Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Call Read online

  VOLUME I

  A HERO’S JOURNEY

  By P.T. Dilloway

  Copyright P.T. Dilloway 2012

  Cover Art:

  Rusty Webb: http://rustywebb.blogspot.com/

  Dedication

  For Mom and Dad, without whom none of this would be possible.

  VOLUME I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  VOLUME II

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part 3

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  VOLUME III

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  VOLUME 0

  Chapter 1: My Dinner With Merlin

  Chapter 2: The Gift

  Chapter 3: The Chieftain

  Chapter 4: Plague

  Chapter 5: War of Magic

  Chapter 6: Darkness Rising

  Chapter 7: Training Camp

  Chapter 8: Fight & Flee

  Chapter 9: The Messenger

  Chapter 10: The Trial, Part 1

  Chapter 11: Into the Fire

  Chapter 12: The Trial, Part 2

  Chapter 13: The Trial, Part 3

  Chapter 14: Demon Army

  Chapter 15: Baptism By Fire

  Chapter 16: Aftermath

  Chapter 17: The Pursuit

  Chapter 18: Angel & Devil, Part 1

  Chapter 19: Angel & Devil, Part 2

  Chapter 20: The Temptation of Merlin

  Chapter 21: The Duel

  Chapter 22: The Order Begins

  SISTERHOOD

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 2

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 4

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part 5

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Also by P.T. Dilloway

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  As she mounted the steps to her dream job, Dr. Emma Earl’s main concern was not to trip over her own feet. She kept her eyes down on her size-9 flats to make sure she didn’t fall on her face. First impressions came only once and she didn’t want her new coworkers to think she was clumsy.

  She made it to the top unscathed and recognized the man waiting for her as the same Dr. Ian MacGregor who had conducted her second interview. If she hadn’t recognized his face, then his Scottish accent would certainly have jarred her memory. “Good morning, Dr. Earl. Here early on your first day even.”

  Emma needed a moment to remember that she was Dr. Earl now; the title sounded so strange from someone else’s mouth. “Yes,” she managed to get out. As her face turned red-hot, she summoned the courage to add, “Am I too early?”

  “Not at all, lass. I like employees who are punctual.”

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “Now, why don’t we go inside and I’ll show you around?”

  “Shouldn’t Dr. Brighton—?”

  “He won’t mind. Trust me.” Since Dr. MacGregor was the head of the geology department, Emma had no choice but to take his word for it.

  She hadn’t visited the museum in four years, but it looked relatively unchanged. They walked around the ticket line, into the Great Hall. At one end of this hall was the longest-running exhibit of the Plaine Museum, the skeleton of a mastodon named Alex in honor of Dr. Alexander Plaine, the museum’s founder who had discovered the mastodon in Ohio and brought it back to his native Rampart City. At his own expense he built the museum around it so the city might have an institution dedicated to knowledge and learning to rival any major European city at the time.

  Emma knew this story by heart—she had read Dr. Plaine’s biography when she was three—but didn’t mind hearing it again from Dr. MacGregor. They paused in front of Alex while Dr. MacGregor told the story in his Scottish brogue. “No one expects you to be a tour guide, but it’s always good if you can point visitors to the right place.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been coming here since I was little.”

  “You’ve probably memorized every inch of the place then, haven’t you?”

  “Not quite, sir.”

  “No need for that ‘sir’ stuff like we’re in the military.”

  “Sorry, Dr. MacGregor.”

  “You can call me Ian, lass. You mind if I call you Emma?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Excellent.” He indicated the sets of double doors behind her that for the moment were closed. “Those are our temporary exhibits. Right now we’re winding down th
e ‘Wonderful World of Ants.’ The kiddies really seem to like that. We’ve also got ‘American Pirates’ going on. That’s a popular one, might keep it for a while longer if we can.”

  “What about that one over there?” she asked and pointed to the left.

  “Oh, that. Bloody mess is what that is. Supposed to be something called ‘Egypt’s First King’ about this Karlak II bloke. Except on the trip here, the freighter carrying most of the artifacts sank.”

  “The captain scuttled the ship, didn’t he? I remember reading about that in the newspaper.”

  “Quite right, lass. They say he went nuts and destroyed the boilers. No one is quite sure why. We’ve been trying to sort things out with the Egyptian government. As you might imagine, they’re a bit annoyed that some of their relics are sitting at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “That’s awful,” Emma said.

