Read Fall of Knight for Free Online

sailed into the middle of a storm. But there was nothing else happening to indicate a storm…no fierce winds, no hammering of rain, certainly neither thunder nor lightning. Just the waves in the normally calm Pacific Ocean that were becoming more and more violent with each passing moment.
    “What’s happening?” Gwen cried out, jostled violently awake by the ship’s shaking.
    “I don’t know!” Arthur struggled into a pair of sweat shorts as he scrambled toward the stairs leading up to the deck. “I’ll find out!”
    “Arthur, you can’t! There’s a—”
    “We don’t know what there is! And I’m not about to cower down here.”
    He threw open a long, narrow cabinet and pulled out Excalibur. The redoubtable blade gleamed in the darkness of the cabin.
    “What do you think you’re going to do with that?!” Gwen cried out. “Stab the ocean to death?”
    “If it annoys me, yes.” With that, he charged up onto the deck, keeping the sword gripped tightly. Gwen watched him go, hesitated, and then leaped out of bed and proceeded to pull on clothes herself. She wasn’t about to stay hidden below if her husband was risking his neck up above.
    By the time she scrambled to the deck, she discovered water lapping over the edges of the yacht. Arthur had gunned the motor to life, and was now trying with all his might to steer the Malory away from…what?
    She saw it clearly now, a huge bubbling of water, as if something gargantuan was surfacing from below. Gwen had no idea what it could be. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. It was just that what she was coming up with sounded daunting, even for the wielder of Excalibur. A blue whale, perhaps, that had decided for some reason that the yacht presented a threat? Maybe a submarine, although she couldn’t begin to guess what a submarine would be doing cruising around there. Or a giant kraken, perhaps? Granted, the creatures bordered on legendary, but then again, her husband had crossed that border ages ago, so who was she to judge?
    Arthur, bathed in the light of the full moon, wildly gesticulated toward the cabin, shouting, “Get below! I order you to get below!”
    “You order me?” She staggered across the rocking deck and grabbed his arm. “Who do you think you are, ordering me!”
    “The bloody king!”
    “Yeah, well, I’m the bloody queen, so get over your bad self!”
    “My self is not bad!” he shouted over the roaring of the waves. It was starting to look as if the vessel might be swamped.
    “It’s an expression, you medieval doofus!”
    “How about this expression: Get below! Now!”
    “If we die, we die together!”
    “How about you do what I say, and we don’t—oh, bugger this !”
    He released the wheel, and it spun violently on its own as the waves pushed the yacht to the starboard side. What was truly insane was that, for all the violence erupting around them, the skies continued to remain cloudless and full of moonlight. He turned, grabbed Gwen, and tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
    “Let me go!”
    Arthur started toward the entrance to the cabin, with the intention of tossing Gwen into it and bolting the door from the outside if necessary. Suddenly he stopped in midstep, his eyes going wide. He almost dropped Gwen as the deck rocked wildly beneath him, and he grabbed on to a trailing rope from the sail and held tight.
    “What’s going on? Is something behind us? Turn around, for crying out loud!”
    Gwen twisted her neck to see where he was staring, and her jaw dropped.
    “Oh my God,” she whispered.
    A massive vessel was rising from beneath the waters directly behind them. Gwen remembered the first time, as a youngster, when she had sat enraptured in a movie theater as Star Wars unspooled upon the vast screen. She would always remember that opening shot, where the gigantic space vessel appeared overhead and kept going and going for what seemed an endless amount of time.
    That was how she felt now, staring in