Merlin hummed a calming tone and sent his mind careering toward whatever came next. Being able to sense the vague shape of the future was one of his gifts. An ill-gotten one. He shook off thoughts of the past and tried to peer forward in time, but he couldn’t see himself locating Arthur or the sword.
He tried clearing his mind like a junk drawer, rattling everything out. He hopped on one foot to regain equilibrium. He even ate a sandwich, which required an enormous amount of magic to summon. “Nothing worse for future workings than low blood sugar,” he muttered, devouring the ham and cheese, mustard, bread, tomatoes, and pickles with wild abandon.
But when he’d done all of that, he still couldn’t see a single tiny prophetic thing. Just the back of his own eyelids, which turned out to be a boring wash of reddish black. “Is this what normal people see when they close their eyes?” he muttered. “Ridiculous.”
Merlin had gotten used to having a sense of the soon-to-be, even if he couldn’t fill in the details. It kept him one step ahead of the story, always able to help Arthur. In the end, though, it came back to stab him in the eye. Because eventually Merlin saw the end of the story and could do nothing to stop it.
Merlin ran his fingers over the surface of the portal. He had no idea where it would send him, and that was the first new thing he could remember in ages. The next breath he pulled in shivered with possibilities.
If Merlin couldn’t see anything about this cycle, did that mean the ending was unwritten?
What if this Arthur finally united mankind, and brought the cycle to a close, ending the story as triumphantly as Arthur 12 had killed that giant with three eyes, or Arthur 40 had stopped the cyborg uprising?
Then—maybe—Merlin would be free.
Stranger things had happened.
Merlin cleared his throat and hummed a special set of notes. He would have to track Excalibur the old-fashioned way: using his magic to call out, waiting for Excalibur to respond, then going to fetch the sword and the young boy carrying it.
The sword hummed back, and Merlin smiled. “This time is different,” he whispered to himself. “This time is ours.”
With a purposeful wave, he drew the darkness like a curtain. Testing the ground with his slipper, he stepped out, inside the circle of a stone wall, facing a downed oak tree that had the same quality as a freshly robbed grave. Excalibur was gone. Arthur 42 had taken the sword. Morgana had fled, most likely while he’d been eating that sandwich. Typical.
Merlin stood on a ruined planet, under a tetchy gray sky. As he turned in a slow circle, the tang of smoke filled his mouth. He remembered the earlier glories of this place, a time when everything was green, and a young Arthur—the first Arthur—climbed trees and learned the names of plants, becoming a squirrel with a little help from Merlin’s magic. It had been the happiest time in Merlin’s absurdly long life.
Fire tore through those memories as a spaceship shot away from the ground, rising through the atmosphere in a hurry. Merlin hummed so frantically it felt like a bee had gotten trapped in his mouth. A few moments later, the sword hummed back, confirming what Merlin feared. Excalibur was in that spaceship.
Headed away from Earth.
Stranger things had not happened.
When the hum of the sword and the roar of the spaceship had faded, Merlin heard something else. What could only be mechanical destruction.
A machine rolled in, looming above the stone wall as large as a building. He searched for windows in its face. A control room, perhaps. There were no humans to be seen. They had disappeared from the landscape, leaving behind machines programmed to devour mindlessly.
As if on cue, the mechanical jaws opened wide and bit down on the stone wall. Merlin wondered if it would crumble, but instead it disappeared, swallowed by the beast.
He ducked as the machine took out another bite and another. Next, its armlike protrusions aimed thin cannons and rapidly fired into the graveyard.
Bullets!
Merlin thought he would catch one in the chest or the shoulder, and braced for impact. But the bullets lodged in the trees around him, and each went down with a splitting crack.
“Interesting,” Merlin said. The only bullets he’d ever seen killed creatures of the breathing, fleshy type. Was this some kind of fast-acting poison released on impact? A vibration that interfered with the tree on a molecular level?
What would it do to a few-thousand-year-old magician?
As if ready to find the answer to that question, the machine fired at him. Merlin hummed a frantic bit of magic. He split his hands apart and the bullet that was headed for his face broke into a hundred shards, which all flew wide. To prove that he still could, he wove his fingers back together and the bullet reformed behind him, hitting another trunk with a righteous thump. He neatly sidestepped the falling tree. It landed with a crash.
“I don’t have time to be shot at right now,” Merlin said to the machine. “Now would you please point me toward the nearest spaceship? I need to get off this, as they said in the last age I lived through, hot mess of a planet.”
The machine had no answer, and he wasted no time slipping through the hole in the stone wall, and searching the skies for the remains of that spaceship. If only he could chase after it. His brain flicked through the steps of the cycle in a panicking rhythm.
Find Arthur
Train Arthur
Nudge Arthur onto the nearest throne
Defeat the greatest evil in the world
Unite all of mankind
It was one thing to be stuck on that last bit, but he had never had trouble getting past the first step. Usually Arthur was more or less waiting for him when he stepped out of the crystal cave. It looked like this new Arthur would be a different sort of fellow, harder to pin down. A gust of irritation moved through him. Could he make a spaceship? That’d take too much magic and far too much time. If only he didn’t need one. If only he could…
“Fly,” Merlin muttered. “I can fly.”
It felt like the sort of thing a person should remember, but to be fair, he hadn’t flown in centuries. Medieval societies would have pestered him with witchcraft charges and modern ones would have simply shot him out of the sky. But ages ago he’d loved taking off like a roman candle. He had never left Earth’s atmosphere, but if he had the chance to end the cycle, it was worth any risk.
Merlin felt himself heating, sparks gathering at his feet. His body became an engine, burning itself up. He rose at a speed that was equal parts thrilling and terrifying.
He passed through a layer of mean gray clouds and emerged, damp as a trout. He opened his mouth and could only manage a gasp. The atmosphere was growing thin; soon his breath would give out. He couldn’t die—the cycle had proven that more than once when he’d been skewered or burnt or thrown out a window—but he could spend the rest of eternity spinning in space like a broken top.
“Not ideal,” he muttered.
He flicked the moisture off his fingers and hummed a bit of an old ragtime song. A second spell formed a protective layer around him, sealing him into a sort of invisible spacesuit. Ice skittered off of it as he passed the highest, coldest reaches of the sky.
With a violent pop of the ears, he breached the atmosphere. He spun around, still hurtling backward, to say good-bye to the planet where he had spent so many ages. “You gave me toast slathered with jam,” he said, starting with the best things. “You gave me magic, and some very nice views.” He probably should have kept it to happy memories, but the not-so-happy ones elbowed their way in. “You let Morgana exist. You let Arthur die. Forty-one times.”
Earth stared at him, unapologetic.
“I’m not going to miss you very much, either.”