Deep Secret (38 page)

“Might work,” Will agreed. “If we start from the end by the door and keep checking. I’ll do it. You find Zinka.”

I left at once and pelted to the lifts, which White’s recent activities outside my door had now set four corners away. The lift which arrived first was the one where Rob had been. It was not working very well. It went down in fits and jerks and stopped entirely at Floor Two. I could sense Zinka further down, but I had not the time to spend working on the lift. I stormed out and set off down the stairs at a gallop.

The roar of voices and singing hit me at the first landing. As I barged aside the fire door and swung on down, I saw why. There was a party going on. Almost the entire last flight of stairs was full of people, partying busily, drunkenly, uproariously and, in some areas, orgiastically. It looked rather fun.

Sitting on the top stair, more or less beside where I stood and detached from the rest, was Kornelius Punt. He raised a toothglass to me solemnly. “I am trying,” he told me, “to sort out one body from the next on these stairs and not succeeding.”

“They are rather entwined,” I agreed. I looked at the party. I looked down at him sadly. One of the underlying reasons why I had assumed that Punt might make a Magid was that he held himself apart from the rest of humanity. In fact, he was just a voyeur. I was the one who held myself apart, and it was not necessary, or right. It was probably why I had made such a mess of things. “Why don’t you join in?” I said to Punt.

“I am always aloof,” he told me. “I am going for Loof of the Year Award.”

Zinka was down on the stairs somewhere. “You’ll probably win it,” I said. I started picking my way down the packed and roaring stairs. I could only advance most of the time by holding on to the wall while I worked one foot, then the other, between thighs and arms or under hands and torsos. I caused several yelps of pain. I knocked over several glasses and a china bottle of the strongest liquor I had ever met. The fumes made me gasp and cough, but left the six people packed in beside it quite unmoved.

I apologised. One of the six said, “Damn, I think the stair carpet’s dissolving!” as I was making a long stride to a tiny space two stairs down, and they all laughed.

A hand came out of the writhing bodies lower down and passed me a full glass of rum. I accepted it politely and realised as I did so that the hand was the much-nicked mauve hand of Milan Gabrelisovic. Good. Great, in fact. But I did not trust him not to try poisoning me as a witch. I clambered through a nest of twining legs and passed the glass to the hand that came waving out from among them. Possibly it was Tansy-Ann Fisk’s. Below this, a vastly tall and shapely young man was spread out over at least eight stairs, with girls attached to him at intervals. The young man was wearing nothing but a leather loincloth and seemed to be asleep. The girls were drawing on him with felt-tip pens. Two of them were giving him a sunburst on his chest, in a riot of reds and yellows. His arms were being given hearts and anchors on one side and diagrams on the other. Zinka was at work on his left thigh, twining it with delicately drawn vineleaves. She was wearing a slithery silk gown that shone two delicious shades of rose and tended to slip fetchingly off her plump left shoulder, and she was wholly preoccupied. I could tell that, while the other girls were just drawing on the man, Zinka’s vine trellis was intended, gently and temporarily, to make the fellow hers later that night.

It seemed a shame to spoil her fun, but the candles were burning down. I bent and took hold of her warm, slithery shoulder. “Zinka, I’m sorry to—”

She jumped and looked up. “Oh God, it’s an emergency, isn’t it? Rupert, I
am
sorry – I
had
meant to check before I… I could tell something was up. Come on.”

She stood up and took my hand, towing me on downwards. I would rather have gone up, but down was nearer and easier. Together we negotiated a fairly extreme orgy and then forced our way between a row of ten people swaying on the lowest step and singing. Then we had only to stumble among glasses and bottles into a clear space by the fire door.

“Tell me,” said Zinka.

I was aware of Kornelius Punt, up above, doing his trick of amplifying our voices. So was Zinka. She glanced up there and frowned at me and we both cast up at him the illusion of a different conversation –
two
different conversations. We were too hurried to co-ordinate them. Them Up There alone know what Punt thought we were talking about.

“It’s like this,” I said, and gave Zinka a rapid run-down of events.

“Babylon!” said Zinka. “Oh my lord, Rupert! You should have called me
hours
ago. Here’s my verse for a start—”

The fire door beside us whammed open. Mervin Thurless lunged through and stood looking up at the crowded stairs in huge disgust. “What a revolting display!” he said to us, as if he thought it was our doing. “And the lifts aren’t working. How the hell am I supposed to get upstairs?”

“Terrible,” I agreed, remembering in time that I was supposed to be a fan of his.

“Just pick your way up,” Zinka told him cheerfully. “Kick people. They’re all too drunk to notice.” She pulled me the other way, out through the fire door, adding, “Or some are. With any luck someone will kick you back!” By this time, we were in the relatively open space beside the lifts. “It’s all right,” she said, seeing me staring anxiously back at the doors. “I laid it on Thurless to go up through the party. And I think we need to be down here anyway for the kitchens. Here’s my verse:

“Ah, of
course
!” I said. They should have been carrying the elements of life! I should have thought!”

“Kitchens,” said Zinka. As we sped that way, she panted out, “I’ve plenty of candles. Wool’s easy. So’s water. It’s the grain that’s going to make problems.”

After some blundering about in the hind parts of the hotel, we barged our way through steel doors into a vista of steel appliances, smelling strongly of fat that was not quite hot enough. I let Zinka take the lead here. Every Magid has a special feeling for his or her particular secrets and, besides, the only person on duty here was a weary fellow in a tall white hat. He would obviously respond better to Zinka than to me.

She set about him briskly. “It’s very important we have something with whole grains in it,” she told him. “Have you got any unmilled cereals?”

“Muesli?” suggested the bewildered chef.

“Too many extras in it,” Zinka said. “Wheat or oats or barley in
grains
is what we’re looking for.”

