The Merlin Conspiracy

  Toby is always a pale boy, but just then he was chalky, with a dazed sort of stare to his eyes. Behind him, I could hear the most dreadful yelling and sobbing noises. Dora, I thought.

  “What’s happened?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  Toby gulped. “Grandad. He was carried off just a minute ago. Mum says it was the King of the Dead who took him.”

  The inside of me seemed to pitch downward into somewhere icy. “I shall kill Sybil,” I said. “Quite soon.”

  TWO NICK

  I hadn’t expected Roddy to be quite so overbearing. I suppose she was upset about all the things that had been happening, but then so were we. The way Maxwell Hyde had been taken—just like that—seemed to hang over us all like nervousness and horror. It was almost as if something awful was going to happen. Instead of it just having happened, if you see what I mean.

  I was picking up furniture and game pieces and trying to calm Dora down while I did it. Salamanders were rushing about, and transparent creatures were bundling this way and that in droves. I was saying, “Hush, you’ll upset the salamanders. Hush, it doesn’t help to yell,” when Roddy came striding in with Toby and another boy behind her.

  She stood staring about. You’d think her eyes were weapons. They sort of snapped dark fire. Otherwise she was just as I’d been remembering her, with that look of having simply grown, like a tree or something. She had a fabulous figure, even in baggy old trousers and an old gray sweater, quite thin, but all beautifully rounded, and she smelled nice, too, even from where I was on the floor. My heart began beating in little rapid bangs. My legs felt weak, and I could feel my face flushing red and then draining white again.

  But part of the simply grown thing with Roddy was that she never even thought she might have that sort of effect on people. In fact she didn’t care what effect she had. She said, “This place looks as if a bomb hit it! And there are salamanders everywhere. Haven’t any of you thought of the fire risk?”

  That was enough to start my heart beating normally, if you count angry thumping as normal. And I could pretend that any strange color in my face was due to groping under the sofa for game pieces.

  “You!” she snapped at me. “What’s your version of Grandad’s disappearance?”

  I stood up. It helps to be tall enough to loom a bit. “What, no ‘Hallo, Nick, fancy seeing you again!’?” I said. “Shut up, Dora.”

  “Yes, be quiet, Auntie,” Roddy said. “Of course I remember you, but this is urgent.”

  “Gwyn ap Nud,” I said. “I know him because we have him on Earth, too. Just rode through here and hauled Maxwell Hyde up on his horse and left.”

  At this stage Dora decided to stop screaming and turn social. She surged off the sofa with tears on her face, saying, “My niece, Arianrhod Hyde, and her friend, Ambrose Temple, Nick. Nick is Daddy’s Oriental pupil, Roddy dear.”

  This attempt at Courtly graces misfired rather. I said, “I am not Oriental! I’ve told you!”

  Roddy snapped, “He prefers to be called Grundo! I’ve told you!” Then she whirled round on me and demanded, “Haven’t you any idea where Grandad’s been taken?”

  Obvious, I thought. Land of the Dead. But she was in such a mood I didn’t say so. “I could try some divining,” I said. “I’ve got pretty good at that.”

  “You do that,” she commanded, and whirled round on poor Dora again. “Auntie, Grundo’s very tired and hungry. Could you find him some supper? And I’m afraid we’ll both have to stay the night, unless the Progress is very near. Can you find Grundo a bed? Could he go in with Toby?”

  I looked at this Grundo. He was a strange-looking kid with a hooked nose and a faceful of freckles, slightly older than Toby. He didn’t look particularly tired. He and Toby were giggling together because they both had salamanders sitting round their necks.

  It was never any good commanding Dora. Maxwell Hyde had always been pretty careful not to, not if he wanted anything done, that was. She stared at Roddy and then went into wet mode, sinking onto the sofa and wringing her hands. “But I couldn’t think of anything to go with the potatoes!” she moaned.

  “Oh, God!” Roddy said. “Grundo has to eat something!”

