The Third Magic

by Molly Cochran

  Just like Arthur.

  She reached beneath her narrow bed of fragrant straw and pulled out the sword Excalibur. "Well, here you are again," she said, her voice heavy with irony. "Come to take him for good, I suppose."

  For she could not keep it from him, she knew. The Goddess was using Guenevere as Her tool, it was true, but if she refused, the Hag would find another way.

  Arthur would possess the sword until he himself chose to make the sacrifice that would remove it forever from the world of men. And with it, himself.

  When he arrived, she held it out to him wordlessly.

  He stared at the sword for a moment, then smiled slightly, the corners of his mouth barely lifting. "I thought that was long gone," he said.

  "It's been here." She smiled in return. Her eyes were rueful and compassionate.

  "Why are you giving it to me now?"

  She shrugged. The gesture struck Arthur as almost unbearably pretty. "I thought it might be useful to you."

  He grunted. "I doubt if even Excalibur can bring me victory against that one. He's got a bigger army. Not to mention a younger one." He allowed her to place the blade reverently into his hands. "Since Lot died, a lot of the fence-sitters have gone over to Mordred. He's offering some of Lot's lands as spoils of war. Not to mention Morgause."

  Even the name was repugnant to Guenevere. "What can she do?"

  Arthur smiled. "Oh, quite a lot. She'll marry anyone who's advantageous."

  "What about you? Marry her and make Mordred your heir. It will avert a civil war."

  "And I'll be poisoned on my wedding day."

  "Two can play at that," Guenevere said. "Clap her in irons immediately after the ceremony."

  Arthur shrugged. "Then Mordred will finish the job. Don't you see?" He spoke softly. "It's time." They both knew what he meant.

  After a long silence, she nodded. "In that case, you should have Excalibur with you," she said.

  He smiled. True to her blood, Guenevere understood just what it meant to be a warrior. "I wish I'd spent more of my life with you," he blurted out.

  Guenevere bowed her head.

  "The young think that there will be time to right every wrong," Arthur mused. "They believe, contrary to everything they know, that they will live forever."

  "And so you will," she said. "In your way."

  "I love you, Guenevere."

  "I love you, Arthur."

  And in the glance that passed between them, all the regret and anguish of their wasted lives stood between them like a stone monolith.

  At last Arthur put the sword under his arm and turned blindly, his eyes swimming and burning with tears that he refused to shed.

  "Godspeed," Guenevere said to his retreating back. "Perhaps we shall meet again."

  He hesitated for a moment, the muscles of his back tensing. Ah, yes, the thought passed between them. The Goddess always gives another chance.

  Then he stepped through the small stone doorway and was gone.

  The air outside was gusting. Arthur Blessing smelled the coming storm. The moon had disappeared, and the first wave of thunder rolled in.

  She's going to die, he thought.

  He stood up, feeling the dryness in his throat. Who was? Had he been asleep? It was so hard to tell anymore. That was part of his becoming. Or his madness, whichever he believed at the moment. He could no longer discern waking from sleeping, or truth from illusion, or fiction from memory.

  A faint thrum of electricity passed through his hands and feet, up his body and into the top of his head. This was going to be a bad storm.

  "Gwen," he whispered aloud. That was the girl's name. It sounded close to Guenevere. Was she Guenevere, he wondered? Was she the one he was meant to find in this life?

  That was the problem with living two lives at once, he thought. Aside from the drawback of losing your mind, there was also the challenge of discerning whether you were recalling the past or predicting the future. And what was worse, he was beginning to suspect that the two lives were becoming three. The blond priestess named Brigid was visiting him more and more often, as was Guenevere. And the girl on the road. Gwen.

  A young girl wearing leg coverings, like a man…

  Guenevere had seen Gwen in a dream. How was that for convoluted, he mused. His dreams were having dreams of real people.

  Dead... Dead before she could bear children...

  Gwen?

