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.
“We’re wise to you, you see,” Grundo explained. “But he isn’t. And he’s got two-thirds of his mind on his binding anyway.”
The Merlin was staring up at us with desperate hope. I looked at Romanov, who was watching the Izzys thoughtfully. “What do you think?” I asked him.
“It’s worth a try,” he said. “If they can make the slightest break in that spell, I can probably do the rest. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere without some kind of distraction. I’ll give you strong protections,” he said to the Izzys.
The Izzys looked at him the way courtiers do when a foreign ambassador offers a bribe, very haughty and honorable, with just a touch of well-judged doubt. “My dear, we couldn’t possibly!”
Nick leaned toward them across the Merlin’s head. “I don’t believe this!” he said. “You get offered the chance to behave as dreadfully as you can, and you turn it down! Where’s your pride, both of you? Go and show us just how awful you can be.”