Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Prove to me that you are who you say you are, that you’re as old as the Old Dread.”

  “I’m not as old as the Old Dread,” he said, as though Quin were simple. “How could I be as old as my own father?”

  “Very easily, depending on how much time you or he spent in no-space,” she retorted.

  He smiled. “Ah, Quilla, you have me there. What would prove my history to you?”

  He was calling her Quilla again. Nothing was straightforward about his story or about his mind.

  “I think you’re a very good storyteller, so good you make me feel like you were actually there, when really you’re repeating a legend.”

  He sighed. “I like your version. Let’s pretend I’m a magnificent storyteller.” He closed his eyes and appeared to let his hands direct themselves. He drew his medallion out of the leather straps and fitted the stone disc into a circular recess at the very center of the wall.

  “This is my medallion,” he said, eyes still closed, all trace of lightness gone from his voice. “My father made four of them, one for each of us, so that we could find each other, and find our way through no-space—though his notions about no-space were somewhat different then. This room, this is where we tune them, where we refine them, where we give them new functions. The wall of emblems out in the cavern, for athames, is cruder and came much later.”

  He opened his eyes, and his fingers sank into two of the smaller carvings. The intricate designs had been etched so deeply that his fingers could fit inside and around the patterns. He began to turn them, one after another, as an engineer might adjust the dials on some enormous and complicated machine.

  “This setting allows me to find Matheus,” he said when he’d stopped moving the carvings. A shiver ran through him. He waited for Quin to examine the pattern, though she did so with no understanding of what it meant, before he turned the carvings again, choosing new positions. “With this I could find my father—though I know exactly where he is already, because he’s sleeping in my territory.”

  He looked at this pattern for a while, and then, with the surprised assurance of one who has suddenly remembered something he practiced a hundred times as a child, he turned each carving again, creating a new pattern.

  “This setting,” he whispered. “This is the one.”

  He drew the bent metal rod from one of his pockets and tapped it, one time, against his medallion in the center of the wall. A penetrating rumble passed through the room. He touched the medallion with his fingers and whispered, “It doesn’t look different, does it?”

  Quin studied the stone disc and shook her head. The medallion hadn’t moved or changed in appearance in any way.

  “But it is different,” he told her, leaning his head against the wall. “I’ve made it a weapon.”

  “What sort of weapon?” The disc looked the same as it had before—harmless.

  Dex didn’t answer. He was already adjusting the carvings again. When he’d created yet another pattern, he said, “And this would find my mother’s medallion—if I tapped the wall now.”

  He did not tap it. His confidence appeared to drain out of him as he studied the pattern. It was like watching a swimmer overwhelmed by rising waves.

  “Adelaide turned on Maggie in the end. She didn’t like her grandmother’s view of the world,” he said. “When that happened, Maggie began to leave the world for long stretches of time, just as we all did. She comes back for Adelaide’s own children and grandchildren and descendants, always with the thought that they are more worthy than anyone else with an athame. But she is out of the world so often, she has no idea what is really happening.” He touched his medallion at the center of the wall, one finger tracing the atom emblem meditatively. “My mother never learned how to use her medallion properly. She demanded all the rights of my father’s knowledge, but she refused to study the intricacies of how anything worked. That was for other, lesser people to worry about.”

  “Dex,” Quin began. He could bring her to Maggie—and Shinobu, if Maggie still had him—right now.

  “When I get close to my family, even in my thoughts, I’m back here, Quilla, with the disruptor sparks and Matheus’s knife…”

  If he had been walking through a labyrinth all this time, Dex was surely approaching the center of the maze. Even without changing her vision, Quin could see the cataract of energy surging from his head to his hip. His eyes were becoming wild. She was about to lose him entirely.

  “You want me to take you to your friend,” Dex said, “but he’s there, she’s there.”

  Quin reached a hand to his arm to calm him. “Dex—”

  Misunderstanding, he pushed her roughly away. “I said no!”

