The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  “There was once a time when I might have bothered answering such questions.” He fixed Nate with a melancholy smile. “Perhaps I might even have deigned to ask a few of my own. But the truth of the matter…” He shook his head, scooped up the clay cup Nate swore had been empty a moment ago, and took a heavy swig of whatever was inside. “The truth of the matter is that it matters very little at this juncture what either of us have to say where tongue and mind are concerned.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He leaned forward with a predatory grin and a reek of strong booze and whispered conspiratorially, “I am so glad you asked.”

  The guy was mad. He had to be. He was speaking complete nonsense. But for some reason, Nate couldn’t bring himself to do the sensible thing and walk away as the ragged man set his clearly not empty cup down on the bleachers and continued.

  “Allow me to offer you a deal, Nathaniel Arturi. I will give you the answers you seek.” He huffed to himself, as if amused by the simplicity of his own words, then continued on. “I will tell you exactly what that creature was and what it was doing here last night. I will tell you who I am. I will even tell you who you are.”

  “You already said who I am,” Nate pointed out, more than a little creeped that this guy knew his name. Then again, if the inexplicably working phone in his pocket was any indication, the old man might know even more than that. His eyes sure seemed to say so.

  Nate couldn’t imagine many people had ever received such a look of pitying condescension from a guy who looked like his last shower might have actually taken place right before he’d dressed up in costume to go see the cinematic debut of Fellowship of the Ring almost twenty years ago.

  “What’s this deal you’re offering, then?” Nate asked, looking around the park just for an excuse to escape that stare. “What am I supposed to do for these magical answers?”

  “You must pass but one simple test.”

  Nate scanned the ragged man and their immediate surroundings more closely, trying to deduce what trick was at work here. Some part of his brain was sure that this was the part where he realized it’d all been parlor tricks up till now, and that this was merely another homeless dude looking for money. The rest was busy quietly digging up every bit of lore he’d ever heard about crossroad demons and fae tricksters.

  This was ridiculous.

  “What kind of test?” Nate asked anyway.

  The ragged man tilted his head back and forth, swirling the contents of his clay cup in deliberation. “A measure of character, really. Conducted remotely, by my associate. You need only acquiesce for us to begin.”

  And that was Nate’s cue. He wasn’t sure where this was going, but he had a strong feeling the next step was a call-center associate named “Steve” asking for his social security number or some such on the other end of the line.

  “Okay,” Nate said, standing in preparation to descend the bleachers, and snapping for Copernicus to follow. “Well, this has been weird. Good luck scamming the next guy.”

  “And good luck to you, Nathaniel Arturi, in surviving the troglodan invasion, and all that follows.”

  Nate paused, hating that he couldn’t not pause at that. Hating that some part of him—the part that knew he’d nearly been crushed not twenty yards from here last night by a beast whose existence he couldn’t explain—actually wanted to bite at this madness.

  He stared at that spot on the baseball field.

  “Troglodan?” He finally asked, glancing back at the ragged man. “Seriously? You expect me to believe that thing was, what? The vanguard of some alien ogre invasion or something?”

  “Expect?” The ragged man frowned and stroked his beard, looking genuinely stymied. “In the future, I believe it would behoove you to improve your skill at asking sensible questions, Nathaniel. What I expect has as little effect on the truth as what you believe. And the truth is that the troglodan armada is coming for Earth. Likely mere weeks away at this point. They won’t be the last ones, either. Not by a long shot.”

  For several seconds, all Nate could do was stare, wondering who the hell this guy was and, if by some galactically screwed chance even a single word of this was true, why the crazy old bastard had thought to tell him, of all people.

  Because the guy is bat shit insane, came his brain’s exasperated answer. Obviously.

  And also because Nate was probably the only kid in town who’d been stupid enough to even listen to the guy’s mad rambling this long. Obviously.

