Time Shards

by Dana Fredsti

  The policewoman frowned at the older man and extended her hand.

  “Please excuse the professor’s lack of manners, Amber,” she said. “I’m Police Constable Alex Brice. In here, though, I think just Alex is fine.”

  Amber shook the policewoman’s hand, and Cam followed her lead, despite the manacles on his wrists. Not to be outdone, the professor regained his composure and doffed his hat to them, adding a slight bow.

  “A thousand pardons. Professor Winston Harcourt, at your service.”

  The younger man just grinned, seeming to enjoy the mutual displays of social awkwardness. He removed his sunglasses and bowed low with an overly ornate, swirling salute fit for Marie Antoinette.

  “His imperial majesty Lord Simon William Albert Edward George Broad of East End, Cosh Boy, defender of the faith, protector of the commonwealth, and your most humble servant.” He straightened up again and flashed another mocking grin. “But in here, I think just Simon is fine.”

  Cam started to return the bow, but Amber grabbed him before he’d completed the gesture. He looked at her, his expression confused. It darkened when Simon snickered.

  Constable Brice—Alex—shook her head.

  “You’ll want to take his imperial majesty here with a pinch of salt, I’m afraid. We’ve only been in here since yesterday, and we’re all pretty much ready to kill him.” Simon’s grin widened. She ignored it and looked at Amber and Cam with concern. “Are you two alright? Do you need any medical attention?”

  “We’re okay,” Amber replied, grateful for the concern. “I mean, it’s been a crazy couple of days, and we’re pretty freaking far from okay, but we don’t have any major injuries or anything. We’re just pretty beat up.” Her stomach growled. “And hungry.”

  “We’re all hungry about now,” Alex said with a wry smile. “They haven’t been in any hurry to feed us, or even give us water. I don’t suppose you have any information about what’s happened, do you?”

  Amber shook her head. “I was really hoping you guys might know what’s going on. I mean, seriously, what is going on?”

  Alex took a sharp breath before answering.

  “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s hard to wrap our heads around it, but as far as we can tell—” She shook her head before continuing. “—it’s utterly unprecedented. And for all we know, it’s happened worldwide, as well.”

  Professor Harcourt cleared his throat.

  “Indeed,” he said, “and most understated. Were I not a man of science, suffice to say I might be tempted to suggest that Judgment Day has arrived, and all the souls from throughout the ages have been summoned to appear before the Almighty.” He paused, then added, “Whether it involves a deity or not, there can be no doubt that some dreadful cataclysm has struck, every bit as powerful as the inescapable forces that long ago sank the continents Atlantis and Lemuria.”

  You’ve got to be kidding, Amber thought.

  “Perhaps they’ve risen again, through some powerful method unknown to us,” he continued. “For that matter, who can say that this isn’t an attack upon our planet by the inhabitants of some other celestial body? Or more likely, the planets and stars have aligned in some cosmic configuration that has unintentionally concentrated its energies upon our hapless world. Whatever the proximate causation, this unparalleled and extraordinary calamity has thrown the very procession of time itself into disruption.”

  Simon leaned against the closest column and folded his arms.

  “No disrespect to your worthy Atlantis or little-green-men-from-Mars theories, Doctor, but it seems more likely that some eggheady lot went mucking about with some daft new atom-splitting scheme, and things got out of hand. Now the entire planet’s gone tits up, and we’re left to pick up the pieces.”

  Harcourt turned on him with an affronted glare.

  “See here, you impudent reprobate! There are members of the fairer sex present, and I won’t stand idly by while you offend their gentle sensibilities. So curtail your vulgarity and spare us your boorish behavior and wretchedly ignorant pseudo-scientific nonsense before I am obliged to box your ears like the unruly schoolboy you are!”

  Simon leaned in and went head to head with the professor.

  “I wouldn’t fancy your chances, mate,” he growled. “I may not have my flick-knife, but I can still lay the likes of you right out.”

