But beyond the airport district, beyond the tourist havens and the glittering illusion palaces, there was a different Creen. Pyrgus, who’d been visiting the country since before the revolution that brought the Seven into power, took one of the least-known walkways from the airport, a narrow, dingy, ill-lit track that held out the promise of threatening alleyways, simbala dens, dope deals, muggings and cut-purses. But the promise was deceptive, for, after a short rooftop walk, a humming distortion created a Mobius shape that bent the path back to the instant it began, allowing Pyrgus fresh entry; and now the walkway was an open avenue that led into the Old City.
The Old City dated back to the foundation of Creen, close to a thousand years ago, and Pyrgus loved it. The streets were narrow, but the timber-inlaid buildings that overhung them were enormous – structures that defied the laws of engineering with the help of spells so ancient no one now knew how they worked. At the precise geographical centre of the Old City lay its suk, a vast, open maze of market stalls, bathed in perpetual sunshine, that offered magical artifacts, ingredients, spare parts, potions, powders, clothing, weapons and machinery unlike anything found elsewhere in the Realm. Haleklind was the magical capital of the planet, known to its citizens by its traditional name, Creen. Creen City was Haleklind’s capital, Creen Suk its beating heart. It was in the suk that Pyrgus once bought a prized possession, his first Halek knife. It was to the suk that he was going now.
Despite the teeming crowds, he found the secret walkway without difficulty, although mounting it unseen was so problematical that he wasted almost half an hour pretending to examine a selection of copper vessels designed to capture djinn. But then the crowd thinned suddenly and he made the transition. The walkway swept him outwards, then downwards into the subterranean labyrinth beneath the suk. When it emerged, he was standing outside a derelict factory plastered with Unsafe Building notices.
Pyrgus climbed on some disused spice drums to look through the dusty windows. He couldn’t afford to risk the possibility of a security breach, but the interior was a deserted ruin with the only things of interest some scraps of rusting machinery, and the only signs of life the remains of a camp fire that had once warmed squatters. He tossed a pebble through a broken pane and listened as it echoed on the stone-flagged floor. A small stream of dust cascaded from cracks in the ceiling.
He climbed down, glanced around to make sure he was not being watched, then leaned on the broken pillar to one side of the boarded entrance. The spell coating recognised his DNA and sucked him inside.
The receptionist was a dark-eyed female demon, one of the very few he’d ever seen permitted to work outside of Hael. She glanced into the crystal ball set on her desk, then smiled at him. ‘Crown Prince Pyrgus,’ she acknowledged. ‘What can the Society do for you today?’
‘Is Corin still alive?’ Pyrgus asked. There was considerable wastage in the Haleklind Society for the Preservation and Protection of Animals: the wizards hunted down its members without mercy.
‘Yes,’ the demon told him pleasantly. She looked at him expectantly. Literalism was a Hael characteristic. The demons never seemed able to interpret what you said, never got a jump ahead (without creeping into your mind, of course, which Blue had made illegal) so they reacted to every question a sentence at a time.
‘Is he still your Executive Secretary?’
‘Yes, Crown Prince Pyrgus.’
‘Is it possible for me to see him?’
‘Yes.’
After a moment, Pyrgus added, ‘Now?’
‘Yes, of course, sir,’ said the demon enthusiastically. Her long, graceful hand reached towards a symbol inlaid in her desk.
‘It’s just Pyrgus Malvae,’ Pyrgus told her. ‘I don’t use the title any more.’
‘Of course, Pyrgus Malvae.’ The smile was quite pleasant despite the sharpness of her teeth. The outstretched hand touched the symbol. ‘May your Gods walk with you.’
The transition to Corin’s office was instantaneous. Corin himself was rising from behind his desk, smiling broadly, hand outstretched. ‘Pyrgus, dear boy, how good to see you! How is the lovely Nymphalis? Have you two had children yet? No, of course not: far too busy for that sort of thing. So little time and so many animals in need, eh? And I believe you’re making wine now – some excellent vintages, from what I understand.’
Pyrgus took the hand and grinned at him. ‘I’ll send you a bottle or twelve. Meant to bring one with me, but I left home in a hurry. Bit of an emergency, I’m afraid.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Corin said, waving him into a seat. He was a small, balding, rotund middle-aged Haleklinder, who looked as far distant from hero material as you could possibly imagine. Yet he was probably the bravest man Pyrgus had ever known. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘My manticore’s escaped,’ Pyrgus told him bluntly.
Corin’s eyes widened. ‘The prototype? The one you liberated?’
Pyrgus nodded. ‘I don’t know what happened. She was perfectly happy for more than eighteen months, then suddenly she broke out and took off.’
‘She’ll have come on heat,’ Corin said. ‘She wasn’t eating John’s wort, by any chance?’
Pyrgus looked at him in surprise. ‘She was, actually. I don’t know who fed it to her.’
‘Nobody, would be my guess. A full-grown manticore is perfectly capable of manifesting a few choice leaves of anything she fancies – the wizards built in magical capabilities. There’s nothing they fancy more when coming into heat than John’s wort.’
‘I didn’t know that: about manifesting,’ Pyrgus said. ‘She never did it before.’
‘Probably didn’t have to. They only manifest when they need something. It’s a credit to you, Pyrgus. Shows she was happy with you. Shows you gave her everything she needed. Until she came on heat, of course. She’d be off like a rocket then, looking for a mate. And more John’s wort.’
For the first time since Nymph told him the news of the break-out, Pyrgus felt something relax in his stomach. He’d come to his old friends in the Society hoping Corin might raise some manpower to help him track the manticore, but now it was beginning to look as if he might not have to. ‘I thought she might head for the lab. The place where they constructed her.’
‘What, try to get back at the wizards? Revenge for the pain they caused her?’
‘Something like that,’ Pyrgus said. ‘Vengeance is a manticore characteristic.’ He looked soberly at Corin. ‘Actually, I wasn’t so much worried about the wizards as the manticore. If she did attack the laboratory, they’d kill her. They’d have to and they wouldn’t hesitate. I thought the only chance would be to head her off – that’s why I came here. I was hoping you might loan me some men.’
Corin gave a faint smile. ‘Let me show you something.’ He pressed an inlay on his desk and a viewscreen emerged out of the floor behind him. As it rose, Pyrgus noticed it was one of the newer models with three-dimensional immersive capabilities: the Society must have robbed a few banks lately. Corin made a small adjustment to the inlay and the screen flared into life.
The immersive spells pulled Pyrgus in at once. He knew he was still seated in Corin’s office, of course, but he still experienced the sensation of standing outside, on a small, grassy hillside with a breeze ruffling his hair as he stared down on the ruin of a distant building, now reduced to a heap of rubble, still smoking slightly.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Corin’s smile widened. ‘The laboratory. We blew it up.’
Pyrgus snapped out of the illusion and gave him a startled, delighted look. ‘I heard nothing about that!’
‘The Seven kept it quiet: complete news black-out. It was their main research centre after all. Very bad for their image to admit they couldn’t protect it against a ragbag of misguided elements, which is how they like to portray us.’ He looked at Pyrgus benignly. ‘The one thing you need have no worries about is your manticore attacking the laboratory. The laboratory doesn’t exist any more.’ He pushed his chair back so he could look at the picture on the screen. ‘We used null-energy explosives so they can’t build again for years: magic won’t work there for the remainder of this century.’