by Steve McHugh
“Is he dead?” I asked.
Irkalla shrugged. “I have no idea. He’s not trying to kill us, so quite possibly, yes.”
“Gilgamesh fell down there.” I pointed to where I’d seen him fall and Irkalla ordered the soldiers to go and check.
“The other gates held,” Nabu told me, his voice completely neutral, giving nothing away.
“What aren’t you telling me? Did Mordred escape?”
“No, Mordred is fine: he’s unconscious, but alive. Isabel was taken. Three human guards were killed in the fight.”
“Do you know by whom?” I asked, trying to get back to my feet, but Nabu held me in place until I gave up on the idea.
“Siris.” Nanshe’s tone betrayed the hurt that her expression didn’t give away. “We were betrayed by one of our own.”
CHAPTER 8
Now. London, England.
I do hope you’re comfortable,” Mordred said as he sat on the chair beside me.
The half-dozen golems that had stopped me from being crushed by the collapsing building stood there, stoic and emotionless, as if holding up several tons of rubble was nothing to them. Which it probably was, considering they were a magical construct.
The tranquilizer was beginning to wear off, and once it did, I’d be able to free myself and stop Mordred before he did anything to hurt someone.
Mordred reached out and, before I could move, slipped a sorcerer’s band onto my wrist. I tried to push him away, but was too weak, and the second the clasp shut I felt my magic vanish from my body.
“Now don’t try to take that off; you know what happens. I don’t want you being silly.”
If I tried to remove the band, the runes inscribed on the metal touching my skin would instantly ignite, setting off the equivalent of a magical napalm bomb. It would be too quick for me to set up any kind of defense, and all I’d be able to do would be to die quickly and painfully. If it were possible, I hated Mordred even more for making me wear one, for removing my magic from me, but I pushed the anger down. I was in no position to make demands. Instead, I stayed still and stared at the man I had once called a friend.
“Why are you here?”
“To talk to you. I brought someone with me.” He pointed over to his right.
I turned and saw a woman. Her hair had been cut short since I’d last seen her over a thousand years ago, and was dyed bright green, but I couldn’t mistake the woman I’d once loved. The woman who’d betrayed Arthur, betrayed Avalon—betrayed me. Morgan.
“I wouldn’t distract her if I was you,” Mordred told me. “She’s all that’s keeping those golems from letting that roof fall onto you. So here’s how it’s going to go: you’re going to stay exceptionally still and answer my questions. I may even answer a few of yours. Because I’m feeling so generous, I’ll let you go first. Just to prove it, I’m not going to trick you.”
I continued staring past Mordred at Morgan. I always thought I’d feel something when I saw her again, something bigger than myself, something I couldn’t contain and would have to scream and rage at her. Ask her why. Ask her how she could betray me. But when it came down to it, I didn’t feel anything for her: no anger, no hate; I just pitied her. I pitied her for the fact that she’d aligned herself with such a psychopath as Mordred. A thousand years of distance between people was apparently a good way to deal with something.
“What’s the point? You’ll only lie.”
Mordred raised his hand, palm out, toward me. “You know what this is, don’t you?”
I recognized the small mark still drying on his palm. A blood-magic curse, one that forces the wearer to tell the truth. Like all blood-magic curses, this one had a catch, and in this mark’s case, one that made it rarely used. The mark could only be activated on someone who’d drawn it on themselves with their own blood, and done so freely. It meant that Mordred could avoid my questions, he could change the subject, but if he lied, he would feel intense pain.
“You’re wondering why I would go to such lengths to talk to you,” Mordred said, as if reading my thoughts. “I thought it better that we meet face-to-face, and when I watched you fight Kay, I was going to intervene, but I needed to be sure you had no fight left in you.”
We maintained eye contact for several seconds before he sighed. He held out his hand again, showing me the mark. “This mark was drawn here by a wandering giraffe.” The screams that left Mordred’s throat were immediate, and he threw himself from the chair, using his non-marked hand to hold the other against him, like someone would do if they’d broken a limb.
“No,” he said and raised his hand toward Morgan, who had taken a step toward her comrade.
“Do you believe now?” Mordred asked, showing me the mark once more, which had turned bright orange.
“Yes,” I promised him. There was no way to fake what he’d done. Which left the question: why had Mordred wanted to talk to me?
“Right,” Mordred said, smoothing back his hair and reapplying his ponytail before returning to his chair. “Damn it, I’ve got mud on my trousers. Do you see this?”
I looked at the specks of mud that had stained the black trousers of the expensive suit he was wearing. “I knew I should have just worn a T-shirt and jeans. These will need to be dry-cleaned. All it needs now is to piss it down with rain and my day will be complete.”
“Did you really come here to talk about clothing?” I asked, feeling confused about the sudden conversation change.
“Oh, yes, sorry. Where was I?” He looked around, as if trying to figure out where he was. “Right, why I’m here. And I assume you want to know how I’m still alive.”
“The question did come up,” I admitted. “I killed you.”
“Yes, you did,” Mordred said, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Bloody good job you did, too. Sniper round through the eye. Unbelievably painful. And you took my hand.” He raised both hands. “But just like dying, losing a hand didn’t take, either.”
