Lake in the Clouds

by Edward Willett

  He took a deep breath. Okay, he thought. This always works in movies.

  “Help!” he screamed, voice breaking. “Help! Help! Help!” Not the most original dialogue, but short and to the point.

  He heard footsteps running toward the door. It swung inward. Iftekhar rushed in, gun in hand. Wally dodged around him and dashed down the hall toward the elevator, slamming the door behind him. He couldn’t lock it, but it would slow the guard.

  He hoped.

  Not very much, it seemed. It was already swinging open.

  Wally pounded on the button of the elevator, even though he knew pushing it over and over again did nothing to make it come faster. Iftekhar was coming. The elevator wasn’t there. He turned frantically and held the poker en garde. Iftekhar slowed. “What are you doing?” he said. He sounded more puzzled than anything else. He had holstered his gun. “Why did you call for help?”

  “I’m escaping,” Wally said.

  Iftekhar frowned. “Escaping? Escaping from where?”

  “From here,” Wally said. “From you.”

  Iftekhar’s frown deepened. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re holding me prisoner here. I don’t want to be a prisoner.”

  “I am not holding you prisoner. I am protecting you.”

  Wally glanced up at the elevator. Twenty floors to go.

  “Protecting me from what? Or who?” He paused. “Um…I mean, whom?”

  Iftekhar shrugged. “I do not know. I have just been ordered to protect you.”

  “Well, you can stop.”

  “No. I cannot. I must protect you. That means you cannot leave.”

  “But I am leaving.”

  “Then I will stop you.”

  “Then you are holding me prisoner.”

  “No, I am protecting you.”

  Ten floors.

  “Either way, I’m leaving.”

  Iftekhar sighed. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Iftekhar laughed. “You won’t.”

  Wally hefted the poker. “I might.”

  The elevator pinged. The doors slid open. Iftekhar lunged. Wally, without even thinking, parried his outstretched arm, spun and struck with the poker. It thudded against Iftekhar’s head. The man dropped like a stone. Wally had a horrified glimpse of blood starting to pool beneath his skull before the elevator door slid shut.

  Wally backed up against the back wall of the elevator, shaking. He hadn’t meant to hurt Iftekhar. He didn’t even know how he’d done what he did. The poker had almost had a life of its own, as though it were wielding him instead of him wielding it.

  It was the whole lousy-fencer-to-Western-Canada-competitor phenomenon all over again. It had to have something to do with whatever secret Major was keeping from him.

  Guess I’ll never know what that is after this, he thought.

  And then he thought, with a sense of dread, Did I just kill a man? Did I kill him?

  He dropped the poker. It had blood on it. It looked like a murder weapon. Maybe it was. Maybe he was a murderer.

  Even if he wasn’t – even if he’d just given the guy a concussion – he’d given a guy a concussion. Concussions could be serious. He should know. And Iftekhar had been bleeding. A lot. What if he bled to death?

  I’ve got to get help for him, Wally thought. But I’ve got to get out of here, too. I’ve got a plane to catch. Aunt Phyllis has no one else.

  When the elevator had started sinking it had felt as if he’d left his stomach behind. It still hadn’t caught up.

  How could I do that to him? he thought. I’ve never hurt anyone before. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone before…well, not badly, honesty forced him to add. There had been a time or two when Flish –

  His mind was skittering away from what he had done. He forced it back on track. That wasn’t me. That was…someone else. That was…

  And then it hit him, as hard as he had hit Iftekhar.

  That was the sword. That was Excalibur. That was the same force that had changed Ariane, fuelled her anger to the point she had put Flish in the hospital.

  But I’m not the Lady of the Lake! he cried to himself.

  Yet he was something special. At least Major – Merlin – thought so. The Lady had thought so, too. “I wonder if Merlin…” she’d said when he’d met her in Wascana Lake. Wondered if Merlin what? Knew the truth about him?

