by Daniel Diehl
“What do we do now?” Jason did not know why he was whispering; at this distance it was impossible for anyone to hear them. What he did know was that the cold was robbing his legs and hands of feeling.
Merlin held up one finger asking for more time. Reaching into his belt pouch, he pulled out a small bundle of cloth, laid it on the sand and unwrapped it. Inside was the piece of Venetian mirror. “Let’s see if Madame le Fay is in residence, shall we?”
Jason had never been allowed to watch Merlin consult his scrying glass before and didn’t know whether he should watch or look away. Since Merlin said nothing and did not turn his back, Jason decided it was all right and scooted closer. Merlin began muttering; as his voice droned on it took on the monotonous sing-song of a monastic chant. His free hand moved back and forth, scribing shapes and signs in the air only inches above the reflective surface. After repeating the same unintelligible words and motions for two minutes or more, the mirror began to cloud. Another minute and the fog in the mirror turned black. Merlin knitted his brows in concentration and continued his litany of sound and movement, but the mirror remained stubbornly dark. Finally, Merlin rewrapped the glass in the cloth shaking his head in puzzlement.
“Odd. Very odd.”
“What’s odd?”
“The scrying glass functions like radio. I tune it to the vibrations of the person whose image I want to call up. But as you saw, it showed me no image of Morgana.”
“Could it be broken?”
Merlin made a snorting sound like he was choking on a laugh. “No. Not broken, it has no moving parts so there is nothing to break. It means that where ever she is, Morgana is in total darkness.”
“Maybe she’s taking a nap and has the lights off.”
“No. Darker than that. This was total darkness. A room with no windows; a tunnel, a vault, something like that. Even if the subject is asleep I can see their image on the pillow even in the darkest room. Here I got no impression of anything.”
“Why would she be awake and in a totally dark place?”
“A very good question.” Merlin nodded his head thoughtfully before rising from the scrub-covered ground just far enough to tuck his whiskers inside the heavy fur coat and roll onto his back. He lay there staring wordlessly at the first stars to appear in the darkening sky. Jason turned on his side to look at him.
“So now we don’t even know where she is?”
Merlin pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger in concentration. “I know she is in there, I just don’t know where.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. I also know she’s expecting us.”
“WHAT?” Jason sat bolt upright and stared into Merlin’s weathered face.
“She’s known all along that we would follow her here.”
“You knew and didn’t tell me? How the hell could you do that?” Jason’s voice was taking on an edge of either anger, fear, or both, he was not sure which.
“I did say she might be leading us here, but I wasn’t certain until the last few days.”
Jason rolled face down onto the cold ground and banged his head against the dirt. “Christ, Merlin. You could have warned me.”
“I couldn’t be sure you would come if you knew she was waiting for us.”
“But why me? I’m no spy, I’m no commando, and I’m certainly no wizard.”
“You’re the only other person who understands the nature of the threat and you have a knowledge and awareness of the modern world. I am out of place, out of time and ultimately constrained by the past, which is the only reality I understand. You may be no wizard, Jason, but you are clever and intelligent. And...” Here, he hesitated as though he was having trouble shaping the words. “You are the only person I can trust.”
“Son-of-a-bitch, Merlin, if you trust me, then you have to learn to be honest with me.”
“I’m sorry if I lied to you.”
“Again.”
“Again. I should have told you.”
“So tell me now. Why in the hell are we in this God-forsaken place, anyway?”
“That much I did tell you. It’s imperative that we find out whether Morgana has some means of contacting the Dragon Lords here in Mongolia. If she does, then we must destroy it.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Then this entire trip was nothing more than an attempt to lure us here so she can kill me before her computers are repaired.”
“Damn.” Jason lay silent for a long minute, shaking with cold and trying to control his anger. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he was here and there was nothing he could do about it. And, Morgana le Fay had to be stopped. “Ok. So what now?” His voice was little more than an angry hiss.
Again Merlin rubbed his eyes. “We wait until it’s completely dark, sneak around to the back of the fortress and find the sally port.”
