The Temporal Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘You did?’ Edeard couldn’t help the surprise in his voice.

  Eachal gave Edeard a furtive glance. ‘I didn’t turn out quite like you, but yes, that’s where I served my probation, and eight years on the streets.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘You’re not going to let us down, are you?’

  ‘Let you down?’

  ‘People have a lot of expectations now.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘Yet you’re going to marry into the nobility.’

  Edeard stopped and faced the sergeant. ‘I’m marrying the girl I love. The gangs will not benefit from that. This city will see the full restoration of law and order, and it will apply to all equally.’

  Eachal pursed his lips and nodded in apparent understanding. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  Edeard knew the man was still sceptical, yet didn’t know how to convince him, nor why he should make a special effort.

  As always, the view from Finitan’s office was a huge distraction. Edeard managed to greet the Master formally while Eachal bowed and backed out. He’d been worried that the height of the office would somehow remind him of his fall from the tower in Eyrie, yet his nerves were calm as he gazed out across the rooftops.

  ‘My boy,’ Finitan said happily, rising from behind his desk to shake Edeard’s hand. ‘So glad to see you. And you don’t have to ask, I will be delighted to be your nominee in the Upper Council when Julan introduces the Marriage Consent bill.’

  ‘Ah, thank you sir.’ He’d said he didn’t care about the ludicrous formalities of the marriage, yet . . . As soon as a delighted Julan granted his permission, the household’s senior equerry had been summoned to inaugurate the preparations. There were the legal requirements, Julan had to ask the Mayor for a ruling to introduce the Consent bill before the Upper Council – which would be a week yet, the current session’s legislative schedule was very busy. The Pythia was informed, and her blessing requested for the engagement; then her staff had to find a time when the main church in Eyrie was free for such a ceremony, which wasn’t going to be until autumn at least. Letters of notification issued to the other District Masters, and by custom the Guild Masters as well. The official engagement party planned for the evening following the vote in Council – which was usually hosted by the groom’s family, but would now have to be at the Culverit mansion.

  Edeard had sat through the two days (two entire days!) of talks with Julan’s household staff arranging such things. Given his profound ignorance in such matters his input was minimal, but still he had to be in the room where a dizzily happy Kristabel chattered endlessly with her housekeeper and stylists of the merits of various fabrics. For, given how important these events were, you had to dress correctly for them. In Kristabel’s case it meant an entire new collection of evening gowns and a whole ‘engagement wardrobe’; while the rest of her family started commissioning new robes and fashionable suits. Edeard was taken to one of the rooms on the seventh floor, where a tailor who specialized in dressing militia officers was summoned to produce a set of constable uniforms made from cloth more fitting to someone of his new ‘status’ – he was already dreading the day they’d arrive and he’d have to wear them at Jeavons station.

  Once the engagement party was over, preparations for the actual marriage ceremony could legitimately begin. Between then and now, the happy couple would be receiving invitations to parties and civic galas which they would have to attend. A lot of invitations. And Uncle Lorin was to be their official chaperone at such events.

  Finitan laughed at Edeard’s broken expression. ‘So thought of eloping yet?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Edeard said loyally.

  Finitan just laughed louder. ‘Now you know how I feel about all the speeches I have to deliver. I’m addressing the Chemistry Guild apprentices this evening in the hope of a few votes cast my way. Will you be attending?’

  ‘Kristabel’s expecting me; I have to help her select the music for our engagement party.’

  ‘That’s nice. Do you know many songs?’

  ‘Only Dybal’s,’ he confessed.

  Finitan laughed again. A couple of ge-chimps scurried in through their little doorways in the bookshelf walls, bringing trays laden with tea and biscuits. Edeard eyed the brandysnaps and chocolate chip shortbreads keenly. He’d never found the bakery which supplied the Blue Tower, but Finitan always had the best biscuits in Makkathran. The main door opened behind him.

  ‘I’m sure you remember Master Topar?’ Finitan said lightly.

