That’s my cue, Wally thought, and sprang up and dashed toward the churchyard at the same moment the SUV roared to life and took off, spraying gravel.
Merlin bellowed in anger, and tried to get up, but every time he moved Ariane slapped him down again. Wally ran through the big vehicle-sized gate in the churchyard fence’s eastern corner, dashed to the box, grabbed it and ran back again toward the pond near which Ariane still lay in her trance, controlling the water-woman.
Something whizzed by him like an angry bee and buried itself in the ground ahead of him – a tranquilizer dart. Merlin wasn’t completely helpless after all. Gulping, Wally redoubled his efforts, crashing through the brush to Ariane’s side and throwing himself down beside her. “I’ve got it!” he cried.
•••
Through the eyes of her pond-water golem, Ariane watched Wally run back toward the slough where her real body lay. She heard a pfft! and turned to see that the second she had turned away from him Major had regained his feet, drawn his tranquilizer pistol, and fired after the fleeing Wally. Furious, she swung a watery arm, but this time he ducked under it and scrambled on his hands and knees back across the ground to where his two shards of Excalibur lay, close to Flish, who was sitting up staring at the water-woman with wide, white eyes. Merlin grabbed the shards and thrust them at Wally’s sister. “Take them!”
Kill your enemies, Ariane’s own shards urged her. Kill your enemies!
She swung her massive liquid body around and took a step toward Merlin and Flish – but then Flish took hold of the shards.
A howling whirlwind sprang into being out of nowhere, ripping up grass and dirt and even bits of the broken headstone. It slammed into Ariane’s liquid body, whipping it into spray that she tried and failed to pull back into shape. Just like that, the water-formed body was gone. Thrown back into her own body, she screamed from the shock of the sudden dissolution, and snapped open her eyes to find Wally kneeling beside her, holding out the flat box of silvery metal, inlaid with strange gold markings, that had been hidden inside Ebenezer Knight’s gravestone.
“The hilt!” she gasped. She grabbed the box. “Give it to me!”
“I was going to,” Wally said, voice almost angry, but she knew that surliness came from the shards, whose anger she could feel inside herself as well, and ignored it. She scrabbled at the box with fingers that seemed not to want to work.
The whirlwind that had blown apart her water body roared toward them from the churchyard, a miniature tornado, a funnel of dust and swirling leaves that would hit them in an instant. She crouched lower, sheltering the box, still trying to open it, as the whirlwind crossed the road and tore into the trees…
…and then, suddenly, her fingers found the two small catches, and lifted them, and the box popped open.
At long, long last, she beheld the final piece of the sword Excalibur, the culmination of their quest.
Fine gold wire wrapped around and around the ancient sword’s hilt, from which protruded a few centimetres of pitted steel blade, with a jagged break at the end. The pommel, a heavy black disc, had a small hole in it.
Ariane took all that in in an instant, then seized the hilt and lifted it from its hiding place.
Power ran through her like an electric shock. There was a sharp pop, a miniature thunderclap, and where before there had been only two shards of Excalibur at her feet, there were suddenly four, as the two Merlin had stolen from her, the two they had so heartbreakingly lost, one in the south of France through Wally’s misguided betrayal, one on Cacibajagua Island where Merlin had left Wally for dead, appeared out of thin air.
In the same instant, the approaching whirlwind simply ended, its burden of dust and leaves and twigs and gravel dropping to the ground just a few metres away. But even if it had kept coming, howling like a banshee, she wouldn’t have heard it, because in that moment all she could hear was the sword.
She’d dreamed of this instant. She’d expected the song of the sword to finally be complete, the five pieces to join together in a symphony of joy, or satisfaction, or triumph, perhaps even gratitude – but there was no song. Instead, the sword screamed, howled a sound of pain and fury and frustration that made her drop the hilt and scramble back from it, hands over her ears, though that did not and could not block out the horrible noise of the angry blade, for the sound was inside her head, inside her soul, filling the world.
