The Seventh Tide (2 page)

Today, Professor Hurple had decided he was going to teach Eo the fine art of triangulation IF IT KILLED HIM. ‘Him’ could refer to pupil or teacher – or both – in this case, but whichever way,
Hurple was determined.
He was convinced that mathematics was essential, the key to whole swathes of human experience, and Eo was going to be introduced to those swathes come hell or high water.

(It could be proposed that all the events that followed happened result of Professor Hurple’s obsession with mathematics. And his being a ferret, of course, since most mathematicians will not normally eat rabbit unless somebody cooks it first.)

Eo was receiving this part of his education on one of the most beautiful of the G islands. It was as close to being the centre of G society as any place could be, an unofficial capital, for the simple reason that it was green and pleasant and had beaches of the finest silver. In terms of practical triangulation, the view from its shores offered a number of distant mountain peaks to work out the height of, but to a ferret there were much more interesting problems to solve.

‘Now, pay attention, boy! As you can hear, I have placed a beeper –’

‘Ooo – what’s a beeper, sir?’

‘It’s a thing that beeps – what do you
think
it is?!’

‘Just checking, sir.’

Professor Hurple narrowed his ferrety eyes suspiciously. He never quite trusted Eo when he started calling him ‘sir’ in that oh-so-innocent tone of voice. Still,
I will not be distracted
! he thought to himself.

‘I have placed a beeper,’ he repeated more loudly, ‘down a tunnel in this deserted rabbit warren. I will give
you the length of the tunnel – you may use the horizon as observable from this point – and I would like you to use the principles of triangulation, as explained on
a number
of previous occasions, to work out the exact depth at which the beeper may be found. Do you understand?’

Eo nodded earnestly. ‘Yes, sir! Yes, I do… except for one thing.’

Hurple sighed. ‘Well?’ he said wearily. ‘What is it?’

‘The beeper. You said it was a thing that beeps?’

‘YES?!’

‘Well… it’s stopped.’

What the Professor said next was, thankfully, in Ferret, thus saving Eo’s tender ears. Still, it was quite a safe guess from his tone – and the instantaneous fur muss-up – that he was not best pleased.

‘Wait here,’ he snarled (in G this time), and disappeared into the warren.

Eo grinned contentedly. Old Hurple was certainly good entertainment. He even had some interesting things to say, sometimes. Eo quite liked maths, though it seemed to involve more work than should be absolutely necessary. He lay back on the grass while he waited for the ferret to re-emerge, and looked up into the blue autumn sky.

The clouds were fat and frisky before a brisk wind, and the tide was on its way out, so the smell of fresh mud and seaweed was strong on the air. Eo rolled over on to his stomach and squinted out to sea, watching the way its colours changed themselves restlessly from bright aquamarine to blue-black and back again.

It was one of those moments when Eo felt good about life in general, and being Eo in particular. There wasn’t
any real reason, beyond it being such a nice day – it just happens like that sometimes.

After a bit, though, his feeling of well-being began to leak away. He started to wonder a little uncomfortably about what had happened to the Professor. Even an exceptional ferret can sometimes forget other commitments while underground. Not that Eo minded – he never minded not having lessons – but he didn’t want to have to spoil the mood of the day by needing to worry about his teacher…

He frowned, and put his ear to the ground. Sure enough, there were muffled scuffling noises to be heard, and then a short screech. Then silence. Eo chewed his lip. The scream hadn’t
sounded
like old Hurple’s voice. But still… If he were an adult, it’d be no problem – he’d just shift shape, into another ferret maybe, and scuttle on down there. Find out what was what. But he wasn’t, and he couldn’t. All
he
could do was dig down from where he was (and he didn’t even have a shovel) or else go and find an adult G someplace and get
them
to help. He didn’t like to leave, though. He didn’t really know
what to
do, so he decided to do nothing for a while longer. That sometimes worked.

Eo had just reached the point of
having
to make a decision when, to his great relief, the Professor re-emerged from the tunnel.

He was looking dreamy and content, in spite of being in dire need of a good grooming. His muzzle in particular had some pretty incriminating red marks round it. He seemed surprised to see Eo.

Ah… yes…’ he said, and stopped.

Are you all right?’ asked Eo.

Hurple burped. ‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am quite all right, thank you for asking. I did, however, make one slight miscalculation. I believe, earlier, that I stated this warren was deserted. I was wrong. Then. But I’m right now!’ He grinned a little sheepishly at Eo and then gave himself a shake. ‘Right,’ he continued, trying to sound a bit more like a proper Authority Figure. ‘Did you bring your bag with you, boy?’

Eo nodded. School-age G needed sturdy and capacious bags with strong straps. There was no telling what your tutor might want you to carry around or bring to lessons. (Especially if the tutor in question couldn’t carry things very well himself because of not, for example, having any hands.) In Eo’s case, his bag had more of the Professor’s work in it than his own. The ferret never liked to be without his great work,
Professor Pinkerton Hurple’s Answers to Your Most Pressing FAQs
, and was quite capable of breaking off in the middle of a lesson – even the middle of a sentence! – to get down a new idea that struck him.

‘Here it is, Professor,’ said Eo.

