TWELVE

(1)

From Maree Mallory’s Thornlady Directory, file twenty-five

Nick deserted me halfway through this morning, the rat, but not before we had done quite a bit of exploring together. We were trying to disentangle Mallory Universe from Home Universe and the other ones. Couldn’t be done. The Hotel Babylon, true to its name, wants everything mad as the man who ate grass or mixed, up like the Tower of Babel—particularly the last, particularly Russians and Germans. There was a huge crowd from both countries in a room upstairs called Ops, shouting one another down in both languages, with squirts of bad English in between. Ops is supposed to deal with crises. This was clearly a crisis, but no one in Ops knew if it was one combined crisis or two separate ones.

People kept explaining things like this to us. Or if there wasn’t a crisis, people chatted or gave us friendly smiles. They all seemed to know who we were without looking at our badges (nobody looks at badges anyway). The three long-haired people with the baby kept grinning at us as we went up and down the corridors, even the baby. Nick remarked that it was the most unpunishmently punishment his parents could have devised, and I kept saying how nice everyone was. But that was before we found a room labelled Press Office, where people in more than usually wordy T-shirts were just running off this morning’s news sheet. Apparently they do several each day of the Con. They gave us one each and we went and sat in the Grand Lobby to read them.

Everyone sits in the Grand Lobby. It is pretty big, but it looks enormous, because there are mirrors in one wall reflecting large windows in the wall opposite. It is full of armchairs and tables and small children running about in little cloaks or small-scale Batman gear, and all the adults sitting around in bundles. At that moment it was pretty full because a whole lot of new people had just turned up. Most of them were rather smartly dressed and had a sort of urgent, I’m-working look, which some of them clearly felt placed them in a class above the rest of us.

“Don’t despise them,” fat Wendy said, flopping down next to us. Nick had to look away from her again. “Those are the publishers. They’ll all be giving parties this evening.”

So I didn’t despise them and looked at the news sheet instead. But Nick really can’t take someone the size and shape of Wendy. He sprang up. “I’ve got to go. Games Universe is just starting,” he said. “I’ll look for you here or in your room at lunchtime.” This was a blatant lie. I knew the Games didn’t start yet, and I could see him hovering over by the far door, but the fact was that he had deserted me—deserted me just as I hit the para in the news sheet that said: “Fans please take note of Ted Mallory’s niece, Maree. This small orphaned-looking lady is going about with a broken heart. Any fan happening upon Maree needs to be nice to her.”

I was so angry and so embarrassed that tears came into my eyes. My face felt sort of blue-hot. Wendy said something to me, but I couldn’t hear or answer or look at her. She was probably only talking to me because the news sheet told her to. I made a kind of low howling noise.

“I said,” said Wendy, “was there anything interesting in the news sheet? I haven’t read it yet.”

Then I hated myself for being hypersensitive. I looked up and pushed my sliding glasses up on my nose. And behold. Lo! WONDERS! The tall Nordic type I had seen the night before was walking through the Grand Lobby. He was every bit as beautiful as I remembered—better, if possible. Such wonderful slender hips, and such a walk! And—shame!—he just went striding through, past armchairs, past tables loaded with cups, past kiddies swirling little cloaks, past people sitting on the floor, past huddles of publishers, and went out the other end without looking at anyone, followed every inch of the way by my eyes.

I wasn’t the only one. A well-dressed publisher lady got her legs in a corkscrew trying to watch him and almost fell over. Beside me, Wendy said, “Oh my God! Look at that! Look at him! Have you ever seen anything quite so beautiful?” When I managed to tear my eyes away from the archway where the man had vanished, I saw she was staring after him too. Her hands were clasped under her enormous bosom and her face was all funny colours.

“Fabulous,” I agreed. My lower half felt weak.

Then I saw Tansy-Ann bearing down on me waving a news sheet. I gave a sharp cry and managed to get up and run, weak legs and all. People were going into the big hall by then for Uncle Ted’s panel and I went in with them, where I flopped down on a chair near the door and began thinking that I seriously might be getting over Robbie. I’d never felt like that over him.

After that, a certain amount of sanity came to my rescue, and it occurred to me that you feel like this about pop stars and other people you never expect really to meet, and the fever went off enough for me to start wondering who the man was. Then I started wondering angrily about the news sheet and who might have done that to me. I was disposed to blame Uncle Ted. He might not have meant to punish me, but it would be very like him to have dropped a jovial word about me over supper last night. But it was even more like Janine. Or it could even have been Dutch Case or Rick Corrie, thinking they were doing me a kindness. And I still haven’t found out whose fault it was. Whoever it is is going to get themselves bitten, savagely, in the fleshy part of the calf.

