“Ah, so now the lad teaches the man.”

  I felt irked. “Somebody with a full soul tells someone with a tiny bit of soul the truth.”

  “Huh. The arrogance of those with soul, so-called! The oppression they cause!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Henchy. “Those with soul sustain the existence of everyone else.”

  “And what, I wonder,” growled the giant, “if there was a revolution? What if the common people both here and in Chorny rose up and killed or checked all their masters and mistresses?”

  “That couldn’t happen,” Henchy said. 'If it did, the world would collapse upon itself. Is revolution what you’re plotting together with Chorny’s intellectuals? I’m interested in your lines of communication, Matyash. Do the robbers in the Lettish marshes smuggle your star maps over the border? Do those maps perhaps code for conspiracies to overthrow both kingdoms?”

  “That’s. ridiculous.” The giant’s voice faltered. He had developed so much contempt for Samostan and palace, so much contempt for squires and nobles that he almost told us his plottings outright, almost taunted us with those, and expected us not to realize.

  “You claim that you’re loyal to life,” I said to him, “but you act like someone who’s sick of it.” I did my best to sound menacing, as if I was supported by a squad of guards; whereas there were only two of us confronting him, and one of us a cripple.

  It seemed evident that Matyash was no spy, as such. A spy would have behaved less blatantly. However, his astrological work masked a political motive-which he might argue was a scientific motive. Were his horoscopes entirely honest? Had he been subverting the citizens of Bellogard by means of the stars?

  I had kept my ears open in the bars of Seveno district. Recently I had overheard various inexplicable outbursts and innuendoes, which I had duly reported back to the palace. These now made better sense in the context of a dawning subversive movement. Not much of one! A movement of nocturnal drunks and diddle-brains. Bellogard had always seemed a contented, complacent city. To my mind a political movement of commoners-a “commonist” party-should stand a better chance of success in dark, harsh Chorny. Maybe I had been listening in the wrong bars; or bars were not the best places to listen.

  Henchy plainly had more information than I had, and maybe what really interested him was a possible worm within Chorny’s apple. Plus a way to make use of this worm.

  “Are you coming up to view the stars and worlds?” nagged Matyash. “The heavens are brightening. I shall point out how they indicate the nature of space.”

  Henchy shook his head. “You might feel tempted to demonstrate the instability of this structure-by helping us to tumble off and break our necks. Thus exemplifying your political philosophy. You would fail. We can protect ourselves magically against commoners.” (Not necessarily! We could easily suffer mundane wounds.) “This folly would lead to your death as surely as a fly is squashed.” (Brave words!) “I’m more interested in discussing how you can be allowed to continue in your post-for the sake of scientific enlightenment-while at the same time assisting the kingdom. I want you to fulfil certain reasonable conditions, Mr Matyash. Reasonable, as opposed to treasonable.”

  Henchy may have lost the use of his fighting arm; but he had sharpened his wits to demonstrate his continuing usefulness to king and queen. I felt leery about the way this interview was proceeding, and wished Henchy had been more straightforward about the reasons for it.

  As Henchy proceeded to outline conditions, the palace’s plan became all too clear. In the not-so-distant future a certain white pawn-squire was going to be advanced into Chorny territory. The said pawn must be furnished with underground contacts in Chorny, who would shelter him. He would present himself to those subversives as a messenger from Matyash, equipped with coded astrological charts which would serve as introduction and credentials.

  And who would the lucky pawn-squire be? Who had been trained in the nocturnal habits of Seveno district? Who had been polished for life in the black city of Chorny? A life which might not last very long? I’ll give you one guess.

  “I can see a couple of things wrong with this plan,” I said to Henchy. We were descending Bresh Hill, with the constellations twinkling overhead.

  The first deficiency was that the plan was just a copy of what Chorny had done when they infiltrated Squire Sara into Bellogard (except that Sara had needed no contacts to shelter her!). The second flaw was that Sara’s eidolon hadn’t even appeared on the chequerboard at the time. Her face was still unknown to us.

  Only Queen Isgalt and I knew about Sara. In the nick of time I stopped myself blurting my secret out to Henchy.

