Intangible

by C. A. Gray

  The faces in the little circle around him looked properly amazed. “The Ancient Tongue?” repeated one of the townsfolk. “What is it, if not magic, then?”

  “It was the first language of the earth,” said Mordred importantly. “The words in the Ancient Tongue are different than words in any other language. In English, words represent objects, but in the Ancient Tongue, the words are the essence of the thing itself. When one knows an object’s true name, he can command it, and it has to obey.”

  Most of the faces looked shocked, and a few seemed a little frightened at this declaration, but the bartender narrowed his eyes at Mordred skeptically. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Prove it. Let’s see you command something.”

  Mordred could not have been more pleased with the request. His mouth curled into an arrogant smile, and in response he raised one arm casually at the wall behind the bartender. “Sruthán,” he murmured. Instantly the wall went up in flames.

  The bar erupted into chaos. Men overturned chairs in their haste to get out the door, shouting and nearly trampling one another. The bartender frantically tried to unlock the latch that kept him behind the counter, blocking his escape. Mordred enjoyed their panic for a few moments more before he finally stretched out a lazy arm and murmured, “Dul amach.” Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the flames went out, leaving not so much as a scorch mark behind. It was as if the fire had never been. Mordred folded his arms across his chest and sat back, watching their expressions in satisfaction. I should come into town more often, he thought.

  It took another few moments for the patrons to realize that they were no longer in mortal danger. A few shouted that he was insane and left in anger and fear, but those that remained gathered round him again, although significantly more cautious than before.

  “All right then,” said the toothless farmer shakily. “If Morgan le Fay can do that, why does she stay holed up in Avalon all the time? With power like that, and her looks, why – she could rule the world!”

  “She will rule the world, and I shall rule with her, when she returns with the object of power.” Mordred emphasized the last few words, just in case they did not by themselves produce the desired effect.

  “Object?” said the bartender warily, and tilted his head to one side. “What kind of object?”

  “It’s an object that gives its owner complete and total mastery over all the elements of the earth, and all who align themselves with the owner’s purposes. We will be like gods!”

  The crowd began to murmur at this, looking at Mordred as if he were an eminent threat.

  “Leave him alone, he’s just a kid,” muttered the bartender to the grumbling crowd, although he also looked disturbed. Distracted, he put the glass down and leaned toward Mordred. “Say,” he said, “the object your aunt is looking for… it’s not the Philosopher’s Stone, is it?”

  Mordred was surprised, and then uncertain. He had not expected the bartender to be more informed than he was. “What...” he tried to decide whether his curiosity was strong enough to admit ignorance, and finally decided it was. “What is the Philosopher’s Stone?”

  “It does what you say, according to legend,” said the bartender, “but more than that, too.”

  “More?” gasped the man in the back with the full beard. “Why would anybody need more than complete control of the elements?”

  “It’s not a matter of need, it’s a matter of what’s possible,” said the bartender. “If you control all the elements, you can also change one element into another.”

  “You mean like those there glasses into diamonds?” demanded the toothless farmer.

  “That,” nodded the bartender, “but that’s a straight ways conversion,” he said, and indicated a horizontal line with his finger. “It can go the other way too.” With that, he indicated a line from heaven to the earth.

  “What do you mean, the other way?” Mordred demanded. “What sort of other way is there?”

  “Glass and diamonds both exist on earth already, dun they?” said the bartender. “Mortal to immortal, though – now there’s a trick.”

  Mordred’s mouth fell open. “Immortal?”

  “Immortal,” confirmed the bartender, absently polishing the same spot on the same glass, his eyes boring into Mordred’s.

  The crowd looked horror-struck. The toothless farmer said to Mordred loudly, “Well, if Morgan le Fay finds it, I hope you’ll have sense enough to destroy it if you can, boy, and bury it if you can’t!”

  “How do you know this?” Mordred demanded, flattening his hands on the bar as he stood to his full height. His pale eyes were alight with intensity. “Who told you?”

  “I’ve heard of it, too,” said a farmer towards the back of the crowd. He was no more than bones stretched with skin that looked like leather. “Word gets round,” he added, as if that explanation were sufficient.

  “Maybe not to Avalon, though,” said another, and then muttered under his breath, “Nobody goes there.”

  Mordred sat down again with a thump, swirling his empty glass as if it still contained liquid, lost in thought.

  Aunt Morgan had talked about limitless power, but she had not given him a clear idea what she meant by it. Immortality would mean limitless power, forever. Imagine! Aunt Morgan’s beauty forever preserved. And he, the exiled Crown Prince of Camelot, stripped of his title, would be exalted beside her.

  The irony was irresistible.

  He rode back to Avalon as quick as the dark pony would carry him. He had been eager for Aunt Morgan’s return before, but now that he knew the nature of the object she sought, he was overwhelmingly anxious.

  When he entered the stable, Mordred saw Hutchins grooming the horses. That meant Morgan had returned as well. Mordred tossed the reins at him hurriedly without so much as a greeting and dashed inside the castle, searching every room, eager to discover that his aunt had been successful and had found the Stone.

