The Book of Magic: Part 1. Группа авторов

Tor Drove, and slipped and slithered my way down the logging tracks, which were badly overgrown with briars where the logging crews had burned off their brush, only to find that the Blackwater was up with the spring rain, the ford was washed out, and there was no way over. Despair. I actually considered parting the waters or diverting the river. But there are rules about that sort of thing, and a man in the running for the chair of Perfect Logic doesn’t want to go breaking too many rules if there’s any chance of being found out; and since I was known to be in the neighborhood …

      So, back I went: up the logging trails and down the Drove, back to where I originally left the road—a journey made even more tedious by reflecting on the monstrously extended metaphor it represented. I reached the village (forgive me if I don’t say its name) bright and early in the morning, having slept under a beech tree and been woken by the snuffling of wild pigs.

      I so hoped it had changed, but it hadn’t. The main street takes you right by the blacksmith’s forge—that was all right, because when my father died, my mother sold it and moved back north to her family. Whoever had it now was a busy man; I could hear the chime of hammer on anvil two hundred yards away. My father never started work until three hours after sunup. He said it was being considerate to the neighbors, all of whom he hated and feuded incessantly with. But the hinges on the gate still hadn’t been fixed, and the chimney was still on the verge of falling down, maintained in place by nothing but force of habit—a potent entity in the Mesoge.

      I had my hood pinched up round my face, just in case anybody recognized me. Needless to say, everybody I passed stopped what they were doing and stared at me. I knew nearly all of them that were over twenty.

      Gnatho’s family were colliers, charcoal-burners. In the Mesoge we’re painfully aware of the subtlest gradations of social status, and colliers (who live outdoors, move from camp to camp in the woods, and deal with outsiders) are so low that even the likes of my lot were in a position to look down on them. But Gnatho’s father inherited a farm. It was tight in to the village, with a paddock fronting onto the road, and there he built sheds to store charcoal, and a house. It hadn’t changed one bit, but from its front door came four men, carrying a door on their shoulders. On the door was something covered in a curtain.

      I stopped an old woman, let’s not bother with her name. “Who died?” I asked.

      She told me. Gnatho’s father.

      Gnatho isn’t Gnatho’s name, of course, any more than mine is mine. When you join the Order, you get a name-in-religion assigned to you. Gnatho’s real name (like mine) is five syllables long and can’t be transcribed into a civilized alphabet. The woman looked at me. “Do I know you?”

      I shook my head. “When did that happen?”

      “Been sick for some time. Know the family, do you?”

      “I met his son once, in the City.”

      “Oh, him.” She scowled at me. Lorica doesn’t work on peasant scowls, so I hadn’t bothered with it. “He still alive, then?”

      “Last I heard.”

      “You sure I don’t know you? You sound familiar.”

      “Positive.”

      Gnatho’s father. A loud, violent man who beat his wife and daughters; a great drinker, angry because people treated him like dirt when he worked so much harder than they did. Permanently red-faced, from the charcoal fires and the booze, lame in one leg, a tall man, ashamed of his skinny, thieving, no-account son. He’d reached a ripe old age for the Mesoge. The little shriveled woman walking next to the pallbearers had to be his poor, oppressed wife, now a wealthy woman by local standards, and free at last of that pig. She was crying. Some people.

      Some impulse led me to dig a gold half-angel out of my pocket and press it into her hand as she walked past me. She looked around and stared, but I’d discreetly made myself hard to see. She gazed at the coin in her hand, then tightened her palm around it like a vise.

      I was out of the village and climbing the long hill on the other side a mere twenty minutes later, by my excellent Mezentine mechanical watch. There, I told myself, that wasn’t so bad.

      Once you’ve experienced the thing you’ve been dreading the most, you get a bit light-headed for a while, until some new aggravation comes along and reminds you that life isn’t like that. In my case, the new aggravation was another flooded river, the Inso this time, which had washed away the bridge at Machaera and smashed the ferryboat into kindling. The ferryman told me what I already knew; I had to go back three miles to where the road forks, then follow the southern leg down as far as Coniga, pick up the old Military Road, which would take me, eventually, to the coast. There’s a stage at Friest, he said helpfully, so you won’t have to walk very far. Just as well, he added, it’s a bloody long way else.

      So help me, I actually considered the stage. But it wouldn’t be fair on the other passengers—innocent country folk who’d never done me any harm. No; for some reason, the Mesoge didn’t want to let me go—playing with its food, a bad habit my mother was always very strict about. One of the reasons we’re so damnably backward is the rotten communications with the outside world. A few heavy rainstorms and you’re screwed; can’t go anywhere, can’t get back to where you came from.

      So, reluctantly, I embarked on a walking tour of my past. I have to say, the scholar’s gown is an excellent armor, a woolen version of lorica. Nobody hassles you, nobody wants to talk to you, they give you what you ask for and wait impatiently for you to finish up and leave. I bought a pair of boots in Assistenso, from a cobbler I knew when he was a young man. He looked about a hundred and six now. He recognized me but didn’t say a word. Quite good boots, actually, though I had to qualisartifex them a bit to stop them squeaking all the damn time.

      The Temperance & Thrift in Nauns is definitely a cut above the other inns in the Mesoge; God only knows why. The rooms are proper rooms, with actual wooden beds, the food is edible, and (glory of glories) you can get proper black tea there. Nominally it’s a brothel rather than an inn; but if you give the girl a nice smile and six stuivers, she goes away and you can have the room to yourself. I was sleeping peacefully for the first time in ages when some fool banged on the door and woke me up.

      Was I the scholar? Yes, I admitted reluctantly, because the gown lying over the back of the chair was in plain sight. You’re needed. They’ve got trouble in—well, I won’t bother you with the name of the village. Lucky to have caught you. Just as well the bridge is out, or you’d have been long gone.

      They’d sent a cart for me, the fools. Needless to say, the horse went lame practically the moment I climbed aboard; so back we went to the Temperance for another one, and then the main shaft cracked, and we were ages cutting out a splint and patching it in. Quicker to have walked, I told him.

      “I know you,” the carter replied. “You’re from around here.”

      There comes a time when you can fight no more. “That’s right.”

      “You’re his son. The collier’s boy.”

      Most insults I can take in my stride, but some I can’t. “Like hell,” I snapped. I told him my name. “The old smith’s son,” I reminded him. He nodded. He never forgot a face, he told me.

      Gnatho’s father, in fact, was the problem. Not resting quietly in the grave is a Mesoge tradition, like Morris dances and wassailing the apple trees. If you die with an unresolved grudge or a bad attitude generally, chances are you’ll be back, either as your own putrifying and swollen corpse or some form of large, unpleasant vermin—a wolf, bear, or pig.

      “He’s come back as a pig,” I said. “Bet you.”

      The carter grinned. “You knew the old devil, then.”

      “Oh, yes.”

      Revenant pests don’t look like the natural variety. They’re bigger, always jet-black, with red eyes. They glow slightly in the dark, and ordinary weapons don’t bite on them, ordinary traps can’t hold them, and they seem to thrive on ordinary