“Let’s go for the scarmbled eggs.” Chick laughed. “I want to know what they do to it.”
So, in spite of Arnold’s 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 backyard 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 spelled 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 saber-toothed tiger,” Chick put in.
“No, it was spotted,” I said. “Not a tiger. A big, mean hunting cat, sort of cream with dark gray 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 anymore 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 novice to arrive, and they had thought I was him.
This meant that somewhere back in that other London there was the real Maurice.
If this Maurice was my age, he wasn’t going to like having gone without breakfast and then finding they’d all left without him. He was going to go back to this academy he came from, or phone there, and tell them. If I was really lucky, them at the academy would just shrug and say serve him right for being late.
But I couldn’t count on it.