The Gypsy Morph (32 page)

Logan Tom nodded slowly. “Of course. And I’m sure you will, too. But that won’t change things. It won’t change the way the magic works or the effect it has on you. It won’t change the bad choices. It won’t absolve you of your guilt. In the end, you still have to live with yourself. But it might be easier to do so if you understand why sometimes you feel so terrible about who you are. I’m just telling you how it will be. I’m just doing what I can to pass along what I know.”

Kirisin nodded. “I guess I understand.”

“You make me remember what I was like at your age. I was a little older when I was given the magic, but I knew less about it than you do. I wasn’t raised in a culture where magic existed. I was bitter and angry about what had been done to me. All I wanted was revenge. Especially against that old man. He took everything from me. My family. My life. I haven’t forgiven or forgotten any of it. Every time I use the magic, I see his face. It’s not a good thing. I know this. Rationally, I can say I know it. But it doesn’t change how I feel. Even now.”

He took a deep breath. “But your sister . . .”

“Sim?” Kirisin prodded, when he failed to continue.

Logan Tom nodded. “When I look at her, I can see what I’ve given up by being a Knight of the Word. It seemed the right thing until now. But she made me realize that my whole life is going by, and I don’t have anything to show for it but the magic. And my promise to myself that I would hunt down and kill that demon.”

The boy stared. “You’re in love with her.”

It sounded so naïve, so foolish, that he regretted the words the moment they left his mouth. But Logan Tom just shrugged. “I don’t know anything about being in love. I just know she made me question what I wanted out of life, and I haven’t done enough of that. I was burned out when I came to find the gypsy morph, but I thought it was just because I needed something new, a change from what I’d been doing.” He hesitated, as if considering what that something was. “Now I’m not so sure. I think it’s more complicated.”

“I think she likes you,” Kirisin said impulsively, wanting to do something to help. “In fact, I’m sure she does.”

Logan shook his head. “Maybe she ought to think twice about it.” He rose abruptly. “Well, I’ve said what I wanted to say. That’s enough about it. Time to be going.”

They climbed back into the AV and set out once more. Kirisin sat in silence, mulling over what Logan Tom had told him. He found that he believed almost all of it. He had known from the first moment he had used the blue Elfstones and felt the power of the magic surging through him that nothing was ever going to be the same for him again. Nor did he dispute that use of the magic was dangerous—not just in a physical way, but in an emotional way, as well. He understood what the other was saying about the ways in which using power could subvert you. He understood that he would always be at risk, that he would always need to be cautious. That was the price you paid. And while he hadn’t asked for that use, he had willingly embraced it. He had wanted to help the Ellcrys as a member of the Chosen, and had pledged on more than one occasion to do whatever was needed to see that she was protected.

So he couldn’t very well complain now about the consequences of having made that commitment. He couldn’t complain about not having fully understood what that meant.

On the other hand, he had somehow convinced himself that the commitment was only temporary; that once the Elves and their city were safely delivered to their destination and released back into the world, it would all be over. Things would go back to the way they had been with his life. He would continue as a Chosen in service to the tree until his time was up, and then he would enter the ranks of the Home Guard.

How naïve, he realized.

Because it wouldn’t be so simple. What was he going to do with the Elfstones? Not just the Loden, the use of which might be ended for his lifetime, at least, but the blue Elfstones, the seeking-Stones. What did he think he was going to do about them? Give them up? To whom? Who could he trust to see that they were used in the right way? He could give them to the King, but Arissen Belloruus wasn’t the most dependable person with whom to entrust such a powerful magic.

Changed or not, he was still a volatile personality. And if not to the King of the Elves, then to whom?

He couldn’t give them to anyone.

Because Pancea Rolt Gotrin had given them to him and sworn him to the task of finding a way to convince the Elves that the magic that was their heritage must be recovered and put to use. In the rushed frenzy of everything that had happened since her shade had bestowed the blue Elfstones on him, he had forgotten his promise. But it recalled itself now in chilling detail, and he realized that nothing of this matter would ever be over for him. He had committed himself to a lifetime of service to a cause, an undertaking he must somehow resurrect from its thousand-year dormancy, that he must breathe fresh life into, that he must fully embrace.

