If Nerise had to guess, she would have wagered this man died in his sixties. The fingertips of his right hand were gnarled and scarred. The left arm was missing, neatly severed by something so hot that it had cauterized the wound. The grey beard reached to the middle of the man’s chest in a haphazard manner devoid of dignity. Not even death and the thin light from a single lantern could smooth the lines of stress written across his face.
She didn’t want to believe this had been her husband. Wayne had disappeared in the dark waters of Loch Morar two months ago.
He’d been twenty-eight.
A man wearing a black suit stepped into the lantern’s light on the opposite side of the examination table. “Are you convinced?”
Nerise wanted to rip open Edgar’s throat for asking. His words held the edge of a smirk. At least he wouldn’t have to go far if she killed him. They were in a morgue.
She held Wayne’s limp hand. Yes, she was convinced it was him. Despite all that insisted otherwise, too many things proved it was him: the curve of his lips, the thin patch of hair at the center of his chest, and the two moles clustered together to the right side of his abdomen.
His death tore her heart apart. They’d met at the university, married shortly thereafter. Their love for the lore of Camelot brought them together, and their search for the reality behind the myth had stolen him from her. She’d assumed her tears were exhausted, but she found herself fighting them.
A fan, efficiently feeding frigid air into the room, rattled to life within the walls of the Dundee morgue. With the 20th century just a few years away, the Scottish university had spared no expense to equip itself. That Edgar had brought her here in the dark hours after midnight without anyone to grant them permission suggested his master had provided the necessary funding. He could do whatever he wished here, even conceal the discovery of her husband’s body.
Edgar lifted the sheet back over Wayne’s corpse. “The body washed ashore a few days ago.”
She leaned against the metal table for support. “We already held the funeral.”
His mother had worn a black, high-neck dress almost as stiff and cold as her glare from across the empty casket. She’d often railed at Wayne about how improper it was for Nerise to have a profession, that she might never have any grandchildren. For the first time, the accusation stung. Knowing she would never see his smile again on the face of a son or daughter wounded her soul.
“My employer is still eager to see you fulfill your contract, Mrs. Mackinnon.” Edgar checked the time and then slipped his pocket watch back into his vest. He lifted his charcoal frock coat from a chair where he’d tossed it upon their arrival and slid it back on. “Especially in light of this new find.”
“The contract was with my husband. I signed nothing.”
“I have a copy of the document in my carriage, if you wish to review it. The terms of the agreement were with your husband and you. From a legal standpoint, he signed for you both.” He slipped on a pair of black gloves. After he picked up the lantern he’d placed by the door, he led her out of the room and up the stairs.
“If you think that just because someone found my husband’s body on the shores of Loch Morar that I’m going to drop everything and go back to work for you, then you are sorely mistaken.”
“Let us speak to the point. You are incorrect, and on many matters.” His boots echoed on the stone steps. “If you do not carry out your contract, then my employer will sue you for the advance, the majority of which we both know you have spent.
“No doubt, the college of archeology will deny you tenure at the university in London. To say your reputation was ruined by the manner of your husband’s death would be an understatement. This leaves you without income.
“But most of all,” Edgar stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at her, “you wrongly assume where your husband was found.”
She stopped mid-climb and clung to the railing. “He drowned in Loch Morar.”
“He was lost in Loch Morar, but—and this is the best part.” The bastard paused, savoring her panic. “Your husband’s body was found on the shores of Loch Ness, more than fifty miles from where he disappeared.”
The unnaturally advanced age of his body had been shock enough, but this left her without words.
“All I require from you at this time is the answer to one question. Certainly not whether you will go. We both know you will.” Edgar lifted his lantern to better illuminate the arrogant indifference on his face. “Where do you wish to continue your search for Excalibur, where your husband was lost or found?”
• • •
Dull blue skies and what passed for warm weather in September mocked Nerise’s mood. Three days had passed since she’d seen her husband’s body. Holding his hand one last time had not brought her closure, nor did coming to the rocky shores of Loch Ness where his body had been recovered.
Edgar lifted the top part of her new dive suit over her head. This one fit much better than the one lost with Wayne. They’d been forced to share the same suit, and he’d been several inches taller. She still remembered the violent jerk on the umbilical line. The motor feeding air to him had bounced across the sand and splashed into the water before the taut line went slack. The line she’d reeled in had been cut by something too sharp to be natural.
