Chapter 16
When Gwen and Robin walked into the chapel on the campus of Rackham College, three days after Allie kissed Donna goodbye at
long to students, but at this hour, only the accent lights were on, throwing brilliance onto the ornate stonework overhead.
A century-old Bible, a book twice the size of Enoch Crane’s journal, was open on the altar, and Robin wandered up to give
it a glance. She had a smug look of satisfaction when she got back to her pew.
“Psalm forty-four, eighteen–nineteen,” Robin said. “‘Our hearts were never false and our feet never left your path, though
thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.’ I wouldn’t have expected anything
different.”
They sat in a companionable silence, Robin leaning back, legs crossed, Gwen in her pea jacket, a messenger bag between her
feet. Folding metal chairs clanged in the basement, and Gwen heard the shuffle and thump of the attendees gathering their
things to go. Gwen watched some of the alcoholics, anonymous, as they appeared in the mudroom—the narthex, she remembered,
great crossword fill, that word—and slipped out through the big double doors into the unseasonably warm night.
Allie and Tana were the last to arrive at the top of the steps, Tana lugging a giant stainless steel coffee urn, Allie clasping their coats to her chest. As Allie came into the dim glow of the church, Gwen thought she looked like a woman restored, her blond curls bouncing on her shoulders like she had just stepped out of a shampoo commercial.
Tana had squeezed into a pair of jeans that looked as if they had been spray-painted on.
Gwen wasn’t sure it was entirely moral to wear a pair of jeans like that in a place of worship.
Then again, not-entirely-moral pretty much covered Tana Nighswander’s operating philosophy.
They took the pew in front of Robin and Gwen and twisted to face them.
“Are you ready to spill it, then?” Tana said. “You going to finally let us in on what you’re thinking over?”
“Can you?” Allie asked. “Can’t King Sorrow spy on you—on all of us?”
Gwen gave her head a little shake. “He can . . . but not here. Arthur told me once that he thought places of worship were,
to dragons, a little like a lead apron is to radiation. If he came through into our world, he could smash the roof in on us,
but while he’s in the Long Dark, I doubt he can hear us through these walls.” She did not add that Arthur had no proof for
his theory. It had been little more than a wistful notion.
“Get on with it then,” Robin said.
Gwen flipped back the flap on the messenger bag at her feet and began to remove items, one at a time, starting with the items
Allie had procured a few days before. First the martyr’s robe. She gently set the silver-handled mirror of the Russian princess
atop it, the glass turned face down. She did not want to look into it until the time was right, had a not unjustified fear
of what she might see there. Her hand dipped into the bag again and came up with a battered green thermos. Next to that she
placed a stainless-steel cylinder, about the size of a soda can, painted matte black. Lastly, she produced five of Arthur’s
Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, bundled together with heavy red rubber bands. She did not really need the notebooks, knew them by
heart, forward and back, but it felt good to put them next to her. Arthur Oakes has entered the chat, she thought, and almost laughed. She doubted Arthur had ever logged into a chat room in his life.
“When Arthur died, he left me some money, and he left me some notebooks.
The money was precious. There was enough of it so I could reduce my hours to part-time and go back to school.
But I know now the notebooks were worth more.
Arthur had an outline and about seven chapters of a book called A Toolkit for the Well-Prepared Dragonslayer.
At first, I thought it was an attempt to present his ideas about fairy tale monsters to popular readers. But now I think
it was also at least partly a very long letter he was writing, some things he wanted me to know, in case something happened
to him. See, by the time Svangur led him into that hole in the ground, Arthur didn’t just think he could kill King Sorrow.
He knew he could.”
Allie sat up straighter, her fists balled on her thighs in excitement. Gwen supposed she was overselling it—Arthur didn’t
deal in certainties, only luminous possibilities—but she thought the hope might be as useful as anything she had pulled out
of her messenger bag.
“The easiest way to get rid of a dragon is to learn its true name, which gives you the power to banish him from the mortal
realm, for at least as long as you live. King Sorrow’s true name was almost certainly in the Crane journal, and if it hadn’t
burned up in the fire at Fleming’s Antiquarian twenty years ago, we could’ve been out from under our pet iguana decades ago.
