A Sudden Wild Magic

1

“The capsule’s nearly ready,” Amanda said, looking up from the student essay she was marking. “Do you want to come and see it?”

“Who else is going to be there?” Zillah asked. She managed to keep her manner entirely neutral. I’m getting good at that, she thought.

“Nobody, I hope,” said Amanda. Zillah relaxed, unhappily, and dabbled one hand in the large bowl of crumble mix on the table beside her to show both herself and Amanda she was truly relaxed. If Mark had been going to be there, she dared not go — and yet the hope, the horrible hope, attacked her that he might be going and she might have a chance of seeing him again. Even after two and a half years, she could not trust herself.

“Nobody?” she said.

The sisters were sitting in Amanda’s kitchen, a comfortable, light, spacious room, in which every detail was planned for convenience and beauty together, and in which every detail was also slightly battered from having been used by children. To Zillah’s mind, this added to the comfort. Without the battering, she was sure the place would have been as soulless as a magazine advertisement for a kitchen.

Amanda reached for the cup of tea beside her and took off her glasses. “Most of the people making the thing can only get there at weekends,” she said, “but the ones who live nearest work on it in the evenings when they get out of their jobs. I usually drop in by bus on my way to the university — to make sure it’s going right and to check the wards on the warehouse and so forth. But I make sure to keep my visits as random as possible. Today I’m at home. So I thought I’d go there by car at a totally different time.”

Zillah reached a floury hand for her own cup of tea. “Security really is that tight then?”

“Lord, yes!” said her sister. “All the people working on the capsule think we’re taking it up into space to meet UFOs. They think we’re a bit mad, but they trust us. Some quite skeptical ones are seriously rethinking their position on aliens. And I’m the only one of the Ring who ever goes near the capsule. We don’t want the pirates noticing we’re all interested in a certain warehouse.”

Zillah relaxed further. Mark was never likely to have been there. She let the devastating misery of that discovery ebb away and laughed a little. “Isn’t the Ring taking a bit of a risk, leaving it to you? You know what you’re like with machinery. Jerry swears the dishwasher blew up last time just because you looked at it.”

Amanda’s eyebrows peaked in that stare of hers. It must terrify her students! Zillah thought. “I was being deliberately negative then, Zillah. When I monitor the capsule, I’m entirely positive. If things blow up when I look at it, it’s because our designer got them wrong. I know what I’m doing. I’ve studied the plans until I know them backwards.”

And really! Amanda thought as she stared at Zillah, Zillah could be unspeakably irritating at times. They were very alike, she and Zillah. This was probably the reason why they got on so well most of the time and clashed so furiously for the rest of it. Zillah had the same clear features as Amanda, but hers were softer and tawny. Where Amanda’s hair was straight and raven black, Zillah’s sprang into a cloud of wiry tendrils, with red lights. Both had the same strangely luminous eyes, though Zillah’s eyes were blue. And Zillah had, Amanda was positive, at least as strong a talent for magic as her own, but — Amanda sighed, and drank tea to cover the sigh. One of the irritating things was that she was always having to look after Zillah and always failing. Over and over again. Knowing, from her own bitter experience, what Zillah’s life was like, Amanda had rescued her from their mother as a teenager and made sure she went to college. Result: Zillah dropped out, saying apologetically that university was not her scene, and disappeared. A year later Amanda had found her making baskets for a living somewhere in Yorkshire and fixed her up with what she herself considered a proper job in London. Result: Zillah disappeared and turned up working in a record shop a few months later, saying she felt that suited her more. By this time, Amanda had resigned herself to the fact that Zillah had an extremely low opinion of her own worth. Mother’s fault. Amanda let her get on with the record shop and tried instead to induce her to train that magic talent of hers.

“It gave me tremendous self-respect,” she told Zillah over and over. “I know you’ll find the same. And what you’ve got is strong. But as it is, it’s wild. You really could do damage, to yourself and other people, unless you learn how to use it.”

Zillah, as always, meekly agreed to Amanda’s plans. For a while she did study, almost diligently, with a circle of witches in outer London. Amanda encountered her at one or two ceremonies and felt proud whenever they met, because a number of people — Mark and Gladys among them — told her that her little sister had at least the potential of Maureen Tenehan. Amanda harbored fond notions of seeing Zillah selected for the Ring. Result: Zillah vanished again, saying she was not sure she had any talent at all. When Amanda next traced her, she was eight months pregnant. She said, in her usual apologetic way, that she had decided she needed to be a single parent.

