We laughed briefly together and continued on up the hill. The higher we rose, the further I could see out across the land. The rows of Wicker Men were still burning fiercely, pumping black smoke and ashes up into the sky. Huge bat-winged shapes flapped slowly through the clouds, lean and vicious things. They weren’t dragons. Something else Merlin had summoned up from Hell? I pointed them out to Suzie, and she smiled and said something about target practice.
When we finally got to the castle, we found ourselves facing two huge steel doors, great featureless slabs of gleaming metal, thirty feet tall and twenty wide, that were the only way in. I looked the doors over, but there was no knocker or bell-pull anywhere. The blank metal walls on both sides seemed to stretch away forever, towering high above us, without so much as a single arrow slit to relieve the monotony. Suzie did offer to try her shotgun on the door, and I said some very loud things about ricochets. While we were still arguing, the great metal doors swung slowly back, opening wide enough to allow a single knight in dark armour to march out to join us. Suzie and I immediately stopped arguing and glared at him, and he stopped dead in his tracks. Behind the narrow slit in the front of his helmet, his gaze was suddenly uncertain.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m John Taylor, and this is Suzie Shooter. Be impressed, or we’ll take you apart with a can-opener.”
“Doesn’t it get hot inside all that armour?” said Suzie. “You can take it off if you want. It wouldn’t protect you from us anyway.”
“Please don’t kill him yet, Suzie,” I said. “He’s the only guide we’ve got. I don’t want to end up wandering through this bloody place with a map in my hand. You are here to guide us, aren’t you? Speak up!”
“Yes,” said the knight. “I’m ... uh ...”
“Get on with it,” I said ruthlessly. “And get a move on. We’re expected.”
“Merlin Satanspawn demands you attend him in the Great Hall,” said the knight, getting the words out in a rush so as to be rid of them as quickly as possible.
“Good,” said Suzie. “We want to see him. We have a lot to talk about. Don’t stand too close, and you won’t get blood and innards all over your armour.”
“He’s going to kill both of you,” said the knight. “And I’ll get to watch.”
“And you were doing so well,” I said.
“How do you take a piss in that outfit anyway?” said Suzie, looking the armour over critically. “Have you got a trap-door, or something? Doesn’t it get rusty?”
The knight turned his back on us and stomped off through the doors. Suzie and I wandered after him, taking our time. The courtyard beyond the gates was full of men, women, and children, all of them impaled on long metal spikes. Hundreds of them, filling the courtyard from wall to wall. All of them still alive, kept alive and suffering. Suzie and I stopped short, and the great metal doors slammed shut behind us. The knight looked back at us, smirking behind his helmet.
“See? Not so funny now, are you?”
Suzie and I surged forward and hit him together, bowling him off his feet and slamming him onto the courtyard floor. Suzie knelt on his chest and stuck the barrel of her shotgun right into the slit opening of his helmet. I put a hand on her arm.
“Don’t kill him, Suzie. Not yet.” I looked at the knight. “You—arsehole. Tell me what’s happening here.”
“You wouldn’t dare shoot me,” said the knight.
“You really don’t know her,” I said. “Trust me. I am the only thing keeping you alive at the moment. Talk.”
“They spoke out, everyone here. Against the way things are. Someone overheard them and turned them in. Now they’ll squirm and rot on those spikes forever, kept alive by Merlin’s magic. Or at least, until the next batch of traitors get hauled in.”
I stood up and looked round me. Sharp metal points protruded from mouths and eyes, and blood and other fluids ran down the poles to pool on the courtyard floor; but all of them were still alive. Dying by inches, over and over, but never getting there. Agony beyond belief ...
“I can’t help them,” said Suzie. “I don’t have enough ammunition. Please, John. Do something.”
I raised my gift, and, powered by my rage and disgust, it only took me a moment to find the magic that made all this possible. I could See it, hanging across the courtyard like a spider’s web, every strand an artery, pulsing as it fed on the pain it made possible. I grabbed the whole web in my mental hand and crushed it. Something far away cried out, in pain and fury, and I smiled. All round me, men, women, and children slumped forward on their spikes, dead at last. I looked at Suzie, still with one knee pressing down on the knight’s breast-plate.
“Get his helmet off.”
Suzie wrenched the steel helm off and threw it to one side. It didn’t travel far in the shit and gore crusted on the floor. The knight’s face was pale and sweaty, and very young. Barely out of his teens by the look of him. He tried to glare defiantly up at Suzie, but he wasn’t used to being on the receiving end. He couldn’t meet the cold fury in her eyes. He was close to death, and he knew it.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Sir Blaise.” He licked his dry lips. “I am a knight of the land, and it is death to threaten me.”
“Never stopped me before,” said Suzie.
“Get him on his feet,” I said.
Suzie hauled him back onto his feet again through a combination of brute strength and intimidation. I walked up to Blaise, kicking his helm out of the way. I smiled at him, and he flinched at what he saw in my smile, in my eyes.
“Blaise,” I said, “you only think you know scary. Look at me, and look at Suzie. See that gun she’s holding? She just killed Prince Gaylord with it. If you say one more word to piss either of us off, she will blow your head right off your shoulders. Won’t you, Suzie?”
“Love to,” said Suzie.
“Lead the way, Blaise, and don’t waste our time with the scenic route.”
He led us on, through the courtyard and out the far door. Suzie paused there for one last look at the bodies on their spikes.
“That is it,” she said. “Merlin is dead.”
“You get a decent chance,” I said, “go for it.”
Blaise led us into the dark interior of Camelot, and we went with him. Guards in dark armour lined the corridors all along the way, but none of them spoke to us, only sometimes standing aside to let us pass. They looked at Suzie and me as though they were seeing something utterly alien. I don’t think they were used to seeing people who still had their pride. Who weren’t afraid of them. I felt like killing them all, on general principles, and given the fury that was still burning so very coldly within me, I think I might have used my gift to find a way to do it ... But I kept reminding myself, that wasn’t what I was here for. I had to concentrate on keeping Excalibur away from Merlin, or everything was lost.
“How much further?” I said to Blaise.
“It’s a big place, Camelot,” said the knight, looking straight ahead. “Don’t talk to me. You’re nothing but dead men walking. Merlin will make you suffer and die, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Because that’s what happens here.”
“Someone’s getting snotty again,” said Suzie. “Let me shoot him somewhere painful, John, for the good of his soul.”
“And death won’t be the end of it,” said the knight. “No-one stays dead here. No-one escapes Merlin that easily.”
Suzie looked hopefully at me, but I shook my head. We still needed a guide.
The interior of the castle grew steadily more awful the further in we went. Camelot was a place of fear and horror and endless suffering. The floors were covered with flayed human faces, there to be stepped on and crushed under metal boots. The faces still had eyes in them, alive and aware, and the mouths moved constantly in whispering pleas for death and an end to pain. More faces had been stapled to the walls, the eyes following us as they passed. The mouths moved, but their tongues had been torn out. Further in, people had been buried alive in stone walls, with their hands left to protrude, still feebly moving. Bloody organs and human viscera hung from the ceilings in intricate displays, dripping blood and other fluids—still alive, pulsing, twitching. I asked Blaise about them.