Song of the Sword (24 page)

Then the pickup pulled up on the opposite side of the pile, and the two men got out of it and walked toward the pond in which she’d materialized, leaving the truck running. Almost without thinking, she leaped up and ran. The men shouted as she darted past, but they were slow, way too slow, and before they had closed half the distance back to the truck she was in the driver’s seat. Grateful for the Driver’s Ed she’d had in her last semester at her previous school, she jammed the transmission into drive and shoved her foot down hard. In the rearview mirror she saw the men duck as the spinning tires hurled gravel in their faces, then she fishtailed the truck around and headed for the centre of the pit...and the shard of Excalibur.

“All security personnel!” the radio squawked. “Intruder in the pit – she’s just grabbed Pickup 27. Stop her!”

She ignored the voice. All that mattered was the shard, calling her, pulling her to it. Its song filled her mind, flooding out all fear. In minutes it would be hers. She floored the accelerator. There were pits and piles of rock to maneuver around, and she attacked the winding path like a rally driver, spewing gravel and dusty snow at every turn. A bulldozer backed into her path, and she spun the wheel savagely to the left, then to the right, catching a glimpse of the driver’s wide eyes as the pickup’s right-side mirror snapped off against the bulldozer’s rear end. She skidded and roared on.

In the centre of the pit, the giant mining shovel continued to dig and roar, like some prehistoric monster.

She was heading straight for it.

~ • ~

Drezner and Wally’s staring contest in the Visitor Orientation Centre was interrupted by the crackle of Drezner’s walkie-talkie. “All security personnel! Intruder in the pit – she’s just grabbed Pickup 27. Stop her!”

Drezner swore and jumped to his feet. He grabbed Wally’s arm and hustled him back outside to the pickup truck they’d arrived in, shoving him through the passenger door so hard he sprawled across the seat. “Hey, not so rough!” Wally protested. Drezner slammed the door on him, then dashed around the front of the pickup. As Wally pulled himself upright, Drezner threw open the door on the driver’s side and clambered in.

“She escaped from me,” Drezner snarled, twisting the ignition key as though he’d like to break it off. “If anyone’s going to get her back, it’s going to be me.”

Wally grinned. “Good luck. She’s pretty slippery.” Drezner shot him a fierce glare, then slammed the pickup into drive and stomped down hard on the gas pedal.

“She’s heading for the centre of the pit,” said the radio. Then, “She’s going to get herself killed if she doesn’t watch out!”

~ • ~

Ariane wasn’t unaware of the gigantic digging machine looming over her, but it seemed unreal, unimportant. What was real, what mattered, was the shard singing in her head, calling to her, calling to the blood and the power of the Lady of the Lake, its creator and guardian. And then that song became an overwhelming shout that flooded her senses so thoroughly it almost blotted out the world around her. She slammed on the brakes as the inside of the truck faded from her vision and the roaring of the giant shovel subsided to a faint growl.

The only thing that remained clear and sharp in her vision was the last great gash in the gravel made by the shovel. The giant bucket’s edge had caught and lifted the end of an enormous slab of rock within that gash, and water glittered in the dark space underneath.

And in that water...

She threw open the door of the pickup and stepped in
side a deepening shadow that suddenly made it hard to see beneath the slab. Annoyed, she looked up to see what was blocking the light – and fear burst through the song of the sword, trapping her breath inside her chest.

The huge steel bucket was dropping toward her for another bite of gravel, far too fast for her to leap out of the way.

What happened next was out of her conscious control, pure survival instinct, the ancient imperative to draw on every resource the body could command when death threatened. Driven by adrenaline and terror, the power of the Lady reached out for the nearest water – and found the pool beneath the huge rock slab that sheltered the first shard of Excalibur.

The water exploded out of its hiding place, lifting the slab as easily as a gust of wind would lift a leaf. Thick mud splattered the ground around Ariane, but not a drop touched her. The slab smashed into the descending bucket with an earsplitting crash, driving it up and backward, shifting the whole massive shovel over the lip of the shallow slope to its right. Cables snapped, whining like angry bees as they wrapped themselves around the shovel’s structure. The rock slab crashed to the ground just metres from Ariane, shaking the earth. The shovel, unbalanced, began to tip. The operator scrambled out and jumped clear just as it fell ponderously onto its side down the slope, where it lay, twisted and useless.

Ariane had already forgotten about it. Now that she had removed the slab, Excalibur’s song slammed into her mind with as much force as the slab had slammed into the shovel. Her knees buckled. She dropped to all fours, then scrambled to the edge of the gaping hole the shovel had just opened, drawn like a moth to a candle flame.

Every drop of water had exploded out of the hole and left it bone-dry. She slid down the slope on her rear, landing on her feet in a cloud of dust.

In the middle of the hole, sunlight gleamed off the black, glassy surface of an obsidian box the size of a jewelry case. Ariane knelt beside it, wondering how to open it – but the moment she touched it, it clicked and the lid lifted.

Nestled inside a bed of fibrous dust that might once have been cloth was a sharply pointed piece of age-pitted and darkened steel, about twenty centimetres long and a bit under four centimetres wide, honed on two sides, and broken off at the top.

Ariane reached for it. The instant she touched the shard, its already nearly overwhelming song crescendoed to such a fortissimo of joy and delight that, dazed, she fell ungracefully – and painfully – onto her bottom.

But as quickly as the song had climaxed, it quieted, as if the shard were relieved to have returned to the hands of the Lady of the Lake.

Or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The cessation of the shard’s song brought the reality of her situation crashing down on Ariane. She had the shard, but Security had Wally, Rex Major had probably realized by now what she was up to, and she had just destroyed a very large and very valuable piece of equipment.

