But if it turned out their science was wrong, and messengers weren’t needed after all—that the Shadows weren’t needed—it would be like yanking the cornerstone out from under a tower. The whole vast construct could come crashing down. That was why they wanted the Dreamwalkers dead, I realized suddenly. All the other reasons I’d been given were bullshit. This was why they’d wiped us all out centuries ago, and why they’d established rules about hunting down any new Dreamwalkers who were born. But did the people who were hunting us today know why they were doing it? Or had centuries of propaganda and misdirection obscured the true story, so that even the most fanatical Shadows didn’t remember why they wanted us dead? From the few things people had told me about the ancient dreamers—or not told me—it sounded like that might be the case.
I looked back at Rita. Her eyes had stopped twitching, and she was sleeping so soundly now. So peacefully. I couldn’t tell her about this yet. I couldn’t tell anyone about it.
I needed time to think first.
I looked down at the toaster strudel that was still in my hand—now crushed beyond recognition—and I suddenly started laughing and crying, all at once. This was my symbol of revelation: a ruined breakfast cake. How appropriate.
Thank you, little brother. You have no idea what you gave me tonight. Thank you.
12
SHADOWCREST
VIRGINIA PRIME
ISAAC
THE DEAD WERE RESTLESS.
Lying in his bed in the darkness, Isaac could sense them in his bedroom. Moans and cries and whispers echoed just below the threshold of his hearing, and whenever a spirit drew close he could feel its presence, like prickly pressure on his skin. Sometimes there were so many of them surrounding him that he felt claustrophobic.
He was starting to be able to sense their emotions. Not that the dead were supposed to have real emotions. The Shadowlords taught that ghosts were merely echoes of human souls, that death robbed a man not only of his physical substance but also of his capacity for passion. But Isaac wasn’t buying it. Sometimes he could sense the emotions of the spirits that were near him, and they felt totally human. Rage, despair, frustration, resentment . . . it was a dark and disturbing—but utterly human—repertoire.
Besides, if they had no feelings, why did one hear sounds of human suffering whenever they were nearby? His teachers said it was just a reflex, like when you cut the tentacles off an octopus, and they kept on twitching. The wailing of the dead was like that. Postmortem twitching. Yes, it was hard to accept now, when his Gift was still immature, but they assured him that once he underwent First Communion he’d see that it was true. Until then, he would just have to take it on faith.
Tonight the dead were thick as flies in his room, and he pulled the blanket over his head, even though he knew it would do nothing to shut them out. The sounds of the spirit world weren’t physical in nature, and merely blocking his ears wouldn’t stop him from hearing them. They seemed unusually agitated tonight. Maybe the Shadowlords had committed some new atrocity that upset them. Isaac thought back to the ritual he had witnessed and shuddered. The look in Jacob’s eyes as he died was seared into Isaac’s brain. He would do anything to forget it.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the ghostly murmuring ceased. Startled, he came out from under the blanket and looked around. He couldn’t see anything, but he could sense that spirits nearest him had drawn back. The space around his bed felt empty now.
Why?
The temperature in the room dropped slightly as a new spirit entered. This one was more substantial than the others, a complete human soul rather than a mere fragment of consciousness. It was rare for that type of spirit to be wandering around Shadowcrest, Isaac knew. The bound servants of the Shadows generally stayed close by their masters, while free spirits avoided this place like the plague.
Isaac stiffened as the spirit approached the bed. In theory it couldn’t do him physical harm, but as a mere apprentice he had limited power to banish the dead, so he was wary. But the spirit came to the foot of his bed and just stopped there. Maybe it was making some attempt to communicate, that he couldn’t hear. Maybe it was just watching him.
The situation made his skin crawl.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want?” That’s how one was supposed to deal with spirits: firmly and authoritatively. Death robbed a soul of initiative and left it highly suggestible. If you gave it an order in a forceful manner it was likely to obey you.
The spirit made no sound. It didn’t move.
“Why are you here?” Isaac pressed.
A cold breeze gusted across his face. He could sense the ghost reaching out to him, as if to make physical contact. Instinctively he drew back from it, until the headboard behind him put a stop to his retreat.
Then the spirit began to speak. Isaac could make out a few scattered words but not enough to figure out what it was saying. That was the curse of his immature Gift: to sense the speech of the dead but not be able to hear it clearly. If he concentrated hard enough, could he do better? It was worth a try. Gathering all his mental energy, he focused his concentration on the spirit. He knew the technique that was required, and tried to envision the spirit standing before him, to give it substance in his mind. He channeled all his strength of will into the effort—
—And suddenly he saw those eyes again, the terrified bloodshot eyes of a young boy in the process of being slaughtered. No body was visible—just the eyes—but Isaac could smell Jacob’s blood as it flowed across the granite altar, he could smell the stink of sweat and the fear that filled the room, he could hear the chanting of the Shadowlord who held the knife—
Gasping, he jerked backward, slamming into the headboard. The vision dispersed, but the sense of fear in the room remained. He was trembling now, and it was hard for him to force the words out. “You’re . . . you’re . . . Why are you here? What do you want?”