  “My face will hardly be unknown,” I said.

  “That’s no problem. By night, with a modicum of disguise, you’ll be safe enough. It’s about time we launched an attack! What security is there in passive defence? With Prince Feryava already injured, even a pawn could take him. But not if we all stay at home. Oh it’s high time. Sir Brant will explain the details.”

  “So this is Brant’s plan?”

  “In consultation with the queen, who cares deeply for your safety. What’s your other objection?” “Nothing, nothing.”

  Obviously I ought to reassess Queen Isgalt’s generosity in letting me keep Meshko’s sketch-book with its enticing portraits of Sara, squire of Chorny.

  The word “keep” hardly conveys the intensity of my attachment to that sketch-book. I had treasured it.

  I had possessed it. Four years had slipped by since I fell in love with Sara, since she fled from Bellogard, yet I still often opened the book and gazed at her image, fixated.

  On my return to the palace that night I did so once again.

  My present room, high up in the pages’ tower, was furnished in rococo style. Table, chairs, and a huge bed were carved and gilded. Ornamental plaster fruits and flowers clung about the door and window- frames, about the covings round the fireplace, and circuited the ceiling. Ornate paraffin sconces backed by cherub-framed mirrors lit the room by night.

  Taking the sketch-book from a locked cupboard, I carried it to the table and opened it. Sara’s fine features confronted me: slim nose, high cheeks, dark liquid eyes, pertly sentimental mouth, framed by a crinkly black cascade of hair. How I admired the soft hollow of her throat and the ivory of her shoulders-so smooth yet capable of so much hardness, as when she had advanced to attack me.

  Here was inducement indeed to quit the security of Bellogard, willingly to risk my neck by sneaking into the enemy city.

  As so often before, my lips hovered over the page and I kissed the air. I avoided touching the paper lest I moisten and smear the charcoal. An onlooker might have regarded me as a fool. I even saw myself as foolish. Yet what a sweet folly this was. Until now my tryst with her image had only amounted to a romantic folly; one in which I had indulged myself achingly, and which had become something I needed nearly as much as a drunkard craves his drink. Now the demands of reality were intruding. In Chorny I might actually meet Sara in some dark street. Must I ignore her? If she recognized me, would she betray me?

  Meshko’s portraits were very faithful. As of four years ago. In the interim I had doted on image, rather than original. When next I saw Sara in the flesh, might I find her strange because she would be mobile, and real? Might I recoil at some trivial, yet devastating, disparity?

  An image possesses no wilful, impatient, personal motives of its own. What’s more, an image contains no ordinariness. An image is detached from the stream of daily life, exalted. The portrait of one’s self which exists in other people’s minds may well excite those people intensely. An admirer might exclaim to a queen, “How very thrilling to be you!” However, the queen might reply: “Believe me, it isn’t thrilling at all. It’s very ordinary to be me.” One might admlre, or lust after, a woman’s long and graceful legs. To her, most of the time, those are simply sexless, familiar limbs she uses for walking about on. Her hindquarters are just something she sits down on. Her eyes are points of view, jelly organs she hopes not to get grit in on a windy day. Her teeth are for chewing food. Her arms are for lifting things. Sara’s own ordinariness-to herself-might well be that fatal disparity.

  I had made love to a number of other women down Groody Lane during the past four years. In the darkness I had found myself imagining that those women were Sara-and this had made me wonder whether I had ever genuinely made love to Sara herself! Or only, even while I embraced her, to a kind of erotic eidolon which I superimposed upon her. Margarita had long since stopped visiting my bed in the palace. For some reason I had never questioned why. Nor had I made any further attempt to entice Margarita, other than to pose for Meshko. I assumed that in some fashion I had outgrown the maid who had initiated me. It now occurred to me that the queen might have warned Margarita off me. Isgalt wanted me to yearn for Sara.

  After a while yearning becomes an end in itself, perhaps preferable to the attainment of the dream. Sara hadn’t magicked me at all. I had magicked myself, enchanted myself with her. I’d decided to fall in love, and I’d done so. Awareness of this fact made not a whit of difference to the disturbing power of that love.

  I lowered my lips and this time I kissed the actual page.

