A Sudden Wild Magic

1

Tod was told to take the party straight to Healing Horn. Our High Head wishes for time to think, he told himself in considerable amusement as he led the women there.

He was quite right. The High Head was forced to retreat to his workroom and think furiously. What do you do with six women (and one infant) of uncertain origin and social status, when you are an all-male community under Oath of Celibacy? The worst of it was that the problem, however he solved it, would be with him for the best part of a year. The tides that permitted travel between Arth and the Pentarchy were two months past. The next were eight months off. Otherwise the High Head would cheerfully have decanted his unwanted guests to the Orthe and let the king deal with them.

There was always otherworld, of course. The ritual for sending people there was at everyone’s fingertips. But these people had already burst from another universe into this one, and a lot of them had died inexplicably on the way. A second transition would probably kill the survivors. Pushing them off to otherworld was the equivalent of allowing Defense Horn to explode the capsule when it first appeared — as well as a waste of a perfectly executed rescue operation. And the Goddess had permitted these women to come here.

This was a strong consideration. The High Head, although he presided daily at the most reverent worship of the Goddess, took a wholly pragmatic view of Her — some might even say cynical. She was the Power in the Wheel upon which Arth drew: therefore, you did not run counter to this Power. And the rogue capsule had passed through several hundred subtle and strong defenses set up in the name of the Goddess, designed to keep hostile intruders out. It followed that the intruders who survived were under the protection of the Goddess and harmless to Arth. It was in Arth’s best interests to treat them politely.

On the whole, the High Head favored pitching the women back to wherever they had come from as soon as possible. There were, however, two difficulties about this. First, as in the case of otherworld, was the Law of Altered Reality. This stated that the changes brought about in a person in order to permit him to pass from one universe to another were — particularly in the case of worlds of high reality like Arth and its parent the Pentarchy — so great as to allow a person only one such transition. In other words, these women might be stuck here. Going back might kill them in the same way that sending them to otherworld might. But, since the hasty scan the High Head had made while the women were in front of him suggested they were as human as he was, he had hopes that he might find a way around the Law. It was just possible they came from a universe of equivalent reality to Arth. This was his main reason for shunting them straight off to Healing Horn. Edward was presumably checking on the women’s humanity at this moment. If it tallied enough with Arth’s standard, they could be returned whence they came.

This brought him to the second difficulty. Where exactly were they from? The High Head was not sure he followed or quite trusted the explanation given by the one who called herself Roz Collasso — standing very straight and speaking with brave schoolgirl openness — that they were a sport team from somewhere called Middle-Earth who had been on their way to compete in the Highland Games by strato-cruiser. They had, claimed this Collasso, hit sunspot turbulence and found themselves in Arth in free-fall. The High Head doubted this. Even allowing for the fact that the woman was in shock, his study of suns had never come up with a similar accident, and her manner had too much in common with that of one of his cadets trying to conceal the truth from a Duty Mage. He intended to question them separately until he got at the truth.

But what was he to do with them meanwhile, until he found out?

The measure of the difficulty was Brother Dewi, Horn Head of Housekeeping, and his assistant Brother Milo, standing in his outer office waiting for a decision. It was unprecedented. Housekeeping prided itself on knowing the precise social status of every visitor to Arth and providing accommodation for that visitor’s exact rank and degree without ever consulting anyone. But Brother Dewi had no idea what these women were. Nor had the High Head. All he could tell Brother Dewi after his brief survey was that, although one woman had the black skin of a highborn Azandi, neither she nor any of the others merited being housed in the Rooms of State where the Ladies of Leathe had spent the night.

He had no wish anyway to treat these women as important. Even though the Goddess had allowed them to reach Arth, strong twinges of foreknowledge suggested to him that they meant trouble, and his impulse was to lock them up, away from everyone else in the citadel. But Arth had only three solitary-confinement cells. It would mean draining a fish-cellar for them. Besides, this was the sort of solution one would expect of otherworld — all Arth knew that otherworld locked refugees up as a matter of course. Arth could not do that. Arth was civilized.

Edward’s sigil appeared in his glass at last. Thank the Goddess!

“Just my first impressions, you know,” Edward said in his most apologetic way, “but I’d say these — er — people are every bit as human as we are. The black one has nearly all the Azandi traits, and some of the others test out as quite markedly gualdian — specially that very pretty one and her little boy.”

“Fine,” said the High Head. “Then we can send them back where they belong before long.”

“What do you want me to do with them when I’m through?” Edward wanted to know.

Gualdian traits did not mean gualdian status. The decision was not all that difficult after all. “Put them in the servants’ hall attached to the Rooms of State. They can sleep and eat there. It’s convenient for Kitchen.”

Feeling considerable relief, he gave the same order to Brother Dewi.

2

“I saw a centaur,” said Flan. “I know I did. Just after that Tod boy took his skin off.”

“Don’t be silly.” Roz glanced at Judy. Judy was sitting quietly in one of the few hard, upright chairs, which were all the furniture the room had, and she seemed calm enough. That doctor fellow, even though he seemed to be scared stiff of all six of them, had worked wonders there. Now it looked as if Flan was going bonkers too, and that could set Judy off again. “You can’t have seen any such thing.”

“Centaurs are a physical impossibility. I read it somewhere,” Sandra said. “Hey! Is that why they’re all so respectful of me? Do they think I’m a physical impossibility too?”

“Perhaps black women are, in this universe,” Roz agreed repressively. “But centaurs can’t exist anywhere.”

“I tell you I saw one,” said Flan.

“You saw someone riding a horse, maybe,” Helen suggested pacifically. “They must ride horses all over the fortress. Why else do they have ramps instead of stairs?”

“For centaurs, of course!” Flan said angrily. “Why would anyone ride a horse in the sanatorium, idiot?”

Zillah, who was sitting against the wall trying hopelessly to amuse Marcus in this bare blue hall, said, “Flan did see a centaur. I saw him too.”

No one gave her much heed. She was an outsider among them. Roz looked at Judy and at Flan, then expressively at the other two, and changed the subject. “Odd, wasn’t it, how that doctor fellow never really came near us? But he saw my bad tooth and spotted Sandra’s allergies.”

And cured Judy, Zillah thought, by tentatively touching her head. And there had been a centaur, but it had only appeared near the beginning when the doctor’s assistants were all down the other end of the room somehow causing warm water to gush out of the ceiling. The chief doctor — Edward, he’d said his name was — had been trying to shepherd them all down that way to have a shower behind chastely thick veiling. Zillah followed the others. But Marcus had rushed the other way, shouting, “Eeh awe!” and she turned and chased him. That was how she had seen the centaur tiptoeing — as far as knock-kneed horse legs could tiptoe — around the corner from another part of the health center. He looked pale, and he had a dressing over one eye. Tod had seemed delighted to see him. Tod had been in the act of removing his all-over invisible covering — Zillah had been glad; by then she had been wondering if the sort of squashed look to his face was some kind of deformity — and he had flung it aside in order to seize the centaur by both hands.

“Josh! Did they save that eye?”

“Oh yes — it’s really only a cut,” the centaur replied, in a wholly human, though rather resonant, whisper. “Tod, I heard you got all the blame. What’s going on?”

Here, however, Edward had approached, causing the centaur to back hastily out of sight and Tod to look nonchalant. Edward, it seemed, wished Marcus to have a shower on his own and not with Zillah and the others. As soon as Marcus grasped this, he clung to Zillah’s leg and protested lustily. Zillah pleaded. Edward replied that Marcus was male, and therefore it would be unseemly for him to stand in a shower with six naked females, and he tried to drag Marcus off her.

“Oh, look here!” Zillah shouted, flaring up. “He’s only two!”

She saw Tod shoot a sharp look at her and step forward. “Excuse me, Horn Brother,” he said with crisp politeness, “but the little fellow’s still only really a baby — far too young to be separated from his mother — and in a strange place and all.”

