Twist of the Blade (3 page)

It had never caught her. When she was awake, she didn’t think it
could
catch her. But in these dreams, more often than not, her fear overwhelmed her waking reason.

She forced herself to stay put, but she couldn’t stop turning in place, knowing she could never see the demon, but unable to stop trying. The fog swirled around her, thick, choking fog, tinged yellow and smelling of sulphur.

You cannot sssleep
, the demon hissed at her.
Where are your powersss now, young Lady? I have ssstolen them from you...without sssleep, you are nothing. My massster knowsss thisss. My massster laughssssss....
The hiss moved closer. She felt a hot breath on her neck, as if a furnace door had opened behind her. Her heart jumped and in a moment she would have run, would have dashed blindly through the fog...

Instead she jerked herself awake, gasping, pulse pounding.

She glanced at her bedside clock. She’d slept less than ten minutes.

Fatigue pressed down on her, filling her head with fog as choking and deadening as the one in which the demon spoke to her, weighing down her heart with despair. She closed her eyes again, but she didn’t sleep.

Instead, she wept.

~~~

Rex Major, eyes closed, let the glorious “Flower Duet” from the first act of
Lakmé
wash over him. He sat alone in his box in Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Opera had not existed in the era of Camelot. He had originally purchased his season tickets to present the image of a community-minded businessman, but to his astonishment, he had discovered he loved opera.

Musicals, on the other hand, he couldn’t stand. Although he liked
Spamalot
better than
Camelot
. He chuckled at the thought.

His cell phone buzzed. Major debated ignoring it, but knew he couldn’t. Before the opera had started, he’d configured his phone so only high-priority messages were allowed through. He sighed, opened his eyes, and pulled the phone from its holster.

He glanced at the screen.
She sleeps not
, it read.

He smiled and put the phone away.
Text messages from a demon
, he thought.
What a wonderful age this is.

The demon couldn’t physically harm Ariane. But by disrupting her sleep, it was disrupting her power, keeping her reserves of energy so low that she wouldn’t be able to sense the location of the second shard of Excalibur. He smiled more widely.
And keeping her reserves so low she doesn’t realize she has the power to push the demon away.
The real Lady, his
beloved
sister, tucked away on the other side of the barely open door to Faerie, had failed to tell her heir and protégé many, many things that might have helped in her struggle against Merlin.

The “Flower Duet” ended, but Major hardly noticed. Few things could distract him from opera, but thoughts of Excalibur were among them. Thinking about the girl in Regina who held the sword’s first shard – temporarily – also brought to mind the boy, Wally Knight. A youth, a stripling, barely more than a child...and yet he had resisted Major’s Voice of Command, the Voice that no
adult
had ever withstood before: no adult save one.

Arthur.

The King had never been Merlin’s to Command. Had he been, he would have been a far lesser King than he became. Arthur had been an extraordinary leader because he had aided Merlin of his own free will.

Wally Knight had the beginnings, at least, of the same power. True, he had succumbed to the Voice of Command at first, but almost at once he’d begun to push back. The second time Merlin had used it, it hadn’t worked at all. The Lady didn’t have the power to counteract his magic so directly, so
she
couldn’t have given Wally that ability.

Wally must have
inherited
it.

Major believed in coincidences. But not where magic was concerned. Magic seeped through everything it touched, like water carving a cave out of limestone, smoothing and shaping the rock. Arthur had been born with the ability to resist Command, just as Merlin had been born with his abilities, and the Lady with hers. Where magic had come from originally was a matter for theologians. Major wondered about it but didn’t really care: Magic was a fact, it operated according to its own natural laws, and those who best understood those laws...like him...could make the most effective use of it.

Wally
, Merlin thought.
W
alter Arthur Knight the Third.

If Merlin was right, then even the boy’s name was not a coincidence. Ariane was the heir of the Lady of the Lake. And Wally, Major had slowly come to believe, could be none other than the heir of Arthur himself.

Arthur had had several sons; the most notorious of them had been Mordred. When he had come to court he had been presented as Arthur’s nephew, but in reality Arthur had fathered the boy with his half-sister, Morgause, before either of them knew they were related. Mordred eventually led a rebellion against his father. In the final battle, at Camlann, Arthur slew his own son...but only after Mordred had mortally wounded him.

All of Arthur’s
legitimate
sons had died childless. But Mordred had had sons of his own, who had continued rebelling against Arthur’s successor. Ironic though it was, Arthur’s bloodline had continued only through the son who had slain him.

Arthur had had other magical gifts besides the ability to withstand Command. Men had begged to follow him, begged to join hopeless battles against overwhelming odds...and then won those battles, because of their love for their King. And with Excalibur in his hand...Major shook his head, remembering Arthur striding across long-ago battlefields, Excalibur flashing in the sun, blood running like water from its silvery blade, the sword singing a terrible, magical song that only he, Merlin, could hear. Warriors fell like wheat before a farmer’s scythe when Arthur took the field. Yet neither Excalibur nor his physical prowess had saved him when he faced Mordred, whose skill had been nearly equal to his own; and that, too, told Major something: Mordred had inherited some of his father’s gifts.