“Oh, don’t talk nonsense!” Amanda had almost screamed at her. “How are you going to support the child? Who’s the father, anyway? Can’t he help?”

“Not really,” Zillah explained. “He’s happily married, and I didn’t want to upset him, so I didn’t tell him.”

She had obdurately refused to discuss the child’s father any further. Amanda, to this day, had no idea who was responsible for Marcus. The only thing to do seemed to have Zillah and the baby to live with her own family. It was lucky the kids liked Zillah and that Amanda’s husband, David, was so easygoing, because there were times when—

The bowl of pastry mix tipped, pivoting sharply on the edge of the table. Both sisters shouted with one voice, “Don’t, Marcus!” Zillah shot a hand out and grabbed the bowl. Amanda, with a swift gesture, halted the avalanche of dry crumble in midair and guided it back into the bowl.

“Gladys would approve, but everyone else would call that a waste of magic,” she remarked.

Zillah lifted the bowl high, and Marcus was revealed below the level of the table, lightly dusted with flour and still with both hands raised to grab the bowl, gazing at them blandly. “Little devil,” she said. “Did nobody notice you for five minutes? Is that it?” She lifted him up, absently checking the stout denim seat of him for damp, and dusted the flour from his hair, which had the same reddish tone as her own.

Marcus gave utterance. “Bond Jewry,” he said, stretching a hand like a plump pink starfish toward the bowl.

“It’s not jelly,” Zillah said, translating expertly. “And you’re not having it. Amanda, if we go to the warehouse, we’ll have to take him too. Will that be safe?”

“Honestly, Zillah, the way you’ve got that child warded, I don’t think even Gladys could touch him,” Amanda said. “I doubt if a nuclear missile could.”

Zillah checked a need to cry out, Because he’s all I’ve got! and also to explain that most of the protection was so that Mark — and therefore Mark’s wife — should never know that Marcus existed. “Well, it’s not so much what it might do to him, but what he could do to it,” she said. “But if you think it’s all right, let’s go, shall we?”

With Marcus safely strapped into the backseat, Zillah drove — ferally, as she did many things — while Amanda crouched down in the passenger seat and invoked protection from several different pantheons, wishing she had remembered the way Zillah drove before she suggested this. Amanda did not care for driving herself. It was useful that Zillah enjoyed it. Besides, she had sensed that Zillah was having a resurgence of unhappiness lately and needed a break. But this — they hunted down a lorry and overtook it on a bend; luckily there was nothing coming the other way — this was enough to make Amanda wish she had left Zillah by the wayside two years ago. If she killed them, what became of the capsule, of their plans, of the world?

The road opened up straight. Zillah stalked a motorcycle down it at ninety miles an hour, only dimly aware of her sister’s growing panic. She always hoped that driving dangerously would take her mind off the ceaseless tramp of misery inside it, but it did not. Nor did having Marcus. It was not that he was a constant reminder of Mark: he was another thing again. When Marcus was born, she discovered it was quite possible to love two people with the same intensity. It was as if her mind opened up another lobe, and there was Marcus in there, passionately precious. Alongside him, her feelings about Mark remained, exactly the same. They said you got over things in time, but it was just like her, Zillah thought, to have missed the trick of that somehow. Two years had made absolutely no difference. Maybe it had something to do with the weirdness and intensity of that moment—

She caught the motorcyclist where the road bent, passing him well over to the right, and absently dodged the Bedford van coming the other way. Beside her, Amanda uttered a faint, brave gasp. Marcus turned his head calmly to watch the van driver waving two fingers about. He liked the way they always seemed to do that.

— the moment when she had seen Mark as a shadowy reflection of himself at the bottom of a deep well. And Paulie down there too, drinking him. The horror of it was that she clearly knew Mark was allowing Paulie to do this to him. He was letting Paulie have all the eager, interesting, vital parts of him — the parts that laughed, or cried — and Zillah was only going to be allowed the pale, decorous, serious Mark. Prim, she had often thought, when she first met him. Priggish was a better word, she thought now, as old, gray factory buildings began to flash by.

“Next left,” Amanda said faintly. “Then the first big gate on the right.”

Zillah turned the wheel and they howled left into a side road. She slowed to sixty, not to miss the gate. If ever she could bring herself to tell Amanda about this vision of Mark in the well, she was sure Amanda would tell her it was a true Seeing. Amanda always said Zillah’s talent was enormous, but Zillah had never noticed it herself, except just that once, when she knew she had seen the most important fact about Mark there was and—

There was gate. She swung through it. And there was another car parked just inside it, no time or space to miss it.

