Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

“Now he’s in a sort of coma. He’s still absorbing a little of whatever magic is going on around him. He can’t help it, any more than you can help breathing, so he’s giving Maja a bit of protection, but he can’t do anything extra to shield us or warn us.

“That’s why we were worried sick, Fodaro and me. Jex might have absorbed some of the signal before he passed out, but he couldn’t possibly have coped with all of it. And Rocky was still there, completely unshielded, far more than I could possibly screen, let alone in a hurry. But when Saranja took Rocky’s wings off the signal dropped almost to zero, and nothing happened and nothing happened, and we thought we’d got away with it.

“And then, suddenly, the Watchers were coming after all. We’d always known it might happen, so we’d set up a system, nothing to do with Jex, a sort of maze with a separate warning system, to slow them down and give us a bit of time. It wasn’t so we could run or hide—that doesn’t work with them. They’ll find you in the end. The only hope was to use the equations to take them by surprise with something they hadn’t got any defenses against. And that fitted in with something else that mattered even more than we did, something about that particular bit of hillside—can’t tell you what, but it was all to do with Fodaro’s equations too—and it would be a disaster if the Watchers found out about it. So the only thing to do was to destroy it. Of course we didn’t want to, not if we could possibly help it, but it wasn’t something you could arrange at the last minute, so we’d got it all ready to go, just in case.

“Fodaro worked out how to do it and I set it up. It was an extremely delicate balance. Two…”

He stopped and stared at his hands. In an unconscious gesture he’d raised them in front of his chest and was holding them, stretched flat and almost touching, palm to palm. Deliberately he folded them together and laid them in his lap.

“No, that’s telling you too much,” he said in the same listless, weary voice. “Anyway, if whoever did it got it dead right, there’d be an explosion, and in the instant before it happened he’d get out. A scrap too little, and it wouldn’t happen at all. A scrap too much, and…well, you felt what happened. But if he got it right, the Watchers, or whoever had come for us, wouldn’t be ready for it. It wouldn’t be any sort of magic they’d ever run up against, and that would be two fewer Watchers in the world, and our traces completely covered.

“I think I could have done it. I was pretty sure he couldn’t. That’s what we were arguing about. Oh, blood, I wish I hadn’t had to leave him like that. He didn’t try to pretend what he was going to do was a certainty, but he said if I stayed to help him they’d get us both, and that would be his whole life wasted, but if I got away in time it wouldn’t. He said that now you’d come it didn’t really matter what happened to him, but I had to get away because this was what I’d been born for. This was the moment they should all have waited for.”

“Who’s they ?” said Ribek.

“The Andarit. The Free Great Magicians. When the Watchers decided to take complete control they began by picking off the other fifth-level magicians one by one, sucking them in or just destroying them, until the ones who were left realized what was happening and decided to band together and try to fight them. They called themselves the Andarit.

“My parents were two of them. I never knew them. They didn’t love each other or anything—magicians don’t do that—but they wanted a child to carry on the fight if the Watchers got them. If I was any good, of course. They couldn’t even use magic to make sure. It had to be a clean break, so the Watchers couldn’t trace me. They just had to take the chance.”

“That makes two of us,” muttered Saranja.

Benayu frowned at her, not understanding.

“Not born to be loved,” explained Ribek. “Her mother wanted a daughter who could hear what the cedars were saying.”

“Oh, I don’t blame them for not loving me. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to. They couldn’t have. We all have our own…anima, the books call it. It means soul, spiritual essence, inner self, something like that. It’s the place where we keep our really important feelings, all the stuff that really matters to us. Even hedge magic is bad for it, if you do it all the time, and a lot of serious, powerful magic eats it away until you stop being human.

“There are just a very few, like the ones in your story—Asarta and Faheel and the Ropemaker—whose anima is strong enough to stand it. But almost all serious magicians have to find a safe place to keep their anima, utterly separate from themselves and out of their reach, until the time comes for them to put their magic aside and become human again.

“That’s why my father and my mother couldn’t love me. Magicians can have feelings—spite, anger, envy, pity even—but they’re different, cold, so that the magician can control the feeling and use its power. But there’s no such thing as cold love. It doesn’t make sense.

“My parents weren’t bad people. They knew what was right, and tried to do it, and died for it in the end. But all in a cold way. They died because they knew what the Watchers would do to them if they were caught alive. They booby-trapped every step of the way as they went, in case anyone tried to follow them and bring them back. Yes, they were very powerful magicians, but all the magic in the world couldn’t make them love me.

“Fodaro didn’t want me to be like that. At first he told them he wouldn’t help them unless they could think of a way round it. They said it couldn’t be done, it was a sort-of all-or-nothing thing. How can your anima be a living part of you, right at your center, and at the same time utterly separate? But there are things in mathematics a bit like that—impossible numbers that actually work—so Fodaro decided he’d look after me until I was old enough to choose for myself. And then he found a place in the sheep pasture, and there the answer was, waiting for him in the equations.

“There’s a lot more to the equations than that, and the one great thing we’ve got going for us is that the Watchers don’t know any of it, and it’s going to be too late for them when they find out. Yes, by all the Powers and Levels, they’ll find out!”

“What a load to carry at your age!” said Saranja. “It makes my kicking and screaming about having to take on Woodbourne and the stupid unicorns look pretty petty. Was Fodaro really your uncle? Why wasn’t he in with the others?”

“He wasn’t good enough. He was my father’s brother, but he was just an ordinary third-level magician because he couldn’t make the shift. Partly couldn’t, partly didn’t want to.”

“These levels,” said Ribek, “they’re real? I mean, we do a thing called kick-fighting in the Valley and we have grades for that, but that depends on how many bouts you’ve won and who you’ve beaten and so on.”

“They’re only sort-of real. That’s one of the big things Fodaro found out. It’s in his equations. But even he couldn’t actually imagine what the real thing is like, the way you can imagine, well, levels, for instance—something like stories in a building you can go up and down stairs between. He said his mind wasn’t the right shape. Nobody’s is.

“So magicians have always talked about levels, because that’s what it feels like. You know at once when you make a shift, because you have to change yourself to do it. It’s like learning to breathe a different kind of air. Third to fourth is the hardest. That’s like learning to breathe water, Fodaro said. He never could do it, though he knew what made it so difficult. I haven’t tried—too much of a risk, I don’t know enough—but I don’t think it will be a problem for me.