Dragons can also be tricked into trying to eat things they shouldn’t, like a sun, or their own tails, but unfortunately King
Sorrow sticks to a limited menu. I guess you could say he’s on the paleo diet. The crafty old snake only has a taste for blood
seasoned by grief and hopelessness. They can be outfoxed in a good riddling contest, but that’s another nonstarter for our
guy. I got him once with a bad joke about lousy beer. I’ll never get him again, not that way. He’s got five thousand years
of riddles in his head, and what I’ve got—what we’ve all got—wouldn’t fill a bad jokebook. A person might also kill one dragon
by summoning another.”
“If that’s why you wanted the mirror,” Allie said, “to summon another dragon, then I’m going to put it right back where I
found it.”
“No worries there. One was enough for me. Finally, as anyone who’s ever read even one story about Camelot knows, there’s another way to take a dragon off the board, and that’s to chop off its head.
Bullets—and Sidewinder missiles—bounce right off something like King Sorrow, but stories of mythic adventure are full of magical blades, like Excalibur and the Sword of Strange Hangings, which are sharp enough to cleave through dragon scale.
Arthur talked about swords like that almost as if they were people, with names, preferences, moral certainties.
Excalibur, for example, could only be drawn by an idealist who would place the law above his own authority.
The Sword of Strange Hangings—which Galahad took with him on the Grail quest—could only be drawn by someone who was ready to give his own life, with a light heart, for others.
“Only Arthur didn’t just think these weapons had personalities . . . he thought they had souls. In fact, he said they are souls, pure spirits forged into blades. He wasn’t being metaphorical either. He wrote that the human body is itself a kind
of sheath for the blade within, and death is the moment the sword is finally drawn, another weapon in God’s armory.” Gwen’s
hand had come to rest on the notebooks. “That was almost the last thing he wrote before he went down into the cave with Colin
and the troll. But there were also some notes in the margins that I didn’t understand right away. He said it was too bad—he
already had the sword he needed, but he couldn’t draw it while he was alive, and he wouldn’t be around to draw it after he
was dead. He wrote that the thing he needed most he could never reach.”
“Remember, I’m new to this,” Tana said. “You have to talk real slow for the townie. You can pull someone’s soul right out
of their body and use it like a sword?”
“I don’t know how you’d pull a soul out of someone’s body,” Gwen said. “But I know how you pull one out of the Long Dark.”
She tapped the mirror with one fingernail, click, click, click.
“You want to bring Arthur back,” Allie said in a hush. “And use him to fight King Sorrow.”
Robin was frowning, prettily, thoughtfully. Tana’s features were bunched up into an expression of concentration, tinged ever
so slightly by anger—she was a woman who hated uncertainty. Only Allie seemed to get it, nodding to herself as she thought
it over.
Tana said, “You’d have, like—one of your séances? Like what you used to bring King Sorrow into the world at the beginning?”
“Yes. I’d find a place that was important to Arthur emotionally and call for him to return.
Cast the spell, same as we cast a spell to bring King Sorrow through from the Long Dark.
” She moved her hand to the cylinder that resembled a black soda can—a Bluetooth-enabled projector for iPhone.
“I’ve got a recording of Arthur from a few years back.
I can project the video onto the wall, which will bring him right into the room with me.
We know a bit of Elwood Hondo’s ugly spirit got stuck to a piece of film.
Maybe there’s a bit of Arthur stuck to my video.
” She gestured at the mirror. “And there’s the mirror.
It was one of the instruments we used to summon King Sorrow.
It operates as a kind of window into the Long Dark. ”
“I didn’t use the mirror,” Allie said. “I used the conch. I should’ve brought that too. I’m not sure the mirror will work
for me, Gwen.”
“Don’t worry about that, Allie,” Gwen said. “This isn’t going to require the conch.”
Allie frowned, didn’t understand what that implied. Before she could follow up, though, Tana said, “So you repeat what you
did to bring King Sorrow into this world—”
“Yes. Only for Arthur’s spirit. Play the video and call for him to join us. There’d probably also be a task to complete, something
that would bend reality ever so slightly. Last time I had to bring some dead butterflies back to life. I don’t know what it’ll
be this time.”
“And if everything works, Arthur’s ghost shows up carrying a sword?”
“No,” Robin said. “Arthur is the sword. Isn’t that right? You draw him from the Long Dark, just as the other Arthur, the famous one, drew the sword from