by Ardis, Priya
“Realist,” he answered. “People from this time have a certain expectation from life that didn’t exist in mine.”
“Did you just call me spoiled? You can’t tell me you’d rather go back to the Dark Ages. Starvation. The Plague. No plumbing,” I said. “Exactly what is this certain expectation?”
We made it to the second tier. He walked over a thin ledge to a boulder close to the waterfall and tested a small foothold. I tugged at the rope around our middles. It yanked against his stomach. He stilled. “In a sense, life back then was easier.”
Life without you was easier.
I crossed the ledge to face him. “If I’m so spoiled, then why do you bother with me at all?”
Shadows darkened on his face as the afternoon slipped into evening. “You pulled the sword, Ryan. You’re capable of more.”
I stiffened. “I can only do what I can. I’m not changing for you.”
“I’m not asking you to.” Matt took a step closer. Our bodies stood a mere few inches apart. He reached out a hand. It hovered just under my chin but didn’t make any contact.
“I’m asking you to make choices, Ryan.” Soulful, amber eyes captured mine and refused to let go. He said huskily, “I’ve told you multiple times how I feel. You’ve never replied.”
For a second, I forgot to breathe. I forgot everything, but us. In this spot. At this time. Roaring water slammed against rocks with the same intensity as my own pulse beat against my eardrums. I whispered, “Maybe because I’ve never believed you.”
Matt let out a small, startled laugh. “You don’t believe me or believe in me?”
“I could say the same,” I retorted.
His head bowed down. “What else need I do to convince you?”
A burning ember lay banked, waiting for me to fan it, to give it permission to blaze. I looked into those hooded eyes and knew he was right. I had to make a choice.
The problem was—if I did, could I live with it?
CHAPTER 9 – GODS OF WATER
CHAPTER 9
GODS OF WATER
I yelped in surprise.
A gush of water surged from the top of the falls and drenched us with buckets of bitterly cold water. The waterfall ebbed into a network of small trickles over the ledge, revealing a small concave curvature to the rock underneath. I gaped at the cleared expanse. I hadn’t seen it before because of the flowing water, but I knew this spot.
“This is it. This is the ledge that I saw in the vision.”
Matt nodded. He took out the cross from the bag and took a step into the falls.
I caught his hand. “Are you sure? What if the water starts coming down again?”
“That’s why I need to go quickly.” Disentangling his fingers from mine, he picked his way across the slippery ledge toward the center of the falls. In the sky, a few stars twinkled as the day sought its end. In a déjà vu scene from the vision, I watched Matt run his hand along the wall. He paused.
“There’s an engraving here,” he shouted past the roar of the water. “A horned deer under a tree. Rawana used a deer to lure the princess to him. The tree is the same size as the cross. I’m going to try it.”
The vision. I yelled, “Don’t, Matt!”
He did anyway.
“Trust me,” he said.
I didn’t. I gripped the stem of a plant growing in between the boulders. As soon as he put the cross against the rock, an opening showed in the rock and water burst forth. Matt scooted to the side instantly, which saved him from the geyser’s direct blast, but it still managed to catch him and he went flying backwards. I caught the rope around my middle and braced myself with the plant. Luckily, the plant held. Under me, Matt swung himself back toward the ledge and crawled back up.
The geyser slowed and finally stopped. Matt peered into the hole.
“What’s there?”
“A cave.” He tugged the rope to urge me forward.
I inched over onto the ledge. Matt slid into the hole. Above us, the waterfall started to gush once again.
He stuck his head out. “Hurry! I’ll catch you if you slip.”
No, I really didn’t want to hurry. I looked down the long expanse of the waterfall and briefly closed my eyes. Opening them, I ran down the slippery edge. Matt pulled me into the hole. A giant whoosh of water slammed down like a closing curtain behind me. My heart, running a hundred miles an hour, was all I could feel, and it took me a minute to catch my breath and realize Matt was holding me in his arms in the empty darkness.