  “Yes.” Ian shook his head and then smiled. “But that’s for the lawyers and Anthropology to figure out. None of our concern.”

  He led her over to the staff elevator behind Alex. She resisted the urge to wave goodbye to the mastodon as she had done when she was a little girl. Aside from her closest friend Becky Beech, Alex’s presence had reassured her after her parents had died, when the rest of the world had been in flux. That the mastodon was still here made her smile as she had back then.

  The staff elevator wasn’t much different than the regular patron elevator, except that it had more buttons. These went from the fourth floor executive offices all the way down to something labeled as the “Sub-Subbasement.” Ian pressed the button for the third floor department offices.

  The corridor was a dingy white; some of the lights flickered overhead. The tiles were scuffed and in some places chipped from repeated use and abuse. She wondered when the department offices had last undergone a renovation; probably long before she was born. Still, this didn’t dampen her enthusiasm as she followed Ian down the corridor, past frosted glass doors with labels like, “Metallurgy Division” and “Gemstone Division.”

  They finally stopped at the door marked “Exogeology Division.” Ian opened the door for her. The state of the office prompted Emma to gasp. Piles of books and journals took up the worktables and the desk in the room was nearly invisible from the amount of folders and loose papers on top of it.

  “I’m afraid your predecessor wasn’t the neatest sort,” Ian said.

  A door to the left opened and out of it stumbled an old man with wild white hair, at least a three-day growth of stubble and the bulbous red nose of an alcoholic. If these signs weren’t enough to indicate the man had a problem with alcohol, the smell of his breath was almost enough to make Emma gag.

  “What’s going on here?” the man said. “Who the hell is this?”

  “Hello, Walter,” Ian said. “This is Dr. Emma Earl. She’s your new researcher.”

  The man’s watery gray eyes narrowed at Emma, who took an involuntary step back. “This girl is the one you’ve hired? Has she even finished high school yet?”

  “Dr. Earl has a PhD in Geology from the University of California at Berkeley. She’s more than qualified for the position,” Ian said. The iciness of his voice prompted Emma to take another step back into the doorway. “The director and I think she will be a welcome addition to our team.”

  “Is that what we’ve come down to now? Hiring pubescent girls and calling them doctors?” The man shook his head. “Good thing I’m almost to retirement.”

  With that, the man turned and slammed the door to his office. Emma stood in the doorway, barely holding back tears. Ever since she’d enrolled at Northwestern at age fourteen, she’d been the butt of jokes for being a kid. She had hoped things might be different here, but clearly that wasn’t the case.

  Ian put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry about Dr. Brighton. He used to be quite the scholar back in the day.”

  “Yes. I’ve read some of his papers,” she said. “They were very good.”

  “He hasn’t been the same since his wife died. Won’t be much longer now until we’ll have to force him to retire.” Ian smiled at her. “He shouldn’t give you too much of a problem, so long as you don’t bother him. If it gets to be too much, you come and see me. My office is right at the end of the hall.”

  “Thank you, s—Ian.”

  “You’re welcome, lass. And good luck.”

  He left her among the ruins of the office. With a sigh, she started to clean up the place.

  Chapter 2

  The Rampart City docks covered several square miles. Everything from fishing boats to freighters to cruise ships used the port. That meant it took them nearly an hour to find the right ship.

  The good part was that the Coast Guard had thoughtfully laid everything out for them on the dock. It was far less of a haul than Dr. Dan Dreyfus had hoped for. Still, anything they recovered from the icy Atlantic was better than nothing.

  For two months Dan had been on the edge of panic. The artifacts, most of which he had excavated from the Egyptian sands, had been lost at sea on their way to the Plaine Museum for the exhibition. The expedition had taken four years and cost quite a lot of money, the director had told him often enough. To lose everything because the captain went nutty and sank the ship was beyond Dan’s comprehension. Had it been some kind of political statement? A religious beef? There would be no way to find out since the captain had gone down with the ship and none of the sailors seemed to have any idea.

  Then came the call three days ago from the Coast Guard. Against all odds, some of the crates had washed up in Massachusetts, near Cape Cod. The labels on some of the crates had listed the Plaine Museum as the destination, so the Coast Guard wanted someone from the museum to identify the objects and whether they belonged to the museum or not.

