Pendy ran over and lifted his foster brother up by the knees until he could work himself free.
“I’m going to burn this bloody place to the ground. It’s a death trap!” yelled Kay the second he was disentangled.
I expected Pendy to offer some sort of comeback. But all at once he’d become shy and servile. “Oh, you mustn’t be angry, sir. You know he doesn’t like you being in here when he’s not around,” said Pendy. “Or when he is around,” he added in a soft mutter that only I heard.
“Who is your dim-witted friend and why does he refuse to help me? Does he not value his life?” said Kay petulantly.
“Please, call me Daniel. And I do value my life, thanks for asking. I didn’t know you needed help, that’s all.” I shrugged. “I just thought you were doing interpretive dance.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but regardless, you speak with great disrespect. I’m a knight and a noble,” he declared, fingering the sword that hung by his side in a ruby-studded scabbard. “I’m not a man you want to cross. If I cut you down right here and now, no one would bat an eyelash.”
I grinned. He was less scary than he thought he was. “Looked like you were the one who needed cutting down, sir.”
Pendy was looking distraught. “Sir Kay, don’t do this. Daniel didn’t know who you were, and I’m sure he’d be happy to apologize…”
Pendy was wrong about that, but his pleas did no good anyway. With a growl, Kay drew his sword with ease. It looked like something he did a lot. And were those bloodstains on the blade? Suddenly I regretted my frivolous attempt at wit. I didn’t have another elephant in me right now.
Kay pulled back, raising the sword high in the air.
Chapter 54
BUT INSTEAD OF COMING DOWN, the sword kept going up. Straight up. And Kay was still holding on to it by the hilt.
He reached up another hand, trying to pull the weapon back down, but it only shot up faster, finally embedding itself in the ceiling—with Kay kicking his legs at least twelve feet above the floor.
“Kay! You know I don’t approve of violence. If you want to play, do it outside. And far, far away from my workshop!”
Standing next to us suddenly was a man in a red velvet bathrobe, grinning like it was his tenth or eleventh birthday party, and Kay was the piñata. And he was about as tall as a ten-year-old, too.
Only thing was, he also had a long, white beard, so bushy it would have put Santa Claus to shame. It reached all the way down past his waist. Which wasn’t that far, actually.
Kay howled like an animal until Pendy ran underneath him, yelled “Let go,” and broke his fall. Took an awful hit, too, poor Pendy.
Kay got up, dusted himself off, gave the three of us a long, dirty look, and stormed out, slamming the door so hard that it made a pile of junk in the corner collapse.
“That miserable oaf,” the strange character said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve caught him playing with my toys. It’s fortunate I’m able to reverse gravity, isn’t it?” The weirdo in the red robe giggled for about twenty seconds. It was awkward.
“He’s just a jerk,” I said. “So is anybody who needs to be called sir.”
The bearded boy—or should I say man?—gave a start, as if I hadn’t been standing there the whole time, then looked bemused.
“I’ll be quite certain not to call you sir, strange fellow.”
“Good.” I extended my hand. “The name’s Daniel.”
“He’s a wizard,” said Pendy in a stage whisper, glancing at me apologetically. “Sorry.”
At this, the short guy narrowed his eyes and stared at me. Actually, he stared past me and ran his tongue around his lips very slowly, like he was concentrating deeply. “You are not a wizard. No, no, no, no. That isn’t it, not at all.”
The next moment he winked at me, and I heard his voice very clearly in my mind: You’re an alien. What can I say? It takes one to know one.
I reached out a hand to steady myself against a column, and it was a good thing, because he then announced, out loud, this little piece of news: “My name’s Merlin. I see you and Arthur have already met.”
Chapter 55
MERLIN AND ARTHUR.
King Arthur?
Merlin the Sorcerer?
Pendy was actually Arthur Pendragon, the future leader of England, the legend. A myth, supposedly. It was all too much to absorb at once. But then, I suppose the legend might be equally shocked to be meeting an alien. All depends on your perspective, I guess.
