The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (13 page)

“It was what the others told me,” I said, twisting the blade hard enough to make him cry out again. He dropped to his knees as the knights stared. I have no problem admitting I thoroughly enjoyed his pain. “Giving Arthur a gift that would ensure Camelot never comes to be. A weapon from the age of the older gods. This is just like Rome, isn’t it? You want Camelot to fall before it’s even been built. You don’t want humanity to have something that perfect.”

He grinned through the pain at me. “And Camelot has fallen, hasn’t it?” he said. “It has died with Arthur. It could have been but it never will be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, straight-faced. “Arthur isn’t dead.”

“I felt you slay him. . . .” Judas said, looking over at Arthur slumped against Excalibur still. And all the knights looked at their dead king as well.

I waved my hand and resurrected Arthur. It was a showy move, and it took most of my remaining grace, but it was only fair because, as Judas pointed out, I had killed Arthur. But he was dead no more.

Arthur gasped for breath as he looked around himself. And then he saw Merlin and rose to his feet.

“Magicker!” he hissed.

And now the others stepped back and stared at me. I couldn’t really blame them. But this wasn’t the time or place to explain things.

“Arthur still lives,” I said to Judas. “And so does the dream of Camelot.”

Judas looked back at me. “Very well,” he said. “If you want the dragon, you shall have it.
Hic verum gradale
,” he whispered, and mist came out of his mouth now when he spoke.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“I am calling the dragon,” Judas said and laughed, and coils of fog rolled out of his mouth and wrapped around me.

Now that I finally had him, I fully intended to force him into telling me the truth about my past, and why he had done what he had done to me. But I knew that was going to take time. In fact, I wanted it to take time. I wanted to draw it out. So I had to take care of the immediate problem first and then enjoy myself with Judas later.

“What is the dragon?” I asked. I looked around the mist as the other knights formed into a circle, backs against each other. Strange sounds came out of the mist. Moaning and shrieking noises. And a low rumble. As if something large was stirring.

“It is your nightmares and despair made real,” Judas said. “Among other things.”

And then the city I’d seen in my dreams formed out of the fog around me. It was as if I were suddenly in a city of Heaven. Beautiful, crystalline towers disappearing into the mist overhead. Statues of smiling men and women in the squares, and ornately carved fountains. Perfectly formed cobblestones under our feet. Trees with branches bent heavy with fruit. A smell of baking bread in the air.

“Camelot!” Arthur cried.

“It is where the dragon has hidden itself,” Judas said, laughing even though he was still on his knees, still on my sword. “In the impossible.”

And then Gareth screamed, and we turned to see a pack of bears dragging him off. They were made of the mist itself. We started forward to help him, but then more things came out of the mist. A skeleton with an axe attacked Percival. A huge dog with three heads lunged at Tristan. A woman with worms at her breasts reached for Gawain. They were all mist.

“Now we are truly in the belly of the beast,” Judas said, and I knew from his words that somehow all of these things were the dragon.

A young man in black armour stepped out of the mist and raised a black sword at Arthur. The sword looked like the twin of Excalibur.

“Prepare yourself to die,” he said. “Father.”

Arthur stared at him. “What madness is this?” he said. “I have no son.”

“In Camelot you do,” the youth said. “But I would have no father.” He lashed out at Arthur, who parried with Excalibur, and the blades shrieked as they touched. Then the mist grew so thick we couldn’t see each other. I could only hear the sounds of battle, and the screams.

Once again, it was just Judas and me.

“All right, the dragon is my nightmares and despair,” I said. “How do I kill it?”

Judas shook his head at me.

“When you fight the dragon, you are fighting yourself,” he said. “There can be no victory in that. That’s why it is the dragon and not some other beast.”

I twisted the blade in him again, just to hear him scream. I did wish it didn’t sound so much like a joyous scream.

“Why?” I said.

“Why destroy Camelot?” Judas said. “Because it would have ushered in a new age of light to keep the darkness at bay. It would have redeemed you.” He spat dust at me. “But none of you are worthy of redemption. You belong to the darkness, not the light. I’m simply keeping you in your place, as I have done so many times before.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said since Rome,” I said, “and I think you’re full of shit.”