When I came-to a bit, a good looking woman in publisher clothes was introducing herself as Master of Ceremonies—I think she’s called Gianetti and runs a chat show on TV—and then telling us that Uncle Ted was Master of Black Comedy, and that some woman beside him wrote funny stuff too, and Mervin Thurless, who was sitting up there with them, was renowned for his wit (well, you could have fooled me) and they were all going to discuss “A Sense of Humour in Fantasy.”

I have to hand it to Uncle Ted. You’d not have known he hadn’t had a notion what he was supposed to be talking about. He just took hold of the microphone and talked about it. “Writing a book is just a job, like any other job,” he said. I hoped he wouldn’t go on that way, but he did. Shortly he was saying, “Consider the job as if I were building a bicycle instead. I’d have to plan the frame—call that the plot—and put on the wheels—call that characters and their motivation—and then I’d put in the gears. Now the jokes are the gears. You have to get them just the right size and configuration, or you wind the pedals and—hey presto!—the chain falls off.” That got a good laugh. “So I always plan my gags in detail and in advance,” he says. “The whole book is like a machine, planned in detail in advance and well oiled with a smooth writing style.”

There was quite a bit more like this. Then Mervin Thurless upped and said yes, he agreed in every particular, except he thought humour was more like planning spices for a sauce. Then the woman upped in her turn and said she agreed with both of them, it was utterly mechanistic, but she said (as if she was very ashamed to admit it) sometimes her jokes made her laugh.

At this, Uncle Ted seized the mike again and said he never laughed: it was fatal.

And Thurless said it was bad form anyway, to laugh at your own jokes.

By this time I was really depressed. I thought of Uncle Ted’s wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Coming on top of everyone being nice to me just because the news sheet told them to, it was just too much. Can’t anyone look out there and see that you need not think of everything in terms of what works, or what they ought to do?

To do the Ceremonies lady justice, she began to look a trifle glum as well. At length she said, “But what about that extra factor, the miracle ingredient? Isn’t there a moment when everything stops being like a machine? Doesn’t a joke ever take off on its own for any of you? Let me stick my neck out here. What about inspiration?”

“No,” says Uncle Ted. “To work, it has to be all hard graft. You can’t afford to get carried away, or your book becomes a dangerous, out-of-hand thing and it may not sell.”

“I’ll go further,” says Mervin Thurless. “If there is a miracle ingredient, it’s money.”

“Precisely,” says Uncle Ted. “It’s how much you get paid for using the right formula.”

I got up and went out. I didn’t care if the door did crash behind me. I felt totally let down. Machines. Bicycles. FORMULA. Bah!!

As I stood there with sort of gloomy thunder and lightning playing round my mind, the door behind me clicked quietly and the Prat crept out and closed it gently behind him. He looked, to my surprise, just like I felt.

“Money!” I said to him. “Bicycles!”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “What price imagination, let alone integrity? And for God’s sake don’t push your glasses up your nose at me like that. You make me feel I’ve got to defend those three, and I don’t want to. How about some coffee?”

So, to my further surprise, I found myself having coffee with him in the corner of a corridor somewhere, at a glass table. I think the Prat was fairly surprised himself. He had a wondering look behind the gold-rimmed glasses. But, just to be on the safe side, I asked him if he had read the news sheet. At this, his wondering look increased and he said, “What, do they have a news sheet as well as all the rest? They work pretty hard, don’t they?” Then I was satisfied he was not giving me coffee out of kindness and, as I was still fulminating, I told him angrily about Uncle Ted’s wavy windows.

“And all he could say about them was they added value to his house!” I said. “Gah! Phooey!”

“Possibly it’s the only way he can convince himself to talk about them,” the Prat says fair-mindedly. “They must have some kind of effect on him. He said ‘value,’ after all, even if he put it in terms of money. It may be quite hard for him to talk in public about things that strike him as strange or wonderful. He may be afraid people will think he’s soft.”

“He should try,” I said. “And you said you didn’t want to defend him.”

“I know,” he said. “But there’s this—I know that in my work, I don’t get very far forward unless there comes a moment when everything suddenly rushes together in an exciting sort of explosion in my mind. Then it all seems wonderful and ideas just pour in. Your uncle and the others—they must have times like that, or they couldn’t do what they do. But it’s awfully hard to describe. So they fake it, and say what they think people want to hear.”

“Nice try,” I said. “But describing things is what they’re supposed to be good at. They fell down on the job, in my opinion. What work do you do?”

