Copyright

HarperCollins Children’s Books

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First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1997

This edition first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2013

Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1997

The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007507542

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007507559

Version: 2016-11-24

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Keep Reading

About the Author

Titles by Diana Wynne Jones

About the Publisher

In the year E.K. 3413, the following files were secretly obtained from the Magid Rupert Venables and, at the Emperor’s personal request, deposited in the new archive at Iforion.

I may as well start with some of our deep secrets because this account will not be easy to understand without them.

All over the multiverse, the sign for Infinity or Eternity is a figure eight laid on its side. This is no accident, since it exactly represents the twofold nature of the many worlds, spread as they are in the manner of a spiral nebula twisted like a Mobius strip to become endless. It is said that the number of these worlds is infinite and that more are added daily. But it is also said that the Emperor Koryfos the Great caused this multiplicity of worlds somehow by conquering from Ayewards to Naywards.

You may take your pick, depending on whether you are comfortable with worlds infinitely multiplying, or prefer to think the number stable. I have never decided.

Two facts, however, are certain: one half of this figure eight of worlds is negative magically, or Naywards, and the other half positive, or Ayewards; and the Empire of Koryfos, situated across the twist at the centre, has to this day the figure-eight sign of Infinity as its imperial insignia.

This sign appears everywhere in the Empire, even more frequently than statues of Koryfos the Great. I have reason to know this rather well. About a year ago, I was summoned to the Empire capital, Iforion, to attend a judicial enquiry. Some very old laws required that a Magid should be present – otherwise I am sure they would have done without me, and I could certainly have done without them. The Koryfonic Empire is one of my least favourite charges. It is traditionally in the care of the most junior Magid from Earth and I was at that time just that. I was tired too. I had only the day before returned from America, where I had, almost single-handed, managed to push the right people into sorting out some kind of peace in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. But all my pride and pleasure in this vanished when I saw the summons. Groaning to myself, I put on the required purple bands and cream silk brocade garments and went to take my seat in the closed court.

My first peevish, jet-lagged thought was, Why can’t they use one of the nice rooms? The Great Imperial Palace has parts that go back over a thousand years and some of those old courts and halls are wonderful. But this enquiry was in a new place, lined with rather smelly varnished wood, bleak and box-like and charmless. And the wooden benches were vilely uncomfortable. The figure-eight insignia – carved in relief and painted too bright a gold – dug into my shoulders and dazzled off the walls and off the big wooden chair provided for the Emperor. I remember irritably transferring my gaze to the inevitable statue of Koryfos the Great, looming in the corner. That was new too, and picked out in over-bright gilt, but there is this to be said for Koryfos: he had a personality. Though the statues are always the same and always idealised, you could never mistake them for anything but the likeness of a real person. He carried his head on one side, a bit like Alexander the Great of Earth, and wore a vague, cautious smile that said, “I hear what you say, but I’m going to do things my way anyway.” You could see he was as obstinate as sin.

I remember I was wondering why the Empire so loved Koryfos – he reigned for a bare twenty years over two millennia ago, and most of the time he was away conquering places, but they persist in regarding his time as the Golden Age – when we had to stand up for the entrance of the present Emperor. A very different person, small, plain and dour. You do wonder how it is that Emperors always marry the most beautiful women in several worlds and yet produce someone like Timos IX whom you would hardly notice in the street. You would glance at him and think that this was a short man with weak eyes and a chip on his shoulder. Timos IX was one of very few in the Empire who needed to wear glasses. This embarrassed me as I stood up. I was the only other person in the court in spectacles – as if I were setting up to be the Emperor’s equal. In many ways, of course, a Magid is the equal of any ruler, but in this particular court of enquiry I was a mere onlooker, there by law to certify simply whether or not the accused had broken the law as stated. I was not even supposed to speak until after a verdict had been reached.

This, among other legal facts, was tediously made known to me in the preliminaries after we all sat down and the prisoner was marched in and made to stand in the centre. He was a pleasant-looking youngster of twenty-one or so, called Timotheo. He did not look like a law-breaker. I am afraid that, apart from registering, with some perplexity, that Timotheo was an alias and that, for obscure legal reasons, his real name could not be given, I could not force my jet-lagged mind to attend very well. I remember going back to my thoughts of Koryfos the Great. He stood to the Empire in the place of a religion, it seemed to me. The wretched place had religions in plenty, over a thousand godlets and goddities, but the worship of these was a purely personal thing. As an example of how personal, I recalled that Timos IX had, about fifteen years ago, adopted the worship of a peculiarly unlovable goddess who inhabited a bush planted on the grave of a dead worshipper and who imposed on her followers a singularly joyless code of morals. This probably explained the Emperor’s pinched and gloomy look. But no one else at court had felt the need to adopt the Emperor’s faith. It was Koryfos who united everyone.

