Twist of the Blade (18 page)

Two strong hands shot over the edge of the cliff and seized her forearms in vise-like grips. “Tiens bon! Je vais te tirer de là!”

She had no idea what that meant, but she had never been happier to see anyone than she was to see the guards she had worked so hard to evade. They pulled her up over the lip of the cliff, and she rolled onto her back, gasping for air, knees bruised, hands aching, the front of her jacket scuffed, one pocket half torn off. But the guards gave her no time to rest. Together they hauled her to her feet. One of them kept a tight hold on her arm while the other shone a flashlight in her face, “Qui es-tu? Que fais-tu ici? Tu aurais pu te tuer!”

“Hey, stop that!” Ariane scrunched up her eyes. “I can’t see! And I don’t speak French. Um, je ne parle pas français.”

“Américaine?”

“No.” Ariane shook her head. “Canadian.”

“Canadienne?” The guard frowned. Then, “Who are you?” he said in accented but understandable English.

“Ar –” She suddenly realized that giving her real name might not be the best idea. With only a slight hesitation, she changed it in mid-word. “Arial.” An image of Disney’s red-headed Little Mermaid popped into her head. It seemed oddly appropriate. “Arial Muirhead.” She doubted her English teacher would mind Ariane borrowing her last name, since she’d never find out about it. “I’m sorry, I was just –”

“This is...” The guard spread his hands to take in the cavern. “Interdit. Forbidden. By order of le Ministère de la Culture. It is very precious. You could...cause damage. Or hurt yourself.”

“I didn’t know,” Ariane said truthfully. “It was just...I saw someone come out of the cavern, and then you two ran off when that weird flood came pouring through the trees –” she wasn’t about to suggest she’d had anything to do with
that
, “– and I just thought it’d be cool to see inside. It was just...for fun.”

The guards exchanged rapid-fire French. The one holding her arm never slackened his grip. Finally the guard who spoke English said to her, “We must detain you. Dr. Beaudry must talk to you, make a report. The Ministry will want to be sure you did not mean to cause damage.”

“I didn’t! I told you, it was just for fun –”

“Dr. Beaudry will decide,” the guard said firmly. “C’est réglé. It is settled. Amène-la dehors!” – that to the other guard, who promptly propelled her toward the opening of the cavern.
It doesn’t matter
, Ariane thought.
They’ll put me in the tent, I’ll call up the river again, and I’ll be out of here.

Outside the entrance, the English-speaking guard made her take off the caving equipment. “Enferme-la dans la remise!” he said to the other man, and that was the first hint Ariane had that things weren’t going to go the way she had imagined them.

Rather than put her in the tent, the guard led her out through the gate in the chain-link fence...and then away from the river. She had been at the very limit of her ability when she had called it up to distract the guards. Now she felt it slipping away from her, out of reach despite the power of the shard.

They climbed the path up the cliff. To her right, the woods fell away until she could see the river beyond, foaming its way through the gorge farther down. Up, up they went to the very top of the cliff, parallel to it until they had almost crested the rock face, to where the path turned sharply. Rough rock steps took them up the last few metres between shoulders of grey stone, and then they emerged into a large clearing in the forest. On the far side stood a trailer; closer to the edge were a couple of Quonset-like huts and a small, blue plastic structure with the look and the smell – Ariane wrinkled her nose – of a portable toilet. The ground bore the marks of several vehicles, but there weren’t any there now. Ariane waited to see if “Dr. Beaudry” would emerge from the trailers, the huts, or even the porta-potty – or whatever they called it
in France – but there didn’t seem to be anyone around at all.

She listened for a song of water from anywhere nearby, but she and her guard were literally high and dry: there were no streams or puddles nearby, and the sun beat down from a cloudless blue sky. That escape route, too, was closed to her.

For the first time she began to think that she might have
got herself in a lot more trouble than she’d realized.

That thought became certainty when the guard led her to the nearest of the huts, a prefabricated storage shed with metal walls and roof, seven or eight metres long and four or five wide. He unlocked a padlock on the sliding doors, pulled them wide, pointed her inside and once she was in, slid the doors shut and padlocked them again.

She looked around the inside of the hut, dimly lit by narrow, fiberglass-covered windows in the curved ceiling. Crates and barrels filled the space. Thanks to Canadian laws that mandated bilingual labels on everything from shampoo to breakfast cereal, she could read French better than she could speak it. If she was right, the barrels were filled with fuel oil, probably for generators. Some of the crates contained food. Others were labeled with words she didn’t recognize at all: scientific equipment, maybe.

But none of the barrels contained water. Nor were there any faucets, drains, or anything else she could use.

Despite all the power she’d inherited from the Lady of the Lake, despite the additional power the first shard of Excalibur gave her, she was hopelessly and completely a prisoner.

Or was she? Her cell phone! She grabbed her backpack, unzipped it, and rummaged through its jumbled contents...there! She pulled out the phone, took one look at it, and almost threw it across the room in disgust.

Of course it was dead. When was the last time she had charged it? Then she snorted. And how many times had it been dunked in water since she’d left Regina? Probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Without her cell phone, and without a watch, she didn’t even know what time it was. After noon, surely? Which meant Wally would be landing in Lyon within a few hours.

