Conrad's Fate (21 page)

“Oh,” said my mother. “Oh yes. But he's not here now. He insisted on leaving school as soon as he was old enough, and he took a job right outside this district. I—”

“Did Uncle Alfred tell you that?” Anthea interrupted.

“No, of course not,” my mother said. “You know as well as I do that Alfred is a compulsive liar.
He
told me Conrad was staying on at school. I even signed the form, and then Conrad went off without a word, just like you did. I don't know what I've done to deserve two children like you.” Then, while Anthea was trying to say that it was not true about me at least, my mother suddenly snapped, “Who is this wonderful man who has lured you into female bondage, Anthea?”

“If you mean marriage, Mother,” Anthea said, “it's Count Robert of Stallery.”

At this, my mother uttered something that sounded like “That impostor!,” though it was more of a strange wailing yelp, and dropped the phone. We heard it clatter onto a hard surface. There was some kind of distant commotion then, until someone firmly put the phone back and cut us off.

As Anthea hung the whirring receiver back on its rest, I had the hardest job in the world not to burst into tears. Tears pushed and welled at my eyes, and I had to stand rigid and stare at the shelves of books in front of me. They bulged and swam. I felt utterly let down and betrayed. Everyone had lied to me. By now I didn't even know what the truth
was
.

Anthea put her arm around me, hard. Christopher said, “I know how you feel, Grant. Something a bit like this happened to me, too, once.”

Anthea asked him, “
Is
our mother under a spell, do you think?”

“She just doesn't care!” I managed to say.

“No, Grant, I think it's a bit more complicated than that,” Christopher said. “Think of it as a mixture of lies and very small spells done by someone who knows her very well and who knows she'll go where she's pushed if she's pushed often enough and gently enough. It sounds as if much the same was done to you, Grant. What's this Walker you were supposed to summon? Why don't you try summoning it now and see what happens?”

The same dry-mouthed fear seized me that I had felt in the Magicians' Circle. I was horrified. “No, no!” I cried out. “I'm not supposed to do that until I
know
!”

“Know what?” my sister asked.

“The—the person who's—the one who I should have killed in my last life,” I stammered.

I felt Anthea and Christopher look at each other across my head. “Fear spell,” Christopher said. “And you
don't
know, do you, Grant? Then it's much safer to summon the thing now, before there's any real danger.”

“Yes, do that. Do it at once, Conrad,” Anthea said. “I want to know what he's making you do. And you,” she said to Christopher, “if you really
are
an enchanter, you can stand guard on the door, in case that butler comes back with a computer.”

Christopher's face was such a mixture of surprise and outrage that I nearly laughed. “
If
I am an enchanter!” he said. “
If!
I've a good mind to turn you into a hippopotamus and see how Count Robert likes you then!” But he went and stood with his shoulders against the door all the same, glowering at my sister. “Summon away, Grant,” he said. “Do what the hippopotamus tells you.”

Anthea still had her arm around me. “I won't let it hurt you,” she said, just as if I were six years old again and she was putting plaster on my knee.

I leaned on her as I took the wine-blotched cork out of my waistcoat pocket. I still felt miserably ashamed of myself for believing all those lies, but the dry-mouthed fear seemed to have gone. And the cork was so ordinary. It had
Illary Wines 1893
stamped on it, and it smelled faintly sour. I began to feel silly. I even wondered if the Magicians' Circle had been playing a joke on me. But I pointed the cork at the end wall of the library and said, “I hereby summon a Walker. Come to me, and give me what I need. I think it's a hoax,” I added to Anthea.

“No, it
isn't
,” Anthea said, sounding sharp and stern. Her arm went tight around my shoulders.

There was a sudden feeling of vast open distances. It was a very odd feeling, because the library was still all around us, close and warm and filled with the quiet, mildewy scent of books, but the distances were there, too. I could smell them. They brought a sharp, icy smell like the winds over frozen plains. Then I realized I could
see
the distance, too. Beyond the books, farther off than the edge of any world, there was a huge curving horizon, faintly lit by an icy sunrise, and winds that I couldn't feel blew off it. I knew those were the winds of eternity. And real fear gripped me, nothing to do with any fear spell.

