He changed the subject.
“I knew you would call, of course. Once you realized we would take Needlemier. He’s the largest piece left on the board; you couldn’t afford to lose him. And ‘Greater love hath no man than this,’ yes?”
“I know that one. It’s from the Bible.”
“Though Needlemier somewhat stretches the definition of ‘friend.’ He gave Samuel to us quicker than you can say Judas.”
“Maybe he’s just not cut out for this kind of chess.”
“Not like we are, certainly.”
“Don’t lump me in with you, Vosch.”
“Why shouldn’t I? We’re not so different, you and I. You grasped immediately my move against the lawyer, just as I discerned your countermove to contact me. Even our motives are similar, Alfred. You would do anything to protect your friends, just as I would do anything to protect my patron Jourdain Garmot. Now we near the end of the game: I bring you to him while you plot your response. What is it? An ambush at Tintagel? Your guardian and this mysterious yet beautiful blonde await our arrival? Or have you enlisted the aid of the saber-wielding Spaniard and his powerful Company?”
“Maybe it’s simpler than that,” I said.
The sun was setting over the Atlantic and the chalkboard-gray had changed to burnished gold. The shining patina hid a world teaming with life, fantastic creatures for whom our world above was deadly. Predators and prey, from the microscopic to the huge—the sea was empty and chokingly full. In my dreams lately, it was full of dragons.
“Like Lancelot upon the Plain,” Vosch said, “he marches to the drumbeat of his sin, toward his certain doom.”
“Who said that?” I asked.
He smiled. “I did.”
TINTAGEL, CORNWALL, U.K.
THE CASTLE CAMELOT
00:06:35:10
The ruins clustered near the cliff’s edge gleamed in the moonlight. You could hear the surf crashing into the rocks three hundred feet below. There was a storm far out at sea; you could see the dark line of clouds on the western horizon and the flicker of lightning, though it was so far away you couldn’t hear the thunder.
The stones were white, worn down from a thousand years of sun and wind and rain. They stuck out from the ground like the huge, discarded teeth of a giant. Here great halls once stood, courtyards and chambers with vast, cathedral ceilings and, somewhere in the rubble, a great hall with a round table in the middle of it, and around that table sat a king and his knights, including the bravest in the kingdom, his best friend and my ancestor, whose disloyalty would lead to the crumbling of the white stones and the death of the king he loved.
It was midnight and Camelot was deserted.
“Where’s Jourdain?” I asked.
“You know where he is,” Vosch answered.
Of course I knew. Flat-Face II and Weasel stayed in the Land Rover while Vosch and I descended the steps cut into the cliff side. On the eastern shore of the inlet the mouth of a cave yawned toward the open ocean and the silent, raging storm.
We entered Merlin’s Cave. Torches burned along one wall, throwing our shadows across the floor and against the opposite wall of the chamber, where a collection of human skulls sat grinning, grouped in a circle on a natural ledge about chest high.
“What are those?” I asked, horrified.
“Can you not guess by now?” Vosch asked.
Shadows danced in the empty eye sockets, creating the illusion that the skulls still had life—that they were looking back at me as I stood still, shivering, looking at them, while the wind whistled and howled through unseen cracks and fissures in the stone.
“They are the Knights of the Sacred Order, Alfred. There is Windimar of Suedberg. There is Bellot of St. Etienne. And that one is Cambon of Sicily. The ones closest to you are the remains of Lord Bennacio and of course, your father, the great Bernard Samson, heir to Lancelot.”
So that’s what Jourdain was doing in Pennsylvania: the same thing he did in Knoxville. Digging up the knights and taking their heads.
I counted the skulls. Twelve. I remember my father’s words, spoken so long ago in Uncle Farrell’s apartment. Only twelve of us are left now . . .
Behind me, Vosch said, “You’ll note there is room for one more in the center, in the place of honor.”