It had seemed reasonable, and yet Zillah had been sure something very strange was going on. While Tod spoke, she felt as if the whole angry tangle of her feelings were being deftly sorted into a strong and orderly chain, stretching down from somewhere far, far overhead, and that this chain was then being firmly bound around Edward. Edward’s look of bewildered hauteur bore out this feeling, particularly when it turned to alarm, possibly even fear. At any rate, his small, pale features reddened slightly, and his eyes were as wide and hurt as Marcus’s. “All right then,” he said. “If that’s the way it is, I’ve no option. The child shall stay with his mother.”

I like Tod, Zillah thought gratefully. Tod’s strange help stopped her feeling quite as lost as she might have done. She had made her complete break. She and Marcus truly were in quite another universe, she had no doubt of that. But, in her usual unforeseeing way, she had not bargained for being alive and having to live in this universe. Maybe she was in shock. It had been plain terrifying in that capsule. She felt she ought to have been dead from whatever it was killed all the others at her end of the capsule. Now she had a dreamy, raw, invalid feeling, like you do when you have passed the crisis in a bad illness but are still far from well. Frankly, she had no idea what to do next.

This citadel was causing some of her disorientation. It was queer the way it was all blue, inside as well as out. The floors throughout were of ribbed rubbery stuff which was not rubber — it had a smell more like stone. The walls were those huge blue blocks. They had been led through passages and under veiled archways of queer proportions but many different shapes. Veiling seemed to be used for doors everywhere. And it was all blue, blue, blue, and brightly lit, including the mad Escher-like ramps. On a ramp, bringing up the rear with Marcus, Zillah had looked up at the top of Tod’s head, or at Roz standing out at right angles into space at the front of their group. After that it had been ramp after ramp, with everyone at crazy angles, all blue, but without ornament, chaste and bare. Not a trace of decoration anywhere. It was, to look at, a serious, clinical place. The cells they were to sleep in were monastic. Yet — this was what was muddling Zillah — for no reason she could see, the fortress was not cold or joyless. If the place were a person, Zillah would have said it was itching to spring up and do a mad dance, because it was full of health and delighting in that health, but it seemed to have been too well trained or severely brought up to do anything so frivolous. Perhaps repressed was the best word for it.

There I go, fantasizing again. Trust me!

Her companions seemed to be fantasizing too. “All these men!” Flan was saying, stretched on her back on the ribbed floor, grinning like a hyena. “Some of them real good-lookers too! Did you see that little dark medical one? Yum-yum-oh-yum!”

“There were two in those short-horn things,” Sandra concurred. “You know — when we first got inside. I can’t wait to get to know either of them!”

To which Judy, looking much more her normal self, added, “You can’t have Edward. He’s mine. I love him. He’s so shy.”

“Pleasure with business!” chuckled Flan, kicking her legs up.

“Talking of business,” Zillah said, “will you fill me in on the Highland Games story a bit? I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

“Zillah, for goodness’ sake!” said Roz. “Walls have ears. Put a sock in it — huh? Now, I tell you who I’m going after,” she told the others, “because I always make straight for the top, and that’s the great panjandrum himself — the one with the big horns!”

“You mean the High Head,” said Helen.

It was at this moment the High Head chose to sweep through the veiling at the door. Zillah was hard put to it not to laugh. Roz, caught with her hands to her head to illustrate the horns she meant, pretended hastily to be stretching. Flan rolled into a ball and bounced to her feet. The rest just looked guilty.

“Good evening,” said the High Head. He spoke with the same pleasant firmness he used to the Ladies of Leathe. Judging by what he had overheard, what he had to say decidedly needed saying. “I hope you are settled in comfortably. These are only temporary quarters — I want you to understand that. We will do our best to get you home. I came to assure you of this. Or, failing that, we’ll send you over to the Pentarchy in a few months time when the tides are right, where you’ll be much more at home. But until then you will, of course, be guests of the citadel, and there are one or two things I have to make clear to you about Arth.”

Looking along their faces, he had a sense of deja vu. This felt just like his speech to the servicemen, except none of these women struck him as second-rate. They all gave him a sense of quality. But what was the same was that they were all — he knew it — potential troublemakers — including the child, who was raising his voice in some kind of complaint.

“Please silence your infant,” he said politely.

Zillah’s face flushed all over. There was a sense of anger. Of powers. But the child stopped his noise.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now, Arth and its Brotherhood were founded a thousand years ago on the king’s orders, for a double purpose: first, so our charter states, to protect the Pentarchy and, by our researches, to strengthen the realm; and second, to provide the young men of the five provinces with proper teaching in magework. This citadel was made so that the Brotherhood could employ its arts in peace and seclusion, and a very holy ceremony was performed to create it. A piece of the Sanctuary of the Goddess was raised and moved to this place, which afterwards became Arth. Now, you will understand from this that Arth is in a special position: not only is it in existence solely by favor of the Goddess, but it is also at once very potent and very fragile. We in Arth have to be very careful that, while we take advantage in our mageworks of the special vibrations of this citadel, we do not in any way unbalance them. If we did, Arth would be destroyed. For this reason, all of us in Arth—” He paused impressively. They were listening patiently, waiting for him to stop. “All of us in Arth,” he repeated, “take solemn vows of total celibacy. The Goddess exacts extreme penalties from those who break those vows. Now, you are all women. I must therefore ask you to understand, and to respect the oath we take.” Ah, that got to them! They were looking alarmed — shocked, in fact — and impressed. “I believe you take my point,” he said. “Thank you. Someone will be along with food for you shortly.”

He swept out. He did not hear Flan say, “Obvious, isn’t it? Work on these vibrations with a bit of kamikase sex, and who needs virus-magic?”

“Tantric,” agreed Roz, and cackled hilariously.

3

The food was appalling. What was not tasteless and tough, swimming in some weak liquid, appeared to be some kind of cereal — large, off-white mounds of it — that looked like rice but, as Flan said, tasted like overcooked potato. They were none of them hungry after their experiences. Most of them could not eat it. Marcus deliberately overturned his bowl on the floor and smacked the resulting sloppy heap severely and often.

“Ardy poo,” he stated. “Dummy ay.” No one asked Zillah to translate.

But after a night under one thin blanket on a hard wooden bed, every one of them was ravenous. They were given a jug of brown liquid that — possibly — partook of the nature of both tea and coffee, and, to their dismay, the cereal again, this time cold but fried.

“Oh, looky, looky!” said Flan. “Potato Krispies!”

“Snap, crackle, sug,” Zillah agreed.

“And I like my popcorn hot,” Roz said morbidly. “Is this drink toffee or kea, or neither?”

“Cooking’s not really my scene,” Sandra observed, “but it wouldn’t take much to make me go in that kitchen and try. Even I could do better than this.”

“You wouldn’t be allowed,” said Roz. “This is the way they mortify their flesh for the Goddess. This is not food, it’s religion, friends.”

“Not religion — magic,” Helen said in her quiet way.

“Oh, you mean we’re supposed to transmogrify it into bacon and eggs like they all do?” said Flan. “Abracadabra—kippers! No, still the same old ardy poo.”

Zillah was not surprised that Marcus spat the stuff out. She was scooping it off the floor when they were summoned by two solemn young mages. “They go in pairs, to chaperone one another,” Flan said in a stage whisper. Both young men went scarlet, but pretended not to hear. They guided the party decorously along corridors and dizzy blue ramps to the outer office of the High Head. There an elderly mage told them to wait. The High One wished to ask each of them some questions.

The High Head meanwhile was looking at the full report Edward had handed him over breakfast. All the survivors were in good physical condition, it seemed, but none, except for Flan Burke, appeared to be athletes. The child was healthy too, but Edward was at a loss to think what sport a child so young might compete in. So was the High Head. He intended to find out.

He had them in one by one, starting with Judy. Edward had stated that she was the least stable and most likely to give the real truth if pressed. But Judy simply and doggedly repeated the story Roz had given, and then burst into tears. “All my friends are dead!” she sobbed. “And I don’t know why. Lynne just died. She was talking to me, and then she was dead — just like that!”

The High Head was not used to people crying. He got the woman out of his room as fast as he could and called in Roz.

It was a trying half hour. Why don’t I like this woman? the High Head kept thinking. She stuck long legs in high boots out across the floor of his office with a confidence that would have reminded him of Leathe had it not also seemed so masculine. If he had let her, she would have got up and strode about. He judged it prudent to keep her seated, but her aggression still came out — Leathe-like — in strident little phrases tacked on to the end of everything she said.

