The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  We took our glasses and went to one of the benches at the edge of the green. From there I could see the Merlin pacing awkwardly about near the bonfire while Prince Edmund talked earnestly to him. The Prince seemed fascinated by the Merlin. I suppose they were the same age, more or less, and this Merlin was likely to be the one the Prince would have to deal with all through his reign when he got to be King. I also noticed Alicia hanging about near them, looking very trim in her page’s uniform. She was making sure that the Merlin got twice as much of the wine and the snacks that were going round. Doing her duty. But, well, she was sixteen and quite near the Merlin’s age, too—not that he seemed to notice her much. He was listening to the Prince mostly.

  My parents were asking Grandad how he had managed to find the new Merlin when nobody else could, and he was making modest noises and grunting, “Magid methods. Not difficult. Had my eye on the chap for years.” I don’t quite understand what it means that Grandad is a Magid, not really. I think it means that he operates in other worlds besides ours, and it also seems to mean that he has the power to settle things in a way that ordinary Kings and wizards can’t. He went on to say, “I had to have a serious talk with the King, told him the same as I told the Scottish King. It’s vitally important that the Islands of Blest stay peaceful. Blest—and these islands in particular—keep the balance of the magics in half the multiverse, you see.”

  “How old is the Merlin?” I interrupted.

  “Twenty-five. Older than he looks,” Grandad told me. “A powerful magic gift does that to some people. Roddy, do you mind taking Grundo and going off somewhere? We’ve got things to talk about here that aren’t for children.”

  Grandad is like that. He never likes to talk about the interesting things in front of me. Grundo and I drifted off.

  “He’s too old for Alicia, the Merlin,” I said to Grundo.

  He was surprised. “Why should that stop her?” he asked.

  2

  NICK

  ONE

  I thought it was a dream at first. It was really peculiar.

  It happened when my dad took me with him to a writers’ conference in London. Dad is Ted Mallory, and he is a writer. He does horror stories with demons in them, but this conference was for people who write detective stories. This is the strange thing about Dad. He reads detective stories all the time when he isn’t writing himself, and he really admires the people who write them, far more than the people who write his kind of thing. He was all excited because his favorite author was going to be speaking at the conference.

  I didn’t want to go.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” Dad said. “I’m still shuddering at what happened when I left you alone here last Easter.”

  “It was my friends who drank all your whiskey,” I said.

  “With you as a helpless onlooker while they broke the furniture and draped the kitchen in pasta, I know,” said Dad. “So here’s what I’m going to do, Nick. I’m going to book you in with me, and I’m going to go, and when I go, I’m going to lock up this house with you outside it. If you don’t choose to come with me, you can spend the weekend sitting in the street. Or the garden shed. I’ll leave that unlocked for you, if you like.”

  He really meant this. He can be a real swine when he puts his mind to it. I thought about overpowering him and locking him in the garden shed. I’m bigger than he is, even though I won’t be fifteen until just before Christmas. But then I thought how he isn’t really my dad and how we’d both sort of adopted one another after Mum was killed because—usually—we like one another, and where would either of us be if that fell through?

  While I was thinking this, Dad said, “Come on. You may even enjoy it. And you’ll be able to tell people later that you were present at one of the very rare appearances of Maxwell Hyde. This is only the third time he’s spoken in public, and my sense is that he’s a very interesting speaker.”

  Maxwell Hyde is this favorite author of Dad’s. I could see I would be spoiling his fun if I didn’t let him take me along, so I gave in. He was ever so pleased and gave me one of this Maxwell Hyde’s books to read.

  I don’t like detective stories. They’re dead boring. But Maxwell Hyde was worse than boring because his books were set in an alternate world. This is what Dad likes about them. He goes on about the self-consistency and wealth of otherworld detail in Maxwell Hyde’s Other-England—as far as I could see, this meant lots of boring description of the way things were different: how the King never stayed in one place and the parliament sat in Winchester and never did anything, and so forth—but what got to me was reading about another world that I couldn’t get to. By the time I’d read two pages, I was so longing to get to this other world that it was like sheets of flame flaring through me.

