Read The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) for Free Online Page A

said, “Say what you think! So I know how to fashion you to be what I want.”
    “You’ll beat me for it.”
    He glanced at the hound watching him.
    “I may,” he said, with a curious uncertainty in his voice.
    “Then I’ll keep silent.”
    “I’ll beat you for that.”
    “It’s absurd,” I cried.  “That’s what I think.  A sword’s a tool, nothing more.  A defunct prince incants moldy rhymes over a piece of cold metal.  You teach me antique philosophies.  None of that changes the world or the sword.  I’ve seen too much of princely fraud and false religions in the back alleys of Carbonek, and of lying magicians and mind-diseased old queens and foolish scholars like my foster father, to have faith in things that don’t live and crawl before my own eyes.”
    “You mean in Brutus stones and Caliburns?  You have no faith in those?”
    “In all dead things!” I shouted, cowering from the blow I expected.
    The hound watched Galabes.  Its great body was behind my back, buttressing me, but the beast seemed to stand between us in spirit, the war hound protecting me as the last progeny of dead Arthur.
    “Oh, well,” said Galabes in a sudden twist of tone that startled me and proved him madder still.  “You’ve your own mind, I suppose.  Better and better!  But I’m here to teach you of the ‘dead things’ that must live again through you.  Unless you believe the spirit of Arthur is another fraud?”
    “I’m Arthur’s child.  That much of his spirit I believe.”
    “A very practical answer.  A greedy answer.  A knightly and royal answer.  The answer I might hear from the High King himself.  So that’s a start.”
    Galabes said all that with a growing satisfaction.
    “Yes, I can make you a warrior, I see that now,” he said, “because you have the royal greed in you.  Then I’ll make you a magician. But you’ll have to make yourself what you must be.”
    “What’s that?” I said, cringing, waiting for his blow.
    “I want you to know Arthur as I knew him.  I want you to have the power to recall him to his kingdom.  I want you to have the courage to quest after a dead king.  The courage to win back the king from Morrigu, Pluto, and Satan.  Make the sword that Arthur needs to heal him.  Then, make me an Arthur!”
    “Great gods, Father, you are mad,” I whispered, but the hound made my whisper into a silence and Galabes did not hear me.
     
    * * *
     
    “Your warrior’s school begins now,” Galabes said to me.  “You sleep outside my cave door through the winter, drink only cold water, and make your weapons from the stones I show you.”
    I cried, “You make me a knight by making me a slave?”
    Galabes struck me and knocked me down. “Obey me now,” he said, “and one day you can command me.”
    This time I would not bleed for him.
    The silent dog watched.  So much for the hound’s protecting his old master’s progeny.
    “Yes, Master,” I said. “I obey.”
    For now.
    My life became harsh routine.  I slept outside the cave, wrapped in reeking, half-cured hides, and woke dreaming of suffocation to find myself buried in snow.  I got up before the sun, fed on cold gruel, quarried stone to make my day’s weapons – a mace, club, dagger, and spear – while Galabes and Caval huddled in furs by the fire I had struck for them.
    Then I trekked with the beggar-knight – who was well-fed, well-dressed, well-armed thanks to my labors – into a valley where the snow had not drifted and we could practice fighting on hard soil.  Or we roared and rallied with club and shield among the spires and peaks of the mountain.
    Each brawl was the same.  I, bloodied and bruised.  Galabes shouting taunts.  My poor weapons shattered.  My makeshift armor dented and pierced.  My head so clubbed and knocked about that, at night dreaming under my hides as snow fell on me, I saw an awful vision of a bleeding king holding out to me a sword, saying, “Take Caliburn and return to