The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  And it was an odd thing. Instead of being nine-tenths asleep and unable to open my eyes like I usually am, I felt quite sharp and awake. Maybe it was because I’d been practicing being awake all night. I collected my clothes and dressed downstairs in the kitchen. While I was making coffee, I looked in Dora’s mirror with the rabbits round it, expecting to see that I had giant, droopy black bags under my eyes, but I looked normal. Just grumpy.

  My coffee was poured out into a mug ready to drink when the doorbell rang. That was when I discovered I was in a really bad mood. The doorbell rang twice more while I was going along to answer it. Then someone battered away with the knocker. “All right!” I shouted. “All right, all right, all right! Do you expect me to teleport to the door or something?” I wrenched the door open.

  Two quite small girls were jigging about on the doorstep, both in little pleated sailor dresses. The one on the left was in blue trimmed with white, and the one on the right was in white trimmed with blue. Otherwise I couldn’t tell them apart. When they saw my angry face, they flung their arms round one another and stared at me over their shoulders with identical soulful looks.

  “He must be Grandad’s pet ape,” said the blue one, and the white one said, “I love them when they’re angry!” and sighed ecstatically.

  “You’ve come to the wrong house,” I said.

  “No, we haven’t,” said the blue one. “We want Mr. Maxwell Hyde.”

  “He’s our grandfather,” the white one explained. “I’m Isadora, and this is Ilsabil, and tell him it’s urgent.”

  “He isn’t here,” I said. “He’s been kidnapped.”

  We all stared at one another blankly for a moment. Then the Ilsabil one said, as if she was about a century old, “They’re such liars, these boys.”

  “We must search the house,” Isadora agreed.

  They unwound their arms and started to walk inside, one on either side of me. I put out both my arms and stopped them at neck level. “Just a moment,” I said. “How come you’re trying to visit your grandfather at five-thirty in the morning? There’s been jiggery-pokery for weeks now. How do I know Maxwell Hyde really is your grandfather? He never said a word about you.”

  “Now you’ve hurt our feelings!” Ilsabil said tragically.

  “He never said a word about you, whoever you are!” Isadora said. Then, as if they had given one another a secret signal, they both shoved mightily at my arms. I shoved back. I could feel them using some sort of witchcraft to get past me. That didn’t bother me particularly, though it made me more suspicious than ever. I went on shoving back. The one on the left sank her teeth into my forearm, and the one on the right kicked my shins.

  “Let us in!” they screamed.

  By this time I was sure they were another part of the conspiracy that was now trying to storm Maxwell Hyde’s house. I took hold of them by a skinny arm each and tried to bundle them back into the street.

  “We’ll wake everyone up in all the houses!” Ilsabil threatened.

  “We’re being assaulted!” Isadora screamed. “Help! Child abuse!”

  I suppose it was not surprising that the noise woke everyone except Dora—Dora is even harder to wake than I am. Grundo turned up at my elbow, buttoning his shirt. “Oh, God! It’s the Izzys!” he grunted. “That’s all we needed!”

  The Izzys stopped yelling and fighting in order to exchange weary looks across me. “It’s per-thetic again!” said one.

  “Fetch Roddy,” commanded the other.

  “I’m here,” Roddy said sleepily from behind me. “What are you two little beasts doing screaming on the doorstep at this hour of the morning?”

  “Roddy, this huge Indian boy is hurting us!” Isadora whined.

  “You probably deserve it,” Roddy retorted. “Why are you here? Did Judith bring you?”

  One twin promptly went sweet and gentle, and the other crisply efficient. “My dear,” the gentle one said sadly, “Judith has vanished. So has Heppy.”

  “We begged a lift from Mrs. Simpson,” stated the efficient one. “We are so resourceful.”

  Then they did it the other way round. I felt as if my eyes were crossing.

  Roddy sighed. “You’d better let them in,” she said to me. “I’ve been afraid this might have happened.”

  I let go of the Izzys willingly. They immediately twinkled in past me on tiptoes, wafting their arms this way and that like ballet dancers.

  “What have you done with your dog?” Grundo boomed at them as they wafted past him.

