Chapter 12
They needed a while to get their breath back. Svangur stood a couple of yards away, slouched in the darkness, all seven and
a half feet of him, arms as thick as telephone poles, elbows jutting, lumpish head sunk between his shoulders.
“How does that work?” Colin asked. “How come you don’t look like a man anymore?”
“’S’like anythin’ else. You gets your eye in,” Svangur told him.
“His little glam is effective but also like the reflection on a window. With a little concentration you can see right past
it,” Arthur said, rising at last and tightening his belt. He had lost the button at the top of his pants. His bare brown head
shone with a damp gleam in the subterranean gloom. “We must be almost there.”
Svangur sulked. “You see it now, Finger. They will have whatever they likes and if you don’t let ’em, they’ll make you into
a stalackamite. They will have all your old issues of Score, and all your copies of Penthouse. They will break your Slade Greatest Hits for spite.”
“Spare us your sob song,” Arthur said. “We’ve heard enough music for tonight.”
Svangur led them down a tunnel as wide as a road, with a sloping roof. There were sources of illumination below, a kind of
greenish flicker like sunlight seen through shallow tropical waters. Colin was acutely aware of his pulse thrumming in his
wrists and throat as they approached the chamber below.
When they reached the edge of the room, he thought, for one dizzying moment, they had emerged into night.
A sky of hallucinatory bluish stars glimmered in the velvety darkness above, strewn in unfamiliar constellations.
But in another moment his vision sharpened, and he could see it was a spattering of some luminescent substance on rock.
“What is that?” Colin said.
“A kind of glowworm, I think, though I’ve never heard of them in England.”
Water dripped and plinked in the cathedral-like vault before them: an animal den filled with chewed, dirty bones. Colin played
his flashlight around the space, drifting the ray across the skull and rib cage of a horse, over tibias and collarbones and
teeth. It was mostly bones, drifts of bones knee deep. But there was also an old white refrigerator—it had to date from the
1940s—thrown open and filled with magazines. Most of them were porn, although Colin saw a stack of gun magazines as well.
There were several broken TV sets, an office chair, a bloodstained mattress, and an inflatable sex doll. The sex doll had
been deflated through heavy use and was crusted with what looked like white sea foam. There were panties—lots of pairs of
panties, cast here and there, hanging over bones, two hundred years of panties, from tiny purple Victoria’s Secret creations
to puffy yellowing grammy bloomers. It looked like he had chewed the crotch out of most of them.
“Crap!” Colin said. “It’s all crap! I thought it would be, like, piles of gold coins.”
“Treasure is in the eye of the beholder,” Arthur said. He cast a desultory glance toward Finger. “The sword. Let’s have it.”
“Don’t know where we might a left it,” Finger said.
Arthur turned the Cree hi-thrower to the most powerful setting and Finger squealed, even though the light was pointed away
from him.
“There!” Finger screamed. “There! In our cabineck of curiossitease!”
Arthur’s flashlight found, at the far end of the chamber, an elevated white stone box. A Celtic cross had been carved into
a lid speckled with those phantom lights cast by the glowworm. A tomb, Colin reckoned. They waded through the bones toward
it.
“Did he kill all of these?” Colin asked.
“No. This was the plague. The tomb will have belonged to someone who could afford to die in style. A knight, or the wife of
a lord. Svangur probably moved the bones in here to make it more homey.” The troll followed them halfway across the room and
then Arthur waved the light close to his feet. “Stay there, Finger. You’ve made it this far by being good. Don’t spoil things
now. Colin?”
Colin took one edge of the stone lid. Arthur took the other and looked at him across the top.
“What if this is another trap?” Colin asked. “What if it’s full of, I don’t know, soul-eating centipedes?”
Arthur traced his fingers across the Celtic cross, shook his head. “No. They couldn’t bear it. Not if this cross means anything.
Come on. Lift.”
They heaved. Stone ground against stone. As the lid was tipped back, a smell billowed out . . . a surprisingly sweet and grassy
odor, as if they had opened a door to a meadow on a cool spring morning.
