Song of the Sword (14 page)

But though her body had dissolved, her mind and spirit remained intact. All the water in the world couldn’t extinguish the spark of her soul unless she allowed it, and she would not allow it (
not this time
, something inside her whispered, and she felt a pang of fear), and so she centered her consciousness on a large expanse of water and willed her body back into existence.

She found herself in blackness, floundering. Her clothes pulled her down, but she reached the bottom quickly and kicked up again. Her head burst above the surface, and she gasped for air beneath a sky ablaze with stars. Treading water, she saw the black shapes of bushes and trees to her right. A few strong kicks put her in water shallow enough that she could stand up, and she splashed ashore, then turned to stare across the lake. The water had seemed warm when she had willed herself back into existence within it, but now that she had left it behind, cold gripped her. She remembered the trick she had pulled off in Wally’s shower and ordered the water off of her. That helped, but it was still a cold night, even when she wasn’t soaking wet, and she had already gotten chilled. She wrapped her arms tightly around her shivering body, teeth chattering.

She had no idea where she was, and the only lights she could see were so far away on the prairie horizon she might die of hypothermia before she could walk to them. There was nothing for it but to plunge back into the water and try to reverse whatever it was she had done that had brought her here, but she hesitated, remembering that tiny, chilling voice, her voice, whispering,
not this time
...

I could simply dissolve into water and vanish
, she thought.
I could
.

The thought held her motionless (except for the shivering she couldn’t control) for a long moment – not because she thought it could happen unless she let it, but out of perverse fascination. It would be simple, painless, clean...to everyone else it would seem she had just vanished, like her mother before her.

Like my mother...

The thought that her mother might have dissolved into water horrified her.
No
, she thought.
She rejected the power. She
couldn’t
have
...

Could she? Even before I completely accepted the power, I had
some
of it. Could she have had enough to...?

She would have to think about it later. When she was warmer.

Putting aside her fear, she plunged back into the lake. The cold made her breath catch in her throat for a moment, but the instant she touched the power inside her, the water welcomed her and the chill disappeared. She dissolved into the swirling chaotic maelstrom, the water that could take her almost anywhere, because it was all connected, like the World Wide Web but with an even greater reach.

For now, though, there was only one place she wanted to go: home.

Unerringly, the power took her there, but then she was confronted with a new and terrifying problem: she could flow through her own bathroom, one with the spray in the still-running shower, but she couldn’t materialize there. Again and again she tried, looping through sewer and lake and filtration plant and pipe, but her body would not take shape. Worse, she could feel herself tiring, her power waning. What would happen if she reached the limit of her endurance while her body remained immaterial?

Join with me
... Though it had no words, she clearly understood the water’s call.
Join with me forever...

She tried to think. It didn’t seem to matter how little water was present when she dematerialized, but when she had rematerialized before, she had been out in a lake, fully underwater when she reasserted her own shape…

Frantically she began casting around for the nearest body of water large enough to submerge her.

There! Not too far from Aunt Phyllis’s house, a pool of some sort.

She emerged in hot, steaming water. She looked around. Tile floor and walls. Stacks of towels. A frosted glass shower stall –

– and the blurred pink shape of someone – a
naked
someone! – on the other side of the glass! Ariane couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and didn’t want to.
I’m in someone’s hot tub!
she thought in horror.

She’d never moved so fast in her life. Up and out of the tub, ordering the water off her body as she moved. Dry, she opened the door a crack and looked out into an empty hallway that ran deeper into the house to her right and ended at a door to her left – a door with shoes scattered around it, a sure sign it led outside.

Seconds later she stood gasping for breath in an alley, having set some kind of record for the twenty-five-metre dash. At last she knew exactly where she was. Aunt Phyllis’s house also backed onto this alley, just a couple of trash bins to the north.

Unfortunately, Aunt Phyllis’s house had a motion-activated light in the backyard. Ariane had hoped to sneak back in without being noticed, but her aunt must have seen the light come on. She opened the back door just as Ariane climbed the steps. “Ariane?” Aunt Phyllis looked bewildered. “How did you get here? You were upstairs taking a shower. I can still hear the water running...”

“I...”
Think fast!
“...um, thought I heard a, uh, cat. Meowing. Like it was hurt. Before I even got undressed. I went out to look. You must not have noticed. I guess I forgot to turn off the water.” She hugged herself and pretended to shiver. “I didn’t even stop to put on my coat.”

“But...” Aunt Phyllis blinked at her, then shook her head and laughed. “Well, that book must be more engrossing than I realized...I never noticed a thing.” She moved aside. “Did you find the cat?”

“What? Oh, no, no sign of it...guess I imagined it. Good night!”

Aunt Phyllis opened her mouth to say something else, but Ariane hurried past her without giving her the chance. The sooner she ended this conversation, the better.

A minute later she was standing in her bathroom again. She turned off the water and looked at herself in the now steamed-up mirror.

She
still
didn’t look like a powerful sorceress. But after what she had just done...

It frightened her a little, but also emboldened her. Maybe she wasn’t helpless against Merlin after all.