  “Look,” he said, backing down the bleachers, “I don’t know what you want from me, but—”

  “Did I not make that bit clear?” The ragged man frowned down at his drink in confusion, then back at Nate. “My mistake. We have a vacancy of sorts, you see, and my associate believes you might be worthy of filling it.”

  “You have…”

  Nate stared in disbelief.

  A job?

  Homeless Gandalf was offering him a job… to help stop the alien invasion?

  He’d lost his mind. Maybe it had been drugs, or a psychotic break from sheer public embarrassment. Maybe it had been a goddamn brain bleed from the head trauma, or just a freak accident stroke. But clearly, somewhere along the way, Nate had lost his freaking mind.

  “Nathaniel,” the ragged man called as Nate turned to retreat.

  “No!” Nate rounded on the crazy bastard, surprised by his own animosity, but hardly caring in that moment. “I don’t know who you are or how you found out my name, but you stay the hell away from me. If I see you again, I’m calling the police.”

  “Nathaniel, there’s really no point in…”

  But Nate was already hopping from the bleachers and turning to jog off, only slowing enough to confirm that Copernicus was with him.

  “Oh nine hells, don’t you start too,” the man growled from the bleachers.

  Nate didn’t engage. Just ran a little faster.

  “I asked him your bloody questions. If you care so much why don’t you…”

  Only when the growling voice had faded from clear hearing did Nate slow to a hasty walk and glance back over his shoulder. The ragged man was evidently arguing with someone who clearly wasn’t there, waving his hands animatedly. Nate felt a pang of pity for the crazy bastard. But he had his own problems to—

  “Hey!”

  Nate whipped around at the familiar voice, stomach sinking, and found its owner glaring at him from the sidewalk across the street.

  “Hey!” Emily Atherton shouted again, jabbing a finger his way. “Is that my dog, you creep?!”

  Shit.

  Nate raised a hand and gave Emily a stiff wave, his mind racing with bad excuses. Did she know he’d been there last night? He doubted she would’ve seen them in the dark yard if she’d looked out during the pummeling, but would Todd have told her afterward?

  He had no idea. All he knew was that she looked properly righteous and pissed over there, cocking her hips and spreading her hands in a clear demand for immediate and gratuitous clarification.

  Nate gestured toward the corner of Atherton and Hamilton and pointedly headed that way to meet her, avoiding direct eye contact and desperately rifling his brain for some explanation. With a look of incredulous indignity that burned so bright it probably would’ve been visible from orbit, Emily slid out of her power stance and broke into a murder march, headed for the corner—and, by the looks of it, for Nate’s life blood too.

  Think. Think.

  Nate glanced back and forth along the street, barely registering the cars speeding by in both directions, head and heart both racing so frantically that he might’ve forgotten all about the insanity of the ragged man—had the crazy robed bastard not chosen that moment to materialize from the bushes behind Emily and flick his wrist at the murder-marching brunette.

  What happened next, Nate couldn’t rightly say. Maybe the heel of Emily’s svelte gray boots just so happened to break by random chance, but there was something unnatural about that snapping heel.
Something unnatural, too, about the way she lurched haphazardly off the sidewalk, as if nudged from a distance.

  Straight into the busy street.

  Nate’s mind went blank, but for the blaring of the horns and the look of pure shock gripping Emily’s perfectly made-up face.

  He sprang forward before he had time to think.

  Horns droning in on either side. Emily’s broken boot twisting under her weight as she tried to catch her balance, knee buckling in kind. Sheer terror in her eyes.

  Nate ran faster, lunging for her, screeching brakes tearing at the edges of his awareness. Her wide eyes too far away. The air shimmering between them. He flew toward her, some corner of his mind screaming that something was terribly wrong—even beyond the cars coming to crush them both to paste. He reached out—

  And watched in disbelief as the space between them ruptured, imploding in on itself in a way that laughingly defied his brain’s feeble attempt at understanding. For the briefest instant, Nate flew on toward the rift between him and Emily, powerless to stop at this point, distantly aware of the headlights rushing in from the right, a mere moment from hitting them both.

