Gwalcmai knew armies and, after stealing the proper equipment, he had no problem infiltrating the Romans, moving his way forward, toward the first units forming at the base of the ramp. He could see Aspasia’s Shadow in the small tower along with Flavius and the other senior Roman officers.
Before the sun broke the horizon, the first cohorts moved up the ramp as archers took their positions to give covering fire. Pretending to be a courier, Gwalcmai took his place between the lead cohorts. The sound of ropes creaking under pressure echoed against the mountainside as the heavy catapults were loaded.
Gwalcmai could feel sweat begin to rise on his skin as he made his way up the ramp. There was the smell of death in the air from the most recent corpses that had been shoved over the side and carrion-eaters squawked in protest as a few Roman archers let bolts fly at them. The front line of legionnaires reached the rear of the ram and halted, going to one knee and bringing up their shields to protect themselves. Whips cracked as overseers forced the gathered slaves to their feet.
The heavy ram began to swing back and forth, gaining distance as the slaves put their muscle into the movement in time with the yells of the head overseer. After a minute it hit the stone wall with a light thud, bouncing back. The head overseer was an expert, having battered down the walls of Jerusalem and many other cities and towns. He used the rebound off the wall and the effort of the slaves to increase the backward momentum. The ram came forward, its iron headslamming the stone with more force. Again and again the ram hit, the sound echoing out over the desert floor.
Still there was no attack from inside the fortress.
After a while, the Roman archers could no longer keep the tension on their bows and they were ordered to stand by. Pressure was also released a bit on the catapults for fear of ruining the ropes. A low mutter of unease rippled through the ranks of soldiers massed on the ramp. Not that they weren’t grateful not to be fired at, but soldiers distrusted the unusual and their minds turned to wondering what devilment the Jews inside Masada had waiting for them once they breached the wall, since the Jews obviously weren’t going to try to stop the ram.
A block of stone splintered and fell out of place.
The overseer increased their speed and soon more blocks were falling away. A pair of slaves was smashed as a particularly large one tumbled on top of them. The bodies were tossed over the side and two more were sent to take their places on the ropes.
Donnchadh initially watched the attack from the traders’ camp. There were bets being wagered as to the exact time that the ram would break through the wall. Some of the older traders were a bit perplexed that there was no apparent resistance from inside the fortress. It was throwing off their estimates and money was going to be lost.
Donnchadh edged forward, closer to the base of the ramp near a pile of rocks where she had told Gwalcmai she would meet him. She wanted to be up there, close to the Grail. A chill passed through her and she turned slightly, toward the command tower.
Aspasia’s Shadow was staring directly at her, his dark eyes boring into her. She pulled the hood of her cloak tighteraround her face, but he did not shift his gaze. Donnchadh began edging backward through the watching crowd.
She became completely still when she felt the point of a dagger pressed against the base of her spine.
“He knows you do not belong here,” a hoarse voice whispered in her ear. “But then again, neither do I.”
The center of the wall crumbled and the overseer of the ram cried out for the slaves to slow the swinging, eventually bringing the ram to a halt. It was trundled back from the hole it had punched as the archers brought their bows up and aimed at the breach. Three volleys of arrows were fired blindly through the hole as a precaution, but still there was no reaction.
Gwalcmai made his way forward, into the ranks of the lead cohort that was to enter the fortress.
Donnchadh kept her body still as she turned her head to look at whoever was behind her. All she could see was a figure wrapped in a black robe with black cloth even covering his face.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Vampyr. We’ve met before. Surely you remember.”
The Romans poured through the breach, swords at the ready. Gwalcmai was among them, his own sword out. The beads of sweat on his skin had turned to small rivulets and he shook his head, spraying sweat to either side. He bumped into the soldier in front of him and stopped, realizing that the assault force had come to a complete halt, which was quite unusual, considering there was no sound of fighting. Elbowing his way to a vantage point, Gwalcmai was able to see the courtyard of the fortress and what had caused such a response from the Romans.
The ground was littered with bodies. Grouped in family clumps. Arms around each other in many cases. The ground below each group was soaked with blood.
“Mars help us,” the Roman next to Gwalcmai muttered.
Gwalcmai blinked sweat out of his eyes. He realized he was breathing too hard, close to hyperventilating. He had seen this before. He had seen his own family like this.
What do you want?”
“Do not worry,” Vampyr said, as he eased up the pressure of the dagger against her. “You saved me, so I owe you your life.”
“What do you want?” Donnchadh repeated.
“Is the Grail up there?”
Donnchadh hesitated. The pressure from the weapon increased.
“Tell me,” Vampyr insisted.
“No.”
“You lie,” Vampyr said. “You would not be here otherwise.”
Donnchadh gasped in pain as the point of the knife entered her back, just to the left of her spine. Vampyr ripped the dagger to the left, tearing through her internal organs. Donnchadh collapsed to her knees and looked up at Vampyr as blood flowed from her body. “You said you owed me my life.”
“I lied.”
