Gypsies

Laura whispered, “It’s out there, Michael… please, I know it is.” Home.

He held the word inside him. Those forests and those cities. Home, he thought…

And then the walls gave way, and there was only time and possibility and a great and simultaneous motion; and Michael closed his eyes against the brightness and opened them on a high blue sky very far away.

Chapter Twenty-four

1

Cardinal Palestrina followed Carl Neuma

Its emptiness was shocking and he could see that shock in Neuma

Finally it was Neuma

Cardinal Palestrina turned away.

It’s over now, he thought. There is no Plenum Project; there is no secret weapon. All this effort and constraint had come to nothing. There was the collaborator—Tim—the man cringing by the wall—but Neuma

And there was Walker… but Walker had been wounded with clumsy neurosurgery, gutted until he was nothing more than a passive psychic bloodhound, a hunting machine. So the Project had ended and probably Neuma

And in the long run, Cardinal Palestrina thought, what else might this mean? A potential advantage in the war irrevocably lost; the alliance with the Americans weakened; years of entrenchment and bloodshed and compromise.

So this was a disaster. A terrible thing had happened today.

But Cardinal Palestrina felt the hammering of his own heart, and it was a kind of giddiness—a vicarious triumph: strangely, as if the Devil had taken a beating here today.

2

Walker learned from a distressed mage what had happened in the containment cell, and he hurried there looking for Neuma

Neuma

But I brought them here, he thought. I did my part. It was a contract (though never written or spoken), and, Walker thought fervently, I fulfilled my part of it. Payment due, he thought.

But Neuma

He thought for the first time, Maybe it’s too late. Maybe they won’t give it back—what they took from me. What I lost.

He touched his fingers to the scar ru

“It’s not the end,” Neuma

Cardinal Palestrina shook his head. “You’re talking about years. Generations.”

“Not necessarily!”

“Our needs,” Palestrina said, “are unfortunately more immediate.”

“Needs!” Neuma

But Palestrina merely turned and left the room.

Neuma

“Fucking Papist,” Neuma

Walker stepped forward. His mind was whirling. So much had happened and he understood so little of it. Make me whole, he wanted to say; that was the bargain; you promised me that. But he knew from Neuma

So he said, simply, “Do you want me to find them?”

Neuma

“Yes,” he said. “And kill them?”

It was all Walker had to offer. It was everything. He understood how fragile the sorcels of entrapment; had been, how long they had taken to devise—more than two decades since the day he had offered three gifts to three children: small potent binding magics. It was an edifice, moreover, which could not be rebuilt … certainly not within Neuma

“They’re dangerous,” Neuma

“What about this one?”

“Begin with him.”

3

Tim watched the Gray Man advancing.

His outrage was instantaneous. Not for this, he thought.

I didn’t do any of it for this.

Christ, and how many miles had he traveled to come here since he left that house in Polger Valley two decades ago? How many fucked-up menial jobs and days without food and nights on some raw rained-out interstate hitching Detroit to Chicago to Des Moines to Points fucking West? How many empty bottles, how many insulted veins? How many lame dodges through crippled worlds like (admitting it now) this one? And for what?

So he could hand over his sisters to be killed? And be killed himself for his trouble? No. Oh, no.

He looked into the eyes of the Gray Man, his fists bunched. He said, “I trusted you!” Walker didn’t laugh.

Home! Tim wanted to say. I came home! And you showed me! Kingdoms! Empires! You owe me that!

As Walker reached for him.

Tim stood up straight. He felt what Walker was about to do, some presentiment of it, the opening of the world’s walls around him. He looked Walker in the eye, but there was no recognition there; only a shadow.

Walker touched him. All over now. “Fuck you,” Tim said. “You were never my father.”

And tumbled away into chaos… only the echo of him left to bounce around these old stone walls.

Chapter Twenty-five

1

We can’t hide,” Laura said. “I’m not even sure we can run.”

But Michael was more optimistic. “Moving around helps. I think it’ll gain us some time, at least.”

So they thumbed a ride up the broad highway that ran between Ville Acadie

They walked for an afternoon. At dusk, they knocked at the door of an old stone farmhouse and asked for shelter for the night. The woman who answered—a pretty woman in a peasant skirt and thick, rimless eyeglasses—said they could have the loft and leftovers, and it was a good thing the weather had warmed up.