“Yeah, you’re right,” said Vivien. “No one works entirely solo. I hadn’t really thought about it. Mum never talked that much, though. She was a very reserved person.”
“So say she found evidence of a child of an Ancient Sovereign, born at dawn on May Day, near Glastonbury,” said Susan. “She’d want to follow that up, wouldn’t she?”
“Absolutely. But what evidence?” asked Vivien. “What could have led her to learn about your existence, Susan, and who your mother was?”
Susan couldn’t answer.
“If we can find out exactly who Susan’s father is, that might tell us,” replied Merlin. “And then we might also be able to work out who in the crime world—or from the Old World but who is working with criminals—wants Susan out of the picture.”
“Out of the picture?” asked Susan.
“I didn’t want to say dead,” said Merlin, with a bright smile. “Besides, I don’t think whoever it is does want you dead, or they’d have shot you from a distance or something like that. Those two thugs, the van, that was an attempted kidnapping. And the goblins . . . maybe that was to put you on ice, or it might have been a temporary prison, before they handed you on.”
“What about the Raud Alfar you say was shooting at me? That was to kill.”
“That’s separate, but it makes sense. The Raud Alfar are fiercely independent. They would fear the child of an Ancient Sovereign—you might claim their allegiance and make them serve you. So the opportunity to kill you before you came into your powers—and that’s another interesting question, the nature and extent of whatever your potential powers are—would be welcome to them.”
“So the Raud Alfar of Highgate Wood must know who you are, and thus who your father is,” said Vivien thoughtfully. “I wonder how?”
“You could go ask them,” suggested Merlin.
“I value my life too much, brother,” said Vivien. “You know Midsummer Eve is the only day we’d not be met by arrows, and that’s too far away.”
“So we’re back where we were before,” said Susan. “We need to find out who my father is. The only thing that’s changed is that now you might have to kill me once we do.”
As she spoke, she felt a realization crystallize in her head. She needed to not only find out who her father was, she needed to find him. Whether the booksellers wanted her to meet him or not.
“That’s about it,” said Merlin cheerfully. “Let’s go and have lunch and we can work out how to identify your father and not have to kill you. Oh, and I found this so you won’t even have to pay.”
He reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty-pound note with a flourish, waving it in front of Susan and Vivien.
“After you,” said Vivien. She leaned back to whisper to Susan. “Told you. He always has money squirreled away somewhere. Never pay for him. He’ll get used to it.”
“I heard you, dear sister,” caroled Merlin. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor but then immediately leaped back inside and slammed the door shut.
“What?” asked Vivien.
“I don’t know,” said Merlin woodenly. His left hand was inside his tie-dyed bag. “Something’s not right.”
Vivien approached the door, wrinkling her nose. Susan sniffed the air, too. There was a faint hint of something she couldn’t identify.
“Scent of laurel,” said Vivien sharply.
“Maybe someone’s keen on Aleppo soap,” suggested Merlin weakly.
“And a hint of amaranth,” added Vivien. “It’s not some vigorous over-soaper. Overlaying a faint but definite whiff of putrescent flesh.”
“But there aren’t any of them anymore. There hasn’t been for over three hundred years!” exclaimed Merlin. “And if there were, how would one get past the wards?”
“I don’t know,” said Vivien. “But the smell, that’s textbook. . . .”
“I should take a look,” said Merlin, but he didn’t open the door again. Instead, he took his hand out of his bag and reached between two Burberry trench coats on the closest clothes rack to draw out a sword, an old light cavalry saber with a curved gilt-bronze guard, sharkskin grip, and bronze lion head pommel. “You’d better call downstairs, Viv.”
Vivien nodded and looked around.
“Behind the PVC raincoat,” said Merlin.
Vivien shifted a rack aside and lifted a bright pink raincoat, revealing a telephone on a bedside table some distance from the bed. She lifted the handset and dialed “0,” the familiar click-click-click-click of the dial returning to its position somehow now strange and ominous to Susan.
“What is it?” she asked. Merlin had not seemed so apprehensive before, not even in the fog, with the Shuck stalking them. And Vivien was clearly rattled.
“From the scent, a Cauldron-Born,” said Merlin. “They smell of funerary flowers and death . . . and I felt a peculiar kind of wrongness, nothing I’ve ever sensed before.”
“Um, what is a Cauldron-Born?” asked Susan.
“Someone dead who’s been reanimated by sticking them in a magic cauldron,” said Merlin very matter-of-factly, clearly keeping a lid on his own reaction. “Incidentally causing them to be very, very hard to make dead again. They have to be hacked into little pieces, and the pieces burned. So guns aren’t much use. Oh, and they’re completely under the control of the master or mistress of the cauldron, in fact becoming a kind of puppet, an extension of the Cauldron-Keeper’s mind.”
“Uh . . . a magic cauldron?”
“Yes,” said Merlin. “You know, a giant pot. Big enough to stand up in. You saw one, in the painting on the door at the New Bookshop.”
“And they can make dead people alive again? Like zombies or something?”
“Considerably worse than the classical zombie of fiction,” said Merlin. “Because like I said, they are controlled by the Cauldron-Keeper. So they’re smart. And if the corpse is fresh enough when they go in, they don’t even look dead.”
Susan thought about this for a few seconds. “Have you got another sword?”
Behind Susan, Vivien was speaking urgently
