The Merlin Conspiracy (50 page)

Everything was very misty, too, and statue-still, with the normal summer colors looking unclear and rather dark, as if they were reflected in deep, thick water. None of it smelled quite right. And there were none of the transparent folks tumbling in the hedges in the wind from the car.

When the road brought us into sight of the green line of the Ridgeway Hills, running along the skyline to our left, those hills were nearly hidden by low, gray, moving clouds that formed big, puffy blue-gray waves, which were all cascading and rushing westward faster than the car. By the time the road brought us nearer to the hills, we were in those clouds. Hot white vapors almost hid the road. Dora was forced to slow right down, so that we could actually see the mist surging across us in waves, galloping into the west.

We were almost at the right place by then. I could feel the strange tug and pull of it. I was fairly sure it was the same place that Grundo and I had felt on our way to London. Grundo, Toby, and I all cried out, “Here it is! We're nearly there!” and I said to Dora, “If you could take the next turning left …”

“Oh, no,” she said.

This was where it got really frightening.

I said, “But this is truly the best place. Romanov said. I think it's a wood—”

“Oh, no,” Dora said again. “It's much too near where Toby's father lives. I can't take you there.”

“But you
have
to, Mum!” Toby cried out. “I went to them—I told them in the wood that I'd go back and call them out. They're
waiting
for me. I
promised
them!”

Dora said, “And I promised I would do at least this one thing for the group. They'll be very displeased if I don't.” And she kept driving.

“Oh,
please
!” Toby said. I had never known him so upset. Tears were bursting out of his eyes and rolling down his shirt. I remembered, with a quiver of fright in my stomach, that Dora had always been at least half dotty, and Toby knew she was.

“Where
do
you think you're driving us, then?” Nick said belligerently to Dora. He was in the front seat, and he more or less turned and shouted in Dora's face.

“Stonehenge,” Dora said. “It'll be quite all right then. They promised me.”

I almost relaxed at that. Stonehenge was one of the other four places Romanov had told me. But Nick said suspiciously, “
Who
told you to take us to Stonehenge? Toby's dad?”

“And Mrs. Blantyre,” Dora said placidly. “And the sweet young man they get their orders from. I think he said he was the Merlin, but I'm not sure. He said that this was the least I could do. I was quite worried yesterday when I couldn't find any of you, because I didn't want to let them down, did I?”

“Mum!”
Toby shouted. “
I
made a promise, too! Stop the car!” He stood up and gave Dora's shoulder a shake, but the car swerved so violently that he sat down again quickly.

Nick tried cunning then. He said, “Dora, how about we stop the car and keep Toby's promise first? Then we can go on to Stonehenge and keep yours.”

Dora shook her head. “No, dear. Please don't try any Oriental blandishments on me. I do know when someone's trying to get round me.” And we bucketed on, with waves of mist rolling across us and away in front of us.

Nick and Toby both shot me desperate looks. Nick leaned over and tried to put on the handbrake—he says this is the only control that's the same as an Earth car—but he couldn't do it, even heaving with both hands. “What have you done to this?” he asked Dora.

“Nothing,” she said, “but Mrs. Blantyre did promise me she would make sure we got there. She's clever, isn't she? Now, do be good. It's so hard to see in all this fog.”

Grundo leaned over the side to see if it was possible to jump out, but we were going far too fast. He sat down and looked at me. “It may be all right,” I said. “Stonehenge was another of Romanov's places.”

“Stonehenge is
the
place,” Dora said happily. “The King is going to abdicate there today.” As she said this, the roof of the car rolled back over us and we found that none of the doors would open. We roared onward in a warm box surrounded in fog, and there seemed no way of stopping Dora that wouldn't crash the car. All my flower files were useless, useless, because the hurt lady had never known about cars, and I had never known much myself either.

I know the others tried things. Grundo tried an illusion of people in the road ahead, but he was upset, so they came out behind the car. Shadowy people chased us through the fog for miles. My idea was to give Dora cramp and a crick in her neck, but either this Mrs. Blantyre of hers had thought of that or Dora just ignored what I did to her. Toby tried an illusion of the controls bursting into flame, but Dora knew it was him.

“Toby,” she said reproachfully, “don't play tricks while I'm driving. It's not safe.”

Toby sighed, and the fire vanished. And Nick …

Yes, well, I called that dragon.

I didn't do it just because I was scared spitless—although I was. The sight of the silly, dreamy smile on Dora's face while she refused to stop driving was one of the scariest things that had happened so far. But as soon as she mentioned the Merlin, I knew it was serious for a lot more reasons than just my own safety. I thought through the way Joel had talked, and how urgent Romanov had been, and what Roddy had told me, and I thought I'd better do what I could, and do it before we got out of range.

I shut my eyes and concentrated, the way Maxwell Hyde had tried to teach me. I'd never done it right before. I suppose I'd lacked the incentive. It surprised the hell out of me when I found I was sort of floating beside the hillside, where the turf rolled back to show the dragon's vast white head. We were swamped in mist, both of us. His big green eye was open and turning this way and that to watch the waves of cloud rushing across him, but the eye turned and looked at me when I got there, even though I was really sitting in a car speeding away from him.

“
YOU AGAIN
,” he said. Just like Romanov. “
HAVE YOU COME TO CALL ME OUT THIS TIME
?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's time. I summon you.”

“
YOU LEFT IT A BIT LATE
,” he said, “
IN MY OPINION. VERY WELL. IT WILL TAKE ME AWHILE TO WORK LOOSE. AND REMEMBER WHAT I SAID. I DON'T LIKE BEING CALLED. PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GET HURT. YOU ARE GOING TO GET HURT. NOW GO AWAY
.”

I went away, fast. I flipped back into the car, shaking all over, and found we were on a stretch of road that was not in fog any longer. Dora was fair batting along it. She had her foot right down most of the rest of the way. It was frightening.

It was thoroughly frightening. It was also very hot, too, as if the fine weather that my father had never been allowed to cancel was getting out of hand somehow. With the heat there was the sour, disinfectant-like smell you get when magic is being done. At first I assumed it was coming from the spells that were holding the car doors shut, but then, slowly, I realized that it was coming from everywhere. It was outside, not simply in the car. And finally I realized what it was. It was the smell of quantities of magic being moved. It was the way things smelled when all the magic in the countryside was being pulled, and sucked, and dragged, into one place.

“Oh, gods!” I said. Everyone except Dora looked at me anxiously. “It's the magic,” I said. “Someone's pulling in all the magic of Blest.”

“So how do we stop it?” said Nick.

He said this as if he really thought it was possible—build a dam, suck in the opposite direction—I don't know what he thought, but it made Dora drive even faster, as if she was afraid Nick would really find some way to deal with the magic, huge as it was, unless we got to Stonehenge quickly. I could feel her adding in a speed-the-journey spell. It was a variant of the fifth one in my
Traveler's Joy
file, and it had a foreign feel, as if someone else had provided it for her. It was strong. We were on Salisbury Plain five minutes after Nick asked his question.

Bare green distances rushed by. And suddenly, in that way it has of turning up, unexpectedly small and indescribably massive, there was Stonehenge.

We bumped across the grass right beside the enormous stones of it, and Nick said, “There's a lot more of it standing than there is on Earth.”

I hardly heard him. Too many other things grabbed my attention. I thought I caught a glimpse of Salisbury standing near one of the stones, just a sight of green rubber boots as we bumped past, and a flutter of ragged coat that might have been Old Sarum squatting beside the boots. But the main thing that held my attention was the great orderly jumble of cars, buses, and lorries parked downhill from the henge. And despite all I knew, I found myself thinking, Oh, good! We've caught up with the Progress at last!

What a stupid way to think! I told myself as Dora stopped the car. Every single person who might have been friendly to us was currently in a xanadu worlds away, shrouded in white spells of binding. As proof of this, the car was instantly surrounded by royal pages, who came running up while the car was still moving and pulled the doors open as soon as it stopped. They were Alicia's lot, all the people of Alicia's age whom I particularly did not like, and they stood in a close circle with official, polite looks on their faces—except that the polite looks were just slightly exaggerated, so that we knew it was a mass jeer, really.

“If you will come this way, please,” Alicia herself said, reaching in and hauling on my arm.

Her fingers dug, but I hardly noticed. We climbed out into such a storm of magic that it made me quite dazed. It set the hurt lady's knowledge racing randomly through my brain:
Purple Vetch: vortex; Goose Grass or Cleavers: bindings; Gorse: land and home magics; Woody Nightshade: spells of evil intent, death spells, and sacrifices; Foxglove: raising of power
; and so many more that I went dizzy and could only see things around me as sick-colored shadows for a minute or so. Then my brain steadied on
Purple Vetch
, and I knew what was happening. We were at the center of a vortex here, where all the magic in Blest, and for worlds around Blest, was coming roaring and soundlessly howling inward to a spot right beside Stonehenge. I could feel it. I could see it, too, in the swirls of white cloud that marked the lines of force in the blue sky, winding and dragging inward to an icy spearpoint of power only yards away. I found I was bending sideways from it as Alicia hauled me politely toward it.

I hardly saw—but noticed all the same—a perfectly horrible woman leading Dora away, patting her and praising her as if she were a dog. “Good girl!
Well
done!
Doesn't
it feel better now you've done what you owed your friends to do?” Poor, silly Dora. She was beaming and nodding and looking shamed, all at once.

Another thing I hardly saw, but noticed all the same, was the way the pages expertly cleared a path for us through the crowds of people gathered in a ring around the point of the vortex. Some were people I knew from Court, but most of them were folk I'd never seen before, a lot of them like the horrid woman praising Dora, and crowds of men with beards and dishonest faces—many of these had too much hair and golden disks on their chests in the manner of priests—and large numbers of men and women who struck me as like Dora: not quite sure what they were doing here.

When we reached the space in the center of the crowd, I hardly saw, but noticed all the same, that it was packed tight with the transparent folks. They had been pulled here by the magic, and now they were being drawn on for their own magic. Their hard-to-see bodies bumped aside to let us through, and bumped and blundered high into the air, until they were crushed together into the white lines of the vortex clouds, where they were borne rushing downward again. The space was full of their soundless screams and their dreadful anxiety. They were terrified and horrified, but wildly excited as well, as if they couldn't help themselves.

There was more dreadful anxiety from the fringes of the crowd, but I couldn't find who it was coming from. All I knew was that a lot of someones were there, more worried than I cared to think about.

In the center of the space was Sybil, dancing. Her big, square-toed feet were bare, and her green skirts were hauled halfway up her massive legs. She must have been dancing for hours. When she saw us, she shouted,
“Hai!”
and flung her arms up, and I saw great dark patches of sweat spreading from her armpits almost to her waist.

Two chairs had been put facing one another on the grass, about ten yards apart. The King sat in one, looking royal and expressionless, with Prince Edmund standing beside him. The two Archbishops stood behind the chair, wearing robes and miters. Each of them had a puzzled and slightly distant smile, as if they had no more idea than Dora what was going on but felt they ought to look benevolent all the same.

The Merlin sat in the other chair. False Merlin, I should say. Now I had met the real one, I could see that this one's face was rattier and his hair fairer. But they were very alike. They both had the long neck and the big Adam's apple and the same small, pointed face. Maybe this was what had put the idea of the conspiracy into this one's head. But I had the feeling that he wasn't pretending to be anyone except himself now. He was in plain brown robes that reeked of power, and he sat in the same pose as a saint in a statue. Sir James was standing to one side of him, looking smug in a smart suit. There was a big box on the other side of the false Merlin. In front of him was a large silver bucket—or maybe it was a cauldron—that smoked cold white smoke. This was where the point of the vortex of magic rested.