The Third Magic (12 page)

All in all, they scuffled inside the car for less than five minutes, at the end of which both of them lay back, exhausted, slick with blood, and bruised in all their joints from striking the hard parts of the automobile.

"Idiot," panted Titus.

"Asshole," breathed Pinto.

Thus was born a partnership between two men whose destinies would come to be entwined, in the unlikely yet inexorable way of fate, with the legend of King Arthur.

DESTINY

Puma Mountain, South Dakota

T
he sword's name was Excalibur
, from the Celtic
calad-bolg,
meaning "voracious."

It was magnificent, this hungry-bellied man-eater of a weapon, with its gold pommel studded with polished gemstones, its blade gleaming with its own cruel intelligence: a sword created, it was said, by the ancient gods themselves and given as birthright to the great King of the Celts.

"Can you see it?" Taliesin whispered.

In the black scrying mirror, dazzling now with moonlight, the sword stood shrouded in a film of what looked like smoke. "Yes," Arthur said, his eyes unblinking. "What's around it?"

"Rock."

"But I can see through it."

Taliesin's mouth closed into a thin line. "That's because it's a vision," he snapped. "You're looking not with the eyes of the senses, but of the soul. Don't be a dullard."

He struggled to maintain a stern expression, but inwardly the old man was whooping for joy. The boy was better than he had been four years ago, sharper, more intuitive, possessed of a capacity for vision and magic usually found only in trained druids.

Even Arthur Pendragon had not been able to see through a scrying mirror. The King had tried once or twice, at the Merlin's urging, but had quickly given up, muttering about feeling foolish.

But this one could see even through the rock!

"Concentrate," Taliesin said softly.

Arthur rubbed his hands over his face. "I'm sorry," he said, breaking the connection in the mirror. "I lost it."

The old man sighed. "It happens. Rest for a moment. The vision will come back." He leaned back, bracing himself with his long spindly arms. "Tell me, Arthur. Do you ever see this sort of thing on your own? That is, without trying?"

"I never try," Arthur said tersely, hoping that would be the end of the conversation.

It was true; he never tried to see beyond his normal senses. He never had to. Ever since the televised incident in New York, during which he had been in a kind of trance, episodes of uncanny clarity had been happening to him with increasing frequency. Mostly it had been small things: being able to find missing objects, or knowing when one of the farm animals was going to have trouble delivering its young. But there were stranger occurrences, too, such as the time a hired hand on the farm had died, and then had told Arthur in a dream where to find his family.

Or the girl.

No, not the girl, he thought, feeling himself sweating cold. The girl was not a vision. She was an indication of insanity.

Nameless yet familiar, she stole into his dreams and the timeless moments before sleep when everything seemed possible. She came again and again—not the vague, pneumatically breasted fantasy of a teenage boy who knew no females, but a rather conventionally pretty girl with gray-green eyes and the slender fingers of an artist. She seemed real, achingly, blood-poundingly real to him, so real that there had been nights when he had waited for her to come, prayed that she would. And then they would have conversations, sometimes desultory and trivial, sometimes burning with importance, outrage, tears. She would complain about her mother, or talk about God. It didn't matter. Arthur just liked to hear the sound of her voice.

When he spoke, he would tell her his plans for the future, and it also did not matter that he knew his plans would never materialize, because by then Arthur realized that the girl was not real, that she was no more than an outcropping of his growing madness.

He had read that schizophrenia often manifested in the young, bringing to promising lives barely begun a horror which no human being should have to live through. The disease was characterized by florid and utterly believable hallucinations, both visual and auditory....

It was her hair that informed him.

She rarely appeared with the same kind of hair. Sometimes it was blond and flowing, like a river of gold. At other times, the hair was hacked short, dyed jet black and sticking out in all directions. And there was a third version of this nameless, wonderful girl, too: a vision in veils and headpieces, or with long chestnut curls bound by ropes of gold and silver.

Yes, the hair. Only a lunatic would change the color of his dream lover's hair and never learn her name.

"Arthur?" The old man was peering into his face. "Do you want to tell me something?"

