A Sudden Wild Magic

“I’m not asking you to break your damned Oath!” she roared in his face. “I’m just asking you to dance! Is that so bad? I want to — I will if you will!”

It did look fun, Brother Milo thought, wistfully watching joyous faces prancing past. And nothing in the Oath said anything about dancing. The end of the line was coming past now. He could hear himself speak when he protested, “I don’t know the words!”

“Nobody ever does,” said Helen. “Make some up.”

And here came the end of the line, the two kitchen cadets, out of step and shooting the wrong leg out and roaring, “Cesspits are for honkers — Ah!”

“Oh, all right,” said Brother Milo. He seized the waist of the hinder cadet and joined in, lustily singing, “Decline and fall and conquer — Ah!” He felt Helen seize his waist, but there really was no harm in it. “And conquer — Ah!” they both bellowed, dancing toward the main ramp. Some latecomer joined in behind Helen. As soon as she felt her waist grasped, it was clear to her that Brother Milo had given in to more than dancing. He would break his Oath with her as soon as they stopped. She felt as much sadness as triumph — which was ridiculous, since this was one of the things she was here for, for God’s sake! “Decline and fall and conquer — Ah!” She resolved that he should enjoy it tremendously. It seemed the least she could do.

Halfway up the main ramp, bouncing tirelessly at the head of the line, Flan felt as if she were in a dervishlike trance by then. It was wonderful. Almost every mage in Arth was coiling up the main ramp behind her toward Healing Horn, some upside down, some sideways, each singing for all he was worth, and the whole fortress vibrating with it. She was dimly aware that the rhythms were fiercer. The line of heads apparently jogging above her as they came up after her were singing something different now. Flan changed her own song to match the change. “I came I saw I conquered—Ah!” Flan sang, too loud in her own ears to hear that the mages coiling up the ramp were in fact singing, “Let’s pull the High Head’s legs off — Ah! Let’s finish the old bastard—Ah!” No one knew where this began, but once begun, it overtook and replaced even the servicemen’s new words, which were very dirty indeed. “LET’S KILL THAT BROTHER LAWRENCE!” they roared, and pounded upward to do it.

Edward looked up from Judy’s face. The citadel was vibrating very oddly indeed — joyfully, fiercely — tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-tum-TAH, in a way he had never known it to do before. Listening, he could hear a huge, rhythmic roar, from the throats of many people.

“What is it?” said Judy. “It’s like a football crowd.”

It was nothing Edward had heard before, a strange, uplifting, and decidedly threatening sound. He went and took a look out of the doorway. Beyond the veiling, the words were gigantic and unmistakable.

“Wait here a moment,” Edward said to Judy. He wasted no time in efforts to project to a mirror: he ran, ran in huge, long-legged strides, downward and along a corridor that gave him, every so often, arched glimpses of the roaring blue line snaking up the main ramp. The citadel pounded around him like a drum. He threw himself through the veiling of the High Head’s outer office, bursting between the two elderly mage-clerks there who had been timidly peering out to see what the noise was, and dived into the sanctum itself. It was, as usual, sunny, quiet, and serene. In here there was no hint of the beat or the roar.

The High Head looked up with placid annoyance. “Edward — I was going to send for you to explain these reports—”

“No time for that now, Lawrence!” Edward gasped. “You’ve got to get out of here! Those women are all witches from otherworld. They’ve managed to harness the vibrations against you. Every mage in the place is on the way up here roaring for your blood!”

The High Head found it impossible to grasp the enormity of what Edward was suddenly telling him. If it had not been Edward, he would have dismissed it as a joke. “But the vibrations are normal!” he said. “For the first time for—”

“They’ve got the citadel on their side,” Edward said impatiently. “You have to believe—”

“The citadel’s not a conscious entity,” the High Head interrupted. “Otherworld? Are you sure? How did they change their shapes?”

The vibrations were suddenly with them. The room shook to the enormous rhythm, rackingly. The blocks of the walls ground together, jolting in time to it, filling the room with regular clouds of fine blue dust. The High Head stood up and stared slowly around.

“It is conscious?”

“Yes, and they didn’t change shape — they’re as human as we are!” Edward gabbled. “Go now! You can just get to the secret way from your back ramp, if you go now!”