marks. I suppose I wanted Arnold and Co to think I’d been sitting there all the time. But I wasn’t really attending. I was shaking all over and I pretty well wanted to cry.
I was full of hurt and paranoia and plain terror that someone had wanted me killed. I kept thinking, But I told them in the Empire I wasn’t going to be Emperor! They’d taken me there into those worlds and I’d signed things – sort of abdicated – so that my half-brother Rob could be Emperor instead. It didn’t make sense.
I was full of hurt and paranoia too at the way Romanov had despised me. A lot of people had called me selfish. I’d been working on it, I thought. I’d looked after Dad and been really considerate, I thought. But I could tell Romanov saw through all that, to the way I really felt. And of course I still felt selfish, in spite of the way I behaved. All the same, I was trying, and it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t fair either that Romanov had despised me for being ignorant too! I’d been working on that as well. I’d been reading everything I could lay hands on about magic and trying to get to other worlds – and trying every way I could to persuade the bunch of people who govern the Magids – they call them the Upper Room for some reason – to let me train as a Magid too. It wasn’t my fault they wouldn’t.
Then I thought about Romanov himself. I would never, if I lived to be a thousand, meet anyone else as powerfully magic as Romanov. It was shattering. I’d met quite a few Magids, and they seemed quite humdrum now, compared with the stuff I’d felt coming from Romanov. It was awesome, it was just not fair, for someone to be as strong as that. Razor-edge, lightning-strike strong. It shook me to my bones.
And those big cats shook me to my bones too. When I found they were real…
Hang on, I thought. This is a dream. You always put yourself through seriously nasty experiences in bad dreams. This is just a nightmare.
Then I felt a whole heap better. I looked up and saw that the overhead lights were getting stronger orange, while the gridded holes in the walls were growing pink. It looked as if the whole day had passed. Well, I thought, dreams do like to fast-forward things. I wasn’t really surprised when, about five minutes later, Arnold came pounding up to me carrying his bag of tricks. His thick, fair face looked white and exhausted.
“Up you get. Time to go,” he said. “The Prince’s own mages handle security overnight.”
I got up, thinking in a dreamlike way that it was rather a waste that we were all taking so much trouble to guard a Prince who was going to lose his Empire and be dead before long. How had Romanov known that anyway? But dreams are like that.
I was still thinking about this when we passed the first soldier. He looked at us enviously. “Poor beggars stay here all night in case anyone plants a bomb,” Arnold remarked. Then we came up to Chick and Arnold said, “Time up. Hotel first or eat and drink?”
“Food!” Chick said, collapsing his sword to a knife and then stretching his arms out. “I’m so hungry I could eat that novice.”
“I’d prefer a horse, personally,” Arnold said and we went on round to underneath the pavilion. Dave and Pierre were already there, waiting. Arnold asked them too, “Hotel first, or food?”
“Food!” they both said and Dave added, “And wine. Then some hotspots. Anyone know this town – know where’s good to go?”
I watched them as they stood around discussing this. After Romanov, they struck me as simply normal people, jumped up a bit. I was a bit bored by them.
None of them did know where to go in Marseilles, as it turned out. Nor did I, when they asked me as a last resort. So we all went out through the guarded doors underneath the pavilion into the street and Arnold hailed a taxi. “Condweerie noo a yune bong plass a monjay,” he told the driver as we all piled in. I think he meant, Take us to a good place to eat, but it sounded like Zulu with a German accent.
The driver seemed to understand though. He drove off downhill towards the sea with a tremendous rattle. Even allowing for the way the streets were cobbled and how old that taxi was, I think the way its engine worked was quite different from the cars I was used to. It was ten times louder.
But it got us there. Before long, it stopped with a wild shriek and the driver said, “Voila, messieurs. A whole street of eateries for your honours.” Clearly, he had us spotted as English – or, considering Arnold and perhaps Chick too, not French anyway. The place he’d brought us to was a row of little cafés, and they all had big hand-done notices in their windows. SCARMBLED EGG, one said, and SNALES was another. LEG OF FROG WITH CHEEPS and STAKE OR OLDAY BREKFA said others.
We all cracked up. It had been a long day and it felt good to be able to scream with laughter. “I am not,” howled Dave, staggering about on the cobbles and wiping tears off his face, “repeat not, going to eat cheeping frog legs!”
“Let’s go for the scarmbled egg,” laughed Chick. “I want to know what they do to it.”
So, in spite of Arnold 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 back yard 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 spelt 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,
