Traveler by Arwen Elys Dayton

Author:Arwen Elys Dayton [Elys Dayton, Arwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

It was raining at Dun Tarm, and thick tendrils of mist grew up from the lake, hiding the forest. The distant rocky summits showed themselves as dark shapes peeking through a curtain of gray.

“How many times are you gonna hit me?” Nott demanded from the floor of the fortress, his face in a puddle of stagnant water from Loch Tarm. Raindrops pattered on the back of his head.

“You’ll take your beating without complaint,” said the brown-skinned Watcher.

His name was Geb. Nott knew this because he’d introduced himself around the time he’d started pummeling Nott. Geb probably wasn’t more than eighteen years old, but he seemed to think he was second to no one but their master.

His younger partner, a skinny boy called Balil, was in the process of driving his fist into Wilkin’s gut repeatedly. Wilkin made muffled yelps, but Nott was proud to see that his own partner wasn’t crying. Why should they give these other Watchers the pleasure?

From that strange room full of computers in Hong Kong, they’d finally followed their master’s instructions. After a long walk There, they’d found Geb and Balil standing as still as figures in a churchyard, waiting to be brought back into the world. Nott had seen the distant shapes of other Watchers, also waiting in the blackness. In a perfect world, they would have retrieved all of them. But this was not a perfect world, because they didn’t have their helm. By the time they’d found Geb and Balil, they’d been in danger of losing themselves in the no-time of that place, and they’d had to settle for bringing back only two.

They’d carved an anomaly back to Dun Tarm and dragged Geb and Balil through with them. The older boys’ limbs had been stiff, even though their skin was soft, and it had been heavy work to haul them through the cold water of the lake and dump them in the sheltered area within the fort, to wait for them to wake up.

Geb and Balil both had the sort of dark, dark skin Nott associated with deepest Africa. Nott wondered fleetingly where their master had recruited them, and when. Their master trained all Watchers at Dun Tarm—where he taught them the joys of fighting and killing things, where he taught them the necessity of following his orders, where he punished them, and from where he banished them if they disobeyed him. But of course the training took place over many decades or maybe even longer, and Watchers might have come from anywhere in the world originally, anywhere their master had found likely boys to mold in his own image.

Most Watchers had been purchased from their families, some stolen. Nott himself had been bought, for a few silver coins. He remembered his first glimpse of his master, broad like a bull, with a face not made to smile, his dark cloak hanging about his shoulders as though it were a natural-born part of him. Nott had been terrified as that man took him

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