  For that, Dan and his assistant Gregg had rented a U-Haul truck and wandered around the docks to find where the Coast Guard had unloaded the items. The officer Dan had talked to waited for them on the dock, with the items spread out on a black tarp. They shook hands and introduced themselves. Then the officer got down to business. “This is all the stuff we could find. Just tell me what you think is yours and then fill out the papers.”

  “Not a problem,” Dan said. He motioned to Gregg. “My assistant has a list of the items for the exhibit. Shouldn’t be too hard to find them.”

  Dan had taken most of the items from the ground himself, so he didn’t need a list to identify everything. He got down on his knees on the tarp and picked up a clay jar. Miraculously, the jar had survived intact. “They don’t make ‘em like these anymore,” he mumbled. He handed the jar to Gregg to check off their list.

  There were more items: arrowheads, bridles, and the like. The most important item was still in its crate; the lid had stayed on throughout the ordeal. “Do you have a crowbar or something?” Dan asked the officer. The Coast Guard officer sent an aide off to look for one. The aide returned a few minutes later with a claw hammer. “I guess that’ll have to work.”

  Dan worked at the crate’s lid until he finally got the claws under a nail so he could prop it open. The lid came free and Dan tossed it aside. He whooped with joy to see the contents of the crate still intact. He reached into the crate and then ran his hands along the smooth stone of the sarcophagus for Karlak II. It wasn’t as elaborate as the ones for the later pharaohs, but it was even more special than those. This was the first real Egyptian king, the first to unite the various factions to form what would later become the Old Kingdom.

  Dan needed the help of Gregg, the officer, and three sturdy sailors to get the lid of the sarcophagus off. Karlak II had not been mummified like the pharaohs; Karlak II’s ancestors would perfect those rituals. The Coast Guard officers gagged at the smell from the sarcophagus, but Dan had smelled a lot worse in the field. He peered into the sarcophagus; the skeleton seemed undisturbed by the seawater. Dan let out a sigh of relief.

  “Looks like he’s safe,” Gregg said.

  “It sure does. I thought f
or sure the old boy was going to be buried at sea.” Obviously Karlak II’s sarcophagus had been the center of the exhibit; no Karlak, no exhibit the director had told him. Now that they had the ancient king, they could revive the exhibit.

  Dan squinted at something almost camouflaged by the black tarp. “What is that thing?” he asked and pointed at a rectangular object that was entirely a glossy black.

  Gregg looked down at the list and then shook his head. “I don’t see anything like it on the list.”

  Dan crawled over to the object. He put a hand to the black surface, but pulled it away a moment later at the coldness of it. Well, he supposed it had probably floated around the cold Atlantic for a while. He leaned closer to search for any kind of markings that might identify it as Egyptian in origin. There was nothing, just a black surface that reflected the light. It seemed to be made of some kind of crystal. Ebony? Jet?

  “It gives me the creeps,” Gregg said. “It looks like the monolith in 2001.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Dan said. He touched it again, this time prepared for the cold. He ran his hands over the surface to search for any seams or levers or anything that might indicate its purpose. He turned to the officer. “Can your guys help me turn this thing over?”

  “Hold on, Boss,” Gregg said. He sprinted back to the truck. He returned with a handcart. Between that and some old-fashioned muscle power, they managed to get the thing turned over. Dan found nothing on that side either. It was a glossy black box. Not even really a box, since it didn’t seem to have any kind of storage compartment. Maybe it was a marker of some sort, like a tombstone. It certainly had the ominous quality of one.

  “Was this in a crate?” Dan asked the officer.

  The man shook his head. “It was like that, sitting on the beach with some of the other stuff. It’s not yours?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then we’ll have to put it back in the hold.”

  “Why? So you can put it in a government warehouse to be examined by ‘top men?’” Dan said. He had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark a hundred times when he was a kid. Even if the government didn’t put it in a warehouse, Dan doubted they would be able to figure it out. He stood up to face the officer. “Look, we have people who can give this a proper scientific analysis. Then maybe we can figure out what it is.”

  “I don’t know. I could get into trouble—”

  Dan leaned close to the officer to whisper, “Come on, what kind of trouble can you get into? No one knows who this belongs to, right?”