The Gypsy Morph (41 page)

“Do you think we have much farther to go?” Owl asked him after she had finished her meal.

He hesitated before answering. She was trying to hide it, but he could hear the concern in her voice, a ragged, furtive thing. Normally, Owl was the steady, optimistic one. She was the center of their family; she held them all together. He didn’t like what he was thinking.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted finally.

No one said anything. The midday heat beat down on them, baking their bodies within the oven of clothes long since gone stiff with sweat and dirt, their minds as tired as their expectations. Hawk couldn’t remember his last real bath. None of them had done more than wash off a little dirt and cool down their faces at the end of each day’s trek since they had set out. Before that, things hadn’t been much better. Food was growing scarce, too.

Time was as thin as hope.

“Will the King of the Silver River help you?” she pressed.

He shook his head and shrugged.

“Has he spoken to you since we set out?”

He shook his head again.

“Then how do you . . . ?”

“Owl, I don’t know!” he snapped, silencing her. He regretted his anger at once. He gave her an apologetic smile. “I wish I did know. I wish I knew everything about what we are doing instead of nothing. I think about it every day, all day, and then at night I lie awake and I think about it some more. I hate it that so much depends on me. But I don’t know what else to do other than what I’m doing—to just keep going.”

“Faith has gotten us this far,” Tessa offered quietly.

“Faith is pretty much all we have,” Owl agreed.

He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’ll tell you something. The truth? Faith isn’t what keeps me going. It isn’t what drives me. Fear does. I have faith, but it’s the fear that won’t let me give up. Fear that if I fail, everyone will die. I can’t deal with it. I’m running all the time. Not
to
the King of the Silver River so much as
away
from the fear.”

Owl reached over and touched his cheek. “I shouldn’t be asking you questions,” she told him. “I know better. I know you are doing the best you can. I can’t help myself. I’m afraid, too. I want our family to be safe. I want all of them to be safe.”

“We just have to keep going,” Tessa declared firmly. “We just have to remind ourselves not to lose hope.” She took Hawk’s hand and squeezed. “The King of the Silver River said you would find him, didn’t he? He said you would reach him if you followed your instincts, if you did what they told you. And that’s what you’ve done.”

“But I can’t help wondering how all this will end,” he replied, squeezing her hand in response. “Even if we find him, how will he protect us? If the world really is about to be destroyed, how can we be safe anywhere? Besides, what’s the point? The world’s destroyed—what’s left for us?”

“A new world,” Owl said at once. “Even if the old is gone, there will be a new one born of it. That’s the lesson of life. New replaces old. It will be like that here, too, don’t you think? We are staying alive so that new generations can be born. Like your baby.”

“Owl is right,” Tessa agreed. “Like our baby.”

Hawk nodded, pretended he was in accord, but inside he found himself fighting doubt and confusion.
New worlds born of old
sounded good. So how did that happen exactly? What did it take for people to survive a cataclysm of the sort that had been promised? Their world was already ravaged beyond repair. Even back in Pioneer Square in the city, they had been doing little more than surviving, living hand-to-mouth, day-to-day. How could it be any better when things got worse?

There were no answers to such questions, of course. Wouldn’t be until they got to where they were going—wherever that was—so that they could discover what was waiting.

A leap of faith was required. A huge leap.

Sure, he thought. Tell that to Squirrel. Tell it to Chalk. Tell it to the other children they had lost. Tell it to all those who would be taken from them before this was over. He felt his throat tighten. How many more lives, he wondered, would his leap of faith cost?

He found himself thinking anew of the vision of the boy who would lead his children to the Promised Land, of the boy who would find a safehold where all could survive the coming destruction. A vision rooted in dreams, but not necessarily in reality. He had believed in that vision so strongly when he was waiting for it to come to pass. He had never doubted it, never questioned that he would be the one to do what it had shown.

For the first time ever, he was wondering if it had played him false.