“Tossing the caber is immensely satisfying to a woman — but female satisfaction will be outside your experience, I imagine,” she remarked; and later, “female athleticism is largely a matter of mind and emotions, you know. Muscle tone isn’t hugely important to us. But I don’t expect an all-male community to grasp this sort of fact.”

He knew she was lying, over these Highland Games of hers and almost everything else, but there was in her aura a background of sincerity almost as strident as the rest of her, which he was at a loss to account for. Somewhere, at some level, Roz cared deeply about what she was saying. It kept reminding him she was alien, with alien notions of truth. There was magecraft in her aura too, though not much of it, and that little as alien as the rest of her. That did not surprise him, since she reminded him of Leathe anyway; but, annoyingly, that and her sincerity kept her mind warded from him. He looked her in her frank and self-confident face and thought of cracking her open with raw power. That would destroy her mind, and one did not do that to a guest under the protection of the Goddess. A pity.

The last ten minutes of the interview was rendered even more trying by an uproar in the next room, where Marcus was becoming steadily more unhappy. The High Head shielded, and warded, and blocked, by every method he knew, and the child seemed to slide his noise past everything put in its way. Irritably the High Head realized that he had better see this infant next or it would disrupt every interview until he did.

“There was a time in my life when I contemplated being gay,” Roz announced through the din. “Do you know the term? It means homosexual.”

The High Head had had enough. “I’m not interested in the history of your life. Go to hellband, Lady Collasso,” he said cordially. “Kindly go away. I will see the small child next.”

He made the last two sentences performative, rather forcefully. The mages in the outer office responded. Roz, without quite knowing how, found herself walking forth from his office into the outer room, with the curtain wall folding and dilating about her to let her out and to let Zillah and Marcus pass her on their way in. She directed a look at Zillah to Play dumb! and wished there had been more time to brief the woman. The others, waiting in the outer office on high stools, evidently felt equally anxious.

This was not lost on the High Head. The veiling of that entry was designed to give him sight of such things. But he was mostly taken up with exasperation. “When I said I would see the child, I meant the child on its own — er — Lady Green.”

“I think I’d better stay with him,” Zillah answered diffidently. “He’s a bit difficult when he’s upset like this.” In her arms, Marcus turned wide, accusing eyes on the High Head and was shaken with a huge gasp of a sob.

It was, the High Head recognized, primitive magic he was up against, the bonding between a mother and a small child. It was something he had only read about up to now, and he was astonished at its strength. Zillah, for all her apologetic manner, was immovable. It had nothing to do with her own magic gifts. He had Edward’s report to show him these were strong indeed. According to Edward, this woman had actually adapted young Gordano’s birthright for her own use and held Edward pinned to her desire. These were not gifts you meddled with lightly. He sighed and gave in.

“Little boy, what is your name?”

Marcus looked up under his mother’s chin, a stormy blue glare, and gave another body-shaking sob. “Barker.”

Odd name. “And where do you live?” asked the High Head.

“Idanda how,” said Marcus. “Dilly bool.” He turned his face away.

“And how did you travel here?” persisted the High Head, with a strong sense of getting nowhere.

“Bud,” said Marcus, with his face pressed into Zillah’s shoulder. “Jidey bud. Didden lie bub. Go bub. Doe lie did how. Wan hoe, wan hoe, wan hoe, Dillah! Wan gorblay, wan bregia, wan barberday, wan doad!” By this time he was bawling desolately again. “Dillah, I need DOAD!”

“There, there, honey,” Zillah said, rocking him.

There was a sort of helpless concern to her rocking the boy, and a meekness before fate — the High Head had read this described — but he nevertheless discerned that her meekness was a blind. The wretched woman knew he could not make head or tail of the infant. She was trying not to laugh.

“What is wrong with him?” he said, giving in again. “Why is he crying?”

Zillah swallowed. She was rather good at concealing her frequent unseemly need to laugh, and she was fairly sure this High Horns had not noticed. “He’s hungry,” she explained. “He was frightened in the capsule, and this place is strange, and he doesn’t like the food we were given.” She added, in her usual placatory way, “I’m afraid.”

The High Head saw a way to break this partnership without a clash of mageworks. “In that case we must find him something to eat. If I get someone in from Kitchen, would the child consent to go there while I ask you a few questions?” It was not the way around he wanted things, but the other way was hopeless.

“I think — well, he might,” Zillah conceded.

“Good.” The High Head gestured, crisply and precisely. Marcus took his head out of Zillah’s shoulder and gazed with tear-filled but interested eyes at the sigil of Housekeeping forming in the air, then dissolving to that of Kitchen, but he hid his face convulsively again when the sigil gave way to the flesh-and-blood figure of Brother Milo, with a list of stores in his hand.

The High Head explained. Brother Milo nodded and seemed rather relieved that this was all the High Head wanted of him. He held out his free hand to Marcus. “Coming with me, sonny? Come with Brother Milo and we’ll find something to eat.”

It was not as simple as that. The High Head contained his exasperation while Marcus hid his face again and Zillah placed him on the floor and then knelt down to explain that the kind man would find Marcus some toast, and that Mum would stay here for just a bit, and Marcus would be happy with the kind man. Then there was further delay while Marcus turned and examined Brother Milo, with his thinning hair and wiry body, and while he made up his mind that maybe he rather liked the way Brother Milo’s face hung in nervous folds like brackets around his mouth. Finally, with some condescension, Marcus held out his hand for Brother Milo to take and trustingly vanished with him.

Zillah gave a little sigh. It was not relief. She hoped High Horns did not realize how much she had spun all this out. She was dreading this interview. No one had told her what she was supposed to say.

Luckily, the High Head was too inexperienced in the ways of children — as far as he knew, Marcus was the only child ever to visit Arth — to do more than conclude that Zillah was an overprotective mother. She was bound to be, he thought irritably. Love beamed from her aura. Here he realized, with something of a jolt, that Zillah was the one whom the Goddess had been most concerned to protect in that madly plunging capsule. He looked at her in this light, wonderingly but warily. She was, he had to admit, very comely — not in the highly wrought cosmetic fashion of the Ladies he was used to, but in a direct, untreated way which, again he had to admit it, spoke directly to the austerities of his soul and no doubt pleased the Goddess too. But she was also tiresomely humble and probably very devious. He told her curtly to sit down.

“Tell me the reason for your journey in that capsule.”

“It — it was on the way to the Highland Games,” said Zillah. This at least she knew to say.

“But you were not taking part in those games yourself,” guessed the High Head.

“That’s right.” Zillah found she had agreed before she was aware. Panic. She sat twisting her hands between the knees of her jeans and wondered what the hell to say she had been doing. Inspiration flushed through her — thank the Lord! “But it was a charter flight, you know, and Marcus and I got the two spare tickets at the last moment because I — er — had to get away.”

The High Head watched the power rise around her to answer his suspicions and was not surprised that the Goddess had singled this one out. This woman was important. He began to suspect that whatever business the occupants of the rogue capsule had been on, it concerned Zillah and her child somehow. Maybe they were her bodyguard. Yes, that might fit. Roz would lie to protect her. Well, that was no concern of his, so long as it did not threaten Arth. But he needed to be sure.

“Had to get away?” he asked, using the time-honored technique of simply throwing the remark back.

“Oh — yes,” Zillah invented. “The courts had given me custody of Marcus, but his father wants him. He was threatening to kidnap Marcus, so I had to get away quickly to somewhere where he wouldn’t find us.”

“Where is that somewhere?” the High Head inevitably asked.

Zillah wished she could remember whether Roz had named a place. “Lyonesse,” she said desperately. “Near where they hold the Highland Games.” And, striving for local color, she added, “Logres is near there too, just down the road from Camelot. Marcus’s father wouldn’t dream I’d gone there. Camelot’s politically unsound.”

“And Marcus’s father is who?” came the next question.

Oh my God! Zillah thought. “Someone very important — whose name I’m not at liberty to reveal.” Which, she thought, was not so far from the truth.

