The Merlin Conspiracy (11 page)

I sat in silence in that tall, cold room, staring at his intent white face across the plates and crumbs. Grundo looked to be holding his breath. “I—I suppose I'd better,” I said when the chills had almost stopped scurrying up and down my back. “Someone has to do something.”

My grandfather Gwyn
could
smile, after all. It was an unexpectedly warm, kind smile. It helped. A little. Actually, I was terrified.

I
sat down again after Romanov had gone. For some reason, I fitted myself carefully into the exact place I had been in before, with my back against the wall and my heels in the scuff marks. I suppose I wanted Arnold and Co. to think I'd been sitting there all the time. But I wasn't really attending. I was shaking all over, and I pretty well wanted to cry.

I was full of hurt and paranoia and plain terror that someone had wanted me killed. I kept thinking, But I
told
them in the Empire I wasn't going to be Emperor! They'd taken me there into those worlds, and I'd signed things—sort of abdicated—so that my half brother Rob could be Emperor instead. It didn't make
sense
.

I was full of hurt and paranoia, too, at the way Romanov had despised me. A lot of people had called me selfish. I'd been working on it, I thought. I'd looked after Dad and been really considerate, I thought. But I could tell Romanov saw through all that, to the way I really
felt
. And of course I still felt selfish, in spite of the way I behaved. All the same, I was
trying
, and it wasn't
fair
, and it wasn't fair either that Romanov had despised me for being ignorant, too! I'd been working on that as well. I'd been reading everything I could lay hands on about magic
and
trying to get to other worlds and trying every way I could to persuade the bunch of people who govern the Magids—they call them the Upper Room for some reason—to let me train as a Magid, too. It wasn't
my
fault they wouldn't.

Then I thought about Romanov himself. I would never, if I lived to be a thousand, meet anyone else as powerfully magic as Romanov. It was shattering. I'd met quite a few Magids, and they seemed quite humdrum now, compared with the stuff I'd felt coming from Romanov. It was awesome, it was just not
fair
, for someone to be as strong as that. Razor-edge, lightning-strike strong. It shook me to my bones.

And those big cats shook me to my bones, too. When I found they were
real
…

Hang on, I thought. This is a dream. You always put yourself through seriously nasty experiences in bad dreams. This is just a nightmare.

Then I felt a whole heap better. I looked up and saw that the overhead lights were getting stronger orange, while the gridded holes in the walls were growing pink. It looked as if the whole day had passed. Well, I thought, dreams do like to fast-forward things. I wasn't really surprised when, about five minutes later, Arnold came pounding up to me carrying his bag of tricks. His thick, fair face looked white and exhausted.

“Up you get. Time to go,” he said. “The Prince's own mages handle security overnight.”

I got up, thinking in a dreamlike way that it was rather a waste that we were all taking so much trouble to guard a Prince who was going to lose his Empire and be dead before long. How had Romanov known that anyway? But dreams are like that.

I was still thinking about this when we passed the first soldier. He looked at us enviously. “Poor beggars stay here all night in case anyone plants a bomb,” Arnold remarked. Then we came up to Chick and Arnold said, “Time up. Hotel first or eat and drink?”

“Food!”
Chick said, collapsing his sword to a knife and then stretching his arms out. “I'm so hungry I could eat that novice.”

“I'd prefer a horse, personally,” Arnold said, and we went on round to underneath the pavilion. Dave and Pierre were already there, waiting. Arnold asked them, too, “Hotel first, or food?”

“Food!” they both said, and Dave added, “And wine. Then some hot spots. Anyone know this town—know where's good to go?”

I watched them as they stood around discussing this. After Romanov, they struck me as simply normal people, jumped up a bit. I was a bit bored by them.

None of them did know where to go in Marseilles, as it turned out. Nor did I, when they asked me as a last resort. So we all went out through the guarded doors underneath the pavilion into the street, and Arnold hailed a taxi. “Condweerie noo a yune bong plass a monjay,” he told the driver as we all piled in. I think he meant, Take us to a good place to eat, but it sounded like Zulu with a German accent.

The driver seemed to understand, though. He drove off downhill toward the sea with a tremendous rattle. Even allowing for the way the streets were cobbled and how old that taxi was, I think the way its engine worked was quite different from the cars I was used to. It was ten times louder.

But it got us there. Before long it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “
Voilà, messieurs
. A whole street of eateries for your honors.” Clearly, he had us spotted as English—or, considering Arnold and perhaps Chick, too, not French anyway. The place he'd brought us to was a row of little cafés, and they all had big hand-done notices in their windows.
SCARMBLED EGG
, one said, and
SNALES
was another.
LEG OF FROG WITH CHEEPS
and
STAKE OR OLDAY BREKFA
, said others.

We all cracked up. It had been a long day, and it felt good to be able to scream with laughter. “I am not,” howled Dave, staggering about on the cobbles and wiping tears off his face, “repeat
not
, going to eat cheeping frog legs!”

“Let's go for the scarmbled eggs.” Chick laughed. “I want to know what they do to it.”

So, in spite of Arnold's saying he rather fancied the stake, we went into the
SCARMBLED EGG
one. We charged in, still laughing, and snatched up menus. I think the proprietors found us a bit alarming. They brought us a huge carafe of wine straightaway, as if they were trying to placate us, and then looked quite frightened when we all discovered we needed to visit the gents and surged up to our feet again.

There was only one of it, out in the backyard past the telephone and the kitchen, where a large fat French lady glowered suspiciously at us as we waited for our turns. I was last, being only the novice, so I had to stand a lot of the glare.