  I saw she was going to start snapping commands at Toby next, and Toby had already had a pretty tough day. He was looking wiped. “Through here,” I said, and led the way to the dining room where the cheese and the potatoes were still on the table. I fetched out more plates and knives and found the pickle.

  Grundo stared a bit and said in a strange grunty voice, “I’m not sure I can manage cold potatoes after all that cake with Mrs. Candace.”

  “There’s plenty of cheese, though,” Roddy said coaxingly, pulling out a chair for him. “Sit down and try to eat a bit anyway.”

  She was like that all the time with this Grundo. To other people, she was all “Grundo must have this, Grundo mustn’t go without that,” and with Grundo himself she was as if she was his caring elder sister—or his very fussy mother, more like. You’d think Grundo was the only person in her world. It annoyed me. I wanted to tell her to forget Grundo and get a life. Anyway, the sight of food had its usual effect on me. I sat down, scooped up pickle, and began a second supper. Toby came and sat beside me and started eating, too.

  “What are you doing?” Roddy demanded.

  “Eating,” I said.

  “But you’re supposed to be divining for where Grandad is!” she said.

  “I will when I’ve got my strength up,” I said soothingly.

  Roddy was disgusted. “I asked you for help. You’re—you’re obstructionist!”

  “And you,” I said, “would get on a bit better if you stopped being so uptight and domineering.” I’d never seen anyone look so outraged. She was too angry to speak. Toby shot me a look that said he was going to laugh any minute and probably choke on a potato. So I said to Roddy, “Oh, come on, sit down and get something to eat yourself.”

  She stared at me like a queen on a particularly haughty day. “I tell you,” she said, “there’s a conspiracy.”

  “I agree,” I said. “I believe you. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop eating. And while you eat, we can work out what we ought to do about it. That make sense?”

  She dragged a chair out reluctantly. “Sit down, Grundo. The most important thing is to find out where the King’s Progress is at the moment.”

  “They’re still in Norfolk,” Toby said. “It was on the morning media.”

  “Oh,” said Roddy. She seemed a bit daunted for a moment. “I must get in touch with my parents!” she said. “I know! Grandad’s bound to have Dad’s latest speaker code, isn’t he?” She was pushing her chair back again to go to the far-speaker as she said it.

  Grundo settled that. “Sit down,” he said. “Nick’s right. No one in the Progress knows we know anything, so you need to be careful what you say. You could get your parents into trouble. We need to decide what to do first. You’re not the only one who’s had a shock, you know.”

  The power of the Grundo! She listened to his quiet, growly voice, and she sat down again at once. Actually, he was quite a nice kid. I discovered that as soon as we got talking. Not that this helped when it came to us deciding what to do. I was pretty stumped, to tell the truth. With Kings and politics in it, and powerful people like the Merlin, and Maxwell Hyde pretty probably dead, I didn’t see what kids like us could do.

  “I wish we could ask Romanov,” I said.

  THREE RODDY

  Nick is the most maddening person I ever knew. If you try to make him do anything, he just goes kind of heavy at you. But perfectly polite. He gets a sweet look on his altogether too handsome face and refuses to budge. What made it worse was the way I seemed to feel him pushing at me all the time, in a warm, moist, eager way that I didn’t understand and didn’t want at all. I nearly threw one of Aunt Dora’s vile, bruised-looking potatoes at him several times.

  We did get things talked through in the end, though Nick didn’t help by bleatin
g every so often that we ought to talk to Romanov. I’d never heard of this Romanov, so I took no notice, and we did get our priorities straight at last. We had to find where Grandfather Gwyn had taken Grandad and let my parents know what was going on.

  After we cleared the food away, Nick finally got down to some serious divination magic. I didn’t feel too hopeful of it. His method seemed to be to spread a whole lot of books and maps on the living room floor and surround these with bowls of ink and water and different sorts of weights on strings—all of it in danger from twenty inquisitive salamanders—and sit hunched over it with Toby and Grundo squatting beside him and a crowd of the transparent folk hovering over their heads. The boys kept giving him advice. Aunt Dora put in her bit by sitting on the sofa and calling out things like “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” and “Is that how they do this in the Orient, dear?” and “Daddy won’t be pleased if you spill that ink!”

