Door Into Faerie

by Edward Willett

  But the two shards he now wore in a special money-belt-like apparatus around his waist remained quiescent. Ariane clearly did not have the hilt. Which meant he still had time.

  They landed, got into the waiting SUV with the two employees from the Regina office of Excalibur Computer Systems that he had Commanded into new roles as henchmen, and began the long drive to Cannington Manor. Felicia remained in surly-teenager mode, staring moodily out the window at the fields, many still covered with vast sheets of shallow water from the only recently melted snow. Ariane won’t have any trouble finding water to work with, Major thought, looking out his window at the similarly soaked fields on his side of the SUV. But he smiled at the thought, because both he and his men were armed with tranquilizer guns, tucked away in holsters on their belts. One shot, and Ariane would be out of commission and unable to interfere. And the guns would be just as effective at dealing with Wally, safely removing him from contention without triggering Flish’s apparently still-active little-brother-protection circuits.

  Most likely, of course, Ariane wouldn’t appear at all. She and Wally had clearly struck out in their attempt to retrieve the hilt.

  He wasn’t sure what to expect as they pulled up to the closed main gate of Cannington Manor Provincial Park. Would there still be police on the scene, investigating the vandalism? Dozens of park staff to deal with?

  But in fact, everyone seemed to have left for the day except for a woman who came out of a building near the gate. She knocked on the driver’s window as they rolled to a stop. “Open it,” Major told his driver, who complied.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the woman said. “The park is closed. It doesn’t open to visitors until the long weekend.”

  “You will open the gate for us,” Major said to her from the back seat, in the voice of Command.

  “Of course I will, sir,” the woman promptly replied.

  “Are you in radio communication with any park staff remaining?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After you have let us in, radio them and tell them we are here to investigate the grave vandalism and they are to vacate the park immediately. They will return in the morning as usual.”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman repeated.

  “Now, please,” Merlin said, and leaned back.

  For the third time, “Yes, sir.” The woman opened the gate; they rolled over a cattle guard onto the gravel path running the length of the remnants of the village, down past the grey-and-white church. As they drove slowly along the path, a couple of workers came out of a building on the right and got into a white pickup. They drove in the opposite direction, giving Rex Major’s vehicle a curious glance as they rolled by.

  Another white truck came toward them from the biggest building in the park other than the church, a two-storey whitewashed house at the far end of the road. It passed them just as they pulled up at the churchyard gate. Rex Major climbed out of the SUV along with his two men. Felicia, sighing heavily, got out last and slammed the door with more force than was strictly necessary.

  The men weren’t dressed like his usual security types back in Toronto – he’d wanted them inconspicuous, and told them to wear what they would for a weekend at home. As a result, one of them had on a Saskatchewan Roughriders jersey over blue jeans, while the other wore a red sweater and khaki pants.

  Merlin took a deep breath of the prairie air, rich with the smells of damp earth and decaying vegetation and fresh growth. He looked back down the path to the main gate. The second white truck was just pulling out. As he watched, the woman he had Commanded closed the gate, got into a car, and drove away. No one else was in sight.

  They had Cannington Manor Provincial Park all to themselves.

  But as he’d expected, there was water close at hand, several bodies of it, large and small. Ariane could literally pop out of any one of them at any minute. “You two,” he said to his henchmen, “search for the girl and boy whose pictures I showed you. If you see either of them, tranquilize them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the guy in the football jersey. Major had heard his name but hadn’t bothered to remember it. They drew their tranquilizer pistols and moved away from the truck in opposite directions.

  Felicia had wandered across the path to the side opposite the church to read the plaque in front of a hole in the ground identifying it as the former location of the parsonage. “This way,” Major called out to her impatiently.

  She gave him a flat, unresponsive look, but followed him to the churchyard gate and through it, between trees on their right and the church on their left.

