Song of the Sword

by Edward Willett

  Ariane wanted to deny it. Somehow, having all this move into the humdrum reality of her life seemed wrong, against the rules she had absorbed from years of reading children’s fantasy stories. The parents or guardians of the kids involved never knew what was really going on.

  But this wasn’t a story. This was reality. And Aunt Phyllis deserved the truth.

  As simply as she could, Ariane told Aunt Phyllis everything that had happened since she had seen the staircase leading into the waters of Wascana Lake.

  Aunt Phyllis listened intently, her eyes fixed on Ariane’s. She seemed perfectly calm, but her face grew paler and paler, and when Ariane glanced down, she saw Aunt Phyllis’s fingers digging into the flowered upholstery of the couch. “And so, tonight...we’re going,” Ariane finished. “Wally and me. To the Northwest Territories. By...” She hesitated, but had to say it. “By magic.” She searched Aunt Phyllis’s face. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  A small smile lifted the corners of Aunt Phyllis’s mouth. “If you are, then I was, too, all those years ago – and I still am. I’ve heard of shared delusions, but not spread out among three people – four, counting Wally – over decades.” Her smile faded. “What I want is for the whole thing to go away. Why should you be saddled with saving the world?”

  “I don’t know,” Ariane said. “It’s like...an inherited disease or something. I don’t seem to have any choice.”

  Aunt Phyllis snorted. “An inherited disease. That’s it, isn’t it? We inherited...something. The ability to use the power of the Lady of the Lake. It’s like the old saying, ‘You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.’ Especially not your family from a millennium and a half ago.” She looked down at her twisting fingers, and clenched them tightly in the afghan. “How can I let you go, Ariane?” she said softly. “You’re all I have left of Emily, all I have left of a family. If anything happens to you...”

  “But staying here isn’t safe, either, Aunt Phyllis,” Ariane said. “Rex Major knows who I am. He knows where I live. By now, he must know you’re my guardian. If he decides to simply kidnap me...there won’t be anything we can do to stop him.” There might be something I can do, she thought, remembering the power she had been able to unleash against Flish and the coven – but she had no idea if that would work on Merlin himself. And she didn’t want to sit around to find out. “If I go up north, if I can actually get this first shard of Excalibur, then at least I’m fighting back. And after that...”

  “After that, what, Ariane?” Aunt Phyllis said. “Rex Major will still know where you live. He’ll still be able to snatch you away without warning. Where do we go? How do we escape one of the richest men in the world?”

  Ariane shook her head. “I don’t know, Aunt Phyllis. But the Lady of the Lake hasn’t given us any choice. We have to try to defeat him. We have to.”

  “Damn the Lady of the Lake!” Aunt Phyllis said, and Ariane stared at her. Her aunt had never sworn in front of her before. “What gives her the right to get our family mixed up in some battle that goes back more than a thousand years?” She glared at Ariane as though expecting her to defend the Lady, but Ariane agreed with her.

  Oh, do you? a part of her wondered. Or are you secretly glad? The power...you like having it, don’t you?

  I don’t know, she answered herself. I don’t know anything.

  Either way, she remained silent – and Aunt Phyllis remained angry. Ariane could see it in the bright red splotches on her cheeks and the flaring of her nostrils. But she spoke with forced, icy calmness. “But I guess you’re right, Ariane. She hasn’t left us any choice. She’s fixed our course for us, right into the heart of the storm, and the best we can do is batten down the hatches and hope to ride it out. And if I ever meet her outside of a dream, I’ll –” She stopped, clenched her jaw for a moment, then gave a sharp, short nod. “Very well, then. You and Wally have to go to the Northwest Territories, by magic, to retrieve the first shard of Excalibur.” She paused. “I still don’t really understand how Wally got involved in all of this. You two really aren’t…?”

  Ariane felt her face flush. “No!”