“Arthur, would you mind running along to the castle?” the little man—I mean, Merlin—said to Pendy—I mean, Arthur. “Daniel looks like he could use a cider.”
Arthur, who had no idea that his tutor and I were both reeling from our sudden mutual mindfreak, trotted casually out of the barn.
“Well, that should keep him busy,” Merlin said as soon as Arthur left the room, and then he burst into a series of delighted chuckles. “You look surprised,” he said in his squeaky voice.
I didn’t know what to say. Merlin blinked, and a black-and-white-splotched beanbag chair appeared behind me. I collapsed into it.
“Do you like it? I invented it myself. Just a standard cowhide full of kidney beans! Quite brilliant, wouldn’t you say? Now, where was I… oh, yes! So I gather you now understand that I’m from another planet, and, judging by your… interesting clothes, you are too.”
He looked like he was going into another laughing fit, so I interrupted before he could start.
“I’m an Alien Hunter from Alpar Nok, here to hunt down outlaws on Earth.”
It might not surprise you to hear that this is not the most common way for me to introduce myself to strangers. It felt… good. But weird.
He froze suddenly, his teeth barely showing between his lips. “That’s impossible!” he spat. And I do mean spat. “I’m assigned to Earth.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. Merlin was an Alien Hunter? Come to think of it, he did look a little bit like one of the cousins I’d met during my last family reunion, an annoying little guy called Syffaldingus.
“Unless…” Something seemed to strike him, and he stopped mumbling and buried both hands in his beard thoughtfully. “The future. Yes, that’s right! That must be it.” He whistled, impressed. Or at least, he tried to whistle. It just sounded like he was trying to blow out a cake full of birthday candles. “So I gather someone finally figured out how to jump between temporal rifts. Then again, I suppose I knew you were coming. Only I might have expected someone a little more, I don’t know… experienced… to be the first.”
“Experienced? You seem younger than I am!”
“I’ve been living here a hundred and seven years. I just imagined myself this way. A little trick I thought of one day while bathing. I call it mentis vitae—a mental fountain of youth. Clever, don’t you think?”
I raised an eyebrow and pointed at his beard.
He shrugged. “Well, I kind of forgot what I was doing halfway through. I get bored easily. Mind wanders to other tasks, games of chance, foods I adore.”
I shook my head. It was fortunate he’d never tried time travel. His short, skinny legs might have ended up two hundred years away from the rest of his body.
“You knew I was coming?” I said skeptically.
“Yes, yes, yes. Hold on, where is it? I know I left it around here somewhere.” He got down on his hands and knees and started rummaging through one of the larger piles crammed into a corner.
All I can say is, Merlin would have been great at Jenga. He darted around like a mongoose, pulling out a sheaf of papers here and there, crude-shaped jars of ink and feather pens, a wooden recorderlike instrument, and the odd animal skin, tossing them a few feet and leaving all kinds of holes in the pile so that it seemed it would come crashing down at any moment.
“Brilliant! I was looking for this the other day,” he declared. Without turning around, he handed me something. It was a kind of shallow clay cup, and i
t felt strangely warm in my hands.
“Hold this for me, my dear Daniel? We shall need it in another twenty or thirty years.”
“What is it?”
“The Holy Grail, for heaven’s sake! Isn’t it obvious?”
Chapter 56
I PUT the sacred vessel down in a clear spot on a table across the room. Very carefully. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
“Say, Merlin,” I began, thinking on my feet. “You don’t suppose I could borrow that? I’m, um, pretty sure we could use that in the future, too.”
“Hmmm… perhaps we can negotiate something, fellow Alien Hunter,” said Merlin. “But first we must focus on more important matters at hand.” He stood up to face me and smiled. “Here it is!”
His eyes were shining. I mean, they were literally shining, a bright neon blue that gave his robe a purple luster. It was a moment before I realized that they were reflecting light from the even more mind-shattering item that was clutched in his hands.
