“Any chance of some decent fodder for Rocky?” said Saranja. “He’ll want more than hay. I’ll bring him with you so that he can carry it back.”
“I’ll ask the farmer. I don’t want to do any more magic than I have to. It’s a nuisance screening things and then getting rid of the traces.”
Two of the five drove huts had been blasted flat. The pasture sloped away below them, with the village on their left and its fields spreading on down the hill. Some of the houses had lost roofs and chimneys. Beyond the fields more woods, much less shattered, reached into the distance, and further off still the snow-topped peaks through which Rocky had carried his riders that morning now glistened untroubled under the setting sun. He nosed and snuffled contentedly into the feed that Benayu had bought from the farmer, while the humans sat, or in Ribek’s case lay, round the small fire Saranja had built. She and Maja were roasting gobbets of liver on pointed sticks and Ribek, flat on his back but looking a bit better now, chewed happily on his, but Benayu remained silent and hunched, gazing into the fire while he nibbled abstractedly at a morsel Saranja had bullied him into accepting.
At last he shook himself into the here and now, stuffed what was left of the liver into his mouth, chewed purposefully at it until he could swallow it, drank a mouthful of water and spoke in a low, anxious voice.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “There’s a colossal explosion of magic, two of the Watchers get wiped out, and they still haven’t sent anyone to find out what happened.”
“Would we know?” said Saranja.
“I would if it was more Watchers,” said Maja. “I didn’t feel them coming. They were suddenly there, just before the explosion. They were horrible.”
“I didn’t either,” said Benayu. “We had a system—it worked back up on the hillside, when we first realized they were coming. They must have picked that up and canceled it somehow. Perhaps that’s what took them so long…. Anyway, it’s going to be dark soon. We’d better get the fire out.”
“I’ll do that,” said Maja, and began carefully to rake it apart.
“What did happen?” said Saranja, but Benayu shook his head.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” he said wearily. “I’m not trying to be all mysterious about it because I’m a magician, but a lot of it’s stuff it’s dangerous to know. Really dangerous. Not just dangerous to you, dangerous to everybody—everybody in the Empire, anyway. If the Watchers get hold of you they won’t just kill you. They’ll take you apart, find out everything about you, all you’ve ever done, all you know. And if they find out some of the stuff Fodaro discovered they’ll become even more powerful than they are now—far more—and there’ll be nothing they can’t do, and nothing to stop them doing it.
“That’s why Fodaro died. He didn’t do it for our sake. He took two of the Watchers with him for our sake, to help us get away. But he died for the whole world’s sake so that they couldn’t find out what he knew.
“But I’ll tell you as much as I can because…well, I suppose because I’ve got to talk to you about Fodaro. He was a very good man—too good to be a good magician, really. He was only an ordinary third-level magician, but he was a pretty good scholar. He knew a lot more than he could do, he used to say. And on top of that he was a genius.
“Mathematics was his thing. And astronomy, I suppose. I built that pool up there for him. He told me what he wanted but he couldn’t do it himself, so I did it. It was his way of looking at the stars.
“But for him the astronomy was only part of the mathematics. He said that if you want to find the how and why of anything you have to measure everything you can about it so that you can put it into numbers, and then you work out how the numbers fit and put that into an equation, and then you can use them to understand the real world and do things in it. You can get an equation that’s almost right, and it’ll work well enough until you run into something that doesn’t fit. Then you either have to change your equation or start all over again.
“Magic is stuff that oughtn’t to fit in the real world….”
“I’ve always said it was nonsense,” said Saranja.
“Yes, but somehow it works,” said Benayu. “Fodaro wanted to find the equations that would tell him why. I’ve gone to bed leaving him sitting by the fire, thinking stuff out, and woken up and seen him still there, with his eyes open and the firelight glinting off them, and he’s still been there in the morning, wide awake but almost too stiff to move.
“In the end he came up with three equations for the how and why of magic. I know them by heart and I can use them, but I don’t really understand them. I can’t make a picture in my head of what they’re doing when they’re working. And I certainly don’t understand how he came up with them. I don’t think anyone else could have done it, not even by magic. That’s why it’s safe to tell you about him.
“But I can’t tell you much more about Jex. If the Watchers ever found out that he and his kind exist it’d be a disaster for them, but you already know that he’s there so it can’t be helped. I suppose you’d better know that he feeds on magic. That’s why he was useful to us. He could help mop up the overflow of whatever we were doing and stop it getting out to the Watchers. And he can protect Maja a bit now by mopping up some of the heavy stuff before it reaches her. But a sudden overdose of magic knocks him sideways, so he’s developed a sort of warning mechanism that can tell him when something like that is coming his way so that he can be ready for it. That’s useful too.”
“You were scared when we came,” said Maja. “Not just you. The whole hillside. Everything.”
“A winged horse is big magic, far bigger than anything we’d been doing. That’s scary in itself. But Jex had sensed you coming and was ready for it and managed to absorb it somehow. What he wasn’t ready for was Saranja suddenly saying the Ropemaker’s name. That took him completely by surprise and knocked him out. I think he might have died if Fodaro hadn’t thought of getting Saranja to do that stuff with the feathers.
“Now he’s in a sort of coma. He’s still absorbing a little of whatever magic is going on around him. He can’t help it, any more than you can help breathing, so he’s giving Maja a bit of protection, but he can’t do anything extra to shield us or warn us.
“That’s why we were worried sick, Fodaro and me. Jex might have absorbed some of the signal before he passed out, but he couldn’t possibly have coped with all of it. And Rocky was still there, completely unshielded, far more than I could possibly screen, let alone in a hurry. But when Saranja took Rocky’s wings off the signal dropped almost to zero, and nothing happened and nothing happened, and we thought we’d got away with it.
“And then, suddenly, the Watchers were coming after all. We’d always known it might happen, so we’d set up a system, nothing to do with Jex, a sort of maze with a separate warning system, to slow them down and give us a bit of time. It wasn’t so we could run or hide—that doesn’t work with them. They’ll find you in the end. The only hope was to use the equations to take them by surprise with something they hadn’t got any defenses against. And that fitted in with something else that mattered even more than we did, something about that particular bit of hillside—can’t tell you what, but it was all to do with Fodaro’s equations too—and it would be a disaster if the Watchers found out about it. So the only thing to do was to destroy it. Of course we didn’t want to, not if we could possibly help it, but it wasn’t something you could arrange at the last minute, so we’d got it all ready to go, just in case.