“Oh, I—er—design computer games,” he said.

“What? Killing aliens? Pzzwat, pzzwat?” I said. “I like shooting aliens.”

“I thought you might,” he says. “You get to do a lot of other things too, with mine. They’re fairly sophisticated. It’s an odd thought that quite a few of them are based on books that are on sale here in the Dealers Room, so I’m told, and I haven’t actually read one of them.”

“Then you should have read them!” I said. I was quite scandalized. He protested that he just worked on specs from the distributors and I told him that that just wouldn’t do. As soon as we’d finished the coffee, I took him along to the Dealers Room. I’d not dared to do more than drool in the doorway before this. I knew if I wanted to eat anything apart from the free breakfast, I shouldn’t get in among all those books. But it was all right if somebody else was buying them—it took the fever off me, so that I didn’t need to buy any myself. Well, almost. I made him buy all the basics (believe it or not, he hasn’t even read I, Robot or The Lord of the Rings!) and one or two of my special favourites, including the latest by three or four writers I really like. I intend to borrow those off him. We also looked at jewellery and dragons and comics (they had an old Sandman I hadn’t got, but the price was horrible) and then at stalls of painted things. Zinka Fearon was selling some beautiful stuff, but there was another stall full of glass aliens that were yurk!

“Reminds me of your aunt’s jumper,” says the Prat. “She is your aunt, isn’t she? The one with the custard on her shoulder.”

“I thought it was an egg,” I said. “Yes, that’s our Janine.” That reminded me of breakfast, and I tried to get out of him why he had looked that way at the crazy Croatian who thought Uncle Ted wrote about King Arthur. But I had forgotten what a cool customer he is.

He said, “Poor fellow. I suddenly saw what war can do to people.”

I knew that wasn’t the truth, but that was all he’d say. Strange. I can’t help connecting the way he looked at that Croatian with what Nick says he saw last night.

Anyway, we went on to the Art Show after that. By this time I was thinking that, if anyone had told me yesterday that I’d be standing in front of pictures chatting amiably with the Prat, I would have blacked their eye and called them a liar. It must be something in the air of this con, I think. And there were some very naughty paintings by Zinka Fearon we were just discussing, when Dutch Case comes zooming through the Art Room. The Prat takes off after him at the double, grabs him by the arm and says, “Found you at last!” he says. “Care to come and have lunch with us?”

With us? I thought. No way, not with Case—quite apart from the fact that the Prat has money and will go and expect me to buy lunch in that expensive dining room. And I went off in the opposite direction, fast.

I ran into Nick near the lifts. Nick was looking like the cat that had the cream. “They loved Bristolia!” he proclaimed. “And my new Wantchester game! I’d got some twists on both of them that no one had come across before. They’re saying I ought to get them made into proper computer games. Only I don’t know who to ask about it.”

“I do. Start talking to the Prat,” I said. Nick stared at me. “Honestly,” I said. “He’s just been telling me he designs the software. He seems to know most of the distributors and manufacturers.”

“Wow!” says Master Nick. “Let me at him!”

(2)

From the account of Rupert Venables

I find that the notes I made at the time scarcely mention the hour or so I spent with Maree. I seem just to have jotted down Bought an unconscionable number of books, followed by Mallory uncomfortably shrewd, by which I certainly didn’t mean her uncle. I have seldom heard such drivel as he talked on that panel. What I meant was the awkward moment Maree gave me in front of Zinka’s paintings. Zinka does exquisite, delicate portrayals of humans copulating with various kinds of ribby-winged beings. Mostly they are the people you find in increasing numbers as you go Ayewards from the Empire. Though I have never myself met the horned men she had painted, I’ve met quite a few of the other winged ones in the pictures—but clearly not as intimately as Zinka has.

Maree said, staring, the sob growing in her voice, “You’d really think these were painted from life!”

I tried not to jump. “Zinka has quite an imagination,” I said. At this, Maree pushed her spectacles up her nose and looked at me. She seems to have an instinct for when I’m covering something up. Shortly after, she disappeared while I was flagging down Kornelius Punt, and I hardly knew whether I was relieved or aggrieved. Possibly she didn’t like Punt. I don’t exactly blame her.

I didn’t dislike him, or like him either. This is not a consideration for a new Magid anyway. What I was looking for were certain qualities that are necessary. Kees, as he told me he liked to be called, certainly had some of them. He had the brains. The travelling scholarship he had won was for outstanding achievement at university, and he told me he had been selected from thousands, all over Holland. But it was a while before I could get him to talk about this. He was incredibly hyped—I think it was contact-high from the convention—and would keep making inane jokes.

