At the far end of the room was a large, circular stained-glass window. As Josh watched, the air in front of it shimmered, and the details of the window bulged like bubbles of molten glass as the aperture broke through into their timeline. He thought he could hear distant sounds, distorted and fragmented, coming from the other side of the breach. The distortion expanded, and inside the bubble he could see a writhing mass of inky tendrils weaving their way out from its centre.
‘First wave,’ Johansson declared as the dark skeins formed into shapes. He was working frantically on one of his devices. ‘I’m going to need another minute,’ he warned, looking anxiously over to Sohguerin.
‘Inside the circle,’ she barked at the colonel and Josh, who stepped quickly over the coal-dust boundary. Josh noticed that the edges had already begun to crystalise into diamond.
A creature coalesced out of the seething mass. Its pale, eyeless face was still cloaked in strands of dark vapour as it took on the form of an old man. His jaw had been ripped away, revealing rows of shark-like teeth that seemed to go on forever down into his throat.
The monad broke out of the aperture and rose up in the air above them, beneath the layers of smoke, Josh caught fleeting glimpses of deformed hands and claws of many other creatures.
It was like staring at a nightmare. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest, and his mouth went dry. The monad emanated despair, feeding on his fear.
‘Level three at least,’ the colonel said from behind Josh, ‘and there’s at least two more coming. Sergeant, we need that weapon pronto!’
There was a cry from the corner and Josh turned to see Guillaume shaking, wild-eyed and still pinned to the wall. His hands were bloody where he had gripped the blade to pull the sword out.
Attracted to the sound or the blood, the monad turned towards the alchemist.
‘Stop it!’ shouted the colonel. ‘Captain, we cannot afford to lose him.’
The captain whispered to one of her shrunken-head charms and lifted it up like an offering to the monad. The creature’s misshapen head turned, the half-eaten nose seeming to wrinkle as if sniffing it out. Sohguerin was chanting in a language that Josh couldn’t understand. When the monad drew closer, an outline of a Hindu god projected out from the charm, an elephant-headed being with six arms that took hold of the monster and held it fast.
‘Hold it steady,’ said Johansson, opening one side of a small metal cage and offering it to her. The captain dropped the charm into the box, and Johansson pushed it across the floor and out of the circle. The monad, unable to free itself from the grip of the effigy, was pulled inside.
‘What the hell was that?’ Josh asked, while Johansson pulled a glass jar wrapped in wire out of his bag and began to wind up the clockwork device that was attached to the side of it.
‘Godheads — she’s a mystic,’ Johansson replied as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Josh didn’t have time to ask what that was before another wave of monads solidified before them.
‘Make yourself useful.’ Johansson handed Josh a couple more jars.
‘What are they?’
‘Timetraps. Faraday cages of sorts.’ He showed Josh how they opened. ‘Mousetraps for monads!’
The first two were followed by five more. The traps were running out, and there seemed to be no end to the flood of monsters.
‘Are we going to have enough?’ Josh wondered aloud, counting the next wave as they began to take shape. There would be at least ten more in the next few minutes.
‘Not unless she can seal the breach!’ Johansson nodded towards Sohguerin, who was using two deities against a posse of monads.
They were surrounded, though the colonel was holding his own against three grotesquely mutated creatures, each individually horrific in their reimagining of a human body.
‘Time for a little exorcism,’ Johansson cried out, stepping forward and swinging a mace-like incense burner above his head — he ploughed into the newest arrivals.
Josh’s eye caught sight of the dark gaping hole at the middle of the aperture and was captivated by the feeling that there was something else within it. Concentrating on the swirling centre, he began to catch glimpses of other things, spinning fast, like on a merry-go-round. There were flashes of different worlds, and amongst the chaos he thought he could make out the shape of a man moving towards him. Like a badly edited film, the frames out of sequence, the stranger seemed to move closer and then drop back. The silhouette of the figure was an irregular shape with a spherical head, as if he was wearing a spacesuit.
Josh couldn’t quite come to terms with the idea that an astronaut was walking towards him from the other side of the breach.
‘Don’t gaze too long into the abyss,’ warned the colonel, pulling Josh away, ‘lest the abyss gaze into you!’
Johansson laughed as he caught one of the monsters with his smoking mace. ‘Now is really not the time for Nietzsche!’ The monad’s body evaporated as the censer smashed into it.
‘Hey bookworm, are you seriously going to just stand there?’ Johansson looked back at Josh.
Josh was finding it hard to take his eyes off the aperture. The figure was getting closer, and as it flickered in and out of view he was sure he would soon be able to see it clearly.
The protective circle was nearly completely white with diamond when one of the monads broke free of Sohguerin’s deities and rushed at her. Johansson stepped between them, pushing her back and swinging the mace at its head, but he missed, and the globe shattered on the stone floor.
‘Shit! Timetrap, now!’ he screamed at Josh.
Josh wasn’t quick enough. The monad’s claws scythed off the first three fingers of Johansson’s outstretched hand as Josh threw the trap.