“Do we have a light?” I said, my voice breathy. Hard thighs braced me, my back against the wet rock of the cave wall. I couldn’t see him, but I felt him move against me in the dark.
His lips grazed my ears. “Do we need one?”
I shivered and put my palm flat against his wet, lean chest. His subtle, woodsy scent mingled with the warm humidity of the cave. A trickle of cold liquid dripped on my head and down my back. On my left, a hiss sounded from somewhere down below us. Hard droplets of water shot up in a scattered burst as if we were standing next to a sprinkler.
I startled.
Matt’s arms tightened around my waist. “Don’t move.”
In the dark, I heard him fish around in his bag. A light flared on. I gasped and dug my fingernails into Matt’s shoulders. He held an orb in his hand. It showed the sheer edge of a drop-off directly to our right. A quiet stream ran along the cave’s edge and dropped deep into a black hole. Suddenly, the pressure of the water increased. Behind us, water gushed down cutting off the hole that led back outside.
I said, “It’s going to be tricky getting out of here.”
“Let’s see what’s in here first.” Matt let the orb go and it floated in the air. To our left stood a huge chamber. Attuned to Matt, the orb floated a few feet in front of him as he walked beside the stream and followed it further inside the cave.
The creepy cave didn’t worry me until I stepped on my first skeleton. Crunch.
The orb floated in front of us and I had to stop myself from gagging. Myriad skeletons lay scattered along the interior of the cave. Severed human body parts marked a path across the chamber. Matt knelt down and picked up a broken fragment of a femur. It fell apart in his hand. “These have been here a long time.”
“Yay, we’ll be its freshest victims,” I said with a shudder.
We didn’t see anything else until we hit the other side of the chamber. In the wall, ten human-sized heads were carved into the rock. At the center of the heads, on the fifth head, two long vertical stones on the sides and one slab across the top framed a doorway with closed red doors.
“Rawana’s ten heads,” Matt murmured. “Or ten heads for the four Vedas and six Upanishads, making up all knowledge of magic and celestial events.”
I took a breath. “The red doors are just like the ones on Aegae.”
“The frame is a trilithon. Two vertical sides and one on top like the ones in limbo. In Aegae, the top slab was triangular.” Matt pointed to a golden emblem on the doors in the shape of a lotus. The lotus had a circle with an eye inside.
My brow wrinkled. “Limbo had engravings of the trident—”
“And the crescent moon and the eye,” said Matt. “I think we can safely say that those were the symbols of the Earth-Shaker. These are different. Maybe another one the Guides.”
“It’s Rawana’s ten heads. Was he a Guide? That doesn’t bode well. Wasn’t he called the demon king?”
“By the winning side. In Lanka, he was a great king before he succumbed to his own lust for a married princess.”
Lust and politics. I’d heard that one before—every time I turned on the news, it seemed. Matt glanced at me as if he sympathized with the king.
I made a face. Still, had I made things worse between them? Or was I just the latest toy to be fought over by two spoiled children? When I’d been with Vane, I’d been afraid to ask the question. Now, I honestly wanted the answer. “Would you have kidnapped her?”
“N
o,” Matt answered. “Not if she’d chosen. Vane would.”
I didn’t doubt it. It’s why I liked him. I wondered what that said about me.
Matt read the response on my face. “He would have been wrong.”
“Someone has to take a risk.”
“While someone else pays the price,” Matt muttered.
“He knows the line.” At least, he used to.
Matt glowered. “His line is always further than where it should be.”
“Further than where you think it should be,” I muttered. Matt was like a stone pillar. He wouldn’t bend, not on this and I couldn’t understand it. Vane was his family. I would have done anything for mine. “He’s not perfect, Matt, but he’s —”
“I know what he is!” Matt exploded. “Can’t you see you’re just another one his line of conquests?”
I sucked in a hard breath. “Maybe I am, but why aren’t you? You’re his brother. You should love him.”
