It was daylight as you see it through sunglasses. I suppose the dome was tinted. But nearly all of us looked up nervously, expecting rain or thunder, even before we stared about and found ourselves in a thicket of fruit trees. They were all yellowy. Even allowing for that lurid light, I guessed those trees had not been tended for fifty years. I had a branch of misshapen figs almost in my lap and little undernourished oranges bobbed over my head. Grundo calmly picked figs. Nick reached up for an orange. Then they both threw them disgustedly away. I don’t think any of the fruit was eatable.
Romanov pointed. “Go that way. No, don’t worry about the vegetation. Go straight there.”
The elephant turned and walked the way he pointed. She made an awful mess. She stepped on trees. Trees got shoved out of the way, causing fruit to shower off them. Branches snapped and tree trunks crashed, and our knees were scraped by twigs as she marched on through. Bark and leaves and fruit rained over us. I looked behind and saw a squashed, cloven path of ruined trees and trodden fruit where we had been. The elephant’s funny little tail was quivering and jerking with excitement. I think she was enjoying this. When I looked to the front again, we were plowing through apple trees, and the elephant’s trunk was going out and back, out and back again, snatching apples and cramming them into her mouth—or it was until Romanov noticed.
“Cut that out, Mini!” he said, and hit her quite hard on her head.
She flapped her ears crossly and forged on. Shortly she crunched across a thicket of raspberry canes and came out into an overgrown field of melons. The melons were small and self-seeded, but all the same, you cannot imagine the effect an elephant has on a field of melons. There is the most incredible squelching and bursting. Seeds fly, and the smell of ruined melon comes up in waves. I was leaning over, so fascinated by the carnage, that I did not notice anything else until Toby said quietly, “I think we’re here.”
There was a space ahead that was fenced off with white plastic walls. Anyway, it was something half transparent made into walls that came up to the elephant’s shoulder. I thought I could see people beyond, though the light was queerer there, sort of filmy and foggy.
Romanov said, “Ten paces on, then stop and let us down.”
The elephant obeyed him literally. This meant that she walked straight through the wall, and it went pop, pop, CLAP as it tore in two and then clatter as she trod on some of it. But none of the people just beyond seemed to notice. They were simply standing there, in a grassy space, covered in the stuff that was making the light so queer. It was coming down from the roof, this stuff, in cascades and swaths of what looked to be white cotton-wool cobwebs. Everyone I could see was draped in it. They were all alive, though. That was what made it such a horrible thing to see. Every so often some of them would shift from one foot to the other or move their heads as if they were trying to get rid of a crick in the neck—but slowly, slowly, like people moving in treacle. The only good thing about it was that most of them didn’t seem quite conscious. The pink blurs of faces that I could see—though they were very hard to see through the white cobwebbing—seemed to be at least half asleep.
Mam and Dad are in there somewhere! I thought. I could hardly wait for the elephant to bend one of her front legs up so that Romanov could slither onto it and jump to the ground. And when he was down, he stood for a long, long moment, staring at the draped, white, slowly fidgeting crowd, until I nearly screamed at him to help us down to the grass, too.
“This is a very strange spell,” he said, turning to look up at us, all perched on our seat. “I’m going to need all the help you can give me to solve this one. Do any of you have any ideas?”
I was shaking my head along with the others, no, when I realized I was down on the ground. The elephant bulked above us, but almost at once she retreated to what was left of the fence and cowered there—if an elephant can cower. Nick went over and patted her trunk. “I know,” he said. “None of the rest of us likes it either.” Then he said, “Roddy!” and pointed.
It was the Izzys, naturally. They had gone right up to the edge of the silent, film-draped crowd. One of them was making mad balletic movements toward the nearest shrouded person, while the other one was dramatically on her knees with her hands clasped. “Speak to me!” she was saying. “I, the Isadora of Isadora, implore and command you! Speak!”
I got to her just as she tried to take hold of the swath of veiling that anchored the person to the grass. From this close, it looked sticky, like slightly melted spun sugar. I dragged both of them clear of it. “Don’t touch it, you little stupids!” I said. “It would probably get you, too!”
“But I wanted to break the spell!” Isadora protested.
Ilsabil said tragically, “How could you do this to us! That’s Heppy in there!”
It was Heppy, now that I looked closely. She was shorter and dumpier than any of the shrouded shapes around her. By peering, I could just pick out the muted glow of her orange hair through the whiteness. I could see her eyes most clearly of all. They seemed to track slowly across me as I leaned toward her, but I had no idea if she knew me or not. For a moment I felt absolute despair. Heppy was a witch after all. The people standing in there with her were all magic users. But if Heppy couldn’t break this spell, if none of them could, what chance was there of anyone’s ever breaking it?
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.
12
RODDY AND NICK
ONE RODDY
While 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.”
“I don’t think you will,” I said, “unless you can break his concentration first. It won’t even start to unravel unless you can force him to make a hole in his pattern.”
“How do we do that?” Nick demanded, standing too close to me. I felt his warmth sort of pushing at me and moved away. He followed me, saying, “Joel came and had a conversation with us and didn’t slip up for one moment as far as I can see. He must be doing it on autopilot.”
Toby nudged Grundo, and Grundo gave one of his smoothly wicked grins. “Why don’t we,” he suggested, “set the Izzys on him?”
The Izzys, who had been standing sighing and fidgeting and looking pious and wronged, at once became extremely indignant. “Do you take us for dogs?” Isadora demanded.
Ilsabil said, loudly and shrilly, “Take no notice, my dear. Per-thetic just wants us to get wrapped in white cobwebs, too. He said so.”
“Please be quiet,” Toby said, looking anxiously across at Joel, bowed over in his chair.
“And don’t be silly,” Grundo said. “You’d be quite safe if you put your glamour on him.”
They heaved dramatic sighs. “Our glamour doesn’t work anymore,” Ilsabil said tragically.
“Yes, it does,” I said. “It just doesn’t work on any of us.”
“Look what you did to that fat teacher,” Toby said.
The Merlin Conspiracy Page 34