Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Nott’s helm had been stolen by Shinobu, but Shinobu was the Watchers’ new master, which must mean that Nott’s helm was back at Dun Tarm. The Young Dread and John had their own helm. They’d let him wear it a few times, but it didn’t work on his mind in the same way; it didn’t make him feel cruel and untouchable.

  “They say a piece of the Middle Dread’s mind lived inside my helm,” he explained to Aelred, who looked up at him with interest, “and that’s why I think like him. I suppose helms don’t work right without a piece of the Middle Dread’s head stuck in them.”

  The Young Dread was in charge here, even though she was a girl. Nott didn’t think he cared much for girls, but this one was beautiful; even he could see that. She had a sort of beauty that was terrifying, like the statue of an avenging angel he’d once seen in front of a church, cold and awful and splendid at the same time.

  The Young Dread had told Nott that he might train as a Seeker if John invited him to do so. That’s why the two of them were gone this evening; John was going to become a Seeker.

  Nott turned from the mirror and took the bat out of his pocket. Avoiding the gaze of Aelred’s shiny black eyes, he set the creature on the workshop table, unwrapped him, and stretched both of its wings out to their fullest extent again. The skin was translucent, crossed by the narrow lines of wing bones. Two tiny, grasping hands clutched at Nott’s fingers, and two small feet scrabbled at his wrist.

  “You’re really just a rat with wings.” Nott squeezed the bat’s right wing. He felt the bones bend beneath his grip. The animal let out a click and a squeal. With only a little more pressure, the bones would crack and the wing would be destroyed. Aelred would cry.

  It should feel good.

  He released the wing, folded it back against the body. If Nott stayed here, if he trained with John and became a Seeker—whatever idiot sort of thing a Seeker might be—he’d never want to hurt anything again. Would that be good?

  Nott was fairly certain that people who didn’t like to hurt things were soft and weepy and fat. He imagined himself many years from now, completely bald from all the hair washing and too fat to get to his feet. What would happen then? Would he lie around in his own filth, trying to slap away the rats that came to eat him?

  “What I need is the helm,” he told the bat. “My helm. The real one.”

  He stroked the creature’s head, and then stopped himself. These caresses had become a habit. What’s next, kissing it good night?

  Baths, tidiness. Enough. Nott made a decision.

  “If I had my helm, I’d know which Nott I prefer.” The bat let out a series of comfortable squeaks as Nott wrapped it back up. Nott told it honestly, “Aelred, you might not like the one I choose.”

  He stripped off the modern clothes and pulled on his rough trousers and shirt and cloak, which were still damp and much more itchy than he remembered. He hesitated over Aelred, but eventually Nott slipped the bat into his cloak pocket and filled the small bottle with milk, in case the animal got hungry.

  Outside, Nott retrieved his throwing knives from the trunk of the oak tree. The Young Dread had been teaching him the proper way to throw, and he’d gotten much, much better.

  But never mind that.

  If he left now, he wouldn’t have to say anything to John or the Young Dread. It was not as if they were his friends.

  He turned south and walked into the night.

  “If you grow up with wonders and miracles, they’re just an ordinary part of the world you know.” Dex spoke the words into Quin’s ear.

  They were riding Yellen together through the estate. More accurately, Quin was riding Yellen; Dex sat hunched behind her on the horse, his hood drawn all the way down over his face. She had a feeling he had his eyes clamped shut beneath the hood, to avoid any glimpse of the pleasant day.

  “They spent years walking through England, and the children thought it was perfectly normal to carry a laboratory on your back.” He had returned to his story, and he was speaking softly, because, as he’d told her, he didn’t like the sound of his own voice echoing into the open air.

  “A laboratory?” she asked. He’d said “wonders” before; a laboratory was a different idea altogether.

  “The pack was huge, like something a mountaineer would carry,” he explained. “He’d planned the trip a long time before it began—without telling the rest of the family.”

  They were passing piles of charred stone and wood that had once been Quin’s and Shinobu’s cottages. The grass of the commons had grown up to chest height, and the tall stalks grazed Quin’s lower legs where they hung on either side of the horse’s belly.

  “The man made mistakes. I can’t pretend otherwise. He hadn’t expected to end up where he did, and he didn’t know it would take so long.” Dex said this reluctantly, apologetically, as if Quin might judge him for the words. “Where are we now? I feel grass.”

  “In the meadow. You were asking me to find electronics. There might be things in the old barn that weren’t totally destroyed.”

  “Is it, is it open sky above us? No—don’t tell me.” He tucked his head against his chest, like a bird disappearing among its own feathers.

  “Is this your story, Dex, or is it someone else’s?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a little too slow. They just keep walking, don’t they?”

  What Quin really thought was that she needed to keep him talking to keep him sane. As soon as they’d emerged from the tunnel back into the world, Dex had become even more unstable. They’d spent an uncomfortable night in the castle courtyard, and in the morning Dex had woken up demanding that Quin help him gather electronic equipment. She had agreed because having a goal, no matter how odd, seemed to focus him.

  “The story is my string in the labyrinth, Quilla,” he whispered. “When I follow it, I remember other things.”