Then I realized that I could see the Walker coming. Across the huge horizon, lit from behind by the strange hidden sunlight, a dark figure came walking. He or she walked in an odd, hurried, careful way, bending a little over the small thing it carried in both hands, as if whatever it was might spill or break if it was jogged in any way. So it walked smoothly but quickly in little steps, and the winds blew its hair and its clothes out sideways—except that the hair and the clothes never moved at all. On it came, and on. And all the time I could see the shelves of books in front of me, in ordinary daylight, and yet I could see the distance and the Walker just as clearly.

Anthea's arm was clamped around me. I could feel her trembling. Christopher's shoulders thumped against the library door as he tried to back away, and I heard him mutter, “Gracious heavens!” We all knew there was nothing we could do to stop the Walker coming.

It came nearer and nearer with its strange pattering strides, and the winds blew its clothes and its hair and they still never moved, and it still bent over the small thing in its hands. When it was only yards away, and the room filled with gusts of arctic scent that we could smell but not feel, I could have sworn the Walker was taller than the library ceiling—and that was two stories high. But when it came right up to me, it was only a foot or so taller than Anthea. It was properly inside the room then, and I was numbed with the cold that I couldn't feel, only smell. It sort of bent over me. I saw a sweep of dark hair blown unmovingly away from a white face and long dark eyes. The eyes looked at me intently as it held out one hand to me. I had never seen any eyes so intent. I knew as I looked back that this was because the Walker was bound to get whatever it gave me exactly right.
Exactly
right. But I had to give it the cork first in exchange.

I put the cork into the hand it was holding out. That hand closed around the cork, and the other hand came out and passed me something else, something cold as ice and about twice as long and a good deal heavier. My face felt stiff and numb, but I managed to say, “Thanks,” in a mumbling sort of way. The intent white face in front of me nodded in reply, once.

Then the Walker walked on past Anthea and me.

All our breaths, Christopher's, Anthea's, and mine, came out in a
Whoosh!
of pure relief. As soon as the Walker had gone past me, it had gone. The icy smell and the horizon of eternity had gone, too, and the library was once more an enclosed, warm room.

Christopher said, in a voice that was trying not to sound too awed, “Was it a man or a woman? I couldn't tell at all.”

“I'm not sure that applies to a being like that,” Anthea said. “What did it give you, Conrad?”

I looked at the thing in my hand. It felt quite warm now, or only cold the way metal always feels. I looked at it and puzzled. It seemed to be a small corkscrew—very like the one I used to struggle with when the Magicians' Circle wanted a bottle of port opened—one of those with an open handle that you hook two fingers through, with little curls at either side for two more fingers. But there was a key sticking out from the top of the handle. If I held the thing one way up, it was a corkscrew, but if I turned it around, the corkscrew became the handle of the key.

I held the thing up to Anthea and twiddled it at Christopher. “Look. I'm supposed to
need
this. What do you think I
do
with it?”

Anthea leaned over me to look. “It
could
be the key to a wine cellar.”

Christopher slapped the side of his velvet breeches. “That's
it
! The hippopotamus has got it in one! I
knew
it was important to get into that wine cellar! Come on, Grant. Let's go and do it before we have to go back on duty.”

He rushed off to the gallery staircase. I followed him slowly, feeling upset and puzzled and let down. I had expected the Walker to give me something much more dangerous than a key or a corkscrew.

“Get a move on, Conrad,” Anthea said. “That butler …”

So I hurried a bit, and lucky that I did. I had only just climbed into the gallery when the door below opened again. Mr. Amos came importantly in, followed by a line of footmen carrying a viewscreen, a tower, a keyboard, drums of flex, armloads of disks, a stack of power cells, a printer, boxes of paper, and a load of other accessories.

