The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  “Where?” he asked quietly, sweeping the room again, this time for anything that might be used as a weapon.

  YOU are supposed to be the weapon.

  “Yeah, this coming from the freaking Excalibur,” Nate muttered, scooting over on the bed to look out the dark windows. “Remind me again why—”

  He jerked and nearly dropped his phone when the thing buzzed in his hand.

  “Jesus,” he hissed at the device, as if it were all the phone’s fault.

  Hopeless.

  Nate ignored the Excalibur and woke the phone. It was a text from an unknown number, and a rather odd one at that.

  Unknown: “May I speak with you in the backyard?”

  Three guesses who that could be.

  Fool. You needn’t wager even a single guess.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s an—”

  An idiom. Ah, yes, I see that now.

  The impatience radiating from the Excalibur was clear enough, but if Nate hadn’t known better, he might’ve thought there was actually a hint of embarrassment there, too.

  If there is any embarrassment present, Nathaniel Arturi—

  “It’s me,” Nate sighed, climbing off the bed and reaching for his hoodie. “I know, man. I know. One day together and you’re already getting predictab—Agh!”

  His left leg buckled beneath him as he planted his foot and his ankle caught fire with a deep, throbbing pain. He caught onto his computer chair, hoping for balance, then hit the faux wood floor with a thud and curse when the traitorous furniture tipped on him.

  Would you rather I be UNpredictable, then?

  “What did you do?” Nate growled, reaching to pull up the leg of his jeans, as if seeing the pained region could somehow make it better, or at least help him make sense of what was happening. All he saw, though, were the same dark bruises that’d been there before, when he’d first made it to the safe isolation of his room to check. Ugly bruises, to be sure, but nothing compared to what he would’ve expected after getting run over. It was only the pain that had suddenly quadrupled, which didn’t seem to make a lick of sense, unless—

  Unless SOMEONE was managing the pain for you, and repairing the underlying tissue damage faster than your sad little body could shake a stick at.

  Nate stared down at the mottled mess, trying to process what the Excalibur was telling him.

  That was an idiom, by the way, his gruff companion added, right on the crest of a particularly vivid wave of pain.

  Nate grimaced, his mind’s eye replaying the scene of the blue Honda’s rear right tire crushing its thousand-pound way over his helpless ankle. He hadn’t been imagining it.

  Your leg would be shattered right now, had we allowed it, the Excalibur confirmed. Your hand, too.

  No wonder the driver had been so freaked out. He had hit something. And holy damn, was Nate noticing now.

  So would you like me to kiss it and make it all better? Or would you prefer to continue being confrontational?

  “Bite me, asshole,” Nate groaned, climbing back to his feet. The pain wasn’t that bad, if he just kept all the weight off of it. “You want a Knight…” he growled, pulling open the door…

  And stopping dead when he found Zach standing at the bathroom sink right across the hallway, frowning straight at him, as if he’d been listening through the door while he patted his hands dry.

  “Just talking to Copernicus,” Nate lied quickly.

  Copernicus trotted out of the room, corroborating with a little yip, and the two of them scooted off—or at least hobbled off—before Zach could so much as blink, heading down the hallway to go meet their not-so-mysterious visitor.

  15

  How to Save the World

  Nate ducked left through the kitchen, masking his limp and hoping to reach the back door without drawing the attention of Marty and Kyle, who were hooting and hollering at their respective TVs in the living room ahead. They saw him the moment he poked his head into the dining area anyway.

  “Yo, Nate!” Kyle called from his favorite back-of-the-couch perch. “Come play with us, man. Marty’s getting too drunk to pull his weight.”

  “This is still my first beer,” Marty said.

  “Ooo…” Kyle scrunched his face up apologetically. “Bad news then, buddy.”

