11
Brotberhood of Evil
The boat rocked. In the distance the lights of Port Midion gleamed against the face of night. “I don’t like this,” Jarvey said.
“I’m not fond of it myself,” Betsy returned. “But I’d rather be here than somewhere those cobra things could reach us.”
Jarvey had to agree with that. They had taken a fishing boat, about a dozen feet long, and had rowed out into the bay, where they dropped the boat’s small anchor. Now they bobbed about a mile off shore, trusting to the night to hide them. The waves weren’t large, but they occasionally slapped the boat with a slushing sound and a salty spray of water.
“The one hunting us must be the Nawab,” Jarvey said miserably. “He was the one who sent the cobras, the one who hunted us. And if he’s a Midion, he’ll know all about the Grimoire.”
“We’ll have to get it back.”
“How?”
“You’re the magician,” Betsy pointed out.
“You keep saying that!” Jarvey fought to keep his anger down. “Look, Betsy, I don’t know how to work magic. When I try, weird things happen. I make lightning strike! I can’t control it. I could kill us both.”
“Or not. You have the art, Jarvey. You may not be able to control it, but you have it, and I don’t. If you could learn—”
“Yeah, right, if I could learn, I’d be great,” Jarvey said bitterly. “I could make my own world, just like old Junius. Have an army of ghosts to serve me. Or I could turn the tables on the Nawab, couldn’t I? Make the cobras and the trees and the birds obey me, not him.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Jarvey grunted. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe if someone used the Grimoire for good and not for evil, it would change it somehow.”
“Except I don’t think anyone who’s used it has thought of himself as evil,” Betsy said slowly.
“Oh, come on. Tantalus Midion kidnapped about a thousand people from Earth and made them his servants. Junius has trapped his family for all eternity, and his kids can’t even grow up and get away from him. This Nawab guy hunts people!”
“But Tantalus created Lunnon so he’d have a place to feel safe and a place to have power,” Betsy pointed out. “He thought he’d make a city that ran properly, don’t you see? And Junius really believed he was a great actor and a great playwright. The way he saw it, he was just making himself a place where his genius would be recognized.”
“You’re saying they aren’t evil?” Jarvey asked sarcastically. “What about Siyamon? He locked my parents up in his book, and he tried to do the same thing to me! Don’t tell me that’s not evil!”
“It is to you,” Betsy said. “But what about to him? Maybe your father was due to inherit the Grimoire, and Siyamon thought it should be his and his alone. From his point of view, he’d waited all his life to own and use the Grimoire, and here’s this stranger, this foreigner, coming in and—”
“My dad didn’t want the stupid old book!” Jarvey snapped. “And if he had inherited it, he sure wouldn’t do anything with it that would hurt anybody. Don’t tell me that Siyamon’s not evil.”
“What would you do with the Grimoire, if you mastered it?” Betsy asked.
Jarvey didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said, “Use it to free everyone it’s got locked away. Get rid of the worlds the Midion sorcerers have created.”
“So everyone in my world would die,” Betsy said.
“No—”
“Yes. If you made Lunnon cease to exist, then all my friends, everyone you knew there, they would die. We can’t go to your world, Jarvey. There’s no room for us there. So to us, you’d be evil, do you see? You might not mean to be, but you would be.”
“There’s no use talking about it,” Jarvey said glumly. “We’ve lost it.”
“No, we’re going to get it back somehow,” Betsy corrected him. “And then we’ll decide how best you can use it.” She shifted herself on the seat. “You try to get some sleep. I’ll take first watch. I’ll wake you when I think about four hours have passed.”
Jarvey couldn’t lie down in the boat, because it was rolling and pitching too much, and besides, about an inch of water had collected in the lowest part. He halfway lay down on one of the hard, uncomfortable seats, gripped the gunwale, the side of the boat, with his left hand, and tried to relax, thinking about the Grimoire and what it could do.
