Diana Wynne Jones - A Sudden Wild Magic

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A Sudden Wild Magic [070-4.3]

By: DIANA WYNNE JONES

Synopsis:

Magic, Mages and a host of other supernatural phenomena populate this

novel.

VICTOR GOLLANCZ

LONDON

First published in the USA 1992 by Avon Books First published in Great

Britain 1996 by Victor Gollancz An imprint of the Cassell Group

Wellington House, 125 Strand, London we2R OBB

publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or

any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission

in writing from the publishers.

The right of Diana Wynne Jones to be identified as author of this work

has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act, 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

ISBN 0 575 06299 1

Typeset by CentraCet Ltd, Cambridge Printed in Great Britain by St.

Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk The magical

activities of Britain have always been highly organized.

Anyone who doubts this should consider the Spanish Armada and the winds

that so conveniently dissipated it and perhaps further consider why

even the most skeptical of historians accepts this convenient hurricane

so calmly, as a perfectly natural occurrence. Or the doubter might

also consider why Hitler, or Napoleon before him, never got around to

invading Britain, and why we accept these facts, too, so easily.

A moment's unclouded thought should persuade anyone that these things

are too good to be true. But of course, no one's thought ;'s

unclouded, for the very good reason that the organization has, for

centuries, devoted itself to clouding it and making sure that most

people perceive its activities as messy, futile, and mainly concerned

with old ladies astride broomsticks. In fact, the organization is so

ruthlessly secret that even the majority of those engaged in the

various forms of witchcraft are unaware that their activities are being

directed by a ruling council which we shall call the Ring carefully and

secretly selected from the ranks of practitioners all over the

country.

This council has had to work increasingly hard this century. Its

activities have, more and more, been forced to encompass the whole

world. Most of its members agreed that this was a natural result of

improved communications. The only person who disagreed was the one man

of the Inner Ring.

His name was Mark Lister, and his actual title is a secret. He made

his living with computers. It always pleased him that he should work

at something so unrelated to witchcraft, and make good money at it too,

without more than occasionally invoking his powers as magician.

He dressed the part of a businessman, in expensive charcoal grey suits,

kept his pale face meticulously clean-shaven and his pale hair most

conservatively cut, and, since he was of average height and neither fat

nor thin, he looked almost unremarkable. This pleased him too. He

made just one concession to his secret activities: he always wore a

wide-brimmed hat as a covert allusion to the Magician in the tarot

pack. It did not worry him that, apart from the hat, most people found

him both humourless and colourless. What did worry him was certain

current trends in the world.

Thinking about these trends. Mark Lister started to feed certain data

to computers in his office. It was idly done at first, in a spare

moment, just to make him feel he was doing something to control

something that had long gone beyond anyone's control. The answers he

got back added up to something that so startled him that he set about

designing a special program of inquiry. When this was done, he stayed

in his office all night to run it.

His absence took careful planning. His wife, Paulie, was no mean witch

herself, and Mark was not at this stage prepared to trust anyone, let

alone Paulie. Halfway through the morning he phoned her with his

excuse: an unexpected conference in Birmingham. This gave him time to

set up a simulacrum of himself and send it to dine with another

colourless simulacrum in Birmingham, in case Paulie or an unknown

decided to check; and he had the rest of the day to recoup the

considerable energy it took to do that. In the evening, as soon as his

partners and staff had left, he set to work.

First he had to be spell the office so that no cleaner or security man

would be tempted to enter while he was there, and to make it seem as if

the place were empty. He had to block telephones and fax machines so

they would not distract him during the more delicate magic to come. All

simple enough stuff, but if what he feared was true, he could not

afford to put a finger wrong. By the time the office was silent and

looked to any possible observer like the usual empty space lighted by

greenish strip lights he was already shaking and sweating.

He had to compose himself magically, before he started on the complex

of tiny sendings to prevent anyone anyone from noticing the sort of

data he would be receiving. Since his program was going to access a

number of very secret files, further sendings were necessary to make

what he filched invisible. He was not going to trust to technology

alone in this.

"And all for nothing if it turns out to be my overactive imagination,"

he murmured. But he did not think it would, and he cast at his

gentlest, strongest and most careful.

When it was done, he walked about waiting for the excess ambience of

power to die away. He did not want that to influence the computers.

Even then, after he had at last tapped in the instruction to run the

program, he found he was walking about still, in terror of accidentally

influencing the running of it. It was absurd. He had worked with

power ten years now. He knew how to control it. But he was still

scared. He stopped and grasped a tubular steel chair with both hands

not precisely cold iron, he thought ruefully, but it should serve to

negate anything wild he was putting out and stood leaning on it

whenever he was not needing to monitor the program.

Results gathered. Mark took his hands from the chair, intending to

take printouts before asking for forecasts, and felt the tubular steel

crunch and seem to crumble under his fingers. He looked down at it

rather irritably. And stepped away in dismay. The steel portions

were reverting to some kind of red iron-bearing sandstone speckled with

crusty black granules. The plastic of the seat was curling into

feathers of something yellowish and dry, which had a strong chemical

reek.

Rather grimly, he dusted redness off his hands. The chair was surely

only a symbol of his state of mind he hoped but it looked as if his

worst fears were being confirmed, even before he had asked the final

question.