“Wally!” she gasped. “Take the hilt!” If I can’t make it sing as a whole, maybe the heir of Arthur…
Wally didn’t hesitate – he seized the hilt avidly, so eagerly Ariane knew he’d wanted to claim it from the moment he’d seen it, his own connection to the sword and his own inherited power urging him to wield it as he had been born to do.
The moment Wally’s fingers closed around the gold wire, the shrieking cacophony in Ariane’s head quieted, as it had in France when Wally had taken hold of the first two shards they’d recovered. Here at last was the glorious music she had hoped to hear, and even as Excalibur exulted, the shards began to glow, red, then orange, then bright yellow. Heat rose from them, so intense Ariane had to scramble back even farther. The broken piece of blade protruding from the hilt glowed as hotly as all the others, and Wally, not as though it burned him, but as though he were in a trance, responding to a command only he could hear, placed the hilt on the ground.
The moment he did so, the other pieces of the sword moved, sliding together, forming themselves into one long blade, a white-hot shaft of metal. As the sword reforged itself, it sang a single ringing chord of joy that brought tears to Ariane’s eyes – and yet, it still wasn’t quite as perfect as she had imagined or expected. Deep within that chord was a single sour note. The blade was complete, and yet something was still missing…
…something vital.
Excalibur seemed to recognize it. The sourness grew. The chord of joy blew apart in echoing discord that made Ariane gasp in pain.
And then came rage.
As white-hot as the blade it sprang from had been an instant before, anger and fury flooded out from Excalibur, pouring into Ariane, who leaped to her feet to face Wally, who had likewise scrambled up and now glared at her with murder in his eyes. “What did you do wrong?” he screamed at her. “You ruined it!”
“I ruined it?” she yelled back. “You were holding the hilt. What did you do wrong?
This isn’t right, an inner voice, almost lost in the cacophony of the infuriated sword, tried to tell her. It’s not Wally’s fault. It’s not your fault. Something else is going on…
“A very good try,” said a voice she knew, a voice she hated, a voice that should have sounded defeated, but instead sounded triumphant. “A very good try, indeed. You almost won the game. No doubt you thought you had. But you really should have known better. You should have known I would have an ace up my sleeve.”
Ariane spun toward that hated voice, all the rage she’d been feeling toward Wally suddenly directed to a new and far more deserving target.
Rex Major – Merlin – stood ten metres away, on the gravel path, wearing a sardonic smile.
Over his shoulder peered the white face of Wally’s sister.
Chapter Fifteen
The Lady Returns
Even as he reached for the box containing the hilt of Excalibur, Merlin heard the wheels of the SUV spinning on the gravel of the park road, but the sound might have come from a dream – it meant nothing to him. His hand gripped the box. He drew it from the rubble. He stood, and turned…
…and saw a giant liquid woman-shape rushing toward him like one of the long-dead giants of Faerie.
Cold, filthy water, stinking of rotting vegetation, slapped the box containing the hilt out of his hand, sent it sailing across the cemetery to bounce off the lone tree against the southeast fence. A second watery tentacle punched him in the chest, knocking him flat, the broken pieces of Ebenezer Knight’s tombstone digging painfully into his back. He tried to scramble up, and was slapped down again…and then
again…and then…
The onslaught stopped. The watery figure had turned its head to stare in the direction the box containing the hilt of Excalibur had been thrown. Merlin scrambled to his feet at last, saw Wally snatch up the box from the base of the tree and run toward the gate. Furious, Major pulled the tranquilizer pistol from its holster and fired at the boy.
It would have taken an extraordinary bit of luck to hit him at that distance, and it wasn’t forthcoming. The shot went wide. The water-woman saw it and swung angrily back toward him. This time he was ready for her, though, and ducked under the lumbering liquid arm, throwing himself headlong toward where his shards of Excalibur had dropped, yelling at Felicia to hold them. He didn’t know if she’d have the presence of mind to obey, but she scrambled forward, and together they seized the shards.