In the beginning, he had thought that his parents, that he himself, that the whole city of Lunnon were actually in the book, were part of its pages. But Zoroaster had said the book didn’t hold worlds, but opened a gateway to them. It somehow warped reality, made a hole in time and in space, and let people from one world slip through it into another. He was beginning to think that this world, that the theater of Junius Midion, that Lunnon, all existed in places that had their own reality. The dimensions, the realities, whatever you called them, existed before the Midions tampered with them. But the Midions wrote chapters in the book that were actually magic spells, and these complex spells changed the dimensions to the liking of the magicians. Maybe the cobras here weren’t Earthly cobras at all, but some kind of native animal changed and reshaped by the spell that let the Nawab come through from Earth. Even the sentient trees might be plants native to the world that the magician had changed.
Or had used the Grimoire to change. Just before he drifted to sleep, Jarvey had a final, disturbing thought. Maybe he could use the Grimoire to warp the world, all right.
But when he did, if he did...
Maybe the Grimoire could warp him at the same time.
The eastern sky was barely pink with dawn when they rowed back to shore and tied the boat up to the same pier from which they had borrowed it. No one was awake yet.
“Okay,” Jarvey said. “I’m going to try a spell. I did it once before in Lunnon, when a policeman was after me. Zoroaster said it wasn’t really an invisibility spell. It just made people overlook me, not notice me. I did it once, so I should be able to do it again.”
“All right. Try it.”
Jarvey closed his eyes and began to chant: “No one will see me. Everyone will ignore me. No one will know I am there.” He said it over and over, clenching his hands.
“Nothing’s happening.”
“I’m trying!” He balled his fists even tighter and chanted again, faster, more urgently.
“Jarvey, it’s almost daytime. We’d better hide—”
Jarvey felt a flash of anger. “I can do it!” He repeated his chant and felt a strange, electric quiver. He opened his eyes. Everything looked dim. Betsy stood looking anxiously around her.
“How’s that?” Jarvey asked.
Betsy didn’t reply. She looked around, her gaze sweeping right past him.
I did it, Jarvey thought. She can’t see me! He nudged her, and she took a few uncertain steps away. She turned and looked around again, her face clenched in a puzzled frown. She looked as if she were on the verge of speaking, but then shook her head and walked away. Jarvey followed her.
He watched her snitch some bread for her breakfast, expertly. Jarvey simply walked into the shop and picked up a piece of the bread, eating it as the cooks chattered around him, talking of the ship that had come in with dyed fabric and cheap jewelry. No one paid him the least bit of attention. They stepped around him, never bumped into him, but they didn’t seem to see him at all. Now all he had to do was...
“Let me go! I’ve done nothing!”
Betsy’s voice, coming from outside the booth! Jarvey ducked out, and what he saw made his heart sink. One of those gorillas had grabbed Betsy’s wrist and was dragging her along the cobbled street. She was stumbling after her captor, trying not to fall.
Jarvey hurried after her. “I’m here!” he whispered.
She still didn’t seem to hear him. She was flailing at the gorilla’s huge hand, crying and pleading.
The ape’s nostrils twitched. Its brown eyes narrowed in suspicion, and it looked right at Jarvey. Maybe the spell didn’t work with animals! Jarvey began to back away.
But the gorilla sniffed again, then tugged Betsy along. Jarvey breathed a little easier, and he fell into step behind the two. He suspected they were going his way.
And sure enough, the ape hauled Betsy along to the park, through the gate, between the guardian cobras. Jarvey had a nasty moment when he passed between them, but the snakes paid him no attention. Only when they had passed through the park did he finally see the palace, a shining white building with a multitude of towers, turrets, and domes, something like the pictures of the Taj Mahal he had seen.
The ape held tight to a struggling Betsy with one hand while it raised a heavy bronze knocker with the other. The knocker sounded like thunder in the distance, hollow, echoing booms. A moment later, the door opened and a man stood staring down at Betsy. “So here’s the one causing the trouble,” the man said. “I will take her to the master.”
The gorilla released its hold on Betsy as the man seized her other arm. She tried to pull away, and the man, with an irritated snarl, said, “Stop that, you fool! The serpents know you’re here. You won’t get far, even if you pull away.”