  I couldn’t have worked like that, but Nick seemed quite placid. No doubt it helped that he was also basking in admiration. Grundo was in a fair way to thinking that Nick was the most marvelous person he’d ever met. I don’t think any boys Nick’s age had ever treated him like a human being before. Boys at Court were always too lofty, or else nervous because Grundo was a magic user, or both. As for Toby, I could see he had been Nick’s worshiper for weeks.

  I began seriously to believe I had bungled that working in Wales, or why else had the spell sent me an amateur wizard with a swelled head? Oh, well, I thought, and went and found the far-speaker in the hall.

  Grandad had one of those useful codepads, where you punch the name of the person you want and it springs open, to show you the code. Hoping hard that he had kept it up to date, I punched in Daniel Hyde. It duly sprang open, and the code looked right. Court codes are usually two letters and three numbers. This said “DH145,” so I dialed that.

  It rang for quite a long time and was finally answered by a high, breathless voice saying, “Court Weather Office.”

  The relief! I was so glad to get through that I hardly noticed or minded that the voice was the voice of Grundo’s odious sister, Alicia. She was a royal page after all, and one of her duties was to take calls when everyone else was too busy. “Oh, Alicia!” I said. “Could I speak to Dad? This is Roddy, and it’s urgent.”

  She knew my voice, too. She giggled unpleasantly in her usual way. “So you’ve turned up again!” she said. “Where are you? I thought we’d left you safely stuck away in Wales.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m in London now, and I need to speak to my father at once. Could you get him to the speaker, please?”

  She giggled even harder. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “Do you mind telling me why not?” I said.

  “Because he’s not here,” she said. “He hasn’t been here for ages now. We expelled all the dissident wizards two weeks ago.”

  I had that pitching downward feeling inside again, but I said, politely, “Then perhaps you can tell me where he is now.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know!” Alicia said. “He’s where nobody’s ever going to find him again. And your mother’s there, too. And you know, Roddy, you really have no business ringing this number, because you’re not a member of Court any longer. I shouldn’t really be speaking to you.” There was true triumph in her voice. I could tell she had been looking forward to telling me this from the moment she heard my voice on the speaker. “Both your parents have been impeached for treason to the Crown, you see,” she explained.

  “Thank you so much for telling me,” I said. “Who’s seeing to the weather, then?”

  “Well, nobody at the moment,” she said, “but I expect a new appointment will be made as soon as the King has abdicated.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Is the King going to abdicate?”

  “I didn’t tell you that!” she said hastily. She sounded quite frightened.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Alicia, you’ve been so good telling me all this. Now tell me what happens to Grundo, please.”

  “Oh, is he with you?” Alicia asked coldly. “I suppose you’d better send him back to Court. Not to Norfolk, though. We’re moving first thing in the morning, and we won’t get to— Oh, what a nuisance that child always is! Send him to Salisbury Plain the day after tomorrow. He can always wait if we’re not there yet. Good-bye, Roddy. So nice talking to you.” She rang off.

  I stood and stared at the whirring earpiece. I felt dead. All I seemed to be able to think was that it was no wonder the weather had been so hot all this time. Dad couldn’t have had a chance to change it. Then I thought—viciously—that Alicia had always been a liar if she thought she could hurt my feelings and get away with it. This simply could not be true. I slammed the receiver back, slapped the codepad shut, and punched in “Annie Hyde” instead, furiously. Mam would surely tell me that none of it was true. Mam’s code was AH369 currently. But all I got when I dialed it up was a mechanical voice saying, The owner of this code is no longer in Court. The owner of this code is no longer …

  I put the receiver back and stared at my grandfather’s dark, shabby wallpaper. Both my parents seemed to be gone. Grandad was gone, too, the King was about to abdicate, and no one seemed to realize that there really was a conspiracy. Who could I tell? Who could possibly help? I couldn’t tell Grandfather Gwyn because he had been ordered to take my grandfather Hyde away, with the help of London himself. Who else could I tell?