Now he looked a little less joyous.

“I don’t think you’re trying to keep us where we belong,” I said. “I think you’re trying to keep us from where we belong. We’re not beasts who dream of blood and anarchy. We dream of Camelot. And before that we dreamed of Rome, and before that the Garden. And before that maybe we dreamed of other places that lifted us out of the mud and shadows. Because if we ever manage to build a place like that, then your time is done. I’ve seen Camelot, and I know there’s no room for something like you in it. You’ll fade into dust just like the rest of your kind, whatever they were. The blood and mud is where you belong, not us.”

I shoved the blade down into the ground, pinning him. Like he’d once pinned me. It didn’t feel as good as I’d hoped it would, but we were just getting started.

“This time the blood and mud is where you’re going to stay,” I said.

“Who says I’m even here?” Judas said, somehow impossibly smiling again. “How do you know I’m not just another dream of the dragon?”

I paused. He made the sort of point only a trickster could make. I looked around but there was no one else to help me figure out what was real and what wasn’t here. I was lost in nothingness.

I thought about killing Judas quickly. I certainly wanted him dead, before he had a chance to escape again. But I couldn’t kill him yet. Not until he told me what I wanted to know about myself. Before I could get to work on him for that information, though, a massive serpent’s head formed out of the mist in front of me, and I no longer had a choice.

I ripped the sword from Judas and his scream was lost in the cry of the dragon as it lunged at me. I slashed part of its face off, but it only melted away. And those jaws snapped shut on me.

What to say of being swallowed by the dragon? It burned and it choked and it seared and it smothered and everything else you can think of. I tried to swing my sword again but the mist pressed in on me like a solid thing, preventing me from moving. I really was in the belly of the beast now, or I would be shortly. I screamed—not in pain or fear, but in rage at being so close to Judas and then having this happen.

But the screaming kept up after I’d run out of breath. The very air around me came apart in a scream and I fell to the ground. At Arthur’s feet. The screaming continued without a break, and I realized it was coming from Excalibur in his hand. The blade was clean but Arthur was drenched in blood. Some of it leaking out of the holes in his armour where he had been run through.

“I don’t know what you are,” he said, “but save yourself.”

I looked around for Judas instead, but he wasn’t there. He was gone.

And the dragon came at Arthur and he threw himself into its maw, slashing madly with Excalibur, and I was lost in the mist again.

I’d like to say I stayed to help him, that I fought at his side until the dragon was slain. But instead I ran blindly through the fog, swinging my sword in hope of striking Judas by chance.

And I stumbled out of the mist and fell against one of the stones of Stonehenge. I pushed myself to my knees and looked around. The mist still wreathed the area, but it was fading now, even as the sounds of battle from within it grew louder. And then Gawain fell out of it, collapsing to the ground with dozens of wounds on his body. And Percival stumbled out, waving his broken sword at something behind him that didn’t follow. And one after another the knights emerged from the mist, all of us bloody and broken.

All of us except Arthur.

When the mist finally faded completely, leaving us alone in Stonehenge, Camelot was gone and Arthur was nowhere to be seen.

“The dragon has taken him,” Percival said, gasping for breath.

I wondered if Arthur had found the Grail. If it even existed.

“And it has taken Merlin,” Gareth said, clutching the stump of his right hand and rocking back and forth.

I looked around for Judas, but his body was nowhere to be found. I felt too tired to even swear. I felt like Arthur must have when he saw the Camelot he could never have.

“Merlin betrayed us,” Gawain said.

“He is slain,” Tristan said.

“He betrayed us,” I said, “but I don’t think he’s slain.”

“No,” Percival said, and he spat on the ground where Camelot and the dragon had been. Where Arthur had vanished, and his kingdom along with him. “It was that bitch of a faerie queen,” he said. “She tricked us into coming after the dragon.” He looked at me. “And you were the one who brought her to us.”

