The Third Magic

by Molly Cochran

  "Are you disappointed?"

  He looked about, confused. "I thought the gods, at least, would be immortal."

  "We are all immortal," she said softly.

  "Are there gods beyond the gods, then?" he asked. "Unknown gods to whom the gods we know pray?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "And are they, too, destroyed before they are worshipped?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Where does it end?"

  A small smile played at the corners of her mouth. "At the beginning," the Innocent said.

  Morning broke.

  "Go, little bard." She patted his knee. "Be who you are and do what you can."

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  COMING HOME

  Titus made it safely to Panama, where he immediately found work on a freighter headed for Dover. Why he would want to go to England, of all places, was something he asked himself again and again during the sea voyage. The Coffeehouse Gang was centered in London, for one thing. So was MI-6, which still employed a number of people who might recognize Titus as a former field agent who was supposed to have died many years before.

  That the FBI meanwhile had a perfectly accurate photo of Titus Wolfe was a source of some anxiety to him, although the FBI was not Titus's main concern. The significance of the photo was not lost on the Coffeehouse boys. It was only a matter of time before they found Edgington's body and figured out the truth.

  But they wouldn't think to look in England, Titus told himself. Right under their noses. He could get lost in London, easily. He would make himself bald, tan, with contact lenses and a stone in his shoe to make him limp, put on a hundred more pounds, get a job in a small college somewhere, or shoot billiards for a living...

  He knew he was lying. For in truth, he had no good reason for coming to England except that when he learned that the freighter was headed there, he knew with uncanny urgency that he must be on it. His call to return to his native land was as strong as the need to mate.

  The peculiar thing was that he did not know why he wanted to go there.

  On the journey, he puzzled over his desire. It would be almost certain death to dangle himself in front of the Coffeehouse Gang. They would have found him even in Panama; surely the wide network of information the Boys had created would find Titus Wolfe in England. And yet he stayed on the freighter.

  By day he worked at whatever job was given him— cleaning lavatories, washing dishes. That didn't matter. Those hours flew by without a thought. He spoke to no one, absorbed in his own obsession to reach England. Sometimes he felt as if he were single-handedly guiding the ship toward its destination by the power of his will alone.

  At night, though, he felt the threads of his reason unraveling. He began to draw, for one thing, obsessively and badly. One of the motifs of his dubious artistry, drawn with lead pencil on lined notebook paper, was a flat topped, ziggurat-shaped mountain. He caught himself doodling again and again, and each time he tore out the page and threw it away in embarrassment. It was like something he'd seen in a movie once. Yes, that must have been where the idea came from. A stupid American movie.

  He was compelled to draw other things, too: figures as crude as the drawings on cave walls, of hunters or something. Or rather, one hunter, a single man with certain characteristics which always appeared in the doodles, even if they were drawn in a state of stuporous drunkenness, which had become the norm during the long, frightening nights.

  His stick figures always had tongues, for one thing. Big, bulging black tongues. They were creepy images, real meat for any psychiatrist worth his salt, Titus thought, although he himself did not understand any of it.

  Then there were smaller figures, children from the looks of them, throwing stones. One of them was missing an arm. It was lying on the ground at his feet, while blood spurted out of the torso in paisley-shaped droplets. Another was a girl with spiky black hair and a bullethole on the side of her head.

  Daddy, she said.

  Sometimes the figure would come to life in his mind. She would stand up, the bullet wound still fresh and dripping at her temple, and walk off the page, trailing bubbles of blood that exuded from her wound. The bubbles would turn into faces, grimacing, disembodied, disturbing as the floating heads in Picasso's "Guernica."

  The faces filled Titus with so much dread that he took pains to burn these drawings as soon as he realized he'd made them. And then, feeling utterly embarrassed, he drank more of the whiskey he'd taken from Edgington's boat.

  Unfortunately, the whiskey was gone by the second night. On the third day, after viewing his creation of the resurrected child who, this time, was speaking to him through a cartoon bubble containing the words, "You'll go to the Tor to make things right," his hands shook as he held the empty bottle to his lips, hoping for a drop to fall into his mouth.

  He became so distraught that at one point he rummaged through his duffel bag and held the misshapen little cup in his hands, hoping that somehow, in some magical way, it might take away his sorrows and his fears and the memory of his daughter's eyes as she lay dying. But of course, the worthless thing did nothing.

  It had all been for nothing. What was left of the finger he had cut off was festering. His fever, rising steadily, caused all the stick figures he drew to jiggle and move now, the one-armed boy, the black-tongued warriors, as if they were trying to come to life. The girl with the bullet in her brain, of course, hardly ever kept still anymore.

  Weeping, his tears running hot down his fevered face, he opened Edgington's stash of heroin.

  After Edgington's death, Titus had taken the stash from the captain's cabin, earmarking it for use as bribes. Indeed, he had been recommended for the job on the freighter as a result of just such a bribe.

  Titus had followed Edgington's addiction from the beginning. During their years at Cambridge, a number of the idealistic young men in Professor Darling's inner circle experimented quite openly with the more popular recreational substances. They were actually encouraged to do so by their teacher, who was then able to determine who among them might be prone to addictions. These were washed out of the program on some pretext or other, or—more likely— sent on assignments of extreme danger.