— left him. Zillah thought that something picked the car up and lifted it bodily sideways. At all events, they were stopped, facing the warehouse, side by side with the other car, and not even scraped. Just a little shaken.

“I’m grateful to rather a lot of gods,” Amanda said.

“Whose bloody car is that?” Zillah demanded.

“I’ll see.” Amanda swept out of the car. Zillah unbuckled Marcus and ran after her, carrying Marcus, ready to lend her weight to Amanda’s fury if necessary. And it might be necessary for once, she saw. The warehouse door slid aside under Amanda’s angry hand, evidently unlocked. “And they took the wards off!” Amanda snarled. “Who is this fool?”

They clattered inside, into semidark. Zillah at once felt that, for some reason, everything was probably all right. She could see the capsule, a shrouded, nearly oblong thing almost the size of a bus, bulking in the center of the space, and she could tell it had not been tampered with. There was more than that. A kind of strength grew up around her from the floor. Doubtfully, she conjectured that this warehouse had been chosen because it happened to have been built over some place of power. She felt quite unworried as she followed Amanda around to the far side of the capsule.

A limber brown-clothed figure swung its long legs down from the crate it had been sitting on. “At last!”

“Maureen!” Anger, relief, and surprise made Amanda’s voice turn high and chilly. “What the hell are you doing? We nearly hit your damn car! You know perfectly well that none of the rest of you are supposed to come here.”

Maureen shrugged. “Where’s the harm? This place is warded sky-high — and I just had to consult you over our final list for people to go. Whatever time they go, it has to be soon. Don’t you understand? And I’ve got teams training in separate batches all over the country. None of them know if they’re going or not, or anything about what they’re really going for, and it’s not fair on them or their families, Amanda. It’s putting me under a lot of pressure, not being—” She stopped as she saw Zillah behind Amanda and continued looking at Zillah over Amanda’s head, meaningfully.

Zillah lowered Marcus to the floor. She did not like Maureen, and she knew Maureen did not like her. This could be rather unfortunate.

“I still fail to see why you had to come here,” Amanda said. “You could have phoned me, or consulted one of the other two. They both know all the people as well as I do.”

“It’s your baby — you made the first selection,” Maureen said, strolling back and forth with her hands in the deep brown pockets of her coat. “And Gladys isn’t doing anything but watch Laputa-Blish these days. Mark’s up to the armpits calculating those tides Gladys found and matching them with sidereal tables, trying to find us a window.” Her eyes flicked across to Zillah. “I went and tried to see Mark twice, as it happens. The first time all we did was have this long, long argument, because he said it wasn’t possible for them to go at full Moon, and I said it had got to be.”

She knows! Zillah thought. She fancies Mark herself and she’s letting me know.

“I managed to persuade Mark in the end,” Maureen continued, “but it was so late then, I had to leave. The second time I went, that wife of his was there, and it was all cuddle up, cuddle up, and she wouldn’t let me have a moment alone with him—”

She stopped as Marcus plodded forward and stared up at her. He pointed with a starfish finger. “Do bitch,” he stated.

“What?” Maureen’s head jerked downward, and she bent over him like a vulture.

“He says you’re a witch,” Amanda translated hastily. “It’s amazing how they know.”

“Oh,” Maureen said.

It became imperative to Zillah to get away from Maureen. She scooped Marcus up and carried him away through the porthole-like door of the capsule. Inside, it was suddenly all right again. Immense safety had been built into the thick walls of the thing — strong Amanda safety, which reminded Zillah of Amanda’s house, particularly of her beautiful, battered kitchen. There were no windows. The only light came from the round door. Soothed and calm and quiet, Zillah carried Marcus along the central gangway, hearing nothing but the metallic ring of her footsteps and seeing nothing much but bent, wriggly reflections of herself and Marcus in the silver metal welded over the walls, ceiling, and floor. The thing had been a bus once. The seats were now reduced to twenty or so. The rear end was partly blocked off with more silvery metal, and Zillah conjectured that the machinery she could dimly see through the places where the metal was missing had to be a life-support system. At the front end, the drivers’ seats faced television screens instead of windows, and there were controls of a sort, though not many. Zillah paced back and forth. As she went, she detached a long, coiling gingerish hair from her head and then quietly removed a short, fine one from Marcus. Why she should do this, she had no idea. When she had both hairs, again impelled by reasons she did not understand, she tucked both, the long and the short one, well down inside the upholstery of a seat near the back.

Meanwhile, Maureen said ferociously to Amanda, “Why is she here? How much have you told her? You talk about me breaking security, but honestly!”

