“Damn!” said Will. “Another verse? How?”
“Zinka!” I said. I jumped up, much to the consternation of the quack chicks. “I’ll go and find her.”
“The candles,” Rob said.
Nick, now kneeling between the rows like a spent Olympic sprinter, echoed Rob. “Yes, the candles.”
They were right. The candles would be burning lower every minute we took finding the missing verse. But we dared not blow them out while Maree was still out there. “Suppose,” I said, “we were to put them out all but the two nearest the road? Do you think that would be enough to keep the road still there, Will?”
“Might work,” Will agreed. “If we start from the end by the door and keep checking. I’ll do it. You find Zinka.”
I left at once and pelted to the lifts, which White’s recent activities outside my door had now set four corners away. The lift which arrived first was the one where Rob had been. It was not working very well. It went down in fits and jerks and stopped entirely at Floor Two. I could sense Zinka further down, but I had not the time to spend working on the lift. I stormed out and set off down the stairs at a gallop.
The roar of voices and singing hit me at the first landing. As I barged aside the fire door and swung on down, I saw why. There was a party going on. Almost the entire last flight of stairs was full of people, partying busily, drunkenly, uproariously and, in some areas, orgiastically. It looked rather fun.
Sitting on the top stair, more or less beside where I stood and detached from the rest, was Kornelius Punt. He raised a toothglass to me solemnly. “I am trying,” he told me, “to sort out one body from the next on these stairs and not succeeding.”
“They are rather entwined,” I agreed. I looked at the party. I looked down at him sadly. One of the underlying reasons why I had assumed that Punt might make a Magid was that he held himself apart from the rest of humanity. In fact, he was just a voyeur. I was the one who held myself apart, and it was not necessary, or right. It was probably why I had made such a mess of things. “Why don’t you join in?” I said to Punt.
“I am always aloof,” he told me. “I am going for Loof of the Year Award.”
Zinka was down on the stairs somewhere. “You’ll probably win it,” I said. I started picking my way down the packed and roaring stairs. I could only advance most of the time by holding on to the wall while I worked one foot, then the other, between thighs and arms or under hands and torsos. I caused several yelps of pain. I knocked over several glasses and a china bottle of the strongest liquor I had ever met. The fumes made me gasp and cough, but left the six people packed in beside it quite unmoved.
I apologised. One of the six said, “Damn, I think the stair carpet’s dissolving!” as I was making a long stride to a tiny space two stairs down, and they all laughed.
A hand came out of the writhing bodies lower down and passed me a full glass of rum. I accepted it politely and realised as I did so that the hand was the much-nicked mauve hand of Milan Gabrelisovic. Good. Great, in fact. But I did not trust him not to try poisoning me as a witch. I clambered through a nest of twining legs and passed the glass to the hand that came waving out from among them. Possibly it was Tansy-Ann Fisk’s. Below this, a vastly tall and shapely young man was spread out over at least eight stairs, with girls attached to him at intervals. The young man was wearing nothing but a leather loincloth and seemed to be asleep. The girls were drawing on him with felt-tip pens. Two of them were giving him a sunburst on his chest, in a riot of reds and yellows. His arms were being given hearts and anchors on one side and diagrams on the other. Zinka was at work on his left thigh, twining it with delicately drawn vineleaves. She was wearing a slithery silk gown that shone two delicious shades of rose and tended to slip fetchingly off her plump left shoulder, and she was wholly preoccupied. I could tell that, while the other girls were just drawing on the man, Zinka’s vine trellis was intended, gently and temporarily, to make the fellow hers later that night.
It seemed a shame to spoil her fun, but the candles were burning down. I bent and took hold of her warm, slithery shoulder. “Zinka, I’m sorry to—”
Sh
e jumped and looked up. “Oh God, it’s an emergency, isn’t it? Rupert, I am sorry – I had meant to check before I… I could tell something was up. Come on.”
She stood up and took my hand, towing me on downwards. I would rather have gone up, but down was nearer and easier. Together we negotiated a fairly extreme orgy and then forced our way between a row of ten people swaying on the lowest step and singing. Then we had only to stumble among glasses and bottles into a clear space by the fire door.
“Tell me,” said Zinka.
I was aware of Kornelius Punt, up above, doing his trick of amplifying our voices. So was Zinka. She glanced up there and frowned at me and we both cast up at him the illusion of a different conversation – two different conversations. We were too hurried to co-ordinate them. Them Up There alone know what Punt thought we were talking about.
“It’s like this,” I said, and gave Zinka a rapid run-down of events.
“Babylon!” said Zinka. “Oh my lord, Rupert! You should have called me hours ago. Here’s my verse for a start—”
The fire door beside us whammed open. Mervin Thurless lunged through and stood looking up at the crowded stairs in huge disgust. “What a revolting display!” he said to us, as if he thought it was our doing. “And the lifts aren’t working. How the hell am I supposed to get upstairs?”
“Terrible,” I agreed, remembering in time that I was supposed to be a fan of his.
“Just pick your way up,” Zinka told him cheerfully. “Kick people. They’re all too drunk to notice.” She pulled me the other way, out through the fire door, adding, “Or some are. With any luck someone will kick you back!” By this time, we were in the relatively open space beside the lifts. “It’s all right,” she said, seeing me staring anxiously back at the doors. “I laid it on Thurless to go up through the party. And I think we need to be down here anyway for the kitchens. Here’s my verse:
‘What shall I take to Babylon?
A handful of salt and grain,
Water, some wool for warmth on the way,
And a candle to make the road plain.
If you carry three things and use them right