Twist of the Blade (17 page)

It was strong, and yet...there was something
odd
about it....

She needed to get closer, and so she went back down to the shore of the little lake, stepped into the water, and dissolved.

In the water, the second shard practically shouted at her:
I’m here! I’m here! Come get me!
She followed that clarion call through wild lakes and streams until she knew she was almost on top of it....

...but she couldn’t reach it!
Yes, it was in water, but not enough to materialize in, and now she was so close she could also tell that the shard was deep underground. Even if she found another pool down there in which she could materialize, there was no guarantee she could get from it to where the shard was, and the thought of materializing underground in absolute darkness, perhaps in water completely enclosed in rock, with no airspace, terrified her. Would she even be able to dematerialize again and escape if that happened? Floundering in darkness, unable to take a single breath, would she have the courage or presence of mind to call on her power? Or would she die there, entombed deep beneath the earth, a puzzling fossil for some far-future paleontologist?

No, thanks!
She chose instead to materialize above ground, more than half a kilometre from where she had sensed the shard.

She burst into a pool at the edge of a winding river. High cliffs of rough grey stone towered above her, but there was a narrow flat space of tumbled rocks between the water’s edge and the nearest cliff; at times, obviously, the river had far more water in it than now. She splashed ashore and ordered the water off herself, then closed her eyes and concentrated again on the call of the second shard. It was
that
way, behind her, so she turned, picking her way over the stony shore, until she finally found a gully that led up through the cliff face a few hundred metres downriver. She scrambled up it on all fours and emerged at last into a pine forest, perhaps three hundred metres wide, growing on a broad shelf of land between the cliff behind her and a second, higher cliff in front of her.

She glanced around...and saw, no more than the length of a football field away, a large blue tent.

It
could
have belonged to ordinary tourists, except most ordinary tourists wouldn’t bother to surround their tent and the rock face with a chain-link fence that ran right up to the cliff, forming a compound about ten metres on a side. The only way into the compound was through a narrow gate between Ariane and the tent.

Most tourists also wouldn’t have looked as unfriendly as the two men in grey, vaguely military uniforms who sat at a folding table in front of the tent, playing cards. They glanced up as Ariane emerged from the forest, and one of them immediately stood and shouted, “Va-t’en! C'est la propriété du gouvernement!”

She hesitated. She could almost understand that...something about government property and....

The man took a menacing step toward her. “Je t’ai dit, va-t’en!”

Ah.
Go away.
She held up her hands. “Pardonnez-moi,” she said. She gave the two guards...because that was obviously what they were...her biggest smile, then turned and went back into the forest.

Once she was out of sight, she circled back through the woods, making sure she didn’t get too close and moving as quietly as she could.

From off to one side, she could get a better glimpse, stolen through a screen of branches, of the cliff face behind the tent. She saw a dark opening in the rock, a crack that didn’t look big enough for a man to slip through...though even as she watched, a man emerged from it. His orange overalls, smeared with dirt and mud, the helmet with a lamp, and the rope, hammers, and other climbing equipment hung all over him, made it clear he’d been in a cave.

And it was equally obvious to Ariane, reaching out with her magical senses, that the second shard of Excalibur was inside that same cave.

Has Merlin found the shard? Is this his way of keeping it safe until he can get here to claim it?

But none of this looked like a Rex Major operation. Two apparently unarmed guards, who had chased her away but not arrested her, an ordinary chain-link fence, and nothing but a tent to hide the entrance? Major would have locked the cave behind a steel door as thick as a bank vault’s, guarded by a dozen armed men and a pack of killer dogs. These guys might not want anyone sneaking into the cavern, but they didn’t seem to think whatever they were guarding was likely to invite serious trouble.
Maybe it’s just got some nice crystal formations and they’re hoping to set up a tourist attraction
, she thought.
Well, fine. I’ll be the first visitor.

If
she could get past them.

The man who had emerged from the cavern disappeared into the tent, and came out a few minutes later without his overalls, helmet and climbing equipment. Dressed now in a casually elegant suit, he stopped and spoke to the guards for a couple of minutes, then left the fenced compound and disappeared into the woods away from the river, toward the second, higher cliff. A moment later he reappeared above the trees, climbing a path she hadn’t noticed until that moment. She watched him until a bend in the path took him out of sight, then turned her attention back to the guards, the tent and the cave entrance. The guards had resumed playing cards. All she had to do was sneak past them, get inside, find the shard and flow away through whatever underground stream she might find.

But she would need a light, and from the looks of the man who had come out of the cavern, maybe a rope as well.
As if I’ll know what to do with it
, she thought uneasily. Everything she knew about spelunking she had learned from watching the Discovery channel, where it always looked like a cross between climbing mountains and crawling through sewers.

Ariane thought again of Wally – his help would be useful right about now. But she shrugged away the notion. If she couldn’t get to the shard on her own, then she could come back with Wally and they’d figure out something else. But she wouldn’t know until she tried.

The man had left his equipment in the tent, so she needed to get in there first. And that meant she needed to get the guards away from it.

She needed a diversion. She smiled a little as she heard herself echoing a line from every action movie she had ever seen; smiled more widely as an idea came to her.
Let’s see Supergirl do this
, she thought. She closed her eyes and concentrated, reaching out to the river singing to her from just beyond the drop-off at the other side of the clearing.

