Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “You may say your oath now,” she told him.

  Very steadily, his eyes locked on the Young Dread’s, John recited:

  “All that I am

  I dedicate to the holy secrets of my craft,

  Which I shall never speak

  To one who is not sworn.

  Not fear, nor love, nor even death

  Will shake my loyalty to the hidden ways between

  Rising darkly to meet me.

  I will seek the proper path until time does end.”

  Maud withdrew the athame from her waist and held it in front of John. He planted a solemn kiss on its blade.

  “And now, your wrist,” she told him.

  From the fire she drew out the metal brand. The tip, with its dagger shape, was glowing.

  John extended his left wrist, and Maud brought the hot metal toward his skin. She sensed a reluctance in her own muscles. The idea of burning him was difficult. How odd.

  She pressed the brand into the flesh on the underside of John’s arm, searing the image of an athame onto him. John first cried out, and then he gritted his teeth against the pain. The Young Dread was relieved to remove the steel from his skin. He clenched his fists and was silent for a minute as he came to terms with the blistering burn. When he’d steadied himself, he spread his hands. Maud formally laid the athame and lightning rod across his palms.

  “This athame bears the emblem of the fox, John. It is yours.”

  She experienced a sense of finality as she set the ancient tools into John’s hands. His training was over. He was a Seeker. And Maud herself no longer had an athame for her own use. It was time to retrieve the athame of the Dreads from Quin. The girl would have to find her own family’s athame, if indeed it still existed.

  John got to his feet, looking intently at the stone implements.

  “I’ve made it to my oath,” he whispered. The Young Dread saw that a few tears had escaped his eyes, and she tried to remember the feeling of crying. She could not. “May I use it for the first time, right now?” he asked.

  “Of course. My permission is not necessary.”

  As John began, almost reverently, to adjust the dials in the hilt of his athame, Maud wondered if he would leave her now. Her master, the Old Dread, had given the role of all Dreads to her. Maud must train someone to be a Dread alongside her. She still carried hope that John might choose that path. But would he even consider this, now that he was a Seeker in his own right? If not, who would she find? Quin herself?

  “Maud,” John said then, using her given name, which he did so rarely that the sound of it brought her up short. “Will you come with me? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  The moon was gone, the sky over the English coast dark and silent. Security lights glared above them on tall poles, lighting the shipyard, a city of quays and dry docks and enormous hangars. Cranes rose up on every hand, their skeletal masses reaching across the sky.

  “This way,” John told her.

  They walked past the slips where oceangoing ships stood in mid-repair. John’s own steps were quiet, but the Young Dread’s were nearly inaudible. Try as he might, he could never match her silent tread. It was something about the way her feet met the ground, as if flesh and shoe and earth were uniting in mute agreement.

  “There,” he said when they stood in front of a hangar close to the water.

  “That is Traveler?”

  He nodded. “The repairs are almost finished. It will fly again in less than a week.”

  The airship on which John had grown up was covered in scaffolding, its bow and front engines protruding through the hangar doors. Traveler’s metallic hide, which had been mangled when the ship crashed in London, had been replaced, and the new skin glinted in the security lights. It would be more beautiful, John thought, than it had been before. Soon it would resume its position in the London sky, where Catherine had wanted it.

  The Young Dread threw off her hood to gaze up at the airship. She and the other Dreads had been on Traveler once. They’d boarded it on the night John got his athame and his mother’s journal back from Quin. That was the night the Young Dread had killed the Middle Dread, and in doing so had saved John’s life.

  “Will it be your home now?” she asked him.

  He was struck again by the natural cadence of her voice, so different from the steady, biting way she’d spoken when he first knew her. This question was also more personal than what she would have asked months ago.

  “Will it be my home again?” The sense of self-doubt was pulling at him once more. “I think so.”

  She must have heard the discontent in his voice, because she turned her gaze from the airship to look at him. Her eyes were a light brown, he knew, though they were colorless in the mixed dark and glare of the shipyard. She waited, in her usual way, for him to say more.

  “My mother built Traveler for me.”

  “What troubles you about the ship, John?” the Young Dread asked when he said no more.

  “You don’t use money, but can you understand how much wealth it took to build an airship like this as our family home? And we own this enormous shipyard, and countless other things.”

  He watched Maud’s eyes roam over the industrial city around them, trying to see it as a modern person might. “I think I understand,” she said at last. “Vast wealth.”

  “Yes.” Quietly, he added, “I can’t escape the fact that my mother did so many questionable things to create this wealth.”

  Maud’s long hair fell loosely about her shoulders in a way that looked almost girlish, but John didn’t let that fool him. He could feel her close attention, the scrutiny of a lioness.

  He went on, “When I read Catherine’s journal, I see the young girl who wanted to do as much good as she could. But…Maud, that isn’t what she did. She and my grandfather plotted to make their fortune. Catherine couldn’t have done it without killing rivals. How many people did she take by surprise, arriving by athame into their private homes, threatening them or…” He trailed off. He took a breath, steeled himself. “You taunted me about her when you trained me, to break my concentration. And it worked because the things you said were true.”

