A Knight of the Word Read online

  She walked through the hilly woods that marked the beginning of the eastern end of the park, alone now with Pick, wrapped in the silence of the big hardwoods. The trees rose barelimbed and skeletal against the autumn sky, stripped of their leaves, waiting for winters approach. Their colours not yet completely faded, the fallen leaves formed a thick carpet on the ground, still damp and soft with morning dew. She peered ahead into the tangled clutter of limbs and scrub and shadow. The forest had a bristling, hostile appearance. Everything looked as if it were wrapped in barbed wire.

  Her long strides covered the ground rapidly as she descended to the creek that wound out of the woods and emptied into the bayou. How much bigger the park had seemed when she was a child growing up in it. Sometimes her home felt the same way too small for her now. She supposed it was true of her child's world entirely, that she had outgrown it, that she needed more room.

  `How much farther?' she asked as she crossed the wooden bridge that spanned the creek bed, and started up the slope toward the deep woods.

  `Bear right,' he grunted.

  She angled toward the bayou, following the tree line. She glanced involuntarily toward the deep woods, just as she always did, any time she came here, remembering what had taken place there five years earlier. Sometimes she could see it all quite clearly, could see her father and John Ross and the maentwrog. Sometimes she could even see Wraith.

  `Has there been any sign of him?' she asked suddenly, the words escaping from her mouth before she could think better of them.

  Pick understood what she was talking about. `Nothing. Not since . .

  Not since she turned eighteen two summers ago, she finished as he trailed off. That was the last time either of them had seen Wraith. After so many years of having him around, it seemed impossible that he could be gone. Her father had created the giant ghost wolf out of his dark magic to serve as a protector for the daughter he intended one day to return for. Wraith was to keep her safe while she grew. All the time she had worked with Pick to keep the magic in balance and the feeders from luring children into the park, Wraith had warded her. But Gran had discerned Wraith's true purpose and altered his makeup with her own magic in such a way that when Nest's father returned to claim her, Wraith destroyed him.

  She could see it happening all over again through the dark huddle of the trees. Night cloaked the deep woods, and on the slopes of the park, over by the toboggan slide, Fourth of July fireworks were exploding in a shower of bright colours and deep booms. The white oak that had imprisoned the maentwrog was in shreds, and the maentwrog itself was turned to ash. John Ross lay motionless upon the charred earth, damaged and exhausted. Nest faced her father, who approached with hand outstretched and soothing, persuasive words. You belong to me. You are my blood. You are my life.

  And Wraith, come out of the night like an express train exploding free of a mountain tunnel . . .

  She was fourteen when she learned the truth about her father. And her family. And herself. Wraith had stayed as her protector afterward, a shadowy presence in the park, showing himself only occasionally as the next few years passed, but always when the feeders came too close. Now and then she would think that he seemed less substantive than she remembered, less solid when he loomed out of the darkness. But that seemed silly.

  However, as she neared her eighteenth birthday, Wraith turned pale and then ethereal and finally disappeared completely. It happened quickly. One day he was just as he had always been, his thick body massive and bristling, his grey and black tiger-stripe facial markings wicked and menacing. and the next he was fading away. Like the ghost he had always seemed, but finally become.

  The last time she saw him, she was walking the park at sunset, and he had appeared unexpectedly from the shadows. He was already so insubstantial she could see right through him. She stopped, and he walked right up to her, passing so cease that she felt his rough coat brush against her. She blinked in surprise at the unexpected contact, and when she turned to follow him, he was already gone,

  She hadn't seen him since. Neither had Pick. That was almost a year and a half ago.

  `Where do you think he's gone:' she asked quietly.

  Pick, riding her shoulder in silence, shrugged. `Can't say'

  `He was disappearing though, there at the- end, wasn't he?'

  `It looked that way, sure enough:

  `So maybe he was all used up:

  'Maybe'

  `Except you told me magic never gets used up. You told me it works like energy; it becomes transformed. So if Wraith was transformed, what was he transformed into?'

  `Criminy, Nest!'

  `Have you noticed anything different about the park?'

  The sylvan tugged at his beard, `No, nothing:

  `So where did he go then?'

  Pick wheeled on her. '`you know what? It you spent a little more time helping me out around here, maybe you could answer the question far yourself instead of pestering me! Now turn down here and head for the riverbank and stop asking me stuff!'

  She did as he asked, still pondering the mystery of Wraith, thinking that maybe because she was grown up and Wraith had served his purpose, he had reverted to whatever form he had occupied before he was created to be her protector. Yes, maybe that was it.

  But her doubts lingered.

  She reached the riverbank and stopped. The bayou spread out before her, a body of water dammed up behind the levy on which the railroad tracks had been built to carry the freight trains west out of Chicago. Reeds and cattails grew in thick clumps along the edges of the water, and shallow inlets that eroded the riverbank were filmed with stagnation and debris. There was little movement in the water, the swift current of the Rock River absent here.

  She looked down at Pick. `Now what?'

  He gestured to her right without speaking.