If he did not . . .

He brushed the rest of that thought aside. He did not care to speculate about what would happen if he did not. At best, he would be haunted for the remainder of his life by the breaking of the promise he had given. Some promises you could break and live with yourself after doing so, but not this one.

He was brooding on the consequences of having made that promise when Logan suddenly said, “You asked me why I didn’t take the staff with me when I came to rescue you, Kirisin. Do you still want to know?”

It caught the boy off guard. He looked over at Logan, but the Knight of the Word had his eyes fixed on the road, maneuvering the AV through the obstacle course of debris and potholes.

“If you want to tell me,” he said.

Logan nodded. “When I was living with Michael, after he saved me from the compound, we used to go hunting. We would strip down, paint ourselves with camouflage, arm ourselves with nothing but K-Bar Classics, and go after the militias that were always hunting us. Hunting the hunters, we called it. A game we played to scare them off. We’d go out, find a patrol, kill a few, and then disappear. Leave no footprints behind, no trace of who we were. Just the dead men. It was a warning to them. But it was something more to us.”

He paused. “That all stopped a dozen years ago, when Michael stopped being Michael and became someone else.”

He glanced over at Kirisin, and the boy found himself wondering—not for the first time—who Michael was. But Logan pressed on with no explanation. “Last night I found myself wanting to do that again. To strip down and go after those skrails with nothing but a hunting knife. It was a dangerous impulse, a foolish idea, and I knew it. It risked everything if I failed. It was selfish, too. I had been lucky enough to find you, to catch up to your captors, and now I was thinking about throwing it all away on a whim. I knew this. I recognized it right away.”

He shook his head. “But I did it anyway.” He went silent, eyes on the road. “I did it,” he continued finally, “because I needed to do something to save myself.”

His gaze shifted momentarily to Kirisin and then back again to the road. “Michael said once that automatic weapons were our best defense against the militias and the rogue armies and all the rest, but that you shouldn’t let yourself rely on them too heavily. Sooner or later, one of them would fail. If that was all you had, you were dead. He said that we hunted to be sure we had more to work with than guns and armored vehicles. He said that sooner or later a time would come when you had only yourself, so you’d better be ready for when that time came around.”

He gave a quick, hard laugh. “Even that wasn’t enough to save him in the end. He thought it would be, but it wasn’t.”

“Michael was your teacher?” Kirisin asked, wanting now to know something more about Michael, unwilling to let it slide further.

Logan Tom nodded. “That, and much more. My surrogate father. My best friend. My only family.” He took a deep breath and exhaled sharply. “Everything, once.”

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “When I went into the skrail camp to rescue you, I was doing something for myself, too. I was proving to myself that there was more to me than the staff’s magic, that I was more than a Knight of the Word. I had to reassure myself. Michael had warned about relying too heavily on automatic weapons. It’s the same with magic. It’s wrong to rely too much on anything.”

“Like you were telling me earlier,” Kirisin said. “The magic can be dangerous in more ways than you might think. It can undermine you in lots of unexpected ways.”

“The magic hasn’t been too reliable lately,” the other continued. “I thought it was time to make sure I could still get along without it. I needed to test myself. Going in after you in the old way, the way I used to with Michael, was what I thought I needed to do.”

“Well, if you thought it was important, then it probably was,” the boy offered, at the same time wondering if that was really so.

“Maybe. I’m still not sure. You make a choice and it works out and you think it was the right one. But maybe you just got lucky. If you made that choice a second time, you might end up dead.”

There was nothing Kirisin cared to say about that. He decided to leave the matter there, and he turned back to face down the road, looking off into space, seeing things that hadn’t happened yet, but that one day would.

Neither said anything further.

