Twist of the Blade (21 page)

Inside the bathroom, she first rummaged in her backpack for the flashlight she’d packed. It wasn’t very big, maybe twice the size of a lipstick case, but its LED lamp put out plenty of illumination. She didn’t plan to be underground very long: she’d materialize in the pool, and that close to the shard, she should be able to find it without any trouble. She’d grab it, get back in the water, transport herself to Lyon and find Wally at the hotel. Then – once she’d apologized profusely and explained why she’d gone after the shard without him – they could plan their return to Canada. Wally might have to wait to catch a flight, but Ariane could head home at once, whisking the second shard of Excalibur safely out of Major’s reach.

If he’d even dare to come after it. She shivered a little, wondering what it would be like to have
two
of the shards of Excalibur strapped to her skin, filling her with their power, their anger, their fierce desire to strike down all enemies.

She’d find out soon enough.

She pulled her backpack back on, then, holding her flashlight in her left hand, turned on the cold-water tap in the marble sink basin with her right, stuck her fingers into the water and whisked away.

By now, the sensation had become as familiar as breathing, the immense strangeness of it almost forgotten. She was used to rushing through pipes to sewage treatment plants...at least her watery self had no sense of smell!...and quickly found her way to the outflow of the one that served the village. It dumped clean effluent into the river, well downstream of where she needed to be, but that was no obstacle. Close to the cavern, she followed rivulets through the rocks, racing in seconds through crevices the water took days or weeks to seep through. Slithering through stone, twisting, turning, she sought an approach to the pool she felt nearby.

And suddenly she found it. No underground river fed the pool after all; it was just a deep depression into which water seeped from one place and seeped out through another. Beginning to feel her strength starting to wane as she squeezed through the rocks, she gladly let herself materialize. The pool wasn’t much deeper than a bathtub, but that was deep enough. She lifted herself dripping out of the water and shone her flashlight around the chamber.

Her breath caught. Salmon-coloured stalactites, glittering with crystals, hung in curtains ten metres above her head like a frozen aurora borealis. Around the edges of the S-shaped pool, shining stalagmites thrust upward. She stood in water the colour of milk, rafts of multifaceted crystals floating here and there on its surface. She wished she could illuminate the whole chamber at once, instead of being limited to pointing her bluish circle of light here and there, but even the little bit she could see was beautiful and eerie at the same time.

But she wasn’t there as a tourist. She pulled the circle of light away from the stalactites and flashed it around the edge of the pool. Finding a spot where the rock sloped gently into the milky water, she waded out and wished herself dry. Then she began looking for an exit from the chamber. Dr. Beaudry had seen this pool, so there must be....

...there. A dark opening, a tunnel leading up.

A
narrow
tunnel. She hesitated. She’d have to crawl, and she was uneasily aware of the mass of rock over her head, rock she had been flitting through as water just minutes before. But if Dr. Beaudry had come
down
this tunnel, he must have gone back
up
it, and that meant she could too.

But
he
had had a helmet lamp. She only had a handheld flashlight. She considered the problem for a moment, then slipped off her backpack and tied the flashlight by its wrist strap to one corner of the backpack, so that it peeked over her shoulder. It flopped a bit as she moved, but it left her hands free.

All set at last, and wondering uneasily just how long her flashlight batteries would last, she got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel...and toward the song of the second shard now flooding her mind.

At first the going was easy enough. The water-smoothed stone didn’t even hurt her hands and knees...much. But as she continued to climb, the tunnel narrowed. Before long she had to lower herself onto her belly, pulling herself along like a snake. The stone roughened, scraping her elbows and arms.

Worse was to come. The tunnel narrowed still more. To keep going, she had to wriggle out of her backpack, pushing herself backward down the tunnel until it came off her outstretched arms. Breathing hard from exertion and rising panic, desperate to get out of the tunnel, she pushed the backpack ahead of her and kept wriggling uphill...but now her tiny light, still fixed to a top corner of her pack, was completely hidden from her, so that she slithered through utter darkness, a black so complete that it seemed to have physical mass, pressing down on her with all the weight of the hundreds of feet of solid rock above her head.

Her breath came in tortured gasps, and in her chest, pressed tight against the rock, every heartbeat felt like a blow.
Could Dr. Beaudry
really
have come this way?
she thought. And then, a horrifying idea.
What if there was
another
tunnel? I didn’t really explore the chamber....

An even more horrifying thought followed hard on the heels of the first.
What if I get stuck? Nobody knows I’m here!

Panting, she stopped. Should she wriggle back down again, return to the pool?

But she’d come so far...and this tunnel
was
still taking her toward the second shard – she could hear it so clearly now, could feel the first shard yearning to join it, as strongly as when she had entered the cavern earlier. She pushed ahead again, and almost at once the tunnel expanded. Emboldened, she redoubled her efforts. She sensed a wider space ahead, and gave her backpack a mighty shove into it....

...only to see the backpack vanish into emptiness, the circle of illumination from the flashlight drawing a brief, final blue streak across a line of stalactites before disappearing.

And then, with a loud crack, the ledge onto which she had unknowingly climbed gave way and she fell, screaming, into the same darkness that had swallowed her pack.

