Diana Wynne Jones - Deep Secrets

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Deep Secret

Diana Wynne Jones

A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

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“I’d vote for Diana Wynne Jones as a British National

Treasure.”

—Locus

“Unusual seriocomic science fantasy.”

—Booklist on Dogsbody (An ALA Notable Book)

DEEP SECRET

All over the Multiverse (the universe that is in the

shape of Infinity, like a figure eight laid on its side), the

Magids, powerful magicians, are at work to maintain the

balance between positive and negative magic for the good

of all. They use their magical talents to push people into

doing the right thing at the right time.

Rupert Venables is the junior Magid assigned to Earth

and to the troublesome planets of the Koyrfonic Empire

as well. The Empire is situated right at the twist at the

center of the Multiverse. There is a problem of succession

when the Emperor dies without a known heir, paralleled

by a more personal problem on Earth when Rupert’s

senior dies and appoints him senior. Now Rupert must

search the Earth for an appropriate new Magid, while

helping part-time to prevent the descent of the Empire

into chaos.

And then the problems become intertwined when

Rupert finds that he can meet all five of the potential

Magids on Earth by attending one SF convention in

England. And that other forces, some of them completely

out of control, will be there too.

By the same author:

THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND

A SUDDEN WILD MAGIC

MINOR ARCANA

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used

fictitiously.

DEEP SECRET

this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This book was first published in Great Britain in 1997

by Victor Gollancz, an imprint of the Cassell Group.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

For Books on the World Wide Web:

http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty

Associates, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Diana Wynne.

Deep secret / Diana Wynne Jones.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 0-312-86859-6

I. Title.

PR6060.0497D44 1999

823'.914—dc21 98-49010 CIP

First Tor edition: March 1999

Printed in the United States of America

In the year e.k. 3413, the following files were secretly obtained from the

Magid Rupert Venables and, at the Emperor’s personal request, deposited

in the new archive at Iforion.

ONE

^ »

I may as well start with some of our deep secrets because this

account will not be easy to understand without them.

All over the multiverse, the sign for Infinity or Eternity is a

figure eight laid on its side. This is no accident, since it exactly

represents the twofold nature of the many worlds, spread as they

are in the manner of a spiral nebula twisted like a Möbius strip to

become endless. It is said that the number of these worlds is infinite

and that more are added daily. But it is also said that the Emperor

Koryfos the Great caused this multiplicity of worlds somehow by

conquering from Ayewards to Naywards.

You may take your pick, depending on whether you are

comfortable with worlds infinitely multiplying, or prefer to think

the number stable. I have never decided.

Two facts, however, are certain: one half of this figure eight of

worlds is negative magically, or Naywards, and the other half

positive, or Ayewards; and the Empire of Koryfos, situated across

the twist at the centre, has to this day the figure-eight sign of

Infinity as its imperial insignia.

This sign appears everywhere in the Empire, even more

frequently than statues of Koryfos the Great. I have reason to

know this rather well. About a year ago, I was summoned to the

Empire capital, Iforion, to attend a judicial enquiry. Some very old

laws required that a Magid should be present – otherwise I am sure

they would have done without me, and I could certainly have done

without them. The Koryfonic Empire is one of my least favourite

charges. It is traditionally in the care of the most junior Magid from

Earth and I was at that time just that. I was tired too. I had only

the day before returned from America, where I had, almost

single-handed, managed to push the right people into sorting out

some kind of peace in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland.

But all my pride and pleasure in this vanished when I saw the

summons. Groaning to myself, I put on the required purple bands

and cream silk brocade garments and went to take my seat in the

closed court.

My first peevish, jet-lagged thought was, Why can’t they use one

of the nice rooms? The great Imperial Palace has parts that go back

over a thousand years and some of those old courts and halls are

wonderful. But this enquiry was in a new place, lined with rather

smelly varnished wood, bleak and box-like and charmless. And the

wooden benches were vilely uncomfortable. The figure-eight

insignia – carved in relief and painted too bright a gold – dug into

my shoulders and dazzled off the walls and off the big wooden chair

provided for the Emperor. I remember irritably transferring my

gaze to the inevitable statue of Koryfos the Great, looming in the

corner. That was new too, and picked out in over-bright gilt, but

there is this to be said for Koryfos: he had a personality. Though

the statues are always the same and always idealized, you could

never mistake them for anything but the likeness of a real person.

