that only the elf's feet hung over the edge. Sam sauntered over to join him. When he reached the stone, he crouched.
'What do you make of this?'
'A popular place to look at the scenery?'
'No, these symbols. There's something carved along the side of the stone.'
Dodger rolled over onto his side and ran his fingers along the carving. 'Hmmm. Writing. Most of the letter forms seem to be roman, but the frequencies and juxtapositions are not English. 'Tis not a language I know.'
Sam stared at the words, if they were words. Most of the letters were familiar, but they were not ordered into words he knew. Silently, he tried sounding out the syllables he knew. There seemed to be a rhythm to the sounds, an interlocking cadence. Like the locking spell Sally had taught him.
'Didn't you once tell me that all mansions had secret passages?'
Dodger chuckled. 'You don't think that this is some kind of hidden entrance to an underground tunnel complex where Glover and his fellows plot the overthrow of all who stand in the way of their re-establishment of the British Empire? Speak the incantation and the stone shall rise?'
'Since you put it that way, why not?'
'Because this is not some cheap piece of fiction.' 'But there does seem to be a crack. Like the top of the stone is a lid.'
Dodger slid from the stone and examined the shadow
Sam pointed out. 'Mayhap.'
'Give me a hand to lift it.' Lifting didn't work. Nor did sliding, pushing, pulling, or twisting. Sam knelt in front of the stone, frowning at it. Dodger sat on the grass, leaning back on his hands.
'A trick of the light. A crack in the rock.'
'I'm going to try something,' Sam said. He stared at the symbols, clearing his mind of his frustration. He focused his magical energy, using the rhythmic mnemonic by which he., recalled the counter to Sally's locking spell. Into its steady but broadening cadence, he wove the rhythm he had discerned in the carved symbols. Nothing happened. He tried again, working at smoothing the flow of his thoughts, forcing them deeper into the pattern of the spell. This time he felt something in the stone relax.
Tentatively, he reached out his hand and pressed on the top of the stone. The upper surface slid back slightly, revealing a dark hollow wide enough for fingers. Sam stood and slipped his fingers into the gap. He braced himself, ready for the weight, and found the stone swinging up far more easily than he expected.
Visions of concealed stairways and torch-lit underground passages flashed through his head. With a final heave, he swung the slab back. It rocked up, but instead of sliding free, stayed upright as if hinged to the back of the bench. He looked; it was.
The bench contained no entrance to secret places. It seemed filled with carefully folded white cloth. Sam tugged on one pile. It unfolded to reveal that it was a robe. Complex swirls were embroidered on its chest. 'Tacky rags,' Dodger said. He was standing too, looking over Sam's shoulder. 'Wizard stuff.'
' 'Tis hardly a surprise. We saw what he did to that
Mihn-Pao gunner.'
'I've seen these symbols somewhere.'
'Mayhaps Friend Glover is Merlin Ambrosius reawakened to save the world.'
'Merlin?' Sam asked thoughtfully.
'Sir Twist, I jested.'
'But you jogged my memory. When I was studying about magic, I read some about the different kinds. A lot of sources suggest that Merlin, if he existed, was a druid. These are druidic symbols.'
Dodger poked at the bundles of cloth still in the bench. He disturbed the piles enough to reveal a golden glitter. Careful not to snag the cloth, he removed a small sickle. Its blade glittered a ruddy gold in the sunlight.
'A sacrificial knife?'
'A ritual implement for the cutting of the holy mistletoe. Druids are nature magicians, shamans of a peculiar breed. They were very prominent in the restoration of the wild lands in Ireland before the Shidhe took control.'
'Driven out like the snakes before Padraigh's wrath.' Dodger tossed the sickle back into the bench. 'There are enough robes here to clothe a dozen or so people. 'Twould seem Friend Glover is part of a circle of druids. Mayhap he acts in their interests and, if so, he might even be a government agent.'
'How so?'
'Know you not that the Lord Protector is a druid?'
'I didn't.'
' 'Tis true. His Green Party is a coalition of members of both Houses of Parliament.'
'I didn't realize the Greens were druids. I remember hearing how they ousted the last Conservative government after the restoration of the monarchy.'
'They were instrumental in the restoration and have yet to face a serious challenge to their control of the government. England has not seen such a powerful interest group since Cromwell's Puritans.'
'Well, I hope that the druids are more open-minded than the Puritans. With the power they have in this country, they'd better be,' Sam said. 'Everything I read about druids makes them out to be benevolent sorts. Of old, they were lore keepers and law speakers, prominent and worthy members of the community. In modern Britain, they are active in the recognition and training of magically active persons as well as taking a prominent role in higher education.'
Dodger prodded at the robes. ' 'Twould not be wise to expect more tolerance than the Puritans offered. Was not druidism a sort of a religion and druids its priests?'
'Before the Awakening, maybe so. The cults subscribing to druidism built their belief systems on idiosyncratic reconstructions of old Celtic paganism. They had more than their share of egotistical false prophets. Nobody really knows exactly how the old druids operated, since they kept no written records.
'The druids of the Sixth World are the inheritors of that tradition, but I'm not sure that any of them are direct descendents. When the magic came back, some magicians built their focus parameters around what they believed to be druidic tenets and rituals. Their totems were things like Sun, Oak, Zephyr, Stream, and Stag. Forest and growing land stuff. Naturally, they called themselves druids. Maybe it's their mindset or maybe it's the way the magic works, but mostly they have confined their activities to Europe. Although they were quite active in the restoration of the land in the isles and on the continent, they weren't aggressive like the tribal magicians in North America. I hadn't known they were so involved in British politics.
'England has been prospering under the Greens. If Glover is a druid, we're probably being paranoid about his motives; the delay may be nothing sinister at all. He may just be waiting for the right phase of the moon or something to undertake the next part of his operation. Druids worry a lot about astrological cycles.'
Dodger rubbed his fingers together, switching his gaze from them to the contents of the bench. He said thoughtfully, 'Let us hope that he is not a fanatic about this stuff.''
Glover was uncomfortable in the closeness of the room, finding the scent of the many bouquets oppressive. Some of the flowers were wilted, some fresh cut. The mixture of floral perfume and organic decay was an olfactory confusion. How did Hyde-White stand it? Or was the old man no longer able to smell the blossoms with which he surrounded himself?
Hyde-White sat enthroned behind an ancient oak desk whose top was eccentric, the shape of a crosscut bole. His massive gut was wedged into a concavity that allowed him easy reach of the telecom on one hand and the bank of internal intercoms on the other. The grey light of the telecom monitor, the brightest source of illumination in the room, lit his face from below, reversing the normal pattern of highlights. The lighting roughened the softness of the broad face and made his eyes a glitter in pools of darkness.
Glover felt sweat snake out from his armpits to trickle down his sides despite the room's lack of heat. He didn't have Hyde-White's insulation of bulk, but his fear of the old man's disapproval warmed him uncomfortably. He felt the temperature rise as the dark eyes across the desk left the telecom screen and focused on him. It was as bad as it had been at university when the old man had been his teacher.
'So you called upon the guardian I set over you.'
