said. “I’ve no need to threaten that Prince. He’s going to lose the French part of his empire, and most of his German holdings too, as soon as he comes to the throne, and he’ll be dead a couple of years after that. No, it was you I wanted. I’ve been offered a fee to eliminate you.”
My knees went wobbly. I tried to say that I wasn’t a threat to anyone. I’d said I didn’t want to be Emperor. My father was Emperor of the Koryfonic Empire, you see, many worlds away from here. But I just harmlessly wanted to be a Magid and walk into other worlds. I opened my mouth to tell the man this, but my tongue sort of dried to one side of my mouth and only a surprised sort of grunt came out.
“Yes,” the man said, staring at me with his dreadful, keen eyes. They were the kind of brown that is almost yellow. “Yes, it surprises me too, now I see you. Perhaps it’s because of something you might do later. You strike me as completely useless at the moment, but you must have some fairly strong potential or that panther there wouldn’t have befriended you.”
Befriended! I thought. What befriending? I was so indignant that my tongue came unstuck and I managed to husk out, “I – he’s not real. He’s my totem animal.”
The man looked surprised. “You think she’s what? What gave you that idea?”
“They told me to go into a light trance and look for my totem in the otherwhere,” I said. “It’s the only explanation.”
The man gave an impatient sigh. “What nonsense. These Plantagenate mages do irritate me. All their magic is this kind of rule-of-thumb half-truth! You shouldn’t believe a word they say, unless you can get it confirmed by an independent source. Magic is wide, various and big. If you really think that animal is just a mind-product, touch her. Put your hand on her head.”
When that man told you to do something, you found yourself doing it. Before I could even be nervous, I found myself bending sideways and putting my hand on the panther, on the broad part of her head between her flattened ears. She didn’t like it. She flinched all over, but she let me do it. She was warm and domed there and her black hair wasn’t soft like a cat’s; it was harsh, with a prickly end to each hair. She was as real as I was. I don’t think I’d ever felt such a fool. The man was looking at me with real contempt and on top of it all I hadn’t noticed that the panther was a female.
But perhaps, I thought as I straightened up, I’m not very real here after all, because my body has to be in a trance back at the stadium. Then I thought, I keep having to do what this man tells me. In a minute, he’s going to say Go on, die. And I shall do that wherever I am.
I said, “So he – she’s not a totem.”
“I didn’t say that,” the man said. “She wouldn’t have come to you if she wasn’t. I simply meant that she’s as much flesh and blood as Slatch is.” He reached out and rubbed the head of the spotted cat. His hand was thin and all sinews, the sort of strong, squarish hand I’d always wished I had, full of power. The cat gazed at me from under it sarcastically. See? it seemed to say.
I knew it was only seconds before he was going to tell me to die and I started to play for time like anything. “And this wood,” I said. “Is this wood real then?”
His thin black eyebrows went up, irritably. “All the paths and places beyond the worlds have substance,” he said.
“Even…” I made a careful gesture towards the turquoise oval, making it slow in order not to annoy that spotted cat. “Even if you can see that from here? They can’t both be real.”
“Why not?” he more or less snapped. “You have a very limited notion of what’s real, don’t you? Will it make you any happier to be somewhere you regard as real?”
“I don’t kn—” I began to say. Then I choked it off because we were suddenly back in the concrete passage under the seats of the stadium and a little patter of applause was coming from overhead. I was standing in front of this man and his killer cat, exactly as I had been under the tree, but the black panther wasn’t there. She must be relieved! I thought, and I took a quick look round for my body, which I was sure had to be sitting against the wall in a trance.
It wasn’t there. I could see the place where it had been by the scuff marks that my heels had made on the floor. But I was the only one of me there. The time seemed to be much later. The light coming in from the grids slanted the other way and looked more golden. I could feel that the patter of clapping was faint and tired overhead, at the end of a long day.
This is only a dream! I told myself in a panic. Someone can’t have made off with my body! Can they?
“You were in the wood in your body too,” the man told me, as if I was almost too stupid for him to bother with. In here, he seemed even more powerful. He wasn’t much taller than me, and a lot skinnier, but he was like a nuclear bomb standing in that passage, ready to go off and destroy everything for miles. His cat was pure semtex. It stared up at me and despised me, and its eyes were deep and glassy in the orange light.
“If you’re going to kill me,” I said, “you might as well tell me who you are and who hired you. And why. You owe me that.”
“I owe you nothing,” he said. “I was interested to know why someone thought you worth eliminating, that’s all. And I don’t think you are. You’re too ignorant to be a danger to anyone. I shall tell them that when I refuse the commission. That should make them lose interest in you – but if they send anyone else after you, you’d better come to me. I’ll teach you enough to protect yourself. We can settle the fee when you arrive.”
He sort of settled his weight a different way. I could tell he was ready to leave. I was all set to burst with relief – but the spotted cat was not pleased at all. Its tail swished grittily against the floor and I just hoped the man could control it. It was a big creature. Its head came almost up to my chest and its muscles were out in lumps on its neck. I knew it was longing to tear my throat out.
Then the man settled his weight towards me again. I was so terrified I felt as if I was melting. His eyes were so yellow and cutting. “One other thing,” he said. “What are you doing here in a world that has nothing to do with you, masquerading as a mage?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This is a dream really.”
One of his eyebrows went up. He had been pretty contemptuous of me all along. Now he really despised me. “It is?” he said and shrugged his leather-covered shoulders. “People’s capacity to deceive themselves always amazes me. If you want to live past the age of twenty, you’d be well advised to learn to see the truth at all times. I’ll tell you that for nothing,” he said. Then he did turn and go. He swung round and he walked away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me any longer. The cat rose up on its musclebound tiptoes and walked after him, swinging its tail rudely.
“Wait a moment!” I called after him. “Who are you, for heaven’s sake?”
I’d expected him just to go on walking away, but he stopped and looked over his shoulder, giving me the benefit of his lightning-strike profile again. “Since you put it like that,” he said, “I’m generally known as Romanov. Ask your little mages about me if you like.”
Then he turned his head away and went on walking, and the cat after him, round the curve of the corridor and out of sight. In spite of the way he’d made me feel, I nearly laughed. He and that cat – they both walked the same way.
I hoped they’d run into the soldier on guard round there, but I knew
