The Merlin Chronicles: Box Set (All Three Novels)

by Daniel Diehl

  Merlin took this in and nodded. He had no intention of going back through the dragons’ realm unless there was absolutely, positively no other way to carry out the plan he had been formulating since arriving back in his own time.

  “So what about the other gates?”

  Vivian brightened immediately, feeling far more certain of herself now. “Oh, the little ones can be wherever you want them to be.”

  Merlin reared his head back in amazement, his intense blue eyes large and round. It had never occurred to him that the gates might be portable. His mind flashed back to the day in Jason’s flat when he had been watching an odd program on the television in which a cartoon bird opened a box marked ‘Acme Hole Company’, extracted a black disk, threw it against a rock wall and disappeared into the void, shouting ‘Beep, beep’. His entire concept of inter-dimensional travel was suddenly turned on its head.

  “Really? And you can connect wherever you happen to be at the moment to anyplace or any time you want?”

  “Well…” the sprite looked down, studying a finger nail, mumbling. “Some can, but I can’t. I’m not allowed to move through time any more. It’s part of my punishment.” Then, brightening, she raised her head. “But, of course, since time is all the same for me, I don’t really need to, do I?”

  “But you can go to any location you want?”

  “As long as I stay in or near the water. When they turned me into a naiad one of the limitations was that I must always remain close to water. You saw how easy it was for us to move from Cornwall to Ynys Enlli.”

  Merlin was now leaning forward across the table as far as he could, one hand reaching out to grasp Vivian’s tiny fingers.

  “And anyone who knows how to operate the gates can move just that easily from place to place and from time to time?”

  She reached out with her free hand to trace the large veins in the back of his hand.

  “Yes, but operating the gates demands absolute precision in your coordinates.”

  “I’ve gathered as much from my reading. If I understand it right, you have to have perfectly precise coordinates in both time and place.”

  “It’s easier for us, we just seem to have the skill but you humans will have to be very careful. Mistakes in time can be remedied by turning around and going back to your starting point, but a mistake in space could be disastrous.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, depending upon where you are going, even a small mistake could put you in the middle of the ocean, or at the top of a mountain. You might wind up inside a mountain or somewhere out there in the vast emptiness between the stars. You wouldn’t have time to conjure up another gate before you died.”

  Merlin rubbed his hand across his forehead and nodded. Obviously even the world’s greatest wizard was going to have to proceed with great caution if he intended to conquer this particular skill before it conquered him.

  Watching the frown lines creep across his face, Vivian gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

  “Look at it this way. You know how you use a person’s unique sympathetic vibrations to call up their image in your scrying glass?” Merlin looked up, locking eyes with her and nodding. “Well, this is a lot like that. Every minute in history and every geographic location in the universe has a specific set of harmonics. All you have to do is attune yourself to those harmonics and you can go anywhere, and any when, that you want.” Watching deep lines of worry spread across Merlin’s face, she jumped to her feet, smiled, pirouetted and grabbed his hand, pulling him off the chair. “Come on. I’ll show you how it works. I can’t move through time, but we can go anywhere in the world as long as we stay near water.”

  “It really is that easy?”

  She walked toward the door, extending one hand behind her, signaling for Merlin to follow. “Don’t be afraid. Just think of it as stepping around a corner.”

  In the blink of an eye their surroundings changed. No longer under the clear skies of Ynys Enlli, they were standing under a rolling bank of slate gray thunderheads. Off to one side was the bank of a wide, gently rolling river, in every other direction stood endless ranks of blackened ruins which had once been a city. Scattered amidst burned and charred fingers of wood that reached skyward like beseeching hands lay the destroyed bodies of humans and animals. Near Merlin’s feet the skeleton of a dog lay where it had fallen, the flesh seared from its bones. But despite the sea of death surrounding them there was no stench of decay or decomposition; this sad place had lain conquered and destroyed for many months. Standing shocked and slack-jawed, Merlin realized that over the long centuries he had almost forgotten what war looked like.

  “What is this place?”

  “Don’t you recognize it?”

  “No.”

  Vivian waved an idle hand toward the tumbling width of water running close behind them. “The River Avon is just there. You knew the town as Vaddon, the Romans called it Aquae Sulis and someday the English will call it Bath.”

  “The dragons did this, didn’t they?”

  The girl-thing’s shoulders heaved and dropped with the effort of a great, sad sigh. “Yes, they were here only shortly before you cast the spell to close their gate; it was their last major attack on the world of men. But there was very little left for them to devour after the Saxons came.”

  Merlin scowled, trying to arrange the exact sequence of events that had, for him, happened more than sixteen centuries in the past.

  “Was that when Arthur fought Colgrim’s army, or another time, later?”

  “The Saxons were only here once; the time they beat back Arthur’s army. In the later time, after Arthur’s death, the dragons came and finished the job the Saxons started. This is what it looks like now.”

