The Merlin Conspiracy

I ran for my life, out of that alley and then through several others, always turning uphill away from that street when I could. That may have been a mistake. For one thing, it got steeper, so that there were steps in some places. For another thing, there were more and more people about, lovers walking, or people just sitting in doorways, so that when I began to hear shouts and police whistles and lots of feet climbing up behind me, I didn’t dare run. The ones who saw me running would point me out to the police.

Then things got worse. Arnold’s voice suddenly spoke, sounding like it was somewhere inside of me. Nick, Nicholas Maurice. Come here. We want to ask you a few questions. I’d forgotten they were mages. They were probably tracking me by magic.

Dave’s voice spoke too. Come on, Nick. Don’t be a fool. Nicholas Maurice, there’s a full security alert and you can’t get away.

My name’s not Nicholas! I thought frantically. It’s really Nichothodes Euthandor Timosus Benigedy Koryfoides. It was the first time I’d ever been glad of having this string of outlandish names. They seemed to cover up the voices. I recited them over and over again and climbed the hill until I’d no breath left and was hot as a furnace. I pounded up another set of steps, saying a name for each step, “Nichothodes – puff – Euthandor – puff – Timosus – gasp – Benigedy – pant – Koryfoides!” And the voices faded away as I burst out into bright lights, shops and crowds of people.

Thank goodness! I thought. I can get lost in these crowds!

It was proper city life there. Nobody spared me a glance as I went past tables on a pavement packed with people eating and drinking, and then crossed the road among a bunch of happy folk having a night out. They were all much better dressed than me, but nobody looked at me anyway. I got my breath back wandering along that side of the street, looking into expensive shop windows, and I was just beginning to feel safer when both ends of the road filled with uniforms. Police and soldiers were stopping everyone from leaving, and squads were coming down towards me asking everyone to show their ID.

I bolted up the nearest alley. There was some kind of big church up the other end and I stopped dead when I saw it. There were a couple of soldiers with rifles standing outside its door. Perhaps in this world you really could kneel holding the altar and shouting “Sanctuary!” and be safe. And they didn’t want me doing that. I leant against the alley wall wondering what to do. I knew what I should do, and that was simply walk on into another world, or back into my own. But I couldn’t seem to do that, however hard I pushed my shoulders at that wall, no more than I could do it when I’d tried at home. I didn’t know what to do.

Then, Hang on! I thought. I spent most of today up a tree somewhere quite different. That should be safe enough, if I can get there. I’ll try that.

So I looked around. And I could hardly believe my eyes. Paths to that wood, and to all sorts of other places, more or less radiated out from where I was standing. They looked dim and blue and at odd sort of angles to that alley, but they looked as real as Romanov had said they were. I bolted up the nearest path.

It was night there too and fairly dark, but before I had gone very far I could see the oval of turquoise light that was the cricket stadium. I took my bearings from that and trotted round and along into the wood. It was pitchy dark there, full of uncanny rustlings and birds hooting, but I refused to let that bother me and kept on trotting. I’ll find that panther, I thought, then climb a tree and let her protect me. That should do it.

While I was shoving through the next clump of bushes, I smelt a butcherish sort of smell and heard the most tremendous grating and cracking, like teeth on bone, and I realised I had found the panther. It was the extra blackness under the next bush. But before I could say anything, she gave a hideous, fruity growl.

Go away. Busy. Eating. MINE.

I got out of those bushes fast. I could tell she would add a piece of me to her meal if I didn’t leave her alone. There was no way that panther was a tame totem-thing. It shook me up and made me feel horribly lonely to realise that. I’d been relying on beastly protection. But as that wasn’t on, I thought I’d climb a tree anyway and blundered on until I came to one that seemed easy to climb. I had my arms round its trunk and one foot up on the lowest branch, when I heard voices again.

Nicholas Maurice, we know you’re here. Come on out.

I froze. I looked where the voices were coming from, and there were two things like shining yellowish ghosts drifting along among the trees about a foot in the air. They were over in the direction of the turquoise oval, but much nearer, following a path there. Inside the ghost-shapes I could just recognise Chick and Pierre. This was another thing I’d forgotten they could do.

