The air creaked.
‘There goes Quirm,’ murmured Carding.
‘That just leaves Al Khali,’ said one of the others.
‘There’s some clever power there.’
Carding nodded glumly. He’d quite liked Quirm, which was a -had been a pleasant little city overlooking the Rim Ocean.
He dimly recalled being taken there, once, when he was small. For a moment he gazed sadly into the past. It had wild geraniums, he recalled, filling the sloping cobbled streets with their musky fragrance.
‘Growing out of the walls,’ he said out loud. ‘Pink. They were pink.’
The other wizards looked at him oddly. One or two, of a particularly paranoid frame of mind even for wizards, glanced suspiciously at the walls.
‘Are you all right?’ said one of them.
‘Um?’ said Carding, ‘Oh. Yes, Sorry. Miles away.’
He turned back to look at Coin, who was sitting off to one side of the circle with the staff across his knees. The boy appeared to be asleep. Perhaps he was. But Carding knew in the tormented pit of his soul that the staff didn’t sleep. It was watching him, testing his mind.
It knew. It even knew about the pink geraniums.
‘I never wanted it to be like this,’ he said softly. ‘All we really wanted was a bit of respect.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
Carding nodded vaguely. As his colleagues resumed their concentration he glanced sideways at them.
Somehow, all his old friends had gone. Well, not friends. A wizard never had friends, at least not friends who were wizards. It needed a different word. Ah yes, that was it. Enemies. But a very decent class of enemies. Gentlemen. The cream of their profession. Not like these people, for all that they seemed to have risen in the craft since the sourcerer had arrived.
Other things besides the cream floated to the top, he reflected sourly.
He turned his attention to Al Khali, probing with his mind, knowing that the wizards there were almost certainly doing the same, seeking constantly for a point of weakness.
He thought: am I a point of weakness? Spelter tried to tell me something. It was about the staff. A man should lean on his staff, not the other way around … it’s steering him, leading him … I wish I’d listened to Spelter … this is wrong, I’m a point of weakness …
He tried again, riding the surges of power, letting them carry his mind into the enemy tower. Even Abrim was making use of sourcery, and Carding let himself modulate the wave, insinuating himself past the defences erected against him.
The image of the interior of the Al Khali tower appeared, focused …
… the Luggage trundled along the glowing corridors. It was exceedingly angry now. It had been awoken from hibernation, it had been scorned, it had been briefly attacked by a variety of mythological and now extinct lifeforms, it had a headache and now, as it entered the Great Hall, it detected the hat. The horrible hat, the cause of everything it was currently suffering. It advanced purposefully …
Carding, testing the resistance of Abrim’s mind, felt the man’s attention waver. For a moment he saw through the enemy’s eyes, saw the squat oblong cantering across the stone. For a moment Abrim attempted to shift his concentration and then, no more able to help himself than is a cat when it sees something small and squeaky run across the floor, Carding struck.
Not much. It didn’t need much. Abrim’s mind was attempting to balance and channel huge forces, and it needed hardly any pressure to topple it from its position.
Abrim extended his hands to blast the Luggage, gave the merest beginnings of a scream, and imploded.
The wizards around him thought they saw him grow impossibly small in a fraction of a second and vanish, leaving a black after-image …
The more intelligent of them started to run …
And the magic he had been controlling surged back out and flooded free in one great, randomised burst that blew the hat to bits, took out the entire lower levels of the tower and quite a large part of what remained of the city.
So many wizards in Ankh had been concentrating on the hall that the sympathetic resonance blew them across the room. Carding ended up on his back, his hat over his eyes.
They hauled him out and dusted him off and carried him to Coin and the staff, amid cheers - although some of the older wizards forbore to cheer. But he didn’t seem to pay any attention.