Terry Brooks - A Knight of the Word

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 the dark ayes bore into her. `Listen, and I will tell you what has become of him.'

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.