Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

She seized the moment and clung to it, as she might have clung to a rock in a raging torrent. The outflow faltered, ceased. Moonfist turned toward her. She felt him summoning up further powers and knew that this was the end.

Everything changed. The finger she was grasping melted from her hand. With a shudder the chasm below the lake sealed itself shut. She felt warmth, heard the mutter of a human voice, opened her eyes and found herself swaying with exhaustion by the fire in front of the hut. Hands took her by the shoulders before she could fall and lowered her to the ground, where she crouched, shivering, her whole body bathed in sweat.

“Near thing,” said the Ropemaker’s voice. “Did it between us, just.”

He was standing beside her, much as she remembered him, a skinny, gawky figure topped by his immense turban. A body lay at his feet. The head was away from her but she recognized the silver links of the belt chain. The hand that protruded from the sleeve beside it was fleshless bone.

Meena, she thought. Alnor. Tahl.

She looked toward the fire. Moonfist’s staff lay half across it. The end to which the bag had been fastened was blackened embers.

Numbly, through her sobs, she was aware of being lifted, carried, set down. A voice spoke. She didn’t take it in. She must stay where she was. He was going to do something. She was alone with her horror and grief, and the knowledge of failure. All useless. Alnor dead. Tahl dead. Meena, whom she loved more than anyone in the world, dead, horribly, horribly dead. Nothing else mattered. Nothing ever would.

Something changed. She didn’t feel or hear or smell the change, but there was a sort of inward flicker, and the world was different, just as it had been when Alnor had spoken Faheel’s name in Lananeth’s warded room. She looked up. Through the gray blur of her tears she could see the entrance of the hut, but nothing beyond. She wiped her eyes. There was nothing beyond. The hut floated in grayness, lit by a vague light that came from nowhere. As she stared the grayness changed, becoming paler at the center and darker to either side. Faint shadows appeared in it, acquired dim shapes, five people standing in a group. The man on the left moved his arm and touched one of the others on the shoulder. That figure vanished. The man moved his hand and did something at the top of the staff he was carrying, then moved it back to touch the next figure. And the next. Now the girl on the right faced him alone, and Tilja understood that she was looking back out of one time into another, watching herself a little while ago confronting the magician she called Moonfist.

They stayed motionless. Tilja knew what they were saying, but could not hear the murmur of their voices. As the time she was watching came nearer to the time in which she watched, the figures became clearer. She couldn’t breathe for the sudden intense hope and intense fear. Now, as Moonfist swung his staff toward the fire, she could see the transparent globe at its end. The movement paused. The girl moved her arms to draw something from under her clothing and offer it to the man. He reached to take it.

She saw the spasm of violent action, her own grab at his hand, her other arm flinging the ring into the darkness; heard, like a far whisper, her own cry, Ramdatta!; saw the staff toppling into the flame . . .

Now, Ropemaker! Now!

At the edge of the darkness on the right the Ropemaker exploded into his shape. His arm moved, flicking something toward the fire. The staff was twitched clear. The Ropemaker was bending, picking the ring up, sliding it onto his finger . . .

For a long moment he stood rigid, then turned and strode toward the motionless pair by the fire, locked in their desperate inward conflict. He seemed larger than he had been, no longer gawky and misshapen in his monstrous turban, but all of a piece, commanding, magnificent. Briefly he considered the magician, then raised his hands in a firm gesture and held them over the magician’s face. Something invisible grasped Moonfist’s body and battered him violently from side to side, like a terrier killing a rat. It let go. He collapsed and lay still.

The Ropemaker turned to the girl and far more gently made the same gesture. The invisible hands caught her as she crumpled and lowered her to the ground, where she crouched, hiding her face in her hands.

Tilja understood what she must now do. Sobbing with relief, she huddled down into the same posture as the girl. She heard the pad of the Ropemaker’s feet on the hut floor, felt herself lifted and carried. The Ropemaker waited for the exact instant at which the time that he was in caught up with the stilled moment from which Tilja had been watching. When the two times became one he lowered her into herself.

She let her sobs die, rose and looked. The staff was lying beside the fire. The cord that the Ropemaker had used to twitch it clear was still wrapped round its shank. The globe lay well away from the embers. The three mannikins were standing up, waiting to be released.

“Got that box?” said the Ropemaker.

She drew it out and handed it to him. As he slid the ring off his finger and put it away he changed, shrinking to the odd, slightly clownish figure she was used to, but sagging with weariness. She looked at the globe.

“What about the others?” she asked. “Can you . . . ?”

“Your turn,” he muttered. “I’m done for.”

Uncertainly, feeling that all her powers were exhausted, she bent to pick up the globe. It vanished at her touch. She held out her spread hand to the mannikins. Each reached and grasped a fingertip. Between instant and instant they rose to their true size.

“Don’t ask me to go through that again,” said Meena, with a shuddering half laugh. “I really thought we were down to be toast. My, was I cross about it!”

18

Roc Feathers

Is there anything else out there?” said Alnor, peering into the darkness. Even he was unable to conceal the horror in his voice.

“Nothing much left,” said the Ropemaker. “Just small stuff. Won’t bother us. Fellow there was the last.”

He sounded just as exhausted as Tilja herself felt. The long, angular face was gray and lined.

She turned and gazed at the figure of Moonfist lying beside the fire. A skeleton. Yes, she thought, that was his real body, dead already, dead long ago. He had been even older than Faheel, so his real body had died. But by magic he had made himself a seemingly living body, and waited for the moment when Faheel gave up the ring and he could take possession of it. Then he would use it to do for himself something like Faheel had done for Meena and Alnor, bring his own young body, living, into the present, and when that in its time wore out do the same again, and again, forever. That was what Faheel had said couldn’t bear thinking of. No wonder Moonfist had so wanted the ring.

“Who was he?” she asked. “Faheel told me a little about him, but he didn’t know his name. I’ve been calling him Moonfist, because of the magic he used when he tried to get hold of Axtrig on the walls of Talagh. You saw it too, didn’t you? You were the cat.”

She’d taken him by surprise. He stared at her. She saw the other three stiffen, and guessed that he was putting up some kind of magical defenses, but felt nothing herself. Then he made a rueful grimace and relaxed.

“No use against you, anyway,” he said. “Talk about it later. Moonfist, you say? That’ll do. Don’t know that much about him. Spent my time keeping out of his way since he showed up. Glad to see him gone . . . Ah well, let’s get rid of him.”

He drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, gazed at the fallen body and muttered. The body crumbled to a pile of pale dust. He muttered again. A breeze sprang up, concentrated, became a swirling dust devil which danced across the clearing, picked up the ashes and swept them away in a swirl of dead leaves and other trash. The first huge drops of rain started to fall, laying the dust, cleansing the place with the sweet smell of damp earth, until the Ropemaker pointed out a circle around the fire and made a gesture of ending. Within the circle the rain stopped. He nodded and relaxed.