Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Did—did you know my master?” Nott asked, worried that she’d get mad at him because he’d asked twice. “The one they call the Middle Dread?”

  Some of the kindness left her face, replaced by an emotion that might have been sadness but might have been something else entirely. The boy caught a glimpse of hidden energy in her. She eyed Nott sharply and said, “I saw him die.”

  “It’s true for sure, then? He’s really dead?”

  “Oh, yes. A whipsword through his heart. He was dead before he hit the ground. It was shocking.”

  Her voice carried an odd mixture of hatred at the topic and enjoyment at being the bearer of upsetting news. For his part, Nott wasn’t sure if he should feel crestfallen or relieved about the Middle Dread being dead. His master had made Nott fierce and proud, but on the other hand, the man had been—there was no escaping it—terrifying. Nott wanted to tell Aelred, Don’t be sad. Everyone’s got to die sometime, but the bat had never known the Middle Dread. And truth be told, the Middle Dread probably would have sliced Aelred up into little ribbons if he’d ever caught the bat.

  “Were you hoping he was still alive?” the woman asked, observing Nott carefully. “You may be one of the only people ever to have wished that.”

  Nott’s thumb brushed over the hilt of his favorite knife. No matter what he had thought of his master, who was this woman to be badmouthing him? She wasn’t a Watcher, and Dun Tarm was a place that belonged to Watchers. He was getting tired of her impudence.

  “Thinking about attacking me?” She sounded kind again, as though Nott were a very small child and she was proud of him for coming up with the idea of drawing his knife. Nott dropped his hands away from his weapons. Then he sniffed, vexed with himself. The truth was, he didn’t love using his knives quite as much as he used to.

  “You said I’d recognize you, but I don’t,” he told her defiantly.

  “I used to be Margaret, but I’ve never known why my parents picked that name, when they insisted on calling me Maggie almost from the moment I was born.” She smiled at him, and he was reminded of her gray hair and advanced age. “You may call me Maggie.”

  “I’m Nott.”

  “Hm.” She studied his clothing. “He found you a long time ago, then? When he began gathering his own little army to get rid of people he didn’t like?”

  Nott shrugged; years and time confused him. “How did you know him?”

  “That’s a strange story for another day.”

  From a pocket in the rustling material of her green-splotched jacket, Maggie pulled out a small, round stone disc. Automatically Nott drew closer to look at it.

  “That’s my master’s,” he said at once. There were three interlocking ovals carved on its face, as plain as day. “I thought Shinobu had it. I thought he was our master now.” He looked up at her suspiciously. Now that he was standing close, he noticed her scent—something like old, wet wool mixed with another, sweeter smell.

  “What if there’s more than one medallion?” Maggie asked. She was reaching into her pocket again as she walked away from Nott. Nott felt something about the air change; the atmosphere was growing heavy.

  He frowned. “Then how would we know who our master is?”

  She had drawn something else from her pocket. Nott’s teeth were biting on air as thick as water, and his ears were filling up with honey.

  Maggie turned to face him, holding some sort of weapon. Nott’s ears popped, and his jaw shifted. Then suddenly he was flying through the air over the lip of the fortress floor and crashing into the water of the lake. He thrashed helplessly in the freezing water, tried to gasp for breath, but he had no idea if he succeeded, because his head went black.

  When he woke, he was lying, soaking wet, on the floor of Dun Tarm, coughing up water by the lungful. Maggie was leaning over him, and though she somehow must have retrieved him from the lake, she was perfectly dry.

  Nott ran his tongue over his teeth and was amazed to find they were all still in place.

  “How did you do that?” he rasped.

  “When my husband abandoned me, I took two small trinkets when I left.”

  Nott was dazed from being tossed about like a sack of barley, but even in that state he was puzzled by her choice of words; in the same breath, she’d said that her husband had left her and that she had been the one to leave.

