Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Someone was holding her, pinning her arms to her sides to keep her still. Quin’s thoughts were spreading out, falling away from the stream of now. The cool water of no-time swirled about her.

  Below was a frenzy. Shinobu lay, useless, his limbs sprawled. The Watchers had turned away from him. They stood in a circle, killing every person who was not one of them. The Seekers down there, young and old, did not know they were being butchered. Only Quin could watch in horror as those boys ended the Seekers’ lives in a rain of vicious blows.

  “Let me stop them! Let me stop them!” she cried, trying to wrest herself free. But she was losing herself, and the hard truth was that those Seekers were already dead. She was going to be sick.

  Her captor pulled her closer, whispered into her ear, “She was about to kill you. She made him collapse, and she was coming for you. You’re a ram. She would have done to you what she’s doing to them.”

  Dex. He stood next to her, and yet they were not standing exactly. They were in the air above the fight, and Dex’s face was lit by the glow of the medallion that was hanging around his neck.

  She reached up, felt that the helmet was gone. Her head hurt, distantly; her temples were throbbing.

  “You took off my focal.”

  “I need it myself in no-space,” he told her.

  “You did nothing!” Quin yelled at him. “And you stopped me from fighting them!”

  She wasn’t yelling, though. She could hardly hear her own voice.

  Knowledge of self, she tried to say. Knowledge of home. A clear picture of where I came from…

  I hate you, Dex! You’re mad and cruel and cowardly! The words lay inside her throat, unspoken.

  They were floating farther away. He held her against him, her back to his chest, his arm tightly around her waist. His other hand was gripping the medallion, and before Quin lost herself entirely, she saw the blackness around them shift, saw streaks of gray at the corners of her vision, and knew that he was taking her somewhere else.

  John owed it to his mother to go to the fox Seekers first, of course. He and the Young Dread followed the two-hundred-pace instructions they’d found in the cave beneath Mont Saint-Michel. John wore their helmet, and Maud, so much better than he was at keeping her own sense of time, followed with her hand on his shoulder. At the end of those two hundred steps, in the blackness There, they found a small group of fox Seekers. Many of them, like the boar Seekers, were seriously wounded, though they and their injuries had frozen into timelessness.

  They brought the first group back to Traveler. The medical staff took the rigid bodies, still holding their decades-old poses, directly to hospital beds.

  Next, in honor of John’s father, he and the Young Dread searched for the Seekers from the house of the stag, his father’s house. There were more of them, a dozen in all, also with many old injuries that John hoped could be mended.

  When the stag Seekers were safely on Traveler, John’s mind turned to Quin. The ram Seekers would be her relations, and he chose to retrieve them next.

  He and Maud used the instructions they’d written in the journal, just as they had with the first two houses. But this time, as they neared the end of the two hundred paces, John understood that they’d begun their search too late.

  There had once been people sitting in the darkness in this location, but one couldn’t rightly call them people anymore. His flashlight revealed a tableau of carnage unlike anything John had ever seen. Even the terrible pictures of death Maggie had shown him as a boy were tame compared with the blood and ruined bodies here. Though time was stopped and the blood would stay fresh eternally, there was no mistaking whose work this was and how recently it had happened.

  Maggie had done this. Slaughter. There was no other word for it. John was held immobile for what felt like a hundred years, staring at hands, feet, faces. This was what Maggie’s and Catherine’s vengeance looked like. Beneath the high-minded words, this was the reality.

  Odors did not carry well in this place, but the metallic tinge of blood and worse smells had gathered like a fog. John doubled over and was violently sick, as if his body were trying to rid itself of any particle of this butchery. Even the Young Dread, more stoic than anyone else John knew, turned her head away and covered her nose.

  “Maggie’s already found them with the Middle Dread’s Watchers,” John said. When he could stand again without retching, he noted the dozens of footprints where the boys had trampled through the mess before heading off into darkness. The Watchers had continued on. So— “She might be somewhere else between, right now, killing everyone she can find. Are we too late?”