  There are lots of worlds. I know, because I’ve been to some. My real parents come from one. But I can’t seem to get to any of them on my own. I always seem to have to have someone to take me. I’ve tried, and I keep trying, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me, even though I want to do it so much that I dream I’m doing it. There must be something I’m doing wrong. And I’d decided that I’d spend the whole first week of the summer holidays trying until I’d cracked it. Now here was Dad hauling me away to this conference instead. That was why I didn’t want to go. But I’d said I would, so I went.

  It was even worse than I’d expected.

  It was in a big, gloomy hotel full of soberly dressed people who all thought they were important—apart from the one or two who thought they were God or Shakespeare or something and went around with a crowd of power-dressed hangers-on to keep them from being talked to by ordinary people. There was a lecture every hour. Some of them were by police chiefs and lawyers, and I sat there trying so hard not to yawn that my eyes watered and my ears popped. But there was going to be one on the Sunday by a private detective. That was the only one I thought might be interesting.

  None of the people had any time for a teenager like me. They kept giving my jeans disapproving looks and then glancing at my face as if they thought I must have got in there by mistake. But the thing that really got to me was how eager Dad was about it all. He had a big pile of various books he was trying to get signed, just as if he was a humble fan and not a world-famous writer himself. It really hurt my feelings when one of the God-or-Shakespeare ones flourished a pen over the book Dad eagerly spread out for her and said, “Who?”

  Dad said in a modest voice, “Ted Mallory. I write a bit myself.”

  Mrs. God-Shakespeare scrawled in the book, saying, “Do you write under another name? What have you written?”

  “Horror stories mostly,” Dad admitted.

  And she said, “Oh,” and pushed the book back to him as if it was contaminated.

  Dad didn’t seem to notice. He was enjoying himself. Maxwell Hyde was giving the big talk on the Saturday evening, and Dad kept saying he couldn’t wait. Then he got really excited because one of the nicer writers—who wore jeans like me—said he knew Maxwell Hyde slightly and he’d introduce Dad to him if we hung around with him.

  Dad was blissed out. By that time I was yawning every time Dad’s back was turned and forcing my mouth shut when he looked at me. We went hurrying up and down corridors looking for Maxwell Hyde, pushing against crowds of people pushing the other way, and I kept thinking, If only I could just wheel round sideways and walk off into a different world! I was in a hotel when I did that the first time, which gave me the idea that hotels were probably a good place to step off from.

  So I was daydreaming about that when we did at last catch up with Maxwell Hyde. By then it was just before his lecture, so he was in a hurry and people were streaming past us to get into the big hall, but he stopped quite politely when the nice writer said, “Oh, Maxwell, can you spare a moment for someone who’s dying to meet you?”

  I didn’t really notice him much, except that he was one of those upright, silvery gentlemen, quite old-fashioned, with leather patches on his old tweed jacket. As he swung round
to Dad, I could smell whiskey. I remember thinking, Hey! He gets as nervous as Dad does before he has to give a talk! And I could tell he had had a drink to give himself some courage.

  I was being bumped about by all the other people in the corridor, and I had to keep shifting while Dad and Mr. Hyde were shaking hands. I was right off at one side of them when Mr. Hyde said, “Ted Mallory? Demons, isn’t it?”

  Just then one of the people bumping me—I didn’t see who, except that it was a man—said quietly, “Off you go, then.” I stepped sideways again out of his way.

  This was when I thought it was a dream.

  I was outside, on an airfield of some kind. It must have been early morning, because it was chilly and dark, but getting lighter all the time, and there was pink mist across the stretch of grass I could see. But I couldn’t see much, because there were things I thought were helicopters blocking my view one way—tall, dark brown things—and the other way was a crowd of men who all seemed pretty impatient about something. I was sort of squashed between the men and the helicopters. The man nearest me, who was wearing a dirty pale suede jacket and trousers and smoking a cigarette in long, impatient drags, turned round to throw his cigarette down on the grass and saw me.