  Rubbing his hand over his face and shaking his head, Merlin muttered, more to himself than to his companion “We almost beat the Saxons that day. We were so close. If we had only had a few more men or…something. If I could have just given Arthur the right edge. I tried, but it wasn’t enough.” Finally he opened his eyes and shifted his hypnotic gaze to Vivian. “Let me understand this. The gates will give me access to any point in time, forward or backward; is that right?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how far forward in time a human can go, but certainly any point within your own lifetime.”

  “And what would happen if I went further forward than the end of my own lifetime?”

  “I’m not sure, but I you could possibly vanish.” Looking up at him she smiled. “So once I have shown you how to step around the corner, be certain that you step around the right one. I would hate to lose you.” Merlin stared at her with large, surprised eyes as she reached for his hand. “Are you ready to go back to my island?”

  It was a long, long time before Merlin was prepared to take his first, tenuous step through one of the time gates. For an unknown number of days, or possibly months, he poured through the ancient scrolls, books and folios, looking for the right enchantments and spells that would allow a human to access the portals which offered their services so readily to the immortals. He hung on every word of instruction and advice that Vivian could impart to him. Since she could not move through time to demonstrate the proper procedures, it was essential that he get every detail perfect before setting off on his own because there would be no way for her to correct an error if he wound up in some far flung location at some unknown period of time.

  Ingredients for an endless number of potions and incantations had to be gathered from all over the British Isles, some had to be picked, or plucked, or collected during the correct phase of the moon, or at the right season of the year in order for them to have the specific properties required to make the enchantment work. Through every step of this long process Merlin paid scrupulous attention to detail; never before had he been in the position that even the slightest miscalculation could cost him his life and, just as terrifying for him, deny him the opportunity to change both a past and a future that had played out with such tragic injustice.

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nbsp; “I think I’m finally ready, my dear.”

  Merlin and Vivian lay next to each other in her big bed. The naiad had snuggled close to the wizard, her tiny head resting lightly on his upper arm. Before speaking he had lifted his free hand absently and begun stroking the length of her hair as it fell across her shoulder.

  “Ready for what?”

  “To open a gate and go through.”

  “Really?” She raised her eyes and tilted her head slightly but all she could see of his face was the line of his cheek and his long, sharp nose.

  In response, Merlin only nodded.

  “Well, just to be safe, I think I should show you how to take a peek into the place you are going before you step through. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

  Now Merlin pulled his chin close to his chest, canting his head downward so he could look at her. “A peek?”

  He could feel her nod her head against his side. “Before you step around the corner, take a peek first to make sure you are in the right place.”

  “I can do that?”

  “Yes. You will only appear as a shadow to anyone at the other end who sees you.”

  The following day, and for several days thereafter, Vivian demonstrated how to ‘peek’ into another place before stepping through the gate. She could not, of course, even look into another time, but after more than a dozen glimpses into places both near and far away, he was certain he understood the principal and was prepared to take his first tentative peek on his own. Because of the peculiarities of time and space, the distant future was no further away than was ten minutes into the past; knowledge of this fact led Merlin to the conclusion that he had nothing to lose by immediately trying to glimpse into the twenty-first century world of Jason Carpenter.

  All the practice peeks he made with Vivian had given clear, if slightly translucent, views into dozens of different temporal locations but on his first solo attempt to reproduce the procedure the results were something less than he had hoped for. Nearly blinded and driven back through the portal by withering heat and searing flashes of light, he held his hand in front of his tortured eyes in an attempt to make out his surroundings. This was not where he had planned on being. Merlin was shocked and terrified beyond words when he glimpsed the world into which he had opened a doorway. Had he stepped through the gate his feet would have been wedged on a tiny precipice of land clinging to the edge of a world comprised entirely of flames and death. The sky overhead reeled and danced with the reflected orange fire cast up from an endless sea of molten earth. Plumes of smoke and fire exploded into the air as great gouts of gas bubbled up through the lava, bursting into flame as they hit the super-heated air. Afraid he might be consumed by the inferno, Merlin pulled his head back to safety. Apparently there had been a slight miscalculation.

  On his second attempt – which he made some considerable time later, after much recalculation - the world spreading out before him appeared to be filtered through a heavy fog or mist. Swirling clouds of moisture surrounded him, making it nearly impossible to discern images. Squinting through the haze he finally glimpsed an ill-defined female form; a sea of auburn hair tumbled behind the upturned head as water streamed over the woman’s face. When she moved her hands over her face to clear away the soap suds and rubbed her eyes before opening them, Merlin realized several things simultaneously. He had very nearly located Jason, but was obviously a few feet, or yards, off target. The woman in the fog was Beverley McCullough and, finally, he realized that she was taking a shower and was as naked as the day she was born. As she turned her head and reached for the knob to shut off the water, the young woman bathing in the twenty-first century, and the wizard standing in the fifth century, came eye-to eye for a split second before a very embarrassed Merlin pulled his head back around the corner of time.

  Shaken and humiliated at having violated Beverley’s privacy, Merlin refined his method of calculating physical and temporal locations yet further before attempting another glimpse through time and space. For his next attempt he chose a glimpse into the recent past which proved considerably more satisfying than his first two tries.