  “You’re an A-hole,” Marty said. “I had more kills than either of you last round, and I rezzed both of your sorry—”

  Nate didn’t bother interrupting to promise just a minute or make some excuse about taking Copernicus out to use the little doggy’s room. He just quietly opened the back door and slipped out onto the porch while the two of them continued bickering about kills and revives and who had shot whom, and who had done it better and with more pizazz.

  Outside, the night air was pleasantly chilly after an unintentionally long afternoon spent cooped up, stagnating in his own despair. It was darker than dark, this far away from the heart of town—the yard lit by only what light trickled out from the kitchen window. All was calm and quiet, relatively speaking, the thumping heart of a State College Saturday night only a faint hum in the distance.

  “It never ceases to amaze me,” came the Merlin’s quiet voice from the shadows. “The further mankind removes itself from actually living the warrior’s life, the more infatuated it grows with chasing the thing through video games and glorified pop culture media. What a farce it all is.”

  “Video games?” Nate asked quietly, stepping off the porch and treading carefully toward the wizard’s voice in the darkness.

  “Humanity. Sentience. All of it.”

  So it was going to be one of those talks, huh? Wonderful.

  The Merlin possesses countless lifetimes of wisdom, Nathaniel. You would be wise to listen.

  “Of course you’d say that,” Nate muttered, though he also did have to admit he had about nine-thousand questions for the wizard.

  “Am I to take it you are becoming properly acquainted with your new companion?” came the Merlin’s voice from the thicket of trees ahead. There was barely enough light coming from the kitchen window to make out the wizard’s outline.

  “Yeah, he’s a real hoot,” Nate said. “So much so that I can’t help thinking you might’ve warned me what the hell I was getting into before you threw me into that portal. You had my number, apparently. Would it have killed you to send a text?”

  You embarrass us both with your sniveling, Nathaniel.

  But Nate couldn’t have cared less who he was embarrassing. It was his neck—or ankle, as it were—that’d been thrown under the treads today. His future that’d been blown sky high. His life that’d apparently been hijacked to a cause he still didn’t even understand.

  “Would you have responded to a casual message from the drunk hobo asking you to come have a chat in the park?” the Merlin asked.

  “Hell no, I wouldn’t have,” Nate growled, “which is exactly my point. You forced me into this.”

  “Forced you? Did I not adequately illustrate my point on the freedom of choice earlier?”

  “Giving me the option between keeping my life and watching an innocent girl die doesn’t really count, in my book.”

  “Then perhaps this book of yours could use some refreshment on the meaning of the words.”

  Nate felt his fists clenching in the darkness. He wanted to hit something. Or someone. Which wasn’t something Nate found himself often thinking, but hey, that was what these two wanted, wasn’t it? Some kind of alpha warrior badass? A guy who punched first and asked questions later? For a second, he was tempted to test the theory.

  You would be a fool to try.

  “Fine,” Nate said, trying to calm himself. “You wanna talk about choices? I choose to not be a part of this. And if that’s not good enough for you, you should talk to Mr. Excalibur. He says it’s a no-go, too, so you might as well just take him back and try again. Find one of those big strong warriors you mentioned earlier. I recommend you try the Navy SEALS instead of a goddamn college town next time.”<
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  For a few silent seconds, Nate thought the Merlin was actually considering his words. But then the wizard shambled a few steps forward from the trees, tipping the remainder of his clay cup’s contents into his mouth, then shaking his dirty mane as if to sober up.

  “You were chosen, Nathaniel Arturi,” he said, drawing close enough that Nate could just make out the glint of his dark eyes in the reflected kitchen light. “And so you will remain chosen until such a time as you are not.”

  “Then un-choose me!”

  “That is not how it works. Not if you wish to continue drawing breath, at least.”

  As you would know if you had been listening earlier.

  Nate tensed and untensed his jaw, wanting to argue but not really seeing the point. “For the record,” he finally said, “you suck at giving fair choices.”

  “There is no such thing as an unfair choice, Nathaniel. Only the unfair circumstances surrounding it. It was time for a Knight to be chosen, and you willingly charged through that portal. Here we are.”