She grabbed the helmet, in Edgar’s hands, to stop him from putting it on her. The memories of that last moment with Wayne and his cocksure smile made her feel trapped.
“I need a moment. I can’t breathe.”
“Mrs. Mackinnon, I assure you that the air pump is the most advanced of its kind.”
Nerise wondered if Edgar’s employer had stolen the design and the equipment. They’d never met “Master A. Dexter.” Wayne once suggested Edgar might be Dexter. After the past few days, Nerise was convinced he wasn’t. Edgar was just a well-trained attack dog.
He slipped her helmet on with precise movements. A pair of clicks let her know he’d locked the helmet in place, limiting her view of the world to a round circle of glass. The air pump rumbled to life, which she felt more than heard.
“You have an hour of air.” Her helmet muffled Edgar to a whisper as he yelled over the generator.
Her boots slipped on the wet rocks as she lumbered into the water, but she refused to ask for help. The surface of the loch smoothed beneath her feet after about two dozen yards.
The blue-green filmy waters covered her, making it difficult to see more than twenty yards ahead. Small, dark shapes flitted through the water to escape her invasion. Her teeth clenched as she struggled to keep her breathing steady. The sky turned to a blurry image with the sun a wavy, bright spot.
She reached up and tugged the umbilical thrice, the signal to turn on her helmet’s lamps. This close to the surface, the extra light wasn’t necessary, but knowing the light was there would calm her. A soft hum vibrated through the helmet as the bulbs came to life.
When she and Wayne had started these underwater explorations, she’d enjoyed this. She once teased Wayne that she might toss a sword into the water for him to find. The first place they’d explored had been Loch Katrine. Night fell by the time they’d given up. They took advantage of the darkness and solitude, making love on the shore. She’d insisted on concealing their act beneath a blanket. When they were done, breathless and limp with exhaustion, they’d stared at the water and debated what Excalibur might have really been. Neither believed it was a magic sword. The weapon’s many names such as Excalibur and Caliburnus all hinted at connections with ancient worlds and perhaps lost technology, but Nerise and Wayne never agreed on a theory to justify its significance within Arthurian legend.
Wayne’s ghost felt distant. Within this metal suit, she sensed the world had excised her like an unwanted limb.
She came across the wooden remains of a small boat, rotting in the patient onslaught of currents and time. The sunken ship blocked her path, and as she walked around it, she was startled to see another light to the left of the ship. As she neared the source, she realized it was her reflection on a silver, metallic surface.
She should have seen something of what the reflective object was. Instead, she only saw ripples. The alteration in the water made no sense. The ripples resembled the tiny waves from where a rock might break the surface, but the pattern of the ripples was perpendicular to the floor of the loch.
Then she saw the edge of the uncertainty, shaped like a heptagon. It was taller than her. Her reflection bent inwards.
Nerise’s heart still raced, but anticipation and excitement replaced her fear. She stepped around the shape that rippled like water but was not. From the side, the shape curved in and out, reminiscent of the top half of a chalice on its side. Her mind played through stories of the Holy Grail, and she scolded herself for jumping to conclusions.
A drop of sweat threatened to fall into her eye. She reached up to wipe it off and remembered just before her hand could strike the front of the helmet that she couldn’t do that. The closer she came to the liquid chalice, the warmer she got.
She moved back in front of it. What was she to do with this? She had no means to record it, nor was it some lost relic to be collected and categorized. The only option was to study it as long as her oxygen permitted and write down every detail when she returned to shore.
What would Wayne have done if he’d come across this? Had he? She felt the compulsion to brush fingers along its surface. She didn’t doubt he would have. She reached for it, but not to test the surface tension. She needed to know what happened to Wayne, and that meant doing what he would have done.
Her fingers dipped into the center of the heptagon and pressed forward without any more effort than the water of the loch. The only difference was the warmth filling her fingertips. The pattern of the ripples didn’t change. The liquid steel refused to acknowledge she existed.
She tried to pull her hand back and couldn’t.
Her struggles pulled her deeper into the chalice. Her boots dragged in the sand in a losing match of tug-of-war. She screamed and cursed. The hold of the chalice pressed on her forearms.