  And Ariane had said that the first two shards of Excalibur hadn’t wanted to play together…until he’d touched them. Then they’d sung in perfect harmony. He hadn’t heard it. He hadn’t heard anything. But just like Ariane, he had held the shards of Excalibur. The first, when that was all they had. The second, when he had taken it to Merlin. And both together in the hotel room. And somehow, whatever that sword truly was, it had called out to whatever he truly was.

  He had thought that by betraying Ariane and stealing the second shard he was saving her from the sword’s violent influence. But who would save him?

  He swallowed hard. Then the elevator reached the garage level and the door opened. Wally snatched up the poker and dashed out. He looked around hurriedly, saw a garbage can just outside the elevator hallway, and threw the poker into it. The police would surely find it there, but he hoped to be long gone.

  He couldn’t leave Iftekhar bleeding and unconscious. The man needed an ambulance, right away. He got back on the elevator, rode it up to the lobby, hurried over to the security desk. The guard looked up at him, frowned. “Who are you?”

  “Wal…” Wally stopped just in time. “Wallace Gromit,” he said in a panic, and then winced. But apparently the guard was not an aficionado of stop-motion animation.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Wallace,” the guard said.

  “Man…hurt,” Wally said, deciding to stick with the bunny-in-the-headlights approach. “Rex…Rex Major’s floor.”

  “What?” The guard jumped up. “What kind of injury?”

  “Head injury,” Wally said. “He fell. Blood everywhere.”

  The guard ran for the elevators. Wally turned and dashed toward the front door. The guard shouted after him, but Wally was already on the street. Five minutes later he was on the subway. A few random back-and-forths on the subway and a dash through the “underground city,” which sprawled beneath Toronto’s downtown like an endless shopping mall, and he was pretty sure he’d lost any pursuers. Also himself, but he could always find himself again.

  He sat in a coffee shop, had a latte, and caught his breath. He had no idea how long word would take to get to Rex Major that his guard was injured and Wally was gone. He didn’t even know how Major would interpret that. Would he think Wally was kidnapped? Wally snorted. Who would kidnap me?

  No, Major would figure out right away what Wally had done. But he might not guess why. So what would he do?

  Wally didn’t know. All he could do was press on with his plan…and hope Major couldn’t figure out where he was headed.

  He glanced at his watch. His Air Canada flight to Saskatoon left at 12:05 Toronto time and arrived at 2:40 Saskatoon time, leaving him with just over half an hour to grab the 3:15 Transwest Airlines flight from there to Prince Albert. He’d be in Prince Albert with maybe an hour of daylight left to try to do something about Aunt Phyllis.

  It was time to get to the airport.

  First, though…

  There was an ATM not far from where he sat. He took out his bank card and withdrew $1,000 – his limit. It barely scratched the surface of the money he’d transferred from Major’s account, but just in case Major found out about that and somehow stopped the transaction, he thought he’d better draw out as much as he could.

  Feeling rather naked with that much cash on him, even though no one had been nearby when he’d taken it out and even though he immediately hid it in his backpack, he hurried off to the nearest exit to street level. Emerging on Bloor, he flagged down a taxi. A taxi ride to the airport was expensive, but it wasn’t
like he didn’t have the money.

  He couldn’t hide his identity while flying, and he knew Major’s magic could conceivably be monitoring every airline transaction, but on the other hand, when he had bought the tickets, Major hadn’t had any reason to be concerned that Wally might be flying somewhere. Wally hoped that was enough to keep him in the dark.

  Check-in and boarding went smoothly. Wally settled back in his seat on the Air Canada jet and closed his eyes. A little over three hours to Saskatoon, and he hadn’t slept well the night before. He intended to make up for it.

  But after ten futile minutes he opened his eyes again and sighed. Stupid brain, he thought. Quit thinking.

  But it didn’t pay him any attention. As he winged his way west, the same three thoughts kept spinning around in his head like hyperactive puppies chasing their tails. Where is Major? Where is Ariane? And where is the third shard?

  And just like those tail-chasing canines, all he got was dizzy.

