The Merlin Conspiracy (48 page)

Something caught the light inside the white film. I looked and saw Heppy's hand moving, slowly, slowly, and the rings on her fingers glinting with the movement. I stared as Heppy's hand rose and moved back and forth, in what was clearly a slow-motion wave or even a slow, slow blessing—a personal message to me to show me she knew me and was willing us well in our rescue attempt. My despair vanished, and I could have shouted for joy. My grandmother was evidently a very powerful witch indeed, and I had her blessing. Maybe after all this, we
did
like one another, just a little.

I smiled at her, though I am not sure she smiled back, as I seized hold of the Izzys and towed them over to Grundo and Toby. “Take hold of an arm each,” I told the boys, “and don't let either of them go, even for an instant.” It did me good to give a few orders again. I felt brisk and confident.

The boys glowered at me. Toby shrugged and did what I said. Grundo reluctantly took hold of Ilsabil's arm and said, “It would be far easier to get them draped in this white spell, too.”

“You
dare
!” I said.

Romanov was walking slowly beside the draped crowd with Nick. Both of them kept bending and staring at the white stuff and looking mystified. Toby and Grundo went after them, each dragging a twin. I followed. I rather carefully didn't look at any more of the imprisoned people. More than half of them would be Court wizards whom I knew. Two of them must be my parents. I didn't want to see them like that, at least until there was some hope of freeing them.

Goose Grass or Cleavers
, said the knowledge in my head, along with the image of the long, skinny plant, covered in sticky whiskers and little green knobs.
Binding spells
. This seemed hopeful. I walked behind the others in a sort of dream, running through binding spells. There were hundreds, that was the problem. They were divided into
spoken
and
ritual
, and before I had run halfway through the
spoken
spells, I realized there were at least double the number I'd first thought, because you could reinforce any
spoken
spell by performing one or more
rituals
—and the other way round.

The very first
ritual
binding I came across was that old favorite
knots and crosses
. I discovered that you could make a net silently, or draw the pattern for tic-tac-toe, and bind most things to your will. If you made the net pattern with goose grass—nice sticky stuff—it was a truly strong binding for a short while, but if you said
words
as you made the pattern, the binding would last until the goose grass rotted. And so on. You could make hundreds of other patterns—cobweb, cat's cradle, tatting, crochet, knitting—and use words, or you could perform other actions
and
say words. You could dance … Oh, it was hopeless!

Here we walked round a sort of bulge in the veiling and came across a painfully thin man sitting in a chair on his own. The chair was suffused in piles of the white stuff, but it only came up to the man's waist. His upper half was free, and he was leaning wretchedly against a low wall of the same sort of plastic that the elephant had walked through. Beyond the wall there seemed to be some kind of living quarters. We could see armchairs and a table, and from somewhere beyond those came a smell of cooking. The man seemed to have been put where he could smell the food but not get to it.

I was thinking, How cruel!, when the man looked up and saw us. And he was the Merlin. I was utterly astonished. So was he.

“Who are you?” he said. I remembered his weak, throaty voice so well.

“Who are
you
?” Romanov replied.

“Me? I'm from Blest,” the Merlin said, in a hesitating, apologetic way. “I was selected as the Merlin there, but I was carried off—”

Grundo said, “He has to be lying. Doesn't he?” and looked dubiously at me.

“I assure you I am not,” said the Merlin. He leaned his head backward against the wall, showing his chin all covered with scraggy new beard. The Adam's apple worked in his skinny neck, and tears began to run from his eyes. I remembered Grandad being disgusted that this Merlin was a weeper, but I felt I could hardly blame the man now. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “I was snatched away here about a month ago. Hauled out of my car, blindfolded, and brought here. I was the only prisoner here then. He fetched the others in batches later. Three batches. Some of them have only just arrived. I—I must confess that the first time I—I even advised him who to send for. I hoped the wizards might be able to break this terrible spell, you see.” He put his hands over his face and sobbed.

“Have you any idea,” Romanov asked in a level, unsympathetic voice, “of the nature of this spell at all?”

The Merlin shook his head behind his hands. “It's the queerest thing I ever met.”

Toby asked, hushed and shocked, “Don't they give you anything to eat?”

“He tries,” the Merlin said, “when he remembers. His mind's on the binding, you see. But it's hard for me to digest anything much. The binding slows everything down so.” He took his hands from his tearful face and tried to smile at Toby.

“I don't
understand
!” Grundo declared. “You—the Merlin—you were in Blest not so long ago. It wasn't a month ago. I
saw
you. You were talking about the bespelled water in Sir James's Inner Garden.”

“I swear to you …” The Merlin started to cry again. “I
swear
to you I was never in any Inner Garden! I never got that far. I was at the shrines in Derbyshire when they carried me off. And I've been here nearly a month. I marked the wall …”

“But I
saw
you!” Grundo insisted.

