We waited in silence for ten minutes till Augusti had the new information wrapped up and sucked dry. At last, he condescended to pay attention to us.

  “Hmm! It’s as I said, Skripka: different dimensions rub against each other. Different universes! The boundaries repel one another. This generates radiations resembling the output of phantom stars far away. By analysing the spectra of those ghost suns we should be able to deduce the rules which govern the juxtaposed cosmoses. Meanwhile the magic-mongers of both kingdoms cavort ignorantly, intent only on mayhem, death, and power.”

  He gestured urgently, so I hurried to his side. He held up a thin pane of glass before the candle flame. I saw bars and stripes annotated with astrological symbols. Principally I spotted a serpent coiled around some kind of ladder. This reminded me about Brant’s tale of Lisa.

  “Is that serpent the key to the universe next door?” I asked.

  “It may well be the key! Where is the lock to fit it into? If only I could communicate with scientists of another world! Incompatibility of our respective nature laws? Hang that! Surely it’s no ultimate barrier to communication. But our own world is doomed by war. How shall I have time to carry out this grand experiment?”

  I studied the serpent carefully, memorizing the way it coiled and how many times. Its body was a patchwork of red and green paint blobs.

  “Our own world mightn’t end for dozens of years,” I said idly.

  “Didn’t Matyash explain anything? The planets already portend the end. Their courses are influenced by events in our earthly kingdoms. Stars are the clue to other universes; planets keep the score of historical events. Planets and moons are moving swiftly into conjunction.”

  “Matyash probably took that as a sign of imminent revolution,” I said. Immediately I realized that I’d used the past tense. I would only draw attention to this if I corrected myself.

  Better not mention bombs or riots. How would I know about such things unless I had travelled to Chorny at magical speed?

  “There’s a revolutionary pamphlet circulating in Bellogard, called The Capital,” I added.

  “Is there indeed.” This wasn’t a question.

  Time to try a different tack. “Does Bishop Lovats often visit you, sir? How does he regard the theory of coexisting universes?”

  “Lovats has a very perceptive intellect, my lad. If he wasn’t a blood-stained bishop he might be a great scientist.”

  “Blood-stained?”

  “Everyone of so-called soul who is in charge of the state is blood-stained, either actually or potentially.”

  “You do find Lovats worth talking to? When he visits here? Or when you visit the Khram?”

  Augusti shrugged his shoulders. “Lovats both protects me, and menaces me. A visit from him is like a visit from a friendly tiger. How else would he have such influence over court and country?”

  “Mr Matyash rather hoped that you would take me on as an assistant. To familiarize myself with Chorny science for a while.”

  “Yes, yes; and I owe him a favour. Happens I could use a servant lad-one who doesn’t get in my hair or pester me with stupid questions. Define ‘stupid’? Well, Bellogardian science lags far behind ours. You just hang on my words. Obey my instructions. Observe and infer. You may sleep in a cubbyhole down below there, if you clear it out.”

  So I became for a while an astrologer’s apprentice, placing me very conveniently for a strike at Bishop Lovats. who may have been instrumental in sending Sara to Bellogard, to whom I might owe my acquaintance with her.

  Mr Augusti wasn’t exactly good company. On the other hand he was far too involved in staring through lenses, and calculating the “spectra” of spectre suns away at the edges of space, to bother quizzing me about my own background or motives.

  Within a few days I felt that I had found a safe niche. I had worked hard, too. Begging my new master’s permission, I ventured down into black, gas-lit Chorny city of a midnight to sightsee.

  How odd, at dead of night, to explore crowded thoroughfares. How disconcerting, even frustrating. Daylight opens up perspectives. Sunshine lets you peer from a safe distance. You can see through archways, down long boulevards. Here no distances were safe. Far perspectives were drained of content, reduced to basic geometry. The world only filled up with precise detail in your immediate vicinity. This city yielded no colourful “spectra” from which to extract enough information. The inhabitants knew what they were about; but I didn’t know. I seemed to have developed a curious species of blindness, so that I could see but not recognize what I saw. I was walking in a taunting, elusive dream.