M
IDDAY CAME AND WENT,
and in the lengthening shadows of the Cintra the afternoon crawled toward another lank, gray evening. Findo Gask stood at the edge of the skrail encampment and watched the sun slide toward the wall of the mountains west. Fifty of his once-men were engaged in cleaning up the mess behind him, diligent servants under the whip and blade of a pair of his newly promoted demon lieutenants. With Delloreen dead and the Klee still in search of the gypsy morph, he had need of new subordinates, of creatures anxious to move up in the pecking order, to take the place of those he had favored before. They lasted only a short while, for the most part, and then they were gone and there were others. They all had the same ambitions, the same central goal—to fawn for his favor while they schemed to replace him. They all wanted the same thing—his power, his status, his rule.

Except for the Klee—which wanted nothing but the opportunities he provided for it—they were all alike.

He thought momentarily of Delloreen. Unlike most of the others, he genuinely regretted losing her. Certainly, he would have had to kill her before much longer in any event, but he had admired her grit and determination. He had enjoyed their verbal sparring; staying alert to her endless machinations had helped keep him sharp. There was no one among the present crop who could scheme as she did and be prepared to back it up with savagery and cruelty, which even he had trouble matching.

The demon called Dariogue wandered over, slouching in that peculiar way it had developed, one leg shorter than the other, neck twice broken and reset, face all smashed in. Findo Gask didn’t like Dariogue much and didn’t trust him at all, but he was the most capable of the bunch.

“It’s done, Master,” his subordinate offered, gesturing vaguely.

“All of them?”

“All, Master.”

“Do we know anything more than we did before about what happened to the boy?”

“No, Master, nothing.”

Findo Gask was not pleased. Not that he had expected Dariogue to be any more successful than himself at finding out how the Elf boy had escaped. Not that he didn’t already have a pretty good idea.

“Let’s have a look, then.”

They started off toward the grove of skeletal trees north of the clearing. Findo Gask was already thinking ahead to his pursuit of the Elf boy. It didn’t matter how he had escaped—or with whom. The end result would be the same. He would track the boy, find him, and extract from him the truth about the whereabouts of the Loden. The boy would have it near him or know where it was; he would have to if he expected to save his people. Culph had been quite clear about how the Elfstone worked. His ideas of manipulating the user remained valuable even though he himself was dead and gone.

Gask frowned on thinking of the deaths of his spies—the old man and the Tracker. How had the boy managed to kill not one, but two demons? He must have access to a magic Findo Gask did not yet know of; he would have to be cautious. The boy was capable of more than any of them had believed. The boy was dangerous.

“Here, Master,” Dariogue advised, breaking into his musings.

He looked to where the other was pointing. The broken bodies of the minder and twenty-five skrails dangled from the limbs of the trees to which they had been nailed. They looked vaguely like bats. Or strange decorations for a pagan celebration.

The old man studied them with his cold, empty eyes, and was satisfied. Failure of the sort that had occurred here would not be tolerated.

“We’re leaving,” he said to Dariogue. “Send me something that can track the boy. Blood soaks or huntrys should do. Then bring up the rest of the army. March them by these trees so that they can see what happens when I am disappointed.”

An object lesson, he thought as he brushed the other off with a wave of his hand. But it was nothing compared with the lesson he intended to teach the Elf boy.

TWENTY-TWO

A
NGEL PEREZ
stalked through the center of the refugee children’s camp, radiating anger and dismay with every step. She walked purposefully, giving no sense that she had any doubt at all about where she was going. She had been in the camp for only three days, but that was enough time for her to find her way about. The camp sprawled, and its configuration changed continuously as its inhabitants were shifted from one care group and one location to the next. But Angel was a quick study. Besides, it didn’t really matter where she was going. It only mattered that she was able to find the person she was looking for.

She heard Helen Rice before she saw her, and she saw her just about where she expected, down by the bridge where the work was going on, engaged in discussions with the demolition experts and the sappers. Helen was animated as she issued instructions and responded to questions, a small dynamo of energy. Nothing had changed since their time together at the Anaheim compound. Helen was still a take-charge kind of person, a born leader able to adjust to what the circumstances required. Even when she didn’t possess knowledge specific enough to provide a solution, she knew how to find those who did and enlist them to her cause. Like she was doing now, as she set about preparing for the demon army that had pursued them all the way north from California.