You can be there by candle-light.’”
“Ah, of course!” I said. They should have been carrying the elements of life! I should have thought!”
“Kitchens,” said Zinka. As we sped that way, she panted out, “I’ve plenty of candles. Wool’s easy. So’s water. It’s the grain that’s going to make problems.”
After some blundering about in the hind parts of the hotel, we barged our way through steel doors into a vista of steel appliances, smelling strongly of fat that was not quite hot enough. I let Zinka take the lead here. Every Magid has a special feeling for his or her particular secrets and, besides, the only person on duty here was a weary fellow in a tall white hat. He would obviously respond better to Zinka than to me.
She set about him briskly. “It’s very important we have something with whole grains in it,” she told him. “Have you got any unmilled cereals?”
“Muesli?” suggested the bewildered chef.
“Too many extras in it,” Zinka said. “Wheat or oats or barley in grains is what we’re looking for.”
He did his best, poor fellow. His first offering comprised a packet of frozen sweetcorn, a bag of flour and a carton of porridge oats. Zinka smiled up at him, pink and silky, with her shoulder slithering bare, and made him try again. He came up with brown rice. “It might do at a pinch,” Zinka told him. “But we need it European if possible.” He came up with sesame seeds and groundsel, wholemeal bread and pumpernickel. Zinka took him kindly by the hand and led him away from the cupboards.
While they were gone, I found some plastic bags. There were cruets lined up by the hundred on a shelf near the door and I cavalierly emptied the salt out of them until I had a bagful. Then, furiously conscious of the candles dwindling on the top floor, I found a big strainer and attempted to sieve the porridge oats. Most of the grains were crushed, but I had succeeded in getting a couple of ounces of whole, uncrushed oat grains out of it when Zinka came hurrying back with a tin clutched to her chest. In it was a sparse rattling of wheat grains which the chef gloomily opined must have come off the outside of something.
“Oh good,” Zinka said, seeing what I had been doing. “If we combine yours and mine and top it up with groundsel, sesame and just a little of the rice, we should just about have two handfuls. Thanks, chef. I love you. Come on, Rupert.”
We sped back to the centre of the hotel, clutching our two plastic bags.
“I’m not sure what’s wrong with the other lift,” Zinka gasped, “but I’m afraid the far lift is my fault – and yours. You sure do put stasis on when you put it, Rupert. I couldn’t get it off.”
“Oh, is that all it is?” I said. That was a relief. I hadn’t fancied wading upstairs, through that party again. When we reached the lifts, it was an easy matter to whip the remains of my stasis off the lift where Rob had taken refuge and haul it down. We shot up to Floor Three in it, where I waited with it while Zinka picked up her rosy skirts and pelted off to her room for candles.
That wait was horrible. My watch said I had only been gone half an hour and I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid it had stopped. I was increasingly convinced that something had gone wrong, but whether it was something wrong in my room two floors above, or some terrible thing that had happened to Maree waiting semi-lifeless in a land of shadows, I had no idea. I just wished Zinka would hurry.
To do her justice, she did hurry. Two minutes later, she pelted up from the opposite direction with her arms full of candles – genuine beeswax: I smelt the honey – gasping out that the node seemed to have gone do-lally and her room was nearer this way now. I clapped us into the lift and we shot upwards.
More node activity, I thought. Gram White again. A thought struck me.
“By the way,” I said, as we whirled past Floor Four, “which of them do you think did which killing? They were both in it, I’m sure. There wasn’t time for one of them to do it all.”
“Women very seldom cut throats,” Zinka said decidedly. “She did the shooting.”
That fitted. Whoever shot at me had been slow, as if he – she – was not entirely used to handling a gun, whereas Gram White, who ran a factory making small-arms, must be quite an expert. “Thanks,” I said. “Then he’s the more dangerous of the two.”
“Don’t bank on it,” Zinka said, as the lift slowed. “She’s pure poison, to my mind.”
The door went back. We stormed out and ran again. And ran. And turned corner after corner, running.
And there was a vista of corridor, with my door open halfway along it and Will out in the corridor beside it, making a stooped and swooping chase after a madly running quack chick. Beyond him, in the distance, three people were walking briskly away: Gram White and Janine, with Nick between them.
Rupert Venables continued
Zinka and I stopped and looked at one another. “Someone’s done a working out here,” she said. “I can feel it.”
So could I feel it now. It was what White had been doing after he shouted outside my door. I knew I should have felt it when I left, but I had been in too much of a hurry. I had slipped up again. I cursed. The working had been designed to fetch Nick out of my room the next time the door opened. Will told us the way of it when we walked slowly up to him and he stood up, red and exasperated, after shooing the quack chick back inside.
“I thought the damn door was shut,” he said, “but you must have left it open a crack.”
“No I didn’t,” I said. “Gram White left a working on it.”
“Oh I see!” Will said, and ran his hands through his woolly hair in the manner of Dakros. “I couldn’t understand it. Both bloody chicks got out. Nick and I were out here rounding them up when those two came marching up. And she said, ‘Come along, Nick, I need you,’ and he obviously couldn’t think of a reason not to go with them. Didn’t even argue, just went.”
We watched Gram, Nick and Janine turn the corner out of sight.
“Not much to be done,” Zinka said. “She is his mother, that’s the problem. So what do we do now? You’ve got a major working half finished in there. You can’t just leave it.”