“Eh?” said Stan. “Well, has to be after six or they’d call it tea or something instead.”
“Six,” I said. “Six. That gives me about ten hours to think of something. Thanks, Stan. See you.”
I got out of the car and locked it like a sleep-walker. I simply couldn’t think what to do. Or, let’s be honest, what to do about Nick. Janine and White I would cheerfully hand over. It was just a matter of thinking how. But Nick. It was no use pretending Nick was my favourite person since he had left Maree in Babylon. As Emperor he would be nothing like as badly placed as those poor dead children. They would have been snatched out of next to nothing into almost everything, where Nick would come from the complex culture of Earth and merely have to adapt to a life of high ceremony. Teenage boys do adapt, though I couldn’t exactly see him enjoying it. In fact, the way I felt at the moment, I almost felt that would serve him right.
Except, did it serve even the most selfish boy right to be pitched into the situation that had made Dakros lose his hair and Jeffros still look like walking wounded?
The question was, really, was Nick Intended to be the next Koryfonic Emperor? Normally, if a thing is Intended, you have a very strong sense of it, and you know equally strongly if it isn’t. At that moment, I simply could not tell. I felt a total, weary blank.
Oh damn it! I thought, getting into the lift. Maree valued Nick. You only had to see the way she looked after him at breakfast, when the kid couldn’t get his eyes open, to see how much she valued him. I dwelt on that. Maree and Nick may not have known they were brother and sister, but they were friends, all the same. Maree wo
uld certainly not want Nick condemned to the inevitable early death when the Empire fell to pieces in his hands. There was my decision, then. No matter what was Intended, or what was not, I was going to respect Maree’s wishes. A pity that I had no idea how, I thought, as the lift door opened on Floor Five.
Here I realised where I was. Well, no point in going back down again. I could get coffee from Room Service. My recent fracas inside the node seemed to have put everything back more or less where it had been on Thursday. Room 555 was now only a short way down the corridor. I went there.
The door opened on a rich smell of coffee. The eighth pair of candles was now alight. In the skewed distance they led to, the landscape was grey and cloudy, but still nebulously there. Will and Zinka were on the floor by the bathroom, just beginning on a hearty breakfast.
Zinka plays room service like an artist,” Will announced through a mouthful of croissant. “She’s got us things that aren’t on the menu.”
“I got the pancakes and bacon for you,” Zinka said to me. “Sit down and eat and tell. Someone messed with the node again. Is that all? Tell us.”
I sat and ate and drank ravenously and told them. In the course of it, my quacks woke up. Each took a glorious near-indigo head from under a wing, saw me, saw food, and spread their dark blue wings to glide to the carpet. Then, most circumspectly, they picked their way round the outside of the road by the door and arrived politely for their share of the croissant.
“Those birds are intelligent beings,” Zinka said respectfully. “They’ve been to Babylon. I don’t know what to advise about Nick, Rupert.” Here we all took one of many cautious looks towards the bed, but Nick slept on, on his back now, snoring faintly. “There’s no chance he’d make a success of the Empire, is there?” We all examined Nick again as he slept. Zinka and Will both shook their heads slightly. It seemed that they, at least, had sufficient precognition to know this was impossible. Zinka frowned as she plastered marmalade upon cinnamon toast. “I don’t know about you two,” she said, “but my sense is that Nick is actually supposed to be something quite different.”
“That makes one of us,” I said glumly.
Zinka fed the toast to the quacks, who accepted it with grave pleasure. Will said, “You could forestall Dakros by putting a geas on Nick.”
“Ah, come on, Will!” Zinka said. “That’s how to have the Upper Room hopping mad at him.”
Privately, I thought Will had hit on the best idea yet. But I said, “Dakros has got to have someone, you know.”
“He can have himself,” Will said. “He’s had a lot of practice by now. If you leave him no alternative—”
“He’d never deal with me again,” I said.
Zinka laughed. “Oh, the secret relief on your face when you said that! Poor Rupert. No one wants Koryfos. But Koryfos wants Janine and Gram and I vote they should have them. Let’s plan.”
We spent the next half hour planning. We hatched what seemed to us a perfect, foolproof way to deliver the two of them to Dakros by six that evening. Then Zinka said she would get some sleep. Will said he would go down to his Land Rover: he needed to phone through to Carina to let her know he was going to be here for the rest of today. I was left alone. I sat in the frilly chair with a quack roosting companionably on each shoe and waited. I don’t think I thought any more. I don’t think I expected anything any more. I simply stared into that increasingly fogged landscape at the end of the burnt-out rows of candles. And waited.
Will took his time. He tells me he suddenly felt an overwhelming need for some exercise and took a walk by the river. He was still away when the eighth pair of candles began to near their ends. I watched them anxiously. The slight draught from the door meant that one was burning ahead of the other whatever I did. I was going to have to light the seventeenth candle well before the last one, and the Lord knows what effect that was going to have! In an effort to preserve the fast-burning one, I leant forward and cupped my hand round the flame and tried with everything I knew to slow it down. I worked on it so furiously that I never heard footsteps. I didn’t hear a thing. I simply looked up and saw Maree coming over the brow of the hill.
She was the old Maree in every way. She was the right colour again, though pale, and her hair was once more brownish and possibly even bushier. Anyway it seemed to frame her small serious face in quantities, in tendrils and in fine frizz, as she bent earnestly over the tiny lighted stub of candle she carried. And she was the old Maree in another way. For some reason, she was now wearing the woefully ragbag skirt and top in which I had first seen her, and large soft shoes that put me in mind of the children on the hill. Even her fingernails had grown long and spiked again. She was using them to grip the candle with, by its very end.
With all this, she was a whole new Maree. It was hard to say how, but I knew immediately that the same change that had overtaken the quacks had overtaken Maree too. It was not that she was older. It was not that she was more, or larger. It was as if she had not been filling her proper outlines before this. Now she did. A small, small measure of the change was that she now looked good in her woeful old garments. She looked astonishingly good.
As I saw all this, Maree looked up and saw me. A look I had not seen before – one of pure delight – filled her face. I don’t think she had ever been truly happy in her life before. Now she was, because she had seen me.
I forgot prudence. I forgot the danger of intruding in one’s own workings. The quacks spilled off my feet with indignant honks as I took off like a sprinter and raced down the road of candles. I picked Maree up in both arms, hugging her crazily tight, and swung her round and round. Her candle went out and went flying. I heard her laugh. Nothing mattered. The dark landscape went away in a blink, between one mad rotation and the next. When I put Maree down, there was nothing there but two rows of wax-filled holders. The candles by the door were out too.
Maree’s face was a glowing heart-shape of pleasure. She looked up at me and said, “Really?”
“Yes,” I said. “Really.”
At this, she stepped back a bit and pushed at her glasses in her combat-manner. “I’m not a very good investment,” she said, with that sob in her voice. I had missed that sob. “I warn you.”
“Neither am I,” I said. “Wait till I tell you.”