Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Oh God,” he whispered.

  One was a woman, judging by the hair, though she’d been dead so long and was so decayed that she was little more than bones and the dusty remains of dried flesh among dark clothing and cape. His first thought was of his mother. Catherine had been kept alive by machinery in a barn on the estate for years after she’d been disrupted. At the end, with her sunken eyes and transparent skin, she hadn’t looked much better than this corpse. The sight of it brought memories of the helplessness he’d felt when he’d seen her that way.

  John steadied his mind. He was not helpless now.

  He ducked low and crawled closer to study the bodies in the flickering light. There was no smell of death; the corpses were dry. The second figure was smaller, and perhaps had been dead longer, though it was difficult to tell. The clothing on the smaller one was more like a pile of dirty rags.

  “Was that one a child, do you think?” John asked when Maud had crawled up beside him.

  “It’s hard to say,” the Young Dread answered.

  John didn’t want to touch the remains, but Maud had no such qualms. She reached out and picked up the withered left arm of the woman and pushed up the crumbling sleeve of the corpse’s shirt.

  “Look,” she said quietly.

  John leaned closer with the torch. There was a discoloration on the leathery skin of the wrist. It was a brand in the shape of an athame. The Young repeated the procedure on the other arm, and John saw a different brand on the woman’s right wrist, this one in the shape of a bear.

  “Seekers used to brand themselves a second time with the sign of their house,” Maud told him. “That tradition seems to have died out in recent years.”

  John could guess why Seekers like Briac Kincaid hadn’t branded themselves with their house insignia. They lived with stolen athames, and it might look strange to have a different emblem on your arm than the one on the athame you were using.

  He looked at the female body again.

  “The journal said the athame was last known to be here, with a Seeker called Delyth Priddy and possibly a companion. Is this Delyth? And is that her companion?”

  They turned their attention to the smaller corpse. The hair had been short and dark, the clothes gray and rough. Maud peeled up shreds of cloth to examine the body’s wrists. The skin was more decayed than the other corpse’s skin had been, and there were no brands.

  “Not a Seeker, then,” John said. He was trying not to think too much about the withering skin with the bones poking through, so much like his own mother’s collarbone and jaw the last time he’d seen her.

  Maud had turned the small body’s leathery skull toward the light, revealing dirty, scratched teeth inside a dead grimace.

  “Not a Seeker,” she agreed, leaning away from the bodies. “This one is…more like those boys we saw on the Scottish estate. Their teeth were dirty like this.”

  This conclusion appeared to affect her deeply. She sat back on her heels and stared at the smaller corpse for some time.

  “How long do you think they’ve been dead?” John asked.

  The Young Dread shook her head slowly. “That is hard to say. Dry desert air, away from the elements. They died years ago, but I cannot say how many years. Perhaps the smaller one has been dead much longer than the woman.”

  She’d gotten back to her feet and was looking at the inscription melted into the wall again.

  “The numbers sum to…” She fell silent as she added them up.

  As John stood, he observed a change come over the Young Dread. Her expression didn’t alter as she looked at the carvings, but it was as though a heavy weight of despair settled upon her shoulders. Without looking at John, she turned and walked out of the cave.

  He followed, ducking through the low opening and into the desert night. Overhead, despite the bright moon, stars shone in infinite numbers, as though the heavens were larger and richer here than anywhere else in the world. The cave’s entrance was halfway up the sandstone peak, and he found Maud sitting on a ledge overlooking the vast stretch of land below.

  He seated himself close by, wary of whatever state of mind had overtaken her. She looked as if she were drawing darkness from the night to wrap about herself. As soon as John was sitting, the exhaustion of his long run overtook him again. He was hungry, he was thirsty, and his muscles ached for sleep.

  He spoke to her against his better judgment. “It sums to two hundred,” he said. “Two hundred is mentioned in the journal several times. Does it mean something to you?”

  A long stretch of silence passed before she finally answered, “No. There is a world of things I knew nothing about, a world of events to which I was blind and deaf.”

  In an unexpected gesture of anger, the Young Dread tossed the burning torch off the ledge. It cartwheeled down the hill, flaring brightly until it came to rest far below. John watched the torch’s flames slowly flickering out.

  Maud gazed out past the desert to the ocean in the distance, where the moon made a band of white upon the dark blue surface that shifted as waves rolled in to shore. The world was so beautiful here, John wished he could let his eyes, his mind, linger, but he could not. There were two corpses in the cave behind him. Was it possible his mother had already taken her revenge by killing those two, or had she, like John, found only the bodies? Either way, this location was a dead end. He had to try the next, and the next—provided Maud was still willing to help him.

  He didn’t understand her current mood.

  “Why Africa?” he asked, hoping this was a topic she wouldn’t find bothersome. “It seems an odd place for a Seeker cave.”

  “Seekers are most at home in Europe, yes, but they have spread themselves across the world,” she answered, her gaze still on the ocean. Her tone was as even as ever, but he sensed frustration beneath it. “There are Seeker outposts in many strange places, John.”

  “Will you let me go to the next place in the journal?” he asked. “The cave for the house of the boar?”