A ring of truth there, thought the High Head. “Where—”

Brother Milo rematerialized in the middle of the room, still holding Marcus by the hand. Saved by the bell! thought Zillah. Tears were rolling dolefully down Marcus’s cheeks. “What is it, Marcus?”

The High Head lifted his chin and expressed his irritation in a venemous look at all three. “Why are you here again, Brother?”

Brother Milo was harassed. “I do beg your pardon, sir. The little fellow is getting very upset. I’m afraid none of us can understand what he’s asking for. He keeps saying he wants damages.”

Zillah bit the inside of her cheek in order not to laugh.

“Damages?” the High Head said irately.

“Damages, sir,” said Brother Milo.

Both of them looked at Marcus. Marcus was exasperated at their stupidity. “Damn bitches,” he enunciated, his whole body shaking with the effort to communicate. “Damn damn bitches.”

The High Head’s astonished face turned first to Brother Milo, then to Zillah. She unclenched her teeth from her cheek. “He’s asking for jam sandwiches,” she said, rather impressed to find her voice was quite steady.

The two mages of Arth stared at her much as they had stared at Marcus. “Could you perhaps explain what a sandwich is, my lady?” Brother Milo asked helplessly.

“You take two slices of bread,” said Zillah. “You do have bread, do you?” Both nodded. “Then you spread butter on each slice and a lot of jam on one — Do you have jam?” They looked blank. “Marmalade? Preserves?” Zillah asked, beginning to see how Marcus had become so upset in the kitchens. They looked enlightened at “preserves.” They nodded. “Then you put the two slices together and give it him to eat,” she explained patiently.

“Oh!” said Brother Milo and looked at the High Head, who said almost simultaneously, “Oh! She means a buttie — or that’s what we used to say in Leathe. Didn’t you call them that in Trenjen?”

“No, sir. We used to call them slathers,” said Brother Milo. Jolly with relief, he looked down at Marcus. “Come on, my fine fellow. You shall have a red slather and a yellow one and see which you like best.”

“Dyke dead buds,” Marcus announced confidently as he was led away into nothingness.

The High Head took a second to recover from all this. Zillah looked up at the thick-framed window while she waited. He’s not so bad, she thought. Just not got a clue about toddlers. They all seem to mean well here — I don’t understand it. Amanda was sure everyone in this place was out to destroy the Earth. I’d expected to find a whiff of downright evil somewhere at least, and nothing’s even sinister. If you look at him without that costume, High Horns is more like the director of a big company, or perhaps a cardinal — one of the worldly ones. I’m sure he thinks of himself as a good man.

Through the window, apart from the corner of a blue tower, she could see only clear pale blue sky. No birds of course. Insects? How do they pollinate those gardens I saw? Come to think of it, what do they use for a sun? I must find out. And how funny that they didn’t know what a sandwich was. At this point she remembered that sandwiches were the invention of the Earl of Sandwich, who ate them rather than leave the gaming table for a meal — which surely had to be something entirely local to Earth.

So much had her confidence been restored by the incident with Marcus that she said, before the High Head could ask her further awkward questions, “Please could you tell me why it is we both speak so much the same language? We don’t even come from the same universe.”

He answered with surprising readiness, “It’s fairly simple. This cluster of worlds develops in parallel, with parallel influences — this applies to many other things beside languages. It is clear that you come from a world in this cluster, or we would not be able to understand one another.” He was happy enough to explain. It was a surprise — he could almost say a treat — to deal with a woman who was simply asking for information, as a cadet might do, instead of using questions to trip or manipulate like the Ladies of Leathe.

Zillah realized she had stumbled on a way to divert him whenever his questions became too difficult. Thereafter, whenever she needed time to think (what kind of place had she implied Logres was?), or when he pressed too hard (why did he keep asking what kind of work she did?), Zillah simply asked the High Head some of the things she genuinely wanted to know. She learned in this way that plants had to be pollinated by hand or by magecraft, depending on type; that Arth’s light source was a small star, maintained by mageworks and veiled by a special ritual each evening; that atmosphere was contained in a mage-net; that most research in Arth was directed toward otherworld, because it was a debased image of the Pentarchy; and that the starchy potato-rice was called passet.

Here the High Head confounded Zillah by projecting, with a gesture, a dazzle in the air like a Rorschach blot. She blinked at it.

“This is a map of otherworld,” he explained. He was perfectly aware that she kept trying to divert him, and it amused him. He simply answered her questions and went on. “I’m showing you otherworld first because it’s one of the three main types of land distribution in this cluster of universes. Look at it carefully and tell me whether it in any way resembles your own world.”

“It’s a map?” It resembled to Zillah more the lights and lungs of an animal hung in a butcher’s shop. “Sorry. It means nothing to me.”

Another gesture. The butcher’s shop dazzle was replaced by another, mostly a large pear shape with a crab wedged against it, trying to eat it. Zillah was already shaking her head when she recognized a sort of Africa in the pear shape. And could the crab be a version of Australia? Antarctica? High Horns was using some form of map-projection that was squashed and sideways and alien to her, and showing her a world not really anything like Earth, but — The moment she saw this, Zillah realized what the butcher’s shop had been. Earth! My world! The one he calls otherworld and a debased version and they all do research on! It had all been there, dangling and sideways, Europe, Asia, Greenland, the Americas, Africa, and Australia masquerading as the meat hook. Now she understood what Amanda had been talking about, and the reason all the other women were here. Guilt flooded her, along with shock and anger. How could she have been such a fool as to blunder in on what had to be a commando action? How could the mages of Arth so coolly tamper with Earth? How dared they?

To cover up her feelings, she kept shaking her head. The High Head dismissed his second projection with something of a showman’s gesture. He was unable to resist the flourish because, if her world was like neither of these, it had to be even closer to his own than he had realized. The pear and the crab vanished, and with panache, blue on white — like the United Nations! Zillah thought — two new shapes came to hang in the air. The larger, if you stripped away outjutting lands like Britain, Spain, Greece, India, Japan, and then tilted the whole lot downward, was not so unlike Europe and the bulk of Asia. The smaller was — somewhat — like North America, if you turned it sideways and south.

“That’s it,” said Zillah. This projection was almost saying Choose me! anyway.

“Then we must be very near neighbors,” said the High Head, rejoicing. It should be simple to get these castaways home before long. He used his sword-wand as a pointer. “This larger blue mass is the Pentarchy, where everyone on Arth was born, and this other is Azandi. If your home looks anything like this, it must be quite close.”

Zillah could see the idea pleased him. She could not think why. Her mind was still roaring with shock and anger, which she knew he would notice unless she was careful. She could feel her hands shaking. She tried to disguise her feelings as excitement. “Well, fancy that!” Lord, how artificial that sounded! She clasped her hands together and clamped them between her knees to stop them shaking. She leaned forward as if eagerly. And spoke almost at random. “I’d never have believed it — never for a moment! — because my world is so much more creative than yours.”

“How do you mean?” asked the High Head.

He was offended. Zillah realized that her anger had fooled her and somehow slipped out sideways. She bit the tip of her tongue. Otherwise she was going to give the obvious answer: Because your world sponges on mine. “Well — I suppose I meant — well, this fortress is so bare. Don’t any of the mages paint or sculpt or — compose music or anything?”

“If we do,” the High Head answered austerely, “it goes into our work. Magework is creative and leaves us little room for hobbies.” He was taken aback. Zillah’s power had risen about her until she appeared to him to be enfolded in golden, feathered flame. He could not understand why a trivial thing like artwork could be that important to her. But there was no accounting for alien ideas. His main thought was that he had been right about Zillah: she was the important one among the castaways, and it behoved him to treat her with respect, or her world might become a hostile force on the Pentarchy’s doorstep. “Why,” he asked, with as much courtesy as he could muster, “does this trouble you so much?”

There seemed no way on but honesty. Zillah blurted, “It — it seems so sterile. And — I get the feeling that this fortress needs something more creative.”

“Ah no,” the High Head politely corrected her. “What you have sensed is that all Arth, and particularly the citadel, is precariously balanced. It certainly has needs. Our work is performed very carefully to supply the needs without upsetting the balance.” He stood up to show the interview was at an end. “Any extra activity — music, artwork, and so on — would influence the vibrations in a way that might destroy the balance.”

