John Ross knew what he had to do. The crucified Knight’s memories of what was needed were clear and certain. He could not tell if the dream had shown him his own fate, if he was the Knight on the cross and he had witnessed his own death. He could not know if by being told of the morph he was being given a second chance at changing his own life. To accept that his dream had allowed him to step outside himself completely in bearing witness to the future he was working so hard to prevent, he must conclude that there was an extraordinary reason for such a thing to happen because it had never happened before.
It was easier to believe that seeing his own face on the crucified Knight of the Word was a trick of his imagination, a deception wrought by his fear that he would fail as this other Knight had failed and come to a similar end. It was not difficult to believe. The odds against his successfully capturing and exploiting a gypsy morph were enormous. It had been done only a handful of times in all of history. The methods employed and the differing results had never been documented. There was no standard procedure for this. But if necessity was the mother of invention, John Ross would find a way.
The stories of gypsy morphs were the stuff of legends. Ross had heard tales of the morphs during the twenty-five-odd years he had served the Word. Mostly they were whispered in awe by forest creatures, stories passed down from generation to generation. When the consequences of an intervening magic were particularly striking, either for good or evil, it was always suggested that it might have been due to the presence of a morph. No one living, as far as Ross could tell, had ever seen one. No one knew what they looked like at the moment of their inception. No one knew what they would turn out to be because no two had ever turned out the same. There were rumors of what they might become, but no hard evidence. One, it was said, had become an antibiotic. Another had become a plague. Gypsy morphs were enigmas; he had to be able to accept that going in.
What John Ross knew for sure when he went to Oregon was that whoever gained control over a gypsy morph acquired the potential to change the future in a way no one else could. It was a goal worth pursuing, even knowing it was also virtually impossible to achieve. He had little working for him, but more than enough to know where to begin. The crucified Knight’s memories had told him the morph would appear in a low-tide coastal cave on the upper coast of Oregon near the town of Cannon Beach three days after Thanksgiving. In those memories he found a picture of the cave and the landscape surrounding it, so he knew what to look for.
What his dream of the crucified Knight had revealed to him was not so different from what his dreams usually told him—a time and a place and an event he might alter by his intervention. But usually he knew the details of the event, the course it had taken, and the reason things had gone amiss. None of that was known to him here. He did not know the form the gypsy morph would take when it came into being. He did not know how to capture it. He did not know what would happen afterward, either to the morph or to himself.
It was reassuring in one sense to have it so. Not knowing suggested he was someone other than the Knight on the cross, their resemblance notwithstanding. But it was odd, too, that the Knight’s memories ceased with the moment of the morph’s appearance, as if the slate afterward had been wiped clean or never come into being. Clearly the Knight felt he had failed in his attempt to secure the morph’s magic and unlock its secret. Was this because he had failed even to capture the morph? Or was it because he was hiding the truth of what had happened afterward, not wanting Ross to see? There was no way for Ross to know, and speculation on the matter yielded nothing.