh. Wow!” Zinka said. “Long time since I encountered a genuine witch-sniffer. He must have added quite a dimension to their war! He’s mad as a hatter as well, isn’t he?”

Knowing what a good healer Zinka is, I said wistfully, “Is there any chance you can make him sane again?”

“No,” she said, staring after Gabrelisovic as he strode from the room. “No way. Not after he’s killed people bare-handed, there’s no chance. And he’d go for me if I tried.” Then, as I opened my mouth to continue pleading about my working, she added, “And no to that too, Rupert. I always know when I’m needed now. Go away.”

I took myself off, wondering what to do. The answer seemed to be, to finish my work here – at least I needn’t now interview Gabrelisovic – as far as I could, and then ask Will, as the nearest off-world Magid, to stand in for me while I dealt with Knarros. Will was easier to reach than any other Magid currently on Earth. It sounded so simple, put like that. I went off to do it.

From Maree Mallory’s

Thornlady Directory, file

twenty-six

I
’m entering this quite late at night, after I left the publishers’ parties and dragged Nick away with me before he got too drunk. One of the parties must still be going on. I can hear distant drunken hooting, and somewhere there’s just been a huge crash of broken glass. Someone turned the wrong way at a corner and tried to walk through a mirror probably.

Actually I left because a) my fabulous Nordic type wasn’t at any of them (Wendy was hunting for him too); b) Rupert is furious with me; and c) Janine came in while I was sitting on the floor between Nick and Wendy and bitched about what a sight we looked. She can talk. She was wearing a black thing with a golden snake wrapped round it that made her look like an advanced version of one of Zinka’s pictures. The snake had two heads and one head was – well anyway, I couldn’t stand any more and came away.

But I really meant to write down the extraordinary thing this afternoon.

What happened was that Nick was desperate to talk to Rupert – the Prat – about computer games. ‘Desperate’ is an understatement. Nick wouldn’t let me do anything else but help find him and snabble Rupert Venables. Of course we couldn’t find him at first. Then we ran him down in the bar – naturally at the precise moment he got caught by the dreadful Tansy-Ann. He was with her for ages.

Nick kept saying we should go and rescue Rupert, why didn’t we? He said we would earn the man’s undying gratitude. And I told him he had no idea what Tansy-Ann was like. She was quite capable of catching us and holding us in thrall too. And even Nick agreed she did look a bit that way. So we sat and waited. Somebody bought me some Real Ale because they said I looked as if I needed it – I blame that news sheet again – and Nick got bought a Coke he didn’t like. And we watched Rupert avoid having his back massaged by Tansy-Ann and get his hands squeezed instead, while Tansy-Ann pushed her beak into his face and talked for a good hour. I was getting almost sorry for the Prat, when Nick and I looked up after not looking for a second or so. And Rupert was gone. Tansy-Ann was alone, looking startled.

“Told you so,” said Nick. He had done no such thing. “He’s just like me. I can always get away from people if I want to. He’s probably in the gents.”

He wasn’t. Nick went in and looked. So we hunted all over the hotel again.

This time we found him with Mervin Thurless, but not until we’d hunted through all the downstairs places and most of the public parts of the first floor – not to speak of asking everyone we met. Rick Corrie went bounding past and sent us up to the first floor. Someone else sent us down again, where we met Wendy, who said she wouldn’t know Rupert if he came up and hit her. Then a great huge man with a fringe of black beard round his face and F
ANGS!
written on his T-shirt came up and slammed into Wendy and hugged her. It made a truly massive embrace. And he told us over Wendy’s shoulder that Rupert the Mage was in Ops looking for Mervin Thurless. So there we went, and a man in battle fatigues who was trying to canoodle with a carroty girl told us wearily that he’d only just come on shift, try the Press Room. So we did that. And got handed another news sheet full of stuff about Uncle Ted pinching ideas from Mervin Thurless, and Tina Gianetti refusing to have both of them together on the same panel ever again.

“I bet he did take stuff from Thurless,” Nick said, reading all about it as we went along the corridor.

“I’m sure he did,” I said. “He told me he couldn’t bear to see ideas lying around not being used properly. And I wouldn’t trust a person like Thurless to use an idea properly if it was handed to him on a scroll from Heaven.”

“It says here,” said Nick, “that Thurless is running the Writers’ Workshop tomorrow in place of Wendy Willow. I should think she’d be better at it, wouldn’t you?”

