Deep Secret (2 page)

“
Now
what?”

It was my elder brother Will. “Bad day?” he said.

“Very,” I said. “The Koryfonic Empire.”

“Then I believe you,” he said. “Glad I don’t have to look after that lot any longer.” Will is a Magid too. “And what I’ve got to tell you won’t make your day any better, I’m afraid. I’m ringing from Stan Churning’s house. He’s ill. He wants you here.”

“Oh God!” I said. “Why does everything unpleasant always happen at once?”

“Don’t know. It just does,” Will agreed. “It’s not a deep secret, but it ought to be. I think Stan’s dying, Rupert. He thinks so anyway. We tried to get hold of Si too, but he’s out of touch. How soon can you get here?”

“Half an hour,” I said. Stan lives outside Newmarket. Weavers End, where I live, is just beyond Cambridge.

“Good,” said Will. “Then I can stay with him until you get here.” And keep him alive if necessary, Will meant. If Stan really was dying, there would be Magid business he had to hand on to me. “See you soon,” Will said and rang off.

I stayed in the house just long enough to make coffee and fax Senior Magid that I intended to complain about the Empire, to the Upper Room if necessary. Senior Magid lives several worlds Naywards and I normally make heavy weather of getting a fax through there. That day I did it in seconds. Five angry, trenchant sentences in no time at all. I was too busy thinking of Stan. I got in my car still thinking of him. Normally, getting into my car is a thing I pause and take pleasure in – particularly if I have just been away for a while. It is a wholly beautiful car, the car I used to dream of owning as a boy. I usually pause to think how good it is that I can make the kind of money you need to own such a car. Not that day. I just got in and drove, swigging coffee from the Thermos, with my mind on Stan.

Stan had sponsored first Will, then our brother Simon, then me, into the Company of Magids. He had taught me most of what I know today. I wasn’t sure that I knew what I’d do without him. I kept praying that he, or Will, had made a mistake and that he was not dying after all. But one of the things about being a Magid is that you don’t make that kind of mistake.

“Damn!” I said. I kept needing to blink. I didn’t consciously see any of the roads I drove along until I was bumping up the weedy drive of Stan’s bungalow.

A nasty bungalow. A blot on the landscape. It looked like a large cube of Stilton cheese dumped down in the flat heathland. We used to kid Stan about how ugly it was, but he always said he was quite happy in it. People who knew me, and particularly people who knew all three of us Venables brothers when we lived in Cambridge, used to wonder what we saw in a seedy little ex-jockey like Stan. They asked how we could bring ourselves to haunt his hideous house the way we did.

The answer is that all Magids lead double lives. We have to earn a living. Stan earned his advising sheiks and other rich men about racehorses. I design computer software myself, games mostly.

I parked my car beside Will’s vehicle. At dusk, with the light behind it, it passes for a Land Rover. In broad daylight, as it was then, you look away and think you may have imagined things. I edged past it and Will opened the bottle-green front door of the bungalow to me.

“Good timing,” he said. “I have to go now and milk the goats. He’s in the front room on the left.”

“Is he—?” I said.

“Yes,” said Will. “I’ve said goodbye. Shame Si can’t be found. He’s somewhere yonks Ayewards and not in touch with anyone I can contact. Stan’s written him a letter. Let me know how things go, won’t you?” He went soberly past me and climbed into his queer vehicle.

I went on into the bungalow. Stan was lying, all five foot of him, stretched on top of a narrow bed by the window. His slightly bandy legs were in child-sized jeans and one of his socks had a thin place at the toe. At first sight, you would not have thought there was too much wrong with him, except that it was unlike him not to be wandering about doing something. But if you looked at his face, as I did almost straight away, you saw that it was strangely stretched over its bones, and that his eyes, under the high forehead left by his curly grey receding hair, were standing out like a cat’s, luminous and feverish.

“What kept you, Rupert?” he joked, a bit gaspily. “Will phoned you a good five minutes ago.”

“The Koryfonic Empire,” I said. “I had to send a complaint to Senior Magid.”