  He closed his eyes. No oh no oh no oh no oh no. He wished he could just shut his mind off for once, rest, throw away this horrid thing, this ability that clung to his back like a beast.

  Her name was Gwen, and she was going to die, and he did not know if he could stop it.

  Wearily, wanting to scream with the horror of his isolation, Arthur walked out the door.

  The first fast drops of rain, smelling of dust and still warm from the heated summer air, slapped against his face. The thunder called again.

  Chapter Forty

  THE CUP

  The half-block walk to Emily Blessing's house seemed to Hal like the proverbial journey of a thousand miles. He had turned back again and again, certain that Emily would have nothing to say to him. Her recent message commanding his appearance in Dawning Falls had been terse at best, and he had not known what to make of its verbal adjunct, the strange announcement that she had been horribly disfigured years before.

  He had not seen her disfigurement, though. When he awoke after the gunshot, her scars, if that was what they had been, had been healed along with his own. He shook his head. It would be like Emily Blessing to accept a face that had been altered by fire as a triviality, worth mentioning only because of its possible effect on whoever had to look at it.

  Emily was a strange woman, immune from most feminine vanities. It was conceivable that she did not consider facial scars to be of adequate importance to make use of the powers of the Holy Grail until it was convenient for her to do so.

  She was tough.

  By the time he finally reached her door, the rain had begun to fall in ribbons. Hal hesitated before knocking. There was still time, he thought in a panic, to run back to the rented house.

  But he did not have the opportunity. Emily opened the door while his hand, balled into a loose fist, still hovered tentatively in midair.

  She seemed pleased to see him. "Emily, I hope..." His voice died away. She was wearing the yellow dress.

  It was the same yellow dress she had worn on their last day together. All those years before, when life still made sense, he had kissed a woman in a yellow dress, and for one moment, the whole of his miserable life seemed to make sense.

  "I hope I'm not bothering you," he finished hoarsely.

  "I'm glad you've come," she said.

  Then he walked into her house, and eight years vanished in an instant.

  They lay in a tangle of arms and legs, each almost surprised to be with the other, neither quite believing that what they were experiencing was really happening. Emily's hair streamed across her face, her lips inches from Hal's. "You're beautiful," he said.

  She ran her hand over his chest, the unbroken expanse of skin and hair that had been a bloody mortal wound less than twelve hours before. She closed her eyes. She did not want to think about miracles now. The bizarre had become the matrix of their lives; in the face of the reality-bending events of the past few days, it was nearly impossible for anyone in Dawning Falls to attend to what had once been the ordinary things of life—working, going to school, being with family, making friends, falling in love...

  But that was what life was, Emily thought, all of those ordinary things. All of the things she had scorned as trivial and useless for most of her life.

  She knew better now. For her, lying in this bed with this man at this moment was more important than the fact that he had been brought back from a state near death or that her face had grown suddenly, inexplicably unscarred. It was more important than the death of a supernova, or the birth of a Messiah. This was her life, now, in this
moment, and she would have it.

  "I love you," she said.

  Hal stroked her hair. "I love you, too," he said.

  Her eyes welled with tears. "I thought I'd lost you today."

  He thought of himself tumbling through the void, headed for the Summer Country. "And miss out on this? No way."

  "Did the police find whoever shot you?"

  Hal shook his head. "No, but I've got an idea. I was shot a few days ago by a crazy biker in South Dakota," he said. "In the scuffle, a car came by. The biker got in it."

  "Wouldn't that have been a carjacking?"

  "That's what the cops believed. But I found something near where the car had stopped. A detonator. Handmade, seamless, custom."

  "For a bomb, you mean?"

  "For a big bomb."

  "Would this have something to do with the scare at that military base in Wyoming?" she asked.

  "Maybe," Hal said.

  "The news is saying that the person responsible is an Arab terrorist."

  "Except the guy in the car wasn't an Arab."

  "He may just have been a bystander," Emily reasoned. "If the car were hijacked..."