Then her body launched off the bottom of the loch and into the metal liquid. She screamed her husband’s name. She couldn’t decide if she hoped he might hear, or if she was praying to God that her soul might find Wayne in death.
Heat and darkness engulfed her. A current captured her and turned her into a blind torpedo.
Reality blinked. The pressure crushed the breath from her lungs. Then she was prone on the shore.
This wasn’t Loch Ness, nor Loch Morar. Gold sands shined enough to hurt her eyes. She dipped her gloved hand into the beach to scoop it up. The grains spilled out between her fingers, not sand but tiny metal shavings. Even through her helmet, she heard the tiny clinking sound as each grain rejoined the land.
She rolled onto her back on the water’s edge. Her arm shook as she lifted it to block the sunlight. The yellow-white ball she had known all her life was replaced by a white-blue one amid a backdrop of pale red.
As she sat up, she saw no trees, no grass, no animals. Beyond the gold shore, crystalline spires of all size and colors thrust from the ground to create a rainbow-hued forest. Beyond the crystal spires, massive cliffs and mountains of hard, grey rock buttressed the sky.
Then she heard the scream.
The closest thing to match the rage within that scream was a carriage horse Nerise once saw go berserk in the middle of London’s streets. The beast of burden had worn a wide-eyed mask of frothy panic and smashed in the head of the carriage driver as he attempted to calm it.
The weight of her dive suit made getting upright a slow process, despite her desperation. She fought for leverage in the metal sand to get to her knees and then her feet.
Just as she stood, one of the distant crystal spires shattered. The sound was delayed, reaching her seconds later. A flame shot into the sky from the same location, followed by another shriek, the sound of giant, rusted gears grinding against each other.
Where could she go? Had her husband been forced into this same choice? Could she get back to Loch Ness? Where was she? How had her husband survived this environment to reach an old age in a place that appeared to be made of nothing more than metal and rock? Her mind chased too many questions and refused to settle long enough for her wits to choose a course.
Another crystal spire, one much closer to Nerise, shared the first one’s fate. The fractured sound of its destruction reached her faster this time.
She needed to get back, but when she turned to look at the lake, she received her next shock. The “water” was nothing but the shiny grey liquid that brought her here. When she’d been sucked into the chalice, she couldn’t see anything, even before her umbilical snapped and her lamps went dark.
The land shook beneath her feet as more spires shattered at her back.
Her breath grew thin, and she realized she didn’t have her umbilical to feed her any fresh air. The remnant still attached to her helmet flapped against her back.
Her fingers fumbled for the clamps to her helmet. She needed to get it off long enough to get some fresh air into her suit. The wind hit her, and she was overcome by nausea. The air carried an offensive tang of steel and iron that reminded her of blood.
The direction of the wind changed, and she smelled something that was decidedly not metal.
She turned and looked up into the burning eyes of an abomination.
The mechanical creature resembled a dragon with a long snout and neck. Wings stretched from its back with a steel framework and membranes of pale leather. The tips of the wings stabbed into the ground as the massive body lurched forward.
She stumbled back into the silver water.
The monster’s neck curved down with a violent grinding of gears. The head stopped a few feet from her. Its hot breath slid over her with the stench of kerosene.
Small forearms reached from its upper torso towards her. The dragon’s fingers weren’t metal. Each finger was comprised of an arm taken from men and women and attached to a steel palm. The stolen arms held enough life that the human hands remained animated. The human fingers grabbed at air in a desperate need for contact. Glowing wires, slightly visible at the point of contact between the metal and flesh, pulsed with a glow that changed from crimson to white. Nerise stumbled deeper into the lake, up to her waist.
A voice as strained as the motors within this beast then spoke.
“Are you the Future King?”
Her lips shivered in silence, because no answer seemed right. Would this monster kill her if she said she wasn’t?
Only when she saw the nearest of the fingers/arms did she manage to speak. Her revulsion was overpowered by loss. She recognized her husband’s silver ring, engraved with “Caledfwlch,” the Welsh name for Excalibur.
She reached out to his amputated arm. His fingers coiled with hers, his touch alive and warm. Was a piece of Wayne’s soul here?
“This one.” She ran a finger across the etched letters in his ring. “What was his answer?”
