“I am fine,” said Lance, delicately lifting the injured limb across his chest. It had popped back into place, and the pain had eased. He leaned down and pulled Excalibri from Mordred’s back, noting the strange absence of blood on its inscribed silver blade. Relieved that the pen was undamaged, he handed it to Arti. “A Knight of Maren is never alone. You saved my life, and I am in your debt.”
“Same goes for me,” said Gwen, staring down with contempt at Mordred’s lifeless form. Her eyes narrowed. “But how did you do it? The bolt from the lighter just bounced off him.”
Arti studied the pen in her hand. “Excalibri wrote The Verses, so maybe that’s why the words couldn’t stop it.” She shrugged, “I was lucky, I didn’t know it would work.”
“You were brave to try,” added Lance. “Now let’s get you inside; the book is waiting.” He turned to Gwen, expectantly. “Where is the key?”
Arti answered for her, “Mordred kicked it under the door.” Her expression darkened as the awful truth sank in. “We can’t get the book. We…failed.”
Refusing to accept the dreadful verdict, Lance bent down and stuck his fingers through the gap, hoping he might be able to reach the key. He felt only air.
“There must be a way,” he growled, standing again, gauging the door’s strength, searching for a weak point.
“It’s no use,” said Gwen. “Merl was right; the door’s too solid—even for you. And we don’t have the tools or time to try anything else. Judging by what we heard over the trooper’s vidlink, something’s happened outside. It sounded like a fight, as if they were being attacked. I’m surprised this place isn’t swarming with Incendi, but I’m sure it soon will be.” She scooped Lance’s leather jacket from the floor, holding it so he could slip his injured arm through its sleeve. “We have to get Arti and the pen back to Merl before they lock the castle down—and just hope we get another chance at the tome before Fay finishes it.”
Gwen and Lance started toward the stairs, but Arti hesitated, staring at the iron door. To be so close to the tome and not complete the mission was devastating. She looked down at Mordred’s body, trying to find some solace in the knowledge that he’d no longer be hunting her.
There was little comfort in the thought. Morgan Fay was still going to win, and the future she would write would be too horrific to imagine. Merl’s ominous words echoed in Arti’s mind: When she writes the final page, she’ll have the means to find every scribe and reader in existence. No one anywhere will be safe. She’ll burn every book…and kill us all.
Lance’s firm grip on Arti’s arm pulled her from those morbid thoughts, and with Gwen close behind, he led her down the spiraling stairs, arriving at the landing on the second floor. A black boot stuck out from behind the buttress of stone and the hallway beyond, belonging to one of the troopers Lance had dealt with earlier. Lance went ahead to check the corridor and make sure there weren’t any more Incendi waiting in ambush. When he whistled that the coast was clear, Gwen nodded for Arti to go.
“I’m not leaving,” said Arti, defying the order. “If my parents are here, I have to find them.” She turned back to the stairs, but Gwen blocked her way.
“You’re going back to Merl,” said Gwen, looking hard into Arti’s eyes. “This isn’t over. Not yet. If the final page is still blank, then there’s still hope. You’re the only one who can write it, so I’m not going to let you risk your life for anything. Or anyone.”
“What hope do we have?” asked Arti, fighting back tears. “I can’t get the book from Fay. Not without the key. But if my parents are still alive, I have to free them. We could be together, even if it’s only for a little while.” Her eyes pleaded with Gwen, “I can’t just leave them to die!”
“Who said anything about leaving them?” said Gwen. “Lance will take you back to Merl. I’ll look for your parents.”
Wondering what the hold up was, Lance returned just in time to hear the end of the exchange—and voice his objection. “It is too dangerous, Gwen. You said it yourself: the Incendi will be coming. They will—”
“It’s the only way,” said Gwen. “Arti has to get back to Merl—which means you need to be with her. Even with one good arm, you’re her best bet at getting out of here. And if there are prisoners down there, someone has to release them. That leaves me.”
“You don’t have to do this,” said Arti. “They’re my parents, not yours.”
