Chapter 26

 

“Where did Kane take the flashlight?” Cole panted.

“Shh!” said Lily sharply. “Not so loud!”

“Sorry,” Cole whispered back irritably, still breathing hard. Then he whispered, “Where did Kane take the flashlight?”

“I think he took it – back – to his room,” Peter huffed. He wished he’d taken physical education class a bit more seriously.

“So we have to search for an unknown room in the dark?” said Cole.

“Basically, yeah,” said Peter. He had slowed to a stop when they reached the blank stone wall near the store room and closed his eyes.

“What are you –” Lily began.

“Shh!” said Peter. “I’m trying to remember.” A few seconds later, he opened his eyes and began to tap a sequence very carefully on the wall, the one he had tried to cement in his memory when he had seen Kane do it. He was rewarded by the sound of heavy movement, and in another second, they were standing in front of a gaping black hole that looked even more forbidding this time around, considering what he planned to do. Peter tried not to think of the open mouth of a grave. He plunged in first and the others followed him.

They moved in silence and darkness so complete that if not for the sounds of their footsteps, muffled in the narrow and dank interior, it would have seemed as though they were inside of an isolation tank. Then the ground began to curve steeply downward, which gave Peter his bearings. He remembered that the ground had begun to curve just before Kane had told him to make a hard right…

“The library is coming up soon, isn’t it?” came Cole’s voice behind him.

“Yes, but there’s a fork in the path before that,” said Peter. “I’ll try here, on both sides. You guys go on up ahead until you get to the next doors and passages.”

“What? Why?” said Lily anxiously. “I say we stick together!”

“It’ll be faster if we divide and conquer,” said Peter brusquely. “Just open every door you come to until one of us finds the Commuter Station, and then shout out so the others meet up with you.” Then he moved to the passage that opened to his left, making space in the center hall for the other two to get by him.

“What if there are no lights in the rooms?” Cole said. “How will we know which one is the Commuter Station if we can’t see?”

“Gerald said that the fire specialist lights the torches in every room of the castle in the mornings, whether people are in them or not,” said Peter, “and they all blow out at night. But it’s still daytime so they should all be lit.”

“I want to go with you,” said Lily abruptly.

“What?” said Cole, and his voice betrayed his nervousness. “You just want to leave me?”

“I’ll be fine,” said Peter quickly, “go with Cole.”

Lily hesitated, and then said, “Oh, fine. But we’ll all meet up again as soon as one of us finds the Commuter Station. Right?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Peter, and hoped she couldn’t hear the insincerity in his voice.

Suddenly Lily managed to find Peter’s hand in the darkness, and wrapped her fingers around it. “Be careful,” she said earnestly.

“Of course. You too,” Peter replied, trying to keep his tone as even as possible. For a wild second he entertained the thought of hugging them both goodbye, but he knew that if he did that they would never let him go. Instead, he disentangled his fingers from hers and slipped down the passage to his left.

 

Peter didn’t have to go very far before he came to the first door. He cast a quick, reflexive glance over his shoulder to make sure the others were out of sight, but he could see nothing in the gloom anyway. He steadied himself then and pushed it open.

The brightness of the room momentarily dazzled Peter compared to the darkness in the secret passageway, even though the room was illuminated only by the flicker of firelight. When his normal vision returned to him, his jaw dropped.

Apparently, he had stumbled upon the Armory. This was where Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table stored their weapons when they were not in use, and he remembered from his dad’s stories that it was also a practice room for sparring and training. Thousands and thousands of weapons lined the walls, many of which looked centuries old.

This must be where Kane got his stash from on that first night, Peter thought. There were broadswords and katana blades, scimitars and clubs, axes and bows with arrows, dirks, Chinese throwing stars, numb chucks, knives of every size and shape, and a variety of other vicious-looking things that Peter could not readily identify. The weaponry seemed to be a mish mash of ages and cultures (much like the fashions in Carlion), though notably there seemed to be no guns, as if the collection extended only through the early fifteenth century. One section of the wall was devoted just to shields and body armor of various types, from chain mail that looked light as a feather, to the sort of full body armor that Arthur and his knights wore in their last battle, complete with helmets with every imaginable color and size of panache. A different crest marked each of the shields, but his eyes were immediately drawn to the one with two interlocking red dragons emblazoned on a background of gold.

Under ordinary circumstances, Peter would have been thrilled to stumble upon such a find. At the moment, however, he could not afford to linger. He cast a reluctant look at the beautiful, vicious-looking array and headed back towards the hall again when he stopped himself.