“He said he was not.” The power of its voice made her release Wayne’s hand. “He ran from my children.”
Water sprayed up around her as lithe figures dropped from the sky and surrounded her. They stood a head shorter than her. Black wings folded in to surround and protect their slender bodies and created the illusion of cloaked women.
“And if I am the Future King?” Saying “no” wouldn’t end well, but that didn’t make “yes” a wiser choice.
“Are you?”
So much for being clever. The children stepped closer. Their wings parted enough for arms to reach out. Each child had four arms, two of metal and two of borrowed flesh.
She couldn’t run. Only dumb luck might help her find the “chalice” on this side.
Nerise forced herself to look up at the metal dragon.
“I am.”
“Let us see if you are true.”
The dragon’s neck twisted and creaked as it reared. A roar capped with flames burst from its snout. Wings reached wide into the sky. As the blue sunlight reflected off them, she recognized what animals had died to provide the leather patchwork for the wings’ membranes: humans.
The children’s many hands latched onto Nerise. They ripped her suit apart. Inhuman shrieks drowned out her screams.
“Drink, Future King! Draw from the bosom of the lake and receive her judgment!”
The children shoved her face into the lake. Pain stabbed from inside her chest as the metal liquid flooded her throat. Hot pain sliced through her right shoulder, and a second darkness fell over her mind, as her arm was severed.
• • •
The next time Nerise washed upon a shore, the ground was rocky and cold against her naked body. The blue light shining on her came from the moon. No sooner had she awakened than Edgar’s discourteous hands grabbed her and jerked her to her feet.
The lamps of a carriage blazed to life, blinding her. She was pitched forward and landed on her knees next to the now silent generator that had empowered her lost dive suit.
The silhouette of a man stepped in front of the lamps. “I must say that I am very pleased.”
As he neared, she saw his skin was pale. A blond beard framed a well-defined jawline. The most striking element was his eyes. The irises were shiny and silver, glowing in the dark. His suit and tie were grey, as if chosen to match.
“Master Dexter?” Nerise asked.
His smile reminded her of a tiger ready to feast. “We have passed the need for formality. Call me Amhar.”
He knelt in front of her and took her right arm into his hands as if to cradle a holy relic. A sigh of awe misted into the night air.
“It has been so long since I saw this on my departed father, the King.”
Her eyes widened as they took in the work of metal the children and their mother had given her. Even in the night, she could make out the engraving on the forearm. The letters were unknown to her, but she could see how easy it would be to interpret them for the many names given to it in ancient texts. At one angle, the alien markings resembled Excalibur, and as the light shifted, they changed to Caledfwlch.
“Look, Edgar.” Amhar grabbed her chin to tilt her head back. “I’ve not gazed on the eyes of another Fae-Touched since my father’s betrayal.”
He laughed as he stood. “Of all of Artur’s children, only I inherited the gift of the Fae’s waters into my blood. Excalibur should have fallen to me, the true Future King. He buried me alive after I tried to take it. By the time I found my way out, that fool Mordred had killed Father and exiled this blade and scabbard to the water.”
She smiled at him. “You weren’t buried as a punishment, Amhar. Your father knew the Fae would demand all of the lake’s water back. He wouldn’t let them have you.”
At Nerise’s command, a blade burst from beneath her metal wrist as she lunged at Amhar. The weapon glowed hot and bright. Edgar placed himself in her path to protect his employer. Gun raised, he fired a shot at her chest. Nerise felt the bullet strike her breastbone, but the bullet bounced off her flesh like the tap of a finger.
Before Edgar could fire a second shot, her blade separated his head from his body without a drop of blood. The heat of the “sword” cauterized the wound. His bowler hat landed on its top next to the frozen look of shock on his severed head.
“Impressive.” Amhar clapped. “A pity I already know Excalibur’s secrets, far more than I imagine the Fae have had time to teach you. The weapon will be mine, and you will die before the sun can rise. Thank you for bringing it.”
“The Fae warned me you might be able to take Excalibur from me, so I brought something else back for you.” She pointed up. “I brought them.”
From above, the grinding shrieks of the children issued with amusement.
“They’ve come for what Artur refused to return.”
Amhar’s screams echoed over Loch Ness as the children descended. They clawed at his body and threw him into the waters, drowning his cries.