Song of the Sword (4 page)

But whatever she wondered, she didn’t say. The boy suddenly yelped and dug frantically in his pocket, digging out a smartphone that he dropped the moment he had it. “It’s hot!” he said, staring down at it. The phone’s screen blazed white, and steam rose all around it.

The water-woman stared down at the phone, mouth open, hand outstretched. For a moment, she looked as frozen and lifeless as the glass statue she resembled. Then a single drop of water formed at the end of her nose and dropped to the floor with a musical “plink.” At the sound, the Lady returned to life again. “No!” she cried. “You have revealed me to him!”

Ariane stared at her. “Revealed you to who? What’s wrong?”

“Listen!” the Lady said.

Ariane listened, and heard the trickling of water behind her. She turned and saw a thin stream flowing down the watery steps that led up to the sunlit world.

As she watched, that trickle grew.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” the geeky kid muttered.

Ariane scrambled to her feet. “We have to get out of here!” she cried.

But the Lady grabbed her wrist, making her yelp, the transparent fingers as solid as steel. “Not yet!” the Lady cried. “You must listen! I have only seconds. Remember: Excalibur will call to you. Follow its song. Find it, all of it, before Merlin does. Your whole world depends on it.” The trickle grew to a frothing stream. Water, cold as ice, flowed into Ariane’s shoes. “Your mother refused to accept the power. But you must. You must!
There is no one else
.”

She released Ariane’s wrist, but then, quick as a striking snake, seized her face in both hands. Ariane gasped. The Lady’s palms, at first cool against her cheeks, suddenly blazed with heat. Deep within the water-woman’s clear gaze, Ariane saw twin blue pools the color of midsummer sky. Those pools rushed toward her, then swallowed her whole.

The chamber and the cold water lapping at her ankles faded from her senses. She felt as though she were floating in a warm lake, fathoms deep. The sound of waterfalls and rushing creeks filled her head and formed strange words:
Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Yp
ˆ
wer yn eiddo i chi.
Though the language was one she had never heard, Ariane somehow knew what the words meant: “Let the waters live within you, and you within the waters. The power be yours.” And indeed, she sensed the power within the strange phrases, so much power that, just for a moment, she felt luminescent, ablaze with light, like a living star, so much so that as she became aware of the chamber
again she thought she could see light streaming from her skin, outshining the diluted rays of the sun far above.

But then the Lady thrust her away, and the light disappeared. Instantly Ariane felt the cold embrace of the water again, up to her knees now, pulling and sucking at her calves. Her teeth began to chatter.

“Go!” the Lady cried. Her once-perfect form dripped and sagged. “This place will soon cease to exist! Go! Accept the power! Find the shards of Excalibur! Stop him!” She turned her dripping face toward the boy. “I charge
both
of you with this quest! You must help her!”

“Both of us?” Ariane shot a startled look at the strange red-headed kid, but he was already splashing toward the exit, his malfunctioning phone lost beneath the water. Ariane followed, but she paused at the dissolving archway. She looked back, hoping for a farewell: a final charge or a benediction.

Instead, she saw the figure of the Lady melt away. One moment she was there; the next, a column of water splashed to the floor of the chamber, raising a wave that raced out and lapped around Ariane’s waist. Ariane stared, then fled, splashing up the stairs through the descending torrent like a salmon swimming upstream.

~ • ~

Merlin raised his aching head from the surface of the desk and ran a shaking hand through sweat-soaked steel-gray hair. His racing heart began to slow. It had taken all his strength, but he had driven the Lady’s consciousness back into Faerie, out of this world –
his
world – once more.

But had it been in time?

Two and a half years ago, the last time she had tried this, had been his moment of greatest peril. He had been weaker then, his thin-stretched web of magic able to sense what was happening but unable to transmit any of his sadly diminished power to put a stop to it. But for whatever reason, the Lady failed to bestow her power on the human woman she had called to herself, her heir in this age. He didn’t know why. Nor had he been able to discover who the woman had been, though he had tried.

Now the Lady had made a second attempt. This time a thread of his magic had been close enough that he had not only sensed her presence but had been able to respond swiftly. But had he been swift enough?

And to whom had she attempted to give her power? The same woman, or someone else?

He frowned. If the Lady had succeeded, if some mortal now had the Lady’s power, then he faced a potentially dangerous adversary. In Faerie, the Lady had had some skill with water; on Earth, she ruled over water like a goddess. And though she could never return to Earth in her own body – the door between Earth and Faerie would have to swing wide for that to be possible, and the Faerie Queen and Council of Clades would never permit it – anyone she had given her power to would have far more magic to draw on than he did. His magic came entirely from Faerie, and with the door so nearly shut, he could draw on only a sad trickle of the vast might he had once wielded. But the source of the Lady’s power was all the fresh water of the Earth. From Faerie she drew only the ability to use that power.

One day, with Excalibur in his hand, he would
force
that door open from this side, regain his full strength, and march through at the head of a mighty army to unite both worlds under his reign...
as should have happened long ago
...but until then...

