Twist of the Blade (24 page)

Dr. Beaudry noted his glance. “This was not the original entrance into the cavern,” he said. “This part of France is seismically active. The original entrance was in the next valley, the ancient bed of the river that now lies behind us. At some point an earthquake brought a landslide down
over the entrance our cave-painting friends would have used. Perhaps that same earthquake altered the river’s course. For millennia the cavern may have been completely sealed. But then another earthquake shifted things again, creating this opening...and down below, a tiny, tiny crack through which we can once more reach the complex of caverns the ancients knew.”

He pointed to the top of a folding ladder that dangled into the depths, anchored at the top by two pitons driven deep into the rock. “This way. Be careful climbing onto it – it can be tricky to get your footing.”

Wally gave the sloping rock above him another uneasy glance, rather wishing Dr. Beaudry had not told them about the local landscape’s tendency to shift without warning, but then he sighed and moved forward. Dr. Beaudry helped him over the edge. Wally was glad he didn’t have more than the normal fear of heights.
Or enclosed spaces. Or being crushed. Or buried alive. Or...

Stop it
, he ordered himself. He felt with his foot for one of the flat metal rungs of the ladder. The thing seemed to have a life of its own and strongly objected to his putting his weight on it, always wriggling away just when he thought he had his foot in position. Eventually it stilled and he was able to step down on it. After that it was just a matter of carefully descending, gripping the sides of the ladder so tightly his hands hurt, always making sure he didn’t move the higher foot until the lower one was firmly on the next rung.

Halfway down he froze as dizziness swept through him and his head throbbed.
Not now!
He closed his eyes and held still, and the moment passed. Shaken, he resumed his descent. At the bottom he stepped off, turned sharply, and pressed his back against the rock face, breathing hard. The cold blue lamp hung on a collapsible aluminum pole, its light gleaming off the huge slab of the roof, which met the floor seven or eight metres from where he stood. He still couldn’t see how they could travel any farther. But then, peering around into the darkness, he saw that the floor sloped down to his right...and maybe fifteen metres away, just at the limit of the light from the pole lamp, he spotted a black crevice between the rock of the roof and the rock of the floor.

Not a very
big
crevice, though. Certainly not tall enough to walk through.

Uh-oh.

Dr. Beaudry, once he’d joined Major and Wally at the bottom of the cliff, confirmed Wally’s suspicion. “Now, we crawl,” he said cheerfully. “I will lead. Then the young man, then Monsieur Major. D’accord?”

“Okay,” Major said.

They walked over to the opening. It was even smaller than it had looked from a distance. Dr. Beaudry dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into it. Wally looked at Major. “Go on,” Major said. “I’ll be behind you if you run into trouble.” His mouth quirked. “I have considerable experience with being confined to small spaces. At least this will be for only a short time. It’s less pleasant when it lasts for centuries.”

Wally cringed at the thought, and decided
not
to think about it. He took a deep breath, lowered himself to his hands and knees, and crawled after Dr. Beaudry.

The light of his helmet lamp revealed rough stone all around. Loose rocks covered the uneven floor. Sometimes he had a metre of clearance over his head; in other places his helmet scraped rock, making him very glad he was wearing it. At one point he wormed his way forward on his belly. All the time he was conscious of the vast weight of rock above him, aware that all it would take was an insignificant shrug of the earth’s surface to squash him into paste, and he found his heart pounding and his breath coming in ragged gasps. His brain kept yelling at him to go back and his limbs threatened to freeze up entirely, unwilling to continue to carry him farther on this unnatural journey into the bowels of the earth. But he concentrated on pushing himself a little bit farther, then a little bit farther still, telling himself that if the rotund Dr. Beaudry had made it through without getting stuck, then surely he could...and sure enough, after what really wasn’t very long but certainly felt like it, he saw light ahead of him. A moment later the gap suddenly widened and he crawled out into open space, illuminated by another battery-powered light. He raised his head and gasped.

A wild ox glared from the wall in front of him, its white eye wide above a black muzzle. Long, twisted horns ran up the rock, and a natural hump of stone painted ocher and yellow formed its massive shoulder.

Wally had seen photographs of cave paintings before, but seeing one in person took his breath away. The millennia-old pigments looked as fresh as though the artist who had daubed them on the stone had just put down his brush and stepped around the corner. Somehow the black lines, fewer than a modern cartoonist would use, and the smears of colour oozed life – primitive, wild and free – from a time Wally could barely imagine, a time already ancient when Merlin lived in Camelot.

Dr. Beaudry stood next to the ox, his head level with its eye, and smiled as proudly as if he had painted it himself. “This is what the three schoolteachers saw when they emerged from that tunnel for the first time,” he said. “And they knew immediately they had found something remarkable.”

“Remarkable indeed,” said Rex Major as he, too, crawled out of the tunnel and stood, gazing at the painting. “And yet only the beginning, I believe?”

“Oui,” said Dr. Beaudry. “This way.”

Tearing his eyes away from the painting of the ox, Wally realized that here, at last, were the underground rock formations he had been expecting to see since they’d entered the cavern. From the ceiling, just feet above his head, daggers of stone stabbed the darkness, glittering with crystals. More rounded humps and spires rose from the cavern floor. The path Dr. Beaudry now led them along wound and doubled back upon itself, avoiding stalactites and stalagmites. Glancing down, Wally saw the marks of many booted feet: but, strangely, all were confined between two strands of red twine, strung along both sides of the path.

