The bed was covered in a chaos of images, all of them of death. The warped floor shifted as she moved closer to him. The Young Dread had no desire to participate in John’s revenge—or even to acknowledge it—but she found herself picking up a few of the photographs to study. Many were in black and white, which she understood indicated great age. But many others were in full color, with the deep red of blood the most prominent hue. Even in the black-and-white photographs, she could feel the red hidden within the great pools of black: A man, a woman, and four children, cut to pieces, the adults pinned to the wall by long knives, the children crumpled on the floor, their clothing dark with blood. People dead from beatings, from shootings. People killed, with unmistakable exuberance, by whipswords. There were so many.
“Were you there?” John asked quietly.
It took Maud a few moments to understand what he meant. He was asking her if she’d participated in killing these people, who were members of his family. It bothered the Young Dread deeply that John thought she would be capable of such evil action, and yet that was how he had been raised—to see threats and killers on every hand.
She looked through more of the photographs. In truth she recognized most of the faces. She had seen these men, these women, even some of their children. She had watched them train, she had given them their oaths. But she had never seen them like this.
The Young Dread shook her head. “No.”
Her eyes lit on one of the more recent pictures. A lovely young woman clutched a yawning wound in her abdomen, her blue eyes staring, fixed in death. There was a deep gash across one cheek that, despite its gruesome aspect, took little away from her fine features. Catherine, Maud thought. I was there when Catherine died.
But on closer inspection, she realized this was not Catherine Renart. This was Catherine’s older sister. The girls were very alike, but the one in this photograph had different wounds. Catherine’s fatal injury had been to her leg, not her belly. And she hadn’t died, of course, not until years later. The Middle and Briac had insisted on disrupting Catherine and keeping her alive. In that way, Briac could honestly say he hadn’t taken her life—though clearly there was nothing honest about Briac’s handling of Catherine.
“You knew her?” John asked.
“I gave her her oath on the estate,” Maud said. “She and your mother were very alike.”
John pointed to the figure drawn on the girl’s blouse in blood—a crude ram.
“A ram,” the Young said quietly. “Someone drew a ram.”
“The killer drew the emblem of his house,” John told her in a whisper. “The ram is Quin’s house, but she wasn’t born yet. This was Briac.”
“Possibly,” Maud said. Though anyone might draw anything on a dead body, she thought.
Now that John had pointed this out, she saw similar figures drawn on many of the victims: the shape of a bear, drawn with a bloody finger on the shirt of a child; in another picture she saw the outline of a boar. The Young Dread tried to imagine Seekers signing their grisly deeds with the insignia of their houses, but she couldn’t quite envision it. Why would someone do such a thing? The only result would be to create lasting enmity between Seekers.
John had no such hesitation. He studied the photographs as if he were planning out a battle—which, Maud realized a moment later, he was.
“In my mother’s journal, she was recording the locations of different Seeker houses and their athames. But here you can see which houses have gone bad, which need to be stopped,” John explained. He pointed to three loose piles of photographs. “Looking at the signs drawn on the bodies, I count seven murders done by the house of the bear, five by the house of the boar, and two by the house of the ram. So the house of the bear…”
He trailed off, but Maud knew the words that would complete his sentence: the house of the bear is first on my list.
John asked for the journal back, and he leafed through it until he found the page with a bear drawn at the top. Beneath the animal was an illustration much like the one he’d shown Maud back on the estate. It was another drawing of a cave. This one was perched halfway up a hillside. Behind the hill was a line of other hills, with a distinctive pattern. Beneath the drawing was a set of coordinates.
“Here,” he said. “My mother last knew of the house of the bear in this location. The journal says the bear athame was last seen in southwest Africa, eighty years ago, in the possession of a Seeker called Delyth Priddy, house of the bear, who possibly had a companion with her. And here are the coordinates. She was gathering coordinates so she could go to these places.”
Maud understood his intent. He wanted her to take him to this place so he could retrace his mother’s path. The Young Dread recognized the location by the drawing and by the coordinates. It was a cave in Africa that was special to the house of the bear, just as each Seeker house had once had a special location for its own members—though most locations had fallen out of use long ago. It looked as though Catherine had been searching for those caves.
She explained none of this to John, because it suited her, for the moment, to let him draw his own conclusions. She moved back into the hall to retrieve the shield and the helmet.
“What are they?” he asked, looking up at the objects when she returned. “There’s a drawing of that one”—he gestured to the helmet—“in the journal.”
“This is a focal,” she answered, holding it up. “If used properly, it is a great tool. The shield is interesting but less important for training.”
“Is the helmet what you were talking about before?” he whispered. “To help me face a disruptor without falling apart?”
“Possibly,” she said. In truth, that was exactly what she intended to teach him. How to face the disruptor—and many other things—without falling apart. How to find the proper path.