“Don’t be stupid! I’ve only told her the most general outline,” Amanda said with equal ferocity. A certain amount of guilt lay behind her fierceness. While she had not given Zillah any real details, she knew she had talked to her more than she should. It had been so hard, never telling David or the children anything about this other, hidden side of her life; and when Zillah came to live with them, who knew all about this hidden side, the relief of having someone to talk to had certainly led Amanda to say far more than was quite discreet. “I’ve told her almost nothing!” she snapped. “Far less than you did by babbling about windows at full Moon! And what do you mean about Gladys not listening to you?”

“That was a smoke screen, you idiot!” Maureen retorted. “Besides, she didn’t listen much.”

“But what about the attack-magic? It doesn’t matter how many teams you select, if they’re going to arrive in Laputa-Blish without anything to— And don’t you ever mention Laputa-Blish in front of Zillah again! All I’ve told her is that there are hostile magicians in the next universe. I haven’t said a word about where!”

Maureen shrugged. “I assumed you’d told her the lot. All right. You needn’t glare. And Gladys has got the attack-magic ready. She’s calling it virus-magic — that was Mark’s idea — and they’re both dead chuffed with it actually, and they say it’ll go through Laputa-Blish like wildfire as soon as it touches anyone there.”

“Good,” said Amanda. Both were cooling down a little. Both found themselves looking around and behind them. Their anger had been interacting with the delicate magics of the capsule. They could feel it building elemental things that could be disastrous. They smiled at each other, like bared teeth. “Well, let’s have a look at that list,” Amanda said.

“Okay.” Maureen plunged a hand into her pocket. Before she took the list out, she said, “I’m sending Flan Burke. I can’t really spare her, but I think the team needs her vitality. And I think Roz Collasso will have to go. I hate the woman, personally, but you can’t deny she’s got a strong character. Then Tam Fairbrother is a must—”

“Tam?” exclaimed Amanda. “He’s a man! It’s unlike you not to notice, Maureen!”

“Jesus, Amanda! You are a prig!” Maureen said heatedly. “We discussed it. I thought even you agreed that an all-male world is likely to have a fair share of gay men. I’m sending two of our best looking boys. Even you must have noticed that Tam is bloody good-looking!”

This was hopeless. Around them on the dim floor, dust was beginning to rise in little dancing fountains. Maureen’s copper hair and Amanda’s straight black locks were lifting, and there was a smell of ozone. “Maureen,” Amanda said decisively, “you’d better get into your car and trail us back to my house. We’ll discuss the list there. If we argue anymore here, this capsule’s going to be possessed.” And, so that Maureen should have no chance to argue, Amanda strode to the open door of the capsule, calling ringingly for Zillah.

“Sorry I spoke!” Maureen muttered, plunging her hand back into her pocket, where the typewritten list was already half-materialized. “Back into hiding for now. Mother knows best!”

Amanda took the wheel this time and drove slowly and considerately in front of Maureen — which probably made Maureen even madder than she was already, Zillah thought. Maureen drove a fast car, new and expensive. Zillah could tell she hated crawling. Zillah sat in the backseat of Amanda’s car, because Marcus seemed to want her there, and kept her thoughts carefully on Maureen raging in third gear behind. It served to push that curious, primitive piece of magic she had performed in the capsule right down to the bottom of her mind. It was necessary not to know about that, though she had no idea why. She wished that the sight of Maureen’s furious face could push the misery out of her mind too — but nothing did much for that. And I’m so sick of it! Zillah thought. I’d like to be shot of it for good, though that’s a sort of death, and not fair on Marcus. She found her mind repeating this. A sort of death... a sort of death... Anyway, back to Maureen. I think she’s a bitch. Swaggering into the warehouse and behaving as if she’s in charge of the whole operation. Thinks she’s plenty officer quality, doesn’t she? I can just see what it would be like if she really was in charge. Zillah let her mind run on this. It was better than thinking of death. Maureen strutting, sauntering, hitching her long, limber legs about, taking all the best men for her own use.

It was during this flight of fancy that the High Head of Arth made his routine, delicate contact. He smiled. Then he hooked Maureen’s boyfriend out of the ether and told him to get off his haunches and get to work on Maureen.

