Cave Beneath the Sea

by Edward Willett

  “The Caribbean is a big place,” she said after a minute. “How do we figure out where he’s going?”

  “Same way I found out he was going to New Zealand,” Wally said. “He’ll take his private jet. He has to register a flight plan...and flight plans are searchable. We’ll know where he’s going before he’s even left, at least in general terms. We just have to be waiting for him, and then follow him.”

  “And Flish.”

  “And Flish,” Wally said.

  “If he finds out you’re close behind him, he might use her as a hostage,” Emma warned.

  “Then we won’t let him find out we’re there until it’s too late,” Wally said. “We won’t let anything happen to her.” He looked at Ariane. “Right?”

  Ariane knew the unspoken reason behind his questioning look. She’d hurt Flish badly in Regina when Flish and the coven of mean girls she’d hung out with had tried to attack Ariane on the tennis courts near Oscana Collegiate. It had driven a rift between her and Wally that had led directly to his deciding to throw in, for a time, with Rex Major – which was why Major had the one shard he held.

  Flish would have no qualms about hurting me, Ariane thought. And maybe Wally, too – even though he doesn’t want to believe it – if Merlin has his hooks deep enough into her. After all, Wally hurt me when he was on Merlin’s side, stealing the shard from me, convinced it was for my own good. Merlin’s Voice of Command may not work on the younger Knights, but he can be plenty persuasive even without magic.

  But she didn’t say that out loud. I control the sword; it doesn’t control me, she told herself for the umpteenth time, and tried to think it as though she meant it, even as her memory conjured up the way the water of the pools in Gravenhurst and this hotel had bubbled and swirled when she got upset. Even if Flish attacks me, I won’t hurt her.

  Much.

  “Right,” she said.

  Wally took a deep breath. “Then we’ll need computer access tomorrow,” he said.

  Emma frowned. “There’s probably a business centre somewhere in the hotel, although I’ve never –”

  “Not here,” Ariane said. She’d suddenly had a wild notion, a way to maybe have her cake and eat it, too. “Too dangerous. Too close to Barringer Farm.”

  “Then where?” Wally said.

  Ariane met his gaze squarely. “How about West Vancouver?”

  “West...?” Wally blinked. “Ohhh...you mean Horseshoe Bay.”

  “We need a computer a long way from here. We can kill two birds with one stone. It can’t hurt to take a quick look around. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Mom...

  “What if Rex Major figures out you’re out there?” Emma said quietly. “Won’t that be dangerous, too? For you and her?”

  “He’ll just know we’re using a computer again. He won’t know we’re there because we think Mom might be there,” Ariane said.

  Emma and Wally looked at each other, then at Ariane, together. “You’re the boss,” Wally said. He grinned crookedly. “My Lady.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Ariane said, surprising herself with the heat in her voice. Wally looked startled.

  “I’m sorry, it was just a –”

  “I’m not the Lady of the Lake. I have her power. For now. But the sooner we can get rid of it, the better. The sooner we can get all of this magic out of our world, the better. The sooner I can go back to just being an ordinary girl, the better.”

  Wally raised his hands. “All right, all right. I said I was sorry.”

  Ariane took a deep breath, trying to release her anger.

  In the bathroom, the toilet gurgled.

  The sound frightened her. I control the sword; it doesn’t control me, she thought again. But was that true?

  And for all her brave words, did she really want to give up the power of the Lady of the Lake? The power to make water do her bidding, the power to travel anywhere in the world she wanted? Did she really want to go back to being Ariane Forsythe, the “foster brat” who was teased at every school she went to?

  I’m not a foster brat anymore, she thought. I’ve got Aunt Phyllis. And soon I’ll have Mom. And I’ll give up all this magic in a minute if it means I can live with her like we used to, go back to being a normal family.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said. She longed to leap up and let the water take them to Horseshoe Bay right then, but there was still no point in getting there in the dark. And they both needed rest. Rex Major wasn’t flying to the Caribbean until Sunday. That left all of Saturday.