  Edeard couldn’t recall meeting Topar since his first day in the city which, now he thought about it, was odd since Topar was Finitan’s deputy. And looking at the figure walking across the office, he was surprised by the Master’s appearance. Gone was the overweight frame. He looked a lot leaner, but not necessarily healthy with it. His face was haggard, the full chubby cheeks had given way to deep worry creases in loose flesh, while his eyes seemed bruised. He still wore expensive clothes, a silk shirt and suede trousers, high black boots, and the traditional Master’s cloak, but even they couldn’t cover the fact that he’d undergone a time of considerable hardship.

  ‘Master,’ Edeard bowed.

  ‘You’ve been making quite a name for yourself while I was away, so I’m told,’ Topar said in his powerful baritone – that at least remained the same.

  Edeard shrugged.

  ‘How little any of us knew the day we arranged for you to join the constables,’ Topar continued.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I apologize, Waterwalker, I’m blaming the messenger. It’s not been a pleasant time for me.’

  The three of them sat down as the ge-chimps handed out the elegant china cups.

  ‘Partly my fault,’ Finitan said. ‘But you did come to us with an incredible story, Edeard. Ordinarily, I confess, I would have paid little heed to it: a lad from the provinces exaggerating a few brawls, seeking sympathy to gain entrance to the Guild. However, I found you pleasingly guileless, and Akeem chose you as his apprentice which really told me all I needed to know.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Edeard said.

  ‘The weapon,’ Finitan said softly. His third hand opened a drawer on his desk, and lifted out a package of leather wrapping. It drifted through the air to finish on the desktop.

  Edeard froze as his farsight probed the contents. ‘Oh my Lady,’ he moaned. It was a repeat-fire gun.

  Finitan’s third hand unwrapped the package gingerly. Edeard gazed at the thing with utter loathing. The metal was tarnished, with ingrained rust corroding several areas, and the magazine had received several dents, but he would recognize the evil device to his dying day. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Where you left it,’ Topar said. ‘At the bottom of the new well in Ashwell.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘That’s where I’ve been, and as you know it’s not an easy journey at the best of times. I only returned last night.’

  ‘You’ve been to Ashwell?’ Edeard thought he was over his life in the village with all its lost inhabitants, he really did, but staring at someone else who’d seen those forlorn ruins was triggering an avalanche of memories.

  ‘I sent Master Topar to try and confirm your story,’ Finitan said. ‘Which, I’m afraid, he has done in no uncertain terms.’

  ‘It was all as you described it,’ Topar said. ‘The weeds and moss have grown over the rubble, of course; but I knew Ashwell as soon as I saw it. The cliffs, the old rampart wall around. Even the well shaft you hid in was easy to locate; though it was mostly full of mud. How you moved that capping stone is a mystery to me. It took us a day to break it up and move the pieces away; then it was another week excavating the mud before we could recover the gun.’ He gave the weapon on the desk a scowl.

  ‘So now what?’ Edeard asked.

  ‘Now we’ve established the gun is real we need to know about those bandits,’ Finitan said. ‘If that’s what they truly are. What can you tell us about their
leader? You said you spoke with him.’

  ‘All I can tell you is his anger. He hated me because I’d killed his kindred in their ambush.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  Edeard struggled to remember. It wasn’t easy; for so long now he’d been trying to banish this very memory. ‘Friends. That’s what it was, he called them: our friends. I was to die because of what I’d done to our friends. Yes.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Finitan said. ‘And how long between the ambush in the wood and the raid on your village?’

  ‘Not quite a year.’

  ‘So it wasn’t an instinctive hot-headed response, then? They’d planned it out.’

  Edeard nodded, hanging on to the memory no matter the pain. ‘They knew us. They knew Salrana. The one from the church, that’s what he said. I suppose they must have been watching us. I never considered that before.’

  ‘Then they were organized?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hardly the kind of raid I would credit ordinary bandits with.’

  ‘Their clothes,’ Edeard exclaimed. ‘The ones in the wood were wild, savages; they daubed themselves with mud, and they didn’t even have shoes. But the ones who came to the village wore proper clothes, with boots.’

