“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 hel
ped 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.”