He inhaled sharply. "No. That is... No." His face turned toward the moon, enormous now, sitting fatly on the tops of trees beyond the mountain. "I just get confused sometimes." He spoke in a whisper. "It's as if I can't remember where I am. Maybe I'm still in there." He nodded toward the scrying mirror. "There, I mean."

"Oh, but that's good," Taliesin said. "It means the veil is getting thinner."

"Veil?"

"The veil between the worlds." Taliesin squatted on the rock, perfectly comfortable. "What you see is not merely another place, but another life."

"I know that." He looked away, muttering, "I also know that mental hospitals are filled with people who believe they're King Arthur."

"Now don't start that," Taliesin said. "Just because you're extraordinary doesn't mean you're mad."

The moon shimmered. Maybe the reason he was going insane was because he was constantly subjected to insanity, Arthur thought. If he could only go, just go, find a job, learn a trade, get a place to live, make some friends...

"Let me put it this way," the old man said, settling comfortably on the ground. "Every person on the planet has lived many times before. And most people remember those lives, or at least parts of them. How else would you explain a young Irish girl's fascination with Peruvian weavings, or a person in Iowa who is deathly afraid of water?" He smiled. "But they can't make sense of things because they won't allow themselves to believe the memories."

... Instead of always listening to how he had been the bloody High King Grand Poobah of the goddamned Dark Ages...

"Although, if the truth be told, most of the time, it's probably for the best that humans don't remember. Doesn't do much good for a house painter to recall that he used to be the Queen of Sheba, does it? Heh, heh." The old man smiled, savoring his little joke. "Anyway, it's different in your case. You see, Arthur Pendragon's life was unfinished. You were killed by magic. In the karmic scheme of things, the death didn't really count." He waved a hand in front of Arthur's blank face. "I say, are you quite sure you feel all right?"

Arthur forced himself to pay attention. "Yes, I'm fine." He took a deep breath. "So you're saying that because something interfered with his—that is, my—former life, and made me die before my time, I got another life to make up for it?"

"Just so. At the time, everyone knew you'd come back. Even the Christians, although I don't know how they reconciled that with their belief that people are permitted only one body through all eternity." He shrugged. "Odd new religion, that." He tapped the scrying mirror. "Let's continue, shall we? What else do you see?"

Arthur frowned as he stared into the smoky vision. "Nothing. Woods." He looked at Taliesin. "Where is this place?"

"Camelot," the old man answered with relish. The boy was perfect. "You're looking at Camelot, before the castle was built. The spot where the sword came from is very sacred. It's said to be the burial site of ancient heroes, watched over by the Cailleach herself."

"The what?"

"The Cailleach. She's a goddess, very old, known sometimes as the Wild Hag. According to Celtic lore, it was she who made the very mountains of Britain."

"Did you worship her when you were a druid?" Arthur asked.

"Not really. She was too old, even back in the fifth century. No one knew much about her, not even what she represented or how she was worshipped in the time before time. No, the Cailleach is one of the truly ancient gods."

"Did she put Excalibur there?"

He shrugged. "Perhaps. No one knows. But it was put there for you." He smiled. "For the Great King."

Arthur closed his eyes. He was getting a headache. "Taliesin ..." His voice caught.

"Yes, Arthur?"

"What if... Well, what if I don't want to take up that life again?"

The old man sat back, aghast. "I beg your pardon?

"I mean, Arthur Pendragon was a great man, there's no doubt about that. He united the Celtic tribal kingdoms. Got rid of the Saxons. Brought order out of the chaos of post-Roman Britain. But..."

"But what?"

Arthur looked levelly into the old man's eyes. "That's the point. All that's been done. It doesn't need to be done again."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about
me
, Taliesin! Arthur Blessing, Boy Nobody. Why can't that be enough?"

"Nonsense." The old man waved him away with a smile.

Arthur clasped his hand. "No, don't dismiss me." He made sure Taliesin was listening before he went on. "Look, I appreciate all that you and Hal have done for me, but I think it's time for me to go."

"Go?" The old man was genuinely perplexed. "Go where?"

Arthur released his hand, smiled, shrugged. "Wherever," he said mildly. "That's how most people's lives go. They're free to choose what they want to do with their time on earth."