She looked at the pictures of death strewn across the bed. John wanted to hunt down the house of the bear to avenge his mother and those dead people in the photographs. The fact that no one had seen a member of the house of the bear in about eighty years did not deter him. Nor did the fact that the house of the boar, the next house on John’s list, had been missing for a generation—since Emile Pernet had disappeared in Norway. John seemed to think his mother had discovered a secret trail leading to her enemies. The Young Dread was doubtful. If Seekers and athames had been missing for so long, she didn’t think they would be easily found.
She made a decision. John could make his search. She would let him look for his revenge on Seeker houses that were long gone. And along the way I will train your mind out of its petty cruelties and vendettas. I will turn you into something better. And perhaps, following Catherine’s journal, I will discover for myself what the Middle Dread has done.
“It may be I can help you follow what your mother wrote in her journal,” she told him. “But I will make you work for the privilege of doing so.”
“Because Catherine was John’s mother, I imagined she was a bit of a lunatic,” Quin told Shinobu. “When John talks about what she wanted, there’s not room for anything else in his mind. When he was chasing me on the estate—and we fought on the roof of the cliff barn—I thought he was crazy and it was all because of her.”
They were in Quin’s healing office, and the pages of the journal were lined up along the counters and across the examination table. She’d organized the rows chronologically, just as they’d been in the journal, but seeing the pages out in the open would make it easier, she hoped, to wrap her mind around them.
“You don’t think Catherine was crazy?” Shinobu asked her. He was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest, watching her as she browsed the pages.
“She must have been a bit crazy,” Quin answered. “But what I see in her journal is someone who kept track of things that were wrong…because she wanted them to be better.”
She picked up a few sheets of paper from the examination table. “And she included things that were good, just because they were good. Like this one, about M
aud when she was very young and still training to be a Dread. Two Seeker apprentices saw her on the estate, and they wrote to their father, describing how fast she could run: ‘like a hawk diving for a field mouse.’ Catherine admired the Young Dread.”
“And what about the Middle Dread?” Shinobu asked.
Quin glanced up and found that he’d moved closer. He was standing just behind her, reading over her shoulder. He’d been in a funny temper the last few days, quieter than usual, and more serious. His mood ebbed and flowed as he healed. But his interest in the journal was drawing him out.
“I think Catherine hated the Middle Dread,” Quin answered. “It seems that any time she found someone with something bad to say about him, she put it in the journal.” There were lots of journal entries, particularly early ones, that showed the Middle Dread in a bad light.
“Do you think he’s important?” he asked her.
“Important to what we want to know? To why Seekers like my father are so different from how they’re supposed to be?” She shrugged. “In the journal, all of the bad things the Middle Dread did were hundreds of years ago. I don’t see how we can blame Briac’s behavior on that.”
He looked dissatisfied with that answer. As she watched, he sorted through several journal pages and picked out one. It was a letter in which one Seeker told the other about seeing the Middle Dread nearby before someone had been found gravely injured. Shinobu held it up for her to see.
“Do you think he was important?” she asked.
He took a deep breath and leaned against the counter. “Well…” he began, looking uncomfortable. “When I wore the focal—you know, when you found me with all the needles—we’d been looking at the journal just before that, and I…felt something.”
“You mean, in your mind? In the helmet?”
He nodded and crossed his arms thoughtfully. “I don’t think the focal can show you anything you don’t already know. But maybe it helps you see what you already know in a different light.” He ran a hand across his hair and studied his shoes, almost as if he didn’t like what he was going to say. “I might have understood something about the journal. Catherine uses the first half for the Dreads—letters about them, times people saw them, bad things the Middle Dread did or was accused of doing.”
“That’s right,” Quin agreed.
“And most of the rest is a record of where Seekers from the different houses—and their athames—were seen.”
He fell silent, and she prompted, “And you saw something about this when you wore the focal?”
Slowly he told her, “I think I saw a connection—between the Middle Dread and what happened to Seeker houses more recently. What if Catherine thought there was a connection?”
Quin’s eyes ran over the paper in front of her as she thought about this. “You think the Middle Dread was at the heart of what she was looking for?”
“I think she thought he was important. I don’t know if he actually was.” His gaze had gone back to his shoes, and he was prodding at the floor with the toe of a sneaker.
“She did think he was important,” Quin agreed, looking at the early pages of the journal. “But if she figured out a connection, I don’t think she wrote it down here.”
“Or she did but you can’t see it,” he said.
He was still looking at his shoes and appeared to be wrestling with a sticky thought. Without looking up, he gently took hold of her elbow and pulled her closer.
“You could…you could try the focal, you know,” he said quietly.
“You want me to wear it?”
“I know I shouldn’t wear it,” he responded, still not looking at her. “But…there was something to it, Quin. You’ll see things you would otherwise miss.” He nodded at the papers surrounding them. “I promise you will. And even if you don’t, you can tell me what it feels like for you. Maybe it’s different for different people.”
She looked around the room and then back to him. He was resisting whatever urge he’d had to use the focal himself, and that was good. She admitted to herself that she was curious to see what the focal did. As long as she followed Mariko’s instructions, she would limit the danger. And maybe Shinobu was right and she would learn something.
