"All right, Merlin," I said. "Show yourself." A pentacle flared into life on the floor, right in front of the screaming wicker face, forming line by line, glowing with the blue-white glare you sometimes see in lightning strikes over graveyards. There was a growing tension on the air, as that old enchanter Merlin, Architect of Camelot, the Devil's only begotten Son, Merlin Satanspawn himself, rose unhurriedly up through the pentacle to stand before me, with his familiar cold and arrogant smile. Merlin had been dead for centuries, his body buried in the cellars under the bar not long after the fall of Logres; but being dead didn't necessarily stop you from being a major player in the Nightside. Merlin was dead, but very definitely not departed.

An awful lot of what Alex had said on the phone made sense now. All the changes in the bar were artifacts of Merlin's time, and the man himself could only manifest by possessing, or rather pushing aside, Alex Morrisey, latest in a very long line of owner/bartenders bound to Strangefellows by a geas almost as old as the bar itself. Merlin rarely appeared in person these days, to everyone's relief, and when he did, it meant bad news for everyone.

Merlin ran one hand caressingly over the screaming wicker face, perhaps savouring old memories, then he turned the full force of his attention on me. He was tall and wiry and utterly naked, his corpse-pale skin decorated from throat to toe with unpleasant Celtic and Druidic tattoos. Beneath the curling signs of power, his dead flesh was blotchy and discoloured with rot and the various stages of decay. Even Merlin's awful will couldn't fully hold back the ravages of Time. His long grey hair fell down past his bony shoulders in thick convoluted knots, packed and stuffed with clay. His heavy brow supported a crown of mistletoe, unhealthily green and red with poisonous berries. His face was long and heavy-boned, ugly with character, and two flickering fires burned in his empty eye-sockets. (They say he has his father's eyes.) And in the middle of his chest the old, old wound that had never healed, still showing broken bone and ruptured muscle, where the heart had been torn right out of him.

Merlin Satanspawn, perhaps the most powerful sorcerer of all time, still continuing through his own implacable will. Old and bad and dangerous to know.

"We're seeing far too much of each other," I said. "People will start to talk."

"Insolent as ever, John Taylor," said Merlin, in a voice like grinding iron, thick with an accent no-one had used in over fifteen hundred years.

"You made Alex call me, before you took him over."

"Of course. It was necessary that you come here. There are things that must be said, words that must be spoken. You have set a thing in motion, and even I cannot See where it will lead."

My first impulse on hearing that was to turn and run like hell. When Merlin started plotting, even the other Powers and Dominations remembered urgent appointments elsewhere. But I couldn't abandon Alex, and I was curious as to what Merlin had to say. Besides, I was pretty sure that even if I did leg it, Merlin would just drag me back again.