The Merlin Conspiracy. Diana Wynne Jones

heap better. I looked up and saw that the overhead lights were getting stronger orange, while the gridded holes in the walls were growing pink. It looked as if the whole day had passed. Well, I thought, dreams do like to fast-forward things. I wasn’t really surprised when, about five minutes later, Arnold came pounding up to me carrying his bag of tricks. His thick, fair face looked white and exhausted.

      “Up you get. Time to go,” he said. “The Prince’s own mages handle security overnight.”

      I got up, thinking in a dreamlike way that it was rather a waste that we were all taking so much trouble to guard a Prince who was going to lose his Empire and be dead before long. How had Romanov known that anyway? But dreams are like that.

      I was still thinking about this when we passed the first soldier. He looked at us enviously. “Poor beggars stay here all night in case anyone plants a bomb,” Arnold remarked. Then we came up to Chick and Arnold said, “Time up. Hotel first or eat and drink?”

      “Food!” Chick said, collapsing his sword to a knife and then stretching his arms out. “I’m so hungry I could eat that novice.”

      “I’d prefer a horse, personally,” Arnold said and we went on round to underneath the pavilion. Dave and Pierre were already there, waiting. Arnold asked them too, “Hotel first, or food?”

      “Food!” they both said and Dave added, “And wine. Then some hotspots. Anyone know this town – know where’s good to go?”

      I watched them as they stood around discussing this. After Romanov, they struck me as simply normal people, jumped up a bit. I was a bit bored by them.

      None of them did know where to go in Marseilles, as it turned out. Nor did I, when they asked me as a last resort. So we all went out through the guarded doors underneath the pavilion into the street and Arnold hailed a taxi. “Condweerie noo a yune bong plass a monjay,” he told the driver as we all piled in. I think he meant, Take us to a good place to eat, but it sounded like Zulu with a German accent.

      The driver seemed to understand though. He drove off downhill towards the sea with a tremendous rattle. Even allowing for the way the streets were cobbled and how old that taxi was, I think the way its engine worked was quite different from the cars I was used to. It was ten times louder.

      But it got us there. Before long, it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “Voila, messieurs. A whole street of eateries for your honours.” Clearly, he had us spotted as English – or, considering Arnold and perhaps Chick too, not French anyway. The place he’d brought us to was a row of little cafés, and they all had big hand-done notices in their windows. SCARMBLED EGG, one said, and SNALES was another. LEG OF FROG WITH CHEEPS and STAKE OR OLDAY BREKFA said others.

      We all cracked up. It had been a long day and it felt good to be able to scream with laughter. “I am not,” howled Dave, staggering about on the cobbles and wiping tears off his face, “repeat not, going to eat cheeping frog legs!”

      “Let’s go for the scarmbled egg,” laughed Chick. “I want to know what they do to it.”

      So, in spite of Arnold saying he rather fancied the stake, we went into the SCARMBLED EGG one. We charged in, still laughing, and snatched up menus. I think the proprietors found us a bit alarming. They brought us a huge carafe of wine straightaway, as if they were trying to placate us, and then looked quite frightened when we all discovered we needed to visit the gents and surged up to our feet again.

      There was only one of it, out in the back yard past the telephone and the kitchen, where a large fat French lady glowered suspiciously at us as we waited for our turns. I was last, being only the novice, so I had to stand a lot of the glare.

      But when we came back to our table, things were almost perfect. We swigged the wine and ordered vast meals, some of it weirdly spelt and the rest in French, so that we had no idea what would be coming, and then we ate and ate, until we got to the cheese and sticky pastry stage, where we all slowed down cheerfully. Dave began saying that he wanted to look at the nightlife very soon.

      “In a while,” Arnold said. “I suppose I’d better take your reports first.” He lit one of his horrible Aztec smokes and took out a notebook. “Chick? Any attempts to break through the East? Any threats?”

      “Negative,” said Chick. “I’ve never known the otherwheres calmer.”

      The others both said the same. Then Arnold looked at me. “How about your patrol? What’s your name, by the way?”

      They’ve finally asked! I thought. “Nick.”

      Arnold frowned. “Funny. I thought it was something like Maurice.”

      “That’s my surname,” I said, quick as a flash. “And I do have something to report. A fellow called Romanov turned up and he…”

      That caused a real sensation. “Romanov!” they all shouted. They were awed and scared and thoroughly surprised. Arnold added suspiciously, “Are you sure it was Romanov?”

      “That’s who he said he was,” I said. “Who is he? I never met anyone so powerful.”

      “Only the magical supremo,” Chick said. “Romanov can do things most magic users in most worlds only dream of doing.”

      “He can do some things most of us never even thought of,” said Pierre. “They say he charges the earth for them too.”

      “If you can find him,” Arnold said wryly.

      “I’ve heard,” said Dave, “that he lives on an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries. Went there to escape his missus.”

      “Sensible fellow,” murmured Arnold.

      “He escapes there to avoid being pestered to do magic,” Pierre said. “I’d heard he was self-taught. Is that true?”

      “Yes – that’s the amazing thing about him,” Dave said. “According to what I heard, he was born in a gutter on quite a remote world – Thule, I think, or maybe Blest – and he pulled himself out of poverty by teaching himself to do magic. Very unorthodox. But he had a gift for it and discovered things no one else knew how to do, so he charged high and got rich quick. He could probably buy our entire Empire now. And nobody’d dare say he couldn’t.”

      “Yes, but,” Arnold said doggedly, “was it really Romanov that Nick Maurice met?” He turned and puffed his awful smoke at me, staring through the brown clouds of it with big, earnest blue eyes. “If you were doing as you were told, you’d have been able to see his totem animal. What was it like?”

      “I’d heard it was a sabre-tooth tiger,” Chick put in.

      “No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean, hunting cat, sort of cream with dark grey blodges. It had tufts on its ears and sarcastic green eyes and he said it was female. It came up to my waist, easily. I was scared stiff of it.”

      Arnold nodded. “Then it was Romanov.” I could see they were, all four, really impressed. “Did he tell you why he was there?” Arnold asked me. “Was he looking for the Prince?”

      “I asked him that,” I said. “And he seemed to think the Prince would make his own trouble, without any magical interference. When he was King, he said.”

      They exchanged worried glances at that. Dave muttered, “Could be right. By what I’ve heard, some of Romanov’s island is thirty years in the future.”

      “They say he never bothers to lie,” Chick agreed.

      I was relieved. I hoped I’d given them enough to think of to stop them thinking any more about me. From the moment Arnold said he thought my name was Maurice, it was like a whole train of pennies dropping in my head. This was not a dream. It was real. I’d no idea how it happened, but I knew that somehow I’d done the thing I’d been longing to do and crossed over into another universe. A real other world. And when I did, I’d turned up beside those fliers while they had all been waiting for the