  “Sounds like you have your plan,” Emma said. She got up. “Off to bed, Wally. You too, Ariane. Tomorrow will be a big day.”

  Wally nodded. He looked at Ariane, hesitated, said, “Good night,” and went out.

  Ariane got ready for bed and climbed beneath the covers, but sleep eluded her for a long time.

  <•>

  The proverb “it never rains but it pours” was unknown during Merlin’s first lifetime on Earth, but during his second lifetime, in his new incarnation as Rex Major, he had observed its truth often enough.

  The proverb usually referred to problems coming in swarms, and in his business dealings Major had seen that happen many times. On the magical side, though, he’d noticed that negative and positive things tended to happen in clumps.

  It had nothing to do with coincidence, not when magic was involved. Magic, after all, was simply a way to shape the world. It was all based on knowing the True Names of things: not Names in the sense of sounds that could be spoken out loud, but a deep, deep understanding of every aspect of the object’s – or person’s – makeup and internal workings. If you understood something, you could control it. If you understood it only partially, you could control it only partially. But if you understood it completely, you could control it completely.

  In Faerie, magic was part of the natural order, a means of accomplishing things, a tool that everyone could use, though most managed only a very limited knowledge of True Names and thus had only minimal skill. On Earth, though, magic’s influence was far greater, because it came from outside, subverting what humans liked to think of as immutable natural laws. On Earth, magic set in place centuries ago continued to tug at the strings of reality like a puppeteer manipulating a marionette.

  So it did not surprise Rex Major, though it pleased him a great deal, that hard on the heels of the email telling him that the fourth shard of Excalibur had been sensed by the software that bore his magical imprint came an email telling him that his computer experts had found images of Ariane’s mother online, placing her in Horseshoe Bay, B.C., just a couple of weeks previously.

  Ariane’s mother, Merlin knew, had been offered the power of the Lady of the Lake before Ariane had, and though she had rejected it, and then fled in a futile attempt to keep the magic from interfering with her daughter’s life, she still bore magic within her. It continued to tug at her, as magic also tugged at Ariane and Wally and Felicia and even Merlin himself, the magic the Lady had infused into Excalibur and then set loose in this world to try to bring the shards of the sword together. Now the magic that wound around all those who had any connection to the sword was slowly tightening.

  The sword wanted only to be whole. Merlin could not deny that it would prefer to be whole under the control of the Lady of the Lake – Ariane – but it would serve him, too, if he were the one who managed to forge it anew: its own strange sense of self-preservation burned brighter within it than the thin veneer of loyalty to its creator the Lady had attempted to lay upon it.

  Major reached up to touch the ruby stud in his earlobe, caught himself doing it, and lowered his hand again. It was becoming a very bad habit, reaching for that jewel every time he thought of the sword – a “tell,” as poker players would put it. Not that there was anyone to see, here in his office, to which he had returned after telling Felicia about their upcoming trip to the Caribbean. And where he had just hung up the phone after politely letting her parents know where she would be travelling, and stre
ngthening the Commands that kept them from worrying about that fact. But even though there was no one to see him finger the stud at this moment, at some other time there might be, and it just might be someone who would realize what it meant.

  He picked up the phone again. Horseshoe Bay, for all its seeming small-town-in-the-wilderness feel, was only fifteen kilometres from downtown Vancouver – and the offices of Excalibur Computer Systems.

  Chapter Six

  Horseshoe Bay

  “At least it’s not a swimming pool,” Wally ventured.

  After a good night’s sleep – at least on his part; he wasn’t sure about Ariane, who looked a little pale and bleary-eyed this morning – and a huge breakfast in the hotel’s buffet restaurant, they had consulted a map of B.C. they’d found in the lodge lobby, and identified a likely place to travel to: Whyte Lake, a small body of fresh water about three kilometres inland from Horseshoe Bay. Of course, that meant it was tucked into a fold in a mountainside, but the map indicated a trail down.

  A trail currently half-buried in snow. They’d checked the temperature on the Weather Network before they’d left for Horseshoe Bay: a predicted high of four degrees Celsius, a low of minus-three. Chilly, though a lot warmer than Saskatchewan.

