Peter Dickinson - Angel Isle

“That must be an object of prodigious power. I have never heard of anything remotely like it. I wonder if the Ropemaker ever used it again, after that first time. It sounds as if he may have been a bit afraid of it.”

“That’s what Fodaro thought,” said Benayu. “He’d never heard of it either. And he was a scholar of magic, he used to say. He knew it all, but he couldn’t do it all. Do you think the Watchers know about it?”

“If they do, and if they can find it, then there is no hope,” said Chanad. “That brings me to the chief thing that I have to tell you, which is that the nature of the Watchers has changed from that in your story. Those had been set up by Faheel to police the use of magic throughout the Empire, but they failed in their task because as time went by they became savagely competing powers. Such is the corrosive effect of strong magic. Even among the Andarit I could see this beginning to happen. I could feel it in myself.

“Very few of us are free from it. Faheel had known it in his youth, but had put it aside, and in the end was forced to destroy his own creation because he could not control it in others.

“The Ropemaker was different. He was never interested in power. His passion was knowledge. He would far rather have remained a free agent, wandering the Empire at his own will, seeing and hearing. Until you told me your story I had not known how he was forced to take control, and begin to sort out the chaos that followed the fall of those earlier Watchers—other magicians warring for power, in their ignorance and frenzy releasing forces they could not control, demons roving the land unchecked, sand dunes threatening to engulf whole cities for ransom, and so on. He could not do this without helpers, so he chose those who came to hand and whom he thought he could trust.

“To begin with they worked as an informal group, but when the first urgent tasks were done some decided to leave, while most agreed to stay and help to maintain the order they had achieved, each with their own responsibilities in a more formal structure, though they did not then call themselves the Watchers.

“Knowing how the original Watchers had become corrupted, he persuaded them to bind themselves into a magical covenant to cooperate for the general good of all the peoples of the Empire. This worked well enough, thanks—I now realize—to his mitigating presence in the covenant, since they did not feel him to be in competition with any of them. Then, some two hundred years ago, he told them that he would be away for a while. He gave them no explanation other than that there was something he must do, and do alone. Months went by, and seasons, and years, but still there was no word from him. They searched by all the means at their disposal, but he seemed deliberately to have left no trace.

“So the covenant remained in being, and their natural urge for power was constrained into a joint urge of ever-increasing force, until the time came when they put their individual selves aside and became what they are now, a single entity, a single shared nature and thought system. What one knows, they all know. What one desires, all desire. Their joint mind creates a single purpose. They cannot be destroyed one by one. They replace a missing member with a fresh recruit who cannot help but join them and then becomes identical with all the others. And thus conjoined they are far more powerful than the Ropemaker, or even Faheel, or any of the other master magicians in their prime. The Emperor and his officials function as they have always done, only where Watchers allow them to do so.

“Elsewhere they ruthlessly adapt the system to their own needs. It is still the case, as it was in the time of your story, that nobody can die within the Empire without a license to do so, in order that the Empire should not be flooded with the natural magic released into the world at every human death. Those who could not afford the license and the cost of the rituals to control that magic had to travel to Goloroth, the City of Death, in the far south, where they boarded rafts which were floated out on the Great River and were carried out into the ocean. There they died and their magic was harmlessly released. The first part of this system remains as it was, but now when they pass through the inner gate of Goloroth their lives are simply taken from them, and their personal magic is funneled back to feed the power of the Watchers in Talagh while their lifeless bodies walk on into the Great River and are carried away.”

“That’s the nastiest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Saranja. “I’ve always thought the system in our story was bad enough, but that’s obscene!”

“I suppose they say they haven’t broken the covenant,” said Ribek, “because they exist for the good of the peoples of the Empire, so the greater their power the greater the good?”

“Exactly,” said Chanad. “But it is the general good, remember. They will ruthlessly sacrifice any number of individual citizens of the Empire, just as an individual Watcher will sacrifice himself or herself, in order to achieve it.

“They are like the demons of old. Demons are, as it were, embodied lusts, rage, greed, cruelty, spite, brains without minds, terrible. The Watchers are an embodied lust for domination. Limitless domination, first of the Empire, then of the other nations of this world, then of worlds elsewhere in this universe and universes beyond it, if any there be. Somewhere along that course they will meet their match and destroy themselves, and the Empire, and perhaps the whole world with them. They must be stopped. You set out to find the Ropemaker, three of you for the sake of your Valley, and Benayu to take his revenge for the death of Fodaro, but you are here for greater purposes than that. Even the Ropemaker cannot stop the Watchers on his own, but somehow, between us, we will achieve it.”

Maja looked at her friends, appalled. She had simply not thought about it like that. At the start she had just been running away, as she had done all her life in her dreams. Only by accident had she found that she was now looking for the Ropemaker, and then by further accident that she was going to help Benayu destroy the Watchers. Even at their most frightening their adventures hadn’t mattered much to anyone except themselves. Who else cared all that much about what happened to a miller and a farmer’s daughter and two children?

But now there was a world to save. Finding the Ropemaker would be only the start.

Ribek must have had the same thought. For several moments he looked unusually serious, then shook his head in disbelief.

“It’s a bit more than we bargained for,” he said, smiling slightly, as if at the absurdity of the enterprise.

Saranja flushed and tilted her head defiantly.

“Well, if it’s what we’re here for we might as well get on with it,” she said.

“I’m going to destroy the Watchers,” said Benayu firmly. “When I’ve done that I’m going to go back to shepherding, and a bit of hedge magic. Anything that happens after that—someone else can deal with it.”

“I wish you well, Benayu,” said Chanad. “But you will find that you are unable to do as you wish. Your own powers will either compel you or destroy you. But first, as I say, you must find the Ropemaker. Where do you propose to start? You have some kind of plan, or clue?”

They looked at each other, uncertain.

“We have a plan of a kind and a clue of a kind, but I’m afraid we’ve been told not to tell anyone what they are,” said Ribek. “Not even someone like you. All I can say is that we need to get to Tarshu.”

Chanad actually laughed.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Benayu has some major magic to perform, connected with your search, and instead of attempting to hide it from the Watchers in some remote province you are taking the risk of disguising it as part of the explosion of magic that will erupt when the Watchers try to repel the coming Pirate invasion. I agree with you. It is much your best chance. But you will need to hurry. Tarshu is almost a month’s journey from here.