“I thought they already had,” Dagonet said.

  I do miss the upper world and its many surprises. It’s very quiet down here. Very still. I’ve been down here a long time now.

  “Not long enough,” Nimue said.

  Many, many surprises. You, for instance.

  The ancient wizard’s invisible attention had turned to Collum, and the hair stood up on his arms.

  “Sir Collum of the Out Isles,” he said.

  So you are. Well, welcome, Sir Collum. You are a curious company indeed. What noble cause brings you all here tonight?

  “You tell us,” Nimue said. “You dragged us here.”

  Interestingly, I did not. I suspect greater forces than myself are at work.

  “Our cause does not concern you.”

  Of course it concerns me, Nimue. Of course it does. Britain has been my life’s work, and I have had a very, very long life. Everything that happens on this blessed isle concerns me. Every footfall, every raindrop, every heartbeat. You live only for yourself, Nimue, but I have only ever lived for Britain.

  So tell me. Something has happened, something grave.

  “Arthur is dead,” Bedivere said. Nimue looked daggers at him. “There was a battle, and he and Mordred killed each other.”

  The earth shifted under their feet, as if a huge sleeping form were stirring restlessly under a thin blanket. Nimue took out a small flask and began shaking drops of a clear liquid from it onto the dust in a circle around them.

  That is a tragedy, Merlin said finally. What a terrible thing. Though it wouldn’t have taken a prophet to see it coming. It would merely have taken a competent magician, but well, there it is, isn’t it? The fall of Camelot began with Merlin’s fall. Were you there?

  “Yes.”

  What happened to the sword?

  “I threw it in the sea.”

  I see. Good enough. Good, good, good.

  “Please don’t insult us by pretending you care about anything besides yourself, Merlin,” Nimue said.

  I pretend nothing. If it is God who brought you here, then I doubt it was for my sake. He knows you need my help.

  Merlin spoke calmly and slowly, drawing out every word with a slight purr.

  “If you have something to offer us then get to the point,” Nimue said.

  If you want to know everything I can offer you, well, we’ll be here all night! Grim Bedivere, I could fashion you a new hand. I could alter your nature, to better suit the practices of God and man. Or you, Dinadan. I could give you what you desire more than anything in the world. What even the fairies couldn’t give you. Nimue, I suspect, cannot. Can she? No, I thought not. She lacks my skill with bodies.

  But I could do it, if you let me out. I could do it tonight. No? Your famous wit has flown?

  Dinadan’s face was blank. If he had a clever comeback he kept it to himself.

  “No one’s impressed with your boasting, Merlin,” Nimue said. “If you can help, do it. If not, we’ll be on our way.”

  But you won’t, though. Your bluff is sadly transparent. So go on, ask. Ask me. Why wouldn’t I help you? I gave everything for Camelot, I did nothing but serve, and you see how this treacherous whore thanked me.

  “Watch your mouth,” Collum said.

  Oh dear. Sauce from the fisherman’s bastard. Tell me, what are you questing for? I hope it isn’t some last holy toenail that God left behind on His way out the door.

  But it is, isn’t it? Oh, dear. Oh, how disappointing.

  Well, I don’t expect you’ll find it. A quest is hero’s work, hero’s business, and that’s just not quite you lot, is it? You’re the other ones, the sidekicks, the spear carriers. The stage is empty now but for the stagehands, and who will play the story?

  But the heroes could come again. It was I who hid away Uther’s child. When the moment came it was I, Merlin, who revealed him, by the miracle of the Sword in the Stone. God worked through me to set a new king on the throne. Me, and no other.

  I could do it again. But not while I’m down here.

  “End this, Nimue,” Constantine whispered. “You’ve made your point. We n-need him.”

  “He’s lying.”

  Collum wanted to leap to Nimue’s defense, but even after what Merlin called her he wondered if Constantine could be right. It was a calculated risk. Merlin wasn’t going to be pleasant to have around, but they could find out what he knew, and then if it went wrong, well, Nimue beat him once. Surely she could do it again.

