Past Imperative_The Great Game

by Dave Duncan

  Mm! again.

  Creighton stiffened, and pointed. “See lights over there?”

  “Yes,” said the front bench unanimously.

  “Where’s that?” Edward added.

  “It must be the Royal Artillery Barracks at Larkhill. Means we’re getting close.”

  Salisbury Plain, apparently, was not a plain. The road dipped into another hollow.

  Edward felt scruples. This sneaking around in the small hours of the morning with a Gypsy and a highly suspect character like Creighton was probably going to involve him in trespassing at the very least, and Lord knew what else. “Does anyone live at Stonehenge, sir? Who owns it?”

  “It’s owned by Sir Edmund Antrobus. There’s a policeman lives in a cottage about quarter of a mile to the west. Let us trust that the worthy constable does not suffer from insomnia.” After a moment Creighton added, “The aerodrome’s even closer, but I don’t suppose there will be anyone there in the middle of the night.”

  Edward looked up as a patch of cloud began to glow fiercely silver. He shivered.

  “Ah!” Creighton said. “You feel it too? How about you, Boswell?”

  The Gypsy muttered something in Romany.

  “Incredibly strong, if we can feel it here. There it is!”

  The moon sailed out from behind its veils. Glimmering on the skyline a short way ahead stood the ghostly circle of trilithons—ruined, sinister, inexplicable. At first it seemed very small, surrounded by so much emptiness. As the cart grew closer, the height of the stones began to register. Who would have erected such a thing in so desolate a spot, and above all why? It was archaic insanity in stone, alone in the wind and time. The pony continued to trot along the dusty track, unaffected by such morbid wonderings.

  Edward’s scalp prickled. “Are you sure we couldn’t try somewhere a little less spooky first, sir? Not so much ‘virtuality’?”

  “We could, but I have my reasons for wanting to start here. The Chamber knows the prophecy too, remember. There are only five or six nodes in Sussland, so it would not be an impossible task to interdict them against you.”

  “I don’t think I quite follow that. In fact I’m sure I don’t.”

  “Think of a magic spell: ‘No one named Edward Exeter may come this way.’ ”

  “Magic is that specific?”

  “Call it mana, not magic. If it’s strong enough, it can be. I’m hoping that a portal this powerful will overcome that sort of blockage, if it’s been tried.” Hrrnph! “It’s a great mistake to assume that your enemy is infallible, you know. They may have forgotten that you have a middle name.”

  Edward wished Creighton’s words would justify the confidence in his tone. “What about guards at the other end? I mean, if the Blighters are hunting me here, why won’t the Chamber be waiting for me there?”

  “I’m sure they will be,” Creighton said breezily. “I hope some of our chaps will be on hand to make a fight of it. I’ll be on my own turf, too, in a manner of speaking.”

  Affalino kaspik…The nonsense words were going around and around in Edward’s head. He could feel the complex stirrings of the rhythm, too. Was that some sort of response to the occult power of the node? Sheer funk, more like.

  “There’s a fence!” He hoped that the fence would be the end of the matter and they could go home now, but he didn’t really expect that. It was a confident-looking barbed wire fence strung on steel posts.

  “Yes, and the attendant is not on hand to accept our sixpences or whatever they charge.”

  “We can climb that.”

  “We could, but Mr. Boswell can deal with the fence for us, can’t you, Mr. Boswell?”

  Billy said nothing while the cart dipped where the track crossed a wide hollow and a bank. Then he reined in the dogcart alongside the fence. “Didn’t tell me t’bring me tools. Can just ’eave it dahn fo’ ya.”

  “Why not?” Creighton said, jumping out of the gig. “Devil take it! Beastly bad form to disfigure a national treasure that way.” His obnoxious heartiness was probably concealing the same sort of eerie nervousness as Edward was feeling. “Now, Exeter, I have bad news.”

  Edward sighed. “Yes, sir.”

  “You can take nothing with you when you cross over. Nothing can translate except a human being, not even the fillings in his teeth. You needn’t worry about those, but clothes are an impediment.”

