“Well, that lasted another twenty generations, and then it broke down again, so four of us—Tilja and her gran from our family and a boy called Tahl and his grandpa from Ribek’s—went off to look for this Faheel person…Bother. No, it seems to be all right to call him that…Anyway, after a lot of tiresome magical adventures…I think I’m leaving out something important, Maja….”
“The Watchers?”
“Oh yes. Everything in the Empire was very tightly controlled. You couldn’t travel anywhere without having a way-leave. You couldn’t even die without a license from the Emperor. And magic—oh, gods! I suppose I’ve got to start believing in all this stuff—that was controlled by a bunch of super-magicians in Talak…am I saying that right?”
“The city is differently pronounced in different parts of the Empire,” said Fodaro. “Up here in the North we mostly call it Talagh. You were about to tell us what you know about the Watchers.”
“Oh yes. They were supposed to be controlling the magic in the Empire, only they were all at daggers drawn with each other but that didn’t stop them cracking down hard on anyone using magic without permission. Faheel had set the Watchers up to stop people doing that, but it went on in secret, and the system got out of hand, so everyone was scared stiff of the Watchers, who were meant to be there to look after them, and meanwhile Faheel had disappeared.
“But Tilja’s gran had—wait for it—a wooden spoon, of all things, carved from the wood of a peach tree that had grown from the stone of a peach out of Faheel’s garden, and the darned thing knew where he was and if you said his name over it would swivel round and point that way. The trouble was that sent out a magical signal which put the Watchers on to them whenever they tried. But they just managed to get away each time and in the end they found Faheel on an island out in the southern ocean, but of course he was incredibly old and tired and longing to give up, but he couldn’t until he’d found someone to pass the famous ring on to.”
“In what way famous?” said Fodaro.
“He could control time with it. I’ll come to that in a minute. Anyway, Tilja told him about a magician called the Ropemaker they’d met on their journey. Faheel decided he was the one he’d been waiting for, but they looked at a sort of magic table he’d got and saw that the Ropemaker was in the palace at Talak and just about to be made into a Watcher. So to stop that Faheel used the ring to hold time still for the whole Empire while he and Tilja were carried up to Talak by this roc and he destroyed the Watchers. But before—”
“One moment,” said Fodaro. “‘He destroyed the Watchers.’ Does your story say anything about how he did that?”
“Yes, but it makes even less sense than anything else. Everything got bent out of shape. There were a lot of towers. They were all straight if you looked at just one of them, but they weren’t straight with each other. Something far off looked bigger than something nearer. Shapes didn’t fit together with themselves. In the end the sky came forward until it was inside out and swallowed the Watchers up. And if you know what any of that means you’re welcome to it.”
Fodaro was staring at her, oblivious to her outrage. Benayu in turn was staring at him with his mouth half open in astonishment.
“As it happens, I do know what it means,” said Fodaro slowly. “It is unbelievable, though not in the way you think. Anything else you can tell me about it…?”
“I don’t think so. Maja? No, we both know the same version, but Ribek’s is a bit different in places. You’ll have to ask him when he wakes up. Shall I go on?”
“Please. So, having destroyed the Watchers Faheel gave the Ropemaker the ring?”
“No, because before he could do that another magician who wanted the ring—he was one of the secret ones—Tilja called him Moonfist—he took Faheel by surprise and nearly killed him, but Tilja managed to use the ring to stop time again and get him back to his island. Then before he died he gave Tilja the ring to take to the Ropemaker.
“They had a lot more stu—I’ve got to stop saying that—they had a lot more adventures before they found him, of course, and he gave them the power to seal the Valley off again and sent them home. Tahl and Alnor couldn’t go through the forest because they were men and the sickness was back, but they had a tiresome old mare with them called Calico, and the Ropemaker put a couple of roc feathers—the ones I just showed you—onto her shoulders and turned them into wings, so that she could fly them home. And I think he actually managed to hide the Valley completely this time. I spent six years out on the other side of the desert among the warlords, and nobody had any idea it was there….”
“One moment,” said Fodaro. “There were magicians there, among these warlords? And magical objects?”
“Yes. Why? Magic didn’t work so well out there, but—”
He interrupted her with a gesture and glanced at Benayu, who nodded.
“Only a minor puzzle,” he said. “Later, perhaps. Please go on. Nobody among these warlords knew of the existence of the Valley….”
“That’s right. I don’t think anyone in the Empire does, either. In the old days, before the Ropemaker, the Emperors kept trying to send armies through the forest to recapture what they called their Lost Province—that’s in the story—so they must have known about it then, but I’ve never heard they’ve tried anything like that since.
“But the magic must have stopped working now because it was only supposed to last for twenty generations and they’re up. My family kept count, and my mother always told me I might be the one who had to go and look for the Ropemaker and ask him to renew the magic. I couldn’t stand it. Why me, for pity’s sake? I never wanted anything to do with any of it in the first place. I thought it had ruined my life. So I ran away, and that turned out even worse, so as soon as I got the chance I ran back. So there I was, looking at the ruins of my old home, when I found the feathers among the ashes, and I realized that all this had been planned somehow, long ago. I’d even picked up an old horse to put the wings on, and there was Ribek limping up the road. And at that point Sheep-faces turned up in their airboat looking for us. Ribek says that no one had ever seen anything like that in the Valley before. Which shows that the Sheep-faces had only just found out the Valley was there, and—”
“Sheep-faces?” said Benayu. “They’ve got to be the same as the Pirates, haven’t they?”
“It sounds like it,” said Fodaro. “I want to know more about this ring, as well as anything you can tell me about the destruction of the Watchers. I’ve heard rumors about that, as a matter of fact, but I’ve never heard about anything like the ring, not even a rumor. But you tell us about your Sheep-faces first. This may be more immediately important. What do these airboats look like?”
“I’ve drawn you one,” said Saranja.
She’d been scratching away at her picture all the time she’d been talking. They studied it while she told them about the Sheep-faces.
“Yes, they’re the Pirates all right,” said Benayu. “That explains a lot. I wonder if even the Watchers know all that.”
“Watchers!” said Maja. “But Faheel…”
“Destroyed the ones he had originally set up, just as Saranja has told us? Indeed he did. But magic is wild, dangerous stuff. All sorts of evils follow its uncontrolled use. The Ropemaker was forced to set up some kind of a system to replace the Watchers. He built in safeguards and for a while it worked well enough, but then he vanished, no one knows where, and over the centuries his system became perverted, just as Faheel’s had done, though in a different manner, and then people started to call them the Watchers again….”