  He looked back up at the bulk of Traveler as he struggled to put the rest of his thoughts into words. “I’m a Seeker now. It’s what Catherine and my grandmother Maggie wanted me to be. If I go back to Traveler and life with my grandfather—if he lives—I don’t know how much like Catherine I’ll become.”

  He glanced away so that she would not see in his eyes the other words he didn’t speak: I know how much like Catherine I want to be.

  Carefully the Young Dread asked him, “Do you think you must become the person Catherine became?”

  “She lived a harsh life, where she might die if she didn’t kill. It’s how she built all of this.” He nodded at the shipyard. “How can I inherit everything she created without taking on the same burden? Don’t I have a duty to make our house the center of Seekers, as she wanted?”

  Maud was on the point of answering, when her gaze changed. “There is a guard coming,” she told him.

  John threw his hearing and could faintly make out the distant approach of heavy boots.

  “Come,” she said. “Take us back to the estate and we will speak more.”

  Ducking with her into the shadows between two pieces of machinery, John used his athame to take them back.

  They entered the estate on the commons. Since the moon had already set, only starlight lit their way as they walked back to the workshop, where they and Nott had been living as John finished his training.

  Maud rested a hand lightly on his shoulder as they moved through the grass. “John, I can’t force you to be a perfect Seeker. None of us is perfect. I can only judge you, as a Dread, if you stray from the three laws. But I have offered you another choice. Do you remember?”

  Of course he remembered. When he and the Young Dread had sat together in that cave in Norway, she’d given him a glimpse of an
entirely different future.

  “I could become a Dread. You would train me.”

  The Young Dread let go of his shoulder, but he could feel the place where the pressure of her hand had been, as though her touch had traced permanent lines on him. Perhaps that was the right way to describe the effect she’d had on him over the past months. She’d changed him in ways that he hoped would never fade. But her influence and his mother’s felt directly opposed.

  They reached the workshop and discovered that Nott was gone, though the wet earth around the bathtub meant he’d left only recently.

  “Do you think he went hunting?” John asked.

  The Young Dread studied the shirt and trousers that had been left haphazardly on the workshop floor, as though Nott had stripped them off in a hurry.

  “I think he will come back to us, or he won’t,” she said evenly. “He never agreed to be trained.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Returning to their conversation, Maud told him, “I cannot say for sure that you would succeed in becoming a Dread. The training is difficult.”

  John laughed. His Seeker training had been the most arduous weeks of his life. If Maud considered something “difficult” in comparison, it was hard to imagine how strenuous it would be.

  “I barely made it through to my oath,” he muttered.

  “Not true. Do you think you’re unfit to be a Dread?”

  John knew he could give her a glib answer, but he didn’t want to. He spoke soberly. “When Catherine was dying, she made me promise to get revenge on those who’d hurt us. That promise has guided me all these years. Why would you give me more power?”

  He watched Maud absorb this question. Then he busied himself in lighting a fire. A month ago, he would have hidden such thoughts. Now it felt better to speak them aloud. When he next looked at the Young Dread, the ghost of a smile had appeared on her face.

  “Are you smiling?” he asked as she sat with him by the blooming flames. A smile on the Young Dread’s lips was as rare as a new moon. And unexpected in this conversation.

  The smile was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “My old master used to say that being a judge was a matter of balance,” she told him. “To be a Dread, a judge of Seekers, you must see all you can, and balance the good against the bad, always giving extra weight to the good.”

  “So I should only think about my good qualities?” John asked skeptically. “Like, I’ll be very good at exacting vengeance from my mother’s enemies? And I’m such a good son to be willing to kill for her?”

  She ignored his sarcasm and said simply, “You’ve lost your balance, John. You’ve done things you should not have done, to Quin and others.” When he nodded his agreement, she went on, “What if you could regain the balance?”

  “How?”

  Something almost like mischief flickered across her features. “You chose the African quest yourself. Why?”

  John looked inward and spoke honestly. “Because it was a good thing to do. I wanted to know how that felt.”

  “How did it feel?”

  “Different,” he breathed. It had felt very different from the electric pull of revenge.

  “And what would you choose next?” she asked him with a directness that struck John deeply.

  “The boar Seekers,” he answered before he’d even examined the thought. “Catherine and Maggie wanted me to get rid of them. But there are children among them. Why should some children deserve to die when others deserve to live? I don’t want to get rid of them. I want to bring them back.”

  “Why?”

  “To see how it will feel.”

  The Young Dread nodded slowly in approval. “The boar Seekers, then,” she said. “After a night of sleep.”

  “Look, Aelred, that’s Dun Tarm,” Nott told the bat when the crumbling fortress came into sight.

  He held Aelred up in order that the creature might see the fortress for itself, before he remembered. “Ah, you don’t see very well,” Nott murmured. “You’ll have to trust me that it’s there.”

  They’d emerged from the forested hills onto the shore of Loch Tarm, and Dun Tarm stood midway around the lake. Nott stopped walking and scratched Aelred’s head thoughtfully.

  “The thing is, I’ve been telling you they’ll be happy to see me, but there’s a chance they won’t be happy at all.”