  So he locked them in a metaphorical kennel and decided to spend his time more productively: figuring out how he was going to rescue Aunt Phyllis. By the time the plane touched down in Saskatoon, he had a pretty good idea. It all depended on Major still being blissfully unaware that his email had been hacked, of course – if you could call it hacking when he’d been sitting at Major’s own computer when he’d done it. In any event, Wally thought there was a pretty good chance Major still didn’t know about it. Even if Major had been informed by now that Wally had flown the coop – and sorry though he was for what he had done to Iftekhar, he rather hoped the man was still in no condition to answer questions, because the longer he remained incommunicado, the longer Major would remain in the dark – Major had no reason to think Wally had managed to break into his office and access his computer.

  More likely he’d think Wally had just gone stir crazy, had somehow managed to hurt Iftekhar, and then had run in panic. Which meant he would most likely think Wally was still in Toronto. The last place he would expect him to be was in Prince Albert, trying to rescue Aunt Phyllis.

  Which meant Wally’s mad scheme to do so just might have a chance.

  •••

  Late in the afternoon, Ariane rode in silence in the back of the limo as it rolled toward the Prince Albert airport. Rex Major sat in the front next to the driver, talking quietly into his phone, leaving her with nothing to do but stare out the window and try to figure out something, anything, she could do to thwart Major’s well-laid plans.

  As she had all day, she came up dry. Literally, she thought. Oh, they had passed water en route to the airport, but it zipped by too fast for her to do anything with it even if she’d had an idea. Force the car off the road and then slip away into a handy stream? Major would still have Aunt Phyllis.

  Form the water into a sword of ice and kill him where he sat?

  She shuddered. The fact she’d even thought of that scared her. The fact she thought the sword would entirely approve of that scared her more. She had the horrible feeling that if she ever gave in to the sword’s most bloodthirsty urges, there would be no going back. She would begin to use the sword as it wanted to be used – or it would use her – and then how would she be any better than Merlin?

  She folded her arms and sat in unhappy silence for the rest of the ride.

  From the outside, the terminal looked more like a bus depot than what she thought of as an airport building, although a little farther off stood a more airporty structure, with a small control tower attached.

  But they drove right past the terminal, heading to a hangar. “My pilot is ready to go,” Major said over his shoulder to Ariane. “The plane is fully fuelled and he’s already filed the flight plan. I’d love to fly directly to Honolulu and then head on to Sydney…but you don’t have a passport with you, do you?”

  “My passport is somewhere at the bottom of that cave in France,” Ariane said, heart leaping with sudden hope. It takes weeks to get a passport. I’ll have time to figure out some way to –

  Major nodded. “So we go to Vancouver first. We get you a replacement passport. Then we’ll fly to Hawaii. I have some business there anyway. Then on to Sydney. We’ll home in on the third shard from there…unless you get a better idea of its location before we get there.”

  Ariane said nothing.

  They pulled up to the hanger. Major got out, came around, and opened the door for her. She climbed sullenly out, not looking at him. He sighed. “You might as well enjoy the trip,” he said. “Not many fifteen-year-olds get to take a private jet to Vancouver, Honolulu, and Sydney.”

  “Not many fifteen-year-olds get kidnapped by a thousand-year-old sorcerer,” Ariane snapped.

  Major laughed. “I know. Makes you doubly lucky, doesn’t it?”

  He offered her his arm. She gave him what she hoped was a withering look, but he remained disappointingly unwithered. In movies, magically preserved monsters always crumble into dust before the final credits, she thought savagely. If only I had a spell to make that happen to him.

  This time she didn’t berate herself for her bloodthirstiness. That bit of rage she was pretty certain had nothing to do with the sword. Rex Major was threatening Aunt Phyllis. She didn’t need any magical boost to feel angry about that.

  The jet Major led her to looked only slightly smaller than the Transwest Airlines commercial turboprop plane that had just landed and was pulling up to the terminal. The jet had the Excalibur Computer Systems logo on it. Ariane glanced around at the Transwest Airlines plane, hoping someone on board would look out at and think there was something strange about a teenage girl getting aboard a corporate jet with an older man, but realistically, why would they? He could be her father, after all.

