Lake in the Clouds Read online

  “Ariane…”

  “I just called to tell you I’m all right,” she said. “And that I can’t join you. And that you’re being watched. I’m going after the third shard. Just stay put and you should be fine.”

  “Ariane, no,” Aunt Phyllis said. “You can’t do this alone. You need my help. Come to Emma Lake. There must be some way you can get into the cabin without being seen. We can talk, figure things out –”

  “No, Aunt Phyllis,” Ariane said. “This is my quest. Mine alone. I’ll let you know when I have the third shard.”

  “Ariane –”

  Ariane hung up. She stared at the phone in the cradle. That was a mistake, she thought. I shouldn’t even have called her. Now she’s going to worry even more.

  Then she thought, I can’t stay here.

  That much she was certain of. Not only was she out of food and water, but Major’s man would be back in a couple of hours, settling into the cabin to keep a leisurely watch on Aunt Phyllis, waiting for Ariane to make an appearance.

  He can rot here, Ariane thought viciously. I won’t be anywhere near.

  But then…where?

  She couldn’t go back to the house she’d shared with Aunt Phyllis in Regina. She was sure Major must be watching it, too. But she had to have somewhere to stay. She needed fresh clothes. She needed food. And she needed somewhere with water, a pool deep enough to cover her, deep enough for her to materialize in…

  And then it hit her. The perfect solution, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before.

  Wally’s house.

  It had a swimming pool. It was empty: Wally’s parents had separated; Wally was with Rex Major; and his sister, Felicia – Flish – was still in hospital, and had moved out weeks ago, so she wouldn’t be returning to the house even after she was released. Last time Ariane had been there, the cupboards and fridge had been stuffed with food. Mrs. Carson had been hired to look after the Knight siblings, but with both of them gone, she wouldn’t be living there – although she might still be checking on the house once a day. But all Ariane needed to do to dodge Mrs. Carson, or anyone else who might come into the place, was to run water in the sink.

  As long as she was careful, she could live in Wally’s house undetected, for as long as she needed…until the third shard manifested itself. And the fact she’d be living rent-free at Wally’s expense just made it all that much more perfect.

  She glanced around the old cabin. Everything looked the same as she had left it when she’d gotten up that morning. She didn’t disturb it – she didn’t want Major’s man noticing anything had changed. No doubt he was wondering if she’d been there, but he couldn’t be sure it had been anything more than a tramp. And that meant Rex Major couldn’t be sure.

  She was still one step ahead. For the moment.

  She slipped out the back door, went down to the lakeshore, and let the water take her away.

  Chapter Two

  The Lap of Luxury

  “I'm a tweet wittle birdie ’n a gilded cage, Tweety’s my name but I don't know my age. I don't have to wowwy and dat is dat, I'm safe in here from dat old putty tat!” sang Tweety Bird.

  Tweety Bird, Wally Knight reflected, looked downright alarming when viewed on a wall-sized television, especially with Mel Blanc’s voice likewise amplified by speakers that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a rock concert.

  All the same, he knew how Tweety felt. At least the “wittle birdie ’n a gilded cage” part, if not the “safe in here from dat old putty tat” part. Because even though he’d only been in Rex Major’s penthouse condominium for four days, and even though it was by far and away the most luxurious place he’d ever been, it was also, very clearly, a cage.

  He’d said as much to Major that morning, as his host was preparing to go out. “I’ve been stuck in here since we got back,” he’d complained. “I just want to go downstairs, walk around the block.”

  “No,” Major said. “You’re only fourteen –”

  “Fifteen in a couple of months,” Wally interjected.

  “Fourteen,” Major repeated firmly, “and you’re in a strange city. I don’t want you wandering around by yourself.”

  “My Mom grew up in Toronto and was taking the subway by herself all over town when she was twelve,” Wally argued. “I got to Lyon, France, on my own. I don’t think I’m likely to get abducted from the lakefront!”