But when we came back to our table, things were almost perfect. We swigged the wine and ordered vast meals, some of it weirdly spelled and the rest in French, so that we had no idea what would be coming, and then we ate and ate, until we got to the cheese and sticky pastry stage, where we all slowed down cheerfully. Dave began saying that he wanted to look at the nightlife very soon.

“In a while,” Arnold said. “I suppose I'd better take your reports first.” He lit one of his horrible Aztec smokes and took out a notebook. “Chick? Any attempts to break through the East? Any threats?”

“Negative,” said Chick. “I've never known the otherwheres calmer.”

The others both said the same. Then Arnold looked at me. “How about your patrol? What's your name, by the way?”

They've finally asked! I thought. “Nick.”

Arnold frowned. “Funny. I thought it was something like Maurice.”

“That's my surname,” I said, quick as a flash. “And I do have something to report. A fellow called Romanov turned up and he—”

That caused a real sensation.
“Romanov!”
they all shouted. They were awed and scared and thoroughly surprised. Arnold added suspiciously, “Are you
sure
it was Romanov?”

“That's who he said he was,” I said. “Who is he? I never met anyone so powerful.”

“Only the magical supremo,” Chick said. “Romanov can do things most magic users in most worlds only dream of doing.”

“He can do some things most of us never even thought of,” said Pierre. “They say he charges the earth for them, too.”

“If you can find him,” Arnold said wryly.

“I've heard,” said Dave, “that he lives on an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries. Went there to escape his missus.”

“Sensible fellow,” murmured Arnold.

“He escapes there to avoid being pestered to do magic,” Pierre said. “I'd heard he was self-taught. Is that true?”

“Yes, that's the amazing thing about him,” Dave said. “According to what I heard, he was born in a gutter on quite a remote world—Thule, I think, or maybe Blest—and he pulled himself out of poverty by teaching himself to do magic. Very unorthodox. But he had a gift for it and discovered things no one else knew how to do, so he charged high and got rich quick. He could probably buy our entire Empire now. And nobody'd dare say he couldn't.”

“Yes, but,” Arnold said doggedly, “was it
really
Romanov that Nick Maurice met?” He turned and puffed his awful smoke at me, staring through the brown clouds of it with big, earnest blue eyes. “If you were doing as you were told, you'd have been able to see his totem animal. What was it like?”

“I'd heard it was a saber-toothed tiger,” Chick put in.

“No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean hunting cat, sort of cream with dark gray blodges. It had tufts on its ears and sarcastic green eyes, and he said it was female. It came up to my waist, easily. I was scared stiff of it.”

Arnold nodded. “Then it was Romanov.” I could see they were, all four, really impressed. “Did he tell you why he was there?” Arnold asked me. “Was he looking for the Prince?”

“I asked him that,” I said. “And he seemed to think the Prince would make his own trouble, without any magical interference. When he was King, he said.”

They exchanged worried glances at that. Dave muttered, “Could be right. By what I've heard, some of Romanov's island is thirty years in the future.”

“They say he never bothers to lie,” Chick agreed.

I was relieved. I hoped I'd given them enough to think of to stop them thinking anymore about me. From the moment Arnold said he thought my name was Maurice, it was like a whole train of pennies dropping in my head. This was not a dream. It was
real
. I'd no idea how it happened, but I knew that somehow I'd done the thing I'd been longing to do and crossed over into another universe. A real other world. And when I did, I'd turned up beside those fliers while they had all been waiting for the novice to arrive, and they had thought I was him.

This meant that somewhere back in that other London there was the real Maurice.

If this Maurice was my age, he wasn't going to like having gone without breakfast and then finding they'd all left without him. He was going to go back to this academy he came from, or phone there, and
tell
them. If I was really lucky, them at the academy would just shrug and say serve him right for being late.

But I couldn't count on it.

What was much more likely, since this cricket match was a Test and going to go on for several days, was that the academy people were going to make arrangements for the real Maurice to get to Marseilles later that same day. Then they were going to phone someone in the Prince's security team to say Maurice was on his way. In fact, it was just amazing luck that they hadn't phoned while I was sitting in that concrete passage thinking it was all a dream. I would have had a rude awakening. Perhaps it took them a long time to arrange the journey. But they could well have phoned by now. Or Maurice could even have got here.

It was probably only the fact that the mages had been starving hungry and gone off with me in that taxi without saying where they were going that had stopped me getting arrested a couple of hours ago.

They
would
arrest me. They'd do that in my own world if I accidentally got in among security for the Queen. But this world was so paranoid that it had to have a charmed circle round a cricket field, and I'd got in on that, too. These people were going to accuse me of magical terrorism or something. I
knew
they were. I had to get away.

But at that moment they were still sort of attending to me, even though they were now discussing totem beasts and the way the animals reflected a mage's personality. So I kept a humble, eager, novice-like look on my face. When they asked me if I thought Romanov's totem beast reflected Romanov's personality, I said, “Yes. It walked exactly like him.”

They laughed. Then Chick said, puzzled, “But didn't he say anything else to you?”

I said, “He called me ignorant and went away in disgust.” As I said it, I wondered if it was Maurice's academy that had sent Romanov to stop me before I did any acts of terrorism. But I saw that couldn't be right. Romanov had known my name. I hadn't told anyone here my name until just now.

“Just passing through, I suppose,” Arnold said dubiously. “Odd, though. I'd better report it as soon as we get to the hotel. Nick, you must be ready to give a detailed account to the Prince's mages.”