Gwalcmai blinked sweat out of his eyes. He realized he was breathing too hard, close to hyperventilating. He had seen this before. He had seen his own family like this.
What do you want?”
“Do not worry,” Vampyr said, as he eased up the pressure of the dagger against her. “You saved me, so I owe you your life.”
“What do you want?” Donnchadh repeated.
“Is the Grail up there?”
Donnchadh hesitated. The pressure from the weapon increased.
“Tell me,” Vampyr insisted.
“No.”
“You lie,” Vampyr said. “You would not be here otherwise.”
Donnchadh gasped in pain as the point of the knife entered her back, just to the left of her spine. Vampyr ripped the dagger to the left, tearing through her internal organs. Donnchadh collapsed to her knees and looked up at Vampyr as blood flowed from her body. “You said you owed me my life.”
“I lied.”
Gwalcmai blindly walked down the ramp, not really noticing the Romans moving up it. He was not alone, as there were other stunned soldiers coming down, not answering the questions of those heading in the other direction. He reached the bottom of the ramp and walked through the camp to the rock where he had left Donnchadh.
His shock at what he had just seen in Masada was penetrated by the vision of her lying in a pool of blood. He rushed up, dropping to his knees next to her.
“What happened?”
“Vampyr,” she whispered. “My back.”
Gwalcmai ran his hands around her body to her back and found the wound. He put pressure on it, trying to stop the bleeding.
“The Grail?” Donnchadh asked through her pain.
Gwalcmai shook his head. “There is only death up there.”
“There is only death here,” Donnchadh said, closing her eyes.
“I can—” Gwalcmai began, but she shook her head ever so slightly, using all the energy she could muster.
“Take my ka and go.”
Aspasia’s Shadow had known something was wrong when there was no resistance to the ram. That, combined with the presence of the two strange humans and one of the Undead, made him act quickly. He strode up the ramp, hearing the disturbed mutterings from troopers coming the other way.
He clambered over the tumbled rocks in the breach, entered the courtyard of Masada, and immediately saw what had happened.
They were all dead. By their own hands.
Flavius Silva was not far away and from the slump in the Roman commander’s shoulders, Aspasia’s Shadow knew that in their own way these Jews had extracted a final victory over the Romans.
More important, he also knew that the Grail could not be here. They would have never done this if they possessed the Grail. And, interestingly, it was obvious the two humans and the rogue Undead had thought the Grail was here.
So who had it and where was it now?
Joseph of Arimathea was tired. Bone tired. Two years he had been journeying and now as the prow of the small fishing boat scraped on the pebbly shore, he had finally arrived. The place where the Wedjat were headquartered. One of the sailors he had paid on the continent to take him across the channel gave him a hand off the boat.
Joseph had a battered leather pack slung over his shoulder and he kept one hand tight on it as he climbed over the side and onto the beach. There was a village less than two hundred meters away and several men were walking toward them, curious to see what strangers had arrived.
Joseph looked at the men as they came up. He held up a gold coin. “Can you tell me the way to the place called Avalon?”
XV
Ahalf dozen candles sputtered and flickered, giving off an inconsistent light and filling the chamber with a slightly foul odor. The lone occupant of the room was wrapped in a dirty black robe with a tattered blanket over his shoulders. He was in his early thirties but looked much older, the hard conditions living in the caverns inside the tor having taken their toll on his body. A tic twitched unnoticed on his left temple, not able to disturb his fierce concentration upon the documents lying on the large wooden table that took up most of the chamber’s space.
He was reading, which was what he did almost all the time. The walls of the cavern were lined with sagging wooden racks, which were full of documents ranging from rolled-up papyrus to crudely bound books. For eighteen years he had been there, reading. Not that he was a slow reader, for eighteen years was more than enough time to have gone through all the documents, but because he’d had to learn all the languages in which the various reports were written.
He’d worked his way backward in time. And in that manner he was able to trace inversely the changes in the languages and work on comprehending each one that preceded the other. He was now arriving at the beginning.
His name was Merlin. He’d spent his childhood in a swamp far from there, raised by his mother who told him nothing of his destiny until one day when he was twelve, his father, whom he had never met, showed up at their hut. His father brought him to the cavern and told him that he would be the next Watcher of Avalon, a position of great importance.
Merlin had not been impressed with either his father or the position.
Until he found the document room.
His father had died less than a year after bringing Merlin to Avalon. Merlin had buried him on the side of the tor, alongside the long line of graves of the Watchers who had preceded them. When he did so, he knew that his own grave would be next in line, and that had given him a strange sense of foreboding. Not of death, but of a fate that seemed ordained to bring nothing of value to the world, despite his father’s grand words about what an important job being a Watcher was.
Merlin looked down at the parchment covered with High Runes. It told of the First Gathering and the edict to watch the Airlia and their minions. It had been many years since any Watcher report had come to Avalon — none in Merlin’s time on the tor and only once during his father’s.
Merlin read of Atlantis and could only shake his head in wonderment at the description of the city and the way people lived. Few here in England lived past thirty. Starvation and disease were rampant. There was practically no law. Each little cluster of huts was a world unto itself. It seemed to Merlin that Watching had not done mankind much good. Even the stories he’d heard as a child of the Romans spoke of a better world than the one in which he lived. There were some petty kingdoms here and there on the island where a powerful man managed to bring others under his rule, but hardly any of them lasted beyond a few generations.
Merlin ran a dirty finger over the parchment, mouthing the words to himself. The Grail. He had read of it in quite a few of the documents. A most wondrous thing — something that promised eternal life. And it was there. He had held it in his own hands many times. But, according to report made by Joseph of Arimathea, who had brought it to Avalon so long ago, the Grail was useless without two special stones, and they were not to be found.
And then there was the sword. Merlin passed it every day in the crystal cavern on his way in and out of the tunnel complex. It was a magnificent thing. His father had beaten into him that he was never to touch the sword, but had never given a reason why. The sword was powerful, very powerful, in a different way from the Grail, his father had said. Merlin had sensed that even his father didn’t know what exactly that power was, although the old man had indicated it was power that could only be wielded by one man, just as the sword itself could only be wielded by one.
Merlin shuffled through the pile of parchments until he found the one that had caused him great excitement the previous evening when he’d first translated it. One paragraph had riveted him: