I found I knew this spell, or one so like it that it made no difference. It was under Traveler’s-Joy: mundane journeys. It was one of six ways to shorten a road. I wondered, as I watched, if Mrs. Candace knew the other five, too. And before I had quite finished my cake, I realized that Judith was nearly home already with her carload of yelling Izzys. Mrs. Candace was good at what she did. She was even doing something the flower file in my head had not mentioned, unpleating the road behind the car as it traveled, so that no other cars would get caught in the spell. That impressed me.
“There!” Mrs. Candace sank down as if it had tired her to take so much off the journey. Salisbury sat down, too, at last, cautiously, and the low chair groaned underneath him. He passed her a cup of tea. She smiled at him and turned to me, still smiling. I saw that she had once been ravingly beautiful. “That seemed the least I could do for her,” she said. “Now, what have you two been up to that Hepzibah Dimber couldn’t handle?”
I didn’t want to talk about it, so I said, “Grundo?”
Grundo explained about the invisible beings in the Regalia.
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Candace. “Oh, dear.” A plate of cake came up beside her and jiggled invitingly. “Thank you,” she said carefully as she took a slice. “I do make a point of thanking them,” she said to Grundo, “though it’s not always easy to know how to reward them. There are, however, quite a number of minor magicians who treat their captive folk very badly. And I assure you, I had no idea that the Dimbers didn’t know they were using them. I see I must start looking into all that. But there is more,” she added, looking at me.
I nodded and, once again, tried to explain what Sybil, Sir James, and the Merlin had done.
Mrs. Candace listened attentively, with her head gracefully bent, and I had real hopes that she believed me until she said, “Ah, no. You can’t have it right, my dear. This Merlin is very new and young, so new that I haven’t met him yet, but he’d be simply incapable of the kind of treason you describe. If he was capable of it, he wouldn’t be the Merlin, do you see? I think you must have misunderstood some new idea of his.”
“The Little Person believed I was right,” I said despairingly. I knew I had to make Mrs. Candace understand. She was the one who counterbalanced the Merlin. “He took it very seriously, and he advised me to raise the land.”
“On no account!” Mrs. Candace said sharply. “What a thing to suggest! I’m surprised he even mentioned it. The Little People are usually so wise, though they can be mischievous. Perhaps this one was or perhaps he didn’t realize you were only a child. You see, my dear,” she went on, leaning forward and staring earnestly at me with her enormous almond-shaped pale green eyes, “the magic of Blest is most intricately interlaced with itself—the hugely old, the old, and the newer and the most recent—so that each part supports all the others. What you’re suggesting is pulling up the very foundations. This would make it all come loose or perhaps even blow it apart. And we can’t have that because Blest magic keeps the magics of several hundred surrounding worlds in their right places. Do you see?”
“But if Blest magic went all rotten—” I began.
“Oh, I grant you,” she said. “If that happened. But it hasn’t. Unless somebody was superhumanly clever at keeping it from me, I’d know. I can feel there’s nothing wrong.”
The far-speaker on the table beside her chair began warbling for attention. Salisbury nodded at it and spoke for the first time, in a gently rumbling voice, like bricks grating. “I got through to London at last.”
Mrs. Candace smiled sweetly at him and picked up the speaker. “Hallo, is that Maxwell Hyde? … Oh, it’s Dora, is it? Is Mr. Hyde there? … Well, tell him as soon as he comes in that I’ve got his granddaughter here with me and I’m proposing to send her … Yes, Arianrhod, and she has a friend with her, Ambrose Temple … No, no, just tell him they’ll be with you this evening. Salisbury’s going to see to it now. Nothing to worry about.”
She put the speaker down and smiled. “There, that’s all sorted out.”
It wasn’t, but she was not to know that.
9
NICK
ONE
I couldn’t get over the way my father let me go to Blest with Maxwell Hyde. Dad was still in the London hotel when we got back—me pulling Maxwell Hyde and Maxwell Hyde keeping up a long, grumbling moan about how much he hated the dark paths. The people from the conference had left days ago, but Dad said he’d had to stay because he’d lost his front-door key again. He took it quite philosophically when I explained that my key was still in the police station in Loggia City and just said that he’d phone a locksmith from the hotel.
See what I mean? In the normal way, Dad falls over his own brain not to admit that anything supernatural can happen. It must be his defense against all those demons he writes about. But now he not only admitted the existence of other worlds and a Magid who lived in one of them, but let me go there with him.
“That man Hyde cost me over two hundred quid, getting him drunk enough to go and find you,” he said to me. “Let him teach you a few tricks. I want some return for my money.”
I knew this was Dad’s way of telling me he’d been worried sick when I suddenly disappeared from beside him in the hotel corridor. I was quite touched. I was still in a state of shock about it after he’d bought me some extra clothes and Maxwell Hyde gripped me by one arm and walked downhill into Blest with me.
Going between worlds the way Magids do it means walking down a hill that is mostly grass, with patches of tarmac and misty bits every so often. Each misty bit seems to be between other worlds. I looked sideways along the grassy stretches and saw that the dark paths led away there in all sorts of directions. I was very interested, but Maxwell Hyde didn’t seem to know the paths were there.
Then we stepped onto tarmac again in front of Maxwell Hyde’s London house, and I was very excited and nervous for a moment. Now we’re going to meet Roddy! I thought, and the prospect of all those foreign politics made me feel a bit sick. But Roddy wasn’t there. We were in a street of tall Londonish houses that were all much smarter and better painted than any London houses I knew.
“That’s because no one knows when the King is going to turn up and see them,” Maxwell Hyde explained as he unlocked his own glistening green front door. “The Council sends you an order to redecorate if they think you’re getting dingy.”
That struck me as fascist. “Do they tell you what colors to paint it, too?” I asked. It helped to cover up my nervousness.
“No, no,” he said. “They leave that to the owner, though I daresay they’d object if I decided on murals of naked women or some such.”
The London buses in Blest are bright blue. One roared past behind us as we went into the house. They use some kind of fuel that smells quite different from diesel but just as bad.
“Hallo! I’m back! Brought a visitor!” Maxwell Hyde shouted, stamping his feet on the doormat.
It smelled quite different from an Earth house indoors. Sort of spicy. Maxwell Hyde’s daughter and her boy, Toby, hurried down the hall to meet us. The daughter is called Dora. She keeps house for him, and she is quite potty. She dyes her hair bright red and wears layers of colored clothes like a native of Peru, all different patterns and hung all over with dangly beads and stuff. Most of them were charms. Toby was younger than me and seemed quite normal, except that he behaved as if he was frightened. He had this way of hanging about as near as he could get to anyone bigger than him, as if it was safer like that. He was very pale, with almost red hair.