A Knight of the Word

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.

me 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.

It was late winter, and time was already short when he left for California. He reached San Sobel more than a week before April I, and he felt confident that he had sufficient time to prevent the impending tragedy. There had been no further dreams of this event, but that was not unusual. Often the dreams came only once, and he was forced to act on what he was given Sometimes he did not know where the event would happen, or even when. This time he was lucky; he knew both. The demon would have set things in motion already, but Ross had come up against demons time and again since he had taken up the cause of the 'Word. and he was not intimidated. Demons were powerful and elusive adversaries, relentless in their hatred of humans and their determination to see them subjugated, but they were no match for him. It was the vagaries of the humans they used as their tools that more often proved troubling.

There were the feeders to be concerned about, too. The feeders were the dark things that drove humans to madness and then consumed them, creatures of the mind and soul that lived mostly in the imagination until venal behaviour made them real. The feeders devoured the dark emotions of the humans they preyed upon and were sustained and given life by. Few could see them. Few had any reason to. They appeared as shadows at the corner of the eye or small movements in a hazy distance. The demons stirred them into the human population as they would a poison. If they could infect a few, the poison might spread to the many. History had proved that this was so.

The feeders would delight in a slaughter of innocents, of children who could barely understand what was wanted of them by the men John Ross would confront. He could not search out these men; he had no way to do so. Nor could he trace the demon. Demons were changelings and hid themselves with false identities. He must wait far the men and the demons who manipulated them to reveal themselves, which meant that he must be waiting at the place he expected them to strike.

So he went to San Sobel Preparatory Academy to speak with the headmaster, He did not tell the headmaster of his dream, or of the demon, or of the men the demon would send, or of the horror that waited barely a week away. There was no point in doing that because he had no way to convince the headmaster he was not insane. He told the headmaster instead that he was the parent of a child who would be eligible for admission to the academy in the fall and that he would like some information oat the school. He apologised for his appearance–he was wearing jeans and a blue denim shin under his corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows and a pair of worn walking shoes–but he was a nature writer on assignment, and he was taking half a day off to make this visit. The headmaster took note of his odd walking staff and his limp, and his clear blue eyes and warm smile gave evidence of the fact that he was both sympathetic and understanding of his visitor's needs.

He talked to John Ross of the school's history and of its mission. He gave Ross materials to read. Finally, he took Ross on a tour of the buildings–which was what Ross had been waiting for. They passed down the shadowed corridors from one classroom to the next and at last to the auditorium where the tragedy of the dream would occur. Ross lingered, asking questions so that he would have time to study the room, to memorise its layout, its entries and exits and hiding places. A quick study was all it took. When he was satisfied, he thanked the headmaster for his time and consideration and left.

He found out later in the day that a boy named Aaron Pilkington attended the academy, that he was enrolled in the third grade, and that his parents had been made enormously wealthy through his father's work with microchips.

That night, he devised a plan. It was not complicated. He had learned that by keeping his plans simple, his chances of successfully implementing them improved. There were small lives at stake, and he did not want to expose them to any greater risk than necessary.

It seemed to him, thinking the matter through in his motel room that night, that he had everything under control.

He waited patiently for the days to pass. On the morning of April 1, he arrived at the school just before sunrise. He had visited the school late in the afternoon of the day before and left a wedge of paper in the lock of one of the classroom windows at the back of the main building so the lock would not close all the way. He slipped through the window in the darkness, listening for the movement of other people as he did so. But the maintenance staff didn't arrive for another half hour, and he was alone. He worked his way down the hallway to the auditorium, found one of the storage rooms where the play props were kept at the rear and side of the stage, and concealed himself inside.

Then he waited.

He did not know when the attack would come, but he did know that until the moment of his intervention, history would repeat itself and the events of the dream would transpire exactly as related by Teddy's mother. It was up to him to choose just when he would try to alter the outcome.

He couched in the darkness of his hiding place and listened to the sounds of the school about him as the day began. The storage room had sufficient space that he was able to change positions and move around so his leg didn't stiffen up. He had brought food. Time slipped away. No one came to the auditorium. Nothing unusual occurred.

Then the doors burst open, and Ross could hear the screams and cries of children, the pleas of several women, and the angry, rough voices of men fill the room. Ross waited patiently, the storage door cracked open just far enough that he could see what was happening. A hooded figure bounded onto the stage between the half–closed curtains, glanced around hurriedly, and began barking orders. A second figure joined him. The women and children filed hurriedly into the front rows of the theatre an response to the men's directions.

Still Ross waited.

One of the men had a cell phone. It rang, and he began talking into it, growing increasingly angry. He jumped down off the stage, screaming obscenities into the mouthpiece. Ross slipped out of the storage room, the black staff gleaming with the magic's light. He moved slowly, steadily through the shadows, closing on the lone man who stood at the front of the stage. The man held a handgun, but he was looking at his captives. Ross could see a third man now, one standing at the far side of the roam, looking out the door into the hallway.