But if there was any answer, he lacked the ability to understand it. Maybe Jacob had come to find out why Isaac had done nothing to save him. “I had no power to change anything,” he offered. “They just brought me there to watch.” Would he have saved the boy if he could have? He’d never asked himself the question before. Until tonight it hadn’t seemed to matter.
The chill that had accompanied the spirit’s arrival began to fade, and with a start Isaac realized that the boy’s ghost was leaving the room. Why? Had Isaac told him what he wanted to know, or was the wraith just giving up in frustration now that it understood the limits of Isaac’s Gift? Maybe it had expected him to be able to communicate with it like the Shadowlords did.
He remembered how the boy had locked eyes with him while dying. Was it possible the connection between them had compromised the ritual somehow, so that the bond between this newly created spirit and its mistress wasn’t all that it should be? If so, did that mean the boy’s spirit was a free agent? Or just poorly bound? Isaac wished he knew enough about how the ritual worked to guess at the answer. Frustrated, he stared into the darkness as the spirit withdrew, cursing the weakness of his Gift. He tried to invoke some kind of vision again, but whatever spark had made that possible the first time was gone.
And then the spirit was gone.
All that remained in the room were questions.
13
BLACKWATER MOUNTAINS
VIRGINIA PRIME
JESSE
THE RACCOON SHOWED UP SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT. At first only its eyes were visible, two tiny spots of reflected moonlight glinting at me from among the trees. They were low to the ground, so at first I just figured they belonged to some small animal, and I wasn’t worried. But when it saw me looking back at it, the raccoon turned and scampered into the woodland shadows. Its bushy ringed tail twitched into the moonlight just long enough for me to identify its species. For a moment—one sweet innocent moment—I thought it was a raccoon, and only a raccoon.
&nbs
p; Then I realized the truth.
I went over to Rita and nudged her. “Hey. Hey. Get up.”
The urgency in my voice must have triggered her innate survival instinct, because as soon as her eyes opened she was sitting upright with knife in hand, looking around the clearing for something to stab. “What? What is it?”
“I saw a raccoon.”
She looked at me as if I had just announced I was from Mars. “A raccoon? Seriously?” The hand holding the knife lowered, and she snorted. “Hardly nature’s great killing machine, Jess.”
I took out the fetter that Seyer had given me and showed it to her. I’d strung it on a cord so I could wear it like a necklace. It was a copper disk with a symbol on one side that looked like a hashtag, only at right angles and with four bars running in each direction. A crudely etched wolf was on the other side.
When she still didn’t make the connection I said, “Wards off wildlife, remember?”
Somewhere there was a person whose Gift allowed him to influence the minds of animals. A Weaver had bound a trace of his mental energy to this item, so that for as long as we had it with us, beasts would not approach. Any and all animal brains would be affected.
Animal brains.
“Shit!” Suddenly Rita got it, and from the way she stared intently into the woods I knew that she was thinking the same thing I was. We weren’t equipped to deal with Soulriders. “Shit.”
“We’ll have to sleep in shifts from now on,” I said. Not like that would help us much if Hunters attacked in force.
She looked up at me. “Does that mean you want to sleep now? ’Cause I can take a turn at watch if you want.”
“No.” I sighed. “I’m way too wound up for that. I just wanted you to know what was going on, so if I did have to wake you up to deal with this you’d be prepared.” I looked in the direction the raccoon had fled, but there was no motion visible. Even the night breeze was still. “It isn’t here,” I said quietly.
“What?” Rita looked confused. “Oh . . . you mean Morgana’s artifact? Did you dream about where it was?”
“I dreamed where it wasn’t.” I sighed heavily. “We’re in the wrong place, Rita.”
She exhaled in a hiss. “So what, then? This whole trip was a waste?”
I looked out over the forest. We were high on a hillside, and the moonlight provided a clear view of miles of wooded land, all of it looking pretty much the same. The Seers’ Gift allowed them to pick up impressions from people’s minds, right? So if something was emanating Dreamwalker energy so strongly that Morgana’s people had sensed it from halfway across the state, maybe the source wasn’t an artifact. Maybe it was human, and we should search for clues where there was human activity. To the south it was possible to see a faint light in the distance, if you squinted just right. A pale blue glow peeking out between the trees. “What’s down there?”
She peered in that direction. “Not sure. Let me get out my tourist guide . . . oh, wait, that’s right, I don’t have one.”
Smartass. “I think we should look down there.”
“Like, right now?”
“Like, when there’s enough light to see by. Duh.”
“We’ll have to signal Seyer that we’re planning to spending another day in the field.”
We were supposed to use the fetter Seyer had given me to signal her once a day, to let her know we were still okay, and that we were staying in the forest of our own free will. But we didn’t have to tell her why we were staying, or what we planned to do, just let her know we were still all right.
Thank God I told my family I’d be gone for a whole week. We still had time before anyone back home started worrying.
