Song of the Sword (12 page)

And then light, as bright and white as lightning, banished the darkness and cast everything into sharp relief. Ariane and Wally jerked apart and stared at her desk. The light was blazing from the computer monitor. As they watched, it darkened and turned a deep blue. Something swirled in the centre of it, coalesced, and became an image of a bloodstained sword – gripped by a mailed fist.

A voice boomed from the speakers, deep and powerful enough to rattle the window. “The sword is not for you. Abandon your quest, or face the wrath of Merlin!”

Wally’s grip on her hand tightened. Ariane felt grateful for the human contact.

“Merlin grants you this warning because he is merciful. But his mercy is not unlimited. Do not expect it again!”

The image of the sword vanished. The blue changed to the blazing white light that had startled them a few moments ago. Wincing, Ariane threw her hand across her eyes. And then the light was gone, and the monitor once again showed computerized fish swimming in a virtual aquarium. In the sudden hush, Ariane heard the sound of a car starting up outside. She leaped to her feet, knocking over the candle, which splattered hot wax across the floor before sputtering out. “Watch it!” Wally cried, but Ariane hardly heard him. She raced to the window, jerked up the blinds, and peered out into the night just in time to see a car pulling away from the curb...a white Ford Focus.

Wally joined her. “Who was that?”

“Someone who was trying to scare us.”
And succeeding.

“But...how?” Wally walked over to the computer. “How could he...reach inside your computer like that?” He sounded tense...even frightened, though Ariane doubted he’d ever admit that to her. “I’ve never seen a monitor light up like that before. Something would have to be short-circuiting and arcing inside...but the thing is still working. Nice trick.” He managed a smile. “And it sounded like he got James Earl Jones to deliver his lines. Mr. Darth Vader himself.” The smile faded. “Do you think he was spying on us? Was that
Merlin
outside your house?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But whether that was him, or someone who works for him…he knows who I am now.” She felt a chill. “And where I live. I’ve seen that same car several times. It was parked on Winnipeg Street this afternoon. I walked right by it. It even had a sword on the door. If it belongs to Merlin, he’s practically advertising.”

Wally looked up sharply. “What?”

“Not a real sword. A picture of a sword. And some letters. ECS.”

Wally’s mouth fell open. “Oh, wow.
Wow
.”

Ariane stared at him, irritated. “Wow
what
?”

“ECS. It stands for Excalibur Computer Systems. Rex Major’s company.”

“Rex who?”

“Rex Major!” Wally said. “He’s like…Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, all rolled into one. One of the richest men in the world. His Excalibur server software is everywhere. The whole Internet practically runs on it.” He gasped. “My phone – remember the way it lit up in the underwater chamber? Just like this computer. It was a smartphone – connected to the Internet.” He leaned forward, excited. “If Merlin is still alive, he wouldn’t be calling himself Merlin anymore, would he? He’d have to have a disguise, become someone else – something other than a wizard.
What if Rex Major is Merlin?
What if he’s combined his magic with his computer software? He could extend his power anywhere the Internet reaches. And that’s almost everywhere.” His eyes widened. “And his name!”

“Rex Major?”

“It means High King in Latin!”

“But Merlin’s not a king.”

“But if the Lady was telling us the truth, he wants to be one. That’s why he wants Excalibur – to take over the world.” He looked at the window. “Rex Major wouldn’t have been out there in person. But he’s got offices everywhere. That must be one of his…” he grinned suddenly, as if he couldn’t believe he was actually getting to use the word, “…minions.”

Ariane felt a chill. “But…how are we supposed to beat someone like
that
?”

“The Lady said you could do it. With the power she gave you.” He looked down and nudged the fallen candle with his foot. “So do we try again?”

Ariane thought about it, recalling what had happened the first time they’d tried it, and suddenly she realized something: the strange new song she had heard in the mystical darkness still echoed in her mind. She shook her head. “No need,” she said in wonder. “It worked.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Ariane spread her hands. “I can hear the song of the sword. I know where to find the first shard of Excalibur.”

CHAPTER SIX

Going with the Flow

Wally stared at Ariane.
He opened his mouth to speak, not sure if he should ask “How?” or “Where?” first. Before he could make up his mind, the bedroom door opened and Aunt Phyllis stuck in her head.

Good thing I just turned on the lights
, he thought. The fallen candle was just beside his foot; he nudged it under the bed. He couldn’t do anything about the rug having been rolled up, but though Aunt Phyllis’s eyes flickered over it, she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she smiled.

“Hello, you two! I’ve got some cookies and hot chocolate waiting downstairs for dessert, if you’re ready.”

Wally looked at Ariane.
Are we?

“That would be great, Aunt Phyllis,” Ariane said. “Perfect timing.”

“How is the project coming?” Aunt Phyllis asked as they followed her down the stairs.

“We’ve made a good start,” Ariane said.

“I thought I heard a loud voice upstairs – a man’s voice,” Aunt Phyllis continued as she led them into the kitchen. “Gave me a start, until I figured out it must have been coming from your computer.”

Ariane looked at Wally.

“It was a YouTube clip,” he answered without hesitation. “Of this cheesy King Arthur movie. The volume was set too high. I’m sorry if it startled you.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Now, you two sit at the table...”

In two minutes she had poured three big mugs of hot chocolate and Wally was biting into a thick chocolate-chunk macaroon. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
Why can’t Ms. Carson bake like this?
“You’re a terrific cook, Ms. Forsythe.”

