The Merlin Conspiracy (34 page)

Judith, as usual, pretended not to notice. She said, “I can't stay very long, I'm afraid. It's such a long drive.”

“You'll stay for a cup of tea,” Mrs. Candace stated. “Then I shall make sure you get home much faster than you came. More tea and perhaps some cake,” she said to the air.

We all sat down politely on little padded chairs, except for the Izzys, who wandered about, pulling and prodding at everything in the elegant room. A fat gray cat that had been peacefully asleep on a stool only just escaped onto a high cabinet in time, where it stood with its fur bushed, staring down at the Izzys in horror. Mrs. Candace looked up at it anxiously. But Judith simply pulled her shawl closer round her shoulders and went on explaining how Grundo and I had been left behind by the Progress.

A teapot and a big cake cut into large, squashy slices came floating through the room. The Izzys left off trying to reach the cat and stared. Grundo's eyes followed the path of the cake with interest. I screwed my eyelids up against the daylight and found I could just see the shapes of four transparent, birdlike creatures guiding the teapot and the cake down onto the small table beside Mrs. Candace.

“Don't even
think
of it!” I whispered fiercely at Grundo.

He shot me a guilty look and grinned. Then he worked some magic. It is often hard to tell when Grundo is working magic. He doesn't move, and his face hardly changes. But this time I had no doubt. It jolted me. I jumped as if I'd had a bad fright, and so did Mrs. Candace. I rounded on Grundo to tell him to behave.

But just then one of the Izzys succeeded in grabbing the cat's dangling gray tail. The cat squawked. The cabinet rocked, and all the delicate china inside it rattled. And, to my surprise, Judith sprang up and more or less shouted at the Izzys. “Isadora, stop that at
once
! Come
here
, both of you!”

The twins, looking as surprised as I felt, wandered sulkily toward her. “It's booooring here!” Isadora moaned, and Ilsabil said sweetly, “But we're being
ever
so good, Mother. We
promised
!” Then, as usual, they did it the other way round.

“You are not being good at all!” Judith snapped. Her face was most uncharacteristically red and angry. “Say sorry to Mrs. Candace and then we'll go home. I do apologize,” she said to the rest of us. “We really must leave now. It's such a long way.”

She began pushing the Izzys out of the room. Both of them leaned backward. “But I want some
cake
!” Ilsabil protested.

“You're not getting any. You don't deserve it,” Judith said. “We're going straight home, and you're going to have another long talk with your grandmother.”

Both Izzys burst into loud tears. We could hear them wailing and yelling even after the front door had slammed behind them. We could hear them through the opening and shutting of car doors and the sound of the engine starting. We went on hearing them until the noise of the engine had died away into the distance.

“Well!” said Mrs. Candace in the final silence. “What was
that
about?”

“Grundo?” I said.

Grundo went pink. “They had a spell on Judith,” he growled, “so that they could do whatever they liked and she would never notice.”

“And you took it off?” Mrs. Candace demanded.

“Not quite. They had it on Hepzibah, too,” Grundo explained. “I had to put a spell on
them
, to make what they were doing obvious to Judith—and Hepzibah, too, I hope, once they get home. It was difficult. It took me the whole drive to work it out.”

“Well!”
Mrs. Candace said again. “In the normal way, young man, I would give you a good talking to. It is not allowed to tamper with people's personalities. That's black magic. But in this case I concede that it was richly deserved. Still, it seems hard on poor Judith to have to take to the road again without even a cup of tea. I'd better do what I promised her. Help yourselves to cake. I won't be long.”

She stood up—with an effort. She was old and creaking. Salisbury passed us cake, gravely and silently, and the cat came down from on high and sat across Grundo's legs, purring. The cat knew who to be grateful to all right. I bit into squashy cake while I watched Mrs. Candace bring several pieces of empty air together and then sort of pleat it in her twisty old fingers.

“Find them a way through a suitable otherwhere,” she murmured, “and then bring their road to it and fold it like a fan, so that they only touch the road at the tops of the folds....”

