The Third Magic (42 page)

"Not that way," Taliesin said gently. He raised his bare hands, and the brambles and thorns shimmered before him, then melted away into air, closing again behind them as the men moved forward into the new century.

B
ehind the wizard walked
Arthur and Gwen, side by side. Although nothing had been said, the others stayed apart from them, allowing space for the invisible nimbus that surrounded the young couple like a shroud. The knights pulled up the rear, with Launcelot in the center of the front line.

Death lay thick on the air, heavy as ropes. Launcelot did not know why Arthur was going to die, or how. He only knew that it would come to pass, just as it had before. How many more times would he be forced to walk behind Arthur on his way to death? For even in his own hell nothing, nothing could be worse than this: to feel the same sorrow in life after life, the same regret, to watch the great King fall time and time again because of the venal desires of cruel and petty beings, like a lion brought down by jackals.

And who were the jackals this time, Launcelot mused. Who had taken the place of the petty kings in this life? The ones with the sirens and guns, or the ones who made the pictures on the television?

Or was it just all the lost ones clinging to Arthur, wanting him to bring them the happiness they could not find for themselves? Were all Kings expected to provide what only each man himself could find, and therefore always fail?

He looked up from his ruminations to find, to his astonishment, a large white wolf, very old and quite blind, loping beside him.

"Don't be alarmed, Lance."

The knight's face reddened. It was the damned pagan magician again, he thought, his fist clenching around the hilt of his sword. "What the devil are you doing now?" he growled.

"I absolve you," the wolf said. "When this is done, you can go to your god."

Launcelot coughed. "Blasphemy!" he sputtered. "How dare you, you heathen trickster—"

"Because you understand. It was for you that he came back."

The knight was taken aback. "What? For me? What are you talking about?"

“To show you that he forgave you. And Guenevere. And the Merlin, too. That he'd forgiven all of you from the beginning." The wolf panted. "It was the love he had for you that mattered, not your betrayals."

Launcelot stood stock still.

"You'll go home this time, knight. To heaven."

At first he did not respond. His gaze darted from the wolf to the Merlin, and then back again. Then his jaw began to tremble. His lips worked, trying to bring himself under control before he allowed himself to speak. "I'm a soldier," he said hoarsely. "A soft afterlife will be no reward for me." He kept his eyes facing forward, unwavering. "With Galahad gone, I'll stay with the boy, if it's all the same to you."

The wolf cocked her head, understanding. "There are many ways to look at heaven."

In the next moment the animal was gone. Launcelot looked to the others, who had passed him and continued walking toward the rock.

Finally they came upon it. The altar stone stood in the center of the clearing Merlin had made, massive and yellow and worn smooth with time. In the middle of it jutted the ancient sword Excalibur, just as it had sixteen centuries before, when Guenevere first came upon it, just as it had been left sixteen centuries before that, when the priestess Brigid had thrust it into the altar of the Cailleach.

VORACIOUS

T
he Tor first appeared
to Titus Wolfe through the window of a taxicab. Parched and shivering with fever, he had taken the cab from Dover, giving the driver all the money in his possession, a wad amounting to some four thousand pounds.

There was something forbidding about the sawed-off mountain. To Titus, it looked like some ancient ziggurat standing as a challenge to him. As the cab approached the village of Lakeshire and the Tor at its outskirts, he felt his heartbeat quickening, thudding louder with each passing moment.

"What's that you said?" the driver asked genially. It was his last fare of the day, and luck was with him. It hadn't been the first time a drunken sailor had given him a month's pay for a ride. Usually that ride ended up at a whorehouse, but he didn't mind making the extra effort to drive the fellow to Lakeshire. There was still plenty of time to get home, play some darts, buy the lads a pint...

Titus grunted fuzzily.

"Is this where you wants off, gov?" the cabbie said, louder. "Not that it matters. I can drive you wherever you says, long as it's—"

"Here." Titus tried to rouse himself to action. His lips felt stuck together. It hurt to pull them apart. He blinked twice and propped his hands on the arms of the taxi's doors. He could smell himself, stale, unwashed, redolent of whiskey and vomit. "I'll get out here."

