by Ben Zackheim
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 offered little protection from it.
But Rebel turned on her pen knife and pointed it at my face. I wasn’t sure how it still worked after our little electric storm.
“We made it,” she said, shining the light in my face.
“You okay?” I asked, pointing it back at her.
A loud sound, like a distant cave-in reverberated through the space. We were sealed in good and proper.
“Awful. Terrified,” she muttered. Sounded about right. “How about you?”
“That’s the 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 her thin beam of light to the wall where the slashed circle symbol was clumsily painted.
“Is that…” Rebel started to ask before I interrupted her.
“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 irises were pointing.
Rebel aimed her finger at the opposite wall.
“It’s a wall. She wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. It was too bright in here a minute ago.”
“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 orders to her 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 lit just 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 the sword,” I said.
“Yeah. I think you’re right.”
Chapter 6
“The room is a circle,” Rebel said. She looked around, wide-eyed.
“Just like the symbol.”
“But wait, if the symbol represents this room then where’s the line that goes through it?”
“Let’s find out.”
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 sense of balance. But it did the trick. We could see the entire room. Our eyes met. Our smiles matched.
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 to exhaustion.
“You just worry about yourself, Kane.”
“How are you going to recharge? Did you think about that?”
“Wow, what a great point!” she yelled, throwing her hands in the air. “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, Rebel, fine. I get it. I’ll just not give a shit any more.”
“Maybe I need another decade of trining before I can think about such an advanced concept.”
“All right! All right! Tire yourself out. When it’s time to find a way to escape this tomb, you can tell me how right I was.”
We went back to looking for any sign of a line-through-the-circle as if nothing had happened. That’s just the way we were together.
I glanced up at the darkness above us. We couldn’t see the ceiling at all. I must have said “Hm” out loud.
“Hm, what?” Rebel asked.
“We’re in a circular room. A circular room means we’re probably under a circular ceiling, too,” I said.
She looked up too. “So the line could run through the ceiling or the ground.”
“I don’t see a line on the ground.”
“And we can’t see the ceiling. It’s too high up.”
“So can you…?” I asked her, 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.”
“Come on. Just light up the ceiling, Rebel.”
“I don’t know, it’s not wise to stress my delicate system. 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.
The dome above our heads was huge and filled with a whole lot of nothing. It was just a blanket 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 this line? Were we following a dead-end clue? We didn’t have much time to figure things out. There wasn’t much oxygen left in the collapsed cave to keep us going. The space was big, sure, but it wasn’t giving my lungs or brain a lot of food.
I scuffled around, my feet dragging up the loose dirt, searching for something, anything. I stopped for a second when I realized the sound might distract Rebel’s concentration, but she sat cross-legged, still as a statue. I should have known. She was really good at zoning me out when necessary.
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.”
She shook her hands like they’d fallen asleep and the glow flowed. It 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 wi
th the right resources.
My guess was that the two of them worked for the vamps.
That meant we lucked out getting there when we did. Just a little bit more luck could get us out.
Rebel stood up, took a deep breath and clapped her hands together.
“So what do we do now?”
“Let’s see that symbol again.”
She handed me the scrap of paper she’d taken from the first dead woman’s hand.
A circle. A line slashing right through the center of it. But I noticed another detail. It was a small one.
It gave me an idea.
“Turn the lights off and walk to the other side of the cave,” I told her. “Please,” I added before it became a thing.
She walked one way, into the darkness. I walked the other.
“I’m there,” she said. “I’m facing the center.”
“Okay, I’m on the opposite end,” I yelled back. “Touch the wall with your right hand and walk to your right. Don’t lose contact with the stone. On my mark. Go.”
I started walking right as well. Rebel’s fingernails made a racket on the wall, as usual, and I’m sure she enjoyed every second.
“Walk slowly,” I said. “To a beat. Like this.” I hit the ground with my shoes hard so she could hear my pace. We had to stay in sync. I heard her steps fall in line. My guess was that it would take a few minutes to walk around the entire room like that.
As it turned out we only needed to walk for a few seconds.
She bumped into a corpse at the same time I bumped into another one.
“I have a dead one over here!” she called out.
“Me too! Move the body but don’t lose its spot.”
“Hard to lose it when he bled out.”
After a minute of grunting and scraping I said, “I’m back in place.”
“Hold on! Getting…”
But she didn’t get to finish her sentence.
The cave lit up like the sun.
Chapter 7
“What the fuck!” Rebel screamed.
“Cover your eyes with your palms!”
I fell to the floor. The brightness was so painful I couldn’t think straight. I tore off my shirt and pressed it hard to my brow. I curled up in a fetal position so my face was buried between my knees. At that moment, I wished I’d stuck with yoga.
“What is it?” Rebel asked. I could hear the pain in her voice.
“I think you were right. It’s the sword. Do a spell!”
“Do a spell?”
“Yeah! Do a spell! Block our vision or something.”
“Or something!”
“Why are you repeating everything I say?”
“Because everything you say sounds like it’s coming from a moron!”
The argument bought us a few seconds of distraction but I knew we were looking at some serious injury in a few seconds.
And then the light started to fade.
The slow dimming made me feel like a kid who’s been chewed out by a teacher. A teacher who was now calming down. As it waned so did the pain.
But it was still too bright to open our eyes when Rebel asked, “How did you know we needed to stand on opposite ends of the room?”
“I didn’t,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I just guessed. The symbol on the paper shows a slight bulge of ink where the line meets the circle. It could have just been a result of the ink spreading but I knew it could also mean that something, or someone, needed to be at those two points. Straight across from each other.”