  “Do you think that cave will make more sense?”

  “My mother found some of our enemies, and she was looking for the rest. I can find them as well.”

  “Or maybe what you seek is entirely elsewhere. What if your mother’s notes have nothing to do with your revenge?” She paused, and then said, “I know this cave, John. Each Seeker house had a place like this. A private refuge, meeting place, a place for ceremony and conference, known only to its own members—and sometimes to the Dreads. It should not be a dangerous place for a member of the house to whom it belonged. It should not be a place where they disappear.”

  The Young Dread lifted her gaze to his face, and he felt his usual discomfort under her steady stare. After a time she turned back to the embers of their torch far below. “I am wondering, John—is it always wise to learn something, simply because it can be learned?”

  In the moonlight, he could see emotion creep into her eyes. She’s going to confess something, he realized. The idea was so strange, he stopped breathing for a moment.

  “There are things I would prefer not to know,” she told him. Her eyes met his again, and for the first time since he’d known Maud, she looked like a girl instead of a Dread. She looked vulnerable. “If I learn all that the Middle Dread has done,” she said, her voice less steady than he’d ever heard it, “if I learn how he has corrupted Dreads and Seekers both, do I share responsibility for his actions? Am I as he was?”

  John’s breath had come back to him, but it still took a few moments to find his voice. Eventually he said, “Sometimes you remind me of Quin. Too noble to see how things truly are. Too decent to know that nothing in the world is decent.”

  “Her thoughts often come to my mind,” the Young Dread admitted.

  “Quin’s?” He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his surprise.

  “Sometimes, when you have trained your mind as we have, you can touch another’s thoughts directly. Quin’s mind and mine cross in this way from time to time. I do thin
k she has a noble heart, or I would never have entrusted her with the athame of the Dreads.”

  “But—her thoughts come to your mind?” John asked again, trying not to sound foolish.

  “At times. Other times I feel her looking out through my eyes. She sees what I see, though maybe she doesn’t realize.”

  He almost didn’t want to ask: “What—what is she thinking about when you hear her thoughts?”

  She glanced at him. “Why do you ask that? Do her thoughts worry you?”

  “No. I—I’m only asking,” he said, turning away, embarrassed.

  “I try not to listen,” the Young Dread told him. “She doesn’t mean to reach me.”

  Her eyes were on John again, and it felt as though she could see his discomfort coming off him in waves. Her voice had returned to the steady tones of an instructor as she asked, “John, do you think of her often?”

  “Not on purpose,” he answered quietly.

  He hadn’t wanted to speak to Maud about Quin, but the questions had come anyway. He averted his eyes. “Sometimes you mention her name, when we’re training, to throw me off. I know you’re just baiting me, but she fills my mind.” He wanted to be quiet, but he couldn’t. “I think of that look on her face, when she realized I’d betrayed her. When I open the journal, I think of her hands touching it, her eyes reading it. I imagine what she’d say about the things my mother and grandmother ordered me to do. She’d tell me I’m wrong…and I want her to know I’m not wrong. I want her to know I’m right. Because I am right. She’s the one who’s wrong.”

  John managed to stop himself at last, ashamed of how much he’d said. They were thoughts he hardly admitted, even to himself. He wondered if, despite the great lengths to which Maud had gone to help him clear his mind, the focal had made him more talkative.

  “I did not understand how much your thoughts were absorbed by another,” the Young Dread said after a time. “You are not distracted only by fear of the disruptor or memories of your mother, but by Quin, who is alive in the world now.”

  “Yes,” he whispered after a moment in which he admitted to himself how true this was.

  “Others cannot rule your thoughts, John. If you want to be a Seeker, you must learn to rule them yourself. That is half the work of getting to your oath. The focal can help…superficially. But a deep habit must be changed by you.” John was gripped by the fear that she was about to disavow him as a student. Instead she told him, “I will let you go to the next place you seek in your mother’s journal, this cave of the boar Seekers.” He was about to thank her, when she held up a hand. “But first,” she said, “there is somewhere else I must bring you.”

  19 Years Earlier

  “He’s looking at you,” Mariko said.

  “What?” Catherine yelled back. She’d seen Mariko’s lips moving but couldn’t hear anything over the music.

  The nightclub pulsed with a beat so heavy, it felt like earthquakes shaking the floor. White laser light cut through clouds of smoke, twisting in designs that strobed in time with the music. Faces and bodies were decorated with glow-in-the-dark paint, highlighting features grotesquely and exaggerating movements.

  The club was packed, and Catherine was beginning to understand the pleasure of losing oneself in joyous anonymity. She and Mariko were painted with streaks of silver that sparkled when the lasers played across their faces.

  “He’s looking at you!” Mariko repeated, screaming to be heard. She touched Catherine’s hand and pointed discreetly.

  A young man with dark hair was slowly working his way through the crowd, and though he tried to direct his gaze at many things in the club, it was obvious his eyes kept coming back to Catherine. His face was a dark blue that didn’t glow, so his features were obscured, almost as though he wore a mask.

  They were on the Transit Bridge, which spanned Victoria Harbor from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon. Catherine was staying with Mariko for a few months, and Mariko’s parents believed that the girls were, at this moment, taking a night class in traditional dance. It wasn’t completely untrue.

