by Daniel Diehl
Now, rather than frightened, Beverley looked concerned. “Look, Captain Pierre, this is a really brilliant thing you’re doing for us, but who’s paying for your boat and your time?”
“It is of no consequence Mademoiselle. Meles has done many favors for me in the past and I am happy to do this small thing for him.”
“At least let us chip in on the fuel.”
“A gentleman should never accept money from a lady, but as you put it so delicately, it would be deeply impolite of me to refuse.”
The rest of the night passed in quiet, mellow conversation and by the time the first fingers of dawn crept across the gleaming green surface of the Gulf of Aden, Ismail’s trawler was chugging into the port side of Aden’s harbor. Now nearly twenty-four hours without sleep, both Jason and Beverley felt shaky with exhaustion and woozy after a night of drinking, but they mustered the last of their energy to scramble off the boat and onto the pier.
“And remember what I told you, Mademoiselle and Monsieur. Do not take a hotel too near the docks. Take a cab, go into the city, eat and then sleep. You will feel much better in a few hours.”
“Thanks for the help, Pierre.”
“No thanks are necessary. Be safe and Dieu soient sur vous – May God be with you.”
“Come on, babe. Let’s find a place to crash. I know I should try calling Merlin, but I’m just too tired. I’ll do it later when I can find my brains.”
Chapter Nineteen
“I know you’re worried about Merlin - I’m worried about him too, but ringing your flat every two minutes isn’t going to make him come home any faster.”
Beverley laid a calming hand on Jason’s uplifted mobile phone and pressed it down toward his lap. When she felt the tension drain out of his rigid fingers and the tight muscles in his arm relax she gave his fingers a perfunctory squeeze and laid her hand on top of his to keep him from automatically raising the phone and dialing again. Now, deprived of anything to occupy his thoughts, he sat with unfocused eyes, staring blankly through the train window. The fact that spring had returned to England during his weeks of absence escaped him entirely; the soft green shoots of new grass and tiny, budding leaves on the trees made no impression on his distant, preoccupied mind. Inside his head he couldn’t decide which was more frustrating and confusing, the fact that Merlin’s absence was so obviously wrong, or the fact that because he did not have the vaguest idea what might have happened to his friend, he was completely unable to formulate any kind of a plan that might help him deal with the situation.
Jason had not thought much about his inability to contact Merlin during the long morning they spent hanging idly around the airport in Yemen before catching their flight back to England. Merlin wasn’t a prisoner and he was allowed to come and go as he pleased. Later, during the flight itself, the use of mobile telephones was prohibited, but Jason comforted himself with the thought that by the time they landed at Heathrow, Merlin would have returned to the flat. Almost immediately upon landing Jason had begun calling and now, three hours and connecting rail trips from Heathrow to King’s Cross Station and from King’s Cross half way to York, he had been frantically pounding the buttons on his mobile phone. He had reached the point of being simultaneously furious at Merlin and frantic about the old man’s safety.
“If we would have just had your car we could have at least gone looking for him.”
“Jason, we’ve already talked about this. I left my car at St Lawrence’s church when Merlin and I stole the disk.”
“Maybe we should have gone to West Wycombe and got your car.”
“After Merlin and I made off with Morgana’s van and the disk I don’t think we could even get close to the place. She probably has a whole flock of her knuckle-dragging yobs crawling through every inch of the caves, all around the hill and probably all over the village.”
“But maybe Merlin went back there.”
Beverley was so exhausted from the endless rounds of ‘what if’ and ‘maybe’ conversations that she had to force herself not to snap at Jason.
“Why would he go back there before we got back with the stones? That’s what this whole thing has been about since the start, finding the key to close the dragon gate. For Merlin to go back to the cave empty handed wouldn’t make any sense at all, and he just doesn’t do things without a good reason.”
“I know.” Beverley could tell by the look on Jason’s face that he was grasping at straws, trying to find some logical reason for Merlin’s failure to answer the phone. “Maybe Morgana found him somehow and kidnapped him.”