  “Oh, there you are!” he said. “Why didn’t you say you’d got here?” He turned back to the rest of them and called out, “It’s all right, messieurs! The novice finally got here. We can go.”

  They all sort of groaned with relief and one of them began talking into a cell phone. “This is Perimeter Security, monsieur,” I heard him say, “reporting that our numbers are now complete. You can tell the Prince that it’s safe to embark now.” And after the phone had done some angry quacking, he said, “Very good, monsieur. I’ll pass that on to the culprit,” and then he waved at the rest of us.

  Everyone began crowding up the ladder into the nearest helicopter-thing. The man who had spoken to me pushed me up ahead of him and swung onto the ladder after me. This must have put his face up against my legs, because he said angrily, “Didn’t the academy tell you to wear your leathers for this?”

  I thought I knew then. I was sure this was one of my dreams about getting into another world and that it had got mixed up with the sort of dream where you’re on a bus with no clothes on, or talking to a girl you fancy with the front of your trousers missing. So I wasn’t particularly bothered. I just said, “No, they didn’t tell me anything.”

  He made an irritated noise. “You’re supposed to be skyclad for official workings. They should know that!” he said. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?” He sounded quite scandalized about it.

  “No,” I said. Dad and I had been going to have supper after we’d listened to Maxwell Hyde. I was quite hungry, now I thought of it.

  “Well, that’s a relief!” he said, pushing me forward into the inside of the flier. “You have to be fasting for a major working like this. Yours is the pull-down seat at the back there.”

  It would be! I thought. There were nice padded seats all round under the windows, but the one at the back was just a kind of slab. Everyone else was settling into the good seats and snapping seat belts around them, so I found the belts that went with the slab and did them up. I’d just got the buckles sussed when I looked up to find the man with the cell phone leaning over me.

  “You,” he said, “were late. Top brass is not pleased. You kept the Prince waiting for nearly twenty minutes, and HRH is not a patient man.”

  “Sorry,” I said. But he went on and on, leaning over me and bawling me out. I didn’t need to listen to it much because the engines started then, roaring and clattering, and everything shook. Some of the noise was from the other fliers. I could see them sideways beyond his angry face, rising up into the air one after another, about six of them, and I wondered what made them fly. They didn’t have wings or rotors.

  Eventually a warning ping sounded. The bawling man gave me a menacing look and went to strap himself in beside his mates. They were all wearing some kind of uniform, sort of like soldiers, and the one who had bawled at me had colored stripes round his sleeves. I supposed he was the officer. The men nearest me, four of them, were all dressed in dirty pale suede. Skyclad, I thought. Whatever that meant.

  Then we were rising into the air and roaring after the other fliers. I leaned over to the window and looked down, trying to see where this was. I saw the Thames winding underneath among crowds of houses, so I knew we were over London, but in a dreamlike way there was no London Eye, though I spotted the Tower and Tower Bridge, and where I thought St. Paul’s ought to be there was a huge white church with three square towers and a steeple. After that we went tilting away southward, and I was looking down on misty green fields. Not long after that we were over the sea.

  About then the noise seemed to get less—or maybe I got used to it—and I could hear what the men in suede were saying. Mostly it was just grumbles about having to get up so early and how they were hungry already, along with jokes I didn’t understand, but I gathered that the one who had talked to me was Dave, and the big one with the foreign accent was Arnold. The other two were Chick and Pierre. None of them took any notice of me.

  Dave was still irritated. He said angrily, “I can sympathize with his passion for cricket, but why does he have to play it in Marseilles, for the powers’ sake?”

  Pierre said, slightly shocked, “That’s where England are playing. HRH is a world-class batsman, you know.”

  “But,” Dave said, “until last night he wasn’t going to be in the team.”

  “He changed his mind. Royal privilege,” said Arnold with the foreign accent.

  “That’s our Geoff for you!” Chick said, laughing.

  “I know. That worries me,” Dave answered. “What’s he going to be like when he’s King?”