2

Mark found a window for the next full Moon. It was a very small one, but it would serve, provided everything was synchronized to the second. Laputa-Blish would then be, as far as Gladys could tell, at a high point in one of its eccentric, wobbling circuits of its parent universe, and slightly inclined toward Earth. In this position, the capsule could clear the pirate defenses and reach Laputa-Blish without spending too long in the dubious interstitial stuff between universes. That was important. The moment it left Earth’s universe, the circles of magic users sending it would lose touch with it. It would have to rely on its own inbuilt defenses, and no one wanted it to have to do that for too long.

According to Mark, who had been strenuously calculating for most of a month now, the window was all right, but the other influences were iffy. Much that was good was streaming in the inner spheres, but there was strong, obscure opposition too. “Perhaps we should wait for a more favorable Moon?” he said doubtfully.

The others vetoed this. There was, no one quite knew why, a general feeling that it was now or never. Mark, even as he gave in, admitted to having the feeling too — as if the pirates were breathing down their necks and would read over their shoulders what they were doing if they left the attack to wait any longer.

Gladys and Maureen, with occasional crisp interventions from Amanda, devised a very strong double ritual, whose purpose was cleverly hidden from all but the four of them. After that, as Gladys said, they had reason to be glad that the Ring was so well organized. The Outer Ring accepted the ritual without question and went to work on the mass of detailed arrangements whereby it was distributed and timed to synchronize all over the country. Gladys, as always, gave marveling chuckles. The groups of magic users were so various. The circles of serious, educated witches were only a small part of them, and to them the word could be handed down openly; but there were hereditary covens, who required secret negotiations; groups of amateurs who thought they were playing independently at magic, who needed to be nudged to do the right thing at the right time; spiritualists to be hinted at to meet and perform a specially adapted rite, which they did not see as a rite at all; individual magicians who did not know they were being organized; prayer groups, mediums, dowsers, meditators, and also numbers of people who imagined themselves to be charlatans and cheats, all of whom had to be induced to put forth power in a certain direction at the same time; and last but not least, there were the several mighty Orders of trained magicians, who needed very careful handling indeed. A few of these did acknowledge the authority of the Ring, but most regarded themselves as independent priesthoods and would have been utterly outraged to know that the ritual they had ordained for the next full Moon was not ordained by their own need and will.

“Bless their hearts,” Gladys chuckled, when the last major Order made it known it had decreed a Grand Rite for that night. “They do know their job, those Outer Nine.”

The real disappointment was that there had not been time to organize witchcraft in the rest of the world. Only where some of the great Orders were international was there any hope of cooperation. The witches of the continent had already planned a propitiation of their own. Australia and New Zealand were working on the rising sea. Asia gave vague answers which were not easily understood. The witches in America replied regretfully that they were having hell’s own job holding down a major earthquake, but assured the Ring of their goodwill. Africa did not reply at all.

“Damn!” said Maureen. “I wish we dared explain what we’re really trying to do.”

“Most of them are using power that night anyway,” Gladys said, “and that should help. Goodwill is a power on its own. Don’t fuss, Maureen, and have you got down the exact minute we want each of those Names said? Well, don’t look like that! I only asked.”

“I’m sorry!” Maureen said irritably. “I’ve a lot on my mind, what with Flan leaving to go on the capsule. Joe’s behaving strangely too. I’m under a lot of pressure. I—”

She was interrupted by Amanda telephoning to say that there was a hitch in the capsule’s directional jets, and could someone get hold of that strange girl who had worked on the French space programme, quickly please!

Zillah felt the mounting excitement, although she knew nothing of the details. It’s going to take off at full Moon, she thought, quite calmly, and then I shan’t have this misery anymore. On the rare occasions when she let herself think of those two hairs she had planted in the capsule, it seemed to her that they were designed to carry her unhappiness out of this world with them. In fact, it was as if her misery were already there, installed in those two hairs. She cooked, cleaned Marcus and the house, washed clothes for Amanda and her children, shopped for socks for David, and talked cheerfully with everyone, all without the dark background of misery she had been used to for so long. A sort of death, she thought, by substitute. She felt rather empty.

The night before the launch, those who had built the capsule tested everything carefully and packed up their tools for the last time. Each in his or her way gave it a blessing. Some simply patted the stained metal skin. Some said things like, “You’re awful, but I love you!” or “Hope you make it, bus!” Others were more serious. One prayed. Another poured champagne from a mini bottle. Then they departed, to journey to the various sites of power where they had to be tomorrow.

Amanda kept vigil there, just in case.

In the morning the finally selected team arrived, eighteen of them, very cheerful and healthy, with their bags, lunch packs, woolly hats, and knapsacks. None of them knew quite what to expect. The rumor most of them believed was that they were to storm a monastery in Greece. Most of them were very surprised to see who the others were.

