The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (20 page)

Sleeping? But Sir Tom had slid over from talking
about sleep to talking about death. So the wild things in the woods couldn’t
really be woken, could they? Not by a trumpet—whatever that was—or
by anything else. And at the end of what?

Feeling unnerved
, I picked up a
long stick and poked at the fire. The old man turned his face toward the sea
and stared fixedly at the horizon.

When the wind kicked up and set the sea
frothing, making me shiver and reminding me that time was short, I decided to
try a different approach, a more direct one.

“Sir Tom,” I said, and waited until he looked at
me. “Have you ever heard of the Guardians?”

The old man let out a cackle and leapt to his feet, gouging
a deep channel in the wet sand. When he charged toward me I flinched back,
scuttling on the sand like a crab on my heels and bottom and hands.

“She’s heard of the Guardians, has she?” I lost my balance
in the soft sand and fell, half on my side and half on my back, and the old man
stood over me, eyes wild. “Of course she has heard of the Guardians. Bogeymen,
monsters under the bed, goblins gobbling up bad little boys and girls, keeping
them bounded in their nutshell.”

He was biting off his words and his blue eyes were flaming,
and I didn’t like him towering above me. I scrambled to my feet and backed
away, sand prickling everywhere my skin was bare, catching in the wind and
threatening my eyes.

“Guarding the guarded for the watchers watching the
watchers,” Sir Tom said. “Watch
makers
,
making watches without any sense
of time or tide or
wisdom,
presumptuous idiots, full of sound and fury.”

I took another step backwards. If I ran would he chase me?
How fast was he?

“Signifying nothing!” he shouted, and then he spun around
and stalked away, talking loudly as he went, waving his arms, shaking his fist.
At me? At the wind, the sea, some demon seen only by himself?

He went twenty yards away, thirty. Only then did I realize
I’d been holding my breath.

And he kept going. Fifty yards.
His boots left marks in the wet sand. The wind whipped my hair into my face and
I fought it back, watching the old man go. Where was he going? The beach
stretched out in front of him, long and unbroken, until it hit a steep wall of
rocks in the distance
.

Eighty yards or so. Ninety. He looked small now, small and
unthreatening.
The first rays of sun hit the sand and
set it sparkling, as if it were strewn with tiny bits of glass.

I felt small, there alone there on the beach, small and
helpless.

Was he going to go away and leave me here? If he did, then
what would I do? The woods
were so
dark
and thick they
seemed impenetrable. There was underbrush, thorny and twined. And there were
traps, he had said. If I could get through all that, I probably could find my
way back to
Optica
—all I had to do was walk
straight in and keep going until I hit the wasteland and the city
wall—but there was no help for me in
Optica
,
where Farrell Dean lay chained and
Meritt
was caught
in some dangerous game with the Watchers, and where I’d be weeded out before
winter. And somewhere in the woods were the
wilderland
creatures, those sniffing, prowling wolf-like men. I didn’t want to face those
things again, and I didn’t want to be caught by
Caliban
,
Jensen, whoever or whatever he was. Maybe the other man would help me find the
Guardians. Angel. Could I find him, if I went back into the woods?

If I hadn’t been so frightened I might have cried.

Down the beach the old man was so far away that he looked as
if he’d stopped moving entirely. I squinted. Was he moving? Was he still
walking away?

He wasn’t. He’d turned. He was coming back toward me, across
that long
expanse of
wet
sand, making a second set of
footprints beside his first.

The wind shifted, blew smoke from the dwindling fire into my
eyes. I blinked hard, tried to bring the old man’s face into focus. Was he calm
now? Sane?

As he got closer I was pretty sure he looked calm. At least,
he wasn’t berating the wind anymore. All the same, I got ready to make a run
for it. I brushed the loose sand off my hands and face and planted my feet
firmly, plotting a path. I’d go straight toward the firmer sand, the wet sand,
and I’d run up the beach beside the waves and then, when I’d put enough
distance between us, I’d cut across the soft part to the tufty yellowed grass.