He did his best, poor fellow. His first offering comprised a packet of frozen sweetcorn, a bag of flour and a carton of porridge oats. Zinka smiled up at him, pink and silky, with her shoulder slithering bare, and made him try again. He came up with brown rice. “It might do at a pinch,” Zinka told him. “But we need it
European
if possible.” He came up with sesame seeds and groundsel, wholemeal bread and pumpernickel. Zinka took him kindly by the hand and led him away from the cupboards.

While they were gone, I found some plastic bags. There were cruets lined up by the hundred on a shelf near the door and I cavalierly emptied the salt out of them until I had a bagful. Then, furiously conscious of the candles dwindling on the top floor, I found a big strainer and attempted to sieve the porridge oats. Most of the grains were crushed, but I had succeeded in getting a couple of ounces of whole, uncrushed oat grains out of it when Zinka came hurrying back with a tin clutched to her chest. In it was a sparse rattling of wheat grains which the chef gloomily opined must have come off the outside of something.

“Oh good,” Zinka said, seeing what I had been doing. “If we combine yours and mine and top it up with groundsel, sesame and just a little of the rice, we should just about have two handfuls. Thanks, chef. I love you. Come on, Rupert.”

We sped back to the centre of the hotel, clutching our two plastic bags.

“I’m not sure what’s wrong with the
other
lift,” Zinka gasped, “but I’m afraid the far lift is my fault – and yours. You sure do put stasis on when you put it, Rupert. I
couldn’t
get it off.”

“Oh, is that all it is?” I said. That was a relief. I hadn’t fancied wading upstairs, through that party again. When we reached the lifts, it was an easy matter to whip the remains of my stasis off the lift where Rob had taken refuge and haul it down. We shot up to Floor Three in it, where I waited with it while Zinka picked up her rosy skirts and pelted off to her room for candles.

That wait was horrible. My watch said I had only been gone half an hour and I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid it had stopped. I was increasingly convinced that something had gone wrong, but whether it was something wrong in my room two floors above, or some terrible thing that had happened to Maree waiting semi-lifeless in a land of shadows, I had no idea. I just wished Zinka would hurry.

To do her justice, she did hurry. Two minutes later, she pelted up from the opposite direction with her arms full of candles – genuine beeswax: I smelt the honey – gasping out that the node seemed to have gone do-lally and her room was nearer
this
way now. I clapped us into the lift and we shot upwards.

More node activity, I thought. Gram White again. A thought struck me.

“By the way,” I said, as we whirled past Floor Four, “which of them do you think did which killing? They were both in it, I’m sure. There wasn’t time for one of them to do it all.”

“Women very seldom cut throats,” Zinka said decidedly. “She did the shooting.”

That fitted. Whoever shot at me had been slow, as if he – she – was not entirely used to handling a gun, whereas Gram White, who ran a factory making small-arms, must be quite an expert. “Thanks,” I said. “Then he’s the more dangerous of the two.”

“Don’t bank on it,” Zinka said, as the lift slowed. “She’s pure poison, to my mind.”

The door went back. We stormed out and ran again. And ran. And turned corner after corner, running.

And there was a vista of corridor, with my door open halfway along it and Will out in the corridor beside it, making a stooped and swooping chase after a madly running quack chick. Beyond him, in the distance, three people were walking briskly away: Gram White and Janine, with Nick between them.

Rupert Venables continued

Z
inka and I stopped and looked at one another. “Someone’s done a working out here,” she said. “I can feel it.”

So could I feel it now. It was what White had been doing after he shouted outside my door. I knew I should have felt it when I left, but I had been in too much of a hurry. I had slipped up again. I cursed. The working had been designed to fetch Nick out of my room the next time the door opened. Will told us the way of it when we walked slowly up to him and he stood up, red and exasperated, after shooing the quack chick back inside.

“I thought the damn door was shut,” he said, “but you must have left it open a crack.”

“No I didn’t,” I said. “Gram White left a working on it.”

“Oh I see!” Will said, and ran his hands through his woolly hair in the manner of Dakros. “I couldn’t understand it. Both bloody chicks got out. Nick and I were out here rounding them up when those two came marching up. And she said, ‘Come along, Nick, I need you,’ and he obviously couldn’t think of a reason not to go with them. Didn’t even argue, just went.”

We watched Gram, Nick and Janine turn the corner out of sight.

“Not much to be done,” Zinka said. “She
is
his mother, that’s the problem. So what do we do now? You’ve got a major working half finished in there. You can’t just leave it.”

“I’ll go,” I said, “if you can keep the road open.”

It was what I had been aching to do anyway. I could barely credit it when Will and Zinka both sternly shook their heads. “It was
your
working, Rupert,” Zinka said, and Will added, “You can’t start a working on the outside and then go
inside
, Rupe. You must remember Stan telling you that. It’s basic.”

“Magids have been lost that way,” Zinka said.

Will said, “But Rob says he’ll go. He was wanting to go back with Nick anyway. I was trying to tell him how dangerous it is to alter a working halfway through when those damn chicks got out.”

“It’s altered anyway!” I snapped, and flung inside the room.

And here was further trouble.

In the odd-shaped space left between the roadway of candles and my bed, Rob was half on his feet, supporting himself painfully on the bedside table with one hand. His other hand was pointing to the road itself. “I couldn’t stop them! I was too slow!” he said.

I followed his pointing finger. And I saw the two quack chicks scurrying between the only two lighted candles, off the carpet and on to the hillside beyond. I confess my first thought was, Good riddance! My second was to wonder anxiously what damage this would do to the working. Will and Zinka crowded into the room behind me, just in time to see the chicks scuttle down over the shadowy brow of the hill and disappear.