The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  I know how it feels to need coffee. I’m like that every morning. I shoved the kettle onto the hot part of the range and began looking for the other things. “Coming up,” I said.

  “Thanks.” He sighed. His tweed suit was sopping. He was steaming as he sat there. His face was sort of bluish white, and he was so exhausted that he never looked at me, or even at Mini, who was peering in through the door at him. But he seemed to feel he had to explain himself. All the time I was making the coffee, he was bringing out little sentences, in jolts, by way of explaining. “Not usually like this,” he said. “Fact is … I have to get drunk before I can walk the dark paths … can’t see them sober … never could … Shaman stuff not my strong suit … Worn off now … head like a treadmill … Took so long … Hadn’t bargained for Romanov’s island being in the past … Cunning stuff … Ten years or more behind the times, this place is … though I believe parts of the island may be in the future, too … Must be why Romanov knows what’s going to happen … Have to ask him how it’s done … Pay him, too … Please remind me to ask him what his fee is this time … Thanks, lad. Thanks. You’re a hero.”

  I pushed the biggest mug I could find, full of strong coffee, into his hands, and he drank it scalding hot without stopping to breathe. Then he held it out for more. He drank the second lot slowly, in sips, without speaking, and steamed, and turned a slightly better color. When I’d given him the third mugful, he sat up a bit straighter and asked, almost alertly, “What was that flier doing outside that went off in such a hurry?”

  “I don’t know why they went off like that,” I said, “unless they were afraid of you.”

  “Could have been,” he said. “Depends who they were.”

  “It was a Prayermaster from Loggia City and his two boys,” I said. “They wanted to kill Romanov, and they used me—”

  “Then that explains it,” he interrupted. “We Magids have been trying to keep the Prayermasters in line for centuries now.”

  “You’re a Magid?” I asked. I was delighted. I’d met three Magids in my life, and now here was another one.

  “For my sins,” he said, dismissing the whole thing. He rubbed at his little mustache and frowned at his coffee in a tired way. “What’s Romanov been doing to stir them up? I wish he wouldn’t do this—keep stirring people up. Not that I can stop him, of course. Far more powerful magic than any of mine. All I’ve got is moral pull. Better use that, I suppose. Lad, you wouldn’t have anything to eat, would you? My stomach’s just reported in starving.”

  I looked at the basket on the table. “Eggs?”

  He shuddered violently. “Not eggs, not after two hundred quids’ worth of booze! I couldn’t! Anything else?”

  “Well,” I said, “the goat’s just eaten the bread, but …” On the off chance I reached back and opened the oven where I’d found the loaf. And there was another one in there, to my great relief. Magic at its best. “Here’s another loaf,” I said.

  I found him a big hunk of cheese in a cupboard and brought the butter out of its bowl and put them in front of him. He eyed it all a moment, speculatively, rather like the goat had wondered about the armchair, and then he suddenly snatched the loaf and a knife and ate. And ate. And finished the loaf. Neither of us talked until he’d done.

  By this time he looked a lot better. I found him staring at me rather piercingly. He had eyes that looked at you so firmly that you couldn’t remember what color they were, just how they looked at you. All I knew was that his were red-rimmed.

  “Now,” he said. “You, lad. Has Romanov taken on an apprentice at long last?”

  “No,” I said. “Or … well, I was hoping he’d take me on, but … I didn’t know how to get home, you see, but when I got here, Romanov was ill, so I couldn’t ask him anything.”

  “Ah!” he said. He raised a finger at me triumphantly. “Got it! Placed you. You’re the lad I gave the magelight to. Did it help at all?”

  “It was great,” I said, “but I couldn’t get it back again after I sent it away.”

  I got the piercing look again. “You from Earth, by any chance?”

  I nodded.

  “Thought so,” he said. “Earth people always have trouble raising magelight. Something in the climate, I suppose. Mind telling me your name?”