  “OK, OK.” Aunt Phyllis held up her hands. “Well, I’m glad someone is going with you, at least. Though he’s not exactly a knight in shining armor, at least he’s a Knight.”

  Ariane rolled her eyes. “Aunt Phyllis!”

  Her aunt chuckled, but her amusement died quickly. “How can I help? What do you need to take with you? Food? Supplies?”

  “I don’t think I can transport much more than Wally, and whatever we are already carrying,” Ariane said. “So we can’t take a lot. But food – yeah, food would be good. We’ll have to put it in something waterproof, though.”

  “I can do that. Crackers, cheese, summer sausage, beef jerky, chocolate, nuts. Lightweight but lots of calories.” Aunt Phyllis stood. “Let’s get at it.”

  Ariane jumped up. “Wait a minute.”

  Aunt Phyllis paused. “What?”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What will you do if Major’s...uh, ‘henchman’...comes back?” Ariane felt a little silly. She’d never used the word “henchman” in a sentence before. “What if he decides to kidnap you instead of me?”

  Aunt Phyllis smiled a strange little smile Ariane had never seen before. “You leave Major’s ‘henchman’ to me.”

  The next couple of hours passed by in a blur. Ariane went upstairs and discovered that Wally had indeed emailed her a list of supplies – a rather daunting one. Ariane wondered how he planned to fit it all into a backpack, whether she’d be able to stand up once she put it on – and most importantly, whether she had the energy to transport it as far as they had to go.

  Wally had highlighted several items on the list he didn’t think he had in his house, such as spare flashlight batteries. For once, Aunt Phyllis’s habit of imagining possible disasters came in handy. She had several basement shelves filled with emergency supplies – including waterproof bags into which she stuffed the food. With her help, Ariane soon filled in the gaps in Wally’s list. Pendragon sat on the basement steps, tail curled neatly around his toes, watching her pack with wide green eyes.

  Wally showed up in person promptly at six-thirty. “Hello, Ms. Forsythe,” he said to Aunt Phyllis. “I sure am looking forward to seeing a movie with Ariane this evening.” He sounded like a bad actor in a high school play.

  Aunt Phyllis caught Ariane’s eye and winked, then gave Wally an innocent-looking smile. “What movie are you going to see? Camelot?” The smile widened. “Excalibur?”

  Wally’s mouth fell open, and Aunt Phyllis chuckled as she patted his arm. “Ariane has told me everything. So you don’t have to worry about pretending.”

  “Every –” Wally’s gaze slid past Aunt Phyllis to Ariane, “– thing?”

  “Everything,” Ariane confirmed with a grin. “And Aunt Phyllis has been helping me round up supplies. Come upstairs and help me pack, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  The pile of stuff on the bed looked impossibly huge, but it took up far less space when organized in the backpack. In the end the only things left behind were a small axe and some cooking utensils.

  “We’re not really planning to camp,” Ariane pointed out. “And we’ve got knives.”

  “You can’t chop branches to build a lean-to with a knife,” Wally warned. “And just because we’re not planning to camp doesn’t mean we won’t end up camping.”

  “The axe is too heavy. It stays behind.” Ariane hefted the backpack, slipped it on, and staggered backward a step or two before she caught her balance. “I don’t know if I can get even this much all the way to the Northwest Territories. And we haven’t added the food yet!”

  “Well, don’t wear it now! Save your strength until we’re ready to go.” Wally looked around the room, hesitated. “Are we ready to go?”

  “There’s one thing we’re missing,” Ariane said. “We don’t have a clu
e as to the layout of the mine.”

  “Hmmm,” Wally said. “Well, let’s take a look...”

  He sat down at the computer.

  ~ • ~

  Wally prided himself on his online researching skills. If there was information about a topic to be found on the Web, he was confident he could find it. And something like a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories should be easy. Big corporations loved to promote their projects, especially flashy ones, and what could be flashier than a diamond mine?