  "The car was stolen," Hal said. "The Feds found that out fairly soon after I gave them what I could remember of the license plate."

  "And so they're thinking that these guys—the biker and the other one—are somehow connected with Hassam Bayat because of this detonator you found on the ground?" She sounded dubious. "It could have been lying there for months."

  "Okay, I know it's not the best argument," Hal said, putting on his trousers. "But there's one other thing. The FBI checked out all of Warren A.F.B.'s regular vendors. Turns out a guy from Minneapolis selling metal dies had an appointment in one of the central supply offices for the day following my run-in with the biker."

  "So?"

  "So he was found murdered and stuffed down an air shaft in a hotel. The work was very professional, and the victim bore a fair resemblance to the guy I saw in the car."

  "How do you know? I thought you didn't work for the FBI anymore."

  "I called my old boss," he said.

  "What's he think of your theory?"

  "Frankly, not much," Hal said. "But I've asked the local cops to keep an eye out. They've got a pretty good sketch of the guy in the car. I think he and the biker might both be here."

  "And they might not," she said. "In other words, Arthur may have been the target all along."

  Hal sighed. Emily always took the shortest route, and she could see through the thickest smokescreen. That was what had made her such a good researcher, he thought. "It's a possibility," he said. "He's getting so overexposed that that kind of thing is going to become a problem unless we can find a way out of all this. And I don't know that we can." He ran his hands through his hair. "I'm sorry, Emily. He should have stayed with you. That was what was supposed to happen, you know. He was going to come back to you as soon as the danger passed, only—"

  "It's all right," she said, putting her arms around him.

  Hal realized he was babbling. "I'm sorry. It's just that I've been thinking about this so much, trying to find a way—"

  "There is a way," Emily said. "We'll stay here, you and I and Arthur, until the media storm blows over. Or we'll go somewhere else. People forget, Hal."

  "Not as long as Arthur keeps doing the things he's doing."

  "Then we'll make him stop," Emily said. "It'll be for his own good."

  "How can he stop?" Hal shouted. "He doesn't even know he's doing it!" He took a deep breath. How could she know how much thought he had given to Arthur's strange and unwelcome gift? "The water didn't heal the gunshot wound in my chest, Emily," he said softly. "It wasn’t the cup. It was Arthur."

  She put her hands over her mouth.

  "He said it was the water. So the crowd wouldn't know."

  Emily was silent for a moment. "He healed my face, too," she said at last. "I was covered with burns from the fire in Tangier. The water didn’t work for me, but my scars went away as soon as Arthur touched me."

  "Jesus," Hal said. He studied her. “So the cup couldn’t heal either of us, even though it’s worked for both of us before.”

  “It used to work for everyone.” Emily’s mouth felt dry. “But now, it’s become unstable, unpredictable.”

  “While Arthur—”

  “Exactly,” Emily said. “It’s as if the power of the cup—the Grail—were being transferred to him.” Her eyes met Hal’s, and filled suddenly with frightened tears. “Oh, God, Hal, what's happening?"

  He was about to say "nothing," but couldn't bring himself to tell the same old lie again. "I don't know," he answered. "It’s as if Arthur’s growing into some kind of god in front of us." He paced the room. "And I'm scared shitless over it."

  She swallowed. "Why?"

  "Because there's always a payback. You don't get hands that heal the sick and bring manna from heaven and not pay a steep price somewhere down the road."

  A long moment passed between them "I just wish there were someplace safe where we could take him.” He didn't want to say too much.

  "But there isn't any such place," she finished.

  Hal sat down. "Right. There isn't. Not in this world."

  Outside, a bolt of lightning illuminated the street. The crash of thunder was so loud that the very floor seemed to shake.

  Titus and Pinto began digging that night. Titus had hoped to have another day to think through his plan more carefully, but when the thunderstorm blew up and promised to last through the night, he knew he had to act.

