A huge, round rock stood in the middle of the lawn, shaped like the grinding stones used in old flour mills, except this was carved. There were letters around its edge.
Warren stared, ringing silence filling his ears. He called out for his father, asking what the stone was for, but there was no answer. Nobody could hear him and there was no sound. His voice came out in a sleepy sigh, no matter how hard he tried to shout. He was inside an invisible bubble.
Warren knelt by the stone and tried to make out what the letters said.
“Whosoever pulleth this sword from this stone, he shall rightwise be King of All England,” Merlyn spoke beside him.
He glanced up.
Snow lay on the ground around them. It was a freezing night. A graveyard had replaced the garden, the round stone nestling against the wall of a small church. An anvil rested on top of the stone with a sword poking out of it. The sword was black, dull, and somehow familiar.
“Where are we?”
“London,” Merlyn said. “It took the blacksmith a lot of hard work to get the sword into the anvil but I paid him well.”
“How did he do it?”
“Heated them both to glowing point, then slid the sword in.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Warren said. “If he put the sword in when it was partly melted, then the blade inside the anvil’s going to be all melted and mixed up inside the anvil. The particles are mixed together.”
Merlyn frowned. “You can’t think about magic in the same way that you do about science.”
“You said it wasn’t done by magic. You said it was a blacksmith.”
“You think I visited a human blacksmith?”
“Well, yes.”
“Try and pull it out. Go on.”
Warren stood on the lip of the stone and faltered. It was tempting to take the sword out of the anvil, to wave it about and delight in the fact that he was chosen, just like Arthur. However, he doubted whether he would be able to do it. In fact, by the laws of reality and all that was rational, he knew he couldn’t. Nobody could.
“I can’t.”
“You’ve not tried!”
“This is a trick. A joke you’re playing on me.”
“Warren, just try.”
Warren curled his hand around the sword’s pommel. As soon as he touched it, electricity, a kind of magnetism, something, flowed through his arm into his mind. He knew where he’d seen the sword before.
Nightwalks 