The Merlin Conspiracy

by Diana Wynne Jones

  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 toward me, asking everyone to show their IDs.

  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 leaned 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 sorts 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 smelled a butcherish sort of smell and heard the most tremendous grating and cracking, like teeth on bone, and I realized 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 realize 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 recognize 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 anymore. 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.

  TWO

  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 troubleshooters, 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. “Okay. 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, squelchy sounds that m
ade 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 plow 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 whiskey. He couldn’t have hurt anyone in that state. He had trouble just seeing me. He wavered about, holding the little flame out toward 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 backward and forward 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 leaned backward 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 center—can you do that?”

  “My navel, you mean?” I said.

  “No, no!” he howled. “You’re not a woman! Or are you? Confess I can’t see you too well, but your voice sounds like teenage male to me. Is that what you are?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And a plumb ignorant one, too,” he grumbled. “Fancy not knowing—Well, your center is here!”

  He plunged toward me and took me completely by surprise by jabbing me hard just under my breastbone. What with that, and the blast of alcohol that came with the jab, I went staggering backward into the rocks on the other side of the path. He overbalanced. He snatched at my knees as he went down, missed, and ended in a heap by my feet. The blue light seemed to splash all over the ground. Then it climbed one of his arms and settled on his shiny wet shoulder.

  “Polar sexus,” he said sadly. “That’s where it is, polar sexus.”

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  He raised his soaking gray head. “There is,” he said, “a special angel appointed to watch over those under the inkerfluence of eight over the one. That, young man, is why I had to imbibe before coming here. It all hangs together. Now do you understand how to summon light?”

  “No,” I said frankly.

  “Don’t you even know where your solar plexus is?” he demanded.

  “I thought you said polar sexus,” I said.

  He went up on to his hands and knees and shook his head sadly. Water flew off as if he was a wet dog. “Now you’re making fun of me. But I shall be forbearing,” he said, “though mostly for the reason that I shan’t get out of this place if I’m not. And I may add, young man, that your attitude toward the elderly is less than respectful. Polar sexus indeed!” He started fumbling around on the ground in front of my feet. “Where is it? Where did I put my damn light?”

  “It’s on your shoulder,” I said.

  He turned his face and saw it. He more or less put his nose in it. “Now you’re having a joke on me,” he said. “I shall be freezingly polite and ignore it, or we’ll be here all night. Pick me up.”

  He smelled so disgustingly of booze that I really didn’t want to touch him, but I did want to know how you made light, so I bent down and grabbed him by his sopping jacket. He didn’t like that. He said, “Unhand me at once!” and crawled away backward.

  “You asked me to,” I said. I was getting fed up.

  “No, I didn’t,” he retorted. “I was merely seeking a way out of our dilemma by asking you to pick up my witchlight. If you can keep it alight when you have it, you will in fact be making it for yourself. Come on. Take it. It won’t hurt you, and I can easily make more.”

  Well, I wondered if he d
id mean this, but I went gently up to him and tried cupping the little flame in my hands. It didn’t feel of anything very much. A bit warm perhaps, but that was all. I stood up holding it, really delighted. Then it began to sink and fizzle.

  “No, no! Ignore it,” he cried out. “Think of something else quickly!” He scrambled himself up the rockface and somehow managed to stand up. Then he snapped his fingers and held out another blue flame, balanced on the palm of his withered old hand. “See? Now change the subject.”

  “Er,” I said, trying not to look at the blue spark I was holding, “you said we had to meet three folks in need. Are you my first?”

  “Of course not!” he said. “I don’t need anything. I just want out of here, and you’re my third, so I can go now.”

  “Who else did you meet,” I asked, “before me?”

  “A goat,” he said. “I kid you not! Joke, joke, ha-ha! Lost its way, you know, and then there was an obnoxious child who said she was hiding from her sin twister—twin sister—and she only wanted me to promise not to give her away.”

  “What did you do about the goat?” I asked.

  “What can one do for a goat? Turned it round and gave it a push on the rump, I think,” he said. “That’s a bit hazy, to tell the truth, but I know neither of them was half the trouble you’ve been. Do you think you’ve got it now?”

  I dared to look down at my hands. There was a cautious little flicker there, about the size of a match flame. I tried willing it larger, but nothing happened. “Sort of,” I said.

  He pushed off from the rocks and came staggering across to see. I swear the drink on his breath made the flame twice the size for an instant. “Yes, yes, you’ve got it now all right,” he said. “No need for me to linger. Farewell, for I must leave thee, don’t hang yourself on a weeping willow tree!” By then he was singing again, bawling out a tuneless tune and swaying himself round as he bawled. I thought he was going to walk straight into the rockface opposite us, but there turned out to be an opening there that I hadn’t seen before. He plunged into it, turning it all blue-silver with the flame in his hand, singing his head off. “In his master’s steps he trod,” I heard, booming out of the rocky cleft. “Heat was in that very naughty word which the saint had printed! Print and be damned, I say …”