“Well, fancy you as a shock trooper!” Roz Collasso said to Tam Fairbrother.

They were even more surprised when Amanda locked the warehouse door and told them why they were there, adding that none of them were to leave the building from then on. They saw the point of that. It would be fatal if the pirates were to learn of the plan now. Besides, they were all dedicated. Each of them had, at Gladys’s special request, made their wills before they set out. But they still did not quite believe it, and they spent a lot of time laughing. Tam doing his gay walk made them fall about.

Sobriety set in during the early evening when someone suggested that the capsule ought to have a name. Somehow, discussing what name made the whole thing seem more real.

“It used to be a bus.”

“What does that make it? The Magical Mystery Tour Coach? Hold very tight, please, for your tour of the multiverse!”

“Call it Omnibus.”

“Try again!”

“Well, omnibus does mean everything.”

“Sky-High Bus?”

“What about the Flying Coach?”

“I know!” said someone. “The Celestial Omnibus!”

That name pleased them all, so they christened it with coffee, unaware that it had already been done with champagne, and ran through yet again the routine for using the virus-magic when they got to Laputa-Blish.

A little before moonrise a motorcyclist roared up to the warehouse door and, when Amanda opened it, carefully handed her four packages, two blue and two red. Gladys had insisted on there being four. “The two halves have to stay apart until the last minute,” she had said. “It’s too potent to handle any other way. And just two packets is daft. I’m going to send a backup pair.”

Amanda gave a telephone number to the motorcyclist, and he roared away, first to phone through a code word and then to join his own coven. The packages Amanda gave to Helen, Judy, Francine, and Laura, all of whom were stable, proficient adepts who were unlikely to panic. After that, she had to leave herself, locking the door behind her, to fling herself into her car and to drive in a manner not so unlike Zillah’s to a secret site of great power about forty miles away.

Her going was the signal for the storm troopers to climb into the Celestial Omnibus and sit there, tense and ready. Judy and Lynn settled at the controls, and Roz stood by the door to seal it. Tam and Solly tested the oxygen supply yet again and found to their relief that it still worked. After which they only had to wait.

By this time, not only were innumerable apparently unconnected small groups gathering in rooms all over Britain, but dark-clothed persons were assembling in stone circles, woods, and other places of power from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, whispering and occasionally flashing a flashlight to make sure that things were where they should be. Lights were not supposed to be shown at this stage.

The Moon rose as Amanda arrived at the secret site. It gave her enough light to see Mark in the pale majesty of his robes, preparing to begin. Paulie was with him. She had chosen glittering black robes. Well, she would, Amanda thought. Maureen was there, in white and green, looking very lovely. And there stood Gladys, bulging out of a disgraceful maroon Burbery, with Jimbo scratching himself in the grass at her feet. Nothing would ever persuade Gladys to dress up, but Amanda sometimes suspected her of dressing down. There, too, were the nine of the Outer Ring, who had arrived commendably promptly, considering they knew nothing of how tight the schedule really was.

“I do think we should tell them what it’s all about,” Amanda had objected when they were discussing the schedule.

“Afterwards,” Gladys said with great firmness. “The traitor’s in there with them. We don’t want to give her or him a chance to ruin everything.”

The four of the Ring drew together to begin. “Christ! I’m nervous!” Mark whispered. “Suppose the capsule just vanishes into the void!”

“Or blows up,” said Maureen.

“Hush. It’ll get there,” said Gladys.

Amanda said nothing, but her private fear was that the Celestial Omnibus would still be there in the warehouse when she unlocked the door in a few hours time. But the ritual had started. Almost at the same instant, other groups joined in all over the country. Amanda felt the building of power as she carefully cleared her mind.

Zillah, at home in Amanda’s house, felt the build of power as a great void, waiting to be filled. In some strange way, she was the void, and ached with it. Then, as the first Name was spoken, nearly in chorus, from the lands all around her, it brought her a sudden vision of Mark. He was not as she usually remembered him, but dressed in robes with the Moon shining pale on his hair. Idiotically, this hieratic image carried with it an acute sensory memory. Mark’s body hair. Mark had a surprising amount of hair on his body for such a pale, slender man, and it was not fair, like his hair, but dark like his eyebrows, and all of it kitten-soft. Remembering the feel of it gave Zillah a scathing wrench. The misery was back, thundering in her head, worse than ever.

“Cut it out!” she said aloud, because it made her furious not to be able to forget. And her furious exclamation made her see what she had to do. She had to cut it out properly, make it a sort of death, the biggest and cleanest break possible. Only that would lance the boil. Call it what you like, only stop it.

