by Ben Zackheim
The room was filled with dozens of massive hanging banners. They drifted gently back and forth, scraping against the dirt floor. There were so many of them that we couldn’t see more than ten yards in front of us.
What they were attached to? Who knows. We couldn’t see the ceiling. It was so high that the light didn’t reach it. The tops of the banners just disappeared into the darkness. The smell in the cave was pleasantly musty, like a house filled with old Persian rugs. Each one was covered in its own ornate symbols, woven into the fabric with incredible detail.
The confused expression on Rebel’s face said it all. A wind blew from behind us and made the banners sway back, almost as if they were about to attack.
It was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that was getting ready to…
A woman’s scream bounced off the walls.
“That way,” we both said pointing to the left.
We moved together, walking toward a red banner with hundreds of black star-like symbols woven into it. I lifted my Glock and aimed at one of the stars. Just gut instinct. Rebel ran her fingernails over the stone wall. The sound almost made me pull the trigger.
“Will you please not do that?” I pleaded.
“It’s my call sign.”
“I know it’s your call sign. I’m asking you to please find another damn call sign.”
She frowned at me and almost said something, but a sound from behind the banner distracted her. It was a grating noise. Like feet on dirt, or…
A woman stumbled past the banner and fell against the stone wall. Her throat had been cut. A wheezing sound escaped what was left of her neck.
I didn’t run to her. It was probably a trap. It reminded me of our Amsterdam mission.
But, of course, Rebel ran to her. She didn’t really learn from her mistakes. Which was good for me because being my partner was probably her biggest one.
The poor woman grabbed Rebel’s shoulder and pulled her down slowly. She tried to say something to my partner but all that came out was a hiss. She died, eyes open and terrified.
Rebel peeled the woman’s hand off of her. She found a piece of paper in her grasp.
“What is it?”
She unfolded the paper and her eyes went wide. She put a finger to her lips.
I knew that look. I held my breath.
He came from behind a banner on the other side of the cave. Probably wanted to surprise us. He almost did. But we surprised him instead.
He took a shot at Rebel who dodged it easily. He forecast his aim with a dramatic, untrained flourish. He turned the gun on me. I got off a shot that hit him in the shoulder. He grunted and ducked behind the closest banner.
Rebel and I made eye contact. She nodded. We had one last trick up our sleeve and we were ready to play it.
Chapter 4
I leapt onto the nearby wall first. Rebel sprinted and jumped onto the opposite wall. Our elixir-powered fingers grabbed onto the chisel marks easily. We climbed up into the darkness.
When I was high enough to be covered in shadow I glanced down.
There were armed men behind every row of banners. Eight in all. They wore the same outfits the guys on the cliff wore. Guardians of the Sword. They’d be as ruthless, too. I’m sure the woman with the slashed neck would agree.
I got the first sign that my power was fading when a pinky slipped off of the wall. I had about one more minute until I was a normal guy with normal strength hanging 100 feet above guys who wanted to kill me.
I held on tight with one hand, grabbed the pistol with the other and took out the first Guardian. I thought the echo would give me cover. I was wrong. The seven remaining guys laid down a ridiculous blanket of lead.
We didn’t have time to take them all out. We needed to end this now.
So as bullets splattered the stone all around us, Rebel and I dropped our Sparks.
These are not nice weapons, but they’re good in a pinch, and we were in a damn pinch.
The projectiles burst in the air and sent cracks of lightning through the cave. It was like an indoor lightning storm.
Screams hit the stone walls like bullets and faded to silence. We heard bodies hit the ground. The air was charged and smoky.
The smell of fried flesh is not an easy one to get used to. Yeah, it smells like any other burnt meat but just the knowledge that it’s human meat makes it tough to keep your lunch down. Luckily, I was running on one meal in the last 36 hours and it was holding onto my guts like a pro.
“You okay?” I yelled over to Rebel.
“Yeah. You?”
“Crispy. Suddenly vegetarian.”
“I know what you mean.”
The Sparks were spell-weapons, also known as Speps. They didn’t impact us, just as all spells have no effect on the caster. The way Rebel taught me is that it’s kind of like smelling your own breath or tickling yourself. When it comes from your own body it has a built in blind spot. Makes sense in a world that otherwise defies sense. Magic is Rebel’s thing, not mine.
I dropped to the ground from ten feet up. I’d run out of juice. I wanted more. I tried to tamp down the urge. The last thing I needed was an addiction to Skyler’s product. Who knows how he’d use that against me?
“What did the paper in her hand say?” I asked.
“It has a symbol on it.” She held it up for me to see. It was a circle with a single line slashing through it.
“Let’s look for the symbol on the banners,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just a hunch. Don’t touch them.”
She started checking for the slashed circle but I got distracted by the body of a Guardian. I needed to know who we were up against.
He was covered in black cloth just like the rest. But he also had a white mask on - no nose or mouth, with slits for eyes. I pulled it off and turned away. I forgot about the fried eyeballs part.
