Deep Secret (39 page)

“Oh no!” said Will.

Zinka’s eyes scanned the dark landscape lying at such a queer angle to the rest of my room. I could see she was awed. But she said drily, “Our Mr White has done even better than he expected, hasn’t he? I don’t think you should fetch them back now. What do you want to do, Rupert?”

“We carry on regardless,” I said. “Maree’s out there waiting.”

“In that case,” Rob said, “I have to go, don’t I?”

Will and Zinka edged down beside the frilly chair by the bathroom. I shut the door of my room and we all looked at Rob. Zinka looked at him with frank lascivious admiration. You could see why. Even ill and pale, with his horse-coat dull and staring, Rob was a magnificent sight.

He stood himself cautiously on all four hooves. “I do owe Maree,” he said. “She can’t manage alone. And you made me see… I see I’ve done a lot of damage and I ought to try to put it right.”

“He is mage-trained,” Will said.

“But you’re ill!” I objected. Besides, I still wanted to go myself.

“I can manage,” Rob said. His beautiful features twisted a little. “If it hurts, it probably serves me right, doesn’t it?”

“I think you’ll have to send him,” Zinka said decisively. “It fits.”

After that, I couldn’t argue any more. The two candles burning on the edge of the dark landscape were each nearly a third gone. We had wasted enough time. “What does he need to take?” I asked Zinka.

“Water’s easy,” she said. “I see you’ve got four little empty bottles. Now, for wool…”

“I’ve got a cashmere sweater,” I offered.

“Then you’d better get it unravelled,” Zinka said.

“
What?”
I said.

“The feel of the verse is for raw wool,” she explained. “In a hank. You know.”

Will stood in the bathroom doorway with a fistful of little bottles, laughing at the look on my face. “Not to worry,” he said. He fished in the pocket of his coat and came up with a big handful of fluffy white goat’s hair. “This do?” he asked Zinka.

“Perfect,” she said.

The last of our hasty preparations had to be done with the door of my room open, mostly in the passage outside. Rob, being so much longer than a human, could not fit into the space in front of the road when the door was closed. He was forced to hop, wincing at the jolt, across the first pair of candles, then out through the doorway and on into the corridor, where he turned himself to face into my room. There Zinka handed him a candle and Will’s belt pouch, with the four little bottles of water chinking in it despite being packed round with the goat’s wool.

“There you go,” she said, lovingly fastening the belt around Rob’s muscular waist-parts, while I stood waiting impatiently with my lighter and the plastic bags of grain and salt. “There. Do try to come back, Rob. You’re too stunning to lose.”

Rob had been looking ahead, very tense and determined, but at this, he flung back his sheet of black hair and turned his face down to Zinka’s. “You think so?” he said. His whole pose turned amorous. So did Zinka’s.

I more or less ground my teeth, but before I could say anything I heard the thud of sprinting feet on the carpet. I whirled round. Nick came flying up to us and caught hold of me to stop himself. “Oh good,” he said. “Rob’s going too.”

We stared at him. “I thought your mother—?” Zinka said.

“I told her I was going to bed,” Nick said. “That’s all she wanted me for anyway. OK, Rob. Let’s get going, shall we?”

Will and I looked at one another and grinned, remembering how deftly Nick had avoided Janine before. “Hold out your hand,” I said, advancing on Nick with my grain and salt.

“Both hands,” Zinka corrected me, and thrust a candle into Nick’s other hand.

I had filled Nick’s hand with mingled salt and grain and was just about to tip grain into Rob’s outstretched hand when I thought I heard footsteps again. Again I whirled round. Gram White was coming round the corner, from the same direction as Nick. Almost certainly he had been following Nick. I saw him in the mirrors first, reaching into his armpit under his robe in a way that could only mean he was fetching out a gun.

Things seemed to go into slow motion. I had time to realise that, if I could see him, then Gram White would have a distant view of us too, including Rob, and that Rob would be the one he shot first. I had plenty of time to plant the plastic bags on the floor. I had what felt like half an hour’s leisure to build a thick shield across the corridor, and then to check the other way, in case Janine was coming from the other end. But White was on his own.

