Conrad’s Fate

All the magicians of the Circle were there, though I hadn’t heard them arrive. Two of them were smoking cigars, filling the workroom with strong blue smoke, which made the place look a different shape and size somehow. Instead of the usual workbench and glass tubes and machinery, there was a circle of comfortable armchairs, each with a little table beside it. There was another table in the middle loaded with bottles, wineglasses and several decanters.

I knew most of the people sitting in the armchairs at least by sight. The one pouring himself a glass of rich red wine was Mr Seuly, the Mayor of Stallchester, who owned the ironworks at the other end of town. He passed the decanter along to Mr Johnson, who owned the ski runs and the hotels. Mr Priddy, beside him, ran the casino. One of those smoking a cigar was Mr Hawkins the tailor and the other was Mr Fellish who owned The Stallchester News. Mr Goodwin, beyond those, owned a big chain of shops in Stallchester. I wasn’t quite sure what the others were called, but I knew the tall one owned all the land round here, and that the fat one ran the trams and buses. And there was Mr Loder the butcher, helping Uncle Alfred uncork bottles and carefully pour wine into decanters. The thick nutty smell of port cut across the smell of cigars.

All these men had shrewd respectable faces and expensive clothes, which made it worse that they were all staring at me with concern. Mayor Seuly sipped at his wine and shook his head a little. “Not long for this life unless something’s done soon,” he said. “What’s causing it? Does anyone know?”

“Something – no, someone he should have put down in his last life, by the looks of it,” Mr Hawkins the tailor said.

The tall land-owning one nodded. “And the chance to cure it now, only he’s not done it,” he said, deep and gloomy. “Why hasn’t he?”

Uncle Alfred beckoned me to stop standing staring and put the bottles on the table. “Because,” he said, “to be brutally frank with you, I’ve only just found out who he should be dealing with. It’s someone up at Stallery.”

There was a general groan at this.

“Then send him there,” said Mr Fellish.

“I am. He’s going next week,” my uncle said. “It couldn’t be contrived any sooner.”

“Good. Better late than never,” Mayor Seuly said.

“You know,” observed Mr Priddy, “it doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s someone up at Stallery. That’s such a strong Fate on the boy. It looks equal to the power up there – and that’s so strong that it interferes with communications and stops this town thriving as it should.”

“It’s not just this town Stallery interferes with,” Mayor Seuly said. “Their financial grip is down over the whole world, like a net. I come up against it almost every day. They have magical stoppages occurring all the time, so that they can make money and I can’t. If I try to get round what they do – bang. I lose half my profits.”

“Oh, we’ve all had that,” agreed Mr Goodwin. “Odd to think it’s in this lad’s hands to save us as well as himself.”

I stood by the table, turning from one to the other as they spoke. My mouth went drier with each thing that was said. By this time I was so horrified I could hardly swallow. I tried to ask a question, but I couldn’t.

My uncle seemed to realise what I wanted to know. He turned round. He was holding his glass up to the light, so that a red blob of light from it wavered on his forehead as he said, “This is all very true and tragic, but how is my nephew to know who this person is when he sees him? That’s what you wanted to ask, wasn’t it, Con?” It was, but I couldn’t even nod by then.

“Simple,” said Mayor Seuly. “There’ll come a moment when he’ll know. There’s always a moment of recognition in cases of karma. The person he needs will say something or do something, and it will be like clicking a switch. Light will come on in the boy’s head and he’ll know.”

The rest of them nodded and made growling murmurs that they agreed, it was like that, and Uncle Alfred said, “Got that, Con?”

I managed to nod this time. Then Mayor Seuly said, “But he’ll want to know how to deal with the person when he does know. That’s quite as important. How about he uses Granek’s Equation?”

“Too complicated,” said Mr Goodwin. “Try him with Beaulieu’s Spell.”

“I’d prefer a straight Whitewick,” Mr Loder the butcher said.

After that they all began suggesting things, all of which meant nothing to me, and each of them got quite heated in favour of his own suggestion. Before long, the tall, land-owning one was banging his wineglass on the little table beside his chair and shouting, “You’ve got to have him eliminate this person for good, quickly and simply! The only answer is a Persholt!”

“Please remember,” my uncle said anxiously, “that Con’s only a boy and he doesn’t know any magic at all.”