  “The lakefront?” Major said. “Think about that. We don’t know what Ariane will do.” He pointed at Wally’s face. “You just got the stitches out yesterday from what she did to you in France.”

  Wally rubbed his cheek. The cut where the second shard of Excalibur had sliced his cheek as Ariane called it to herself was still healing, and was at the angry-red-scar stage. He’d been told to rub it with petroleum jelly every day and that it should eventually all-but-disappear. Which he’d also been told about the wound on his forehead from slipping and falling on the ice and knocking himself out just a few days before the sword-shard-in-the-face incident. Unfortunately, neither wound had left a mark he could pass off as either the result of having survived an attack by Voldemort as a baby or fighting a duel with rapiers in Heidelberg. They just made him look like he must be incredibly clumsy.

  “You’re too valuable to me,” Major said. “I can’t risk anything happening to you.”

  “You keep saying I’m something special,” Wally complained, “but you never tell me why.”

  “Because I’m still not certain, Wally,” Major said. “Give me time. Now I have to go. Stay put and we’ll talk more tonight.” And then he’d gone, locking the door behind him.

  Which might not have been enough to keep Wally in, except he’d also stationed a “bodyguard” in the short hallway outside which led to the elevator. Wally wondered how he’d explained the man’s presence to the condo board. Then he snorted. He’s Rex Major. I doubt he has to explain much of anything.

  After four days in the condo, amazing though it was – six bedrooms, a dining room bigger than the main floor of Ariane’s whole house, a kitchen grand enough to host a Top Chef episode (maybe it had, for all he knew) and even a swimming pool (empty: Major wasn’t taking any chances), he was going stir crazy.

  He had television. But he didn’t have the Internet. There was a library, but the books seemed to have been chosen more for bragging rights than content, as Wally discovered when he pulled down an enticing leather-bound volume only to find out it was an eighteenth-century Spanish/Latin dictionary with the catchy title of Dictionarium emendatum, auctum, locuplectatum, edited by one Elio Antonio de Nebrija. Very impressive, no doubt, probably valuable, and useful should he suffer from insomnia, but otherwise…

  All the other books seemed to be in the same vein. He couldn’t find a single one that was even in English.

  Which was how he had ended up sprawled on the couch in the media room yet again, watching old Warner Brothers cartoons blown up to terrifying size.

  But today was going to be different, because today he had a plan. He was just waiting long enough to make sure Major was really gone and wasn’t going to pop back in unexpectedly for something he’d forgotten, and to establish in the mind of the guard (who presumably could hear at least something of Sylvester’s “Suffering succotash!” through the door), that he was watching TV.

  And he’d probably waited long enough.

  He got up and went into the living room, a vast expanse of marble floor with a minimum of furniture and a maximum of window, overlooking Lake Ontario – well, overlooking its own enormous terrace, actually, and then overlooking Lake Ontario – and padded in his stocking feet across to the door on the far side.

  It was the only door that was always closed. It was the only door that was always locked. It had a combination keypad to ensure it stayed that way. And Wally had watched from the far side of the room as Rex Major had put in the combination just that morning, peering around the corner of the hallway that led to his own bedroom, then drawing
back and emerging yawning and stretching a few minutes later.

  He’d decided back in France that Merlin was more to be trusted than the Lady of the Lake, and that in order to save Ariane from herself, and from the pernicious influence of the shards of Excalibur, he had to help Major get the remaining shards. But trusting Major more than the Lady of the Lake wasn’t the same thing as trusting Major completely. Wally didn’t trust the Lady of the Lake at all. Trusting Major a little bit more than that was still a pretty small measure of trust.

  And Major was keeping something from him. He kept talking about how Wally might be someone special, as special in his own way as Ariane. But he wouldn’t tell Wally what he meant until he could be certain. And for some reason, even after four days and even though he had the second shard in his possession, he still couldn’t be certain. Or at least he pretended he couldn’t be certain.