Which meant Wally, if he
were
Arthur’s descendant, might have those gifts as well, though masked by his youth.

The first act of
Lakmé
ended. The audience moved to the exits for intermission, but Rex Major stayed put.
When I have Excalibur
, he thought,
I will need someone to wield it, someone to lead the army I will raise, someone to command and rally my troops as we march through the door into Faerie and I take back my world from the tyrants who oppress it.

Could Wally be that someone? After proper grooming, proper instruction, could he lead Merlin’s army of liberation to victory?

He’s loyal to his friend now
, Major thought,
but that doesn’t mean he’ll stay that way. He doesn’t know what he is, or could be. When he does, why would he be content to serve the Lady of the Lake, to help her erase magic from this world, to go back to being an ordinary boy, sentenced to become an ordinary man?

Even in Camelot, magic had never been the
only
tool Merlin used to bend people to his will. Threats would work with some; he didn’t think they would work with Arthur’s heir. But good old-fashioned bribery, the lure of greatness, of glory...
that
, Major thought, had possibilities.

And there was something else. He smiled as he thought of it. The young Arthur had been orphaned at fifteen by the death of his father, Uther Pendragon. Aware of that, Merlin had deliberately set out to become a father figure to the youthful King. He had wielded far more influence through that personal connection than he ever would have as a mere wizard, no matter how powerful.

Wally Knight’s father still lived, but he had all but abandoned the boy, as had his mother. Wally’s sister Felicia, not unlike Arthur’s other half-sister Morgana, was more foe than family.
Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it
, Major thought. He smiled to himself.
But those who
do
remember history can
cause
it to repeat, if it suits them. And I think it will suit me very well.

The audience was filing back in. He decided to put thoughts of Excalibur out of his head for the rest of the evening. But just as the lights dimmed, his cell phone buzzed again. He glanced at it. What he saw brought him surging to his feet. The door of the box closing behind him cut off the opening notes of the second act. Two minutes later, texting his chauffeur as he walked, he was striding through the glass-walled members’ lounge to the cloakroom.

Rex Major had just discovered the location of the second shard.

CHAPTER TWO

BLINDSIDED

Wally rose slowly to consciousness, as if he were surfacing from the bottom of a muddy lake. He first became aware of sounds: voices he could make no sense of, the hum of air conditioning, footsteps. Then a smell: harsh, antiseptic. He realized he was lying in a bed, but not his own – this one felt harder. He was wearing pajamas, and he didn’t wear pajamas. The crook of his right elbow hurt, as if something sharp had jabbed it. His head throbbed. He raised a shaking hand and felt rough gauze wrapped around his head like a turban.

What the...?

He opened his eyes. It took a great deal more effort than it should have, and his lids scraped like sandpaper over his dry eyeballs. He blinked up at speckled acoustic tiles. A metal track curved through them, supporting a blue curtain bunched up at his right.

And then, finally, he understood: he was in a hospital.

But why? What had happened?

He remembered hiding from Flish in his smelly locker.
He remembered deciding to go out through the gym instead
of the front doors of the school. He remembered saying hello to Coach Mueller, and then....

...then nothing. It was all a blank.

But it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to put two and two together when you were lying in a hospital bed with a headache and a turban.

“I fell,” he said out loud. The words sounded hoarse in his ears. “I fell and hit my head.”

“But shouldn’t be any the worse for it,” said a voice to his right, startling him. He looked that way, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, and saw a woman in a nurse’s uniform standing between him and a second bed. The old man who lay there mumbled something and rolled onto his side. The nurse glanced at him, then back at Wally. “A few stitches, a rather nasty concussion. But no skull fracture, and the CT scan is clear. You should make a complete recovery.”

He looked down at his sore elbow. A needle was stuck into his skin, taped in place and attached to a tube that ran through a grey box on a metal pole, and then up to a bag of
clear fluid. He turned his head. On his left arm was a blood pressure cuff. It started to tighten, and just when he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, loosened again. Two green numbers on a second grey box shifted, then steadied: 122 over 74. “BP is good,” announced the nurse. “You’re doing fine.”

“How...” Wally’s throat closed on the words and he coughed. The nurse picked up a glass of water from the side table and held its curved straw to his lips. He sipped gratefully, then said, “How long have I been here?”

“Ambulance brought you in last night. A teacher was with you...Natasha Mueller?”

Wally nodded.

“She stayed until you were admitted and brought up here. Dr. Kipkoskei wants you to stay forty-eight hours for observation, so you’ll be our guest for another night at least.”

“I really don’t feel like going anywhere,” Wally said. The throbbing in his head wasn’t severe, but it was constant.

“Head hurt?” the nurse asked.

He nodded.

“I can bring you some painkillers. According to your school records, you aren’t allergic to any medications. Is that right?”

“As far as I know,” Wally said.

“Do you need anything else?”

Wally nodded again. “I have to go to the bathroom.”