Song of the Sword (13 page)

“Ariane!” Aunt Phyllis snapped.

“Sorry, Aunt Phyllis. I just...um...this is something we could use for our project.” Ariane plopped the paper down between her and Wally, and they scanned it together.

TORONTO (Staff) - Rex Major, president of Excalibur Computer Systems, has scheduled a visit to the Thunderhill Diamonds mine in the Northwest Territories for this weekend, the
Financial Post
learned yesterday. News of the trip has sparked speculation that Rex Major Industries (RMI) may be planning to invest in Thunderhill Diamonds, Inc., which owns and operates the mine.

Even though representatives of RMI insisted that the visit will be “strictly personal,” stock prices for Thunderhill have risen sharply since yesterday.

“Mr. Major has long had an interest in the Canadian diamond mining industry, and decided to see for himself how the gems are extracted,” said Thomas Horton, RMI’s Director of Communications. “Nothing more should be read into it.” Horton emphasized that Major will be making the visit alone, with no support staff.

Some financial analysts, however, were not convinced by the company’s disclaimer. “Rex Major doesn’t do anything for purely personal reasons,” said...

Ariane got to her feet. “We should get back to work.”

“Huh? Uh, I mean, yeah, right, we should.” Wally turned to Aunt Phyllis. “Thank you for the cookies and cocoa, Ms. Forsythe.” He pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “They were delicious.”

Aunt Phyllis looked at the newspaper, raised an eyebrow, then looked from Wally to Ariane and back again. “Was it something I said?”

“Of course not, Aunt Phyllis,” Ariane said. “But we
are
trying to get this assignment done and I, uh, just had an idea.” She picked up the paper. “May I take this?”

“Of course.” Aunt Phyllis shook her head. “Although how you’re going to work the
Financial Post
into a presentation on King Arthur – for English class, wasn’t it? – I can’t quite imagine.” She smiled at Wally, who was looking at the plate of cookies with regret. “We can have more cookies and cocoa later, before Wally goes home, if you like.”

Wally brightened. “Great! Uh, I mean, thanks!”

Ariane gave Aunt Phyllis a smile that belonged in a toothpaste commercial. “Back to work!” She ran up the stairs two steps at a time. Wally followed her, but not before giving Aunt Phyllis a sheepish grin.

When they were safely upstairs again, Ariane tossed the newspaper onto her bed. Wally pointed at it. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

Ariane nodded, her face flushed with excitement. “I think so. When I said I know where the first shard of Excalibur is, I meant I know in a kind of general way. When we did the, um, ‘meditation ritual,’ I could hear it singing in my mind, and I could sort of tell where it was coming from. North. A long, long way north. I figured if we went north…somehow…maybe as we got closer I could pin it down more precisely. But maybe we just got a break. If Rex Major really is Merlin –”

“I’m sure he is,” Wally said.

“Well,
if
he is, and out of the blue he’s suddenly decided to visit a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories, all by himself, then...”

“You figure the shard is at the mine.”

“Or close by.”

Wally nodded. “Okay. Which brings us to the next question.” He stabbed at the picture of the Thunderhill Diamond Mine with his finger. “How do we get there?”

A long pause, while Ariane chewed on her lower lip. Finally, she said, “I’ve...got an idea.”

Wally raised an eyebrow. “You don’t sound convinced it’s a
good
idea.”

“I’m not. I...I need to think about it some more.”

“So think out loud. But think fast, because Rex Major –
Merlin – is headed there –,” he pointed at the picture of the mine again, “ – this weekend. Which is, like,
now
.”

Ariane shook her head. “I don’t want to say more until I know it’ll work.” Wally opened his mouth to protest, but Ariane plunged ahead. “No, Wally. I need to try this on my own.”

Wally took a deep breath. “All right. You’re the Lady –”

“Don’t call me that!”

“– the one with the power, then. Is that better?”

From the look Ariane gave him, it wasn’t.

“But we’re supposed to be in this together, don’t forget.”
Or are we, really?
he wondered. The Lady had only
intended
to enlist Ariane. He’d been an afterthought, someone who had just happened by at the right – or maybe wrong – time. If this was the Fellowship of the Sword, he might be more Bill the Pony than Samwise Gamgee.

“If it works, I’ll tell you right away.” Ariane
sounded
as if she meant it.

“So what do we do for the rest of the evening? I can’t leave if we’re supposed to be working on some giant school project.”

“We need to learn everything we can about Rex Major.” Ariane indicated the computer. “How are you at Googling?”

Wally grinned, stretched out his arms and cracked his knuckles. “Try me!” But just as he was about to start typing, he stopped. “What about the warning?”

Ariane went over the window and peered out through the blinds. The street was deserted. “Nobody parked outside,” she said. “I think we’re safe.”

Wally still hesitated. “Well,” he said at last, “I suppose when you come right down to it, all he did was light up the monitor like a searchlight and throw Darth Vader’s voice at us. And it’s just a computer, isn’t it? It’s not like he can make it blow up.” He shrugged, and started typing.

Nothing strange or magical happened, and within minutes, they were scanning through a list of hundreds of websites, news stories and magazine articles about Rex Major. But despite the apparent wealth of information, precise biographical details were scarce.

Rex Major had been born in England, but no one knew when he’d come to North America. He hadn’t invented the Excalibur software, but he had seen its potential and bought the original version from its creator, a man named Charles Wyndham. No one could understand why Wyndham had sold it outright for such a piddling sum: he’d never explained and died soon afterward. (Wally exchanged an alarmed glance with Ariane when they read that.)