The river was much farther away than any body of water she’d ever tried to manipulate before, but she had the power of the shard to augment her own, just as when she’d pulled the apparently unreachable water from beneath the tennis courts.
Come to me
, she whispered to the river with her mind.
Come to me. Come to your Lady....

And the water responded.

She opened her eyes to watch it pour up from the river, flowing
uphill
through the gully she had followed from the river bank, tumbling white over rocks, foaming around tree trunks, its leading edge brown with mud, twigs and leaves. The guards stopped playing cards as the sound of rushing water intensified, looking around in bewilderment; then one of them shouted and jumped to his feet, knocking
over his campstool and pointing toward the forest.

The other guard leaped up, too, as river water poured out across the ground, a tongue of liquid three metres wide and a metre deep that didn’t spread out as an ordinary flood would have, if any ordinary flood could have made that climb in the first place. Answering her call, it rolled straight toward her hiding place, but with her mind she turned it aside and sent it straight at the guards.

They shouted French words she didn’t understand but really didn’t need to, and almost knocked each other down trying to open the gate and run for the path up the cliff, away from the impossible rush of water...and Ariane, watching from behind her screen of leaves, smiled and chased them with it. The shard’s power filled her, and with contemptuous ease she raised the crest of the water off the ground, higher and higher, until it towered above the terrified guards, who scrambled up the path on their hands and knees.
I could wipe them right off the cliff side
, she thought, but then, shocked at her own bloodthirsty impulse, she yanked the water back down again and released it, dropping her control like a red-hot piece of metal. The water hit the ground in a vast splash, spreading out and flowing back toward the river as gravity once more took effect. In seconds, all that remained of it were a few scattered pools, mud, and wet rocks and tree trunks.

Ariane rose to her feet, a little shaken both from the amount of energy she’d had to expend and the way the shard had once again tried to take control. But she had to move
now
, while the guards were out of sight. They’d be back soon enough...though if she were them, after
that
she’d be moving very cautiously.
Take your time, guys.

She ran across the clearing to the now wide-open gate, dashed through it and then pushed through the tent flap into the shadowy, blue-lit interior. She glanced around at two cots with sleeping bags untidily sprawled across them, a small camping stove and a long folding table covered with paper, two laptops and a jumble of still cameras, video cameras and other pieces of equipment she didn’t recognize at all. At one end of the table, green and red lights flickered across the face of a sleek black two-way radio, microphone clipped to its side. The place smelled of damp ground, campfire, cigarette smoke and a little bit of boys’ locker room.

She figured the latter pungent scent came mostly from the mud-smeared orange overalls hung on pegs on the tall central pole holding up the tent’s roof. The helmet and climbing equipment worn by the man she had seen exit the cave hung there too. She grabbed the helmet, rope and utility belt festooned with hammers, pitons, a compass, a large knife and other things she didn’t immediately recognize. She ignored the coveralls, not
just
because of the smell, but also because they were so large they would have made her feel like a clown. She fastened the belt around her waist, then, feeling slightly silly, pushed open the tent’s rear flap and studied the black crack in the cliff face, just three or four metres away. The song of the second shard oozed from it thick and sweet as honey, vibrating her bones like the bass at a rock concert, making her whole body thrum with excitement. The shard she already wore shouted its own fierce joy at being so near its brother, filling her with a yearning desire to plunge into the dark opening before her.

Yet she still hesitated, remembering those Discovery channel spelunking specials again. Cliffs, mud, rock falls, bats and absolute darkness.... Was she prepared to face what she might find in there?

Only one way to find out. She stepped through the tent flap and walked toward the opening in the rock – but just before she reached it she heard a man’s angry shout. She whipped her head around and up. The guards were running full-tilt down the path up the cliff face. Heart pounding, Ariane turned and plunged into the cave.

The outside light barely penetrated the gloom. She fum
bled with the helmet light, found the switch and then followed its circle of illumination across the floor of bare rock. The songs of the shard she carried and of the shard she sought mingled and wound through her brain, separate, discordant, but longing to merge together into perfect harmony. “I’m coming,” she heard herself gasp. “I’m coming!”

The second shard was close, very close...but not up here. It was farther in, farther down.

She stopped. The blue-white circle of light from her helmet had just slid across the smooth stone floor into emptiness. She edged forward, looked down.

The rock fell away, a sheer cliff dropping at least fifteen metres, down to another floor that her helmet lamp barely illuminated. She turned her light frantically this way and that and finally spotted, off to her right, a collapsible ladder fastened to pitons driven into the floor.

She heard voices outside the cavern. She didn’t have time to dither. The second shard was somewhere below and as far as she could tell, the ladder was the only way to get there.

But how was she supposed to climb onto the thing?

Footsteps crunched at the cavern entrance. She sat down and scooted on her rear until her legs were dangling over the edge of the cliff. Then she rotated her upper body so she could take hold of the pitons with both hands. Gripping them as tightly as she could, she twisted her lower body, feeling for the rungs.

She could have sworn her foot was on one. But maybe there was some knack to it she lacked – or maybe she was more flustered by the approaching guards than she realized.

For whatever reason, her foot slipped.

She screamed as she fell, fingers tightening convulsively on the pitons holding the ladder in place, then grunted with pain as her hands caught her full weight, almost pulling her arms from their sockets, and her body jerked forward, slamming into rock. She kicked wildly with both feet, desperate to find the ladder, but though she felt it bumping against her, she couldn’t find purchase. Her fingers were slipping. She couldn’t hold on...couldn’t...