  “Nick Mallory,” I said. “But I’m not really from Earth—”

  “Yes, but according to your dad, you were born there,” he said. “Your mother was pregnant with you when he married her, he tells me.” And while I stared at him, he added, “He told me all about you while I was getting drunk enough to go after you. Cost him two hundred pounds, I’m afraid. But he didn’t mention you were so large and striking-looking. Accounts for me not recognizing you before. Expecting someone smaller. Well, at least this means I don’t have to pay Romanov to find you.” He stood up and held out his hand in an old-fashioned, courteous way. “Pleased to meet you, Nick. My name’s Hyde, Maxwell Hyde.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Er. How do you do.” I was gobsmacked.

  THREE

  When I got my senses back, I wanted to ask Maxwell Hyde a hundred things. But he was so tired he was swaying about.

  “Later,” he said. “I have to sleep, lad. Just a couple of hours and I shall be right as rain. I don’t need much. Just a couple of hours.”

  So I took him along to the living room. I’d forgotten the goat. It had eaten half an armchair, and it looked up at us cheekily with a strip of carpet dangling out of its mouth. “Damn,” I said.

  Maxwell Hyde said, “I’m not having that in here!” and he took hold of the goat by one of its horns and its backside and ran it into the kitchen. There was a good deal of clattering and bleating in there, but he got the front door open somehow and kicked it outside. I was impressed.

  Meanwhile I was dragging together the two armchairs and a stool to make him a bed. I draped a carpet over it all to hide the part the goat had eaten, and it made quite a respectable place to sleep.

  “Thanks, lad,” Maxwell Hyde said, coming back, wiping goat hairs off himself. “I’ll be with you again for lunch. Tell Romanov I’ll talk to him then, if you would.” He climbed into my contraption and, as far as I could see, went to sleep on the spot. He was snoring when I shut the door.

  I went along to Romanov then, but I couldn’t tell him anything. He seemed to be unconscious. His face was ash-colored and covered with little clusters of sweat. The illness smell in the room was stronger than ever. I tried to open the window for him, but I’d shut it too firmly and I couldn’t budge it. So I went away. I didn’t know what else to do.

  Lunch, I thought, and went to the kitchen. There were eggs, of course, but Maxwell Hyde hadn’t seemed to fancy those and he’d eaten all the cheese. I hunted around, and I couldn’t find any pasta, which is the other thing I know how to cook, and I got rather anxious. I wanted to do things right for Maxwell Hyde. Dad thought so much of him. I thought a lot of him, too, because he was a Magid and helped secretly run the universe, and I could tell he was the sort of person who expected proper meals to turn up regularly whatever else was going on.

  And I was even more anxious about Romanov, in a horrible, nagging way. I was sure he ought to be in hospital. But there was no way to get him to one. And then I was almost equally anxious about that Prayermaster. I kept expecting him to turn up again. I was sure he had flown away just to tempt me outside so that he could knock me out with a well-aimed prayer and then go after Romanov.

  I made more coffee and sat at the kitchen table drinking it and staring at the chinking, glowing fire in the range. It was odd. The fire never seemed to need fuel, and it never occurred to me to look for any. It glowed comfortingly orange and black and red between the bars, and it helped me think somehow.

  Strange that Maxwell Hyde had turned out to be a Magid and come looking for me. I supposed he meant to take me back to Dad. In a way I was relieved, because that definitely meant I’d have to wait before I did anything to help that girl, Roddy. But after th
at dream I’d had, I wasn’t sure that I was allowed to wait—and that made me nervous and excited in about equal shares, and it also made it awkward if Maxwell Hyde was determined to run me back home the way he had dealt with the goat. It was funny the way I always had to call him by both his names—Maxwell and Hyde—in my mind. If I thought of him as Mr. Hyde, I found I was calling him Dr. Jekyll. If I tried thinking Maxwell, it made me think of silver hammers …

  It was here I realized that my thoughts had gone all small and silly. It is maddening the way your mind sheers off into silly ideas when you try to think seriously—or I know my mind does. I got up in exasperation and went outside. I was too annoyed with myself not to.

