Deep Secret (35 page)

“We’ll get it out of him somehow,” I said. “But I think you saved his life by running into him. He was obviously supposed to take them back to Thalangia with him.”

“But what are you going to do about Janine and this man White?” Will wanted to know. “There’s no evidence against them except Nick’s and she’s his
mother
!”

“I know,” I said. “And I’m going to have to send Nick to Babylon with Maree – if he turns up – so we could lose that evidence anyway.” I looked up at the indicator and found we were passing the fourth floor. Nearly there. “Will, tell me your Babylon verse. I need it.”

“You certainly will,” he said. “It’s the central one.” And he recited rapidly:

The lift stopped and the door opened as he finished. I pushed Maree out, saying, “Thanks. Yes. That sounds central.” As I said it, the other lift opened and Nick stepped out. He was looking so shut-away and non-committal that all I liked to say to him was “Oh, there you are. Come to my room and I’ll get us something to eat from Room Service.”

“I’m not very hungry,” he said.

“Maybe
you
aren’t,” Will told him cheerfully, “but
I
am. I can eat anything you can’t manage.”

That was the right approach with Nick, seemingly. Nick came along beside us as I trundled Maree round the first mirrored corner and along the corridor beyond. The node had been tampered with again. We turned another corner and still had not reached my room. It occurred to me to wonder if this happened whenever Gram White made transit to or from Thalangia. I asked Will.

“Not only that,” he said, “someone else has been at it too. Your room’s been further off every time I’ve been up here.”

This time it was so far off that we reached Nick’s room first. Nick said he wanted to get a sweater and would catch us up.

“We’ll wait for you,” Will and I said, almost in chorus. We didn’t want to lose him again. “And where’s Maree’s room?” I asked while Nick unlocked the door.

Nick pointed to the next door along. “There. Why?”

I didn’t like to say that Janine had suggested I take Maree there. “Just want to check something,” I said. “Where would Maree keep her key?”

“Top right-hand pocket of her jacket,” Nick said. I could tell by his deadpan face that he guessed it had something to do with his mother.

Wincing rather, I got the key from Maree’s pallid pocket and let myself into a hotel room much smaller than mine, filled with a surprising number of possessions. At a rough guess, I would have said it contained all Maree’s worldly goods. There was a grey and skinny teddy bear on the bed that looked as if it had been carried around by its neck for years, the vet-case on top of a heap of things on the floor, a computer set up on the dressing-table and several boxes of much-read-looking books. And, as I had suspected, something felt wrong. Something felt very wrong, but I couldn’t tell where it was. But it felt so wrong that when Will started innocently pushing Maree in after me, I told him to stay out and, at all costs, to keep Maree outside. Will sensed the wrongness too. He nodded and backed out. I climbed about among the heaps, unavailingly searching.

“Try the computer,” Nick said from the doorway. He was engulfed in a big furry blue sweater and shivering as if he had only just now noticed how cold and shocked he had been. “She uses her computer a lot.”

I climbed over a book box and turned on the computer. As the screen lit, I did almost without thinking what I always do with any computer of my own, and put out a scan for viruses, Magid-style. The result was startling. V
IRUS OPERATES
, the screen told me. The space behind filled with dry clustering twigs, more and more of them, until the screen looked like dense undergrowth, and there was a sense of something looking out at me from among them. The twigs grew thorns, vicious ones, and with their burgeoning came every feeling of frustration, despair and humiliation I had ever known – and some I had not, particularly the humiliations. And it caught me.

I stood and stared at the clustering twigs, writhing with several kinds of shame, thinking I might as well give up and go home and die. I was no good. Nothing was any good. Nothing was even worth fighting for because everything I touched was going to go wrong. Nothing—

An exclamation from Nick snapped me out of it. He was pointing to the bed. A shadowy thornbush seemed to be growing upon it. It was sending spiteful sprays up through the pillow, thrusting clumps of spines up through the duvet, and several spiky shoots were even pushing through the grey teddy bear. My shame and despair were wiped away by anger. So this was why Janine wanted Maree to lie down! No doubt the original intention was to have left Maree stripped in the lane for Dakros to find along with the other murdered heirs – and she must have been quite annoyed, Janine, to find I had retrieved Maree. So she had suggested this instead, knowing that in Maree’s present condition these spectral thorns would finish her off. Somehow it angered me particularly to see them attacking that evidently loved teddy bear.