  Someone might recognize the logo, though. Someone might even recognize Rex Major.

  Maybe Wally will…

  She cut that thought off. Old habits died hard. Yes, Wally might see a Tweeted photo of the jet, or of her – and wouldn’t care. He wanted Major to do whatever he was doing. He’s not on my side anymore, she reminded herself. He’s not my friend. He’s my enemy. Like Merlin.

  I have no friends.

  I have no allies – except Aunt Phyllis, and she’s more of a liability.

  I only have myself.

  And I’m helpless as long as Major has Aunt Phyllis.

  She climbed up the gangway into the jet, entering a compartment just behind the cockpit. “Move aft,” Major said, and silently she complied, leaving that compartment for a deluxe lounge, all creamy gold leather and rich brown wood. There were comfortable chairs, a table, a bar, a galley. “Go on,” Major said. “Check out the whole thing. You’ll be spending a lot of hours in here over the next few days.”

  Curious despite herself – she’d never been on a private jet before, never even seen one except in the movies – she moved through the forward lounge into the next compartment, clearly an office for Major, with a desk and luxurious chair, a computer terminal, and locked cabinets. Behind that was a bedroom, with a twin-sized bed, offset so that a corridor led past it along one side of the plane to the lavatory at the very back. She glanced into that, too: it was way roomier than the typical airline washroom. She half-expected it to boast a shower, but she supposed the water required for something like that would weigh down the plane too much and restrict its range.

  Which must be pretty impressive if Major had flown across the Atlantic in this plane and now intended a direct flight from Vancouver to Honolulu, and from there to Sydney.

  She made her way forward again. “It will take days to get a passport,” she said to Major. “Are you going to leave poor Aunt Phyllis stuck in that little camper all that time?”

  “It’s not a little camper to her, it’s a luxurious mansion,” he said. “But not to worry. It won’t take days to get a passport. I expect it to take no more than twenty-four hours.”

  “Don’t you need all kinds of documents?” Ariane said desperately. “Proof of citizenship, photos, all kinds of stuff?”
<
br />   Major just smiled. “Ordinarily, yes. But I can pull a few strings.”

  Ariane stared at him. “You’re going to use magic to force someone to issue me a passport.”

  Major’s smile widened. “Of course I am. What’s the point of having magic if you don’t use it to get what you want? Although the thing still has to get made, of course…but if you pay a $110 fee you can get twenty-four-hour urgent service. I think I can spare the $110.”

  “But Aunt Phyllis is still stuck in that trailer.”

  Major sighed. “I told you, as far as she’s concerned, she’s in the lap of luxury. Don’t worry, she’ll be well taken care of. And once you’ve handed over the shards to me, you and she will be free to go.” The smile faded. “But never forget,” he said softly, “that I can always find her again…if you cause me more trouble.”

  Ariane felt a surge of white-hot rage then, and very little of it came from the sword. But there was still nothing she could do but acquiesce, and so she turned and reentered the lounge while Major spoke to the pilot in the cabin. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. A minute later he came aft. Behind him the pilot pulled up the gangway and secured the door.

  “We’ll be taking off right away,” Major said. “It’s about an hour and a half to Vancouver. We’ll spend the night in a hotel. Tomorrow we’ll look after your passport. With luck…” he smiled, “well, with magic…we’ll have it by evening. We’ll fly to Honolulu. I’ll have to spend another day there – some of the business I need to take care of over the next couple of days doesn’t lend itself to being conducted from an airplane.” He made a face. “It will be a great relief when I can quit worrying about being Rex Major, businessman, and focus on being Merlin, the thousand-year-old sorcerer.”

  “I feel your pain,” Ariane muttered.

  “No one likes a sarcastic kid,” Major said severely.

  The engines suddenly began to whine. Major sat down opposite Ariane, and reached for the seatbelt. “Buckle up,” he said. “We’ll be airborne in a few minutes.” He sighed. “If we don’t crash on takeoff. I hate flying.”