Free The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) by Jon Land

left one off by accident since I’ve been here.”
    “Someone clever wouldn’t need an ax to leave behind whatever clues they wanted.”
    “Someone like you, Ferryman.”
    “Except the young lady doesn’t suspect me.”
    “Because she doesn’t know you as well as I do.”
    “Meaning?”
    Peet’s face was expressionless. “Accept what you are, Ferryman. Stop using me for scale to place yourself at the level you desire. Even the young woman from the FBI looked at you and knew.”
    “Knew what, Peet?”
    “That she was facing what she was after. Perhaps not in name, but certainly in feeling. The other level, Ferryman. She knew that only one who dwells there could do what her quarry has done. You, me, and now Tiny Tim. She accused me, but she might just as easily have accused you.”
    “I don’t want to believe her.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it would mean I was wrong about you.”
    “No—because it would mean you were wrong about yourself. Your misjudgment of my character would mirror your misjudgment of your own. If I could still be guilty of such an act, then so could you.”
    “And could you?”
    The faintest hint of a smile crossed Winston Peet’s lips. “My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move. The line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a circle, which has a midpoint and is peculiar to him. It is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses himself as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world… .”
    “And how does Tiny Tim measure it?”
    “The evil of the strong harms others thoughtlessly—it has to discharge itself; the evil of the weak wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused.”
    “You’re saying Tiny Tim is weak.”
    “Physically, he is a match for us, but in no other way. How many now?”
    “Over two hundred. Two separate towns in less than a week.”
    Peet seemed to dwell on that briefly. “He likes what he does, Ferryman. I have felt him out there, a black vacuum sucking in what little it can accept.”
    “But you didn’t send for me. You didn’t want to …”
    “Help?” Peet completed. “I didn’t because I can’t. I can’t help you with Tiny Tim because the dark world he inhabits lies on the fringe of our own. To pursue him I will have to cross over, and once over I fear I will never come back.”
    “In other words, you’re afraid of becoming the man you used to be.”
    “Because I never stopped being him, Ferryman. I merely redefined his essence. To pursue Tiny Tim, I would have to redefine it again.”
    “In hunting a monster, one must avoid becoming one,” said Kimberlain, paraphrasing Nietzsche.
    The giant smiled broadly. “And when one stares into the abyss, the abyss stares back.”
    “I’ve just come from there,” Kimberlain told him. “And it’s empty.”
    “Leeds is out,” Kimberlain said when they were inside the cabin, watching as Peet’s features became tense. “He escaped from The Locks three days ago with the rest of the population of MAX-SEC.”
    “How many?”
    “Eighty-three.”
    “I did not feel them, Ferryman. Strange.”
    The cabin’s interior was furnished with a combination of the furniture Kimberlain had built before abandoning the project and that which Peet himself had constructed. The lines of Peet’s pieces—a couch with handmade cushions, a kitchen table made of birch, bookshelves only sparsely filled—were much rounder and softer. Kimberlain realized the hard squareness of his own work mirrored the difficult times that had seen its construction. He sat on the couch, dwarfed upon it. Peet, of course, had built everything to his own massive scale. The giant stood motionless in the open kitchen area, suspended between the task of making breakfast and the chore of