  Major went at once to what was clearly the Ebenezer Knight grave, although he couldn’t see the headstone – a tarp had been thrown over the grave, presumably to protect it from rain until it was properly filled in again, and the tarp obscured the marker. But then, he wasn’t interested in the grave marker. In truth, he wasn’t even particularly interested in the grave, except as a starting point for his real search.

  He undid the bottom couple of buttons of his shirt and reached inside to draw from the “money-belt” the two shards of Excalibur he had claimed for himself. Felicia was looking around the cemetery, and further afield, at the handful of other buildings still standing in the little community. “So this is where Great-Grandpa Knight moved to from Scotland.” She shook her head. “I’d go crazy out here. What did they do for fun?”

  “Fun is overrated,” Merlin said. “It’s a good thing you didn’t live in Arthur’s time. The cellphone coverage was terrible.” He held out the shards of Excalibur to her. “Touch them,” he said. “I need their power so I can search the ground for the hilt. Ebenezer Knight must have buried it somewhere in this churchyard.”

  Felicia gazed around at the graves. “I can’t sense anything.”

  “Neither can I,” Merlin said impatiently. “That’s why I need the power of the shards.” He thrust them at her again.

  “All right, all right. Don’t get pushy.” She took hold of the other ends of the bits of broken blade.

  Instantly Merlin felt his own magic wax as the power of the shards flowed into him. It was still nothing compared to what it would be once the sword was intact and he used it to swing wide the door into Faerie, but it was more than enough for this task. He closed his eyes and silently spoke the True Name of the soil, Commanding it to reveal its contents.

  The earth beneath them responded. In an instant, he knew the precise location of every body, every scattered bone, every worm and rock and lost penny and old horseshoe nail and piece of broken crockery within the churchyard…

  …and also knew the hilt was not among them.

  It has to be here, he thought. It has to!

  He cast his net wider, through all of Cannington Manor, probing its underground secrets.

  Nothing. Nothing but rocks and rubbish, bugs and burrows.

  “Dammit!” He released the power. Felicia let go of her ends of the shards and stepped back.

  “No luck?” she said.

  “Obviously,” Merlin snapped. And I was so sure. As, obviously, was my sister’s pet, or she and Wally wouldn’t have been digging here.

  He knew the hilt was not buried in the grave they stood next to, where Ebenezer Knight’s bones mouldered peacefully inside his coffin – or, come to think of it, where he assumed Knight’s bones did. After all, he hadn’t actually looked to see if this was the elder Knight’s final resting place.

  He reached down and pulled back the tarp, revealing the headstone.

  Ebenezer Knight, yes, there was his name, date of birth, date of death, and below that, a stylized cross…

  He blinked. No. Not a cross.

  A carving of a sword hilt.

  The hilt, one he knew well, though he had not seen it for more than a millennium.

  The hilt of Excalibur!

  Wild surmise gripped him. He turned to Felicia. “Take the ends of the shards!” he commanded.

  “Why? You just said –”

  “Do it!” he
snapped, so fiercely she flinched. Mouth set in an angry pout, she took the ends of the metal fragments again.

  Power flowed back into him. This time he focussed it on the gravestone. Break! he Commanded the rock of which it was made. Shatter!

  Unable to withstand his magic, the tombstone of Ebenezer Knight shuddered as though in the grip of a very localized earthquake – and broke apart in cloud of dust and a shower of rubble.

  And there, peeking out from the chunks of granite, was a flat box made of silvery metal, its lid marked with golden runes Merlin recognized at once as components of a hiding spell – and that was as much proof as anything else that here, indeed, lay the hilt of Excalibur, the final piece of Arthur’s shattered sword.

  Fierce elation surged through him. He let go of his ends of the shards, leaving them in Felicia’s hands, and dropped to his knees. At last! At long, long last –

  He reached for the box.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Excalibur Reforged

  “Ariane, wake up!”