  “With the vicar,” an Izzy said over her shoulder, wafting. “Food,” she added, in tones of deep longing.

  “She wanted to keep us, too,” said the other, “but we slipped away. Kitchen,” she added yearningly.

  They broke into a gallop and rushed to the kitchen. By the time we got there, they had found every packet of cereal in the place and were busily pouring vast heaps of breakfast food into bowls, along with all the milk there was. Puffed rice had gone all over the floor, and they had upset my coffee in it. I dourly got a cloth and mopped it all up, while Grundo put the kettle on again.

  “We’d better have toast,” Roddy said irritably. “It’s no good expecting any sense out of those two until they’ve fed their horrible little faces.”

  She was very pale, with blue patches under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept, and she seemed tenser than ever. I did wish she was not so tense all the time. That is the unexpected trouble with love affairs, I thought as I made more coffee. You can fancy a girl like mad, but more than just the look of her comes into it. You find yourself having to allow for her personality, too. At five-thirty in the morning.

  “They’re your cousins, are they?” I said, nodding at the Izzys as they guzzled.

  “Yes,” she said. “Dora’s sister’s twins. They’re awful.”

  At least she had the sense to see that, I thought. None of that blood being thicker than water nonsense with Roddy. It seemed to be one thing we had in common, even if it wasn’t much of a basis for a love affair. I was rather surprised, as I put the coffee on the table as far away from the Izzys as possible, that I still meant to have a love affair. It was not as if I’d had any encouragement.

  Around this point Toby put his sleepy face into the kitchen, saw the Izzys, and went pale. “Oh, no!” he said. “Not them now! I’m going to see to the goat.” And he went.

  Grundo chuckled. “A hundred percent vote against,” he said. “Here’s some toast, and you’re to eat it, Roddy.”

  “Did I say I wouldn’t?” she snapped.

  “No,” he grunted. “You looked at it.” He waited until Roddy had taken a mouthful and turned to the Izzys. “Now, tell us. How did Heppy and Judith vanish? When?”

  Isadora looked up from filling her bowl for the fourth time. “We need more milk and some toast first.”

  “You’ve had all the milk,” I said.

  “Then our lips are sealed,” said Ilsabil.

  “No, they are not,” Roddy said. “One of you is to make some toast while the other talks.” She took a large bite of toast. “Or fleas,” she said with her mouth full.

  The Izzys exchanged gentle, angelic looks. “We don’t understand,” said Ilsabil, “why you aren’t nice to us.”

  “None of you responds to our great charm,” said Isadora.

  “What great charm?” I said. “If you want people to be nice to you, you have to be nice to them. Are you going to tell us what happened or shall I bang your heads together?”

  They stared at me haughtily. After a bit Ilsabil flounced up and made sulky efforts to cut bread.

  “We don’t really know,” Isadora said, quite as sulky. “It was just before supper, and we were in the garden. Heppy and Judith were being boring, making a fuss about trying to talk to the Regalia, so we stayed outside. And we thought we heard a horse whinny inside the house. And Heppy shouted a bit, but she does that a lot. We thought she was shouting at the Regalia again, so we took no notice....”

  Wh
ile Isadora was saying this, Ilsabil was looking from me to Grundo and then at Roddy, with a sweet, helpless smile, waiting for one of us to come and make toast for her. None of us took any notice.

  “It sounded like quite a lot of horses,” Isadora said, “but not for very long. We couldn’t understand it. Then we got hungry and came in for supper, and Judith and Heppy weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere in the house and supper was still raw. We got so hungry! When it was dark and they still hadn’t come back …”

  Toby came into the kitchen. Ilsabil was still gently waving the bread knife above the loaf. Toby pushed her aside and packed the grill with doorsteps of bread with cheese on them. “The goat’s almost eaten through her stake,” he said as he worked.

  “I’ll go and look in a moment,” I said. “Go on, Izzy.”