“Whoever you saw,” the Merlin sobbed at him, “it was not me.”

Grundo looked up at Romanov, who was staring down at the Merlin in a keen, pitiless, almost clinical way. “Weepers shed tears with the truth,” he said to Grundo. “I think I'm inclined to believe him.”

“But that means there's an impostor …,” I started to say, when we saw another man coming toward us beyond the wall.

SIX
NICK

Finding that Merlin fellow was even worse than finding that crowd of veiled, living corpses. He was alive, see. He had been sick all down the wall and all over this feathery stuff he was sitting in. I think the stuff stopped him digesting properly. He'd used the sick to mark the days in.

Anyway, Roddy had just cried out that there was an impostor in Blest when this heavy sort of man came marching over and leaned his hands on the wall to stare at us. I knew him at once. It's strange how some people hardly change at all as they grow up. When I first met Joel, as the older of the Prayermaster's two boys, he had had this thick pile of dark hair, cheekbones that stuck out, and eyebrows that seemed to express disgust with the whole world. Those eyebrows were just the same now. So were his rather fat lips and his blunt chin. I knew that chin perfectly, even though it was now covered with dark stubble. I remembered his sarcastic eyes, though they were bloodshot and tired. But then it had only been about three weeks since I last saw him, and it had been ten years for him and enough time to grow up in. And he stood there and didn't know
me
from Adam.

“What are you people doing here?” he said.

“You might say, looking for missing persons,” Romanov answered. “Do you care to let any of them go?”

“No,” he said. “Who are you?”

“They call me Romanov,” Romanov answered. “You may have heard of me.”

“Yes,” Joel answered, in a dull, unfeeling way, as if his mind was on something else. “The abomination. You're not supposed to be alive. We sent—”

He looked at me then and made the connection. “We sent
you
,” he said to me. “You were armed with a plague to kill Romanov, and we offered Romanov money to kill you.”

“And I love you, too, Joel,” I said.

He hardly seemed to hear me. He went on, as if he simply couldn't understand it. “I sent you off from London on Earth just before we brought the Merlin here. Why aren't you dead? Why are you here?”

So that's how it was, I thought. “No idea. This must all be in the future for me,” I said, fast as thought. I wasn't just meaning to confuse him. I was hoping to stop him putting his cotton-wool spell on me. He'd think he didn't need to if he thought Romanov was going to kill me sometime later. “Where's Japheth, then?”

“In Blest, of course, doing what he must,” Joel said. “Go away, all of you. You'll get no joy here.”

He turned away, but Romanov stopped him by saying sharply, “What must be done in Blest, Joel?”

Joel gave him a heavy, tired look over one shoulder. “Nothing you can stop, abomination. I can feel you picking at my workings, but I'm doing them the one true way, and you can't touch them. Even if you did, it would be too late now. You're doomed, abomination, you and all your kind.”

“But why
Blest
?” Romanov snapped out.

Joel gave him a bleary, sarcastic grin. “The balance,” he said. “This is our great atonement, that we now tip the balance of all magics to our hands. By nightfall Blest magic and the magics of many other worlds will be in the hands of righteousness. So now leave and tread your path to damnation, all of you.”

He went walking wearily away, as if he simply could not be bothered with us, and sat himself down on a chair in the distance, bent over, staring at the grassy floor and frowning.

We all looked helplessly at Romanov. He was frowning, too. It made a sort of pout above the zigzag of his nose and mouth. “Some sort of religious mania, evidently,” he said. “Damn it! I can't even see what
form
of spell he's using!”

“It'll be some sort of Prayermaster thing,” I said.

Romanov snapped round to face me, looking as if a great light had struck him.
“Right!”
he said. “And?”

But I didn't know any more than that. It was hopeless.

ONE
RODDY

W
hile Nick stood there beside the gently heaving mass of white cobweb stuff, looking helpless, I was thinking, thinking. I knew this had to be some kind of binding spell, but it didn't match any of the spells in the hurt woman's files. When Nick said the word
Prayermaster
, though, I began going through
Goose Grass or Cleavers
in a different way. My teachers had never said much about Prayermaster magic, but it stood to reason that it had to be mostly words—prayers. So I went back to
spoken bindings
and thought those through again. Most of them were quite simple and temporary—unless you were laying a strong
geas
, and it wasn't one of those.
Spoken bindings
mostly only became lasting if you combined them with actions, like making a net pattern or a cat's cradle. Otherwise you had to make the pattern with your words alone, and if you wanted it to last, you had to keep repeating it.

“Oh!” I said. “He's repeating it in his mind! No wonder he looks so tired!” I turned to Romanov. He was clicking his fingers in frustration and obviously searching through his mind in much the same way as I was. “It's a spoken binding,” I said.

“A pretty complicated one,” Romanov said irritably. “I can't get a handle on it at all.”