But she would need a light, and from the looks of the man who had come out of the cavern, maybe a rope as well. As if I’ll know what to do with it, she thought uneasily. Everything she knew about spelunking she had learned from watching the Discovery channel, where it always looked like a cross between climbing mountains and crawling through sewers.
Ariane thought again of Wally – his help would be useful right about now. But she shrugged away the notion. If she couldn’t get to the shard on her own, then she could come back with Wally and they’d figure out something else. But she wouldn’t know until she tried.
The man had left his equipment in the tent, so she needed to get in there first. And that meant she needed to get the guards away from it.
She needed a diversion. She smiled a little as she heard herself echoing a line from every action movie she had ever seen; smiled more widely as an idea came to her. Let’s see Supergirl do this, she thought. She closed her eyes and concentrated, reaching out to the river singing to her from just beyond the drop-off at the other side of the clearing.
The river was much farther away than any body of water she’d ever tried to manipulate before, but she had the power of the shard to augment her own, just as when she’d pulled the apparently unreachable water from beneath the tennis courts. Come to me, she whispered to the river with her mind. Come to me. Come to your Lady....
And the water responded.
She opened her eyes to watch it pour up from the river, flowing uphill through the gully she had followed from the river bank, tumbling white over rocks, foaming around tree trunks, its leading edge brown with mud, twigs and leaves. The guards stopped playing cards as the sound of rushing water intensified, looking around in bewilderment; then one of them shouted and jumped to his feet, knocking over his campstool and pointing toward the forest.
The other guard leaped up, too, as river water poured out across the ground, a tongue of liquid three metres wide and a metre deep that didn’t spread out as an ordinary flood would have, if any ordinary flood could have made that climb in the first place. Answering her call, it rolled straight toward her hiding place, but with her mind she turned it aside and sent it straight at the guards.
They shouted French words she didn’t understand but really didn’t need to, and almost knocked each other down trying to open the gate and run for the path up the cliff, away from the impossible rush of water...and Ariane, watching from behind her screen of leaves, smiled and chased them with it. The shard’s power filled her, and with contemptuous ease she raised the crest of the water off the ground, higher and higher, until it towered above the terrified guards, who scrambled up the path on their hands and knees. I could wipe them right off the cliff side, she thought, but then, shocked at her own bloodthirsty impulse, she yanked the water back down again and released it, dropping her control like a red-hot piece of metal. The water hit the ground in a vast splash, spreading out and flowing back toward the river as gravity once more took effect. In seconds, all that remained of it were a few scattered pools, mud, and wet rocks and tree trunks.
Ariane rose to her feet, a little shaken both from the amount of energy she’d had to expend and the way the shard had once again tried to take control. But she had to move now, while the guards were out of sight. They’d be back soon enough...though if she were them, after that she’d be moving very cautiously. Take your time, guys.
She ran across the clearing to the now wide-open gate, dashed through it and then pushed through the tent flap into the shadowy, blue-lit interior. She glanced around at two cots with sleeping bags untidily sprawled across them, a small camping stove and a long folding table covered with paper, two laptops and a jumble of still cameras, video cameras and other pieces of equipment she didn’t recognize at all. At one end of the table, green and red lights flickered across the face of a sleek black two-way radio, microphone clipped to its side. The place smelled of damp ground, campfire, cigarette smoke and a little bit of boys’ locker room.
She figured the latter pungent scent came mostly from the mud-smeared orange overalls hung on pegs on the tall central pole holding up the tent’s roof. The helmet and climbing equipment worn by the man she had seen exit the cave hung there too. She grabbed the helmet, rope and utility belt festooned with hammers, pitons, a compass, a large knife and other things she didn’t immediately recognize. She ignored the coveralls, not just because of the smell, but also because they were so large they would have made her feel like a clown. She fastened the belt around her waist, then, feeling slightly silly, pushed open the tent’s rear flap and studied the black crack in the cliff face, just three or four metres away. The song of the second shard oozed from it thick and sweet as honey, vibrating her bones like the bass at a rock concert, making her whole body thrum with excitement. The shard she already wore shouted its own fierce joy at being so near its brother, filling her with a yearning desire to plunge into the dark opening before her.
Yet she still hesitated, remembering those Discovery channel spelunking specials again. Cliffs, mud, rock falls, bats and absolute darkness.... Was she prepared to face what she might find in there?
Only one way to find out. She stepped through the tent flap and walked toward the opening in the rock – but just before she reached it she heard a man’s angry shout. She whipped her head around and up. The guards were running full-tilt down the path up the cliff face. Heart pounding, Ariane turned and plunged into the cave.
The outside light barely penetrated the gloom. She fumbled with the helmet light, found the switch and then followed its circle of illumination across the floor of bare rock. The songs of the shard she carried and of the shard she sought mingled and wound through her brain, separate, discordant, but longing to merge together into perfect harmony. “I’m coming,” she heard herself gasp. “I’m coming!”
The second shard was close, very close...but not up here. It was farther in, farther down.