  Then the rift engulfed him, space itself seeming to dilate even as it swallowed him into its internally curling infinity. The world melted around him, running off like so much hot wax until he found himself alone, drifting and bodiless in an endless sea of darkness.

  10

  Across the Universe

  Wherever he was—and whatever had happened to his body—the first notable thought that passed through Nate’s mind was that he was even still capable of thought at all. That seemed promising, even if he was stuck on the one rather useless thought, echoing through his mind and the bodiless darkness, ad infinitum.

  What the actual fuck.

  It was a stupid phrase—the sort that he and his roommates would’ve normally scoffed at as lazy and self-satisfied. Just a bad use of language in general, really. But if ever in the history of human existence there had been a justified use, Nate was pretty sure he’d just found it.

  Of course, maybe that was just what everyone thought when they died.

  Because that was the most likely explanation for what this was, right? One moment, he’s lunging to save Emily Atherton from an oncoming car, the next he’s drifting in endless darkness? It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.

  Except he was missing another two, wasn’t he? There’d been the ragged wizard who’d pushed Emily—or had he pushed her?—and the bizarre distortion that had ruptured the space between them just as Nate lunged in to save her.

  Had he imagined that part too?

  His current predicament said no, and that no promptly graduated to a hearty hell no when the darkness around him began to flicker to life with first a few dozen, then a few thousand tiny winks of light.

  Stars?

  Hello, Nathaniel.

  What the hell?

  Do not be afraid. I do not intend you any harm.

  The voice was tranquil, yet something about it made Nate feel small and afraid. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, and yet also from nowhere at all—like he’d simply thought the words out of thin air.

  “Who’s there?” Nate whispered, too startled to give much thought to the fact that he could whisper at all without any apparent body or mouth.

  Who I am matters little to you here and now. What matters is what I bring you, Nathaniel. But, if it should ease your mind for the duration of this conversation, I am the one called the Lady.

  The voice seemed to take direction at the end, shedding that odd everywhere-and-nowhere ambiance and forming up behind Nate—if there could be a “behind” for someone without a body. When he thought about turning to face the voice, though, he suddenly found some ghostly form to his presence. Not quite his body, but a wispy imitation.

  Odd as it was, he accepted it for the moment, far more concerned about who and what was behind him. He turned, and there she was.

  Whatever she was.

  At first glance, she passed for an ethereally beautiful woman in a flowing white gown. But there was something off about her. Something uncanny. Like what he was seeing was only a thin veneer laid over a vast and impossibly complex power. Her beauty was preternatural. Her hair shining with the barely contained radiance of a thousand stars. Her dress fluttering with a subtle yet magnetic sweep that whispered of passing eons and the birth and death of galaxies.

  Earlier, speaking to the ragged man, Nate’s thoughts had turned to crossroad demons and other impossible things. Now, though, he found them dragging up a fabled entity of an entirely different caliber.

  A celestial being.

  Was this… Could it be…?

  “Am I dead?” Nate asked.

  The Lady favored him with a benevolent smile that made him want to fall to his incorporeal knees and weep for its beauty. “Not yet, Nathaniel.”

  “But Emily… Those cars…”

  “In a manner of speaking, your physical body does remain in peril back on Earth. Rest assured, though, that I will not allow anything to happen to you while we speak. Should you pass the test, you will be returned home safe and sound, better than ever.”

  “The test?” Nate gaped, some of his awe receding as the pieces fell into place, brick-by-incredulous-brick. “This is… You’re that crazy bastard’s…”

  What? Associate? Could any man so casually call such an illustrious being an associate?

  “Yes,” the Lady said, with a knowing smile. “But please, do not allow my associate’s demeanor to spoil your appetite for our enterprise here.”