“You must give me a Dutch treat,” was the first thing he said. “I have no money.”

“That means we both pay half,” I said.

“And so we will!” he said, his voice going up into a delighted shriek. “You will contribute the money and I will give the pleasure of my company.”

“Fine by me,” I said. So he proceeded to order the most expensive things on the menu, while I tried to get him to talk sense.

When the food came, he said, gobbling up scampi, “I have decided it is a fine joke to be in love with Maree Mallory. They say she has a broken heart, so there is no danger to me.”

I felt my face heating with anger. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” I said.

“Oh I know. She will bite me. Or scratch,” he said gleefully. “But then I am a masochist so that is all right.” I think I would have cut in angrily here, only it dawned on me that Kees was trying to get a reaction out of me, having seen me going about with Maree. I was sure of it when he added, cocking his eye to see how I responded, “And she is a chip off the old block. Probably she is one of her uncle’s demons in disguise.”

I ignored this, but I was very mortified. Probably the reason I made such few and curt notes on the morning was that I was increasingly exasperated to find that I infinitely preferred Maree, whom I had discounted, to any of the candidates left. If only she did not speak with that sob in her voice …

Meanwhile I got irritated with Kees Punt. He seemed to be a confirmed jester. It would in a way, I thought, be quite good cover for a Magid, never to be taken seriously, except that Punt was drawing attention to himself all the time—his voice kept rising to a shriek as he made yet another outrageous pun—and it is not a good idea for a Magid to do that. If people notice you for one thing, they tend to notice the rest. But Kees was young. I had hopes he could grow out of it. There must be a serious man in there somewhere, I thought, while he shouted that he was great joker and then told me in a shriek that the words on his T-shirt were Elvish.

And I still feel I may not have done justice to Kees, because while he was blithely laying into his Woodcock Supreme and I had just got him to talk about his travels, we were both distracted by turmoils among the other eaters. From the table behind me, Ted Mallory said loudly, “Well, why should I have denied it, for fuck’s sake? He’d made a total mess of it. I simply took it and improved it and I’m not ashamed to admit it! Books are public property—and he’d no business to be so damn rude!”

Kees’s pale face lit up and he raised a hand to make sure I was attending to this. “I am a great gossip,” he said gleefully, “and a nosy parker. Listen. There is some scandal here.”

From the table behind him, one of my American friends was saying, “Why, if that guy thinks he’s been robbed, how is he going to handle shared world writing? There, you make a gag, someone else takes it up, and next you know it’s being bounced around every single story. That’s all Mallory did. Thurless is an asshole.”

From across the dining room, I could now hear Thurless himself, practically screaming. “It’s shameless plagiarism! I’ve a good mind to sue Mallory for this!”

I looked at Kees, his pale excited face and raised hand. He had the ability to be a Magid all right. I could feel him raising the sound level of all the voices around, so that we could hear even the distant Thurless without missing a word. “It is a scandal!” he said delightedly.

Evidently Maree and I had left the panel just before the fun started. Thurless had suddenly rounded on Mallory and accused him of having stolen all the funniest bits of Shadowfall from a novel Thurless had published the year before that. Mallory had blandly confessed it was so. “If I find the cog I need lying around in somebody’s botched machine,” he was saying behind me, “I feel quite justified in taking it and using it properly.” Well. That certainly fitted his philosophy. But it was clear there had been a flaming row, and not everyone had enjoyed it.

Under Punt’s manipulations, I could hear the MC, Tina Gianetti, saying tearfully to Maxim Hough, “I couldn’t stop them! I thought they were going to fight across me! And I don’t like to hear language like that in public, Maxim.”

“What language?” Kees wondered delightedly. “Double Dutch consisting of four-letter words? Let someone tell us, please!”

Now he was actually pressuring Gianetti and the Americans to repeat what had been said. I said to him, rather sharply, “Kees, do you always do this to people?”

“Only when I need to know,” he said happily. “For gossip and exams and so on.”

“It’s a misuse of power,” I told him.

“Yes, you are po-faced,” he said. “I have noticed. But where is the harm?”

“It amounts to cheating if you do it in exams,” I pointed out.

“Everyone cheats,” he said, “if they can. I would not do it for something serious like a parliamentary election or anything like that. And this is juicy gossip.”

It left me with considerable doubts about the man’s ethics. I think he truly intended no harm to anyone, but that was not to say he would still be harmless in ten years’ time. I was doubtful about him, enough to be quite glad when he looked at his watch and said he had to go and gopher for the publishers.