Ross tame up to the man standing on the stage and levelled him with a single blow of the staff. He caught a glimpse of the other two, the one on the phone stall yelling and screaming with his

back turned, the other wheeling in surprise as he caught sight of Ross. The children's eyes went wide as Ross appeared, and with a sweep of his staff Ross threw a heavy blanket of magic over the children, a weighted net that forced them to lower their heads and shield their eyes. The man at the door was swinging his AK‑47 around to fire as Ross hit him with a bolt of bright magic and knocked him senseless.

The third man dropped the phone, still screaming, and brought up a second AK‑47. But Ross was waiting for him as well, and again the magic lanced from the staff. A burst from the man's weapon sprayed the ceiling harmlessly as he went down in a heap.

Ross scanned the room swiftly for other kidnappers. There were none. Just the three. The children and their teacher and two other women were still crouched in their seats, weighted down by the magic. Ross lifted it away, setting them free. No one was hurt. Everything was all right …

Then he saw the feeders, dozens of them, oozing through cracks in the windows and doors, sliding out of corners and alcoves, dark shadows gathering to feast, sensing something that was hidden from him.

Ross wheeled about in desperation, searching everywhere at once, his heart pounding, his mind racing…

And police burst through the doors and windows, shattering wood and glass. Someone was yelling, Throw down your weapons! Now, now, now! The women and children were screaming anew, scrambling out of their seats in terror, and someone was yelling, He's got a gun! Shoot him, shoot him! Ross was trying to tell them, No, no, it's all right, it's okay now! But no one was listening, and everything was chaotic and out of control, and the feeders were leaping about in a frenzy, climbing over everything, and there were weapons firing everywhere, catching the kidnapper who was just coming to his knees in front of the stage, still too stunned to know what was happening, lifting him in a red spatter and dropping him back again in a crumpled heap, and small bodies were being struck by the bullets as well, hammered sideways and sent flying as screams of fear turned to shrieks of pain, and still the voice was yelling, He's got a gun, he's got a gun! Even though Ross still couldn't see any gun, couldn't understand what the voice was veiling about, the police kept firing, over and over and over into the children. . ,

He read about it in the newspapers in the days that followed. Fourteen children were killed. Two of the kidnappers died. There was considerable debate over who fired the shots, but informed speculation had it that several of the children had been caught in a crossfire.

There was only brief mention of Ross. In the confusion that followed the shooting, Ross had backed away into the shadows and slipped out through the rear of the auditorium into a crowd of parents and bystanders and disappeared before anyone could stop him. The teacher who had been held hostage told of a mysterious man who had helped free them, but the police insisted that the man was one of the kidnappers and that the teacher was mistaken about what she had seen. Descriptions of what he looked like varied dramatically, and after a time the search to find him waned and died.

But John Ross was left devastated. How had this terrible thing happened? What had gone wrong? He had done exactly as he intended to do. The men had been subdued. The danger was past. And still the children had died, the police misreading the situation, hearing screams over the kidnapper's dropped cell phone, hearing the AK‑47 go off, bursting in with weapons ready, firing impulsively, foolishly …

Fourteen children dead. Ross couldn't accept it. He could tell himself rationally that it wasn't his fault. He could explain away everything that had happened„ could argue persuasively and passionately to himself that he had done everything he could, but it still didn't help. Fourteen children were dead.

One of them, he discovered, was a blond, blue–eyed little boy named Teddy.

He saw all of their pictures in magazines, and he read their stories in papers for weeks afterward.. The horror of what had happened enveloped and consumed him. It haunted his sleep and destroyed his peace of mind. He could not function. He sat paralysed in motel rooms in small towns far away from San Sobel, trying to regain his sense of purpose. He had experienced failures before, but nothing with consequences that were so dramatic and so personal. He had thought he could handle anything, but he wasn't prepared for this. Fourteen lives were on his conscience, and he could hardly bear it. He cried often, and he ached deep inside. He replayed the events over and over in his mind, trying to decide what it was he had done wrong.

It was weeks before he realised his mistake. He had assumed that the demon who sought to inspire the killings had relied on the kidnappers alone. But it was the police who had killed the children. Someone had yelled at them to shoot, had prompted them to fire, had put them on edge. It took only one additional man, one further intent, one other weapon. The demon had seduced one of the police officers as well. Ross had missed it. He hadn't even thought of it.

After a time, he began to question everything he was doing in his service to the Word. What was the point of it all if so many small lives could be lost so easily? He was a poor choice to serve as a Knight of the Word if he couldn't do any better than this. And what sort of supreme being would permit such a thing to happen in the first place? Was this the best the Word could do? Was it necessary for those fourteen children to die? Was that the message? John Ross began to wonder, then to grow certain, that the difference between the Word and the Void was small indeed. It was all so pointless, so ridiculous. He began to doubt and then to despair. He was servant to a master who lacked compassion and reason, whose poor efforts seemed unable to accomplish anything of worth. John Ross looked back over the past twelve years and was appalled. Where was the proof that anything he had done had served a purpose? What sort of battle was it he fought? Time after time he had stood against the forces of the Void, and what was there to show for it?

There was a limit to what he could endure, he decided finally. There was a limit to what he could demand of himself. He was broken by what had happened in San Sobel, and he could not put himself back together again. He no longer cared who he was or what he had pledged himself to do. He was finished with everything. Let someone else take up the Word's cause. Let someone else carry the burden of all those lives. Let someone else, because he was done.