picking his way down the steep tunnel, Nina and Macy following. At the bottom of the incline was the start of a literal maze, one of the tomb’s defences, but Barley led them briskly through it. Past the statue of the Lady of the Lake, down through what on Nina’s first visit had been a flooded labyrinth, up into a foul-smelling space where a great grinning relief of Merlin once marked an explosive end for the unwary, and finally into the vaulted chamber of the tomb itself. The side room containing the black stone coffins of Arthur and his queen was open.
Macy took it in with awe. ‘Wow, this is incredible. I only saw pictures before – didn’t think I’d get to see it for real.’
‘Working for the IHA has its perks,’ Nina joked. She became more serious as she examined the object between the coffins. It was a cube of granite, three feet to a side, with a narrow slot in the top from which Excalibur had once protruded – and a chunk sliced from one corner where she had inadvertently discovered that in the right hands, Arthur’s weapon was more than a mere sword.
‘So, what are these artefacts?’ Barley asked. Nina opened the case. The British scientist seemed underwhelmed by the figurines within. ‘I don’t recognise them.’
‘Nor do we – and that’s the problem. I’m hoping that bringing them here will prove . . . illuminating.’
Nina hadn’t planned on making a pun, but couldn’t resist. She touched one of the statuettes. As she had hoped, the tomb was still a confluence point for lines of earth energy – and whatever it was about her that had allowed Excalibur to slice effortlessly through solid stone now caused the figurine to light up with an eerie indigo glow.
‘Good God!’ cried Barley.
Macy’s response was much the same. ‘Whoa!’ she yelped, flinching back. ‘It’s not radioactive, is it?’
Nina lifted her finger from the statue, and the glow vanished. ‘Open the case, and we’ll find out.’
Macy was about to put the case on Arthur’s coffin when a stammered protest from Barley prompted her to switch to the granite block. She opened it, and Nina took out a piece of equipment. ‘Geiger counter,’ she explained. ‘Macy, you hold it while I touch the statue again.’
Macy held the counter at arm’s length, cringing as the figurine lit up. Nothing came from the machine except the intermittent crackles of normal background radiation. ‘I wish you’d checked that first, before maybe zapping us with gamma rays,’ she complained.
‘What causes that glow?’ Barley asked, stepping closer.
‘It’s a phenomenon called earth energy,’ said Nina, ‘but as for exactly how it works, I can’t tell you. Not because it’s classified – although it is – but because I genuinely don’t understand it myself. I’m not a physicist. All I know are its effects.’
‘Which are . . . ?’
‘Classified.’
Barley sighed. ‘I suspected as much.’
Nina placed the first statue on the block, then took the other from the case. It too reacted in the same way to her touch, filling the chamber with an unnatural light. But she noticed something as she put the second figure down beside the first: the effect was not uniform.
Macy saw it too. ‘It’s brighter on the side facing the other one – like it’s responding to it.’
Nina picked up the second statuette again and slowly moved it in a circle round the first. There was indeed a somewhat stronger band of light on one side of the figure, which changed position as the stone was moved, so that it always shone in the direction of the statue’s near-twin. ‘Like holding a magnet to a compass,’ Barley mused.
‘There’s a compass in the case,’ Nina said. ‘Macy, get it out; we’ll see if it’s some kind of magnetic effect.’
It wasn’t, the needle unmoving. Nina picked up both statues experimentally, wondering if each would show a bright band when they were aglow. They did, pointing towards each other no matter the figures’ relative positions. Whatever caused the earth energy effect, whoever made the two statuettes had found a practical use for it – if somebody who could utilise the phenomenon had one statue in their possession, they could use it to find the other.
But there was something else – another, barely discernible line of increased illumination on each. Whatever this pointed towards, it was unmoving. Still holding the statues, she walked back and forth across the chamber in the hope of spotting a parallax effect. None was evident. The