The Old Magic (12 page)

Merlin scrambled out of the boat and hurried after Frik.

“Your Majesty,” Frik began, as soon as Merlin reached the top of the stairs, “may I present …”

But Mab was too impatient to wait upon protocol. “Merlin, Merlin,” she whispered lovingly. “You’ve come at last. Do you know
who I am?”

“Queen Mab,” Merlin said uneasily.

He was not certain what he’d expected the Queen of the Old Ways to be like, but he found Mab oddly disturbing in a fashion
he could not put a name to. He knew so little about her—it was only hours since Ambrosia had told him that Mab had created
him, and he was still reeling from the knowledge. He wasn’t even sure what the Old Ways were—he knew that they were important,
and involved magic, but beyond that he was ignorant. Deliberately
kept
ignorant, he suddenly realized. Ambrosia and Herne and even Blaise had certainly known about them, but they’d always steered
the conversation away from any discussion of them … or of Mab.

Why?

Mab held out her hands to him. “Yes-s-s …” she hissed. “I’ve waited so long. You’ve grown handsome and true. I did well when
I created you.”

Urged on by Frik and Mab, Merlin stepped forward. Though the words were fond, the way she said them only increased Merlin’s
discomfort. She made him sound like a basket or a pot of jam, just an object instead of a person.

Mab spread her arms wide and shouted to the thousands of invisible watchers that filled the air. “This is Merlin who comes
to save us! He is the great leader who will bring the people back to the Old Ways!”

Her words echoed unnaturally through the cavern. Instead of dwindling away, the echoes got louder and louder, until it was
as if a thousand voices shouted his name at once:
Merlin—Merlin—Merlin—

Come to save us—save us—save us …

Merlin gazed around himself and felt a sudden flash of blind panic. If he knew nothing about Mab, he knew even less about
the Old Ways—how could he save them?
I can’t save them—I can’t be what she wants me to be!

“But come,” Mab said, putting a long be-ringed hand on his arm. It is time to begin your training.”

Merlin followed Mab through dozens of rooms, each stranger and more colorful than the last. The strange sights he saw ought
to have frightened Merlin, and a day or so ago they would have, but he’d seen too much since then. Now the oddities he saw
only excited and interested him.

It seemed as if they walked for hours through the splendor of Mab’s palace before Mab stopped at a door. The door had a face
carved into the center of it, eyes closed and mouth hanging open as if it were asleep.

“Well?” Mab demanded.

To Merlin’s astonishment the eyes of the carven figure popped open and the mouth smiled ingratiatingly.

“Yes, Madame. At once, Madame,” the door said, and swung inward.

Inside was a room that, after all the wonders Merlin had seen, looked almost normal. It had a large fireplace on the left
side, with a cheerful fire burning in the grate, and beside the fire, an enormous carven chair, with a large red velvet cushion
on its seat. The entire chair was carved and gilded into the shape of lions and dragons and snakes, and the name
mab
was carved into the large gold crown at the top of the back. The room was filled with shelves full of enormous old books
that overflowed onto the tables. Books were even stacked in piles on the floor. The room looked as if it were dusty and disused,
but instead of dust, the corners of the room were heaped with drifts of crystals, each sparkling nugget larger than a lump
of coal.

Merlin forgot his momentary panic in his curiosity with all the new things to look at. As Mab did not stop him, Merlin began
to wander about the room, inspecting things which caught his fancy.

There was a great crystal ball, clear as water. Inside it there was a city of golden towers. As Merlin peered closer at it,
he could see people moving on the streets, birds flying about the towers, and the bells inside the towers moving back and
forth silently as they tolled.

Next to it was a cap with long earflaps woven of golden mesh with a band of diamonds and rubies around the bottom edge. There
were words engraved on the inside, and Merlin felt the magic tingle over his fingers as he touched it. He drew his hand back
in surprise, and then turned away from it as his attention was caught by a movement in a cage hanging from the ceiling. When
he looked closely, he saw that the cage did not contain a bird, but a tiny white winged horse.