Jarvey took advantage of that moment to slip past them. No one, not the man, the gorilla, not even Betsy, noticed him. The man dragged Betsy inside and closed the door. “Come with me.”
As quietly as he could, Jarvey followed in their wake, down a carpeted hall. They stepped out into an airy room, its walls crimson and hung with trophy heads. Jarvey saw the head of a great cat, something like a lion, and other heads that sprouted weirdly shaped horns. He didn’t look too closely at the top row. They looked too ... human.
Two men stood across the room, bending over a table. “My lord,” the servant said, “the guard has just brought this.”
One of the men, young, athletic-looking, and blond, turned around. “Ah, my quarry,” he said. “Well, you must be the clever one, damaging my property the way you did. Is this the person who caused you so much trouble, brother?”
The other man turned around then, and it was all Jarvey could do not to yell out in surprise and alarm.
“No,” said the displeased, dry voice of Junius Midion.
Jarvey sat huddled in a corner, hoping that his magic spell wouldn’t wear off He had watched as the blond man ordered Betsy locked up in an adjoining room, and now he listened as the two brothers argued heatedly. “Kill her, Haimish,” Junius said. “And then find the other one, the boy. He’s the one who took this.” He rested a hand on the Grimoire, which lay atop the table.
Haimish Midion, the blond man, lifted his cane and gently nudged Junius’s hand away from the book. “My dear brother, you always want to act so rashly. Kill her? Why kill her when we can use her as bait? If we let the town know that I’m holding her as a prisoner here, I’ll wager the rogue will hear of it and will come to save her. People are so predictable, you see, just as in those dreary dramas of yours.”
“Do whatever you want, but do it quickly and let me go back,” Junius growled. “You know how the theater begins to decay if attention is not paid.”
“It’s not my fault you created such a shoddy little spell,” Haimish retorted. “My world could function quite well without me. I’ve built up a whole civilization: Port Midion, and six other cities that provide us with our little luxuries. Of course, my people are real, not ghostly automatons.”
“Don’t tell me how to run my life,” Junius said. Looking at the two of them side by side, Jarvey could tell they were brothers. Both of them had the dark, glittering blue eyes of the Midion family, and both of them had streaks of reddish hair interwoven with the blond. Junius looked at his brother with evident distaste. “And you will not disparage my art, Haimish. If I had not thought quickly and diverted him into your world, the boy might have gone anywhere. Without my warning, you would not even have known of this ...” Junius reached to caress the book’s cover.
Again, Haimish moved his cane to sweep Junius’s fingers aside. “No, kindly leave the Grimoire alone, Junius.”
“I shall take it back with me, of course,” Junius Midion said carelessly as he stepped back from the table.
“You shall do no such thing. Oh, you managed to warn me to look for the Grimoire, but I remind you, my servants found it. It is mine. Remember, I shall use it to send you back, of course, but after doing so, I shall see that it is safely kept.”
“Safely kept?” sneered Junius. “You just admitted the people in this world of yours are real. It would be far safer with me, where there are only the actor automatons and the spectral audience. No one in my world could use the book.”
“How about that son of yours, that frustrated young Augustus?” countered Haimish. “Oh, dear, I can just imagine what might happen should he get his hands on the Grimoire. You know what would occur should he open the book to your chapter whilst in your world, of course.”
“The spell would reverse,” Junius said. “It would cast our whole family back into our time and place on Earth, and we would age and die. Of course I’d let them all know that, and that would be enough—”
“No, it would not be enough,” Haimish said smoothly. “Not nearly enough, not when your theater-mad family is involved. If you go back to Earth, the book goes back to Earth as well, and I’ll not have the gateway to my world available to any meddling fool who can use a simple spell.”
Junius glared at his brother with something like hatred. “Need I remind you that I am the elder?”