I thought about arguing with them, but maybe they had a point. Besides, Judas was as gone as Arthur and Camelot and the dragon. And the Grail, if it had ever existed at all. There was nothing here for me anymore.

Also, there were more knights than me, and they were still angry that I’d killed Arthur in the first place, let alone everything that had happened since then. So I found a horse and got the hell out of there before they could regain enough strength to raise their weapons again and come at me.

And so ended my days as one of Arthur’s noble knights.

I don’t know how long I was lost in the faerie pub before something broke Morgana’s spell and woke me.

An irritation in my head, like a mosquito’s whine. I tried to block it out but couldn’t. It took me a few minutes, or maybe days, to realize what it was.

Words.

“Cross. Awaken, Cross. Cross. Awaken, Cross.”

Cassiel.

I opened my eyes. I was face down on a table in the pub. The air was still and silent around me. Musty. No lights, but enough of a glow came in through the windows that I could see.

“Cross. Awaken, Cross.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.”

I pushed myself up and looked around. And thought maybe I was still dreaming.

I was surrounded by bodies. All the people I’d been dancing and drinking with the previous night. They sat slumped in chairs or collapsed on the floor. Mummified, their flesh shrivelled, bones sticking through skin in some of their faces. Their clothes rotted. Those black rings still on their fingers though.

Wait. Not everyone was there. I didn’t see Morgana or any of her entourage.

And another detail: the glasses on the table looked fresh, with beer and scotch and wine still in them. I struggled to make sense of it.

I’d been on many a battlefield in my life, and one thing is always the same when there’s dead bodies other than me involved. Flies. But there were none of them here, none of that usual drone of them going about their business. There was just the stillness. And the voice coming down through the fireplace.

“Cross. Awaken, Cross.”

“I’m up,” I said, and I was. I staggered over to the fireplace and peered inside it. There was no one there, of course.

“Do you live?” Cassiel asked. A whisper from somewhere far above.

What a stupid question, I thought. Then I looked down at myself to check.

“I think so,” I said.

“You are ensnared by the faerie,” Cassiel said. “Your quest is now one of liberation.”

My mind was still a bit muddled, but I think he meant I had to escape.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Are you bound physically as well as spiritually?” Cassiel asked.

“No,” I said. “I just haven’t found what I need yet.”

I turned back away from the fireplace.

And collided with a dancing woman as the music started up again. She laughed and took my hands and swung me around, passing me off to another woman in the crowd. And it was all laughter and drinks again, and the women kept spinning me around, one to the next, until I found myself in Morgana’s arms.

“I know what you’re doing,” I told her. Which wasn’t exactly true, but I’ve found it’s often better to pretend you know what’s going on. People are less likely to try to stab or shoot you then. Or suck the life out of you and leave you abandoned in some empty faerie pub in a field somewhere for the rest of time.

“And what might that be?” Morgana asked.

“You’re trying to turn me into one of the others,” I said. “One of the fey.”

She smiled and put her finger to my lips, and suddenly I couldn’t talk. She drew me closer into her arms, and her eyes flashed the same red as her hair.

“You are not like the others, though, are you?” she said. “I have to admit, I’ve thought about hiding you away from the world for the rest of time, so that you stay mine. There are underground chambers no mortal has stumbled across yet. There are others who’ve wronged me who have yet to be discovered again, centuries later, and who will never be found again. Even I’ve forgotten where they are.” She spun me around and around faster and faster, until the crowd was a blur. “But you’re not the type to stay forgotten, are you? Any more than you’re the type to stay dead.”

I didn’t try to answer that. I couldn’t speak anyway.

“And who knows what would happen when you bloom again?” Morgana said. She shook her head. “No, it’s better to just play with you for a time.”

And with that she led me to a room upstairs, a room with detailed tapestries of forest hunts on the wall and a bed fit for a queen with green blankets, and we did the sorts of things you did in a bed like that while under a spell like I was.

After, she touched her finger to my lips and I found I could speak once more.

“Is there anything you want to say to me?” she murmured.

“Actually, there is,” I said. “When you said my kind took Mona Lisa, which kind did you mean exactly? Mortals or the other kind?”