“I shall supervise the setting up of the equipment personally, miss,” Mr. Amos said to Anthea.

Christopher dragged me through the door at the back of the balcony. “Good,” he said when we were safely out in the corridor. “If he's busy in there, he can't possibly be in the wine cellar. Let's
go
, Grant!”

We galloped downstairs, and down again
to the undercroft. “Funny,” I said to Christopher as we tiptoed toward the stairs that led to the cellar. “I didn't know any of those footmen with Mr. Amos. Did you?”

“Hush,” he said. “Utmost caution, Grant.”

Actually there was no one about, and it was quite safe. Christopher was just being dramatic because it was all so easy. There were nice broad steps curving down to the cellar and a light switch beside the door at the bottom so that I could see to put the corkscrew key into the keyhole. The keyhole looked far too big, but the key went in, fitted exactly, and unlocked the door when I turned it. The door swung open easily and silently, and lights came on in the cellar as it opened.

“Lock it after you,” Christopher said.

“No,” I said. “We may need to get out quickly.”

Christopher shrugged. I pushed the door shut, and we walked on into a set of low, cold rooms lined with wine racks and barrels. There were dusty bottles and shiny new bottles, rank on rank of them, little kegs labeled
Cognac
in foreign letters, bigger barrels labeled
herez
that Christopher said meant sherry, and whole walls of champagne.

“One could get awfully drunk here,” Christopher remarked, surveying a dusty wall of bottles marked
Nuits d'éte 1848
. “I have quite a mind to drown my sorrows, Grant. I
saw
Millie. I talked to her. Do you know how to open champagne?”

“Don't be a fool,” I said. I pulled him away and led him on, and on, past thousands of bottles, until we came to another locked door in a wall at the end.

“Ah,” said Christopher. “This may be it—whatever
it
is. Does your gadget work on this door, too?”

I tried the corkscrew key again, and it worked. This door creaked a bit as it opened, as if it were not used very much, and we saw why as soon as we were inside. Lights came on and showed another, newer-looking staircase that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Christopher looked up at the shiny new metal of the trapdoor very thoughtfully.

“I do believe,” he said, “that we may be right under the butler's pantry here, Grant. In which case the important stuff is just round this corner.”

The walls here were of quite new brick. It looked as if an extra room had been built, off at an angle to the main cellars. We edged around the corner to it. There we both stopped, quite bewildered. This room was lined—as closely as the wine cellars were lined with bottles—with lighted, flickering viewscreens. From floor to ceiling they were stacked in rows. Most were covered with green columns of figures that ran and jumped and changed all the time, but about a third of them, mostly on the end wall, were full of strange swirlings or colored jagged shapes. The jumping and flickering made me seasick. Worse than that was the peculiar buzzing of magic in the room, electric and alien and feeling like metal bars vibrating. I had to look at the floor for a while, until I got used to it. But Christopher walked up and down the room, watching the screens with interest.

“Do you understand this, Grant?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“I almost do,” Christopher said, “but I'm going to need your help to be sure.” He pointed to a screen of jumping numbers. “For instance, what does Coe-Smith mean?”

“Stock market,” I said. “I think.”

“Right!”
Christopher said triumphantly. He pointed to another screen, where blue columns of numbers raced so fast that I couldn't read them. “What's Buda-Parich?”

“That's a city,” I said, “over in the middle of the continent. It's where all the big banks are.”

“And here's Ludwich,” Christopher said, at another screen. “I know that one. More big banks and a stock exchange in Ludwich, am I right? But there can't be a city called Metal Futures, can there? This lot of screens must be stocks and shares, then. Yes, Chemics, Heavy Munitions, Carbon Products—it sort of makes sense. And …” He paused at a clump of screens where green and red lines zigzagged, bent, and climbed. “These lot have to be graphs. But the really puzzling ones”—he went on, moving around to the end wall—“are
these
. They just seem to be patterns. What do you think this one is? The one that's all jagged moving shapes.”