I had never seen it before, but I recognized the form instantly. It was nothing like the laptop that I’d left in the London town house, but the thin leather-bound book Merlin now held out toward me had pictures that flickered in a familiar way, symbols that somehow ate their way into your brain. It looked a little like an ordinary high school yearbook, but the gold, flowing script stamped on the cover confirmed that there was nothing ordinary about it.
YE OLDE LIST.
Terra Firma.
This was The List of Alien Outlaws, about fourteen hundred years older, and analog instead of digital.
“Ye Olde List? Merlin, this has to be a joke!”
Merlin had only to open the book to prove me wrong. On its yellowed pages, the words shimmered, and lifelike illustrations of devils, goblins, and gargoyles—which were actually aliens, I realized—danced in the wide margins. Literally, I mean—the pictures on the paper were moving.
Merlin pointed to a scene, and I took the book from him to examine it more closely. It was an inked black-and-white drawing of two figures standing on the moonlit shore of a wide lake. In the middle of the water, a huge maelstrom split the otherwise smooth surface like a hole torn in silk. At its center burned a small, ragged flame.
The whirlpool and the shadows that filled it were slowly spinning, projecting a rotating halo on the clouds overhead. And then suddenly the taller of the two figures turned around and looked toward us.
I dropped the book.
It was me.
And that wasn’t even the most incredible part. At the same moment that I recognized my own face, a caption flickered into existence under the picture: The arrival of Phosphorius Beta in the British Isles.
“I hope you don’t have plans tonight,” said Merlin. “I do believe we have aliens to catch!”
“I say.” I heard Arthur’s voice at the doorway, where he stood carefully balancing three mugs of cider. “Do tell, chaps: what on earth is an alien?”
Chapter 57
MERLIN was good on his feet, I must say. He convinced Arthur that an “alien” was a rare species of insect that we had a mutual interest in—which we’d discovered after discussing the great mastodon. He explained that we were going on a hunt for the creature that night, but that Arthur surely wouldn’t want to join us since “aliens” lived only in the smelliest and murkiest swamps.
Well, it wasn’t entirely a lie, anyway…
Only a few hours later and closing in on evening, Merlin led me across the meadow on the opposite side of the brook, then into a dense wood.
It was just after twilight and the forest was the “dark and scary” kind, but Alparian senses are keen and the two of us had very little trouble finding our way through the trees. Merlin even skipped a little and, what can I say, it just reinforced the fact that I liked this ancient little guy a lot. Somehow, he didn’t seem to feel the weight of the world, as I always did, on his shoulders.
“Now then, you must know a great deal about Beta,” he said, spinning into a backward jog. “You came all the way here to help me, did you not?”
“We’ve met, yeah,” I said darkly, my skin practically blistering at the memory of our last encounter. Actually, I came back in time to help me, I thought. And Dana, and all of my friends. If I could eliminate him now, I could return to the present, and Dana and I wouldn’t be face to face with death.
“Right, then. I presume you know his history.”
“I know that he’ll be here in England for another fourteen hundred years. And that he won’t be finished until everything on Earth is ash. You mean there’s more?”
“Ah, that’s not the half of it, Daniel the Traveler.” He ducked just in time to avoid a branch and then straightened up again, still backpedaling so fast that I had trouble keeping up. “It sounds like they sent you unprepared… with no cheat sheet. This isn’t good, not good at all.
“Let’s see…” He sighed, the way a teacher sighs before launching into an hour-long lecture, then jumped like he’d been pricked with a pin, and spun around 180 degrees. “The lesson will have to wait. We’re here.”
Chapter 58
“THIS IS WHERE HE COMES. There’s no doubt about it, Daniel.” Merlin cocked an eyebrow and his eyes sparkled with intelligence that went far beyond his childish appearance. “I calculated it very precisely. At least, I think I did. Couldn’t find the notes I made, of course!”
We were on the banks of a small lake, its surface as smooth as a freshly Zambonied hockey rink in the moonlight. I was struck by a vivid memory of time travel. Could this be the same lake that I’d seen? The one covered with fire?
