“You would fight the Dreads?” the Middle asked him, finally breaking his silence.
“Do I have a choice?” John responded.
The Old Dread made a tiny motion with his hands again, which seemed to say, Leave this to me. He brought his eyes back to John. “Return our athame and we will not harm you,” the old man said.
John could almost believe that the Old Dread meant it. He glanced toward the Young Dread. She was impossible to read, but he sensed she would follow the old one. Then he looked again at the Middle. In that man’s face, he saw nothing but his own death. He was quite sure that this Dread, and others like him, were the ones who had all but eradicated his house. John made up his mind.
“Thank you for your kind words,” he said.
With that, he threw the athame as hard as he could over the cliff. The dagger flew end over end through the air, then began a downward arc out of sight.
The Old Dread’s arms whipped up, pointing toward the falling athame in a gesture that ordered the other two to follow it. He needn’t have bothered—the Young and the Middle were already racing toward the edge of the cliff, searching for a path to the river below.
The Old Dread turned his eyes back to John, but he moved no closer. John didn’t wait to see what else the old man might do. He ran to the edge of the roof farthest from the cliff. From there, he lowered himself and dropped to the ground. It was a long way down, but he landed well. Scrambling to his feet, he sprinted toward the woods without looking back.
PART THREE
WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD
CHAPTER 48
SHINOBU
“I’m not running errands for you,” Shinobu said, elbowing his way through the crowd on the main Bridge thoroughfare. A few people turned to stare at him. “Does it look like I’m speaking to you?” he barked at them. When they turned away, a few frightened, more of them annoyed, he began muttering again. “Still on the Bridge, still running your errands. You promised me I’d be rid of you. Yet here I am.”
He was, in point of fact, speaking to Quin, though some part of him realized she was not actually present. He hadn’t bothered using the air mask that hung at the exit of the opium bar, and he was weaving dangerously between other pedestrians as he made his way toward Quin’s front door.
When he saw her house swimming crookedly across his field of view, looming among many such buildings in the middle section of the Bridge, he made an effort to steady himself. The Bridge authorities didn’t look kindly on intoxicated visitors walking around outside their designated areas.
“You’ve always taken me for granted,” he told Quin. His words were rather blurry, but since Quin was absent from the conversation, he was fairly sure she wouldn’t mind. “Asking for what you need. ‘Find my mother.’ ‘Save me from being killed.’ ‘Give me a shower.’ What about what I need?”
He lurched to a stop at Quin’s door and rested his head against the wood for a moment, just to help him stay upright. Then he knocked softly. What do I need? he wondered. After all, Quin had only asked him to let her mother know that she was all right. He’d done that days ago. But he’d continued staying at Quin’s house.
The door he was leaning against was abruptly pulled open, startling Shinobu, who had forgotten that he’d knocked. He fell through the doorway into Fiona’s arms, ending up down on one knee, with Fiona pulling him up by his shirt. She didn’t look very steady on her feet either.
“What about what I need?” he said to her.
“What do you need, Shinobu?” Fiona asked him. Her red hair was disheveled, hanging loose about her face. “Tell me.”
She got the door closed behind him, pulled Shinobu through the front room, and eased him down into a chair in Quin’s examination room, nearly losing her balance as she did so. The treatment table had been turned into a bed, with sheets and blankets, and Brian Kwon was lying there, much like a baby whale, still recovering from his injuries.
“What do I need?” Shinobu repeated, trying to remember how he had gotten from the front door to the chair. “I need …” He wasn’t sure. It was something to do with Quin. He remembered her body pushed up against his, his arms around her. He could still feel the imprint she had left upon him.
“You don’t need opium, that’s sure,” Fiona commented, her words slurring a bit. “You’ve had more than enough of that.”
He focused his eyes with great effort, looking around the dimly lit room with its shelves of herbs, and the giant form of Brian studying him from the bed.
“Only two pipes,” Shinobu told her.
“Your body tells a different tale.”
“It might have been twelve. A number with a two in it. Maybe twenty or twenty-two point two. Two hundred twenty-two …”
“Hmm,” Fiona said. She moved into the kitchen, attempting to tie her hair back as she did so. Then she busied herself making tea.
Brian was propping himself up on an elbow. “Be nice to her,” he said. “She’s … not feeling well.”
“She’s drunk.”
It had been three days since the fight on the lower levels, and the nasty cut on Brian’s shoulder was healing. His many broken ribs were wrapped tightly in a fashion that made him look like an enormous Chinese sausage.
“Sorry I didn’t bring you any, Sea Bass,” Shinobu said, assuming his failure to bring home drugs was why Brian was looking at him disapprovingly. “You know they don’t let you take pipes out of the bar. You must be dying for something.”
“I’m invited to Master Tan’s house for dinner,” Brian told him. “He says I can start walking more today.”
“Well, don’t expect any opium from him.”
Brian wasn’t laughing. “I’m not looking for opium. I have my tea.”
“Whatever you say, Sea Bass.”
Brian grimaced and swung his legs off the bed, so he was sitting on the edge. Very carefully he lowered one foot to the floor and then the other. His grimace deepened as he put his full weight onto his feet. But after a few moments in a vertical position he seemed all right.
