The Merlin Conspiracy

But it got us there. Before long, it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “Voila, messieurs. A whole street of eateries for your honours.” 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 egg,” laughed Chick. “I want to know what they do to it.”

So, in spite of Arnold 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 back yard 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 spelt 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 sabre-tooth tiger,” Chick put in.

“No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean, hunting cat, sort of cream with dark grey 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 any more 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.”

“Sure,” I said and thought that I’d better give them the slip on the way there.

Then Arnold said, “Call for the bill, Dave. Ladeeshun or whatever they say. Everyone got enough cash for this blowout?”

The four of them began fetching out money. One glance was enough to show me that it wasn’t anything like the couple of ten pound notes in my back pocket. Their notes were kind of white, with black writing on them, like legal documents, and the coins were vast heavy things that rang down on the table like church bells. I knew I had to get out now.

I stood up. I said, “I have to go to the gents again.”

“Trying to get out of paying your share?” Pierre said, laughing.

The others laughed too and Chick said, “Hey, Nick, you never told us what your totem beast is. Or is it a state secret?”

“No… It’s a black panther,” I said, edging off.

“Go on!” said Dave. “That would make you a high adept!”

“That was a joke,” I said hurriedly. “Just a joke.” And I marched off, followed by jolly shouts and more laughter. I felt bad. They were quite nice fellows really.

I didn’t dare run, but I walked quite fast, down the passage past the huge Frenchwoman – she glowered at me again – and opened the door into the yard. It was a narrow door and I had to turn half round to get through it. That was how I happened to see the officer from the flier just coming in through the front door of the café. He was waving his cellphone and looking pretty agitated. You could see he had been hunting all over for us.

I shut the door very gently behind me and raced through the yard to the back entrance. There was an alley there full of rubbish bins. But no soldiers. Yet. I think the officer hadn’t been sure enough of finding us to have the place surrounded. But I was sure he must have a squad outside the front. I ran.