  I strolled along the esplanade by the black waters of the Vada. I wandered through a busy, funereal fish bazaar. On sale were mounds of Stygian sturgeon, sombre salmon, umbral trout, sooty eels. Somehow the gaslights did not properly restore colour to the glistening bodies. After a while in Chorny your eyes no longer paid attention to rainbow hues, only to grey, white, and black.

  I crossed Most Bridge to stare up at the blackly-reflective planes of the palace. I retraced my steps, and walked along Glavny towards Perehod Square.

  People’s clothing was mostly grey or black. White ghosts did not haunt these streets-but perhaps something worse? People who had died while still remaining alive. People who had become shadows; who had been born as shadows.

  Dominating the north side of Perehod Square was the Magheela Tomb-equivalent to Bellogard’s own

  Spomenik Monument, now vandalized. No infernal device could have done much to harm the monstrous solidity of the tomb. It likewise was a shrine to music, though of a different calibre entirely. The composer Mahgeela had created enormous music dramas and oratorios lasting four or five hours apiece, requiring hundred-strong orchestras and massed choirs.

  Atop the tomb was a reviewing stand. On the first of October every year King Mastilo and Queen Babula would stand there to greet a torchlight procession of their people, who had been specially marshalled by the royal militia. Quite a contrast to King Karol’s reclusive eccentricity, pantoufles, and magic bubble-blowing!

  I found myself in the Prakhoda Arcade. Marble flooring. High wrought-iron columns. Gas mantles. The arcade wasn’t unlike an elongated version of Vauxhall Station. There were huge tubs of ferns, and hanging baskets of silver starflowers. The goods on display in shop windows looked uninspiring.

  I entered a cafe. Imitating the customer in front of me, I ordered a hundred grams of spirit and a caviar pancake; then found a vacant table. The pancake tasted of yeast, though not unpleasantly, and the red caviar was salty. The chilled spirit was faintly oily, and powerful.

  A couple of youths dressed in dark grey overalls decided to share my table. They had ordered a halflitre bottle of spirit. One of the youths amiably raised his glass to me.

  “Here’s to the future! May it be black!”

  I lifted my own glass. “Here’s to you. Health and wealth.”

  “So where are you coming from, fellow?”

  “Up north,” I answered vaguely. “Why?”

  “You call that a proper toast?”

  “Go blind!” said his friend. “Drop dead!”

  “Go to sleep in Babula’s bed!”

  “No: wake up there!”

  They hooted with laughter.

  “How about this one? May your soul survive!”

  I asked them quietly, “Are you unhappy with the way your country’s run?”

  “What have we here, my brother? An agitator?”

  “Or is it an informer, brother mine? A provocateur?”

  “No, that sort would string us along a bit more subtly. I think this one’s an idiot. A holy idiot. Here’s to idiocy!”

  “Does he see visions of a bright light in the sky?”

  Hastily I excused myself.

  Two nights later Bishop Lovats paid a surprise visit to the Planetera. I was up on the platform, oiling certain gears which Augusti claimed were not working as smoothly as they might. Augusti was down below, deducing spectral horoscopes by candle-light.

  Footsteps, lanterns, voices. I looked down cautiously.

  A figure wearing a black cassock: that was the bishop without a doubt. Accompanying him was someone slighter, blacksuited, with a mass of long dark hair.

  Sara. She was ten metres below me. I lay flat so as to peer without attracting attention.

  Augusti was soon showing the bishop a sheaf of diagrams. Lovats studied these for a while.

  “It seems to me, Augusti”-I overheard-“that the world starts from a set of simple rules. Those are the fundamentals of existence; the constants. As soon as an actual world unfolds from those rules-as an entire leafy tree from a seed-the plain rules become masked. The world no longer quite obeys them. Otherwise the world would never become full and rich. It would stay a mere skeleton of a world, lacking living flesh; a schematic, an outline.”

  I couldn’t make out Augusti’s reply.

  Lovats, again: “I believe the universe is controlled by twin deities. Call them a God and a Devil. These deities play games using these basic rules; in the process they compel us to make war on each other. I see no possible means of communication with those deities. They are outside of our universe. I doubt if they’re aware of our existence, or would care a hoot about us, if they were.

