Chapter 33 | Part 3 | The Course Change

The argument lasted an hour and settled nothing except the direction.

Dulint wanted to follow the original mission. Northeast to the convergence point. The barrier, the destination, the thing they’d been walking toward since Zuraldi. The person carrying the other artifact was someone else’s problem. Their problem was the system, the Beacon, and whatever awaited at the point where the pull had been leading them.

“We don’t know this man,” Dulint said. His voice had the careful steadiness of someone whose argument was built on the part of the truth he could bear to share. “We know the Beacon. We know it was leading us somewhere before it started leading us to someone. That somewhere still exists.”

“The somewhere was wherever he was standing,” Maris said. “There was never a fixed point.”

“You don’t know that.”

“She knows the Beacon tracks his artifact. She knows the artifact moves with him. The fixed point was a coincidence of his stillness.”

Aldric cut through it. “If he’s carrying the other half of this system, then he’s the most important person in whatever is happening.” He held the Beacon’s direction in his mind the way he held sightlines and exit routes, with the tactical clarity of someone who’d spent a career reading threat geometry. “We reach him, we have both pieces. We have leverage. We have options.”

“We have a man we don’t know,” Dulint said, “carrying something we don’t understand, on the other side of a barrier we can’t cross.”

“Can we cross it?” Balin asked.

The question was directed at Xandor. The old druid was sitting against a tree, his left hand opening and closing in its involuntary rhythm. He’d been quiet during the argument, the particular quietness of a man who was processing information through a framework the others didn’t have access to.

“The barrier is not a wall,” Xandor said. “It’s a membrane. Things pass through it. People have passed through it, historically. But the crossing requires compatibility or circumstance, and we have neither.” He paused. His good hand touched the tree beside him. Listened. “However. The Beacon is a component of the system that generates the barrier. It may have properties at the barrier’s edge that we haven’t observed yet. Proximity may reveal function.”

“May,” Aldric said.

“May,” Xandor confirmed. “I am not in the habit of guaranteeing things I haven’t tested.”

“So the plan is: walk toward the barrier, hope the Beacon does something useful when we get there, and somehow reach a man on the other side of the most dangerous boundary in recorded history.” Aldric’s voice was flat. The flatness that meant he’d already accepted the plan and was angry about it.

“The plan is follow the Beacon,” Maris said. “The Beacon is now tracking him. Whatever it was going to do when it reached the barrier, it’s still going to do. The destination hasn’t changed. Just our understanding of it.”

Dulint stared at the fire pit. His thick fingers worked at the strap of his pack, a nervous habit Maris had noticed increasing over the past weeks. The pack contained the Beacon and whatever weight the Beacon had placed on the old dwarf’s shoulders since the day he’d found it.

“If we follow his bearing,” Dulint said slowly, “we’re no longer walking toward the convergence. We’re walking toward a person.”

“Yes.”

“And if that person walks away from the convergence?”

“Then the convergence was never a place.”

Dulint closed his eyes. The argument he wanted to make, Maris could feel it pressing against his silence. The seer’s warning. The vision he carried like a second pack, the one nobody could see, the one that made every decision heavier and every route slower. She could feel his fear the way she felt the Beacon, as a frequency, low and constant and draining.

He didn’t say it. He opened his eyes and shouldered his pack and stood.

“Northeast still works,” he said. “For now.”

It wasn’t agreement. It was the absence of a better objection. It would do.

Aldric broke camp in seven minutes. The efficiency of a man who’d decided a course of action and would not tolerate the camp existing one second longer than necessary. Balin fell into line without complaint, his walking stick finding ground with a rhythm that had become as natural as breathing. Xandor moved slowly, his body still recovering from the damage Maris couldn’t fully see, the internal cost of proximity to a system that used human flesh as its antenna.

They walked northeast. The same direction as before, for now. The Beacon’s bearing and the original course overlapped enough to make the change invisible to anyone who wasn’t feeling it from the inside.

Maris felt it. The quality of the pull had changed. Before, it had been geographic, the steady tug of a compass pointing true north, reliable and impersonal. Now it was personal. The pull had a heartbeat in it. A rhythm that corresponded to someone’s stride, someone’s breathing, someone’s progress through a landscape Maris could see only in fragments and paid for in blood.

He was walking east. They were walking northeast. The lines converged somewhere ahead, at a point that moved because one of its coordinates was a person and the other was whatever the Beacon intended to do when the distance closed.

Aldric fell into step beside her as the forest thinned into open ground.

“If he’s carrying the other half of the Beacon,” he said, “then we need to reach him before he reaches the barrier. Because if the Beacon is this anxious from here, imagine what he’s walking into.”

Maris looked at him. Aldric’s grey eyes held the particular intensity of a man who’d spent years watching people walk into things they didn’t understand, and being proven right about the outcome, and hating the proof.

“She’s trying,” Maris said.

“Try faster.”

He moved ahead. Maris walked behind him, the Beacon humming in Dulint’s pack four paces in front of her, the pull in her chest steady and personal and aimed at a dark elf she’d never met whose fear she’d worn like borrowed skin.

She tried faster. The headache behind her eyes built another floor.

End of Chapter 33.3 —> 33.4: What the Beacon Lost: The Distance