  Ariane awoke, suddenly and uncomfortably – not just because she’d come straight out of a muddled unpleasant dream in which she had been floundering in an oil-slicked sea, trying desperately to keep her head above the filthy salt water, but also because she was, literally, uncomfortable. In fact, she felt as though she’d bruised bones she hadn’t even known she had, sleeping on the ground.

  “What –” she began, but Wally shushed her frantically.

  “Major,” he said, barely mouthing the words. “He’s here. With Flish. And backup.”

  Ariane blinked. She raised her head and peered out through the screen of bushes.

  Sure enough, there was a black SUV – just once, she wished Major would choose another form of transportation, like a red minivan or a blue pickup – and two men, one wearing a red sweater, the other a Riders jersey, walking away from the SUV in opposite directions along the gravel path. Each carried what looked like a pistol with an extra-long barrel. “Are those…?”

  “Tranquilizer guns,” Wally whispered. “He knows how close it came to working last time.”

  “It did work,” Ariane said. “You saved us.” She shifted her gaze as Rex Major and Flish came into sight past the corner of the church. “They’re headed to the grave.”

  “He’ll find the shard in the headstone,” Wally groaned.

  “He won’t be able to sense it any more than we could,” Ariane said, and hoped that was true. “And the stone is covered with a tarp. He won’t see the carving, so there’s no reason for him to think of the headstone.”

  For a few minutes it looked as if her optimistic assessment would prove correct. Major reached inside his shirt and took out two lengths of dull metal – the other two shards! she thought, and felt a surge of anger that he had them instead of her, their rightful owner as heir of the Lady who had forged them. She tamped down the reaction – it largely came from her own shards, of course – and kept watching.

  Not that there was anything much to see. Major held out his two shards to Felicia, who took the other ends. Ariane understood that perfectly – Flish, like Wally, was an heir of King Arthur, and only the heirs were able to convince the broken pieces of the sword to work together. Presumably that would change once the sword was reforged and whole once more. What exactly Merlin could do with the power of the two shards, she didn’t know. His powers were largely a mystery to her, although on Cacibajagua Island he had called down lightning, almost killing Wally with it, so presumably he was doing something impressive that she just couldn’t detect.

  From her point of view, Major simply froze, and stayed that way for several minutes while the two men continued to patrol, now wandering off the road along the southeast and northwest sides of the churchyard. Keep going, she thought. Keep going. Out of sight. There’s a nice lake over that way. Maybe you could jump in it. If she had to act, she’d have to act quickly, and the farther away Major’s henchmen were from her and Wally’s hiding place, the less likely they could take her down with one of those blasted poison darts in time to stop her from doing – whatever it was she had to do.

  She considered that. What could she do?

  If Merlin actually got his hand on the hilt, it would all be over. She knew whoever had three could claim all five, and she wouldn’t be able to stop it, which implied an instantaneous transfer of some kind. If Merlin got the whole sword, would she be left with even the power of the Lady she had been given before she had possessed any of the shards, or would that desert her, too?

  She couldn’t afford to find out. That meant if it looked as though Merlin was about to claim the shard, she had to be ready to stop him – and she could think of only one way to do that…

  The first time she had created a water-woman, she had done so in a frantic effort to save her mother, who was being held hostage by Merlin’s men. Ariane had fed off the powerful link she shared with her mother by virtue of their mutual connection to the Lady of the Lake. She hadn’t known until then that she could do it. But in the past month, since the ice came off the slough at Barringer Farm, she’d practiced it, frightening the cows in the process. It took a lot of power – but Major wasn’t the only one with two shards of Excalibur and an heir to Arthur close at hand.

  She rolled over on her back, pulled up her shirt, took the shards out from under the bandage that held them in place, then rolled onto her side to face Wally. “Take hold,” she whispered. “I have to be in position in case he gets lucky.”

  “In position…oh!” Wally’s eyes widened. He nodded, and took the ends of the shards.