  But still cold enough for snow, and there’d obviously been quite a bit of it in the recent past. They stood on a floating wooden pier in the lake, after having clambered out of the near-freezing water and using Ariane’s Patented Quick-Dry Method to avoid hypothermia. A sign indicated the path to the Baden-Powell Trail, which would take them down, according to the map, to a trailhead located in a small car park alongside the Trans-Canada Highway, just above Horseshoe Bay.

  “It’s not far,” Ariane said. “And it’s all downhill. Let’s get going.” She started off.

  Wally sighed, and followed her along the pier and onto the alternately snowy-then-muddy trail. They passed an outhouse, and, after a short walk through the trees without encountering any difficulty, reached the spot where their path intersected with another, marked by an orange triangle attached to a tree bearing the letters BP in blue, a fleur-de-lis above it. An additional blue sign reiterated the fact they had reached the Baden-Powell Trail. Ariane and Wally turned left along it, and began picking their way downhill.

  Although parts of the trail boasted boardwalks and wooden steps, parts didn’t, and about ten minutes later, Wally was scooting down one particularly steep bit on his rear end, icy water soaking his bottom, his feet having slid out from under him twice before he gave up and decided indignity was preferable to infirmity. Sliding down the slope, he reflected once again on the fact that Saskatchewan people just didn’t do mountains. And yet somehow he kept finding himself on slippery slopes.

  Metaphorically as well as literally, perhaps. He wondered what waited for them at the bottom of the hill.

  It turned out that the first thing that waited for them was Highway 99. The trail took them under it, then continued on a short distance to the Trans-Canada Highway. They heard it long before they reached it, as two motorcycles screamed by, one after the other, at what sounded like two hundred kilometres an hour.

  They emerged at last into a small gravel parking lot that opened onto an access road; they followed that road a short distance, and then crossed onto a bridge that took them over the highway. The TransCanada ended at the B.C. Ferries terminal, and looking down from the bridge they could see cars lining up for the next ferry to Nanaimo.

  Wally had been to Horseshoe Bay before; Ariane hadn’t. But he didn’t have a clue where the public library was, or even if there was one. In her backpack, Ariane carried the photo Wally had scanned to use in his Internet searches. She planned to show it around the waterfront businesses to see if anyone recognized her mom, while Wally did his thing on the Web – assuming he could find a computer.

  Before they went into the town, though, he stopped and turned around and showed Ariane the soaked rear of his jeans. “Do you mind drying me off?” he said.

  Ariane laughed. “Sorry. I already did that for myself.” She whacked him playfully on the butt and he instantly felt warmer – in more ways than one. Ears burning, he set off along Marine Drive.

  He didn’t really know the town all that well, but he knew the bay lay downhill and to their right, so he turned down Nelson Drive, which seemed to go in pretty much the right direction. They walked along the tree- and hedge-lined street, past neat houses. They’d left the snow behind on the mountainside, it seemed: here, beneath grey skies, the roads were wet and cold mist shrouded everything, but only a little slush clung to life in the deepest shadows, looking as if it would rather have been anywhere else.

  Nelson Drive, it turned out, delivered them to the end of the pier that stretched into the Bay, pointing like a finger at the giant ferry docked on the other side, the mist fading the ship from bright blue and white into the muted tones of an old photograph. A handful of boats nestled up to the docks on their side of the harbour, most of them buttoned down with awnings and tarpaulins. To their left, the mouth of the bay couldn’t be seen in the mist, which also hid the glorious mountain views Wally remembered from his summertime visits.

  But they weren’t there for the scenery. And since he’d just had to slide down some of that scenery on his rear end, which, though it might no longer be damp, still felt decidedly bruised, he’d kind of had his fill of mountain scenery anyway.

  They made their way through the park to Troll’s, the restaurant that had been in the first photo of Ariane’s mom Wally had uncovered. Just inside the front door, where framed caricatures of notable Canadians who had eaten there stared down from knotty-pine panelling, he asked the waitress who greeted them where he could find a public library. She blinked at him. “There’s no public library in Horseshoe Bay,” she said. “You’d have to go to West Vancouver.”

