A subtle vibration stopped his feet, made him hold his breath to listen. At first there was nothing, no indication of danger. And then, just when he thought perhaps he was manufacturing nonexistent terrors out of adrenaline and frustration, he heard the sound of something large and heavy dragging over gravel. Then again, nothing. The minutes ticked by. He heard, felt, breathed nothing but quiet.
Adrenaline still humming through his nervous system, he sank back into contemplation of Arthur and his legendary sword. Excalibur. Symbol of the knight errant, the holy quest, magic. Wielded by the Once and Future King, returned to the Lady of the Lake at his death. Every language gave it a different name: Excalibur, Caliburn, Caladvwlch, Escalibor.
A new sound jolted his head upright. A heavy beating, like wings, only too loud, too big—as though a jet had mutated into a living creature. He looked out across the sitting room, through the picture window. Tree branches tossed in a gust of wind that rattled and creaked the old cabin. A dark shadow fell over the grass.
Silence.
When the front door exploded, his hand was already on the trigger of Jared’s gun, firing at a gigantic horned head thrusting through the splintered wood. Unbothered by the shots, the head lunged farther into the room, propelled by a serpentine neck. An enormous golden eye took Zee’s measure.
The shock was less than it would have been twenty-four hours ago. Zee’s brain made short work of registering the relevant facts—
dragon, real, danger
—and suggested he take immediate action for survival.
He fired off another volley of shots, aiming for the eye, but the head whipped upward at unbelievable speed, bullets ricocheting off scales in a whining frenzy that slammed into the floor and walls. A thin line of heat creased Zee’s cheek, and he felt the wetness of blood.
A flesh wound, nothing serious. He backed against the green door, holding fire, searching for a place he could shelter but coming up empty. There was nothing to prevent the rest of the creature from crashing through the wall if it chose, in which case it could pick him off at its leisure. On the other hand, if it decided to flame from its current position, he was charcoal. Shooting was dangerous unless he had a clear shot at the belly or the eye, and the dragon was apparently smart enough to figure this out. It kept its ugly forehead directed straight toward him, nothing but bone and horn and scales to target.
The only option was to get through the green door and away.
Think, Zee. George meant for you to get through that door.
The old man had been anything but random, had planned meticulously for years. Every book sitting on that table was there for a reason. Wizards and dragons, real-life assassins, mythological kings.
Seek Excalibur. In the old French,
Escalibor.
Sirens sounded in the distance, getting louder. Heading this way.
The dragon rumbled, ears swiveling to listen. It snorted and withdrew its head. Again the sound of giant wings. The shattered door framed nothing but blue sky and a bit of green tree, suddenly blotted out by shadow.
A passage from
The Lord of the Rings
drifted into Zee’s head—Gandalf standing beside a lake seeking entrance to another recalcitrant door. He thought about the message left
him by the old man, about the book of legends written in the old French. And he thought maybe he knew the answer to the puzzle.
Outside, the sirens reached a climax and stopped. A crunch of tires on gravel. Doors slamming. Air thrumming with the beating of the dragon’s wings.
A voice shouted. “Get down!”
Zee’s first thought was relief. They could distract each other, the dragon and the police. A fortunate diversion, allowing him to get where he needed to be without being eaten or barbecued or arrested. A perfect plan, except for the part where the cops were just men trying to do their jobs. Men who wouldn’t have a clue how to deal with an airborne, fire-breathing monster.
Keeping low, he crossed the room, flattened himself against the wall, and peered out through the doorway. Three black-and-whites. Six uniforms, all crouched behind the cars for shelter, service weapons ready, looking not at him but up.
Following the trajectory of their collective eyes, Zee caught a glimpse of the dragon before it flew out of his narrow visual range. No longer clumsy and heavy, in the air it was a sinuous flying machine, scales rainbow bright and glittering in the sunlight.
He hadn’t expected it to be beautiful; not that this recognition changed what needed to be done.
The initial shock had settled and allowed him to collect his thoughts. Stupid to fire at random as he’d done. A waste of ammo that had almost gotten him killed with his own bullets. He released the clip to see what he had left. One shot.
