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?”