  Demeanor?! Nate wanted to ask. But that was hardly the most pressing concern here. He opened his mouth, thinking to ask what they wanted from him, and instead ended up wordlessly gaping as the starry expanse brightened around them, clarifying into breathtaking color and depth as if the Lady had magically removed the shades he hadn’t realized he’d been wearing.

  It wasn’t just stars he saw, but the entire cosmos. The swirling, radiant spires of entire galaxies, painted milky hues of yellows and oranges, greens and blues. The kiss of starlight on untold lightyears of space dust, breathing life into an interstellar canvas of violets and pinks that would’ve defied any attempt to contain its magnificence with words, or even with thoughts.

  It was incomprehensible.

  “All will become clear in good time, Nathaniel,” said the Lady, reaching out one slender, perfect hand to him. “But for now, we should not tarry. Come. Allow me to show you why you are here.”

  Nate wasn’t sure why he glanced back, or even how he did—or how he and this Lady could hear one another in space at all, for that matter. Such details kind of felt insignificant. Especially when he finished turning, and saw the rift that’d swallowed him whole hovering right there behind him—an impossible, wriggling portal, juxtaposed against the grand expanse of space. A clear path straight back to Atherton Street, where two screeching cars and the shocked eyes of Emily Atherton were all frozen in time.

  The Lady didn’t speak as Nate looked, nor did she have to. Words couldn’t have made it any clearer. He understood on a deep, intuitive level that he was being offered one last chance to turn back—the so-called “choice” the Lady’s mad associate had apparently forgotten to offer.

  But it hardly mattered now anyway.

  Not when the Lady’s fingertips brushed against Nate’s cheek like a kiss of sunshine and spring breeze. Not when he turned back to her and found her reaching for his hands, watching his eyes for permission.

  He couldn’t speak.

  Then her hands closed around his, and they moved.

  The word seemed inadequate, but Nate wasn’t sure how else to describe it. One moment they were floating above the sprawling cosmos, drinking in the never-ending beauty, and the next, the Lady took a single step forward, and they were simply elsewhere, and Nate’s head was spinning with the feeling that they’d somehow just jumped light years in a single step.

  He coul
dn’t have said where they were. Only that they were in a cavernous room unlike anything he’d ever seen, and that it appeared to be housed underwater. The architecture was like a strange and beautiful collision between an old, vaunted cathedral and the Emperor’s throne room from the second Death Star.

  That was all Nate had time to process before the Lady took another step, and they moved again.

  With a flash, he was standing on a mesh metal deck, staring at a pair of… he didn’t know what. They were aliens. Of that, he had no doubt. One was tall and slender and decidedly feminine in her copper armor, with smooth green skin and waving tendrils that looked something like hair. The other, he realized with a surge of panic, looked like a bigger, stronger version of the ogre that’d attacked him in the park last night, encased in fearsome blood red armor.

  Nate stumbled backward, trying to run, but the Lady held firmly to his hand, and Nate went nowhere. He watched in terror as the smaller one’s hair tendrils came to life like a hundred emerald serpents, cocking Nate’s way as if they could hear his ragged gasps. Then the tall green alien turned to look their way, cruel, dark eyes narrowed.

  “I’m sorry!” Nate cried reflexively, throwing his free hand up in surrender.

  But the Lady was already stepping forward, pulling him effortlessly along, and with another flash, they were drifting back in space, and Nate was staring at the fiery radiance of a nebula, trying to wrap his head around what was happening.

  “You need not fear for your safety here,” the Lady said in her tranquil tone, apparently unperturbed by the violent intent of aliens or the effort of phasing them across the universe, step by step.

  They flashed on, untold stars and planets rushing by faster than Nate could register starts and stops. Impossibly fast. And yet on they flew, like Nate had tripped on all of the acid in the world, and now he was on his way to meet the Maker himself.

  “You are not alone in this universe, Nathaniel,” the Lady said as the universe flowed by. “In fact, contrary to what so many of your kind choose to believe, the humans of Earth are actually some of the most primitive of the known sentient species of your galaxy.”