She wouldn’t know until she tried to beat him. But she
would
try. The power of the Lady, the music of the water, the song of the sword – they were
hers
, something solid to hold on to, something that couldn’t be taken away from her in an instant...as her mother had been. She knew where to find the first shard of Excalibur. She knew how to get there.

But could she take Wally with her?

Only one way to find out. She went into her room, turned on the light, and sat down at her computer. She opened her email software, entered Wally’s address, and typed,
My idea worked. Meet me at the Human Bean tomorrow morning at 9:30?

She clicked SEND. She leaned back in her chair, feeling an immense weariness. By the time her computer beeped, she had changed into her pajamas and was brushing her teeth.

Wally’s message was to the point.
I’ll be there! – Wally
. He’d added a P.S.
Bring some of your Aunt Phyllis’s cookies.

Ariane laughed. And as she climbed into bed, it occurred to her she’d laughed more in the two days since she’d met Wally than she usually did in two months.

The thought didn’t make her laugh again, but it did make her smile, as she drifted off to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Ponytailed Man

The Learjet bucked like an angry horse
as it descended through the clouds above Yellowknife, jerking up and down and from side to side as though determined to throw out its sole, white-knuckled passenger.

Rex Major gripped the arms of his seat and gritted his teeth. He hated flying – or rather, he hated flying in these cursed contraptions held up by nothing more substantial than air flowing around their wings, without a whiff of good solid magic. When he did have to fly – and in this strange age, it was necessary in order to conduct his business – he usually took Excalibur Computer System’s Boeing 737, whose massive size he found comforting. But on this trip, the “optics,” as his public relations advisor called it, dictated that he use the Learjet, whose luxurious interior was a plus but whose small dimensions he found alarming. By his using the Lear, owned by him personally rather than Rex Major Industries, his PR staff hoped to enhance the plausibility of his claim that he was making this trip purely out of curiosity. As it was, the stock price of Thunderhill Diamonds Inc. had risen because of speculation that he was about to invest in the company. If he’d flown to Yellowknife in the ECS Boeing, complete with entourage, that price might have skyrocketed – and made it that much more expensive for him if he
did
decide to invest.

At the peak of his powers, he had loved to fly, sometimes putting his mind into a bird and soaring through the clouds on two honest, feathered wings – not like the ugly, rigid metallic things now holding them so tentatively in the air – sometimes simply rising from the ground in human form, using his magic to counteract the constant, hungry sucking of the Earth...gravity, they called it now.

Once he had re-forged Excalibur, claimed it as his own, and forced open the doorway between Earth and Faerie, he would fly like that again. But right now his powers were so diminished he couldn’t even ensure that the metal monstrosity in whose belly he rode didn’t immolate itself and him in one final angry plunge. If that happened, he would
die
, and all his ambitions with him. Though all-but-immune to aging, he could still be killed. And if he were, the Queen and Council of Clades might continue their tyranny over Faerie for another millennium, without challenge.

A lurch made him gasp and squeeze the armrests so hard his fingers turned white, but it was immediately followed by a second, softer lurch, and then the roar of the jet’s engines, and he realized that while he had been busy convincing himself he was about to die, they had landed.

He looked out the window for his first glimpse of Yellowknife and saw nothing but swirling snow, lit intermittently by the flashing lights of the plane, as they taxied to the tiny terminal. A few moments later he was out in that storm, flipping up the collar of his overcoat and muttering two-thousand-year-old Faerie curses (the old ones were the best ones).

After that unpleasant interval, the terminal seemed almost homey. Its warm yellow walls were offset by hanging banners the color of northern skies and ice, a reminder that they weren’t in the soft southland any more – as if the storm raging outside wasn’t reminder enough. A tall, heavyset man with no hair on his head but lots on his chin approached, his hand outstretched.

“Mr. Major?”

Major shook the proffered hand. “Victor Ursu, I presume?”

“That’s me. Vice-president for investor relations. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.” Ursu’s deep voice, as big as the rest of him, boomed through the terminal. Major saw people turning to look, then whisper to each other, and knew he had been recognized. He sighed. As Merlin, he had often gone about his business incognito, but a millennium and a half ago he hadn’t had to deal with mass media and the Internet splashing his photo all over the place.

Of course, he consoled himself, he was still incognito in the most important sense: nobody knew who he
really
was.

“What time tomorrow will we leave for the mine?” he asked.

Ursu shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think we’ll be able to go tomorrow at all. This storm is going to get worse before it gets better. They’re closing the airport. You made it in just under the wire.”

Major was glad he hadn’t had that knowledge a few minutes earlier, when he’d been gripping the arms of the Learjet’s seat. He felt a flash of annoyance at hearing it now. In the old days, no storm could have delayed him. “Then when
is
it expected to clear? I’m a busy man.” It was a foolish thing to say. He knew Ursu could no more control the weather than he could…now. But his new persona as a hard-nosed
businessman was so ingrained that phrases like that came to him almost automatically. They usually got results.