One. In a gun accurate only at close range.
Meanwhile, the cops were repeating his mistake in a flurry of gunfire. At least they had reloads, and the chances of getting killed by a ricochet outdoors were less. Maybe someone would fire a lucky shot. Or maybe the dragon would get spooked by the noise and fly off elsewhere.
To pluck some unsuspecting person off a street corner. No, the dragon must be killed.
Again the shadow, rolling in fast, darkening grass and gravel. The air thudded with the cadence of giant wings. Wind bent the trees, rolled small stones across the yard. And then the dragon itself, unspeakably big, blindingly bright, flew into his line of sight. Most of the cops cowered down, arms over their heads. Two continued to fire, ducking at the last possible second as talons struck one of the squad cars with a crunch of glass and metal. The car rocked up onto two wheels, teetered, and crashed upside down.
One of the men was trapped beneath it, his legs crushed, his mouth screaming wordless agony. Again the dragon swooped down out of the sky, this time shooting flames that engulfed the car. A horrible shriek echoed through the clearing, followed by shouts from the other men as they struggled to pull their fallen comrade free.
And then the dragon once more, in a low pass right in front of the cabin.
Zee was ready this time. He aimed, calculating the creature’s velocity, the wind, the angle of his shot. Maybe if he’d had a rifle, all of that would have counted for something, but he knew he was at the mercy of pure dumb luck.
He pulled the trigger.
The dragon kept moving, and Zee’s heart sank. But then the huge wings stuttered and drooped. Instead of rising back up in a graceful arc, the creature continued a forward trajectory, losing altitude as it went, cutting a furrow through gravel and grass until at last it shuddered to a stop in a twisted heap.
Two of the cops approached the unmoving mound of wings and scales, cautious, weapons extended, keeping their distance. Two stayed on their knees beside the blackened form of their comrade. They’d managed to get him free and away before the car blew up, the three of them at a distance from the flaming wreckage. He wasn’t screaming anymore, but he must still be alive. One was rolling up a jacket to put under his feet; another leaned over him, saying something in a low voice. Encouragement.
Which left one officer free. One man who had kept his
calm throughout the onslaught, who held his gun like an extension of his own body. He looked from the dragon to the other men, then back to the cabin. Zee could almost read his thoughts—something was bothering him about the shot that killed the dragon. He was putting together the trajectory, the timing of the shot, and was going to come and investigate.
Avoiding the direct line back to the green door, faster but visible to curious eyes, Zee circled around the living area, keeping to the perimeter. He paused to reconnoiter before making a dash across the line of fire. Framed against the sunlight in the broken doorway, he made out the silhouette of a man with a gun.
“Drop your weapon!” The gun aimed directly at his heart.
With a feeling of déjà vu, Zee did so. The .22 was empty, anyway. He slid it across the floor with his foot, watched the cop bend to pick it up, toss it away behind him.
“On the floor, hands behind your head.”
This he wasn’t prepared to do. The two of them stood, eyes locked. “Nice shot,” the cop said. “You saved us from whatever that thing was. But I’ll still shoot if you don’t get down.”
“Can’t,” Zee said. “With all due respect.”
Without looking away, he measured with mind and body the distance from where he stood to the green door. Ran over again in his mind the words he thought would open it. The cop didn’t want to shoot him. There would be a hesitation, a belief that there was nowhere for him to go if he ran deeper into the house.
Maybe long enough to get through the door. Maybe not.
Zee lowered his body toward the floor, as if about to comply, watching for the moment when the other man’s gaze relaxed, when he took an incautious step forward.
At that precise instant Zee flung himself behind the big recliner, shoved it across the floor so that it would lie between him and the green door. Keeping low, he zigzagged toward his goal.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!”
A voice that meant what it said, but Zee kept moving. Into the little room, pulling the first door closed behind him. Down on the floor behind the coffee table, half-skidding to a stop with one hand against the green door.
“Search Escalibor,” he murmured, wrenching at the doorknob.