CHAPTER TEN

BE MY GUEST

Wally expected Rex Major to drive straight to wherever the shard was, but instead, as they climbed into a taxi, Major asked him what hotel he and Ariane had booked. “Why?” Wally said. “We won’t –”

“You might still need it,” Major said reasonably. “And if you don’t check in, you’ll not only lose the room, you’ll lose your deposit.”

It made perfect sense, but it was all so mundane Wally felt bemused.
This man is Merlin
, he reminded himself.
Old, ancient, wise, powerful in magic...and he’s worried about our hotel deposit?
Oddly, the sense of being looked after for a change made Wally feel better about accompanying him.
Monsters don’t worry about other people’s budgets!

He told Major the name of the hotel, and Major, in impeccable French, instructed the cab driver to take them there.

Aunt Phyllis hadn’t splurged on the hotel, and the building, when they drove up to it, made Wally think she’d paid too much even so. A tattered canopy hung from walls of rough, soot-blackened stone over the sidewalk. “Cœur de Lyon” read tiny grey letters on a canopy of equally dingy blue.

“Heart of Lyon,” the name meant, and certainly they were somewhere in the old city, though hardly at its centre. But also, Heart of Lion...Lionheart. Like Richard.
Another King of England, but his time came long after Arthur’s
, Wally thought. And long after Merlin/Major, who told the taxi driver to wait, then got out, held the door for Wally and led the way to the hotel entrance.

Together they went through the rotating glass door into the small, dark lobby, all red-leather chairs and walnut-panelled walls. It didn’t look like much, but rich smells of spices and roasting meat filled it, making Wally’s mouth water. Wally glanced through a door to their right as they approached the desk and saw a half-dozen patrons enjoying dinner in a rather gloomy restaurant panelled in the same dark wood. His stomach growled, and then, desperately tired, he yawned.
And
his head was hurting again. How long before he could eat...and sleep?

“There’s another thing you obviously didn’t consider,” Major said as they approached the front desk.

Wally shot him a suspicious look. “What?”

“To check into a hotel in France, you must be eighteen years old.” And then he switched to French and took care of everything with the desk clerk, checking Wally in, signing the register, then handing Wally two keys for room 404. But they didn’t go up to the room: instead, Major led him back to the waiting cab.

Wally yawned again, jaw cracking, as he relaxed in the car seat. Major gave him a sympathetic smile. “Jet lag,” he said. “One more reason to hate flying.”

I wonder if Ariane suffered from jet lag, coming across the way she did?
Wally thought, and felt a pang of unease.
If she made it across at all.

What would she say if she could see him now, practically best buds with Merlin?

I’m just trying to find out the truth, for both of our sakes. I haven’t betrayed her.

Yet
, a tiny voice whispered deep inside.

Their new destination was fit for an emperor: it was even
called
L’Empire. Artfully lit to show off the intricate architectural detail of each of its five stories, it looked to Wally like something James Bond should be driving up to in his Aston Martin, ready to play high-stakes poker against some evil genius.

Its interior elegance matched that of its exterior. Marble floor and pillars, glass-topped tables, palm fronds, red-striped chairs that Wally could tell at a glance were intended more for looks than comfort...though tired as he was, he longed to sit down in one and just fall asleep.

But first they had to deal with the desk clerk. Wally listened as Major requested a second room for his young friend. The clerk protested, saying there were no rooms available. But Major lowered his voice until Wally couldn’t hear him anymore, and a moment later the desk clerk, suddenly all smiles, said, “Bien sûr, Monsieur Major, à votre service.”

Two minutes later Wally had a room card in his hand and, feeling rather dazed, was in the brass-and-marble elevator with Major. They emerged into a long cream-coloured hallway where every door was trimmed with gold and the white carpet was so thick they seemed to make no impression on it, gliding silently along. Wally felt almost disconnected from his body, as if he were a ghost haunting the old hotel, not a flesh-and-blood boy at all.

Major showed him to his door. “Sleep well,” he said, and smiled. “As I’m sure you will. I think you are half-asleep already. I’ll see you in the morning.” He turned and went back down the hallway toward the elevators.

I could escape now
, Wally thought, looking after Major’s retreating back.
Nothing to stop me. Go out, go back to our own hotel, wait for Ariane....

But the truth was, he didn’t want to. All he wanted was sleep, and that was waiting just beyond that white-and-gold door.

The room had warm yellow walls, a deep blue carpet, thick, velvet drapes, fresh flowers on an elegant little side table and beautiful paintings on the walls: it was, in short, the most luxurious hotel room Wally had ever been in, even with his well-to-do parents. He desperately wanted to crawl into the bed, with its magnificently carved wooden headboard and snow-white, feather-filled duvet, but there was something else he had to do first.

He went into the bathroom – which had a marble floor and vanity, naturally – and filled the tub, marvelling even in his exhaustion at the tap, which surely wasn’t real gold...was it? He sat on the closed toilet seat staring blankly at the marble-tiled wall while the water ran, so tired he almost nodded off twice. When he judged there was enough to allow Ariane to materialize in the tub should she somehow figure out where he was and arrive via magic in the middle of the night, he rose wearily to his feet and returned to the bedroom.

He stripped off his clothes, shoved the ribbon-tied box of chocolates off the pillow, pulled the duvet to his chin, and fell asleep in seconds.