“It’s the Thornlady,” Nick said. “Maree had dreams about it. That’s why we did the Witchy Dance in Bristol. To get rid of it.”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” I said. “It’s a damned goddess. Her computer’s rigged so that every time Maree used it the manifestations get stronger.” My respect for Maree increased, now I knew she must have been fighting this all the time.

“Can
you
get rid of it?” Nick asked me.

“Yes, but it’ll be a long job,” I said. Any kind of theurgy and workings connected with deities always take long strenuous hours to undo. Sometimes you have to request the help of another god. I sighed. This was another item in the stack of things accumulating for me to do tomorrow. “We’ll just lock it up for now and keep well away.”

We did that. I felt drained. Those thorns were powerful. We went on down the corridor and round another corner, with me only wanting to get to my room, clean up and rest before starting on the next part. And there was my room at last. There was something stuck to the middle of the door, just below the number.

“Yuk!” said Will. “That wasn’t there when I last came up.”

It was one of the foulest of the foul sigils. It made me frankly retch. Its foulness was such that it was perceptible to Nick and even to Maree too. Nick’s shivering increased to shudders. Maree gave a mumbling cry and tried to cover her face. I had no doubt that Janine had just been putting the thing here before she came down in the lift. I clenched my teeth and went to get rid of it.

“No, not you,” Will said, shoving me aside. “It’s aimed personally at you, you fool!” He scooped at the sigil with both hands – hands that were used to scooping farmyard muck every day – and almost instantly threw the double handful down on the carpet with a yelp, where he stamped on it and ground it in with his substantial shoe. For a second or so there was a truly filthy smell. “As I said – yuk!” Will said, wiping his hands hard on his coat.

There was now a smooth rounded hollow in my door, but at least it was a clean hollow. I unlocked the door and we all trooped in. Will had left lights on. I could see Rob as a large mound under my duvet and a spread of fine black hair on my pillow, apparently asleep. Once I had made sure that he was breathing and unharmed by the foulness that had been on my door, I quite deliberately left him alone. I simply pushed Maree in her wheelchair to where Rob could see her if he deigned to open the one beautiful black-fringed eye that was visible, and went to the phone.

“Hamburgers and chips all round?” I asked Will.

“Two cheeseburgers for me,” said my brother. Years of the two of us winding up Simon paid off. I didn’t even have to wink at him. He went on innocently, “What do centaurs eat? They’re all vegetarians, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. “Perhaps I’d better order a vegeburger and a bit of lettuce for him.”

“Vegeburgers are full of additives – could do damage to his stomach – you’d better not,” Will said callously. “But on the other hand the meat in most hamburgers could be horse.”

Here Nick tumbled to what was going on and nearly gave the game away by laughing. Will and I both glared at him. I said anxiously, “So he’s faced with a choice of two things he can’t eat. I don’t think I’d better order any food for him at all. He seems to be asleep anyway.”

Will capped this with. “There’s probably nothing on Earth he
can
eat, you know. He’d better not have coffee, and I’m sure milk’s bad for him. Even water’s full of harmful chemicals.”

Here Rob could take no more. He rose up on one elbow, looking surprisingly healthy considering what he had been through. “Oh please!” he said. “I’m very hungry. Isn’t there really anything I can eat or drink?”

“That depends,” I said. “
Do
you eat meat?”

“I love it,” Rob said frankly. “And cheese and bread, and I’d even eat lettuce. And I do drink milk.”

“All right,” I said. “Cheeseburgers, chips and coffee all round then.”

I picked up the phone, leaving Rob confronting Maree and, beyond her, Nick staring gravely and wonderingly at Rob. I took my time over the order, which was not difficult to do, since the Room Service waiter I spoke to showed signs of stress and kept asking me to repeat things. “And can you assure me, sir,” he asked, “that the members of staff who deliver this meal will be spared the sight of – er – eccentric costumes?” I looked at Rob, who was very clearly trying not to look at Maree and as a result kept meeting Nick’s eye, and assured the man that everyone in my room was perfectly normal. “And can you give me exact directions, sir, as to the whereabouts of room 555?” the harassed man continued. “Staff have unaccountably got lost tonight and we are trying to avoid – er, further complaints.”