Major lived in Toronto. He wasn’t married, and he had no living relatives. He seemed completely focused on business – the analyst who had said “Rex Major doesn’t do anything for personal reasons” hadn’t been exaggerating – but he was also very generous and gave to numerous charities. He donated to all political parties equally; his own political convictions, if any, were a mystery. The only public comments he made concerned the activities of his company.

He was, in short, nothing more than a PR image. After almost an hour of digging, Wally shoved the mouse away in disgust. “He’s hiding himself in plain sight. Which makes me even surer we’re right. It’s just what you’d expect from a wizard. But it doesn’t help us.”

Ariane was sitting on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands, looking gloomy. “He has unlimited resources, he’s focused and ruthless, and if he’s Merlin, then he has his own magic – which he may be able to piggyback on the Internet, so it’s just about everywhere. And the only thing stopping him from taking over the world is...us?”

“He doesn’t stand a chance,” Wally said with a straight face.

Ariane stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. Wally joined in. Aunt Phyllis chose that moment to stick her head in again. “All done?”

Ariane grinned. “Checking up on us, Aunt Phyllis?”

Wally felt himself blushing, an annoyingly familiar sensation.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Aunt Phyllis said primly.

Ariane chuckled. “It’s all right. Wally was just going home.”

Wally blinked. “I was?”

Ariane gave him a dirty look.

“Oh. Right. I was.” He stood up. “So, um, you’ll tell me how that...thing…works out?”

“As soon as I can try it.”

“Try what?” said Aunt Phyllis.

“Something on the computer,” Ariane said.

“Ms. Forsythe?” said Wally.
Time to change the subject.

“Yes, Wally?”

“May I have just one more chocolate chip cookie, to go?”

Aunt Phyllis laughed. “Of course, Wally.”

A few minutes later Wally was on his way, one half-eaten cookie in his right hand, a second in a plastic baggie in his left. He stopped by the leaning gnome beneath the spruce and looked back up at Ariane’s room.
Just what is she going to try?

The light went out in her bedroom, and came on behind the tiny bathroom window next to it.

Whatever it is, I hope she’s careful.

Munching his cookie, he headed home.

~ • ~

As soon as the door closed behind Wally, Ariane turned to head upstairs. Before she climbed the first step, though, Aunt Phyllis said, “Did you learn a lot about King Arthur?”

“Some,” Ariane said. “We’ve still got work to do.”

“So you’ll be seeing more of Wally?” Aunt Phyllis sounded as if she was trying a little too hard to be casual. Ariane kept her own face as bland as she could.

“I guess so.” She put her foot on the stairs. “I think I’ll take a shower, then go to bed.”

After a moment of silence, as though weighing her next words carefully, Aunt Phyllis sighed and said, “All right, dear.”

Feeling a bit like she’d dodged an arrow, Ariane climbed to the second floor. She reached into her bedroom to turn off the light, then went into the bathroom, locked the door, and started the shower, adjusting the water until it had a nice, pleasant warmth. She stared at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look like a powerful sorceress.

She widened her eyes and bared her teeth in a horrible grimace.

She still didn’t.

But she couldn’t deny what she had done to Felicia and friends. She couldn’t deny that she had seen and spoken to the Lady of the Lake, a figure that existed only in myth – or so everyone thought. She couldn’t deny that someone in a white Ford Focus was stalking her. She couldn’t deny that someone calling himself Merlin had sent her a warning, telling her not to meddle in his business.

But most of all, she couldn’t deny the song of the sword, humming away in the back of her head. The first shard of Excalibur pulled at her as though it were a magnet and she a compass needle. She wanted that shard, wanted to hold it, wanted to hear its full-throated song filling her mind instead of the faint, faint echo that was all she could hear now. That song excited her in a way she couldn’t describe, even to herself, and certainly not to Wally. She had accepted the Lady’s power in the hope it might help her find her mother, and that was still her hope: but now that the power was hers, she had to have the shard for its own sake. She could no more turn away from the quest she had been given than she could stop breathing.

That shard of Excalibur belonged to
her
, not to Merlin –
and she intended to claim it.

And she was certain that the power the Lady had bequeathed could get her to the Thunderhill Diamond Mine...

...
if
she could figure out how to use it.

While talking to Wally she had remembered how she had felt in his kitchen, how it had seemed the water would have taken her with it down the drain, if only she had let it. And that had been
before
she had fully accepted the Lady’s power. Now she not only intended to let it take her, she intended to
insist
that it take her.

She stared at her rather pale-looking face in the mirror, wished it good luck, then turned to the shower and stuck her hands into the spray.

The power inside her blossomed like a flower at the water’s touch, revealing colors she had never seen before and crevices she longed to explore.

But for now there was just one part of that flower she wanted to examine. She closed her eyes to concentrate on the feel of the liquid on her skin. Just as she had in Wally’s kitchen, she felt it flowing away from her, into the pipes, then into the sewer, off into the distance. She let her mind follow it, but it would only go so far before something held it back.

Oh, of course! My body. I can’t leave it behind...

So she took it with her.

Suddenly she was rushing through the pipes at tremendous speed, following the water, not exactly seeing where it went – what was there to see inside a pitch-black sewer pipe? – but feeling the shape of the pipes it flowed through, feeling the water’s unfocused frustration at being constrained. It wanted, in some elemental fashion, to be free, free of pipes and holding tanks and filters and grates, free to caress mud and sand and rock and ice, fish and fowl and weed and whale, to splash or crash against the shore, to form clouds in the sky and fall to the earth as rain. Whatever constraints humankind might place on it, water always found a path back into the natural world, seeping, splashing, puddling…and everywhere it went, she could go too she realized – and did, in a rush that would have been breathtaking if she had still been breathing. For a moment she felt confused and lost, her mind a whirl of wave and foam, black depths and sunlit shallows...