  She lifted her hands, revealing that she was holding a cylinder of stone about the length of her forearm. Through the dark stone ran an uneven seam of black glass. It was an evil-looking object, which made it irresistible to Nott’s twelve-year-old eyes.

  “This trinket threw you into the lake and fetched you out.”

  “What does the second one do?” Nott asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, particularly if Maggie chose to demonstrate it on him as well.

  “It would do nothing in a place like this,” she said. “But it would do something very great in the right place.” She smiled at him. “You asked how to know who your master is.” She held up the black cylinder. In her kindest grandmother’s voice, she asked Nott, “Does this help you recognize me?”

  Nott nodded his aching head. “You’re my new master.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go! That way!” Shinobu ordered.

  He had split the Watchers into three groups to chase a deer up from Loch Tarm into the wild hills. The moon threw the forest paths and rock outcroppings into sharp relief, but rain clouds were moving in from the east, and it would be a wet night before they slept—hopefully with bellies full of fresh meat.

  “There!” Shinobu called. “First Group, go!”

  He’d glimpsed the shaggy buck—their prey—leaping through the trees. The eight boys on his right who made up the first group hollered and yelled as they picked up their pace. The animal spooked left, bounding through the undergrowth.

  “Second Group, go!” he ordered.

  The boys at the middle of the chase took up the cries, driving the buck away faster.

  “Now the third Group!”

  Off to his left Shinobu heard them hollering in unison. The deer would be forced up the hill with enemies on every side.

  They’d tried this hunting strategy twice before, and both times had been a disaster of Watchers tripping other Watchers to get to the deer first, and then an all-out fistfight over who got to kill it. In fact, all-out fistfights were the normal state of affairs when dealing with almost two dozen Watchers. Two of the boys had even been killed during previous hunts—one had fallen to his death, and another had hit his head on a rock. The fact that Shinobu’s own thoughts were always running in two directions at once didn’t make the Watchers any easier to deal with.

  They’re terrible at following orders. I hate them.

  I need them, to fight for me and protect Quin against other dangers.

  He clung to that second thought.

  The buck veered again, looking for a weak spot in their line.

  “First group!”

  Those boys surged forward, making a racket, and the deer altered course. Shinobu called the other groups in turn, driving the buck straight up the hillside, which grew steeper with every yard they traveled.

  As they neared the top, he became aware of a buzzing in his focal. In another moment, it was vibrating discordantly, as if wasps were batting around between his head and the metal. A stab of pain traveled through his temples. His muscles were tiring. The wound in his side, which Quin had worked so hard to heal weeks ago, was throbbing. He scanned the Watchers spread out through the trees, but he could no longer keep track of where everyone was.

  When the nausea hit him, Shinobu understood. His focal had run out of energy. He’d been wearing it for so long—a whole month, if you included the time There—that he’d almost forgotten it was on his head. The helmet needed to sit in the sun to recharge. He supposed it absorbed some energy when he wore it during daylight hours, but he hadn’t removed it since he’d brought the Watchers to Dun Tarm, and now he
’d used it up.

  The tines of the buck’s antlers flashed in the moonlight, yards ahead, and then Shinobu and all the Watchers were in the open. The trees had ended, and they were at the crest of a rocky bluff. Behind them was the forest and the loch and, far below, the ruins of Dun Tarm. Here was the dark sky, the half-moon being eaten by fast-encroaching clouds, and the antlered buck. The animal stood on an outcropping as boys closed in on three sides. The buck would have to charge through its attackers, or leap to its death.

  “Hold!” Shinobu ordered.

  The boys were listening. After a week of beating each other and being beaten by Shinobu, they were finally obeying. They had their knives out, bloodlust written on their faces, but they waited for his word. Shinobu usually shared their eagerness to kill, but with the focal dead, the world looked different. He smelled the rank stench of the Watchers, which he’d stopped noticing days ago.

