‘Enough with your riddles,’ she snapped. ‘Is he coming or not?’
The officer disappeared into the aperture, and the rope snaked in behind him. Everyone held their breath, waiting for a reaction from the void.
Suddenly, the line tightened as though a fish were caught on the end of it. The men struggled to hold the cord as it thrashed back and forth before going slack once more.
They frantically wound the rope back in, everyone expecting to find nothing more than a severed end. When the intact empty loop appeared they all looked to one other with confusion and fear in their eyes.
‘Witchcraft!’ declared Kelly, waving his hand in the air. ‘There’s magic in the web of it!’
‘Nonsense!’ Ravana said, turning towards one of her officers. ‘Give me the skull.’
The man removed the rune-covered skull from its silk bag and handed it to her.
‘Dalton always said that Daedalus would show us the way.’
Holding it out before her, she walked towards the aperture. The sigils began to glow with an iridescent hue as she drew closer.
The Grand Seer took a piece of chalk from his pocket and hastily drew a small circle around himself, embellishing it with arcane symbols and glyphs while whispering some unintelligible incantation under his breath.
As she stood on the brink of the precipice, ribbons of energy began to leech off the surface of the skull, like gas escaping from a punctured balloon, the tendrils winding around each other as they were sucked into the vortex.
Ravana used both hands to steady her grip as a ghostly outline of a man’s face materialised around the bone. He was an old man with pale eyes that stared directly at her, his mouth moving as if saying something, but she couldn’t hear.
Cold numbed her fingers, gradually working its way along her forearms, yet she refused to yield. Like frostbite, the burning raced along her nerves, turning her arms to lead, but she held on, knowing this was the only chance she would ever have of reaching her son.
‘Where is he?’ she hissed through gritted teeth.
Other shapes were beginning to form around the skull. The malformed limbs of creatures twisted and curled like the snakes of Medusa as they writhed out from the portal.
‘Ravana!’ she heard Kelly try to warn her as the Djinn began to manifest, but it was too late; she’d felt a connection with Daedalus’ timeline and her mind leapt into it.
The world around her disappeared as the darkness reached out and took her.
She calmed herself, knowing that in reality, she was still standing in the middle of a church in 11.664 — if Ravana concentrated hard she could still feel the floor underneath her feet.
Daedalus’ skull was shining brightly in her hand, like a beacon, the line of his life spreading out like glowing ribbon into the infinite void. She followed it back through time; the skull had been lost for millions of years, sleeping below the earth while the world turned. She felt the aeons pass as the ice came and went. No one had ever travelled this far into pre-history — it was a time before the age of man, and her own laws forbade anyone from going there.
Even though Ravana knew she was still within the continuum, she could feel the hostility of the maelstrom around her, waiting just beyond the shadows.
Reavers would always speak about the maelstrom as if it were the place beyond death, the stygian land of no return. Even her husband, the most rational man she’d ever met, had an unfounded fear of what awaited him in the afterlife.
But not her. Ravana had always known, with scientific certainty, that the logical antithesis of order must be chaos.
She located the point where Daedalus had entered the continuum, the moment when his head at least had appeared out of the maelstrom and into standard linear time. The skull was now fully fleshed, a bearded man in his fifties sitting between her hands, still talking animatedly to someone she couldn’t see or hear.
‘Where is my son?’ she asked him again.
Daedalus formed words, but they remained as mute as before.
She found herself standing in a rock-strewn desert, vast purple mountains rising like broken teeth along the horizon. It was barren, with no vegetation, only a harsh, dry wind driving stinging sand across the dunes.
The head was too heavy to hold now. She placed the skull on the ground and stood back as time continued to reverse around it.
His head seemed to grow a neck and shoulders until a man rose from the ground before her. A dark shape flickered into existence beside him, a colossal creature with black armour and a great scythe of a sword.
The blade was slicing upwards through Daedalus’ neck, sealing the awful wound, as his execution played out backwards before her eyes.
There was a brilliant white flash as an aperture appeared in mid-air and Daedalus reversed onto his feet and ran backwards towards it.
He was trying to escape, Ravana thought.
His executioner stepped back through the portal, but before it disappeared, she caught sight of his face, or rather the wicked smile that sat upon it.
It was Dalton.
A detachment of heavily armed Dreadnoughts appeared out of thin air, surrounding the Protectorate officers, who immediately surrendered their weapons and were moved out of the firing line.
Grandmaster Derado, in full battle armour, made his way through his men to the Grand Seer, who was kneeling inside a chalk circle as if in prayer.
‘How long has she been in there?’ Derado demanded, staring at the figure of Ravana shrouded in layers of dark, swirling energy.
‘Longer than I would like,’ Kelly replied gravely.
Derado stared into the spinning vortex, his eyes narrowing as he studied the chaos within. He turned to his lieutenant. ‘The Wyrrm is holding a bridge open, and we need to shut it down. Get the civilians to safety and reinitialise the stasis fields.’