Before he could ask, Dr. Beaudry explained. “This path follows the footsteps of the discoverers, who, most fortunately, were very careful to disturb the cavern as little as possible. No one is permitted to step anywhere else. Look here.” He stopped and pointed to one side, his helmet light picking out the skull of a great cat, snarling at them from across uncounted years. “There are other skeletons of animals that found their way in but did not find their way out. There may well be skeletons of humans elsewhere. There could be tools the painters dropped, arrowheads, traces of pigment...a careless footstep could destroy something of immense scientific value.” He turned his attention back to the trail.

Still feeling a little breathless after the harrowing crawl through the tunnel, and fascinated by the sight of the cat skull, Wally lagged behind the other two, casting his helmet light across the floor in the hope of seeing some of those other skeletons Dr. Beaudry had mentioned. He spotted the small skulls of rodents, and what looked like a bird...and then, something else.

At the very limit of the light from his helmet, he glimpsed, stretched on the cavern floor, a dark shape that looked like...

...like a corpse
, his mind insisted.

Certainly the object was the right size and general shape of a human body. Not a skeleton, though, or there would be the gleam of bone. This person...if it
was
a person...was clothed. Had some spelunker found his way into the cavern and...?

Wally glanced toward Dr. Beaudry and Rex Major, still winding their way among the stalagmites. He opened his mouth to call out to them...and then closed it again.

He remembered the mysteriously flooded field outside.

Ariane had been there. He was sure of it. And if she had made it that close to the cavern, she surely would have found some way into it.

But Rex Major insisted she didn’t have the shard.

Which could mean....

A careless step could destroy something of inestimable scientific value, Dr. Beaudry had said, but in that moment, Wally didn’t care. Major and Beaudry were out of sight now, somewhere at the end of the path, either in the main cavern already or just around a bend. Heart in his throat, Wally stepped off the path and picked his way through the stalagmites toward that long, dark object.

The light from his helmet found a pale face, streaked with mud and blood, and he dashed the last few steps.

Ariane lay curled on her side, as still as death.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LOST AND FOUND

In her dreams, Ariane wandered, lost and alone, through an endless, empty wasteland, beneath skies swathed in funereal black.

Then...a glimmer of light. The clouds brightened to grey and swept open like a curtain. Silvery illumination streamed down all around her, and she reached up with a wondering hand toward the full moon...

Her eyes flickered open. Light stabbed her pupils and she cried out, wrenching her head to the side.

“Thank God,” said a voice. “I thought you were dead!”

Relief, joy and disbelief poured through her like the flood she had raised from the river. She twisted her head around again, squinting against the light. “Wally?”

“Shhh!” he hissed urgently. “They’ll hear.” He took off his helmet and set it to one side so that the beam angled away from them.

Ariane didn’t ask who “they” were; at that moment, she didn’t care. She sat up, threw her arms around Wally and hugged him as tightly as she could. He was warm and solid and smelled of chocolate and sweat and life, and she’d never been happier to see anyone.

Wally stiffened when she first grabbed him, then relaxed and hugged her back. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “You’re okay.” He pushed her away gently. “What happened?”

Ariane swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to order her thoughts. “I was in a pool, down below somewhere. I found a tunnel leading up toward the shard, but then I fell. I lost my backpack, my light...I’ve been crawling, feeling my way with my hands, trying to reach the shard, no light, no sound, no water, no...” She heard her voice quiver and felt her lip tremble. “I thought I would die down here, alone in the dark. How did you...?”

Wally hesitated. “Rex Major brought me,” he said at last.

Ariane gaped.
“What?”

Wally nervously glanced left. “He’s looking for the shard.”

“Rex Major
brought
you? How did you escape?”

“I didn’t,” Wally said. He sounded uncomfortable.

“But –”

“I came voluntarily,” Wally rushed on. “He’s...he’s trying to convince me that we shouldn’t trust the Lady. That we shouldn’t even be going after Excalibur, that it’s too dangerous for....”

“For who?” Anger rose inside her, and this time it came as much from herself as from the shard. “For
me?”

“For both of us. For everyone around us.” The pleading note in his voice grated on her like fingernails on a blackboard. “Ariane, Major says he can use the sword to make the world a better place. But if we give it to the Lady...that will be the end of magic.
All
magic. Are we sure that’s what we want?”

“‘Major says,’” Ariane mimicked. “And you believe him? The man who held a gun to your head just two weeks ago?”

“Ariane –”

“Major –
Merlin
– will say anything, do anything, to have Excalibur!” The shard sharpened her words.
“But he will...not...have it!”

Wally didn’t answer. He grabbed his helmet and leaped to his feet, jamming the helmet back on his head and tightening the chinstrap with a convulsive tug. As the light stabbed down at Ariane again, she jerked her head away to avoid being blinded.

“They’ll come back to look for me any second,” Wally said. “You should hide.”

“I have to find the shard,” Ariane retorted, still not looking at him. “I’m not going to hide. I’ll follow you, far enough behind that I can’t be seen.”

“But if Major gets the shard before you can....”

“He might get it,” Ariane said stubbornly, “but that doesn’t mean he can hold on to it.”