This caused a silence. “Ah,” Mayor Seuly said at length. “Yes. Of course. Well then, I think the best plan is to enable him to summon a Walker.”

At this, all the others broke into rumbles of “Exactly! Of course! A Walker. Why didn’t we think of that before?”

Mayor Seuly looked round the circle of them and said, “Agreed? Good. Now what can we give him to use? It ought to be something quite plain and ordinary that no one will suspect…Ah. Yes. A cork from one of those bottles will do nicely.”

He held out his hand with a handsome gold ring shining on it and Mr Loder passed him the purple stained cork from the bottle he had just emptied into a decanter. Mr Seuly took it and clasped it in both hands for a moment. Then he nodded and passed it on to Mr Johnson, who did the same. The cork slowly travelled round the entire circle, including Uncle Alfred and Mr Loder standing by the table, who passed it back to the Mayor.

Mayor Seuly held the cork up in his finger and thumb and beckoned me over to him. I still couldn’t speak. I stood there, looking down on his wealthily clipped hair, that almost hid the thin place on top, and wondering at how rounded and rich he looked. I breathed in smells of nutty, fruity wine, smooth good cloth and a tang of aftershave, and nodded at everything he said.

“All you have to do,” he said, “is first to have your moment of recognition and then to fetch out this cork. You hold it up like I’m doing, and you say, ‘I summon a Walker to bring me what I need’ Have you got that?” I nodded. It sounded quite easy to remember. “You may have to wait a while for the Walker,” Mayor Seuly went on, “and you mustn’t be frightened when you see the Walker coming. It may turn out bigger than you expect. When it reaches you, the Walker will give you something. I don’t know what. Walkers are designed to give you exactly the tool for the job. But take my word for it, the object you get will do just what you need it to do. And you must give the Walker this cork in exchange. Walkers never give something for nothing. Have you got all that?” he asked. I nodded again. “Then take this cork and keep it with you all the time,” he said, “but don’t let anyone else see it. And I hope that when we next meet you’ll carry no karma at all.”

As I took the cork – which felt like an ordinary cork to me – Mr Johnson said, “Right. That’s done. Send him off, Alfred, and let’s start the meeting.”

I didn’t really need Uncle Alfred to jerk his head at me to go. I got out as quickly as I could and rushed upstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. But by the time I got there, my mouth was hardly dry at all. That was odd, but it was such a relief that I hardly wondered about it. I wasn’t even very scared any more, and that was odd too, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

Chapter Four (#ulink_a75acc75-2284-5bf6-9b42-267078f832fd)

I got much more nervous as the week marched on. The worst part was the end of term assembly, when I had to sit on the left side with the school leavers, while all my friends sat across the gangway because they were going to Upper Schools. I felt really left out. And while I sat there, I realised that even when I’d found the karma person and got rid of him, I’d still be a year behind my friends at Stall High. And on my side of the gangway, the boy next to me had got a job at Mayor Seuly’s ironworks and the girl on the other side was going to train as a maid in Mr Goodwin’s house. I still had to get my job.

Then it suddenly hit me that I was going off on my own to a strange place where I wouldn’t know what to do or how to behave – and that was bad enough, without having to find the person causing my evil Fate as well. I tried saying It’s him or me to myself, but that was no help at all. When I got home, I looked out of my window, up at Stallery, and that was terrifying. I realised that I didn’t know the first thing about the place, except that it was full of powerful wizardry and that someone up there was thoroughly wicked. When Uncle Alfred came and took me to his workroom to put the spell on me that would make this Mr Amos give me the job at Stallery, I went very slowly. My legs shook.

The workroom was back to its usual state. There was no sign of the comfortable chairs, or the port wine. Uncle Alfred chalked a circle on the floor and had me stand inside it. Otherwise, the magics were just like ordinary life. I didn’t feel anything particularly, or notice much except a very small buzzing, right at the end. But Uncle Alfred was beaming when he had finished.

“There!” he said. “I defy anyone to refuse to employ you now, Con! It’s tight as a diving suit.”

I went away, shaking with nerves. I was so full of doubts and ignorance that I went and interrupted Mum. She was sitting at her creaky table reading great long sheets of paper, making marks in the margins as she read. “Say whatever it is quickly,” she said, “or I’ll lose my place in these blessed galleys.”