Here I was jerked to alertness. The Emperor himself read out the charges against the young man in elaborate legal language. Stripped of the law-talk it was appalling, even for the Empire. The so-called Timotheo was the Emperor’s eldest son. The decree he was said to have broken stated that no child of the Emperor, by any of his True Wives, High Ladies or Lesser Consorts, was to know who his or her parents were. The penalty for discovering who they were was death. And death for anyone who helped an Imperial child find out.

The Emperor then asked Timotheo if he had broken this decree.

Timotheo had evidently known no more of this decree than I had. He was looking as shocked and angry as I felt. I could have applauded when he answered drily, “Sire, if I hadn’t broken it before, I would have broken it when you read out my parentage just now.”

“But have you broken the decree?” the Emperor reiterated.

“Yes,” said Timotheo.

Catch-22, I thought. I was furious. What a charade!

The worst of it was that Timotheo was intelligent as well as pleasant. He would have made a much better Emperor than his father. It had obviously taken some ingenuity to find out who he was. He had been one of the four fosterlings in the house of a provincial noble and, as the enquiry proceeded, it became clear that the other three fosterlings and the noble must have given him some help. But Timotheo stuck to it that he had done the detective work and made the discovery by himself. Then he had made the bad mistake of writing to his mother, the Emperor’s First Consort, for confirmation.

“Did it not occur to you that, once you were known, my enemies might kidnap you in order to threaten me?” the Emperor asked him.

“I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” Timotheo said. “Besides, I can look after myself.”

“Then you were intending to claim the Imperial throne for yourself,” the Emperor suggested.

“No, I wasn’t,” Timotheo protested. “I just didn’t like not knowing who I am. I think I have the right to know that.”

“You have no right. You are convicted of treason to the throne out of your own mouth,” the Emperor said, satisfied. He looked at me on my high, uncomfortable bench. “The law is the law,” he said. “Bear witness, Magid, that this man broke our Imperial decree.”

I bowed. I couldn’t bear to speak to him.

After that there was a great deal of palaver, with other dignitaries getting up in their grand silks and bearing witness too. It got like a pompous dance. I sat there considering when would be the best time to spirit young Timotheo away – and I blame my jet-lagged state that I didn’t do it there and then. He was looking stunned by this time. Six men had just paraded past him, passing sentence of death on him, each swinging the white lining of their bright pink cloaks towards him. It was like being sentenced by a bed of petunias. I couldn’t take it seriously. I reckoned the best time to act was when they marched Timotheo back to his condemned cell. He had been brought in by a squad of elite guards with a mage following for added assurance, and I assumed they would think no one could touch him through all that. I bided my time.

And missed out completely. The petunias retired. The Emperor said, quite casually, “The sentence can be carried out now.” He raised a hand glittering with rings. One of them must have been one of their beam weapons, miniaturised. Timotheo gasped quietly and fell over sideways on the floor with blood running out of his mouth.

It happened so quickly that I hoped it was a trick. I could not believe that, even in the Koryfonic Empire, an Emperor would not want his eldest son alive. While I was climbing down the varnished wooden steps to the centre of the court, I was still sure it was just a deception, to make the Emperor’s enemies believe Timotheo was dead. But it was no trick. I touched Timotheo. He was still warm like a living person, but my fingers told me there was no soul there.

I left at once, from beside the corpse, to make my feelings plain.

I was thoroughly disgusted, with myself as well as the Emperor. As I made my way home, I told myself I had been stupid to expect compassion or even value for life in that place. And I had sufficient time to curse myself. Earth lies Naywards of the Empire, which makes the journey rather like going slowly uphill. I had to haul myself from lattice to lattice in the spaces between the worlds, and by the time I reached my house I not only hated the Empire, but also the stupid hampering robes it caused me to wear. I was just tearing the darn things off in my living room when the phone rang.

I wanted nothing more than to sit down with a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, before calling up the Senior Magid and lodging a formal complaint against the Emperor. I swore. I snatched up the phone.

“Now what?”

It was my elder brother Will. “Bad day?” he said.

“Very,” I said. “The Koryfonic Empire.”

“Then I believe you,” he said. “Glad I don’t have to look after that lot any longer.” Will is a Magid too. “And what I’ve got to tell you won’t make your day any better, I’m afraid. I’m ringing from Stan Churning’s house. He’s ill. He wants you here.”

“Oh God!” I said. “Why does everything unpleasant always happen at once?”

“Don’t know. It just does,” Will agreed. “It’s not a deep secret, but it ought to be. I think Stan’s dying, Rupert. He thinks so anyway. We tried to get hold of Si too, but he’s out of touch. How soon can you get here?”