  Power sang through Ariane. Sleeping on the hard ground – and before that in the dank tunnel beneath the walls of the castle – wasn’t the same as sleeping in her nice warm bed back at Barringer Farm, but it had still done wonders to recharge her magical batteries. She wished she had time to eat the lunch Wally had packed, but even without it, she had the power she needed.

  She poured her consciousness out of her body and into the water behind them, the slough in which they had materialized, and formed the water into a girl-shape around the seed of her mind, like an oyster covering a bit of grit with pearl. Girl-shaped, but not girl-sized. The water-woman towered two feet taller than Ariane herself.

  She could see through the eyes of the water-woman as if she were looking through her own. She glanced down to see her physical body stretched out again as if asleep, and Wally staring up at her with wide eyes. She would have smiled at him if she had a face, but she hadn’t bothered to waste any power on that level of detail. She raised her watery head to peer through the screen of trees, and saw that the two men were coming back toward the SUV now, while in the churchyard, Major still stood frozen…

  …no. Suddenly he stirred. She saw him say something to Flish, though she couldn’t hear the words. He stared around the churchyard. Then he looked down at the grave, reached out – and pulled the tarp off of the gravestone.

  He’s seen the carving, she thought. But will he make the same assumption Wally did?

  Apparently so.

  Rex Major turned toward Felicia, and held out the shards again. She took them. He stiffened.

  The gravestone of Ebenezer Knight shattered into a hundred pieces.

  Ariane dared not wait any longer.

  In the shape of a giant woman made of muddy water, she charged toward the churchyard.

  •••

  Wally stared up at the giant water version of Ariane. He’d seen her create watery figures before, but never one this large, this fierce looking. Practicing at the farm, she’d made them as real as possible, so that they looked exactly like her, clad in foam instead of clothing. They’d also been the same size as her. But this one…

  This one was a monster, a giant, vaguely female form with no recognizable face at all, just a smooth egg-shaped head, glaring out over the park like a peregrine falcon looking for a gopher to devour. He turned to follow the thing’s gaze. Major stood by the grave, unmoving – and then sudden
ly he reached down and pulled the tarp from the headstone. He stared at it, and Wally knew he’d seen the same thing he had – the “cross” was really the hilt of a sword. Major turned toward Flish, and held out the shards again. A moment’s silence – and then, with a sound that rang out across the quiet churchyard like a gunshot, the granite shattered. Major released the shards and bent down to pick something up from the rubble…

  And Ariane’s water-woman tore through the screen of branches, which momentarily shredded it into a cloud of spray that instantly leaped back into its form as it hurtled across the road and dashed toward the churchyard faster than an Olympic sprinter.

  Riderman and Sweaterman had just returned to the SUV. As the water-woman erupted into sight they spun toward it – and, not surprisingly, froze. Ariane’s water form grew long tentacles that slapped the tranquilizer pistols from their hands. The weapons whirled away, one smashing into the side of the church, the other vanishing into a patch of weeds. Then she punched each of them in the chest, knocking them onto their backs. The shock seemed to break the Command that Merlin must have put on them – they scrambled to their feet, stared around wildly, and then ran for the SUV, the doors slamming even as Ariane’s watery simulacrum splashed through the churchyard gate and briefly vanished from Wally’s sight behind the church as she tore across the cemetery to Ebenezer Knight’s grave – where Rex Major was even then pulling a rectangular box of silvery grey metal from the rubble of the grave marker.

  Ariane’s watery form reappeared, barreling down on Flish and Major. Flish looked around and Wally heard her scream as Ariane’s water-woman knocked her aside like a running back bowling over a defender, sending her rolling across the ground. Merlin straightened sharply and spun to face the onrushing apparition, but Ariane’s water-arm lashed out and the box holding the hilt flew away from him as the tranquilizer guns had from his henchmen. It bounced off the tree that grew against the southeastern fence. The water-woman knocked Merlin flat on his back on top of Ebenezer Knight’s shattered tombstone.