“What?” Jason’s voice was too sharp, and he took a deep breath to control himself. “What do you mean?”
“A sally port is a hidden door near a castle wall and...”
“I know what a sally port is; I’m an archaeologist. But what makes you think there’s one here?”
“I can sense it, or rather, I can sense that when I couldn’t see Morgana in the glass it was because she was in a tunnel leading from the fort to the sally port.”
Jason rolled over and thumped the back of his head onto the ground. “And you think you can find this door in the dark.”
“Yes.”
* * * *
Jason’s chin, neck and hands were covered with frozen sand and dirt. He could taste it gritting between his teeth; the same teeth that now chattered from cold. Or was it fear? In the darkness, the silence of the desert had grown to ominous proportions, as though the entire world were holding its breath in anticipation. It felt like they had been crawling around in plain sight for hours. Any minute one of the guards was bound to spot them and open fire. All this time Merlin had been grubbing and scrabbling through the dirt with his fingers, looking for something like a dog searching for a lost bone. Having no idea what the old man was looking for, or how to help him find it, Jason held back, lingering in the dark a few yards away, shaking, cold and frightened. More than once he wondered if the guards could hear his teeth chattering.
“Pssst.” Jason’s head snapped toward the sound. He could just make out Merlin’s hand, a few inches above ground level, motioning to him. As silently as he could, Jason crawled on his belly, commando style.
“What?” His voice was nearly inaudible.
“I found it.”
“The sally port?”
Merlin nodded and motioned Jason closer. With heads almost touching, Merlin dug his hand into the gritty soil. Jason could just see him hook his finger around something buried in the dirt. When he lifted his hand, Jason could see that two fingers were looped through an iron ring.
“The door handle.” Merlin whispered. “Help me clear away the dirt so we can lift it.”
Jason grabbed Merlin’s wrist. “What if they hear us?”
“We wait until the next time the guard passes and turns the corner. That should give us four or five minutes before he comes back. By then we should be inside.”
“Even so, they’ll see the door once the dirt is cleared away.”
“If we close it, they won’t be able to see it till morning and it can’t be later than seven-thirty now. That gives us twelve hours. More than enough time.”
Jason scraped frantically at the three inches of turf obliterating the door, working his way outward from the iron ring till he found the edge of the doorframe. His fingers were so numb he could hardly feel the surface of the wood. A foot to his left, Merlin was doing the same thing, but working his way in the opposite direction.
“You’re crazy, old man.” Jason muttered half under his breath.
“Of course. Why do you think they still talk about me after all these centuries, my piety?”
The ground was hard f
rom the winter’s cold and the work took longer than Merlin had estimated. Once, the guard had come around the corner of the wall and Merlin only spotted him seconds before he would have been within earshot of their scratching. Merlin lunged forward, throwing his arms across Jason’s hands, pinning him to the ground to silence him. The two remained motionless, barely breathing, for nearly two and a half minutes, while the guard stopped to relieve his bladder over the wall before continuing his circuit and disappearing around the corner.
With the surface of the door finally exposed, and no guard in sight, Merlin and Jason stood up, tugging on the circular handle. As the ancient door pulled free from the ground, the half-rotten timbers sagged and twisted, threatening to collapse. Finally, they raised it to an upright position. Carefully, slowly, Merlin lowered himself onto a barely visible set of stone steps. He descended one step after another until only the top of his head was visible. Finally, when he was almost swallowed by the inky blackness, he motioned silently. One step at a time, Jason followed, letting the rotting door slip back into place behind him. If the night had been dark, here even the faint starlight ceased to exist. It was as though closing the door had tied blindfolds over their eyes. The only difference was that even blindfolded, the eyes continues to perceive tiny dots of red and white as an indication that they are working. Here there was nothing. Their eyes were wide open but there was only absolute blackness. Jason reached out a hand searching for Merlin, a wall, anything to give him some point of reference. After a few seconds of fumbling, he felt Merlin’s hand reach into his own.