Taliesin looked stunned. "That may be true for them, but good heavens, child, you're the King of the Celts. You can't just go wandering off like some bohemian."

Arthur breathed deeply, trying to be patient. "Be reasonable, Taliesin. This isn't England, and it isn't the fifth century. What do you imagine I would be King of? Jones County, South Dakota?"

"That's not for me to say, Arthur. Your destiny would determine that."

"But my destiny is what I decide it is."

The old man hesitated. "I'm afraid not," he said. "That is... Well, it might not be as easy as you think to live as Arthur Blessing."

"Why wouldn't it?"

Taliesin exhaled noisily. "It's rather difficult to explain. That is, actually, it's nothing to do with..." His face reddened. "Oh, dash it all, Highness, Arthur Blessing doesn't exist!"

Arthur blanched. "What?" He tried to laugh, but the attempt was unsuccessful.

"Don't you see, you
are
King Arthur. Then or now, that is who you are, and all that you arc. You came here to finish out that life, that destiny. And whatever you might do, that destiny would catch up with you."

"Are you saying I can never live a normal life, no matter what I do?" The boy looked stricken.

"Come now, you're acting as if you'd come down with the plague!" Taliesin said cheerfully. "It took a lot of magic to get you here, you know."

"Then undo it," Arthur demanded.

"Now see here. You're hardly mature enough to make a decision of his magnitude—"

"I said undo it!" Arthur shouted. "I want my life, my own life, whether you think it's worthwhile or not. Now undo whatever spell you put on me and Hal and the rest of them!"

A terrible silence stretched between them like a chasm. "I can't," the old man said at last. "That magic can't be undone. Centuries have passed. The lives of all the knights have been suspended. And Hal..."

Arthur stood up.

"Oh, do try to understand," Taliesin said, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder. Arthur shrugged it off.

"It'll all be fine, you'll see...."

Arthur turned to face him, his eyes filling with tears and rage. "I always knew there was something wrong with me," he whispered hoarsely. "Something not quite normal. I thought I was just crazy. But this . . ." He backed away, stumbling.

"Arthur—"

"Get away from me!" He turned and ran down the mountain, tripping over loose rock, skinning his legs as he bolted away from the nightmare truth of his existence.

"Don't be a fool!" Taliesin called after him. "You have an opportunity never before granted to anyone! You can pick up your life where you left off, don't you see? You can live again!"

But the boy was not listening. He was running, still believing that he could run away.

The old man sighed. Humans, even kings, always had to learn things the hard way.

THE ARAB AND THE MORON

St. Francis Hospital, Rapid City, South Dakota

T
he two FBI agents passed
the object between them over Hal, who was sitting up in bed. "Object" was the word they had decided to use to describe the thing Hal had called them in for, the thing he had picked up near the spot where the cream-colored Cadillac had stopped.

It had been flung out of the car during the sixty seconds or so when everything had seemed to happen at once: Gawain's spear had hit the crazy biker on the shoulder, sending him spinning out of control until he struck the side of the Cadillac at almost the same time Lugh's fifteen-inch mace tore a hole through the automobile's roof.

What had occurred then, which no one saw, was that the mace had smashed open the locked case in the Cadillac's back seat. When Pinto hit the car, the now-opened case bounced upward toward the point of impact while the object—a small metal thing weighing less than two ounces and shaped vaguely like the midsection of a miniature trumpet—was propelled out the window at approximately the same moment that Pinto was being propelled in.

To anyone else, including the local police, the object would have been something of no concern, but Hal knew better. For one thing, it was made of extremely lightweight metal, with no rough edges, meaning that it had been worked and polished by hand. For another, it was made of a single piece. No welds. A die had been specially made to produce it. From those two facts, Hal was ready to deduce that there were very few of these objects around. Maybe only one.

"What do you think? Titanium?" One of the agents held the faintly key-shaped object up to the light.

"Something like that," Hal said. "Ben'll be able to tell you, if he's still in the lab."

The agent smiled. "Oh, he's still there, all right. They'd let the director go before him."

Ben was the man in charge of the FBI laboratories. He had been working in the lab since before Hal came in as a new recruit. Hal had been gone for more than ten years now. The agent who had been called into the hospital to talk to Hal had worked briefly with him long ago.