  “This isn’t right.”

  The Merlin gave an amused huff at that. “Hmm. Rightness. Well, luckily rightness is not why I am here.”

  “And why are you here?” Nate asked, glancing back at the kitchen window, all too aware that his roommates were only a stone’s throw away. “You come to explain to me what the hell it is you dragged me into here?”

  “Sadly, no,” the Merlin said, and as abrupt as the denial was, he actually did sound a touch disappointed about it. “It seems your Excalibur will have to do the honors, there. I only came here to let you know that I must leave for a short while.”

  “Leave?” Nate was surprised by the depth of the panic the news woke in him. “You can’t just leave me here with this thing!”

  Funny, I might have said the same thing, were I an insolent little sniveler.

  “Oh bite me,” Nate growled at the darkness. Then, to Merlin, he added, “Aren’t you supposed to… I don’t know, train me, or something?”

  “Stop complaining.”

  Nate rocked back on his heels, and was rewarded with a flash of pain from his bruised ankle. “What?!” he hissed through a wince.

  “That’s lesson number one,” the Merlin said, almost cheerfully. “Stop complaining, and accept who and what you are.”

  “Well thanks for that, Shitty Yoda.”

  Insolent cur!

  “Any chance I can get lessons two and three before you skip town?” Nate pressed on, too aggravated to care if he was being an insolent cur, or a sniveling one, or any other variation thereof. “You know, if you’re not too busy, that is.”

  “Oh, lessons two and three are quite simple,” the Merlin said, apparently indifferent to Nate’s temper. “Prepare your body. And prepare your mind. The Excalibur can enhance both beyond your wildest dreams, but the effects will always be proportional to whatever raw materials you bring to the table, so to speak.”

  Nate paused, mouth half-open. He hadn’t really been expecting a real answer, and now that he’d gotten one, it only opened the door to about three-thousand more questions—how the Excalibur had managed to protect him from a ton of rolling destruction, for starters, right along with how it had given him the strength to steel-arm a speeding bike, and then blunted his panic attack like a mad pharmacologist.

  “Perhaps you should ask your new life partner,” the Merlin said, holding up his hands to prevent the outpouring of questions. “And most of all,” he added, before Nate could point out that his new life partner was an argumentative brick wall, “do try to remember that this is not about you, Nathaniel Arturi, no matter how much you might feel that your life has been unfairly affected.”

  “Affected?” Nate hissed. “That’s real easy for you guys to say when—”

  The Merlin swept forward so suddenly and fluidly that Nate barely had time to tense before the wizard’s hand clamped to the side of his head.

  “What the hell are you—”

  Dark night flashed inexplicably to gloomy day around them. Thunder cracked in the distance, and suddenly Nate was staring down at a broken, burning cityscape, hollow dread ringing in his chest. Distantly, he was still aware of the Merlin’s hand on the side of his head, but that hand somehow didn’t obstruct his view, almost as if he were seeing through eyes that weren’t his own.

  And what he was seeing was chaos.

  Gunfire and explosions in the streets. Broken glass raining from the skyscrapers, raining on fleeing pedestrians, refracting the flaring scarlet pulses of some kind of energy weapons. Dozens of stout, jagged ships that almost looked like hovering rock crags filled the sky, raining death from above.

  For a second, Nate thought they’d flash-stepped to another world, like the Lady had done with him, but then he registered how familiar the crumbling buildings looked, and the cars and trucks burning in the streets, and on the highway overpasses, and—

  “Jesus Christ,” Nate whispered, finally registering the distant hulking forms among the chaos for what they were.

  Troglodans.

  They were flooding the streets of what looked like New York, tearing through everything they met—buildings and vehicles and humans alike. Nate watched in horror as military jets screamed in on an attack run and promptly blossomed into neat little fireballs, plummeting to the streets below, where what remained of the human ground forces were meeting similarly violent ends.