L
OGAN TOM PARKED THE AV
at the lee of a long, low rise that snaked through the barren, empty land. When he was satisfied that it was safe, he climbed out to look around. The sun boiled down out of the cloudless sky, a ball of fire that had baked the surface of the drought-starved terrain until it was riven with cracks. From where he stood, gazing out across the flats, he might have been alone in the world.

Using the directions Cat had given him, he stood by the outcropping amid the wilted sage and measured off the twenty-nine yards north-northwest on his compass that led to the burial site down inside the shallow ravine. Then he walked it off, black staff held ready. On reaching the final steps, he saw where she had dug, the earth already beginning to harden anew in the heat. Chalk and the other children, all jammed together, less than three feet down. He felt renewed rage for the thing that had done this. A demon of the worst sort, a killer that enjoyed playing games with the helpless and unprotected.

But just another demon, as well, he told himself. One he intended to hunt down and destroy before it could take any other lives.

He thought suddenly of Fixit, another casualty of the madness that had enveloped them. Dead without knowing what had happened to his best friend. Gone in the blink of an eye.

He had sent Cat on ahead with the surviving bridge defenders, telling her to let Hawk and the others know what had happened, asking her to warn them to stay close together and inside the camp perimeter until this was over. She had refused at first, unwilling to leave him. But this was something he knew he must do alone, and he had told her so in no uncertain terms. She had been hurt by his insistence, but she would be safe. There was no room for argument.

They had stood looking at each other in the aftermath of his insistence, the silence between them uncomfortable, and then she had walked right up to him, put her arms around him, and buried her face in his shoulder.

“Don’t make me go,” she had pleaded again. “Let me stay with you.”

He relented enough to hug her back, to put his hand on her hair as he held her. “We’ve had this discussion,” he replied. “It won’t help to have it again.”

“There was no discussion. You told me what I had to do, nothing more. But you’re wrong. You shouldn’t make me go.”

“The others need to be warned. Right away.”

“You will be alone,” she insisted. “It’s too dangerous.”

He almost laughed, but instead he simply patted her head. “I’ve been alone for a long time, Catalya. I’ve been alone for more than ten years. I know how to take care of myself.”

She shook her head in denial. “Not with this thing. This thing is different. Worse than Krilka Koos or anything else we’ve come across. You almost died the last time. Do you remember who saved you?”

He backed her away. “I remember. Now go. Do what you have to do, and I’ll do the same.”

He turned then and walked away, ignoring her calls to turn around, to come back and stop being foolish. Before he was far enough away to miss it, he heard her crying.

He remembered it now. She was so strong, so confident in what she could do, but she was still emotionally vulnerable, whether she cared to admit it or not. It was in the nature of who and what she was. It was a part of being human.

He should know. When the bridge went up and the world exploded in fire and smoke, he had cried for Fixit.

He broke away from his reverie and began circling the burial site, searching for tracks. He found them easily enough; others would have missed the telltale scrapes entirely. There were several sets of tracks, all identical, but it was the ones that led off to the northeast in the direction of the caravan that determined his path. These were the ones that mattered. He had already decided that the demon would follow the caravan and its children, would continue to pursue its culling of those unwary enough to get within reach, always hoping its efforts would eventually bring Hawk out to face it.

There was real danger in that happening, of course. Both Angel Perez and he had warned the boy that under no circumstances must he attempt to settle this business on his own. If he were lost, the entire caravan and perhaps the future, as well, were lost. He might want to stop the killings, might desire revenge, might even think that there was something he could do to change things, but he must not act on those impulses.

Hawk was a gypsy morph, though, and in the end he would do whatever he decided needed doing, no matter what anyone said. He was formed of wild magic and was unpredictable. He would only listen to them for so long.

Which was why Logan had to find the demon first.

Which was why he would track it until he caught up with it.

It was a calculated risk, but nothing else had worked. This demon was skilled at hiding its presence and staying all but invisible. Guards and search parties did not seem to trouble it. There was an obsessive quality to its hunting of the children; it would not quit until it got what it wanted. It had come for the gypsy morph, and it meant to have him.