  “What’s more, Augusti, I fancy that those deities do not themselves make the simple rules. They inherit those. They, too, are prisoners of the rules-to a greater extent than us! How paradoxical, that we may be destroyed-and yet we are free-while they are immortal but in chains, condemned to play together throughout eternity, presiding over world after world. They are the real victims. Yet only in this way can a world such as ours evolve spontaneously.

  “What’s that? Of course two deities are required. Without the negative and positive-the constant pull and push-how could there be any growth of life or kingdoms?”

  This time I did hear Augusti clearly. “Required, is it? Yet they don’t set the rules? I hardly see any need for deities!”

  “Paradoxes abound. I’m inclined to say that those deities probably express the rules.”

  “Express, is it? A moment ago you said that we’re free. Do those deities move kings and queens into action, or do kings and queens move themselves?”

  “Both! Neither!”

  Sara moaned loudly and held her head.

  “My dear,” Lovats exclaimed, steadying her.

  “Apprentice!” Augusti squawked upwards. “A glass of spirit for this squire!”

  I squirmed out of sight.

  “The pang will pass,” said Lovats. “They always do. You have taken an apprentice, have you?”

  “Did you hear me up there, boy?”

  “Please don’t screech in our ears,” said Lovats. “One of us has a headache already.”

  “I’m sorry, my Lord. The idiot seems deaf.”

  I muffled my mouth and called, “My hands are oily, sir. By the time I clean up and climb down. The spirit’s in the usual cupboard.”

  “Impertinence!”

  “Your apprentice may have a point,” drawled the bishop. “If you’ll kindly tell me which cupboard?”

  “I’ll fetch a glass with pleasure, my Lord.” Augusti must have recollected-tardily!-my origin and nationality, since he called, less raucously, “Stay where you are! Keep out of our way! Carry on oiling then polish all the brass.”

  Silence for a while, punctuated by the chinking collision of glass and bottle.

  Presently I heard Lovats say, “I think we shall return to the Khram and pursue our discussion some other night.”

  “No need,” Sara assured him. “I’m quite all right now.” Oh her voice.

  “In that case let us inspect your new apprentice, Mr Augusti.”

  Again I was called. My heart thumped. I checked that my dagger was available; I prepared to cry magic to summon Sir Brant.

  Summon him into this dim, unfamiliar building? Brant might be asleep when I summoned him. The countryside didn’t follow city time. He would wake up and jump, feeling a bit fuddled. I might as well invite him into an ambush.

  Dubiously I descended the spiral stairs. Staying in shadows, I halted some way from the trio.

  The bishop’s features were familiar to me from his eidolon. A pursed, down-turning mouth: expression of sour meditation. Long cavernous cheeks. Eyes that were watchful and alert. Wrinkle lines aplenty, suggestive of humour, wisdom-those traits weren’t often on open show. His was a cautious, far from innocent face which spoke of a reserve of patient energy, flexibility, experience. He wore his grey hair close-cropped.

  “Step forward, young man.”

  I shuffled a few paces, hanging my head.

  And Sara exclaimed, “Surely he’s.!”

  I was on the brink, on the absolute verge of shouting to invoke Sir Brant-and Prince Ruk too, if he was in line. Blessedly, Sara bit her words back.

  “What, my dear?”

  “He’s rather young.” Her voice shook.

  “To be an apprentice? Whatever do you mean?”

  “I can’t think properly, Bishop. My head suddenly hurts me worse than ever.”

  Had she actually recognized me? Did I only remind her of a certain Squire Pedino? If she recognized me, had she kept quiet because she genuinely cared about me? Or in order to avoid an immediate, chaotic fray-during the course of which the bishop, not she, might have killed me?

  Nodding to Augusti, Lovats took Sara by the elbow and guided her towards the door.

  Both their backs were turned on me. I might never see a better chance. I could probably kill Lovats unaided. I would be doubly a bishop-slayer, the boldest, most successful pawnsquire in the history of Bellogard.

  Yet Sara had kept quiet.

  They left.

  Conceivably she had not pierced my disguise. What emotions had my resemblance to Pedino stirred? Revenge? Afflicted, forbidden affection? I spent the remainder of that working night in an agony of indecision, provoking Augusti’s squeaky choler several times.