  She turned and found herself staring right at the tatterdemalion. She had seen only a handful in her life, and then just for a few seconds each time, but she knew this one for what it was right away. It stood less than a dozen yards away, slight and ephemeral in the pale autumn light. Diaphanous clothing and silky hair trailed from its body and limbs in wispy strands, as if on the verge of being carried off by the wind. The tatterdemalion's features were childlike and haunted. This one was a girl. Her eyes were depthless in dark-ringed sockets and her rosebud mouth pinched against her sunken face. Her skin was the colour and texture of parchment. She might have been a runaway who had not eaten in days and was still terrified of what she had left behind. She had that look. But tatterdemalions were nothing of the sort. They weren't really children at all, let alone runaways. They weren't even human.

  Are you Nest Freemark?' this one asked in her soft, lilting childlike voice.

  `I am; Nest answered, risking a quick glance down at Pick. The sylvan was mired in the deepest frown she had ever seen on him and was hunched forward on her shoulder in a combative stance. She had a sudden, inescapable premonition he was trying to protect her.

  `My name is Ariel; said the tatterdemalion. `I have a message for you from the Lady'

  Nest's throat went dry. She knew who the Lady was. The Lady was the Voice of the Word.

  'I have been sent to tell you of John Ross,' Ariel said.

  Of course. John Ross. She had thought of him earlier that morning for the first rime in weeks. She pictured him anew, enigmatic and resourceful, a mix of light and dark, gone from Hopewell five years earlier in the wake of her father's destruction, gone out of her life. Maybe she had inadvertently wished him back into it. Maybe that was why the mention of him seemed somehow inevitable.

  `John Ross,' she repeated, as if the words would make of his memory something more substantial.

  Ariel stood motionless in a mix of shadow and sunlight, as if pinned like a butterfly to a board. When she spoke, her voice was reed-thin and faintly musical, filled with the sound of the wind rising off trees heavy with new leaves.

  `He has fallen from grace; she said to Nest Freemark, and th
e dark ayes bore into her. `Listen, and I will tell you what has become of him.'

  CHAPTER 4

  As with almost everything since John Ross had become a Knight of the Word, his disintegration began with a dream.

  His dreams were always of the future, a future grim and horrific, one where the balance of magic had shifted so dramatically that civilisation was on the verge of extinction. The Void had gained ascendancy over the Word, good had lost the eternal struggle against evil, and humanity had become a pathetic shadow of the brilliant ideal it had once approached. Men were reduced to hunters and hunted, the former led by demons and driven by feeders, the latter banded together in fortress cities and scattered outposts in a landscape fallen into ruin and neglect. Once-men and their prey, they were born of the same flesh, but changed by the separate and divisive moral codes they had embraced and by the indelible patterns of their lives. It had taken more than a decade, but in the end governments had toppled, nations had collapsed, armies had broken into pieces, and peoples world-wide had reverted to a savagery that had not been in evidence since well before the birth of Christ.

  The dreams were given to John Ross for a purpose. It was the mission of a Knight of the Word to change the course of history. The dreams were a reminder of what the future would be like if he failed. The dreams were also a means of discovering pivotal events that might be altered by the Knight on waking. John Ross had learned something of the dreams over time. The dreams always revealed events that would occur, usually within a matter of months. The events were always instigated by men and women who had fallen under the sway of the demons who served the Void. And the men and women who would perpetrate the monstrous acts that would alter in varying, cumulative ways the direction in which humanity drifted could always be tracked down.

  But even then there was a limit to what a Knight of the Word could do, and John Ross discovered the full truth of this at San Sobel.

  In his dream, he was travelling through the nightmare landscape of civilisation's collapse on his way to an armed camp in San Francisco. He had come from Chicago, where another camp had fallen to an onslaught of demons and once-men, where he had fought to save the city and failed, where he had seen yet another small light smothered, snuffed out in an ever-growing darkness. Thousands had died, and thousands mare had been taken to the slave pens for work and breeding. He had come to San Francisco to prevent this happening again, knowing that a new army was massing and moving west to assault the Bay Area fortress, to reduce humanity's tenuous handhold on survival by yet another digit. He would plead with those in charge once again, knowing that they would probably refuse to listen, distrustful o£ him, fearful of his motives, knowing only that their past was last and their future had become an encroaching nightmare. Now and again, someone would pay heed. Now and again, a city would be saved. But the number of his successes was dwindling rapidly as the strength of the Void's forces grew. The outcome .area inevitable; it had been foreordained since he had become a Knight of the Word years ago. His failure then had writ in stone what the future must be. Even in his determined effort to chip away the hateful letters, he was only prolonging the inevitable. Yet he went on, because that was all that was left for him to do.

