Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Shinobu got to his feet as quickly as he could and learned that his bones were much more solid after a day of sleep, though not much less painful. If he continued to heal at this rate, most of his strength would be back in another day or two. “Come!” he called, and he began rounding up the Watchers from the corners of the fortress.

  He watched Maggie sidelong as he skirted the broken floor. She seated herself next to Nott, who was on the flagstones, holding his badly broken left arm against his chest. With his right hand he was feeling about in the dark and whispering, “Aelred? Aelred?” but when he noticed Maggie, Nott fell silent.

  “Why did you leave John?” she asked the boy. “Was he angry at you? Did he send you away?”

  Nott’s face darkened. “I left, my choice. He said he would train me if I wanted.”

  Shinobu ushered the last pockets of Watchers out of the fortress, but his eyes kept returning to Maggie.

  “I might have been too harsh today,” the old woman was saying to Nott as her hand gripped the controller. “When John has cooled off, he’ll want to come back. It’s natural that we finish this together. Could you find your way back to him?”

  Nott looked cautious. “W-why?”

  “The person who convinced John to come to me would deserve his own helm. For him alone to keep.”

  Shinobu didn’t need to see the desperate hope that flared up in Nott’s eyes to know that the boy would agree to this absolutely.

  “How would I do that?” the boy asked.

  “Ask him to fix your arm. He obviously has a soft heart.”

  “It’s getting hard to breathe,” Quin said. Her outstretched fingertips brushed the walls of the stone passage on either side. “Couldn’t we have used your medallion to get straight through this?”

  Just ahead of her, Dex answered, “We could have, but it’s a relief to be somewhere like this. We’ve been outside for days.”

  “The fresh air was certainly becoming a hardship,” Quin agreed wryly.

  “You’re making fun of me.” He sounded not the least offended. “I permit it,” he said airily. “You may laugh at me all you want.”

  They’d passed through the old crypt of the castle ruins, where the tombs of Scottish lords from centuries past—Quin’s ancestors—lay in rows, some buried by pieces of the castle itself. Quin had been there before. She and Shinobu used to dare each other to go as far inside as they could before becoming terrified and running back out into the sunlight.

  The crypt ended in a wall of rock, or so Quin had thought. Dex had shifted a slab of stone out of the way and continued on past it, into these narrow steps taking them down into the ground.

  Dex had a bright white flare in his hand that acted as their flashlight as the passage led steeply downward and got narrower with every yard they traveled. She suspected the light was mostly for her. Dex could see in the dark as well as a cat.

  “Would you like to hear more of the story?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Dex treated his hodgepodge story as something personal, but Quin was increasingly sure it was a glimpse of Seeker history—a legend, with errors and exaggerations, of course, but a story with kernels of truth. Her father had avoided teaching her history. But Dex, in his disjointed way, was filling in some of the gaps. And at the moment, she needed a distraction; the sense of earth hanging heavily just above her head was becoming overpowering.

  “Where we’re going is part of the story,” Dex told her. “It became the father’s workshop, the place to keep the inventions that were the most delicate or the most dangerous. Desmond and Matheus came here all the time. It was their workshop and playroom. It’s where they began inventing things themselves.”

  They were passing now through a tunnel with an arched ceiling of rough stones that hung just above Quin’s head. Dex had to stoop over, but, if anything, this inconvenience seemed to lighten his mood even more. The darker and more cramped the space became, the happier he got.

  “The boys invented things too?”

  “The younger one, mostly. Are you sure you’ve never heard of him? I thought maybe he was famous. First he and his father made the focal. Do you call it that too? The metal helmet to help you focus your thoughts?”

  “I call it that, though I only learned the name a few weeks ago. My father left some important bits out of my training.”

  “They needed the focal, or they were going to get lost again,” Dex explained, as if that were so obvious it hardly bore mentioning.

  He and Quin had reached the end of the low tunnel. There was a jagged opening here that led deeper into the earth. Dex squeezed through first, maneuvering his large frame with more grace than might be expected in such tight quarters. Quin followed. On the other side there were more stairs, and the walls of bare, carved earth were so close that she could barely walk without her arms brushing both sides. She was battling the sense of being buried alive.

  “Were they Seekers, way back then?” she asked. “They knew how to go There—to no-space?”

  “Of course they knew how to go to no-space,” Dex answered. “That was the start of everything. Have you never heard this story? What did they teach you before you took your oath?”

  “Not enough, clearly.”

  “The father explained the functions they needed from the focal, and Desmond helped him design it. He was fourteen then, and knew most things his father knew, even though the England of the Dark Ages wasn’t the best classroom.”

  Quin had been thinking the passageway might narrow until it crushed them, but at last it began to open up. Even as the steps curved more steeply into the earth, the walls retreated on either side.

  Dex said, “Once they had the focal to focus their thoughts, Matheus thought they should create the opposite sort of device. He said, if they could make something that brought all of your thoughts together, couldn’t they also make something that would send your thoughts off in every direction?”

  The stairs curved in a full circle. Quin felt the air changing around her, flowing more freely. She was more relieved than she cared to admit.