  Cam bristled, reacting to the hostile tones. Worried he might try to jump in, Amber put a hand on his arm and shook her head. Meanwhile Alex stepped over to intervene, sounding more like an exasperated school teacher than an angry cop.

  “Look, that’s enough from the two of you,” she snapped. “You’re both insufferable.” She pointed a finger at Harcourt. “You with your bloody arrogance! And you—” She turned on Simon next. “You with your incessant wisecracks.” She shook her head in exasperation. “For all your smart-arse load of bollocks, I know you’re both just as scared as the rest of us.”

  Harcourt sniffed and tugged on his coat sleeves. Simon resumed slouching against his column like an offended alley cat, pretending nothing had just happened. Alex gave them both a warning glare, and then continued.

  “But you’re quite right, Professor,” she said. “We’ve got a very serious situation here.” She fell silent for a moment, cocked her head, and shot Simon a sideways glance. “Come to think of it, in the short time I’ve known you, that may be the closest you’ve come to saying something sensible.”

  He just gave a sullen shrug.

  Amber took the opportunity to jump in.

  “Look, I hope this isn’t a silly question, but I really want to ask you all—” She stopped, shaking her head. “God, I’m not even sure how to ask it, but, well… what year is it now?”

  The professor frowned.

  “To be perfectly honest, that question posed much less difficulty three days ago, before matters became quite so… shambolic.”

  Amber nodded sympathetically. “I totally understand, but can you at least tell what the date was for you before everything happened?”

  “Certainly,” he replied. “The morning of the twenty-first of November, 1889.”

  Amber turned to Simon.

  “What about you?”

  “The eve of Guy Fawkes Night, 1956,” he replied with another of his cocky grins. “It was a good night.”

  “And you, Alex?”

  “April the seventeenth, 1985,” the police constable answered. “I’m guessing that’s fairly close to your time, too?”

  “Actually,” Amber said, “I’m from 2016.”

  The others stared at her with a new appreciation. Simon whistled softly. Even the cool, pragmatic constable gave her a look of surprise before catching herself with a chuckle.

  “The twenty-first century! I know that’s only thirty years away, but it still sounds so futuristic when I say it out loud.”

  Amber gave a rueful smile. “It seems awfully far away from here right now. I feel like Dorothy trying to get home to Kansas.”

  “Would we were in Oz,” Simon muttered.

  “Where exactly are we?”

  “Well,” Alex said, “as far as I’ve been able to tell, we’re in the county of Essex. To be exact, we’re in the quaint little hamlet of Lexden, just down the road a bit from Colchester.” She pointed out a column of smoke rising slowly above battered city walls, a mile or two away, “Which our charming hosts have been in the process of attacking.”

  “These soldiers are—they’re called Roundheads, right?” Amber looked out over the wall at the army below. “Oliver Cromwell’s men?”

  “Full marks, American girl,” Harcourt said with more than a little condescension. “However, Cromwell isn’t in charge as yet. Currently he’s still the second-in-command to Lord Fairfax—at least as far as they are concerned. But yes, they’re the Parliamentarian army, and they’ve been laying siege to the Cavaliers inside there.” He pointed toward Colchester. “Those are the Royalists who still support King Charles I.”


  Amber leaned further out to get a better look.

  “Careful now, Red,” Simon cautioned. “Don’t stick your head out too far. If they catch you watching them, they throw nasty things at you. Like musket balls.”

  She pulled back, turned, and noticed that Cam had taken a seat with his back to the wall, Indian style, and commenced trying to slip out of his manacles, without success. Simon turned to watch his painful lack of progress with an annoying Cheshire Cat grin. Cam glared back at Simon, then pointedly ignored him.

  “At present,” the professor said with a self-important air, “—if one can still employ the term with any meaning—it seems we are looking at the siege of Colchester, which means this is the summer of the year 1648, and the Second English Civil War is on. Or at least it was until poor Father Time went completely senile and scattered the pages of the calendar to Hades and back. Now time is more a matter of geography than chronology, I’m afraid. Go a few miles down the road, and who can say what year it will be.”