I took a look down at myself. I seemed to be quite dark and solid. The only parts of me I could really see were my pale hands, clutching the tree. But for all I knew, Chick and Pierre looked dark and solid to themselves and I was the one who shone like a ghost to them. I didn’t know enough, that was the problem. All I knew was that they hadn’t seen me yet.

Nicholas Maurice! they fluted beguilingly.

Nichothodes! I said to myself and began backing gently away, reciting my names again. I backed, and crept, and bumped into several trees and a spiky bush, and watched the ghosts drifting along, more and more distant, until I backed right round behind the spiky bush and couldn’t see them any more. Then I looked around and saw another path winding its dim, blue way up to my right, and I fair pelted up it.

This path was rocky and wet, with wet cliffs bulging up on both sides, and it was horribly uneven. I kept stumbling as I ran, but I didn’t stop until the light from the turquoise stadium faded away entirely and I couldn’t see it at all. I was looking over my shoulder, checking on it, when I whanged into a piece of cliff and fell down.

2 (#ub0833fe8-e8c4-5333-8c6e-7495778e46f9)

I stayed down for quite a while. Here I was, I thought, once again sitting in a state of terror and paranoia, only this time was worse. Add to that the way my knee hurt from ramming the cliff and the fact that my rear felt as if I was sitting in a puddle and you have the recipe for true misery. And it was dark.

There wasn’t any way that I could see of getting home to Dad. I seemed to have a choice of going back to the wood and giving myself up to the ghostly shapes of Chick and Pierre, or going on along this path, or choosing another. There didn’t seem to be any future in any of those choices.

I felt vile. And guilty. Let’s face it, I had deceived a whole security team. I hadn’t exactly meant to, but I had been so set on the idea that this was all a dream that I was having that I hadn’t even tried to say, “Excuse me. I’m not your novice.” Maybe this was because, underneath, I might have had a small sense of self-preservation which told me that, if I did, I was likely to be arrested and interrogated anyway. But I knew why I hadn’t said anything really. It was because I had actually – really and truly – got to another world on my own, just as I’d been longing to do. And it was too good to spoil.

Now I was in a real mess. And so were the mages I’d deceived. It was no wonder that Arnold and Dave had been tracking me hard in Marseilles and that Chick and Pierre were in a trance searching the wood. They were in bad trouble. If they didn’t find me, they’d almost certainly be arrested themselves.

I was not surprised someone had hired Romanov to terminate me. I was getting to be a real menace. It was for something I was going to do later, he said. Romanov must have known I was going to go from bad to worse – and all only because I’d set my heart on being a Magid. Magids were strong magicians. They guided the flow of magic from world to world. They were trouble-shooters too. Most of them were dealing with problems – really exciting problems – in several worlds at once, using all sorts of different magical skills to do it. I wanted to do that. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything. But the people who ran the Magids – the Upper Room – wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t let me have any training. So it was no wonder I was blundering ignorantly around, getting into this sort of mess. Romanov had been right to despise me.

This set me thinking of Romanov again. I still had the idea he was more powerful than any Magid. Romanov, I thought. That’s the name of the old Czars of Russia. And he probably was a Czar, a magics supremo, the magics Czar, the way we have drugs Czars in England. I wished I could talk to him about the mess I was in. I knew he could tell me how to get back to my own world.

This was where the odd thing happened.

It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t smelling, or feeling, but it was like both things. It was also like there was a tiny breeze blowing from the path ahead, as if thinking of Romanov set it off. But there was no breeze. The air was perfectly still and wet. All the same I could suddenly smell-feel that Romanov had gone along this very path on his way back to wherever his home was.

“He said come to him if anyone else came after me,” I said out loud. “OK. I will.”

I got up and began feeling my way along the path.

For I don’t know how long, it was quite awful. It was so dark. I could see sky up above, between the rock walls, but it was almost as dark as the path. There were no stars in it – nothing – and it didn’t help me to see at all. I could just pick out my hands, the right one trailing along the wet, lumpy rocks, and the left one stretched out in front in a shaky sort of way, in case I hit a spur or a corner of cliff. I didn’t want to think what else I might hit. There were noises, squelshy sounds that made me sure my fingers were going to plunge into something big and slimy any second, and creaking noises, and dry flappings that were worst of all. Every time the flapping happened, the hairs on my neck came up and dragged on my collar as if it were velcro.