  “We sort of knew they weren’t going to come back,” Isadora said. “And we were so hungry by then that we found Heppy’s purse and went down to the shop with the money, and on the way we remembered that Mrs. Simpson always goes to London Airport over Friday night to collect the new tea when it’s fresh …”

  “See how resourceful we are,” Ilsabil murmured.

  “Except about making toast,” Grundo said. “So you went off and just left the dog, didn’t you?”

  “No, promise,” Isadora said. “We changed our clothes and went to the vicar and told her what had happened and said we had to go to Grandad because he’s a Magid …”

  “And left Jackson with her, so there!” said Ilsabil. “She wanted to keep us, too, but we told her Mrs. Simpson was giving us a lift to London—”

  “Then we had to run, and we just caught Mrs. Simpson before she drove away,” Isadora said. “And she sighed and said, ‘Jump aboard, then,’ and we did.”

  “But we never had any supper because it was such a rush,” Ilsabil said, with a wistful eye on the cheesy toast.

  To do them justice, both twins were looking quite upset, though it may have had more to do with missing supper than losing their mother, to my mind. “What do you make of it?” I asked Roddy.

  “Every magic user who might have been able to stop Sybil seems to have gone,” she said. “I’m willing to bet that all the other hereditary witches have been taken, too.”

  “You think we should check?” Grundo asked.

  “What’s the point? We should be doing something!” she said, twisting her hands together. “Only what should we do?”

  “Find Romanov,” I said.

  She rounded on me. “You keep bleating that!”

  Allow for personality, I told myself, but I thought if I had to do much more allowing, I might run out of patience. “For one thing,” I said, “I was told Romanov has more magic than anyone in several universes—he’s a sort of magics Czar—and for another thing, he knows your grandfather quite well....”

  Her annoyance faded down into surprise. “You never said that before!”

  I didn’t say that she had never given me a chance. I took a long breath and said, “That’s why I think he’ll help.”

  “So how do we find him?” she demanded.

  I’m so glad you asked me that question, I thought. “Um,” I said. “He doesn’t live in a particular world. He has this strange island that’s made out of bits of several different universes, and I sort of know the direction....”

  She sighed. “In other words, you can’t find him.”

  “I didn’t say—” I began.

  Toby interrupted in his quiet way. “The goat,” he said. “You said she was Romanov’s goat.”

  “That’s it!” I shouted. I jumped up, and chairs crashed on the tiles all round me. The only wonder was that even this didn’t wake Dora up. “Let’s go!”

  11

  RODDY AND NICK

  ONE RODDY

  I could not believe it when the Izzys turned up! It seemed like the last straw, even though it was more proof that I wasn’t imagining the conspiracy, since it made it clear that Heppy and Judith had really vanished, too.

  Then the Izzys insisted on coming with us to find this Romanov person. We should have simply dashed off and left them while they were busy pulling strings of cheese off their toast with their teeth. But they shouted to know what we were doing, and Nick took entirely the wrong line with them. He told them they had to stay behind and explain to Dora. He said they were too young to go on the dark paths. You would not credit the whining and arguing and winning persuasions this led to from the Izzys. When that didn’t work, they followed it up with double yelling. At least that gave Grundo time to eat a proper breakfast.

  When he and Toby had finished eating, I gave in. I said, “All right, you can come.” They instantly stopped whining, wiped their greasy hands on their sailor suits, and flung their arms round me, exclaiming that I was the most marvelous cousin in the world! I pushed them away. “On condition that you stop acting about and behave,” I added. They looked wronged and hurt and saintly. “Just stop trying to twist everyone around your greasy little fingers,” I said.

  “Yes, cut the glamour,” Nick said. “You’re like a couple of aging film stars. You could be sixty instead of six.”

  “We’re not six!” Isadora exclaimed—if she was the one in white. “We’re nearly nine!”

  “Whatever,” said Nick. “I’ve had enough. Let’s go.”

  We all bundled out into the garden at the precise moment when the goat bit through the last of her stake with a snap. Nick dashed over and caught hold of the stake at both ends, so that the chain fastened to the goat’s neck couldn’t slide off it.

  “Now, Helga,” he said, “we want you to take us to Romanov. Romanov, Helga. All of you think very hard about this goat taking us back to her owner.”