  “We have to go through with this rigmarole in the nude?”

  “Starkers.” Creighton tossed his hat into the dogcart and began unbuttoning. “Quick, while there’s moonlight.”

  Groaning, Edward began to strip also. He removed his shoes with relief. Dawn would appear in about two hours, he thought. The moment the sun’s edge showed above the horizon he would be free of his oath, and then he was going to shed his lunatic companion, even if the only way to do it was to walk into a police station and give himself up.

  Billy led the pony forward a few feet. A section of fence tried to follow with a long squeal of agony, the posts pulling free from the chalk. “’At aw’a do ya,” the Gypsy remarked, and backed up the cart so he could recover his rope.

  Edward looked nervously at the lights of Larkhill to the north; he stared across the dark plain to the vague shapes that might be the aerodrome buildings, but no lights had come on in their windows. He tossed his socks into the wagon.

  “Splendid fellow!” Creighton said patronizingly. “Now, Boswell, you’ll wait here for twenty minutes or so, won’t you? Just in case. Hate to have to walk to Salisbury in my birthday suit.”

  He reached into the dogcart for the drums. He hung one around his own neck and looped the other over Edward’s.

  “Come, Exeter!” he barked cheerfully, stepping carefully over the fallen wire. He set off across the turf, a ghostly white shape in the moonlight.

  Still fumbling with the buttons of his fly, Edward suddenly said, “No!”

  Creighton stopped and wheeled around. “Word of honor!” he barked.

  “Sir, you extracted that by unfair means. I have a duty to King and Country.”

  “You have a duty to your father’s memory and his life’s work, also.”

  “Sir, I have only your word for that. You have not been fair with me.”

  Creighton growled. “You have no concept of what is going to happen in this war. Millions of men are going to die! The mud of Europe will be soaked with blood!”

  “I have a duty!”

  “Idiot! Even if you managed to get to the front—which I doubt very much—you would be nothing there but more cannon fodder. Your destiny lies on Nextdoor. Shut up and listen to me! You don’t know what the prophecy calls you—the Liberator!”

  “Me?”

  “You! Why do you think the Chamber fears you? These are the people who killed your parents, Exeter! If you refuse to come with me now, then your mother and father died in vain!”

  Edward shivered in silence for a moment, the night air icy cold on his bare chest. “I have your word on that, sir?”

  “I swear it as your father’s friend.”

  With a sigh, Edward unfastened his trousers.

  Naked, he followed Creighton through the gap in the fence, shivering with both cold and a bitter apprehension. Nudity seemed only fitting, somehow. The last few days had progressively stripped him of everything—his good name, his prospects for a career, his chance to fight in a war, his future inheritance, his most precious possessions, like his parents’ picture and that last letter to Jumbo, even Fallow, which had been in fact his home. Alice. He might never even know how The Lost World turned out at the end, he thought bitterly. All gone.

  “Might as well go right to the center,” Creighton remarked. “We’ll be less conspicuous there if anyone should happen to come along the road.”

  What would Billy Boswell do in that case? Better not to think about i
t. Better not to think about anything. Edward followed his leader between the towering stones, into moonlit mystery. At close range, Stonehenge was not just a clutter of standing stones, it was a building—a ruined building, but an awe-inspiring one.

  Creighton’s teeth gleamed at him in a smile. “One last warning!”

  “Tell me.”

  “Passing over is quite a shock to the system, especially the first time. You’ll be badly disoriented. I should react better, although it’s a bit like seasickness—you can never predict. It may last some time. I hope we’ll have some friends there to help. They won’t speak any English, of course.”

  “How can I tell if they’re friends or enemies?”

  “Well, look out for johnnies in black gowns like monks. They’re called ‘reapers’ and they’re deadly. They can slay a chap with a touch. Otherwise—friends will help you. If they try to kill you, assume they’re enemies.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Edward muttered under his breath. “Lay on, Macduff!”

