Dreamseeker (31 page)

Suddenly something touched his arm. Startled, he looked up, and saw an abbie standing over him, a small female with a wrinkled face and deeply hooded eyes. She was holding out an apple.

He didn't move.

She nudged him with the fruit, urging him to accept it. Finally he reached up and took it from her. The scent of it made his stomach lurch in hunger. “Thank you,” he whispered, ashamed and grateful. “Thank you.”

She nodded and went back to her errands, leaving him alone in the alley.

Is this what you want for me, father? That I should sink so low that even the abbies pity me? Do you believe that's a just punishment for my offense?

The flesh of the apple was sweet in his mouth, but the taste of it was bitter.

“Tell the Domitor about the ritual you witnessed.”

Confused, Isaac looks up at his father. His forehead still burns from the Fleshcrafter's work, and the Domitor's ministrations have left him disoriented; it's hard for him to think clearly. “Sir? I'm not sure I understand.”

“You attended a ritual that no outsider should know about.” His father gestures toward the Domitor. “Describe it to her.”

Isaac slowly turns to face the woman who has just altered his brain. Beside her stands Virilian, the Guildmaster of the Shadows, utterly expressionless. A statue of judgment.

He draws in a deep breath and begins, “It took place on one of the lower levels of Shadowcrest, a place called—”

Nausea wells up inside him suddenly, choking off his voice. It's followed by a wave of pain so intense that he doubles over, then falls to his knees on the stone floor. His flesh feels as if it's being peeled back from his bones, and as he struggles not to cry out in pain, wave after wave of sickness surges through him. Helplessly he vomits, right onto the polished floor of Lord Virilian's audience chamber.

Then, suddenly, both the pain and the sickness are gone. Gasping for breath, Isaac wipes his mouth clean with his sleeve. His whole body is shaking.

The Domitor says, “Any time he tries to share the secrets of your Guild with outsiders, this will be the result. The harder he tries, the worse it will be.”

His father looks at Lord Virilian. “Are you satisfied?”

The Guildmaster studies the boy for a moment. Trembling, Isaac can do nothing more than wait on his knees for judgment.

“Very well,” Virilian says at last. “You have my permission to exile him.”

The Warrens were empty of life—of human life, anyway—and filled with a fetid odor that was worse than anything Isaac remembered. Maybe some of the bodies from the raid had been left behind to rot. The place also seemed more cramped than he remembered, but it had been a refuge for him when he needed one the most, and there was dark comfort in returning to it, no matter how bad it smelled.

Oil lamp in hand, he walked through the familiar tunnels, reclaiming his memories. He passed the place where he had first talked
to Jessica. She had asked him about the dreaming Gift that day. If he'd understood the significance of her question, would it have changed any of the choices he made after that? Eventually he came to the circular meeting room where everyone had stored their mementos, and he discovered that the Lord Governor's men had gone out of their way to wreck the place, crushing or stealing any items that looked particularly valuable. Nothing that Isaac cared about was still intact, but he picked up a few broken fragments that reminded him of particular people, and put them into his backpack. The children here had accepted him despite his aristo origins, and right now, acceptance seemed the most precious thing in the universe.

The Warrens inhabitants had stored their food in metal containers to keep the rats out, and hidden them in the darkest corners of the labyrinth so sewer workers passing through the area wouldn't find them. If those supplies were still intact they might provide Isaac with enough to keep him going for a while. Or so he hoped. But when he reached the first such cache—a rusty locker tucked underneath a maintenance platform—he discovered to his dismay that the raiders had gotten to it already. Packages of food that he'd helped steal from aboveground were all torn open, cans crushed and split, jars shattered. The rats must have had a field day.

Staring at the mess in utter despair, he felt the sharp bite of hunger in his gut. The food stores in the Warrens had been his last hope. If they all failed him, he had no idea what to do next.

The next two caches he visited were as useless to him as the first. Clearly the Lord Governor's men had wanted to send a message to anyone who survived the raid, that they shouldn't even think about coming back here. And the message had clearly been understood. In all his wandering, Isaac saw no sign of another human presence. The Warrens were like a tomb.

Finally, just as his last fragile strand of hope was about to give way, he found a cache where not everything had been destroyed. Maybe the raiders had gotten tired by the time they found it, so they didn't notice when a few cans rolled under a low-slung utility pipe.
Trembling with hunger, Isaac squeezed under the pipe to retrieve them, then searched for something in his collection of household items to cut them open. By the time he finally managed to tear half the lid off a can of baked beans, his mouth was so dry he could barely swallow the contents. The cold beans were clammy and dreadful, but they seemed a veritable feast, more delicious than anything he'd ever tasted. In less than a minute the can was empty.

Leaning back against the pipe in exhaustion, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Right now he wanted nothing more than to open all the cans and feast—he wanted it desperately—but this was the last food he might find for a while, and he needed to ration it carefully. He reached for his bag so he could pack the unopened cans for later use—

—and suddenly he was aware of another presence in the tunnel. Maybe it had arrived while he was eating, and he just hadn't noticed it, but there was no mistaking it now. A soft, almost inaudible moaning filled the tunnel, rising and falling in volume like the breath of a dying animal. He didn't think the spirit making the noise was a high-order wraith, but it didn't feel like a mere soul shard, a fractured remnant of a human spirit too far gone to think or act on its own. It had a faint aura of volition about it, and Isaac wondered if it had been drawn to him because of his Gift, as the dead so often were, or if it was here for some other reason.