Logan walked back to the Ventra and stood beside it for a moment. He would catch up to the caravan by nightfall tomorrow if he traveled steadily. He might even catch up to the demon by then, as well. He would have preferred to travel afoot, but the Ventra would allow him to cover ground faster. The risk in driving was that it didn’t allow him to read the demon’s signs of passage as carefully as he would have preferred, which meant he might miss something. Still, he would have to make the best of things.

He drank from his water bottle and thought about how skewed things had gotten. What had begun as a simple enough task—to find and guide the gypsy morph and those it led to a safehold the morph would find—had evolved into a complex struggle for survival involving thousands of children, an entire nation of Elves, and various other species of mutated humans. His original charge had been altered so often that he was no longer certain exactly what it was. He supposed it was still the same, only grown larger.

He started to climb back into the AV when something in the distance caught his eye. He froze, one foot already inside the vehicle, and stared at the sky.

A hot-air balloon hung silhouetted against the western horizon, floating slowly on the sluggish air. He blinked in disbelief, watching its progress.

It was coming his way.

No,
he thought,
it isn’t possible.

Praying at the same time that it was. Praying with every last shred of faith he could muster that he wasn’t mistaken. Watching the balloon grow larger, settling lower in the sky as it neared him, the details growing sharper, more certain.

Until at last there could no longer be any doubt.

It was Simralin.

TWENTY-SEVEN

A
FTER HE HAD HELD HER
for long minutes, needing the feel of her body pressing against his own to make her presence real enough that he could accept it, grateful beyond anything words could express, he asked her to tell him everything. She did so as he drove the Ventra in pursuit of the demon, eyes on the rough terrain as he listened, searching for tracks, for sign of his quarry’s passing, his hands steadied by their grip on the wheel in a way they might not have been if they were only resting in his lap.

He had been so afraid of losing her, of having to live without her, of the consequences of his decision not to insist that she come with him. He had been terrified, and now he could breathe again in a way he hadn’t been able to in many days.

She seemed aware of this, and she touched him frequently, smiled often, and reassured him that she was really there. She was feeling the same way he was, he told himself, as much in love with him as he was with her. He couldn’t have explained how he knew this beyond what his instincts and his heart told him. It was in things that would have been barely noticeable to others—the small gestures, quick asides, and momentary glances. It was in the changes in her tone of voice when she spoke and in the silences in between. In these little things, seemingly unimportant and fleeting, everything was made known. It was cemented by her physical closeness to him, by the fact that she had come back from the precipice on which he had left her standing, alive and well, a whole person still despite the terrible struggle she had been through.

Almost no one else, he thought, could have done what she had done and lived to tell about it.

Even so, she had not survived unscathed. There was blood and dirt on her ripped clothing. Save for her adzl, her weapons were gone. She had been wounded several times, although she had cleaned her injuries and bound them up. She had not eaten in more than a week save for what she had managed to forage. Her face was gaunt, her cheeks hollow, and her eyes haunted.

Even in this condition he found her the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

A
FTER HE LEAVES HER
days earlier in the mountains of the Cintra, she goes back in search of Arissen Belloruus and the others who remain behind to defend against the demon army. She is with another dozen or so Trackers and scouts, all of them mindful of the need to find routes of escape for those who fight to provide cover for Kirisin’s escape.

They encounter resistance almost at once, the once-men under demon command flooding through the trees and rocks in an unstoppable torrent. The Elves under her command take cover and fight back with bow and arrow and javelin, slowing but not stopping the attack. Gradually, they are forced to give ground, unable to get through or stem the tide. They back their way clear of the forests and up into the rocks, counterattacking the entire way. The once-men try to get at them, but fail. They lack automatic weapons or even blades in most cases and are forced to rely on pieces of pipe and lengths of wood. These poor weapons are useless against the experienced and well-trained Elves.