  And paper moved against my lips, twitching and rippling.

  I jerked my head back.

  Sara’s portrait undulated. It might have been lying at the bottom of a stream. Did her lips really move? Did her eyes blink? Did she breathe?

  I felt such a strong sense of her presence. A sense of indignation, mingled with excited curiosity. Of pleasure mixed with pain. Of angry delight; and sweet shock. Suddenly the side of my head ached violently-where I had clubbed Sara with my poniard hilt.

  Hastily I closed the sketch-book. All such sensations vanished. Meshko must have brushed a trace of magic paint on to this picture-the same paint that Sara had supplied for espionage. Had he brushed some on to all the other portraits in the book? How often, during the past few years, had Sara sensed my presence? Almost, my touch. My parting, stunning touch!

  In that strange moment of contact I had not sensed hatred. I had sensed a thrill of love; yet at the same time my blow continued to pain her magically-and the only possible cure would be for her to kill me. This realization put my dotings of the past four years into a different perspective. In another respect nothing was altered; only reinforced.

  Was there any way to heal a magical hurt other than by killing the inflicter of it? When the hurt in question wasn’t severe, when it didn’t involve torn flesh or broken bones?

  Nobody before had ever wished to heal an enemy’s magic wound. I decided to ask Bishop Veck’s opinion, circumspectly.

  Next day I sought the bishop out; and found him in the Bibliotek.

  Hunched in a dusty leather chair, he was scanning the even dustier surface of a desk through a powerful reading-glass, which he held steady by bridging his hands.

  Correction: on the desk lay the most minuscule of books, held open by tweezers. Veck grunted in frustration.

  I whispered so as not to blow the book away. “Excuse me?” Veck placed the reading-glass carefully atop the book, as one might entrap a flea beneath a glass dish.

  “I’ve been thinking about Henchy’s broken wrist, Bishop. He imagines it’s getting better slowly. Is there no way to speed the healing?”

  “He imagines. The little wound in my own cheek has never improved. Nor will it, till the world ends.”

  “Will you heal up when the world ends, sir? In time for the next cycle of existence?”

  “Not the personal me, Pedino. Otherwise I should remember a previous cycle of existence. As to the ideal me. maybe.”

  “What if the person who wounded you was still alive and wanted to undo the wound?”

  “Sir Oscaro is dead years since.”

  “Yes, but what if?”

  Veck knit his brow. “Ah, now I see what’s bothering you, Pedino! Henchy was injured by Bishop Zorn.

  You killed Zorn. If you had checked him instead and dragged him to Henchy for Henchy to kill. Ha! You couldn’t have known that Henchy was hurt. Nor could you have effectively checked Zorn. You did the only possible thing; and did it well. Don’t trouble your conscience, lad.”

  I chose my words carefully. “If the ‘ideal’ you heals, surely that healing must occur somewhere? In the space between cycles, in the gap between worlds? Maybe there’s some way to reach that space and time by magical travel before the world ends?”

  “You’ve been harking to our astrologer’s notion of other universes.”

  “No, sir, I haven’t. Henchy and I called on Mr Matyash yesterday. That was in connection with subversion.”

  Veck nodded. “Sir Brant will want you to pay more visits to the astrologer, so that you can plausibly pass for an associate of the fellow. No doubt Matyash will bend your ear with his theories of coexisting universes. I see no evidence, myself. Proof of successive universes, ah yes. That’s another matter.”

  Veck tapped the glass atop the microscopic book, and chuckled wryly. “Not that I can discern very much detail of those!”

  “What exactly are these ‘coexisting’ universes?”

  “You had best ask Matyash. But briefly: he thinks he reads signs in the stars indicative of other regions of space where different natural laws apply. Different from those which apply to our own world. Other rules govern existence in those regions. According to him.”

  “I shall ask him.”

  “If Matyash discovers a universe next door to ours where Henchy’s injury and mine can be healed-plus a way to reach that region-do tell me! I should be fascinated.” Veck’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “The man’s rather mad. He only has a tiny scrap of soul, and lacks magic. So he burns with resentment. He concocts imaginary worlds where our own magic wouldn’t work; where he might be our equal.

