Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

usual.
    Kae looked about him as I led the way to the long wooden bar at the end of the room. “Hasn’t changed that much since I was last here. Still a dive. And the ambience is just short of actually distressing. The whole place could use renovating. With a flame-thrower.”
    By this time, we’d reached the bar. Alex glared at Kae. “I heard that! Would you like to say Hello to Mr. Really Big Stick, who lives behind the counter?”
    “Ease off, Alex,” I said. “This is a London Knight in disguise.”
    Alex smirked. “Well, colour me impressed. Nice suit. What does he want me to do, polish his helmet?”
    “Yes,” said Kae. “This is one of Merlin’s line. He thought he had a sense of humour, too.”
    “What is a London Knight doing here?” Alex said to me, ostentatiously ignoring Kae. “Bearing in mind that I’ve still got that nuclear suppository the Holy Sisters of Saint Strontium gave me, round the back somewhere.”
    “Well,” I said, “it turns out it wasn’t only Merlin who was buried in the cellars under this place. King Arthur’s down there, too. And we are here to dig him up, so I can give him the sword Excalibur. Oh, and by the way, this is Kae, stepbrother to King Arthur, last surviving Knight of the Round Table.”
    There isn’t much that can throw Alex, so I stood there and quietly enjoyed the way his jaw dropped, his eyes bulged, and he couldn’t get a word out to save his life. Suzie took the opportunity to lean over the bar and help herself to a bottle of gin.
    “I should have been told!” Alex said, finally, and very loudly. “This is my bar! I had a right to know!”
    “You were safer not knowing,” said Kae, entirely unmoved.
    “Safer?” said Alex. “I live in the Nightside! I’ve had all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in here, playing bridge!”
    “He has a point,” I said. “Don’t be upset, Alex. What we didn’t know, we couldn’t accidentally let slip, or be made to tell someone else.”
    “Hell with that,” said Alex. “Do you have any idea how much money I could have made, running guided tours? Can you imagine how much tourists would have paid, to take photographs of each other, standing over Arthur’s grave? I could have been rich! Rich!”
    “And that is why we didn’t tell you,” said Kae. “Or anyone else of your misbegotten line. You couldn’t be trusted. A secret can be kept by two men, but only if one of them is ignorant.”
    “Did he just call me ignorant?” said Alex, dangerously.
    “I’m sure he meant it in a nice way,” I said.
    Alex sulked. “No-one gives a damn for the poor working-man.”
    He finally calmed down and let us behind the bar. Suzie was still sucking noisily on her bottle of gin, but Alex had enough sense not to make a fuss. He opened the heavy trap-door that led down to the cellars and lit an old storm lantern he kept handy. Electricity doesn’t work down in the cellars. Something down there doesn’t like it. Alex held the lantern out over the stone steps leading down, but the pale amber light couldn’t penetrate the darkness below. Kae looked over his shoulder.
    “Dark,” he said. “It was dark then, too. All those years ago. Merlin always did like the dark. Said it felt like home.”
    Alex looked at me. “John ... What is he saying?”
    “He buried Merlin and Arthur here, fifteen hundred years ago,” I said.
    Alex surprised me by nodding. “What goes round, comes round. Let’s get this over with before my customers rob me blind in my absence.”
    He led the way down the smooth stone steps, and we all went down after him, sticking close together to stay inside the circle of amber light. The steps seemed to descend a hell of a lot further into the impenetrable darkness than I was comfortable with. I had no idea how deep we were, under the bar, under the Nightside. The air was close and clammy, and there was an almost painful feeling of anticipation. Of something important, and significant, waiting to happen. Waiting to be brought back into the light after fifteen hundred years in the dark.
    The steps finally gave out onto a packed-dirt floor. The bare earth was hard and dry as stone. I remembered Kae saying how he’d dug two graves out of this earth with his bare hands. A blue-white glare appeared slowly round us, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Alex put his lantern down at the foot of the steps and looked uncertainly about him. We were standing at the beginning of a great stone cavern, with an