  Creighton turned his back, and began to pat out the rhythm on the drum with his hands. In a moment he said, “One—two—three!” and began the chant.

  Jumping, jiggling, gesturing, singing, they pranced around, following each other in a small circle. Inso athir ielee…paral inal fon…. The moonlight faded, then brightened.

  There were a lot of beastly sharp stones in the grass.

  Edward decided he was not cut out to be a witch doctor. This was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done in his life. He would freeze to death. And it was wrong! Those great pillars looming over him in the darkness were an ancient mystery, sanctified in ways he could not imagine. He was profaning something mighty, consecrated by the hands of time itself….

  He cried out and stumbled to a halt, shivering and sweating simultaneously, shaken to the core by a sense of revulsion and awe. “No, no!”

  Silence returned to the night.

  “Aha!” Creighton said triumphantly. “You felt that?”

  “No. Nothing. I felt nothing!”

  “Hrrnph! Well I did! It was starting. So it works. It’s going to take us somewhere, even if not where we want to go. Sure you felt nothing?”

  “Quite sure,” Edward said, jaw chattering. “Quite certain.”

  “Mm? Clench your teeth.” Creighton reached out and prized up a corner of the sticking plaster on Edward’s forehead. “Now!”

  Yank!

  “Ouch! You scalped me!”

  “Let’s see if that helps. All right, we’ll start from the beginning again. Now, concentrate! Be sure and get the movements right. Ready?…”

  “No!” Edward shouted, backing away. “Oh, no!” He was naked and cold and he had been duped into behaving like a lunatic. “You’re just trying to fulfill the prophecy, aren’t you? That’s what all this is about!”

  “I’m trying to save your life! If what we do fulfills the prophecy, then so be it. You’d prefer to die? Take it from the beginning—”

  “I won’t! I’m not coming.”

  “Boy!” the colonel thundered. “You gave me your word!”

  Edward backed away farther. “You cheated. You lied to me!”

  “I did not!”

  “You said the Service supports the prophecy! You said my father was one of them—you said he did, too! But the guv’nor didn’t, did he? He wanted to break the chain! He said so in that letter!”

  After a long moment, Creighton sighed. “All right, old man. You’re right. I never lied to you, but you’re absolutely right. Cameron Exeter did not approve of all the things prophesied about the Liberator. Some, yes, certainly, but not all. He split with the majority on this. He did not want any son of his to be the Liberator.”

  Edward backed up another step and cannoned into a monolith. It was hard and cold and jagged. He recoiled. “The guv’nor did not approve of turning worlds upside down! That’s what he said.”

  “That was partly it—what you will do to the world. But it was more what the world will do to you.”

  “What do you mean: ‘What the world will do to me’?”

  “He didn’t think you could possibly be man enough to…” Creighton shivered. “Look, you haven’t any alternative now, have you? Trust me! When you get to Olympus we’ll give you the whole story from beginning to—”

  The silence of the night exploded in noise. Something enormous roared nearby, the sound merging into the pony’s scream of terror. Billy howled curses as the dogcart rattled and jangled away into the distance, taking him with it and leaving the two men stranded, naked, on Salisbury Plain.

  “What in the name of Jehoshaphat was that?” Creighton demanded, staring into the darkness.

  The hair on Edward’s neck was rising. “That was a lion!”

  “No!”

  “Oh yes it was! That’s the grunt they use to scare their prey when they’re hunting. How do lions get to Stonehenge, Colonel?”

  “Ask rather what they eat at Stonehenge. Let’s try the key again, shall we? And this time it had better work.”

  Edward thought he agreed with that. He had heard lions often enough, but never so horribly close. That fence would never stop a hungry lion, and there was a gap in it now anyway.

  “Ready?” said Creighton. “One—Two—Three…”

  Affalino kaspik…The drumbeats throbbed. Arms and legs waved—even head movements were supposedly important, and he kept wanting to watch the wall of trilithons, to see what might be coming through. To look for green eyes in the night.

  The moon sailed into a cloud and died.