Out of all the things I wanted to know, all I could think of was, “Do I need to take any clothes with me to Stallery tomorrow?”

“Ask your uncle,” Mum said. “You arranged the whole caper with him. And remember to have a bath and wash your hair tonight.”

So I went downstairs, where Uncle Alfred was now unpacking guidebooks out in the back, and I asked him the same question. “And can I take my camera?” I said.

He pulled his lip and thought about it. “To be frank with you, by rights you shouldn’t take anything,” he said. “It’s only supposed to be an interview tomorrow. But of course, if the spell works and you do get the job, you’ll probably start work there straight away. I know they provide the uniforms. But I don’t know about underclothes. Yes, perhaps you ought to take underclothes along. Only don’t make it obvious you expect to be staying. They won’t like that.”

This made me more nervous than ever. I thought the spell had fixed it. After that, I had a short, blissful moment when I thought that if I was dreadfully rude to them in Stallery, they’d throw me out and not give me the job. Then I could go to Stall High next term. But of course that wouldn’t work, because of my evil Fate. I sighed and went to pack.

The tram that went up past Stallery left from the market square at midday. Uncle Alfred walked down there with me. I was in my best clothes and carrying a plastic bag that looked like my lunch. I’d arranged a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of juice artfully on top. Underneath were all my socks and pants wrapped round my camera and the latest Peter Jenkins book – I thought Uncle Alfred could spare me one book from the shop.

The tram was filling up with people when we got to the square.

“You’d better get on or you won’t have a seat,” my uncle said. “Good luck, Con, and I’ll love you and leave you. Oh, and Con,” he said as I started to climb the metal steps into the tram. He beckoned and I came back down. “Something I forgot,” he said. He led me a little way off across the pavement. “You’re to tell Mr Amos that your name is Grant,” he said, “like mine. If you tell them a posh name like Tesdinic they’ll think you’re too grand for the job. So from now on your name is Conrad Grant. Don’t forget, will you?”

“All right,” I said. “Grant.” Somehow this made me feel a whole lot better. It was like having an alias, the way people did in the Peter Jenkins books when they lived adventurous double lives. I began to think of myself as a sort of secret agent. Grant. I grinned and waved quite cheerfully at Uncle Alfred as I climbed back on the tram and bought my ticket. He waved and went bustling off.

About half the people on the tram were girls and boys my own age. Most of them had plastic bags like mine, with lunch in. I thought it was probably an end-of-term outing to Stallstead from one of the other schools in town. The Stallery tram was a single-line loop that went up into the mountains as far as Stallstead and then down into Stallchester again by the ironworks. Stallstead is a really pretty village right up among the green Alps. People go there all summer for cream teas and outings.

Then the tram gave out a clang and started off with a lurch. My heart and stomach gave a lurch too, in the opposite direction, and I stopped thinking about anything except how nervous I was. This is it, I thought. I’m really on my way now. I don’t remember seeing the shops, or the houses, or the suburbs we went past. I only began to notice things when we reached the first of the foothills, among the woods, and the cogs underneath the tram engaged with the cogs in the roadway, clunk, and we went steeply up in jerks, croink, croink, croink.

This woke me up a bit. I stared out at the sunlight splashing on rocks and green trees and thought, in a distracted way, that it was probably quite beautiful. Then it dawned on me that there was none of the chattering and laughing and fooling about on the tram that there usually is on a school outing. All the other kids sat staring quietly out at the woods, just as I was doing.

They can’t all be going to Stallery to be interviewed! I thought. They can’t! But there didn’t seem to be any teachers with them. I clutched at the slightly sticky cork in my pocket and wondered if I would ever get to use it to call a Walker, whatever that was. But I had to call one, or I would be dead. And I realised that if any of these kids got the job instead of me, it would be like a death sentence.

I was really scared. I kept thinking of the way Uncle Alfred had told me not to be too obvious about taking clothes and then to call myself Grant, as if he wasn’t too sure that his spell on me would work, and I was more frightened than I had ever been before. When the tram came out on the next level part, I stared down at the view of Stallchester nestled below, and the blue peaks where the glacier was, and at Stall Crag, and the whole lot went fuzzy with my terror.