I crossed the track and opened the gate. "There's a village beyond those trees. You can get food there and cuddle up to some buildings."
It took my master some time to lose his jitters. It was almost as if he expected the empty fields or winter bushes to rise like enemies and fall on him, and his head turned constantly against surprise attack. He quaked at every bird call.
Conversely, I stayed relaxed for this first part of the journey, precisely because the countryside seemed wholly deserted. There was no magical activity of any description, even in the distant skies.
When we reached the village, we raided its solitary grocery store and pinched sufficient supplies to keep the boy's stomach happy for the rest of the day. It was a smallish place, a few cottages clustered around a ruined church, not nearly large enough to have its own resident magician. The few humans we saw ambled around quietly without so much as an imp in tow. My master was very dismissive of them.
"Don't they realize how vulnerable they are?" he sniffed, as we passed the final cottage. "They've got no defenses. Any magical attack and they'd be helpless."
"Perhaps that's not high on their list of priorities," I suggested. "There are other things to worry about: making a living, for example. Not that you'll have been taught anything about that."[90]
"Oh no?" he said. "To be a magician is the greatest calling. Our skills and sacrifices hold the country together, and those fools should be grateful we're there."
"Grateful for people like Lovelace, you mean?"
He frowned at this, but did not answer.
It was mid—afternoon before we ran into danger. The first thing my master knew about it was my throwing myself upon him and bundling us into a shallow ditch beside the road. I pressed him low against the earth, a little harder than necessary.
He had a mouthful of mud. "Whop you doing?"
"Keep your voice down. A patrol's flying up ahead. North—south."
I indicated a gap in the hedge. A small flock of starlings could be seen drifting far off across the clouds.
He spat his mouth empty. "I can't make them out."
"On planes five onward they're foliots.[91] Trust me. We have to go carefully from now on."
The starlings vanished to the south. Cautiously, I got to my feet and scanned the horizon. A little way ahead a straggling band of trees marked the beginning of an area of woodland. "We'd better get off the road," I said. "It's too exposed here. After nightfall we can get closer to the house." With infinite caution, we squeezed through a gap in the hedge and, after rounding the perimeter of the field beyond, gained the relative safety of the trees. Nothing threatened on any plane.
The wood was negotiated without incident; soon afterward, we crouched on its far fringes, surveying the land ahead. Before us, the ground fell away slightly, and we had a clear view over the autumn fields, heavily plowed and purple—brown. About a mile distant, the fields ran themselves out against an old brick boundary wall, much weathered and tumbledown. This, and a low, dark bunching of pine trees behind it, marked the edge of the Heddleham estate. A red dome was visible (on the fifth plane) soaring up from the pines. As I watched, it disappeared; a moment later another, bluish, dome materialized on the sixth plane, somewhat farther off.
Hunched within the trees was the suggestion of a tall arch—perhaps the official entrance to the manor's grounds. From this arch a road extended, straight as a javelin thrust between the fields, until it reached a crossroads next to a clump of oak trees, half a mile from where we stood. The lane that we had recently been following also terminated at this crossroads. Two other routes led away from it elsewhere.
The sun had not quite disappeared behind the trees and the boy squinted against its glare. "Is that a sentry?" He pointed to a distant stump halfway to the crossroads. Something unclear rested upon it: perhaps a motionless, black figure.
"Yes," I said. "Another's just materialized at the edge of that triangular field."
"Oh! The first one's gone."
"I told you—they're randomly materializing. We can't predict where they'll appear. Do you see that dome?"
"No."
"Your lenses are worse than useless."
The boy cursed. "What do you expect? I don't have your sight, demon. Where is it?"
"Coarse language will get you nowhere. I'm not telling."
"Don't be ridiculous! I need to know."
"This demon's not saying."
"Where is it?"
"Careful where you stamp your feet. You've trodden in something." "Just tell me!" "I've been meaning to mention this for some time. I don't like being called a demon. Got that?"
He took a deep breath. "Fine."
"Just so you know."
"All right."
"I'm a djinni."
"Yes, all right. Where's the dome?"
"It's in the wood. On the sixth plane now, but it'll shift position soon."
"They've made it difficult for us."
"Yes. That's what defenses do."
His face was gray with weariness, but still set and determined. "Well, the objective's clear. The gateway is bound to mark the official entrance to the estate—the only hole in the protective domes. That's where they'll check people's identities and passes. If we can get beyond it, we'll have got inside."
"Ready to be trussed up and killed," I said. "Hurrah."
"The question," he continued, "is how we get in…"
He sat for a long time, shading his eyes with his hand, watching as the sun sank behind the trees and the fields were swathed in cold green shadow. At irregular intervals, sentries came and went without trace (we were too far away to smell the sulfur).
A distant sound drew our attention back to the roads. Along the one that led to the horizon, something that from a mile away looked like a black matchbox came roaring: a magician's car, speeding between the hedges, honking its horn imperiously at every corner. It reached the crossroads, slowed to a halt and—safely assured that nothing was coming—turned right along the road to Heddleham. As it neared the gateway, two of the sentries bounded toward it at great speed across the darkened fields, robes fluttering behind them like tattered rags. Once they reached the hedges bordering the road they went no further, but kept pace beside the car, which presently drew close to the gateway in the trees. The shadows here were very thick, and it was hard to glimpse what happened. The car pulled up in front of the gate. Something approached it. The sentries hung back at the lip of the trees. Presently, the car proceeded on its way, through the arch and out of sight. Its drone faded on the evening air. The sentries flitted back into the fields.
The boy sat back and stretched his arms. "Well," he said, "that tells us what we need to do."
35
The crossroads was the place for the ambush. Any vehicles approaching it had to slow down for fear of accident, and it was concealed from the distant Heddleham gateway by a thick clump of oaks and laurel. This also promised good cover for lurking.
Accordingly, we made our way there that night. The boy crawled along the base of the hedges beside the road. I flitted in front of him in the guise of a bat.
No sentries materialized beside us. No watchers flew overhead. The boy reached the crossroads and burrowed into the undergrowth below the biggest oak tree. I hung from a bough, keeping watch.
My master slept, or tried to. I observed the rhythms of the night: the fleeting movements of owl and rodent, the scruffles of foraging hedgehogs, the prowling of the restive djinn. In the hours before dawn, the cloud cover drifted away and the stars shone down. I wondered whether Lovelace was reading their import from the roof of the hall, and what they told him. The night grew chill. Frost sparkled across the fields.
90
How true this was. Magicians are essentially parasitic. In societies where they are dominant, they live well off the strivings of others In those times and places when they lose power and have to earn their own bread, they are generally reduced to a sorry state, performing small conjurations for jeering ale—house crowds in return for a few brass coins.
91
A variety with five eyes, two on the head, one on either flank, and one—well, let's just say it would be hard to creep up on him unawares while he was touching his toes.