  For a moment he hesitated, remembering the threatening warning they had received from Rex Major’s henchman the previous evening. But they’d used the computer again after that with no problem. Besides, Wally thought. I’ve seen scarier things than that in video games.

  He twitched the mouse to bring the hibernating computer to life, and the monitor lit up. “We probably can’t get a detailed map, but the mining company is bound to have a website. If nothing else, there ought to be photos of the place.”

  “Worth a try.” Ariane sat on the edge of the bed to watch Wally work.

  Wally opened the browser, typed “Thunderhill Diamond Mine” into the search field in the upper-right corner, and hit RETURN.

  The first entry was the mine’s own website. “Jackpot,” he said, perversely annoyed that he hadn’t had the chance to show off his “skillz.” He clicked on the link, and the screen lit up with a picture of buildings, taken from the other side of a large lake. Only a few low plants, poking up between the big boulders scattered around, kept the surrounding countryside from being completely barren. “North of the tree line,” Wally said, feeling sheepish. “Guess you were right to leave out the axe.”

  Ariane very politely did not say, “I told you so.”

  Wally kept scrolling. After a moment, he whistled. “Look at this!” He pointed to the screen. “At any given time, there are seven hundred people working in the mine. Seven hundred! That’s bigger than half the towns in Saskatchewan.” He leaned closer to view the fine print. “It’s got a gym, squash and racquetball courts, a games room, a theater, TV lounges, high-speed Internet access, satellite telephones, private rooms and private bathrooms for everyone, a gourmet chef...” He leaned back and shook his head. “It’s not a diamond mine, it’s a resort!”

  “It’s also only two hundred kilometres south of the Arctic Circle in the middle of the treeless tundra and a six-hour drive from the nearest town – if it’s winter, which is the only time there’s a road,” Ariane pointed out, reading over his shoulder. “Some resort.”

  “Well, maybe not in winter,” Wally conceded. “But in the summer, I’m telling you, they could make as much money renting out rooms as they do mining diamonds.”

  He scrolled further. “Ah! There’s a brochure called ‘All About Thunderhill.’ Let’s try that.” He clicked again, and two seconds later they were looking at a map of the mine. “Not very detailed,” Wally said, “but a lot better than nothing!” He clicked PRINT. The inkjet printer to the left of the monitor hummed to life.

  Wally was about to get up to grab the printout when the monitor flickered and turned a brilliant, poisonous green. He blinked and leaned forward. “I think your video card is screwed...no, wait a minute, I can see something in there. Maybe it’s a video file that –”

  His voice and his breath both choked off: a green, clawed hand, covered in scales, burst from the surface of the monitor and seized him by the throat. He scrabbled at it, trying to pry it off, but his fingers slid uselessly off scales as hard and impervious as glass. The hand began to squeeze...he couldn’t breathe...

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a horrified Ariane leap for the wall socket. She jerked out the power bar plug. The printer stuttered to a halt, the disk drive stopped in mid-chatter, but the green-scaled hand didn’t falter, and the algae-green glow of the monitor didn’t so much as flicker.

  Wally, dizzy and terrified, was afraid the hand would drag him into the poisonous green soup the monitor’s surface had become, but instead it pushed him back, away from the computer. The wheels of Ariane’s ancient office desk chair squeaked horribly as they rolled centimetre by centimetre away from the desk – and slowly, the arm attached to that scaly green hand appeared. An armor-plated elbow came through next, then a massive green bicep...

  ...which meant the head and the rest of the body couldn’t be too far behind. Wally did not want to see either ...but then, it seemed likely he wouldn’t be seeing anything at all in a minute. His vision had narrowed to a blurred tunnel. He couldn’t feel his arms and legs. A buzzing filled his head...

  Think...think! The thing was coming out of the computer, so it had to be connected to it somehow. But the computer was not only off, it was unplugged...