“And if that happened – which I doubt – she would probably have found him at home; so the most logical place to start looking is back at your flat. Right?”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
She patted his hand again and leaned over to give him a small, comforting peck on the cheek. “Then we’re doing the right thing. We’re going back to your flat and that’s the most logical place to start looking for him – or at least it’s the best place to look for clues to tell us where he might have gone.”
When their train finally pulled in to the rail station at York, Jason insisted they take a taxi to his flat on St Mary’s rather than make the twenty minute walk through the center of the city. Even then, as the taxi wound its way up Parliament Street, Jason was frantically dialing the number of his land line which was now less than a mile away. Even before the cab pulled over to the edge of the road Jason had one hand on the door handle, the other one still holding the ringing phone firmly against the side of his head. Inside the taxi Beverley sighed and paid the driver before following Jason up the path to the house where he had left the outer door standing ajar. At the top of the stairs she could hear the sound of his footsteps filtering out of the little student flat he shared with Merlin, so she knew he had left the door to the main room open as well. Inside, standing in the middle of the combination living room-dining room-kitchenette, Jason was still holding the phone in one hand but was now making a slow, distracted circumnavigation of the room, looking for any evidence of Merlin’s return.
As she walked past Jason, Beverley didn’t say a word but brushed one hand slowly across his upper arm. From the bedroom door she studied her surroundings. Piles of ancient scrolls and manuscripts lay scattered across the floor and piled under the old kitchen table which served as a desk. On the desk, Merlin’s antique scrying glass stood upright, leaning against the pile of books, exactly where it had been for most of the last seven months. Although there were maps and books spread out on the table around it, they appeared to be the same ones she and Merlin had been poring over before they went to West Wycombe to intercept Morgana’s men and steal the communicating disk. After a few moments of staring blankly at the desk, Beverley walked back to the main room where Jason stood with his back to her, hands on his hips, shaking his head.
“Jason, I don’t think Merlin ever came back here after he and I went to the caves and stole the disk.”
Whirling around, eyebrows knitted together in a confused scowl, Jason stared at her for a long minute before he spoke. “I don’t think so either, babe. There aren’t even any dirty dishes in the sink.” Motioning Beverley toward the battered sofa, Jason plopped down, threw his head back and let out an exhausted sigh. “We have to figure this out; I need you to tell me again, where, exactly, was the last place you saw him at Heathrow and what did he say to you when you left him?”
* * *
The first thing Merlin was aware of was a shrieking headache as sharp and unforgiving as icepicks driven into his temples. It hurt too bad to open his eyes so, as he slowly regained consciousness, he kept them pressed shut while he concentrated on taking stock of his overall physical condition. When he tried to move his limbs he discovered two things; first, the searing pain was not limited to his head - it flowed and pulsed through every nerve and muscle of his body. Second – as he began to separate one kind of pain from another – he realized he was bound in a sitting position. H
is hands were tied behind him and he could feel the edges of the back of some kind of a chair rubbing painfully against the inner surface of his forearms. His ankles were tied as well, probably to the legs of the chair. He was also restrained around the waist and chest. As his senses slowly returned and the worst of the pain subsided, he felt a cool draft moving through the air, playing with his ankles beneath the edge of his long gown. Feeling slightly refreshed by the tiny breeze, he realized that since his first seconds of consciousness he had been aware of a barely audible sound, the soft gurgling noise made by moving water, and it was somewhere not far from where he sat. Where was he? How had he gotten here? His mind and body were too racked with pain for him to think. Memory would undoubtedly come back when he was able to think clearly and take stock of his surroundings.
