Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  He wouldn’t do that, not unless Quin was there to help. They needed the focal, he knew that now, but they would use it together, and only together, because that was the safe way. When he’d used it alone, it had broken off a piece of his mind, and it required constant work to ignore the thoughts from that piece, and channel all of himself into protecting Quin.

  He pulled her closer to him and kissed her cheek. When her eyes came open, she smiled at him sleepily, then stretched.

  “You’re very nice-looking, do you know that?” she murmured.

  “Am I?” It secretly delighted him to hear her say it. He tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “I want to tell you what happened with your father. And everything else.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  She sat up on the straw-covered pallet and pulled her jacket tightly about her in the chilly air.

  “I found him in a hospital outside London,” he told her, propping himself up on his elbows. “It was an awful place, Quin. But I used the focal on him, and he started to make sense.”

  He told her everything Briac had said, about the Middle Dread, and his Watchers, about turning Seekers against each other and getting rid of Seekers altogether, about Briac himself trying to take over for the Middle Dread now that he was gone, but being too crazy to follow through.

  He watched the effect of his narration on Quin. She didn’t interrupt him, but when he’d paused, she said thoughtfully, “That explains why there have been fewer Seekers with each generation. And why my father tried to stick close to the Middle Dread, to win his favor.”

  “Besides what he’s gotten Seekers to do to each other, the Middle Dread was doing something else,” Shinobu told her. “The most important thing Briac told me was this: the Middle has been using different locations There to—to keep valuable things.”

  “What do you mean different locations There?”

  Shinobu understood her confusion; he’d felt it himself when Briac had explained. Though there was plenty of room in the dimensions There, Briac and Alistair had taught Quin and Shinobu to use the exact same coordinates each time they jumped from the world to the dark space between. It was so easy to lose yourself in that blackness that Seekers were not supposed to linger—ever—and there had been no reason to think much about other possible locations There.

  He told her, “We have one place There we use with the athame. We use that same spot over and over. That’s why you were able to find your father when he was lost There—he had lost himself in the same spot we always go to. But the Middle was using other points There to store…things, I guess, that he wanted to keep secret. Like his Watchers. He kept them hidden in places none of us use.”

  Quin’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “He stored people There?” Clearly the possibility had never occurred to her.

  Shinobu nodded.

  “What else did he keep? And where—where are these hiding places?”

  “I don’t know what else he kept There, and Briac didn’t know where the hiding places were,” he answered. “He knew they existed somewhere in the darkness. But, Quin, listen…” Shinobu felt his eagerness returning. “I think I know how to find them.”

  “How?” she asked. When he didn’t immediately answer, she grabbed his hands as though he were torturing her by dragging out the explanation. “Shinobu! How?”

  He allowed himself a dramatic pause, then said, “You have the clue.”

  “I have the clue?”

  He dug through the pockets of his cloak and pulled out the athame of the Dreads. Holding it in front of her, he slid his fingers along the dull blade, then across the dials of the handgrip.

  “Can you remember what coordinates were on this athame when the Young Dread came back for us on Traveler?” he asked her.

  It took her a moment to understand what he was asking.

  “After the fight on the airship? After we crashed?”

  Shinobu nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

  “Why those coordinates?” she asked. “Wouldn’t they be the coordinates of the ship itself?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Remember what happened? The Young Dread killed the Middle, and then she and the Old Dread dragged him out of the fight in the big room on Traveler. She came back alone—a short while later.”

  “We know she took the Old There,” Quin said. “She took him There, and then she came back to help us.”

  “Yes,” Shinobu agreed. “But she was gone for only, what—one or two minutes? I don’t think the Young went There with him. I think she carved an anomaly, the Old Dread stepped through, and she stayed on the ship.”

  “So the coordinates on her athame would take us to where the Old Dread is?” she asked, following his logic. “But—why do we want to find the Old Dread just now?”

  “We don’t.”

  He saw understanding dawn in her eyes. “You think the Middle Dread’s body is with him.”

  “Yes.”

  Quin closed her eyes, concentrating, but after a minute, she shook her head. “I saw the athame in the Young Dread’s hands, but only for a moment.”

  “We’re going to use the focal,” he told her. “I know you don’t like it—I don’t like it either—but it’s going to help you remember.”

  The barn loft appeared to glow in the light of Quin’s expanded awareness. She’d cleared her mind, then slipped the focal on. The disorientation passed more quickly this time, and she was vaulted into that peculiar state of concentration the focal made possible. She became aware of ten thousand motes of dust suspended in a weak beam of fading sunlight, the small gusts of air moving past the barn window, even the multitude of varied currents in the river far, far below. And there was more. She saw all the times she’d been in this barn before, all the steps her feet had taken on those previous visits.

  Shinobu’s hands were on her shoulders as the focal buzzed and entwined around her own thoughts. The pressure of his touch steadied her.

  “The coordinates,” he said. “Can you remember?”

  She threw her mind into that past moment when she was lying inside the crashed airship. The Young Dread had lifted a great sheet of glass off Shinobu and Quin. When Quin had crawled free, she’d looked up to see the Young holding the athame in her hands.