—
Quin had Mariko’s written instructions in her hands. Shinobu hadn’t followed these instructions at all when he’d used the focal, but Quin intended to obey them perfectly. She sat cross-legged on the roof of her house, with Shinobu crouched beside her. The first rule was to be firm in body. She was.
She was now following the second instruction: clear your thoughts, begin from neutral mind.
She carefully emptied her mind, just as she did when she worked as a healer. When that was done, she read the next step: Focus upon the subject at hand.
What was the subject at hand? I want to discover where dishonorable Seekers began, she thought. And what Catherine might have known about that. She held these questions firmly in mind.
The next step: Place the helm upon your head.
The focal slipped on as though it had been designed especially for Quin. The moment it was in place, she felt a buzzing in her ears and through her skull. It wasn’t a noise really, more a vibration, unpleasant and discordant. The one real noise was a faint crackle—the helmet was alive with electricity, and she could feel fingers of it across her forehead and around her ears.
A wave of disorientation hit her, as though she were on the deck of a wildly rocking boat, though she knew quite well she was seated solidly on the roof of her home. She began to tip over, saw the surface of the roof coming toward her, but Shinobu grabbed her shoulders and held her upright.
“It’s okay,” he said, loud enough so she could hear him despite the crackle around her ears. The weight of his hands was reassuring.
The buzzing in the helmet was getting fainter, but at the same time the sensation through her head was increasing, as though the focal were joining forces with her, becoming almost indistinguishable from her own mind. It no longer felt unpleasant…It felt almost good.
And suddenly she didn’t need Shinobu’s help to stay up. Quin rose to her feet on her own.
The electric vibration of the helmet had fully joined with her mind, and it pushed her into a new mental gear. She gazed down at her body, her hands and arms out at her sides to balance herself, her feet planted wide. Her limbs looked small and far away, and yet they obeyed her commands. Shinobu was right there beside her, poised to take hold of her again if she needed him.
She walked unsteadily to the edge of the roof. From there she gazed up toward the Bridge’s high, draping canopy. Then she looked far down the Bridge thoroughfare in both directions. There were swarms of people on the road, hundreds and hundreds of them, and as Quin looked, she discovered she could sense where each person intended to go. The waves of foot traffic were not random; there were lines of flow within the crowds, a logic to each motion. She felt as she felt when healing patients—an expanded awareness—but in the helmet it was ten times, a hundred times, what she experienced on her own.
She turned. At eye level, she could see out to the harbor beneath the outer edge of the Bridge’s canopy. The water was gray, flowing away from her toward Hong Kong Island, and it was broken in a thousand places where ships churned it into white wakes. And there was other movement, the trails of speedboats and junks, the tiny ripples around rocks near the shore, the patterns caused by the tide running against the great pillars that held up the Bridge itself.
The water of the harbor was part of a single ocean that circulated in great slow waves and touched every coastline of earth. The people below were pieces of one species, which in turn was a part of all living creatures. She could almost see the entire world…
Quin pulled her thoughts back as a fisherman reels in his lines. There was a subject at hand, and it was important. Catherine’s journal. When things changed and why.
Her mind was larger. She could see those subjects like dark, clear shapes standing out
sharply against the rest of the world. She understood, just as Shinobu had said, that the focal couldn’t show her something she didn’t already know. But there were things she did know…The journal. The Middle Dread, just as Shinobu had pointed out. There was a logic to what Catherine had written.
Quin let her gaze sweep along the Bridge thoroughfare again, saw the people entering and leaving, sitting, walking, eating, fighting, being healed on the upper level. She could sense as well the hundreds of others below, seeking oblivion in the drug bars on the Bridge’s lower levels. She didn’t want to sever the connection she felt to all of them, to the ocean outside, to the boats in the harbor, to the gray sky above everything. It felt right to see things this way. What if she kept the helmet on forever? Wouldn’t that be better? Wasn’t she better when she was wearing it? She could figure out anything with the focal on her head.
She turned to find Shinobu watching her, his face reflecting the strange ecstasy of interconnectedness she was feeling. He had warned her—the focal was something amazing.
Forcing her arms to move was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but she pulled off the focal in a sudden, violent motion and tossed it aside as though it had burned her.
Immediately the electric buzzing became noticeable again, rough and discordant, as if the helmet and her mind were arguing as they tore apart. Quin felt herself double over, and then Shinobu’s hands were on her, easing her down onto the roof. She let herself go farther, until she was lying on the roof’s rough surface, staring up at rafters and canopy far above.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. He smoothed her hair away from her face. “You didn’t like it?”
“I did,” she said automatically, thinking she might never have liked anything more. “I really did.” She took a few deep breaths, added, “But it’s—it’s too much. I can’t take it.” She was dizzy and disoriented, though she wasn’t sure how that was possible when she was lying down. And sick. She was sick to her stomach. Beyond the physical, there was a sense of mental distress pulling at her, a painful low that corresponded to the high she’d felt in the helmet.
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