K Jeter: Morlock Night

"The nurse," I said. "At the clinic…"

"Ah, yes, the nurse, as you say. That was Merdenne's little masquerade for me. All the time I had served as his right hand, he wished to humiliate me that way. He knew my ambitions. were as great as his, and might someday cut the ground from beneath his feet. The wretch! Leaving me to die and rot in a hospital charity ward as soon as I had answered all his questions about your rescue of Arthur. I vowed then, in the heart of my scabbed and twisted body that I would live and take his place somehow. And so I have. Merdenne is gone and I am now the Morlocks' collaborator. The sweet triumph for which Merdenne craved will be mine."

The intensity of the woman's greed and egotism repulsed me. So Evil always had an understudy such as this to take its place when needed! "Do you know where Merdenne is?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter," said the woman. "From the fact of his sudden disappearance it's easy to surmise that your friend Dr. Ambrose has somehow managed to remove him from the scene. And since you two have been pursuing your quest without Ambrose's help, it's equally obvious that your powerful ally is also no longer a force that needs to be considered. No, the contest is between you and myself – and I have won."

"You knew then what we were trying to do? What the purpose of our quest was?"

The bandaged head nodded slowly. "After your raid on the clinic you had Arthur the King. What else would you need other than the sword Excalibur restored to its true strength?"

"So that's why you had the sword that had drifted to the Lost Coin World brought to you."

"Of course. But not just that sword. All of them I had located and retrieved, except for the one that was already in your possession." The woman's gauze-wrapped hands left the table and lifted up something that had been propped next to her chair. It was the sword I had carried, still bound in its cloths and leather straps.

The woman clumsily laid the bundle on the table. "All along," she said, "I believed Merdenne to be a fool for merely dividing up Excalibur's power and scattering the swords to their hiding places. A weapon such as this! A thing of power! A waste for it not to be employed to further our own ends. So after I had taken Merdenne's place in the confidences of the Morlocks the first thing I ordered was that the swords be found and brought to this particular place."

"Why this place?" said I. "Of what significance is this castle?"

"I'm glad you show a curiosity about these things, Hocker. I would think it a pity for anyone to die ignorant of the truth. As for this place, it is a site of great power – the same power that the sword Excalibur is said to possess. The castle itself used to stand at a similar site of power in the Languedoc section of France and was called Montsegur, and before that Montsalvat. It was rumoured to have once been the repository of that stone known as the Holy Grail. Whether that is true or not I cannot say. Be that as it may, a mysterious order that called themselves the Last Cathars moved the castle of Montsegur to this spot stone by stone sometime in the last part of the Twentieth Century – this I know from the records they left behind. Their occult attempts must not have been successful, for the order died out and vanished shortly after. When I learned of the existence of this place I resolved to bring the Excalibur swords here for my own purpose – melding the swords into one again."

Her last statement puzzled me. "Couldn't that have been done anywhere? I thought it was sufficient merely to bring the swords together and they would combine by themselves into one."

A nod from the bandaged head. "So I had thought as well. But I had three of the four swords in my possession and nothing resulted from their juxtaposition. They remained three separate swords, worthless in themselves. That is why I brought them to this desolate spot, hoping that the power inherent in the location and the very stones of the castle would serve to unite them."

"And you succeeded?"

"No." The word was hard and flat as iron. "Even in this place where more than anywhere else it should have been possible, nothing happened. I tried every conceivable positioning of the swords to each other, yet still they remained separate. At last I came to the only possible conclusion." She paused, then went on, her voice even more steely. "The swords are fraudulent. There is no Excalibur, and perhaps never was. It was all concocted by Dr. Ambrose for reasons of his own, most likely as a diversion to draw Merdenne's attention away from his real plotting."

Her accusation stunned me. "But- but that can't be- He told us. He sent us after them."

"So?" A shrug. "He used you then, a pawn on his board while his more valuable pieces awaited their turn. Did you really expect a master strategist such as Ambrose to move so simply toward his goal?"

For a moment I felt dizzy with shock, and Tafe put her hand on my shoulder to steady me. "I thought," I said weakly, "that he had told the truth to us. That he owed at least that much to us."

"You meant nothing to him," said the woman. "Such as you are less than dirt to him. But now I've grown tired of our little conversation. As I had expected, it was a rare treat to see your faces when I told you these things. Now you're so pitiful when deprived of your illusions that you make me sick." She raised her hand and the door behind us opened, admitting Col. Nalga and several of the guards. "Take them away," she ordered, then picked up the sword I had carried all through the regions below the Earth's surface, and tossed it into my hands. "Here – take your worthless scrap of metal. I hope you find it a fitting object of contemplation."

The Morlock guards led us out of the room just as peal after peal of muffled laughter sounded from the bandaged figure's hidden mouth.

Flight after flight of time-worn steps led down to the bowels of the castle. At last our guards had brought us to a heavy iron door with a small opening hatched over with bars. The flickering light of a torch was visible through the aperture.

"Consider this your last residence," said Col. Nalga, drawing open the door. The Morlock guards shoved us in, then the officer slammed the door shut once more. "I'm afraid," he said to us through the barred opening, "that whatever vermin you find in there will have to do for your supper. We hate to abandon our guests like this, but we must return to the invasion force that's massing beneath the England of 1892. Our plans will be ripe in a few days of that long ago time. So now we must leave you. Sleep well."

He and the guards departed, boots tramping upon the ancient stairs. That noise died in the distance above us. Tafe and I turned away from the door. There was no point in even trying it, as we had heard the bolt fall into place on the other side. We surveyed the chamber where we had been left to die.

From all appearances the room had once served as one of the dungeon cells for the castle. Below the sputtering torch on the wall dangled several pairs of rusting manacles and leg shackles. Most of the space, though, was taken up by the mounds of nondescript trash that had accumulated in this low point over the centuries. Old clothing and fetid garbage lay mixed in with battered pieces of armour. Idly, I poked about in the nearest heap with the clothwrapped tip of the useless sword they had allowed me to keep.

A trio of objects slid from the top of the heap and clattered on the stone floor. In the dim light I at first could not make them out, but then saw that they were three swords, all alike and identical to the one inside the bundle in my hands. The Morlocks, having found the sword useless, had simply thrown them away down here. No doubt it fitted their cruel mockery to shut us in with them as well.