Chapter Seven

"Your accent -- I can't quite place it."

Ghean smiled a little. Try as she might, she couldn't erase the faint traces of Atlantis from her voice. At first the fact had been a source of chagrin, but she'd come to be quietly amused at having a singularly unique accent in all the world. "I'm from the Mediterranean," she explained easily. "My family moved a great deal when I was a child."

The lie came easily after more than a decade of living in the twentieth century. At first she'd stuttered and mumbled useless explanations, certain her secret would be revealed. The frightened voice often resurfaced in those times, screaming out its horror of being found out. The other, infinitely patient, waited until the frightened one had yelled itself out before interfering.

They have no reason to suspect you, it pointed out. Write out your new history and study it. Make it simple, and there will be no flaws. Be confident. They cannot possibly suspect us.

And they didn't. Ghean knew the exact moment when she'd begun to think of mortals as 'they', as creatures different from herself. It had taken years, years in which she grew accustomed to the new world she was in. She learned languages, Egyptian first, from the young guide who'd told her how much time had passed. Two years with him was not enough to feel the difference between herself and mortals, nor were the following handful of years while she learned English and German from archaeologists robbing the magnificent temples and crypts the Egpytian pharohs had left behind.

The illusion that she was the same as she had been, as mortal as those around her, ended with a car crash. Her teacher, a skinny American, sped around a corner and into a cart pulled by oxen. He, the oxen, and two of the three in the cart died; Ghean jerked awake minutes after the crash, shattered skull stitching itself back together while a handful of terrified onlookers stared. A woman screamed, naming her a witch, and ran for the authorities.

The war has ended, the patient one advised. The gods are telling us it is time to leave Egypt and search for our enemy. Ghean pulled herself from the wreck and sold the last of her stash of hair for passage on a boat going to America.

"I do not understand this Prohibition," she went on. "Nowhere that I have been would such a thing be thought of."

The boy next to her smiled, waving his hand. "Only in America," he agreed. "It doesn't work very well, does it?" Another waves of his hand encompassed the dark little tavern -- speakeasy, Ghean reminded herself -- where they, and dozens of others, were congregated.

Ghean shook her head, about to speak when a headache rocketed through the back of her head, the abrupt wash of pain hard enough to feel as though it would come out her eyes. As quickly as it came, it passed, and she was left gripping the edge of the bar. After a few seconds she lifted her head, looking beyond the boy, frowning with concern.

A tall woman, dark hair bobbed and curled in permenant waves, stood just inside the door, scanning the room with narrowed eyes. In a moment, her gaze fixed on Ghean and she nodded slightly before making her way to the other side of the bar. Ghean watched her sit, then excused herself to the boy, and followed the other woman, coming to a stop a few feet away from her table.

The woman looked up, eyebrows arched. "I'm not looking for a fight," she said without preamble. "If you aren't either, have a seat."

Ghean sat, tentatively. "You gave me that headache," she half asked. The woman's eyebrows went up again, and sympathy suddenly washed across her face.

"You don't know what you are, do you?"

Ghean hesitated a moment. Tell her no! the patient one ordered. We need to learn to fight. She may help us, but how would we explain knowing what Immortals were and yet being unable to fight? "No," she said slowly. "I was in an automobile accident in Egypt and . . . . "

The woman's mouth twisted in a smile of acknowledgement. "And you got up from a fatal injury." Her voice was soft. "Maybe it's happened again since then. Maybe not. It will, though." She lifted her head, catching the bartender's eye and lifting two fingers. He nodded, and a minute later a pretty young woman delivered two drinks to the table. "Thanks," the Immortal woman said, and paid, pushing one drink across the table to Ghean. After the waitress was gone, she said, "I'm guessing that was the first headache like that you've felt."

Ghean nodded, picking up the drink to taste it, and grimaced. "What is this?"

"Gin and tonic." The brunette laughed. "It's awful, but it's cheap." She sipped her own drink, then offered a hand, across the table. "I'm Katerina. I was born in Venice four hundred and nineteen years ago. Have you ever used a sword?"

Surprise, largely heart-felt, flooded Ghean's face. I thought Immortals would be much more secretive. She shook the other woman's hand slowly. "I'm Ghean. I -- no, I've never used a sword."

"Funny, you look as though you're here. Maybe it's a case of here today, Ghean tomorrow." Katerina grinned, then shook her head. "Sorry. Unusual name. Kind of pretty, though. You're going to need a teacher, then. Finish your drink and we'll go to some nice little church and I'll tell you all about what you are."

Two days later Ghean went west with Katerina, to an isolated cabin in Navajo territory. "I lived with the tribes about three hundred years ago," Katerina explained. "Their holy people gave me permission to build a retreat here. It's a good place to hide, and to learn."