The officer nodded and began to relay the orders to the others. Within a matter of minutes, the church was cleared of all non-essential personnel, and the artificers were busily repairing the stasis units.
Derado put on his helmet, activated his temporal shielding and walked slowly into the centre of the circle. Ravana had become a pale ghost of her former self, old and haggard from prolonged exposure to the maelstrom. But she was smiling, and tears were running down her cheeks; whatever she was experiencing seemed at least to be making her happy.
‘Do you want us to disrupt the connection?’ asked one of the technicians through the comms system.
‘Do we know when she is?’
‘Negative. The readings are off the scale.’
Derado looked into her glazed eyes and sighed. ‘Leave her. I doubt anyone will thank us for bringing her back anyway.’
‘But the council?’
‘I will explain to the council. Let’s focus on locking this down before anything serious comes through.’
He walked back out of the breach and took off his helmet. ‘Bentley!’
‘Yes sir,’ Bentley said, stepping forward.
‘Well done son.’ Derado slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’ve just stopped the seventh crisis.’
Bentley winced in pain as his commander took his hand away. ‘Still giving you trouble?’ he asked.
Bentley nodded. ‘Nothing that won’t mend.’
He couldn’t explain why Sabien had helped him escape from Ravana’s cells, but the things he’d witnessed in there would stay with him for years. The medics said his injuries were going to take weeks to heal, but it was worth it to see the old witch sealed in with what was left of Daedalus’ skull. They were both too dangerous to be allowed to survive.
Bentley looked over to where Darkling’s body lay. ‘What happens now?’ Bentley asked.
‘We bury our dead and regroup. It’s time to see if we can rebuild the Order.’
82
Viking
The colonel was sat by one of the more dramatic windows when Josh came to visit him the next day.
He was staring out at
the stormy seascape, lost in the power of the waves as they crashed against the granite cliffs.
‘Hey,’ Josh said as he sat down on the bench beside him, ‘how are you doing?’
The old man looked around at him, his eyes taking a moment to focus. ‘Joshua, it’s good to see you.’
There were so many things Josh wanted to discuss with him, but he could see the weariness in his eyes; the aetherium had nearly destroyed his past, and it looked as if he had been reliving it ever since Josh put it back together.
‘You saved my life,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Although there are definitely some parts I would have chosen to leave out.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
He smiled. ‘It’s not your fault. Without the sadness, we would never have the joy — as my mother used to say.’
It was the first time he’d ever spoken about his mother, and for some reason, Josh couldn’t imagine the colonel as a child.
‘When were you born?’
‘10.875. In Jórvík or York, as you would call it. Back then it was part of Danelaw under the control of the Vikings.’
Josh laughed. ‘You’re a Viking? That explains a lot!’
The colonel raised a fist. ‘Careful boy, I’m not that weak.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Josh held up his hands. ‘So who discovered you?’
‘I was one of the first,’ the colonel began proudly. ‘Back in the days before the Order existed, we were just a disorganised bunch of clans using our talents for our own ends. It was a lawless time, every man for himself. No one cared too much about changing the world or protecting the future. We were totally wild and incredibly selfish.’
Josh had never thought about a time before the Order existed. It seemed to him like it had always been. ‘And the founder changed that?’
The colonel nodded. ‘He walked into the town like a Shaman with his followers in tow, talking of the dangers that lay ahead — the usual oracle stuff we do to ingratiate ourselves with the locals. Next thing I know one of his acolytes, Dolovir, had singled me out and was asking if I wanted to join them — the rest is history.’
‘The founder told me something after we saved you.’
‘Did he now.’
‘That he’s not from this continuum.’
‘Oh that. Well, we’ve all got our little secrets. I’ve never held it against him.’
‘You knew?’
The colonel sighed. ‘I’ve known him for nigh on eight hundred years, and there aren’t many secrets left when you get past a hundred — not that he remembers me of course.’
‘And the Nihil?’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘The founder never told you about the Nihil?’
The colonel shrugged. ‘Are they bad?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Josh thoughtfully. ‘He said they feed off aetherium, the stuff that you were infected with.’
‘Then they’ve got terrible taste. So where is the founder now?’
‘I haven’t seen him since we cured you.’
The colonel stood up and swayed a little. ‘Have you told anyone else about this?’
Josh shook his head.
‘Good, keep it between us for now. Djinn are bad enough, and I’d rather not start spreading fear amongst the ranks with stories of even more dangerous creatures. Now, let’s see if we can find him.’
83
Fundamental truths
Grandmaster Derado flexed his toes as he stood in the centre of the Star Chamber surrounded by what was left of the Order. It was an old trick that his father had taught him when forced to stand for long periods of sentry duty, stopping his legs from cramping. The meeting had been in session for over an hour, and still, members were arriving.
He needed them all before he could begin; he didn’t want to have to say this twice.
A quick scan of the seats told him what he most feared, that the Copernicans had suffered the worst under the rule of the Eschaton Division and those that had come numbered less than fifty. He was hoping more had chosen to disappear into the dark niches of the past and would take some coaxing to come out of hiding.