Just how much do giant mining shovels cost, anyway?

She had to somehow elude Major, find Wally, and get both of them back to Regina. After that...

After that, she didn’t have a clue.

But first things first.

She clambered up the hole’s dusty slope to the floor of the pit. There she pulled herself to her feet, brushed herself off, and finally looked up, intending to get back into her pickup –

– only to see
three
pickups blocking her way, and, standing between her and all of them, Rex Major, his left arm wrapped around Wally’s chest, his right hand pressing a pistol to Wally’s head.

~ • ~

Rex Major had seen the extraordinary eruption of water, mud and rock smash into the giant shovel, and despite himself, had been impressed. At the peak of his powers, he might have been able to manage such a feat, but not anymore.

Once he had Excalibur whole and in his possession, of course, all that would change – and the first shard of Excalibur had to be right at the girl’s feet. Why else would she have stopped where she had, beneath the giant shovel’s bucket?

He roared along one of the winding roads leading to the pit’s centre. A glance at the rearview mirror showed him the other pickup; it was close enough that he could tell who was in it – the massive security guard, Drezner, and the girl’s young companion, the boy who was so resistant to his Voice of Command.

When he looked ahead, he saw the girl had moved into the pit dug by the shovel. She might be putting her hands on the shard at that very moment.

He glanced at the rearview mirror again, and bared his teeth in a feral smile.

She won’t have it for long!

~ • ~

The destruction of the shovel made Drezner swear and Wally’s jaw drop. Even after everything he had seen Ariane
do, he had never imagined she had
that
kind of power. It frightened him a little – heck, more than a little.
I’ve gotta warn Flish to lay off her, or I may just find myself short a sister!

“Damn thing must have hit an Artesian well or something,” Drezner muttered. “I hope your
sister
is still alive.”

“She’s alive.” Wally had glimpsed her momentarily, before she dropped out of sight into the hole dug by the shovel.
But she may not stay that way for much longer
, he thought, his eyes shifting to Major’s pickup ahead of them.

The two trucks raced across the bottom of the mine pit and braked to a halt within a few metres of each other, next to the mud-covered pickup Ariane had been driving.

As Drezner leaned forward to lift the microphone from the truck’s two-way radio, Major burst out of his vehicle and ran toward them. “Drez!” Wally warned.

Drezner, his back to Major, hushed Wally with an impatient chop of his hand and spoke into the mike. “Security Five here. She’s in the pit, down in the hole the shovel just dug. Looks like the shovel is a complete write-off. I’ll go down there and –”

But just what he’d go down there and do, Wally never heard, for at that moment Major reached the pickup, jerked open the driver’s-side door, and snapped one word at Drezner:
“
Sleep
.”

Drezner closed his eyes mid-word and slumped in his seat.

“Security Five?” the radio squawked. “Security Five, come in! Drez, what’s going on? All our cameras in the pit just went out!”

Major reached inside the cab and pulled Drezner’s pistol from its holster, then looked at Wally. His gaze, as blue and cold as a January sky, chilled Wally, who turned and tried to grab the door handle. But Major dashed around the front of the truck and, just as Wally started to push the door, the sorcerer grabbed it and jerked it wide open. Wally tumbled out onto the gravelly ground in a bruised and undignified heap.

Major hauled him to his feet –
Shouldn’t a centuries-old man be at least a
little
bit frail?
Wally thought resentfully – as the wizard twisted his arm behind his back. “You’re too late,” Wally gasped. “She already has the shard by now.”

“She may have it, but she won’t keep it.” Major began frog-marching him toward the edge of the hole into which Ariane had disappeared. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for fifteen hundred years. With Excalibur, I can return to my own world and free it from millennia of tyranny. I’m not going to let you, her, or anyone else on Earth stand in my way.”

As if on cue, Ariane’s head reappeared above the lip of the hole. Merlin pulled Wally into a bear hug with his left arm while his right hand pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the boy’s cheek. The cold, hard metal dug into the skin, the pressure so hard it made the bone beneath ache.

Ariane climbed out of the hole, dusted herself off, straightened, saw them – and froze.

~ • ~

Rex Major’s face had taken on a harsh, angular appearance, as though the ancient skull beneath his skin had somehow come to the fore. The ruby stud in his right earlobe looked less like the affectation of a modern businessman and more like the barbarous display of an ancient warrior. No one who knew him from his corporate publicity photos would have recognized him. His colleagues and employees would have crossed the street to avoid him.

Unfortunately, Ariane didn’t have that option.

“Give the shard to me,”
Major said in a voice like broken glass.
“Or the boy dies.”

The Lady’s power registered the Voice of Command – and casually parried its feeble thrust. But the power could not protect Wally. Ariane could see how the gun’s pressure against Wally’s cheek had driven the blood from his skin so that, once again, his freckles stood out like a leopard’s spots. She knew that Major would not hesitate to pull the trigger to get what he wanted.

“This whole pit must be on camera,” she said. “And there are workers down here. They’ll see you threatening Wally. You can’t –”

“I have more power than you think,” Major said. “The cameras are not working. The witnesses can see nothing but haze and dust. No one will rescue you.”

Ariane reached inside herself for her own power, the power that moments ago had been able to hurl tonnes of rock into the air...and found nothing.

She didn’t have enough energy left to move a raindrop.

If the Lady were to be believed, it would be a disaster for the world if Rex Major were to re-forge Excalibur. She’d told Wally herself in the Human Bean that Merlin would be the worst tyrant in all of history.

But he was holding a gun to her best friend’s – her only friend’s – head.

It’s only one shard.

There were other shards. There would be other opportunities to stop Merlin.