“A guide for where to stand.”
“Yeah. Two dots,” I said. “Two people on opposite ends of the circle will trigger the spell.”
“And reveal the sword.”
“I hope so.” My eyes were clamped shut. I cherished every moment of the fading pain but I couldn’t bring myself to look around yet.
“It’s a simple trick to trigger a light spell,” Rebel said in her teacher voice. “But it would take some serious magic to hide something in plain sight.”
I didn’t argue. I didn’t know magic and I wanted to keep it that way. “Can you open your eyes yet?” I asked.
“No. So who were these new dead guys?”
“Same guys as outside. They probably triggered the sword to blind the women. Get the advantage. Looks like she took them down before biting it herself.”
“I think the women work for Vamps,” Rebel said.
“I don’t know. Since when do Vamps hire humans?”
“Who else then?”
“They could be independent. Or they could be Cannon’s people.”
“Don’t go there,” Rebel said. “No way.”
“He has a track record with us, Rebel.”
Cannon was an elusive son of a bitch. Dangerous. We’d lost our last couple of Vampire treasures to his hired thugs. We’d never met the man himself but, then again, not many people had.
“I guess it’s a good thing that I’m right much more than you are, Kane,” she shot back.
“Can you just lay off until we have the discovery of the century in our hands?”
A silence fell on the cavern. We’d made it all the way here. We were exhausted. We were in pain from bullets in the butt, fried eyes and whatever else I’d forgotten about. I’m sure my body would tell me all about it in the morning.
Which reminded me there might not be a morning. We still had no idea how we were going to get out of there.
We’d find a way. We didn’t have a good track record with finding treasure, but we were batting 1000 in the escape-by-the-skin-of-our-teeth front.
“I’m opening my eyes now,” I said.
“Me too,” she said.
I looked across the room and saw Rebel first. She was looking back at me. She’d ripped her top off to cover her eyes too. Our eyes met and then we glanced down at the sword at the same time.
Excalibur lay on the dirt floor like someone just dropped it there. There was no ornate pedestal. No immortal knight holding it. It was a weapon. That’s it. And it looked lonely. It called out to me for company.
It wasn’t what I expected. It was a Japanese sword, one that would look right in the hand of a samurai, not a knight or king.
“That’s Excalibur?” she said. Though she knew the answer. We both did.
It was Excalibur. I could feel its power.
“It must have been reforged,” I said. “Maybe to hide it.”
“Skyler will know.” Her faith in our teacher was infinite.
“I’ll grab it. There may be more traps.”
“So why should you be the one to…”
“Shut up,” I said I wasn’t having any of it.
“Fine.” She knew this was my job. No one else, mortal or otherwise, was a better choice to take that sword and get it the hell out of there.
I took some timid steps toward Excalibur, as if it were an injured animal. It very well could have been. Again, the world of magic made me question every move I made. Nothing was ever what you assumed. Kind of like life in general but with more purple light and less laws of physics.
I stood over it. The sword that etched its story in myth was about to be a sword that dropped into history and shook everything up.
“What are you waiting for?” Rebel asked. She was on all fours now. Was she ready to lunge? I found myself not trusting her in that moment. Did she want it for herself? Did she have secret plans for Excalibur?
I shook the paranoia off as best I could. For all of her faults, Rebel had been loyal for years. It was the sword. It was getting into my head. It was messing with my thoughts. I had to remind myself who I was. Why I was there.
I bent down and grabbed the sword’s hilt.
I half-expected it to defy my grasp. This was the same sword that stuck in that damn stone, stubborn as a tick, until the right person came along to wield it.
Would it fight me the same way it fought those men who tried to pull it from the stone?
But Excalibur was the weig
ht of a light barbell. That was my first impression. It wasn’t light but it also wasn’t heavy. Maybe 8 pounds. And its balance was off. Maybe from laying in the sand for a thousand years. Or maybe Excalibur wasn’t all it was cut out to be.
When I brought the blade to my face and stared into the steel’s beauty I thought otherwise.
Chapter 8
I had a vision. Or something. I saw something.
The room went dark and I saw fire. It started small and bloomed bigger and bigger. The sound was terrifying, loud, end-of-world stuff. A fireball formed and filled my vision.
I snapped out of it and tried to catch my breath. I’d been holding it.
I looked at the blade’s edge. It could split an atom. It was the sharpest I’d ever seen.
I wiped the dust away with my shirt. The steel gleamed where I touched. Not quite as brightly as the light show it had given us a minute before. But close. It made me wince when I touched it again, this time to wipe off the handle.
I must have lost myself in the process because the next thing I knew, Rebel was shaking my shoulder.
“Kane!”
“What!”
“What is it? You were in some kind of trance.”
“Look at the edge,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s sharp. Not bad for an old thing.”
“It’s not that…” I didn’t know how to say it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s talking, no, beckoning to me.” And it was. The sword was beautiful. It was special. And it wanted me as much as I wanted it. I didn’t say any of this out loud or there would have been a scene. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to control myself if she laughed at me. Because laughing at me meant laughing at the sword.
No one was allowed to do that. Not while I was around.
“Kane!”
I turned to her. I must have had one hell of a face on.
“Jesus, what the fuck, man?” she said, backing up a step.
I caught myself and managed to pull back from a rage I’d never felt before. It was beyond me. Almost like it wasn’t even my own.
“You did it again. Totally zoned out. You were looking at it like… Maybe you should put that thing down.”