  Half the beat stopped as if cut off by a guillotine, and so did Creighton’s voice. His drum bounced and rolled away on the grass. Edward stumbled to a halt. He was alone.

  45

  IT BEGAN AS A FAINT SIGH IN THE DISTANCE. IT CAME closer. It was a rushing of wind through the trees and soon seemed all around, everywhere but where Eleal lay in the darkness. At last it arrived and the leaves stirred. Boughs creaked, thrashed. Gradually it faded, traveling on, and the night stilled. Trumb shone unchallenged in a cloudless sky, drowning out the stars with his baleful splendor.

  She shivered, wondering what god had sent that wind sign. She was cramped and cold. She flexed herself, one limb at a time, frightened of making any noise among the trash of leaves and branches that covered the steps. She had no idea how long she had been lying there, too tense even to doze. Her neck was appallingly stiff.

  Her eyes were still insisting that there was a reaper on the far side of the court. It could not be just a trick of the light, for the big moon had moved a long way since she arrived, and was very bright. It must be a tree stump, perhaps a dead sapling coated in ivy. No man could stand for so many hours like that.

  Trumb must eclipse soon! There had been a hint of shadow on one side of his disk when he rose, but now it was a perfect circle and that meant…

  A scream rent the silence of the night and a man rolled to the paving only a few yards from her. His limbs flailed and he cried out again. Her hair rose. Where had he come from?

  Naked, a grown man—this must be the Liberator! He sounded as he was in terrible pain. She started to rise and then stopped, hearing feet slap on stone. Another man came running out of the darkness on her right, and then a second from the left.

  The first was T’lin—big, and heavily bearded, and wearing a black turban that barely showed in the moonlight, so that the top half of his head seemed to be missing. He carried a bundle. And the other was the lanky Thargian, drawing a sword and looking around as he ran.

  Huh! Well if those two were here, they could attend to all the washing and nursing required. Eleal’s services were not needed, not wanted. She could have enjoyed a good night’s rest instead.

  The Liberator’s cries of pain had faded to grunts and moans. He retched and vomited, then groaned again.r />
  “You, sir!” the Thargian exclaimed. “We expected someone else.” He knelt, and helped the man sit up.

  T’lin stayed standing, peering around warily at the darkness with his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Gover?” The Liberator retched again, and doubled up as if cramped—except that the Thargian had implied that this was not the Liberator. “Good to see you.”

  “We should leave!” T’lin growled.

  “Calm down, Seventy-seven!” the Thargian snapped. “If there was anyone out there, they’d be all over us by now.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Just wait a minute! Can’t you see the man’s in pain? Bad crossing, sir?”

  The reply was a suppressed bubbling shriek from the newcomer, as another spasm took him. The Thargian put an arm around his shoulders and cradled his head like a child’s.

  “All right, Kriiton,” he muttered. “You’re among friends. It’ll pass.”

  The comforting seemed to help. In a moment Kriiton muttered, “Thanks!” and pushed himself free. “Where’s Kisster?” He looked around. “God Almighty! He…He didn’t make it?”

  “No sign of anyone else, sir.”

  The reply was lost in another groan, another spasm of cramps. Again the Thargian cuddled the sufferer, and again the physical comforting seemed to ease the pain.

  The men were fading! Eleal tore her eyes away and looked up in sudden terror. Trumb was well into eclipse already. Darkness raced over the great disk.

  “Gotta go back ’n get’m!” Kriiton mumbled.

  “You’re in no state for another crossing, sir! It would kill you! We’ve got no key for it anyway, not that I know of.”

  “Where is this?”

  “The Sacrarium at Ruatvil.”

  Kriiton sighed. The others were almost invisible now; his bare skin showed up better. “In Sussland! So it should have worked! Let’s hope he keeps trying!”

  “First time is hardest sometimes, isn’t it?” the Thargian said.

  The Kriiton man suppressed a groan, as if he was being racked by more cramps. “Can be. Maiden voyage. Trouble is, the opposition was moving in on us.”