“Not too bad today,” he muttered.
Shinobu watched him hobble across the room to his clothes, which were clean and folded on a nearby chair. With what looked like tremendous difficulty, Brian began pulling his shirt over his head. This involved many Chinese swearwords.
“Would you like some help?” Shinobu asked.
“I would not,” Brian responded. “You’d end up breaking more of my ribs.”
“That’s probably true.”
Fiona returned with tea, which she forced into Shinobu’s hands, sloshing some of it over the rim. With her help, Brian finally got all of his clothes on, shoes included, though Fiona seemed to make the process take longer. When he was dressed, Brian placed his feet gingerly one in front of the other and walked out of the room.
“Since you’re up now, I’ll bring you down to the lower levels tonight,” Shinobu called after him. “What do you say? Fiona can’t keep us locked up here forever.”
“What do you mean ‘locked up’?” Brian called back. “She doesn’t even want you here. You just keep showing up.”
“So you’ll come with me?”
“I’m done with opium.”
“Fine—I was thinking Ivan3 tonight anyway.”
Brian ignored him. With a jingle of bells, the front door opened, and before it swung shut, Shinobu heard him breathing heavily and cursing again as he walked off.
“Tea. Now,” Fiona ordered, pushing it toward his face.
Shinobu took a sip and then spit it back into the cup. It was one of those healthy concoctions Master Tan had been making for Brian.
“Where’s your tea?” he asked her.
Fiona looked daggers at him. She had put her hair up, but a large portion was still hanging down along one side of her face. “You will drink that tea or you will leave this house. And hopefully be arrested on your way off the Bridge.”
“Is it only tea for opium addicts? Not alcoholics?”
It seemed ridiculous for her to lecture him when she was too drunk to stand up straight.
“You’ve no need to call me that,” she said, making an attempt to speak clearly. “If I have a little something from time to time, whose business is that? You fill your body with all sorts of nasty things.”
“It’s the same,” he protested.
“It is not.”
“Your poison comes in a bottle. Mine comes in a pipe, or sticks, or needles. That’s the only difference.”
“It is not the same.” She was busying herself by making Brian’s bed, but the sheets were not cooperating. “You don’t see what I see. You don’t listen to things you’d rather not hear, do you?”
“I listen to things I’d rather not hear all the time,” he retorted. “Come visit my mother with me, and I’ll show you.”
“Your mother?” she asked, confused for a moment. Then she grabbed back on to her train of thought: “Do you have a daughter, Shinobu? A daughter who’s hidden her past but sees things in her dreams? What if when she sees those things, there’s the chance you’ll see them also? That you’ll know exactly the sorts of things she’s done? What sorts of things I’ve let her do?”
Shinobu watched Fiona as she finished making the bed. Strands of red hair continued to fall down around her face, but she was getting less drunk by the moment.
“You get to see what’s on the surface,” she went on. “You’ve never been married to Briac Kincaid, have you? If you had been, you wouldn’t want to see inside his mind, I promise you. You might have a few drinks to make the world nicer.”
Shinobu had no answer for her. She might be a drunkard, but … wasn’t she trying to be a good mother to Quin? He was still dizzy, so he obediently began to sip at the revolting tea.
There was a brisk knock on the front door. Fiona composed herself and walked out of the back room to answer it. Moments later, Shinobu heard official-sounding voices requesting access to the house. They were looking for a few young men who had been involved in a disturbance on the lower levels of the Bridge earlier in the week.
He could hear Fiona, in a calm and reasonable voice, her words hardly slurred at all, asking why they had chosen her house. Shinobu didn’t wait to hear the response. The idea that he might be arrested by the Bridge authorities sent him into a panic. Bridge officials were very strict, and though they couldn’t put him in jail, they could easily cut off his access to drugs—perhaps permanently.
He launched himself to his feet and went quietly up the stairs and out the balcony door. He never heard what was said next, because by the time he saw Fiona again, he was up in the rafters above her house, looking down at the Bridge thoroughfare from a dark perch inaccessible to anyone but a sewer rat like himself. His heart continued to beat frantically for a while. Being banned from the Bridge would make life quite unpleasant.
It was from this vantage point in the rafters that he watched Fiona leaving her house, still walking a bit unsteadily. She was surrounded by several men, two of whom had their arms linked with hers, almost like they were forcing Fiona to walk away with them. As he crouched in his hiding place and observed them moving out of sight, a small thought tickled at the back of his mind: That’s odd.
It was not until his opium fuzziness disappeared, hours later, that he realized several things. First, the men who had taken Fiona were not officials from the Bridge at all—they’d had no uniforms. Second, one of the men walking with Fiona had been John. Third, Shinobu had been staying at Fiona’s house with the idea of protecting her (though he hadn’t wanted to admit it), but he had soaked himself in drugs and had run away at the slightest hint of danger—not even danger to himself but to his ready supply of intoxicating substances.