Still locked. Nothing happened.
Shit.
The door behind him burst open, the business end of the .38 aimed right between his eyes. “Give it up,” the cop said. “Nowhere to run.” Footsteps ran through the house toward them. Backup.
Zee closed his eyes. Words, ideas, stories swirled through his brain.
And then he smiled.
“
Cherche
Escalibor,” he said.
With a little click the green door cracked open.
Zee rolled through the open door and slammed it shut with his foot.
He heard a thud as something hit the door, followed by a grunt of pain. His lips twisted in a grin of commiseration. Somebody’s shoulder was aching from that blow. His own was bruised enough to make lifting his arm a difficult proposition.
Confident that the door was going to hold, he got to his feet and looked around. Vivian wasn’t here. The room had a sense of untouched emptiness. Nobody home.
Still, he called her name. “Vivian! Are you here?”
No answer.
No sound save for an erratic clicking, ticking, and hissing, not unpleasant but two degrees off normal.
The room was the size of a warehouse and crammed with strange and wonderful objects. He traced the ticking sound to a long row of time devices. A clock face with thirteen hours, one with twelve but each hour divided into forty-five minutes instead of sixty. They ticked in an odd counterpoint.
Sand glasses, identical in size but flowing at different rates, made the hissing. And a complicated structure of steel wire and copper balls, spinning in a way that suggested the possibility of extra dimensions, accounted for the clicks. For longer than he intended, he found himself watching this, trying to follow the path of the little copper balls and regularly losing track as they seemed to vanish and reappear. At length he shook himself and moved on, with an uneasy sense of uncounted time having passed.
Making his way through narrow aisles that wound between shelves and tables, he almost tripped over a wooden box with the word
Schrödinger
painted on the lid in capital letters. His foot knocked the lid loose, revealing a pink towel covered in cat hair. Otherwise the box was empty.
Zee replaced the lid, moving on between shelves of books, masks, statues, and images. A picture caught his attention. A castle—something out of a fairy tale, with dragons flying around turrets and pinnacles. Technique drew him first, the artist in him admiring detail so fine it seemed photographic, wondering how it had been done and what made it appear so nearly three-dimensional.
He leaned closer to see better. No artist in the world could paint a scene with such perfection. And yet it could not be photography, because such a place could not exist outside of dream.
It seemed to him, in that moment, that time stopped. The ticking and whirring of the clocks, the slow hiss of running sand all faded. In the glass of the picture, superimposed over the lifelike castle, he saw a reflection of his own face, a face that shifted and altered before his eyes: by turns bearded and unshaven, thin and haggard, desolate, laughing, and then finally a face so deeply scarred that its identity was unrecognizable, except for the eyes, which were always and ever the same. This face, these eyes, were his and not his. They moved independently of him, blinked when he had not blinked, leaned closer to see him better. The vision cleared, as suddenly as it had begun, and he saw again his
own face, strange and familiar, with a bloody furrow on the right cheek carved moments ago by a stray bullet.
Zee’s eyes shifted to a shelf below the painting. He had a vague impression that before it had held books, but now a single object lay there, long and narrow, half obscured by a thick layer of dust.
It was a sword in a worn leather scabbard. The hilt was plain and serviceable with a single black stone set into the pommel. Zee put his hand to the grip and drew back, startled, as impossible memories flooded his mind: battles he had never fought, dragons he had never slain. A moment of hesitation, and again he reached out for the sword, noticing this time how each finger fit to familiar patterns of wear.
With a hiss of leather on steel he drew the blade and flourished it experimentally. Keen and well balanced, it moved in his hand like memory. Dreams, he thought. He had carried this sword through all the nights of his life, and now here it was in his flesh-and-blood hand.
A distant, plaintive meowing roused him from his reverie. Fastening the scabbard around his waist, he sheathed the sword and followed the sound through the narrow aisles to the Schrödinger box. More meowing, faint at first, growing louder and more demanding. Bumping sounds came from inside the box. Zee lifted the lid. A large gray cat bounded out and coiled itself around his ankles, purring.