  At last he found her, sitting by the hearth in the kitchen with her eyes closed. She had hair the color of honey, smooth as corn silk, falling like a sheet of pliable metal around her shoulders, and her form seemed waif-like except for her substantial breasts, showing at the top of her dress with just a hint of scandal. She rocked back and forth with an eerie smile on her lips when suddenly she stopped, apparently sensing she was no longer alone. She opened her eyes, which were startlingly black: not an abyss, but the glossy, empty gaze of a beetle. They gave one the queer, chilling feeling that she was completely hollow, like a beautiful shell.

  In the hearth before her was a brown paper parcel tied with twine. It was no larger than a fist.

  “You found it,” Mordred whispered.

  “Yes,” she said, her black eyes locked on his pale ones. Her lips curled into a smile. Before her, a book lay open to a page with symbols that Mordred did not recognize: three of them arranged in a horizontal line, with words beneath that were written in the Ancient Tongue. “Mordred,” she whispered, “You have the face of an angel. We will make such a pair, you and I!”

  Mordred took a step towards his aunt and towards the package, frightened by the intensity of his desire. “Some men in the pub were talking,” he said, his voice trembling. “They said there were legends that the Philosopher’s Stone could convert the elements from one form to another.”

  Morgan’s smile stretched wider. “Yes,” she murmured.

  “We can use it to make our bodies incorruptible, then! We will never age nor die!”

  “What?” she snapped suddenly, the mood shattered. “Who told you that?”

  “But I –” Mordred fumbled for words, trying to understand what he had said wrong.

  “Foolish boy!” said Morgan disdainfully. “You said it yourself: the Stone can convert matter from one form into another. That means there is an exchange. If we use the Stone on our bodies, they will become spirits, and our bodies will die! Is that what you want?”

  “I –” Mordred’s mouth hung open, and he stammered, his pale cheeks burni
ng, “no, of course not –”

  Just as suddenly, his aunt’s expression softened again, and she spoke tenderly. “Of course not,” she echoed. “Perhaps you did not know. The Dark One who came before me used the Stone exactly as you proposed. He thought he would achieve immortality too, but instead he transformed himself into one of the penumbra, and killed his mortal body in the process.”

  Mordred was confused. He had never heard her speak of the Dark One before. “Who was the one who came before you?” he asked.

  She lowered her voice and whispered conspiratorially, “We cannot speak his name! You know why, of course; he is one of them now. He calls himself the Shadow Lord; Shadow, because his very existence is relegated to the shadows now, like them. Still, he has great power,” she turned away abruptly. “Yet he is dependent upon the bodies of others in order to wield it. We don’t want to be dependent on anyone, now do we?”

  Mordred shook his head mutely.

  “So you know what we must do,” she whispered.

  Mordred had no idea what they must do, but he waited to hear her explain it with baited breath.

  “We cannot use the Stone directly on ourselves. But indirectly –” she gestured to the kitchen, to the walls, to the moat outside the window, glittering in the sun.

  Mordred stared at her, not comprehending. “You want to use it on the castle?”

  She turned on him with frightening intensity. “We will dislodge Avalon from the earth, and then it will be our throne forever!” she finished triumphantly.

  “How will we ever get back?” said Mordred doubtfully. “What about our revenge on my father? All that we’ve planned for, all that we wanted –”

  “It shall be managed,” she said calmly. “Once we reign from our castle in the sky, we can come and go from the earth as we please. Like them.”

  The idea did not form in Mordred’s head in so many words, but he began to wonder for the first time if his aunt was quite sane.

  “Oh,” said Mordred uncertainly. “I thought you meant we would leave earth forever.”

  Unexpectedly Morgan burst into a musical fit of laughter. “Of course not!” she said. “We shall live here most of the time, as we do now. Nothing will change – except that we shall have absolute power and eternal life, of course. Eternal, because once we are there, we will live in a world that cannot be corrupted.” She licked her full lips, scarcely able to contain herself a moment longer. Her hands reached for the parcel, and, trembling, she began to untie the twine. “Now, Mordred,” she whispered, “go and fetch me twelve Lantana berries and a handful of Nightshade.”

  Mordred dutifully left the room to do as told, but he was confused. He had no idea why, but some sense of foreboding and a long-forgotten instinct of self-preservation made him pick up speed. He fled across the grounds and over the stone footbridge that spanned the moat to the banks on the other side. By the time he reached them, he was winded, and automatically dropped his hands to his knees, where he stood panting, watching the castle of Avalon carefully.

  He wondered why other ingredients should be necessary at all. The object that his aunt had always spoken of was sufficient to wield the complete power of the Ancient Tongue by itself. At least that was what he thought she had said. Slowly he stood and began to search the edges of the forest for the ingredients she requested, but even as he did so, he began to wonder.

  What if she didn’t need the Lantana berries or the Nightshade after all – what if she had lied? Mordred knew he was the only living person his Aunt Morgan cared about. If her experiment worked, there would be nothing to stop her from returning for him and bringing him to her castle in the sky to reign at her side. If it doesn’t work, though… she had been sitting with eyes closed and an open book when he arrived, and had not seemed anxious to acquire additional ingredients in order to perform her incantation. She looked as if she were ready to begin. But she had thought Mordred was still in the city then. Was it possible that she just wanted to get Mordred out of the way, in case something went wrong?