  There. The coordinates were lined up along the dials between the Young Dread’s hands. They were suspended, perfectly still in Quin’s memory.

  Her mind came back to the present. She took the athame from Shinobu and quickly turned each dial until they matched what she’d seen in that past moment.

  “Here,” she said, handing the ancient dagger back to him. “This is where the Young Dread took the Old Dread, before she came back for us.”

  She removed the focal then, and gritted her teeth through the noise in her ears and the headache and nausea that came on immediately. She sat heavily on the platform and closed her eyes.

  Shinobu sat with her, put an arm around her. “Sorry. I know it feels bad when it comes off. It gets worse the more you wear it.”

  “I’ll be all right in a moment.”

  She breathed in slowly until she felt steady. When she’d recovered, she looked up to find that Shinobu had put the focal on the floor and pushed it some distance away.

  “Show me,” she said, gesturing at the athame.

  Shinobu nodded. He slid his thumb down the athame’s blade, dislodging the lightning rod. When he struck athame and rod together, the whole of the stone barn began to shake. Shinobu carved an anomaly into the air. Long threads came loose of their surroundings to twist away and form the humming border.

  The threshold pulsed with flowing energy, and in the darkness beyond they saw a hunched figure, outlined in the light coming in through the barn window.

  Shinobu took Quin’s arm. “Follow me,” he said. They stepped over the seething border, and in only a few steps had reached the figure.

  “It’s him,” she whispered.

  They were looking at the Old Dread. He stoo
d perfectly still, his shoulders stooped, where the Young Dread had parted from him during the fight on Traveler.

  His face had been shaved recently—Quin remembered that from the last time she’d seen him—and his cheeks and chin were covered with only the faintest white stubble, which made him look, somehow, quite modern. His eyes were closed and his hands were clasped before him. His robe hung about his frame oddly; it seemed the wrong size and didn’t reach past his ankles. He’d given the Young Dread his cloak, Quin realized. What else did he give her? she wondered.

  “Get his legs, Quin,” Shinobu said.

  “His legs?”

  She looked up and realized Shinobu wasn’t talking about the Old. He was leaning over another figure that lay at the man’s feet. Feeling her way, Quin stooped down and grabbed on to two legs. They felt as stiff as a marble statue in her grasp, though they were still soft to the touch. Together Quin and Shinobu hefted the body upward, dead weight in their arms. They backed out through the anomaly, the body threatening to overbalance and topple to the side. When they were firmly on the loft floor again, they set it down with a dull thud.

  Quin knew whom they were carrying, but the man’s eyes—open and gray and staring—gave her an unpleasant shock. In the dimming light, lying inflexible and motionless, a great wash of blood across his chest where the Young Dread had stabbed him through the heart, was the Middle Dread.

  Shinobu looked down at the Middle with an equal measure of distaste and fascination.

  “Now,” he told her, “let’s find out where he put things.”

  “I know he’s dead, but I could swear he could start moving,” Quin muttered.

  She and Shinobu were kneeling on the floor of the barn loft, removing the cloak from the frozen form of the Middle Dread. If he’d been alive, he might have been waking up by now, reentering the normal time stream. But he was, indeed, very dead. Only the blood on his chest had come back to life, trickling thickly from his fatal wound, filling the air with its metallic tang. The rest of him was gray and still.

  “Check every pocket,” Shinobu said.

  “What are we looking for?”

  They’d gotten the cloak off the Middle’s stiff form and were rifling through it, pulling out knives and small tools and weapons. Shinobu examined what looked like a stone chisel, then threw it aside.

  “If he was keeping people and things There, he must have some clue on him that helps him remember exactly where they are.”

  “What if he simply memorized the locations?” Quin asked.

  “That’s possible,” Shinobu admitted. “But the Dreads spend years, decades even, stretched out There. Doesn’t that do something to your mind? Make it foggy? I think he’d have a more permanent record than his memories.”

  This made sense to Quin. Their search of his cloak, however, turned up nothing helpful. Shinobu sighed and gave the Middle a look of distaste. Then he reached, unenthusiastically, for the pockets of the Middle’s trousers.

  “We have to check his body,” he explained.

  Quin wasn’t disturbed by being near a dead body, but this particular body turned her stomach. The Middle had been an unpleasant presence while alive. Death had improved his company, but not by much. Nevertheless, she felt gingerly along the Middle’s trouser legs, then pulled off his strange leather shoes. There was nothing inside.

  When Shinobu’s search of the man’s trouser pockets found nothing, he slit the man’s shirt with a knife, running the blade up from the waist to the neck. He ripped aside the two sections of the garment, revealing small, black tattoos on the man’s abdomen.

  Quin let out a breath, surprised.

  “Come over here and look from this angle,” Shinobu said, sounding excited.

  She joined him near the Middle’s head. From there, it was obvious the tattoos had been drawn so the Middle himself could read them easily. Symbols and letters and numbers were inked into his skin, oriented for his own eyes. Perhaps he had drawn them himself.

  One group of symbols stood out, a set of coordinates—but not for a place in the world; they were for a location There.