‘Good. Excellent. It is my intention, at this point, to get into your bag for a period of, uh, meditation. That doesn’t mean wasted time for you, however. You may continue with your essay on “Demon Incursions from the Dark Worlds” for Supernova Tangent. She mentioned to me only this morning that you were not progressing with it as diligently as she could have wiiiii-’

An enormous yawn interrupted him. Ferrets fall asleep after a meal, in the same way that rivers run downhill and the sun rises at dawn.

‘She was not at all sure you’d been paying attention when she explained the special dangers of this time of
year to you. Again. You may refer to my manuscript if you need any really
strong
quotes. Don’t forget to consider the moon… don’t forget… eclipse…’ Hurple could barely keep his eyes open.

Eo suppressed a grin, and held the mouth of his bag open invitingly. In a blink the ferret was inside, curled up and snoring on his own manuscript and the boy’s notes for his essay. Eo didn’t care. He had no intention of progressing in his understanding of
anything
today. With a chuckle, he folded the top of the bag over, picked it up carefully and headed down to the shoreline.

At no point up till then had anything
irrevocable
happened. There was nothing actually dangerous about a teacher falling asleep or a pupil skiving. And what came next might seem pretty insignificant too, particularly if you think only big actions have consequences.

Or that only cruelty on a large scale is actually cruel.

Eo laid his bag down on a soft bit of the beach, then tiptoed away to look for rock pools. And almost at once he found a beauty. It was a perfect little world of miniature seaweed and red sea anemones like clots of blood, darting transparent fingerlings, at least one small crab, a few snails and a colony of shrimps with their long feelers and their perpetually prissy expressions (Eo disliked shrimps). It was like a little zoo, or his own private collection.

Eo drew his hair back from both sides of his face, knotted the two pieces behind his head and told it to stay there. One of the convenient things about G hair was that it always did as requested, come high wind or water.

It was fascinating, for a while, just to watch the inhabitants going about the place, aware that they were unaware that they were
being
watched. But after a bit,
Eo was gripped by the temptation that comes, sooner or later, to all zoo owners and collectors – the temptation to
interfere.
To find out what would happen
if…

He started with just shifting his weight a little, so his shadow fell across the rock-pool world, cutting off the sun. This made the inhabitants pause for a second, but it was the sort of thing clouds did all the time so they forgot about it almost at once. Then he tried dropping rocks, just small ones, out of the blue on to their heads. That got them agitated! Then he had another idea – he looked about him for a stick…

Every G had tuition on the dangers of demonic entrance – living where they did, it would have been criminal negligence otherwise. Just because the main pillars of G existence had always been pleasure and the satisfaction of curiosity didn’t mean they were reckless or stupid. They knew better than to walk round a standing stone widdershins, or sleep on a faerie mound, or whistle rudely at sea.

Eo had very recently been reminded of all this. The lecture from Supernova Tangent was the same one she gave every year. It described – in painstaking detail – the way certain things could combine at certain times, things like phases of the moon, lunar orbit, whether or not an eclipse was imminent, what Festivals of the Dead were near at hand. When even a few of these things happened together, the walls of the worlds became even thinner, and the chances of a rip between one world and another increased. When
all
of them happened together, it was wise to be very, very careful indeed not to do anything that would attract the attention of the dark realities and the endless hunger of their inhabitants for souls to feed on.

But Supernova Tangent was not a thrilling lecturer, and Eo had heard it all before and his attention wandered…

He didn’t make the connection between what he’d been told, and sitting by a rock pool on a sunny day, casually tormenting the occupants. It amused him to shut off the sun. He enjoyed sending them meteors out of the blue. It made him laugh to create a miniature maelstrom with a stick, to see the little shrimps being swept backwards round and round, waving their tiny legs ineffectually and then staggering across the sand grains afterwards like old women in a high wind until he stirred them up again. He didn’t notice he was stirring the pool counter-clockwise. The word
widdershins
didn’t even cross his mind. He didn’t notice that the sun really
had
gone in, though his body shivered a little. He didn’t hear the way the wind was picking up, or see it flinging bits of foam off the waves and shredding them over the expanse of low-tide sand. He was so intent on the captive world before him, so caught up in the exercise of power, that the changes going on behind his back didn’t register.

Until he suddenly realized that all the sounds of
his
world had stopped. It was as if a giant bell jar had been shoved down over him, cutting him off. He banged the side of his head, desperate to ease the pressure in his ears, to no effect. He turned, and froze.

A gigantic whirlpool of powering black water had appeared, towering over him out of nowhere, balanced impossibly on the wet sand. It was black like a hole ripped from a moonless sky, or out of the dark depths
of the sea, full of grotesquely swirling women’s faces and the bodies of men and flailing horses’ manes and hooves.

He noticed
that.

2
The Challenge

Kelpies!

Eo felt his heart lurch with dread as he realized what he was seeing. The faces in the vortex were clearer now, too eerie and elongated to be beautiful, yet riveting –animal- and human-shaped, horses, women and men. They swept past, some half-obscured by foamy hair, others pinning Eo with their eyes in the instant before they were whipped away again. They seemed to be crying out to him in the silence, yearning for him, drawing him…