“The louts,” the High Head said somberly. “Your Majesty—”
“The majority were indeed louts,” the king agreed. “We had to make up the numbers in some way, and neither I nor my advisers wished to waste any more promising young magecrafters on Arth. But the centaur and the gualdian were hand-picked by me, personally. Both are throwbacks to earlier times and so possess a large degree of wild magic. My hope was that this type of power would act to disturb the vibrations of Arth — which I suspect that it did — but I took care to balance them, in case of disaster, with a Fiveir heir with a trained birthright. And had these three had no effect, my next step would have been to go to Arth myself and force reforms upon you. I wasn’t, of course, reckoning on direct action from otherworld. By the way—” the king put his hands to the sides of his glasses and focused an apparently anxious stare upon the High Head’s harrowed face “— didn’t young Roderick Gordano play any part in all this? I don’t recollect your mentioning him, Magus.”
“Your Majesty,” the High Head said, “I have done nothing to deserve this — this high-handed one-sided action. I had no idea!” His voice cracked.
The king took advantage of the cracking to persist, musingly, “Though you tell me that young Philo and the centaur unaccountably took to the deeps of the citadel with the otherworld young woman and her child, you have not clearly indicated any reason for this.”
The High Head rallied. “I inherited a tradition,” he said chokingly. “I have been doing my best to continue it, Your Majesty. I—I behaved throughout as kindly and humanely as that tradition laid down. Tradition told me it was my duty to take in a party of women in distress. I did nothing wrong. I welcomed them, I tried to find out how to get them home. Meanwhile I warned them of our Oath and its connection with the vibrations — and my reward is that Arth and its values are now in ruins. How was I to know they were from otherworld? Tradition told me that the inhabitants of otherworld were not human!”
His distress was real. Gladys pitied him, even though she knew he was using it to bluster over the facts. The king thought so too. His hands continued to focus his glasses on the High Head. “Magus, I do not doubt you are a good man, though I could wish you were not so much inclined to the traditional. A little more real research into otherworld, a little questioning of tradition, might have helped. Now, if you recall, I asked you about Roderick Gordano.”
The High Head appeared to pull himself together. “So you did, Your Majesty. My apologies. I am in a state of shock. I suppose the young man was one of the dancers roaring for my blood in Arth just now.”
Gladys did not need the nudge Jimbo gave her. “Lawrence!” she said. “That is a whopper! You know it is. You sent Tod off to be a spy in my world. I know, because I met him on his way back here. No real coincidence, Majesty,” she told the king. “There’s only one way through — looks as if someone keeps it open — and he missed it slightly. So he got stuck, and I happened on him and put him right. He told me all what had happened to him on the way.”
The king looked at the High Head. “Magus?”
“He was caught,” said the High Head, with dignity, since he was caught himself, “making love to the young woman, Zillah. He deserved punishment. My practice is to send all such offenders to otherworld.”
“Condemned,” said the king pleasantly, “out of your own mouth, Magus. Transposing a serviceman anywhere except back to the Pentarchy is illegal, as I am sure you know. I am afraid you have given me my official excuse to remove you from your office. But I’d have had to remove you anyway. You see, it was not only Arth’s extreme traditionalism which was disturbing me. Leathe seemed to have got its claws into you—”
“I swear that is not the case!” the High Head protested. “Last time the Ladies of Leathe were with us, I took every precaution—”
“Possibly,” the king cut in. “Possibly you were unknowing victims. But I cannot otherwise account for the fact that Leathe has, for the last decade, been receiving a constant stream of ideas and inventions which the rest of the Pentarchy has never been allowed to have. Nor could I rid myself of a suspicion that the activities of Arth were actually causing the rising of the sea here.”
“Oh, they were, Majesty,” Gladys said. “This is what I came about. Your Great Centaur—”
The king turned his focused spectacles on her. “Then I think you should tell me now, Mrs. — er—”
“Gladys. Well, Majesty—”
“But first tell me about the invasion of Arth,” said the king. “I can’t imagine a person of your powers having no hand in that.”
A shrewd man, she thought. She told him the whole story, aware as she spoke of the unfortunate High Head becoming alternately enraged and desolated in the chair opposite. Len would have managed his feelings better, she thought, though Len was always a bit inclined to be hidebound too. It must go with the man. Having told the king about the capsule, she gave him the facts as she had had them from the Great Centaur. “He was sick,” she concluded. “It was the ideas that did it. He told me that ideas transpose matter — energy — in the most concentrated form there is. Your universe is bloated by this time, Majesty, and ours is getting drained. As I told Lawrence here, it does no good for Arth to trigger this global warming thing with us, because your world is getting filled with what you get from us, and to pull in just another idea from us is going to do more harm than good. It might help more for you to tell us what to do about our trouble.”
“It might,” the king agreed intently.
“But there’s more,” Gladys said. “I’m glad we’ve had this talk, all the four of us together, and you happened to mention Tod, because things are really falling together in my head now. It’s what you said, Majesty, about Leathe getting this whole stream of stuff. I saw that stream, back in the early days. It’s like a great mains sewer, and I’m afraid I know what it is. You see, Tod told me he was set to spy on the man in our Inner Ring — he’s called Mark Lister, and he came out of nowhere suddenly with powers you wouldn’t believe, which always did puzzle me, but I was only just widowed then and I’d other things on my mind, like a row with my daughter, and who was to replace Len in the Ring, and so I kind of let him pass, if you know what I mean. Anyway, Tod said our Mark was the image of a man called Herrel in Leathe—”
“Stop there,” said the king. “I see. Herrel Listanian’s been puzzling us for some time. So not only has the woman Marceny committed an abomination, but she’s poisoned our world doing it. Good. Then I can safely close down Marceny.”
“It seems to me you’d do well to close down this Leathe as well,” Gladys observed.
“Unfortunately I can’t,” said the king. “The ex-High Head here will tell you how Leathe was legally established as the demesne of female mages soon after Arth was established.”
“I could go on for hours about it,” the High Head said bitterly. “It may have started as a safeguard, believe it or not, to separate male and female mageworkers. Now, to cut a long story short, Leathe is established by every magical and legal method possible. It would take a major revolution to unseat those women.”
“You never know,” said the king. “My hope is that it’s begun.” He sat forward. “I’m glad you came to me. Our Powers know what they’re about. As it happens, I am in a position to complete the picture. A regrettable part of our situation with Leathe is that I, too, have agents who spy for me. And reports came out of Leathe this morning that a centaur, a gualdian, a small child, and a young woman have suddenly arrived on the estate of Lady Marceny.”