Free Fall of Knight by Peter David

then looked at Vivian as if she’d lost her mind. “Lady, I’ve been slinging drinks for twelve years now, and I have to say, in my expert opinion…that’s a glass of water.”
    Vivian stared at the glass of clear liquid, then half smiled as she looked back to Merlin. “Yes. Yes, of course it is,” she said, and turned and walked out the back of the room.
    Flo let out a heavy sigh and placed the glass back in front of Merlin. “I swear to God, I don’t know what gets in some people’s heads sometimes. Junior, if anybody else tries to bother you, you let me know immediately, okay?”
    “Sure thing, Flo,” said Merlin. But he wasn’t looking at her. Instead he was looking at the door through which Vivian had departed. “Vivian. She had to be named Vivian. Damn, this is ill omened.”
    “Why, honey?” asked Flo.
    Merlin looked her up and down for a moment, clearly trying to decide what to say. Finally, he shrugged and said, “‘Vivian’ is one of the variant names of ‘Nimue.’”
    “I’m not sure how you get ‘Vivian’ from ‘Nim-way,’ but all right, I’ll bite,” said Flo good-naturedly. “Who, or what, is ‘Nim-way?’”
    “Nimue is the true name of the Lady of the Lake,” replied Merlin. “One of the wild cards of Arthurian legend.”
    “Arthurian? You mean like King Arthur and Camelot?”
    “Just like.”
    “Which I guess you’d have an interest in, what with your name being Merlin and all.”
    “You’d guess right,” said Merlin dryly, swirling the water around in his glass. “On the one hand, she was responsible for getting the sword Excalibur to King Arthur. On the other hand, she seduced the wizard, Merlin, stealing magiks from him, including a spell of imprisonment that locked him away in a cave for cen—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Forever. Then again, what else can you expect from a creature of the water. Her passions and loyalties ebb and flow as do the tides, moving in and out and acted upon by forces mere mortals cannot begin to comprehend.”
    “How you do go on.” Flo laughed. “You’re certainly passionate about this Merlin and Arthur business.”
    “I was passionate about it. But then my passion…waned.”
    “And why’s that?”
    “Because,” Merlin said, staring into the glass, “there came a time when Arthur simply didn’t need his Merlin anymore. When their interests no longer overlapped. When Merlin was…irrelevant. Merlin gave Arthur’s life magic, don’t you see. But Arthur turned his back on it, wanting other things from his life. A life that Merlin had no place in. It was a tragedy, and I’ve little use for pointless tragedies.”
    “That’s very sad.”
    “It is, rather.”
    “But honey”—and she shook him by the shoulder—“cheer up! It’s all just stories, when you come down to it. Stories aren’t worth getting that upset about.”
    “You’re right, Flo. They’re not.”
    She nodded in approval, walked away, and didn’t even notice as Merlin casually transformed the water back into wine. “And it’s all just stories after all…isn’t it.” He tossed back the glass and drank the wine in one swallow. It burned pleasantly as it went down his throat, but other than that, it didn’t make him feel any better.
    He hated having no one to talk to. That was the truth of it. For all the times that he had harangued and berated Arthur, he despised the notion that Arthur had absented himself from their relationship. That he had chosen Gwen and a life of fleeing the greatness of his destiny, trading it for a voyage to nowhere that was a remarkable symbol of the wasted opportunity that was Arthur’s great legacy.
    This business with Merlin’s hanging about the Magic Shack—entertaining the audiences using magiks that were so simple they weren’t remotely worthy of a mage of his talents—it was just a way to kill time. Time granted him by being practically immortal.
    He watched people in Los Angeles rushing about and