  ‘And they had the repeat-fire gun,’ Finitan concluded.

  ‘They’re not bandits, are they?’

  ‘No, not the kind who have always lived around the edge of our society,’ Finitan agreed. ‘Though I suspect they are allied. These are the emissaries of something else entirely.’

  ‘What?’ Edeard asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But they are relentless.’ Finitan gave Topar a small nod.

  ‘There were five in my travelling party,’ Topar said. ‘Only two of us made it back to Makkathran. Edeard, I’m sorry, but the province is all but lost. Eight villages have been overrun, and that was when I left just before New Year. The capital is fortified and afraid, with families leaving every day. Farmers are deserting their land and heading to the eastern provinces. None of the caravans visit any more. Their economy is failing. The neighbouring provinces no longer offer help in any fashion; they are too worried about their own bandit incursions.’

  Edeard’s head sank into his hands. ‘Witham?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Topar said. ‘It fell not six months after Ashwell. Since then, the raids have increased. It’s the same every time, they wipe out the entire village, no one is left alive, the buildings are torched. The senselessness of it all is shocking, they’re not doing it for anything other than the pleasure of killing. There’s no reason for it.’

  Tears were threatening to flow as Edeard thought of the pretty leatherworker apprentice he’d met at the Witham market. He’d never even managed to get her name, gauche boy that he’d been. And now she was dead, every garment or saddle or harness she’d laboured over was gone. Her family murdered.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Finitan said gently. ‘Stop punishing yourself.’

  ‘I should go back,’ Edeard said. ‘I should go with the city’s militia and burn them out of the land they’ve contaminated, every last one of them. He feared me before, and by the Lady he was right to do so. I will bring him and his kind to an end, one way or another.’

  ‘Just calm down,’ Finitan said. ‘There will be a time when we confront the bandits, and you may well lead that battle. But there are many things we have to do before that day arrives.’

  ‘Why?’ Edeard snapped. ‘If you and Owain combine in Council, you could send every militia brigade we have, and order the provinces to raise their militias with us. An army could descend on Rulan province. These new bandits would be wiped from Querencia forever.’

  ‘Where do they come from?’ Finitan asked. ‘They’re not barbarians, they wore clothes.’ His third hand lifted the repeat-fire gun again. ‘More importantly, where do they manufacture this? Do they have a city like Makkathran behind them? Two cities? A continent? We still don’t know what lies beyond Rulan, not with any surety. All these things we need to establish beyond any doubt before we embark on some massive campaign to tame the wilds. Such a venture will be deeply unpopular both here in the city, and out in the country.’

  ‘And if you don’t do it, these invaders will be standing in front of the City Gate within five years.’

  ‘That they will,’ Finitan conceded. ‘This is the greatest threat we have faced since Rah led us here two thousand years ago. I am deeply worried, Edeard. Something is out there, some society, moving with a malign purpose. A society inimical to ours, bent on destroying us for no reason we know. More important, they have these Lady-damned repeat-firing guns. You with your strength could ward off the bullets fired at you by one of these guns, maybe even two or three. But I doubt I could withstand such an onslaught; nor could many people. You talk of marching our militia against them. One man armed with this weapon could wipe out an entire cavalry troop. And they have concealment, too. We cannot send our Militia soldiers against them, it would be slaughter on an unbelievable scale. Edeard, I am frightened by this, do you understand? I do not know what will happen.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I understand.’

  ‘They’re not settling,’ Topar said. ‘That’s the strangest thing. The lands they have driven us from in Rulan are reverting to wilds; weeds and grass flourish in the fields, animals roam free; the ruins of villages are choked in vines and creepers. Nobody lives there, these strangers are not clearing us out so their own kind can dwell in our place. When we arrived at Ashwell, we had seen no one for over a week, and that was a week of hard riding. It was only coming back we clashed with them. Our luck was foul that day; some lone patrol or spy saw us, and we ran away as soon as we realized they were after us. It was as though Honious himself was tracking us. They were unrelenting. So now I’ve seen these guns used in anger, Edeard, I know what horror you faced. The Lady performed a miracle when she guided you to safety that night. All we could ever do was flee, and three times even that was not enough.’