“How are you alive?”
“Lots of reasons, really. I’m not here to get into all of them; they can wait for another time. Essentially, magic, luck, more magic, some more magic, and a fucking shitload of power. I’m not immortal, if that’s what you’re thinking, and I’m pretty certain if you tried that trick again, I’d be dead for real this time. I sort of thought of it at the time like an extra mushroom.”
“A what?”
“A mushroom. You know, a mush . . . room.” He repeated the word slowly the second time, as if talking to someone who doesn’t quite understand the language.
“I know what a mushroom is. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Super Mario,” Mordred said. “Mushrooms make him bigger. There are other things that give him the ability to fly, or shoot fireballs, but they’re not mushrooms, although I guess they’d still work in this analogy. But I went with mushroom, so here we are.”
He paused for a second. “Anyway, if Mario gets hit he doesn’t die; he just shrinks to a smaller Mario. Then if he gets hit again, he dies. That’s me. Although in my case, I’ve gotten a lot more powerful since you killed me. I guess I should thank you for that.”
“You play Super Mario?”
“I had a lot of free time on my hands while my body and mind repaired itself. I played a lot of Mario, and Final Fantasy, and something called Fallout. That was fun. Oh, and Lego. I love Lego.”
I was beginning to feel like I’d been knocked out and was having some sort of weird hallucination. “Have you lost your mind? Genuinely curious.”
“Yes. I got shot in my brain.” Mordred’s words were said with a mocking tone, as if trying to get me to bite, to argue with him. He paused again. “It makes me go off on a tangent a lot. So I’ll be talking about something and then all of a sudden I’ll think of something else and off I go. It gets frustrating for those talking to me. I imagine you’re pretty annoyed right now.”
I sighed. This was turning into an exhausting conversation. “This is the strange
st day I’ve had in a considerably long time. Any chance you could just get on with killing me? This whole thing is beginning to give me a headache.”
Mordred smiled and clapped his hands together. “Oh, it’s going to get stranger. You see, I’m not here to kill you. Not today, anyway.”
“You’re not?” My disbelief was easy to hear.
“Nope. We’re going to talk, and I’m going to leave.”
Despite every part of me knowing that Mordred was an insane murderer, he sounded sincere.
“Have you got Mario on pause or something?” I didn’t mean to mock him. I just couldn’t help it.
“Don’t be facetious. I’m being serious. I don’t want you dead today. If I did, I wouldn’t have had Morgan save you, I wouldn’t have checked the rest of the garden for any more surprises. That annex over there is empty, in case you were wondering. I already searched it. Also, Asag, Kay, and Jerry are long gone. You’re safe—for now.”
“Today?”
“Oh, I am going to kill you. I have to; it’s sort of where my destiny lies. In fact, it’s more where your destiny lies. But you’re not ready; you’re certainly not powerful enough. I need you at your peak before you can die. Or at least a lot more ready than you are now. Killing you now would achieve nothing. It would only make things more complicated in the long term, and I don’t really want that.”
“Do you plan on telling me when you’re going to kill me?”
Mordred tilted his head slightly and rolled his eyes. “I might be crazy, but I’m not an idiot. No, I’m not going to tell you. But you will die, and by my hands, too.”
“So why are you here?”
“To talk to you. To let you know I’m back. Oh, and to see how things are going with you. How many of your blood-curse marks are gone now? Be honest.”
For as long as I could remember—right the way back to waking up age eight on a field outside of Camelot—I had six blood-curse marks on my torso. For the longest time I had no idea what they did, but then, due to Mordred trying to kill me a few years earlier, they’d started vanishing. Two had gone so far, giving me an increase in power and my necromancy. Four remained. I had no idea what they would do, and frankly I was a little nervous about finding out.
I wondered if Mordred wanted to know so he could figure out any more of my weaknesses, but there was little point in lying. “Two.”
“I heard about the necromancy; that’s nice. So, that leaves four to go, yes?”
I nodded.
“They’re taking their sweet time, aren’t they? I mean, I expected another one, maybe two more, to have gone by now. It must be quite frustrating for you.”
“Why do you care?”
“Why? Because when you die, you need to be my equal. I want to kill the best of you there is, not someone who has most of their power locked up. I need as many of those marks gone as possible. Also, I’m really curious about what they do. Aren’t you?”
“What did yours do?”
Mordred looked shocked for a second before he smiled. “Figured that out, did you?”
“You’ve always been able to see my marks before. That means you had some yourself, but you can’t see them now, which means you no longer have any. So, what did yours do? And where were they? I never saw them.”
“Tops of my thighs,” he said. “I don’t believe we were ever that close. And they did vanish, yes. They’ve given me some interesting talents; a few other things, too. I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out who put them there and why.”
“Can I assume you didn’t discover who put them there?”
Mordred shook his head. “I wish I had. If I knew, maybe I could kill you now. Maybe I could get all of this over with.”
“So you came here to say hi and leave. Okay, you can go now, I guess.”