He rummaged in his pockets, turning them inside out. "I'm sorry."

"Already paid in full, sir," the cabbie said with a grin. The grin wobbled uncertainly as his passenger lurched out onto the open road. The poor sot had given him every cent he'd had, and didn't even remember doing so.

Feeling guilty, the driver reached into his pocket for a bill. The least he could do for the man was to leave him enough money for a meal and a phone call after he sobered up. "'Ere you go," he said, holding out a tenner, but Titus had already spilled out of the cab and was shambling across the road toward the Tor.

The driver got out, put the bill away, and then closed the back door which Titus had left wide open. "Christ," he said, shaking his head as he got back behind the wheel.

As he drove back the way he'd come, he passed a car parked alongside the road. The driver of this vehicle, a tweedy sort in his late sixties, was getting out as the cab passed. He gave the cabbie a cordial nod and stretched grandiloquently.

The cabbie might not have noticed the man at all, had it not been for one thing: The tweedy man had been taking something out of the car as the cab crested the hill, something he had hastily placed on the front seat as the cab passed.

The cabbie had only seen the object for a moment, but he had been fairly certain of what it was, if only for its incongruity in the hands of the professorial looking gent who had been carrying it.

It was an automatic rifle with a telescopic lens.

Odd sort of place for a hunt, the cabbie thought.

L
ucius Darling looked after
the receding taxicab for some time, holding his breath and cursing silently. He was getting old. He should have heard the cab's engine as it crested the hill. He should not have taken out the rifle so carelessly.

Chances were that the driver had neither noticed nor cared. And Darling would be changing cars within the next ten minutes. Lakeshire's parking lots would be filled with cars so easy to steal they might as well have their keys in the ignition. He would choose a Honda, if he could find one quickly. The favorite of car thieves everywhere, a missing Honda would cause no more concern to the police than a domestic argument.

As for his being identified by the cabbie, he'd take his chances. Darling had no police record whatever. If anyone cared to trace him through the rented car to his home, he would simply bring out a large barometer approximately the length and shape of a rifle, complete with canvas shoulder bag, and explain that he had been indulging in a hobby of weather tracking.

But it would not come to that. It never did.

He had killed sixteen of his former protégés. Titus was one of the last of the Coffeehouse Gang's bright young things. They had been recruited and developed to be the muscle of the organization, the eyes and hands of the KGB in Britain. But their time had passed. With Titus went the end of the dream, if it had ever been a dream. The very word seemed like an obscenity now, after all the killing, all the deceit and betrayal.

Darling had not meant to become a monster, no more than had Titus and Edgington and the rest. Monsters all, slain by their own kind.

He followed the small figure of Titus Wolfe as it staggered up the winding path leading to the top of the Tor. What he was planning to do there was anybody's guess. But then, Titus was not well in any sense of the word. Whatever demons he planned to meet at the crest of the hill were his own concern.

Darling would wait. He would give his beloved student a few more minutes.

He took a deep breath, reflecting on the fragility of life. For the man climbing the Tor, these breaths were his last. Within minutes his heart would explode and his legs would buckle beneath him. Titus's eyes, once eager with curiosity and aflame with passion, would circle dully and then open wide in surprise before glazing over, his juices inviting the insects to feed upon him.

T
itus Wolfe's ascent up
the hill was laborious and stumbling. After a time, he did not even know why he was making the arduous climb. Only the image of the Tor in his mind kept him at his task.

Once, when he fell, the spidery weapon he had assembled before the debacle at Miller's Creek fell out of his jacket. He picked it up, barely able to hold it, so great was his shaking. His left hand, with its missing finger, was swollen beyond recognition. The bandage that had kept the area clean had long since fallen away. Now the stump was red and pus-filled, its edges turning black.

The infection had spread. He was burning with fever. He had neither eaten nor drunk anything in days.
So much for disguising myself as a fat man,
he thought. He was parched. His eyes hurt.

Come back to the Tor,
the familiar voice sang to him.
You will come back to make things right.