Merlin was pretty sure of himself and pulled me down into a crouch behind a thorny bush that stood near the water’s edge. He didn’t need to crouch, of course. Even standing on his toes, his tufted white hair wouldn’t have shown over the leaves and branches.
We waited in silence. Merlin had hardly stopped talking, laughing, or moving since I’d met him, and so seeing this other side of him was downright eerie. I knew he meant business now. The Alien Hunter in him had come out.
After a time, it almost seemed like he’d stopped breathing completely, a sign that trouble was near. The slightest shift in air could mean trouble.
There was motion on the water. Even though the lake’s surface was as flat as a mirror, we both felt it: the air molecules were vibrating in an unnatural, mechanical rhythm.
And then it slowly opened. A circle appeared in the center like a bull’s-eye. Only it was nothing like the raging vortex I’d seen in Merlin’s illustration.
It was more like a shimmering egg-shaped hole, with the entire universe inside.
A luminescent form reached out of it and extended above the water. It was a wispy tendril of colored flame.
I gasped out loud.
A time traveler. Beta is a time traveler. The thought hit me head-on with the force of a semi.
Merlin pointed to the lake and we both watched as the flames continued to leak slowly into the misty air.
All at once, there was a whistle and a rush of wind, and then a burst of heat filled the cold night. The time hole was gone.
For a moment, a single fiery flower, twenty feet across, hung in the air. Then fire ran across the still water in a line that led away from us, into the dark woods on the opposite shore.
Before the flames disappeared from sight, I thought I saw a silhouette rise out of the bushes and follow the line of fire into the trees.
Merlin was shaking his head in disbelief. “A real live Phosphorian. Beautiful—in its disgusting, deceitful, destructive way. Never thought I’d live to see it.”
I stood up without taking my eyes off the trail of the invader. “So, what’s the quickest way to follow him? We’ve got work to do!”
“Slow down, Alien Hunter,” Merlin said. “I know where he’s headed. And with time travel at our disposal, we’ve got all the time in the world.”
Chapter 59
LIKE A LOT of magicians, Merlin could b
e really annoying when he wanted to. After his mysterious comment at the lake, he refused to say anything further. Not a peep out of him as we made our way.
When he guided us back to his mill, instead of the supposed lair of Beta, I threw a fit—but he just spent the rest of the night braiding and unbraiding his beard.
Well, I certainly didn’t feel like I had all of the time in the world, and I was getting antsy. Part of me wanted to grab him by that stupid white beard, shake him around like a baby’s rattle, and scream, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? BETA IS HERE, AND WE HAVE TO STOP HIM NOW BEFORE HE GETS MY FRIENDS! AND ALL OF ENGLAND!”
But this guy had this crazy idea that there was a time and a place for everything.
The next day Merlin mysteriously insisted on bringing Arthur and me to London. This was London pre–sewer system, and the whole place smelled like… well, yeah. Arthur had been nursing a black eye from Kay and wouldn’t say more than a couple of syllables to me as we rode by oxcart. I’d been brooding about letting Beta slip through our fingers the night before and wouldn’t say more than a couple of syllables to Merlin.
“Beta won’t be going anywhere, Daniel,” Merlin said under his breath. “And there’s a reason we need to be in town. It’s all part of making history. We can’t mess with that, you know.”
“That little crackpot!” Arthur muttered. “I don’t have time for this!”
I looked at him appreciatively, and a grin flickered on his face for the first time that day but quickly gave way to a frown.
“Kay left this morning,” Arthur finally put in, “and if I don’t repair his saddle by the time he gets back from his tournament, he says he’ll give me another one of these.” He pointed at his black eye.
“Why do you put up with him?” I said. “Foster brother or not, I would have punched his lights out—er, hit him. Smote him?”
“He never used to be this way, Daniel. But lately all he thinks about is taking over from Father. When Father’s gone, Kay will be lord of the castle. And I won’t be anything. Kay will probably turn me out onto the streets.”
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