Shall I make some acknowledgement of his presence? I do not wish to offend with forwardness but nor with lack of respect.
Further, something new. There are two youths with him, of lowly families by their dress and speech. The Dread instructs them in swordplay. They do a strange arithmetic among them, counting numbers, and always they sum to two hundreds.
What are we to make of this?
My love to you and my brothers.
Thomas
Again, with a modern pen, Catherine had written athame coordinates into the margin. “Almost the same coordinates,” Quin said, “and here’s the first mention of him training those boys—if they are the same boys.”
“In a forest, and it’s by water again, because he mentions the loch,” Shinobu added.
“And a fortress. These three incidents must have happened quite near each other. We have the Middle Dread in all of them, and the boys in this last. And Catherine took the trouble to track down the locations of where they took place.”
The descriptions of forest, loch, and fortress tugged at Shinobu’s thoughts. He experienced a wash of déjà vu, as though he were remembering a half-forgotten conversation or an especially vivid dream. He wanted to see these places—no, he needed to see them.
He tried to keep his voice steady as he asked her, “We’re going to these coordinates? That’s what you’re thinking?”
Quin looked up at him. “I can’t imagine we’ll find anything—the journal entries are so old. But…it couldn’t hurt to go and look at where these incidents happened, could it?”
“Why not?” he agreed.
It was a tremendous relief that Quin’s thoughts were running parallel to his own. Maybe he never had to tell her that some of those thoughts had come to him from the focal. He had spoiled something by lying to her, but he couldn’t undo the lie just yet, because he still wanted to use the focal.
But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t use it again. And eventually he would tell her.
“Prepare yourself,” the Young Dread said.
Behind her loomed the decaying hulk of an enormous shipwreck, black against the clear blue sky. Other wrecks were visible in the distance, the remainders of their hulls like jagged rib cages among sand dunes along the coastline. Hordes of seals were barking and basking in the sun close to the water, and beyond the shore, the sand became desert, stretching in every direction.
They had used the coordinates in his mother’s journal under the house of the bear—the last location where its athame had been seen—and they were standing on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.
The sand was cool beneath his feet, but the sun was already hot and bright. Behind him was the ocean, pounding against the shore and casting spray high into the air. Before him were steep dunes leading up to a desert with nothing but dry scrub bushes across its face. This wasteland reached from the beach to distant hills in the east and continued on to the south, perhaps forever.
John brought the binoculars to his eyes, focused them again on a sandstone peak beyond the desert. The dark entrance to a cave was just visible, a smudge on the red slope. But even from so far away he recognized the cave, and the line of hills behind it. They matched Catherine’s drawing perfectly. He suspected Maud had altered the coordinates slightly, bringing him to a point far from the cave, in order to make him run.
John put the binoculars away. “I’m ready,” he told the Young Dread. She had allowed him to come here, but she’d insisted the expedition would be a training session.
“Begin!” she called.
He ran.
Despite the sun, he wore his cloak, just as Maud did. She made him go unclothed when training in the cold, and now she was keeping him covered in the desert heat. Because she loves discomfort, he thought. My grandmother Maggie was like that in her own way. Never leaving me in peace. Keeping me afraid. Have I ever relaxed? The answer came against his will: Yes, a few times, with Quin. But most of his life had been lived under extreme tension.
He charged up the dunes, and was sweating and out of breath by the time he reached the first peak.
“Faster!” Maud called. She had kept up with him easily, despite carrying all of their weapons on her back, including the metal helmet and the circular shield they’d found on Traveler. He’d not yet been allowed to use either.
From the crest of the dunes, the sand petered out and became the hard, crumbling