He asked it. He took his printouts. He erased everything and went by

careful, gentle stages back up his tracks, making sure that no trace of

him, magical or technological, remained in any of the places he' had

tapped for data, or in the office either. Around dawn he picked up his

briefcase and turned to the once tubular steel chair, ready to deal

with that now. It stood in the middle of the space as an impossible

curved framework of red earth, although the black nodules were now a

pale sickly green. Mark frowned at them. Then, as an experiment, he

spread a gently imperious hand toward the nearest green blob. It

obeyed him by bursting. Twisting and writhing, it enlarged and threw

out two round green leaves as it grew upon a white thread of stem.

"Hm," he said. I seem to feel more hopeful than I think. All the

same, you have to go. " He gestured again, making it a stiff push from

the elbow, and succeeded in tele porting the entire strange mess from

the office building into the nearest skip, where he felt it crumble

away. After this he was very weary. He rubbed his face and longed for

coffee.

"On the station," he decided. He also longed for his car. But that

had to be left out in the parking lot in Surrey for verisimilitude. A

man travelling by train was much harder to trace, too.

In the station buffet, over a large polystyrene mug of coffee, he

allowed himself to wonder whether he had chosen the right member of the

Inner Ring to take his discovery to. A lot hung on his deciding right.

His first impulse had been to convene the entire Ring, but he still

rejected that idea. The nine of the Outer Ring were all adepts and

none of them was stupid, but there were those among them who came from

walks of life that gave them rather too much in the way of downright

common sense. These few were likely to pooh-pooh every one of his

notions.

He could hear Koppa Taylor or Sid Graffy now: "You can make computers

prove anything! You only have to feed them the facts you want."

True. And he had. Then he knew so little about any of them, beyond

the most obvious things. Take Koppa, whom he knew best of all the

nine. All that amounted to was knowing she had been born in California

fifty years ago. He knew much the same sort of things about the other

eight, and that was all. Secrecy was important.

Personal details were supposed not to count when they communed together

as the Ring. Disguises apparently dropped away at the higher levels

where they were At One. Mark gave a small sarcastic grunt. If they

were up against what he thought they were, then disguise and shielding

at every level was entirely to be expected. He could not trust one of

the nine not to be a spy.

That left the inner three. Damn it, he simply did not want to take his

briefcase full of trouble to the old woman. He and she thought along

such different lines. But he tried to leave his personal feelings out

of it and consider them each dispassionately. Young Maureen? He

smiled. Personal feelings were very much there. Every time he thought

of her, he remembered the exact, scented, animal smell of her and the

long-legged shape of her sharing that bed with him in Somerset. That

had been some night! It had almost made up for Zillah.

But he still felt Maureen was too flimsy? flighty? There was no exact

word for what he knew of her. It just meant he was not, after all,

going to consult Maureen first. He needed a steady mind, and a keen

one. Amanda? She had a mind, all right too bloody right she had! He

found himself wincing at the mere thought of her curiously luminous

dark eyes. Oddly enough, at forty she was still considerably

better-looking than Maureen and could pass for almost the same age.

Mark was scared to death of her (in his secret soul where he hoped

nobody knew), and he knew she would either reject his fears out of hand

or pat him kindly on the head and take charge. So . The old woman

then," he muttered, and with resignation, got up and bought a ticket to

Hereford.

It was a muddled old farmhouse with a veranda on the front of it that

somehow melted into a porch with a green door. A garden spread from it

in successive waves of overgrowth grass first, then longer grass

containing leaves of long-dead daffodils, then bushes, then higher

bushes, several waves of those, including laurels and finally a row of

trees that generally flowered in spring, but were liable to be untidily

in bloom most of the year. The house was quite hidden from the road.

On the other hand, if you knew where to position yourself in the

garden, you could have an excellent view of the road without anyone

knowing you were there.

The old woman knew exactly where. She had been sitting there all

morning, at various tasks, with Jimbo scratching diligently beside her

and the cats stalking hither and yon in her orbit. Around her, the

muddled house seemed to have spread into the grass, manifesting as

flowerpots, tipped-over mugs of coffee, cane chairs, a basket or so, a

colander, a kettle, a few cushions. All the day's work, the old woman

thought, shunting a row of peas with her broad thumb along their pod

and into the colander.

A car engine caught her ears.

"Ah," she said.

"At last!" And she raised her head to watch the local taxi decant a

passenger at her decrepit gate. Her squabby eyebrows rose at the sight

of the pale young man in the sober grey suit who climbed out and turned

to pay the driver.

"It's himV she remarked to Jimbo.

"And here was I expecting someone about that poor girl! Must have got

my wires crossed. Do people like me get their wires crossed, Jimbo?

Well, there's a first time for everything, they say. And whatever he

wants, it's trouble. The poor boy looks all in."

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摘要：

ASuddenWildMagic[070-4.3]By:DIANAWYNNEJONESSynopsis:Magic,Magesandahostofothersupernaturalphenomenapopulatethisnovel.VICTORGOLLANCZLONDONFirstpublishedintheUSA1992byAvonBooksFirstpublishedinGreatBritain1996byVictorGollanczAnimprintoftheCassellGroupWellingtonHouse,125Strand,Londonwe2ROBBDianaWynneJon...

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