  “You said you kn-knew everything he knew,” Constantine said. “You said—”

  “I said I was a better magician! He’s a monster, and if you let him out now then nothing will stop him!”

  “Why would we want to s-stop him? He put Arthur on the throne!”

  “Because it served his purposes to do so. By the end Arthur was the only thing keeping him in check. Who do you trust, Constantine, me or him? And don’t say it’s whom.”

  Constantine didn’t answer, just sniffed his handkerchief.

  Do you remember that hill at Tam’s Head, Nimue? Merlin’s voice was gentler now. The thunder had faded to distant waves. Streaks of meadowsweet down its sides and that one great hornbeam right on top, with a knot in that looked like Sir Lionel’s face. We used to gather mistletoe there together on the equinox. Do you remember?

  It’s dark down here, but I can see it in my mind. I wish you’d buried me there instead.

  “I’m glad I didn’t. This hill is a wasteland. You poison everything you touch.”

  I have been down here a long time, long enough to grow bitter, I know that, and nothing grows from bitterness. I have spoken harshly. I should not have.

  “What about a gesture of good faith then?” Collum said.

  Nimue narrowed her eyes at him, but he pressed on. She was right, he knew who he trusted.

  “The lands between here and the north are crawling with Saxons and rebels and God knows what else, and Britain is running out of time. Your magic brought us here. Is there a spell that can send us to the north, as far as the Ouse? And take us over or under or past the land in between?”

  And what would I get?

  “Nimue will give you the key to the cave,” Bedivere said. “So you can work God’s will, whatever it may be.”

  Moonlight brushed the burned, blasted surface of the hill with silver. A jet of steam hissed from a fissure upslope, as if from the pressure of Merlin’s thoughts. The wizard was silent for a long time; then he spoke crisply and rapidly.

  Find a smooth round stone from a river. Are you listening, Nimue? Find one with three bands around it. Strike it three times with a brass hammer. If it breaks then find another one.

  He must have instructed her with this same voice, master to apprentice.

  When you find a stone that will not break, write ξύπνιος on one side and κοιμισμένος on the other with the blood of an animal that has no hooves. Make a fire with birch sticks and bake the stone in the embers. When you rake it out it should cut easily with a silver knife. You’ll find the word you need inside.

  Bedivere looked to Nimue, who nodded.

  “All right,” Bedivere said.

  He turned and walked away, back toward the horses at the edge of the clearing. Collum and Nimue followed.

  What are you doing?

  “We’re going to find God’s holy toenail,” Collum said.

  “Careful who you call a whore next time,” Nimue said.

  One by one the rest of the knights followed. Steam jetted from cracks all over the hollow hill, and the last of the ditherers, Constantine and Scipio, broke into a startled trot to get clear of them. Dawn wasn’t far off, but stars still ruled the night sky.

  You lied.

  “What did you think confession was for?” Dinadan said.

  “You’re right about us, Merlin,” Bedivere called out. “We’re not the heroes, we’re the odd ones out. The losers. But did you ever think that might be why we’ve lived so long? Losing makes you tough.”

  Nimue, I’ll leave Britain forever, if that’s what you want. I’ll tell you my true name. Just open the hill and let me out.

  “If you and God are such good friends, let Him do it.”

  You fools. I could give you a king. I could give you everything you wanted.

  “And by the way, there is no key,” Nimue said, “because there is no lock, because there is no door. I’m never going to let you out.”

  Single file they picked their way through the dry dead trees back into the forest, where the horses waited. In the darkness Nimue found Collum’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze.

  It will not hold me. I have grown strong under the earth, Nimue, stronger than you know. Did you forget who I am? Did you forget I am a devil’s son? I WAS BORN UNDERGROUND! HELL IS WHERE I COME FROM!

  The thunder was back, loud enough to hurt their ears. Something beat three times on the ground from below, and it seemed like the earth was about to give way, but it held. When Collum looked back for the last time every crack and fissure on the hill was glowing red, a spidery network of bright lines lighting up the circle of wasted trees around it. Hot veins ran as far as the edge of the clearing, and trees burned where they touched.

