I was feeling fairly dejected one way and another. I said, “Thanks.”
He smiled at me, in the way that had always astonished me. This time it astonished me by making me feel more like a viable human being again. “I want to thank you,” he said.
“I don’t understand why,” I said. “A bit of driving. A tin of beans and a bag of sugar or so…”
“Yes, but you see you did those kindnesses to a person who was, on a rough estimate, only a twentieth part of me,” he said. “Most people would have avoided me as plain mad. Let me explain.
“At the end of my last reign, I was in your world, in a city called Babylon which no longer exists, trying to negotiate an alliance with the ruler there. The ruler refused any kind of treaty, so I meant to leave. But the Babylonians attacked as I left with my party and the Magid with us tried to open a gate for us in too much of a hurry. And he accidentally opened it right through me.”
I was glad to hear that some Magids besides me made mistakes. “You were stripped?”
He nodded. “And assumed dead, and buried on both sides of the gate. That area, as you know, is a mass of nodes. The gate had been opened at a node. The stripping was very violent and it took me a good many years to come round from it. When I did, I found I was having practical experience of part of your Babylon secret. Changes had occurred in the worlds on both sides and worlds had divided and multiplied. As I had been buried at the point of division, I had multiplied also.” He laughed slightly, making the room electric. “There were ten of me in normal Infinity and another ten existing as anti-matter. I’ve spent all this time trying to come together again.”
“But I don?
?t see how you—” I began. Koryfos shook his head slightly and I stopped.
“This is where you come in,” he said. “I was always, without understanding why, trying to settle near a Magid. I had a sense that Magids knew something about nodes that I didn’t and that I needed a node to help me in some way. You would hardly believe how many times, in this world and in others, I achieved proximity to a Magid, only to have that Magid realise that there was something strange about me and move away in a hurry.”
“I moved in after you, in Weavers End,” I said. “You’d been there six months when I bought my house. That was pure luck.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but it was not pure luck that you were unfailingly kindly and helpful. You drove me to one node after another, even though neither of us knew what we were doing, until you brought me to the extremely powerful node here in Wantchester. And I would not have understood how to use this node, any more than any of the others, if you had not happened to include me in your fateline working.”
“How did that happen?” I said.
“I sensed the working,” he said. “I always sensed any powerful working and I always came along to them, like a hungry animal, not knowing what I needed. Every Magid before you promptly turned me out. You let me stay. And I half consciously linked my fateline in as you worked. Believe me, it was like a revelation. Quite suddenly I felt and knew four times as much. I knew I had to come to this powerful node here and I knew what to do when I got here. For nearly three days, I was collecting the other parts of myself. I’m afraid I disturbed the node somewhat.”
“Yes, you did rather,” I said. “But other people were at it too. And you got all the pieces?”
“No,” he said. “Some were dead, and those who had become anti-matter were impossible to reach on this plane of Infinity. In order to become complete, I found I had to go outside the material planes entirely, to the place that is another part of your Babylon secret. No doubt this was Intended. For while I was on my way there, I encountered three heirs to the Empire and learnt more or less what was going on there. Rob came with me. He asked for his birthright, you know. He said that you and your brother had made him ashamed to be without it. He told me a great deal on the way back.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Our Rob likes to talk. So you’ll be followed by a line of centaurs as Emperor? Good idea. Centaurs have never been the force they should be in any world.”
“I’m glad you agree,” Koryfos said. “But I feel I have deprived you of your office. Rob and I got lost on the way back. We were trying to do two incompatible things, trying to get home and to find you. And we found your brother instead. The Powers Above promptly installed your brother as our adviser instead of you.”
“Si’s a good deal more competent than me,” I said ruefully. “He seems to have got you recognised as Emperor in no time at all.”
“He knew just what to do, certainly,” said Koryfos. “And he tells me that he is Intended to become Magid to the Empire from now on. But I would have preferred you. Your brother’s habit of striding about and fiddling with things perturbs me.”
“You mean even you can’t make him sit still!” I exclaimed.
“I doubt if anyone could,” Koryfos admitted. “It seems to be part of the way your brother functions.”
I could not help smiling. Nothing is ever perfect. Koryfos was obviously an exceptional man, but all the same… All the same, one thing about Koryfos was plain impossible. “How is it,” I asked him, “that you managed to get stripped so often and still be alive after more than two thousand years?”
He looked at me with his golden head tipped to one side and a slight smile on one corner of his mouth. In that pose, he looked exactly like all the statues of himself. He answered me with a question that shook me to the core. “How many members of the Upper Room are there?”
“You know I can’t tell you that!” I said. “You shouldn’t even know there is an Upper Room!”
“Precisely,” he said. “So I will tell you. There are presently seventy-one. There should be seventy-two, but there are not, because I am missing.”
“Oh!” I said. No one but an Archon could have Koryfos’s sort of vitality, or choose a centaur as his heir, for that matter. “Then greetings, great Archon.”
“Greetings to you too, Magid,” he replied. “I had to come here to do something that would stop Infinity drifting entirely Naywards. The Empire was supposed to do that. But I had not established it properly when I was stripped. I must now finish what I started. Because of this, can I ask you to do two things for me?”
“Probably,” I said. “As a neighbour, or as a Magid?”
“One of each,” he said. “Sadly, I must desert my house and my inventing. Would you, Magid, consent to become the owner of my house, to look after or to sell as you see fit?”