"So, you doing all right?" the agent asked awkwardly. It was common knowledge, Hal supposed, that he'd burned out like a rocket in the FBI and turned into every agent's worst nightmare: a drunk with no connections.

"Yeah, I've been okay," Hal said. In fact, those bad times had only gone on for a year or two. Then he had found Arthur Blessing.

But he could never tell this man who used to be his peer what had happened.
Oh, well, yes, while I was busy drinking myself to death, I ran into this kid who is the reincarnation of King Arthur, and everyone was trying to kill him because he had the Holy Grail with him, see, only now that's not a problem because the Grail's buried in a well in upstate New York, and the Knights of the Round Table
have come back from the dead to look after him.

Oh, yes. That would go over big.

"Say, didn't we see something like this once?"

"At JFK," Hal said, remembering. And then he knew: "It's a detonator," he said.

"Christ, yes. The bomb in the engine of the 747. It was one of the Arab's jobs."

Hal shrugged. "Never proven." The Arab only meant one Arab, the most famous Arab in the world to anyone involved in counter-terrorism.

"Never caught, you mean," the younger agent said, loosening up in the presence of the two veterans. "And now he's in the States."

"Oh?"

The other agent gave his partner a look indicating that he had said too much in front of a civilian.

"So what's around here that anyone would want?" Hal asked. No one answered him. "Except for the nuclear silos at Warren," he remembered.

The older FBI agent took out his cell phone and dialed. "Bingo," he said, gesturing with two fingers for the detonator.

Hal handed it over. "The only problem with that theory is that the Arab wasn't on the field where I found that thing," he said. "No one was, except for my guys and that crazy trigger-happy cracker."

"And the witness," the younger agent said.

Hal tried to bring up the image of the man in the cream-colored Cadillac. Blond, handsome, thin-faced, expensive clothes.  "The witness," he repeated slowly.

The older agent punched in the number he was calling again. "Goddamned switchboard," he muttered. "Hey, what was that guy's name, you remember?" he called out. "The Arab."

"Bayat," Hal said. "Hassam Bayat."

"A
n undisclosed number of
Special Forces troops poured into Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, earlier today. Although the Air Force would not comment on the operation, several sources have speculated that the ultra-top security site has been targeted for destruction by international terrorist Hassam Bayat, who orchestrated last year's bombings in downtown London...."

They found the detonator,
Titus thought, feeling sick. When he had first discovered that it was missing, he had hoped that the small metal object would go unnoticed in a litter-filled campsite. But the Yanks, despite their continued blundering over the fictitious Hassam Bayat, got lucky.

Now the mission would be delayed by several months, and there was nothing for Titus to do except get out of the country before the Feds traced him through the detonator.

He got up off the motel room bed with a groan and limped to the dresser on which he had placed his valise. Inside was a bottle of scotch—the one luxury he afforded himself while working, and for which he was now most grateful.

He poured himself a glass. It hurt to swallow, but the effect was worth it.

Pinto was running a shower in the bathroom. The stall would look like a pig had been slaughtered in it when he was done, Wolfe thought with a sigh.

It had not been difficult to convince Pinto that Titus himself was a fugitive from the law, and would therefore stay away from the police. He had made up a story about killing his wife somewhere in southern California. Pinto, in return, had boasted about the murder of the four physicians in Sturgis, a disgusting-sounding affair that would doubtless result in Pinto's execution.

Pinto was a common lout; he couldn't be trusted to do anything more than get caught. It had just been a matter of sheer misfortune that Titus had even encountered the creature in the first place.

Now, two cars and a hundred miles later, they had settled into a fleabag motel to clean themselves up. Titus had some spare clothing, so he would be able to throw away the bloody things he'd been wearing at the accident. Pinto, naturally, had nothing besides the shirt on his back, which was now in the shower with him.

Titus threw down a second scotch with irritation. Nothing had gone right. Absolutely nothing.

First, there was the detonator. Even if it were still in his possession, the bomb it was designed to explode would be impossible to assemble, since the other components had been rendered useless after being bludgeoned by a mace.

A
mace,
he thought with wonder. Who were those lunatics? Pinto swore he had never seen them before today.