“Half an hour,” I said. Stan lives outside Newmarket. Weavers End, where I live, is just beyond Cambridge.

“Good,” said Will. “Then I can stay with him until you get here.” And keep him alive if necessary, Will meant. If Stan really was dying, there would be Magid business he had to hand on to me. “See you soon,” Will said and rang off.

I stayed in the house just long enough to make coffee and fax Senior Magid that I intended to complain about the Empire, to the Upper Room if necessary. Senior Magid lives several worlds Naywards and I normally make heavy weather of getting a fax through there. That day I did it in seconds. Five angry, trenchant sentences in no time at all. I was too busy thinking of Stan. I got in my car still thinking of him. Normally, getting into my car is a thing I pause and take pleasure in – particularly if I have just been away for a while. It is a wholly beautiful car, the car I used to dream of owning as a boy. I usually pause to think how good it is that I can make the kind of money you need to own such a car. Not that day. I just got in and drove, swigging coffee from the Thermos, with my mind on Stan.

Stan had sponsored first Will, then our brother Simon, then me, into the Company of Magids. He had taught me most of what I know today. I wasn’t sure that I knew what I’d do without him. I kept praying that he, or Will, had made a mistake and that he was not dying after all. But one of the things about being a Magid is that you don’t make that kind of mistake.

“Damn!” I said. I kept needing to blink. I didn’t consciously see any of the roads I drove along until I was bumping up the weedy drive of Stan’s bungalow.

A nasty bungalow. A blot on the landscape. It looked like a large cube of Stilton cheese dumped down in the flat heathland. We used to kid Stan about how ugly it was, but he always said he was quite happy in it. People who knew me, and particularly people who knew all three of us Venables brothers when we lived in Cambridge, used to wonder what we saw in a seedy little ex-jockey like Stan. They asked how we could bring ourselves to haunt his hideous house the way we did.

The answer is that all Magids lead double lives. We have to earn a living. Stan earned his advising sheiks and other rich men about racehorses. I design computer software myself, games mostly.

I parked my car beside Will’s vehicle. At dusk, with the light behind it, it passes for a Land Rover. In broad daylight, as it was then, you look away and think you may have imagined things. I edged past it and Will opened the bottle-green front door of the bungalow to me.

“Good timing,” he said. “I have to go now and milk the goats. He’s in the front room on the left.”

“Is he—?” I said.

“Yes,” said Will. “I’ve said goodbye. Shame Si can’t be found. He’s somewhere yonks Ayewards and not in touch with anyone I can contact. Stan’s written him a letter. Let me know how things go, won’t you?” He went soberly past me and climbed into his queer vehicle.

I went on into the bungalow. Stan was lying, all five foot of him, stretched on top of a narrow bed by the window. His slightly bandy legs were in child-sized jeans and one of his socks had a thin place at the toe. At first sight, you would not have thought there was too much wrong with him, except that it was unlike him not to be wandering about doing something. But if you looked at his face, as I did almost straight away, you saw that it was strangely stretched over its bones, and that his eyes, under the high forehead left by his curly grey receding hair, were standing out like a cat’s, luminous and feverish.

“What kept you, Rupert?” he joked, a bit gaspily. “Will phoned you a good five minutes ago.”

“The Koryfonic Empire,” I said. “I had to send a complaint to Senior Magid.”

“That lot!” Stan gasped. “She gets complaints about them from every Magid who goes near the place. Abuse of power. Contravention of human rights. Manipulation of Magids. General rottenness. I always think she just puts them in a file labelled K.E. and then loses the file.”

“Can I get you anything?” I said.

“Not much point,” he said. “I’ve only got an hour or so – no time to digest anything – but I would appreciate a drink of water.”

I got him a glass of water from the kitchen and helped him sit up enough to drink it. He was very weak and he had that smell. The smell is indescribable, but it belongs only to the terminally ill and once you know it you can’t mistake it. I remember it from my grandfather. “Shouldn’t I ring the doctor?” I asked him.

“Not yet,” he said, lying back and panting a bit. “Too much to say first.”

“Take your time,” I said.

“Don’t make bad jokes,” he retorted. “So. Well. Here goes. Rupert, you’re junior Magid on Earth, so it’s going to fall to you to find and sponsor my replacement – but you knew that, I hope.”

I nodded. The number of Magids is always constant. We try to fill the gaps left by deaths as promptly as possible, because there is a lot for us to do. That was how Stan came to sponsor me as well as my brothers. Three Magids died within six months of one another, long before Will was competent to try. Before that, Stan had been this world’s junior Magid for nearly ten years. As I said to Will, bad things always happen at once.

