Because he was certain by now that one of them was. He could feel the finger bones shifting restlessly in his pocket. They had begun doing so earlier in the day, when he had first reached the edge of the city. He had thrown them again to make certain he was on track, watched them gather and point right at the heart of the downtown, then pocketed them once more. Almost immediately he had felt them begin to shift and stir, making a faint clicking sound as they knocked together. It had startled him so he had been forced to fight down a strong sense of revulsion.
By now, hours later, he was used to it. Evidently, they were responding to the closeness of the morph. It was a strange sensation, having them move around like that, but it meant that his journey was almost over, his search nearly ended. His last cast of the bones had brought him directly to this square and the empty buildings surrounding it, but he had known immediately where the morph was to be found.
He thought momentarily about going after the kid on the street, and then decided against it. Any attempt to confront him here might cause him to cry out and alert the others. He didn’t want the whole bunch of them scattering to the four winds. Better to let this one go and concentrate on the others.
He watched the boy disappear into the gloom, remained where he was for several minutes more, then stepped out of the shadows and started across the street.
His instincts and the force of his magic told him that the building he was about to enter was occupied. He could hear movement within. The finger bones knew it, too. Their rustling inside his clothing grew almost frantic.
He reached the doorway from which the boy had emerged and paused. Nothing seemed amiss. He could still hear the scurrying sounds of the occupants inside, somewhere upstairs from where he stood. He turned and looked around carefully, making certain he had missed nothing in his approach. But the night was empty and still, the square a graveyard of old vehicles, fallen walls, and windblown trash. There was a parched and bitter quality to everything that matched what he had found in the countryside he had passed through to get here. The feelings it engendered were the same—of a time and place, of a world and its inhabitants, passing into dust.
He thought back momentarily to two nights earlier, when he had encountered the ghosts of the dead in the mountains. The deadening he had experienced coming out of that strange and terrible encounter had lessened by now, and he had come back to himself from the dream world of the mist. Ghosts, he knew, must be relegated to the past; the future was for the living. Knights of the Word lived with one foot in the past, the legacy of their dreams, but their purpose in waking was to serve the future. He struggled with this. He knew he always would.
There was a joining of sleep and waking, of past and present, that could not be completely sorted out. Yet his mission in coming here, in finding the gypsy morph, transcended the confusion and misgivings and fears to which such a joining gave birth. What he would do here might change the destiny of the human race. His belief in that possibility demanded that he put aside everything else, everything personal, until he had done what he had been sent to do.
Inside his head, the ghosts chattered and laughed like small animals, and the steel of his determination shivered.
He proceeded through the doorway into the near blackness of a small entry, found the stairway beyond, and began to climb. He went slowly and silently, not wanting to alert the street kids to his presence, not wanting them to have a reason to bolt and scatter. It wasn’t that he was afraid of losing the morph.
But tracking down the morph, if it fled, would consume time he was not sure he had. Other forces were at work, and sooner or later he would come up against them. He did not want that to happen before his quest was complete.
He found the street kids on the night-shrouded fourth floor, barricaded behind a heavy iron-sheeted door. By then, they had gone quiet, alerted to his presence. Perhaps they had heard him approach. Perhaps they had simply sensed him. They possessed preternatural instincts or they would not still be alive. He looked up and down the hallway through the gloom for clues and found none. He looked again at the door. He could hear them breathing, right on the other side of the barrier. Interestingly, they had not fled. That meant they were prepared for intruders and not afraid. He would have to be careful.
“My name is Logan Tom,” he said to the door. “Can one of you talk to me?”
No answer. He waited awhile longer, and then said, “I am not here to harm you. I am looking for someone. I have come a long way to find this person. I think you can help me do that.”
Still no answer. But there was a faint stirring, a whispering that was almost inaudible, and the sound of a very big animal’s low growl.
“Are you from one of the compounds?” a voice asked. It was an older girl or a young woman, her voice steady and confident. He took a chance. “No, I’m not from the compounds. I serve a higher order. I am a Knight of the Word.”
More whispering, including someone’s inadvertently sharp query, “What’s that?”
“Do you have any weapons?” the first speaker asked. He had left everything in the Lightning, which was parked and secured on the main north-south highway, perhaps a mile east. “I am unarmed,” he said.