  He began by making five small bombs. It would have been easier for him to make Molotov cocktails, but he knew that if he bought ingredients like saltpeter and hydrochloric acid anywhere in a town the size of Dawning Falls, people would remember him.

  So carefully, almost regretfully, he took minuscule amounts of the powerful explosive filler from the one-of-a-kind bomb that had been intended for a nuclear silo in Wyoming, and encased it in several plastic eggs from a vending machine in the entrance to a K-Mart. One of the thumb-sized eggs was enough for Titus's purpose—they would not have to dig very far, and the explosives he used were very powerful—but keeping a few extra was always a good idea.

  He sent Pinto into the store for the other items he would need: a roll of duct tape, some hair dye, and a box of garbage bags. There was a dicey moment in the parking lot, when Pinto opened the car's trunk to see Ginger's livid head protruding from the blanket in which Titus had wrapped her.

  "Holy shit!" he shouted, his cigarette flying out of his mouth. "You should have warned me there was a—" He slammed the trunk of the car.

  A young couple huddled beneath a yellow umbrella stopped, startled.

  "What are you looking at?" Pinto snarled. They moved on.

  Pinto got in the car, drenched from the rain, his eyes slitted. Titus had vacated the driver's seat. "Friend of yours?" Pinto asked, more than a little put out.

  "No one you know."

  "Well, that's a damn good thing, since I like my women on the warm side. Were you just going to leave her in there till she drew flies, or what?"

  "Have no fears, my good man," Titus said expansively. "I've arranged for an excellent funeral. Shall we?"

  Pinto shook his head. He had never seen a more natural born killer than this faggy Englishman. "By all means, old chap," he said, revving the engine.

  On the way to Miller's Creek, Titus assembled the weapon that had been packed in the same custom-made case as the bomb designated for Warren Air Force Base: a leggy spider of a handgun with a laser site accurate to within five millimeters at a thousand feet.

  "What the hell is that?" Pinto demanded. It was the strangest gun he had ever seen.

  Titus held it up admiringly. "One of a kind. Lovely, isn't she?" Then he folded it up into a neat rectangle the size of a cell phone.

  "Just what is it you do for a living, your lordship?" Pinto's eyes narrowed, then widened. "Whoa, man. Your neck." />
  "The wound? It's better."

  "But you took a spear, or some damn thing. How'd it get better so fast?" Apparently Pinto had spent no time talking to the denizens of Dawning Falls about the miraculous water in Miller's Creek.

  "I'll show you," Titus said.

  They pulled into the private driveway beside the rickety house, ludicrously named the Sanctuary, beside a Jeep Cherokee belonging to the security guard.

  "I don't think it's such a good idea to park here, man," Pinto said.

  "It'll just be for a minute." Titus winked at him. "Help me with the lady, please."

  The rain was pelting as the two of them unwrapped the stiffened body of Ginger Ranier and carried it to the house.

  Titus knocked, loudly and urgently. When the ancient security guard opened the door and saw Ginger Ranier in Pinto's arms, he let them in at once.

  "We found her by the side of the road," Titus said as Pinto set Ginger on the floor.

  "There's a couch—" the guard began, but by then Titus already had his gun out. With a tap, it unfolded into its working configuration.

  The guard reached for his phone—perhaps the least effective mode of self-preservation under the circumstances, Titus thought as he shot the old man through the head.

  "Now you can move the car," he told Pinto.

  While Pinto was hiding the car, Titus planted one of the plastic-egg bombs behind the house. They met in the woods some distance away with a detonator fashioned from the remote control for the television in their motel room. Nature obliged with a huge, booming thunderclap less than five minutes later. If it were not for the flash and a spray of mud, even they could not have heard the tiny bomb exploding.

  "Coulda used some of these in prison," Pinto said, idly tossing and catching one of the egg-shaped explosives like a beanbag. "Can't hardly hear 'em."

  Titus caught it for him in midair. "They can still kill us, though."