  Wally was tired of waiting. And he was tired of being locked up, no matter how gilded the cage. He’d thought by now he’d at least have a tutor coming in, and much to his surprise, he wished he did: better homework than another Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon, much though he liked the old show. But, no.

  Well, then, he’d make his own homework and entertainment.

  He keyed in the code he’d seen Major use and, without any fuss, the door unlocked. He opened it.

  As he’d expected, the room beyond was Major’s home office, though it looked more like a set piece in an office supply store than a real office. Not a sheet of paper on the desk. No photos of family members, no Newton’s Cradle desk toy with the little swinging silver balls, nothing but an impressively large monitor, a wireless keyboard and mouse, a surprisingly minimalist desk chair, light grey walls, dark grey carpet, and a little bar complete with sink, refrigerator, an assortment of bottles, and a glass-fronted cabinet full of glasses. And, of course, a massive window with a view of Lake Ontario, just like the rest of the condo.

  Wally sat down at the desk and jiggled the mouse. The screen lit up and asked for a password.

  Wally had a theory: that Rex Major, despite heading up a fabulously successful high-tech company, was old-fashioned, as befitted someone who had once been Merlin, court wizard and power behind the throne of King Arthur, and probably wasn’t really all that comfortable with modern technology. That theory had generated a hypothesis: that Merlin’s password was unlikely to be very complex or hard for him to remember.

  And now, to complete the scientific process, Wally was going to put his hypothesis to the experimental test. It might take a while, but, Hey, he thought, I’ve got all day.

  First, the obvious. PASSWORD, he typed.

  No luck.

  MERLIN was next.

  That didn’t work either.

  EXCALIBUR failed. So did FAERIE, ARTHUR, and KINGARTHUR.

  He thought for a moment. Major’s real concern, or so he’d always claimed, wasn’t Earth at all. Seizing control of Earth through the magical power he would have once Excalibur was his was only the first step. He wanted to use Earth’s advanced technology to attack and conquer his own world: the realm of Faerie.

  FAERIE had failed as a password. But Merlin’s first target would be his family’s demesne, he’d said: a name with a long history in Arthurian legend, for reasons Wally now understood.

  Worth a shot, he thought.

  He typed AVALON.

  And just like that, he had access to Rex Major’s computer.

  All Merlin would have had to do was add three or four numbers or letters after that and I’d have never figured it out, Wally thought. Hypothesis confirmed, theory looking good.

  He cracked his knuckles and set to work to find out everything he could that Merlin didn’t want him to know.

  •••In his office high atop the Excalibur Computer Systems tower, Merlin stared at a different computer screen without really seeing the financial spreadsheet on it. His mind was on an entirely different problem than maximizing the quarterly profits. He was trying to figure out how to find the third shard of Excalibur.

  He had thought, with one shard of the sword in hand, he would be able to sense the location of the third piece even though Ariane Forsythe still had the first. He had no idea where she was: there’d been no trace of her since they’d parted ways in France. He supposed it was possible she had died in the attempt to return across the Atlantic, but he thought it unlikely, since if she were dead, whatever interference her having the first shard was causing, in his use of the second should have vanished – and that interference was definitely still there. To his ongoing frustration, he could not draw on the power of the shard he held to bolster the pitiful sliver of magic left to him since the Lady had fled the world and tried to close the door to Faerie behind her.

  He fingered the ruby stud he always wore in his right earlobe. That door remained open, just a crack, so he was not completely without magic, but it galled him every day how puny he was compared to the old days in Arthur’s court, when he had commanded powers that had caused whole armies to throw down their arms and surrender.

  Most of the power remaining to him he had infused into his Excalibur software, piggy-backing on the World Wide Web to cast a barely-there skein of magic around the globe. It was through that magic – ironically present in Wally Knight’s own smartphone – that he had detected the Lady’s presence when she had materialized in Wascana Lake in Regina and convinced Ariane to assume her mantle of power and seek the shards of Excalibur. The same magic had found the first shard for him in a diamond mine in Yellowknife, though he had lost that one to Ariane in the end. His magic had found the second shard for him, in an ancient cave complex in the south of France. But so far, it had not found the third, and he couldn’t even bolster it with power from the second.