By this time it was quite late. People were appearing changed into fine clothes ready for the parties. Maxim Hough hurried past wearing a velvet patchwork jacket, beside two achingly slender girls in glittery dresses. And coming towards us were two fabulous women in long tight black leather dresses that laced up all over with red thongs. It took me a moment to recognise that they were two of the long-haired people with the baby. Their hair was piled up in glossy hairdos and their false eyelashes stuck out a good inch.

Nick recognised them at once. “Wow!” he said. They were delighted. They struck poses and Nick admired them. “What have you done with the baby?” he asked.

“Larry’s looking after him,” said the one on the left. “Loretta, I mean.”

“She’s got ever so maternal since she changed sex,” the one on the right explained.

Nick became speechless. I asked them rather despairingly whether they’d seen Rupert.

“Rupert the Mage?” they said in their lovely husky voices. One of them added, “I love that man – he’s so
straight
!” and the other one said that he (or she) had seen Rupert going into the Filk Room, just along there. Then they went swaying off – they both had shiny black boots on with six-inch heels. I wondered how they could walk at all, in those tight black leather skirts as well.

Nick said, “I know one of them has to be a man! Can you tell which?”

“
Darned
if I know!” I said. “They’re both so beautiful. But that baby’s surely having a weird upbringing!”

Nick said, in a vague way, “
All
upbringings are weird.” He had his con map out, looking for this Filk Room. “It’s down the end of this corridor.”

It was a medium-sized empty room with bits of sound equipment strewn about in it, mostly flexes snaking all over the floor. Rupert Venables and Mervin Thurless were sitting on the only two chairs in there, talking deeply. But Thurless swung round and jutted his beard at us as we put our faces round the door. When he saw it was me, he looked savage.

“So you think you’re going to take
this
room away from me as well, do you?” he snarled. “Go away. Go and voodoo-dance somewhere else!”

We shut the door hurriedly and went and sat by the wall in a kind of lobby outside. Nick said, “It’s all right. We can catch Rupert the Mage as soon as he comes out.”

I wailed, “Oh dear! It
was
his room Rick Corrie gave me!”

“It’s not your fault,” Nick said.

We sat for some time. Nick was quite happy. He got out a notebook and set to perfecting his Wantchester game, bringing it up to Bristolia standard, he said. I was pretty restive. It was an unrestful spot. Waiters and waitresses kept coming out through a door disguised as a mirror, carrying glasses and boxes of bottles for the publishers’ parties. They all seemed to be talking about music. The waitress who had brought Nick his cornflakes hurried by saying, “It’s not that I
mind
music – it’s not that. I just want to know where it’s coming from.”

And the waiter who had brought the coffee said, “Yeah, I know. It’s creepy. Music in the air.”

A few minutes after they had gone, I heard music too. It was coming from behind the closed door of the Filk Room. It didn’t strike me as creepy, but it seemed unlikely that Rupert Venables and Mervin Thurless had both suddenly started playing guitars. “Nick…” I said.

Nick looked up, listened and said, “Oh
no
!” The guitars had now been joined by a sweet soprano song.

We both jumped up and Nick tore open the Filk Room door. The three women alone in there looked rather startled. “We were just having a bit of a rehearsal,” said the one who had been singing. “The filking doesn’t really start until eight.”

Nick spotted the door at the other end of the room, where the women must have come in and Rupert and Thurless gone out. “Sorry,” he said, sprinting for it. “Looking for someone.” We crossed the room like an army crossing the stage, with the women gaping at us, and crashed out the other side into a shabby passage where the service stairs were. Nick seemed to have no doubt that Rupert had recently gone up those stairs. He went up them at a gallop and I panted behind, thinking that, even if Rupert
had
gone that way, he was long gone by now. There was a fire door at the top, saying it led to the Second Floor. Nick pushed it open, looked, and beckoned me on with a large excited sweep of his arm.

I panted up to him to see a long corridor ahead, with the usual mirrors at the corners, and Rupert Venables just turning left at that end. We raced after him. I was almost as frustrated as Nick by then. I’d wasted a whole afternoon and I was
determined
to catch him this time. We whirled round that corner, me on Nick’s heels, only seconds behind Rupert.

It was only when we had run some yards down a passage lined with mirrors, but the glass all faint and dark, like the reflections of reflections, that I had a clear memory of the hotel corridor and knew something was very wrong. There hadn’t been a cross-corridor. There never was this side of the hotel. There was always only a right-hand turn. There was no way we could have turned left without crashing into the wall. But we had.