  I was shaken violently out of sleep. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t utter a single word, magic or otherwise. A firm hand gagged my mouth. Other hands clamped my wrists and ankles. Sunlight glared through the tiny window of the cubby-hole where the curtain was ripped aside. Crowded! A pack of black militia. A dagger poised over my heart-held by Bishop Lovats.

  Lovats bent to say, “Any trouble, and you die immediately. Understand? We’ll gag you properly. And bind you; and take you to the Khram.”

  I let my mouth be gagged with a black scarf, and my wrists be tied with cord. I was hauled to my feet. Lovats found my dagger which I had tucked beneath the mattress. He sniffed at the weapon, smiled, and slipped it inside his cassock.

  Soon I was being force-marched in broad, dazzling daylight down through the otherwise deserted Sahdi Gardens. For the first time I took in the full vista of Chorny, at this hour a no-man’s-land. The city wasn’t beautiful, as Bellogard was. But at this moment the idea of Bellogard seemed specially inviting.

  The chamber was panelled with sheets of glassy black obsidian. These were highly polished so that ghost images of myself and others appeared to be imprisoned inside the walls themselves. A single window was heavily draped. Twin oil-lamps cast deep, luminous mirror-pools in the obsidian which sought to drown our captive reflections.

  I was forced into an oak chair. A militiaman looped a length of cord round my neck. He jerked the loop tight, blocking my breath. This was only to test the noose. He slackened the cord and positioned himself behind me. I felt a constant threatening pressure on my windpipe. My gag was removed, and the other militiamen drew back. Lovats planted himself before me, pointing a rapier at my heart.

  Behind him stood Sara.

  She shook her head urgently as if to convey, “Not me!”

  Lovats must have read the look I darted her, since he smiled droopily.

  “If you’re wondering, it was I who guessed you were an imposter. Aided, I admit, by my squire’s peculiar behaviour. When I questioned her, she confessed her suspicions about your identity. And a bit more, a bit more. This presents me with a pretty problem. In the normal course of events, after your interrogation you would simply be held in check-permanently. Or else disposed of. It seems that either outcome might pain her; literally. Yet she’s reluctant to kill you herself.”

  I breathed out.

  “Do not try to shout any magic words, will you? My man will garotte you at the very first such syllable. Feel free to speak ordinarily. In fact, become voluble. Explain your presence in fine detail. Unravel Bellogard’s plan.”

  How much had Sara told him? Had her shake of the head perhaps meant, “Don’t tell him that you spared my life! Don’t tell him all about us!”?

  Lovats pricked my chest with the tip of his rapier. I winced. Sara moaned faintly as if in sympathy.

  “Sara suffers lightning headaches,” remarked Lovats. “You must have injured her magically, mustn’t you? Without spilling blood or cleaving flesh or breaking bones. How odd.”

  “Should so many commoners overhear this conversation, Bishop?”

  “Hmm, perhaps not. I shall hold your noose. Sara: you stay. Everyone else: wait in the corridor.”

  The chamber soon cleared except for the three of us. Lovats stood at my shoulder; he had swapped his rapier for a dagger.

  “With one hand I strangle you,” he said casually. “With the other hand I stab you dead. Now, confess your follies to me as if to a father.”

  “I may know a cure for your squire’s headaches.” My voice quavered. “Other than killing her,” I hastened to add.

  “Is that the main reason why you smuggled yourself into Chorny?”

  “One’s motives are sometimes mixed.”

  “I’m sure they are.”

  “Our own Queen Dama used to dream of mutual survival through stalemate.”

  “Never mind her. What’s this cure of yours?”

  “It involves our travelling into the Beyond together, shaking ourselves free from the rules of this world.”

  “I see. Eloping from reality. Using what as a guide?”

  “I think I know the answer to that, sir. We would use the sign of the serpent.” I described how a certain knight of my acquaintance had glimpsed an enormous serpent out in magic space. I mentioned how Mr Augusti had deduced the same image from his study of the spectra of ghost stars. “If this sign of Augusti’s were sketched in magic paint, and if this were used as a guide-as a focus, a compass-maybe we could reach the actual boundary zone between one universe and another. If we could, the law about magical injuries might be suspended. She would be cured.”