  “Their father laughed at Matheus and asked what good that would do. Why would anyone want to scatter their thoughts?” Dex sighed. “That was a mistake. Matheus was seventeen by then, taller and stronger than his father. He behaved respectfully, but he didn’t like being laughed at. Any ridicule stung him deeply. When their father was gone for a few weeks, Matheus convinced Desmond to make the thought-scattering device anyway.”

  “You mean a disruptor? You’re saying a child made the disruptor? When he was fourteen—”

  She broke off midsentence. They’d come to the bottom of the steps, and a cavern opened up before them. Dex raised his flare and made it shine more brightly so that white light flooded the space. The cavern was huge. The roof of rock was ten yards above their heads, wet from a steady flow of water through the earth. As Quin’s eyes adjusted to the size of the space, she saw tunnels radiating off from the central chamber, until they faded into darkness.

  The cave looked natural, but a nearby stretch of wall bore the marks of human carvings. Quin was drawn toward these carvings, past Dex, who stood unmoving at the base of the stairs. The carved figures were the emblems of the nine Seeker houses, forming a large circle on an expanse of stone that had been smoothed by hand. The tenth carving, at the very top, was the three interlocking ovals of the Dreads. The light of the flare was not as steady as a flashlight, and the figures danced in her vision as she studied them. When she came to the ram, her own family’s symbol, she touched it reverently. If Dex’s story was a piece of Seeker lore, then this cavern was surely a location out of the same ancient lore.

  “How old are these carvings?”

  “Very,” came Dex’s answer. He remained at the bottom of the stairs, his face expressionless.

  Next to each emblem were small, deep holes with a slight diamond shape. She traced several of them with her fingers before she recognized their dimensions and guessed thei
r purpose.

  “Athames go here?” she whispered. The hollows were just the right size to receive the blade of an athame.

  There was no answer from Dex, and when the flare shifted and dimmed dramatically, she turned to see him on the floor, his knees to his chest. When she got back to him, he was trembling violently.

  “What is it?”

  Dex raised his head just enough to stare into the dark corners of the space, as though they were closing in upon him. His eyes held animal fear. “I die here, Quilla.”

  They were alone, of course, but his certainty shook her. What secrets did this cavern conceal? She retrieved the flare, looked around the huge space and back up the stairs.

  “It’s just us here, Dex. I promise.”

  He shook his head against his knees. “No, that’s not true.” He closed his eyes tightly, as if forcing an image away. Without warning, he grabbed the flare and rose to his feet.

  “Come,” he said. His jaw had set into a hard line. He guided Quin, a firm hand on her back, toward a subsidiary tunnel branching off to their right. Inside the smaller shaft, there was a lower roof and closer walls, and when Dex had led Quin down the passage for a few dozen paces, the flare revealed broken stone-and-mortar steps leading steeply upward. At the top of the steps, set into the rocky ceiling, was a trapdoor of dressed stone.

  “We’re going up there?”

  “Just you,” Dex said, pushing the flare into her hand.

  “Why—”

  “Please, Quilla.” His eyes implored her not to argue. “I followed the string in the labyrinth, and it led me here. The next part I must do on my own.”

  She looked back down the smaller tunnel toward the yawning cavern. “But—how will you see?”

  “I’ll call you back when I’ve remembered. I promise.”

  She started up the stairs. Dex was already walking away into the echoing darkness of the cavern.

  “My mother found the fox athame here.”

  John’s words came back to him with a slight echo, and he could hear the sense of awe in his own voice. He’d pieced together much of his mother’s history, but here was a place she’d actually been, a place that had changed the course of her life.

  The underground room was round, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. There were waterlines on the walls, dead seaweed everywhere, and a smell of salty decay. He and Maud were seated on a shelf that circled the whole room at chest height and was broken only by a tunnel that lead away—probably to the world outside. But they had not come here through the tunnel as Catherine had. They’d followed coordinates his mother had carefully written with small, neat pen strokes in her journal, and they’d arrived into the very center of the chamber. They were, according to her notes, deep under the medieval island city of Mont Saint-Michel.

  A fox head was carved into the wall near John, the twin of the smaller carving on his athame. It marked the cave as the domain of the fox Seekers. For the first time, seeing this place, he felt that he belonged to a family larger than himself and his mother. There had been many fox Seekers, going back for generations.

  The Young Dread trained the flashlight low above the ledge, where neat figures had been cut or melted into the stone:

  67

  24

  9

  100

  Just as they had anticipated: another Seeker cave, another set of clues.

  “Two hundred paces, and we’ll find the Seekers from your own house, John.”

  “We would have figured out the instructions sooner if we’d come here first,” he pointed out. “The symbols for right and left are so obvious. Maybe the Middle Dread was getting lazy by the time he took out the foxes.” In other caves, the notations had been more cleverly masked.

  “It’s hard to mistake an arrow,” Maud agreed. “But you would have to know where you were meant to take these paces. We didn’t know until we found Nott.”

  John wrote the numbers into his mother’s journal, below the coordinates for the chamber. “That’s six we’ve found.”