  Crap. “What about an Internet café?”

  “No.”

  “Anywhere I could get onto a computer?”

  The girl scratched her neck. “Just a second.” She disappeared for a minute, came back. “Joe says he thinks there’s a computer for guests staying at the Horseshoe Bay Motel. Just up the street a couple of blocks.”

  “Thanks.” Wally turned to Ariane. “I’ll go check it out. You’re going to start asking around?”

  Ariane nodded. She stared past him into the restaurant, at the handful of people enjoying breakfast – a rather late breakfast; they hadn’t gotten away from Medicine Hat until late morning, and more than an hour had passed since they’d materialized in Whyte Lake. Even with the time difference, it was after 10 a.m. here. “It’d be an enormous stroke of luck to find her here,” he said quietly.

  “I know,” Ariane said. “But she was here. That photo proved it. And not long ago. Maybe...”

  Wally nodded. “Good luck,” he said, and then, before he even knew he was going to do it, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek as she had kissed him the night before.

  Her eyes swung around to him, wide and slightly startled, and she raised a hand to her face.

  He felt himself blushing, but he didn’t look away. “We’ll meet back here in an hour. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He gave her a smile and a small wave, and stepped out of the restaurant.

  The cool mist felt good on his burning ears.

  <•>

  Ariane watched Wally go, hand still on her cheek. The waitress chuckled. “He’s cute.”

  Ariane swung horrified eyes around to her. “Cute? Wally?”

  “Sure,” the waitress said. “He reminds me of my little brother. He used to be kind of gawky like that, but once he grew into his looks...these days he has to beat the girls off with a stick.”

  Ariane didn’t know how to respond to that. She also didn’t know how to respond to Wally’s kiss. Sure, she’d kissed him first. But that had been a thank-you kiss. This had been a...a “see-you-later-girlfriend” kind of kiss. Were they really boyfriend and girlfriend now? She knew Wally was
in love with her. She wasn’t in love with him. Was she?

  She hadn’t decided. Did she have to decide now?

  She shook her head to clear it. No, not now. Later.

  “Table for one?” the waitress said.

  Ariane gathered her wits. “No,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. I know she eats here sometimes...” She shrugged out of her backpack and pulled her mom’s photo out of an outside pocket. She held it out to the waitress. “Have you seen her?”

  The waitress looked closely, but shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “So many people come and go here, what with the ferry terminal. Unless she’s a local, she wouldn’t make much of an impression.”

  “She might be living in town,” Ariane said.

  The waitress shook her head. “Sorry,” she said again. Then her eyes slid past Ariane and her smile brightened. “Table for three?” she said to the man and woman and young girl who had just come in.

  Ariane tucked the photo back into her backpack pocket and slunk outside into the cold mist. Strike one, she thought, but even if she got three strikes in a row, she wouldn’t give up. Her mom had been in Horseshoe Bay. Someone must have seen her, have some idea of where she had gone. They had to. It couldn’t be a dead end. It couldn’t.

  Except, of course, no matter how fervently she wished otherwise, it could.

  But it isn’t yet, she told herself fiercely. She looked up and down Bay Street. There were several restaurants and galleries and other businesses. She’d ask at every one. And then she’d go up a block and ask again. She’d ask until she ran out of places to ask. She wouldn’t give up.

  Someone in Horseshoe Bay had seen her mom, and Ariane wasn’t leaving until she found that person.

  She turned left and began her quest.

  <•>

  The Horseshoe Bay Motel, its name emblazoned on a red awning in faux-Celtic letters, proved to be an old-fashioned two-storey motel with the room doors opening directly to the outside. Wally entered the small lobby, decorated with antique-looking furniture and West Coast-flavoured artwork. A rotund middle-aged woman sat behind the desk, reading the Vancouver Sun. She looked up as he came in and gave him a friendly smile. “Can I help you?”