Gwalcmai blindly walked down the ramp, not really noticing the Romans moving up it. He was not alone, as there were other stunned soldiers coming down, not answering the questions of those heading in the other direction. He reached the bottom of the ramp and walked through the camp to the rock where he had left Donnchadh.
His shock at what he had just seen in Masada was penetrated by the vision of her lying in a pool of blood. He rushed up, dropping to his knees next to her.
“What happened?”
“Vampyr,” she whispered. “My back.”
Gwalcmai ran his hands around her body to her back and found the wound. He put pressure on it, trying to stop the bleeding.
“The Grail?” Donnchadh asked through her pain.
Gwalcmai shook his head. “There is only death up there.”
“There is only death here,” Donnchadh said, closing her eyes.
“I can—” Gwalcmai began, but she shook her head ever so slightly, using all the energy she could muster.
“Take my ka and go.”
Aspasia’s Shadow had known something was wrong when there was no resistance to the ram. That, combined with the presence of the two strange humans and one of the Undead, made him act quickly. He strode up the ramp, hearing the disturbed mutterings from troopers coming the other way.
He clambered over the tumbled rocks in the breach, entered the courtyard of Masada, and immediately saw what had happened.
They were all dead. By their own hands.
Flavius Silva was not far away and from the slump in the Roman commander’s shoulders, Aspasia’s Shadow knew that in their own way these Jews had extracted a final victory over the Romans.
More important, he also knew that the Grail could not be here. They would have never done this if they possessed the Grail. And, interestingly, it was obvious the two humans and the rogue Undead had thought the Grail was here.
So who had it and where was it now?
Joseph of Arimathea was tired. Bone tired. Two years he had been journeying and now as the prow of the small fishing boat scraped on the pebbly shore, he had finally arrived. The place where
the Wedjat were headquartered. One of the sailors he had paid on the continent to take him across the channel gave him a hand off the boat.
Joseph had a battered leather pack slung over his shoulder and he kept one hand tight on it as he climbed over the side and onto the beach. There was a village less than two hundred meters away and several men were walking toward them, curious to see what strangers had arrived.
Joseph looked at the men as they came up. He held up a gold coin. “Can you tell me the way to the place called Avalon?”
XV
A.D. 521: AVALON
Ahalf dozen candles sputtered and flickered, giving off an inconsistent light and filling the chamber with a slightly foul odor. The lone occupant of the room was wrapped in a dirty black robe with a tattered blanket over his shoulders. He was in his early thirties but looked much older, the hard conditions living in the caverns inside the tor having taken their toll on his body. A tic twitched unnoticed on his left temple, not able to disturb his fierce concentration upon the documents lying on the large wooden table that took up most of the chamber’s space.
He was reading, which was what he did almost all the time. The walls of the cavern were lined with sagging wooden racks, which were full of documents ranging from rolled-up papyrus to crudely bound books. For eighteen years he had been there, reading. Not that he was a slow reader, for eighteen years was more than enough time to have gone through all the documents, but because he’d had to learn all the languages in which the various reports were written.
He’d worked his way backward in time. And in that manner he was able to trace inversely the changes in the languages and work on comprehending each one that preceded the other. He was now arriving at the beginning.
His name was Merlin. He’d spent his childhood in a swamp far from there, raised by his mother who told him nothing of his destiny until one day when he was twelve, his father, whom he had never met, showed up at their hut. His father brought him to the cavern and told him that he would be the next Watcher of Avalon, a position of great importance.
Merlin had not been impressed with either his father or the position.
Until he found the document room.
His father had died less than a year after bringing Merlin to Avalon. Merlin had buried him on the side of the tor, alongside the long line of graves of the Watchers who had preceded them. When he did so, he knew that his own grave would be next in line, and that had given him a strange sense of foreboding. Not of death, but of a fate that seemed ordained to bring nothing of value to the world, despite his father’s grand words about what an important job being a Watcher was.
Merlin looked down at the parchment covered with High Runes. It told of the First Gathering and the edict to watch the Airlia and their minions. It had been many years since any Watcher report had come to Avalon—none in Merlin’s time on the tor and only once during his father’s.
Merlin read of Atlantis and could only shake his head in wonderment at the description of the city and the way people lived. Few here in England lived past thirty. Starvation and disease were rampant. There was practically no law. Each little cluster of huts was a world unto itself. It seemed to Merlin that Watching had not done mankind much good. Even the stories he’d heard as a child of the Romans spoke of a better world than the one in which he lived. There were some petty kingdoms here and there on the island where a powerful man managed to bring others under his rule, but hardly any of them lasted beyond a few generations.
Merlin ran a dirty finger over the parchment, mouthing the words to himself. The Grail. He had read of it in quite a few of the documents. A most wondrous thing—something that promised eternal life. And it was there. He had held it in his own hands many times. But, according to report made by Joseph of Arimathea, who had brought it to Avalon so long ago, the Grail was useless without two special stones, and they were not to be found.
