In the end Maureen left Mark and Amanda to deal with the Outer Ring and drove home. She absolutely had to sleep. Not even a cup of cocoa first. Just fall into bed.
She opened her door into a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. The curtains of her living room were drawn and the lights on. Faugh. And there was bloody Joe sitting on her sofa leering at her with a can of beer in his hand and a loaded ashtray between his feet. He’s been drinking again, she thought. She hadn’t the energy to cope.
“Out,” she said, holding the door open with one hand and gesturing with the other. “Come on. You’re going. I need to sleep. How did you get in here anyway?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m not going. Neither are you. We’re staying here together.”
“Don’t give me—” Maureen was beginning, when the door moved heavily under her hand and shut itself with a dull boom. She whirled toward it. There were wards down on it, preventing her from touching it. Strong wards, weird ones, ones she did not know. She whirled back.
Joe continued to grin. There was something odd about his face. “You won’t find you can break those wards. They’re the wards of Arth. I’ve got them all around this flat. Nobody’s going in or out, and nobody’s going to hear any kind of call you make for help. So you might as well tell me all about this project of yours now. It’ll save us both a lot of trouble.”
I don’t believe this! she thought. She was so tired. “What the hell are you talking about?” As she spoke she realized he was right about the wards round the flat. She could feel them hemming the place in, thick and heavy and strange to her.
Joe stood up. He was thickset, black-haired and with black stubble on his chin, but he was not as drunk as she had assumed. Perhaps not drunk at all. She wondered how she had ever fancied him. “This project of yours,” he said. “I waited until you’d done whatever it was, because I knew you’d be easier to catch then. Now I want you to tell me exactly what you’ve been doing so that I can report to the High Head.”
“You’re raving,” said Maureen.
“No way,” he said. “And don’t try any tricks with witchcraft. I learnt my mageworking on Arth, and I know things you’ve never even dreamt of.”
“The same goes for me!” she snapped. “You’ve no idea of half the things I know!” And, as he took a heavy step toward her, she added, “And don’t think you can overpower me physically, either. I’m a professional dancer, remember. I’m much stronger than I look.”
Joe gave her a look of contempt that somehow deepened the strangeness she had seen in his face. “I know that. I came prepared to wait it out. Look. Take a look.” The sharp smell of his sweat mingled with the smoke-fug as he moved sideways away from her, always making sure not to turn his back, she noticed, and kicked open the doors to the kitchen and the bathroom.
Maureen moved, equally warily, to the center of the room. She was so tired that she seemed to be functioning on animal instincts alone. Her main feeling was exasperation and outrage. The kitchen was piled with boxes of groceries. She could see fruit, vegetables, potato crisps. The bath was full of packs of lager. How typical of Joe!
“See?” he said. “We’ll be quite comfortable while we wait for you to tell me. I got all this stuff mostly so that you’d see I’m in earnest. But it would be much easier if you’d tell me everything straightaway.” Still keeping himself facing her, he retreated sideways and settled himself back in the corner of the sofa. “Well?”
There were reserves of strength in everyone, Maureen told herself. She ought still to have a charge of power from the ritual too. She drew on both, or tried to, and told herself she felt better for it. “Piss off,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do,” he said. “You’ve just performed a very big ritual of some kind. I want to know what it was supposed to do. The real world needs to know. They sent me over here to find out what you were doing, and find out is what I’m going to do. I don’t want to be stuck in your stinking world for any longer than I have to be.”
He’s a spy from the pirate universe, Maureen thought. She was beyond either surprise or alarm. The thought came to her simply as a sort of summing up of all the things she had seen since she first unlocked her front door. She thought of the capsule. It might be in Laputa-Blish by now, or it might not. No one knew how long a transition between universes should take, or even whether they had got the transition right. Even assuming the very best, that the capsule had got there almost instantly and the team had succeeded in entering that fortress, the virus-magic needed time in which to take effect. They had had six hours. They needed at least six more. I’ll just have to wait it out, she thought. “Damned if I tell you anything,” she said.
“Really?” Joe said. “You have to sleep sometime. I can work on your head then.”
“So do you have to sleep,” she said. But her spirit sank. She was so weary. There was a sort of hollow weakness under her breastbone that she suspected was despair. “It seems to be deadlock,” she said, and seated herself grimly facing him at the other end of the sofa. He gazed at her jeeringly. And she realized what the odd thing was about his face. There were all sorts of foreign thoughts in it. She could see the alien consciousness behind his face pushing the features she had thought she knew well into a completely new shape. She tried to tell herself that this did not scare her — not at all. She was just so tired.
IV Arth
1
Tod was not happy. It did not make him feel any better to know he had not expected to be happy in Arth. He was only there because his father had insisted on it.
“It’s your legal obligation, I’m afraid, son,” the Pentarch told him. “I wouldn’t bother you with it if it wasn’t. Hated my stint in the place. Stupid rules and out-of-date notions. They say it’s even more of a back number these days. Lost its point, to my mind, as soon as all the new technology came in. But the law still says that the heir to a Pentarchy has to have his year in Arth. If you don’t, you don’t qualify as my heir, son, and the king could roll me up as well as you. He might, too. I’ve had several polite inquiries from the Royal Office about you. You’ll have to go.”
Tod liked and trusted his old father. He got on with him, even though the old man behaved like a swine to Tod’s mother. So he did not make the fuss he might have done. He gave up his lovely, happy, easygoing life — his expensive car, his good-looking girls, his racing and antiques collecting, his first-class food — he was an adult, for the gods’ sake, and could afford to have these things! — and entered the austere regime of Arth without doing more than grumble savagely to himself.
Now, nearly two months later, Tod kept wondering how his father had been able to stand it, even as a young man. Poor old August! he kept thinking. How had he stood the soldierly bunk rooms, for a start? Not to speak of the food. Drink — forget it! Anything but weak passet beer was against the rules because it disturbed the vibes, so they said. There was a rule against almost everything enjoyable on these grounds. It irked Tod almost to fury at times, even though he had been prepared for it.
What he had not been prepared for was to find his fellow servicemen were — with two exceptions — complete louts. Stupid louts, too. That had surprised Tod, because he had heard that only the best young men qualified for Arth. But these were not only stupid, but the kind of louts who resented Tod for his high birth and got at him for it whenever they could. They did not seem to grasp that Tod’s birth was nobody’s fault, or that Tod could have melted them to little pools of body fat if he’d wanted. So far Tod had refrained from doing anything to them. But it was severe temptation — all the more so because the servicemen were never out of one another’s company. The cadets and the qualified Brothers kept themselves priggishly separate and would barely speak to Tod and his like.