  “He’s quite handsome!” Mariko said privately, by yelling the words into Catherine’s ear canal.

  “How can you tell?” Catherine screamed.

  “I guess I can’t! But this could be your lucky night!”

  This was the game they played, noticing boys who noticed them and pretending that something might happen. The truth was that Catherine, while enjoying herself immensely, couldn’t feel like anything but an observer in a place like this. It was pleasant to pretend she was just one of the vast crowd of revelers here on the second level of the Bridge, but despite the body paint, she was sober, had been trained as a Seeker, and did not actually fit in.

  After recovering her family’s athame, she’d expected her parents to fall down on their knees in gratitude. They’d been grateful, of course, but when Catherine had told them what she wished to do with the athame, what she wished to become one day, they’d laughed at her. They hadn’t meant to be cruel—they’d laughed because they felt sorry for her. Her hopes were so ridiculous and out of reach that she was an object of pity to her own family. They didn’t care that the Middle Dread was unworthy of his position. They didn’t want Catherine gathering evidence to that effect or fantasizing about who might replace him. Even when she spoke of the immediate things she wanted to do as a Seeker (small acts in parts of the world where a little good would go a long way), they’d treated her like a dreamer. Her parents saw the athame as a key to family security only. Catherine hadn’t shared with them her new conviction that she should find the secret caves belonging to every Seeker house, as a first step to discovering where missing Seekers had gone.

  Her older sister, Anna, had been jealous when Catherine brought home the fox athame. Eventually she’d accused Catherine of trying to diminish her older sister’s status in their parents’ eyes. And so Catherine had left.

  She’d done one final act as a Seeker. She’d gone back to the cave under Mont Saint-Michel, alone and hurriedly, and she’d scoured the walls for any clues to the past and the present. She’d found the series of numbers cut into the rock—carvings she hadn’t had time to study with Mariko. The numbers added up to two hundred, and beside them were a series of marks almost like arrows. But Catherine was at a loss to understand what the numbers meant. The arrow shapes hinted that they were directions, but beginning where? Were they a measure of distance? Of time?

  She’d left France without answers. She’d come to Hong Kong to leave her life as a Seeker behind, for a long while, at least. She would let Anna deal with her parents and their legacy.

  Catherine yelped as something poked her near her spine. Enormous, sharp belt buckles were the rage in Hong Kong at the moment, and you had to be careful where you stood in places like this. She took a step to her right.

  “May I speak to you?”

  Catherine was startled. The young man with the face painted dark blue had worked his way through the crowd and was now next to her at the edge of the dance floor, his head close to her ear. Catherine glanced at Mariko, who was also watching the newcomer. Usually she and Mariko politely declined any such advances. Catherine still found the boys out in the world so different from herself that they seemed almost another species. And Mariko was living under her parents’ medieval dating rules. But something about this young man’s self-assurance struck a chord.

  “All right,” she said to him, and Mariko arched an eyebrow so high, it was comical. “Where?”

  The young man gestured toward a quieter area at the edge of the main room. Catherine moved with him, weaving through the crowd. She winked back at Mariko, letting her Japanese friend know that nothing had changed; she would talk to this person, and she’d be right back.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, turning back to her companion and trying to study his painted face in the changing lights.

  “You should know me,” he said.

  “I should get to know you?” she asked, not sure s
he’d heard him correctly. He guided her through the lighter crowd at the fringes of the club, with one hand at the small of her back and the other resting lightly on her arm. At first, she’d liked the confidence of this position, but now, with fewer people around, his double touch seemed aggressive.

  They were navigating through a series of tall glass columns full of swirling liquid. A few couples were dancing slowly there, but they paid Catherine and her companion no mind at all.

  “You should know me,” he repeated.

  “I should— Ow!” she said.

  Something had pinched her back through the light material of her dress.

  “Careful.” His eyes were camouflaged within the paint on his face. “You caught yourself there.”

  Catherine saw that the edges of each column were actually designed in jagged patterns. She must have rubbed against one.

  “I’m thirsty,” she told him, discovering as she said it that she was actually very, very thirsty. The feeling had come upon her all at once.

  “Are you?” he asked.

  He steered her through the last few columns, and now they were in a darker area, where an open, dim doorway led off toward the washrooms. Catherine stumbled, and he caught her, one hand on her arm and one on her lower back again.

  “Ow!” she said.

  “Watch yourself, Catherine. You keep bumping into things.”

  “Briac?” she asked, trying to see through the paint. But he wasn’t Briac, even though his hair was dark and he moved like Briac. This was someone else.

  “Emile?” she asked. Could it be that Emile had been alive and safe all this time? Had he been hoping to find her like she’d been hoping to find him?

  He laughed in a low, unpleasant way that Catherine felt more than heard. “No, I’m not Emile.”

  She stumbled another time as he guided her through the unlit hallway toward the washrooms. A gaggle of girls ran past without noticing them.

  “Wait,” said Catherine, suddenly aware of how dizzy she’d become. And so thirsty. What was happening? “Wait.”