  Helga leered up at Nick with her evil goat’s face and chewed her cud, quite unmoved. We stood round her, panting and trying to will her to obey Nick. I tried to find a spell among the hurt woman’s flower files that would help. But that woman knew goats. I found, under Teasel, to drive sheep without a dog, and to call cattle, and to influence a pig, and after further searching, I found to teach a dog to obey, to call a hawk to the hand, and even to tame a feral cat, but not a single thing about goats. So I dropped that idea and looked through journey spells instead. I found the Speedwell spell and the one Mrs. Candace had used, and a whole string of magics called journeys in the spirit, none of which seemed quite right. The trouble with ordinary journey spells was that they were just that—spells for travel in country that you knew—and the spirit journeys meant that you left your body behind. I gave up and found one called to bless a journey instead.

  And while we waited, I couldn’t help noticing that it was the most heavenly day, one of those days with a milky look over the blue sky, where everything seems to be holding its breath for something marvelous to happen. Beyond the hazy chimneys around the garden, I could hear the huge, hushed mutter of London. The lawn we were standing on was gray-green with dew, marked all over with the faint green footsteps of salamanders. In the distance a silvery clock was striking the half hour, up and down the scale, as if London were singing encouragement to us.

  By then Nick was putting out instructions to the goat so strongly that I was actually getting mental glimpses of a flat green shore where the sea was divided into big triangles of differently colored water. As the clock finished striking, Helga sighed. Then she ducked clear of Nick and bounced sharply away, pulling the chain taut with a rattle.

  “All hold on to me and to one another,” Nick said. “Don’t let go.”

  We each snatched hold of the nearest person. Grundo grabbed Nick, and I took hold of Grundo’s shirt. Behind me, one of the Izzys said, “You’ll disarrange my pleats!” and as she said it, we were off at a run, diagonally across the dewy lawn. I just had time to think what fools we looked, rushing through the garden in a line behind a goat, when we were not in the garden anymore. We were plunging down a steep, earthy path that very quickly became a short tunnel. Some Izzy squeaked that it was dark. Then
we came out into the queerest and most terrifying place I had ever seen.

  It was like the sky on a summer night. It was dark and blue, but with light in it somewhere, so that it was not totally dark, but there were no stars. The terrifying part was that this sky was all round us, above and below, in an immense dark blue void. In front of us, stretching away into distant distance, was a line of bright islands. They were just hanging there, like unstrung beads, or huge stepping-stones, for as far as we could see. Each island was a slightly different shape from the others, but each shone out in various greens and golds and blues, blazing a path across the void. And each one was only about ten feet across.

  As I got to the end of the tunnel, the goat jumped to the nearest island, which dipped and swung and swayed under her, quite hideously.

  “I can’t do that!” I gasped. I was giddy just to look.

  “Interesting, though,” Nick panted, scrambling on the earthy edge of the tunnel. He sounded just as scared as I was, but he said, “They must be universes. It’s just the way a goat would see things.”

  The goat galloped on across the island, and he had to jump after her. The island positively plunged under his weight. I had to jump then, because Grundo leaped after Nick, and the island not only plunged again, but went jogging around sideways when the other three jumped onto it. I couldn’t stand up. The awful thought was that if I over-balanced, I’d simply fall into that empty blue night and go on falling. It was too much for me. I went on one hand and both knees. Clinging to Grundo’s shirt for dear life, I scrambled across a surface rather like roughened glass. If I looked down through the glassiness, I saw dim seas and continents, mountains and rivers and had to shut my eyes. It was truly horrible to have to open my eyes and stand up at the edge of the island and then to make that jump across nothing to the next island.

  It was only just near enough for me to jump to. I was sure it was too far for the Izzys and Toby. I whimpered to Nick, and he hauled on the goat and stopped her on the dipping, jogging, slippery surface, while I stayed standing up and held out my arms to catch first Isadora, then Toby, and finally Ilsabil. Ilsabil nearly slipped off backward. My heart banged in my throat and my arms felt weak as I grabbed her wrists.