  They’d returned to the desert cave by the Skeleton Coast, home of the bear Seekers; they’d found a man-made cave in the woods of Scotland, belonging to the horse Seekers; and of course they’d already discovered the carved instructions in the frozen tunnel in Norway—which they’d used to rescue the boar Seekers. Then they’d found the cave of the eagles, Shinobu’s family, in Iceland, and the cave of the rams, Quin’s family, in the mountains of Patagonia in South America. Both had been beautiful, but the cave of the rams had been a breathtaking series of interconnected chambers of natural marble in pastel blues and yellows and greens, open to the dawn sky. John wondered if Quin even knew that place existed, and if she would ever forgive him enough to let him tell her about it.

  He still didn’t know what he should feel for his mother’s enemies. Yet he’d decided his course, and there was relief in being decided. He was going to retrieve all of the Seekers from the hidden dimensions. He, not Maggie, would choose their fate.

  “We go to the dragon house next,” he said, flipping through the journal.

  The Young Dread’s eyes lingered in the center of the chamber, and she appeared not to hear him.

  “Have you been here before?” he asked.

  “Yes, when I was very young.”

  There was an unusual quality to her response, which John recognized as nostalgia—the most human expression he’d ever heard from her. She ran the light over the ceiling and walls, in case there was anything else for them to see. Only stones and dried seaweed looked back at them, yet it was clear she wasn’t eager to leave.

  “I might have been nine years old,” she said, “though I have never been sure of my age.”

  Maud glanced at him, self-conscious to be speaking of herself. She pulled her feet up beneath her so that she was crouching on the narrow shelf, on which she took a few steps sideways, positioning her body exactly.

  “I stood just here. Halfway between the tunnel opening and the carving of the fox. The center of the chamber was full of seawater, almost up to this ledge.”

  “The seawater came all the way in?” John asked.

  “The outer entrance to the tunnel must have been lower then, because the ocean came in with the high tide. The water swirled and foamed and was pulled into and out of the passage when waves rolled in.”

  As she remembered, John saw glimpses of her human face appear behind the veil of a Dread.

  “My master stood here.” She touched the wall at her side. “Still and straight, as he always was then. There were lanterns hung all over the roof.” She pointed here and there where the ceiling met the walls, and now John could see the hooks carved out of the natural rock, where one could suspend a lantern. “Ten Seekers from the house of the fox stood along the shelf, there, waiting and watching the water. I kept entirely still. My master had told me to observe quietly, as a Dread must.”

  Through the Young Dread’s eyes, John saw the seawater pouring through the tunnel into the cavern, lips of foam jumping over the edge of the shelf to make Maud’s feet wet.

  “They began to arrive,” she told him, entirely lost in the memory as she stared at the empty center of the chamber. “We could feel the vibration through the water and rock. Moments later the children were here, swimming up through the ocean water. Their heads came above the surface, and they were gasping—it was very cold. The adults on the ledge caught their arms and pulled them up. There were four children, no older than I was then, standing where you are now, dripping and smiling.

  “Their instructor came up through the water after the children and climbed up beside them. He was a young man with a shaggy beard and fierce eyes—or I thought so at the time. He’d cut an anomaly straight to the center of this chamber, just as you and I did, John, but the room was full of water. He cut into the water itself, and he and his students had swum out of the hidden dimensions and into this cave.

  “It was the initiation ceremony for the children. They pledged themselves to the
ir training and became Seeker apprentices that day.”

  After a few moments, she pulled her gaze out of the memory and looked at John.

  “Every house held their ceremonies in a different way. Sometimes they would invite my master to attend. He only watched silently, as I did, but he loved his Seekers.” She smiled warmly, startling John. There was the human girl in her, more clear than ever. The ravages of her time There were melting away.

  “Next cave?” she asked.

  They’d made a list, from Catherine’s journal and from the Young Dread’s memory, of all nine caves belonging to Seeker houses. When they found instructions for all nine, they would be able to locate every Seeker left There by the Middle Dread and bring them back to the world.

  John drew out his athame and lightning rod to take himself and Maud away from this place where his ancestors had gathered for hundreds of years. But he was still thinking about the childish expression he’d seen on Maud’s face.

  He asked her, “When you saw the other children, were you curious about their lives?”

  He recalled how much he’d envied ordinary children on the streets of London when he was a child. He’d loved his mother desperately, and yet he’d wondered so many times what life would be like without the pressures she’d lived under.

  The Young Dread shook her head. “I didn’t like the Middle Dread at all. But I wouldn’t have traded my life with my master for anything. With him, I floated above the world instead of walking through it.”

  In the light of the flare, Quin had come face to face with her own ancestors. They were painted on the stone wall, partially obscured by dead vines.

  She’d crawled up through the trapdoor from the cavern below, which had let her into this odd, curving passageway. When she’d seen the faces on the wall, though, she knew this was not the first time she’d been here. This was the place she and Shinobu had found by accident when they were six years old—though they had explored very little of it at the time. It was built into the foundations of the castle and wrapped around its northern perimeter. Somehow Dex had taken her more deeply into the heart of the estate than she’d ever managed to go on her own.