Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “No, of course I do,” she told him, embracing the feeling. “We have to look.”

  He put a hand to her cheek and smiled at her. “If we’re going to go, one of us will have to wear the focal to make it through the two hundred paces,” he told her softly.

  Quin watched a strange expression pass across his face. “You don’t want to wear it?” she asked.

  “No.” He hesitated. “But I also don’t want you to wear it.” He picked up the helmet and turned it around and around, regarding it much as a soldier might regard an unexploded grenade. “It did something to my thoughts—and I—I don’t want it to do that to you. I made you wear it earlier, but that was for a short time. This would be much longer.”

  “I might be better at clearing my mind first than you are,” she pointed out, moved by his worry. “Maybe it won’t be so bad for me.”

  “You are better. That’s part of what I mean. You keep your mind so clear, Quin, without the focal. When we were fighting the Watchers There, you didn’t slow down. You held your focus. And when you work as a healer, I can see how intense your concentration is. That’s why I don’t think you should use the focal. I don’t want to risk it damaging your mind.”

  She thought about that. It was true, she’d managed not to lose herself when they’d fought those boys inside the anomaly, though she considered she’d been more lucky than skilled in that instance. Still, there might be some truth to what Shinobu was saying. Eventually she nodded.

  He looked relieved.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll wear the helmet for the two hundred steps, and you’ll keep your eyes on me. You’ll make sure I don’t do something strange.”

  The tears had dried on the youngest Watcher’s cheeks, leaving clear pink trails through the layers of grime. He sat on the cave floor with the focal over his head, his hands clamped onto the sides of the helmet to prevent anyone from removing it.

  They’d confirmed that his name was Nott but hadn’t gotten much else out of him. The Young Dread and John crouched nearby, watching him closely. Maud had tried to help the boy clear his mind before putting on the focal, but he’d been so desperate for it, he hadn’t listened to her at all. It probably didn’t matter much; whatever damage the helmet was capable of inflicting had already happened to this boy.

  Nott was rocking back and forth, moaning. His tears began again, welling in his eyes, then spilling down his cheeks. Without warning, he tore the helmet from his head and threw it viciously. John, with his newly sharp reflexes, caught it before it hit the cave floor. Nott looked from him to Maud, his face twisting into an expression of absolute distress. A deep sob came out, and as it did, he struck at Maud with both fists.

  “It doesn’t work right!” he yelled. “It’s not like mine!”

  She easily blocked his blows, caught his wrist, and twisted his arm behind him. The boy yelped, and his young eyes stared at her, full of resentment.

  “It doesn’t feel right on my head,” he told her, almost spitting the words out. “It doesn’t feel good!”

  He struck at her with his free hand, but Maud caught that one as well and squeezed it tightly.

  “Stop!” Nott pleaded.

  She released him, and he regarded her hostilely but didn’t try to hit her again.

  “It’s not the same focal you’ve used before,” the Young Dread explained patiently. “This one has had different owners.”

  “I’m becoming a boy again,” he told her, as though this were the worst fate he could imagine. “I was a Watcher. I put the world in its place. Now I’m a child. I miss Odger and our stinking cottage.”

  “You were always a boy,” she said. “The focal has fooled you.”

  He shook his head, sending several droplets into the air. The Young watched them patter across the cave’s rough floor.

  “No,” he said, “I was different.”

  He picked up the frozen rat, which was lying on the rocks near his feet. Cradling it gently in one hand, the boy held it out toward her as his thumb stroked its belly.

  “I wanted to cut it up. It’s good to hurt things. But now…” He shrugged, then wiped at his eyes with his other hand.

  “You can’t use a focal without proper help,” she said. “It changes you.”

  “It makes you better!” he yelled.

  “No.” She said the word firmly. “If it’s been used often by someone else, the focal keeps that person’s thoughts, Nott. If you don’t set your mind right to begin with, you won’t be able to tell those thoughts from your own.”