  Pompous but accurate, Amber thought.

  Alex nodded. “Right. From what we can tell, this super storm, or whatever it was, destroyed parts of Colchester’s outer walls, but also took away a great deal of the Roundheads’ army. A few more seem to have run into some sort of dinosaurs, so now the fight’s a little more evenly matched than it was in the history books.”

  “Is that good news or bad news?” Amber asked.

  “To be perfectly dispassionate,” Harcourt mused, “the political consequences of the Puritan revolution would arguably lead one to declare it was not only morally justified, but ironically, laid the foundations for England’s rise to greatness as the world’s most glorious imperial power.”

  Alex rolled her eyes.

  “Well, be that as it may,” she said, “I’m going to root for the side that isn’t keeping us in custody.”

  “A pox on both their houses,” Simon chimed in.

  “Why do they have us locked up?” Amber asked. “What do they have against us? We don’t have anything to do with their stupid war.”

  “They think we’re witches, of course.” Alex raised an eyebrow. “They’ve decided that we’re the ones responsible for this whole wonky time business.”

  23

  A cold knot tightened in Amber’s belly, and she slid down against the wall, wrapping her arms around her legs.

  “But this isn’t much of a jail, is it?” she said, trying to regain her equilibrium. “I mean, wouldn’t they have us chained up in a dungeon somewhere, if that’s what they thought?”

  Alex gave a rueful smile. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly horrible dungeon in the cellar of Colchester Castle. Fortunately for us, this belfry tower is the strongest confinement our little village here could offer. To begin with, it’s one of the few places built with proper brick, and not thatch. Otherwise, we’d probably be out in the cow fields with the Royalist prisoners, catching whatever dreaded lurgy those poor bastards have.”

  “I guess we should just be glad nobody’s going after us with hot pokers,” Amber joked nervously. No one laughed. The others stared in silence. Cam looked up from his labors, sensing the sudden tension in the room.

  “You don’t really think they’ll…” Amber’s voice trailed away. “Do you? They wouldn’t…”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Simon jerked his thumb toward the body covered by Alex’s raincoat.

  “That’s not very funny,” Alex said crisply.

  “I’d never joke about torture.” Simon’s voice suddenly went serious. “That’s coming soon enough.”

  Amber paled.

  “Shut it, Simon!” Alex hissed. “You’re not helping.”

  The policewoman went over and knelt down to Amber’s level, putting a hand on her knee and speaking gently.

  “Hey,” she said. “Listen to me carefully, Amber. I need you to be strong right now. We all need to be strong, and not give up. I’m not going to lie to you. We’re in quite a serious situation, so let’s stay sharp, yeah? I doubt we can reason our way out of this, so our first priority is finding another way out of here. Understand?”

  Amber heaved a shuddering sigh, looked up and nodded.

  Alex smiled. “Right. Good girl.”

  She offered her hand and helped Amber to her feet again. Cam gave up his painful attempts at slipping out of the shackles, which had only resulted in angry red scrapes on his wrists. He stretched the full length of the chain, as if testing it as a weapon. He looked over at Simon, and smiled.

  “Well, gentlemen.” Alex turned to the group. “Any thoughts on escape?”

  The professor put on a thoughtful look and Simon chewed his knuckle. Amber risked another peek outside. It felt dangerously high, towering not just above the ground, but even the precariously steep church roof next door. The thought of scaling the tower was terrifying to her, but it seemed like their only hope.

  “Do you think we could climb down the tower? It’s awfully far to fall, but—”

  Harcourt snorted in derision.

  “That sort of acrobatics is all well and good for a flying trapeze artist like yourself, but I daresay the rest of us would be dashed to smithereens if we were to attempt such feckless folderol.”

  Alex nodded.

  “I hate to say it,” she responded, “but I think he’s right. These slick walls would be near impossible to climb down. Though if we could manage to make a rope somehow, we might be able to pull it off. We’d have to wait until dark, though.”