“I think we know where Morgana was when I picked her up in the glass.”
“How the hell are we going to find our way out of this pit?”
“Shh. Wait.”
Floating in the intense darkness, at some indefinable point in the blackness, Jason glimpsed a tiny spot of shimmering phosphorescence like a pale blue light. As he tried to focus on it to get a sense of its distance and size, it grew and expanded. In a moment, the light was lying in what at first appeared to be a disembodied hand. Its luminescence increased enough to expose the sleeve of Merlin’s coat, finally spreading to cast a soft glow on the walls, floor and ceiling of a stone tunnel. When the light spread to a distance of nearly ten feet, Merlin shook it free of his hand, allowing the orb to precede them into the tunnel.
“Wow.” It was no more than a harsh, reedy whisper, but Jason was duly impressed.
Merlin motioned him forward. Together they moved through a silence so total that even their footfalls made no perceptible sound. The experience was so disorienting it was otherworldly. The tunnel wound first left then right, occasionally dividing or ending in a “T” junction, but after no more than a moment’s hesitation Merlin seemed to sense the direction they should take and led them deeper and deeper into the maze under the old fort. Every few feet they paused to clear away layers of cobwebs so thick they looked like rotting theater curtains. Falling back into place behind Jason, they clung to his hands, face and hair. The pair had been making slow but steady progress for what Jason assumed must have been nearly fifteen minutes when he became aware of the noise. At first it was very soft, distant, like a child scratching on a tabletop. Then it picked up, coming closer and getting louder. Ahead of him, he saw dozens of tiny red eyes dart to and fro just above floor level, peering at them from inches beyond the halo of Merlin’s light.
“Jesus. Rats.” He instinctively grabbed Merlin’s sleeve to halt their forward movement.
“Visions. Not rats, mental images of rats. She probably uses them to scare off trespassers.”
“How do you know they’re not real?”
Soundlessly, Merlin made a few deft motions with his hands and the eyes blinked out, merging into the blackness. Jason was about to say something when he had to shake his head to clear his eyes. For a second, it seemed like the walls had moved ever so slightly. Then it came again. Ahead of him, the floor rippled and heaved. It rose and tilted, first left then right, like something out of a carnival fun house. And even worse than the movement, he had the distinct feeling that ‘things’ were trying to worm their way into the tunnel through every crack in every block in the pulsating floor and walls. Jason could feel his heart quicken and his throat constrict. He tried to step forward, lifting his foot to meet the rising motion of the floor. “What the hell is going on?”
“Shh. I told you. None of this is real. Just ignore it. She’s trying to scare us.”
“Well, it’s working.” Jason’s voice was hoarse with anxiety. The flesh between his shoulder blades prickled and tightened. He was certain that up ahead, in the darkness, beyond the range of Merlin’s fairy light, something large, dark and deadly waited for them. “Does she know we’re here?”
“Not necessarily. She set a spell to make this happen anytime something moves in the tunnels. It just means we’re getting close.”
“Close to what?”
“To whatever it is she doesn’t want us to find. A door into the compound. A way into her office. Whatever. Now be quiet, I’m trying to locate her.”
As Merlin moved forward, Jason kept one hand on his sleeve, trying to keep his balance in the shifting, churning maw of the tunnel. It may have been an illusion, but it was real enough to make Jason’s stomach heave. For long minutes they pressed forward, one step at a time. Finally, Merlin stopped, turned to Jason, and put a finger to his lips. When he spoke, his whisper was almost inaudible even with his face touching Jason’s ear.
“We’re there.”
“Where?”
“Morgana is almost directly above us.”
“So what do we do now?
“Take my hand.”
“No, I’m ok.”
“Take my hand. We are about to pay her a little visit.”
“What?” Jason’s panicked whisper was filled with disbelief.
Calmly, Merlin explained his plan. “You know how I appeared to you at the cocktail party and on the street?” He waited for Jason’s nod before continuing. “That’s what we’re going to do to her. As long as you hold on to my hand I can project your image along with my own.”
