Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“Now, your status. Qualif was a head servant in the household of the steward to a Landholder, so you, Alnor, will wear the hat of a fourteenth-grade subject of our Lord Emperor, and Meena will wear the scarf. I will show them to you in a moment, and how to recognize the grades of those immediately above you, to whom you must show respect. You are unlikely to meet anyone above twelfth grade, and most will be lower than you.”

Hour after hour her quiet voice flowed on, telling them rules and customs and habits and manners and all the ways things were done in the Empire. Tilja listened and struggled to take it in. Their lives might well depend on their knowing these things. But the thought of the Empire itself kept flooding into her mind, and she kept having to push it away. It was all so different from the Valley. That was a place, the place she loved and lived in. But the Empire seemed much more than just a place, more than the hundreds—thousands—of places within its borders. It was a vast, strange creature with a life of its own, unsleeping, suspicious, merciless. And she and the others were going to try to travel along the innards of the monster without its ever once guessing they might be there.

She felt this especially strongly when they were talking about money. Lananeth had brought some coins to show them. Tahl had fetched Alnor’s small hoard from one of the saddlebags and Meena had hauled out her purse from under her skirt, where she kept it alongside the bag of fortune spoons. Tahl picked out the old metal coins, with the heads of forgotten Emperors on them, from among the wooden Valley ones. He showed them to Lananeth.

“Yes, these are still good,” she said. “No one will question them. There are many old coins around. Things do not change much in the Empire.”

Tilja’s skin crawled at the thought. Nineteen generations, and the coins were still the same. The monster wasn’t just huge, it was old, old.

Lananeth leaned forward and picked up one of the wooden Valley coins, the largest kind made, the size of an oxeye daisy. For a moment she stiffened, as if she were listening to a whispered voice, then turned the coin to and fro, studying it carefully.

“This is a strange wood,” she said. “The grain is so marked, and different on each side. It seems almost alive, as if it had been moving until the moment I looked at it.”

“Let’s have a look,” said Meena. “No, don’t let go of it—come over here if you don’t mind—easier than me coming to you. There. Now, let’s see. . . . Well. I’m . . . I don’t know what to say—must be because it’s been lying alongside my spoons these last few days, but even so . . . my, isn’t that interesting—different from how it is on the spoons, mind you. . . . Look, I’ll show you. . . .”

She took the cloth out of her bag, unrolled it, laid two of the spoons down on it, and showed Lananeth the third one.

“You see how it’s cut along the grain,” she said, “so what you’re looking for is lines in the wood. But that coin is cut across the grain, and that gives you circles instead of lines. . . . Let’s have a look at the other side. . . . Yes, you’re right, it’s showing you two different things—you’d never think there was so much going on in just a couple of inches of wood. Look, Lananeth, this is your side, all neat and ordered, and here’s your house in the middle of it; and see these four little dots, looking like they don’t belong somehow, that’s us, me and Alnor and the kids, showing up out of nowhere. But see here, right off by the edge, this messy bit. It looks like there’s something wrong with the wood, doesn’t it, some kind of disease, and it might get bigger and spoil the whole thing—that’s the place where Qualif and Qualifa used to live, and now if it’s found out they’ve gone and died without getting leave you’re in all kinds of trouble. But—just turn it over now—see here, this side is a real tangle. There’s so much going on that you can’t make anything out for sure, except this one little bit here, where there’s nothing going on at all. And look, if you turn back you’ll see that that little bit is straight under this bit your side that’s causing you all this worry, like they’ve both got the wrong side. So I reckon this messy side’s got to be Talagh, and what this is telling us is you’ve got the right idea, Alnor and me being Qualif and Qualifa for a bit, and taking your worries off to Talagh with us. . . . And see now, alongside those four dots I was showing you—wasn’t there last time we looked, not to notice, was it?—this is you, right at the center of everything. . . . Why are you so jaggedy, though? If it was on one of my spoons I’d say you’re really worried about something, only it’s not the old people dying like it was before, it’s something new. . . . I’ve said something wrong, haven’t I?”

For a while Lananeth didn’t answer, but sat staring at the coin, but, Tilja thought, not really seeing it. At length she put it down on the floor and nudged it delicately away from herself with her fingertips.

“I have taken you under my roof,” she said. “I have fed you and eaten with you. If I have brought disaster on myself and my house, so be it. Salata told me that you had a way of telling fortunes, and had promised her husband’s safe return, but I thought this was no more than the small peasant magic that many people pretend to. That is unwise, but not for the most part dangerous. But this is something more than that. And you have brought it here, into my warded room. You should not have been able to do that without my knowing, but only when I picked up the coin did my wards wake and warn me.”

No one spoke for a dozen heartbeats. Then Tahl said, wonderingly, “Yes, I think I’ve felt it too. There’s been a funny itchy feeling in here since then. Why’s magic so dangerous, though? Can’t lots of people do it?”

“Because it is something beyond the control of the Emperor. The Empire is full of magic. It is there, like the sun in the sky, the water in the streams, the trees in the hillsides. Those who are born with the gift could just take it and use it, if they choose. But most are afraid to make that choice. By decree from the Stair, no one may practice magic except in the Emperor’s service, on penalty of death. So those who wish to do so must either serve him or practice in secret. Many serve the Emperor, and for some of them their task is to smell out magicians who practice on their own. The most powerful of these are the twenty known as the Watchers, who reside in the Emperor’s palace in Talagh, all in their own separate towers, keeping constant watch over the whole Empire.

“But all of those who have the gift, as you seem to, even if they do not practice themselves, can tell when they are in the presence of magic, unless the magician is already powerful enough to set wards around him and thus disguise what he is doing. That is far beyond what I can do, but such people are known to exist. Alnor said you are looking for someone like that, but they cannot be found unless they choose to be. You will need, for a start, to know his name.”

“Might as well tell you,” said Meena. “Seeing we’re trusting each other. All right, Alnor? His name is Faheel.”

Tilja didn’t understand what happened next. She wasn’t deliberately looking at the fortune spoons, merely gazing vaguely at them where they lay side by side on their blue cloth, when Meena spoke the name of Faheel.

Something in the room moved. An instant later there was a crash from outside the window.

She glanced up. No, that had been outside and after . It was here in the room that something had moved.

No, it hadn’t, but . . .

When Meena had shown Lananeth the grain of the spoon she had laid it back neatly beside the other two on the blue cloth, but hadn’t rolled them up and put them away. Now the old, paler spoon, Axtrig, was lying at an angle across the other two. Between one moment and the next she had changed. But she hadn’t moved. Tilja was sure of that. She had no idea what it meant, but it was as if Axtrig had all along been lying where she was now.