Wait a minute. What am I doing?

The weapons were there for the taking. Not that he had the slightest idea how to use them – but walking away from a stash like this when he knew he was facing certain death seemed unbelievably foolish. The penumbra did not usually have bodies and so weapons would not ordinarily do him any good, as Lily had pointed out. In order to abduct a human, they would have to take physical form again, wouldn’t they?

Besides, Peter thought, arguing with himself, and made a face, if Dad is a Watcher, he probably knows how to use this stuff. Obviously, Kane had had a good amount of training, so perhaps they all had.

The next problem was figuring out which weapons to take, and how to transport them. Peter still wore the gray jumper and jeans from the day before, and didn’t have anything like Kane’s overcoat that he had worn the night of the accident under which to conceal a sword. Not that concealing it was strictly necessary, but he didn’t want the penumbra to know he was armed immediately if he could help it.

Peter stopped. How did Kane know he’d need a sword the night of the accident?

He didn’t have time to wonder about that now.

He didn’t think he could move quickly enough with a weapon as large and unwieldy as a sword. He settled instead for a pair of medium-sized knives (he thought machete might be the appropriate term) and strapped one to either shin with the leather holsters lying nearby, which looked newly minted. The machetes were large enough to do damage without getting too close to an enemy (at least, he hoped so), but small enough that they did not extend above his knee, which meant he could barely feel them as he moved.

With the knives in place, Peter turned and ran back into the passageway, trying to ignore the pounding of his heart. He probably had only another few minutes before Cole and Lily finished checking all the doors up ahead and came looking for him. He quickly tried the next door.

Peter knew even before he opened it that it was the right one. He stopped when he saw the rows of photos and paintings, and took a moment to steady himself. The light no longer dazzled him, so it took him only an instant to register the fact that he was not alone. He blinked in surprise as he recognized the skinny figure with the blond hair and jagged scar, reclining with one arm pressed against a wall.

“Kane!”

“Peter,” said Kane in reply. He did not seem surprised to see him at all.

“What are you doing here?” Peter demanded, his gaze involuntarily straying over Kane’s shoulder at the paintings behind him. The one immediately behind him was an abstract sketch of a wristwatch that merged into the face of a mountain, and the title below it said “Cayman Islands.”

“Waiting for you,” Kane said simply through his still-swollen lip.

“You’d better not be here to stop me,” Peter snarled, “because I will hit you again.”

To his surprise, Kane laughed. “Well, now, that’s a threat!” he chortled, and crossed his arms over his chest with an infuriatingly condescending expression. “Before you do that, though, consider that you might not want to injure your allies.”

Peter wasn’t sure how to respond to that. His gaze flickered again to the pictures over Kane’s shoulder. He knew it didn’t matter which one he went through; he only needed to get out of Carlion, and fast. The painting beside the wristwatch said “Siberia, Russia,” and it bore the image of a tiger, which seemed slightly more relevant to its location than the previous one. “Allies?” Peter repeated distractedly, wondering how to get Kane out of the way.

“That’s right,” said Kane. “I’m here to help you rescue Bruce and Brock.”

That got Peter’s full attention. “Isdemus didn’t send you to stop me?” he said suspiciously.

“Nope. And here’s how I see it: you, Peter Stewart, are about 120 pounds soaking wet, you’re winded by a thirty second sprint, and you’ve never held a weapon in your life unless you count swords made of cardboard with a towel draped around your shoulders as a cape.”

Peter still had enough of his faculties to flush at the accusation. “I was a kid!” he protested heatedly.

Kane ignored him and went on, “So the way I figure it, you can’t do this alone.”

“Of course I can’t! But I’m the only one who can find the Fata Morgana, and Isdemus won’t let me go with the rescue team, so I’ve got to do it alone, haven’t I?”

“No, you don’t,” said Kane, his tone suddenly taking on an uncharacteristic note of sincerity. “I got you into this mess. You said it yourself – it’s my fault, what happened to your dad. In order to get him back, Peter, you need help. You need my help.”

“Why do I need your help?” Peter countered.

“Because I’m the only Watcher in this castle who won’t try to stop you. That makes me your only option.”

It was a good answer, Peter had to admit. “How did you know I’d come here?” he asked, still suspicious.