He carried his head on one side, a bit like Alexander the Great of

Earth, and wore a vague, cautious smile that said, ‘I hear what you

say, but I’m going to do things my way anyway.’ You could see he

was obstinate as sin.

I remember I was wondering why the Empire so loved Koryfos –

he reigned for a bare twenty years over two millennia ago, and

most of the time he was away conquering places, but they persist in

regarding his time as the Golden Age – when we had to stand up

for the entrance of the present Emperor. A very different person,

small, plain and dour. You do wonder how it is that Emperors

always marry the most beautiful women in several worlds and yet

produce someone like Timos IX whom you would hardly notice in

the street. You would glance at him and think that this was a short

man with weak eyes and a chip on his shoulder. Timos IX was one

of very few in the Empire who needed to wear glasses. This

embarrassed me as I stood up. I was the only other person in the

court in spectacles – as if I were setting up to be the Emperor’s

equal. In many ways, of course, a Magid is the equal of any ruler,

but in this particular court of enquiry I was a mere onlooker, there

by law to certify simply whether or not the accused had broken the

law as stated. I was not even supposed to speak until after a verdict

had been reached.

This, among other legal facts, was tediously made known to me

in the preliminaries after we all sat down and the prisoner was

marched in and made to stand in the centre. He was a

pleasant-looking youngster of twenty-one or so, called Timotheo. He

did not look like a law-breaker. I am afraid that, apart from

registering, with some perplexity, that Timotheo was an alias and

that, for obscure legal reasons, his real name could not be given, I

could not force my jet-lagged mind to attend very well. I remember

going back to my thoughts of Koryfos the Great. He stood to the

Empire in the place of a religion, it seemed to me. The wretched

place had religions in plenty, over a thousand godlets and goddities,

but the worship of these was a purely personal thing. As an

example of how personal, I recalled that Timos IX had, about fifteen

years ago, adopted the worship of a peculiarly unlovable goddess

who inhabited a bush planted on the grave of a dead worshipper

and who imposed on her followers a singularly joyless code of

morals. This probably explained the Emperor’s pinched and gloomy

look. But no one else at court had felt the need to adopt the

Emperor’s faith. It was Koryfos who united everyone.

Here I was jerked to alertness. The Emperor himself read out the

charges against the young man in elaborate legal language.

Stripped of the law-talk it was appalling, even for the Empire. The

so-called Timotheo was the Emperor’s eldest son. The decree he was

said to have broken stated that no child of the Emperor, by any of

his True Wives, High Ladies or Lesser Consorts, was to know who

his or her parents were. The penalty for discovering who they were

was death. And death for anyone who helped an Imperial child find

out.

The Emperor then asked Timotheo if he had broken this decree.

Timotheo had evidently known no more of this decree than I had.

He was looking as shocked and angry as I felt. I could have

applauded when he answered drily, ‘Sire, if I hadn’t broken it

before, I would have broken it when you read out my parentage just

now.’

‘But have you broken the decree?’ the Emperor reiterated.

‘Yes,’ said Timotheo.

Catch-22, I thought. I was furious. What a charade!

The worst of it was that Timotheo was intelligent as well as

pleasant. He would have made a much better Emperor than his

father. It had obviously taken some ingenuity to find out who he

was. He had been one of four fosterlings in the house of a provincial

noble and, as the enquiry proceeded, it became clear that the other

three fosterlings and the noble must have given him some help. But

Timotheo stuck to it that he had done the detective work and made

the discovery by himself. Then he had made the bad mistake of

writing to his mother, the Emperor’s First Consort, for

confirmation.

‘Did it not occur to you that, once you were known, my enemies

might kidnap you in order to threaten me?’ the Emperor asked him.

‘I wasn’t going to tell anyone,’ Timotheo said. ‘Besides, I can look

after myself.’

‘Then you were intending to claim the Imperial throne for

yourself,’ the Emperor suggested.

