The Broken Sword

by Molly Cochran

  Those gods had won once before, and now, Taliesin knew, they would win again. Arthur would not have a third chance to live out his destiny. Even the Merlin did not have enough magic for that.

  But there is Galahad, bound to the King by a silver thread.

  The old man looked up, his breath catching.

  Galahad.

  Hal might still find the boy. Even with Taliesin dead, Hal might yet be able to keep Arthur out of the magician's snare.

  "Hal..." he said weakly. He could not focus. The spell Thanatos had produced was growing stronger, the vapor now spinning, sucking the old man's life force into it like a vortex.

  "Hal!" he called out with all his strength, but his voice could not be heard above the whirling wind that surrounded him. He tried to clasp his hands to work what energy remained in his body into them, but they would not move.

  "I cannot," he whispered in despair. "I cannot do this alone."

  You are not alone.

  The voice that spoke was clear and loud. Its very sound, if it had even been a sound at all, pushed the whirlwind's core away from Taliesin, leaving him in an eye of calm space.

  We are never alone.

  In the old man's mind appeared a gossamer thread of silver, shining, stretching like a river from the sprawling city to the rolling hills beyond.

  "Come, Hal," he commanded softly. "Come in service to your King."

  The truck was a lost cause. With a final kick at the tire, Hal walked into the gathering twilight.

  Ten minutes later he heard the sound of marching behind him. It was the knights. Kay, the Master of Drill, counted out time.

  "No," Hal said, sweeping the air with his hands. "Absolutely not, guys. From here on in, I'm on my own."

  "We serve the King," Launcelot said, running ahead of the others. "All of us, together."

  Hal shook his head. "I can't look for Arthur and keep you out of jail at the same time."

  Launcelot moved up next to him. "Their behavior was my fault," he said, his eyes haunted. "I was their leader once, but I left them. If you must punish someone, let it be me. Cast me out, and complete the Round Table with another. But do not forsake the others, for they have already given their lives once for their King, and would give them again without hesitation."

  "No," Hal said adamantly. "They don't know how to act like civilized people."

  "They can learn," Launcelot persisted. "For their sovereign, they would consent even to be slaves." He looked back at the approaching knights. "Take them back, Galahad. They have waited an eternity for you to lead them to Arthur."

  "Arthur." Hal exhaled. "Yeah."

  "Together you can find him, mayhap more easily than you alone. We have already come so far, nearly to the New York—"

  "There are ten million people in New York," Hal said. "How are we going to find him there? Hell, I don't even know if we can get there. The truck's dead, our money's almost gone, we're lost..." He jumped. "What the hell's this?"

  From the center of his chest sprouted a thin silver thread that stretched for miles down the road. Hal tried to touch it, but his hand went right through it, as if it were made of light. "Can you see this thing?" he asked.

  "Aye. 'Tis a wonder." The thread flickered and dimmed, like a faulty string of Christmas bulbs. "Methinks it is a sign for you to follow. From the Merlin."

  Hal nodded slowly. He tried to gauge the distance to the farthest point where he could see its light. "Wherever it's going, it's damn far for twelve guys on foot."

  "Twelve?" Launcelot asked. "Not eleven? Then you will have me stay?"

  Hal laughed. "It'd take a better man than me to kick Sir Launcelot out of the Round Table."

  The knights strolled up to them. "Ho, Galahad!" MacDaire called. "This marching is getting to be thirsty work. I say we set about finding a pub for a taste of grog, to keep off the chill of evening."

  Hal gave Launcelot a black look. "If I'm stuck with them, then you are, too." Launcelot smiled as a motorcyclist on a fat Harley zoomed past.

  "Did you see that?" Bedwyr asked in astonishment.

  "I'll eat my balls, it's a headless horse," Kay said.

  The motorcyclist made a right turn just beyond them. His rear lights flashed, then went out. In the silence, Hal could hear party sounds.

  He jogged ahead. In a copse just off the road were parked a dozen motorcycles. Thank you, God, he thought, although he realized that getting these people to part with their hogs would not be easy.