She stopped. The blue-white circle of light from her helmet had just slid across the smooth stone floor into emptiness. She edged forward, looked down.
The rock fell away, a sheer cliff dropping at least fifteen metres, down to another floor that her helmet lamp barely illuminated. She turned her light frantically this way and that and finally spotted, off to her right, a collapsible ladder fastened to pitons driven into the floor.
She heard voices outside the cavern. She didn’t have time to dither. The second shard was somewhere below and as far as she could tell, the ladder was the only way to get there.
But how was she supposed to climb onto the thing?
Footsteps crunched at the cavern entrance. She sat down and scooted on her rear until her legs were dangling over the edge of the cliff. Then she rotated her upper body so she could take hold of the pitons with both hands. Gripping them as tightly as she could, she twisted her lower body, feeling for the rungs.
She could have sworn her foot was on one. But maybe there was some knack to it she lacked – or maybe she was more flustered by the approaching guards than she realized.
For whatever reason, her foot slipped.
She screamed as she fell, fingers tightening convulsively on the pitons holding the ladder in place, then grunted with pain as her hands caught her full weight, almost pulling her arms from their sockets, and her body jerked forward, slamming into rock. She kicked wildly with both feet, desperate to find the ladder, but though she felt it bumping against her, she couldn’t find purchase. Her fingers were slipping. She couldn’t hold on...couldn’t...
Two strong hands shot over the edge of the cliff and seized her forearms in vise-like grips. “Tiens bon! Je vais te tirer de là!”
She had no idea what that meant, but she had never been happier to see anyone than she was to see the guards she had worked so hard to evade. They pulled her up over the lip of the cliff, and she rolled onto her back, gasping for air, knees bruised, hands aching, the front of her jacket scuffed, one pocket half torn off. But the guards gave her no time t
o rest. Together they hauled her to her feet. One of them kept a tight hold on her arm while the other shone a flashlight in her face, “Qui es-tu? Que fais-tu ici? Tu aurais pu te tuer!”
“Hey, stop that!” Ariane scrunched up her eyes. “I can’t see! And I don’t speak French. Um, je ne parle pas français.”
“Américaine?”
“No.” Ariane shook her head. “Canadian.”
“Canadienne?” The guard frowned. Then, “Who are you?” he said in accented but understandable English.
“Ar –” She suddenly realized that giving her real name might not be the best idea. With only a slight hesitation, she changed it in mid-word. “Arial.” An image of Disney’s red-headed Little Mermaid popped into her head. It seemed oddly appropriate. “Arial Muirhead.” She doubted her English teacher would mind Ariane borrowing her last name, since she’d never find out about it. “I’m sorry, I was just –”
“This is...” The guard spread his hands to take in the cavern. “Interdit. Forbidden. By order of le Ministère de la Culture. It is very precious. You could...cause damage. Or hurt yourself.”
“I didn’t know,” Ariane said truthfully. “It was just...I saw someone come out of the cavern, and then you two ran off when that weird flood came pouring through the trees –” she wasn’t about to suggest she’d had anything to do with that, “– and I just thought it’d be cool to see inside. It was just...for fun.”
The guards exchanged rapid-fire French. The one holding her arm never slackened his grip. Finally the guard who spoke English said to her, “We must detain you. Dr. Beaudry must talk to you, make a report. The Ministry will want to be sure you did not mean to cause damage.”
“I didn’t! I told you, it was just for fun –”
“Dr. Beaudry will decide,” the guard said firmly. “C’est réglé. It is settled. Amène-la dehors!” – that to the other guard, who promptly propelled her toward the opening of the cavern. It doesn’t matter, Ariane thought. They’ll put me in the tent, I’ll call up the river again, and I’ll be out of here.
Outside the entrance, the English-speaking guard made her take off the caving equipment. “Enferme-la dans la remise!” he said to the other man, and that was the first hint Ariane had that things weren’t going to go the way she had imagined them.
Rather than put her in the tent, the guard led her out through the gate in the chain-link fence...and then away from the river. She had been at the very limit of her ability when she had called it up to distract the guards. Now she felt it slipping away from her, out of reach despite the power of the shard.
They climbed the path up the cliff. To her right, the woods fell away until she could see the river beyond, foaming its way through the gorge farther down. Up, up they went to the very top of the cliff, parallel to it until they had almost crested the rock face, to where the path turned sharply. Rough rock steps took them up the last few metres between shoulders of grey stone, and then they emerged into a large clearing in the forest. On the far side stood a trailer; closer to the edge were a couple of Quonset-like huts and a small, blue plastic structure with the look and the smell – Ariane wrinkled her nose – of a portable toilet. The ground bore the marks of several vehicles, but there weren’t any there now. Ariane waited to see if “Dr. Beaudry” would emerge from the trailers, the huts, or even the porta-potty – or whatever they called it in France – but there didn’t seem to be anyone around at all.