‘No I wasn’t,’ Timotheo protested. ‘I just didn’t like not knowing

who I am. I think I have the right to know that.’

‘You have no right. You are convicted of treason to the throne out

of your own mouth,’ the Emperor said, satisfied.

He looked at me on my high, uncomfortable bench. ‘The law is

the law,’ he said. ‘Bear witness, Magid, that this man broke our

Imperial decree.’

I bowed. I couldn’t bear to speak to him.

After that there was a great deal of palaver, with other

dignitaries getting up in their grand silks and bearing witness too.

It got like a pompous dance. I sat there considering when would be

the best time to spirit young Timotheo away – and I blame my

jet-lagged state that I didn’t do it there and then. He was looking

stunned by this time. Six men had just paraded past him, passing

sentence of death on him, each swinging the white lining of their

bright pink cloaks towards him. It was like being sentenced by a

bed of petunias. I couldn’t take it seriously. I reckoned the best time

to act was when they marched Timotheo back to his condemned

cell. He had been brought in by a squad of élite guards with a mage

following for added assurance, and I assumed they would think no

one could touch him through all that. I bided my time.

And missed out completely. The petunias retired. The Emperor

said, quite casually, ‘The sentence can be carried out now.’ He

raised a hand glittering with rings. One of them must have been

one of their beam weapons, miniaturized. Timotheo gasped quietly

and fell over sideways on the floor with blood running out of his

mouth.

It happened so quickly that I hoped it was a trick. I could not

believe that, even in the Koryfonic Empire, an Emperor would not

want his eldest son alive. While I was climbing down the varnished

wooden steps to the centre of the court, I was still sure it was just a

deception, to make the Emperor’s enemies believe Timotheo was

dead. But it was no trick. I touched Timotheo. He was still warm

like a living person, but my fingers told me there was no soul there.

I left at once, from beside the corpse, to make my feelings plain.

I was thoroughly disgusted, with myself as well as the Emperor.

As I made my way home, I told myself I had been stupid to expect

compassion or even value for life in that place. And I had sufficient

time to curse myself. Earth lies Naywards of the Empire, which

makes the journey rather like going slowly uphill. I had to haul

myself from lattice to lattice in the spaces between the worlds, and

by the time I reached my house I not only hated the Empire, but

also the stupid hampering robes it caused me to wear. I was just

tearing the darn things off in my living room when the phone rang.

I wanted nothing more than to sit down with a fresh-brewed cup

of coffee, before calling up the Senior Magid and lodging a formal

complaint against the Emperor. I swore. I snatched up the phone.

‘Now what?’

It was my elder brother Will. ‘Bad day?’ he said.

‘Very,’ I said. ‘The Koryfonic Empire.’

‘Then I believe you,’ he said. ‘Glad I don’t have to look after that

lot any longer.’ Will is a Magid too. ‘And what I’ve got to tell you

won’t make your day any better, I’m afraid. I’m ringing from Stan

Churning’s house. He’s ill. He wants you here.’

‘Oh God!’ I said. ‘Why does everything unpleasant always happen

at once?’

‘Don’t know. It just does,’ Will agreed. ‘It’s not a deep secret, but

it ought to be. I think Stan’s dying, Rupert. He thinks so anyway.

We tried to get hold of Si too, but he’s out of touch. How soon can

you get here?’

‘Half an hour,’ I said. Stan lives outside Newmarket. Weavers

End, where I live, is just beyond Cambridge.

‘Good,’ said Will. ‘Then I can stay with him until you get here.’

And keep him alive if necessary, Will meant. If Stan really was

dying, there would be Magid business he had to hand on to me. ‘See

you soon,’ Will said and rang off.

I stayed in the house just long enough to make coffee and fax

Senior Magid that I intended to complain about the Empire, to the

Upper Room if necessary. Senior Magid lives several worlds

Naywards and I normally make heavy weather of getting a fax

through there. That day I did it in seconds. Five angry, trenchant

sentences in no time at all. I was too busy thinking of Stan. I got in

my car still thinking of him. Normally, getting into my car is a

thing I pause and take pleasure in – particularly if I have just been

away for a while. It is a wholly beautiful car, the car I used to

dream of owning as a boy. I usually pause to think how good it is

that I can make the kind of money you need to own such a car. Not

that day. I just got in and drove, swigging coffee from the Thermos,

with my mind on Stan.