  Unplugged from the wall socket, but not from the Internet! A blue Ethernet cable ran from the back of the computer to the DSL modem, and a gray cable attached the modem to an outlet in the wall. Wally quit trying to pry the fingers from his neck and instead grabbed Ariane’s arm. She turned wide eyes to him, and he pointed weakly at the high-speed cables. Then he had to turn away and grip the scaly arm again as it lifted him completely off the floor. Ariane dropped to her hands and knees and fell out of his sight. He hoped desperately she had understood. His legs kicked uncontrollably in mid-air. One flailing foot sent the desk chair rolling across the floor. He heard it crash against something. His tunnel of vision was shrinking. All he could see were spots of gray and green light...

  And then the floor whacked against Wally’s knees as he crashed onto it, gasping, pulling in huge, shuddering gulps of precious air through a throat as raw as freshly ground beef but no longer in the grip of a giant lizard. His vision flooded back, the buzzing in his ears subsided, and he raised a shaking hand to his sore neck.

  Ariane crawled into sight, and he managed a small smile. “Worst computer virus I ever saw.” Talking made him cough. His hand felt sticky. He pulled it away from his throat and saw it was smeared with blood. “I’m bleeding!”

  “Let me see.” Ariane put her hand in his hair and tilted his head back to examine his throat. “It’s not serious,” she assured him after a moment. She let go of his head. “Just a couple of little claw punctures. No worse than shaving cuts.”

  Wally laughed shakily. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Ariane grinned, revealing teeth only slightly whiter than her face. “Anyway, you’ll live.”

  This time, Wally thought.

  He sat up, groaning. Ariane helped him to his feet, then grabbed a handful of tissues from a box by her bed and held them out to him. He dabbed at the punctures on his neck. “I’m lucky he didn’t just rip my throat out.”

  “He was using you to pull himself out of the computer. If he’d made it...”

  “...we’d both be lizard chow.”

  Ariane frowned. “But Major doesn’t want to kill me.”

  “That’s just guesswork on our part. Don’t go thinking you’re invulnerable.” He dabbed at the cuts again. “Besides, who says that thing would have killed you? It might have just dragged you back into...wherever it came from.”

  “It could have killed you, though.” She bit her lip. “Wally, you should –”

  “Don’t tell me what I should do,” Wally snapped. “I can make my own decisions. And I’ve decided to help you.” No matter what the cost? a small voice asked, but he did his best to ignore it. He held out the bloody tissues. “I think I need some more.”

  “You’d better come into the bathroom. We’ll put some antiseptic and then some band-aids on those wounds. Who knows what kind of germs a Lizardoid –” Ariane stopped. “That’s what it was! I thought it looked familiar. It was a Lizardoid!”

  Wally blinked. “You mean like in Devil Swamp?”

  “Exactly like it. I was playing it just a few days ago.” She looked at the unpowered, unplugged computer. Its blank monitor looked back innocently. “Last time Major just used the computer to send us a warning. This time he turned a computer monster into a r
eal one.” She gave Wally a bleak look. “We’re going to have to be very careful using computers from now on.”

  “Now that hurts,” Wally muttered.

  Ariane laughed. “Let’s get you into the bathroom.”

  She had just put a band-aid on the last puncture when Aunt Phyllis appeared at the bathroom door. For some reason, she was carrying a baseball bat.

  “What happened?” Aunt Phyllis looked at Wally’s neck, and then at Ariane. “Never mind, there’s no time. You’d better go now. A car just pulled up outside.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  North. North. North!

  Ariane’s heartbeat shifted into high gear. “He knows where I am. We’re idiots for using the computer!”

  “No kidding.” Wally massaged his throat. “Are we ready?”

  No, Ariane thought. Out loud she said, “Ready as we’ll ever be. We’ve packed everything.” She slung the pack onto her shoulders. “Oof. Including the kitchen sink, it feels like.”

  “Not quite everything!” Wally dashed into the bedroom and grabbed the sheets of paper protruding from the mouth of the printer. He flipped through them. “Looks like we got it all except the last page. We got the map, anyway.”