“That lot!” Stan gasped. “She gets complaints about them from every Magid who goes near the place. Abuse of power. Contravention of human rights. Manipulation of Magids. General rottenness. I always think she just puts them in a file labelled
K.E.
and then loses the file.”

“Can I get you anything?” I said.

“Not much point,” he said. “I’ve only got an hour or so – no time to digest anything – but I would appreciate a drink of water.”

I got him a glass of water from the kitchen and helped him sit up enough to drink it. He was very weak and he had that smell. The smell is indescribable, but it belongs only to the terminally ill and once you know it you can’t mistake it. I remember it from my grandfather. “Shouldn’t I ring the doctor?” I asked him.

“Not yet,” he said, lying back and panting a bit. “Too much to say first.”

“Take your time,” I said.

“Don’t make bad jokes,” he retorted. “So. Well. Here goes. Rupert, you’re junior Magid on Earth, so it’s going to fall to you to find and sponsor my replacement – but you knew that, I hope.”

I nodded. The number of Magids is always constant. We try to fill the gaps left by deaths as promptly as possible, because there is a lot for us to do. That was how Stan came to sponsor me as well as my brothers. Three Magids died within six months of one another, long before Will was competent to try. Before that, Stan had been this world’s junior Magid for nearly ten years. As I said to Will, bad things always happen at once.

“Now there are several things I want to tell you about that,” Stan went on. “First, I’ve got you a list of possibles. You’ll find it in the top left-hand drawer of my desk over there, on top of my will. Get it out of sight before anyone else sees it, there’s a good lad.”

“What? Now?” I said.

“What’s wrong with now?” he demanded.

Superstition, I thought, as I went over to the desk. I didn’t want to behave as if Stan was dead while he was still alive. But I opened the drawer and took out the folded list I found there. “It’s quite short,” I said, glancing at it.

“You can add to it if you want,” he said. “But look at those lot first. I spent all last month making sure you had some good strong candidates. Two of them have even been Magids before, in former lifetimes.”

“Is that a good thing?” I asked. Stan was fascinated with past lifetimes. To my mind, it was his great weakness. He was ready to believe anything people said about reincarnation. It never seemed to occur to him that nobody who said they remembered a former lifetime ever remembered an
ordinary
one. It was all kings, queens and high priestesses.

He grinned, stretching his already oddly stretched face. He knew my opinions. “Well, if they bothered to get reborn, it has to mean they’re keen. But you’ll find the great advantage is that they’re born subconsciously
knowing
half the stuff – and usually with plenty of talent too. All my list are good strong talents though. The best untrained in the world.” He paused a moment. He kept getting breathless. “And take your time looking at them,” he said. “I know we’re supposed to be quick, but it’s not
that
urgent. Do what I did: I left
you
for nearly a year. I couldn’t mostly
believe
it, that three brothers in the same family should all be Magid material. Then I thought, Why not? There has to be something in heredity. But I never told you what really made up my mind about you, did I?”

“My obvious superiority?” I suggested.

He chuckled. “Nah. It was the fact that you’d been a Magid before in at least two lifetimes.”

In the ordinary way, I would have been extremely annoyed. “I have never,” I said stiffly, “
ever
either remembered a former life or told you anything to suggest that I had.”

“There are other ways of finding out,” Stan said smugly.

I let it pass. This was not the time to argue. “All right,” I said. “I’ll weigh up everyone on the list very carefully.”

“And don’t necessarily choose the most willing. Run tests,” he said. “And when you do choose, make sure you let them follow you around during a fairly big assignment before you begin instructing them. See how they take it – the way I did with you over the Ayeworld pornography and with Will over the oil crisis.”

“What did Simon have?” I asked. No one had ever told me.

“A mistake on my part,” Stan admitted. “Someone was doing a white slave and marriage trade, pushing girls through Earth down from Naywards and then on through the Koryfonic Empire. I let Simon see the police team the Empire sent here to see me about it. Half of them were centaurs. There was no way I could pass them off as Earth people. After that I had to get him ratified as a Magid – he’d seen too much. Lucky for me he’s made a good one. But don’t you worry that you’ll make a mistake like that.”

“I should hope not!” I said.

“You won’t,” said Stan. “Because if you start, I’ll stop you.”

