A Sudden Wild Magic

“Amanda, let me have Mark now. Please. I’ve done all I could.”

“I know.” Amanda was holding on to the mantelpiece with one hand. She looked exhausted. She waved the other hand wearily at Mark. “You have to ask him, Zillah. He’s not a pawn.”

“Mark,” she said faintly. “Come home with me? Please?”

Mark seemed to see her for the first time. “Zillah? You want me?”

The look on his face set the other presence squalling again.

“… about the insurance?” Zillah heard. “All those bills and our mortgage.”

“Always,” she said, holding out her arms through the noise.

He walked into her arms gladly.

9

“I don’t get on with all this transposing, or whatever they call it,” Gladys grumbled to Jimbo. They had no sooner arrived in the grove and seen all the great rumps of those centaurs rushing away than they were somehow ahead of them, on a lawn lit by a set of barbecues and standing beside another centaur. This one was smaller and whiter, as far as she could see. She could hear the High Head muttering something about how little light there was.

The king’s seven mages appeared to agree. They all raised light— something she would have given her toes to be able to do — great pearly blue globes of it between each man’s hands. Then she realized they had arrived in one of those utter stillnesses which meant the working of magic was in progress. What she saw, the female in bloodred, the child on the table, and the knife, nearly caused her to rush forward and interrupt. But the king raised a warning hand, and she saw it was a different stillness.

It was over in that instant. A girl — Zillah — sagged onto the end of the table. The small white centaur started forward, and so did two other people from the terrace-thing at the back. The red woman seemed about to bring the knife down, but the man dressed like a jester calmly leaned over and took the child off the table.

“Not this time,” he said. “Not him too.” The red woman stared and then screeched, “Herre!!” The jester-man turned away. “Give me his clothes, Aliky. He’s freezing.”

At this moment Jimbo vanished from Gladys’s arms. She cried out, “Jimbo!” and cried out again when she saw him briefly on the table where the child had been. He loomed like a mad spider in the queer light, and the shadows gave him far too many arms. In another jolt of movement, he was on the red woman. His voice beat and howled through her head, “WRONG GREED! FOUL EATER! GREED!” with such force that Gladys nearly fell over, although she knew Jimbo was not shouting at her. She saved herself on the flank of the white centaur and stared at him attacking the woman. She had never known Jimbo do such a thing before.

The woman screamed. It looked as if she hid her face in her arms. Then she grew other arms and flailed at the ether monkey. An instant later it was clear that there was another thing, many-armed like Jimbo, emerging from the woman’s substance to fight back. There was, for another instant, a scrawl of flailing limbs and a hideous low howling, before the fabric of that world seemed to become too flimsy for the creatures, and for the woman too. Everything elongated around them, blurred and stretched, so that the tearing and howling was going on in a deepening pit composed of lawn, table, house, terrace — until it tore under the strain and snapped back, leaving a vibrating bare space.

10

Wrapped together in the nightmare bodiless intimacy of the sepia space, Joe-Maureen looked up and screamed. A fighting tangle of glossy black limbs, with something fraying and shredding among them, plunged toward them, filling the whorls with senseless howlings. He-she struggled aside, threw herself askew, and then threw himself backward. The tangle plunged wailing past, barely missing them, and vanished on downward, spraying them as it went with hot acid redness, that lashed them agonizingly with salt.

“Blood!” screamed Maureen. “That was real matter!” Joe’s reply was “I want out. up this way?”

“I don’t care anymore,” she said. “I’d do anything.” He said, “You might have to. You realize we’re stuck with one another after this, do you?”

She knew he was right. The nightmare enwrapment meant that she knew he knew a myriad small, disgraceful things about her, for instance, the way she had pushed poor old Flan Burke into going in the capsule just in order that Flan might not rival her in the troupe. And she knew the same things about him. What he had done to that man Wilfrid in Arth, for example. Wilfrid may have deserved it, but Joe had been vile, just vile. These and thousands of other pieces of knowledge bound them so tight that nothing short of murder could release them — and even murder was out of the question, for what one thought, the other would know. “I’ll settle for that,” she said.

“Me too,” he said. “Up now. I think this is how. It’ll take a while.”

Eventually there was a sense of rising. Altogether elsewhere, in the sealed flat, their two flaccid bodies stirred on the sofa.

11