Part 25 (1/2)

Pawson's chair in her crisp white nightdress, holding her knitting wrapped into a stripey bundle.

”Good-bye, child,” she said. ”You read very nicely. Here is the present I've knitted for you. It's full of protection spells.” She leaned forward and draped the knitting around Christopher's neck. It was a scarf about ten feet long, striped in the colors of the rainbow.

”Thank you,” Christopher said politely.

”Just move up-er, Christopher-but don't leave the pentagram,” said Flavian. He stepped back inside the chalk marks, taking up more than half the s.p.a.ce, and took hold of Christopher's arm to keep him inside it. Old Mrs. Pawson waved a withered hand. And without anything more being said, Christopher found himself somewhere quite different. It was even more disconcerting than being carried off from school by Papa.

He and Flavian were standing in a much bigger pentagram that was made of white bricks, or tiles, built into the floor of a lofty s.p.a.ce with a gla.s.s dome high overhead. Under the gla.s.s dome, a majestic pink marble staircase curled up to the next floor. Stately paneled doors with statues over them opened off the s.p.a.ce all around-the most stately had a clock above it as well as a statue-and an enormous crystal chandelier hung from the gla.s.s dome on a long chain. Behind Christopher, when he twisted around to look, was a very grand front door. He could see he was in the front hall of a very big mansion, but n.o.body thought to tell him where he was.

There were people standing around the tiled pentagram, waiting for them. And a stately, dismal lot they looked too! Christopher thought. All of them, men and women alike, were dressed in black or gray. The men wore s.h.i.+ny white collars and cuffs and the women all wore neat black lace mittens. Christopher felt their eyes on him, sizing up, disapproving, coldly staring. He shrank into a very small grubby boy under those eyes and realized that he had been wearing the same set of clothes ever since he had left school.

Before he had a chance to do more than look around, a man with a little pointed gray beard stepped up to him and took the striped scarf away. ”He won't be needing this,” he said, rather shocked about it.

Christopher thought the man was Gabriel de Witt and was all prepared to hate him, until Flavian said, ”No, of course, Dr. Simonson,” apologizing for Christopher. ”The old lady gave it to him, you know.

Shall I-?”

Christopher decided to hate the bearded man anyway.

One of the ladies, a small plump one, stepped forward then. ”Thank you, Flavian,” she said in a final, bossy sort of way. ”I'll take Christopher to Gabriel now. Follow me, young man.” She turned and went swis.h.i.+ng off towards the pink marble stairs. Flavian gave Christopher a nudge, and Christopher stepped out of the tiled pattern and followed her, feeling about a foot high and dirty all over. He knew his collar was sticking up at one side, and that his shoes were dusty, and he could feel the hole in his left sock sliding out of its shoe and showing itself to everyone in the hall as he went upstairs after the lady.

At the top of the stairs was a very tall solid-looking door, the only one in a row of doors that was painted black. The lady swished up to the black door and knocked. She opened it and pushed Christopher firmly inside. ”Here he is, Gabriel,” she said. Then she shut the door behind him and went away, leaving Christopher alone in an oval-shaped room where it seemed to be twilight or sunset.

The room was paneled in dark brown wood, with a dark brown carpet on the floor. The only furniture seemed to be a huge dark desk. As Christopher came in, a long thin figure reared up from behind the desk-about six-foot-six of skinny old man, Christopher realized, when his heart stopped thumping. Theold man had a lot of white hair and the whitest face and hands Christopher had ever seen. His eyebrows jutted and his cheeks stood out in wide peaks, making the eyes between them look sunken and staring.

Below that was a hooked beak of nose. The rest of the old man's face went into a small, sharp point, containing a long grim mouth. The mouth opened to say, ”I am Gabriel de Witt. So we meet again, Master Chant.”

Christopher knew he would have remembered if he had ever seen this old man before. Gabriel de Witt was even more memorable than Dr. Pawson. ”I've never seen you in my life before,” he said.

”I have met you. You were unconscious at the time,” Gabriel de Witt said. ”I suppose this accounts for our being so strangely mistaken in you. I can see now at a glance that you do indeed have seven lives and should have nine.”

