Read Online The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online Page B

a weak smile.
    “What’s incredible?” she asked.
    “Eh?”
    “You came in just now and said that something was incredible.”
    “Did I really?” The enchanter furrowed his brow, stroked his long beard, thinking hard. He took a pair of spectacles out of his sleeve, polished them, and put them on. Then he peered all around the room. No inspiration struck him.
    “I wonder what it was?” he murmured. “Quite slipped my mind. I wonder if it’s something that’s already happened or something’s that’s just about to happen. What do you think?”
    “I don’t know what to think,” muttered Helen. “But don’t worry about it. It’ll be just as incredible when it occurs to you again, if not more so.”
    She made as if to leave, but Sirion Hilversun said: “No, wait. It’ll come back. I was up on the battlements, pacing. I was looking out toward Methwold. Everything was just the same as usual…. I must have turned round half a dozen times. You know how it is when you’re preoccupied… you see what you expect to see, not what’s really there. But I finally noted that something wasn’t as it should be, that something unfamiliar had turned familiar….”
    “The forest…” whispered Helen.
    “That’s right,” said the enchanter, snapping his fingers. “The forest. It’s turned green. Incredible! The enchanted forest has simply been… disenchanted! I can’t remember anything like it ever happening again. Or before, for that matter. Where are you going?”
    “Out for a walk,” said Helen, who was running towards the great staircase, intending to change her clothes immediately. “Maybe I’ll go over the hill and out towards Mirasol.”
    “Oh, yes,” said the enchanter, absently. “Good idea.”
    Meanwhile, in the library at the palace, while Ewan proceeded patiently with his task of cataloguing the books, Coronado was having his doubts.
    “I admit that it was the obvious thing to do,” he said. “But where would politics be if we never looked beyond the obvious? I think that we should have found an easier question. Nothing too fancy, just something ingenious and clever. We do, when all’s said and done, want this marriage to take place.”
    “I answered the first question,” pointed out Ewan. “It was pretty hairy there, for a while, but I did it. There’s nothing impossible about the rhyme. And, as you agreed yourself when you wrote the letter out, the girl has laid down a challenge and we should be prepared to meet it. If we break the pattern she may decide that Damian is a worthless specimen and set something really hard next time.”
    “You have thought ahead, I suppose?” said Coronado sarcastically.
    “About the lamia in the forbidden city? Certainly I have. And also about the gate at the edge of the world. I don’t say I’m not worried. But when things got to their worst in that forest last night… or tonight, perhaps, if I really did come back in time… someone or something helped me. There’s something very peculiar about that so-called will, and I can’t help being curious.”
    “Curious enough to look up a lamia? Do you know what a lamia is?”
    Ewan shrugged. “Supposedly a female vampire who may sometimes change into a snake.”
    “And that doesn’t worry you?” asked the prime minister.
    “I always suspect that such legends and rumours are wildly exaggerated,” said Ewan. “As in the case of the forest, where men had disappeared and there were supposed to be trolls and evil spirits round every corner. It was just dark and rather nasty, that’s all. And even that turned out to be an illusion that collapsed when I did something very simple.”
    “That may be very true,” said Coronado. “And it’s certainly brave. But if I were you, I wouldn’t bank on that theory. It’s never safe to mess about with the supernatural.”
    Ewan shrugged again. “The supernatural is only the natural we don’t yet know much about,” he said. “It’s mostly to do with