With the surge of power that roared through him at that touch, he conjured a whirlwind. The viciously swirling mass of air ripped the water-woman into fog and spray. As it disintegrated, he shouted, “Keep hold of one shard!” at Felicia. Drawing back the second one, he shoved it into his pocket, then turned and drove the whirlwind toward the bushes where Wally had run, and, with Felicia struggling to keep up at his side, holding the other end of the shard he still gripped in his left hand, he strode after it. If he could stop Wally and Ariane from drawing the hilt from the box, he might still…
…but even as his tame tornado ripped into the bushes behind which Wally and Ariane crouched, its winds died to nothing and it vanished.
In that same moment, so too did the shards of Excalibur he had gone to such great lengths to retrieve. One instant he and Flish were holding one and the other was a heavy weight in his right pocket, the next they were gone as though he had never had them.
With them went his power, leaving him with only the faint trickle that found its way to him through the almost-closed door into Faerie.
Light blazed on the far side of the bushes, the hot white light of metal heated almost to melting, and he knew the deed was done. Excalibur had been reforged. The great sword of King Arthur was whole once more…
…almost.
Merlin reached up to touch the ruby stud in his right ear. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this – but it now had, and he could still win, and that was all that mattered.
He strode forward to break the bad news to the two teenagers he had every intention of murdering the moment the sword was his at last.
•••
Wally stared at Merlin, and at his sister standing behind the sorcerer, and even in that moment, face to face with their mortal enemy, his first thought was, What on earth is she wearing?
The little black cocktail dress on a cold rainy day at Castle MacPhaiden in the Scottish highlands had been inappropriate enough but, in Cannington Manor, this red-leather ensemble with the black boots really took the cake.
But then he tore his gaze away from her and focussed on Merlin, although it was hard to think clearly with the fury of the sword burning in his brain. Something was wrong with it, seriously wrong. It was complete, and yet not complete. Some vital component was missing.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “We’ve got the sword. You don’t. You lost.”
“Five shards of Excalibur,” Merlin said. “That’s what my sister told you. But there was a tiny detail she left out. Yes, there were five shards of Excalibur. But there were six pieces.” He grinned, and Wally was reminded of a moment, back at Thunderhill Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories, when Merlin had grinned just like that, and for a moment he had seen the death’s head beneath the skin, the ancient sorcerer lurking beneath the veneer of the urbane modern businessman. Here it was again, a frightening glimpse into the reality of their antagonist, and for a moment, with the sword screaming in his brain, he despaired. Why did we ever think we could succeed? We’re just a couple of kids. He’s Merlin. He’s…
But then anger rose up in him and burned away the despair. And we’ve reforged Excalibur despite his best efforts to prevent it. Just two kids. With the power of the Lady of the Lake. And the blood of King Arthur.
“You’re lying,” he snarled. “The sword is complete. The blade has remade itself. The hilt was the last piece.”
“But you don’t have the whole hilt.” Merlin lifted his hand and touched his earlobe and suddenly, sickly, Wally understood. How often had he noted that ruby stud, that strangely barbaric piece of jewelry, so out of place on a businessman like Rex Major? He looked down at Excalibur.
At the hole in the black disk of the pommel.
“I see you begin to grasp the reality of your situation,” Merlin said. “I have always had this one little piece of Excalibur, this one fragment that has kept the door into Faerie from closing, a tiny jewel through which a trickle of magic has continued to reach me down through the centuries, all during my long confinement and ever since I used it to free myself. And until the sword has this final piece in its hilt, it is not complete – and not fully yours.”
“But we still have the sword, and all you have is a stupid piece of jewelry,” Wally said. “Which looks ridiculous on a guy your age, by the way.” He seized the hilt of Excalibur again and lifted it, ignoring the way it screamed angrily in his head, unfulfilled and furious. “We’re not giving you the sword, and we know you can’t take it from us by force.”
Merlin’s grin grew fiercer. “Can’t I?”
“If you could, you would have already.” Wally shot a glance at Ariane. Why wasn’t she speaking up? Why was she so silent?
To his dismay, he saw that she had dropped to her knees and now sat back on her haunches, hands hanging loosely at her sides, head thrown back, eyes closed, face white.
