A Sudden Wild Magic

“You in the second row — red hair — you’re still missing the beat! One and two and, one and two and! That’s better!” Somehow, with her total exasperation, the professional had arisen in Flan and taken over completely. She remembered herself suddenly in the middle of the room, clapping for attention. Music came jangling to a startled halt, faces had turned, gaping. “That was awful, people, just awful!” Flan had found herself telling them, in the full, carrying voice of a dance teacher. “You can all do much better than that. I’ll show you. Let me just get these shoes off my feet...” And then she had shown them how and worked them and worked with them. Faces by now shone with sweat. The Brother Instructor’s face was twisted and gasping. Honest! He should be fitter than that. He didn’t know what work was! Tomorrow she was going to take them all back to basics, but now it was probably time for a little simple yoga.

“All right, people. You can rest. You have the makings of a good dancer,” she told her handsome mage. His grave face lit with a besotted smile. She knew that if she’d asked him to lick her toes, he would have lain down on the floor and done so.

But Brother Instructor was bustling up to Flan, limping a little and very angry. “My good woman, it is not our purpose here to dance. This is a Ritual of the Goddess.”

“Then you should dance,” Flan told him. “She likes it. Anyway, dancing is the basis of all good movement, whatever you think She wants. All right, people, if you’ve got your breath, we’ll have a little yoga now.”

10

As two dozen mages tried to force their unaccustomed legs into lotus position, the High Head received an urgent summons from Edward.

“Couldn’t it wait until I met you at supper?” he asked as he arrived in Healing Horn. One of the women, the blond hysterical one, was lying on the outermost bunk, pale and comatose. Though the High Head was sure she was unconscious, her presence made him uncomfortable. He was not used to the outline of breasts on a sleeper under a blanket.

“No, it couldn’t be then,” Edward said, in his most apologetic way. “It had to be here.” He was hovering beside a more distant bunk that reeked of stasis mage-work, and he seemed to be concealing something in one hand. “She’s in healing trance,” he said, seeing the High Head’s attention on the woman. “I didn’t realize how upset she was when her friend died. My fault. But I think I’ve discovered the reason for those deaths now. Will you come over here?”

The High Head approached the further bunk and found himself staring down at a true corpse, a fair young man lying lifeless and, oddly enough, looking in death much less deathlike than the unconscious woman. A nice young lad. The pity of this death wrung him, like a pain in his chest.

“Look at him carefully,” Edward said. The High Head did not want to, but for Edward’s sake, he looked. “Does he remind you of anything?” Edward asked.

“Death,” said the High Head. “Life. Waste.”

“No, I meant does he make you think of anyone?” Edward said. “Anyone you know?”

Now Edward mentioned it, the face of the dead lad did seem familiar, a little, but the High Head could not, for the life of him, place the face. Was it Edward as a youngster? No. Edward’s face was longer and his features smaller. “Not — that I can think of, I’m afraid.”

“Then does this ring a bell?” Edward said. Eagerly, precisely, he let unfold the thing in his hand. It was an irregularly shaped sheet of purplish plastic — probably the backing from a dressing — with random holes cut in it. Edward spread this with great care over the right half of the young corpse’s face. “Now look.”

Suddenly the young man was mottled with purple dapples that extended into his hair.

“Great Goddess!” said the High Head. “The centaur — Galpetto!”

“Yes,” said Edward. “And no proper cause for death. He’s the centaur’s analogue in whatever world they come from, and I’m afraid the two of them couldn’t exist together in the same universe. The centaur was nearly killed at about the same moment that capsule got into Arth. I’m willing to bet that the analogues of all the other corpses had bad accidents at that instant too. I’m going to tell her.” He gestured toward the unconscious woman. “It might make her feel better about her friend.”

The High Head had certain difficulty with some of this. “But most of the corpses are women, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Their analogues will be people over in the Pentarchy, I think,” Edward said.

Not a good thought. “I’d always supposed Arth was better separated from the world than that,” the High Head said ruefully.

“So had I, but I think we must be more closely connected than we’d realized,” Edward said. “Anyway, this means I can enter the correct cause of death in my records.”

11

Supper that night was unusually and surprisingly good.

VI Earth and Arth

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