“I do think we should tell them what it’s all about,” Amanda had objected when they were discussing the schedule.
“Afterwards,” Gladys said with great firmness. “The traitor’s in there with them. We don’t want to give her or him a chance to ruin everything.”
The four of the Ring drew together to begin. “Christ! I’m nervous!” Mark whispered. “Suppose the capsule just vanishes into the void!”
“Or blows up,” said Maureen.
“Hush. It’ll get there,” said Gladys.
Amanda said nothing, but her private fear was that the Celestial Omnibus would still be there in the warehouse when she unlocked the door in a few hours time. But the ritual had started. Almost at the same instant, other groups joined in all over the country. Amanda felt the building of power as she carefully cleared her mind.
Zillah, at home in Amanda’s house, felt the build of power as a great void, waiting to be filled. In some strange way, she was the void, and ached with it. Then, as the first Name was spoken, nearly in chorus, from the lands all around her, it brought her a sudden vision of Mark. He was not as she usually remembered him, but dressed in robes with the Moon shining pale on his hair. Idiotically, this hieratic image carried with it an acute sensory memory. Mark’s body hair. Mark had a surprising amount of hair on his body for such a pale, slender man, and it was not fair, like his hair, but dark like his eyebrows, and all of it kitten-soft. Remembering the feel of it gave Zillah a scathing wrench. The misery was back, thundering in her head, worse than ever.
“Cut it out!” she said aloud, because it made her furious not to be able to forget. And her furious exclamation made her see what she had to do. She had to cut it out properly, make it a sort of death, the biggest and cleanest break possible. Only that would lance the boil. Call it what you like, only stop it.
She wrote as much on the back of an envelope for Amanda. Then she went upstairs and picked Marcus up out of his crib, he mumbling sleepily and slobbering a little against her neck. She stood with him in her arms, facing the direction she sensed the capsule to be in. The rituals were building now, and she could feel the power. It was as if she stood in a large, faintly glowing space, where, twining toward her, she could see two misty filaments of her own hair and of Marcus’s. She waited. Power grew. It grew in Zillah, too, rising to surround and fill her, as it always seemed to do when she had real need. She had so much, in seconds, that she knew she could do whatever there was need for. She could choose not to do this. But she chose. She hooked the two filaments to her with a little finger, which was all she could spare from holding Marcus, and made them draw her in.
There was so much power there that it was easy. Quickly, coolly, without stress, like sliding around a half-open door, she found herself, still holding Marcus, standing in the aisle of the capsule, quite near the back. Behind her, the metal that held the machinery was now a complete silvery wall, with a sound like an electric fan coming from it. The space in front of her was full of people, many of whom she did not know. They all looked very tense. Marcus felt something had happened and sleepily uttered a small inquiring noise. Several heads turned. Zillah slipped into an empty seat quickly and apologetically, like someone arriving late in church, and drew the sense of her own insignificance tightly around herself and Marcus. She was nothing, nothing to bother about at all. It was something she had often found useful, this sense of not being worth anyone’s trouble. It worked again here. The heads turned away. Nothing there after all.
Outside, the gale of power being raised was translating into a physical wind, beating around the warehouse, causing hair and robes to stream, all over the country. The Names had mostly been spoken. The time was coming when something should happen — if it was going to.
The Celestial Omnibus jerked.
“I think we’re away!” whispered someone.
Nothing else.
It isn’t going to work! Zillah thought. What a fool I shall look! Oh, go, go, go, go! She pushed, urgently and wildly in her mind, at the solid lump of the bus. Again some wild part inside her rose to her need. She felt it flare around her as she pushed. But this tin box full of people was so heavy! Oh, go, go, go, go! she told it.
Then came the heart of the ritual. Lights blazed in many hundred circles, and fire streamed in high places. Inside the capsule, there was a sudden definite sense of floating, almost of weightlessness.
“This is it!” someone said.
As the last great effort went out, Gladys, wearing her Aspect of the Old Woman, turned to Amanda in her Aspect of the Mother and gave a slight nod. The effort was double-phased. The first was intended to send the capsule off — and there was not a soul participating who did not feel that something had moved, been sent, gone — and the second phase was to raise the Great Wards around the British Isles and — if possible — around the world. Mark felt the Wards of Pridain rise. He, too, nodded at Amanda. Now nothing of evil intent could penetrate the country; but no one could tell if the world was warded. It had never needed to be done before.
3
It was an exhausting night. Maureen was tottering with weariness by the time she climbed the stairs to her London flat. Dawn had come already. Unnatural-seeming sunshine filled the street. A few hours sleep, Maureen thought, setting her keys into the locks with unsteady hands, and she might be all right for dance practice this evening. It ought to be all right. Her weariness was mostly the weariness of elation. That great gale of power that had lifted the capsule and the wards together kept blowing through her mind, exultingly. What a feeling! It was the feeling that she dwelt on, though it had been good, too, arriving at the warehouse to find the capsule gone. Maureen was rather pleased that she had had the forethought to visit the place when the capsule was still there. She at least knew that there had been something there to vanish. It was not so with the nine of the Outer Ring.
They had gone there in a procession of cars. The nine had been very annoyed. And hurt. And incredulous. Koppa’s strident voice still rang in Maureen’s ears. Why had they not been told? What traitor? They were welcome to take her to any sphere of truth they pleased, and they would see she was At One with the Ring. Etcetera. And to be shown an empty warehouse convinced nobody of anything. Maureen kept remembering Paulie standing beside Mark in a white fury. Luckily Amanda had had the sense to take some photographs of the capsule, but what with Amanda’s total incompetence with a camera and the emanations of power in the warehouse, the prints she handed around were both blurred and crooked, and they mollified no one. Amanda had further irritated Maureen by the way her head went up and an expression of woe and worry kept crossing her face whenever she thought no one was looking. Amanda thought something had gone wrong. Did she now? Amanda would claim this special sensitivity — and most of the time when Maureen checked up on her worries, she found Amanda was just making a great fuss about nothing.