He came round the corner and fired. He aimed, I think, at Rob’s head. The
boom
and the
crack
of the rebound shook floor, walls, air, everything. At least I got something right! I thought. I watched a rather large slice of the ceiling slowly unhitch and crash down on the carpet.

“Quick work,” Will said shakily.

Before White could fire again, Zinka trod the fallen plaster to flakes as she marched down the passage. “Gram White!” she said. Her voice rang as loudly as the shot. Instead of getting smaller as she marched away from us, her rosy figure actually seemed to grow bigger. White backed away as she advanced on him. “Gram White!” she said. “You do anything like that again and I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!”

She was magnificent, but we didn’t, even Rob, dare wait and watch. I hurriedly filled Rob’s hand with grain and salt and stowed the remainder in the belt bag, along with a candle for Maree and my spare lighter. Will meanwhile lit Nick’s candle and then Rob’s. Then we both bolted into my room to the far end and began relighting the double row of candles and saying the rhyme. Since Nick and Rob could see the road, they started forward at once. I remember looking up between the third and fourth pair of candles and seeing them go past, both in profile and surprisingly alike, not only in the actual classic shape of their faces, but also in their expressions. Both looked thoroughly determined, and with both you wondered how long that would last. Rob’s resolution might survive pain, but not if something offered him an easy way out. Nick would probably scorn an easy way out, but I knew I would not trust him if he were asked to sacrifice something he wanted. And I had a strong feeling that both the easy way and the sacrifice were waiting out there on that hard-to-see grey road.

We had reached the end of Will’s verse when, to my relief, Zinka came back, expressively dusting her hands, in time to say her own verse. She shut the door and leant against it while we all recited the last one. By that time, Nick and Rob were visible down below, as two dark shapes and two pricks of light, crossing the level towards the next hill. Making good time. We watched them wind up that hill, and went on watching until it was clear that the pinpricks of light did not carry far enough for us to see them on the next rise. It was all dark out there.

“Right,” said Zinka. “I got rid of White for the moment, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. There’s a party somewhere on this floor. I wasn’t going to go, because Thurless invited me there, but I think I will go now. I’ll make sure to be there at least until dawn, and I’ll be listening. If White comes back, or anything else happens, one of you two just call me or phone Room 509. OK?”

“Before you do,” I said, “would you mind terribly checking Nick’s room for us? It worries me that his mother wanted him there.”

“Good thought,” said Zinka.

She went off to do that. I said to Will, “I’m going to risk putting out all the candles but the last two again, and then relighting the next pair as soon as the end pair begin to gutter. That way they’ll last nine times as long.”

Will rubbed his face, thinking about it. “The only trouble with that – now we know the road stays there as long as there
are
two candles burning – the trouble is that someone’s going to have to sit and watch them and relight the next lot.”

“I was going to sit and watch anyway,” I said.

“In that case,” said Will, “would you mind if I got some sleep? I was up near dawn milking the goats.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

So Will climbed under my slightly bloodstained duvet, uttering a great weary yawn. He was asleep almost at once. He never even stirred when Zinka came back.

“You were right,” she told me. “And here was I thinking you were being paranoid. I take it back. There was a really strong slave spell in there. I mean
strong
– about ten times the strength of whatever you did to that lift. Even a selfish kid like that Nick would find himself doing anything they wanted after five minutes in there with that thing. I scotched it, but I made it look as if it was still there. Is that what you wanted?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks, Zinka. Unless… has he got a computer?”

“Nice little laptop,” she said. “But I don’t know about computers.”

“I’ll take a look at it tomorrow,” I said wearily. After what had been done to Maree’s computer, there was almost certainly something wrong with Nick’s too. The list of things I had to do tomorrow seemed to stretch out like a supermarket bill.

After Zinka had gone, I moved the frilly chair round with its back to the door and folded the wheelchair up. It had occurred to me that the wheelchair, though more comfortable, could get shunted forward between the lines of candles if someone like Zinka, to whom locks mean nothing, came in suddenly behind me. I could then be willy-nilly in the midst of a working I should be outside of. Will and Zinka had been right about the dangers of that. If it hadn’t been Maree out there, I would never have dreamt of suggesting it.