Here Rob tried to solve his problems by lying down again and pulling the duvet over his face. As I wanted him to remain off balance, I was forced to turn from the phone and ask, “Rob, do you eat hay?”

“Hay?” Rob said, rising up aghast.

“One bale or two?” I asked.

“
What?”
cried Rob and Room Service almost simultaneously.

“Sorry,” I said into the phone. “We convention people have a strange sense of humour. Tell the staff member it was round three corners from the lift to room 555 when we came here just now.”

I turned from the phone and pulled up a chair so that I could sit facing Rob, beside Maree. “Right,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for the food, so you can answer me a few questions while we wait.”

“I’ll be happy to do that,” Rob answered warily.

“I doubt it,” I said. “I’m going to want you to answer each question in one word only. Who sent you here?”

“Knarros,” Rob said, wide-eyed, sincere and rather hurt.

“And who told Knarros to send you?”

“I don’t really see Knarros taking orders from any—”

“Rob,” I said. “One word. Who?”

“I – I can’t tell you,” Rob said. His face paled and he began looking so unwell that, despite what Stan had said, I felt a brute.

“OK,” I said. “Who were you sent to fetch? One word.”

“I…” Rob’s voice failed. He slumped back on his pillow.

“Not me?”

“No,” Rob admitted, and his voice failed further. His eyes closed.

“Perhaps you’d like to tell us, Nick?” I said.

Nick was now lying face-down on the carpet. He looked up at me ruefully. “Maree,” he said. “Rob said his uncle had to talk to her.”

“Not you as well?” I asked him.

Nick shook his head. “But I wasn’t going to miss something like that.”

Janine, I thought, couldn’t know her son very well if she thought she could keep him away simply by not inviting him. But this sort of ignorance seems to be a failing in most mothers. My own mother obstinately fails to notice the queer things I do as a Magid – the queer things all three of her sons do.

“The conversation you and Rob and Maree had in the lift must have been quite interesting,” I said.

Nick and Rob looked at one another. There was both exasperation and complicity in the look. “I hadn’t thought you’d noticed,” Nick said irritably.

“Like to tell me about it?” I asked.

There was a fairly long silence, broken only by a mutter from Maree. In it, I picked out the words “tell him”, but I had no idea if she was instructing Nick to come clean or if the words were in fact “don’t tell him”. But it proved she was attending. That impressed me. Even allowing for my accidental working, she was showing far more resilience than I expected.

At length, Rob looked at me limpidly and said, “Well, I told Nick we were cousins of course. But I thought I was going to pass out—”

“And there wasn’t time to say very much before you two hauled the lift back down,” Nick cut in quickly.

“Did Rob explain how a centaur and a human could conceivably be cousins?” I asked. “It seems a little unlikely.”

“Oh, by adoption of course,” Rob said. His beautiful features blazed with innocent sincerity. “My Uncle Knarros adopted Nick’s mother as his sister.”

“When was that?” I asked him. I needed to ask
why
, but I knew Rob would not tell me that.

“Fifteen years ago, before she left the Empire,” Rob replied.

“So Janine is definitely a citizen of Koryfos?” I said.

Rob nodded, eager to oblige. “She was born in Thalangia.”

This, from a centaur, would be the truth. We had got somewhere. But I couldn’t see us getting much further with Nick there, not if I was to have Nick’s help with Maree. Will was looking at me anxiously, trying to convey this. All at once, I felt deathly tired. I nodded at Will, suggesting he had a go at Rob now and, fetching clean clothes out of a drawer, I went into the bathroom to wash and change. That felt a great deal better, even with the front of my hair missing. I put salve on my burns and came out.

Will had made no headway. I could see at once. Rob was still shining with sincerity. Nick looked sulky. I went to the cocktail fridge and sorted myself out a little bottle of brandy. “Want some, Will?”