  The buck’s eyes rolled in terror, breath blowing in smoky streams from its nostrils. It was going to charge. Shinobu cocked his arm back and threw his knife. His blade caught the animal straight through his eye, and, mercifully, the buck was dead before its knees hit the ground.

  The Watchers let out cries of triumph and descended on it in a violent storm of arms and legs. He watched them from what felt like miles away.

  What was he doing, really?

  He’d been telling himself he was gathering and taming the Watchers to protect Quin, while he kept her somewhere safe. But…

  The full memory came back to him of Quin standing in the darkness, grabbing at his shirt, asking him not to leave her.

  And then he’d left her.

  Two dozen blood-streaked faces were surging around the dead deer. How could these wild, vicious creatures ever make Quin safe? The focal…it had colored his thoughts.

  Shinobu backed away from the scrimmage of Watchers. “I have to go,” he said aloud. “Right now—”

  The air was humming, and it felt thick in his mouth, was pooling in his lungs. An old woman in camouflage rain gear had appeared—entirely out of place—and was walking slowly out of the woods. With a shaking arm she was holding something out toward him.

  Shinobu’s jaw clicked sideways and his ears popped. He saw a swath of Watchers knocked onto their backs in the moonlight. He himself was thrown through the dark air. Something had hit him, tossed him over the edge of the cliff, and he was falling down the far side of the ridge. He was dropping without parachute or backup plan, and every fiber of his body clamored for him to do something, anything, to stop him from dying. Clouds were moving across the moon, and shadows were shifting on the rocks below.

  He yelled Quin’s name, and then he hit the ground and broke into a thousand pieces.

  —

  It wasn’t until the sun was up that Shinobu discovered he was still alive, lying just where he’d fallen. The old woman was leaning over him, and his body was a collection of excruciating injuries.

  “My goodness, you’re still with us. That’s unexpected.” She sounded genuinely astonished. He heard her drumming her fingers against her leg. Then she said, “Unexpected, but not unwelcome.”

  She might have been eighty years old, with a kind, wrinkled face, and hands that trembled with age as she laid them upon Shinobu’s body. She dug her fingers into him and, with a gasp of effort, rolled him onto his back. Shinobu was in too much pain to scream.

  Now that he could see her face better, he discovered her kind eyes had grown hard and businesslike. She was rifling around in his cloak. Her face was vaguely familiar to him; it brought to mind the fight on Traveler—though he didn’t remember seeing her on the airship.

  “I didn’t mean to throw you off the cliff. My aim and judgment are not the most accurate.” She spoke with the slight quaver of the very elderly, which was at odds with the steely undertone to her words. “But it’s just as well. You’ve been treating the boys far too gently.”

  “I…knock them about…tough…” he mumbled, though he wasn’t sure why he was trying to explain anything to this woman.

  She laughed. “You’ve knocked the boys about, have you? It seems to be working. They were following your orders. But to really make sure they listen, the Middle Dread would kill one of them every now and again. Now that I’ve nearly killed you, maybe we’ve made our point, eh? He created those boys to frighten people who annoyed him. That seems to have been in his nature—to frighten those who annoyed him. Perhaps he was entitled.” She was rambling in not-all-there fashion. “What did you want with these boys, anyway?”

  “Evildoers beware,” Shinobu muttered. It was the Seeker motto he and Quin used to throw about back when they believed they were training to be something noble.

  The woman laughed. “Indeed.”

  What had he wanted with them? The Middle Dread had created the Watchers as a small army to do his bidding. The Middle had been planning, for generations, to get rid of Seekers, and the Watchers had been made to help. Shinobu had only wanted them to protect Quin, but he’d fallen into the Middle Dread’s paranoia, hadn’t he?

  Through the haze of pain and the glare of the morning sun, which kept blinding him, Shinobu felt a wave of revulsion each time the woman’s hands brushed against him. At last she found something in one of his pockets and drew it out.

  “There we are. Smashed to bits. As it should be.”