“Thank you,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Please, have another.”

Wally obeyed, happily. Ariane didn’t say anything: her mouth was already full with
her
second cookie. She polished it off and started on a third. “Hungry?” he asked.

“Famished,” she replied, chewing more slowly.

Aunt Phyllis nibbled daintily on her first cookie. “So, Wally. You said at dinner you grew up in Regina. Has your family lived here a long time?”

Wally nodded.
At least this is safer ground than strange voices in the bedroom.
“My parents were born and raised here too, and my grandparents on my father’s side. My father’s father’s parents moved here around 1915 from Cannington Manor.”

Aunt Phyllis nodded. The name clearly meant something to her. Just as clearly, Ariane had never heard of it. “Where’s that?” she asked. She finished her third cookie,
but though she was eyeing the plate, didn’t pick up a fourth.

“Thirty-five kilometres or so southwest of Moosomin, not far from Moose Mountain Provincial Park. A bunch of English people settled it in the late 1800s. They thought they could recreate a proper Victorian English farming village on the prairie. It boomed for a while, but that was before Canadian Pacific decided not to build a rail line to the town. The nearest branch line ended up ten miles south, and that was pretty much the end of Cannington Manor. There’s hardly anything there now.”

“Well, there’s a very interesting interpretative centre,” Aunt Phyllis said. “I’ve been there. It’s a provincial heritage site. Were your great-grandparents English, then?”

“Great-grandfather Knight was. He was the youngest of five boys, so there wasn’t much of an inheritance for him to look forward to in England. He came to Cannington Manor as a teenager because he’d seen one of the ads Captain Edward Pierce had put in the London newspapers.”

“Ah,” Aunt Phyllis said. “Your great-grandfather was one of the infamous ‘bachelors.’”

Wally grinned. “That’s right. And apparently a pretty wild one too.”

Ariane gave her aunt and Wally a bewildered look. “What are you guys talking about?”

Aunt Phyllis sipped her hot chocolate. “Captain Pierce –
who may or may not have been a real captain – planned to set up an agricultural school where young men from England could learn to be Saskatchewan farmers. What he mostly ended up with were dissolute young men more interested in drinking and carousing than farming.”

“They hung out at Didsbury, this big estate run by the Beckton Brothers,” Wally said. He’d read everything he could about Cannington Manor once he’d learned about the Knight family’s connection to it. “Ernest, Billie, and Bernie Beckton had inherited quite a bit of money back in England, and it went a long way out here on the frontier. They bred thoroughbreds – horses – and raced them too, as far away as Chicago. They even hunted foxes, you know, red coats, hounds, the whole bit. And they were famous for the parties they held at their lakeside cabin.”

“But eventually, like everyone else, even they gave up and left for greener pastures,” Aunt Phyllis continued when Wally stopped to take another sip of his hot chocolate. “Got married and took their wives back to England, I think. A lot of the ‘bachelors’ drifted farther west. A few headed up to the Yukon, prospecting for gold. Others enlisted in the British army and fought in the Boer War. Your great-grandfather must have been one of the few who stayed.”

Wally nodded. “He met and married my great-grandmother. She’d moved here from Germany with her parents. And despite all the partying, he apparently did learn a little bit about farming – enough to make a go of a homestead. But when the town started to dry up and blow away, he decided he wanted his family to have more opportunities than he’d had, so he moved to Regina and started a real-estate company.”

Ariane’s Aunt Phyllis’s eyes widened. “You mean, you’re
the
Knights? As in Knight Real Estate and Development? As in the Knight Towers downtown?”

“That’s us,” Wally said, a little uncomfortable. He didn’t
like to think about how his family had more money than anyone else he knew. It was his parents’ money, not his. And as far as he was concerned, the only reason they had it was because they were never home.

Flish, on the other hand, judging by her shopping habits, had no problem at all enjoying the family wealth. And he no longer knew how she felt about their parents – not since she’d given up talking to him in favour of pushing him around.

Maybe he ought to change the subject after all. “May I have another cookie?”

“Help yourself.” Aunt Phyllis pushed the plate in his direction. “Well, I must say, your great-grandfather sounds like quite a character.”

“He was,” Wally said. “He never saw himself as Canadian – ‘I was born an Englishman, I’ll die an Englishman!’ he used to say. Or that’s what Grandma told me, anyway. But he never went back, even to visit. He used to tell Grandma it was ‘too dangerous’ for him to visit England again.”

“Well, a lot of those ‘bachelors’
were
the black sheep of the family,” Aunt Phyllis said. “He probably committed some youthful indiscretion.”

“I don’t know,” Wally said. He hadn’t really thought about Grandma’s stories for years. “There was something else he told Grandma, something about a treasure – ”

He broke off, ancient family history suddenly driven from his mind. A newspaper lay on the far end of the table, open to the financial page. It was upside down from his vantage point, or he probably would have noticed the headline sooner:

Rex Major to Visit Thunderhill Mine
. And in smaller type underneath:
Server king planning diamond play?

“Wally, are you all right?” Aunt Phyllis asked.

Wally hardly heard her. He stared wide-eyed at Ariane and pointed mutely at the paper. She frowned at him, turned and looked – then grabbed the paper so suddenly she almost knocked her hot chocolate over.