Victor's back was beginning to ache. Carrying young women to safety looked a good idea on paper, but had major drawbacks after the first hundred yards.
'Have you any idea where she lives?' he said. 'And is it somewhere close?'
'No idea,' said Gaspode.
'She once said something about it being over a clothes shop,' said Victor.
'That'll be in the alley alongside Borgle's then,' said Gaspode.
Gaspode and Laddie led the way through the alleys and up a rickety outside staircase. Maybe they smelled out Ginger's room. Victor wasn't going to argue with mysterious animal senses.
Victor went up the back stairs as quietly as possible. He was dimly aware that where people stayed was often infested by the Common or Greatly Suspicious Landlady, and he felt that he had enough problems as it was.
He used Ginger's feet to push open the door.
It was a small room, low-ceilinged and furnished with the sad, washed-out furniture found in rented rooms across the multiverse. At least, that's how it had started out.
What it was furnished with now was Ginger.
She had saved every poster. Even those from early clicks, when she was just in very small print as A Girl. They were thumb-tacked to the walls. Ginger's face - and his own stared at him from every angle.
There was a large mirror at one end of the poky room, and a couple of half-burned candles in front of him.
Victor deposited the girl carefully on the narrow bed and then stared around him, very carefully. His sixth, seventh and eighth senses were screaming at him. He was in a place of magic.
'It's like a sort of temple,' he said. 'A temple to . . . herself.'
'It gives me the willies,' said Gaspode.
Victor stared. Maybe he'd always successfully avoided being awarded the pointy hat and big staff, but he had acquired wizard instincts. He had a sudden vision of a city under the sea, with octopuses curling stealthily through the drowned doorways and lobsters watching the streets.
'Fate don't like it when people take up more space than they ought to. Everyone knows that.'
I'm going to be the most famous person in the whole world, thought Victor. That's what she sail. He shook his head.
'No,' he said aloud. 'She just likes posters. It's just ordinary vanity.'
It didn't sound believable, even to him. The room fairly hummed with . . .
. . . what? He hadn't felt anything like it before. Power of some sort, certainly. Something that was brushing tantalizingly against his senses. Not exactly magic. At least, not the kind he was used to. But something that seemed similar while not being the same, like sugar compared with salt; the same shape and the same colour, but . . .
Ambition wasn't magical. Powerful, yes, but not magical . . . surely?
Magic wasn't difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque edifice of wizardry had been set up to conceal. Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointyhat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it.
Because it was as if the human race was a field of corn and magic helped the users grow just that bit taller, so that they stood out. That attracted the attention of the gods and - Victor hesitated - other Things. outside this world.
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.
All over the entire room, sometimes.
He pictured Ginger, back on the beach. I want to be the most famous person in the whole world. Perhaps that was something new, come to think of it. Not ambition for gold, or power, or land or all the things that were familiar parts of the human world. Just ambition to be yourself, as big as possible. Not ambition for, but to be.
d said that any mortal man who read more than a few lines of the original copy would die insane.
This was certainly true. Legend also said that the book contained illustrations that would make a strong man's brain dribble out of his ears.