Seeker

The Young Dread could not take her eyes off her master’s face. He had shaved his beard and cut his hair, and the change was almost unfathomable. Somehow her master, who had, she suspected, been born so long ago that he’d seen the Romans in Britain, now looked like he belonged in this uncomfortable and crowded modern age in which they found themselves.

True, he had put on different clothes. Instead of his monk’s robe, he wore trousers and a sweater, with modern shoes that looked to her quite painful. She herself had been given shoes and also a dress to wear. The shoes were intensely uncomfortable, and the dress hung about her slender frame awkwardly, giving her the appearance of a panther forced into a costume.NôvelDrama.Org: text © owner.

But it was more than the shaved face or clothing that made her master different. Something about the way he moved had changed as well. Even his voice was altered. He was speaking to the nurse, and his words nearly matched hers. He was even using the strange medical terms the Young Dread had heard so often when she lay in a hospital room like this one, recovering from the Middle’s knife. He had been stretched out for hundreds of years and had woken only a few days ago, when Quin had pulled him from There and into the estate. Where had her master learned to speak this way?

The Old Dread and the nurse were discussing Briac Kincaid, who lay in the hospital bed, his leg and shoulder stitched and bandaged. The Young followed enough of the conversation to understand that Briac would mend perfectly well, given time. The doctors had even put something into his wounds that would heal them quickly from the inside. This did not please her. His moaning and thrashing had given her hope that the wounds would be fatal.

The Middle was standing in the far corner of the room, his arms folded, his cloak hanging from his shoulders. He’d allowed the cut across his chest to be stitched up, but he had changed nothing about his appearance. He looked rough and wild in the ordered surroundings of the hospital.

Eventually the nurse was done speaking to the Old Dread, and with a few final words to Briac himself, and a nervous glance at the Middle, she left the room.

“You will remain here,” the Old Dread told Briac, his mannerisms transforming him, as he spoke now, back into the master she had always known. Somehow he could switch seamlessly between the ancient and the modern, like an actor pulling on different masks. “We will return for you when it is done. And then you shall have—”

The Old cut himself off. His hand went to the inner pocket of his overcoat, where the athame was hidden.

After a moment, the Young could feel the vibration as well. It was growing stronger. Somewhere in the world, Quin Kincaid was using her athame. The Old Dread’s athame, after the ritual in the cavern, would now shake in unison whenever Quin’s dagger was struck.

The Middle, who’d been as still as a piece of furniture all this time, slid into motion, crossing the room and pushing the door shut.

The Old drew the athame from his coat and held it lightly in his hands. The vibration intensified, until it had filled the room and the door began to shudder. Through the window panels into the hall, which themselves were vibrating, the Young saw medical personnel putting hands to their ears as the tremor reached them.

The Old was holding the stone dagger in front of his body, balanced on his palms. After a minute, the vibration began to fade.

“She has gone There,” the Young Dread’s master said.

It was the next vibration, the second one, for which they must wait. That second shaking, as Quin struck her athame and stepped from There back into the world, would tell them where on Earth she had emerged.

The Young Dread knew it might be some time before Quin reentered the world. Getting lost There was one of the chief hazards of using an athame. Even veteran Seekers could find their minds wandering, then floating, then frozen into absolute stillness if they didn’t carefully maintain their mental focus. Seekers used a time chant to achieve this focus, but even with such aids, athame was a perilous method of travel. Quin was still a novice, and the risk of losing herself as she stepped between—for a short while or a long while—was quite real.

It was two hours before the athame came to life again, a duration the Young Dread found impressively brief for a Seeker so inexperienced—Quin’s mental control must be very good.

The Dreads had remained in the hospital room all the while. By then, night was falling. Nurses had come and gone, noticeably frightened by the Middle’s stare. The three Dreads stood with their backs to the door, holding the athame between them as it began to vibrate a second time. The Young, the Old, and the Middle positioned their fingers around the dials.

The second tremor was much, much stronger than the first. It engulfed the room immediately, and a moment later panicked voices could be heard in the corridor outside. The shuddering of walls was disrupting medical equipment in neighboring rooms. Down the hall, a pane of glass broke.

Within the greater shaking, there were small, intense echoes through the athame’s dials. The Old called out the name of two symbols, indicating that he had felt those vibrate more strongly than the others. The Young called out another two, and the Middle a third set.

The tremor ended, resonating in their ears for a moment longer, then disappearing completely. The Old replaced the athame into the pocket of his overcoat, then picked up a pen and paper from the side table near Briac’s bed. To the Young Dread, he appeared to become a modern man again as he put the pen to the paper and quickly wrote out the six symbols they had spoken aloud.

Her master studied the paper, then held it up for the others to see. Together, the symbols were a set of coordinates—the location into which Quin and her athame had just emerged.

“London,” he said.

“She’s going to John,” Briac responded from the bed. His words were drowsy, but he was pulling himself up to a sitting position.

There was a look in his eyes, a brightness there, that the Young Dread didn’t like. Briac did not simply want his athame back—he was eager for revenge.

Briac turned to the Old Dread and asked, “Do you know about John’s home?”