  “We will go to the rest immediately,” the Young Dread said. If she usually kept herself aloof from John’s world, there was no trace of that now. Her eyes were alight with the same urgency John felt.

  “Should we follow them on foot?” John asked, his gaze on the path of bloody footprints.

  “It will always be faster to go by athame,” Maud answered. “Come.”

  They went for the house of the bear next, because Maggie had mentioned them specifically, and they discovered several Seekers and children still untouched by the Watchers. They hurried these people onto Traveler, armed themselves better, and then returned There without delay. John had no idea in what order his grandmother was attacking, nor how careful she would be about choosing whom to kill.

  When they went for the house of the horse, their luck had run out again. Only dead bodies were left sprawled silently in the darkness.

  Two Watchers dragged Shinobu at the back of the line. He’d been turned into a rag doll, and the Watchers had walked over him, fallen on him, and ignored him as they killed their victims. The helplessness had been unbearable, but it had gotten worse when the smell of blood and death washed over him. He’d wished for unconsciousness to take him away. But he was still awake, a useless lump of clay now being yanked along by two careless boys who were pulling him by his limp arms.

  His head flopped around painfully and at last came to rest angled backward, from which position he could see—sort of—what was happening up ahead. Maggie, leaning heavily on two boys to help her walk, led the band of Watchers across long stretches of the hidden dimensions, until they came, after a great while, to another group of frozen Seekers. The boys dragging Shinobu abruptly dropped him.

  From where he lay, he could see only the Watchers’ legs, but he could hear everything they did. They massacred these new Seekers. When the coppery odor of blood reached Shinobu, the focal twisted it into something sweet, tried to make him believe death was good. He was not fooled.

  The nightmare was endless. The next group they came to was, thankfully, Seekers from the house of the stag. Shinobu listened as Maggie examined their wrists and ordered the Watchers to leave them alone, while she wondered aloud at the cruel fate that had brought harm to this particular house, which had always been an ally of the foxes. Stags and foxes—the two sorts of Seekers she cared about.

  He was being dragged again, for a very long way. Eventually mobility trickled back into his arms and legs. By the time they next stopped, Shinobu could twitch his feet and hands. When the boys dropped him, he managed to roll onto his side, from which position he could see a little bit better. They had found a very large group of Seekers this time, maybe a few dozen, scattered over a broad area.

  The Watchers were moving between the Seekers, examining their wrists.

  “A bird!” called out one of the boys.

  An eagle, thought Shinobu. This is my house they’ve found.

  Shinobu was an eagle and a dragon, and Maggie had spared his life solely because his ancestors had intermarried with her own. The drops of their blood flowing through Shinobu’s veins made it acceptable to keep him alive, for a while. But that didn’t mean she felt kindly toward all eagles and dragons. There was no reason to suppose anyone else would be safe.

  Another Watcher hit the first boy over the head. “It’s an eagle, eejit! Don’t you know an eag
le?”

  The first boy took a swing at the second.

  “Enough!” Maggie said, an edge of anxiety in her voice. The boys were following her eagerly while she let them kill people, but Maggie must have known that without Shinobu as her enforcer, she could rapidly lose control of the Watchers if they grew dissatisfied with her. By now they’d been walking for a very long time and were ready to get on with the killing or go home.

  She moved among the frozen Seekers, taking slow steps as she studied their faces. He wondered if she was searching for friends or if she was relishing the sight of enemies.

  “Over here they’ve got dragons on them,” a Watcher called from farther away. “Or could be lizards.”

  From even farther away came another voice: “Tigers down here, with long teeth.”

  “Fanged cat,” he heard Maggie say.

  Three houses—and two of them are my family.

  “That’s all,” called another boy. “Three animals.”

  “Spread out around them,” Maggie instructed. “It’s the fanged cats we want to stop. The others…leave them if you can.”