She listened for a song of water from anywhere nearby, but she and her guard were literally high and dry: there were no streams or puddles nearby, and the sun beat down from a cloudless blue sky. That escape route, too, was closed to her.
For the first time she began to think that she might have got herself in a lot more trouble than she’d realized.
That thought became certainty when the guard led her to the nearest of the huts, a prefabricated storage shed with metal walls and roof, seven or eight metres long and four or five wide. He unlocked a padlock on the sliding doors, pulled them wide, pointed her inside and once she was in, slid the doors shut and padlocked them again.
She looked around the inside of the hut, dimly lit by narrow, fiberglass-covered windows in the curved ceiling. Crates and barrels filled the space. Thanks to Canadian laws that mandated bilingual labels on everything from shampoo to breakfast cereal, she could read French better than she could speak it. If she was right, the barrels were filled with fuel oil, probably for generators. Some of the crates contained food. Others were labeled with words she didn’t recognize at all: scientific equipment, maybe.
But none of the barrels contained water. Nor were there any faucets, drains, or anything else she could use.
Despite all the power she’d inherited from the Lady of the Lake, despite the additional power the first shard of Excalibur gave her, she was hopelessly and completely a prisoner.
Or was she? Her cell phone! She grabbed her backpack, unzipped it, and rummaged through its jumbled contents...there! She pulled out the phone, took one look at it, and almost threw it across the room in disgust.
Of course it was dead. When was the last time she had charged it? Then she snorted. And how many times had it been dunked in water since she’d left Regina? Probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Without her cell phone, and without a watch, she didn’t even know what time it was. After noon, surely? Which meant Wally would be landing in Lyon within a few hours.
She wouldn’t be there to meet him. And she had no way to tell him where she was or what had happened to her.
Ariane had gone to Sunday School for many years when she was little, at her mother’s insistence. How did that line from Proverbs go? “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
You just proved it, she thought.
With a sigh, she made herself as comfortable as she could in a corner of the hut, sitting on a crate, feet pulled up, arms wrapped around her knees.
All she could do now was wait for Dr. Beaudry...and she had no idea how long it would be before he came back.
Ariane Forsythe, you’re an idiot, she told herself, and against that accusation, she had no defence.
CHAPTER NINE
CALL OF THE DARK
Wally had been to Europe before with his family: twice, in fact. He’d even flown into Frankfurt before, on the last trip, the one other time he’d visited France, when his family had still been a family. He’d only been eleven, but he thought he remembered the routine well enough that he’d have no trouble getting through customs and making his connection to Lyon, especially since he could sorta-kinda speak French.
He wasn’t worried about himself...not much, anyway. But he was worried about Ariane.
In the middle of the abbreviated night, somewhere near the Arctic Circle, he leaned his head against the cool Plexiglas of the airplane window and looked down at clouds shining in the moonlight far below. It was a very strange notion, but he wondered if even then Ariane was in those clouds, making her own way to France via this new twist of the Lady’s magic.
He snorted. If she moved as fast through the clouds as she moved us through water, she’s already there and waiting for me. Then he frowned. If she got there first, and sensed where the shard was...what if she simply went and got it, without waiting for him? Despite their plans, if she saw a chance she’d surely take it. She might greet him at the airport with shard in hand.
It was an uncomfortable thought, which, if it happened, would raise an uncomfortable question. Does she really need me anymore? Am I really the heroic sidekick...or just useless baggage?
Wally tried to sleep, with little success, and was jolted awake by turbulence as the sun rose. It wasn’t bad, but it went on for half an hour or more, and by the end of that time his head hurt and he’d even pulled out the airsickness bag, just in case. Thankfully, he managed to fight down his nausea as the turbulence eased, though a faint headache remained. Must be the concussion, he thought, disgusted; he was never airsick, cars
ick, seasick, or any other kind of motion-sick.
The rough ride made him wonder again what the trip had been like for Ariane. What would happen if she hit a thunderstorm? Worrying about her helped him stop worrying about whether the very large gentleman who had been in front of him in the screening line in Regina, had followed him across the Calgary airport to the Frankfurt flight, and was now seated directly behind him, would lose his own battle with airsickness; from the moaning and gulping, he was in worse shape than Wally, and Wally wasn’t sure he could contain the contents of his own stomach if he heard – or worse, smelled – someone else throwing up.
In the end, neither one of them upchucked, though it was a close thing. Wally had devoured the meal served during the first three hours of the flight, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what the protein had been – beef? chicken? fish? – but he turned down breakfast entirely, which surely would have astonished Ariane had she known.
I wish she did know, he thought. I wish she were here.
Early on, Wally had wondered if the big man with the weak stomach was one of Rex Major’s spies. When they finally landed in Frankfurt, he watched the man carefully. But, still looking a bit green, the big man waddled off in the company of a skinny blonde who met him on the other side of customs. He didn’t reappear on the Lyon-bound plane, which Wally caught in the nick of time. False alarm, Wally thought. With luck, Merlin still has no clue what we’re up to.
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