“You need not pay for a dessert,” he said. “I am sweet enough.” And left.

I left as soon as I could flag a waiter and get my bill signed. I hefted my four bags of books and made my way across the room. Thurless was at a table by the exit. I had been hoping to snag him next, but he was clearly still in a fury, to judge by the way he was stabbing the roast potatoes on his plate. I could almost see him thinking of them as Ted Mallory’s kidneys and heart. His beard wagged with rage. Even so, I would have stopped and had a word with him, had not the other man at the table looked up at me as I approached. It was the most unloving look I have ever received. It was delivered at me from pale eyes that were yellow where they should be white and fat lips that parted in a snarl shape amidst a brown and grey beard.

The fellow was a total stranger. His badge said GRAM WHITE, which rang a faint bell. Mrs. Janine Mallory had mentioned that name at breakfast, that was all I knew. But it was clear he had pretty strong magic, about equal to Thurless. I could feel it in both as soon as I was near. And he hated me. And was warning me off. I simply walked on as if I had not noticed. I saw myself in one of the hotel’s ubiquitous mirrors stride on and push at the exit door with a couple of my bags of books without batting an eyelid or changing my expression, for which I silently commended myself. It was not until I was past the door and puzzling about the way the fellow had looked at me that I recalled that there had been a grey hooded cloak thrown across the back of this Gram White’s chair. Then I placed him. He was the leader of those monk-like figures that everyone drew back from in the foyer. And, having been near enough to sense the character of his magic, I thought I knew why he had glared at me. He had been one of the ones using the node. He must have realized that I was the one who had stilled it.

I went straight to the Dealers Room. “Gram White?” I asked Zinka.

She was sitting among her mirrors, boxes and winged models eating a large hot dog. “Bad news,” she answered, one cheek bulging. “Local resident. Runs an arms factory in Wantchester. Always comes to this con and always teaches Esoterica in Universe Three. Don’t touch him with a bargepole, or even something longer than that.”

“Thanks,” I said, and left her to her lunch.

I went to my car then. I came out through the kitchen entrance into a surprisingly biting-cold bright day, in which snow was drifting like pollen, and stowed my carrier bags in the boot before climbing into the car.

Scarlatti went from loud tinkle to faint tinkle. “About time!” Stan said. “Your phone keeps going off, but I can’t seem to manage that like I can manage the tapes. I just had to let it ring.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was busy. Stan, where exactly did you get that list of possible Magids from?”

“Senior Magid,” he said. “Handed down to her from Above about the time I knew I was dying. Why?”

“Upper Room, or higher up?” I asked.

“Well, it came to her through Upper Room, like most things,” he said. “But the details were so vague, I got the feel it could have come from much higher up. Cost me a lot of work, to get you a list with names and addresses out of it, I can tell you.”

“I thought so,” I said. “We are being Intended, Stan. And I don’t like it. I can’t see what they’re playing at! None of these candidates is right. Punt is the best, and he’d do anything for a laugh. I think the Croatian is deranged. Thurless has been throwing scenes like a prima donna ever since he appeared, and I suspect he’s into the bad magic too. Fisk is awful, and you know my opinion of Mallory. I think we’ll have to wipe that list and start again.”

“Steady on. I must have been given it for a reason!” Stan protested. “Have you talked to all of them now?”

“Not to Fisk or Thurless,” I admitted, “and not properly to Gabrelisovic.”

“Then one of them’s got to have hidden depths,” Stan said. “Don’t judge until you’ve done a proper—”

Here my phone clamoured. It was Dakros. The sound was unusually distant and crackly, but Dakros’s voice came out of it joyously. “Got you at last, Magid. Sorry about the interference. I’m in a landcruiser on my way to the Thalangia World Gate. We’ve found Knarros. High Lady Alexandra found him.”

“She did?” And not just a pretty face, I remembered. “How did she do that?”

“You remember I sent her to Thalangia?” Dakros’s crackly voice asked. “To the farm my uncle manages for me? Well, she got talking to my uncle and his people there, and my uncle happened to mention there was a religious colony up on a hill about ten miles away, and somebody else remarked they were thorn-worshippers like the Emperor was. So Alexandra made quiet enquiries. And it appears there are children, or at least young people, up there, but everyone told her that the head of the colony won’t let anyone near the place unless they come on business, and won’t let them talk to the children if they do go with deliveries and so forth. So she asked some more. And today someone told her that the head of this colony is a strict brute of a centaur called Knarros. She called me up at once.”

“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 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 and 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 barehanded, 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 and I’m not 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.