Igrain blinked and smiled weakly. “So, you married him after all? Galois never liked Lot all that much. I thought he was a fine man, a fine soldier. I hoped he’d be in an office here. But I see now that will not be.” She sighed and bowed her head, weak from the terrible thoughts that were now playing a mean game of tag inside her head. “You will deal fairly with Lothain?”
“More so than Uther with the D.R.U.I.Ds.”
“Uther is doing what he honestly sees as best for us all.” She breathed a moment, her daughter not replying. “Goodbye, Morgause.”
With more strength than the dial could handle, Igrain turned the communication off, sparks dripping from her hand and the broken dial clutched in her fingers. She would refuse to believe Morgause for the rest of her life, she knew. She loved Galois and had wept for his death. Had she loved Uther too quickly? Had she always loved him in her heart?
He did the right thing. She had to believe that. She had to see him as the young soldier on the ship that crash landed. The boy who was hardly brave enough to take command after Contans’ death.
She had to make a journey. Not now, but soon, she’d have to go see if what Pellinore once said about Excalibur and the DNA mapping was true. It was the only way.
16
Nimueh
Merlin reread the test results from Nimueh’s scans again. The blood tests had registered over 3000 sets of DNA, which reached beyond his comprehension and had to be a mistake. The brain scans revealed unusual scarring that were not coming up as tissue. They almost looked like strings of data, but Nimueh, it turned out, was not 100% organic. She had no D.R.U.I.D parts in her. Uther had no idea and Merlin wanted to keep it that way. She was flawlessly augmented. Her brain was her own, but her heart, other organs, skeletal system, and almost everything else—even her hair, nails, and flesh—were hyper advanced organic machines.
Nimueh had communicated with Avalon, the Stones, and the Mist, and had no D.R.U.I.D parts. And last he knew she was not a child of Avalon. There was only one way that could have happened and she was too young to be a pure Avalonian unless she had dropped from the sky just years before the colonists landed. She had to have been born during the building of Camelot. But that should have been impossible. The D.R.U.I.Ds, though part Avalonian, were mostly androids. They didn’t have the same drive as other organic creatures and did not procreate.
Did they?
He touched his own skin. Was it cold? Did he just feel cold in the laboratory or were his mechanics making him that way?
With a great power of will and a sigh that rattled his throat, he stepped into the machine himself. The glass was exceptionally clean and he could see every detail of the whirring rings around it as it scanned his brain, nerves, flesh—everything. When prompted, he put his hand to the blood extraction and a small needle pricked his fingers to do a comprehensive blood test. He closed his eyes as the machine sung to him in a deep hum. He thought about Avalon. It had been so close that an organic had felt it. He reimagined the blue stones; the gateway.
A thought struck his brain as the scan touched his sensitive gray matter. Only Nimueh would know for sure. Had she come through the gate? Had she been on Avalon and opened the gate, coming on to Camelot?
A sudden snap in Merlin’s skull made him cry out and stop all thought instantly. It was a physical sting and he had heard it in his head. A strange sound like when one bounces a rock on a frozen lake coupled with a joint popping. His head instantly flared in pain like his skull had been cracked. Blood trickled from his nose.
Panicking, he shut the machine off and ran out to the med pack on the wall. He checked the mirror to make sure his skull had not indeed broken in two and threw painkillers down his throat.
He stared into his own eyes in the mirror on the inside of the medical cabinet. He knew those eyes. They were old. Very old.
“You remember?” a soft voice said behind him.
He didn’t jump, didn’t turn around. Over his shoulder in the reflection he saw Vivian. She looked just as she had the last time he saw her, probably two hundred years ago.
“Why do we do this?” He whispered, afraid to wash away the thousands of memories that had just flooded his brain. “Again and again.” He choked. “I have seen all this before. Done this before. Uther, Vortigern…Arthur.”
A memory appeared from the first time he had put this story in motion. A bloody battlefield, knights in primitive armor, horses screaming, dying men littered his vision. It rained that day. He remembered that because he slipped in mud and put his hand into a disemboweled soldier as he searched for one particular dead man. That was the first time the man he was destined to aid had died.
Vivian didn’t answer his question. She let him think, remember why lifetime after lifetime he gathered these people, first across centuries and now across planets, and watched them play out a similar story no matter the choices he made.
Merlin swallowed the emotion in his throat. “I volunteered. I said I would make the man who would be king.”
“A king of kings.” She smiled and nodded. “All of us from Avalon admired you for that. That’s why we could no longer stand by when Mab interfered. All of us for eternity, fighting over one man and the years that led up to his birth. Over and over again. The time waiting for his birth is always the hardest.”
Merlin rubbed his blood between his fingers.