Eventually, after several failed attempts to open his eyes, Merlin was able to bring his immediate surroundings into focus. There was dirt at his feet - a dirt floor. And a few feet in front of him was the edge of a dark river. Finally he raised his head but had to lower it again when his eyes met the glaring light of a row of exposed incandescent bulbs strung from the ceiling. Still, he had seen enough to reorient himself and bring memory flooding back. He was in the cavern at the end of the Hellfire cave, and no more than three feet in front of him the River Styx gurgled its way toward the opposite end of the cave where it disappeared and continued along its subterranean course.
Raising his head and leaning it back Merlin could feel the hard rock wall behind him. Then, twisting his head slightly to the left, he opened his eyes again. A few feet away was the entry to the tunnel leading back toward the round dining room and the outside world. That was where the draft was coming from; fresh air traveling along the tunnel. Judging from his proximity to the tunnel and the river he must be very close to the end of the invisible bridge. That meant the illusory rock wall hiding the entrance to the dragon gate must be almost directly across the river from where he sat. At least he knew where he was. What might have struck him hard enough to knock him out and how he ended up tied to this chair was unimportant at the moment. The only thing that mattered now was getting loose. Sometime later – possibly after another short bout of unconsciousness – he awoke to the soft sound of feet traveling toward him down the long corridor. Merlin raised his head, determined to appear as dignified as possible. A moment later, Morgana le Fay stepped out of the corridor, a malignant grin distorting her perfect, heart-shaped face.
“Well, well, well. Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of spears. Come to finish our little game, old man? It certainly took you long enough to get here. I’ve been waiting ever so long to see you again; but what’s a millennia or so among old friends?”
Merlin managed to pull himself erect and return her steady gaze with what he hoped would look like calm equanimity. “You don’t frighten me, Morgana.”
“Really?” Her perfectly arched eyebrows shot upward and she pulled her head back. “Well you certainly frighten me; you’re so damned ugly you make my gums ache.” Then, leaning down to bring her face within inches of his ear, she hissed, “You’ve caused me centuries of frustration by keeping the dragon gate closed with your spells, old man. And if that weren’t bad enough, over the past six months you sabotaged my entire computer system, you destroyed my heroin processing plant, you killed my pet dragon and finally you stole the disk to my communicating system. You’ve been a very, very bad boy.”
“Good. And one way or another I am going to stop you permanently.”
“Not in your condition, you’re not. And certainly not while I have you tied to a chair. How do you feel, by the way? Still have that searing pain and those muscle spasms?” Merlin glared at her but refused to give her the satisfaction of letting her see how much pain he was actually in. “What you have been experiencing over the last twelve hours is the result of being tagged with what is properly known as an X26 long-range Taser. The US Army developed it, clever lads. It has a range of nearly two hundred feet and can be fired from any standard twelve bore shotgun; the one that hit you was buried in the wall of the cave – that’s why you didn’t see it when you came in.” Walking back and forth in front of her prisoner, Morgana warmed to her lecture with all the enthusiasm of a sales rep giving their best pitch to a ripe customer with a fat wallet. “Would you like a review of what you’ve been experiencing? Severe and uncontrollable muscle spasms, pain throughout the muscle and nervous system, complete loss of bladder control and general disorientation. The pain must be incredibly intense since the United Nations classifies being hit by the X26 as torture. So, how am I doing so far?”
“I am not going to play your little game.”
Now on a roll, Morgana ignored Merlin and continued as though she had a thoroughly enraptured audience. “I’ll give you one thing, magus, you certainly are a tough old geezer. Most professional soldiers in top physical condition would be telling me anything I wanted to know and a dozen things I didn’t, after being hit with an X26. It’s a shame all that bravery didn’t do you any good at the end of the game, isn’t it? As much as I would love to just get it over with and kill you right now - so I could let my friends lose - there are a few things I really do need to know. After all these centuries a few more days one way or the other won’t make any difference at all.” Pulling herself up straight and crossing her arms over her shapely chest she glared at Merlin. “Now I want some information.”
“Well, you won’t get it. Not from me.”