  Without thinking, Quin pushed him back, and watched his eyes come into focus when she did. He stared at her with a predatory glare, dangerous but less wild. Maybe a fight is what he needs now. She pushed him again.

  Dex turned, surprised and furious. Quin leapt backward and out of the small cell and into the cavern proper as he advanced on her. She pulled the impellor from her cloak pocket, not to fire at him but hoping it would focus his attention further.

  If she imagined she was fast enough or skilled enough to actually fight Dex, however, she was mistaken. He struck the impellor from her hand with a blow so fast and precise that she experienced it only as her hand going numb and the weapon dropping to the stone floor. She assailed him with a series of blows that she’d trained into a fine art as a Seeker apprentice, once even besting Shinobu’s father, the fearsome Alistair MacBain, with them. Dex met each blow easily, and then the heel of his hand connected with her chest and she was thrown backward.

  With Dread-like speed, he was on top of her when she landed, his knees pinning down her arms, a knife in his hand, raised above her chest. He looked at her with the same dangerous eyes she’d first seen in the cave behind the waterfall, hardly human.

  “You want me to end up on the floor, bleeding all my warmth onto cold stone,” he told her, his voice a growl in the back of his throat.

  He clenched the knife convulsively. His whole arm was trembling. She didn’t think he would stab her, but it was impossible to read him; he’d never struck her until now.

  “Do you know what happens when you force someone against their will, Quilla? When you try to make them something they’re not? Over and over?”

  His eyes had lost focus. Quin made a sudden twist to get out from beneath him, but Dex understood what she was doing long before the motion was done. He shifted his weight, pinning her thoroughly.

  “After my father took Matheus away, he doubled Matheus’s training to drive the murderousness out of him. He put him in the focal for weeks on end to smooth out the ‘distractions’ in my brother’s mind—as if a natural love of causing pain were merely a distraction, a habit Matheus had accidentally picked up somewhere, and not a basic part of his nature.” Dex made a guttural sound of disbelief. “The focal strengthened the worst parts of my brother but made him better able to hide them from our father—until he caught Matheus in the act of murder. He wanted to kill Matheus then—he would have been justified to do it, but he’d made a promise. Do you see? My father wanted to change the world, but he couldn’t take the necessary steps to protect other people.”

  His unfocused eyes were looking down at her with hatred. If he struck her with the knife, it would be because he mistook her for someone else.

  “Our medallions are what wake us when we’re stretched out in the hidden dimensions. So instead of killing him, my father threatened to take Matheus’s medallion and cast him into no-space to sleep until the end of time.

  “Matheus groveled and swore he would change. And for a time, the Old Dread believed he’d transformed his son into a trustworthy Middle Dread.”

  Dex’s eyes shifted to something closer, as if watching an approaching phantom. Quin’s arms were falling asleep under his weight; her eyes were fixed on the knife held over her.

  “That’s when my brother be
gan his grand plan. He might have chosen to kill the Old Dread and be free of his rules and punishment, but he didn’t. That would be too gentle. He decided to do something much worse. He wanted to destroy all of our father’s accomplishments, because that would hurt him the most.”

  “So he’s been turning Seekers against each other, in order to get rid of all of us,” Quin said quietly. She realized she had already heard the rest of this story, from Shinobu, who’d learned it from her own father, who had chosen to side with the Middle Dread.

  Dex’s eyes came back to her, and she could tell that he saw Quin herself for the first time in several minutes. “You knew?” he breathed.

  “Shinobu learned the truth,” she told him.

  “Maggie has only noticed Seekers attacking Adelaide’s descendants. She thinks the attacks are personal. She hasn’t seen the poison being fed to all Seekers by my brother.”

  “But, Dex, whatever the Middle Dread did, it’s over. He’s dead. You’ve been telling me this story that I thought was a myth, and you don’t know the most important part.”

  She watched the disbelief slowly take shape on Dex’s face as he returned fully to her.

  “What?” he asked, as if he could not grasp what she’d said.