Matt didn’t answer. My hands shaking, I turned back to the doors. They were easier. The Guides were ancient beings/guardians/gods who’d been around since at least the Greeks, around 1200 BCE, even further back, if they were involved with Rawana. The question whether the mysterious Guides somehow caused Excalibur to drop into our lives once again remained unanswered. The Greek gods didn’t mind interfering in the affairs of mortals.
I touched the golden lotus. “If the Lady of the Lake was Rhea, mother of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, and the Earth-Shaker is Poseidon, could this be one of the other three?”
Matt visibly wrestled with some strong emotion, but when he replied, his voice was calm, “The eye points to the future or visions. The lotus means birth or renewal. I’m not sure what the circle means.”
Out of nowhere, a thought popped in my head. “The sun.”
Matt pondered the emblem. “Or the moon. In any case, like the bull emblem on the Aegean doors was a lock, the lotus must be one also.” He took out the cross from where he slipped it in the front pocket of his bag. “The circle looks to be the same size.”
He put it against the circle. Nothing happened.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Patience, sword-bearer.” Matt drew out the half-used vial of my blood.
“I’d feel better about this if I had Excalibur right now,” I muttered.
“I’d feel better if I had my magic,” Matt said.
I sighed. He poured my blood on the lock. Immediately, the doorway creaked open, revealing a tunnel, and the whole chamber shook. In a loud whoosh, a vacuum of air sucked us forward.
Matt caught the edge of the trilithon frame with one hand and caught me with the other. Past the doorway, in a burst of orange light, the whole tunnel exploded with fire. If we had stepped in, we’d have been barbequed. Rock from the ceiling fell like grenades in the chamber behind us. Retreat became impossible. Stray bits of shrapnel rock threatened to knock us into tunnel, the mouth of hell.
With a nod, Matt let me go as he tried to dig around in his bag with one hand. Another rock slammed into the ground beside the trilithon. A broken piece hurled itself at the bag, causing Matt to lose his grip. He managed to grab the all-important guidebook, but the rest of the bag flew into the tunnel and exploded. Fire decimated the magical vials in a nice rainbow of color. He cursed. “We can’t get through. We’ll have to go back.”
More rock fell from the ceiling and crashed to the ground. It crushed a human skeleton into smithereens. Apparently, Matt wanted me to die a virgin. I didn’t budge from the trilithon.
I shouted, “We’ll be pulverized.”
“What other choice do we have?”
Water pooled at my feet, almost urging me forward. I looked down. The stream disappeared into rocks under the trilithon. It was funneling into a miniscule opening that ran under the tunnel. Yet somehow, part of it now swam into the trilithon to submerge my feet. Like a snake, it slithered into the tunnel of fire. Steam sizzled where the water fell. I said slowly, “Didn’t the stories say something about Seetha going through fire?”
“After her rescue from Rawana, she had to prove her virtue to her prince by walking through fire.”
“How virtuous do you feel?” I asked him.
Matt drew the cross from his pocket. Holding it with one hand, he stuck his other hand out into the fire. His jacket started flaming. He stamped it out, using the cross.
He muttered, “Apparently, my virtue has been declared questionable.”
More water rose against my feet. It spilled relentlessly into the tunnel. “If my blood opened this door, this is the key past the tunnel. We have to prove we’re knights. We have to fully step inside.”
“All right, if that’s what you choose.”
I blinked at his sudden acquiescence. “So if we die here, Merlin, if we never save the world because of what I choose, you’ll be all right with that?”
“You were meant to be here, sword-bearer. You’ve gotten us this far.”
Yes, I had gotten us this far, and he had to pick a cave in the middle of nowhere in Sri Lanka, only minutes away from certain death, to tell me such things. Boys.
I held out my hand to Matt. He took it.
We stepped into the burning blaze. The flames tickled me like soft feathers, but didn’t burn. We passed through them quickly and came out into a smaller chamber. It took me a minute to absorb that we were still alive. I couldn’t help it—I giggled. “I was right.”
“I could do with a little less surprise in your tone,” Matt said dryly. He held the cross up in the air. The metal glowed a faint blue in the dark.
I looked back at the burning tunnel. “Do you think it was the cross?”
