“I’m surprised you guys know so much about me,” I said finally. “I wouldn’t have thought I was important enough to register on your radar.”
“Don’t be disingenuous,” said Sir Gareth. “It doesn’t suit you. We know who you are, and what you are, and what you’ve done. We always said we’d have to do something about you if you ever left the Nightside. Some kind of high explosive, probably. There was a lot of talk about whether we should intervene during the Angel War, then the Lilith War; but we held off. Partly because we really hate getting involved with the Nightside, but mostly because we were curious to see what you would do.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
“And there have always been those amongst us who think we should ride into the Nightside in force and wipe you all out once and for all.”
“Well,” I said. “You could try ...”
“Quite. We have been keeping a more than usually close eye on the Nightside, recently. Ever since King Artur turned up there from Sinister Albion. That damned and corrupt dimension where a Golden Age was drowned in blood and horror. The only reason we haven’t gone there in force and put everything right the hard way is because we can’t find a way in. That Merlin is still alive, and protecting his own little infernal playground. Which is why we were so interested when King Artur appeared. How did he leave his world and enter the Nightside?”
“A Timeslip, presumably,” I said. “The Nightside is lousy with the things.”
“If so, we haven’t been able to find it. And we looked really hard.”
I gave him a stern look. “You people have been to the Nightside?”
“Hardly. We wouldn’t fit in. We’d be noticed. But we do have certain resources ...”
“Do you know what happened to Artur?” I said. “He seemed to vanish.”
“Haven’t a clue. Do you ... ?”
“No. Do you know why he came to the Nightside?”
“Yes. He wanted to get his hands on our Excalibur and make it his own because the Lady of his world refused him her sword. He was not worthy.”
“But what would Artur want with our Excalibur?”
“If he could seize it by force, and make it serve him, Excalibur would make Artur powerful enough to stand up to his Merlin,” Sir Gareth said patiently. “Artur might be King of Sinister Albion; but he still bows his head to Merlin Satanspawn if he wants to keep his throne.”
“Civil war everywhere you look,” I murmured. “Why can’t people just get along?”
Sir Gareth looked at me sharply. “Both sides of the Fae, and a great many other interested parties, would very much like to know where King Arthur is sleeping. Where his body lies, hidden and protected. Including us.”
“You don’t know?” I said, honestly surprised.
“We’ve never known. Whoever put Arthur to rest, dead or sleeping, went to great pains to hide him from everyone, friends and enemies alike. The London Knights have spent centuries searching, to no avail. And we only wanted to protect him. Many others would give everything they possess to discover Arthur’s hiding-place. Because whoever controls him potentially controls everything else. He is the greatest hero and warrior this world has ever known.”
“I take it we’re not only talking about the good guys here,” I said. “The bad guys want him, too?”
“Of course. Artur from Sinister Albion was corrupted by his Merlin. For all his many qualities, Arthur was just a man. He could be swayed, turned, dominated by an outside force. Excalibur was never the most powerful weapon in Camelot; that was always Arthur. And as he goes ... so goes the world.”
“I never know whether we’re talking about history or legend when it comes to Arthur,” I said. “Most of the stories say he was taken away, to sleep in Avalon.”
“What is Avalon?” said Sir Gareth. “Only a name. In the whole existence of our order, we’ve never found any place or any land called Avalon. No-one knows where Arthur is. And before you ask, no, he couldn’t be in Shadows Fall. That’s where legends go to die when the world stops believing in them; and the world still believes in Arthur. But now Excalibur has come back into the world, the chase is on. Everyone will be after Arthur; and it’s vital for the good of everybody that we get there first.”
I didn’t say anything. But I did wonder if perhaps certain elements inside the London Knights might not prefer it if Arthur were to stay sleeping, even if found. That they might even take steps to ensure he never awoke. Because if he did, would he approve of what the London Knights had become? Of all the things they’d done, and made of themselves, in the fifteen hundred years since Logres? They may have meant well; but we all know what road is paved with good intentions.
We moved on, into the Hall of Forgotten Beasts. A long hall whose walls were decorated with the severed, stuffed, and mounted heads of fantastical creatures that were no longer a part of history. The only remaining examples of hundreds, maybe thousands, of exotic beasts. I walked slowly past row upon row of glassily staring, slack-jawed heads. Some I recognised, some I’d heard of, and some that were perhaps completely unknown now, outside of Castle Inconnu.
“For a long time, hunting was a central part of knightly tradition,” said Sir Gareth. “We don’t do it any more, of course. We’re all conservationists now. But we still take a pride in this hall. It took brave men to hunt these beasts and bring them down.”
I didn’t say anything, walking on and on past the dead heads of once-noble creatures. I had no doubt many of them had been man-killers in their day; but it still seemed to me that slaughter, no matter how necessary, shouldn’t be something you took a pride in. You did it because it needed doing, not because you had a gap on your trophy wall. It was only a step from there to mounting the heads of your enemies on spikes over your door, where everyone could see them.
A unicorn’s head stared sullenly out from the wall, its skin still blindingly white though the curlicued horn was cracked from end to end. A gryphon, with a bullet hole left unrepaired in its forehead; a basilisk with no eyes; and a dire wolf with moulting fur, its jaws forever snarling defiance. And, protruding way out into the hall, a dragon’s head, at least fifteen feet wide, its scaled hide a dull bottle-green. The eyes were clearly glass and looked like no-one had dusted them in a while. I finally stopped before one head I didn’t recognise, and Sir Gareth stopped with me.
“This is the fabled Questing Beast. It eluded us for centuries though many knights went after it, tracking it all across Europe. Finally brought down by Sir Bors, in 1876. One shot, from four hundred yards.”
“How very sporting,” I said.
The Questing Beast’s head was an odd mixture of beast and bird. And perhaps it was my imagination, but to me the Beast looked old and tired and pitiful, and maybe even a little resigned. It had outlived the time it was meant for, and the menaces it understood, like swords and lances, and finally died from an attack it never even saw coming.
I looked back down the Hall of Forgotten Beasts, and it did not seem a place of pride to me. All I felt was a quiet air of melancholy.
“You have to understand,” Sir Gareth said defensively, “every beast here preyed on people. It was a knight’s duty back then to hunt these creatures down and protect the innocent from attack. No-one thought about preserving endangered species. These days we only hunt bad guys, the real monsters of the world.”
I looked at him thoughtfully. “Lots of monsters in the Nightside. You ever go hunting there?”
“I told you,” Sir Gareth said steadily. “We stay out of the Nightside.”
“Because Merlin was there?”
“It’s all about territory,” said Sir Gareth. “You should understand that, John.”
We moved on again and came to a long stone gallery where the walls were covered with long rows of framed portraits, reminders of those who’d fallen in service with the London Knights. There were hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, stretching away into the distance. The most recent were photographs, showing men of various ages, all striking the same stiff pose and determined smile. These gave way to black-and-white, then sepia prints, and finally to painted portraits, in the varying styles of the times. The same stiff pose, though, the same determined smile. All the way back to stylised images of the original knights of Arthur’s Camelot. Painted sometime after, I assumed, though of course I could be wrong. Merlin’s court was famous for its anachronisms. I stopped before one portrait.