  “They were my thoughts,” the boy insisted. “I saw how much better I was than everyone else.”

  The Young Dread responded calmly, “They weren’t your thoughts. I can guess to whom those thoughts belonged.” There was a flicker of interest in his eyes, even if he didn’t want to listen. “Your master is someone I knew well,” she told him. “You’ve been wearing one of his focals. I’ve seen him with many different helms throughout many years. He used to wear one often when our own master was not around. I have seen the Middle Dread do terrible things to small animals. He loved that. And the helmet has passed on that love to you.”

  She’d watched the Middle slowly disembowel live squirrels and rats around the campfire, taking obscene pleasure in the animals’ agony. He had once bragged to her, when the Old was out of earshot, that he could keep a rat alive for hours while he tortured it.

  The boy glanced down at the rat and moved it gently with his fingers, apparently considering what Maud had said.

  “If I’m not like him—if all those thoughts were his—what good am I?” he asked. His fingers closed gently and drew the rodent to his chest. He stared down at the tiny body and pressed his own back into the cave wall, as though he hoped to disappear inside it. “They were right to leave me to die here in my cave. I’m useless.”

  “I’ve heard you call this your cave twice now,” John said. “What makes it yours?”

  “My cave. My cave,” the boy said defiantly, as though John were questioning his claim on the place.

  “But why?” John’s voice was soft, but there was something urgent in his tone.

  “Because I—I belong to it some way. I have a boar on my athame. Well, I don’t have the athame anymore, Wilkin has it. But I used to have it. And it had a boar. And there’s a dead boy named Emily with a boar around his neck back there. He’s got a boar, I’ve got a boar—it’s my cave.”

  John and Maud looked at each other.

  “There’s a dead boy in the tunnel?” asked John.

  “Yes,” said Nott. “I’m wearing his clothes.”

  They found the body deep in the frozen tunnel the next morning. Sunlight came through the ceiling of ice in a blue glow, making the corpse’s skin look bruised. The body wore only underclothes; the fatal wound to its chest was dark and ugly against the frozen skin.

  Nott had accompanied them and was standing near John, shivering in his two cloaks and double clothing.

  “Look there,” Nott said, pointing. “I didn’t see that last night.”

  High up on the tunnel wall, partially obscured by ice, was a deep engraving. John pried up a sheet of ice from the rock and tossed it to the ground. Where it had been, the full carving was now exposed. It was a boar with great tusks and angry eyes.

  “I told him this cave was for boars,” Nott muttered.

  “Told who?” John asked.

  “No one,” Nott said immediately, throwing John a suspicious look. Then one of his hands disappeared into a deep pocket in his outer cloak, and clutched, John thought, at the dead rat that he’d insisted on carrying with him.

  John knelt on the cold rock floor next to the body. He pulled up its left hand and found the boy’s name drawn in blood on the palm. Emile.

  “Emile Pernet, house of the boar,” he whispered. “My mother wanted to find him.” He’d thought she’d been searching for revenge, but now he saw things differently. Emile had never been an enemy. He was a boy who’d been misused,
who’d been given no justice, just as John and Catherine had been given no justice. “Were Emile and my mother friends?” he asked the Young Dread.

  “They were,” she said.

  Low on the wall, near Emile’s body, small figures were sculpted into the rock:

  PRO 63

  SIN 48

  DEX 89

  “There are more letters in this cave,” John noted. “Fewer numbers. Though”—a quick calculation—“they still make two hundred.”

  “These letters make sense,” the Young Dread told him, “if they indicate the Latin words for ‘forward,’ ‘leftward,’ and ‘rightward.’ They are directions of some sort.”

  Nott curled his lips back into a smile that bared his teeth, and he murmured knowingly, “Latin, of course.”

  Maud’s thought entered John’s mind: His teeth!