  “Have we got enough clothes to make a rope that could hold our weight?” Simon asked. “Not that I much fancy making my way across the countryside in just my underpants. It might make for an interesting trip, though.”

  Amber pointed to the body under the wrap.

  “What about his clothes?”

  The others turned to look at the corpse, mulling over the idea. Harcourt appeared to be squeamish at the thought.

  “What was his story?” Amber asked.

  Alex shrugged.

  “We didn’t get much of a chance to hear it, I’m afraid. They caught him before any of us, and they’d already worked him over rather badly. He was in pretty rough shape.”

  “That, and he was barking mad to start with,” Simon added.

  Harcourt glared at him in disapproval.

  “There is that,” Alex agreed reluctantly. “He may have been schizophrenic. He certainly didn’t make much sense…” She shot Simon a heated glance. “Let’s see what you have to say when they’re done with you.”

  “You’ll get your chance, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sorry, Simon.” Alex shook her head. “That was a terrible thing for me to say.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he replied with another of his shrugs. “It’s a fair cop. Besides, I wasn’t wandering the moors dressed up like Gandalf. No wonder the Roundheads nabbed the old blighter. If any of us look the part of a warlock, it’s poor old Merlin there. Of course they roughed him up.”

  “For all we know, he was an enchanter,” Alex said. “He never managed to tell us when his time was, or where he came from.” She turned back to Amber and added, “That’s why we called him Merlin. Not to his face, mind you.”

  “How did he die?” Amber asked.

  “After they were done, they dragged the poor demented chap back up here and tossed him in with us,” Harcourt said. “He fell asleep last night, and never woke from his slumber.”

  “Don’t look at me to give him a eulogy,” Simon said. “Barmy old codger gave me the creeps, what with all his muttering and those right peculiar eyes of his.”

  “Wait, what do you mean?” Amber’s heart started racing. “What was wrong with his eyes?”

  Simon raised an eyebrow. “Well, they were… it’s a bit hard to explain, like.”

  “Was it the color?”

  “Yeah, the color, and, well, they just had this odd gleam. Seemed sensitive about it. Didn’t like making eye contact. Why?”

  Abruptly Amber turned aw
ay and stepped over to the body, kneeling by its side. She reached out, then hesitated, her hand hovering uncertainly, before she gathered up her courage and slowly pulled the rain slicker down to uncover the dead man’s face.

  She gasped. It looked as if he had been tortured with knives, branding irons, and perhaps a hammer. The left side of his forehead had suffered a horrible crushing wound, leaving a mess of coagulated blood and matted hair. For an instant Amber thought she would be sick, but she breathed through it and took another, closer look at him, focusing on details other than the horrific wounds.

  He was wearing a sort of monk’s robe made of a black fabric she didn’t recognize. His skin had an almost bronze tint, and his features were such an odd mishmash of different ethnicities, it made it difficult to tell his race or nationality. But she recognized the face.

  Her heart was beating so hard now she thought the others could hear it, too. She leaned in and gently touched him. Then she took a deep breath, and carefully opened the dead man’s eyes.

  They were exactly the same as they had been in her dream. A deep indigo color, with a slow, constant rain of myriad tiny pinpoints of light dropping away before her eyes, like stars tumbling down a well…

  She knelt there, entranced by the vision. Finally, she turned to the others.

  “He’s not dead.”

  24

  The other prisoners crowded around Merlin to see the miracle for themselves.

  Alex crouched down next to Amber, looking at the prone man.

  “Are you sure?”

  Amber nodded. “I’m sure.”

  The constable went into action to check his vitals, feeling his wrist for a pulse. She placed first her fingertips, then her cheek against his face and chest to sense any trace of breathing. She shook her head.

  “Still not getting any sign of respiration or a heartbeat.” She examined his eyes carefully, then turned to Amber. “You’re right, though. He must be in some form of a coma. His eyes are certainly responding to something, though I’ll be damned if I know what it is.” Alex looked down again, captivated by the play of brilliant tiny sparks across the surface. “I’ve never heard of anyone’s eyes doing anything like that.”