She wrote as much on the back of an envelope for Amanda. Then she went upstairs and picked Marcus up out of his crib, he mumbling sleepily and slobbering a little against her neck. She stood with him in her arms, facing the direction she sensed the capsule to be in. The rituals were building now, and she could feel the power. It was as if she stood in a large, faintly glowing space, where, twining toward her, she could see two misty filaments of her own hair and of Marcus’s. She waited. Power grew. It grew in Zillah, too, rising to surround and fill her, as it always seemed to do when she had real need. She had so much, in seconds, that she knew she could do whatever there was need for. She could choose not to do this. But she chose. She hooked the two filaments to her with a little finger, which was all she could spare from holding Marcus, and made them draw her in.

There was so much power there that it was easy. Quickly, coolly, without stress, like sliding around a half-open door, she found herself, still holding Marcus, standing in the aisle of the capsule, quite near the back. Behind her, the metal that held the machinery was now a complete silvery wall, with a sound like an electric fan coming from it. The space in front of her was full of people, many of whom she did not know. They all looked very tense. Marcus felt something had happened and sleepily uttered a small inquiring noise. Several heads turned. Zillah slipped into an empty seat quickly and apologetically, like someone arriving late in church, and drew the sense of her own insignificance tightly around herself and Marcus. She was nothing, nothing to bother about at all. It was something she had often found useful, this sense of not being worth anyone’s trouble. It worked again here. The heads turned away. Nothing there after all.

Outside, the gale of power being raised was translating into a physical wind, beating around the warehouse, causing hair and robes to stream, all over the country. The Names had mostly been spoken. The time was coming when something should happen — if it was going to.

The Celestial Omnibus jerked.

“I think we’re away!” whispered someone.

Nothing else.

It isn’t going to work! Zillah thought. What a fool I shall look! Oh, go, go, go, go! She pushed, urgently and wildly in her mind, at the solid lump of the bus. Again some wild part inside her rose to her need. She felt it flare around her as she pushed. But this tin box full of people was so heavy! Oh, go, go, go, go! she told it.

Then came the heart of the ritual. Lights blazed in many hundred circles, and fire streamed in high places. Inside the capsule, there was a sudden definite sense of floating, almost of weightlessness.

“This is it!” someone said.

As the last great effort went out, Gladys, wearing her Aspect of the Old Woman, turned to Amanda in her Aspect of the Mother and gave a slight nod. The effort was double-phased. The first was intended to send the capsule off — and there was not a soul participating who did not feel that something had moved, been sent, gone — and the second phase was to raise the Great Wards around the British Isles and — if possible — around the world. Mark felt the Wards of Pridain rise. He, too, nodded at Amanda. Now nothing of evil intent could penetrate the country; but no one could tell if the world was warded. It had never needed to be done before.

3

It was an exhausting night. Maureen was tottering with weariness by the time she climbed the stairs to her London flat. Dawn had come already. Unnatural-seeming sunshine filled the street. A few hours sleep, Maureen thought, setting her keys into the locks with unsteady hands, and she might be all right for dance practice this evening. It ought to be all right. Her weariness was mostly the weariness of elation. That great gale of power that had lifted the capsule and the wards together kept blowing through her mind, exultingly. What a feeling! It was the feeling that she dwelt on, though it had been good, too, arriving at the warehouse to find the capsule gone. Maureen was rather pleased that she had had the forethought to visit the place when the capsule was still there. She at least knew that there had been something there to vanish. It was not so with the nine of the Outer Ring.

They had gone there in a procession of cars. The nine had been very annoyed. And hurt. And incredulous. Koppa’s strident voice still rang in Maureen’s ears. Why had they not been told? What traitor? They were welcome to take her to any sphere of truth they pleased, and they would see she was At One with the Ring. Etcetera. And to be shown an empty warehouse convinced nobody of anything. Maureen kept remembering Paulie standing beside Mark in a white fury. Luckily Amanda had had the sense to take some photographs of the capsule, but what with Amanda’s total incompetence with a camera and the emanations of power in the warehouse, the prints she handed around were both blurred and crooked, and they mollified no one. Amanda had further irritated Maureen by the way her head went up and an expression of woe and worry kept crossing her face whenever she thought no one was looking. Amanda thought something had gone wrong. Did she now? Amanda would claim this special sensitivity — and most of the time when Maureen checked up on her worries, she found Amanda was just making a great fuss about nothing.

