A Sudden Wild Magic

“Bless you, they all move, these universes!” Gladys said. “Ours wriggles about, and theirs wanders up and over and around ours, and all the others do it too. Every time I go, there’s a difference. Cup of tea, Mark, please.”

Mark, who had spent his stint looking after Gladys in laboriously exploring ways and means of transferring matter between universes — the pirates had proved it could be done, otherwise he would have despaired— sprang to the kettle, and then stopped. “What about Laputa-Blish? Does that move?”

“Yes. It sort of jostles in a circle around theirs. The first time I went back to look for it, I thought it had gone,” Gladys confessed. “But it was just around the back of them after all. I was in quite a panic till I realized.”

“I’ll need its course plotted,” he said. “If it’s moving about, our capsule could miss it and simply disintegrate in the void between. That void’s giving me nightmares anyway. All sorts of things could happen to our team there. I must have a chart of how Laputa-Blish moves.”

“You’ll get it. When do I get my tea?”

“Now — at once,” he said, diving to the stove through the jungle trees. They kept the kettle perpetually simmering these days. “Amanda left you some soup in a thermos. Want some?”

“Not if it’s like her tea,” said Gladys.

“It’s not. She said her sister made it.” Mark brought her the soup with her tea, and she did not refuse it. As he got back to work, she said sharply, “Did you feed my cats?”

“They make damn sure I do,” he said. She chuckled. When he next looked, she was off again, or perhaps asleep, with Jimbo a dark, leggy, motionless heap on her lap. He got down to work again, grateful for the heavy warding Gladys kept around her house. Someone kept trying to contact him. He was fairly sure it was Paulie. It was sharp and possessive and had a female feel to it. Whoever it was had some difficulty penetrating Gladys’s wards as more than a little nagging whisper. At any other time he would have answered at once, just on the off chance it was Zillah — even though Zillah was never possessive and had anyway made it plain that everything between them was finished — but not now. Transfer was fiendishly difficult. He kept wondering why, when the pirates could do something of this order, they needed to steal from Earth at all.

Gladys burst out laughing.

Mark jumped around to find her leaning back in her chair cackling, and Jimbo capering around her legs. “Are you all right?” he said cautiously.

“Oh, dear me, yes!” she said, wiping a tear of laughter away with her blotchy knuckles. “Oh Lord! You’ll never believe this, Mark! I’ve found out what those big linkages are. I was fairly sure they were transferring people, and they are. They’re women, Mark — girls for the troops! They just sent the lot of them back.”

“Are you sure?” he said. Her earthy cackle unnerved him. He felt prudish dismay.

“Of course I’m sure! Every soul in Laputa-Blish at this moment is a man. Think I don’t know the difference?”

“Then we’ve got our strike force,” he said, divided between distaste and relief.

“That’s right, dear,” Gladys said. “Trojan women. Girls for the troops. Jael smote Sisera sleeping, and a few Jezebels for luck. I almost wish I could be going myself!”

Further careful observation confirmed that the resident population of Laputa-Blish was indeed all male. Amanda and Maureen gleefully set about choosing a group of the gifted, committed, and good-looking from which the strike force could be selected.

“It serves them right,” Amanda said, briskly ticking names on her list, “for confining the use of magic to the male sex.”

“Oh, but they don’t,” said Gladys, and her eyes met Mark’s. “That poor girl in the hospital was a proficient, wasn’t she?”

“We’d better get in touch with her,” he said uneasily.

“All in good time. When she’s ready to talk.” Gladys stroked her animal. “Jimbo says she’s still in shock yet. He thinks the pirates don’t really understand about rebirth the way we do.”

II Arth

1

The High Head of All Horns and King’s Vicar on Arth performed the final motions that transferred his visitors from Arth to their homes in the Fiveir of Leathe. Instead of doing it with his mind, which was the usual practice, he drew the symbols of the weave in the air with his hands and took vicious satisfaction in the way they burned green across his sanctum. Ozone crackled from wall to wall. Those ladies were in for a rough ride. Having done this, he sank into a seat, slung his heavy mitre onto its stand, and loosened his uniform with savage relief.