Corrie nodded and flitted away again. I looked idly after him in the mirror at the end of the bar. And there was Maree Mallory again. She had seen me too. To do her justice, she looked horrified. The feeling is mutual. I looked pointedly away. She was looking rather glum – which I suspect is her natural expression: it goes with that irritating sob in her voice – but otherwise she had neatened up considerably from the witchy bag-lady I had encountered in Bristol. She was wearing a nice leather jacket and jeans and had obviously made efforts with her hair. It was now in quite a stylish bush, though still a bush, and I think she had new glasses. Evidently my hundred quid had wrought quite a change. She looked almost human. I watched Rick Corrie dart up to her, converse, dart away, and dart back with drinks. I got the impression he fancied the woman in his shy way. There is no accounting for taste.
“Is Thurless generally such a pain?” I asked Maxim, with some anxiety.
“Nearly always,” he told me. “The trouble is, he’s not that good a writer and he thinks he is. I’ve never known him quite this dreadful, though. There must be something else biting him. I’ll get someone to— Oh, Zinka! You’re the very person! Have you heard about Mervin Thurless?”
Zinka is not that common a name. I turned stiffly on my stool, unbelievingly. And there, coming up to about my waist, stood the well-known crimson-robed lovely ample shape of Zinka Fearon. Fellow Magid. One-time lover. Last heard from messaging me about Koryfos several worlds Ayewards from the Empire. I couldn’t think what she was doing here. While Maxim was ordering her the pint of cider she always drinks, I bent down and asked her.
“And I love you too, Rupert,” she said. “I’m here on holiday. I always have my holiday here at PhantasmaCon. I close down. I put everything on hold, and I have a rest. Your brother Si’s handling any emergencies out there for me. Are you here working? Yes, I can see you are. It’s not exactly quite your usual scene, is it?”
“I’m beginning to enjoy it rather,” I admitted.
“Oh good,” she said. “If I ever knew anyone who needed to unbend…! But don’t ask me to lift a hand to help you in any way. I’m off duty. I mean it.”
Maxim turned back with her cider then, and we had the tale of Thurless all over again, including the way he had made an ass of himself at the Opening Ceremony.
“Male menopause,” Zinka said decidedly. “I’ll sort him out.”
I sincerely hoped she could, or I was one candidate short. Thinking this, I raised my eyes to the mirror, and saw Maree Mallory bent back in her chair, trying to avoid the great beaky gabbling face of an appalling female dressed apparently in an orange tent.
“Who is that dreadful creature in orange?” I asked.
Zinka looked in the mirror too. She slammed her tankard down on the bar. “Damn! Tansy-Ann’s caught a neo again. Back in a moment.”
She was. The woman in orange fled yelling, Mallory vanished too and Zinka was back, unruffled.
“Tansy-Ann?” I asked her apprehensively.
“Fisk. American,” she told me. “Not exactly nasty – just a well-known pain. Can you lend me ten pounds?”
“Probably,” I said. Damn. There, by the looks of it, wa
s another candidate down the drain. “Why?”
She looked, to be sure Maxim was safely talking to someone else (and he was: bellowing into a hearing-aid) and muttered hurriedly, “I’ve almost no Earth currency until I sell some stuff in the Dealers Room.”
So I gave her a tenner. It is a problem a Magid can face quite often. All in all, it was a very pleasant evening, except that before it ended I seemed to be two candidates short. I went up in the lift knowing that my spirit rebelled at the thought of having Fisk for a pupil – unless she turned out to be one hundred per cent more reasonable than she looked, of course. Of the two women, I almost preferred Mallory. Which was saying something. Mervin Thurless, I hoped, might be still possible, if one supposed that he had been unbalanced by having the sort of gifts that make a person a potential Magid. It is bad, having those gifts and not knowing how to use them. I know I was pretty difficult myself as a student because of this. My brother Will has described me then succinctly as “a little shit” and I suspect I was. But then, I thought glumly, the same could apply equally well to the dreaded Fisk.
I had walked round at least one mirrored corner on the nearest way to my room before I realised that I had not yet reached it. It was literally not where I left it. It should have been just beyond the lifts. But, according to the numbers on the walls, rooms 555–587 were somewhere round the next corner. My room was 555.
I stopped. I thought. Then I turned round and retraced my steps to the corner just beyond the lifts. It was extraordinarily hard going, because I was now walking clockwise, and whoever had been using the power node had set about it anti-clockwise – widdershins, the direction of bad magic. I was not happy about that at all. I had to strive around yet another corner before I came in sight of the lifts too. Someone had set something going and not bothered to stop it. Sloppy practice. In this case you could even end up with a vortex. This node was powerful. I stood at the corner and considered it.
The node was centred on this hotel. It spread through quite a bit of the town too, but the strong centre was almost where I stood. That ought to have meant that things were relatively calm here – like the eye of a storm – but someone had come along not long ago and disturbed it, violently. Two someones, in fact. I could detect two different sets of recent activity from where I stood. And the node had responded violently to violence because it was so exceptionally strong. The Upper Room had been right to feel concerned.
I put everything back and stilled it as gently as I could. Then I went to bed.
[2]
From Maree Mallory’s
Thornlady Directory, file
twenty-four
Thornlady dream again. Biting moonlit comments about my antisocial nature. Why don’t I ever dream I bring matches and set fire to her damn bush?
Got up feeling disgruntled and went to see after Nick. I do this most mornings, particularly on schooldays. Janine is usually happy enough to leave him to me. Nick really is a total, genuine, sleep-walking zombie for at least an hour after he gets up. I have never met anyone quite as bad. Nick is capable of putting clothes on, more or less, but it stops there. I don’t ask if he washes or cleans his teeth.
When I went into his room, he was sleep-walking into walls with his sweater on backwards. He could only speak in a blurred sort of blaring mumble. I turned his sweater right way round, found his room key and led him to the lift. He had still not opened his eyes when we got to the ground floor. This had its advantages. I couldn’t find the place where they were serving breakfast, but Nick could. His nose flared to the smell of bacon and toast and he shambled along that way, dragging me.