  Leave them if you can? Shinobu thought. That was the extent of her goodwill toward Shinobu’s ancestors.

  Maggie examined a few more of the figures. Shinobu was fairly certain that she was deciding whether any of them deserved to live. She shifted her weight a few times, exhausted and pensive.

  “Go on, then,” she told the boys.

  The Watchers closed in.

  John heard his grandmother say, “Go on, then,” in the unmistakable tone of someone ordering the deaths of others.

  He and the Young Dread had run through the paces There, to find the next group of Seekers. They’d come upon the Watchers and Maggie, taking their places around a few dozen motionless forms—the biggest group he’d seen yet—and the Watchers had lurched forward, knives drawn.

  “Maggie!” John yelled. “Grandmother. It’s John. I’ve come back.”

  “Hold,” his grandmother ordered.

  The boys froze, rather unwillingly, and looked around to discover what had made Maggie change her mind. Every Watcher cloak was covered in bloodstains, and their impatience to attack radiated off the boys like heat. They eyed John and the Young Dread suspiciously as the two newcomers came out of the darkness.

  Maggie watched her grandson as he got closer. She was smiling, but it was a smile that said, I’ll teach you a lesson now.

  “Grandmother, are you really doing all of this without me?” he asked as he approached. He could smell the scent of death all around the boys. “I thought we were going to share our revenge.” He was saying the only words that might give her pause. “I’ve waited my whole life for this.”

  He noticed that Maggie’s hair was messy and her clothes uncharacteristically rumpled. She’d been tossed about in the course of killing Seekers today. She looked physically exhausted, yet there was a glow of triumph that was fueling her.

  She scolded him by saying, “You refused me, John. You pushed me away.”

  “I shouldn’t have. I’m here now.”

  The pleasure in Maggie’s face gave him hope. He was only yards away from her. If he could get hold of her…He looked to the Young Dread to silently communicate his intentions.

  Maggie’s expression changed abruptly. In an instant, she understood that John wasn’t sincere. Before he could reach her, she addressed the Watchers. “Go ahead. Now!” she urged. To John she called, “I will not let you make the wrong choice.”

  One of the boys raised his whipsword immediately toward the nearest Seeker. With almost no sign of movement, the Young Dread’s knife was in the boy’s throat and he was falling to the ground, his whipsword unbloodied. Another Watcher attacked a Seeker, and the same thing happened again, Maud’s knife in his throat before his victim could be stabbed.

  John had been heading for his grandmother, but getting to her would do no good now. The boys had their orders, and nothing would keep them from killing—nothing but John and Maud.

  He’d brought a gun from Traveler, and he changed direction, aimed the weapon at the Watchers nearest the victims. He fired, and a bullet found its target, though the explosive report was muted here, as though he had discharged the gun beneath a pile of blankets. He fired again, and a bullet fell from the barrel to land on the ground. Repeated pulls of the trigger did nothing. The weapon had become useless.

  Throwing it aside, John cracked out his whipsword, and in a moment he and Maud were fighting hand to hand with seven Watchers. Not one was a match for them in single combat, and all of them, John suspected, had been warned by Maggie not to seriously damage her grandson in their mission to kill other Seekers. Nevertheless, they were, when all fighting at once, formidable foes, though the Young Dread had speeded herself up so dramatically that her limbs were a blur.

  “They’re attacking behind us,” Maud said over her shoulder, the words almost too fast to understand.

  He spared a backward glance and saw that some of the boys had moved away from the fight and were going after Seekers who stood completely unguarded. John felt the Young Dread pull his athame and lightning rod from his waist. Then, in a flash of motion, she extricated herself from the fight and went after the other Watchers.

  The Young Dread dispatched two Watchers with her whipsword, but not quickly enough. They’d attacked and grievously damaged a handful of Seekers before she’d gotten to them.