She sighed and rolled off me, taking the blankets with her. “You are all mortals,” she said.

And then I woke to find myself alone on the bed, which smelled musty. Morgana was gone, the blankets crumpled around where she’d been. The tapestries on the walls had fallen to the floor, and rich patterns of mould were in their places.

“Cross. Awaken, Cross.”

I looked at the window. Daylight through the dusty pane. The voice coming through it, distant and distorted.

“Cross. Awaken, Cross.”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Cross. You must seek your escape, Cross.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I think I’m making progress.”

“You are serving no purpose now. You must escape in order to find Mona Lisa.”

“Yeah, well, maybe things would be moving along quicker if you’d been honest with me from the start,” I told the window.

“I have told you no lies,” it said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But you sure left a lot of things out.”

“You did not ask the questions to the answers you have learned.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was having this discussion. Especially with a window.

“I don’t think I can leave anyway,” I said. “Not until Morgana is done with me.”

“Unbar the door then,” Cassiel said. “Unbar the door and your salvation will be free to enter.”

All right. Sounded simple enough. It took me three or four days, though. I got up and walked out of the bedroom and into a full-scale dance involving everyone in the pub. I woke up on the dance floor underneath a pile of bodies. I pulled myself out and caught on to the bar to steady myself. And the bartender offered me a glass of the new scotch that had just arrived, a mixture of smoke and fire that had been aged for a hundred years, he told me. I woke up at the end of the bar in a pile of broken glasses, blood smeared everywhere around me. I got up and staggered to the door and then found myself arm in arm with a group of men singing a song I didn’t even recognize, in a language that had been dead for centuries and never had a name. I woke up lying on a tabletop without my shirt. I threw myself at the door and knocked off the bar that locked it from the inside. I stumbled through, but fell into bed with the queen again.

“Why would you want to leave this?” she asked, laughing as she rode me.

So it went.

I’d been there weeks or months when my salvation finally arrived. As usual, it was from an unexpected source.

I was jamming onstage with the band, channelling some crazy mix of Celtic rock and funk, when the door opened and he came in. Everyone did their usual routine, turning to toast the newcomer and offer him a drink and welcome him inside for as long as he wanted to stay which, of course, was forever. But their welcomes died in their throats at the sight of him, and even those of us onstage stopped playing.

The newcomer was wearing a long coat with the collar turned up, and gloves and a hat. A scarf wound tight around his face. To most people he’d pass for an eccentric or maybe a burn victim. But not me. I knew him. It was the mummy.

“Son of a bitch,” I said as it came into the faerie pub, and Morgana turned from her table to look at me.

“Cross, what have you done this time?” she asked.

Before I could say anything, the mummy went to work.

It saw me on the stage and pushed through the crowd, knocking down a man and a woman. Other people tried to stop it, ripping its hat and scarf away, revealing its wrapped head underneath. Those empty eye sockets didn’t move away from me, not even when the bartender hopped over his bar and clubbed the mummy across the back with a cricket bat, knocking it to its knees for a second.

“For Christ’s sake,” I yelled at the mummy. “I don’t even have it anymore.”

My appeal to reason worked as well as it usually does. The mummy swung a fist back into the bartender’s face and sent him sprawling to the ground. Another man rushed the creature and it caught him by the throat and squeezed, until the skin of his neck tore and dust poured out. The man went limp and the mummy tossed him aside too.

I took off the guitar and went to put it on its stand, then decided against that. I might need a weapon. The rest of the band looked back and forth between the mummy and Morgana, uncertain whether they were supposed to keep playing or not.

Morgana’s eyes were fiery slits as she got up and came over to me, climbing on the stage and ignoring the mummy wreaking havoc in her court. Everyone was trying to stop it by piling on now, like they’d piled on me when they put me in the irons, but it just shrugged them off or smashed them off or kicked them off. It was about halfway across the room to us. There was nowhere for me to go. I tried to come up with a plan, but the only thing I could think of was how badly I wanted a drink.

“An explanation,” Morgana said to me. “
Now
.”