But when the old man drew near me, there was
something like tenderness in his eyes, and regret.

“Forgive me,” he said gently. “You asked a
reasonable question. You deserve a
wholesome reply. Red Girl, meet the Guardians.”

 
And
he bowed, touching one hand to his chest.

Words failed me.

Sir Tom smiled, his expression wry. “Apparently reality
doesn’t live up to fiction,” he said.

“
You’re
a
Guardian?”

He nodded. “I was Chief Guardian for thirty-five
years,” he said, and wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad. “Now I’m
the only one.”

“The only one?” I sounded like an idiot, but I
couldn’t help it. All those nightmares, the stories, the legends—that was
all this one old man?

 
Sir
Tom shrugged apologetically. “The others are dead or witless, including poor
soul-sick Jensen. I’d not call him a Guardian, not anymore. Would you?”

I made a helpless gesture.

“As for Angel, he never should have been a
Guardian. Any military man can tell you that conflicts of interest are the
deadliest sort of conflict. Angel pulled some strings and set the puppets
dancing, moved some pieces on the chessboard, and claimed he was playing the
game he was ordered to play, and not his own. But who’s to say?” He shook his
head sadly. “Not I.”

I couldn’t follow what he was saying about
Angel; I was too busy thinking about what his revelation meant. The Guardians
were humans. Nothing more. And Sir Tom, old and cryptic and half insane, was
more or less the only one. It was far from all I’d imagined, all I’d been told.

What did it mean for
Meritt
,
for Farrell Dean, for the others in danger?

It meant the Watchers had no one to back them
up, and that was good. We might be able to do something, might be able to fight
back, save the city, if we had only the Watchers and wardens to face, and not
some unknown power. But it also meant there was no one to come to our aid. The
Watchers and wardens had guns, stunners, handcuffs, cameras, patrol cars,
prison cells. We had nothing, and more than a hundred of us were about to be
euthanized. What a stupid word. We were about to be killed, that’s what was
going to happen.

Could we come out here and survive on our own in
the woods, by the sea? I didn’t know. Winter was coming, and most of those
about to be killed were weak already.

I thought of gentle
Mariella
,
so very old. She wouldn’t live long in a cold cave, and she couldn’t hunt or
fish. She needed a bed in a heated building, needed food prepared and set down
in front of her. Could those of us who were stronger feed those who were not? And
what food was there, besides fish? Could we catch enough fish to survive?

 
“You’re shocked and disappointed,” Sir
Tom said. He didn’t look hurt, just sympathetic. “Of course you are. Oz behind
the curtain is always a disappointment, and I can’t even claim to be a bad
wizard, much less a good one. And I suppose you’re asking yourself the question
I’ve been asking myself all these years.” He lowered his voice confidentially.
“What do Guardians guard?”

“I thought you guarded the Watchers,” I said
tentatively. “They told us you did. That you enforced their rules, protected
them.”

“Ah. You thought we were glorified wardens, more
or less. An understandable mistake. But wrong.” He waited, nodding
encouragingly at me.

“Well  . . . if you don’t guard
the Watchers, then what do you guard?”

“Nothing.”

I stared at him.

“We guard
nothing
,” he repeated, giving me a
knowing look. “Not since the watchmaker died. For he’s long dead—or at
least long gone—and all that remains are the watchers and the watched,
and guardians guarding nothing but an abandoned clock ticking out its last few
ticks.”

Whatever that meant,
it didn’t sound good.

Before I could
figure out how to phrase another question, Sir Tom’s head jerked to one side.
Then he cocked it, listening, squinting as if straining to hear.

“No,” he said, and he wasn’t looking at me. “It
was not my idea, true. But I watched. I watched the ants behind the glass, and
reported, and followed orders regarding their care and feeding. I let myself be
made a demigod, and the gods I obeyed were graven idols.”

