Seeker (12 page)

After I get the athame back, I can walk away from all of this, can’t I?
John asked himself. And yet … 
Seekers cannot use their athames to board
Traveler, his mother had said. There was value in the ship.
Traveler
might still protect him. And it had been built on his mother’s hard work. The idea of others taking control made him angry.

He reached across the table and carefully wiped the dripping tea off Gavin’s chin. The old man was still on his feet, but his eyes were now turned down to the desk. One of his hands swiped across it as though he didn’t understand how the surface could be wet. John felt a surge of pity. Maybe, as Maggie had said, Gavin would eventually be all right, but even if he weren’t, even if he were going crazy permanently, John didn’t see how he could abandon him, when his madness was Catherine’s fault.

John sat down again, feeling drained.

“You want to restore our wealth?” he said at last. “Give me a few weeks. I’ll get back what was stolen from my mother. And I’ll try to help you.”

Gavin seemed to return to himself. He lowered his body into his chair, and his eyes focused on his grandson. Finally he spoke. “A few weeks?”

“A few weeks, Grandfather. I have to make a plan and gather the right men. You’ll have to give me men.”

“John, they’re watching everything I do, waiting to pounce on me. To show I’m—I’m—I’m incompetent. I don’t know if I can give you—”

“Grandfather! You have to pull yourself together. You’re still in charge. If I get what I’m looking for, you can forget about the rest of the family. They won’t matter. We can do whatever we want.”

“Yes, yes, all right. I’ll figure it out,” he said, looking around the room once more for lurking spies. The old man noticed then that the cabinet doors were open behind him, revealing all of Archie’s things. With a guilty glance at John, he pushed the doors closed and turned away from the cabinet. He muttered, “Don’t yell, John. Please. It sends my mind spinning.”

Seeing Gavin sitting at the desk, his shoulders slumped forward, John softened. Gently, he said, “You’ll be all right, Grandfather. I’ll make things right.”

From Gavin’s office, John walked through corridors toward
Traveler
’s bow, then moved upstairs. On the top floor of the ship, his apartment met him with a breathtaking view of London. Though he had been quite young, he still remembered when
Traveler
was built, back when Catherine, and the athame that was rightly hers, had made it possible for Gavin to accumulate their family holdings.

John walked through the suite. Though he had come home from the estate for yearly holiday visits with his grandfather, his rooms had sat mostly empty while he was training in Scotland. Everything was as he’d left it.

From his kitchen, at
Traveler
’s current heading, he had a view across the Thames. In the distance, he could just make out the tip of the building where he’d last seen his mother. He stood there awhile, thinking about that secret apartment, the one he had discovered and to which he’d snuck out one night, unaware of the ultimate consequences of that simple act of disobedience. He watched the building as
Traveler
glided on its way, until the ship made its turn at the bottom of its figure-eight pattern and began heading back the way it had come.

John pulled himself away from the view and moved through the
suite to the last room, his bedroom. Sliding aside a section of the wood-paneled wall, he revealed his closet, at the back of which was a large safe set into the steel hull of the ship. Surely servants, workers, possibly even Gavin himself, had stared at this safe at one time or another, wondering what John might have inside. His grandfather claimed to have no curiosity about Catherine’s methods, no desire to know her secrets, yet John bet the old man had hired expensive locksmiths to try to get this safe open so he could see what was hidden within—hoping to find some magic talisman that could restore things to the way they were when Catherine was alive. But his mother had designed the safe along with
Traveler
’s architect, and you would have to take apart the ship itself to force it open.

John entered a combination and presented his eyes to be scanned. The thick metal door hissed open. There was only one object inside, the last thing he owned from his mother. Lying in the center of the safe’s padded interior was a disruptor.

John felt a deep revulsion at the sight of the weapon, but he took hold of it anyway and hauled it out. It was as heavy as it looked, its iridescent metal solid almost all the way through, with its harness of thick leather adding to its weight. He carried it to the bed and sat with it on his lap. Touching the disruptor made him nervous and slightly sick to his stomach, but despite this, he forced himself to examine every side of it. Life or death, sanity or insanity—he was holding these things in his hands.

Do what has to be done
, his mother had told him. Briac had always been against him, Quin wouldn’t help him now, and Gavin was barely sane. It was up to John to fulfill his promise. He would likely have to do unpleasant things, but he would do what had to be done, in the best way he could.

What would Quin think if she could see him? Quin. He imagined her sitting beside him, pictured himself leaning down to kiss her.
There will be many things that try to pull you from the path. Hatred is one, and love is another
.

He forced himself to focus. The disruptor had been created to instill terror. If it did its job, he would not need to fire it. And Quin—she had already told him she would be far away.

Around midnight, the moon had still not risen, and she was alone in the near blackness of the forest. She moved with the silent tread she had learned as a little girl. It was the only way she knew to walk anymore. Since she had been stretched out so many times, her body would only carry her along as it perceived time should flow: smoothly, steadily, rhythmically.