Zillah wanted to say that in that case, they should redesign the whole thing — anything to show she was at odds with him without giving away the real reason why she was so angry — but he was showing her to the wall, or door, or whatever, bowing her out and asking for Helen. All she managed to say was, “How do I find Marcus?”

“The child will be brought to you,” he said.

Then Helen passed her and disappeared, and she was in the anteroom under the severe eyes of the elderly mage. Roz looked the old man in the eye and demanded, “How much longer do we have to kick our heels in here?”

He pursed his old lips and did not answer. It was obviously a battle that had been going on for some time.

4

By the time it was Flan’s turn to be interviewed, the High Head was in no good mood. Zillah’s accusation had eaten away at his serenity. Helen did not help by sticking doggedly and colorlessly to the Highland Games story. When faced with projections of the three worlds, she pointed to the second — the one Zillah had thought of as the pear and the crab, and known to Arth as Postulate — and declared the whole party came from there. Insipid liar, the High Head thought. Postulate and its people were known to Arth. The two universes guardedly traded objects of magecraft, talismans from Postulate for specula from Arth, and its mauve-skinned traders in no way resembled these female castaways. Sandra he treated with respect, as a quasi-Azandi, and was puzzled to find she seemed to think he was mocking her in some way. She claimed otherworld as her home, and he could tell it was a random guess.

So then he came to the small, chirpy woman with the bright, dark eyes, determined to discover why they were all so intent on concealing their origin.

Flan’s chirpiness was verging on bad temper by this time. Waiting about always gave her a headache. Or maybe it was Roz, sniping away at that old man. Poor old fellow, in his slightly shriveled blue uniform! You might as well make rude remarks to a Chelsea Pensioner because of your income tax. Flan herself wanted to get at High Horns. She wanted to get on with the job they had come to do. But careful! she warned herself. He’s quite capable of locking us all up.

“The Highland Games?” she said. Curse Roz for landing them with that stupid story! Amanda had invented a perfectly reasonable tale of a strayed strato-cruiser, and bloody Roz had to go and embroider it! “Oh yes, Roz tosses the caber, all right. It’s a dirty great tree and she staggers around with it. Me, I’m a dancer. The Games has every kind of competition you can think of. I’m in the Eisteddfod section, which is singing and dancing and weaving, but if you could have talked to the others on the Celestial — the stratobus, you’d have found every kind of competitor. Pity they’re dead.” To her annoyance, Flan found she choked up here and tears came to her eyes. Poor Tam. One of the nicest boys you could hope to meet.

“Healing Horn will, of course, be examining your dead companions,” the High Head told her.

“What do you mean?” Flan squawked. “Autopsies? Oh, well, I suppose we’d have done just the same at home. But I hope you’ll have the decency to tell us — tell us why they died.” She choked and broke off again.

“Of course,” he said. “Was Zillah Green a competitor too?”

“Zillah?” Flan found she was furious with Zillah. What did she think she was doing, bringing not only herself but her baby along on what she must have known was a dangerous mission? Flan had been simmering about this from the moment on the rescue platform when she had realized Zillah had got herself on the Celestial Omnibus; but now she was so angry that, for a moment, she wondered whether to say Zillah was a pole-vaulter and get High Horns to make Zillah prove it. No. Zillah undoubtedly must have told him something. Flan did her best to make it awkward for her. “Oh no, Zillah just came along for the ride because her husband was competing. He’s a pole-vaulter.”

To her annoyance, High Horns simply accepted this, with a bit of a look as if it confirmed something someone else had said, and then went on to show Flan three sets of floating colored shapes he said were worlds.

“Worlds?” said Flan. “I never saw a world that shape. Worlds are round where I come from. But if it makes you happy, this one.” She pointed to the one that struck her as strangest.

Other world. The High Head tried to suppress his annoyance. Another transparent lie. “Very well. As you probably realize, I have a pretty fair idea of what your party was doing by now.” He was glad to see that this terrified her.

“What is that?” Flan asked. She was so scared, her voice almost went.

“You were escorting one of your number to a meeting of great magical importance. I do not think your arrival here was a simple accident. I suspect some enemy on your own world tried to eliminate you all.”

There was a short silence while Flan wrestled with both relief and incredulity. The High Head watched red turn to white in her face, and then the pallor change to a surge of red, and believed he had struck home. Eventually Flan gave a short, wild cackle of a laugh. “Oh no!” she said. “Oh no, what we were really doing, of course, was coming to attack and destroy your citadel.” Hearing herself say this, she wondered if she had gone mad.

She could barely credit her ears when High Horns laughed too. “Indeed? Sarcasm apart, what was your meeting about?”

I don’t believe this! Flan thought. I must be in shock. She heard herself say solemnly, “That’s something I’m not at liberty to say.” And as if that were not enough, she heard herself adding, “But I don’t doubt you could read my mind if you wanted to.”

He looked decidedly shocked. “Great gods, I wouldn’t dream of that! There are very strict laws against reading the mind of a fellow human. But,” he said, standing up to show her the interrogation was finished, “I wish you could all bring yourselves to be a little more open with me. You must see that it is very difficult to restore you to your own world when we don’t know which it is.”

Flan leapt to her feet too. “But we don’t know either!” she babbled. “I thought you knew that. We just call it the world — you know, the way one does — and none of us have the slightest idea how to tell you where it is, because none of us has ever been outside it before, and we don’t even know what it looks like.”

She had no idea if he believed her or not. She tottered forth through the veiling of the wall with a feeling of having diced with death and unexpectedly won.

5

The preliminary reports from Calculus Horn came in later that morning, and they were somewhat confusing. It seemed that Arth had arrived at a node of fate which, although only a minor node giving rise to low-probability outcomes, prevented a fully satisfactory long-term forecast. Calculus had attempted long-term casts, but these were woolly. Two suggested disaster. One of these gave Arth as completely destroyed by the castaways, and the other suggested far-reaching changes; but since all eleven of the other casts gave the situation as largely unchanged by the refugees, High Brother Gamon had written off the two minority casts as the lowest probability and ticked the majority reading. Looking them over, the High Head had no hesitation in countersigning Brother Gamon’s conclusions.

When it came to short-term readings on the castaway party itself, the confusion was even greater. Every single reading was different. Most balanced out into precisely nothing. Looking along the charts, the High Head saw love, success, and stability jumbled with death, disaster, and change in both major and minor readings. “This looks like the Powers of the Wheel saying, ‘pardon us, what was your question?’ to me,” he said wryly.

“My opinion too,” said Brother Gamon. “If you take the disaster to refer to whatever accident befell that capsule, then there is nothing to suggest that their stay in Arth will be anything but peaceful and happy. But of course, I shall have to take detailed individual readings on all the survivors before I can be quite sure.”

“Start those as soon as you want,” said the High Head. “Meanwhile, for horoscope purposes, look at all the close analogues to the Postulate worlds, and if those don’t fit, try analogues to ours. It’s going to be one or the other. As soon as you get a match, tell me.”

He discounted otherworld and its analogues. Flan and Sandra had so plainly been lying. All in all, he sent Brother Gamon forth with considerable optimism, both of them confident that the castaways’ home universe would be discovered in the next day or so. And as far as early readings could be trusted, it looked as if these people were pretty harmless to Arth. You only had to compare these readings with the sharp indications of disaster read on the Ladies of Leathe, to see how little there was to fear. Tentatively he ordered that vigilance on the party be relaxed. He would be interviewing them all again anyway tomorrow.

This done, he turned to Edward’s preliminary report on the dead in the capsule. So far, Edward was puzzled. All seemed to have died of total heart failure without any evidence of violence at almost the same instant. Edward conjectured that this instant of death was the moment when the capsule broke through into Arth and encountered the first wards. He simply could not account for the fact that death had been selective.

The High Head’s decision was conveyed to the castaways along with an execrable lunch. Two young mages arrived carrying a large platter mounded with passet, which steamed overcooked vegetable scents and seemed to have uncertain-looking dark gobbets embedded in it.

