The Merlin Conspiracy. Diana Wynne Jones

came round in front of him. There didn’t seem any harm in him. I’d never seen anyone so drunk, not even my friends after they’d drunk all Dad’s whisky. He couldn’t have hurt anyone in that state. He had trouble just seeing me. He wavered about, holding the little flame out towards me, and blinked and peered. I’d been thinking this flame was some kind of outdoor candle, or a torch like Arnold and Co had used, but it wasn’t. It was a little curl of blue light standing on his hands, blazing away out of nothing.

      “I’m drunk,” he said to me. “Night as a tute. Can’t ever come this way unless I get drunk first. Too scared. Tell me, are you scared?”

      “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off that little flame. It was one of the most extraordinary things I’d ever seen. “Doesn’t that burn you?”

      “Not at all, notatall, notatall,” he shouted. He was too drunk to talk quietly. “Being of one substance with my flesh, you know, it can’t hurt. Litchwight, I mean witchlight, they call it. Not even hot, dear lad. Not even warm. So, well then, out with it, out with it!”

      “Out with what?” I said.

      “Whatever you need or want, of course. You have to meet three folk in need in this place and give them what help you can, before you can get where you’re going. You’re my third!” he shouted, waving his little flame backwards and forwards more or less under my nose, “so I’m naturally anxious to get you done and dealt with and get on. So out with it. What do you want?”

      I should have asked him how to find Romanov. I see that now. A lot of things would have been different if I had. But I was so amazed by that little blue flame that I leant backwards to get its light out of my eyes and pointed to it. “Can I do that? Can you show me how to do it?”

      He wavered forward from his rock, peering at me, and nearly fell down. “Amazing,” he said, hastily getting his back to the rock again. “Amazing. You’re here, but you can’t do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can’t. Why not?”

      “No one ever showed me how,” I said.

      He swayed about, looking solemn. “I quote,” he said. “I’m very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools? Know where that comes from?”

      “One of the Narnia books,” I said. “The one where Narnia begins. Can you show me how to make a light like that?”

      “Tell you,” he corrected me, looking even more solemn. “I can’t show you because it comes from inside yourself, see. What you do is find your centre – can you do that?”

      “My navel, you mean?” I said.

      “No, no!” he howled. “You’re not a woman! Or are you? Confess I can’t see you too well, but your voice sounds like teenage male to me. Is that what you are?”

      “Yes,” I said.

      “And a plumb ignorant one too,” he grumbled. “Fancy not knowing – Well, your centre is here!”

      He plunged towards me and took me completely by surprise by jabbing me hard just under my breastbone. What with that, and the blast of alcohol that came with the jab, I went staggering backwards into the rocks on the other side of the path. He overbalanced. He snatched at my knees as he went down, missed, and ended in a heap by my feet. The blue light seemed to splash all over the ground. Then it climbed one of his arms and settled on his shiny wet shoulder.

      “Polar sexus,” he said sadly. “That’s where it is, polar sexus.”

      “Are you hurt?” I asked.

      He raised his soaking grey head. “There is,” he said, “a special angel appointed to watch over those under the inkerfluence of eight over the one. That, young man, is why I had to imbibe before coming here. It all hangs together. Now do you understand how to summon light?”

      “No,” I said frankly.

      “Don’t you even know where your solar plexus is?” he demanded.