Sohguerin was knocked sideways by the creature when it rounded for another attack on Johansson. Josh picked up the shield and forced the monster back out of the circle. The two Dreadnoughts were badly hurt, and the colonel was fighting a losing battle against a wall of horrors.
Something hit the shield with incredible force and knocked him to the floor. Stunned, Josh thought he heard the colonel shout: ‘Sergeant, the bomb if you please.’
‘Eighty percent my arse!’ complained Johansson, using his good hand to pull a weird looking contraption out of his jacket. Josh watched him cradle it with his half-hand as he twisted the dial on top of it and threw it to the colonel.
Then the world went white.
20
Alone
Motes of dust drifted gently down on shafts of sunlight that filtered through the shattered stained-glass window. Josh watched them for a while, his eyes slowly adjusting to the daylight.
He couldn’t believe how quiet and peaceful it was. After the screeching of the monads, the total absence of sound was like waking from a terrible nightmare, until he realised it was just the ringing in his ears cancelling everything out.
Slowly, the memory of what had happened drifted back into his consciousness. Like a three-dimensional jigsaw, small pieces of the event restored themselves in random sequences. They’d been close to being overwhelmed when the colonel asked for the bomb. Someone was coming through the breach when it went off.
Josh was lying on the stone floor, with what felt like a door pressing down on his back. Lifting his head, he looked around the room for any sign of the others. The bomb seemed to have exploded away from him, blowing everything outwards: every splinter of furniture, shred of book or fibre of carpet had been piled up against the castle walls — which weren’t looking particularly stable either.
Whatever type of explosive Johansson had used, it seemed to have cleansed the room of monads, breaches and the rest of his company.
Josh raised himself up on his elbows and the shield slid away. He sat up and checked himself for any obvious wounds, but there were none. He was, however, covered in a fine white dust, as if someone had thrown a bag of flower over him, which he realised was powdered diamond.
H
is lower back ached — someone had given him an almighty kick in the kidneys just before the bomb went off. Josh wasn’t sure who, and there was no one left to ask — even the alchemist had vanished. He was annoyed that they’d left him behind — no one had hung around to check on him, but he guessed they had other business to attend to.
A light wind blew in through the blasted windows and with it came the scent of rain. It was a refreshing, cleansing smell, like the one you get after a storm. Watching the breeze brush swirls of diamond dust across the cracks in the floorboards, Josh wondered whether everything had gone back to normal now. The astronaut inside the breach was obviously trying to reach the alchemist to give him the formula — the colonel had been right about time tunnellers using the maelstrom. But the question he couldn’t answer, was why. All he could hope now was that by stopping him, the continuum had corrected itself, and that it was the reason the present had got in such a mess.
A shout came up from outside followed by the sounds of swords clashing against shields. Josh stood up unsteadily and went to the broken window. Young squires were practising in the courtyard below; they reminded him of the ones from the picture books he’d read as a kid, all tin helmets and broadswords — and not a musket in sight.
Josh breathed a sigh of relief, their mission was a success. They had prevented the secret of gunpowder being passed to the French, though it was hard to celebrate when you had no one else to share it with.
A glass shard flew past his ear and took its place in the window. Josh span around to see a thousand more pieces flying towards him. Time within the room was reverting: pieces of furniture began to reconstruct themselves, threads of tapestries recombining into beautifully woven scenes, and the fragments of the blasted stained glass were flying back into position.
In a matter of minutes everything was back in its proper place, like nothing had ever happened.
The continuum was stabilising, Josh could feel it. As the colonel had told him he would. There was something about the way time was flowing that he just knew was intrinsically better.
All he had to figure out now was how to get back to the present.
21
Reset
Josh learned quickly that the fundamental problem with being trapped in the past without a tachyon was that he had nothing to take him forward. The tachyon’s ability to record his movements through time was something he’d taken for granted — until he needed it. Even the mighty Paradox needed a sliver of a timeline to move forward through the continuum.
Josh had managed to escape from the castle once it had grown dark. The guards were too busy watching for enemies beyond the walls to be concerned with anyone trying to leave. Although, once he was out of range, he began to wonder if it wouldn’t have been safer to have stayed there. The dirt road was treacherous in the darkness, and he was sure he’d heard wolves howling off in the distance.
His original plan was to search for the local Chapter House, but having no idea where to start, and with a fail in high school French, he ruled out asking the natives. Instead, he found the nearest barn and slept the night in the hayloft.
There was little in the way of technology in 11.060, and medieval was an understatement. The local peasants he encountered on his wanderings through the Normandy hills appeared to be descended from a forgotten tribe of Neanderthals — ones who’d been taught how to wear clothes. They had nothing, apart from some interesting skin diseases and a distinct lack of teeth. Josh quickly decided it was simpler to avoid any kind of contact with the locals altogether. Which led to a succession of uncomfortable nights sleeping under hedges and eating things he wouldn’t wish on a vegetarian.
On the sixth night he was lying in a field with a belly full of strawberries, watching meteorites arc across the star-filled sky, when it occurred to him that he might have overlooked another way to access the continuum.