“You had to,” said Kane simply. “The Commuter Station is the only way to get out of the castle without going through the main gates, and the secret passageway is the only way to get to the Commuter Station undetected.”

Peter faltered for a moment, considering. He suddenly remembered Kane’s ability with a weapon. That would come in handy. Also (though he didn’t consciously acknowledge this part), unlike Cole or Lily, if Kane didn’t end up coming back, Peter wasn’t so sure he’d consider that a tragedy.

“Fine,” he said grudgingly, “but we’ve got to move.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Kane. “I estimate we’ve got about three and a half minutes before Isdemus sends a guard to the Commuter Station, to make sure you have no route of escape.”

“Three and a half?”

“Just a guess. Honestly, I don’t know what took you so long in the first place. I told you exactly where to go when I took you to the library, didn’t I?”

Peter stared at him for a minute before that registered. “You told me that on purpose!” Then he scowled at him and said defensively, “I had to get rid of Cole and Lily. That took some time. And speaking of wasting time…” Without another backward glance at Kane, he began to move towards the photo closest to where he stood, which was of a large, flat-topped pyramid without a label. “I assume it doesn’t matter where we go?”

“Nope, long as we’re outside of Carlion,” Kane affirmed.

Within a few inches of the wall, Peter felt the familiar sensation of a hook just behind his navel, drawing him forward. It seemed as if he was approaching the photo from the inside of a tunnel, rushing towards it with uncontrollable force.

Then the photo suddenly burst into panoramic, and Peter found himself in broad daylight, standing on top of some sort of flat-topped, manmade hill. Most of the top was grassy, but the steps leading down to ground level were made of ancient, crumbling stone. It looked like they were on the site of some sort of ancient Aztec ruins. In the distance, he could see several more platforms just like it rising from the earth, and there were brown-faced children nearby who had stopped to stare at him. Their parents weren’t far behind, and a few looked at him and Kane with expressions of confusion or mild curiosity, but most ignored them.

“Why aren’t they surprised to see us?” Peter whispered to Kane.

“Why would they be? There are tourists everywhere.”

“We just appeared out of thin air!” Peter hissed back.

“Doesn’t look like they noticed to me,” Kane shrugged. “Anyway, if any of them did, their brains have probably already processed the event and explained it away by now. People only see what they expect to see.”

“Yeah, you said that,” said Peter uncertainly. A teenage girl nearby still gazed at him curiously. He tried to smile back, wondering how he and Kane were going to get away from all of these people in order to do what they had to do. As he looked at her, though, he vaguely registered that although she was in shorts and a t-shirt, she wore a long, thin mink around her shoulders like a scarf. Then the mink began to move. It slithered up to her ear, at which point Peter could see its head and its beady eyes staring directly at him. It whispered something in the girl’s ear, after which she turned away and never looked at Peter or Kane again. Peter was startled – it was the first time he had seen one of the penumbra interact with a human. As he glanced around, he realized that Lily had been right – every single person was accompanied by one of the penumbra. They all took different forms, and some seemed to merge with their human hosts while others were several feet away... but they all had one.

“See that? She just forgot about you,” Kane said, and then he repeated, “People see what they expect to see. If any information doesn’t fit into their world view, they just discard it. With a little help, of course.” He grinned. “I’m sure that’s what happened to the Jeffersons’ driver. That’s why the penumbra left him alone.” The fact that Kane was capable of grinning under the circumstances made Peter want to punch him again.

Peter’s eyes darted anxiously in the distance, but there were people as far as the eye could see. Beyond the pyramids was the car park, but that, too, was filled with people. Several miles in the distance, the grassy area seemed to be deserted, but considering they were on foot and (as Kane had pointed out) Peter was winded by a thirty-second sprint, this was far from encouraging.

“How are we gonna get away from all these people?”

“We don’t have to,” said Kane. “They won’t be in any danger. Trust me.”

Peter snorted involuntarily, and Kane correctly interpreted the noise.

“Or don’t,” Kane shrugged. “If we have to get all the way out there, though, we’ll waste a lot of time. Up to you.”

Peter realized Kane was right. In this particular case, he would have to trust him.

“When you’re ready,” said Kane.

Peter hesitated. “I have weapons,” he said, “underneath.” He lifted the legs of his jeans just high enough that the sun caught a flash of metal. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell Kane this now in case he was incapacitated and couldn’t tell him later, or because he was stalling.

“Any idea how to use them?”

Peter winced. “Not a clue.”