And then there was the sword. Merlin passed it every day in the crystal cavern on his way in and out of the tunnel complex. It was a magnificent thing. His father had beaten into him that he was never to touch the sword, but had never given a reason why. The sword was powerful, very powerful, in a different way from the Grail, his father had said. Merlin had sensed that even his father didn’t know what exactly that power was, although the old man had indicated it was power that could only be wielded by one man, just as the sword itself could only be wielded by one.
Merlin shuffled through the pile of parchments until he found the one that had caused him great excitement the previous evening when he’d first translated it. One paragraph had riveted him:
Draw the mighty sword and he will come.
He who will lead.
He who will bring back the glory of Atlantis to us.
A king among men.
It was not clear who had written those lines. From the language and the placement in the racks, Merlin estimated that it had been penned about three hundred years previously. One of the candles sputtered and went out. Merlin slowly got to his feet and stretched out his back, sore from so many hours bent over the reading table. He picked up one of the candles still burning. He left the room and walked down atunnel, exiting into a larger cavern. The light from the single candle was magnified a thousand times over by the crystals embedded in the wall.
Away from the wall, set in a red crystal that jutted up from the floor, was Excalibur inside its sheath. Merlin, as he had done many times before, ran his hand over the pommel of the sword. He felt a surge into the hand, up his arm, and into his chest, igniting a warm glow inside of him despite the constant chill of the caverns.
A king.
Unnoticed, tears were flowing down his cheeks. He had no son. Not any longer. Just a week ago he had been summoned to the cluster of shacks where his own family eked out a living from the swamp. His son was dead, was all the dirty scrap of paper said, most of the words spelled wrong in the handwriting he recognized as his wife’s.
He’d traveled there. By the time he arrived, his son was already in the ground and his wife was well on her way to joining him. Merlin knew he was the last of his line. The instructions he had been given by his father indicated he should do one of two things—find another woman to marry to bear another son—a chancy proposition at best—or find an orphan to bring into Avalon to be taught the ways of the Wedjat.
To what end though?
To sit there and spend a life doing nothing, passing down rules that accomplished nothing? What if no more reports came? What if there were no other Watchers remaining? And all to end up in a hole in the ground, the next in a long line of graves?
And even if there were other Watchers, to what good? There was only death and despair all around.
A king.
Could things to be like they were back in Atlantis, but without the Airlia? That was how Merlin read the parchment. The sword would allow a man to become king.
Merlin’s other hand was now on the handle of the sword. With one smooth motion he pulled it out of the crystal, the sheath still guarding the blade.
Merlin was perfectly still, feeling the surprisingly light weight of the weapon in his hands. Keeping one hand on the grip, he put the other on the sheath and freed the blade. It glimmered in the light reflected in the crystals.
Nothing happened.
Not in the cavern under the tor of Avalon, at least.
MOUNT ARARAT
Inside the mothership hidden inside what would one day be called Mount Ararat, the bloodred twenty-foot-high pyramid that was the Airlia Master Guardian came alive. The surface pulsed with power, stirred from its hibernation by the freeing of its control key, Excalibur.
The first thing the machine did was reach out and contact all of its subordinate guardians. And they in turn contacted those whom they were instructed to.
MOUNT SINAI
Aspasia’s Shadow did not move when the top of his deep sleep tube swung open. He instinctively knew it was not the time he had scheduled to be brought into consciousness
. His instinct was confirmed by the dull red flash that met his eyes as he slowly opened them. Something had happened. Something that demanded his attention.
Still Aspasia’s Shadow did not leave the tube.
It could not be good news. That was a strange revelation that slowly seeped through Aspasia’s Shadow’s thoughts. An awareness he had been coming to for millennia. There was no positive outcome to all of this for him. At best, Aspasia, once he took the reins of this planet and these people, would allow his Shadow access to the Grail and a place on his council. At worst, Aspasia would dispatch him as a tool that had served its purpose and now was no longer needed.
Aspasia’s Shadow roused himself from these morbid thoughts and climbed out of the deep sleep tube. He slipped on a heavy wool robe and left the deep sleep chamber. He descended to the chamber that held the guardian computer that had been deposited there, like Aspasia’s Shadow, so many years ago.
As soon as he entered the chamber, Aspasia’s Shadow had a good idea what was wrong: The golden surface of the computer was glowing vibrantly. He walked to the alien machine and placed his hands on it.
The Master Guardian was active. Which meant that someone had unsheathed Excalibur—the sword that was so much more than simply a sword. Throughout the hundreds of thousands of years of war against the Swarm, the Airlia had, naturally, lost many worlds and ships to their enemy. Guardian computers, including system masters, had also been captured. Because of this the Airlia had learned to safeguard their computer systems. The sword transmitted an authorization code that allowed the Master Guardian to power up and link with all subordinate guardian computers. But the sheath blocked the transmission, allowing someone far away from the Master Guardian to keep it shut down. There was also a destruct built into Excalibur that could be triggered, resulting in the complete cleansing of all memory data in the Master Guardian and subordinate guardians and shuttingthem down forever. This destruct code was something that had not been transmitted to Aspasia’s Shadow from Aspasia.
Area 51: Legend Page 22
