The Merlin Conspiracy (Magids 2) - Page 72

“Good idea,” I said, although if Old Sarum hadn’t been there setting me a bad example, I might have been sarcastic, too. I felt really envious of the way Grundo could understand the salamander.

As for Old Sarum, he did his ghastly face contortions again, going long and egg-shaped and then snapping into a nutcracker bunch. “It’s your funeral,” he said as Grundo climbed into the car, tenderly holding the salamander. “You’re the ones that’ll fry and sizzle when it sets this car on fire, not me. I don’t burn easy.”

“Then that’s one good thing about being a rotten borough, isn’t it?” I said, climbing back in, too. After the fresh dewy evening the smell in the car was beastly.

“True, but Salisbury’s going to be pretty peeved when I come back and tell him his car burned up,” Old Sarum retorted. He started the car moving and grumbled for the next ten miles. “Tell him I never got to London and he’ll do me. Lose my charter and my MP, I shouldn’t wonder. And I hate the smell of burning. Sets all my bricks on edge.”

“Just shut up,” Grundo whispered. He crooned the soothing spell to the salamander until it climbed up his arm to his shoulder, where it sat pulsing out pleasure. What with my envy about that and the smell and the way Old Sarum was grumbling, I didn’t want to be in the car at all. I turned and stuck my face out of the open half of the window.

After a while, when the road was nearly dark, I realized that there was a white horse alongside, keeping pace with the car. I looked up to see that there was a rider on its back, whose flapping black cloak showed a white lining. “Oh!” I said.

Grandfather Gwyn leaned down to the open half of the window. “They have called me out for a third time,” he said, “to carry away a great many more people. In some ways, though, this is good news. If they try to call me again, I am free to summon them. But I am sorry about the rest of it.”

Before I could answer, he clicked his tongue to the gray mare, and she went surging off up the road ahead.

Grundo stared. “He went faster than this car!” he said. “What did he say? I didn’t quite hear.”

“Something private,” I said. For some reason, I did not want to tell Grundo how very anxious this had made me. Sybil was Grundo’s mother, after all, and she had just done something new. I wanted to get to my lovely, safe, soldierly Magid of a grandad Hyde more than anything in the world just then. Grandad would know. He would be able to tell me what Sybil and her friends had done this time. I wished he were here telling me now. Every time Old Sarum slowed down for a corner or a crossroads, I wanted to scream at him to drive faster. When he slowed down and stopped just outside London, I almost did scream. “Drive on!” I shouted.

“Can’t do that,” Old Sarum said. “This is London. Got to negotiate, don’t we?”

To my utter exasperation, he turned off the engine and climbed out of the car. I flung my door open and jumped out, too. After a moment Grundo got out as well, leaving the salamander curled up on the seat. The smells of a hot city night, a hot country night, and Old Sarum flooded round us. Hedges rustled behind us. In front, the headlights of our car blazed down a suburban road lined with streetlights and glistened on two enormous shiny things planted like roadblocks in front of us.

They were shoes. It took us a moment to see that they were shoes.

Our heads turned slowly upward, and we saw London, vast and shadowy, towering against the purple city sky. “What are you doing here?” he said to Old Sarum.

London had the strangest voice. Part of it was like the groan and clatter of thick traffic, and the rest was a chorus of different voices, high, low, and tenor voices, voices with very upper-class accents, bass voices speaking purest Cockney, overseas voices, and every grade of voice in between. It was almost like hearing a huge concert.

Old Sarum whined and bowed and rubbed his hands together. In the headlights his face went through extraordinary contortions. “I’m only a rotten borough, Your Honor, and I mean no harm. Not wishing to trespass in any way upon Your Honor’s precincts, but I was given this mission, see. I’m to drive these two here, take them to the Magid. I knew that might be pushing it a bit, Your Honor, but what’s a poor rotten borough like me to do when people in high places start giving orders? No offense in the world …”

“Who gave you your orders?” chorused London. He had his shadowy head bent, listening to Old Sarum, but even in that dim light he seemed to have the strangest face. It was like the framework of a strong, noble face with other faces stuck into it. Part of one cheek was shifty. The end of one eyebrow and part of his mouth seemed to leer. One of his eyes seemed to be glass. At least, his left eye caught the light differently from the right one. A tarry, bricky city smell blew off him, with a touch of stale river mixed in.

“It was that Candace woman, Your Honor,” Old Sarum whined. “What she tells Salisbury, Salisbury does. Nothing to do with me, except that I got roped in to do the dirty work. As usual.”

“Mrs. Candace,” orchestrated London, “used to be a great beauty. I knew her well. She held salons in Berkeley Square. Then she married an Italian Count.”

“Yeah, but he died, and she gave all that up,” Old Sarum said. “Lives in Salisbury now and bosses the country from there.”

“I know,” London rumbled. “And you should speak of her with proper respect.”

“All the respect in the world, Your Honor,” Old Sarum protested. “Anything you say. But I don’t have to tell someone who straddles a great river like you do that humans are just water under your bridges. Water under all your bridges. Mrs. Candace, these two young’uns with me, they’re all the same. They come, they go. You live on. Even I live on, Your Honor.”

“We grew up for and by means of humans,” London thumped out. He sounded like hammers on a building site.

“Well, speak for yourself, Your Honor,” Old Sarum whined. “All humans mean to me these days is they let me send one of them off to argue in Winchester. What I’m trying to say, Your Honor, is that it’s nothing to you what humans come or go. So you might as well let me take these to the Magid.”

“On what grounds?” chorused London.

I began to feel increasingly uneasy. It wasn’t just that I was frantic to get to Grandad or even that we were standing in the road being argued over by two cities. It was because now that I had learned to see the near-invisible creatures like the ones who inhabited the Dimber Regalia, I could see—and hear—them here, too. They were being drawn here by the argument. The hedges behind were full of stealthy rustlings and small blinks of light. Bluish shadows were stalking in from the rear of the car. These felt different from those I had seen earlier today. I realized that the ones I had seen by sunlight were the lazy, harmless creatures of the day. These, now, were the people of the night. And very few of them were friendly.

Grundo had seen them, too. His head kept turning toward the hedges as the argument went on.

At length London said, in a distant sort of city buzz, as if he were considering, “I’ve no objections to the humans entering. When have I ever prevented that? I suppose they can take a bus or a taxi.”

“We’ve no money!” Grundo called up at him anxiously. “We used it all yesterday.”

I don’t think London heard him. He suggested in chorus, “Or they can walk.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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