“Now there are several things I want to tell you about that,” Stan went on. “First, I’ve got you a list of possibles. You’ll find it in the top left-hand drawer of my desk over there, on top of my will. Get it out of sight before anyone else sees it, there’s a good lad.”

“What? Now?” I said.

“What’s wrong with now?” he demanded.

Superstition, I thought, as I went over to the desk. I didn’t want to behave as if Stan was dead while he was still alive. But I opened the drawer and took out the folded list I found there. “It’s quite short,” I said, glancing at it.

“You can add to it if you want,” he said. “But look at those lot first. I spent all last month making sure you had some good strong candidates. Two of them have even been Magids before, in former lifetimes.”

“Is that a good thing?” I asked. Stan was fascinated with past lifetimes. To my mind, it was his great weakness. He was ready to believe anything people said about reincarnation. It never seemed to occur to him that nobody who said they remembered a former lifetime ever remembered an ordinary one. It was all kings, queens and high priestesses.

He grinned, stretching his already oddly stretched face. He knew my opinions. “Well, if they bothered to get reborn, it has to mean they’re keen. But you’ll find the great advantage is that they’re born subconsciously knowing half the stuff – and usually with plenty of talent too. All my list are good strong talents though. The best untrained in the world.” He paused a moment. He kept getting breathless. “And take your time looking at them,” he said. “I know we’re supposed to be quick, but it’s not that urgent. Do what I did: I left you for nearly a year. I couldn’t mostly believe it, that three brothers in the same family should all be Magid material. Then I thought, Why not? There has to be something in heredity. But I never told you what really made up my mind about you, did I?”

“My obvious superiority?” I suggested.

He chuckled. “Nah. It was the fact that you’d been a Magid before in at least two lifetimes.”

In the ordinary way, I would have been extremely annoyed. “I have never,” I said stiffly, “ever either remembered a former life or told you anything to suggest that I had.”

“There are other ways of finding out,” Stan said smugly.

I let it pass. This was not the time to argue. “All right,” I said. “I’ll weigh up everyone on the list very carefully.”

“And don’t necessarily choose the most willing. Run tests,” he said. “And when you do choose, make sure you let them follow you around during a fairly big assignment before you begin instructing them. See how they take it – the way I did with you over the Ayeworld pornography and with Will over the oil crisis.”

“What did Simon have?” I asked. No one had ever told me.

“A mistake on my part,” Stan admitted. “Someone was doing a white slave and marriage trade, pushing girls through Earth down from Naywards and then on through the Koryfonic Empire. I let Simon see the police team the Empire sent here to see me about it. Half of them were centaurs. There was no way I could pass them off as Earth people. After that I had to get him ratified as a Magid – he’d seen too much. Lucky for me he’s made a good one. But don’t you worry that you’ll make a mistake like that.”

“I should hope not!” I said.

“You won’t,” said Stan. “Because if you start, I’ll stop you.”

“Er…” I began, wondering how to point the hard truth out.

“I’ll be around,” he said. “I’ve arranged to be here. A Magid can work quite well disincarnate, and I plan to do that until you’ve got things settled.”

I said, half joking and wholly disbelieving, “Don’t you trust me not to balls it up then?”

“I trust you,” Stan said. “But you’ve only been a Magid just over two years. And it used to be customary for all new Magids to have a disincarnate adviser – I found it in the records. So I asked the Upper Room if I could stay and keep an eye on you, and they seemed to think it was reasonable. So I’ll be around. Rely on it.” He sighed, and stared into the distance somewhere beyond his flaking off-white ceiling.

I sighed too, and thought, Be honest, Stan. You just don’t want to go away for good. And I don’t want this to happen either.

“Mostly, though,” Stan added, “it’s that I can’t bear to leave. I’m only eighty-nine. That’s young for a Magid.”

I had not realised he was much above sixty, and said so.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve kept my condition. Most of us do. Then one day you get told, ‘That’s it, boy. Deathday tomorrow,’ and you know it’s true. I’ve been given until sundown.”

I looked out of the window involuntarily. It was November. The shadows were long already.

“Call the doctor just before sunset,” Stan said, and did not say much for a while after that. I gave him some water, got myself some more coffee and waited. Some time later, he began to talk again, this time more generally and reminiscently.

“I’ve seen this world through a lot of changes,” he remarked. “I’ve helped clear away a lot of the political garbage that built up through this century. We’ve got the decks cleared for the changes due to come in the next century now. But, you know, the thing I take most pleasure in is the way we’ve managed to coax this world Ayewards. Gradually. Surreptitiously. When I was a lad, no one even considered there might be other universes, let alone talking of going to them. But now people write books about that, and they talk about working magic and having former lives, and nobody thinks you’re a nutcase for mentioning it. And I think, I did that. Me. I slid us back down the spiral. Back to where we should be. Earth is one of the early worlds, you know – well of course you know – and we should be a long way further Ayewards than we are.”