  LET ME OUT, DAMN YOU!

  A dab of bright molten rock appeared at the mound’s summit.

  LET ME OUT!

  Twenty-eight

  The Tale of Nimue

  At first Nimue didn’t pay any special attention when the king’s great sorcerer Merlin came stumping through Rutupiae. She had enough on her mind. She was a fifteen-year-old laundress in the household of Lord Castic and well on her way to worse.

  Rutupiae was an old Roman fortress town on the coast of Cantium, one of the famous Saxon Shore forts, with ruined temples and a crumbling amphitheater and massive seawalls stained with the rust of old Roman iron. It was said to be the spot where the invading Romans had first landed in Britain, and Castic claimed descent, on no grounds whatsoever, from the Count of the Saxon Shore himself.

  The laundry was belowground, a dank, dimly lit place that smelled of lye and urine, which they used shocking amounts of as a stain remover. Silks and samites and velvets and furs came through it in incredible profusion, heaps and hampers and bundles of them with the most astounding assortment of stains and messes. Fortunately Nimue was exceptionally resourceful at finding new recipes for soap when ingredients were scarce, as they usually were. A laundress had to be a bit of an alchemist too.

  But alchemy wasn’t going to keep her from starving. Count Castic was prosperous enough, but he paid his laundry girls practically nothing, and Nimue also had the care of her little sister, Mary, eight years younger, ever since their parents were carried off in a wave of typhoid. Mary was a good girl who tended a wooden sheep named Moo that lived in a house made of butter.

  After two years on the job, Nimue came to the conclusion that it was impossible, she and Mary simply could not live on what she was paid. The castle steward had apparently been waiting for her to reach this conclusion, because that was when he made it clear that laundresses were expected to supplement their wages by having sex with the castle’s highborn guests for money. It was an arrangement of long standing.

  Nimue didn’t want to be a prostitute, but that left the question of how to not be one and not starve. So she prayed. And God, in His own inscrutable fashion, answered.

  Merlin arrived on foot, unannounced and alone, as if he’d just moments ago been deposited at the gates by some capricious zephyr. She would’ve expected a wizened, bent-backed sorcerer, but he was, or appeared to be, a vigorous, thick-bodied man in the prime of middle age with an easy smile and a searching gaze that put you at ease even as it made you wonder what exactly he was searching you for. He wore a druid’s dun robes, with long sleeves that he was always hitching up, though she would learn much later that the outfit was pure theater, as were the tattoos. They were only there to impress the Court—Merlin’s idea of a British lord’s idea of what a scary old wizard should look like.

  Unlike the rattling amulets round his neck, which were entirely real. When he arrived, his hands were coated with bright yellow powder to the wrists, as if he’d just plunged them into a barrel full of buttercups. The first thing he did was ask for a basin to wash in.

  Merlin gave no explanation for his presence at Rutupiae, or any indication as to how long he’d be staying, but then Merlin wasn’t in the explaining business. Rumor had it he was the oldest man in Britain, the last of the druids—the word came from dru-wits, which in British meant “oak-knowers.” They were the adepts of sacred groves, god-whisperers, dealers in silver sickles and mistletoe and moonlight and acorns and blood sacrifice, and even the Romans were scared of them. That was why when they conquered Britain they slaughtered the druids en masse.

  The druids wrote nothing down, they had always passed their knowledge from one to the next by spoken word only, so when they died all that they knew vanished. The lore and culture and memory of Old Britain went out like a candle.

  Except for Merlin. It was simply not in his nature to be slaughtered. He slipped through their net. Or no, he didn’t slip through it, he became part of it.

  Merlin knew how to make himself first unthreatening, and then useful, and finally indispensable to the Romans. There was no problem he couldn’t or wouldn’t apply himself to. You want a stone wall that stretches all the way across the north, eighty miles, from Segedunum to Maia? Not a problem. Merlin would bring the stones flocking through the air from all points of the compass and burrowing their way up from unknown depths like fish rising to the bait, to take their assigned places.