“Oh, I will. By hook or by crook, I’ll get every last bit of information I want out of you. So now let’s play twenty questions, shall we? First question: how did you and that boy make yourselves invisible to my scrying glass? No one has ever been able to do that before and knowing how you did it would be a brilliant addition to my little store of curious facts.”
After a moment of mutual silence ticked off by the soft puffing sound of Morgana tapping her foot on the dirt floor, she finally leaned forward, her face again only inches from Merlin’s. “No? That’s Ok. I have a lot more questions where that one came from. Let’s take a different tack and try this one: What was pretty-boy doing in Africa?”
When Merlin refused to give her the satisfaction of even looking at her, Morgana cocked her arm and slapped him as hard as she could across the face with the back of her hand; the sharp, snapping sound echoing off the walls of the cave.
“Ok, you old troll. Let’s try a really easy one. Where is my bloody DISK?”
Merlin refused to acknowledge the question.
“I know you took it. My men found the van at Heathrow Airport so I know you had help. Curiously it couldn’t have been your boy Jason. He was off in Africa playing with the fuzzi-wuzzis, but I have this gnawing feeling that he was somehow involved. You may not know it but I sent agents all the way to Ethiopia to get some answers out of that young man but the blundering fools lost him at his hotel in Addis Ababa. Still, I know all these threads will eventually come together somehow and they all relate back to my communicator. Now, since I don’t have time to run all over Africa looking for clues, why don’t you save us both a lot of time – and yourself a whole world of pain – and just answer this one small question for me. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DISK?”
Finally Merlin looked up, a smile squeezing its way around the trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his mouth. “You can’t let them out until you have the disk, can you?”
“Oh, I can. Let’s just say they aren’t the kind of people you want to spring surprises on. I’ll let them out without notifying them if I have to, but I’d really rather not. So why don’t you play nice, tell me where the disk is and then remove the spell so I can open the gate?”
Merlin allowed himself a deep, throaty chuckle. “I’m not going to help you, Morgana. Even if you haven’t learned anything else over all these centuries, you should know that much. My mind is still strong enough to resist any torture you can think up.”
“Don’t try to teach your granny to suck eggs, old man. I kno
w more about strength of will than you could ever know. I’ve been out here fighting to rebuild my kingdom while you were wiling away the centuries in your warm little nest. So now I’m going tell you something you may not have learned in the months since that boy let you out of your little sphere, old man. Are you ready? Well here it is: A lot has changed over the last sixteen centuries and the world has completely passed you by.
“We do things differently now than we did in your day. Nobody but the barbarians at the American CIA still use physical torture, and as much as I might enjoy tearing your withered old carcass limb from limb – and believe me, I would enjoy it - we have much more effective ways of extracting information in the twenty-first century. I have an entire cornucopia of drugs that can cause you more pain than you could ever imagine existed, and not a single one of them leaves so much as a bruise. I have drugs that will make a man betray his own mother in exchange for one sip of water and others that will totally and permanently incapacitate the human body while leaving the mind perfectly intact. And I can make any one of those conditions…or all of them…last for the rest of your miserable life.
“And after you have told me everything I want to know, I would love to leave you powerless and mindless, to wither away slowly in some insane asylum, but since you won’t be nice and release the spell on the gate, I’m just going to have to kill you. Oh, let’s be completely honest, shall we? I’m going to kill you no matter what you do – and for no other reason than because I’m going to enjoy it so damn much.
“Myrddin Emrys ap Morfryn, you despicable creature, you are out of date, out of touch and now, at long last, you are out of time.”
Morgana had been leaning closer and closer to Merlin as she spoke. Now she pulled back, straightening to her full height, and stared down at his impassive face. After a moment she opened her shapely mouth into a huge ‘o’ and laid one hand to her cheek in a campy, theatrical gesture of surprise. “Gracious, where are my manners? You came here looking for something, didn’t you? And how dreadfully rude of me not to have shown it to you.”