  Looking at the line of coordinates, Quin had the distinct feeling that she’d seen them several times recently, though she couldn’t remember quite where.

  “And look,” she said, gesturing to the words inked beneath the symbols in ornate printing:

  Protenus 53

  Dextrorsum 59

  Sinistrorsum 54

  Dextrorsum 34

  “Protenus—it’s Latin for ‘forward,’ ” Quin said, thankful for all her mother’s language lessons when she’d been a Seeker apprentice. “And dextrorsum means ‘to the right’; sinistrorsum means ‘to the left.’ ”

  Shinobu’s eyes lit up with understanding. “It’s our P, S, and D from the cave we found in the woods.”

  Quin quickly added up the digits next to the words. “The numbers sum to two hundred—like the numbers in the cave we found, and in the journal. But two hundred what? We still don’t know.”

  “Maybe we do,” Shinobu told her. He got to his feet and paced across the loft, both hands running over his head as though he were juggling a maelstrom of thoughts and needed his hands to keep them inside his skull. He stopped in front of the round window, then turned back to her. “There’s that journal entry about the Middle Dread instructing two boys, counting numbers—”

  “To two hundred,” Quin agreed, “but—”

  “It’s steps, Quin.” He walked back with a look of discovery transforming his countenance. “Your father explained—but it was so confusing I didn’t understand until just now. It’s how many steps to get somewhere between. We follow the coordinates, they’ll take us to a certain point There, and from that point we walk in exactly those directions.”

  Quin furrowed her brow. “How could Briac know that?”

  “Your father admitted that he’d spent years trying to understand the Middle Dread—to try to keep himself alive. He once hid near the Watchers’ fortress and saw the Middle training his boys. He saw them as they practiced ‘counting their steps,’ over and over. They were practicing for this.” He pointed at the tattoo on the Middle’s skin. “But Briac didn’t know about these coordinates. He didn’t know where to start from.”

  Quin thought about this, but when she considered the practicalities, she shook her head. “Two hundred steps There? You would never make it. You’d lose yourself.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s the point. Anyone would lose themselves.” His expression spoke of many pieces falling into place very quickly. “Two hundred steps guarantees that no one could follow these clues unless the Middle taught them how to do it. They’d get lost and stuck There.” Unconsciously, a fever of realization now upon him, he grabbed his hair and made it stand out from his head. “That was the real secret, Quin, the most important thing Briac told me. It’s why the Middle Dread was hoarding all the focals.” He retrieved the metal helmet from the floor and held it up for her. “You don’t lose yourself There if you’re wearing a focal.”

  Quin stared back at Shinobu. “You don’t lose yourself There if you’re wearing a focal,” she repeated, letting the words sink in. Of course. Now that he’d said it, this fact seemed both logical and obvious. “That’s why one of the Watchers was always wearing a helmet each time we saw them,” she reflected, with growing excitement, “to keep himself from getting lost There.”

  “To get whatever the Middle was hiding, you needed the coordinates, the directions—two hundred paces—and you needed a focal.”

  Quin felt parts of the mystery resolving for her as well. “That’s why my father so badly wanted to get his hands on the Watchers’ focal.”

  “Briac wanted to find whatever the Middle had hidden, and he wanted to take over where the Middle left off.”

  “But what does that mean? What will we find if we follow these instructions? And there were different instructions in that cave in Scotland—still two hundred, but a different pattern of steps. Why?�
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  Shinobu picked up a small knife from among the Middle’s scattered possessions. With it he scratched a circle into the floor of the loft.

  “What if this circle is all of the space There,” he said, “and this”—he stuck the knife straight down, making a dot within the circle—“is where you go if you follow those coordinates on his skin? And from that point you can walk different ways to find different things.”

  Quin’s mind was catching up with his now. She took the knife and scratched a steplike path with the blade to represent the paces inked on the Middle’s body. She said, “These paces, from his tattoos, get you here.” She made an X at the end of the line she’d drawn. Then she drew another path, going a different way from the original starting point. “The paces written in the cave in Scotland might get you here.” She made an X at the end of the second line. The two X’s were quite far apart, despite having the same point of origin.

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “They’re all little pirate maps, pointing to something hidden There.”

  “So which set of paces should we follow?”

  “Every set we can find—eventually,” he answered. “But this one…he tattooed this set on his body. It must be the most important.”

  “But…what could be there?” she whispered, feeling jittery at the thought of following in the Middle’s footsteps. So far, his footsteps had led them into all sorts of trouble.

  “I—I don’t know,” Shinobu answered seriously. “We might find whatever he was going to use to get rid of Seekers.”

  Quin bit her lip and stared at the Middle’s tattoos and his tools and weapons. Her mind was reeling. The Middle had been planning so much and causing so much harm.

  “Do you not want to go look?” he asked softly, nodding at the inked instructions on the Middle’s body.

  She pulled her thoughts together. There was still so much they didn’t know; the Middle had left an intentionally complicated trail. But they were, it seemed, on the cusp of understanding. Quin felt an excitement that was close to terror.