“I’m doing it,” said Gwen, “and we don’t’ have time to argue the point. Get going.”
Gweneath Justea. Gwen the Just. The pen had named her well, thought Arti. “Thank you,” she said, giving her a hug. “I won’t forget this.”
The thought of letting Gwen go terrified Lance, but he knew by the look in her eyes she wouldn’t be talked out of it; her will was too strong. “You have to come back,” he said. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” said Gwen. “You have more lessons to teach me, remember?” She smiled mischievously. “We’ll pick up where we left off.”
“I…I—” Lance stammered.
“I know,” replied Gwen, already descending the chiseled tower steps.
The worry she saw on Lance’s battered face made Arti feel guilty for letting Gwen go. Lance and Gwen had only known each other for a few days, but Arti knew love when she saw it. How awful it would be if something so beautiful died before it had a chance to grow.
The least I can do is keep trying, thought Arti, searching for some of the hope Gwen had invested in her. I owe them that much.
With Lance leading the way, Arti stepped over the bodies strewn along the castle’s long second floor hallway. After witnessing Lance’s battle with Mordred, she almost felt sorry for the troopers. Against the young Ferencian, they hadn’t a chance.
The vidlink attached to the fallen squad commander’s chest pocket was still spewing voices: “To the CEO!”, “Hold them back at the stage!” As urgent as the orders were, the Incendi sounded less alarmed than before, as if they’d gained some level of control over the situation. But it still begged the question: who was attacking them?
Right now, that didn’t matter. Arti and Lance cared only about getting out of the castle, back to the motorhome and Merl. To regroup and consider their options—if they had any. Arriving at to the top of the wide staircase curving down into the main foyer, they saw a handful of troopers attending to injured comrades sprawled on the floor. Their uniforms looked singed and torn, there was the smell of burning flesh and a lot of moaning.
“Stay behind me,” said Lance, but Arti didn’t need to be told.
The first shout went up when Lance and Arti were halfway down the stairs. The same trooper screamed into his vidlink, announcing the presence of intruders inside the castle. The alert meant there would be more guards on the way; they had to act quickly.
A verse hummed from Lance’s lips, and he leapt the last twenty feet from the stairs to the lower floor, planting his feet into the chests of two troopers scrambling toward him with their lighters raised. They were flung backward, collapsing on the wounded sprawled next the castle’s main entrance. Landing like a cat, with his good arm Lance punched and chopped a path to the door, snapping lighters and limbs with surgical precision, glancing behind him to make sure Arti was still close.
One trooper stood between Lance and the open door, feebly pointing his lighter at the young Ferencian’s chest. Lance shook his head, and the Flame dropped the weapon at his feet. He moved clear of the threshold, falling back against the wall and collapsing to the floor with his hands raised.
“A wise decision,” said Lance.
Lance looked out at the lit car park to make sure their escape route was clear. From behind him Arti could hear the chaos outside, a lot of yelling and screaming.
“The spectators are fleeing,” said Lance. “We can hide among them until we make it to the hill. Hold on to my jacket, and don’t let go.”
Towed by Lance, Arti weaved her way through the panicked crowd, a river of terrified peop
le dressed in their finest, many of the women running barefoot over the cold asphalt in their sparkling gowns. No one gave Arti and Lance a second look, so concerned were they with escaping the violence at the far end of the castle.
Having threaded their way across the driveway, Lance and Arti crested the hill. As she stumbled down the grassy slope shrouded in darkness, Arti looked back up at the clifftop stage. She could see a battle raging around the raised platform where Morgan Fay had addressed her audience. There were flashes of white from hundreds of lighters emerging from both sides of a battle line. Lance came to a stop on the hill, also looking back. He said nothing, but Arti could tell what he was thinking. The fight looked like it was moving toward the tower.
Toward Gwen.
CHAPTER 26
A few minutes ago, it looked as if his men would win the day, but the tables had turned and the Incendi were gaining the upper hand. Standing on the stage with his back to the pyre, Billy Johnson knew he’d made a terrible mistake.