“Anything?” Rebel asked.
“Not yet. You?”
“These tapestries have thousands of tiny symbols on them. They’d be beautiful if they weren't annoying the hell out of me.”
I smiled and yanked on the Guardian’s cloak to see if he was hiding anything underneath. He wore clothes that looked to be local. He had glasses in his shirt’s chest pocket. He had two daggers in his belt. A Russian Vityaz-SN submachine gun lay near his open hand.
And then I spotted something interesting. He had an image of a sword tattooed on his neck. The ink of the blade wrapped around his neck and the tip was drawn to look like it was embedded into his chin. One small, dark blue blood-drop tat fell upward from his chin, as if crawling into his mouth.
“He’s got a tattoo of the sword,” I said.
“Seriously?” Rebel ran across the cave, caution to the wind. She stood over me wide-eyed and looked down. The shit-eating grin on her face was probably on mine too.
Sure, we’d been searching for it for the last year. But even with all the sacrifice and loss and sleepless nights — we still had a hard time comprehending it.
Rebel said what I was thinking, and with all the drama that I was feeling.
“I can’t believe it. It’s real. Excalibur is real.”
Chapter 5
In her excitement, she almost pushed past the closest banner.
“NO!” I screamed.
I marched up to her, pulled her back a few steps and tossed a stone at the banner she’d almost pushed aside. We heard a loud crack from above us and backed up a little further.
A boulder dropped from the darkness and slammed into the ground right where she would have been standing.
“That is why I want to look for the circle symbol on the banners,” I said, pointing to the paper. “My bet is that the banners that have the symbol will be the safe path through. It was the dead woman’s guide to avoid this trap.”
“The dead guys, too,” she added. “Sorry. Got carried away.”
After a few minutes of searching we found the symbol on the center banner. There were thousands of
them but they were hidden well because they were tiny. From a distance, they looked like a straight thin line. But if you examined the designs on the banner closer you saw that they were made up of tiny markings. Tiny markings just like the symbol. I didn’t know how the weavers were able to craft something so small. Magic, probably.
We peeked around the banner and spotted another body on the ground, again decked out in a black robe. I checked to make sure he was dead. This guy held two pistols in his hand. PL-15s. Russian again. If these thugs were local then they definitely had outside help arming themselves. Good guns.
I borrowed them.
After three more lines of banners we could tell that the light source was behind the next and final cloth wall.
“Take your gun,” I said. “You may need it.” I held out her pistol. The one I’d borrowed earlier.
She smiled and held up her death-tipped fingers. “I’m good.”
She clacked the nails together like she does when she’s showing off. Creeps me out every time.
We moved through the last banner together. It flapped back in place behind us. I expected to see a spotlight of some kind back there. The light was just that bright. But instead we saw a brightly lit tunnel, a long tunnel, sloping downhill to a room about a hundred yards away.
Whatever was lighting the cave up was down there. Waiting.
“You think that’s the sword’s glow?” Rebel asked. We think alike sometimes.
“Hope not. Or we’ll have a hell of a time getting it through customs.” She snickered and nudged her elbow into my ribs.
“Oooooo,” she cooed. “Look at that.” She put her hand up and caught the intense light on her nails. Her smile was quickly killed by a frown. She was either really angry at the tunnel’s ceiling, or she saw something up there that she didn’t like. “Oh, shit.”
“What, oh shit? Don’t oh, shit unless there’s shit about to go down.”
“Oh, shit,” she repeated.
A loud CRACK resonated up the tunnel.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
We both had the same thought. The cave was about to come down on our heads. A split second later, the walls began to shudder and a crack formed in the ground beneath our feet.
We had a choice. We could run back and get the hell out of there. Or we could run into the light and probably be trapped forever.
We took one look into each others’ eyes and we ran for the light.
There really was no other choice. This was our last chance to get Excalibur. We needed that treasure. We couldn’t fail again.
As we got closer, the light got brighter. We squinted. The debris falling on our heads got bigger.
We ran faster.
I reached out and grabbed her hand. If this was the end then I didn’t want either of us to feel alone.
The second I thought I couldn’t take the light anymore, it went out. Poof. We jumped from the collapsing tunnel together and landed hard.
The air was stale and the falling rocks behind us echoed everywhere. Wherever we’d stumbled into was an even bigger space than the one we’d left behind.
When I opened my eyes I didn’t see a thing. For a second I thought I was blind. The light had been so intense that my eyelids had been little protection from it.
But Rebel turned on her pen knife and pointed it at my face. Not sure how it still worked after the electric storm.
“We made it,” she said.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
A loud sound, like a distant cave-in reverberated through the space. We were sealed in good and proper.
“Awful. Terrified,” she corrected. Sounded about right. “How about you?”
“Last time I hold your hand,” I said. Her nails left several slashes on my fingers.
“But it was so sweet,” she cooed.
“We just have to hope there’s another path out of here,” I said, as reassuringly as I could muster.