There were quite a lot of windows in the twilight room, Christopher saw, at least six of them, in a high curving row near the ceiling. The ceiling was a sort of orange, which seemed to keep all the light from the windows to itself. All the same, it was a mystery to Christopher how a room with quite so many windows could end up being so very dark.

”In spite of this,” Gabriel de Witt said, ”I am very dubious about taking you on. Your heredity frankly appalls me. The Chants give themselves out as a race of respectable enchanters, but they produce a black sheep every generation, while the Argents, though admittedly gifted, are the kind of people I would not nod to in the street. These traits have come out in both your parents. I gather your father is bankrupt and your mother a contemptible social climber.”

Even Cousin Francis had not said anything quite as bald as this. Anger flared through Christopher. ”Oh thank you, sir,” he said. ”There's nothing I like more than a polite warm welcome like that.”

The old man's eagle eyes stared. He seemed puzzled. ”I felt it only fair to be frank with you,” he said. ”I wished you to understand that I have agreed to become your legal guardian because we do not consider either of your parents a fit person to have charge of the future Chrestomanci.”

”Yes, sir,” said Christopher, angrier than ever. ”But you needn't bother. I don't want to be the next Chrestomanci. I'd rather lose all my lives first.”

Gabriel de Witt simply looked impatient. ”Yes, yes, this is often the way, until we realize the job needs doing,” he said. ”I refused the post myself when it was first offered to me, but I was in my twenties and you are a mere child, even less capable of deciding than I was. Besides, we have no choice in the matter.

You and I are the only nine-lifed enchanters in all the Related Worlds.” He made a gesture with one white hand. A small bell chimed somewhere and the plump young lady swished into the room. ”Miss Rosalie here is my chief a.s.sistant,” Gabriel de Witt said. ”She will show you to your room and get you settled in. I have allotted Flavian Temple to you as a tutor, though I can ill spare him, and I will of course be teaching you myself twice a week as well.”

Christopher followed Miss Rosalie's swis.h.i.+ng skirt past the line of doors and down a long corridor.

n.o.body seemed to care what he felt. He wondered whether to show them by raising another whirlwind.

But there was a spell on this place, a strong, thick spell. After Dr. Pawson's teaching, Christopher was sensitive to all spells, and though he was not sure what this one did, he was fairly sure it would make things like whirlwinds pretty useless. ”Is this Chrestomanci Castle?” he asked angrily.

”That's right,” Miss Rosalie said. ”The Government took it over two hundred years ago after the last really wicked enchanter was beheaded.” She turned to smile at him over her shoulder. ”Gabriel de Witt's a dear, isn't he? I know he seems a bit dry at first, but he's adorable when you get to know him.” Christopher stared. Dear and adorable seemed to him the last words he would ever use to describe Gabriel de Witt.

Miss Rosalie did not see him stare. She was throwing open a door at the end of the corridor. ”There,”

she said, rather proudly. ”I hope you like it. We're not used to having children here, so we've all been racking our brains over how to make you feel at home.”

There was not much sign of it, Christopher thought, staring around a large brown room with one high white bed looking rather lonely in one corner. ”Thanks,” he said glumly. When Miss Rosalie left him, he found there was a brown spartan washroom at the other end of the room and a shelf by the window.

There was a teddy bear on the shelf, a game of Snakes and Ladders and a copy of The Arabian Nights with all the dirty bits taken out. He put them in a heap on the floor and jumped on them. He knew he was going to hate Chrestomanci Castle.

11.

For the first week, Christopher could think of nothing else but how much he hated Chrestomanci Castle and the people in it. It seemed to combine the worst things about school and home, with a few special awfulnesses of its own. It was very grand and very big, and except when he was doing lessons, Christopher was forced to wander about entirely on his own, missing Oneir and Fenning and the other boys and cricket acutely, while the Castle people got on with their grown-up affairs as if Christopher was not there at all. He had nearly all his meals alone in the schoolroom, just like home, except that the schoolroom looked out onto the empty, shaven Castle lawns.

”We thought you'd be happier not having to listen to our grown-up talk,” Miss Rosalie told him as they walked up the long drive from church on Sunday. ”But of course you'll have Sunday lunch with us.”