“Oh, that was true enough when the sword was in pieces,” Merlin said softly. “But now that it has been reforged, it is true no longer. It is so close to being whole, that becoming whole is all that matters to it. It wants to be complete. It wants to be wielded.”
‘The Lady made it. It belongs to the Lady!” But the sword dragged at Wally’s arm, as though it were made of lead, as though it wanted to free itself from his grip. “She forged it! It wants to be with her!”
“The Lady forged it, yes,” Merlin said. “But we were…closer then. I did not have a hand in its forging, but I offered a gem to decorate the hilt, a magical gem, a link to me, so that I would always know where the sword was, where Arthur was. I could even communicate to him through it.
“But then my sister betrayed me – betrayed our family, Clade Avalon. We had ruled our clade side by side, and together had opened the door from Faerie to Earth, found Arthur, raised him up as High King, helped him unite Britain. We intended to use Britain as a beachhead to conquer all of Earth, to annex it to Faerie – a whole new world of possibilities for our stagnant and hide-bound race.
“But the other clades were jealous. Oh, they claimed they were against our project because they found it unethical, but really, they knew they did not have the knowledge or power to open a door to another world as Clade Avalon had. They feared our ascendancy. And of course the Queen opposed our efforts because eventually we would have overthrown her.
“She came to my sister, and offered her lands and power and, of course, sole control of Clade Avalon, if she deposed me, exiled me to Earth. I found out about the plot too late to stop my own imprisonment in an oak tree by the sorceress Viviane, but not too late to hold one piece of magic to myself.
“Knowing Arthur was doomed, knowing the Lady would reclaim Excalibur, I took the gem from the hilt and kept it. As long as that gem remained in my possession, Excalibur could not be taken from Earth, the door into Faerie could not be closed completely…and, as you have just discovered, Excalibur could not be reforged successfully.” He held out his hand. “You might as well give it to me, boy,” he said softly. “Because if you do not, I will kill you with my bare hands.”
Behind Merlin, Wally saw Felicia’s eyes widen. “No!” she said.
Merlin’s face contorted with ang
er. He spun, and the back of his hand cracked across the side of Felicia’s face. She fell to the ground, crying out in shock and pain. Hand on her flaming cheek, she raised wide eyes to look up at the sorcerer.
“Quiet, brat!” Merlin snarled, glaring down at her.
Rage, born of fear and frustration, born of the sword, born of everything that had happened in the past few months, exploded up in Wally like gasoline poured on a fire. He dropped the useless sword and charged Merlin. “Don’t touch my sister!” he screamed, and crashed into the sorcerer from behind.
Merlin stumbled forward and tripped over Felicia, who cried out again, then scrambled away on all fours. Wally jumped onto Merlin, trying to pin him, but the sorcerer, stronger and faster than Wally expected, rolled over and shoved Wally away so hard he literally flew through the air and thudded to the ground. Lying there, trying to get his breath, he saw Merlin scramble to his feet. “And now at last – at long, long last – I get to kill you, Wally Knight!” the sorcerer snarled. He strode toward Wally –
– and then froze, staring past him with widening eyes.
Wally twisted around to look.
Ariane had Excalibur. Both hands wrapped around the hilt, she was pointing it at the sky, her eyes wide and staring and strangely unfocussed in her pale face. “She’s coming,” she whispered. “The Lady is coming.”
Wally looked up in the direction the sword pointed…
…and saw a hole opening in the blue vault of the cloudless Saskatchewan sky.
•••
Ariane barely heard Merlin’s words, or Wally’s replies – something about a jewel the sword needed, a jewel that Merlin, not the Lady, had made; Merlin had it in his ear.
She knew it was important, knew it was vital, to get that jewel, but she couldn’t seem to focus on it amid the waxing cacophony of the sword, growing louder and louder and louder and louder, blotting out everything else. Lost in the screaming in her own head, she sat on her haunches, arms hanging loose at her sides, blind and deaf to everything else…
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