  Great works like these required sacrifice, sometimes even human sacrifice, but slaves flowed freely into the empire from all over the world. The Romans were rich in nothing if not human blood.

  So Merlin survived and even thrived in Roman Britain, on through the decades and then the centuries. In the fourth century, Rome turned Christian and paganism was banned, but by then Merlin was as much a permanent monument as Hadrian’s Wall and about as easy to move. Go ahead, baptize him! Water off a duck’s back. Even when the Romans left Britain, he wasn’t much bothered. Power was Merlin’s real medium, even more than magic, and power, like heat, was never destroyed, only redistributed. Somebody somewhere always had it. You just had to figure out who it was and how to get close to them.

  His arrival at Rutupiae set off a flurry of cooking and sweeping and beating of carpets and airing of linen and bringing up of fine wines from the cellars. Two days after he appeared a series of crates began arriving by ship, from which he extracted the gleaming components of a large and complex mechanism, each piece packed in straw and wrapped in silk. Merlin commandeered Lord Cantic’s great hall to assemble it.

  Nimue, who had an inquisitive nature, would peer in from time to time. The machine was taller than a man, a confabulation of interlocking tracks and hoops and toothy gears and clockworks and transparent spheres of different sizes, from tiny peas all the way up to whopping melons, filled with colorful marbled liquids. Merlin called it an armillary sphere, and he explained to anyone who would listen that it was a representation, in steel, gold, glass, porcelain, and finely engraved brass, of the universal mechanism of the cosmos. It mirrored God’s creation. In many ways, he added dryly, it represented a considerable improvement.

  But unlike God’s creation it didn’t move. It looked like it should, but it didn’t. When his work was complete everybody expected Merlin to leave, but he didn’t move either. He stayed on at Rutupiae for days, then weeks, as if he were waiting for something. To make matters worse, he started to hold grand parties in the Great Hall, every night, with dancing and reveling around his great enigmatic machine. People came from all over Cantium to attend.

  For Nimue this meant a bounty of overnight guests’ clothes stained with every possible edible and potable substance plus the full range of bodily fluids and the occasional insect infestation. But that was the least of her problems. She was having dizzy spells from hunger. More than once Nimue stared ravenously at a smear of (hopefully) jam on some baron’s stocking and even took a furtive lick.

  Catching sight of her reflection in a basin of gray water one night she saw that she was getting a blurry, haggard look. Her hair looked thin and sick. Pretty soon even prostitution wouldn’t be an option, she thought bleakly. Her market value was declining.

  If she went into debtor’s prison she’d have no home and no job when she came out. And who would take care of Mary? They had her in a trap. The iron vise of circumstance was closing on her, tighter and tighter, just because it could, until sooner or later the unstoppable world would make her do something unspeakable. If not for herself then for Mary, with her fairy braids and her little pie face and her Moo.

  But not yet, she thought. You sons of bitches. You’ll have to squeeze me tighter than this. With thready hunger-logic she decided she would slip upstairs and steal some food from the party. Nothing simpler. She made her way alone up the stone steps to the kitchen and through it to the Great Hall.

  It was a waking dream. The air was full of the clinking of silver, the thunder of footsteps, the massed roar of chatter and aristocratic laughter. The light was mellow, elegant candlelight, not the guttering rushlight of belowstairs. Nimue stared at all these pretty people, whose clothes she knew so intimately, who didn’t smell like lye and piss, who owned themselves. And the food. There was mounds of it, cheeses and pasties and tarts and puddings—

  Someone grabbed her from behind. It was the steward. She would’ve cried out but the collar of her dress bit into her neck and choked her. He was dragging her backward out of the room.

  A voice louder than any voice she’d ever heard before shouted:

  “STOP!”

  The musicians scraped to a halt; the flautist was a moment late. A stocky man in a brown robe was striding across the room directly toward her. It was that man, the king’s wizard. Morton. Marvin.