Faye nodded. “I guess you can’t really surprise somebody who can see the future.”
“Sure you can. I don’t see every little thing.” The skin of his face was drooping and grey. There were holes in his cheeks where you could see white teeth. If he’d had hair when he was alive, you couldn’t tell because all the skin on the top of his head was gone and it was just a white skull dome. His clothing was frayed and torn, but far cleaner than anyone else’s around here except for the field marshal’s. His eyes, still clear and intelligent, swept across the room. “Saw you coming though. Saw that for a long time. What do you think of the gallery?”
“It’s nice, I suppose.”
Zachary shuffled in with a bad limp. “It wasn’t always like this.” His voice was raspy and dry, but he still sounded like an American. “Back before I got killed, my Power was weak. Just sporadic looks into what might happen. I could only see little bits and pieces once in a while. It wasn’t like I could actually tell the future… You heard of déjà vu?”
Faye nodded. It was the sort of thing that Francis had read about in a magazine and thought was amusing enough to share with her. “Like you feel like you’d seen some things before?”
“My magic was sort of like that, but a little better. Happened often enough when I was a kid that I started drawing the pictures that would come into my head. That way I could prove later I wasn’t making things up. Took years to sort of get it straight, but even at my best I’d get some things right, lots of things wrong, wasn’t much better than guessing. No wonder the Society never paid much heed to what I had to say. I was about as useful as flipping a coin. See, back then I didn’t realize that the Power sees things different than we do, and sometimes it was showing me things that could be.”
“I’ve talked to the Power. It’s sorta weird like that.”
“Wasn’t until after I croaked that it really started clicking. Believe it or not, death is handy for some things. When your choices are focus on the pain or focus on your Power, you get pretty good at focusing on your Power.” He made a sad noise, but then Faye realized he was laughing, so she laughed with him. “Now I can’t shut it off. It’s all there, all of it, all the time, from all over the world, and maybe even some other worlds that don’t exist quite yet. Things that are, will be, might be, doesn’t matter, the Power just keeps on shoving it into my head and I keep putting it down on paper.”
“You’re a good drawer.”
“Thanks.” He gestured absently at the walls and she realized he was wearing gloves. He must have caught her staring. “The gloves? Yeah, I don’t like to leave bits of me on the paper. All that effort, my hands are getting worn out. I can barely hold a pen anymore. It really hurts.”
“But you have to keep drawing?”
“Same way you have to keep Traveling. You can’t even imagine what life would be like without being able to Travel, can you?”
“No.” That would be horrific. Horrific and slow. “It’s sorta who I am.”
“This is different, but kind of the same. You ever have a toothache, Faye?”
“Sure.”
Zachary nodded. “Being dead’s like a toothache. Only for your whole body. Forever. You ever been real hungry, so starving that you’d eat anything?” She’d already seen that he’d drawn the shack in Oklahoma, so he already had the answer. “Being dead’s worse, only you can’t ever stop that hunger. And that gnaws at you. It gnaws at your soul.” He touched his head absently with his glove, and some more skin fell away from the top of his skull. “I gotta keep drawing. Keep listening. Otherwise, that toothache will gnaw right through the rest of me and I wouldn’t be me anymore. I’d just be the hunger, like the rest of this town.”
That reminded her. “Jacques sent a package for you.” She pulled the satchel around and opened it up. It was filled with packages of typing paper and ink bottles and pens, and then she understood why it had been so heavy.
“Thoughtful of him, but never mind that. Don’t need them no more… My work is done. See, I only needed to stick around long enough to talk to you. This was all for you, Faye.”
“For me?”
“The Power wanted you to have it. I know why Jacques sent you. Last time we’d spoke was before the Power really started talking to me. See, I think I had too much humanity in the way before to really listen good, to really see the possibilities. Jacques figured I’d show you destroying the world, because that was what I’d shown him before.”
“Do I? Do I really destroy the world?”
“More often than not. There are lots of worlds and lots of Fayes, so that was just the most likely outcome. Not the only one.”
Now she was really confused.
His foot made a horrible sound as it dragged along the floor, and then Faye noticed that there were crumpled up balls of paper scattered about underfoot. She hadn’t paid them any mind before. She picked one up and uncrinkled it. This picture showed her, only older, and much scarier, her features all twisted up, and she was killing lots of people with all manner of magic, fire, and ice, and lightning, and from the looks on their faces, they weren’t bad people at all, just innocent folks, women and kids even…
“See what I mean? And that one isn’t the worst. Not even close.”
She crumpled it back up and tossed it down. “You hide the bad ones.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes they scared me so bad that I tossed them right out the window, watched them float down. I saw too many good ones, so I know your heart, Faye. I prefer to think of what can be, not the worst-case scenario. Now Jacques, he has to think about the worst. Poor Jacques. I never saw your face back when I was alive. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to, you know? Power didn’t want me to see. You got no idea how many pictures I’ve got here of him, agonizing over some hard decision, staring off into space, trying to decide what to do.”
“Fourteen,” Faye answered without hesitation.
“He’s doing it right now, I bet.” Zachary chuckled, but it was a horrible sound, what with the air blowing out the holes in his cheeks.
Faye went to the nearest one of her teacher. Jacques looked incredibly weary in that one. “What’s he doing with that vial?”
“Deciding on whether to poison you or not, I think…”
Faye was offended, but it made her more sad than angry.
“Don’t hold it against him. That much responsibility on one man is a hell of a thing. It’s probably my fault, you know, I warned the others about you. I showed them… I told them there’d be another Spellbound coming. He’d devoted years of his life hunting the last one, lost his girlfriend to Sivaram, even. What’d you expect him to do?”
“If I die, will there be another one after me?”
“I don’t think you realize it yet, sister. Now that we’ve been found, if you die, there’s nothing after you. The Power is a funny thing. It’s smarter than they think. It’s picked you, Faye. It picked you for a reason. With Sivaram it saw a way out, a way to break a cycle. It’s been to a lot of worlds and bonded with a lot of intelligences, but humans are the first one that ever surprised it. We’ve got something the ones before us didn’t have: Creativity. It didn’t realize humans were that capable, and for the first time in a million years it got its hopes up. It tried, only Sivaram wasn’t good enough, so it picked you next. It’s directed you this whole time, guided you, put you in the path of the others it’s picked. I draw them too.” He gestured at the walls. “All of us have a job to do, but you’re the only one that can put it all together. You are the only way the Power sees to beat the Enemy once and for all.”