  ‘Then what are they doing?’ Edeard asked. ‘What do they want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Finitan said. ‘But it is imperative we find out.’ He stared at the broken gun, abhorrence glowing in his mind. ‘If we fail to stop them out in the provinces, then we will have to make similar guns just to survive. Can you imagine the carnage that will unleash on this world? The damage one man can wreak with such a gun, multiplied a thousandfold. For once such a thing is made, it cannot be unmade.’

  ‘It’s already been made,’ Topar said bitterly. ‘We are not the ones at fault here.’

  Edeard reached out his third hand, and grasped the gun. He brought it over to hang in the air before his face, probing the complicated mechanism inside with his farsight. In fact, there weren’t so many components. ‘Have you examined it?’ he asked Topar.

  ‘I have done nothing less for months,’ the Master said. ‘The whole way home I have studied it.’

  ‘Is there some secret part, something that must have come from the ships that brought us to Querencia, or could any metalsmith build it?’

  ‘The mechanism is ingenious, but that is all. There is nothing out of the ordinary about it, no magic or impossible contraption. A competent weapons Guild Master would be able to fabricate such components. Even a journeyman should be capable, I suspect.’

  That caused Edeard to give the Grand Master a sharp glance. ‘The long-barrelled pistols came from the Weapons Guild. An ancient design, Owain said.’

  ‘Yes,’ Finitan said significantly, though his mind was tightly shielded. ‘It could be they already have this or something similar in their deep vaults. Knowledge or artefacts left over from the ships.’

  ‘Is that where the invaders got theirs from, do you think?’

  Finitan allowed dismay to ease through his mental shielding. ‘I find it incredible that after two thousand years, we have never heard even a whisper of another civilization on Querencia.’

  ‘Nobody has ever successfully circumnavigated the pl
anet,’ Edeard said. ‘Or so I was given to understand. Maybe that’s why. Maybe it isn’t geographically impossible, it’s just that nobody ever gets past this other settlement.’

  ‘If they were that big and powerful, we would know of them,’ Finitan said.

  ‘Perhaps we should ask the watching widow,’ Topar said mordantly, then he gave Edeard a keen look. ‘Actually . . .’

  ‘I haven’t seen any souls since Chae,’ Edeard countered. ‘In any case, wondering where they are doesn’t help us, it’s what they’re doing which is the problem.’

  ‘If only we could find where they come from, we might be able to know their full intention,’ Finitan said. He sighed. ‘We’re arguing in circles. It is my response we should be determining.’

  ‘Perhaps a truce with Owain,’ Edeard suggested. ‘Makkathran needs to send scouts out into the wild beyond Rulan and track down the origin of the guns. ‘I’d go . . .’ he began uncertainly.

  ‘No, you will not,’ Finitan said firmly. ‘We need you here to complete your victory over the gangs. Once the city is consolidated, we can start to make more detailed alliances with the provinces. That’s what Owain never understands, we can hardly command unity with the countryside if we’re unable to instil universal law here at home. Yet that unity must come in the face of these incursions. That makes you vital to my campaign, Waterwalker.’

  Edeard nodded reluctantly. ‘After that?’

  ‘When the gangs are banished, and if I become Mayor, then it might be appropriate for you to track down your nemesis. Though the Lady knows how you will explain such an absence to your new wife.’

  Edeard flinched, he hadn’t thought of that. ‘Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right,’ he murmured quietly.

  ‘Indeed,’ Finitan said. ‘In the meantime, I will focus on winning this damn election. That way I can lay the groundwork for the inevitable struggle which is to come.’

  ‘It might come sooner than you think,’ Topar said. ‘The provinces around Rulan have already raised their militias. Their appeals to the Grand Council for help will arrive before long, people will come to understand what is happening out on our western borders.’