“I don’t know.”
Water bubbled loudly at our feet.
Matt drew another orb out of his jacket and tucked the cross inside. Sparkling with magic, the orb floated up high. Light shimmered on a small waterfall that fell from an opening in the rocks above. I could only assume the stream from the first chamber somehow wound its way to the top here. The water dead-ended into a small pond ahead of us. Three tunnels to its right invited us to explore. Matt sent the light into the first one. The orb illuminated a long tunnel.
Recognition flared through me at the familiar curvature of the rock. My chest contracted. I fought to breathe. Matt took my hand to steady me. A whistle of wind flew through the tunnel and I heard the Minotaur’s laugh echoing along with it. My fingernails dug into Matt’s palm. “This tunnel. I recognize it. It’s identical to the ones in Aegae. The Minotaur’s tunnels.”
“Good,” Matt said.
“G-good? Are you crazy?” He hadn’t seen the Minotaur’s massive form. My heart pounded at memory of the beast’s sculpted human body, its monstrous head and the tail of a horned bull, its eyes glowing green and as cold as the sea. It had chased me and I remembered my heart beating in the dark like a beacon calling to its hunger. I whispered, “Nothing about the Minotaur is good.”
Matt looked to me. “I mean it tells us we’re in the right place. Which way?”
I shut my eyes. My heart strummed with the anxiety of facing the monster in his home. I pictured it chasing me through the tunnels. Then, I was chasing it. I pictured the lust in its eyes when it looked up after I interrupted it while feeding on the broken body of an animal. I shivered as much from anxiety as a disturbing rush of desire. Vane.
A hot burst of musk-scented air, reminiscent of the monster’s breath, slithered across my nape. My eyes snapped open and I was safe. I said, “I don’t know.”
Matt pointed to the first tunnel. “Let’s try that one.”
Hours or minutes later, it became obvious we were going in circles. We retraced our steps and tried all the tunnels. They led here and there, but the main paths all wound back to the waterfall. There were no markings. No signs. We could wander around here for years and never find anything.
I sat down on a rock as Matt paced in front of the water. I watched him for several minutes before working up the courage to
say, “We need to talk to Vane.”
Matt continued to pace. “I am not going to risk putting Avalon in his hands.”
He was driving me crazy. “Can’t you see that you both want the same things? Maybe in Avalon we can figure out what exactly we’re supposed to do… what we’re all supposed to do. Aren’t you a little worried about the whole end of the world thing?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course, it’s why we’re here, but whatever we find out, we have to be careful. The information can’t get into the wrong hands.”
“Ugh. Are you never going to learn? We’re in this mess because of your pathological need to hoard knowledge. Face it—you’re no different than Vane. You want to be the powerful one. The hero. At least he’s upfront about it.”
“Is that what you think? Was I wrong to not want to unleash the tsunamis on this world? How many died in Chennai, Ryan?” Matt halted in front of me. “Because of Vane.”
“There are no easy choices, Merlin.” I took the Dragon’s Eye from my pocket.
Matt snatched it away and tucked it into his. “You’re right. No easy choices.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m getting a little tired of you ordering me around. I’m not going to die in here.” I kicked the dirt floor. “And I’m hungry.”
Matt bent down, his face brushing my thigh as he reached into my cargo pants pocket.
“What are you doing?”
He drew out the crumpled breakfast bar I’d rejected earlier. He sat down on the rock beside me and tore open the package, giving me half the bar. It tasted like soy mixed berry sawdust, but I demolished it in three bites.
I yawned. “What’s your plan, Merlin?”
“Do you think you can stop calling me Merlin?” he exploded.
I looked at him curiously. The orb bobbed above us.
Dim light slanted off lean cheekbones, a princely face. In the dark imaginings of the cave, I saw him riding by King Arthur’s side, the shadowy figure behind the warrior. The lion behind the crown. Despite the progress of fifteen hundred years, he hadn’t changed all that much. The wizards still gathered around him like he walked on water. They weren’t the only ones. Even my teachers at school had done so. I had done so.