  The cyclist who had just pulled in was popping open a can of beer. He wore a sleeveless denim vest with a patch on the back reading no fear in lightning bolt lettering. On his head was a World War I German officer's parade helmet with a pointed spike on top. Nearby, fiddling with a boombox that poured out heavy metal music, was a woman with chalk-white hair arranged into eighteen-inch projectiles around her head. She wore a pair of skin-tight jeans and a bikini top. Above her ample breasts was tattooed the legend hot mama.

  The others in the group were equally unorthodox in appearance. One man sported a bushy, grizzled beard that reached to the middle of his chest and ended in two points over his nipples. Another had a bright red tattoo of a tongue running the entire length of his back.

  A woman with pendulous armpit hair and a ring through her nose pointed at Hal with a cigarette. "What-cha looking at, Slick?"

  Hal moved forward uncertainly. "Well, I know this is going to sound like an odd request, but..."

  "In the name of the King, we are requisitioning your headless horses!" Launcelot boomed.

  The woman made a face. "Come again?"

  "What about the king?" a red-eyed man in chaps asked. "Somebody seen Elvis?"

  The other knights walked quietly into the copse behind Launcelot, gazing with awe at the colorful assemblage. "What do they want?" the man in the pointy helmet growled.

  "Something about the headless horseman. Hey!" She waved a green fingernail at Bedwyr, who was looking over the dials on one of the motorcycles. "Spike don't like anybody screwing with his Harley."

  "Somebody messing with my machine?" Spike roused himself enough to turn his head toward the newcomers. He threw an empty beer can at Bedwyr. "Yo, numbnuts."

  Kay strode up to him. "And who be ye calling my young brother numbnuts, thou peckerless fiend?"

  Spike winced. Then slowly, deliberately, he stood up to face Kay. The two men were built exactly alike.

  "Wait a minute," Hal said. "We don't want any trouble, okay?"

  "Then maybe you shouldn't have crashed our party," Spike said, twisting a steel chain around his knuckles.

  "Yeah," chirped the platinum blonde. "What do youse want, anyway?"

  ''Well, actually, we came to see if we could, um... borrow your motorcycles."

  The man in chaps laughed so hard he sprayed beer all over himself. The blonde popped her gum, smiling.

  "Why, sure," Spike said. "We're neighborly folks." With that, he smashed his chain-covered fist into Kay's face.

  Kay went down momentarily, then got up grinning through the blood that flowed from his nose. "Ah, I thought you had not the look of a truthteller about you," he said before smashing his knee into Spike's groin.

  "Here we go," Hal said flatly.

  The man with a tongue tattooed on his back came at him with a tire iron.

  "Launcelot spoke with us," Agravaine said somberly into Hal's ear. "Would it be considered ill-disciplined if we fought with you, Galahad?"

  "By all means, be my guest," Hal said, ducking out of the way of the tire iron. He chopped his assailant at the knees while Agravaine knocked out one of the man's teeth with his hook.

  "Well, what are the rest of you waiting for?" Hal shouted, shaking the pain out of his knuckles.

  With a ululating battle cry, the knights threw themselves on the charging motorcyclists. For a full ten minutes the forest copse rang with curses, groans, and the thud of flesh pounding flesh. A tree was felled by the weight of Dry Lips' flying body crashing into it, and G
awaine lost a fistful of hair to a dagger; but otherwise, the Companions took the day. While the cyclists lay sprawled on the grass, Hal gave a crash course on motorcycle riding.

  "This is the key," he said, turning it in the ignition. "Make sure it's on. Then you squeeze the clutch with your left hand while you shift gears with your left foot." He demonstrated. The Harley purred. "To go faster, turn the throttle—right hand." The motor revved. The knights listened appreciatively. "The right foot's for the brake. The brake makes you stop, got it? That's very important."

  "Right foot, brake," Bedwyr said. "Makes you stop." The knights nodded.