His eyes went to me, and he lowered his voice
and shielded his mouth with a fist, as if pretending to cough, clearly trying
to keep me from hearing. “And now, you see, she has come to me. The one to
whom, above any other, I owe a debt. Gullible old fool that I am and was.”

He shut his eyes as if he couldn’t bear the
sight of me. Then, keeping them shut, he lowered himself down onto the wet
sand, slowly, carefully, and went completely silent. His knees were bent and
his elbows rested on them. His hands were loosely clasped. He sat there for a
long time without moving.

I couldn’t stand it. I had so many questions,
but I was terrified of setting him off again.

Eventually I edged closer. He didn’t move,
didn’t look at me.

“This watchmaker,” I said. “Who was he? What did
he want? Why did he send you out into the woods?”

Sir Tom’s head jerked up and his eyes opened. He
opened his mouth, too, and his lips moved, but no sounds came out.

Finally he flung out his arms. “The admiration
of a grateful nation? Knowledge for its own sake?” For some reason that sent
him into another cackling fit. He clutched his stomach and laughed like a
maniac.

Which he apparently was. I was out here in the
middle of nowhere with a raving lunatic.

In fact—at this thought I backed away from
him, but slowly, so he might not notice—what if he wasn’t a Guardian at
all? What if he was just another person driven mad by the Guardians, like poor
Rosella?

That had to be the case. The Guardians weren’t
just ordinary people; they were legendary, mysterious, powerful. Sir Tom and
Jensen must be outcasts from the city, crazy people who’d never made it back
in, who had somehow survived out here among the wild animals and those
half-human things.

 
And
Angel? I didn’t know what to make of him.

The old man had stopped cackling and was
watching me. “This much is clear,” he said, and I really, really hoped
something clear was coming. “You asked about the Guardians. Does that mean we
are what brought you out into the
wilderland
alone?”

Cautiously, I nodded.

“It must be bad,” he
said. “It must be very bad in the city, if you felt driven to come out here
looking for the monsters.”

I looked at him more
closely. Quiet authority had returned to his voice. He actually sounded sane.

“It is bad,” I said.

“Tell me.”

A minute earlier I couldn’t have imagined having
a coherent conversation with the man. But what was I supposed to do? I had
nowhere else to turn. And surely it wouldn’t hurt to tell him, even if he
wasn’t a Guardian, even if he could do nothing to help us.

“We don’t have enough food to make it through
the winter,” I began, edging a little closer to the fire, now nothing but
glowing red embers. “So the Watchers are going to kill those of us who consume
more than we produce. The sick, the underweight, the injured, —”

Suddenly embarrassed, I hesitated. He smiled a
little grimly. “The old,” he concluded. “Though the Watchers, presumably, are
exempt.”

He stayed calm, and though I’d much rather have
been talking to someone a good bit more stable, it was a relief to tell anyone
outside of
Optica
about the problems there, to
describe the city meetings to someone who wasn’t traumatized by them or
endangered by them, to talk to someone I didn’t have to comfort, who wouldn’t
try to bolster me with false reassurances.

Sir Tom nodded while I talked. He didn’t seem
surprised by anything I said—at least until I got to the part about
Meritt
spying on the Watchers.

“Young
Meritt
,” he
said softly.

“Do you know him?”

Sir Tom’s gaze went distant. “Knowing another is
more difficult than we like to believe,” he said. “In the end we will know
fully, even as we are fully known. But here, faces are veiled. Not entirely, of
course. But some veils are thicker than others.”

Of course he didn’t know
Meritt
.
Meritt
would have told me if he’d met a lunatic who
thought he was a Guardian.

“But that name I do know,” Sir Tom said, his
eyes focusing again. “Yes. I most certainly know the name. Young
Meritt
has nerve, if he’s willing to spy on the Watchers up
close and personal.”

“Yes. He’s very brave.”