The children on the estate called her the Young Dread. It was not her name, of course. She did have a name, though no one used it anymore. She could remember it if she wanted to.

She thought of the three apprentices—two were sworn Seekers now—as children, though by some accountings they were older than she. That was a riddle with no clear answer.

Maud
. It came to her, floating up into consciousness like a piece of treasure rising from the floor of the ocean.
My name is Maud
.

She’d heard them call her companion the Big Dread, though he was, in fact, the Middle Dread, and her dear master was the Old Dread. Those young Seekers had not yet been taught all they would come to know about the Dreads.

Across her shoulders she carried a young deer she had brought down with an arrow. It was growing heavy as she walked, but weight meant little. She did what she must, regardless of discomfort.

To a normal eye, there was not enough light in the forest for her to find her way. For the Young Dread, however, even the faint background glow of the stars was sufficient. Perhaps it was an effect of being stretched out so often, or perhaps it was her old master’s teaching, but her eyes were as sensitive to light as they needed to be. It might be they had learned to take all the time necessary to collect the light around them until they had enough for the work at hand.

Far away there was a noise. She paused midstep to listen, her foot hovering inches above the ground. She could hear the distant song of the river, night birds hunting among the trees, and insects even, moving through the soil at her feet. But this sound was something different. It had come from south of her, in the wildest part of the estate. As she listened, she heard it again. It was the sound of trouble.

She shifted immediately, her motions accelerating. In an instant, the deer was off her shoulders and on the ground. Before it had even touched the forest floor, she was sprinting through the trees, heading for the giant elm at the edge of the clearing to the south. Her body moved so quickly, she could scarcely feel the ground as she sped over it. Then she was at the tree, leaping to its lower branches. Like a jaguar, she scaled the trunk to the very top and stood concealed among its leaves, looking south toward the source of the noise.

There were horses there, six of them, with men on their backs. She scanned the entirety of the estate from her vantage point. These men and horses would be visible to no one else yet. They’d chosen the ideal route to enter the estate undetected.

She threw her sight, as her old master had taught her, sending it
out across the distance to touch these men. At once, she was able to examine them closely, as though they stood directly in front of her. They were carrying weapons and wearing masks—but one was familiar to her, even with his face covered.

They had a disruptor. The familiar one was securing it with straps around the body of another man.

She threw her hearing at them, bringing their words to her ears as though she stood among them.

“It’s bloody heavy,” the man said as the disruptor was tightened across his back.

“Remember, it’s only value is terror,” the other one said, the one she recognized. His voice was quiet, and it was all wrong. He sounded like a demon, not like a person, his voice hissing and scratching. “Do not fire unless I order it. Do you understand? There are innocent people here. All I want is the stone dagger.”

The man grunted an acknowledgment, and his fingers explored the disruptor’s controls. The other men were checking their weapons as the horses moved about restlessly.

The estate was under attack.

She would throw her thoughts. She would reach out with her mind to the Middle Dread, her companion. It was the fastest way to alert him, and he would decide if he wished to alert the others on the estate. Mentally she reached toward him, sending her mind across the distance to his small stone cottage. He was there; she could feel him. Yet with the slightest touch of her mind against his, she recoiled. To her old master she could communicate easily this way. To the Middle it was different. The dislike between them was so great, the thoughts died in her before she could send them.

She would have to tell him in person. He would strike her, she knew, as he did when she said anything to him that was not in
response to a question he had asked. But he was unlikely to give her a full beating when he heard what she had to say.

The Young Dread swung down from the tree, dropping from branch to branch until she had landed on the soft forest ground. She was already running.

Shinobu had three practice dummies set up across the floor of the training barn. It was past midnight and he had the place to himself. He moved from one figure to the next, traveling over the floor with a dancer’s grace, then exploding blows into the dummies’ bodies as he moved past them. He had no weapons tonight—only his fists.

The largest dummy was roughly the size of his father, and he paid it special attention. One strike for every day of the last month. He pummeled the figure’s midsection, driving the rough mannequin back along the floor. Then he was on to the next one. This one was close to Briac’s size, and it was easy to imagine Briac’s face on it as Shinobu rained punches into the canvas. And the third one, the smallest dummy, who was that? Maybe Quin? He felt an outpouring of pity as he attacked it. He worked its face, hitting harder and harder. The more deadly Shinobu was, the faster his fight would be finished. He was putting the figure out of its misery. With an uppercut, he knocked it to the ground.

“Nothing was what we thought,” he muttered to the small dummy as it lay on the floor. “I stayed only for you.”

In the silence that followed, he stood still and listened, a knuckle dripping blood onto the floor. There was a distant roar. Like a storm. Or like … fire? As he moved toward the barn’s door, he heard voices yelling across the commons.