These three things made something else quite clear: he, Shinobu MacBain, former Seeker, current Scottish-Japanese salvage diver and opium addict, might tell himself he was still a good person, but he was, in fact, a completely worthless human being. He made the wrong choices when it mattered most, and others were left to pay: victims dead on his assignments with Briac, Akio nearly killed, his father ravaged by those dancing sparks, and now Fiona captured, right under his nose.
CHAPTER 49
MAUD
The sun was setting. Pain bloomed in the Young Dread’s cheek as the Middle struck her across the face. She fell to her knees by the fire they had built near the ruins of the castle. She had chosen not to block the blow.
“Why did you help the girl?” the Middle asked. Before she could get up, he pushed her with his foot, sending her back to the ground. He was examining her as though she were a rat he was planning to slice apart very slowly.
“There is no need for anger,” her master said.
Her master was on the other side of the fire, tending to Briac Kincaid. Since coming fully awake, Briac had been in agony. The Old Dread had dug the bullets from Briac’s wounds, a procedure accompanied by great amounts of screaming. The Old was now packing the wounds with herbs they had gathered, and was binding them tightly with strips of cloth, while Briac continued to moan and thrash about.
She and the Middle had climbed down the steep path that led from the barn at the top of the cliff to the riverbank below. There, she had swum across to the far shore, where the athame had landed in thick silt, unharmed. Now they were by the ruined castle, where she had trained a hundred times over many hundreds of years, as the castle slowly fell to pieces and was swallowed by grass and soil.
The Middle Dread controlled his voice and asked again, “Why did you help the girl?”
She pulled herself up into a sitting position and wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth.
“She is not a girl,” the Young Dread told the Middle. “She is a sworn Seeker, the last possessor of her family’s athame, and she was in danger. Why would I not help her?”
Gently her master said, “Briac Kincaid is the oldest of their house. He considers he has a claim on the dagger.”
“We believe the athame ends up with whom it belongs, do we not?” she retorted.
With great effort, Briac pulled himself to a sitting position and looked at her across the fire. She saw only hatred in his hard eyes.
“No,” he said. “You interfered and gave her the lightning rod. You allowed her to leave with something that was mine.” He was fighting to control his voice through the pain. “The Dreads must retrieve it for me.”
“Do you understand?” the Middle asked her. “You have made an error. Because of that error, we must now recover Briac Kincaid’s athame and set things right.”
Again, the Middle Dread was coming to the aid of Briac Kincaid, bending the rules to suit him. The Young Dread wondered anew what secrets Briac was keeping for the Middle, what power Briac held over him. She herself knew of many unjust acts by the Middle, but Briac must know of more. She would wager that quite a few of those acts had been done by both together.
“Set things right?” the Young Dread scoffed. “Master, what is this word he uses?”
The Old Dread regarded her across the firelight, but said nothing.
“Are you a Dread?” the Middle asked. “Feared by Seekers for your justice? You have made an error and must correct it.”
“And you?” she asked. “Will you see to justice?”
He struck out at her with his heavy hand, but this time the Young did not wish to be hit. She moved aside, twisting sinuously away from him. Without conscious thought, her knife was in her hand, like magic. Her arm flashed out at the Middle. It clashed with his own knife, which had appeared in his hand. Both blades glowed orange in the firelight.
“Enough,” the Old Dread said.
The Young and the Middle froze, holding their blades still, but they did not put them away.
“Am I a person, Master?” she asked.
“A needless question, child,” he answered.
“Am I a person, or a possession?” she demanded. “Do I have a will?”
“You have a will,” her master said.
&nb
sp; “You gave me into the care of the Middle and told me to obey him.”
“Is that what I said, child?” The Old Dread’s words were soft.
Her knife struck out. The Middle met it with his own. Then his left hand stabbed forward, another knife suddenly appearing there.
The Middle had properly bandaged the wound across his chest, but he was still injured, and the Young hoped this would give her an advantage. She thrust her body to the side and slipped away, pulling a second knife from a sheath at her waist.
“The oath of the Dreads: to uphold the three laws and to stand apart from humanity, so our heads are clear to judge,” she said. “Master, do you know what happened to the Young Dread before me?”
The Middle slashed out at her with both hands. She blocked his weapons.
The Old Dread did not respond.
“Do you know what happened to the Young Dread before me?” she asked again. “And to John’s mother? Has the Middle told you that? It is always my oath of which he speaks. What about his own?”
The Middle made no reply. The Young Dread’s master, sitting on the other side of the fire, was equally silent. The Old Dread was regarding her quietly, and the Young Dread realized her master knew, or at least suspected, the things the Middle Dread had done in his absence. How could he not? He read the Young’s mind as easily as he breathed. He must see inside the Middle’s mind as well.
She had been overjoyed to find her master on the estate, sure that he would finally make things right with the Middle. But he knew what the Middle was, it seemed, and did nothing to stop him. In a flash of understanding, she realized the Old, her good master, was tied to the Middle somehow.
But she was not.
“Let me kill him!” she said.
There was no response from her master. And at this moment, his silence in itself meant something. If the Old Dread did not order them to stop, there was nothing to prevent her. She could remove the Middle from her life. She could repay him for so many injustices …