  Hal looked nervously over at the heap of unconscious men. No one had been seriously wounded, so it would just be a matter of time before they came around. With their vehicles stolen, they weren't going to be happy when they did.

  "Okay, Bedwyr, give this one a try."

  "Left hand, clutch," Bedwyr said intently. "Left foot, gear. Right hand, throttle." He wobbled off slowly down the lane.

  "Shift up to second gear!" Hal shouted. Bedwyr's motorcycle responded with a satisfying roar.

  "Ah, that one's the master of horse, and no mistake," Fairhands said.

  "The rest of you are going to have to learn this, too. Where's Lugh?"

  An obscene laugh came from the direction of the campsite. Lugh was stepping over the bodies toward them. Over his shoulder was slung the woman with the octopus-shaped hair. Spike's pointy helmet was perched on his head.

  "Put her down," Hal said irritably.

  "But she's the spoils of war," MacDaire objected. Leaning closer in, he added, "The other one's too much of a dog, even for Lugh."

  "This isn't a war, and we're not taking prisoners." Hal pulled the woman down. She popped her gum in his face. "When your friends come to, tell them we're going to bring the bikes back."

  "Sure," she said. She winked at Lugh.

  "Okay, guys, mount. Just remember that—" He was interrupted by a scream as Bedwyr flew over the front handlebars of the Harley. "—the brake makes you stop."

  He stuck a helmet on his head and mounted another bike. "I'll meet you at the end of the road," he said, and peeled away.

  While he waited for the others to accustom themselves to their new steeds, he tried to follow the silver thread that mapped out his route like a string in a maze. In the darkness of the moonless night, the thread was at times very pronounced, and sometimes barely visible. A sign from the Merlin.

  "Hold tight, old man," he whispered as the knights came rumbling up behind him. "We're coming."

  At a signal from Hal, all twelve of them laid rubber onto the two-lane highway.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  "Amazing."

  Dr. Rasheesh Shanipati took notes as he studied Beatrice Reed's electroencephalogram on the monitor above her bed.

  "It's looked like that for the past forty minutes," Dr. Coles said. "I didn't want to disturb you during dinner. I know you prefer to be left alone before—"

  Shanipati made a small gesture meant to set his colleague's mind at rest. "I'm glad you called me in on this. It is most interesting." He turned to a nurse. "Could you please arrange to have a glass of milk brought up for me? I would like to remain here for a time."

  "Certainly, Doctor."

  Arguably the foremost neurosurgeon in the world, Shanipati had flown into New York that evening to deliver a talk to the AMA on the brain waves of individuals in states other than consciousness. His research on the effect of prayer on brain activity had been the focus of hundreds of magazine articles and television programs.

  He had just sat down to a solitary room-service meal with his papers spread around him to review the talk he would give the following morning when the hospital called.

  "The entire configuration is baffling," Coles said, picking up a printout from an electrocardiogram, one of several machines to which Beatrice was attached by wires. "Her heart appears to be beating only once per minute."

  "The resting rate of a marmot during hibernation," Shanipati mused.

  "Er… yes. And the alpha waves!" He looked back up at the screen. "I've never seen anything like this. Have you?"

  "Theta," Shanipati corrected. "Between four and eight Hertz cycles, the reading is for theta waves. And yes, I have seen it before. Once."

  Years ago, in his native New Delhi, he had recorded the vital functions of a ninety-year-old yogi. The yogi, who had lived in solitude in the mountains for more than two decades, had agreed to participate in the tests in order to prove that his followers' claims that he could control even his autonomic responses with his mind were correct.

  Shanipati himself had tested the equipment and affixed the wires to the yogi, so he knew that the results had been accurate, even though they were later refuted on the grounds that what they reported to be occurring within the yogi's body and mind were incompatible with life for a ninety-year-old man, and therefore must have been erroneous.

  The yogi, he remembered, had gone into a trance state fairly quickly, in which his pupils dilated and his reflexes no longer responded to external stimuli. His heart rate slowed dramatically, almost to the rate Beatrice's monitor was showing, while his EEG slowly went berserk.