Mordred laughed. “Actually, I thought we could talk for a while longer. I certainly don’t want you to think I don’t care.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
Mordred got up and sat on the ground next to me. He leaned up against the remains of the wall and sighed. “Can I tell you a secret?”
This whole thing was beginning to make me incredibly confused. The only times Mordred hadn’t tried to kill me were when it benefited him somehow. I stared at the man I’d considered my enemy, a man I’d hated for over a thousand years, and thought something was off with him. There was something different. Maybe the shooting had damaged his brain, but it felt like more than that.
“Sure. Why not?” I said eventually.
“I’ve had a few truths shown to me since my murder. I’ve undergone a transformation of sorts. Things have changed—I’ve changed.”
“Yet you’re still going to kill me.”
“Some things will never change. The rain will always be wet, dogs will always be man’s best friend, and Mexican food will always be the greatest food on earth.” He looked down at me. “Sorry, went off on a tangent again. Anyway, my secret.” He leaned close to me until his mouth was almost touching my ear, then whispered, “Your mother was a Valkyrie. Her name was Brynhildr.”
I wanted to say something clever to let him know that I wasn’t about to be played, but as I opened my mouth, nothing came out. My brain suddenly felt as if it were on fire, and I began shaking, unable to talk, unable to move. While Mordred’s words unlocked flashes of memories, I lay there and stared at the darkness and stars above me.
CHAPTER 9
It felt like I’d taken my first breath in minutes. I tried to sit up, but pain laced through my body, causing me to gasp.
“It’ll only hurt for a moment,” Mordred said. “Just a moment.”
For a second I thought he’d poisoned me, or stabbed me with a silver blade while I wasn’t capable of defending myself, but as he said, the pain soon faded and I lay on the cold ground, panting and drenched in sweat.
“What the hell was that?” I asked breathlessly.
“What did you see?”
The words spilled out before I could stop them. “My mother and me, in Constantinople. We were eating a picnic of some sort. I was six years old, and she told me we had to leave, to go north. She was scared. I don’t know why, though.” I fought the jumble in my mind. “Our marks shared some similarities.”
“Yes, several of mine were removed due to memories. I thought it might work for you.”
“How did you know who my mother was?”
“I did some digging. I found records of her moving to Constantinople with a contingent of bodyguards and servants, and a son. Nathaniel Garrett was the name written there. Took me by surprise. I figured she’d have used a fake name, but then, it was centuries ago, and looking things up on the Internet wasn’t really a thing back then.”
“How did you manage to find something that I couldn’t?”
“I had to bribe a few people in the right places, and I had an idea what I was looking for. It was going to happen eventually.”
“Why did you look into my past?”
“Ah, I told you. I need you strong, I need you to be the best you can be, and unlocking those marks is the key to that.”
There was something more there: something he wasn’t telling me. I was certain of that. “If you make me stronger, you’ll never be able to kill me.”
“That isn’t really important right now.”
I stared at my ruined top and saw bare chest where a black mark used to be. “Any idea what it does?”
Mordred shrugged. “No idea. The moment I saw the pain you were going through, I knew that a memory was unlocking a mark.”
“Do you know where the Fates are?”
“No. Kay has them, I assume. I’ve been tracking you since you arrived in London.”
“Any chance you’ve been tracking Kay, too?”
“Ah, yes: Kay. He’s a vicious little git, isn’t he? Never did like him. Always wanted to gut him like a fish. Never did, though.” He stared away across the garden. “Never did.”
“And?”
I asked, prompting Mordred to answer me.
“No. I’ve only been interested in you.”
“How’d you find me?” I asked, as Mordred went back to staring off into space. He started humming to himself.
Mordred’s attention returned to me. “It was easy, actually.”
“Planning on telling me, how?”
“No.”
“Did you bug me somehow?”
Mordred sighed. “No. And if you’re going to start asking lots more questions, we could be here a while, and I don’t think Morgan can keep this up all night.”
“I’m fine,” Morgan said. “But if you get Nate out from under that house, it would make my life easier.”
“Nate, if I get you out from under that house, are you going to try and kill me?”
I wanted to kill him. I really did. But I certainly couldn’t take both Mordred and Morgan while I had a sorcerer’s band on my wrist, and probably not even without. I had to find Kay and Jerry. I had to find the Fates.
“I swear I won’t attack,” I told them.
Mordred dragged me out from under the building using his air magic so he didn’t have to get too close. The moment I was free, Morgan dismissed the golems, and the rubble I’d been lying under collapsed into the vacated spot with a loud bang.
“Why haven’t any police come?” I asked.
“Told them not to,” Mordred explained. “I have a few friends in the right places. Or rather, other people have friends that I can use as I need to.”
“Nice to see you really haven’t changed.”
“Never said I had. Well, actually I did say that, didn’t I? Okay, maybe I haven’t changed too much.” He checked his watch. “I guess we need to be going. Pleasure seeing you, Nate. Glad I could help you with a spot of trouble. Be seeing you again really soon.”
“Mordred, one last thing,” I said.
He stopped and turned back to me. “What?”
“Since we’re being so civilized: what happened to you? We were friends—like brothers. Then you tried to kill me, and everyone I thought you cared about. What happened to you?”
