Deep Secret (Magids 1) - Page 50

“Sorry,” Will said. He clapped his hand rather tremulously over mine and we both hauled. The centaur was apparently an extremely powerful magic user. We had to pull madly for a while. Then the lift came down with a rush. Its door swept open. We stared.

Maree and Nick Mallory were in there, supporting the centaur, one on either side. I am not used to centaurs. There was a moment when I saw a small bay horse with its head hanging down out of sight, wedged sideways across the lift, and its black tail swishing almost in my face, while its rider sat on the horse’s neck with one thin brown arm over Maree’s shoulders and the other arm held by Nick. The rider’s head was resting against Nick’s chest. Long black hair draped over Nick’s supporting hands. The human head was outlined against Nick’s shirt, Asian brown and exquisite in profile, and a large dark eye, almond-shaped and fringed with long black lashes, rolled sideways at us in terror. Though the face was larger than a human face all over, I think my first thought was, What a beautiful boy! Two beautiful boys. Nick, though he was much paler-skinned, had the same sort of dark good looks.

Then things snapped into focus. Horse and boy became one being, with a lot of blood on the lift floor. Maree jabbed at her glasses and raised her chin across the centaur’s bowed back. “I’m a trainee vet,” she said. “We were trying to get him to my room for first aid until you two fools interfered.”

“Take him to my room,” I said. “It’s nearer the lifts.” I hauled Will in behind me and wedged us both into the lift alongside the centaur. Will jabbed the button marked 5 and we shot upwards at an unholy speed. “Will hit him with his car,” I explained.

“Then he’ll be horribly bruised too,” Maree said. “Shit.”

The centaur’s head stirred against Nick’s chest. “Knarros sent me,” he said. He had a pleasant husky voice. “I was to come here because the Emperor’s dead.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m the Magid in charge. You came to the right place.”

The centaur became agitated at this. One rear hoof lashed the lift door and the husky voice cracked as he said, “You don’t understand! I have to fetch the right person! Knarros is forbidden to talk to anyone but the right person!”

“Steady, steady!” Maree said. She sounded like Stan putting a stopper on me.

I said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve arranged to go and talk to Knarros this evening.”

That was all there was time for before the lift banged to a halt on Floor 5. And it was just like our current luck that, for the first time ever, there was quite a crowd of people waiting to go down. About half of them were already in costume for the Masquerade. I stared out at a towering papier-mâché and plastic alien, a gentleman in Tudor court dress, two young men in almost nothing but boots, basques and bras, a slender girl apparently clad in a bead curtain, and at ordinary people clustered among them.

As Will and I edged out of the lift and Maree and Nick carefully manoeuvred the centaur round so that he could come out forward, all these people broke out cheering and clapping.

“Excellent!” they shouted. “Fantastic costume! Never thought of hiring a horse!”

Possibly this was because, as the centaur turned, his unwounded side was always towards them. The hurt side was towards me. Flaps of living horsehide hung down from it. I felt hurt too, with a terrible sympathetic soreness, and rather sick. At least the bleeding seemed to have stopped, although the lift floor was a marsh of blood. I slammed its door shut behind us all, sealed it Magid-fashion, and made sure that lift would not move from this floor until I was ready to deal with it. Will hurriedly brought the other lift up instead. The centaur was near fainting by this time. His hooves staggered and his legs splayed. Since the variously dressed folk getting into the other lift were all staring over their shoulders at him, Will said, smiling inanely, “He’s got to go away and practise, you know.”

“Well done, Nick!” the alien said, bending to enter the lift. He seemed to have conflated the centaur and Nick, regardless of the fact that the two were side by side. I thought, as I passed Maree my room key and got under the centaur’s left arm in her place, that it was the clearest case I had ever seen of someone simply not believing their eyes.

But Nick was highly annoyed by the confusion. He said, in an angry blare, “Before this, I thought the people at this con were the only ones I’d ever met who understood when things weren’t ordinary. But they’re just as bad as anyone.”

Will took a look at Nick and decided that Nick was even more shaken than he was himself. He took over supporting the centaur’s right arm. “Everyone has limitations,” he said.

“They can’t help it if they’re not all superbrains like you, Nick!” Maree snapped. She was looking vainly along the corridor for my room number. I remembered the extra right-angles I had sprinted round downstairs. I clenched my teeth and dragged everything back into place.

“What’s up?” asked Will.

“Someone keeps fooling with the node here,” I said.

Maree made no comment. She just gave me an approving nod as the door labelled 555 slid to a stop in front of her, put the key in, opened it and took charge. “Oh good,” she said. “Lots of space. Nick, you belt off to my room and fetch my leather vet-case. Rupert, go and collect my kettle and any others you can and get them all full of boiling water – but first think of some way to keep him standing up. He looks as if he’s going to fall over and I can’t get at him if he does.”

In mere instants, we were all flying about at Maree’s commands. Will and I dismantled the trouser-press on the wall and, by hasty Magid means, got it to act as a tall shelf-like table, so that the tottering centaur lad could rest his forearms on it. This he did, gratefully. His glorious brown features were all dragged out of shape by pain and he had begun shaking. While Will and I were growing the legs of the padded stool in front of the dressing-table, Maree put her hands on the centaur’s quivering arms. “I never caught your name, sweetheart.”

“Robbios,” he answered. “Rob usually.”

“Oh, not another Robbie!” she said.

“Rob,” said the centaur. “Not Robbie.”

“OK,” Maree replied. “Now, Rob,

I’m going to have to take a closer look at your side. I’ll do my best not to hurt you, but I can’t promise. No. Higher,” she said, as Will and I tried to slide the by-now tall stool under the centaur’s horse-body. “I don’t want him slumping if his legs give.”

I left Will to elongate the stool and flew off for kettles. Some room doors were open and the rooms were still being serviced by a weary-looking chambermaid. I unscrupulously took kettles from the rooms she was not actually inside. Nick and I arrived back together to find Maree in the middle of what struck me as a most efficient and gentle examination of Rob’s flayed and gaping side. Nick looked, turned extremely white, and bolted for the bathroom. I crawled about finding places to plug kettles in. Will finally got Rob supported from underneath by the stool and backed away looking as bad as Nick. It finally dawned on me why Will had so suddenly given up his boyhood ambition to become a vet.

Maree, on the other hand, seeming quite unmoved, finished her inspection and walked round to look at Rob’s face. He was leaning his head in his arms, in a tumble of straight raven hair, on top of the transfigured trouser-press. He turned his face to see her. “First the good news,” she told him. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Most of it’s your hide, but there’s skin damage underneath and a couple of muscles torn. We got the bleeding stopped in the lift, but it wasn’t from any of the really big blood vessels, so you aren’t going to lose any more blood. The bad news is that I’m going to have to stitch you. I haven’t got any local anaesthetic and it’s going to hurt.”

Rob gave a little howl and a gulp. “I can manage.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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