I turned out the lights and sat in the frilly chair. With only the two candles alight, down to a small, small glimmer, the landscape out there was slightly easier to see. It was as if someone had drawn on black paper with the faintest of faint grey luminous airspray a rolling moor-like distance and a faint road looping across it. Far, far off, there may have been the loom of something else beyond the horizon. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t go there. There was no point trying to speculate on what was happening to the three people journeying out there. All I could do was hold the road and watch the candles.

After a while, the party made itself heard from down the passage outside, muffled by the wards round my room. I was glad of it. I was by that time thoroughly enmeshed in the kind of thoughts I had been warning myself not to think, and it helped to have the noise. It reminded me there was life beyond my room. I thought of Rob, buoyant, flashy, flimsy young centaur, with that sort of slave-child mentality that whines when things go wrong. “It’s not my fault! I didn’t mean to!” Rob expected adults to scold him. He preferred that, I suspected, to accepting a fault and blaming himself, but he would duck out of both if he could. Smiling limpidly the while, of course. It was probably the result of being brought up by that kingly granite statue, Knarros. Will had shamed Rob into better behaviour, but Will had only been at work on Rob for an hour or so, and Rob had had Knarros all his life. If the journey proved as hard as the rhyme suggested, I knew Rob would be the first to crack.

Then I thought of Nick. Nick’s personality seemed to me to run deeper, stronger and more complex than Rob’s. When Nick ducked out of things, he didn’t signal it in advance like Rob did. He just vanished. He was, I suspected, quite ruthless about it, and about what he himself wanted. I had no idea what Nick did want, really – except I was sure it was not to rule an empire – because Nick had a dark private core. Possibly he didn’t know what was in there himself yet. But he knew enough to duck out if that core was threatened. And he would. I knew that. Rob and Nick shared, deep in their genes, a very strong selfishness. It was the same selfishness that had made their common father set up the whole mad mess in the first place.

Maree seemed to me to have escaped that selfishness. It was one of the things I had come to like about her. One of the many things. I wished I dared hope there were things she had come to like about me. But I couldn’t think of any. I thought of Maree instead, fierce, droll, unhappy little fighter as she was. She saw deep into things. I wondered, though, if she saw deep enough into herself. It could be that, in that way, she was not selfish
enough
. People who regard themselves as sacred – like Nick and his father the Emperor – know when fighting is worth it and when it is not. I doubted that Maree did know. She could well hurl herself uselessly into something out there, and lose. She could equally well lose by not defending herself when she should do. And with only half of herself present, the loss could be fatal…

As I said, I was glad that the gruff roar and distant music of the party kept forcing itself on my attention. I made a strong effort to think of something else.

I thought of Janine and her brother Gram White, and their intentions. Long ago, Janine must somehow have persuaded Timos IX to let her go into exile in a strange world as guardian of her own son and of Maree, where Janine must rapidly have married Ted Mallory and equally rapidly got Maree adopted by Ted’s brother Derek. The Emperor let her go. She was only a Lesser Consort, and someone as paranoid as Timos must certainly have known she had ambitions. Furthermore, Janine’s son and Maree (whose mother must also have been a Lesser Consort, I imagined) were both embarrassingly older than the children of True Wives. The Emperor must have sent them off Naywards out of trouble with relief. He could not have realised, when he took care to become the brother-in-law of Knarros, and so ensure the centaur’s loyalty, that Gram White had then done the same three years later. The birth of the centaur Kris involved Knarros in a little dynasty and a further loyalty, to Janine this time. No, obviously the Emperor had not known, or he would never have put Knarros in charge of the other children.

So what happened then? Janine seemed to have waited until Nick was old enough to make a credible Emperor (though not old enough to defy her, one supposes), while White learnt to make and use projectile weapons. Before that, he must have been trained as a mage. They must both have been in constant touch with other people on Koryfos, and bided their time until they could organise that explosion in the palace. When the time came—