In the end Maureen left Mark and Amanda to deal with the Outer Ring and drove home. She absolutely had to sleep. Not even a cup of cocoa first. Just fall into bed.

She opened her door into a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. The curtains of her living room were drawn and the lights on. Faugh. And there was bloody Joe sitting on her sofa leering at her with a can of beer in his hand and a loaded ashtray between his feet. He’s been drinking again, she thought. She hadn’t the energy to cope.

“Out,” she said, holding the door open with one hand and gesturing with the other. “Come on. You’re going. I need to sleep. How did you get in here anyway?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not going. Neither are you. We’re staying here together.”

“Don’t give me—” Maureen was beginning, when the door moved heavily under her hand and shut itself with a dull boom. She whirled toward it. There were wards down on it, preventing her from touching it. Strong wards, weird ones, ones she did not know. She whirled back.

Joe continued to grin. There was something odd about his face. “You won’t find you can break those wards. They’re the wards of Arth. I’ve got them all around this flat. Nobody’s going in or out, and nobody’s going to hear any kind of call you make for help. So you might as well tell me all about this project of yours now. It’ll save us both a lot of trouble.”

I don’t believe this! she thought. She was so tired. “What the hell are you talking about?” As she spoke she realized he was right about the wards round the flat. She could feel them hemming the place in, thick and heavy and strange to her.

Joe stood up. He was thickset, black-haired and with black stubble on his chin, but he was not as drunk as she had assumed. Perhaps not drunk at all. She wondered how she had ever fancied him. “This project of yours,” he said. “I waited until you’d done whatever it was, because I knew you’d be easier to catch then. Now I want you to tell me exactly what you’ve been doing so that I can report to the High Head.”

“You’re raving,” said Maureen.

“No way,” he said. “And don’t try any tricks with witchcraft. I learnt my mageworking on Arth, and I know things you’ve never even dreamt of.”

“The same goes for me!” she snapped. “You’ve no idea of half the things I know!” And, as he took a heavy step toward her, she added, “And don’t think you can overpower me physically, either. I’m a professional dancer, remember. I’m much stronger than I look.”

Joe gave her a look of contempt that somehow deepened the strangeness she had seen in his face. “I know that. I came prepared to wait it out. Look. Take a look.” The sharp smell of his sweat mingled with the smoke-fug as he moved sideways away from her, always making sure not to turn his back, she noticed, and kicked open the doors to the kitchen and the bathroom.

Maureen moved, equally warily, to the center of the room. She was so tired that she seemed to be functioning on animal instincts alone. Her main feeling was exasperation and outrage. The kitchen was piled with boxes of groceries. She could see fruit, vegetables, potato crisps. The bath was full of packs of lager. How typical of Joe!

“See?” he said. “We’ll be quite comfortable while we wait for you to tell me. I got all this stuff mostly so that you’d see I’m in earnest. But it would be much easier if you’d tell me everything straightaway.” Still keeping himself facing her, he retreated sideways and settled himself back in the corner of the sofa. “Well?”

There were reserves of strength in everyone, Maureen told herself. She ought still to have a charge of power from the ritual too. She drew on both, or tried to, and told herself she felt better for it. “Piss off,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do,” he said. “You’ve just performed a very big ritual of some kind. I want to know what it was supposed to do. The real world needs to know. They sent me over here to find out what you were doing, and find out is what I’m going to do. I don’t want to be stuck in your stinking world for any longer than I have to be.”

He’s a spy from the pirate universe, Maureen thought. She was beyond either surprise or alarm. The thought came to her simply as a sort of summing up of all the things she had seen since she first unlocked her front door. She thought of the capsule. It might be in Laputa-Blish by now, or it might not. No one knew how long a transition between universes should take, or even whether they had got the transition right. Even assuming the very best, that the capsule had got there almost instantly and the team had succeeded in entering that fortress, the virus-magic needed time in which to take effect. They had had six hours. They needed at least six more. I’ll just have to wait it out, she thought. “Damned if I tell you anything,” she said.

“Really?” Joe said. “You have to sleep sometime. I can work on your head then.”

“So do you have to sleep,” she said. But her spirit sank. She was so weary. There was a sort of hollow weakness under her breastbone that she suspected was despair. “It seems to be deadlock,” she said, and seated herself grimly facing him at the other end of the sofa. He gazed at her jeeringly. And she realized what the odd thing was about his face. There were all sorts of foreign thoughts in it. She could see the alien consciousness behind his face pushing the features she had thought she knew well into a completely new shape. She tried to tell herself that this did not scare her — not at all. She was just so tired.