  Now John was backing toward her, pulling the fight with him. She was adjusting the dials of the athame in the low light, when another boy came running at her, wild elation in his eyes. Maud was forced to block him with the athame. She felt the impact travel through the delicate stone instrument; the boy careened off to attack another Seeker. Maud had only one knife left; she threw it and sent him sprawling.

  She struck the athame and lightning rod and drew a large circle. The edges of the anomaly solidified, and the Young Dread was looking through the opening at dark water, thirty feet beneath her. She had meant to open up a doorway into Traveler itself, but the airship was perched at the shoreline below and far to the left, its engines idling, its hide dark except for a swath of reflected moonlight. She checked the coordinates on the handle—she’d set them correctly. After a moment’s confusion, she understood: the athame had been struck so hard by the attacking Watcher that it had gone out of tune. It would take one of the special tools that the Old Dread had left her to put it back to rights.

  “Maud!” called John from the other side of a group of frozen Seekers. “I can’t hold them off!”

  The Young Dread looked from the huddled Seekers to the water below. She estimated the drop.

  There was nothing else to do.

  She grabbed the child nearest her, a small girl, and threw her frozen form through the anomaly. The girl fell like a stone, and a splash went up far below. The child was suspended in time. She would not need to breathe for several minutes. They could retrieve her before she woke up, hopefully.

  The Young Dread took hold of the next Seeker, a grown man, and with a wrenching twist sent him through the anomaly as well.

  “Maud!”

  She threw another Seeker out, and then another, watching the splashes. If there was air in their lungs, they would float, for a while at least.

  “Maud!”

  She pushed two more out, struck the athame again and re-carved an anomaly in the same spot, as the first doorway began to lose its shape. This done, she ran to John, who was holding off the last four Watchers, his whipsword slashing in wide arcs, trying to keep the boys at bay. Maud cracked out her own whipsword and took his place.

  “Throw them through the anomaly!” she told him. She struck at the boys with blinding speed, forcing them backward and buying John room to move.

  “What?” he asked.

  She slowed her words down, said, “Throw them into the ocean, and count them!”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched John turn to the frozen Seekers. He tossed a figure thr
ough the opening, and then another, after which Maud could pay him no more attention.

  The remaining boys were attacking in a frenzy. The Young Dread felled two of them, kicked the third away. She was moving too fast for them to protect themselves. The fourth boy raised his own blunt, short whipsword. Before Maud could dispatch him, she saw Maggie behind the boy, holding up a dark cylinder. The air grew thick around Maud. Her jaw clicked to one side.

  A shock wave burst from the weapon. Maud, the Watchers attacking her, the two Watchers on the ground by her feet, the final three Seekers grouped behind her, and John were all blown backward through the anomaly.

  The Young Dread slowed her sense of time again as she fell toward the water. Above her, a Watcher was cut in half as his body hit the border of the anomaly. Another lost his arm and shoulder. The maimed boys spun wildly down toward her.

  She slowed time further, could feel her heart beating, a stately drumbeat in her chest and ears, and the night air rushing past her. Above, the old woman was at the edge of the anomaly, staring at the ocean and the airship as the edges of the doorway grew soft and began to collapse.

  Maud turned her head, saw John falling below her. He was clutching the frozen body of a young Seeker child, and he was screaming as he maneuvered his feet downward for impact.

  The Young Dread flipped over. To anyone watching, the motion would have been so fast as to be impossible to follow. The ocean was almost upon her. She raised her arms, stiffened her legs, and hit the water. She sank and sank and nearly struck the shallow bottom, no more than fifteen feet down.

  Her eyes gathered up all the light around her, and she looked above to the surface, which was riddled with the impacts of human forms. John was up there, kicking his legs and grabbing at the Seekers nearest to him.

  Maud forced her lungs and heart into the slowest pace she could maintain while moving. If she conserved her oxygen, she could hold her breath for a very long while, keeping time slow, while she herself moved quickly.