I found I knew this spell, or one so like it that it made no difference. It was under
Traveler's-Joy: mundane journeys
. It was one of six ways to shorten a road. I wondered, as I watched, if Mrs. Candace knew the other five, too. And before I had quite finished my cake, I realized that Judith was nearly home already with her carload of yelling Izzys. Mrs. Candace was good at what she did. She was even doing something the flower file in my head had not mentioned,
un
pleating the road behind the car as it traveled, so that no other cars would get caught in the spell. That impressed me.

“There!” Mrs. Candace sank down as if it had tired her to take so much off the journey. Salisbury sat down, too, at last, cautiously, and the low chair groaned underneath him. He passed her a cup of tea. She smiled at him and turned to me, still smiling. I saw that she had once been ravingly beautiful. “That seemed the least I could do for her,” she said. “Now, what have you two been up to that Hepzibah Dimber couldn't handle?”

I didn't want to talk about it, so I said, “Grundo?”

Grundo explained about the invisible beings in the Regalia.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Candace. “Oh, dear.” A plate of cake came up beside her and jiggled invitingly. “
Thank
you,” she said carefully as she took a slice. “I do make a point of thanking them,” she said to Grundo, “though it's not always easy to know how to reward them. There are, however, quite a number of minor magicians who treat their captive folk very badly. And I assure you, I had
no idea
that the Dimbers didn't know they were using them. I see I must start looking into all that. But there is more,” she added, looking at me.

I nodded and, once again, tried to explain what Sybil, Sir James, and the Merlin had done.

Mrs. Candace listened attentively, with her head gracefully bent, and I had real hopes that she believed me until she said, “Ah, no. You can't have it right, my dear. This Merlin is very new and young, so new that I haven't met him yet, but he'd be simply incapable of the kind of treason you describe. If he
was
capable of it, he wouldn't
be
the Merlin, do you see? I think you must have misunderstood some new idea of his.”

“The Little Person believed I was right,” I said despairingly. I knew I
had
to make Mrs. Candace understand. She was the one who counterbalanced the Merlin. “He took it very seriously, and he advised me to raise the land.”

“On
no
account!” Mrs. Candace said sharply. “
What
a thing to suggest! I'm surprised he even mentioned it. The Little People are usually so wise, though they can be mischievous. Perhaps this one was or perhaps he didn't realize you were only a child. You see, my dear,” she went on, leaning forward and staring earnestly at me with her enormous almond-shaped pale green eyes, “the magic of Blest is most intricately interlaced with itself—the hugely old, the old, and the newer
and
the most recent—so that each part supports all the others. What you're suggesting is pulling up the very foundations. This would make it all come loose or perhaps even blow it apart. And we can't have that because Blest magic keeps the magics of several hundred surrounding worlds in their right places. Do you see?”

“But if Blest magic went all rotten—” I began.

“Oh, I grant you,” she said. “If
that
happened. But it hasn't. Unless somebody was superhumanly clever at keeping it from me, I'd know. I can
feel
there's nothing wrong.”

The far-speaker on the table beside her chair began warbling for attention. Salisbury nodded at it and spoke for the first time, in a gently rumbling voice, like bricks grating. “I got through to London at last.”

Mrs. Candace smiled sweetly at him and picked up the speaker. “Hallo, is that Maxwell Hyde? … Oh, it's Dora, is it? Is Mr. Hyde there? … Well, tell him as soon as he comes in that I've got his granddaughter here with me and I'm proposing to send her … Yes, Arianrhod, and she has a friend with her, Ambrose Temple … No, no, just tell him they'll be with you this evening. Salisbury's going to see to it now. Nothing to worry about.”

She put the speaker down and smiled. “There, that's all sorted out.”

It wasn't, but she was not to know that.