“I’m not really sure how, but it followed me from England,” I said. I decided to leave out the bit about Cassiel telling me to open the door so it could enter. “I think I’ve got a curse.”

“You never thought to tell me that before?” she said.

I shrugged. “You didn’t ask,” I pointed out.

She put a hand to her head and closed her eyes. I looked at Puck and the other faerie. They were still at the table, laughing and placing wagers on the mummy’s odds against the room. Well, at least someone was having a good time.

Morgana seized me by the collar and pulled me to her as the mummy grabbed a chair and started clearing the crowd with it.

“How do we stop it?” she said.

“It’s after me,” I said. “Let me go and it’ll follow.”

She gritted her teeth, then shoved me away from her. “Very well, you’re free to leave,” she said. “I have what I wanted from you anyway.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but now was not the time for that kind of conversation.

“I’m not going until you tell me who took Mona Lisa,” I said.

The mummy was nearly at the stage now. It left a trail of bodies behind it. I’ll give the revellers credit—they were doing their best to stop it despite the growing body count. They were laughing hysterically and toasting each with drinks before throwing themselves at the creature and stabbing it with forks and knives from their tables. But the mummy kept coming, even though it had been dealt a dozen wounds that would have been fatal to anyone else.

I lifted the guitar like an axe as the mummy reached the edge of the stage, shaking off men and women clinging to it. And then the room fell silent just like that, and everyone was dead and mummified on the floor again. Everyone but Morgana. She stood beside me as alive as ever, her arms folded across her chest as she glared at me.

I looked around for the mummy but it was nowhere to be seen. I spun in a circle with the guitar raised to check for it behind me. There was no sign of it except for the open door through which it had come. I could see the parking lot outside, full of old cars, the windshields dark with dust.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“It’s still in the glamour,” Morgana said. I took that to be the faerie name for wherever it was that everyone in the pub was alive and drinking and fighting mummies and such instead of lying dead on the floor.

“Why isn’t it here like the rest of us?” I asked, looking around the room. The mummy wasn’t anywhere to be seen among all the other bodies.

Morgana shrugged. “I guess it’s not like the rest of us,” she said. “We’ve never had anything already dead come into our midst.” She shook her head. “What’s the mortal saying? Live and learn?”

I put the guitar down in its stand, which was covered in cobwebs. I saw the amplifier was on, so I reached over and turned it off.

“Given what I’ve seen of it so far, I’m pretty sure it’ll find its way out,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “So you’ll have to go.”

“Yes,” I said and waited.

She sighed. “If you want to know who took Mona Lisa, ask your angel friend,” she said. “After all, it was an angel that took her.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“An angel stole her from the mortal queen,” Morgana said. “But I don’t know which one or what it’s done with her since, so don’t bother asking.”

Well.

I bowed to her. “I thank you, my queen,” I said. “Both for the information and the hospitality.” It took some effort to force the words out, but I was trying to turn the other cheek and all that. Plus, I had to admit I had been less than gentlemanly to her over the centuries. We’d got off on the wrong foot with that whole Arthur thing. So call it even. “And now, for the safety of your realm, I’ll be on my way.”

She slapped me across the face and smiled. “Do come back and visit sometime,” she said. “Without your friend.”

I smiled back at her. “No offence,” I said, “but I think I’ll pass.” Not that I held out much hope for avoiding her. It was a small world, and our paths would likely cross again.

Before I could leave, she bit down on one of her fingers. When she drew the finger out of her mouth it was bloody. She spat a black ring into her palm and pressed it into my hand. It was like the rings the fey wore. Now that I held it, I saw it was bone.

“When you need to return to me, just put this on,” she said. “And trust me, you will need to return to me.” She smiled that smile of hers again.

“Is it some sort of binding trick?” I asked.

“It helps keep the fey in the glamour,” she said. “And it will help you find your way back to the glamour. To me.”

“Why would I want to return to you?” I asked.

“You’ll want to see your child, I imagine,” she said.

And then she was gone, just the scent of her left in the air.

I closed my eyes and sighed.

Well. This was an interesting turn of events.