  The Young Dread moved forward smoothly, and before the boy could react, she’d grabbed him and lifted his upper lip. Nott’s teeth looked rotten at first glance, but John saw that they had, in fact, been carved with fine designs, then smeared over with a thick, black grease.

  “Look closely,” Maud told him.

  He leaned over the boy with her, and then he understood. The patterns on Nott’s teeth were not random. They were, in fact, symbols from an athame. All together they made a set of coordinates.

  “These will take us somewhere There,” Maud said, contemplatively. Then, to Nott: “What do you find when you follow the carvings on your teeth?”

  A shifty look came over the boy, as if he would never trust them enough to answer any of their questions. But in the next instant, perhaps thinking of the focal and the potential for John and Maud to feed him, his face became friendlier.

  “The symbols on my teeth—and Wilkin’s!—are how we find the other Watchers who are sleeping There. We go to this place”—he tapped his teeth—“and then we walk.”

  The Young Dread asked, “What do you mean, ‘walk’?”

  “He’d kill me for telling you, but he’s dead, and I’m supposed to be dead, so I reckon it doesn’t matter.” Nott had drawn the frozen rat out of his pocket and was stroking it again. “When I say ‘walk,’ I mean ‘walk.’ Two hundred steps, and the other Watchers are there, bang at the end of it.”

  Maud gestured at the numbers on the wall. “These two hundred steps?” she asked.

  The boy looked indignant. “No. We have our own.”

  “So what are these?” John asked.

  Nott shrugged and kicked at the floor. “I don’t know everything about everything.”

  Maud was very still for some time, though John saw her eyes flick between the boy’s teeth and the numbers sculpted into the rock wall.

  “These caves,” she said at last, speaking to herself as much as to them. “Each house had one. I have been to some of them—invited by the Seekers to whom they belonged. This cave belonged to the boar, the one in Africa to the bear. But they’ve fallen out of use…perhaps because the Middle Dread has been using them for his own ends.” John heard her feeling her way toward certainty as she spoke. “Whatever is done here in this cave, whatever is left here—it looks as though it was done by the boar Seekers themselves, since this is their place. Do you see? Because Emile is here, it appears he was killed by his own family. And a Watcher left frozen here will look like a member of that family as well. It is another way the Middle hid his tracks.”

  Maud’s thoughts had begun to mingle with John’s own as she spoke, and suddenly he understood something else. “There’s more—Nott’s teeth,” he told her. It almost felt, in this intense moment, as if he and Maud were one mind speaking with two voices. “If he freezes to death here, his teeth—with their coordinates—are safely kept nearby these walking instructions. A full set of clues.”

  The Young Dread began to line up the symbols on their athame to match the coordinates on Nott’s teeth.

  “If the two hundred paces Nott uses bring him to other Watchers…What if this two hundred paces will bring us to something else?” She indicated the boar hewn proprietarily into the tunnel wall, and a new rush of thoughts leapt from her mind into John’s.

  “The house of the boar?” he whispered. “The Seekers who’ve gone missing…”

  “What if they are missing, but not entirely gone?” the Young Dread asked him.

  “You think we might find whatever is left of them,” John said, giving voice to her thoughts.

  Maud held up the athame’s hilt, showing him the dials, which had been arranged in the pattern on Nott’s teeth.

  “I think we must look for ourselves and discover what the Middle has done.”

  She reached for the lightning rod at her waist.

  18 Years Earlier

  Catherine had locked the bathroom door, but she wasn’t in the bathroom. She was sitting on the floor of the tiny room—little more than an alcove, really—which was to be the nursery. This small space adjoined the bathroom and their bedroom and was tucked into the farthest corner of the flat.

  She didn’t want Archie to worry if he noticed the locked bathroom door, but she also wanted warning if he came close. She was wearing the focal again, an activity she’d continued to keep secret from him.