She wouldn’t be there to meet him. And she had no way to tell him where she was or what had happened to her.

Ariane had gone to Sunday School for many years when she was little, at her mother’s insistence. How did that line from
Proverbs
go? “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

You just proved it
, she thought.

With a sigh, she made herself as comfortable as she could in a corner of the hut, sitting on a crate, feet pulled up, arms wrapped around her knees.

All she could do now was wait for Dr. Beaudry...and she had no idea how long it would be before he came back.

Ariane Forsythe, you’re an idiot
, she told herself, and against that accusation, she had no defence.

CHAPTER NINE

CALL OF THE DARK

Wally had been to Europe before with his family: twice, in fact. He’d even flown into Frankfurt before, on the last trip, the one other time he’d visited France, when his family had still been a family. He’d only been eleven, but he thought he remembered the routine well enough that he’d have no trouble getting through customs and making his connection to Lyon, especially since he could sorta-kinda speak French.

He wasn’t worried about himself...not much, anyway. But he was worried about Ariane.

In the middle of the abbreviated night, somewhere near the Arctic Circle, he leaned his head against the cool Plexiglas of the airplane window and looked down at clouds shining in the moonlight far below. It was a very strange notion, but he wondered if even then Ariane was
in
those clouds, making her own way to France via this new twist of the Lady’s magic.

He snorted.
If she moved as fast through the clouds as she moved us through water, she’s already there and waiting for me.
Then he frowned. If she got there first, and sensed where the shard was...what if she simply went and got it, without waiting for him? Despite their plans, if she saw a chance she’d surely take it. She might greet him at the airport with shard in hand.

It was an uncomfortable thought, which, if it happened, would raise an uncomfortable question.
Does she
really
need me anymore? Am I really the heroic sidekick...or just useless baggage?

Wally tried to sleep, with little success, and was jolted awake by turbulence as the sun rose. It wasn’t bad, but it went on for half an hour or more, and by the end of that time his head hurt and he’d even pulled out the airsickness bag, just in case. Thankfully, he managed to fight down his nausea as the turbulence eased, though a faint headache remained.
Must be the concussion
, he thought, disgusted; he was never airsick, carsick, seasick, or any other kind of motion-sick.

The rough ride made him wonder again what the trip had been like for Ariane. What would happen if
she
hit a thunderstorm? Worrying about her helped him stop worrying about whether the very large gentleman who had been in front of him in the screening line in Regina, had followed him across the Calgary airport to the Frankfurt flight, and was now seated directly behind him, would lose
his own battle with airsickness; from the moaning and gulping,
he was in worse shape than Wally, and Wally wasn’t sure he could contain the contents of his own stomach if he heard – or worse, smelled – someone else throwing up.

In the end, neither one of them upchucked, though it was a close thing. Wally had devoured the meal served during the first three hours of the flight, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what the protein had been – beef? chicken?
fish? – but he turned down breakfast entirely, which surely would have astonished Ariane had she known.

I wish she
did
know
, he thought.
I wish she were here.

Early on, Wally had wondered if the big man with the weak stomach was one of Rex Major’s spies. When they finally landed in Frankfurt, he watched the man carefully. But, still looking a bit green, the big man waddled off in the company of a skinny blonde who met him on the other side of customs. He didn’t reappear on the Lyon-bound plane, which Wally caught in the nick of time.
False alarm
, Wally thought.
With luck, Merlin still has no clue what we’re up to.

Wally’s seat for the short flight to Lyon was near the back and next to the window of the rather small jet, and as a result he was one of the last to exit. Having carried his backpack onto all three planes, he didn’t need to follow the crowd to the baggage reclaim area, but he did so anyway, since that was the likeliest place for Ariane to look for him. As he walked, he searched the crowds rushing past for Ariane’s mane of black hair and bright blue eyes.

He didn’t see her. He reached the baggage claim area, and watched as other passengers hugged children, kissed spouses or lovers, retrieved their luggage from the carousel and then headed off toward buses or parking or taxis or the train station. Still no Ariane.

But while he was staring off into the distance at a black-haired girl, trying to decide if it could be Ariane or not, a familiar voice behind him said, “Welcome to Lyon, Mr. Knight.”

Wally’s heart skipped a beat and his skin went cold. He spun to see a tall man with grey eyes, grey hair and an
impeccably tailored blue suit smiling at him with even white teeth. A ruby stud glinted in the lobe of his right ear. “What are you doing here?” Wally said, and instantly thought that made him sound like an idiot, since Rex Major was obviously in southern France for the same reason he was.

“I am in France for the second shard of Excalibur, of course,” Major said. “But I am
here
, at the airport, to meet you.”

“Why?” Wally demanded. He looked around. The crowd of people arriving had dwindled to a group of four friends having an animated conversation on the other side of the carousel, on which a lonely pink suitcase was going round and round, unclaimed, but it still didn’t seem likely Major was going to forcibly haul him away in front of witnesses, no matter how few. “You can’t do anything to me here.”

“I don’t want to do anything to you,” said Major. “As to why I am here...isn’t it obvious?” He spread his hands. “Because no one else is.”

“Ariane’s here,” Wally said. “Somewhere.”

“Really?” Major’s eyebrows lifted. “But she didn’t board the plane with you in Regina.”