The Antiquarians and Scriptorians appeared to have survived the coup far better, and from his reports, Derado knew that some of them might have even collaborated with Dalton. There was no time for recriminations; for now, he needed them all to put aside their differences and work together.
Finally, the chamber fell silent, and he found himself the centre of attention.
‘Ravana is dead,’ he began, watching their faces as the news sank in, ‘as is her son, we believe. The Protectorate has been relieved of all their duties.’
A general buzz swept around the auditorium, so the grandmaster had to raise his voice over the swell of chatter.
‘I will report the facts as they stand. Both the Nemesis and the founder are still missing, and my sources tell me that the crises of the Eschaton Cascade are in progress.’
He took out a musket as the noise levels increased, and fired it into the air. The shock of the gunshot silenced the chamber.
‘Please let me finish,’ he requested, putting the gun away. ‘The end of times may be upon us, or it may not. As our Copernican colleagues would agree, this is merely a hypothesis, and as with all theories, there is an element of uncertainty. No one knows what it will be that collapses the timeline, but the founder was prepared — while you were busy mocking the prediction, he formed a shadow guild, a secret one known only to a select few. Created to study the crises — they are known as ‘Augurs’ — and as I speak they’re risking their lives to try and contain the cascade.’
Some of the audience nodded as if Derado were confirming a theory that they’d known all along.
‘For too long now the divisions between us have made us vulnerable. We have become blinded by our theories until they were more important than the reality we were studying. The continuum is nothing more than a story we tell ourselves to bring order to chaos, a lie we choose to believe. This must end, there are only two fundamental truths that matter right now.’ He raised his clenched fist and lifted one finger. ‘One: We are stronger when we stand together. Two: The future has not yet been written. As we face the darkest time in our history, it is our duty to stand against the oncoming tide, to hold back the chaos, for are we not the Oblivion Order?’
The audience were on their feet now, their fists raised, cheering him on.
‘Together as one!’
The chamber erupted as everyone rose to their feet and called out, ‘As one.’
Derado turned to the Grand Seer whose eyes were full of tears.
‘So, now the war begins, Master Seer. Tell me, do you know where the founder is?’
‘In hell,’ Kelly said grimly.
84
Conflagrato
‘Where is the founder?’ demanded Caitlin as she stormed into the Armageddon gallery.
Nostradamus was sitting in the centre of the room staring at the world beyond the tenth door, a glass of red wine in one hand and a half-empty bottle in the other.
‘Conflagrato,’ he slurred, raising his glass to the fiery scene.
Caitlin looked through the arch; the whole of London was ablaze. The Thames was a ribbon of orange winding through a blackened sky.
‘The Great Fire,’ said Nostradamus,
‘And the rest of the tenth?’
‘They’re all in there. God help them.’
Caitlin went to take a step into the portal.
‘Wait!’ ordered Nostradamus, putting the bottle down and getting up from his chair. ‘If you’re going to follow him in there you will need the correct equipment.’
He closed the tenth door and turned the key anti-clockwise. When he opened it again, they saw a room full of strange-looking leather suits hung from the brass rails, glistening, as if they were drying from the rain.
‘Wet suits,’ explained Nostradamus.
‘What?’
‘Fire armour. Designed to reduce the
heat of the blaze. There are also breathing masks and fire-resistant gloves. Should protect you from all but the hottest parts of the inferno.’
She walked into the changing room.
‘Are you going in alone?’ asked the curator.
‘No she’s not,’ Josh said, walking into the gallery with the colonel close behind.
‘I wondered when you’d get here,’ said Caitlin, pulling a suit from the rail.
‘You can’t go in there alone,’ the colonel agreed.
Caitlin smiled. ‘Nice to see you back on your feet, but I’m going to have enough to deal with without having to wait for you two to keep up.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’re doing?’ asked Josh.
‘Following the founder.’
‘Because?’
‘Because he hasn’t stopped the eighth,’ Caitlin said and pointed at the open door.
‘Why not?’ Josh asked Nostradamus.
The curator looked sheepish. ‘We were instructed to keep it open.’
‘But we’ve proved it’s been altered, and it’s connected to four of the other crises, including the eleventh!’
Nostradamus shrugged in a way that said it wasn’t his job to question his boss.
‘Then I’m coming with you,’ insisted Josh.
‘So am I,’ added the colonel.
‘No, you’re not,’ Josh and Caitlin said in unison.
The colonel ignored both of them and started putting on a suit.
Once they’d all managed to struggle into their fire armour, Nostradamus switched the door back to the view of the inferno.
Caitlin stared through the tenth portal. ‘Wouldn’t it be wiser to go back to before the fire started?’
Nostradamus winced. ‘We tried that. Twice.’
‘And you couldn’t stop it?’
‘They’re not allowed to,’ interrupted the colonel. ‘The fire has to take place. The only thing they can do is try to contain it.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 87