Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

The so-called magician was dead, his throat slit. Four girls and a boy, all about Meena’s age or younger, were dead too. All their flesh was gone from their bodies. Folds of wrinkled skin wrapped their bare bones.

So the convoy was forced to travel on unprotected as far as the next roadside fair, where the captain hired a plump, homely little woman and explained to the travelers that she was the only magician to be had, and was demanding twice the fee he had paid to the man they had lost. If they wanted her protection, there would therefore be a surcharge.

A man stood up and asked for proof of her powers. She stared at him for a moment and a violent gust of wind came out of nowhere, twisted round him and dragged him into the air, high as a tall tree, and there dropped him, leaving the air still. The man fell headlong, yelling. Just before he reached the ground invisible hands seemed to catch him and set him on his feet. He came tottering back to the gathering and agreed to pay the extra fee.

That evening at the way station Tilja and Tahl went to buy roasted honey sticks and were strolling back to their booth— slowly, to allow the other two a little more time alone together— when the magician appeared in front of them. She gazed silently at Tilja and then laid her hand briefly on Tilja’s bare arm. For that moment, as Tilja felt the numbness flicker and fade, the woman changed, became taller, slimmer, white-skinned, ageless, with the stone look so strong that she might have been born with it. Then she was the unimpressive little housewife again.

“Yes,” she said, “my friend Zara, Lord Kzuva’s magician, spoke of you. So you have done what you set out to do, it seems.”

“How did you know?”

“I will trade information.”

“All right.”

“I did not know, but guessed. Before you came, there was nothing in the Empire that could have destroyed the Watchers. But the power you loosed on the walls of Talagh was of a different order. I was in the city that night. All my wards were shattered by the strength of it, though I could tell that it was operating far from its source. That source, I think, could have done it. Yes?”

Tilja hesitated. What if this woman asked about the ring?

“Yes . . . I suppose so,” she said.

“And the source was a man? A woman? Something else?”

“A man,” said Tilja firmly, but very aware of the something else hidden beneath her blouse.

“And where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He was dying. He told us to put him on a raft so that he could go the common way. He’d been waiting to destroy the Watchers before he went. It was up to him, he said, because he’d set them up in the first place.”

“ That man,” said the magician meditatively, and fell silent.

“Is that why there’s so much crazy magic loose?” asked Tahl. “Like the warden’s family at the way station last night?”

She nodded.

“Things were not always as you have seen them,” she said. “We are taught that long ago, before there were Emperors, there was a balance. Magic came into the world, and those who knew how could use it, and the rest flowed away south. But as the Emperors established their power they hired magicians to take control of the magic. No one foresaw that one result of their work would be that they gathered all the magic they could into themselves, so that now less of it flowed out than came in. The difference was only slight, but the balance was lost. Gradually, over the generations the pressure has increased.

“And, of course, the magicians became ever more powerful, but there was always some man or woman with powers different from and greater than those of any of theirs, who could keep them in check. When each of these grew old they passed the task on to a successor, whom they had themselves chosen. Last but one of these was a woman called Asarta, who in her turn chose a man called Faheel—the selfsame man, I imagine, whom you helped onto a raft and launched upon the common way to die.”

She spoke the name calmly, without any hesitation, and looked enquiringly at Tilja. Tilja nodded. The magician stood, pondering.

“So, as you say, he finished what he had begun,” she said at last. “He destroyed the Watchers he himself had set up.”

“I thought you said it was the Emperors who did that,” said Tahl, who of course by now had taken over the questioning.

“They had hired the magicians in the first place, but it was Faheel who set them up as Watchers, as much to control and counter each other as to control the magic. Naturally he saw to it that the Emperors should think it was their own doing. But in the end the cure proved worse than the disease.”

“So what happens now?” said Tahl.

“Now things are very dangerous. The Emperor left no heir, and the Landholders are struggling for the Opal Throne. My own was fool enough to think he could make a move. His house is destroyed, his servants scattered. The Lord Kzuva was wiser. He retired to his own estates, and my friend Zara went with him, while I am forced to hire my talents along the road. Worse yet, there is an unknown force in the land, something that one by one is seeking out and destroying those Watchers who escaped from Talagh. Five times I have sensed the dissolution of a Watcher’s powers. I do not know how many are left. I had imagined this must be the work of whoever had broken the towers at Talagh, completing his task, but you say he is gone.”

“Yes, I’m sure it wasn’t him,” said Tilja, barely managing to keep her voice steady, knowing what that force must be. She was remembering things that Faheel had said. He came for the ring. . . . He will try to come again. . . . You yourself might withstand him— I do not know. . . . The whole of the next age is in the balance. She was remembering a fist the color of moonlight rising above a parapet and grasping great eddies of raw force as if they had been cobwebs dangling from a beam in a barn. She needed a name for the enemy, a way of thinking about him. Moonfist. Yes, that would do.

The magician was staring at her. She was saying something.

“. . . why Faheel never chose his successor . . . Do not tell me, child, that you are his chosen successor.”

“Oh, no! Of course not . . . but . . . I think it may be all right.” Again, for an even longer while, the magician stood deep in thought.

“You do well to be careful,” she said. “Well, I have a message for you to pass on, perhaps. If there is work to be done, I am willing to help. So, now, I wish you well.”

She smiled an unmeaning, purse-lipped housewife’s smile, nodded and turned away. She’s frightened too, Tilja thought. She isn’t just hiring her magic along the road to earn a living. She’s hiding from Moonfist.

“Chosen successor?” murmured Tahl, as soon as the magician was out of earshot.

Tilja shook her head unhappily. She could almost hear the fizz of Tahl’s brain as he tried to piece what the magician had told them into what they already knew.

“I want to get home,” she said, desperate to distract him. “If things are as dangerous as she says . . . we aren’t going fast enough.”

The next day was miserable for Tilja. In the middle of the night a hideous thought had come to her. She had woken with her own words buzzing in her mind, like a bee she had once seen buzzing against one of Aunt Grayne’s glass windows, trying to find its way through. We aren’t going fast enough. She had spoken the words almost at random, but knew in her heart they were true. And now, waking, she knew why.

Somewhere along the road, Faheel had said, the Ropemaker would be waiting for them. But now Tilja had learned that Moonfist was systematically seeking out and destroying other magicians. He already knew of the Ropemaker’s existence—he had seen him change himself into a giant lion in the palace courtyard. He would be looking for him, surely. So every day she and the others spent on the journey put the Ropemaker in greater danger. The sooner they reached the place where he was waiting for them, the sooner she gave him the ring, the better.