For three years, Ghean learned. Even Katerina towered over her, and most men would be at least the Venetian woman's height. "Use it to your advantage," Katerina ordered, and taught her the short sword, and the use of daggers first. Ghean came to love the elegance of the rapier, and drilled long hours even after practice had ended.

Katerina came out of the cabin early one morning to watch one such drill, arms folded. When Ghean eventually turned to her, the other woman came forward with an envelope. "There's more I can teach you, but you'd be better trained if you went to the far East. There are martial arts which will suit your size and frame, but I can't teach them to you. This is a letter to a friend of mine, and cash for the journey. I'll bring you to California. I've already arranged passage for you, if you're willing to go. It'll help you keep your head."

Not until the mid-30s did Ghean return to America. Only days after she landed, the thrill of warning shot through her as she walked a San Francisco street. The warning was accompanied by the close-by sound of swords clashing. Curious, she followed the sound, creeping forward down an alley to watch the battle. It lasted only minutes, two men silent with intent, the only sounds that of labored breathing and metal slamming against metal.

Ghean had taken no heads herself; the fury of lightning that rained from the sky was the closest she had ever been to a Quickening. She stood rigid in the aftershock, hair blown astray and heart racing as the survivor walked away, down the other end of the alley. Ghean sank against a wall, eyes closed, only to shriek in surprise when someone put a hand on her shoulder. Years of drilling came into play before she thought, as she knocked the hand away, and nearly drove the heel of her hand forward into the lower chest of the man who'd touched her.

He jumped back nervously, both hands lifted in apology. "I'm sorry," he said. He was brown-haired and brown-eyed, mild- looking. "You saw?" he asked, though he gave no indication what she might have seen.

Ghean pulled in a breath, about to deny having seen the battle as the man lowered his hands. For an instant she froze, reconstructing the image of his hands in the air. There was a mark on his inner wrist, impossibly familiar. "I -- what was -- he killed that man!" she blurted. "And the storm! Where did it come from?"

The brown man hesitated. "It would be best if you forgot what you saw," he suggested.

Ghean shook her head. "No. No, I want to know. What was it? Who were they? You know, don't you?" She could hear her accent growing thicker, and calmed herself a little. "Please tell me."

Another hesitation, then the man gestured withhis head. "Walk with me a little while," he said. "Tell me about yourself. My name is Thomas Burns."

"Marion," she replied in kind. "Marion Townsend." It was the name that had been on her travelling papers, the ones Katerina had provided for her. "I just came to San Francisco. I want to go to college. I want to learn history."

"Do you?" Thomas smiled. "I'm a historian, myself."

Ghean lifted her eyebrows. "I don't think I've ever seen a historian with a tattoo." She nodded a little at his wrist. "That's what's on your wrist, isn't it?"

He smiled again, and turned his wrist over, displaying a dark blue tattoo, a deeply curved Y within a circle. Ghean stared, feeling heat surge to her face.

It isn't possible, the frightened one insisted, and even the patient one seemed to agree. There was no detail within the Y, yet the curves were terribly familiar. The circle bordering the design had thirteen points. Ghean counted them rapidly, and then again, heart pounding.

It has to be, she told the voices. The thirteen Houses in the circle, just like all the House symbols had. The ram's head. It has to be. That's my House symbol!

After five thousand years? the frightened one demanded dubiously. It's impossible.

It's improbable, Ghean corrected it, and slowly looked up at Thomas. "It's very interesting. What's it of? The only tattoos I've ever seen have been fantastic creatures or women's names, things like that."

Thomas shrugged, smiling again. "It's a symbol that caught my eye a long time ago."

Ghean glanced back down the street towards the alley where the battle had been. It's impossible, the frightened one whispered. Aloud, she guessed, "It has something to do with the fight back there, doesn't it?"

Thomas stopped walking, frowning down at her. "You're very astute."

Ghean nearly stopped breathing. How? What does my family have to do with the Immortals? Who are you? Why are you watching us? What do you know about us? She stopped the race of thoughts with effort, and said, "I think I would like you to tell me about it, if you would."

Eight months later, Ghean entered the Watcher Academy. She had taken no heads, and her life as an Immortal had been quiet enough, evidently unnoticed by the Watchers. She went into research as quickly as she could, and in a few years transferred to the European branch of the Watchers, unable to find what she was looking for within the American texts.

The Parisian vaults held no more answers regarding the use of her House signet than the American histories had. Paris did, however, have dozens of texts on the only Immortal she had any interest in finding. They were called the Methos Chronicles, and for nearly a thousand years, there had been no new entries. The final journal came from 1066, the Battle of Hastings; his Watcher had lost him, and no one since had been able to find him. There were a few sightings that might have been him, over the last ten centuries, but most of the writers seemed to agree that Methos was dead, if he'd really ever existed at all. More than one chronicler suggested 'Methos' had been a number of Immortals over the centuries, laying claim to the name of a legend.