While they placed this unsavory heap on the only table, the higher mage who chaperoned them stood tapping his boots with his stick — officer’s baton? wand? none of the women were sure which it was — and gazing at some point above all their heads.

“Vigilance upon you is relaxed,” he announced. “You will not any longer be closely watched, and you may go anywhere in the citadel within reason. You will be told if you overstep the bounds. And you will be careful not to interrupt any mage in his work.” So saying, he summoned the two young mages with a flick of his stick and departed, conveying them before him with the tip of it pointed at their backs. It was as if the young men were marched off at gunpoint.

As the doorway folded shut, feelings inside the room were divided between suspicion that this announcement was a trick to get them to talk, and disgust at the nature of the lunch.

“At least we can talk about this food,” Flan said. “What are those horrible-looking black bits?”

“Burnt meat,” said Sandra.

Helen put forward a long-fingered hand and squeezed one of the gobbets in a cautious finger and thumb.

“Oh, don’t!” Zillah said. “It looks like a slug.”

This earned her a startled look from Judy and a reproof from Roz. “There’s no need to be disgusting,” Roz said. “Well, Helen?”

“Someone burnt the meat and then soaked it in water to make it soft, I think,” Helen said. “It may be the way they do things here.”

None of them could manage much of the stuff, and Marcus refused to eat anything at all; although this, Zillah suspected, was because he had spent most of the morning eating bread and jam. “Oddie dug!” he shouted. Encouraged by Flan’s shuddering laughter, he threw a handful of black gobbets across the room.

“Marcus has it right,” said Flan. “Ardy poo for breakfast and oddie dug for lunch. What a gift with words your child has, Zillah.” She might be angry with Zillah herself, but she did not feel Roz had the slightest right to treat Zillah so peremptorily. Having, she hoped, made that clear, she said, “Well, Roz? What say we test out this permission to go anywhere we like?”

“Suits me,” said Roz. The two of them departed without another word. The veiling of the door opened to let them through without any difficulty, and no mage appeared, either to stop them or escort them.

Sandra said unbelievingly, “It looks as if that mage meant what he said. In that case, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to find their kitchens and I’m going to tell them a thing or two.”

“I’ll come with you,” Helen offered quietly. “Suppose we take the plate of stuff back with us? That will give us an excuse to go there.”

Sandra thought this was an excellent notion. The two of them set off, carrying the large platter between them; with everyone’s forks stuck into it at random and Marcus’s handful of gobbets reposing on top. This left Zillah with Judy and Marcus. We’re the two shell-shocked ones, Zillah thought, looking at Judy sitting very upright against the wall. Judy’s eyes filled with tears from time to time. Otherwise there was almost no expression on her slightly droll face. She looked like a sad Pierrot. Zillah did not feel like crying. It was more that she had a blank, disconnected feeling, rather light and feverish — the way she had always thought a person might feel if they were coming around after a lobotomy. She simply could not get used to the fact that she was not missing Mark any longer. By coming here, she had put it out of her power to hope, and her misery was gone. Oddly enough, it did not seem to make her feel relief.

But there was Marcus to look after. “Do you want to go for a walk, Marcus?” Zillah said dubiously. As far as she could work out, he should have been resting — or was it getting ready for bed? She felt more than a little jet-lagged herself. Every rhythm in her body was telling her that, though it was afternoon in Arth, it was quite another time on Earth. If Marcus was feeling the same, he would be restless and irritable.

He agreed, “Awk,” at once and held out his hand to be taken.

“I’ll come too,” Judy said, somewhat to Zillah’s surprise.

The three of them went out through the almost unfelt folds of the doorway into the blue corridors beyond. Judy said nothing and seemed to rely on Zillah to choose a direction. Zillah let Marcus tug her the way he wanted to go. She rather thought he was making for the kitchens.

If he was, Marcus had made a mistake. He stumped doggedly up one of the circling ramps, towing Zillah, with Judy sleepwalking behind, and plunged through a wide area of veiling at the top. The brightness and blueness on the other side made Zillah blink. There was a smell of asepsis. In great busy quiet, mages in pale blue gowns were working beside a sort of bier on which lay a young man with a handsome, friendly face, evidently dead. Because his fair hair was trailing backward, it took Zillah a second to recognize Tam Fairbrother.

Marcus knew him at once. “Dib!” he cried in desperate sorrow, and advanced with one hand out and his face crumpled for crying. “Dib dead!”

The tallest mage whirled around. Before Zillah could move, he had fielded Marcus with large, gentle hands — hands from which a blue shimmering stained with blood rapidly disappeared as they met Marcus — and turned him back toward Zillah. “I don’t think this is quite the right moment to bring the child in here,” he said, looking down on her with awkward shy firmness.

Zillah recognized the curiously small, boylike face of the head doctor-mage. What was his name? Edward. He was nice and he seemed to like her. This made her feel truly bad about bursting in here. “I’m so sorry. Marcus just — just brought us here. I didn’t know — I didn’t realize you’d be doing autopsies. I’ll — I’ll take him away at once.”

“For now. You’re welcome to bring him back in a day or so,” Edward said. He made it sound as if it were all his fault. Then, as Zillah started for the door with Marcus, and Judy turned dumbly to go with them, his large hand fell on Judy’s shoulder, stopping her. “She’d better stay,” he said. “She needs more healing than I knew.”

Before Zillah was aware, she was out on the ramp again without Judy, rather taken aback at the power of this medical mage. At another time she might have been almost destroyed with embarrassment — blundering in on an autopsy like that! — but Marcus claimed her full attention. He was very upset. “Dib!” he said desolately, over and over, as he stumped downward.

Zillah had not realized even that Marcus knew Tam, and she certainly had had no idea that he liked Tam enough to give him a special name. As far as she knew, Tam had twice, but only twice, briefly visited Amanda, but evidently that had been plenty of time for him to make a hit with Marcus.

“Dib’s all right,” she explained as they stumped she knew not whither, except that Marcus firmly led her downward. “He doesn’t hurt, Marcus. It’s like being asleep, only better,” she said, and found herself saying all the things adults do say to a child confronted by death. And they were so inadequate. Marcus had known instantly that Tam was dead. He always knew so much more than she gave him credit for.

They came down to another wide veiling, blue fluting filling a sizable archway, which gave way into a sudden open space. Zillah was relieved. Here was something that might distract Marcus. The large, open square she had seen from the orbiting capsule stretched in front of them. It was possibly a parade ground, for it was nothing but a stretch of gravel with one carefully tended strip of grass around the perimeter. Here, sure enough, Marcus forgot his sorrow and ran gleefully out into the large, sandy space. Zillah followed, pretending to chase him—“I’ll catch you, I’ll catch you!” — to keep his mind on other things. She had to quell an attack of some kind of agoraphobia as she ran. Blue sky was overhead. The blue buildings around the square, reduced by distance to the height of cottages, might have concealed landscape beyond, except that she knew they did not. The blue sky was all there was beyond them. She had to keep her eyes on Marcus’s small trotting figure, and even that became the center of vertigo. For a moment the whole flat space swung upside down, and Marcus was trotting across a ceiling.

It was a parade ground. With immense relief, her eye caught a disciplined group of blue uniforms over in the right-hand corner. They were just breaking ranks after some kind of exercise and streaming toward another of those veiled archways. Some were detaching themselves in twos and threes and making for other exits. The sight helped a little. She now saw everything at a steep slant. No, it was worse. She was absolutely going to fall. But Marcus had changed direction and was now running toward three of those detached figures, arms stretched out, for some reason in an ecstasy of delight. Zillah swerved after him. Her knees bent and she had to restrain an urge to trail her knuckles along the gravel.

“Ort! Ort!” Marcus was shouting.

It was the centaur again, now wearing a smart blue jacket on his human torso. The degree of illusion in this place became apparent when Marcus pounded up to the centaur and his companions in remarkably few strides. Or maybe the centaur moved swiftly to meet him.

“Ort! Ort!” Marcus cried, relief and joy all over him. Zillah realized that it was in hopes of meeting the centaur again that Marcus had gone to that medical place. Perhaps he had even been afraid that the centaur was dead too.

