They arrived in an empty stone room.
Merlin appeared immediately. For once, he looked like a real wizard. He was dressed in a long, crisp linen cloak, and he had a knotted wooden pendant hanging from a long silver chain around his neck, and he wore simple leather sandals. No pointy hat, but that didn’t matter, because his head tattoos were alive with anticipation and enchantment.
The old wizard barely noticed the battered and exhausted party as he demanded greedily, “Well, do you have it? Where is it?”
Kay yelled, “What? Look at Artie, Gramps!”
And the wizard did look, and Kay could tell that his eyes only saw the hand of the forest lord. Before Merlin could take it, she held it away from him. “Look at Artie, you jerk!”
Merlin shook his head and finally comprehended the wounded king.
A surge of relief washed over Kay. “By the trees, what happened?” He gasped.
“No time to explain. Get to work,” Kay ordered.
The wizard nodded and did just that. He repeated the glowing-spinning-floating trick, and before they knew it they were in the hospital room with Bedevere, who was still unconscious. The glass partition was back in place, and this time it was Kay who stood on its far side with Thumb, watching Merlin ply his trade.
The wizard moved in a blur, flickering from one side of Artie to the other. He placed his hands all over him, making tiny adjustments like a weird chiropractor. His tattoos swirled along his skin. His hands glowed and darkened and glowed again.
Artie’s body twitched and twisted as the wizard tended the cooked leg. He chanted and turned his hands around the blackened mass of flesh. It glowed and then changed color, becoming red and white and pink. Merlin lowered his hands and smoothed them over Artie’s leg. He reached for Excalibur’s sheath, which leaned against the bed frame, and laid it over the wound. And there, before their very eyes, Artie was good as new. Asleep, but healed.
Merlin finished by placing moss all over the leg, and he doused this with a green liquid from an oblong decanter. He said more words, and then he clapped one time and came to Kay and Thumb.
“He’ll be fine,” Merlin said. “This time tomorrow he’ll be running laps.”
Kay let out the biggest breath of her life as Thumb jumped up and down on her shoulder.
Then Merlin said, “I’m sorry for obsessing over the key. Understand that I’ve been here for so long, and I am so eager to see the outside world. Please forgive me, Kay.”
Kay smirked and said, “I’ll try, Merlin.”
“Thank you. Well, where is it?”
She held out the hand. “Right here.”
Merlin took it. The wrist’s stump dripped bloody mud and trailed grassy sinews and revealed a bone of ancient petrified wood. Merlin looked so happy. He regarded Thumb and Kay and Artie with obvious pride, then frowned. “But where is Excalibur?”
“Gone,” Kay said apologetically.
“Gone?” Merlin breathed.
“She got it. We still have the pommel though. It’s a long story.”
Thumb said, “They’ve just been through a lot, my friend. Let Sir Kay settle.”
Merlin stepped back and smoothed the front of his robe. “It is a pity that she got the sword. We will have to get it back as soon as possible. Were you able to find out the whereabouts of Qwon?”
Kay hung her head. Thumb, who realized that he didn’t know the answer to this question, looked at Kay. “It wasn’t Numinae who took her,” she said. “It was Morgaine.”
Merlin shook his head and placed a reassuring hand on Kay’s shoulder. He said deeply, “Kay, I will find her and the sword. Since Artie is healing, and since all of you need your rest, let me leave this place and do what I can to find them. Come, we must finally break the bonds of this invisible tower!”
“To the back door, then? To Mrs. Thresher?” Thumb asked excitedly.
“Yes! To Mrs. Thresher!” Merlin answered.
Merlin whisked them through the amazing, percolating rooms, and in no time they landed in the simple chamber at the end of the wizard’s underground lair.
Merlin knelt in front of Mrs. Thresher and flayed open Numinae’s hand with a knife. He worked the skeleton of petrified wood from the mossy skin and placed it in front of him ceremoniously. In fact, he would have liked to do the whole breaking out of the invisible tower with a lot more ceremony—he had been stuck here for nearly fifteen hundred years, after all. This was a big deal. But he knew that the longer they waited to search out Qwon and Excalibur, the harder it would be to locate them.
He murmured a few private words and then looked at Kay and said seriously, “It’s too bad Artie can’t be here now. Remember this well, Kay. Tell him. It is part of his legacy.”
“You got it,” Kay said eagerly.
The small door opened on its own. And then, for the first time in his life, Merlin leaned forward and passed the top half of his body through the opening. He reached for something and pulled it out.
It was a long block of white limestone affixed with a bright titanium handle. On its top along the nearest edge were five finger-sized holes.
“What’re you doing, Merlin?” Kay asked.
“This is the tower’s keystone, Kay Kingfisher. Normally keystones are found at the top of archways, but in this case it’s down here. Once this is destroyed, the tower will be no more, and I shall be free.”
He inserted Numinae’s skeletal fingers into the holes, and once they were in place, the block began to tremble, and Mrs. Thresher began to swing, banging back and forth between the keystone and the wall.
This was it. His eyes widened as the forest lord’s hand shook in the stone sockets. And then it began to crack. Merlin smiled—such an eager, broad, expectant smile—and turned to Kay and Thumb.
Already he looked different. Thumb barely recognized him. He held out his hands, and his robe draped down from him like wings.
“I am finally free!” he wailed. “Freeeeee!”
Wild-eyed and terrifying, he yelled, “Four things, most important all! Do not leave these caverns until the noise has stopped! Do not search for Qwon or Excalibur or venture to the Otherworld until you hear from me! Turn the moss on Artie’s leg in exactly three hours! And above all, mind the store, my friends! Thank you all, and mind the store!”
Then, a searing flash blinded Kay and Thumb for more than a few minutes. During their blindness they heard first the flaps of giant wings retreating through and out of Mrs. Thresher. And then the room shook, and they had to deal with the worst, most spine-rattling series of crashes and crumbles and quakes they’d ever had to endure.