He was on all fours now, scrambling over the dry stones, cresting the final ridge. Yes, the Tor, he thought. He was almost home. Blinking from the dust, he crawled toward the clearing he knew he would find. He had seen it in a hundred visions since the night he had left Dawning Falls. There would be a man there, waiting for him.

The man he was supposed to kill.

Titus halted, confused. He could not remember who the man was or why he was supposed to kill him.

To make things right,
the voice reminded him.

Oh, yes. It was a King of some sort. An assassination. It had all been planned long ago, even before the Libyans.

Squinting, he thought he could make out shapes in the clearing. Taking out the gun with its high-powered telescopic sight, he snapped it into position. Just to see.

The man would be waiting to die, Titus thought. It would not be a problem.

But he did not see a man at first. In the sight of the gun stood a woman. He frowned, adjusting the scope. What woman would be here?

And then he saw. It was his dead daughter, come back to life like his stick figure drawing. And in the foreground a white blur, moving, blocking his view.

Titus staggered backward. A wolf the color of clouds was coming, running straight for him. He tried to scream, but the wolf leaped into the air and in one astonishing bound was on him, its jaws fastened around his throat. Strangling, grappling desperately with the wolf and fighting with all the strength of a dying man, Titus managed to fire one shot. It struck the wolf.

Then he sank to one knee and aimed the gun at the boy-King.

The Christ Child, he thought. Oh my God, the King I've been hired to kill is Jesus Christ.

He hesitated. But that was all written long ago, he realized. He, too, was a part of the tapestry, come to life like the stick figures of his dreams. You must die, he thought, because I am here. He pulled the trigger.

I have come back, back to the Tor, to make things right.

W
ith all the knights
gathered around the yellow rock, Arthur placed his hands upon the hilt of the great sword.

"Thank you for your service to me," he said. "For a time, we created together a community that now is thought of as a perfect world. But we know it was not a perfect world. Far from it. It was a time of fear and bloodshed and betrayal, of early death and failed dreams. A time like all times. But we lived it together, and in that we made memories.

"The memories, my friends, are all that are perfect. Because when it is all done, does any of it matter? Any of it, except for the joy of having lived?"

The knights were silent. Launcelot, standing apart from the others, wept. Taliesin swept the field with his gaze. He was very uncomfortable. Something was coming, something dark and unknowable.

Gwen, too, felt as if she were jumping out of her skin.

Slowly, Arthur pulled Excalibur from the rock and held it aloft with both hands. It was magnificent in the sunlight, its gold untarnished, its blade smooth and sharp as a razor.

"With this, I send you home, back to Camelot, to the perfect world that we did not live, but remember having lived. With this, I give you freedom."

T
he first shot drew
their attention. The second came moments later.

"No!" The Merlin screamed as Titus Wolfe's bullet sped through the clearing and into Arthur's beating heart.

The knights mobilized at once. Launcelot was the first to spot the man lying on the grass beyond the clearing, and in one motion unsheathed his sword and turned to run toward him.

He never made it. With the last bit of life within Arthur's body, he thrust the sword back into the stone, and the knights began to fade.

Launcelot felt himself disintegrating. "My King!" he shouted. "Take me back, I beg you!"

Ahead of him lay the blind white wolf, dying, its fur streaked with blood from the bullet that had passed through it.

"You were valiant, knight, and true," it said in its way so that only the knight could hear. Its eyes were bright and unafraid. "Godspeed, Launcelot!"

Arthur, too, was fading. "Oh, no," Taliesin moaned. He never thought it would happen so quickly. "Arthur, please, by all the gods..."

Arthur's eyes, soft with forgiveness, met his. "Friend," he whispered.

He reached out for Gwen. He could no longer speak. She kissed his lips.
I will find you
, she said to him silently. She spoke with Brigid's voice, with Guenevere's, with her own.
Wherever it is, however long it takes, I will be with you again.

She held him in her arms until he vanished from sight, along with the sword Excalibur, gone at last to the Summer Country.

In the distance, the crack of a rifle sounded. A shabby looking man holding a gun of some kind arched his back before falling forward into the grass.

Gwen sank to the ground. Beside her, on the great yellow stone, the light shone on the Cailleach's ancient carving of the dawning sun with its eternal message.

There would always be another day.