  Edgington had been one of these. In retrospect luck, rather than skill, had probably been the deciding factor, but the fact that he had survived the first assignment, and the second, which had been equally dangerous, had bought Edgington immunity for a long time.

  Eventually, of course, his time had run out. Titus knew that if he himself had not killed his former classmate, someone else would have, probably within days. As it was, that killer was now looking for Titus Wolfe.

  He was well aware of this fact as he heated the heroin in a spoon in one of the ship's heads.

  Edgington had never thought of himself as a heroin addict. The term conjured an image of proletarian squalor which the aristocrat found laughable. Instead, he—and the other users, too, Titus recalled—would talk about the drug as a kind of ultimate solution.

  There was no other substance, Edgington would argue passionately, with quite the same blanket effect at making one's problems disappear. He had said more than once that when a man's troubles became unbearable, heroin was the best way out.

  That had certainly held true for Edgington, Titus thought, although there had hardly been any philosophical thought behind the man's demise.

  It had been easy to talk about easy death when death itself was so remote as to be nearly imaginary, he thought as he shot the liquid into his arm. When death lay under your bed, when it came up out of the bathroom sink every morning or snaked into your window like a vine, it no longer seemed so pleasant.

  The heroin worked. For an hour that felt like eternity, he experienced nothing but blessed, perfect oblivion. He had found the elixir of life. Heroin, he decided, put everything into perspective. If someone was waiting to kill him in England, it didn't matter a whit. Life was today, now, this liquid, soft moment when he was wrapped in arms more secure than any m
other's.

  He got sick afterward, puking into the head in the middle of the night. Several people heard him. He used the incident to go off duty the following day to get high again. The experience had left him with a gray feeling, which was dispelled the instant the magic liquid entered his arm. Then the perfection returned, the blissful state of pure being unburdened by thought, emotion, or conscience. He slept.

  In his dream, an unwanted and disconnected image of Edgington spoke to him from the plane of death:

  You'll have to go back to make it right, old bean.

  No, Edgington hadn't said that, Titus recalled. The girl had. The girl he'd killed because she had seen the bodies at Miller's Creek.

  His daughter. Ah, yes, he remembered now. He had killed his own daughter.

  As she lay dying, she was the one who had spoken those odd words to him: You'll have to go back to make it right.

  He remembered that he had wanted to hold the cup out to her, the magic cup that would save the girl from death. She reached out for it, gratitude in her eyes. But Titus had snatched the cup away again and left her to die.

  You'll have to go back…

  He shot up again, and felt immediately better. Everything was going to be fine, Titus told himself. He was clever and resourceful, probably the best mercenary in the world, Professor Lucius Darling's protégé. Nothing bad was going to happen to him.

  He screamed himself awake.

  "Shut up!" someone called, tossing a shoe at Titus.

  But he did not stop. He couldn't. It seemed the scream crawled out of him like a snake, long and agonizing.

  "Asshole." An ashtray filled with cigarette butts hit him on the head.

  But still, he could not stop. He made other noises, frightened, panting sounds, and he vomited again, this time all over himself in his bunk, but he came back to the scream again and again. His hands shook. He held them in front of his face as if staring at something alien and terrifying, and continued to scream.

  "Gone buggy," someone said.

  "Get frigging security."

  In the end, still screaming, Titus was dragged out of the room and thrown into the brig, where he remained until the ship docked at Dover. There he was unceremoniously dumped, blinking into the unaccustomed sunlight. His duffel was thrown on top of him.

  It was not raining in Dover that night, but there was no moon to see and no stars. Titus struggled to his feet, clutching feebly at the strings of the duffel bag. It was too much for him. He felt as if worms were crawling beneath his skin. He dragged the bag for a few feet, then let it go.

  He looked up blearily. The only thing visible in the night sky was a highway billboard illuminated by powerful floodlights. It showed a silhouetted skyline of Lakeshire, with a castle that was supposed to be Camelot superimposed upon it. Beneath the castle were words advertising a travel agency. They read: "Come to the Days of Adventure."

  Titus did not notice the castle. All he saw was the silhouette of the Tor, the flat-topped mountain, looming in the distance. It called to him. He began to babble. He walked away from the docks with empty hands.

  Some distance away, a man in a telephone booth put a pair of infrared binoculars into the pocket of his jacket. He inserted some coins into the phone box and dialed a number.

  "I've found him," the man said. "This isn't going to be difficult."

  From the opening of the forgotten duffel bag, the unprepossessing little cup rolled out and traveled along the dock for a few feet before plopping into the water and disappearing from view.

  Titus never noticed it. Long before now, he had forgotten all about it.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  THE TOR

  The police lines at Miller's Creek had been taken down that morning; it had been two weeks since the explosion. In another hour a bulldozer would come to knock down the single tenuous wall that still stood in the rubble that had once been called the Sanctuary.