Of course, had they been able to, the Queen and Council would have long since closed the portal between the two worlds completely, cutting him off from Faerie, tearing away the last vestiges of his magic, and sentencing him to live, and soon die, as a mortal man. He rubbed the ruby stud he wore in his pierced right ear, and smiled. But they could not close that door completely. He had seen to that. And so he still lived – as did his vision of a united Faerie and Earth.

Few in Faerie now shared that vision, but once, many had.

Not least, the Lady of the Lake.

The thought brought a familiar pang, like the twinge of an old injury. Time had numbed but never fully healed his grief at the loss of the love and friendship they had once shared as brother and sister, he the Lord of Clade Avalon, she his strong right arm.
If only she were still at my side...we would be invincible!

He shook his head, dragging his thoughts out of the distant past. “Would-haves” and “should-have-beens” were a waste of energy. The cold, sword-sharp fact was that the Lady had turned against him, agreeing to carry out the edict of the Queen and Council that he be eternally imprisoned “for the good of Faerie.” His lip curled.
For the good of Faerie? For her own ambition!
With him trapped on this side of the portal between the worlds, she must have become sole ruler of Avalon.

But her position could never be completely secure while he still lived and wielded power. And so she had attempted, once again, to raise up a new version of herself to fight him. And once again, she had done so in, of all places, Regina.

He would investigate further. Not in person, of course. Once, magic could have whisked him instantly to the prairie city, no matter how far he would have had to travel. No longer. But no matter. Even in the old days, he had far more often used servants to carry out his designs than done the work himself.

For a moment he toyed with the idea of calling on the demon he had summoned and enslaved long ago, breaking innumerable laws of Faerie in the process, but he rejected the notion at once. Controlling the treacherous creature was exhausting, weakened as he was.
Besides, I may have more need of it later. For now, I think an earthly servant will do.

He rubbed his aching temples. The Lady might be able to control water, but his skill had always lain with controlling people.

It was a basic principle of magic that everything had a True Name, a magical name that, if learned and spoken, could be used to command it. In Faerie, those Names were jealously guarded, and to discover a handful had taken him many years. But on Earth...!

On Earth, True Names were easily discovered by those who knew where to look, and the limitless power flowing through the open portal from Faerie in those early years had enabled him to make free use of them. In short order, on first arriving on Earth, Merlin had learned the Name of lightning, and how to call it as he willed. He had learned the Names of many birds and animals, so that he could see through their eyes, hear through their ears, and use them as his agents and spies. And he had learned the Names of many, many men and women he could use as pawns in his games of intrigue.

Because he knew the Names of
some
humans, he knew a little piece of
every
human’s Name, enabling him to Command ordinary mortals to sleep, or forget, or fail to see what was right in front of them, so that he had once walked unnoticed and unhindered wherever he wished.

Most of those powers had deserted him now. He still knew the Names of wind, fire, and earth, but without the full power of Faerie to draw on, he could not make them obey him.

But he could still Command mortals if need be…and he knew just the mortal to Command.

Keith Pritchard.

He reached out a hand and touched a glowing yellow button.

“Gwen,” he said, “please get our district sales manager for Regina on the phone.”

CHAPTER THREE

“The Power Be Yours”

Wally struggled up the water staircase
, feeling as if he were trapped in a nightmare. The stairs were still there, but losing their form. And they were as slippery as ice – with every step Wally felt in danger of sliding back down to the bottom, into that impossible chamber under the water, with that impossible talking statue made of water.
The Lady of the Lake?
he thought incredulously.
Really?

But disbelief took a back seat to his most immediate problem, which was that he didn’t know how to swim.

The water, clear as crystal a moment before, turned brown and began to foam. The rectangle of sky he’d been struggling for was an arm’s length above him. He was almost out...

And then the steps vanished, the walls disappeared, and Wascana Lake roared in to fill the void.

Wally floundered in foul-tasting water. He kicked frantically and managed to pop his head above the surface for an instant, catching a glimpse of the boulders by the parking lot before the weight of his clothes dragged him under again. A strangely detached portion of his mind noted that his earlier question about whether the lake was deep enough to drown in was about to be answered.

Another kick. His head burst into the air again, and he desperately gulped a breath, then managed to squeak out, “Help...!” But the water sucked him under again, and this time, when he kicked and flailed, he couldn’t find his way back to the surface in the foam and scum and brown muddy soup created by the collapse of the magical chamber.

His lungs cried out for air.
I’m drowning
, he thought, disbelieving.
I’m drowning in Wascana Lake...

...Mom and Dad will sue them for making it deeper a few years ago...

...and then something grabbed him. Panic-stricken, he clutched it, pulling it down with him. When he realized it must be Ariane, he forced himself to go limp. Just when he thought he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, his head broke through the surface. Ariane struck out for the shore, and within seconds both of them were belly-down in the mud by the parking lot boulders, coughing and spitting.

“Thanks,” Wally choked out. “I can’t swim.”

“I noticed.” Ariane rolled over, sat up, and stared at the lake. Wally followed her gaze. Aside from a spot of water muddier than the rest, there was no sign of the Lady’s underwater lair.

Maybe I dreamed it
, Wally thought.
Or hallucinated it. Maybe it was a...what’s that old hippie phrase?...a “bad trip.”