The Keep of Fire (10 page)

Travis ran a hand over the folder, certain the other he had met that night would be very interested to see it, would pay dearly for the information within. He looked up. “What about them? What about the others?”

“Duratek.” Deirdre spoke the word like a curse.

“We are not the only ones who seek other worlds,” Farr said. “But we seek them for very different reasons. As I said, we are scholars and academics, interested in knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

Travis licked his lips. “What about Duratek? What do they want?”

Deirdre clenched her hand into a fist. “To use. To consume. To rape.”

“What do you mean?”

Farr leaned close. “Think about it, Mr. Wilder. An entire new world of resources, completely unspoiled, with an indigenous population whose technology is centuries behind our own. We’re talking about a whole new Third World. Only on that world, there are no laws, no regulations, no international social
organizations that must be considered and obeyed. There is only raw wealth, ready for the taking by whomever finds it first.”

Travis stared at Farr, then beyond. He saw the silvery
valsindar
of the Winter Wood cut down to the bare ground. He saw the rugged highlands of Galt gashed by open mines, pitted with smoking holes. He saw the nine towers of Calavere crumbled by the force of a wrecking ball. New fear filled him, not for himself, but for Eldh and all who dwelled on it. They had saved the Dominions from the Pale King. Would it now fall to a new kind of master?

“No,” Travis said. “No, that can’t happen.”

“Then help us,” Farr said.

Deirdre touched his hand. “Please, Travis.”

He looked down at the folder, opened it, and ran his fingers through the old papers—Jack’s papers. He didn’t want to be this important. It was being thrust on him as surely as the power Jack had given him. All the same, Brother Cy was right. You couldn’t choose what happened to you in life. But you could choose what you would do with it.

“All right, I’ll—”

He halted as something caught his eye. A corner of paper stuck out from the folder. Travis could only make out a few of the words written on it, but they caused him to pull the paper from the stack. It was a poem—no, a song. The words were written in a spidery hand, but they were so familiar he had no trouble making out the first lines:

He set down the paper and looked up. He could only imagine the expression on his face, for both Deirdre and Farr took a step back.

Deirdre shook her head. “Travis, what is it?”

He spoke the words in a quiet voice. “You used me.”

Farr shot Deirdre a concerned look. She opened her mouth and struggled for words.

Travis stood. “The song. ‘Fire and Wonder.’ You said you learned it from a singer in Minnesota. But that’s not true.” He slapped the folder with a hand. “You learned it here, in Jack’s papers. You played it in the saloon just to see if I would react.”

Deirdre’s face was stricken. “I’m sorry, Travis. I didn’t mean to manipulate you. But I had to know if you recognized the song. There wasn’t any other way.”

She reached for him, but he pulled back.
You can never really know another.…

“Yes there was,” he said. “You always have a choice. You could have asked me.”

She moved toward him, and he took another step back.

“Please, Travis. Don’t go.” There was fear in her dark eyes, but whether for him or herself he couldn’t tell.

Farr had not moved. “There is a great discovery to be made, Mr. Wilder. And it
will
be made. You cannot hide what you have learned forever. Help us make this discovery for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.”

Anger turned Travis’s blood to fire. Who were they to ask such a thing? This wasn’t some peculiar artifact they wanted to dig up. It was a
world:
a world with living, breathing people. Putting it under a magnifying glass, pinning it like a specimen to cardboard—how was that any better than grinding it all into metal and plastic?

“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. I won’t let you use me to get there. Not you—not anyone.”

Before either could answer him, Travis turned and ran through the darkened opera house and into the night.

“We have to go after him.”

Deirdre grabbed her helmet and pulled fingerless leather gloves from inside.

Hadrian raised an eyebrow. “You’re so certain, then, you know entirely the nature of what we’ve found here?”

Deirdre jerked on the gloves. “No, we don’t know, but that doesn’t matter now. Travis could be in danger. There’s no telling what Duratek might do if they got him.”

Hadrian crossed his arms, and his lips twisted in an ironic smile. “I’m not so certain, at the moment, he thinks any more of us than he does of them.”

