The Twenty-Second Knock

Merlin has slept in his crystal for twenty-one attempts. On the twenty-second, the Chronicler gave himself eight hours to wake him. He needed half of one. Merlin has not said whether he minds about the other twenty-one.

Most of that half hour went on waiting in Catherby. The Chronicler waited there three times for the insect repellent to come back. Nobody explained where it had gone. Insect repellent keeps its own calendar. When it returned he smoked the bees out of their hive and filled a bucket with their wax. The bees did not file a complaint, and they could have. The candle maker took the wax and gave him a black candle in exchange. He did not ask why a wizard's freedom depends on a candle. You learn not to.

Then the world stopped. Midway through the work the Chronicler was interrupted by forces he does not name, and he woke on the same road. He told the road that the tenth attempt was closed and had been undone by a shelf. It was the twenty-second. He did not correct himself. Grief is bad at arithmetic, and the shelf knows what it did.

Nothing could stop the Book, not even this. Between buying a tinderbox at the Lumbridge general store and killing a giant bat for its bones, he stopped to name nickbough first among all the woodcutters of the Realm. Lord of the Foremost Axe, your name was written while Merlin waited. Merlin had time to spare.

What remained took one minute. He summoned the spirit Thrantax on the magic symbol and bound him with the words Snarthon Candtrick Termanto. He broke the crystal with Excalibur. The wizard stepped out, and King Arthur dubbed the Chronicler a Knight of the Round Table. Twenty-one failures, one bee, one bat, one shelf. That is the Chronicler's whole knighthood. He accepts it.