  The dimly lit room lay shrouded in shadow, the only light filtering into it came through a small window located directly above the worktable running along one wall and through the open doorway leading into a finely appointed room beyond. From the next room Merlin could hear the sound of voices talking with great animation and urgency, but he could not see the speakers from his vantage point behind the threshold of the gateway. He knew who they were, however, just as he knew every inch of the room he was in. On the long worktable, and on the shelf above, were containers holding every manner of ingredient used in the preparation of nearly every spell and potion known to exist. Beyond, on another set of shelves, were a pile of dusty books and scrolls that he knew almost as well as he knew the lines on the back of his hands. He had worked in this room nearly every day since Arthur built it for him after he returned to court following his years of aimless wandering through the forests of Caledonia far to the north, in the land of the Picts.

  Leaning into his workroom as far as he dared, he peered out through the small sheets of wavy Roman glass that formed the panes of his window. Moving his head first left and then right, he could see the gently rolling landscape and glimpse a passing herd of shaggy cattle ambling through the last rays of an early winter sunset. Smiling to himself, he wondered how Jason would react if he ever saw such a primitive world, and whether the young man’s knowledge and cleverness could have helped him reverse the course of history and save Arthur’s kingdom. But for the moment these remained matters for idle speculation. Up to this point Merlin had not dared set foot beyond the safety of Ynys Enlli Island. As he pulled his head back to the safety of Vivian’s library, a young man whose face he knew well stepped up to the door of his workshop, grabbed the handle and pulled it closed, cutting off most of the light filtering into the room.

  Later, Merlin sat at the big table in the circular great hall. Across from him Vivian was idly peeling a single grape with the greatest of care, laying the tiny bits of skin on the edge of a plate.

  “You seem to be making great progress, my love…at least for a human.”

  “I think I feel satisfied with my progress. I think I’m almost ready to step through.”

  “Once we are sure you will be able to get back, then you can go. But not until then.” She popped the grape into her mouth, chewing on its sweet flesh pensively.

  “How soon do you think that will be?”

  “Does it matter?” She looked at him, grinned and winked knowingly. “Once you can move through time, you will be free from all constraints. Tomorrow, next year, last year, they will all lie at your feet and you can move through them at will for the rest of your life.” Spitting the tiny seeds into her hand and arranging them in a perfect line on the edge of the plate, she added. “And you can always come back to me at the very moment at which you left. As long as you come back to Ynys Enlli occasionally to be rejuvenated, time will have no more hold on you than it does on me.”

  Chapter Four

  “Ok, you were right and I was wrong. I’m sorry I doubted you. I apologize.”

  Beverley stood in the doorway of the spare bedroom that she and Jason had converted into a shared office space. Covering her dripping wet hair a huge, fluffy towel was wound into a massive turban-like structure. She had paused in her flight from the bathroom long enough to wrap another big, bright orange towel around her body but had not taken time to dry herself before rushing into the room where Jason was working. Behind her a string of large, dark spots crept across the carpeting where the water ran down her legs and soaked into the pale gray pile. Jason looked up from the ancient manuscript he had been mulling over for hours, stared at her in confusion and blinked furiously while deciding on an appropriate response.

  “Umm, thanks.” Scooting his chair back from the desk and turning it around so he could look at his wife face-to-face, gave him time to collect his thou
ghts. “Mind if I ask what I was so right about that you had to run in here and apologize before you got dressed?” Then, after a quick glance at the sodden carpet, “Or dried off?”

  At the end of August they had closed the dig at Barbury Hill Fort, turned the land back over to the farmer and the Swindon Borough Council and packed up their treasure trove of small finds for further study. In the three months since returning to their flat in the rambling Victorian building on Bootham Road in York, Beverley had spent most of her time writing reports on the summer’s work and Jason returned to the endless, and often fruitless, task of trying to decipher the pile of scrolls and manuscripts Merlin had left behind. One of Beverley’s articles on the Roman villa was already slated to appear in Archaeology Today and she and Jason had received a few enquiries asking whether they would consider speaking to one group or another about their work. As things are measured in the world of archaeology this amounted to nearly overwhelming notoriety.

  Jason wished his work was progressing as quickly as Beverley’s. For three consecutive months he had been trying a variety of different enchantments in his quest to make the antique crystal scrying glass obey his commands and move from one specific person to another at his command. Although he had not figured out how to focus the scene on specific, desired individuals, he had managed to get it to shift scenes when he wanted. After more than five years of work he had progressed far enough to turn the magic mirror on, and make it shift scenes on command - now all he needed to do was figure out how to direct its movements. At the moment, however, his biggest mystery was not the workings of Merlin’s scrying glass but figuring out the reason why Beverley was standing in the doorway apologizing. Finally, after rubbing furiously at the mound of toweling piled on her head, she walked across the room, knelt down next to his chair and stared directly into his olive-green eyes.

  “You remember last summer when you got all excited and insisted you saw Merlin in that chunk of glass?”