  “I lost my memory once too,” she confided, trying another tack.

  “How did you get it back?”

  “Slowly…and then rather suddenly.”

  A moan escaped Dex. “It might kill me to remember all at once.”

  “Would it? Or would it be a relief?”

  “No,” he said adamantly.

  The Scottish weather had been cold when Quin was last on the estate. How long had she been gone? Weeks? Months? She had no athame and no vehicle and no idea where Shinobu had gone. Dex, with his medallion, was her best chance of finding him—if she could keep him coherent long enough to help her, and long enough to help himself.

  “The man made mistakes?” she prompted before Dex could fall into a sullen gloom again. With a note of friendly mockery, she asked, “He made mistakes while they were walking and walking through this story about walking? What sort of mistakes did he make?”

  Dex chuckled softly, and she was glad to know that she’d averted melancholia. “You’re right,” he admitted, “there’s too much walking. But when they camped—ah!—that’s when things happened. Their father had a method for unpacking the laboratory. First he set up a canopy to work under. Then he would lay out all of his astonishing tools…”

  Quin wasn’t paying close attention for a few minutes, because they were passing the workshop, and there were signs that it had been recently occupied. It was deserted now, but had the Young Dread and John been here? What was John like under her tutelage? Did she keep him more honest than he’d been with Quin?

  “The older son was called Matheus,” Dex was saying when Quin focused on him again. “When Matheus was four or five, he would watch his father line up those tools. Then he would go off to chase squirrels or toss stones into a stream—or maybe at the squirrels. But the younger son, Matheus’s little brother, liked to sit very still and observe everything his father did. The little one’s name was Desmond, and when he was two years old, he would stand on tiptoe, his eyes just clearing the edge of the workbench. He memorized every tool. Some were rough and large, saws and picks and things like that, but they got s
maller and smaller, down to the most intricate instruments like a jeweler’s tools, but even more minute and complicated.”

  They were approaching the old barn. The back half of the structure had been in ruins all of Quin’s life, but she now saw that the front end was gaping open as well, as though the wall had been blown out.

  John must have done that, she thought, when he attacked us. That had been two years ago—just two years—yet it seemed another lifetime. Dex kept talking, and Quin tried to pay attention, though her mind had slipped away to that terrible night on the estate, facing John, Shinobu saving her…Where had Shinobu gotten himself to?

  “Before the little one could even speak properly, he knew the names of everything,” Dex was saying. He paused. Then he said, “An impellor.”

  “What?” Quin asked, brought back by the change in his tone.

  “An impellor. One of them was called that.”

  “One of the boys?”

  “No, one of the wonders. The black cylinder.”

  They’d left the three stone-and-glass wonders back in the castle ward, and one of them was a long cylinder of black stone with black glass running through it. Dex had apparently just remembered its name—and it was an intriguing name.

  “What does it do?” she asked, looking at him over her shoulder.

  The question was a mistake. Dex drew his breath, hesitated, and then shook his head in dismay. “When I want to hold the memory, it slips away.”

  From the slump of his shoulders, she saw that he was slipping away as well, sinking back into frantic despair. Quin steered him from the cliff’s edge by asking, “What about the little boy? You were telling me how clever he was. What sort of clever?”

  “Every sort of clever,” Dex whispered. And then, his temper improving with each word, he said, “Sometimes the canopy was blown clean off or torn in half—they had to sew it up again and again—or flooded with blinding illumination. Sometimes every thread stood on end, and the canopy would float on static electricity. Half the time the work space was showered with sparks of iridescent light.”

  “Like from a disruptor?”

  “Yes, like that.” A shudder ran through Dex. “Disruptor—I’d forgotten that name as well. He didn’t want to make it, you know. He was tricked.”

  “Who do you mean?” Quin asked, startled. Was Dex speaking of the person who had created the disruptor? Dex stopped speaking—her urgency had pushed him into silence. Quin could have kicked herself. “Go on, Dex, please,” she said quietly after a moment.

  He didn’t speak again right away, but eventually he whispered, “You called the dark tunnel doorway an anomaly, but all of those wonders were anomalies, though Desmond and Matheus didn’t know it. Are we here?”

  She had pulled Yellen to a halt outside the barn. She’d teased Dex about his story being boring, but it had drawn her in, and now she was sorry they’d arrived and he had an excuse to stop.

  Getting him off the horse and into the old barn involved forcing Yellen almost through the gaping hole in the wall, so that Dex could dismount and duck in without opening his eyes for more than a moment. Once inside, he wedged himself into a far corner. When he discovered the space was rather small and fairly dark, he lifted his hood a bit.

  They were standing in what had once been used as a medical facility, a fact made obvious by the dirty hospital bed and the equipment along the back wall. For years, someone had been kept alive on that bed. Briac Kincaid had forced Quin and the other apprentices to look at the body—living, just barely, but worse than dead—to illustrate the dangers of disruptor guns.

  It was only later, after leaving the estate, that Quin had learned that the individual kept in this room had been Catherine Renart, John’s mother, and that Briac had been the one who’d disrupted her. It made her ill even now to recall the odor that had pervaded the space, a mixture of disinfectant and decay. What must it have been like for John, discovering the withered form was his mother?