  First it slowed from the beta, or waking, range into the alpha, where the brain waves of individuals in a state of meditation occur. From there it slowed further, into the mysterious realm of dream activity, sudden insight, psychic receptiveness, memory recognition—the theta.

  "For most people, the theta range is a kind of no-man's-land to be passed through uneventfully on the way to deep sleep," Shanipati explained. "It is the place where dreams occur, where the dreamer can run or fly or leap from buildings while his body remains locked in rigid safety on his bed. But for others, the theta is the very seat of the mind itself."

  The yogi's brain waves did not slow further into the delta, or deep sleep state. Instead, some fifty minutes into the test, they began to take on an entirely different character. They no longer resembled waves at all, but a dense band of solid color from one extreme of the theta range to the other.

  This was the condition currently reflected on Beatrice Reed's EEG.

  "'Is she dreaming?''' Coles asked.

  "No, the theta in this structure is not indicative of dreams. Not exactly." Shanipati struggled to find words the American neurologist would understand. "It is more like a perception... a perception of the soul," he said.

  "A ... I see." Coles cleared his throat.

  He didn't see, of course. What made neurology so difficult to grasp at Shanipati's level was that everything known about the human mind was communicated by doctors, who understood its science but refused absolutely to recognize its divinity.

  After his study on the yogi was deemed unacceptable, as Shanipati had suspected it would be, he had not further blackened his name in the medical community by disclosing that twenty-six letters had come to his office after news of the experiment appeared in the newspapers. From all over India, people had written him about having seen a very old man, naked except for a loincloth, who had performed some sort of miracle before their eyes.

  Many of the letters reported healings: A twelve-year-old boy who had collided with a truck while riding his bicycle and suffered a concussion had sat up, smiling and hungry, after the yogi's visitation. A woman, suffering from bone cancer, told her family that the old man had taken away the horrific pain with which she had been living for years. The headman of a remote village in Uttar Pradesh wrote to tell Shanipati of an ancient stranger who had stood ringing a bell in the marketplace, warning the villagers of an avalanche. Despite the fact that the area was not mountainous and a heavy rain had begun to fall, the villagers heeded the stranger's warning and fled upcountry in time to see most of their homes destroyed by a massive mudslide.

  In all cases, the mysterious old man's arrival had coincided with the period of the yogi's trance state during the experiment; and in all cases the stranger disappeared after performing his miracul
ous acts.

  Twenty-six letters, Shanipati remembered. How many other occurrences involving the yogi had not been witnessed, how many letters not written?

  A perception of the soul, he thought, drinking the milk that had been brought for him. He sat down, a notebook on his lap, to watch the theta waves of the comatose girl in front of him, and wondered to what distant realms she was travelling.

  A river of silver.

  Taliesin saw it stretching over miles of highway to the place where Hal rode with the Knights of the Round Table in search of their King. Light! he commanded, and the band which he had forged in the Summer Country glowed bright as his strengthening soul.

  He trembled with the power that surged through him, filling him, dispelling the drug in his body and the magicians' dark spells. The whirling vortex which had threatened to strangle him dissipated to a mere breeze. Beyond it, unaware, Thanatos began the complex and subtle ritual designed to kill a being such as himself, a human versed in magic. It was the ritual that had been performed on the body of the Innocent, though she had willed herself to death before the sorcerers could take her soul.

  Nor will they take mine, Taliesin thought. He raised his hand, knowing that with one thought he could shatter these magicians' puny spells. With one…

  Yes, Merlin.

  He pulled back. The magic that grew inside him could not be coming from the room around him. This place was dead, contaminated by evil. Nothing but the filthy spells of the demon gods could thrive here. Yet something was moving, swelling, shooting directly into his mind from some other source. Someone was sending it to him, someone of great power.

  Innocent?

  Use my power, Merlin. You have need of it.

  He remembered the magic he had made in the cave. To achieve it, he had destroyed himself. After it was done, he had slept for sixteen hundred years.