“Er…” I began, wondering how to point the hard truth out.

“I’ll be around,” he said. “I’ve arranged to be here. A Magid can work quite well disincarnate, and I plan to do that until you’ve got things settled.”

I said, half joking and wholly disbelieving, “Don’t you trust me not to balls it up then?”

“I trust you,” Stan said. “But you’ve only been a Magid just over two years. And it used to be customary for all new Magids to have a disincarnate adviser – I found it in the records. So I asked the Upper Room if I could stay and keep an eye on you, and they seemed to think it was reasonable. So I’ll be around. Rely on it.” He sighed, and stared into the distance somewhere beyond his flaking off-white ceiling.

I sighed too, and thought, Be honest, Stan. You just don’t want to go away for good. And I don’t want this to happen either.

“Mostly, though,” Stan added, “it’s that I can’t bear to leave. I’m only eighty-nine. That’s young for a Magid.”

I had not realised he was much above sixty, and said so.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve kept my condition. Most of us do. Then one day you get told, ‘That’s it, boy. Deathday tomorrow,’ and you know it’s true. I’ve been given until sundown.”

I looked out of the window involuntarily. It was November. The shadows were long already.

“Call the doctor just before sunset,” Stan said, and did not say much for a while after that. I gave him some water, got myself some more coffee and waited. Some time later, he began to talk again, this time more generally and reminiscently.

“I’ve seen this world through a lot of changes,” he remarked. “I’ve helped clear away a lot of the political garbage that built up through this century. We’ve got the decks cleared for the changes due to come in the next century now. But, you know, the thing I take most pleasure in is the way we’ve managed to coax this world Ayewards. Gradually. Surreptitiously. When I was a lad, no one even considered there might be other universes, let alone talking of
going
to them. But now people write books about that, and they talk about working magic and having former lives, and nobody thinks you’re a nutcase for mentioning it. And I think,
I
did that.
Me
.
I
slid us back down the spiral. Back to where we should be. Earth is one of the early worlds, you know – well of course you know – and we should be a long way further Ayewards than we are.”

“I know,” I said, stressfully watching the shadow of my car spread over his bushy lawn.

“Help it along some more,” he said.

“It’s one of the things we’re here for,” I said.

Later, when the room was getting dim, Stan said suddenly, “It was the homesickness that brought me back here, you know.”

“How do you mean?” I asked him.

“I started out my work as a Magid a long way Ayewards,” he murmured. His voice was getting weaker. “I chose it. A bit like Simon chose it. But I chose it for the centaurs. I’d always loved centaurs, always wanted to work with them. And as soon as I learnt that more than half the places Ayewards of here have centaurs, off I went. I thought I’d never come back here, you know.” Centaurs need a magical ambience to maintain them – well, you know they do – and they all died out here when we drifted off Naywards. And for three years I was blissfully happy, working with centaurs, studying them. I don’t think there’s a thing I don’t know about centaurs and their ways. Then I got homesick. Just like that. I can’t tell you what for. It was too general. It was just that the world I was on wasn’t this one. It didn’t smell right. The wind didn’t blow like it does here. Grass the wrong green. Small things, like the water tasting too pure. So back I had to come.”

“To work as a jockey,” I said.

“It was next best to being a centaur,” he said. After a long pause, he added, “I want to get reborn as a centaur. Hope I can arrange that.” Then, after a longer pause still, “Better phone that doctor then.”

The phone was in the kitchen. I went through there and found the number carefully written on a pad laid by the phone. I remember thinking, as I punched it in, that this seemed hard on young Timotheo. I must have been one of the few people to be sorry he was dead, and yet all my sorrow was concentrated on Stan. I forgot Timotheo again the next moment. Stan had made his arrangements with care. The doctor, to my astonishment, answered the phone himself and promised to be there in ten minutes. I rang off and went to the front bedroom.

“Stan?” I said.

There was no answer. He had fallen half off the bed as he died and he had wanted to do that in private. I put him gently back.

“Stan?” I said again, into the dead, dim air.

There was nothing. I could feel nothing.

“So much for the idea of staying around,” I said loudly. But there was still nothing.