“And I am the wiser. Junius, be reasonable. I agreed to consult with you and learn why this book has turned up here, of all places. It poses us quite a problem, but after all, I have the Grimoire, Junius, and here it shall remain.” Haimish Midion picked up the book, crossed the room, and stopped in front of a massive desk. He fished in his pocket for a key, unlocked a drawer of the desk, and dropped the book inside. “There it shall rest until we find this boy, and once we have dealt with him, I shall use it to send you back to your poor decaying theater. But I shall keep it, make no mistake.”
Junius had been watching him with an expression of rage. “Oh, very well! We shall decide what to do with the Grimoire in due time. But first capture that wretched boy, Haimish.”
“If only you could tell me his full name. A good magician can control anything if he knows its true name, but of course you have no idea, do you?” Haimish asked in a nasty tone.
“I may not know his full name, but I warn you, he is a Midion. He said he was, and anyway, I could recognize him by his features—eyes midnight blue, hair like rusty gold, all that. He may be dangerous.”
“How old is he?”
Junius shrugged. “I don’t know. Twelve, thirteen perhaps.”
“Then his training surely is nowhere near complete. I can deal with any trifling spells he might have mastered.”
“You couldn’t find him in your precious forest!”
Haimish shrugged. “Peasants are so easy to hunt. I fear my abilities as a stalker have become dulled by hunting mere criminals. Yes, I agree, I should have had the two wretches brought here to the palace. I thought it would be fun to hunt some real game for a change, and that was a mistake. He used a lightning spell! Crude, crude, but so crude I did not expect it.”
“What if he does it again? What if he blasts your animal guards?” Junius sounded upset and angry. “If he got close enough, he might even destroy the Grimoire with a spell like that, and you know that would be the end of us!”
Haimish snorted. “He won’t even be able to try, not in town. My magic rules here, you know. Come, it is time to eat. I shall send my servants to post notices in town. Anyone who finds him and brings him here will be exempt from the hunt forever, him and all his family. That will make people eager to find our young Midion for us. Do you know, I almost hope this boy has some real power. I haven’t had a really challenging hunt in so long now....” Still talking, Haimish escorted Junius from the room.
Jarvey immediately hurried over to the desk. It was enormous, made of some heavy, very dark wood. He tugged at the drawer, found it firmly locked, as he had expected, and hunted around for something to use to break the lock. Nothing. He heard the door rattling, and realized that in the next room Betsy was trying to find a way out.
He paused, biting his lip. If he opened the door, Betsy would ignore him, because of the spell he had cast. If she slipped away, the cobras might get her, or Haimish might hunt her. She was safer locked up, at least for the moment.
Jarvey found a poker in a stand in front of the fireplace, but it was too big and clumsy to use. A pair of crossed swords over the mantel offered a possibility. He dragged a chair over, climbed on it, and took down one of the swords, but its blade was too thick to force into the crack around the desk drawer. Jarvey was feeling more and more frustrated and upset. All he needed was something to open the stupid drawer. He made a fist and pounded on it once.
Crack! The wood split with a sound almost as loud as a pistol shot, making Jarvey jump in surprise. He opened his hand and looked at it in wonder. Had he just worked another spell? He must have. The wood was thick and tough, and yet a half-inch wide crack had opened right across the top of the drawer. He tugged at the handle, and the drawer creaked out of the desk, just far enough to let him reach in and pull out the Grimoire.
Then he crossed to the locked door, turned the latch, and the door swung open. Betsy had hauled chairs over and was climbing up, trying to get over the transom. She looked down in shock. “Jarvey!”
She could see him again. “Come on. I’ve got the book. We have to—”
“Stop right there!”
Jarvey spun around. Haimish and Junius Midion had burst into the room, and they stood staring furiously at him. Haimish had raised his cane and waved it, reciting some spell.
“Grab my arm!” Jarvey yelled, opening the catch of the Grimoire. Betsy grabbed the book instead, but he had no time to lose.
Just as Junius and Haimish Midion shouted out spells of their own, Jarvey yelled, “Abrire ultimas!”
The Grimoire writhed, and with explosions of light all around him, Jarvey plunged into the unknown.