  In the days immediately following the murders, people had continued to come for the healing waters, going past the police lines into the woods, but there was nothing special about the water anymore. The local newspaper quoted a spokesperson for Beecham Laboratories, who claimed that according to extensive tests performed at Beecham and other labs, the water at Miller's Creek appeared to have lost all of its unusual properties.

  Since one of Beecham's employees, Ginger Ranier, had been among the murder victims, everyone at the lab had done whatever they could to help the police with their investigation. But neither the photograph taken by the security camera at the lab nor the dismembered finger discovered in the wreckage had served to identify the man she knew as Bob Reynolds.

  Whoever he was, it was generally conceded that he had died in the explosion along with a known felon named John Stapp, aka Pinto, who was wanted for the murders of four physicians in Sturgis, South Dakota, a biker named Banger in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Enrico Santori, the security guard at Miller's Creek.

  Hal Woczniak's body was never found, and so there were no remains to be shipped. And since he had no relatives, there was no funeral in the part of Manhattan where he had been raised.

  The only service for him was going on now, observed by a mourning party of one.

  Emily Blessing placed a flower on the broken boards of the wreckage.

  Far away, in a plane between life and death, Gwen walked along the shore of a lake. Three thousand years before, six men chasing a wild boar had fallen to their deaths on the spot where she now walked. She could almost see them tumbling through the honeycombed earth, screaming as they struck the rocks at the bottom of the chasm.

  "Goddess," she said aloud, about to pray.

  She remembered. She had been the fair-haired woman with the obsidian dagger, the priestess.

  The incident near the lake had brought her to the Goddess in that distant life. In gratitude for sparing her father, Brigid had left behind the man she loved.

  And he in turn had sacrificed the great sword, Excalibur, to win her back.

  I will wait forever, if I must.

  And they had. They had both waited. And the waiting would go on.

  She could picture him, Macsen, trembling as he held it out to her as an offering. Created from his mind and his will and his sweat, Excalibur had been as close to a child of his own flesh as he would ever know. All of his dreams lay within its gleaming blade.

  How will you choose? the Cailleach had demanded. The sword of the gods, or the love of a woman?

  Suddenly her nostrils flared. She felt the burdensome gift of prophecy stir within her now. She could smell someone coming, one with poison in his blood.

  "Goddess," she said again, but this time it was a hiss, a snarl. There would be more death. The air was thick with it.

  He was coming to the Tor. Yes, that was it. Coming... to make things right.

  She herself had first said those words. She, Gwen, the maiden.

  But for the one who was coming, she would need the others. The Mother. The Crone. The Goddess.

  She ran toward the meadow where the altar stone lay. Magic was afoot. Strong magic.

  The end of the world.

  By the time Taliesin returned to the castle, the Great Hall was deserted except for a single servant, an enormously fat woman whose job it was to clear away the dishes and goblets from the previous night's feasting. Taliesin remembered her. "Danna," he said with unexpected delight.

  Her expression of calm jollity was replaced instantly by a look of studied blandness. She curtsied to him, her eyes downcast. "Yes, sir," she said reverently.

  Taliesin's spirits sank. He had forgotten that this was how servants—and most other people—had always treated him during the Middle Ages, as if he were some otherworldly creature capable of turning her at will into a gnat or a toad.

  He put his hands on his hips. "Where's the boy?" he asked querulously.

  "In the King's chamber, sir," she said, licking her dry, fear-quivering lips.

  "Superstitious peasants,
" Taliesin muttered as he strode down the hall. The servant woman breathed a sigh of relief.

  "Are you in here, lad?" he called before entering the room.

  "Yes," Arthur answered. He was seated at the King's enormous carved desk. For a moment the old man was taken aback. The boy looked so natural there. It was as if they had both gone back in time, to when young Pendragon had just taken the sword from the stone and was setting about the business of unifying Britain.

  Those had been wonderful years, back in the beginning, when the world was so young....

  And then he saw the boy, saw him perhaps for the first time, and realized that, for Arthur, the world was still young, still new and brimming with possibility. It was himself who had grown old. The past that Taliesin had clung to so desperately had been his own.

  "They've missed this place," Arthur said.

  "What?"

  The boy pointed toward a high slitted window in the wall. Sounds of horses and men's laughter came from the practice field on the other side of the wall.

  "That... Oh, yes." For a time the only sounds in the room were the happy shouts from the practice field. Bedwyr was Master of Horse again, in charge of the gleaming beasts they rode as if they were extensions of their bodies. Kay and Dry Lips and Gawain, veterans all, formed a knot of bawdy laughter as they swapped old stories about former campaigns. Fairhands and Agravaine and Tristan and Geraint Lightfoot, still too young and thin to be pitted against the older men in terms of sheer muscle, but clever and fast in battle. Curoi MacDaire and Lugh Loinnbheimionach, inseparable, the one always looking for trouble, the other always finding it. And Launcelot, solitary, apart, still unable to forgive himself for his humanness.

  "I've missed it too," Taliesin said in a small voice.

  He was so caught up in his memories that when Arthur spoke again, it took the old man a moment to remember where he was.

  "I'm going to need the sword," Arthur said.