Seyer was the one who had suggested that, I realized suddenly. She must have known back on Terra Colonna that Morgana was planning to send us on this quest. It was all contrived, from the start. Damn. Was this how a pawn felt when it first realized it was standing on a chessboard? Did it look down at the squares surrounding it and think, Shit, now I’m really in for it?
Rita lay back down again. “I’m going to try to get some more sleep, if that’s possible.” She shut her eyes for a moment, then said, “It could just be that the fetter’s not working. In which case, the only thing we need to worry about are bears.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Got that.” I’d rather deal with bears than Hunters, any day.
I kept watch till dawn, but the raccoon never came back.
Our maps indicated there was a chasm nearby, heading in the right direction, so we decided to follow it by way of a landmark. I marked a few trees as we hiked, as backup, but that turned out not to be necessary. Soon we came across a packed dirt road with a ribbon of scrub down its center; clearly a carriage trail. It was heading toward the area we wanted to explore, probably connecting it to the main road that ran along the ridgetop to our west. We followed it downhill, alert for any sounds of people approaching. But the one time someone came our way, the clopping of hooves and the creaking of carriage springs warned us in plenty of time, and we were able to hide in the brush before they reached us.
Eventually we got to a place where we could see that the road ended a short distance ahead, with an open plain beyond. There seemed to be buildings there, and maybe a fence, but we didn’t want to get too close while we were out in the open. So we headed back into the deep woods and crept carefully toward it. When we got to the place where the underbrush gave way to open land we lay full length upon the ground and let the vegetation close over our heads, parting the leaves with our hands just enough to peer between them.
The area ahead of us was large, treeless, and bounded by a tall chain link fence with barbed wire at the top. Short, scraggly grass covered most of the ground, with a small stand of trees in its center. There were a few wooden cabins at one end of the enclosure—including two large ones with barred windows—and a big cinderblock structure at the other. Tables and benches of weathered wood were strewn about the enclosure, more like an afterthought than a decorating feature, and in the far corner was a long building that looked like a stable, with a small carriage parked in front of it.
Inside the fenced enclosure were children. Lots of children. Boys and girls of all ages, wearing loose clothes of unpatterned cotton and simple canvas sandals that made them look interchangeable. All of them had their hair cropped close to their heads, and they looked dazed and listless. Some were sitting on the grass or on the benches, unnaturally still, just staring into space. Others were walking around with no clear purpose or destination, shuffling along with the kind of spiritless resignation I’d once seen in animals in a small zoo, where cramped, featureless cages had sucked the life out of them.
To say that the place made my skin crawl would be an understatement.
“Not exactly high security,” Rita whispered.
“Huh?”
“No sentry post. No observation platform. The lock on the main gate looks pretty basic. Probably easy to jimmy.” She pointed to the only guard in sight, a middle-aged man who looked more bored than dangerous. “Rent-a-cop. Token presence.”
“There’s barbed wire,” I pointed out.
“To discourage people from climbing out. Maybe to keep animals from climbing in. It looks more like an animal pen than a prison.”
That was uncomfortably close to my own thoughts. “You think maybe they’re patients of some kind?”
“Hospitals don’t have bars on the windows,” she pointed out.
“Some mental hospitals do.”
Suddenly I saw a figure I recognized, at the far end of the enclosure. Startled, I squinted to bring her into focus. She’d been a small and wiry child when Rita and I first met her, and she’d worn her blond hair cropped close to her head even then, so she hadn’t changed much. As soon as she turned my way I knew who it was.
“Moth,” I whispered.
Rita fol
lowed my gaze; her eyes grew wide as she spotted the girl. “From the Warrens?”
The last we’d heard about the children living in Luray’s sewer system, city officials had been planning to raid the place, and we’d assumed they intended to exterminate them. But this was a world where homeless children had market value, and Moth’s presence here suggested that some of the orphans might have been rounded up for sale, rather than killed. Sold to cover the cost of the raid.
So what was Moth doing here? What was this place? She was wandering aimlessly, her eyes downcast, moving slowly toward the fence on the far side of the enclosure. I watched for a minute, then slipped out of the straps of my backpack, “I’m going to talk to her.”
It took me forever to scrunch and crawl my way around the compound without being seen, but Rita had been right about the security. No one inside the compound was paying attention to anything going on outside. I managed to locate a spot with good cover near the fence and laid down in it, waiting for Moth to come close enough that I could risk talking to her. At last, when she was only a few yards away, I whispered, “Psst! Moth!”
Startled, she turned in my direction. I raised up my head just far enough for her to see who I was, then ducked down into the shrubbery again. “Look away,” I whispered sharply. “Pretend there’s no one here.”
I could see a tiny spark of life come into her eyes, and it made my heart ache. I remembered the feisty little blond who challenged us so boldly when we’d first arrived on Terra Prime. It was hard to imagine what kind of misery could have turned such a firebrand into the listless creature I saw now. But hiding from people was second nature to her, and as she slowly approached the fence she pretended to be watching the other children. It was very convincing. Finally she sat crosslegged with her back to the fence and started playing with the grass, absently picking one long blade after another to chew on. It disguised the movement of her lips as she whispered to me. “Jesse? Is that really you?”