“Well, that’s helpful, isn’t it?” Kane said with another grin.

“I never claimed to be a fighter,” said Peter defensively. “You know how to use them, though, and so does my dad, right?”

“Well, if you brought one for me, then give it here,” said Kane, walking towards Peter and extending a hand.

Peter hesitated again, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. I brought Kane along because I need the help, and because he knows how to fight, didn’t I? Reluctantly he un-strapped one of the machetes from his right shin and handed it to Kane, who took it and strapped it to his left arm. As he pulled back his sleeves, Peter could also see the glint of metal underneath Kane’s clothes.

“You’re armed too!”

“Of course I’m armed. I told you I was waiting for you, didn’t I? Do you think I’d walk into the Fortress unprepared?”

“Well, give it back, then. You have enough weapons already,” said Peter, feeling vulnerable all of a sudden. A few of the tourists nearby were very obviously trying not to stare, and parents pulled their children back by their collars to keep them from venturing too near Peter and Kane.

Kane pointed to his left arm. “This, in your hands, is a liability. If you tried to use it, the penumbra would take it from you in about a second, and in the next second, they’d use it to slit your throat before you even knew what happened. You get me?”

Peter wasn’t sure if he was more insulted or disturbed by the image. “Yeah, I get you,” he said, shaken.

“You give the other one to Bruce the second you get a chance, and don’t let the penumbra know you have it before then.”

“Fine!” he snapped defensively. “You ready or what?”

Kane flashed him the same infuriating grin, but with a funny look in his eyes. “You have no idea.”

“All right then,” said Peter, steadying himself with a deep breath, and looked one last time at the world as he knew it. He consciously slowed his breathing, but his heart rate refused to cooperate. Then he opened his mouth and shouted.

“SARGON!”

For a split second, Peter thought it hadn’t worked. The tourists turned to stare at him, and their penumbra looked alarmed. They abandoned their humans and moved toward Peter, as if they were trying to see if he’d really said what they thought he’d said.

Then it happened.

Peter thought he saw a ripple in the air beside and around him – and suddenly they were surrounded, so densely that in spite of the transparency of the creatures, he could not even make out the ruins on which he had been standing moments before. He and Kane instinctively retreated so that they stood back to back. The creature nearest him was enormous and gnarled like a tree, and it stood beside a leering face with dripping yellow fangs and hollow eyes, through which a skeletal hand protruded from robes of shadow, and hair of flame danced menacingly on the head of a siren beside it.

“Which one is him?” Peter managed to hiss to Kane.

“None of them,” Kane replied, sounding tense now. “He has no body.”

“What?” Peter demanded. “But I called his name –”

There was a sound somewhere between a hiss and a cough, and Peter realized halfway through the sentence that it was forming words – the gnarled tree-creature was speaking.

“You called for Lord Sargon, and on Lord Sargon’s behalf we come,” it said.

“Why didn’t he come on his own behalf? I want to see him!” Peter demanded.

“He’s banned from our world, remember?” said Kane.

“He’s banned from possessing humans, but he’s still one of them –” Peter began.

“It’s him!” cried the hag with yellow fangs. “Peter Stewart!”

The hag moved closer. Once satisfied with his identity, she snarled, “Kill him.”

“No! You know our orders,” hissed the tree-creature. “He belongs to Lord Sargon.”

“He has my father,” Peter said, his voice growing more solid. “I want to make an exchange. My life for his.”

The hag gestured with its head in Kane’s direction. “What’s he doing here?”

Peter swallowed. “He’s here to make sure my father and my friend get out alive.”

The entire company of them burst out laughing at this. “But of course, but of course!” said the siren when she had regained control of herself, still highly amused. She pushed to the front of the circle and reached one arm towards Peter. He recoiled but she still managed to grab hold of him. Without a moment’s hesitation, Kane fastened his fingers on the siren’s opposite forearm.

“Why… can I feel you?” Peter asked, but even as he said it, he could see the answer. From the moment her fingers made contact with his flesh, he saw the scenery change, but not with the jolt of arrival, as happened when traveling by wormhole. Rather, the meadow and the ruins seemed to dissolve, and he found the landscape rearranging itself as if by pixilation on a computer screen. Suddenly he was standing on a bank beside cool, still water. Peter wasn’t sure how he knew the water was cool, but if motion was the essence of heat, then this had to be the coldest water on earth.

Of course – we’re not on earth.

“Welcome,” said the siren exultantly, “to Avalon.”