  “This is but one version of what may come to pass should you fail to find the Beacon before they do,” came the Merlin’s bodiless voice.

  As I tried to tell you earlier.

  “What are you talking about?” Nate asked numbly at both of them, his mind already at max capacity with the sheer volume of destruction below. “What Beacon?”

  The scene faded from view, and Nate found himself suddenly standing in the dark backyard at State College again, wobbling on unsteady legs as the Merlin released him and stepped back.

  “The Beacon is what draws this conflict to Earth. It is the reason the Lady decreed a new Knight need be awakened in the first place. Every Beacon needs a Knight, you see…”

  Nate didn’t see—not even a little bit. He was still too busy trying to unsee the hellish nightmare the Merlin had just beamed into his brain. But the wizard wasn’t done yet.

  “The Beacon is… how do I put this? It is one of the most powerful objects in the known galaxy. And unless you wish to see that vision come to pass, you’re going to need to help me find it and get it safely off planet as quickly as possible.”

  “I don’t…” Nate shook his head, trying and failing to wrap his head around any of this. “I don’t understand. If this Beacon thing is so… so important, and if it’s already here, why can’t you just go grab it right now?”

  “It is… lost to me, for reasons I cannot explain.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  The Merlin was silent for a long stretch. “It is lost to me,” he finally repeated, as if that was simply that.

  “But… Well, what about the Lady? She can step across the galaxy like she’s stepping out to get the mail, right? Why can’t she come find this thing?”

  “The answer to that question is… even more complicated. Suffice it to say, the Lady is equally bound from taking an active role in this matter, for reasons—”

  “You can’t explain?”

  “For reasons that are not yet my place to explain,” the Merlin corrected.

  “Maybe you should try anyway.”

  “It is far more critical that you do, Nathaniel. You and your Excalibur are innately attuned to the call of the Beacon. Far more attuned than I could ever be. Or you will be, at least, once you have adequately completed your bonding and learned to work together.”

  We can find this Beacon, Nathaniel.

  That caught him off balance. “We can?”

  Yes. If you’d stop your sniveling long enough to listen to what the Merlin is telling you.

  “And what exactly is he telling me?”
Nate cried, throwing his hands up in frustration before remembering his roommates might hear, and dropping it back down to a hiss. “The call of the Beacon? Completing our bonding? It’s all just riddles and insults with both of you assholes!”

  Says the one who spent seven hours attempting to understand the alien technology in his head without once thinking to simply ask.

  “I…” Nate faltered. “I did ask. Back on Allen Street.”

  And so I answered, did I not?

  “Barely,” Nate grumbled. It wasn’t like the Excalibur had exactly been forthcoming. Not with anything but insults, at least. Could the thing really blame him for being skeptical when it had done nothing but berate him for his petulant worthlessness since they’d “met” that morning?

  “Right,” the Melin spoke up, tucking his clay cup into the inner folds of his shoddy robe. “I think I’ll leave the two of you to it, then.”

  “Seriously? What, because you’re so busy running off for… for what? A Saturday night bender? Where the hell are you off to that’s suddenly so important anyway?”

  “I’m off to do something I should have had the courage to do a long time ago,” the Merlin said. He sounded desperately tired. “Something I hope will spare a good many people a great deal of pointless loss.”

  The gravity in the old wizard’s tone stilled some of the frustration churning Nate’s gut. “Something more important than finding this Beacon?”

  “Something I am better equipped for, at least. If all goes well, the two will not be mutually exclusive.” The Merlin shook himself free of whatever thought he was having. “For now, you must focus on learning your Excalibur and finding the Beacon in time. Get it off of this planet, Nathaniel, and quickly, or the troglodan invasion will soon be the least of Earth’s troubles.”

  Nate was opening his mouth to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean when the Merlin cocked his head as if he’d heard something. The wizard leaned in close before Nate could speak, clutching his hand and whispering in a quick, hushed tone.