She shone the light 360 degrees. It was at that point I noticed she wasn’t holding any flashlight. Her finger was lighting the way.
“I didn’t know you could do that with your fingers,” I said.
“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that. Hey. Look.”
I followed the thin beam to the wall where the slashed circle symbol was clumsily painted.
“Is that…” she started.
“Yeah, looks like blood to me.”
The symbol was leaking down the wall as if it had just been drawn. And the color and consistency were just right. I’d seen enough blood over the last two years to know what it looks like.
She pointed her light to the ground underneath and saw another woman, dead. Her skin was torn to shreds. She’d used her own blood to paint the wall.
“Why?” Rebel asked. “Why would she repeat the image in here?”
“Maybe as a warning for her partner.”
“Warnings. I hate warnings.”
I found a spot on the wall near the poor woman. I sat down, just out of reach of the puddling blood. The look of terror on her face was frozen there. But there was something else in that expression. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“What did she see?” Rebel asked. “It looks like she’s looking at something.”
She was right. The woman was in pain when she’d died. She’d been scared. But she’d also been focused on…
“Light it up over there,” I said. I gestured to where the corpse’s eyes were pointing.
Rebel pointed her finger at the opposite wall.
“It’s a wall. She wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. It was too bright in here.”
“Maybe. Can you show me the floor, too?”
She sighed and spotlighted the dirt floor. But as she did that I noticed something. “Wait. Run it over the wall, left to right.”
“I need to teach you this spell so you can do it yourself.” She didn’t like to take orders. Especially from me. I enjoyed giving her orders more than just about anything on the planet.
“No thanks,” I said. “Wait. Look.”
“What?”
“Look at where you’re pointing!” My raised voice echoed in the vast space.
“I’m loo…” she started to say, before she saw it.
She kept running her light over the wall. She turned on another finger and the space grew brighter. Her face was under-lit enough for me to see her eyes go wide. I smiled.
“No way,” she whispered as her fingers finished their lap around the room.
“I think we’re going to find it,” I said.
“Yeah. I think you’re right.”
Chapter 6
“The room is a circle,” she said.
“Just like the symbol.”
“But if the symbol represents this room then where’s the line that goes through it?”
“Let’s find it.”
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and all ten of her fingertips glowed like fireflies. The purple flicker was odd. It took a moment to get used to the effect it had on my balance. But it did the trick. We could see the entire room. Our eyes met. Our smiles matched. I stood up but not before leaning toward the corpse and whispering, “Thank you.”
We walked to the center of the room.
“How long can you keep this lighting spell up?” I asked her. The spell may have been an easy one for one finger. Maybe for a few minutes. But all fingers? I didn’t want to find Excalibur and then lose my partner.
“You just worry about yourself.”
“How are you going to recharge? Did you think about that?”
“Wow, what a great point! I hadn’t thought about that. After two decades of practicing with Skyler. Because he’s not a hard-ass about this stuff at all.”
“Okay, fine. I get it. I’ll not care any more.”
“Maybe I need another decade before I can think about such an advanced concept.”
“All right! All right! Tire yourself out and when we need to find a way out of here you
can tell me how right I was.”
We went back to looking for the line through the circle as if nothing had happened. That’s just the way we are together.
“A circular room means we may be under a circular ceiling, too,” I said.
“So the line could run through the ceiling or the ground.”
“I don’t see a line on the ground.”
“And I can’t see the ceiling. It’s too high up.”
“So can you…?” I asked, not daring to finish my question.
She whipped around to face me. “Can I what?”
“You know.”
“No, Kane. Please tell me what you mean.”
“Just light up the ceiling, Rebel.”
“I don’t know, I may need to save my energy for…”
“Rebel!”
She just smirked and turned her light up to 11. She pointed her hands at the ceiling.
Nothing. Just a lot of stone, carved by some ancient tools with a million slices.
She turned her light back down to one finger and sat down cross-legged. She needed to meditate to recharge. That would buy her a little more time. But if she was going to get back in top shape we’d need a cheeseburger. With bacon. And cheese. Fried cheese. Magic loves grease, or so she says.
I used the moment of silence to think. Would we have to dig to find the line? I didn’t know how much good air we had in there to keep us going. The space was big but it wasn’t giving my brain a lot of food.
I scuffled around, my feet dragging up the loose dirt. Maybe the line was just under the surface. I knew the sound wouldn’t distract Rebel. She’s really good at zoning me out when she needs to.
It was another five minutes before she stirred.
“What’s the latest?” she asked.
“Kicked up some dirt. Could use a light when you can manage it.”
Her glow revealed a bunch of kicked-up dirt. Nothing else. The one spot where I’d really dug deep was just thick sand.
We had to find it. We couldn’t come so far to just abandon the sword. The dead women were working for someone who had the same clues we did. If they came back they could just waltz right in and take it with the right resources.
My guess was that these women worked for the Vamps.