NOTHING SEEMED TO BE going right for Derk. He was now so busy that he had not thought about his new homing pigeon for days.
Prince Talithan had found three more cities deserted when he tried to sack them, and he was, to Derk’s mind, being extravagantly upset about it. “I have failed you, Lord,” he kept saying. And three angry wizards translocated in. One said that the pirates had demanded higher pay before they captured a single Pilgrim more, and the second wanted to know why the dragons had deliberately dropped his Pilgrims in the snow a day’s walk from the dragon with the gizmos. The third complained that the Emir had no slave girls. “And my Pilgrims were expecting them,” he said. “They’re talking of suing me.”
“How did they know what to expect?” Derk asked wearily. “Unless you told them.”
“They’d heard things from last year,” the wizard defended himself. “I may have dropped a hint or so, but they knew what I meant.”
“I’ll take it up with Querida,” Derk promised. He sent the daylight owls to Querida with a message about it and also, hopelessly, asking whether Querida had invented a god yet. He came back from interviewing pirates and arguing with dragons to find, as he had half expected, that the owls had returned with a note signed by someone else, saying that Querida was very busy just now and would get in touch later. Derk glumly faced the fact that Querida had no intention of helping him.
He was tired. Any spare time he had was taken up with journeys to Derkholm, where at least two Pilgrim Parties arrived every day to confront him and push him into the balefire. The day after a battle, there were often as many as seven parties waiting for him. Derk was sick of falling backward into his trench, but he never had time to invent a different way of being killed.
The griffins were tired, too, and Pretty was bored. Pretty was so bored with the Wild Hunt that he started leading the dogs off in the wrong direction. Don got quite hysterical about it—even worse than Prince Talithan over the empty cities, Derk thought. But he forgave Don because it was borne in upon him that Don was too young really to be in charge of anything. He put Callette in charge of the Hunt instead, and Don wretchedly agreed to have another try at helping with the battles.
Then the geese replaced themselves with six pigs and vanished. Now not only was Callette furious, but they had six puzzled pigs getting under everyone’s feet in the base. Every time he tripped over Ringlet, Derk hoped savagely that the geese had gone home and the dwarfs had eaten them. But when he flew Beauty to Derkholm to get tipped into his balefire, Derk found no sign of any geese, only increasing numbers of dwarfs. Scales seemed to have rounded up almost all of them. Look on the bright side, Derk thought. Kit’s den was packed full of treasure, Old George was being quite a convincing wailing skeleton these days, and the demon turned up faithfully to terrify the Pilgrims at every confrontation. Derk gave up wondering why the demon was doing it. He was simply almost grateful.
He flew back to the base to find more things going wrong. Emperor Titus came apologetically to report that half his younger legionaries had resigned and gone home. “They all say their mothers are ill,” he said. “We sent to check, and it seems to be true. There’s some kind of illness that only affects older women. We had to give them all compassionate leave.” And after the Emperor came the mercenary chief of the Forces of Good, swearing and cursing because every one of his female soldiers had deserted in the night.
Kit’s brow jutted and Kit’s tail lashed at this news. Derk could hardly blame him. It was a real puzzle how the Forces of Good could win convincingly when half of them were missing. Kit, Derk sometimes thought, was the only one not being a problem. Now he had stopped feeling so important, Kit had settled down and become almost sunny. Kit was the one who tried to joke Callette out of her fury over the geese. It was not Kit’s fault, Derk thought, that this had only made Callette angrier.
But behind all this, Derk was increasingly anxious about Lydda. She ought to have come back from laying clues long ago. He kept hoping she had gone to Mara. In the end he sent Prince Talithan to find out. Mara would talk to Talithan, and it would take Talithan’s mind off the disappearing citizens. But Talithan came back within the hour to say that Lydda was not with Mara and Mara was as anxious as Derk. “She says she will cause other lady wizards to search, Lord.”
Derk sent the daylight owls off to look for Lydda, too. Lydda was too young, just like Don, and he knew he ought not to have asked her to fly so far. He never would have asked her if he had not been ill.
He had just sent the owls off when Scales arrived with the news that Blade had disappeared. Derk’s stomach twisted, and he was nearly sick with worry. At first he thought that the whole party, Shona included, had gone missing. “No. You misheard me,” Scales rumbled. The reason he knew Blade was missing, he said, was that while he was checking for dwarfs from the Eastern Range, he had flown across a Pilgrim Party wandering miles from anywhere a tour should be. “I dropped down and spoke to them,” he said. “Your Shona seemed to be in charge, and she told me. Some crisis in the night. Young Blade seems to have vanished in a clap of noise, taking two of the others with him.”
