The Stranger's Magic: The Labyrinths of Echo: Book Three (49 page)

I spent the First Night of the New Year in my office, as I was supposed to. My colleagues were sleeping after the mind-boggling frenzy that engulfed all living creatures on the eve of that
notorious event. Only Sir Juffin Hully went to the Street of Old Coins. He finally had time to relax and watch a movie. I could have afforded the luxury of keeping him company—the city was
dead calm—but I preferred to nap in the armchair because the activities of the night before had worn me out.

Soon after midnight, I was awoken by the soft creaking of the door.

“Max, will it kill you to open your eyes if I come in?” said the descendant of Ukumbian pirates, also known as a would-be citizen of sunny Tasher.

“How nice,” I said. “Finally you’ve come without announcing your presence to a dozen junior employees.”

“That’s because I didn’t see a single rodent downstairs or in the hallway,” said Anday. He produced a dusty clay bottle from under his looxi and put it on the desk.
“It’s from grandpa’s old stock,” he said. “Not some sickly sweet potion that they make in local taverns, but a real two-hundred-year-old Ukumbian bomborokka. I came to
say goodbye. Your Tasherian friend Giatta says we’re casting off at dawn.”

“Are you happy?” I said, fumbling for the bottle of Elixir of Kaxar in the drawer. Without it, I would’ve been lousy company.

“Me? Uh, sure. I suppose.” He said it in such a sad voice that I got worried.

“If you don’t want to go, don’t,” I said. “You don’t have to do it, buddy.”

“No, no, no. I do want to go! Really. I’m just scared, Max. Sound the alarm.”

“Well, that’s normal. Of course it’s scary to leave everything behind and set off for who-knows-where, even if there isn’t much to leave behind,” I said.

“Max, I don’t catch. What am I going to do there?” said Anday.

“Publish a newspaper,” I said, laughing. “You’ve got the experience. I’m sure in Tasher they have no clue that people need to read newspapers.”

“A newspaper? That’s great, but your friend says his fellow countrymen mostly don’t know how to read,” said Anday.

And then it dawned on me. “You know what?” I said. “If they can’t read, you can publish comic books. You know, stories in pictures!
They can have short captions that even half-literate people can make out.”

“In pictures?” said Anday, cheering up. “Well, I’ll be, Max!”

The night flew by. I tried to explain to Anday (and to myself) what a newspaper for illiterate Tasherians might look like. Anday, praise be the Magicians, had artistic talent. Excited, I
overindulged in “real two-hundred-year-old Ukumbian bomborokka,” which I hadn’t done in a long time. I ended up dozing off in the armchair. Anday realized that his farewell party
was over and began intoning his sad goodbyes.

“Don’t make such a doleful face, buddy,” I said in a sleepy voice. “Or I’ll think that I’m sending you into exile rather than to the wonderful country of your
dreams. You can send me a call anytime you want, several times a day. Plus, you’re not going away forever. You can come back whenever you want to. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter
here’ is a stupid motto. No door in the world closes forever.”

“You don’t catch, Max,” said Anday. “I’m leaving forever. Everyone always leaves forever. You can’t come back. Whoever comes back is not us. It’s
someone else, but nobody catches that. How did you say it, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’? Is this from a poem?”

“It is,” I said. “A very old one. And not mine.”

“It’s very good,” said Anday and left.

I was still sitting in my armchair, stunned. That funny fellow managed to really nail it. What did he say? “Whoever comes back is not us; it’s someone else”? Oh, boy.

I got up and left the office. I was wide-awake and needed to go for a walk. The soft orange light of the street lamps; the piercing, cold wind from the Xuron; the colorful cobblestones of the
streets; and the greenish disk of the moon in the velvety black night—they were all lucky charms protecting me from the desperation of loneliness. In a sense, they, too, were “ordinary
magical things.”

Maybe it was someone else who returned to the House by the Bridge an hour later, but whoever he was, that guy, he was calm and happy. At least for a while.

Also by Max Frei from Gollancz:

The Stranger

The Stranger’s Woes

A Gollancz eBook

Original text Copyright © 2005 Max Frei
English translation Copyright © 2012 Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore
All rights reserved.

The right of Max Frei to be identified as the author of the original Russian edition of this work, and the right of Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore to be identified as the
translators of this work , has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in the USA by The Overlook Press, 2012
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2012 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 08986 0

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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