“Who are you?” he asked hoarsely.

The spirit didn't respond.

Probably he should banish the thing. Only the undead could afford to let unidentified ghosts hang around them, and the ritual used to banish bothersome spirits was one of the first things an apprentice was taught. But Isaac lacked the energy to perform any rituals right now, and perhaps he also lacked the will. This ghost wasn't hurting him. Who was he to decide where it was or was not allowed to go? Maybe it was seeking refuge here, like he was. God knows, enough people had died down here recently; there was probably more than
one spirit bound to this place. If the wraith left him in peace, then he would leave it in peace.

That decided, he leaned back against the pipe and shut his eyes, savoring the feeling of fullness in his belly. He was safer here than he was going to be anywhere else. Maybe he should take a few hours and sleep.

Free.

His eyes shot open.

Free.

The primitive thought seeped into his brain without words, but its tenor was jarringly familiar. He knew that spirit's voice.

Free.

“Jacob?” he asked.

Silence.

The presence felt like Jacob; there was no mistaking that. But the murdered boy had been a high-order spirit, capable of complex conversation, repeatedly trying to communicate with Isaac. It made no sense that he would be here now, further from Shadowcrest than any bound spirit was allowed to travel, and barely capable of voicing a single word.

Then suddenly Isaac realized what must have happened, and for one endless, horrified moment he could do nothing more than stare at the place where the ghost was standing, unable to speak. “No,” he whispered at last. Forcing the words out. “Please, please, tell me they didn't do that to you . . .”

The Shadows must have discovered that Jacob had helped Isaac break into the Chamber of Souls. Any wraith who was capable of acting against his Mistress's interests was too dangerous to keep around, so they'd condemned him to final death, performing the ritual that was commonly used to destroy malevolent spirits. Normally that would tear an unwanted soul into so many pieces that not a single sentient fragment remained. But Jacob must have survived it somehow. Maybe it was his link to Isaac that enabled an echo of his identity to
cling to the living world while his mind was ripped to pieces. Or maybe the boy had simply been stronger than the Shadowlords gave him credit for. Either way, he had paid a terrible price for his freedom. Even Isaac's apprentice-level Gift could sense that the entity standing in front of him was little more than a hollow shell, his mind so fragmented that he probably didn't even know his own name. The best such a ghost could hope for in the wild was to wander endlessly without language or purpose, driven by emotions he could no longer name, mourning the loss of an identity he no longer remembered. Truly, it was a fate worse than death.

The wraith spoke again, this time more strongly.
Free.

The ritual must have shattered his binding along with his mind, Isaac realized. Whatever fragment of Jacob Dockhart had survived now owed allegiance to no one. Would the boy have chosen such a fate over eternal slavery, had he been given the choice? What mattered more, one's mind or one's freedom? Just asking the question made Isaac queasy. God willing he would never have to make such a choice himself.

“What a pair we make,” he muttered. Though the spirit was too mentally damaged to offer any meaningful companionship, talking to him made Isaac feel less alone. “Hiding in the sewers with no purpose, no future . . . true soul-mates.”

The spirit said nothing.

With a sigh Isaac pulled his backpack toward him and untied the top flap. His scavenged items from the Warrens were on top, along with the things he'd taken from home. He took them out and put them aside. After a moment's consideration he also took his clothes out of the pack and the toiletries case, so that the heavy cans could be placed at the bottom of the bag.

But as he picked up the toiletries case he paused. It was smaller than he'd thought, and flatter. Maybe it wasn't what he had assumed. There was a zipper running around three sides of it, and he opened it carefully, not wanting anything to fall out.

Inside was money.

A lot of money.

Spreading the case open like a wallet revealed a thick stack of bills. He stared at them for a moment in disbelief, then took them out and started counting them. Half the bills were of small denominations, the kind of money one might use to buy small items in a shop, but the other half were larger than that.
Much
larger. All told, there must have been at least a thousand pounds in the case. It was a veritable fortune to someone in his circumstances, though God alone knew where he could spend it.

His mother must have put this in the backpack, but why? Money alone couldn't save him now. Surely she would have realized that. Was this merely a ritual gesture, meant to ease his parents' guilt as they cast Isaac to the wolves? Surely if they really cared about him they would have chosen a different punishment and not sent him away forever.

Tears came to his eyes and he blinked them away, not wanting to break down in front of someone. Even a ghost. As he did so, he noticed there was a photo in the case, tucked into a side pocket. Taking it out, he saw it was a family picture, of him and his mother and father standing in some sunlit place, all smiling. It must have been taken years ago, because his father was alive in the picture, and Isaac was just a child. He no longer had any memory of what his father looked like as a living man, so he stared at the image in fascination, startled to discover how much he resembled him.