“Then I’m going to change that.” She raised the helmet to put it on.

“Very well. I’ll contact the Seekers and let them know that you’ve decided Desideratum Three is no longer necessary. I’m sure they’ll be happy to strike it from the Book.”

Deirdre winced and lowered the helmet.

Hadrian stepped toward her.
“A Seeker watches but does not interfere
. You’ve already broken that rule once by coming between Mr. Wilder and Duratek. Do you really want to compound the infraction? In the past, the Philosophers have tended toward mercy with those who violate the Desiderata once and demonstrate sufficient remorse. However, they don’t have a reputation for indulging repeat offenders.”

Deirdre gritted her teeth. “Fine. Then I’ll go after Travis as a friend, not a Seeker.”

Hadrian laughed. “And now you’re forgetting the Vow.”

Deirdre stared at him, then her shoulders slumped.
“A Seeker’s duty is first to the Seekers.”

“So you remember it after all.”

She set down the helmet, and molten anger faded away, replaced by a cold amalgam of dread, sorrow, and resignation. At that moment she hated Hadrian. But it was only because he was right. She had not sworn the Vow lightly that day three years ago, beneath the sprawling sixteenth-century manor just outside of London. The Seekers were her life now. And although they sometimes seemed exasperatingly restrictive, the Vow and the Nine Desiderata had been created to protect both agents of the Seekers as well as their subjects. It was just that sometimes situations were more complicated than had ever been anticipated by the ancient rules—first set down in the Book five centuries ago by the medieval society of alchemists known as the Philosophers.

Deirdre leaned against the stage. “So we just let him go, then?”

“For now, yes. The Desiderata are clear on this. We cannot force Mr. Wilder to speak with us. We can only observe. That’s because the Seekers must see what individuals with otherworldly connections do of their own free will—without being influenced by our activities, which might contaminate any knowledge we gain from them. In the meantime, remember our motto.
To Watch—To Believe—To Wait.”

“But wait for what?”

Hadrian was silent. Then, “For the danger you fear to become real, so that even the Philosophers must see it.”

Deirdre stood up straight.
Of course. That’s how he
did it—that’s how he made contact with Grace Beckett but didn’t bring down the wrath of the Philosophers
.

“The Ninth Desideratum,” she said aloud.

Hadrian’s crooked grin flashed in the gloom. “Very good. You’re thinking now.” He moved to the table, drew out the photo of Dr. Grace Beckett, and ran a thumb over it. “The Ninth Desideratum.
Above all else, a Seeker must let no other being come to harm.”

He set down the photo, turned, and fixed his dark gaze on Deirdre.

“It’s the Ninth that keeps us human. The Ninth that pricks our arrogance and keeps us from using the knowledge we gain to play games with fate.” He gestured to the electronic surveillance equipment on the table. “We observe, we catalog, we study. It’s all very proper, even antiseptic. But the moment another sentient being’s existence is imperiled, all Desiderata are meaningless save the Ninth.”

Deirdre ran a hand through her hair. It was good, but not good enough. She wanted to act
now
. “So how long do we have to wait?”

“If you’re right, Deirdre, not long. Not long at all.”

Deirdre studied her associate. From the beginning she had suspected there was more to Hadrian Farr than she could see on the surface, and at that moment she was certain of it. One did not rise through the ranks of the Seekers as he had done without good cause. Rumors told that Farr had found evidence of an otherworldly portal—only recently closed—inside a Mayan pyramid in the Yucatán. This, in combination with his Class One encounter with Grace Beckett, had caused some to whisper that he was being groomed to become a Philosopher.

Of course, no one Deirdre had met in the Seekers knew for certain exactly who the Philosophers were, or if any of them had once worked as Seeker agents
before becoming part of the organization’s secret governing circle. Although all orders ultimately came from the Philosophers—by letter, or more recently by electronic means—after three years in the Seekers Deirdre had yet to see or speak with one. Unless she had done so unknowingly, for there were those in the Seekers who held that the Philosophers walked disguised among them.