  The third shard could reveal itself at any moment, of course. All it would take was someone with a smartphone or laptop or other Internet-connected device to get close enough to it. But even the World Wide Web had enormous holes in it where something as small as a piece of a sword blade could hide forever.

  His one consolation was that Ariane should be experiencing the same frustration. She could not draw on the power of the shard she carried, either, and that meant that if the third shard were as distant from her as the second had been, she didn’t yet know where it was.

  In Yellowknife, he had convinced her to hand over the first shard – though she had later stolen it back again – by threatening her friend, Wally Knight. That was unlikely to work this time, since Wally had betrayed her in France – a coup which gave Major no small satisfaction. But he had another possible lever. Even now, he had two men from Ochrana Security, the private firm he used when he didn’t want Excalibur Computer Systems directly involved, watching the cabin at Emma Lake where Aunt Phyllis had gone to ground. He had hoped every day to hear that Ariane had made an appearance there, and had laid plans for that eventuality, but so far there’d been no sign of…

  Right on cue, a small box popped up on his screen announcing the arrival of an email message from one of the Ochrana Security man at Emma Lake. Magic! Major thought, then snorted. Never attribute to supernatural causes what can be ascribed to coincidence. Although to be fair, he’d made good use of coincidence in the past to bolster other people’s belief in his omnipotence. A certain eclipse came to mind…

  Even as he was thinking that, he was opening the email. He read it over, and smiled slowly. Rented cabin across from subject’s for easier surveillance, his prime watcher had written. No sign of the girl at her aunt’s, but the rental cabin had been broken into and someone had been camping there for at least a day or two. Could be coincidence.

  Could be, Major thought. But just because coincidence could account for many “supernatural” experiences didn’t mean it was the best explanation for everything. And this coincidence seemed unlikely in the extreme.

  She’s alive. I don’t know where she is, but that doesn’t really matter. Because now that I know she’s alive, I can pull the other lever I hav
e for getting her to cooperate.

  He clicked Reply and typed, Be prepared to apprehend the subject on my order, as previously discussed.

  He clicked Send.

  He stared at the spreadsheet again, but still didn’t see it. The boy could be a problem if he finds out, he thought. He’s got a soft spot for Phyllis Forsythe. He snorted. And for Ariane. Fortunately enough. He thinks betraying her was for her own good.

  Although to be fair to him, in a way, it was. If she’d give up on the search for Excalibur I won’t be forced to keep threatening her and the people she loves. You’d think she’d see that.

  He sighed. She was being blinded by his sister’s influence, of course. Once she’d assumed the Lady’s power, she’d also assumed something of the Lady’s attitudes. He didn’t believe for a moment that Ariane would give up trying to defeat him, no matter what he did. But he did think she was still enough of an ordinary fifteen-year-old that he could confuse her and frighten her – and thus get her to act against the Lady’s programming. Just as he had confused Wally enough to get him to act against what Ariane wanted.

  Merlin had always been very good at sowing confusion. However much his magical power might have waned, that power still remained to him, even without using his magical Voice of Command, which didn’t work against Wally – his first hint the boy might be Arthur’s heir – or Ariane, because she held the power of his sister.

  Still, if Wally found out about Phyllis…

  I need to distract him, Merlin thought. I need him thinking more about himself and less about Ariane and the sword. I need to dangle something shiny in front of him.

  And I have just the thing.

  He picked up the phone and dialed his own home number.

  •••Most of the files on Rex Major’s home computer proved disappointing to Wally: endless, detailed reports about every aspect of Excalibur Computer Systems. If he’d been interested in industrial espionage, Wally could have been a hero to hackers everywhere within the first five minutes – but that wasn’t what he was after.