  I thought of Mrs. Candace. She was pretty powerful. She might not have believed me this afternoon, but she’d have to believe me now.

  I snapped the pad again. If she was Lady of Governance, Grandad would surely have her number. Yes. He did. It was there, and I dialed it. And it rang and rang and rang. I allowed for someone with a crippled hip. I let the call go from whirring to bleeping. I allowed time for her to lever herself out of her chair and time to limp slowly across a big room. I allowed time on top of that. But still no one answered the speaker.

  I put the receiver slowly down and stared at the wallpaper again. After a bit, as an experiment, I dialed the code for Salisbury again. Just the code. I didn’t get whirring this time, just silence. I got silence for so long that I was going to give up, when a strange, heavy, unechoing voice answered.

  “Salisbury here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank goodness! Look, I’ve been trying to call Mrs. Candace, but she doesn’t answer—this is Arianrhod Hyde, by the way. Is Mrs. Candace all right, or asleep or something?”

  “I regret to say,” replied Salisbury’s heavy voice, “that Mrs. Candace is no longer with me. She was removed from her house earlier this evening.”

  “Who?” I said. “Who took her?”

  There was a short silence. Then Salisbury said, “The son of Nud, I believe. I was ordered not to interfere. I am sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “If even London had to obey orders, there was nothing you could do. Do you know where she was taken?”

  There was another short silence. Then he said, “No.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said. I cut the connection and stared at the wall some more. Then, as a last resort, I snapped the codepad open to “Hepzibah Dimber” and, rather reluctantly, dialed that number.

  That whirred and bleeped and bleeped, too. It rang for so long that I began to think I would be glad even to speak to an Izzy. But it’s Friday night, I thought as I rang off. Maybe they’ve all gone out. But it was so late by then that I didn’t believe it. After a while I went back into the living room. As I came in, Nick looked up and said, as if he was quite surprised, “Maxwell Hyde’s still alive! That’s certain.”

  “But he’s not anywhere we can find,” Toby added.

  Grundo said, and I could see it was part of an argument they had been having, “It has to be outside this world. Your results don’t make sense any other way.”

  Dora gazed at me and said brightly, “Anything the matter, dear?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Nothin
g at all. My parents have only been expelled from Court, the King’s only going to abdicate, and Mrs. Candace and the Dimbers have only been kidnapped, too. Nothing wrong at all.”

  The boys’ faces turned up to me. Nick said, “Wow!”

  “Is that all you can say?” I more or less screamed.

  Dora, who seemed not to have heard a thing I said, beamed kindly. “You know, dear, you need to discharge all the adverse vibrations,” she said. “Sit down here and have a good cry. It does wonders.”

  “Does it indeed?” I said rudely. “Thank you very much!” Then I sat down in the nearest shabby armchair and burst into tears. As one boy, Grundo, Toby, and Nick all became exceedingly embarrassed and turned their backs on me. I really wanted to scream then.

  FOUR NICK

  I had Grundo sleeping on the couch in my room that night. Everyone agreed that Roddy had better have Maxwell Hyde’s room, and Toby’s room didn’t have a couch. Lucky Toby. Grundo must be the most restless sleeper in all the universes. When he wasn’t turning over and over and jangling the couch springs, he was either snoring like a football rattle or shouting out in his sleep that everything was back to front and he couldn’t do it! He kept waking me up. And whenever he woke me, the feeling of nervous horror came back, and I lay and worried.

  I knew we had to find Romanov and ask him what to do. With Maxwell Hyde gone, and from what Roddy said, I could see things in Blest were going down the plughole fast. Romanov would know what to do. He had real power. I could even sort of feel the weird nondirection I ought to go in to find Romanov, but I couldn’t even start to go that way. It was the same as the way I couldn’t walk into another world. I seemed to need somebody else there to help or give me a push before I could do it.

  In the end it got light. I could hear birds singing and salamanders scuttling to get to the places where the sun would shine first. By then Grundo was sleeping as peacefully as a log, of course, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep now. I swore and got up.