  If something does go wrong, what will become of me? Mordred wondered, suddenly horrified at the thought. After all, his father exiled him already. He had no other family, no other home, no one to care for him.

  Mordred stood, and before he knew what he was doing, his feet began to move back towards the footbridge, though he was empty-handed. He picked up speed. He began to run. He suddenly knew that the most intolerable fate of all was for his aunt to leave him behind. He could not let that happen – even if it meant death, he had to be in that castle when she used the Stone –

  His feet pounded the ground with hardly a sound, muffled in the peat moss and by the marsh as he approached the banks. His feet had only just touched the precipitous footbridge, when suddenly he found that his foot went right through it, and plunged into the water below –

  Except it didn’t. There was no water.

  The place where the castle ought to be was now miles and miles of empty peat moss and rolling hills ascending to the edge of the forest, where the sun disappeared behind the tree line.

  Suddenly he heard a thunk, and then another and another. Instinctively he ran towards the first dark object that had landed a few yards away, and discovered that it was the flank of his own pony – the very one he had ridden from town less than a half hour before. The blood still flowed freely from the place where it had ripped from the pony’s warm body.

  Yards away were piles of crumbled stone. It was as if the blast had disarticulated the floor of the castle and distributed it centripetally from its source all around the meadow. Mordred ran from one to the next, finding scattered bits of wood and stone amid the earth and moss.

  Beneath one pile of rubble, he found a human hand, calloused and caked with dirt. He recognized it as Hutchins’s. His panic mounted.

  Reflected in the late afternoon sun, he saw a glint of gold: hair the color of honey, smooth as corn silk.

  Mordred sank to his knees.

  “NO!” he began to howl, covering his head with his arms. “NOOOO!”

  He shouted and shouted until he had no voice left, until he had no words, until he had no breath. Then he lay gasping on the ground that was no longer even damp, and his hands curled tightly into fists.

  What seemed like days later, he stood shakily to his feet, and turned in the direction of Camelot. He would go back on foot.

  Because now, revenge was all he had left.

  Chapter 21

  Lily gasped back to reality a second after Peter. He rolled towards her and reached an arm out to make sure she was substantial.

  “Peter!” she breathed.

  “I know,” he gasped, rolling over from his back to his stomach to push himself to a seated position. “I’ve never been in the mind of a villain before. That was… unpleasant.”

  “Because I could kind of see his side,” she finished, nodding with a shudder. “Knowing only what he knew… I think I would have hated Arthur too.”

  “It wasn’t Arthur’s fault, though,” said Peter.

  “Mordred didn’t know that,” Lily pointed out.

  “What?” Cole demanded. “What happened? Whose head were you in?”

  “Morgan used the Stone on the castle itself!” cried Lily to Peter unnecessarily, ignoring Cole’s question.

  “What happened to it, though?” Peter said. “We saw it disappear – well, most of it, anyway, but does that mean it was all destroyed, or –”

  “– was the rest of it translated into the world of the penumbra?” Lily finished his sentence eagerly.

  “Mordred thought it was destroyed,” Peter said, “and that Morgan was killed in the process.”

  “If it was destroyed, wouldn’t the entire thing have turned into rubble, instead of just bits and pieces of it?” Lily asked.

  “Hi! Excuse me! Over here!” said Cole crossly. “You want to fill me in?”

  They both looked at Cole, as if remembering his presence for the first time. “Sorry,” Peter mutter
ed, and Lily echoed, “Sorry.” Then they recounted what they had seen, although Cole had a hard time understanding them because each talked over the other and they cut each other off in their haste to get the story out.

  When they were finished, Cole said anxiously, “So the question is not so much what happened to the Castle of Avalon, but why did Kane want you to see what happened to it?”

  They were all silent for a few moments. Then Lily mused aloud, “Morgan said that the Shadow Lord had used the Stone to transform himself into one of the penumbra, but his body died in the process. That means he was human once. After that, he ruled on earth by taking over the bodies of other humans. That’s different than the penumbra,” she pointed out. “All they can do is try to influence people. They can’t directly control them.”

  “You think he can inhabit human bodies because he used to be a human himself?” Peter asked.

  She nodded. “I can’t see any other way to explain it, if he became one of them. Maybe it’s… you know, a square peg into a round hole kind of thing.”

  Cole and Peter exchanged a look, and Peter said, “You lost me there.”

  “Well,” said Lily, thinking hard, “let’s just suppose that there’s a spot in a human where his soul goes, like a key hole, but it can only be occupied by a human soul. Nothing else fits. So even if the Shadow Lord is one of the penumbra now, he used to be human, which means he fits in the key hole. The penumbra get as close as they can, but the best they can do is wrap themselves around the doorknob. They can’t actually fit inside.”

  Peter stared at her in amazement.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing. I just… I think you made that up. It makes perfect sense, though, in a completely non-scientific sort of way.”

  Lily snorted. “Thanks. I think.”

  “Even if it’s true,” said Cole, “that still doesn’t explain why Kane wanted you to see that story.”