Jason did not like this idea. “Will I be able to see where we are?”
“Yes. Everything will appear to both of us, and to her, as though we were really there. With any luck she won’t know that we’re not in the room with her. I’m not sure she’s even aware that I can project my image.”
“Not sure? This is no fucking time to be ‘not sure’.”
“It doesn’t matter. Even if she knows, she’s hardly expecting us at this particular moment. Now come on, take hold of my hand, and whatever you do don’t let go.”
The experience was very much like a virtual reality game that Jason had once tried at a science museum. But VR had the same slight feeling of unreality as watching a movie; dimension, distance and color were slightly distorted. This seemed absolutely real. It was as though he and Merlin had simply stepped through a door and appeared in a large room decorated with oriental antiques. In front of him and slightly to his left, the woman he knew as Lu Morgan was seated at an ornately carved desk. She was staring intently at a pile of papers in front of her and seemed completely oblivious to their presence; at least until she looked up. When she did, her eyes grew large - not with fear but with shock and anger. Rising from her chair, she never allowed her steely gaze to leave Merlin’s face for a second. Jason was not even sure if she knew he was there.
“How in the hell did you get in here you miserable old wretch?” For the first time she shifted her gaze from her ancient enemy, shooting a glance toward the closed door. When her eyes snapped back to Merlin, she could see he was smiling and it made her even angrier. A tiny vein began to pulsate along the side of her neck.
“It’s been a long time Morgana. A very long time, indeed.”
“Not long enough you meddling old fool. I should have killed you centuries ago when I had the chance.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You never had th
e chance to kill me. I never gave you the chance.”
“So have you come to return my books? They are long overdue, you know, and there will be an unpleasantly heavy fine to pay.” Her eyes blazed with centuries of pent-up rage. Jason could see her hands tremble from the adrenaline-powered rush.
“I’ve come to send you to hell, where you should have been long ago.”
“You think you can handle me alone; you and pretty-boy?” Jason could tell she was stalling for time, trying to decide what to do. “Go on, old man, try me if you’ve got the nerve.”
Quicker than Jason could move his eyes a swirling, white-hot ball of fire flew from Merlin’s hand and exploded on the desk, only inches from Morgana’s crotch. By the time Jason’s eyes readjusted from the flash another missile shot across the room, barely missing her head, exploding on the edge of a massively carved Chinese box-bed. Pirouetting in what Jason took to be confusion and fear, Morgana dropped to the floor behind the desk. A second later, the entire front of her desk exploded with a deafening roar as a wall of flame reached toward him and Merlin. Instinct made Jason try to jerk away but Merlin gripped his hand so tight he thought his fingers were going to break. Before the smoke cleared, or his ears stopped ringing, Morgana reappeared from beneath the desk. In momentary confusion she blinked at the two figures still standing in the center of her room, but she only took a second to regain her composure.
“If four twelve-bore shotguns didn’t cut you to ribbons old man, that means you’re not really here. You’re not, are you? The coward’s way of confronting their enemy; stay at a safe distance.” She surveyed the top of her desk. Not a single paper had been pushed out of place by Merlin’s fireballs. “Well then, if you’re not really here that means you can’t hurt me, doesn’t it?” A smile played across the woman’s mouth and Jason had the uneasy feeling it was Merlin’s turn to decide on the next move.
Standing there, morbidly transfixed by these two implacable enemies locked in a Mexican stand-off, Jason imagined he could almost hear the sound of footsteps; but they seemed far, far off in the distance and muffled as though the feet were wrapped in layers of soft cloth. That was when he felt his hand wrenched from Merlin’s grip. Disoriented by pain, he tried to understand what was happening. The room, Merlin and Morgana le Fay were all gone and he pitched head first toward a stone floor. The instant before his face came into contact with the wall he could see a leering Chinese face standing above him, as a rifle butt delivered him up to an impenetrable blackness.