The centaur reached down and swung Marcus up level with his face. “How did you know I came from the Orthe?” he asked, through Marcus’s squeals of pleasure. He was quite as delighted as Marcus. His pale, mottled face was shining.

Zillah, as she sloped up, decided it would not be tactful to point out that Marcus had been saying something else.

“You’ve got it wrong, Josh,” Tod said, with his arm affectionately over the centaur’s flank. “The little fellow was actually calling you a horse.” Josh laughed. Tod nodded cheerfuly at Zillah. “Nice to see you again. What’s wrong? This place giving you the slopes?”

Zillah came upright again in the greatest relief. “Yes, but I’m all right now.” Tod had made it all right, by being so normal.

“It does that to me too,” said the third one of the group, leaning on Josh’s other side. “All the open places give me the slopes. That’s because space really is bent here, you know. The more of it you can see, the more it shows.”

Zillah looked at him with interest. He was not as odd as the centaur, but she could not help feeling he might in fact be even odder. He looked human, skinny and fair, but there was a sort of inner shining to him, and his eyes were tremendous — as were his hands and feet. Like an undernourished version of Michelangelo’s David, she thought.

“Let me introduce,” said Tod. “The fellow keeping Josh upright on the other side is Philo. He’s a Peleisian gualdian, if that means anything to you. The centaur is Horgoc Anphalemos Galpetto-Cephaldy, or Josh to his friends.”

“Pleased to meet you, lady.” Josh deftly swung Marcus around to sit astride at his back, where Marcus nestled against the blue jacket looking blissful, while Josh held out a large, pale hand to Zillah. It was warm when Zillah took it, horse-warm. The young-man-seeming part of him was all over larger than human. It would have to be, she thought, to match the horse part. The patch that had covered his eye the day before was gone, showing healing cuts above and below, although the cuts were hard to see for the big liver-colored horse-mottle that crossed his face and spread into his hair.

“I’m glad you’re better,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks to Tod.”

Philo came forward and held out a hand almost as big as the centaur’s, but not as warm when Zillah grasped it. He seemed shy. But when Zillah smiled, he smiled too, and his smile was big and sly and confiding. “We should add that Tod’s full name is Roderick Halstatten Everenzi Pla—”

“No, don’t!” Tod said, wincing. “Tod will do.”

“He’s heir to a Pentarchy,” Josh explained. “It bothers him.”

Since it evidently did bother Tod, Zillah said to him, “How come you’re the only person in this place who understands what Marcus says?”

“I have six elder sisters,” Tod said wryly. “My parents kept grimly on until they got the required boy-child. Apart from being brought up in a houseful of hysteria and general henpecking, this means I have nephews. And nieces. Dozens of them. Some of my earliest memories are of having to understand baby talk so that I could tell the little bleeders that I was their uncle and they couldn’t have my toys.”

They began to walk as Tod talked, to another of the archways, all in a group in the most natural way. It was clear all three young men assumed Zillah was one of their number. And she was too, in some strange way, she thought, looking up at Josh’s laughing face and over at the prattling Tod. Something eased within her. She had friends. This was something she had seldom found possible before. She had never been able to fall easily into a relationship, the way other people could — yet here she was, chatting away as if she had known all three of them for years. She felt as if she had known them for years. Each of them felt familiar: Josh’s awkward strength, Philo’s slyness and sweetness, Tod’s insouciance. She smiled at Philo, and in the most natural manner, he came around Josh to lean against her.

6

Roz halted in a large unveiled archway and struck an attitude, feet apart, hands on hips. She felt good. Every line of her said Woman! And it worked. Without her needing to project her presence at all, the heads of the blue-clothed mages bending over their work in the room beyond were turning toward her, one and one, then hurriedly and guiltily turning away. She could almost see the flickers of lust playing across them. Good. This was doing what she had come to do.

After a moment one of the higher brothers hastened across to her, selfconsciously adjusting his short-horned headdress.

“Am I somewhere I shouldn’t be?” Roz asked as he opened his mouth to speak.

He shook his horned head and looked flustered. “Not at all. This is Observer Horn. Where did you wish to be?”

She knew this was not what he had been going to say. He had meant to turn her out. Good. “Mind if I look round then?”

“Not at all, not at all. Let me show you around.” He led the way toward the rows of busy mages. Roz followed, stalking high, knowing he was conscious of every movement she made behind him. She felt like the cat that had the cream.

7

Sandra and Helen, bearing the large platter toward where they thought the kitchens were, were intercepted by two mutually chaperoning young mages. Politely, deferentially, they told Sandra her presence was required in Calculus Horn.

Sandra popped her eyes at Helen. “Okay. Sure you can manage this plate-thing on your own?”

“Of course,” Helen said quietly. “I’m far stronger than I look. Which way are the kitchens?”

The way was pointed out. Helen arrived there to find the place in that afternoon lull that occurs in all kitchens. She set the platter of half-eaten food carefully on the nearest table and surveyed the long, vaulted chain of rooms. Ovens she located, pans, work surfaces. The business of cooking varied very little from world to world, evidently. This place reminded her of a monastery kitchen she had once visited.

Having acquainted herself with the various arrangements, she walked quietly to the far end, where dishes were being washed by two weary-looking young mages. “Do you two do the cooking here?” she asked them.

“We’re only cadets, ma’am,” they told her, “on scullion duty. Brother Milo’s in charge. Do you want him?”

“Not yet,” Helen said, thoughtfully. “What’s being planned for supper? Do you know?”

Passet casseroled with lamb, she was told, with baked passet on the side. When she inquired how it should be made and for how many, they looked somewhat blank. They were only cadets. The mysteries of cooking had been withheld from them. But they were ready enough to talk. There were, after all, two of them and they felt they were chaperoned. And Helen’s looks had a cool angularity that amounted almost to gawkiness, and almost but not quite to unattractiveness. People always assumed she was a virgin. She carefully accentuated this quality for the benefit of the cadets. They felt she was safe, even if she was a woman. Besides, she was kind enough to help with the dishes. While she did so, they explained, more and more eagerly, that cadets with less than average ability were sent to work in the kitchens and that this made them feel slighted, the more so in that almost none of the mageworks — such as those were — that were used in the kitchens had yet been shown to them.

“It’s not so much magework,” Helen said carefully, “as artistry that one uses in cooking. Would you like me to show you what I mean?”

Would they! But what on?

“We could always make a start on that casserole.”

They liked that idea. Brother Milo would doubtless commend their zeal.

Shortly they were scurrying about fetching ingredients from great cupboards primed with stasis spells. Helen learnt that the magecraft which prevented food from decaying was simple and easy to operate. It had to be, she was told, because so many people handled the food. In one cool corner of her mind she toyed with the idea of simply breaking those spells and then putting blocks on against anyone renewing them. A suicidal act — like this whole foray was, she suspected. Soon everyone in the citadel would be down with dysentery or starving. She dismissed the notion. It was not creative, it was too easily detected and, besides, she liked to cook.

Meanwhile the two boys had heaped the long tables with daunting quantities of provisions, very short on the meat, despite the quantity, and as usual high on the passet. Helen surveyed it, stretching and flexing her thin fingers. When she had talked of artistry, she had been quite sincere. What she had in mind was very artistic indeed, not exactly a weaving, more an insidious campaign to bend the inhabitants of the citadel to the ways of Earth. It would not be as swift as virus-magic, but it ought, in the long run, to be just as effective. And it suited her better, as one whose gift for witchcraft had always been bound up with practical things. In the meantime, the food itself should divert attention from what she was doing—surely someone in this citadel would appreciate better food!

“The first art lies in the choice of herbs,” she told the cadets. “What herbs are there?”

There were gratifying ranks of them, under stasis in glass jars. Clearly the cooking in Arth had not always been so plain. Not all the herbs had names Helen was used to, but touch and smell told her which was which of the ones she knew, and which of the unknown ones might prove useful as well. And, thank goodness, there were masses of garlic.

As she worked, the older kitchen staff began to filter back from their rest period. With quiet, cool requests for this or that, she soon had them busy too. When Brother Milo came back on duty, he was outraged to find his entire staff hard at work and supper well under way, all at the command of this long, calm, gawky young woman — who smiled coolly at him.

