A Knight Of The Word

She had told Ariel she would think about it, that she would decide by evening. Ariel would return for her answer then.

She got up and walked into the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot tea. As she stood by the stove waiting for the kettle to boil, she glanced over at the real estate papers for the sale of the house. She had forgotten about them. She stared at them, but made no move to pick them up. They didn’t seem very important in light of the John Ross matter, and she didn’t want to think about them right now. Allen Kruppert and ERA Realty would just have to wait.

Standing at the living room picture window, holding her steaming cup of tea in front of her, she watched the rain begin to fall in earnest, streaking the glass, turning the old shade trees and the grass dark and shiny. The feeders would come out to prowl in this weather, bolder when the light was poor and the shadows thick. They preferred the night, but a gloomy day would do just as well. She still watched for them, not so much afraid anymore as curious, always thinking she would solve their mystery somehow, that she would discover what they were. She knew what they did, of course; she understood their place in nature’s scheme. No one else even knew they were out there. But there was so much more-how they procreated, what they were composed of, how they could inflict madness, how they could appear as shadows and still affect things of substance. She remembered them touching her when her father had made her a prisoner in the caves below the park. She remembered the horror and disgust that blossomed within her. She remembered how badly she had wanted to scream.

But her friends and her grandparents had been there to save her, and now only the memory remained.

Maybe it was her turn to be there for John Ross.

Her brow furrowed. No matter how many ways she looked at the problem, she kept coming back to the same thing. If something happened to John Ross and she hadn’t tried to prevent it, how could she live with herself? She would always wonder if she might have changed things She would always live in doubt. If she tried and failed. well, at least she would have tried. But if she did nothing...

She sipped at her tea and stared out the window fixedly. John Ross, the Knight of the Word. She could not imagine him ever being different from what he had been five years ago. She could not imagine him being anything other than what he was. How had he fallen so far away from his fierce commitment to saving the world? It sounded overblown when she said it, but that was what he was doing. Saving the world, saving humanity from itself. O’olish Amaneh had made it plain to her that such a war was taking place, even before Ross had appeared to confirm it. We are destroying ourselves, Two Bears had told her; we are risking the fate of the Sinnissippi — that we shall disappear completely and no one will know who we were.

Are we still destroying ourselves? she wondered. Are we still travelling the road of the Sinnissippi? She hadn’t thought about it for a long time, wrapped up in her own life, the events of five years earlier behind her, buried in a past she would rather forget. She had been only a girl of fourteen. Her world had been saved, and at the time she had been grateful enough to let it go at that.

But her world was expanding now, reaching out to places and people beyond Hopewell. What was happening in that larger world, the world into which her future would take her? What would become of it without John Ross?

Rain coated the windows in glistening sheets that turned everything beyond into a shimmering haze. The park and her backyard disappeared. The world beyond vanished.

She walked to the phone and dialled Robert Keppler. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding distracted. “Yeah, hello?”

“Back on the computer, Robert?” she asked teasingly.

“Nest?”

“Want to go out for a pizza later?”

“Well, yeah, of course.” He was alert and eager now, surprised. “When?”

“In an hour. I’ll pick you up. But there’s a small price for this.”

“What is it?”

“You have to drive me to O’Hare tomorrow morning. I can go whenever you want, and you can use my car. Just bring it back when you’re done and park it in the drive.”

She didn’t know how Ariel would get to Seattle, but she didn’t think it was something she needed to worry about. The Lady’s creatures seemed able to get around just fine without any help from humans.

She waited for Robert to say something. There was a long pause before he did.

“O’Hare Where are you going?”

“Seattle.”

“Seattle?”

“The Emerald City, Robert.”

“Yeah, I know what it’s called. Why are you going there?”

She sighed and stared off through the window into the rainy gloom. “I guess you could say I’m off to see the Wizard.” She paused for effect. “Bye, Robert.”

Then she hung up.





* * *





MONDAY, OCTOBER 29





Chapter Six