On the table beneath the cage there was a wide jewelled belt, so small it must have been made for a gnome, and a strange long
skull with a single spiral horn jutting from its brow. Next to that was a large box carved of green stone and covered with
golden letters in a language Merlin could not read. On the shelf beyond the table was a crystal dome covering a single perfect
blue rose, and next to it a pair of tiny slippers barely as long as his hand, completely studded with glittering rubies.

He picked up one of the crystals that shared the shelving with the books. It was as large as his fist, a deep ruddy golden
color. When he touched it, he could almost feel the power resonating into him, a tingling warmth through his arms and body.

He glanced up and saw Mab smiling at him. She’d seated herself in the enormous carven chair—almost a throne—before the fire
and was gazing over the room as if she owned everything in it.

Still carrying the crystal, Merlin walked back to her, stopping a respectful distance away.

“Why am I here?” he asked hesitantly.

“To learn,” Mab crooned. “I’ll teach you to become the most powerful wizard the world has ever known.”

“Why?” Merlin asked.

His dreams of the future had never involved magic. If anything, he had wanted to be a knight, a hero, doing great deeds and
righting wrongs through the power of his sword. But those had been daydreams, nothing more. He’d never expected to achieve
them. And now Mab was offering him something that was both greater than and profoundly different from those half-formed imaginings.
He gazed at her, fascinated, delighted, and wary, all at the same time.

Mab smiled at him proprietorially. “To lead mortals back to us … to the Old Ways.”

This was the second time Mab had spoken of his becoming the champion of the Land of Magic, and Merlin wasn’t sure that either
King Vortigern or his Aunt Ambrosia would approve of the plan. There couldn’t be two kings in Britain—Merlin knew that very
well—and Aunt Ambrosia said you had to live in the realities of the present, not the glories of the past.

“What if I don’t want to be a wizard?” Merlin said warily.

“It’s your destiny,” Mab said unequivocally. “Remember that branch and how you made it grow?”

The memory was so vivid that for a moment Merlin was back at the sinkhole, the smell of wet earth strong in his nostrils as
he frantically tried to reach Nimue.

Nimue.

He’d promised he’d come to visit her tomorrow. In the excitement of discovering the truth about his heritage and travelling
to the Land of Magic, he’d forgotten all about his promise. Remembering made him upset and relieved all at once. What if Nimue
had found out the truth about him—that he was the child of no mortal father? He couldn’t bear the thought of her looking at
him with loathing and disdain. Perhaps it was better if he never saw her again. He looked back at Mab.

“I don’t know how I did it,” he admitted.

She smiled as if he’d given her the answer she wanted. “That’s why you’re here—to learn. Oh, Merlin, you’ll soon know the
power that’s in you.”

She held up her left hand, and with amazement, Merlin saw his own arm rise to copy her gesture.

“And once it’s unleashed, you’ll hold this world in the hollow of your hand!”

Mab clenched her hand into a fist, and Merlin’s copied the gesture of its own volition, grinding the crystal he held within
his fist into glittering powder.

Merlin stared at his hand—not frightened, really, because no one he’d ever known had been unkind to him, but unsettled and
worried, the way the forest animals were before a storm. Mab’s gesture had seemed to have such anger in it, yet he wasn’t
quite sure who she was angry with. He brushed away the residue of the shattered crystal, but before he had the chance to analyze
his feelings further, Frik entered, grunting beneath the weight of another huge stack of books.

“Here we are,” said the gnome. “All set for our first lesson.” He’d changed his costume again. Now Frik was wearing a flat
black-tasselled cap and a long black robe. He carried a long bamboo cane. Unruly tufts of gingery hair protruded from beneath
the edge of the mortarboard, and he wore a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon the end of his nose.

Merlin moved toward him to help with the books, but before he reached Frik, the gnome had set the pile down on another table,
making a place for them amid the scrolls and other manuscripts. He reached up and pulled down a chart covered with strange
and cryptic symbols out of nowhere, and tapped it experimentally with his cane.

Merlin glanced from Frik to the chart to the pile of books, then gingerly opened the top volume. The page was covered with
very small print. It looked like a very long, very dull book.

“All the magic of the universe and all the spells you’ll ever need are in these books, Merlin,” Mab said, with a gesture that
encompassed the entire room.