“I know,” I said, stressfully watching the shadow of my car spread over his bushy lawn.

“Help it along some more,” he said.

“It’s one of the things we’re here for,” I said.

Later, when the room was getting dim, Stan said suddenly, “It was the homesickness that brought me back here, you know.”

“How do you mean?” I asked him.

“I started out my work as a Magid a long way Ayewards,” he murmured. His voice was getting weaker. “I chose it. A bit like Simon chose it. But I chose it for the centaurs. I’d always loved centaurs, always wanted to work with them. And as soon as I learnt that more than half the places Ayewards of here have centaurs, off I went. I thought I’d never come back here, you know.” Centaurs need a magical ambience to maintain them – well, you know they do – and they all died out here when we drifted off Naywards. And for three years I was blissfully happy, working with centaurs, studying them. I don’t think there’s a thing I don’t know about centaurs and their ways. Then I got homesick. Just like that. I can’t tell you what for. It was too general. It was just that the world I was on wasn’t this one. It didn’t smell right. The wind didn’t blow like it does here. Grass the wrong green. Small things, like the water tasting too pure. So back I had to come.”

“To work as a jockey,” I said.

“It was next best to being a centaur,” he said. After a long pause, he added, “I want to get reborn as a centaur. Hope I can arrange that.” Then, after a longer pause still, “Better phone that doctor then.”

The phone was in the kitchen. I went through there and found the number carefully written on a pad laid by the phone. I remember thinking, as I punched it in, that this seemed hard on young Timotheo. I must have been one of the few people to be sorry he was dead, and yet all my sorrow was concentrated on Stan. I forgot Timotheo again the next moment. Stan had made his arrangements with care. The doctor, to my astonishment, answered the phone himself and promised to be there in ten minutes. I rang off and went to the front bedroom.

“Stan?” I said.

There was no answer. He had fallen half off the bed as he died and he had wanted to do that in private. I put him gently back.

“Stan?” I said again, into the dead, dim air.

There was nothing. I could feel nothing.

“So much for the idea of staying around,” I said loudly. But there was still nothing.

A little before Christmas, when most of the other small and large things connected with Stan’s death were done, I had a serious look at the list he had given me. There were five names on it, two of which were female. The addresses indicated that one of these women was British and the other American. The males were from Britain, Holland and – I had to get out my atlas – Croatia. I sighed and tried to look forward to travelling to meet all of them on various invented excuses. At least three of them spoke my language. I could call that lucky, I supposed. Stan had also supplied the dates of birth for all of them except the Croatian. The British girl and the man from Holland were both young. She was twenty, he was twenty-four. That was a point in their favour. The other two were in their forties. I found that a bit daunting. I had just been twenty-six, and the idea of having someone so much older for a pupil filled me with apprehension.

But I set to work to find them all.

I do not wish to describe the frustrations of that search. With interruptions from my neighbour – of whom more hereafter – and my mother’s natural desire to have at least one of her sons home for Christmas, I was divining, travelling or querying my various sources non-stop for six weeks. I flew to Amsterdam to find the Dutchman, Kornelius Punt, only to discover that he had won some kind of scholarship enabling him to travel. He had taken serious advantage of it too. I went down to Avignon, where he was last heard of, and found that he had gone to Rome, Athens and then Jerusalem. After a maddening four days, dealing with the Greek and Italian telephone systems, I came home to find a fax from a Magid visiting Israel informing me that Punt had gone to Australia. I gave up and decided to wait for him to come back. My American contacts traced the older woman, Tansy-Ann Fisk, soon after that. I was just preparing to fly out to Ohio when all sources sent urgent messages not to bother. Fisk had gone into retreat in some kind of all-female clinic where men were not allowed. Looking up this clinic in Magid records, I was a little perturbed to find it carried the remark ‘Query dubious esoterica’. Still, she could have entered the place in good faith for a simple rest-cure. All I could do was wait until she came out. The British man, Mervin Thurless, was equally hard to trace. Eventually it emerged that he was on a lecture tour in Japan. As for the Croatian, Gabrelisovic, I don’t have to remind you that there had been a war there. My NATO sources rather feared he was among the many who had vanished in it without trace.

I turned to hunting for the British girl with some relief. At least we were both in the same country. Moreover she was younger than me and possessed, according to Stan’s list, the greatest amount of untrained talent of the lot. She was the one I secretly hoped to select. I even allowed myself very agreeable visions of her as a pretty and intelligent young woman whom it would be a pleasure to instruct. I visualised myself laying down the laws of the Magids to her. I saw her hanging on my every word. I looked forward to meeting her.