“Some young men have more nerve than brains, and
some have more brains than nerve.”

“
Meritt
has plenty of
both.”

Sir Tom looked at me sharply.
“So
that’s the way the wind blows,” he said. “Well, well.”

My face began to feel hot and I changed the subject.
“Apparently the Watchers watch me in particular,” I said.

 
“Naturally.” To
my surprise tears filled his eyes.

“Because of my hair—” I began, but he gave a short
bark of incredulous laughter.

“Hair has nothing to do with it,” he said. “What? Do you
think they’re beauticians?”

My face grew hotter still—but at least the old man
wasn’t crying any more. He studied me with his brow knitted. “I’m too blunt,”
he said apologetically. “I had a way with the ladies once, but that was many years
ago.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can be blunt. I want to know the
truth. If it’s not because of my hair, what is it? Why do they watch me?”

“They watch you because they can,” he said, and then he
screwed his eyes shut. “I will go no further,” he said, and he wasn’t talking
to me. “I will not. Going further means dashing hopes or raising hopes, and
neither will I do.”

“But—”

He
opened his eyes. “Some doors,
once opened, can never be shut. And some doors, once shut, can never be
opened.”

I couldn’t believe it—he wouldn’t tell me?

Maybe he wouldn’t tell me anything because he
didn’t have anything to tell. He was like one of my old people spinning a yarn,
except without the good grace to finish the story or even say it was all
make-believe.

“I will do no more harm,” he said. “I can live
with no
more. But I will tell you this: Red Girl wouldn’t be in the fix she’s in if it
weren’t for me. And I’d fix that fix if I could, but I can’t, because not a
soul alive can turn back the clock.” A deeper shadow passed over his face.
“Break, break, break, on the cold gray stones, o sea. But the tender grace of a
day that is dead will never come back to me.”

More rhyming. Wonderful.

I had an idea. “Even if you can’t turn back the clock, can
you do something to help me now? In the present?”

He brightened. “Now that is an interesting thought,” he
said. “I’ve been pondering it since you showed up on my doorstep last night,
like the ghost of Christmas Past draped in long red hair instead of chains. But
it’s been a long time since I’ve reconnoitered, a very long time indeed. Longer
than you’ve been alive.”

He was on the wrong track. I had been trying to think of a
tactful way to get him to lead me to the real Guardians, but he sounded as if
he intended to help me fight the Watchers himself.

He tilted his head, gazed at me. “Are the wardens well
armed?”

“They all have stunners, and there are some real guns, but I
don’t know how many—I’ve only seen a few.”

“Is anyone else armed?”

“Not that I know of.”

“No one? Not even after all these years? That is a pity.”

He bent and sketched a big circle in the sand. “Does Red
Girl know where the active cameras are?” he asked. “Not the secret ones, and
not the blanks, but the ones the Watchers watch? Last I checked they were
here.”

Taking a stick, he drew a rough city map, and then marked
the active cameras.

He was right—he knew exactly which cameras were
dummies, and which were active.

“
Meritt
has disabled a few of the
active ones,” I said, and pointed out which. But my mind was on his earlier words.
“The secret cameras?” I said. “What do you mean?”

He looked up at me. “The ones in the wasteland,” he said.
“They’re hidden, as are the ones in the Watcher compound. We didn’t guard the
Watchers, but naturally we had to watch them. And it was essential that we
maintain the perimeter.”

He was talking about the circles on
Rafe’s
map, about the camera
Meritt
and I had found.

“What do you mean, the last time you checked?”

He wasn’t particularly interested in answering—he was
studying the map on the sand—but he replied, absently, “The stockade has
a monitoring system. I disabled it long ago, when I finally realized what we’d
done. Until then we saw whatever the Watchers saw, and more. The streets, the
dormitories. Each cell in the prison. That lazy old warden sitting in the tower
playing Solitaire. The wasteland, where people tried to hide from watching
eyes.”