Blade now! Derk thought. Blade was too young, just like Don and Lydda. He ought to have refused to let Blade be a Wizard Guide, whatever the Oracle said. “Show me where they are on the map,” he said.
He unrolled the map and pinned it down with stones. Scales’s great head bowed over it, and one long claw very delicately made a tiny prick mark, right in the middle of nowhere. “There,” said Scales. “Nothing else for miles.”
“Hmm,” said Derk. If he got the balefire fallen into quickly tomorrow, he would be able to get to that region and still be back for the battle the day after that. “Thanks,” he said to Scales. “Could you spare time to look for Blade at all?”
“Be glad to,” said Scales. “I was getting bored hunting dwarfs.”
Before he left for Derkholm the next day, Derk checked up on the soldiers in the dome. This was another worry nagging at the back of all the others. It was hard to pin down, but years of spells not going quite right, from the blue demon on, had given Derk a feeling for magic that was not acting as it should, and he was sure that the spells Barnabas had put on the dome were not holding in some way. The men in black were behaving as soldiers should, drilling, exercising, queueing at the cookhouse, resting, caring for weapons, but Derk was sure that something somewhere was not quite right. He could not place it. He went around and looked carefully at all Barnabas’s workings. But they seemed to be correct. He would have liked to consult Barnabas, but Barnabas was not there to consult. Barnabas spent less and less time in the camp. Sometimes he only turned up at the last minute before a battle, in a strong gust of beer smell, which was the main reason why Derk was sure something was wrong. But he could not find it. Besides, Beauty was ready, and he was in a hurry. He left.
At Derkholm, he fell into his balefire three times in quick succession and did not wait to chat with Serklid, the third wizard, at all. “Blade’s missing,” he explained. “I have to go. Could you do me a favor and ask the dwarfs if they’ve eaten goose lately?”
He left Serklid murmuring, “Goose? Why goose?” and took off in a whistling of Beauty’s black pinions.
Beauty was as glad as anyone to have a change from routine. She flew with a will, circling high above the hilly, trackless region that Scales had pricked out and searching as earnestly as Derk did. It was she who found the Pilgrims. “Smhell hhorses,” she announced, and she began descending long before Derk spotted the group of riders straggling across a grassy upland. When they were low enough, Derk saw the one in front was wearing bardic green.
“That’s them!” he said joyfully. “Clever of you, Beauty!”
The riders all looked up as Beauty came swirling down. Most of the horses spooked, and so did some of the riders, to judge from the way at least four of them fell off. Derk landed a prudent distance away. Shona swung down from her bucking horse and came racing over, followed by a tall male Pilgrim.
“Oh, Dad! I am so glad to see you! We thought you were another dragon for a second. This is Geoffrey,” Shona said.
She looked wonderful, quite her old self and prettier than ever, Derk saw. He examined this Geoffrey who was clearly so important to her. What a pity the man was a Pilgrim. What Derk saw he liked. A nice person, an honest one, with a commanding look to him. “What on earth are you all doing so far off the tour route?” he said.
“That was Blade,” Shona said. “Oh, Dad, he never looked at the map once! I’m not sure he knows how to read a map even. You know how you always think he must know because of the way he translocates, but I think that must be something quite different. So he’s been leaving maps to Kit, because Kit’s good at them, and we were quite lost long before he vanished.”
“Yes, but what happened to Blade?” Derk asked.
“And my sister and her latest boyfriend,” Geoffrey said ruefully. “They’re gone, too. We don’t quite know what happened, sir. Our camp was raided in the night, we do know that, by quite a lot of people on horseback. Professor Ledbury over there woke us up, shouting and swinging his sword about, and we all jumped up. But it was dark and pretty confused, sir, and all I can work out is that my sister was wearing pale blue, which made her the easiest to see, and the raiders grabbed her and rode off at a gallop with Sukey screaming blue murder. We think Reville—he seems pretty taken with Sukey—went chasing after them on foot and that Blade went after them both. But it’s only guessing. There was a sort of bang, anyway, and Shona says it makes a bang when someone translocates fast, and the three of them have been missing ever since.”
“We’ve been trying to carry on,” Shona explained. “We did follow the riders’ tracks
for a day, but we lost them the next day, and now we’re trying to go on with the tour. But Blade had the map, and we don’t really know where we are.”