I
couldn't get over the way my father let me go to Blest with Maxwell Hyde. Dad was still in the London hotel when we got back—me pulling Maxwell Hyde and Maxwell Hyde keeping up a long, grumbling moan about how much he hated the dark paths. The people from the conference had left days ago, but Dad said he'd had to stay because he'd lost his front-door key again. He took it quite philosophically when I explained that my key was still in the police station in Loggia City and just said that he'd phone a locksmith from the hotel.

See what I mean? In the normal way, Dad falls over his own brain not to admit that anything supernatural can happen. It must be his defense against all those demons he writes about. But now he not only admitted the existence of other worlds and a Magid who lived in one of them, but let me go there with him.

“That man Hyde cost me over two hundred quid, getting him drunk enough to go and find you,” he said to me. “Let him teach you a few tricks. I want
some
return for my money.”

I knew this was Dad's way of telling me he'd been worried sick when I suddenly disappeared from beside him in the hotel corridor. I was quite touched. I was still in a state of shock about it after he'd bought me some extra clothes and Maxwell Hyde gripped me by one arm and walked downhill into Blest with me.

Going between worlds the way Magids do it means walking down a hill that is mostly grass, with patches of tarmac and misty bits every so often. Each misty bit seems to be between other worlds. I looked sideways along the grassy stretches and saw that the dark paths led away there in all sorts of directions. I was very interested, but Maxwell Hyde didn't seem to know the paths were there.

Then we stepped onto tarmac again in front of Maxwell Hyde's London house, and I was very excited and nervous for a moment. Now we're going to meet Roddy! I thought, and the prospect of all those foreign politics made me feel a bit sick. But Roddy wasn't there. We were in a street of tall Londonish houses that were all much smarter and better painted than any London houses I knew.

“That's because no one knows when the King is going to turn up and see them,” Maxwell Hyde explained as he unlocked his own glistening green front door. “The Council sends you an order to redecorate if they think you're getting dingy.”

That struck me as fascist. “Do they tell you what colors to paint it, too?” I asked. It helped to cover up my nervousness.

“No, no,” he said. “They leave that to the owner, though I daresay they'd object if I decided on murals of naked women or some such.”

The London buses in Blest are bright blue. One roared past behind us as we went into the house. They use some kind of fuel that smells quite different from diesel but just as bad.

“Hallo! I'm back! Brought a visitor!” Maxwell Hyde shouted, stamping his feet on the doormat.

It smelled quite different from an Earth house indoors. Sort of spicy. Maxwell Hyde's daughter and her boy, Toby, hurried down the hall to meet us. The daughter is called Dora. She keeps house for him, and she is quite potty. She dyes her hair bright red and wears layers of colored clothes like a native of Peru, all different patterns and hung all over with dangly beads and stuff. Most of them were charms. Toby was younger than me and seemed quite normal, except that he behaved as if he was frightened. He had this way of hanging about as near as he could get to anyone bigger than him, as if it was safer like that. He was very pale, with almost red hair.

“Oh, you've brought an Asian friend!” Dora exclaimed.

A lot of people on Earth think I'm Indian, too, or Greek. It annoys me, but I'm used to it. Maxwell Hyde told Dora firmly that I was from another world, but she didn't listen. She
kept
asking me about the exotic magic of the Orient. She was obsessed with Eastern magics.

“Don't mind her,” Maxwell Hyde told me when Dora had gone off, talking loudly to herself, to find us some lunch. “She's never got over being turned out of her mother's house. Sad, really. Wasn't equipped to cope.”

There wasn't any lunch. Toby had to be sent out for what they call prettybread. Prettybread is a bit like a fat pizza with onions and things baked into it and frizzled cheese on top. Part of Dora's dottiness was that she was always forgetting to buy food. She kept having to send Toby out—and me, too, once I got used to the way food was here—to buy cheese or cakes or tea for her. People in Blest drink tea all the time, and they eat cakes with it far more than I am used to. Half the shops are kept by people who look Chinese, selling fat brown packets of tea and sixty kinds of sticky cakes. Coffee has to come from a chocolate shop and is much more expensive.