  The island was definitely smaller. There was only a short bank between the house door and the garden wall, and the trees had moved closer. There was an odd, ragged look to everything, so that I could actually see the lines between the different slices of grass, raying inward toward the garden. The garden wall was mostly made of stone now, with low, tumbled-down places in it. Mini looked huge beside it. She snatched her trunk back guiltily as I came outside and stood swinging it, rubbing one back leg up the other, looking really embarrassed.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  The goat distracted me then by bouncing up to me as if it thought I wanted it there. Besides, I realized that there was a mass of food in that garden. Maxwell Hyde could have strawberries for lunch. I went to the rickety gate in the collapsing wall and forced it open. And stood staring dismally. It was like a small, tangled allotment in there, with bushy apple trees round the walls and weeds everywhere. While I stared at it, the goat bundled in past me and began eating barren-looking Brussels sprouts just as if it wasn’t full of loaf and armchair. Mini’s trunk snaked slyly over my shoulder and fastened on a green apple in the nearest tree.

  “I love these things,” she said, “even though they give me a funny tummy.”

  I suddenly remembered—from telly, I think—that elephants have quite delicate digestions. And I was furious. It was everything, really, from the phone call first thing in the morning onward. But I took it out on Mini.

  “Leave it!” I shouted at her. “You stupid elephant! You’ll ruin your stomach! And I’ll have you ill as well as everything else! Anyway, it’s stealing!”

  She was really hurt. Her trunk whipped back, and she gave me a shocked look. I shall never forget the way those wonderful gray eyes looked at me. “I thought you were kind,” she said. Then she turned round with that sudden nimbleness that elephants can produce and went away.

  I felt beastly. All I could think of to do was to wade in among the weeds and search moodily for anything I knew how to cook. There wasn’t much. I found brown-edged lettuce, little greenish tomatoes on a starved vine, and a handful of rubbery plums. I was just coming out with this sorry lot bundled up in my sweatshirt when Mini came galloping back again.

  “Oh, do come! I’ve found something horrible! Please come!”

  Her ears were folding and unfolding, her trunk was tossing, and she was trampling from foot to foot. Her eyes were beginning to roll. I could see she was in a right state. “Okay,” I said. “With you in a second.”

  I charged into the house, dumped the veg, and even remembered to shut the door against the goat. Then I followed Mini at a run to the other end of the island. It was only about a hundred yards by then, across line after line of different kinds of grass.

  Mini stopped beyond the clump of trees, shaking all over. “Down there,” she said. Her trunk gave a short jab in the right direction. “I can’t go down there again! I can’t!”

  The island was quite high above the waters on that side. I had to go over a steep, grassy lip and down two sloping shelves of crunchy white pebbles to get near the sea. Mini had left deep sliding footprints in them, going down, and even deeper ones going up. It was easy to see why she had gone here. The slice of water facing the pebbles was a lovely tropical green-blue, rocked by calm ripples. Warm air blew off it. Just the place an elephant would choose to swim. Except …

  I stopped dead.

  Someone else was in the water, rolling gently in the shallow ripples. He was brown and red and shiny. At first I thought he was alive and trying to roll out of the water. He worked about so. Then the ripples turned him so that an eye stared at me out of a cracked gold-rimmed lens. Above and below the eye was a horrible red and white mess. Then I hoped he was dead. No one should be alive with his head smashed like that. The clear water was red-brown around him in clouds. Lots of little flies were sort of sizzling this way and that on him as he rolled. And he rolled the other way, letting me see the embroidery on his back all chopped open and red, and a white glimpse of shoulder blade as the flies went down on him again.

  I made myself creep a step nearer. My foot knocked wood, and I looked away from the Prayermaster for a moment to see the spade and the ax that had done this to him lying on the pebbles. The metal parts were red and gummy, with hairs sticking to them. I thought of Japheth running to the flier covered in what I’d taken for red embroidery. I gagged. I couldn’t help it. I’m ashamed, but I’m no good at this kind of thing at all. I made one frantic scramble into the water to touch the Prayermaster’s staring, tepid face and knew for sure that he was dead. Then I went crashing and crunching up the pebbles until he was out of sight, and threw up. By the time I crawled up over the grass lip with the taste of sicky coffee in my nose, I was shaking worse than Mini.