  “The Young Dread stabbed your brother through the heart two months ago,” she told him. “I saw him die. He’s gone.”

  “Matheus is dead,” Dex said to himself, trying out the sound of the words.

  His relief was immense but short-lived. “Matheus is dead, but I will still have to face her,” he muttered. “She didn’t wield the knife, Quilla, but she wanted me gone just as much as he did. And she wanted you gone too. And so many others.”

  Quin looked up at the knife that still hovered above her.

  “Are you going to kill me, Dex? The one person who is helping you?”

  He glanced at the blade as if he’d never seen it before, let it drop to his side. “I didn’t mean to threaten you.”

  He leaned back on his heels, so that he was not pinning her down. Quin slid out from beneath him. Instead of moving away, she knelt closer. A disruptor had made him insane, but even so he clung to goodness, and she could feel it. They could help each other as they’d already agreed to do.

  Whatever he intended with Maggie and the Old Dread was a mess she wanted no part of, but Quin found herself throwing her own fate in with Dex’s regardless.

  “I want your help, Dex. Let me give you mine. I can’t heal you myself, but I know someone who might be able to do it.”

  Shinobu hung limply off John’s shoulder, unable to move any part of himself. He was being carried through the black dimensions There. Again. How many times was this going to happen?

  After a while, there was another anomaly and John was stepping back into the world. Shinobu was assaulted by a sharp gust of wind from the cold night—much colder here, wherever they were, than it had been at Dun Tarm. John turned, and Shinobu could see black cliffs rising up around them, almost in a circle, and above the rim of those cliffs, a night sky full of brilliant stars. And there was water. He could hear it running down those steep rock faces and trickling onto the ground.

  “I can’t bring you to the London hospital,” John said, the first thing he’d said since they’d left Dun Tarm. “Maggie knows that place. And at any other hospital, they’d ask a lot of questions.”

  Shinobu hated John. He didn’t want to be dangling helplessly at his mercy…and yet it was probably for the best that he was away from Maggie, wasn’t it? Or was she good? He’d told John at first that he wanted to stay.

  John crouched down and guided Shinobu’s body into a mostly gentle fall onto cold, uneven stone. The ground pressed Shinobu’s focal tightly against his head on one side. From his new position he could see across the strange bowl-like place they were in, with its encircling cliffs. A pool of water lay at the center of the bowl, black now, its surface reflecting a swath of the night sky.

  “This place belongs to you,” John told him. “It’s your family’s. All of our families had places, and this is yours.”

  He knelt in front of Shinobu and shined a flashlight into his face and over his limbs. Shinobu could imagine what a sight he must be to John—crooked, swollen, and bruised.

  John’s verdict was only, “You’ve looked better.”

  Shinobu groaned in response, surprising himself.

  Without asking permission, John pulled the focal off Shinobu’s head. The helmet crackled and tore at his mind as it came free. Then the connection was broken, painfully. John tossed the helmet away, and Shinobu groaned again. His head began to pound, and nausea crept into his gut, but he had no control over his body yet, so he couldn’t show John what he thought of this treatment.

  John pushed Shinobu’s torn and dirty cloak away from his back, and Shinobu heard a sharp intake of breath. John’s hands slid between Shinobu’s shoulder blades, lightly touching the flat oval of metal that lay across his spine.

  “You’re probably the best fighter I know, after the Young Dread,” John reflected. “I was wondering how she controlled you. This looks awful.”

  Shinobu tried to tell John to shut up—he didn’t want praise or condescension from someone he hated.

  John rummaged in his own cloak, and shortly a cold blade was against Shinobu’s skin. Shinobu managed to make a sound of alarm, deep in his throat, but he still couldn’t move.

  “Yeah, sorry,” John said, and as he said it, Shinobu felt the blade slip under the edge of the metal plate in his back. He tried to scream in protest, but the sound that came out was feeble and meaningless. “I’ve seen nurses take these out several times,” John told him, in what Shinobu guessed was supposed to be a reassuring tone of voice. “What they do inside your body is a delicate business, but the implants aren’t delicate at all.”

