"Do you really get cheated that often, or are you people just paranoid by nature?" I couldn't resist asking.

"It happens often enough that it's wise to take measures."

"So, even though you have this no harm decree, magical people like to see what they can get away with?"

He pointed a finger at me like he was firing a gun. "Bingo. Otherwise, what's the fun of having this kind of power?"

I had to admit that he had a point. If I were magical, what would I try to do? I might be tempted to adjust the expiration date on a grocery coupon or tinker with the bank's computers so my rent check wouldn't clear as quickly. There were times when I'd wished I could turn someone into a frog—like Mimi—or give the snooty popular girls a bad acne attack, but that probably fell into the category of doing harm. I winced at the thought. Did it make me a bad person that one of the few things I could think of using magic to do involved hurting someone else? Maybe it wouldn't count if it was just a practical joke, something that wasn't real, such as an illusion that would wear off in a few hours.

Otherwise, there wasn't much I could think of. I might get away with something, but my own conscience wouldn't let me rest. I'd probably even run back to the grocery store to pay them the thirty cents I'd had taken off with the expired coupon so I could sleep at night. Unfortunately, I knew there were far too many normal people always out to see if they could beat the system. Why should it be that different for people who could do magic? The degree of paranoia certainly wasn't a good sign.

I've found that the most paranoid people are that way because they know what they'd do to others, given the chance.

It was lunchtime when we made it back to the office. I got my lunch out of the refrigerator and ate while reading, making sure not to get crumbs on Owen's books.

The Camelot story was fascinating. I'd seen many versions of King Arthur's story, but this was different. It was history rather than fable, supposedly, and instead of focusing on the feats of Arthur and his knights, it focused on the activities of Merlin, the king's magician.

While Arthur was forming his round table, Merlin was forming his own society, an organization of magicians dedicated to advancing and policing their craft. A footnote said this was the beginning of what was now known as the corporation Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc. That was cool. To think, I was working at a company founded by Merlin himself.

With that revelation, I decided to put the history of magic on hold and read the company history Owen had sent. It picked up the story from Merlin's time, telling how once the organization was established, he had gone into a deep sleep in a cave of crystal as a form of retirement. He was to be awakened when Arthur returned to lead a victorious Britain, or when the organization he founded had dire need of him.

That triggered a memory in my brain. They'd talked about the big boss coming out of retirement because the company needed him. But that couldn't be the same thing, could it? I switched over to the magical biography book and looked up Merlin. The book gave many forms of his name. The Welsh form was Myrddyn Emrys, which meant Emrys from Myrddyn. And that translated into modern English as Ambrose Mervyn. The name "Merlin" seemed to have something to do either with Latin or a mistranscription of the Welsh.

"Holy cow," I whispered to myself. It couldn't be. He'd have to be more than a thousand years old, but I supposed it was possible that he didn't age while he was in that cave. I remembered bits and pieces of conversations, his stating what his name was in modem English, as if that meant something, talking about the New World, adjusting to the bustle of the city.

If Mr. Mervyn really was Merlin, it was a miracle he was coping as well as he was. I couldn't imagine the difference between Britain in the Dark Ages and New York City today. Had they at least let him wake up in England before bringing him here, or had he awakened in the middle of Manhattan and found himself suddenly at the helm of a multinational corporation that bore little resemblance to the organization he'd founded?

It was a measure of how my last couple of weeks had gone that I was more concerned with how he must be coping than I was startled by the revelation that I was working for the real Merlin.

I read the rest of his biography. The last paragraph said, "Merlin was recently brought out of his cave to steer the company he founded through a challenging situation that threatens the very fabric of the magical community." That sounded ominous, and far worse than dealing with a bad economy. You brought your founder and CEO out of retirement from his cottage in the Cotswolds or his cabin in Vermont for a bad economy or a corporate scandal. What would be so desperate that you'd revive an ancient and legendary enchanter from more than a millennium of magical slumber and bring him across an ocean to a world that must be as foreign to him as another planet? Whatever it was had to be bad, and that could be the reason they were so paranoid and so badly in need of verifiers like me.