Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

Then, as it closed on the towers, it seemed to pause.

All this in an instant, or in a different kind of time.

Tilja heard a mutter from Faheel. She glanced up and saw that he was in his magician’s shape, tall and strong. His spread hands were raised beside his shoulders and his face was set and pale with concentration. She realized that this was the final effort, the moment for which he had been saving his powers so carefully, and when it was over he would have almost nothing left. The four Watchers still in their towers may have been taken by surprise, but they were in the places where they were strongest and they’d had a moment or two to rally their powers. Now they must be fighting back.

She looked again through the screen. The center of the parade ground was empty, apart from a few bodies lying around the toppled litter. In the midst of them was a bulging golden object, like an outsize float for a raft. The Emperor. Dead.

Tilja stared. It was difficult for her to take in. What had Lananeth said? We live and die at his will. No longer. He was dead himself, not at his own will, but Faheel’s. And Tilja’s too, perhaps. Faheel couldn’t have done it without her, and if she’d understood what she was doing she’d still have chosen to do it. For the sake of the Valley.

Too shaken to think clearly, she forced herself to look away and see what else was happening. All around the parade ground the massed spectators were streaming for the entrance gate, and beyond it the regiment of women was charging toward the palace. Tilja could hear their whooping war cry, above the yells and screams of terror from the spectators.

Her eye was caught by a patch of stillness, of difference, not part of the strange, sickening, lurching inside-out world that Faheel had created to do his work. In the middle of it stood the Ropemaker, alone on the terrace. Somehow the sky had managed to leave him behind. Now, instead of trying to escape, he had climbed onto a low stone platform against the palace wall and seemed to be gazing at the confusion as if it had been a show put on for his amusement.

Something was happening to the towers above him. Still, if Tilja looked at any one of them directly, it seemed to stand upright and motionless, but the ones at the edge of her vision were tilting away at unbelievable angles. Some now bent sharply in the middle, as a stick seems to when thrust into a pond. Others stretched away out of sight, endless.

The sky closed round the palace, and closed again. There was an immense, tearing crash, and a shudder that seemed to shake the world. Tilja staggered against the wall and managed to push herself upright.

When she looked again the sky was in its rightful place. Out of a billowing cloud of mortar dust the stubs of twenty broken towers rose straight and true toward it. What was left of the palace rested on the ground. The Ropemaker no longer looked different from everything else, but was still gazing around as if waiting for something else to happen to amuse him.

“It is done,” said Faheel. “With your help I have broken the Watchers.”

“Are they all dead?”

“No. Some fled before we had finished, and still have many of their powers, but they are Watchers no more. Now we can give the Ropemaker the ring and go. I will tell him you are here.”

Tilja looked, and saw the Ropemaker stare toward the tower from which they were watching. He raised a hand in cheerful acknowledgment, but then stiffened and stared again, not at the tower this time, but beyond it. With a quick movement he un-tucked an end of his turban cloth. At a flick of his wrist the whole elaborate structure unraveled and his hair tumbled around him.

Hair? The flaming orange cataract covered his whole body, hiding him completely. A shake of his head and it floated out, hair no more but a blazing ball of fire which grew, became a shape, became solid, an immense flaming orange lion, a lion the size of a barn. It turned its head and stared again for a moment beyond the tower, then swung away and raced off, clearing the outer wall of the palace at a bound.

Puzzled, Tilja glanced up to see why Faheel hadn’t stopped him. She gasped with astonishment and horror. Faheel was staggering back from the screen. His hands were up in front of his face, and his mouth was working. A faint groaning mutter came from his lips.

One of the women on the floor writhed and screamed. The light dimmed as a darkness closed around the tower.

No!

Tilja unclenched her fist and dropped the ring into the box.

Everything stopped. The woman’s scream cut short. Her writhings froze. The darkness stayed as it was. And Faheel, who was already toppling away from the invisible blow, hung suspended in midfall, but when Tilja seized him by the hand he crumpled to the floor and she had to ease him down. He didn’t stir.

She couldn’t think what to do next. With a thundering heart she took the rings from his fingers and put them into the pouch at his belt. As she pulled the last one off he changed into an old man, lying half on his side, looking desperately frail and tired, and he still didn’t wake.

“If I should fail,” he’d said, “you must go by yourself.”

No, she told herself again, you’re not going to fail. And I am going to get back to Woodbourne.

How long had she left before time started again for everyone else, and the powers that had overwhelmed him came swarming down into this room? And the roc still had to fly them home. Faheel couldn’t weigh much, but he was far too heavy for her to carry or drag that distance. If she could find a horse or a donkey, or even a strong man. A strong man. One of the soldiers below? But how . . . ?

There was a gold coin on the floor beside Faheel’s left hand, the one that had fallen from the air and rolled across the floor when time had restarted. Tilja picked it up, found the purse itself and took it, then hurried down the stairs. It was very dark in the windowless room. The guards were as they’d left them, sprawled on the floor, held by the power of the ring and by Faheel’s enchanted sleep, and she wasn’t sure if her touch would overcome both forces. But at the moment when she’d dropped the ring back into the box, several other soldiers must have been running into the room to escape the magical encounter in the courtyard. She chose the one in front, took three gold coins from the purse and gripped the man’s hand. She had to hang on while he dragged her a couple of paces across the room, still in the frenzy of escape. He halted and stared around.

“Wha . . . What . . . Wha . . . ?” he gasped.

“It’s all right,” said Tilja. “Look.”

She held up the coins.

He stared at them, and at her. His mouth gaped soundlessly.

“Listen,” said Tilja. “This is magic. It’s done with a ring. I didn’t do it. Someone else did. But it means that everybody and everything is stuck fast, except me, and anyone whose hand I’m holding.”

He obviously didn’t understand, but continued to stare to and fro between her and the coins.

“Never mind,” she said. “I want you to help me. I’ll give you three gold coins if you’ll carry an old man out of Talagh. He doesn’t weigh much. Nobody’s going to know what you’ve done. The Emperor’s dead, and everything’s different. Here’s one coin to be going on with. All right?”

She put it into his palm and he stared at it, nodding dumbly. She left him in midnod and went and cleared the other soldiers out of the doorway by touching them briefly so that they ran another pace and then froze again. Despite the urgency, doing this, so easily, so confidently, brought back that extraordinary sense of pure, secret power. She could, if she had chosen, have gone upstairs again and stolen every fabulous jewel that those women were wearing, and no one would ever have known how it was done. The idea was thrilling. And dangerous—a danger that came not from outside herself, but from within. A Tilja who gave in to it would have become a different Tilja from the one who had flown to Talagh on the back of the roc. Now she could understand why it had mattered so much that the Ropemaker didn’t become one of the Watchers.