  The dream began in the town of San Sobel, west and south of the Mission Peak Preserve below San Francisco. It was just another town, just one more collection of empty shops and houses, of concrete streets buckling with wear and disuse, of yards and parks turned to weeds and bare earth amid a jumble of debris and abandoned cars. Wild dogs roamed in packs and feral cats slunk like shadows through the midday heat. He walked past windows and doors that gaped broken and dark like sightless eyes and voiceless mouths. Roofs had sagged and walls had collapsed; the earth was reclaiming its own. Now and again he would spy a furtive figure making its way through the rubble, a stray human in search of food and shelter, another refugee from the past. They never approached him. They saw something in him that frightened them, something he could not identify. It was in his bearing or his gaze or perhaps in the black, rune-scrolled staff that was the source of his power. He would stride down the centre of a boulevard, made whole now with the fulfilment of the Word's dark prophecy, his ruined leg healed because his failure had brought that prophecy to pass, and no one would come near him. He was empowered to help them, and they shunned him as anathema. It was the final irony of his existence.

  In San Sobel, no one approached him either. He saw them, the strays, hiding in the shadows, skittering from one bolt-hole to the next, but they would not come near. He walked alone through the town's ruin, his eyes set on the horizon, his mind fixed on his mission, and he came upon the woman quite unexpectedly. She did not see him. She was not even aware of him. She stood at the edge of a weed-grown lot and stared fixedly at the remains of what had once been a school. The name was still visible in the crumbling stone of an arch that bridged a drive leading up to the school's entry. SAN SOBEL PREPARATORY ACADEMY. Her gaze was unwavering as she stood there, arms folded, body swaying slightly. As he approached, he could hear small, unidentifiable sounds coming from her lips. She was worn and haggard, her hair hung limp and unwashed, and she looked as if she had not eaten in a while. There were sores on her arms and face, and he recognised the markings of one of the cluster of new diseases that were going untreated and killing with increasing regularity.

  He spoke to her softly, and she did not reply. He came right up behind her and spoke again, and she did not turn.

  When finally he touched her, she still did not turn, but she began to speak. It was as if he had turned on a tape recorder. Her voice was a dull, empty monotone, and her story was one that quite obviously she had told before. She related it to him without caring whether he heard her or not, giving vent to a need that was self-contained and personal and without meaningful connection to him. He was her audience, but his presence served only to trigger a release of words she would have spoken to anyone.

  He was my youngest child, she said. My boy, Teddy. He was six years old.

  We had enrolled him in kindergarten the year before, and now he was finishing first grade. He was so sweet. He had blend hair and blue eyes, and he was always smiling. He could change the light in a room just by walking into it. l loved him so much. Bert and I both worked, and we made pretty good money, but it was still a stretch to send him here. But it was sorb a good school, and we wanted him to have the best. He was very bright. He could have been anything, if he had lived.

  There was another boy in the school who was a little older, Aaron Pilkington. His father was very successful, very wealthy. Some men decided to kidnap him and make his father pay them money to get him bark. They were stupid men, not even bright enough to know the best way to kidnap someone. They tried to take him out of the school. They just walked right in and tried to take him. On April Fools' Day, can you imagine that? I wonder if they knew. They just walked in and tried to take him. Bur they couldn't find him. They weren't even sure which room he was in, which class he attended, who his teacher was, anything. They had a picture, and they thought that would tie enough. But a picture doesn't always help.

  Children in a picture often tend to look alike. So they Couldn't find him, and the police were called, and they surrounded the school, and the men took a teacher and her class hostage because they were afraid and they didn't know what else to do, I suppose.

  My son was a student in that class.

  The police tried to get the men to release the teacher and the children, but the men wouldn't agree to the terms the police offered and the police wouldn't agree to the terms the men offered, and the whole thing just fell to pieces. The men grew desperate and erratic. One of them kept talking to someone who wasn't there, asking, What should he do, what should be do? They killed the teacher. The police decided they couldn't wait any loner, that the children were in too much danger. The men had moved the children to the auditorium where they held their assemblies and performed their plays. They had them all seated in the first two rows, all
in a line facing the stage. When the police broke in, they started shooting. They just . . . started shooting. Everywhere. The children....

  She never looked at him as she spoke. She never acknowledged his presence. She was inaccessible to him, lost in the past, reliving the horror of those moments. She kept her gaze fixed on the school, unwavering.

  I was there, she said, her voice unchanging, toneless and empty. I was a room mother helping out that day. There was going to be a birthday party at the end of recess. When the shooting began, I tried to reach him. I threw myself . . . His name was Teddy. Theodore, but we called him Teddy, because he was just a little boy. Teddy . . .

  Then she went silent, stared at the school a moment longer, turned, and walked off down the broken sidewalk. She seemed to know where she was going, but he could not discern her purpose. He watched after her a moment, then looked at the school.

  In his mind, he could hear the sounds of gunfire and children screaming.

  When he woke, he knew at once what he would do. The woman had said that one of the men spoke to someone who wasn't there. He knew from experience that it would be a demon, a creature no one but the man could see. He knew that a demon would have inspired this event, that it would have used it to rip apart the fabric of the community, to steal away San Sobel's sense of safety and tranquillity, to erode its belief that what happened in other places could not happen there. Once such seeds of doubt and fear were planted, it grew easier to undermine the foundations of human behaviour and reason that kept animal madness at bay.