She moved to the table. Hadrian was flipping through the pages of a small, leather-bound journal. It was from the Sarsin file. The Seekers had recovered it over a century ago, from the remains of the Queen’s Shelf in London. Those pages not darkened by fire were still illegible, for the symbols written upon them, although runelike in appearance, were similar to no current or historical system of writing. No system known on Earth, at least.

Hadrian ran a finger over a half-obscured line drawing. The drawing depicted a sword, the flat of its blade incised with the strange runes. There was one connection they had not told Travis about—another link between Grace Beckett and the man known as both James Sarsin and Jack Graystone.

She picked up the photo of Grace Beckett and touched the image of the subject’s necklace. It was a trapezoidal piece of metal. Deirdre could not see them in this picture, but she had studied digitally enhanced enlargements, and she knew that the symbols on Dr. Beckett’s necklace corresponded exactly to those in a portion of the journal drawing. That the pendant was a fragment of the sword depicted in the sketch was not the question. How Grace Beckett had come by the necklace—and without any known contact with Jack Graystone—was.

Deirdre sighed. “What does it mean?”

It was a rhetorical question. She didn’t expect Hadrian to answer, but he did all the same.

“It means we don’t know,” Hadrian said without
looking up. “It means for all our observations, for all our centuries of studies and analyses, we are as children when it comes to understanding the mysteries before us.”

“But children learn, Hadrian. We can learn. We’ll watch Travis.” She clenched a fist. “And we’ll get to him before Duratek.”

“Perhaps. But what of those who might get to him before that?”

Deirdre frowned, lowering her hand. “Who do you mean?”

Hadrian shut the journal and said nothing.

The sky was burning.

Travis sat on the crumbled remains of a wall—its bricks darkened with smoke and cracked by heat—and watched the dawn trickle into the valley. He craned his stiff neck and gazed at the ruins around him: the slumped remnants of a stone chimney, the scorched plane of a plaster wall, pieces of furniture scattered on the ground, as charred and tortured as anything dug up from the ash beds of Pompeii.

What had made him come to the wreckage of the Magician’s Attic? It wasn’t until first light transmuted the sky from slate to steel that he had even realized this was where his feet had led him after he fled the opera house. But maybe it made some sort of sense. In a way, this was where the fires had all begun.

Where is Jakabar of the Gray Stone?

Travis heard the desiccated hiss again, as if the man in black had just whispered it in his ear. Jakabar of the Gray Stone—Jack Graystone. It was Jack. It had to be. Who else would the man in black have been
searching for? If Travis still had any doubts, then the evidence Deirdre and Farr had shown him last night had erased them.

Travis gripped his right hand and stared at the remnants of the antique shop. Anger flared in his heart, as hot and bright as the sun.

“It’s not fair, Jack,” he whispered. “It’s not fair, leaving me the way you did. Now I’m stuck with everything you abandoned, and I don’t understand it. I’m not even close. People are looking for you, and it’s me they’re finding instead, and I don’t know what to do. You got off easy.”

The sun peered over the shoulder of Castle Peak. Travis lifted his head, stared into the hot eye, and willed himself to burn as Jack had burned.

Something dark eclipsed the sun, and a cool shadow fell across his face. At first he could not see, then his eyes adjusted, and his gaze discerned the two figures who stood before him. He pushed up his spectacles, then slipped from the wall.

The woman and the girl wore dresses black as cinders, and their faces were pale as the moon in day. The child’s hair was dark—as if the stuff of night still clung to her—but the woman’s hair caught the dawn light and spun it into copper. Travis drew in a breath of wonder. But this too made sense. They had been here the last time everything had changed.

“Samanda,” he whispered.

The girl regarded him with wise purple eyes. “We have been looking for you,” she said in a lisping voice.

Despite the strangeness of the moment, Travis’s lips curled in a bitter smile. “You’re not the only ones.”

The woman groped with a hand, then clutched the girl’s shoulder. “Is it him, then? Does he stand before us?”

“Yes, Sister Mirrim,” the child said. “He does indeed.”

Travis glanced up, and only then did he see the strip of gauze that had been bound across the woman’s face, concealing her eyes. He looked back at the girl. “What happened to her?”