  Nott had been hiking for five days, and all the while he’d discussed with Aelred what he would tell the other Watchers when he reached the fortress.

  They had put him in his cave and had expected him to die there. He’d been telling Aelred that they’d be amazed he’d survived and welcome him as a hero. They would probably offer him his old helm to wear, without his even asking, and when he wore it, he would settle back into his old skin. (“Skin you might not like, Aelred,” he’d warned the bat several times, “but that I might like a great deal.”)

  But the closer he came to Dun Tarm, the less likely this scenario struck him as something that might actually happen. Now, with the fallen fortress looming just ahead, he had to face the truth.

  “I wonder if you can fly yet?” Nott asked the bat. “It might be that I’m done for when they see me and you should fly away.”

  Nott wondered, belatedly, if wearing his old helm was truly worth risking his life. He hesitated, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He couldn’t hear any voices echoing over the lake. Perhaps the fortress was abandoned. Or even better, maybe the Watchers were gone today but had left their packs behind. Maybe his helm was lying there unattended. Surely he couldn’t come this far without checking.

  “It is worth it, Aelred,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “So let’s go, then.”

  He walked briskly along the shore, relieved every minute that there were no signs of life ahead.

  “The first to arrive,” a voice said, startling him, when he was close enough to see through the gaping doorway. The voice belonged to an old woman who appeared, inexplicably, in the entrance to the fortress.

  “Do you see her?” he asked Aelred, wondering if he’d imagined her. When Aelred didn’t answer, Nott said, “Say nothing if you don’t see her—”

  “It’s all right,” the old woman said to Nott, beckoning with one hand in the same way a constable might beckon a thieving child. “Come inside.”

  She certainly looked real. Nott was only twenty yards away, near enough to see details. She wore modern clothing in a pattern of green and brown and gray splotches that Nott guessed would make her hard to spot in the woods. She had a tight knot of gray hair wound up at the back of her head. Her boots were heavy, as though she intended to spend her days tramping through the forest, and the weight of those boots appeared to be wearing on her weak body. She was struggling to keep her shoulders straight. Her face was deeply lined but had, to Nott’s mind, a kindly appearance. He distrusted her immediately, with the same gut instinct that had driven him to stay away from the woman—the witch—at the edge of the village where he’d grown up.

  “Hmm,” Nott said out loud.

  He bought himself time to think by wrapping up his bat and tucking the creature into a pocket of his cloak while he looked around. Dun Tarm might look empty except for this woman, but there was evidence of recent occupants. There were dozens of footprints in the mud by the edge of the lake, and a great pile of animal bones in a refuse heap at the back. In fact, it looked as though his four Watcher companions—the four who’d left him in his cave—had been eating enough to feed an army.

  “Who are you?” he asked the woman.

  “You’ll recognize me when we’ve spoken a little while.”

  That was exactly the sort of thing a witch would say, Nott reflected, and even though her voice shook, like a real old woman’s, that could be a trick. None of the miracles Nott had seen in the modern civilization had done anything to dispel his conviction that there was magic in the world; if anything, modern miracles had confirmed this idea. This old woman was obviously someone to be wary of.
/>
  He rested his hands on the knives around his waist and got a little closer. The woman retreated into the fortress. The previous Nott, the Nott who’d gotten to wear the helm all the time, wouldn’t have been scared of witches, and so the current Nott felt obliged to feign courage. He straightened his shoulders and followed the woman into Dun Tarm.

  Inside were more signs of recent occupation: remnants of cooking fires; pieces of charred meat lying here and there; and patches of blood, such as Watchers were always leaving about when they punched each other in the face or got a little careless with their knives.

  “Where are my four friends?” Nott asked, still keeping his distance. He knew that he was using the word “friends” rather loosely, since the other Watchers had exiled him and tried to kill him, but there was no reason to suppose this old woman knew about that. He’d grown so used to talking to Aelred that he almost added, out loud, Let’s not get too close to her, eh? but he stopped himself in time.

  “What did he call you boys?” the woman asked. The creakiness of her voice made Nott think of tree branches in a strong wind. “Watchmen?”

  “Watchers,” he corrected. Then, curiosity getting the better of him, he asked, “Did you know our master?”

  The old woman glanced around the empty fortress, a smile at the corner of her mouth. She was standing very straight now, as if defying the world to pull her down. “I’ve been watching the Watchers since I got here. You can come with me to find them tonight.”

  She studied Nott, and Nott tried not to shuffle his feet under her stare. He wanted to tell Aelred, She makes my bones tickle, but he didn’t, because that would be a strange sort of thing to say out loud.

  “Did I know you when you were younger?” he asked her, desperate to say something to break her gaze. Was she someone he’d met in the company of the Middle Dread?

  The old woman laughed. It was a muffled sort of laugh, like bubbles coming up through porridge.

  “I doubt that very much. I’ve been old since the dawn of time, or so it feels.” A thoughtful look came over her face, and she said, “The older I’ve looked, the less people have paid me any attention. And that is unexpectedly convenient. You’d be amazed, young man, at what can be accomplished when one gives up the vanity of looks.”