"But one of them smelled like a cop," he had insisted.

The dolt. When asked if the fellow's smell was what had prompted Pinto to start a knife fight against a gang of twelve, he had only shrugged and shown his horrendous teeth.

Titus had wanted to pull them out of the man's head, one by one. If it weren't for Wolfe's injury, he'd have gotten rid of Pinto hours ago. The very thought of sharing a bathroom, even a bloody and temporary one, with such a cretin was enough to make him retch.

One of them smelled like a cop.
Titus couldn't get Pinto's words out of his mind.

Was it possible that those fools on motorcycles were agents of some sort who had been waiting for him?

Of course not, he decided. Think about their weapons. Swords, spears,
pikes,
for God's sake! It had been like walking into a Shakespearean play. No, they couldn't have known anything. Literally. Titus had, he concluded, simply had the misfortune to encounter some sort of club for extremely stupid men.

By now, the authorities had probably found the car and determined that its driver had been killed and dumped somewhere. A search of the Cadillac's provenance would reveal that its owner, a merchant of surfing equipment, had vanished from Venice Beach, California, two months before. The discovery of the car would render that case closed and Titus a free man.

But then, someone had found the detonator. That changed everything. But Titus did not pursue the idea. There was no point in worrying unnecessarily, particularly since he was on his way out of the U.S.

He had given himself two avenues of escape. There was a car waiting for him in northern Montana in which he could cross over the Canadian border, if he wanted to leave now.

That option was out. If the Feds were sending troops in to Cheyenne, they would be watching the northern border.

The second escape route was much more complicated, and involved traveling across the United States, as well as three weeks of waiting. This was the backup plan Titus had devised in case things got sticky.

Well, it seemed they had.

The boat named
Sea Legs
would be docked at a pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the end of the month. Richard Edgington would sail Titus to Panama on it. A roundabout route, but fairly safe, particularly since the mission at Warren had not even been attempted.

He would go by train to New York, then pass the time at a good hotel, perhaps the Pierre. It was small enough to be intimate, but lacked nothing. Even with the wound on his neck, he would be able to spend an enjoyable ten days.

At that moment, a photograph of a police sketch flashed on the television. Titus gasped as he recognized his own face.

"Police are looking for two men in connection with an episode of mayhem on the highways near Sturgis, South Dakota," the announcer said.

Only then did Titus notice that there was another face on the screen besides his own. He had no idea who it was.

Then he heard a low chuckling. It was Pinto, naked and dripping from his shower. "Them police drawings ain't never no good," he chortled.

"The one of me seems to bear a likeness," Titus said bitterly.

Pinto nodded. "Yep, now you mention it. Guess sometimes they hit it right." He looked over at the Englishman and laughed.

"Both men were wounded in the scuffle. One has an injured hand. The other sustained a wound to the neck," the announcer went on.

Titus touched the heavy gauze bandage beneath his chin.

"They think you was in on it," Pinto drawled, his eyes crinkled in amusement.

No mention was made of the fact that Titus had merely been driving by during the incident.

"Anyone spotting either of these men is urged to contact the FBI." A phone number flashed across the screen.

"Didn't I say the one was a cop?" Pinto gloated.

The FBI," Titus whispered. The lunatics with the swords had been agents, after all. And they had remembered his face well enough to put together an accurate composite.

"Which one was the cop?" Titus asked, abstracted.

"The one on the ground. Shot him through the belly," Pinto said.

"He'd be in hospital, then."

Pinto looked up, frowning for a moment until he understood. "Yeah," he said, grinning. "Easy pickings."

Titus examined his face in a mirror. He would have to do something about his appearance, and quickly. Some hair color, a beard, perhaps. A pair of drugstore glasses. He would need someone to obtain those things for him. And drive him.

His gaze rested reluctantly on Pinto, who lit a cigarette. Titus hated smoking.

"How is your hand?" he asked.

"Fine," Pinto answered. He had taped the knife wound. A pair of thin gloves would cover it. Not that anyone would recognize his face from the poor police sketch, anyway.

Titus rested his head in his hands. He had never had to rely on anyone before. And now, in his hour of need, fate had sent as his partner the most stupid, barbarous, unstable human being he had ever met.