The sword was in a loose sheath of silk, so white, so clean, it almost seemed to radiate a light of its own. It lay in the
bottom of the granite box, on top of a neatly folded brown-and-gray robe made of human hair. A simple glass phial, corked
and sealed with wax the color of vanilla frosting, sat on a stone ledge at one end of the coffin.
But mostly, the eye was drawn to and held by the sword. The hilt was another cross, this of dull gold. The silk was so clean,
so lovely, it made Colin unhappily aware of his own dirty hands.
“So here’s where we find out,” Colin said. “Here’s where we find out if only a good man can draw the sword from its sheath.”
“Or to put it another way,” Arthur said, “here’s where we find out if I’m a good man.”
“Oh, Arthur. I don’t have any doubt of it. I’ve never had any doubt of it. If anyone has tried to be good, it’s you.”
Arthur smiled at him suddenly and put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, gently.
“I wish I was half as good as my friends believe I am.” He looked into the box again.
“It might be enough that I know in my heart what I want to do with this blade. That’s how it judges, you know?
Not what you’ve done before, but what you choose to do now.
Maybe knowing my intentions will be sufficient.
If not—then we’ve come a long way and risked our lives without much to show for it. ”
Arthur bent and reached for the hilt of the sword. If there was an enchantment on that loose sheath of silk, Colin saw no
sign of it. The blade—as bright as a mirror—slipped from its shroud with a soft ringing sound, as if someone had stroked a
finger across a wind chime. It flashed an eerie aqueous green in that chamber of mystic lights. Arthur exhaled heavily and
seemed to sag slightly.
“Oh, Colin,” Arthur said. “I thought it would fight me. But when I put my hand on it—it felt like the whole world was saying
yes. It was like a first kiss.” His eyes were as bright as the Sword of Strange Hangings. He turned it this way and that.
“Can I see?” Colin asked.
“Yes,” Arthur told him, and turned it around, and offered him the hilt.
Colin took the hilt in his hand—and felt an ache in his teeth and joints, a kind of nasty thrill of pain. It was like biting
a sheet of tinfoil or licking a battery. There was an almost electric sense of repulsion.
“Do you feel it?” Arthur asked, softly. “Do you feel how good it is? Like hearing women laugh on a summer night? Like being
called home for dinner?”
Colin nodded. “I do. And it will cut through anything? Even a dragon?”
Arthur nodded and turned and looked back into the stone coffin. “Yes. And the robe will protect whoever wears it against dragon
flame. The vial of saint’s blood might be enough to restore one of us if we’re struck down in the attempt. I think we want
all of it. What we’ll do, we’ll gather the others for a conference at The Briars and—”
He frowned, as if struck by a troubling notion, and lowered his gaze, and looked down, at the sword Colin had pushed through his abdomen.
Colin kept pushing, driving it in almost to the hilt.
It wasn’t hard work. The blade was quite keen, and there must’ve been something, some magic in it, because it slid through human tissue like it was passing through water.
Arthur stared at it, his hands still gripping the edge of the stone coffin. His knees softened and he sank down, as if to
pray. He made a sound in his throat, a kind of hunh, and finally his confused gaze found Colin.
“I couldn’t have drawn it from that sheath,” Colin said. “I know that for sure.”
“Why?” Arthur said. His voice was weak and breathless. “We could’ve stopped him, Colin. We could’ve stopped the King.”
“Why would we want to stop him? He’s doing so much that needs doing. You’re the one who had to be stopped, Arthur.”
Colin let go of the hilt. Arthur had lifted his hands to grip the blade, but they held it only very loosely. Colin felt a
little embarrassed by the look on his face, like a boy who has dropped his ice cream on a hot day and is watching it melt
on the sidewalk.
“Oh, hell, Arthur,” Colin said. “I’m sorry. I mean that. But did you really think you were the hero of this story?”
He took Arthur’s shoulder and gently helped him to sprawl on his side. There was a lot of blood. He was already lying in a
lake of it. Colin put his head against Arthur’s, his mouth close to Arthur’s ear.
“You aren’t the hero here,” Colin whispered. “I am.”