I couldn’t find her either.

She had a slightly complex family history. The address I had for her proved to be that of an aunt, her father’s sister, in Bristol where Maree Mallory seemed to be a student. I stood on the aunt’s doorstep in Bristol, in the pouring rain, while damp children pushed in and out of the house around me. Before long, the children formed a yelling, fighting heap behind the aunt. She shouted at me above the din that poor Maree had gone back to her mother in London, didn’t I know? Parents divorced. Sad case. I bellowed to be told whereabouts in London. She screamed that she couldn’t remember, but if I didn’t mind waiting she’d ask her sister-in-law. So I stood for a further five minutes in the rain watching the aunt across the fighting heap of children while she telephoned further down the hall. Eventually she came back and screamed an inaccurate address at me. I wrote it down, with further inaccuracies caused by damp paper and blotches of rain, and went to London the next day. It rained that day too.

The address was in South London. That part I got right. But when at last I found it, it proved not to be called Rain Kitten as I had written down, but Grain Kitchen. It was a healthfood shop. The lady standing behind a glassed-in display of more kinds of beans than I knew existed was tall and slender in her white overall. The white cloth round her head revealed youthful fair hair. She was so young-looking and comely that, for a moment, I had hopes that she was Maree Mallory herself. But when I came nearer, she looked older, possibly even over forty. She could have been Maree’s mother. My blotched notes said that in this case she would be a Mrs Buttle; but the sign over the door had read PROPRIETORS L. & M. NUTTALL. I decided not to risk names. I told her politely that I was looking for Maree Mallory.

She stared at me with her head on one side, in a summing-up way I found slightly ominous. “I’m not helping you,” she announced at length.

“Can you tell me why not?” I asked.

“You think too well of yourself,” she said. “Posh accent, shiny shoes, expensive raincoat, not a hair out of place – oh, I can see well enough why you let her down like that. You thought she wasn’t good enough for the likes of you, didn’t you? Or didn’t she iron your shirts to your liking?”

I know I was speechless for a moment. I could feel my face flooding red. I do, certainly, like to be well dressed, but I found myself wanting to protest that I always iron my own shirts. It was too ridiculous. I pulled myself together enough to say, “Mrs – er Buttle – Nuttall? – I assure you I have not let your daughter down in any way.”

“Then why is she so upset and saying you have?” the lady demanded. “Maree’s not one to lie. And why have you come crawling to me? Realised you let a good girl slip between your nicely clipped fingernails, have you?”

“Mrs Buttle—” I said.

“Nuttall,” said she. “I never did like men who wear cravats. What’s wrong with an honest tie? Let me tell you, if I’d seen you when she first took up with you, I’d have warned her. Never trust a cravat, I’d have told her. Nor a mac with lots of little straps and buttons. Clothes always tell.”

“Mrs Nuttall!” I more or less howled. “I have never met your daughter in my life!”

She looked at me disbelievingly. “Then what are you here for, dripping all over my shop floor?”

“I came,” I said, “because I am trying to trace your daughter, Maree Mallory, in connection with – with a legacy which may come her way.” The idea of a legacy was perhaps a poor one, but I was too flustered to remember all the cleverer pretexts I had invented on my way to Bristol the day before.

It seemed to impress Mrs Nuttall. It was her turn to blush. Her fair pink skin went a strong purple and she clapped both hands over her mouth. “Oh. You mean you’re not this Robbie of hers, then?”

“My name is Rupert Venables, madam,” I said, hoping to rub the embarrassment home.

“Oh,” she said again. I assumed she was about to relent and summon her daughter from a flat upstairs or somewhere. Not a bit of it. “Prove it,” she said, as her flush died down. And when I had shown her a business card, she said, “Anyone can have a card printed.” So I produced my driving licence, a credit card and my chequebook. She looked at them long and hard.

“I didn’t bring my passport,” I said, not altogether pleasantly.

To which she said, “Well, Rupert’s not much different from Robbie as a name.”

“There’s all the difference in the world,” I said.

She returned to my business card and looked at it broodingly. “It says here Computer Software Designer. That’s you?” I nodded. “And this Robbie is supposed to be training for a vet,” she mused. “That is different. But why aren’t you a lawyer if it’s about a legacy?”

“Because,” I said, “I am the executor of the will. The deceased, Stanley Churning, named me executor in his will. Mrs Nuttall, much as I applaud your caution, I would be grateful if you would let me talk to Maree.”

“I suppose I have to believe you,” she said grudgingly. “But Maree’s not here.”

My heart sank. “Where is she?”

“Oh, she went to her dad when they found he’d got cancer,” Mrs Nuttall told me. “She would go. It’s not my fault she’s not here.”

“Do you mind giving me her address then?”

She did mind. She was suspicious of the whole thing. I applauded her instinct even while I tried not to grind my teeth. Eventually she said, “I suppose if it’s over a legacy…” and at last gave me an address north of Ealing.

I thanked her and went there. It took hours. And when I got there I found the house locked and the lower windows boarded up. A neighbour informed me that the owner was in hospital – a long way away, she couldn’t remember where – and the daughter had closed the house up and left.

I drove home, seething the whole way. The M25 was at a standstill. I tried to go cross-country and there were roadworks every half-mile. Talk about a run round the gasworks! I slammed my car door viciously when I finally got out in my own yard. I kicked my back door open and then slammed it shut. I tore off my damp mac. I slammed cupboards hunting for a glass. I slammed my way into my quiet, orderly living room, poured a stiff drink and threw myself into a chair. After the first swig, I had a thought. I swore, tore off my cravat and threw it at the fireplace.

“If I’d only known what you were letting me in for, Stan!” I said. “If I’d known! As it is, I give up. Now.”

“Why? What’s the matter, lad?” Stan’s voice said.

I stopped dead, with my whisky tipped towards my mouth. “Stan?”

“Here, Rupert,” his voice said, husky and apologetic, from the space by my big window. “Sorry about the delay. It’s – well, it’s not as easy to come back as I thought. It’s not like you think. There’s conditions to be met. I had to argue my case with the Lords of Karma as well as the Upper Room, and Lords of Karma aren’t easy. Not all of them are human. I don’t blame you for not looking happy. What’s the problem?”

I think if Stan had arrived at any other time, I would have had trouble accepting him. Something about that unembodied presence brought me out in cold shudders, even annoyed as I was. But I was so fed up that I drank the rest of my whisky in one gulp and told him what was the problem. And finished by yelling, “And it’s all your damned fault!”

“Steady! Steady on!” husked his disembodied voice. I had heard him talk to unquiet horses the same way. “It isn’t my fault. Another Magid has to be found. And you’re going about it all wrong anyway.”

“Wrong?” I said. “In what way wrong?”

“You always were prone to it,” he said. “Going about it like a normal person and forgetting you’re a Magid. You’ve got enormous powers, lad. Use them. Go after them the Magid way.”

“Oh,” I said. “All right. But not until I’ve had a square meal, another stiff whisky and a pint of coffee. Does your present state remember the needs of the body? Can you wait that long?”

“They’ve given me a year, these folk Up There,” he said. “If you can be ready before then.”

That was the Stan I knew. I laughed. It made me feel better.

An hour later, I took off my jacket. I was just about to hang it over a chair in my usual precise way when I thought of Mrs Nuttall and threw it after my cravat. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, with Stan’s voice occasionally husking hints and short-cuts. It was a long evening. And a frustrating one. Thurless was thinking of staying in Japan permanently. Kornelius Punt had decided to go on to New Zealand. The Croatian and Maree Mallory were still untraceable—

“Well, they would be,” Stan’s voice observed, “if they want to be. They’re the two with the really strong talent.”

“And Ms Fisk is probably having a nervous breakdown,” I added.

“That follows again,” Stan said. “It’s the penalty of being odd when most people are normal. We might have gone the same way, you and me, if we hadn’t been picked out for Magids.”

“Speak for yourself,” I snapped. My mood had gone bad again after this further frustration. “I regard myself as a stable personality.”

“Do you now?” said Stan. “You forget. I knew you when you were a schoolboy. This Maree. I agree with you she’s the most likely one. Dowse around for her father. He’ll know where she is. They say fathers and daughters are always pretty close.”

I followed his advice, and it was excellent. A week later, I drove to a hospital in Kent and interviewed a tired, sagging, small man in a wheelchair who had already lost most of his hair. I could see that he had, only recently, been a fat little man with a twinkle. I could see the cancer. They hadn’t done much for it. I was desperately sorry for him. I gave that cancer a sharp flip and told it to go away. He doubled up gasping, poor fellow.

“Ouch!” he said. “First Maree, now you. What did you do?”

“Told it to go away,” I said. “You should be doing that too, but you’re hanging on to it rather, aren’t you?”

“Do you know, that’s just what Maree said!” he told me. “I suppose I do – hang on to it – it feels like part of me. I can’t explain. What should I be doing?”

“Telling the thing it’s an unwanted alien,” I suggested. “You don’t want it. You don’t seem to me to have finished what you set out to do with your life.”

“I haven’t,” he said sadly. “First the divorce came along, now this. I’m not like my brother, you know, book after book – I have just the one thing. I would have liked to patent my invention, but, well…”

“Then do it,” I said. “Where is Maree at the moment?”