  “What happened here?” Dex asked her as his eyes darted around the room.

  “Nothing good,” she answered.

  —

  They returned on foot. Yellen’s back was piled high with broken medical equipment, a microwave oven, and an ancient television they’d found behind the dairy barn, all roped to him as if he were a pack mule. Dex—who had refused to explain what he wanted the equipment for—now clung to the horse’s mane. They were in the forest, which he clearly preferred to the meadow, but even so, there was a tremble in his gait.

  “What did the mother do while the boys were with their father?” Quin asked, to help Dex focus on something other than the world around him.

  “Their mother wasn’t used to living in the wilderness,” Dex told her, keeping his voice steady with difficulty. “She was occupied learning how to keep her husband and boys from starving. She taught herself to hunt.” He stumbled on a tree root, and Quin braced him.

  “What did she hunt with?”

  “An impellor.” This time he remembered the name with no effort. “The father made the impellor first, for her. It could push things away or pull things to her, even big things like deer. And besides hunting, it was good for…other things.”

  “Like fighting?”

  “Their father didn’t approve of fighting then. But England was hostile country. There were wolves and bears.”

  Quin was thinking this placed his story in the Middle Ages at the latest, but probably much, much earlier, when there had still been wolves and bears in the British Isles. Was he relating a Seeker legend that she too should have been taught? Was this a look into the Seekers’ early history?

  “The impellor made hunting easy,” Dex continued. “Their mother could take down even an elk, drag it toward her, and finish the animal off while it was stunned. By the time Matheus was five, he would hunt with her and make the final killing stroke, because she said she didn’t care for the sight of fresh blood, and he didn’t mind. They all ate very well by then.”

  Dex said this with particular relish, so that Quin felt obliged to make appreciative sounds. In fact, she’d been eating rabbits cooked over an open fire and was thinking how very much she’d prefer an enormous bowl of noodles from her favorite restaurant in Hong Kong instead, and how little the thought of eating an elk appealed to her. Just hearing about it gave her a queasy stomach.

  “The problem with the impellor was that it attracted a lot of attention,” Dex explained. “Besides wild animals, England was full of uneducated people, who didn’t look kindly on a man who appeared to be a sorcerer. The family had to use the impellor on people when they were attacked in their camp, or driven out of villages they were passing through. It was an effective way of stopping an assault, but unless you killed the people involved—and the father was against that idea—they would come after you later in much greater numbers, to get rid of the dangerous magician roaming the countryside. Matheus and Desmond grew up with threats all around. They had to avoid being stoned to death, set on fire, hanged, you name it.”

  “Here, Dex.”

  They’d arrived in the castle ward. Fallen masonry and dead leaves littered the edges of the wide space. Quin helped Dex into the tiny shelter they’d thrown together out of large stones, which was only spacious enough for one person to crouch inside. When he was sitting inside it, Dex looked like a statue in a recess just large enough to accommodate it. Arrayed on the ground in front of the shelter, where he’d left them to soak up sunlight, were the three mysterious “wonders.”

  She watched Dex as she began taking the electronic junk off Yellen’s back. The hood was over his eyes and he’d stopped talking. He was sliding away again.

  “Dex?”

  Her voice startled him. His hands reached out and ran over the wonders, as if they might steady him.

  “Look, an impellor,” he whispered. He touched the black cylinder with the seams of glass running through it. Then his hands went to another object. “And this one is full of stars.”

 
; John knelt by the roaring fire the Young Dread had built at the old stone deep in the forest. That stone had stood on the Scottish estate since long, long before Maud’s own life had started. It rose twelve feet, eroded and uneven, from the soft ground in the middle of a clearing. She and John had returned from hot, humid Africa to a chilly Scottish night, where sparse clouds obscured a half-moon.

  John was staring into the flames at the long piece of metal now beginning to glow a dull red. It was the ancient brand bearing the shape of an athame. Maud had set it into the hottest part of the coals.

  As she looked down at John’s bent head, she recalled how slow and frustrating he’d been when she’d begun training him. She’d nearly given up on him several times. And yet he’d become an unexpectedly good student. In the end, she’d taught him more than most Seekers knew.

  An unaccustomed emotion was stirring in her. It was important to her that he had made it.

  “John Hart, I invite you to take your oath and become a sworn Seeker.”

  John’s face was bathed in orange firelight. His hair had grown long and untended in his time with the Young Dread. His features were, she supposed, pleasing, though concepts like handsome and beautiful were tricky for Maud. She didn’t experience those ideas viscerally, as ordinary people must. For her, beauty was an idea that existed in things like paintings and sculptures. And yet, her own sense of self was shifting. She’d been awake in the world for so long, the longest stretch since she was a small child.

  “Recite the three laws,” she commanded.

  John hesitated, but only for a moment. “First law: A Seeker is forbidden to take another family’s athame.” His gaze fell back toward the fire, as if searching there for steadiness. Did the meaning of the laws give him pause? He swallowed before he spoke again. “Second law: A Seeker is forbidden to kill another Seeker save in self-defense. Third law: A Seeker is forbidden to harm humankind.”