So Christopher sat at the long table with everyone else in their sober Sunday clothes and thought it would have made no difference if he hadn't been there. Voices hummed among the c.h.i.n.king cutlery, and not one of them spoke to him.

”And you have to add copper to sublimate, whatever the manuals say,” the bearded Dr. Simonson was telling Flavian Temple, ”but after that you can, I find, put it straight to the pentacle with a modic.u.m of fire.”

”The Wraith's illegal dragons' blood is simply flooding the market now,” said a young lady across the table. ”Even the honest suppliers are not reporting it. They know they can evade taxes.”

”But the correct words present problems,” Dr. Simonson told Flavian.

”I know statistics are misleading,” said a younger man beside Christopher, ”but my latest sample had twice the legal limit of poison balm. You only have to extrapolate to see how much the gang is bringing in.”

”The flaming tincture must then be pa.s.sed through gold,” Dr. Simonson proclaimed, and another voice cut across his saying, ”That magic mushroom essence certainly came from Ten, but I think the trap we set there stopped that outlet.” While Dr. Simonson added, ”If you wish to proceed without copper, you'll find it far more complicated.”

Miss Rosalie's voice rang through his explanation from the other end of the table. ”But Gabriel, they had actually butchered a whole tribe of mermaids! I know it's partly our wizards' fault for being willing to pay the earth for mermaid parts, but the Wraith really has to be stopped!” Gabriel's dry voice answered in the distance, ”That part of the operation has been closed down. It's the weapons coming in from One that present the biggest problem.”

”My advice is that you then start with pentacle and fire,” Dr. Simonson droned on, ”using the simpler form of words to start the process, but...”

Christopher sat silent, thinking that if he did get to be the next Chrestomanci he would forbid people to talk about their work at mealtimes. Ever. He was glad when he was allowed to get up from the table and go. But when he did, the only thing to do was to wander about, feeling all the spells on the place itching at him like gnat bites. There were spells in the formal gardens to keep weeds down and encourage worms, spells to keep the giant cedars on the lawns healthy, and spells all around the grounds to keep intruders out. Christopher thought he could have broken that set quite easily and simply run away, except that the sensitivity he had learned from Dr. Pawson showed him that breaking that boundary spell would set alarms ringing in the lodge at the gate and probably all over the Castle too.

The Castle itself had an old crusty part with turrets and a newer part which were fused together into a rambling whole. But there was an extra piece of castle that stood out in the gardens and looked even older, so old that there were trees growing on top of its broken walls. Christopher naturally wanted to explore this part, but there was a strong misdirection spell on it, which caused it to appear behind him, or to one side, whenever he tried to get to it. So he gave up and wandered indoors, where the spells, instead of itching, pressed down on him like a weight. He hated the Castle spells most of all. They would not allow him to be as angry as he felt. They made everything blunt and m.u.f.fled. In order to express his hatred, Christopher fell back more and more on silent scorn. When people did speak to him, and he had to answer, he was as sarcastic as he knew how to be.

This did not help him get on with Flavian Temple. Flavian was a kind and earnest tutor. In the ordinary way, Christopher would have quite liked him, even though Flavian wore his collars too tight and tried far too hard to be hushed and dignified like the rest of Gabriel de Witt's people. But he hated Flavian for being one of those people-and he very soon discovered that Flavian had no sense of humor at all.

”You wouldn't see a joke if it jumped up and bit you, would you?” Christopher said, the second afternoon. Afternoons were always devoted to magic theory or magic practical.

”Oh, I don't know,” Flavian said. ”Something in Punch made me smile last week. Now, to get back to what we were saying-how many worlds do you think make up the Related Worlds?”

”Twelve,” said Christopher, because he remembered that Tacroy sometimes called the Anywheres the Related Worlds.

”Very good!” said Flavian. ”Though, actually, there are more than that, because each world is really a set of worlds, which we call a Series. The only one which is just a single world is Eleven, but we needn't bother with that. All the worlds were probably one world to begin with-and then something happened back in prehistory which could have ended in two contradictory ways. Let's say a continent blew up. Or it didn't blow up. The two things couldn't both be true at once in the same world, so that world became two worlds, side by side but quite separate, one with that continent and one without. And so on, until there were twelve.”