“I’ll need a lifetime to read all these!” Merlin said, with a desperate look at the room’s contents.

“You’ll have a very long life,” Mab answered.

And I’ll be spending all of it here,
Merlin thought despondently. A thought occurred to him suddenly. “If I’m half-mortal, will I die?” His question was prompted
mainly by curiosity; at seventeen, the thought of his death was a remote and unreal thing.

“In the fullness of time.” Mab shook her head sadly, and when she spoke it was almost with reluctance. “We can’t change that.
But we can change form,” she offered, as though attempting to distract Merlin from a bitter truth.

She reached out a hand and grabbed the edge of Frik’s mortarboard cap. When she pulled it off, Merlin gasped as Frik’s whole
face came with it.

The face beneath was completely different: handsome and dissipated, yet faintly cruel. It was painted and rouged, and its
thick black hair was worn in tight curls that cascaded down over its shoulders. Stuck to the face at the corner of the mouth
was a small black patch in the shape of a star. The new face peeped slyly at Merlin and affected a look of haughty surprise,
conjuring a rose out of nowhere and holding the blossom to its nose as it smiled.

“But it is only an illusion—particularly in his case,” Mab said scornfully. She yanked at the top of Frik’s head, and the
new face came off just as the old one had, leaving Frik in his schoolmaster persona beneath. Merlin thought that Frik looked
a little disgruntled at being returned to his normal grotesque self.

“We can hurt,” Mab continued, “but we cannot use our magic to kill—though humans hardly need any help at that from us. Sometimes
we can see into the future—”

As before, Mab balanced a disadvantage with something she thought of as a reward. She waved her hand, and the wall of the
library seemed to recede swiftly into the distance. Now, sitting on a stool before the fire, was an ancient, white-haired
old man, stooped with age. He was older even than Blaise, his body twisted and gnarled until he almost resembled one of the
ancient oaks of Barnstable Forest.

“This is you as you will be,” Mab said.

“Me?” Merlin stammered, shocked. “Will I grow that old?”

“Have a care, young Merlin!” The ancient grey-beard before the fire roused himself and glared at the boy.

“I’m sorry, sir,” young Merlin said humbly.

His old self relented. “But you’re right. The years batter us as storms batter the trees of the forest, and sometimes we forget
what’s important. Try and always stay as young inside as you are now. And that’s another thing,” the ancient wizard said,
raising one gnarled finger for emphasis. “Don’t start giving advice,” he said in a confidential whisper. “It always ends badly.”

“What—” young Merlin began, but with a wave of her hand, Mab banished his older self. The fireplace shot forward into its
proper place and the room was normal once more.

“Will I be able to do that?” Merlin asked, enchanted. The thought of always knowing what the future held was a beguiling one.

“Perhaps,” Mab said evasively. “But you will have to develop your powers, and listen to all that Frik tells you.”

Mab gazed at him pointedly until Frik drew himself up to his full height and began to lecture in fussy, pedantic tones.

“Master Merlin, there are three classes of magic; three stages of progression to full wizard status. The first and lowest
stage is wizard by incantation, or Voice Wizard; those who do spells and invocations through the power of magic words.” Frik
struck a dramatic pose.
“Abra-cadabra dev and chort!”
he intoned, holding out his hand.

A silver goblet with a red rose in it appeared in his hand. Frik sniffed the flower appreciatively and then set the goblet
aside. With all the wonders he had seen thus far today, Merlin barely noticed.

“The second stage of wizardry is magic invoked through gestures of the hands and fingers: the Hand Wizard.”

Frik passed his left hand over the goblet, and the rose curled, withered, and crumbled to dust. Frik set the goblet aside.

“The third—and highest—stage of wizardry, whose exponents are the supreme embodiment of the mystic arts, are Thought Wizards,
who need no words or gestures but by their will alone pierce the heavens and draw back the veil.”

Mab gestured—Hand Wizardry, Merlin noted with pleasure at his own cleverness—and the goblet full of water leaped into the
air to dash its contents into Frik’s face. To Merlin’s delighted surprise, the water stopped, hanging motionlessly in midair.

“Of course,” Frik said smugly, “only the most supremely gifted personages become wizards of the third stage.” He preened.