Stan had sponsored first Will, then our brother Simon, then me,

into the Company of Magids. He had taught me most of what I

know today. I wasn’t sure that I knew what I’d do without him. I

kept praying that he, or Will, had made a mistake and that he was

not dying after all. But one of the things about being a Magid is

that you don’t make that kind of mistake.

‘Damn!’ I said. I kept needing to blink. I didn’t consciously see

any of the roads I drove along until I was bumping up the weedy

drive of Stan’s bungalow.

A nasty bungalow. A blot on the landscape. It looked like a large

cube of Stilton cheese dumped down in the flat heathland. We used

to kid Stan about how ugly it was, but he always said he was quite

happy in it. People who knew me, and particularly people who knew

all three of us Venables brothers when we lived in Cambridge, used

to wonder what we saw in a seedy little ex-jockey like Stan. They

asked how we could bring ourselves to haunt his hideous house the

way we did.

The answer is that all Magids lead double lives. We have to earn

a living. Stan earned his advising sheiks and other rich men about

racehorses. I design computer software myself, games mostly.

I parked my car beside Will’s vehicle. At dusk, with the light

behind it, it passes for a Land Rover. In broad daylight, as it was

then, you look away and think you may have imagined things. I

edged past it and Will opened the bottle-green front door of the

bungalow to me.

‘Good timing,’ he said. ‘I have to go now and milk the goats. He’s

in the front room on the left.’

‘Is he—?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Will. ‘I’ve said goodbye. Shame Si can’t be found. He’s

somewhere yonks Ayewards and not in touch with anyone I can

contact. Stan’s written him a letter. Let me know how things go,

won’t you?’ He went soberly past me and climbed into his queer

vehicle.

I went on into the bungalow. Stan was lying, all five foot of him,

stretched on top of a narrow bed by the window. His slightly bandy

legs were in child-sized jeans and one of his socks had a thin place

at the toe. At first sight, you would not have thought there was too

much wrong with him, except that it was unlike him not to be

wandering about doing something. But if you looked at his face, as I

did almost straight away, you saw that it was strangely stretched

over its bones, and that his eyes, under the high forehead left by his

curly grey receding hair, were standing out like a cat’s, luminous

and feverish.

‘What kept you, Rupert?’ he joked, a bit gaspily. ‘Will phoned you

a good five minutes ago.’

‘The Koryfonic Empire,’ I said. ‘I had to send a complaint to

Senior Magid.’

‘That lot!’ Stan gasped. ‘She gets complaints about them from

every Magid who goes near the place. Abuse of power.

Contravention of human rights. Manipulation of Magids. General

rottenness. I always think she just puts them in a file labelled k.e.

and then loses the file.’

‘Can I get you anything?’ I said.

‘Not much point,’ he said. ‘I’ve only got an hour or so – no time to

digest anything – but I would appreciate a drink of water.’

I got him a glass of water from the kitchen and helped him sit up

enough to drink it. He was very weak and he had that smell. The

smell is indescribable, but it belongs only to the terminally ill and

once you know it you can’t mistake it. I remember it from my

grandfather. ‘Shouldn’t I ring the doctor?’ I asked him.

‘Not yet,’ he said, lying back and panting a bit. ‘Too much to say

first.’

‘Take your time,’ I said.

‘Don’t make bad jokes,’ he retorted. ‘So. Well. Here goes. Rupert,

you’re junior Magid on Earth, so it’s going to fall to you to find and

sponsor my replacement – but you knew that, I hope.’

I nodded. The number of Magids is always constant. We try to fill

the gaps left by deaths as promptly as possible, because there is a

lot for us to do. That was how Stan came to sponsor me as well as

my brothers. Three Magids died within six months of one another,

long before Will was competent to try. Before that, Stan had been

this world’s junior Magid for nearly ten years. As I said to Will, bad

things always happen at once.

‘Now there are several things I want to tell you about that,’ Stan

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