He thought he had planned well. The landing at Castle Point had been perfect, Captain York masterfully maneuvering the big scow into place next a thick ramp of concrete angling up from the depths toward the rocky shore like a beached whale. Lake Ogden was uncharacteristically calm, and Billy’s men disembarked without incident, finding enough space on the rocky shore to gather until they could begin the ascent. In preparing the route, Tulley Smith and his Lookout boys had outdone themselves. Sturdy iron pegs stuck out from the rock face at regular intervals, offering hand and footholds that even the weakest climbers could navigate with ease. Those carrying the ropes and grappling hooks never even bothered to shrug them from their shoulders.
The islanders managed to arrive at the clifftop without being noticed. A hundred feet from the precipice, they faced a thirty-foot-high latticework of scaffolding upon which the Lighting’s audience was seated, cheering and chanting with no inkling that an invasion force was approaching from below.
The ceremony was reaching its zenith, and a voice from the public-address system echoed above the din: “A picture is worth a thousand words. Show, don’t tell. You are the Corporation.” Big Billy recognized the speaker as Morgan Fay.
Billy had only met her once but would never forget the CEO’s voice. It carried with it a timbre of power and purpose that was at the same time seductive and threatening. He last heard it at a clandestine meeting held in Fay’s tower suite twenty years before, the night they made their “deal”. Billy and his syndicate would control the island without interference from the Corporation, provided he kept Fay Industries’ supplies flowing from the Docks into Main. One entrepreneur helping another, Fay had said. More like a deal with the Devil, thought Billy.
“With this flame, I bring light. With this heat, I cleanse.”
Understanding the meaning of those ominous words, Billy raised his stubby arm and gave the signal to his four captains, bellowing above the roaring crowd, “Up you go! Hurry, my boys!”
Two hundred men, lighters in hand, scrambled up the scaffolding. At first, the audience members sitting in the back row smiled dumbly as the islanders appeared behind them, assuming they were production crew there to add a last dramatic element to the spectacle’s climax. But when they saw the electroshock batons spark to life, it became clear that the intruders were not part of the show, and panic set in.
One row of terrified spectators pushed into the next until utter chaos enveloped the stands. The first Incendi guards who responded to the bedlam barely had enough time to draw their weapons before the islanders were upon them, bolts of white death crackling the air.
Accepting the meaty hand of Docker Mike Burnaby, Big Billy found his footing on the amphitheater’s wide rear railing, a red cylinder clinging to his back, fastened by a shoulder strap. Below, the battle was raging, and he was pleased by the quick progress his men were making. People were running everywhere, the stands emptying. Billy took pleasure in seeing the rich mainlanders scrambling for their lives in designer suits and dresses, abandoning any dignity they pretended to possess.
But he wasn’t after them.
Looking to the stage, he saw a woman in a long black gown standing beside a tall smoking torch next a platform covered in books. The spotlight illuminating Morgan Fay suddenly moved away, revealing a tiny pinpoint of light in her hand—a burning match. Billy watched as a squad of Incendi troopers rushed onto the stage, forming a protective ring around their CEO. His eyes followed the match as it flew from her hand, falling onto the edge of the platform where the books were piled.
“Get me to the stage!” yelled Big Billy. “As fast as you can!”
Docker Mike shouted orders to a few of his men, and together they plowed their way down the steps with Big Billy in their wake, fighting through the throng of fleeing spectators. Ahead of them, a tall camera boom fell, landing with a crash where Morgan Fay had stood just a moment before. Its long arm snapped in the middle, throwing sparks from a severed wire. The stadium lights flickered for a moment, then went out.
The stage rose before Big Billy like a pier thrust out into a dark sea of churning humanity, and Docker Mike hoisted the little man onto it like cargo. Billy removed the cylinder strapped to his back and waddled quickly across the stage toward the pyre, relieved to see that he hadn’t arrived too late. So far, only the books at its base had been turned to cinders, pulses of orange flickering out between layers of tightly bound charcoal pages. But the fire was gaining strength, its heat intensifying, and soon the whole collection would be alight.