The ground was uneven too. My feet kicked stones I couldn’t see, or staggered and slipped on slopes of rock. Several times I stubbed my toe really hard, but I never knew what I’d hit. I sloshed into puddles and crunched through muddy pebbles until my feet were soaked and sore and frozen, and I never knew what was coming next.

Then it began to rain. “That’s all I need!” I moaned. It was cold, drenching rain that had me wet through in seconds, with water chasing down my face and bringing my hair down in sharp points into my eyes. My teeth started chattering, it was so cold. But, believe it or not, that rain was actually an improvement. The noises stopped, as if the creatures making them didn’t like the rain any more than I did, and before long all I could hear was the rain drilling down, splashing in puddles and trickling off the rocks. And the fact that the rocks were so wet meant that they sort of picked up a glisten from the sky and the puddles glinted a bit, so I could see a bit of what was coming next. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and got on faster.

The rain slacked off to a drizzle at last and I began to think there was a bit more light. I could actually see the way winding ahead like a sort of cleft in the rocks, with all the edges just faintly traced in silvery blue. Then I began to hear noises ahead. Not the noises I’d heard before. This was a sort of booming and yelling.

I began going very slowly and cautiously, sliding my feet one behind the other and keeping one shoulder against the right-hand wall so that I could look round each bend as I came to it. There was something big and alive along there, yelling its head off.

After about three bends, I could hear words in the yelling. “We plough the fields and scatter the dynamite on the land!” I heard. And then, after another bend, “Good King Wencis last looked out – when did he first look out then? – on the feast of Stephen!”

I almost laughed, but I still went very cautiously, and the light kept getting stronger and the yelling went on. You couldn’t call it singing. It was too out of tune. And finally I edged round another bend and saw the person making the din.

He was a skinny, white-haired old drunk and he was leaning against a bulge of rock singing his head off. When I peeped round the bend at him, he was yelling about “Rock of Ages, cleft for meeee!” and holding up a little blue flame in both shaky old hands. The flame lit his clothes shiny and blazed off the wet rocks and his wrinkled, yelling face. He held the flame higher up as I peeped at him and shouted, “Come on, come on, both of you! Or am I just seeing double? Come out where I can see all the pair of you! Don’t lurk!”

I came round in front of him. There didn’t seem any harm in him. I’d never seen anyone so drunk, not even my friends after they’d drunk all Dad’s whisky. He couldn’t have hurt anyone in that state. He had trouble just seeing me. He wavered about, holding the little flame out towards me, and blinked and peered. I’d been thinking this flame was some kind of outdoor candle, or a torch like Arnold and Co had used, but it wasn’t. It was a little curl of blue light standing on his hands, blazing away out of nothing.

“I’m drunk,” he said to me. “Night as a tute. Can’t ever come this way unless I get drunk first. Too scared. Tell me, are you scared?”

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off that little flame. It was one of the most extraordinary things I’d ever seen. “Doesn’t that burn you?”

“Not at all, notatall, notatall,” he shouted. He was too drunk to talk quietly. “Being of one substance with my flesh, you know, it can’t hurt. Litchwight, I mean witchlight, they call it. Not even hot, dear lad. Not even warm. So, well then, out with it, out with it!”

“Out with what?” I said.

“Whatever you need or want, of course. You have to meet three folk in need in this place and give them what help you can, before you can get where you’re going. You’re my third!” he shouted, waving his little flame backwards and forwards more or less under my nose, “so I’m naturally anxious to get you done and dealt with and get on. So out with it. What do you want?”

I should have asked him how to find Romanov. I see that now. A lot of things would have been different if I had. But I was so amazed by that little blue flame that I leant backwards to get its light out of my eyes and pointed to it. “Can I do that? Can you show me how to do it?”

He wavered forward from his rock, peering at me, and nearly fell down. “Amazing,” he said, hastily getting his back to the rock again. “Amazing. You’re here, but you can’t do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can’t. Why not?”

“No one ever showed me how,” I said.

He swayed about, looking solemn. “I quote,” he said. “I’m very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools? Know where that comes from?”

“One of the Narnia books,” I said. “The one where Narnia begins. Can you show me how to make a light like that?”

“Tell you,” he corrected me, looking even more solemn. “I can’t show you because it comes from inside yourself, see. What you do is find your centre – can you do that?”