“In Bristol,” he said.

“But I went to see her aunt and—”

“Oh, she’s gone to her other aunt, up the road. I made her go back, love affair or no love affair, money or no money. She’s training to be a vet, you see, and it’s not a thing you can stop halfway over.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Would I find her through the university, then?”

“Or the damned aunt,” he said. “Ted’s wife, Janine. Hateful woman. Can’t think why my brother married the bitch, frankly. Made even more of a mistake than I did, but Ted stuck by his – for the boy’s sake, I suppose.” He gave me the address, maddeningly enough in the same street as the house I’d gone to before, and then said anxiously, “It’s not really true I can get shot of this cancer by just thinking, is it?”

“A lot of cancers do respond to that,” I said.

“I’m not so good at thinking positively,” he said wretchedly.

Before I left I did what I could for Derek Mallory. It was no good hitting the cancer when he was embracing it so fervently, so I hit a few centres in his brain instead, trying to turn him into a more cheerful way of thinking. I suspect he felt every hit. His face puckered like a baby’s. I thought he was going to cry, but it turned out that he was trying to smile.

“That helped!” he said. “That really helped! I’m all for the mind stuff, deep down really. I’ve often argued with Maree about it. She can do it, but she won’t. Makes scathing remarks instead. She lacks belief, that’s her problem.”

So I went back to Bristol again. But not until a week had passed. First I had to earn my living. I had a lot of deadlines to meet that week, and I would have met them too, with time to spare, except that as I was sorting the last and most intractable problems, my fax machine began making the little fanfare of sound I had set it to make when it was bringing me Magid business. I went and picked up the sheet. It said:

Iforion 10.2.3413. 1100 hrs. URGENT

Emperor assassinated. Come back to Iforion

Imperial Palace soonest for immediate conference.

This message by order of the Acting Regent,

General Commander Dakros

“Oh good!” I said. “Hurrah!” That was my first reaction. That man Timos IX really had it coming, and not only because of Timotheo, either. I hoped the assassin had hurt him first. Rather a lot. Then I thought again and said, “Oh shit. No heir.” Then I thought again and added, “And what am I supposed to do about that? I’m their Magid, not their nursemaid.”

“Tell them to go whistle,” Stan suggested. He was evidently reading the fax over my shoulder.

I faxed back that I would come tomorrow.

They faxed back:

Iforion 10.2.13. 1104 hrs URGENT

Imperative you come now. Dakros

I faxed again:

Why? I’m busy here with Magid business.

Dakros (whoever he was) faxed in return:

We got the assassin’s accomplices. We’re dealing rebellion/other chaos. We need you to find the next Emperor. Real problems there. Only a Magid can solve it. Please, sir. Dakros

It was the ‘Please, sir’ that got to me. The man was a General and Acting Regent and he was saying that, like a small boy pleading. I faxed that I was on my way and, since it sounded like the kind of problem you have to spend time on, I started to pack an overnight bag. Doubtless I could borrow stuff, but in the Empire they slept in a thing like a hospital gown, tied up with tapes, which I dislike, and I hate their razors. I could feel Stan hanging over me as I packed, wanting to say something.

“What is it?” I said.

“Don’t get too involved in that Empire, will you?” he said.

“No fear. I hate the place. Why?”

“Because there’s a sort of directive out to Magids about it – not as strong as an Intention, more of a suggestion – to leave the place to go to hell in its own sweet way.”

“It can, for me,” I said. “What directive is this? A deep secret you forgot to tell me, or what?”

“No, it’s something I picked up after I – while I was – was over there – negotiating with the Lords of Karma and so on,” he confessed. “I had to go even higher up in the end. It came from a long way up. Them Up There want the Empire left alone.”

“Happy to oblige,” I said, hurling my washing things into my bag. I zipped it up and set off downstairs. “Are you coming to Iforion with me?”

There was an unhappy pause. It lasted while I hurried from the stairs and into the living room. Then Stan’s voice husked, “I don’t think I can, lad. I think I’m fixed on Earth. I may even be stuck to this house of yours.”

“That’s boring for you,” I said.

“There’s no rule that says life – I mean afterlife – has to be interesting,” he said ruefully.

I sensed him hovering wistfully in the middle of my living room as I set out for the Empire. It took several moves, from lattice to lattice, with its attendant feeling of being a pawn on a chessboard hopping from square to square – but downhill, since I was moving Ayewards. I thought as I went that Lewis Carroll got it right in Alice Through the Looking Glass. No one had ever told me, but I have always suspected that Carroll was a Magid. It is a very influential thing to do, to write books like the Alice books; and influence is what being a Magid is all about. Subtle influence.

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