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?”

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.