  “Is someone dead there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Dreadfully. Let’s go somewhere else. There’s nothing we can do until Maxwell Hyde wakes up.”

  We went back to the sunny place by the garden wall, and I sat there like a sack. Mini kept curling her trunk half round me, then taking it away. I think she was making sure I was still alive.

  After a long time I said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was in a bad mood.”

  “I know,” she said. “You keep having to feed people. I, er, I’d eaten a lot of apples anyway before you came out.”

  “That could be a mistake,” I said. I watched the hens pecking about for a while, and then I said, “There’s a triangle of sea near where we came in that had a tropical look. You could have your swim there.”

  “I’ve lost the urge,” she said sadly.

  We were still there when the house door opened and Maxwell Hyde came out looking very much awake. He was all trim and neat and shaved, though his clothes still seemed damp. “Can’t you pull yourself together?” he said to me. “You’re filling the air with doom and gloom. You and the elephant. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said. I got up and reached up to give Mini a pat. “You needn’t come,” I said to her, “unless you want to.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think I’ll go and have that swim instead.”

  “You do that. But,” I said, “don’t drown or anything. I can’t stand any more.”

  She curled up her trunk and opened her mouth in amusement. “Elephants float beautifully,” she said, and went lumbering off.

  I took Maxwell Hyde in the opposite direction, not very willingly. I could feel my feet dragging. He gave me one of his keen looks and said, “Can you understand what the elephant’s saying, then?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Can’t you?”

  He shook his sprucely combed gray head. “No, I can’t. It’s not precisely a universal gift, lad. Has she told you what Romanov wants with an elephant, then?”

  “He doesn’t,” I said. “I mean, she isn’t his. I met her stuck in the dark paths. She belonged to a circus, but it got struck by a storm—it sounded like a tornado from what she said—and she ran away in a panic. She was my third person needing help, like you said.” I’d been trying to think who the second person was that I had helped after Roddy. I knew it had to be someone in Loggia City, but I couldn’t see who.

  “I see,” he said. “That’s a weight off my mind. I’d been puzzl
ed to death why Romanov could possibly need an elephant. So you can understand animal speech?”

  “Not the goat,” I said. The goat was coming down from among the trees as I said this. It had a spray of leaves sticking out of its mouth and curiosity all over its face.

  “Goats,” said Maxwell Hyde, “are a special case. Mad as hatters, all of them. Now where is this thing we’ve come to see?”

  “Down here,” I said, and led him off down the pebbles and pointed with my head turned away. “Down in the water.”

  “My God!” he said. Then, after some crunching about, “This is horrible! Hacked to death with a spade!” There were watery, shingly sounds. I guessed he was dragging the Prayermaster out of the sea, but I still couldn’t look. “Nothing much to be done except hope he died quickly,” he said, coming back up beside me and swallowing a little. “Who was he?”

  “The Prayermaster from Loggia City who wanted to kill Romanov,” I said. By this time I was swallowing, too.

  “I thought I recognized the embroidery,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Biter bit, eh? All right, there’s no need to stay here if it makes you throw up. Come back to the house. There’s something I want to ask you about there.”

  I set off thankfully and came face-to-face with the goat at the top of the shingle. “Oh, lord! It won’t—won’t try to eat him, will it?”

  “I don’t think they’re carnivores, but we’ll make sure anyway,” he said, and he did the horn-and-rump hold on the goat again and ran it back to the sheds before it could so much as bleat. “Go and find some rope,” he said to me. “Bound to be some in these sheds.”

  I looked into the shed nearest the house, expecting the smart motorboat. It was just a pathetic old punt now, but there was a coil of rope hanging on the wall beside it, along with garden tools, a saw, and two empty hooks. “I think the spade and the ax came from there,” I said, handing Maxwell Hyde the rope.