The constellations reminded him of the colonel’s lifeline and how he’d been able to look forward to his end. Caitlin had told him once how the seers had the ability to look at the potential destiny of a person, and that the reavers had abused it to explore death.
Josh had never told anyone that he could do it. Seers were weird, freaks of nature and much as he liked Lyra, she was bat-shit crazy.
But, he supposed, if he could see the potential future of a person, perhaps he could use it to move along the timeline. At least to a point where they had electric lights and flushing toilets. The next day he found a drunk sleeping off the afternoon under an old oak tree and tested his theory.
In hindsight, he wasn’t the best candidate to start with, but it worked. Josh managed to move a year forward before the man died of cirrhosis.
The next candidate he found was younger, a doe-eyed milk maid who immediately took a shine to the blonde stranger. She’d been very eager to spend the night with him in the barn, and was the first person to show him any tenderness in a while, yet he couldn’t shake the hope that Caitlin was waiting for him in the present. Josh felt a small pang of guilt as he reached into the maid’s timeline, until he saw her long and happy life — one that propelled him nearly sixty years into the future.
So it went on, with Josh leapfrogging through history one life at a time for nearly a thousand years. It was the strangest history lesson he’d ever had. Experiencing how civilisation had evolved over ten centuries through the lives of more than thirty generations opened his eyes to what the Order were trying to protect. It was like watching a child grow from a toddler into a teenager. The lives he ‘borrowed’ gave him an insight into humanity’s potential for destroying itself: so many of the routes that he’d chosen ended badly, whether through disease, stupidity or war. It wasn’t until he made it to the twenty-first century that Josh realised how lucky he was to have been born in that era, and he was relieved to see that everything seemed to be as it should.
Until he reached the now. The present.
Then he realised not everything had gone back to normal.
He couldn’t find his mother.
Josh had gone directly to the colonel’s house in Churchill Gardens and discovered it was occupied by other people — which was something of a shock for both parties as Josh came bounding in through the back door. He’d stupidly assumed that everything had reset back to the way it had been before, but as usual the continuum had other ideas. There was no sign of his mother, and as the rather flustered mum-of-two declared at the top of her voice — definitely no ‘Colonel.’
He left before she called the police and made for the flat.
Mrs B. still lived on the Bevin Estate. Like some kind of universal truth or fixed point in the chaos, she sat in her front room amongst the porcelain cats and photos of her many grandchildren and poured the tea.
‘I haven’t seen Mrs Jones in — oh, it must be ten years now,’ she said, staring into the distance. ‘Not since she met that teacher. Now what was he called? Tims, I think.’
Josh inwardly shivered at the name. ‘Timmins?’
‘Yes. Strange man — never could look me in the eye.’
Timmins had always been odd, one of those confirmed bachelor types that had stayed too long under the influence of a domineering mother.
‘Where are they living now?’ he asked. It felt strange not knowing where his mother was, after he’d spent so long looking after her.
‘Oh, they moved into his mother’s house after she passed away. The large bungalow on Chamberlain Street, the one opposite the bus stop — with all the beautiful flowers.’
Josh knew it well; it sat in the middle of a large rose garden. Timmin’s mother was a very proud woman who would open her house once a year for people to come and visit her gardens. He’d always wanted to take his mum there, but she had never been well enough.
‘I heard they had a child. A boy, I think.’
Josh nearly dropped his teacup.
‘What?’
‘Yes. After a year or so. Margaret from downstairs bumped into her with a pram outside Wait
rose. She seemed very happy.’
Josh didn’t know which was more shocking, the baby or the fact that she was shopping.
‘But what about her condition?’
‘What condition?’
‘Her MS?’
Mrs B shook her blue-rinsed hair. ‘Never heard of it. Where did you say you were from again?’
‘The council. We’re doing a survey.’
‘Yes, the council. I think I was supposed to ask for some identity card wasn’t I?’ she asked, with that twinkle in her eye.
Josh stood up to leave. ‘Thanks, Mrs Bateman. You’ve been more than helpful.’
‘You’re welcome, my dear. What did you say your name was again.’
‘Dalton. Dalton Eckhart.’
22
Mum
[London. Date: Present Day]
Josh stood at the bus stop on Chamberlain Street trying to summon the courage to cross the road. Something was holding him back, an instinctive feeling that he wouldn’t be welcome. His memory of Timmins was of a beetle-browed, older man with a stammer and bad teeth. The creep had hung around for months when they’d first moved into the flat, until his mum’s MS worsened and he disappeared overnight. But it wasn’t Timmins that was putting him off — it was his mother.
Josh was feeling anxious after Mrs B hadn’t recognised him. He tried to reassure himself that it was because she hadn’t seen him in ten years, but part of him remained unconvinced.
From the hundreds of conversations he’d sat in with the doctors he knew that her MS could have been managed better. That if she’d taken care of herself, she could have led a relatively normal life. But Josh was only eight and was hardly able to look after himself, let alone a disabled parent. To hear that she was leading such a normal life should have made him happy, and he felt guilty that it didn’t.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 43