Immediately follows somewhere safe to seaShe was gone. He didn't fear that she would live; who could? The cut had been sharp and complete, the blade of the knife as keen as the day it was forged. He knew. He'd checked. And there was blood in the stone bowl, thick and arterial red. He took it, took the knife, and returned down the long, straight stair. If the blood splashed on his white pants, it was no different than any other stain. It'd be gone by the next time he transformed.
At the door that wouldn't open, he slid a hand into the cooling blood. As he'd seen Melany do, a thousand years ago, he spread the blood down the cracks in the doors. They creaked, and at his push, opened. A gust of damp, cold air rose to meet him, and his surprised gasp brought with it the smell of lichen and salt water. He could hear it, too, and he followed the sound of rushing water down damp stairs. Walking carefully, it took him five minutes to descend to the first plateau.
From there, there were two possible directions. Left or right. But as he stepped towards the right-side hallway, he slipped into a memory. Melany's memory, not his, but it felt--
A bowl in his hands, he stopped before the far pool. It felt odd, to be there without a member of the Order at his shoulders. Someone should be there to say the benediction, to pass off the guilt, to help with the completion of the ritual. But it was only him. Only Camlann, alone with its Knight to wait for the inevitable end. Rumors swirled from the capital, the seasonal festival and its mandatory attendance was upcoming, if the Princess really had decided to swing her glaive and end the world then--
Then.
He had no confidence in their ability to keep their oath. Senshi were not the source of their power; it came from somewhere else, though he knew not where. But they did channel their power through a Princess's Crystal, they drew from it as his family on Earth (and so long ago he'd last seen them!) would draw from a clean aquifer. Senshi were powerful, more powerful than Knights. She could doubtless take the lot of them.
The deaths of the apprentices had been the hardest. It'd been hard to kill the masters, the senior members of the Order, because he'd known them for so long. His whole life. But the children didn't understand.
He knew the benediction. He knew it, and yet when it came time to speak it, his throat locked up. There was more to say than the rote Cosmos grant mercy
or Saturn speed your way
. He could speak of his envy, of his anger that this had become necessary. But that wouldn't see their souls home.
Camlann took a deep breath. He started again. "May Cosmos gather your hearts, apprentices and journeymen and masters of my Order, and most especially the heart which was Gethin's, for he often was a helpmeet to me, and was not ashamed of my chain. His heart was good. His intentions were good." He set the basin on the ground, dipped his fingers inside and streaked them over his cheekbones, over his chin. He poured the blood into the oubliette, heard the shimmering splash of water. "My intentions were good." Smelled copper and salt--it felt like his memory. He looked at the basin of blood. That was for an unjust death, he knew it without knowing why. "******** you, Megiddo," he said, and he poured the blood out. He wouldn't wear her blood. Wouldn't honor her that way. She didn't deserve it.
Rising to his feet, he looked around the dark cave. He lifted his hand, a trick he'd learned on his most recent visit to the dolmen, and his ring flashed bright ashen-lavender. It held back the dark, for now. Camlann turned to the right-hand opening, and tried to pass through it. There wasn't a barrier there, but there was an overwhelming feeling of wrongness. This was not a place he was meant to be, yet. This door was closed to him. The left passage was similarly blocked.
He needed to go upstairs, he thought. To the uppermost level. He'd never been there before, though what awaited was as much his as anything else in the Wonder. It was the Knight's quarters. The knight's library, bedroom, the galleria-hall... all of them waited at the top of the stairs.
By the time he got there, he was tired. So many floors... there were hundreds of stairs, had to be. The fatigue passed as he entered the knight's quarters, passed through space that had not been carefully emptied. Below, in the cavernous main hall or the barracks, things had been neat and clean, personal effects removed. Here he could see the personality of the woman who had been himself a thousand years ago: books, an easel, comfortable chairs and wool blankets, perfectly preserved. It occurred to Camlann that he hadn't yet seen an insect or animal here. Perhaps he would ask Babylon about it, when next they spoke. Soon, he supposed. It would have to be, if he wanted to catch Babylon before Avalon next returned.
Does this mean I am a woman in my soul, he thought, incongruously, suddenly, as he followed the instinct that tugged him down the galleria, past all the unsmiling portraits of his forebears. He didn't want to think that. It couldn't be true, he'd... he wasn't sure, actually, and he slipped past the only open door.
Before him spread a sunken tub, pale green water filling it to three inches below the tiled rim. The whole room stood in silent, sterile white, but for a shrine along the far wall that was draped in lush purple velvet. On the low, stool-like altar rested several amalgations of bone and sinew. They were hideously ugly, but Camlann felt drawn to them--but also as if he should leave them be. They weren't for him just yet.
Bone charms, the instinct in his mind whispered.
They are bone charms, for luck and health and longevity.He wasn't sure why he'd come to this room specifically. There were other rooms to be seen; other things to do. But there was death to wash away, that instinct whispered, and for that he needed to be here.
Bathe.It was only after he'd sunken into the water, shedding his bloodied uniform and his gauntlets and his underthings, that he realized he'd reappear in the same place Megiddo had died. While he wasn't particularly concerned with the police--get there, Aspect out, and go--he was concerned with others like him. Others who might have powers similar to his, and be able to see through them, or might simply want him dead for what he'd done. Not like he really cared, but the greater the numbers the more likely it was that intelligence would matter less and less.
So he'd stay and wait. Take a nap, maybe. He rose out of the water, and a few minutes' chilled digging through one of the white chests along the wall produced a towel. Drying off, he sighed and sat atop the trunk, looked out the great crystal window over the black ocean. Once there'd been whales out there, he thought, apropos of nothing. Gods of the deep.
Camlann kicked his uniform aside. It'd disappear when he henshined down, wouldn't it? In the meantime, he
really wanted a nap. The adrenaline rush had faded, and it'd be best to wait it out. His feet took him to one of the three doors in the galleria. The room beyond was small, barely a cloister cell, but the bed was neatly made. He fell into it gladly, wrapping the starchy cotton sheets over himself.
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