  She sat cross-legged between the half-assembled crib and the stack of baby things her mother had been sending. Her mother’s gifts had ended abruptly the week before, and Catherine hadn’t been able to reach either of her parents since. Now that she knew the Middle Dread had followed her in France, she was worried that he might be after her family. She was still confined to bed—even more strictly than before—so she couldn’t go looking for her parents, and she didn’t want to send Archie into danger on his own. She was trying not to let hysteria take hold.

  Gradually she became aware of a repeated thumping noise that was coming from the living room. Archie had been practicing with weapons every waking moment since their return from France, three weeks before, after he’d fortified their flat with all sorts of door and window locks. (As if locks would keep out a Seeker or a Dread.) He must be punishing the training dummy severely right now, she thought.

  Catherine’s mind hummed with the focal as she studied the journal, trying to make new mental connections from the old entries—to understand who had been manipulated, and when. She’d added to the journal the coordinates for the cave in Norway where Emile had been heading, and his father’s drawing. She would go there as soon as she could—she would try to find all the caves as soon as she could—but what else could she learn while she waited for her child to be born?

  After an unknown amount of time had passed—it was hard to keep track of time in the focal—she noticed a change in the noise from the living room. It was no longer the sound of Archie striking the dummy but of something else, something heavier—it was the sound of a body hitting a wall. That happened occasionally when he practiced, but a moment later she heard the sound again. And then again. There was a new noise on the heels of the last thud—a shatter of glass against the floor.

  Catherine got to her feet and slipped into the bedroom. She grabbed her whipsword from its hiding place in the wardrobe, then tucked a knife into the pocket of her loose dress.

  The crashing in the living room continued, and now she heard voices, three male voices. She could not make out what they were saying, but they were angry and demanding, and not one of them belonged to Archie. She ran into the bathroom, and from there through connecting doors to the apartment’s tiny pantry and then kitchen. A gun went off, once, deafening, and then the weapon clattered to the floor.

  She saw the attackers through the open kitchen doorway. Archie had an ordinary sword in his left hand, and his right hand—which had clearly just fired the gun—was now empty. He drew a long training knife from his belt.

  The three intruders circling him were young. They moved like trained Seekers, and Catherine recognized them at once. They were the three younger cousins in the picture she’d seen in Emile’s house, brothers of Anthony, who’d been Em
ile’s best friend—and probably his murderer—and who’d attacked her in Hong Kong.

  He can’t kill Seekers himself, Emile’s father had said. He gets them to kill each other instead. And here they were to finish what Anthony had failed to do in Hong Kong. What would their reward be? Her athame? Her focal? Or something else?

  “Where is the girl and her book?” one of them demanded.

  Ah, the book, her journal. Maybe that was the real reason the Middle was after her. Briac too had wanted her book. You have your journal, he’d told her. It’s a better weapon than any other Seeker has…I’ll show you how to use it.

  In a flash of understanding—aided by the focal—she finally grasped the journal’s full danger. It was, in large part, a record of bad things the Middle Dread had done or had allowed to happen or had asked others to do. While Catherine had imagined using it so that the Old Dread would cast the Middle out of the brotherhood of Dreads, the Middle Dread must have seen it as an even more serious threat—a threat to his survival, if the book was shown to the Old Dread. Briac had tried to tell her this, she now realized, but Catherine had held on to her stubborn notion that a Dread, at heart, would be honorable, and she hadn’t understood the kind of danger the Middle would see in her keeping a record of his actions. The Middle didn’t know precisely what was written in it, of course. He could only guess—and likely he’d guessed she knew more than she actually did. He saw it as a bigger threat than it actually was. A threat worth killing for.

  And Briac—he must have thought that by controlling her journal he would have leverage over the Middle, something to keep himself alive.

  These thoughts ran through her head in the space of a single breath. Then her mind was back in the flat, in the kitchen, as she looked in at the attackers.

  “Where is she?” the attacker closest to Archie asked again. He cracked his whipsword out toward Archie’s wrist, trying to disarm him, but Archie moved aside and, in a flash of steel, cut the attacker’s arm with his knife.