  “Oh, give him the right advisers, and he’ll be all right,” Chick said soothingly. “His royal dad was just the same when he was Crown Prince, they say.”

  This is a really mad dream, I thought. Cricket in France!

  We droned on for ages. The sun came up and glared in through the left-hand windows. Pretty soon all the soldiers down the other end had their jackets off and were playing some sort of card game, in a slow, bored way. The men in suede didn’t seem to be allowed to take their jackets off. They sweated. It got quite niffy down my end. And I’d been assuming that they weren’t allowed to smoke in the flier, but that turned out to be wrong. The soldiers all lit up, and so did Dave. The air soon became thick with smoke on top of the smell of sweat. It got worse when Arnold lit up a thin, black thing that smelt like a wet bonfire.

  “Yik!” said Pierre. “Where did you get hold of that?”

  “Aztec Empire,” Arnold said, peacefully puffing out brown clouds.

  I shall wake up from this dream with cancer! I thought. The slab seat was hard. I shifted about and ached. Most of the people fell asleep after an hour or so, but I couldn’t. I supposed at the time that it was because I was asleep already. I know that seems silly, but it was all so strange, and I’d been so used to dreaming, for months now, that I had found my way into another world that I really and truly believed that this was just another of those dreams. I sat and sweated while we droned on, and even that didn’t alert me to the fact that this might be real. Dreams usually sort of fast-forward long journeys and things like that, but I didn’t think of that. I just thought the journey was the dream.

  At last there was another of those warning pings. The officer reached into his jacket for his phone and talked to it for a short while. Then he put the jacket on and came toward the men in suede, who were all stretching and yawning and looking bleary.

  “Messieurs,” he said, “you’ll have twenty minutes. The royal flit will circle during that time under the protection of the Prince’s personal mages and then put down on the pavilion roof. You’re expected to have the stadium secured by then. All right?”

  “All right,” Arnold agreed. “Thanks, monsieur.” Then, when the officer had
gone back to the other soldiers, he said, “Bloody powers!”

  “Going to have to hustle, aren’t we?” Chick said. He jerked his head toward me. “What do we do about him? He’s not skyclad.”

  Arnold was the one in charge. He blinked slowly at me as if he’d noticed me for the first time. “Not really a problem,” he said. “He’ll have to keep out of the circle, that’s all. We’ll put him on boundary patrol.” Then he actually spoke to me. “You, mon gar,” he said, “will do exactly as we say at all times, and if you set so much as a toe over the wardings, I’ll have your guts for garters. That clear?”

  I nodded. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t the faintest idea what we were supposed to be doing, but I didn’t quite like to. Anyway the flier—flit or whatever—started making a great deal more noise and going downward in jerks, hanging in the air and then jerking sickeningly down again. I swallowed and sat back, thinking that it would probably all be obvious what to do, the way it is in dreams, and took a look out of the window. I had just time to see a big oval of green stadium surrounded by banks of seats crowded with people, and blue, blue sea somewhere beyond that, before we came down with a grinding thump and everyone leaped up.

  The soldiers went racing and clattering off to take up positions round the roof we’d landed on. They were carrying rifles. It was serious security. We clattered off after them into scalding sunlight, and I found myself ducking as the flier roared off into the air again just above my head, covering us in an instant of deep blue shadow. As it did, the others bent over some kind of compass that Dave had fetched out.

  “North’s up the narrow end opposite,” Dave said, “pretty exactly.”

  “Right,” said Arnold. “Then we go the quickest way.” And he led us rushing down some stairs at the corner of the roof. We clattered along boards then, somewhere high up along the front of the pavilion, and raced on down much steeper stairs with crowds of well-dressed people on either side. They all turned to stare at us. “Ceux sont les sorciers,” I heard someone say, and again, when we got to the smart white gate at the bottom of the stairs and a wrinkled old fellow in a white coat opened it for us, he turned to someone and said knowingly, “Ah. Les sorciers.” I reckon it meant, Those are the mages, you know.