“I’m showing them the way we cook in my world,” Helen said. Her composure was wholly unruffled by her instant recognition that Brother Milo was going to prove her chief difficulty. “It seems to have ended up as cooking supper. I hope you don’t mind.”

Brother Milo did mind, but he could hardly throw good food away and start again at this hour.

8

“What I want to know,” said Sandra, “is why you’re all being so polite to me!”

High Brother Gamon bowed yet again. “We think of you as Azandi, ma’am,” he explained. “Azandi is the other continent of our home world. The people there look like you. They inspire respect.”

“Whatever for?” said Sandra.

“They are,” Brother Gamon told her ruefully, “somewhat dangerous adepts, even the least of them.”

Sandra began and then bit back — just barely — an angry description of the status of black women on Earth. This was a mission, for God’s sake! It might still be possible to do what they had come to do, and she had not been chosen for stupidity. “Explain. I think it might be a bit like that where I come from.”

“Azandi specialize in types of mageworkings that we have never succeeded in mastering,” the man in the horned headdress explained. “They can handle the hidden side of the Wheel. This naturally makes them, in addition to other things, experts in divination. Since we in Calculus, in our laborious way, work at divination too, this is bound to make us treat someone of your appearance most respectfully.”

“Oh,” said Sandra. “Ah.”

“Though I hasten to add that we pride ourselves on treating all ladies with respect,” Brother Gamon added.

What a windbag! Sandra thought. “Okay. So what do you want to do with me?”

“We’re about to try various techniques to discover the whereabouts of your homeworld and how soon you may safely be conveyed back there. There is no need to feel the least alarm, ma’am. A full birth horoscope is, of course, impossible at first, but we are drawing up one for the exact moment of your arrival in Arth. And we shall scry in various ways, based on information Observer Horn imparts — we shall need your age in years, months, and days for all this, a hair of your head, your hand on one or two implements of calculation, and we should like you to cut the cards for our readings of—”

At last the man had got to something Sandra knew about. “Cards? You mean tarot?”

“What is that?” he asked. “Atala is our usual system, but we also use—”

“Show,” Sandra said imperiously. “Cards.”

He led her to a velvet-covered table. Sandra swaggered after him, acting what she hoped was an arrogant Azandi as hard as she knew how. I have power. I work the hidden side of the Wheel. I am arrogant. Bloody hell, I feel like Roz! She looked haughtily down her nose as Brother Gamon spread a pack of cards on the velvet with an expert sweep of his palm. Hm. Quite like tarot really. The old, really weird decks. Sandra picked up what seemed to be the Magician. “What do you call this?”

“The Archmage. That is a most potent and revealing card, which—”

“Piffle. Weak and ordinary — but then he’s only one of the unnumbered trumps: all those count low.” Sandra sensed gasps from all over the great room. “Honest. Does he count high with you then? He counts low with me, where I come from. It seems to me you ought to read me the way it goes in my country, or you’ll get it all wrong. Want me to show you my way?”

There was a long murmur of assent. Mages left what they were doing and drew in around the velvet table. Sandra kept as sober as a judge, but inside she was doing her grin-and-hug-yourself-Sandra. She loved fooling people. Here we go then. Back-to-front tarot. This should mess them up some. After that I’ll have a go at upside-down horoscopes. I’ll never get a better chance at sabotage, not if I look all over this mad blue building for a month!

9

Flan had wandered into a tine of Ritual Horn. But I’m still not sure how we got from there to here! she thought as she swung and bent and sidestepped in front of a grave, dark young mage, who most faithfully echoed what Flan did. Except he’s so good-looking. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

“From the waist, now! That’s better!” she told the young mage. Dip arm, dip arm and up. As far as Flan could recall, she had happened on this dance room, with its smooth blue floor and full-length mirrors on two walls, to find a Brother Instructor attempting to put a team of mages through some kind of movement routine. Swing around and swing. What the purpose of the routine was, Flan still had no idea, but she had hung around at the door fascinated at first, then disapproving, then exasperated. Most of them were so bad at movement. The Instructor didn’t seem to have much of a clue either.

“You in the second row — red hair — you’re still missing the beat! One and two and, one and two and! That’s better!” Somehow, with her total exasperation, the professional had arisen in Flan and taken over completely. She remembered herself suddenly in the middle of the room, clapping for attention. Music came jangling to a startled halt, faces had turned, gaping. “That was awful, people, just awful!” Flan had found herself telling them, in the full, carrying voice of a dance teacher. “You can all do much better than that. I’ll show you. Let me just get these shoes off my feet...” And then she had shown them how and worked them and worked with them. Faces by now shone with sweat. The Brother Instructor’s face was twisted and gasping. Honest! He should be fitter than that. He didn’t know what work was! Tomorrow she was going to take them all back to basics, but now it was probably time for a little simple yoga.

“All right, people. You can rest. You have the makings of a good dancer,” she told her handsome mage. His grave face lit with a besotted smile. She knew that if she’d asked him to lick her toes, he would have lain down on the floor and done so.

But Brother Instructor was bustling up to Flan, limping a little and very angry. “My good woman, it is not our purpose here to dance. This is a Ritual of the Goddess.”

“Then you should dance,” Flan told him. “She likes it. Anyway, dancing is the basis of all good movement, whatever you think She wants. All right, people, if you’ve got your breath, we’ll have a little yoga now.”

10

As two dozen mages tried to force their unaccustomed legs into lotus position, the High Head received an urgent summons from Edward.

“Couldn’t it wait until I met you at supper?” he asked as he arrived in Healing Horn. One of the women, the blond hysterical one, was lying on the outermost bunk, pale and comatose. Though the High Head was sure she was unconscious, her presence made him uncomfortable. He was not used to the outline of breasts on a sleeper under a blanket.

“No, it couldn’t be then,” Edward said, in his most apologetic way. “It had to be here.” He was hovering beside a more distant bunk that reeked of stasis mage-work, and he seemed to be concealing something in one hand. “She’s in healing trance,” he said, seeing the High Head’s attention on the woman. “I didn’t realize how upset she was when her friend died. My fault. But I think I’ve discovered the reason for those deaths now. Will you come over here?”

The High Head approached the further bunk and found himself staring down at a true corpse, a fair young man lying lifeless and, oddly enough, looking in death much less deathlike than the unconscious woman. A nice young lad. The pity of this death wrung him, like a pain in his chest.

“Look at him carefully,” Edward said. The High Head did not want to, but for Edward’s sake, he looked. “Does he remind you of anything?” Edward asked.

“Death,” said the High Head. “Life. Waste.”

“No, I meant does he make you think of anyone?” Edward said. “Anyone you know?”

Now Edward mentioned it, the face of the dead lad did seem familiar, a little, but the High Head could not, for the life of him, place the face. Was it Edward as a youngster? No. Edward’s face was longer and his features smaller. “Not — that I can think of, I’m afraid.”

“Then does this ring a bell?” Edward said. Eagerly, precisely, he let unfold the thing in his hand. It was an irregularly shaped sheet of purplish plastic — probably the backing from a dressing — with random holes cut in it. Edward spread this with great care over the right half of the young corpse’s face. “Now look.”

Suddenly the young man was mottled with purple dapples that extended into his hair.

“Great Goddess!” said the High Head. “The centaur — Galpetto!”

“Yes,” said Edward. “And no proper cause for death. He’s the centaur’s analogue in whatever world they come from, and I’m afraid the two of them couldn’t exist together in the same universe. The centaur was nearly killed at about the same moment that capsule got into Arth. I’m willing to bet that the analogues of all the other corpses had bad accidents at that instant too. I’m going to tell her.” He gestured toward the unconscious woman. “It might make her feel better about her friend.”

The High Head had certain difficulty with some of this. “But most of the corpses are women, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Their analogues will be people over in the Pentarchy, I think,” Edward said.

Not a good thought. “I’d always supposed Arth was better separated from the world than that,” the High Head said ruefully.

“So had I, but I think we must be more closely connected than we’d realized,” Edward said. “Anyway, this means I can enter the correct cause of death in my records.”

11

Supper that night was unusually and surprisingly good.