A Sudden Wild Magic

“Of course,” said the High Head. “People tend to mention the gods when they wish to persuade someone that their argument is important.”

“Ah,” said Gladys. “Then you’ve never seen them?”

“It is a very rare privilege which I confess I have not had,” he told her stiffly.

“Asphorael?” she asked.

“Not for years.” He felt irritable. He had a feeling he was failing some kind of test. “Madam, you must remember I have been on Arth for many years, and Arth is not this universe. Asphorael does not manifest on Arth. But in my youth my tutor did once or twice cause him to appear mistily before us.”

“What does he look like?” Gladys asked sharply.

“As always — brightly colored and somewhat anxious,” said the High Head. “I fail to see—”

“And the Great Centaur?” Gladys pursued.

He looked down at her in astonishment. “I am not sure he has ever been seen.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “I don’t see my lot that often in my own world. I always think we may be too used to them to notice them. Can you do me a favor and make an effort to see the Great Centaur now?”

He stood still and stared at her. “My good female, that would take a daylong ritual even to—”

“No it won’t,” she insisted. “Not when he needs to talk to you. Go on. Go for it. Jimbo will help you.”

He glanced at the ether monkey. So it was with her. He would do well to remember that. Meanwhile he supposed he had better humor the woman. He braced his feet and began to summon the threads of the Wheel. A little way off, Hugon had reached the gate and was holding it open for them, pawing with impatience. The High Head sympathized. He was quivering with shock and desperate to reach the king — and now he thought about it, bruised all over — and yet here he was instead somehow at the beck and call of a fat little — little dame covered with beads like a savage. And Edward had said the folk of otherworld were one hundred percent human! If Edward had met Gladys, he might have doubted that.

Gladys watched the strange gestures he made and tried not to shake her head. He was working beside the lines of force instead of along them, and on a level she would never have chosen. But then, Len had always done things his own peculiar way too, she thought affectionately, and Len nearly always got results. This one was just the same. His gestures — with some extra manipulation from Jimbo — had caused a troubling in the air above their heads. Gladys sighed. She was only able to see white filigree whorls. That reminded her of Len too. But it was clear that the High Head, for a few instants, saw. He whirled around on her, his face pulled into a grimace of awe and anger.

“What is this? What have you done? The Great One is dying! What has otherworld done to us?”

“Nothing. It’s not our doing. But come along and I’ll try to explain.” Sadly and sedately, Gladys went through the gate and turned the way Hugon pointed up the rutty road beyond. The High Head hurried after. Hugon banged the gate shut and strode ahead again.

“You have a great deal to explain, woman!” the High Head panted, catching up with Gladys in the cloud of dust Hugon raised. “The Great One — the Pentarchy — is drowning in poison from your world! And you say it’s not your fault!”

“I didn’t say that,” Gladys said. “I do blame myself. If I’d known, I’d have done something earlier. I just hope it’s not too late now we do know. The trouble is, it’s been going on for centuries now, ever since those magicians up in that pocket universe of yours — Arth, do you call it? — spotted that my world had a lot of ideas theirs didn’t have. I expect at first they just took a look, then copied what they saw. But then they got the notion of making us get ideas for them. If they made us uncomfortable, or worked us around into having a war, or needing a new way to get about, then we set to and invented things to help us out. And they took the inventions and the ideas and sent them down here for people to use here. I reckon they’ve had everything from steam trains to penicillin and magic, for years and years now. No doubt they justified it by telling themselves that otherworld people weren’t really human.”

Heat flooded the face of the High Head. “This is certainly true,” he said. “That is — we were accustomed to rely on otherworld to initiate methods of supplying the needs of the Pentarchy. But I assure you that the whole matter was studied and the experiments most carefully controlled. It was understood from the outset that what we took from your universe must be balanced by something from ours. I was always particularly careful to do this. It was my custom to plant men from Arth in otherworld, whose real physical presence—”