  Such jealous pique unbalances his thinking. Personally I doubt the wisdom of using him as an entree into Chorny.”

  “You doubt?”

  “Not very vigorously. It’s worth a try.”

  Troubled, I left the bishop to his indecipherable, microscopic book.

  I addressed Sir Brant. “Bishop Veck seems to doubt the sanity of this plan.”

  We were in the Ex-Chequer Chamber. Isgalt sat on her ivory throne, her blue eyes regarding me wistfully. Yellow ringleted hair spilled from a chaplet of opals. By contrast she wore a brass breastplate, long honey-coloured tweed skirt, and beige suede boots: a functional, “touch-me-not” costume.

  In the companion throne lolled King Karol, portly and ruddy, puffing at his pipe and chuckling over his latest magic bubble.

  High and haughty, Prince Ruk observed proceedings with hands clasped behind his back. He was elegantly suited in cloth of silver, with silver spats upon his ankles.

  Sir Brant-burly, bluff, sandy-headed-was armoured in lightweight brassarts, cuirass, tasset, and sabatons. His legs were bare: hairy tree-trunks. He wore the same sword with which he had once run through his own squire in order to promote the queen.

  “Veck doesn’t actually oppose the scheme,” Brant said. “It’s a bold one; and I shall be guarding you, lad, on the journey. I shall carry you magically most of the way to Chorny. Then I’ll lurk in the

  countryside. I’ll leap askew unpredictably every now and then. No one will pin me down. I’ll dye my hair black. Prince Ruk will stay on alert here, ready to leap directly to Chorny-just so long as no one gets in his way.”

  “Suppose Prince Ruk were to position himself closer to the border?” Isgalt suggested.

  “What, leave the palace and Your Majesties unguarded?” Ruk shook his head firmly. “I can guard you from a distance, that’s true. If a single Chorny pawn were to interpose, immediate return would be blocked.”

  “Look!” cried the king. Chortling, he rotated his glass bubble. Inside was an insect-clouded marsh curving upward to the equator of the bubble, where there was dry land. Marooned in the fly-infested watery waste were homunculi of Queen Babula and King Mastilo, tiny eidolons. The Chorny monarchs struggled to wade to the sanctuary of the equator, slapping furiously at the biting pests.

  “Most amusing,” said Isgalt. “Do the real Babula and Mastilo feel the slightest irritation?”

  “No,” admitted King Karol. “It’s a pleasant conceit to imagine that they might possibly dream about this! Don’t you think?”

  Ruk cleared his throat. “Could we continue with the business in hand? I say we should ignore Feryava as a target. The Chorny astrologer with whom Matyash intrigues is controlled from the Khram, the Chorny equivalent of our Samostan. Bishop Lovats presides over the Khram. From what I’ve heard about him, Lovats may be highly tantalized by some of Matyash’s mad theories. A messenger purporting to come from Matyash has a good chance of getting close enough to the bishop to strike. Let’s not forget how adept our lad is at catching black bishops enpassant. Eh, Pedino? Or at least you can distract Lovats sufficiently while Brant and I overwhelm him.”

  “In the battle four years ago,” I pointed out, “Chorny attacked our Samostan first of all. Attacking the Khram is a copycat move.”

  “It’s only logical, in view of the astrology aspect.”

  Abruptly King Karol turned his magic bubble upside-down. The whole swamp slid round, tumbling enemy king and queen, soaking and bedraggling them. Soon I was visiting Matyash at the observatory, of an evening, and pestering him about his theories of those other universes next to ours. After a while it dawned on him (or, in his case, “dusked”) that I was more than just an over-privileged nuisance. I was genuinely and vitally interested in his notions; not that he guessed the real reason.

  So here we both were, engaged in a typical nightwatch atop that precarious platform underneath the glass dome.

  He directed his astrolabe at the constellation of the Pig.

  “Mark my words, Shrimp, other rules apply to parts of the cosmos beyond our immediate ken. That’s written in the shapes the stars make. When you travel magically”-he felt obliged to spit exasperatedly over the edge-“you pass through a zone that impinges on the metaspatial zones of those other regions.”