Ghean sat with the newest of the Methos Chronicles a long time, turning pages without really seeing them. It hadn't really occurred to me he might be dead, she realized. Even looking at the scrawled handwriting that recorded the last verified sighting, she did not entirely believe it.

She had time. If her old lover was still alive, she would find him somehow. The Chronicles were a disappointment in that aspect. She decided to study them anyway, as much for the sake of learning history as reading about her beloved. The newer texts were fairly easy to decipher, written in Old English or German, but she had to spend years learning Classical Greek and Latin. The latter was easier, and let her read back centuries; the former took more time, but the oldest texts about Methos were in that language.

The older the books, the more unweildy they were. By the time she had learned enough Greek to read the very oldest books, the covers were nearly as thick as the paper between them. They were terribly fragile, three thousand years old, and Ghean turned the heavy covers and thick paper carefully, remembering the fine, thin paper her mother had used in Atlantis.

The next piece of paper was very nearly that thin, and Ghean's fingers slipped on it, crumbling an edge to dust. She'd hardly been reading the pages as she turned them, and gave the piece under her hand a startled glance.

My darling Ghean,

For a few seconds Ghean couldn't read beyond the first words, written in her mother's delicate hand, in her native tongue of Atlantean.

My darling Ghean,

I realize the chances of you finding this are so slim as to be nonexistant. Still, I write these words in the hopes that this letter will somehow survive the centuries and end up in your hands.

Your Methos saved my life. I find this ironic, as only weeks before I had chosen to make him and his kind my life's study. Had he not saved me when Atlantis fell, that study would have died with me, and the Watchers would not exist. Because he did, I have this final chance to communicate with you, through the barrier of time.

He said that you died in the first moments of the panic. I have no reason to doubt him, other than the hopes of an aging mother. I know that you are, as he is, Immortal, or have that potential within you. It is a comfort to me to imagine that you somehow survived the destruction of Atlantis and live on, last child of our House.

Sheer willpower prevented Ghean from crumbling the paper to dust. Her hands trembling, she stared down at the words. I know that you are Immortal. She was betrayed on all sides. Shaking, she took her hand away from the paper, to prevent herself from clenching her fist and taking her mother's last words to her away. In time, she was able to go on.

I do not know when you will find this letter. I do not know what the world will be like, how much it will have changed, where the Watchers archives might be.

If you have found this at all, it is likely you have found the Watchers themselves. I chose the symbol of House Aries as the marker for the Watchers before Atlantis fell; now I am glad I did so, for it is a sign you should be able to recognize, no matter how many years pass.

I have taught many of my followers -- the Watchers -- Atlantis' tongue and written language, for it is more elegant than any other writing yet known. I can only imagine what language this letter might have been translated in to by the time you find it. I only hope that in whatever form, it survives the years, and that you, too, have somehow survived, and will be able to read this.

If you do, share your history with the Watchers. Share our family with them, as they are a very real legacy of House Aries. Tell them of Atlantis, and if there is some way in the new world that you live in to bring Atlantis back to the sun, I hope that you will try. I hope that its magic will be a part of the world again someday.

Remember that for all time, I love you.

It was signed with the graceful scrawl of Minyah's name.

Ghean read the letter until she could see the words with her eyes closed, committing them to memory. Her mother had known, and hadn't told her. We don't interfere, the patient one reminded her, echoing Katerina's lessons.

She was my mother! Ghean shouted back. She wasn't Immortal! She wasn't bound by the same rules! She should have told me!

She began the Watchers, the patient one said, too rationally. She made her own rules of non-interference. We couldn't have known Atlantis would fall. If we'd known, perhaps she'd have told us, to protect us. It's too late now. Let it go. Be glad there is anything of her at all, after all this time.

Ghean's head dropped, and she nodded a little. "The letter," she murmured, in Atlantean, "the Watchers, and me. And someday, we'll bring back Atlantis for her." Feeling weary, she turned the letter over, trying to focus again on Methos' history.

A second piece of paper cracked free of the back of the letter, falling forward against the Chronicle's pages. For a handful of seconds she simply stared at the blank sheet. Picking it up took conscious will. She could see the impressions from where pressure had sealed it to the back of her mother's letter. I wonder how long it's been since anyone's looked at the Methos Chronicles. She turned the sheet over, carefully. It was old, but far less delicate than the ancient sheet her mother's letter had been written on. Seeing her name written again, in a different hand but in the same tongue, sent a dull sick thud through her, the feeling of a missed heartbeat.

Ghean,

I wish I could have saved you, Ghean. There was no time, and I don't believe anybody could have survived that cataclysm. I still think about you sometimes. I hope your rest has been a peaceful one.

There was no name, only a date, written out in longhand, in Atlantean: eighteen hundred and forty-five.

Ghean set the letter down gently, hands shaking. Only ninety years ago. He's alive. The conviction filled her.

He's alive.