  The knife blade slid farther beneath the metal plate. “This is going to hurt.”

  No kidding! Shinobu wanted to yell.

  With one smooth motion, John pried the plate from Shinobu’s back. Shinobu could feel the forest of needles come out of his muscles.

  John pressed a cloth to the spot where the implant had been, and said, “That was disgusting.”

  Shinobu drew a breath and became aware that he was actually controlling his lungs. All four of his limbs jerked into motion. He grabbed at the cold rock beneath him and screamed.

  The scream echoed all around the amphitheater, but Shinobu didn’t hear much of it. He went limp against the ground almost immediately, blessedly unconscious.

  “They’re going to Kong,” Nott told her with authority. Then he hesitated, his spoon poised above the enormous dish of ice cream in front of him on the table. It was one of the first rules of witches that you weren’t supposed to eat anything they offered you, but he’d made an exception. Half of the ice cream was already in Nott’s stomach, and another portion was all over the tablecloth. He scrunched up his eyes in contemplation, and also because the insides of his eyeballs were very, very cold. “No, Hong Kong.”

  “Hong Kong,” Maggie repeated thoughtfully. She laughed at the way he was bolting his dessert, and said, “Slowly, slowly.”

  Nott didn’t know how to eat slowly. The ice cream was becoming a brownish mess of different flavors, and he was trying to finish it before it all changed color. He had to stop again and press the heels of his hands into his eyes to stave off the pain. This was the first time he’d eaten ice cream, and it was a lot more complicated than he’d realized.

  Maggie asked, “Why are they taking Traveler to Hong Kong?”

  She and Nott were at an outdoor table in a small town in Scotland, where she’d brought him for, as she’d put it, a private conversation. Nott was wearing ordinary clothes, because that’s all he had left anymore (one of the housekeepers on the airship had incinerated his old clothing), so he assumed he fit in perfectly well. He hardly noticed that the people at other tables had scooted their chairs away.

  He answered Maggie between bites.
“The other one of them is there.”

  “The other one of whom?” she asked.

  Nott could see that something about the remnants of his dessert, on his face, or maybe on the table, or in his lap, was offensive to the old woman. But she was trying to hide her distaste. She needs me now. She can’t just throw me away.

  “The other one of them Seekers,” he explained thickly. “The girl. With dark hair.”

  “Quin?”

  “That’s her.” He scraped at the remaining puddles of ice cream in his bowl.

  “Would you like more of that?”

  Nott hesitated, not wanting her to see how very much he did want more. He permitted himself a decorous nod.

  Maggie got up from the table and spoke a few words to a man behind the counter. She moved with frail precision; Nott didn’t think she’d been sleeping very well lately, but even so, the old woman always gave Nott the feeling that nothing could stop her. When she returned to her seat, she fixed Nott with one of her sympathetic stares. He hated those.

  “Why would they go to Quin?”

  Nott shrugged. John and the Young Dread hadn’t told Nott or any of the other children where Traveler was headed; he only knew because he’d made an effort to eavesdrop.

  “Because she’s a Seeker?” he guessed.

  “Hmm,” Maggie said.

  “Oh, and doctors,” Nott remembered. He’d heard a nurse say something about that. “There’s doctors in Kong who are very good,” he explained to her knowledgeably. “They might fix the rest of them if they don’t get mended on the ship.”

  The man from behind the counter arrived at the table with another bowl of ice cream. He also placed a tall glass of beer in front of Maggie.

  “Again with doctors?” Maggie muttered as Nott dug in. “John’s heart bleeds all over everything.”

  “Does it?” Nott asked tentatively, curious if she meant his actual heart and actual blood. Either way, he couldn’t mistake the river of disapproval that ran beneath her words. Reflexively he pulled the ice cream closer in case she might be preparing to take it away.