  Shinobu managed to focus on what she was holding. It was his stone medallion. A network of deep cracks spiderwebbed through it.

  He painfully followed the woman with his eyes and watched her break the medallion into bits and throw them onto the ground. The interior of the stone disc was much more delicate and complicated than he’d imagined; he saw intricate patterns of interlocking pieces, all being torn apart as she destroyed it.

  “It was made for one person only, and it should not have survived his death. It should certainly not be in your hands. The arrogance astonishes me.” With the toe of her boot, she lightly kicked at Shinobu’s shoulder. It was a feeble, old-woman kick, but blinding pain shot down his arm anyway. “But you’re paying for it already, aren’t you?”

  “The boys…” Shinobu croaked, “they follow the medallion.”

  The old woman sighed. “They will have to follow mine now”—the quaver and the steel still both in her voice—“and you will be my muscle.” She squeezed one of his biceps, nearly sending him back into unconsciousness. When she was close, he could smell mothballs and peppermint.

  She looked up the cliff. “Come down here and get him,” she called. “A trained Seeker, who refuses to die.” She turned back to Shinobu. To him, lying in agony with the sun in his eyes, she was a shadow as she asked him, “What house are you from?”

  “Eagle…and dragon,” he mumbled.

  “Hm,” she answered.

  When the Watchers arrived and picked him up by his broken limbs, Shinobu blessedly passed out. His last thought was of Quin. If he died, which seemed rather likely, would anyone ever know she was standing all alone in the darkness There?

  No. No one would know. So I can’t die.

  Shinobu was calling her name. Quin heard him as clearly as if they were standing next to one another.

  All of Quin’s limbs jerked. She was falling! Then she was awake, lying on the ground in the castle ward.

  “Are you all right?” came a sleepy voice that was much closer than she’d expected. She turned her head and discovered Dex’s hood-covered head only inches from hers. Though he’d slept curled up inside the small rock shelter and Quin had slept outside on the ground under her cloak, she must have rolled closer while she was asleep.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, inching away, feeling the echoes of her dream.

  Dex shifted under his hood, and abruptly sat up, full of manic energy. “It’s nighttime, isn’t it? Time to practice!”

  —

  When Quin was up, heading to the center of the courtyard, her back to Dex, he made a faint clicking sound to alert her. Quin heard and dodged
, just as a rock sailed by inches from her head.

  “Good. You’re paying attention,” he said. The hood was still over his eyes, but he was smiling. He liked throwing things at Quin. It seemed to bring him back to life.

  “Name the weapon,” she said in a commanding voice, because she was training him as much as he was training her, and the more she took charge, the more she could steer him.

  “The one that…makes a pulse.”

  Quin sighed; he’d forgotten the names again. But he would remember by the time they were done.

  She slipped the weapon whose name he’d forgotten onto her hand. It was made of pale stone and even paler glass, and it was designed to slide past the user’s knuckles to rest on the body of the hand. She flicked it on, and at once it began to float around her right hand on an electrostatic field so strong that all the hairs on her arm and head stood slightly on end.

  “Television!” Dex called. “Low power. And I won’t go easy on you this time, I promise you that.”

  Quin laughed as she ducked around several heaps of rubble. Dex never went easy on her; each time was worse than the last.

  She’d spent a full day making piles of rocks throughout the castle courtyard. At the top of each pile was a target—something they’d salvaged from the estate—all rather beat up after several days of practice. This training was always at night, when Dex was less bothered by standing out in the open. Quin supposed nighttime reminded him of no-space.

  The television sat askew with a cracked screen, atop its own heap of rocks. Dex pelted her with stones as she neared it. When he threw, he threw for blood, and the missiles came whistling through the air with deadly accuracy. Quin twisted and weaved to avoid being hit, enjoying the sense of training again.

  When she fired the weapon, the force intensified around her arm, and the television flickered to life, a blue glow suffusing the cracked screen.