In haste, Billy aimed the extinguisher at the advancing flames where they licked at a small book with letters and pictures on its cover: an “A” beside an apple, a “B” for a striped ball, a “C” next a fluffy cat. He remembered the book from his childhood when as a small, stunted boy, he had used the tiny tome to learn the alphabet and decode his first words. That knowledge had made him feel as big as a giant.
Billy squeezed the handle, propelling a cloud of thick white dust toward the pyre, shuffling around the platform, blasting quick pulses until every hint of fire was gone. Satisfied the books were safe from further ruin, he turned to locate Morgan Fay just as the lights above the stage came back on. In the darkness, he hadn’t seen the black-clad trooper approach.
The Incendi looked down inquisitively at the extinguisher in the strange little man’s puffy hands before thrusting the tip of his lighter at his head, releasing a stream of electricity that hissed through the air like a demented snake. Billy ducked and rolled away, avoiding the blast, ending up on the floor of the stage with his back pressed against the base of the smoking pyre. As the trooper closed in to finish him, a bolt of white light snapped around the Incendi’s neck like a noose, sending him to the floor in a crumpled heap. Ridley York smiled down at his boss, smoke rising from the tip of the weapon in his callused hands.
“Well done, Ridley,” said Big Billy. “Thought I was a gonner.” He accepted his captain’s hand and regained his feet, just as the dead trooper’s vidlink chirped out a string of commands.
“To the CEO!”, “Hold them back at the stage!”
Wave after wave of Incendi reinforcements started to arrive, bolts of electricity leaping toward the thinning line of islanders. The troopers seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Bodies fell amid the smoke and smell of burning flesh.
Facing overwhelming odds, Billy called his men back to the stage. It was the only high ground available, the only real estate their inferior numbers could defend. A moment ago, victory had been within reach, and now it was unlikely any of them would escape with their lives. Two of his captains were dead, and less than fifty of his men who made the voyage from the Docks still drew breath.
“I’m sorry, my boys,” wailed Big Billy. “I’m sorry.”
The hill was covered in a thin blanket of dew, and Arti struggled to keep from slipping, cradling the pen and inkwell in the pouch pocket of her hoodie. She wondered if the effort to protect them was worth it, having failed to
get the Grail Tome. Without its final page, the pen and ink were useless; she’d never be able write her version of the future.
It would belong to Morgan Fay.
But even if she had the book and could get Excalibri to work, Arti had no idea what the future should be, let alone how to write it. The only instruction came two thousand years ago from Merrill of Astenga, Excalibri’s original owner and one of the Grail Tomes’ scribes: Forged together in truth, the pen and the will are one. Arti was sure it would take another two thousand years for her to figure out what he meant.
In the darkness, it took some searching to locate the hole Lance had cut in the fence, and all the while they could hear the fighting and the screaming and the chaos enveloping the tower on the clifftop behind them.
“Who do you think is attacking them?” asked Arti. “Who would do that?”
“I don’t know,” answered Lance, pulling back the sliced section of chain link, “but they are well armed. And it is clear they knew, as we did, that tonight was their best opportunity to strike.”
Arti crouched and stepped through the opening. “Could they be after the tome, too?”
“It is possible,” said Lance, “but I doubt it. Aunt Vivian said there were few who knew of its existence. It is more likely that those who strike tonight do so for their own reasons.”
Hearing Lance speak of his aunt made Arti’s heart sink. He had only just found out that she was gone, that Mordred had murdered her.
“I’m sorry,” said Arti. “About your aunt, I mean. She was very nice.”
“Yes, she was,” said Lance. He slipped through the fence and joined Arti on the other side. “Uncle Jean taught me how to fight, but Aunt Vivian taught me…so much more. She was the wisest and kindest person I’ve ever known.” His throat tightened, “I will miss her dearly.”
The Book Knights Page 20