Past Imperative

by Dave Duncan

  Except that he had only one shoe.

  As the pony ambled forward, he adjusted his boater at a debonair angle to cover the sticking plaster, and began fighting with his tie. Beautiful morning. Health and freedom! Breakfast now?

  In the light of day, Creighton was revealed as a man of middle years, spare and trim and indelibly tanned by a tropic sun. His close-cropped mustache was ginger, his eyebrows were red-brown and thick as hedges. His nose was an arrogant ax blade. He was staring straight ahead as he drove the pony, with his face shadowed by the brim of his bowler. As he seemed in no hurry to make conversation, Edward remained silent also, content to wait and see what the day would offer to top the night’s marvels.

  Pony and cart clattered along the hedge-walled lanes, already growing warm. As they passed a farm gate, a dog barked. The damp patches on Creighton’s trouser legs were drying. Somewhere a lie-abed cock was still crowing.

  Suddenly the colonel cleared his throat and then spoke, addressing his remarks to the pony’s back.

  “You have seen a wonder, you have been granted a miracle cure. I trust that you will now be receptive to explanations that you might have rejected earlier?”

  “I think I can believe anything after that, sir.”

  “Hrrnph!” Creighton shot him a glance, hazel eyes glinting under the hedge of red-brown eyebrow. “Did you feel anything unusual up there, by the way, even before our friend appeared?”

  Edward hesitated, reluctant to admit to romantic fancies. “It did seem a ‘spooky’ sort of place.”

  Creighton did not scoff as a hard-bitten army man might be expected to. “Ever felt that sort of ‘spookiness’ before?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, Tinkers’ Wood, near the school. Or Winchester Cathedral on a school outing. I didn’t tell anyone, though!”

  “Wise of you, I’m sure. Probably several of your classmates would have felt the same and kept equally quiet about it, but there’s really nothing to be ashamed of. Sensitivity’s usually a sign of artistic talent of one sort or another. Celtic blood helps, for some reason. It doesn’t matter either way. When you get to…Well, never mind that yet. There are certain places that are peculiarly suited to supernatural activities. We call them ‘nodes.’ They have what we call ‘virtuality.’ Some people can sense it, others can’t. They seem to be distributed at random, some more marked than others, but here in England you’ll almost always find evidence that they’ve been used, or are still being used, for worship of one kind or another—standing stones, old ruins, churches, graveyards.”

  “That was why Mr. Old…er, Mr. Goodfellow…why he didn’t cure my leg in the hospital?” Edward had wondered why he had been made to endure that journey.

  “Of course. It would have been much harder for him to do it there than at home in his grove, on his node. Perhaps even impossible for him nowadays.”

  Creighton turned out of one lane into another, apparently confident that he knew where he was heading. For a while he said no more. Edward began to consider his options. To go to any local enlistment center might be dangerous. Of course the police would be much more inclined to look for him in a nursing home than at a recruiting office, but near Greyfriars he might be recognized by someone. His best plan was probably to head up to town and join all the thousands enlisting at Great Scotland Yard.

  Then the colonel began addressing the pony’s arse again. “Officially I am Home on leave. Unofficially, I intended to observe the developments in Europe, do a bit of recruiting, and keep an eye on you.”

  Edward said, “Yes, sir,” respectfully.

  “Things went—Hrrnph!—a little askew. The European thing sort of ran away with us. You see, the nature of prophecy is that it usually comes in a frightful muddle, with most incidents undated. Nevertheless, it describes a single future, so it must relate to a unitary stream of events, right?”

  “Er. I suppose so.” What had prophecy to do with anything?

  “Some foretellings you’d think you can do nothing about—storms or earthquakes. Others you obviously can. If a man is prophesied to die in battle and you poison him first at his dinner table, then you have invalidated the entire prophecy, you see? Prophecy is by nature a chain, so that breaking one link breaks the whole thing. If any one statement is clearly discredited, then the future described is no longer valid and none of the rest of the prophecy applies anymore. If the prophecy foretelling a man dying in battle also foretells a city being wrecked by an earthquake, then by poisoning the man, you can prevent the earthquake.”

  Edward muttered, “Good Lord!” and nothing more. He seemed to have stumbled into a mystical world that was definitely going to take some getting used to.

  “It’s all or nothing,” Creighton said. “Like a balloon. Poke one hole in it and the entire thing fails. And you were mentioned in a prophecy.”

  “I see.” The Jumbo letter had mentioned a chain! Why had Edward been such a fool as to leave it behind?

  “About twenty years ago,” Creighton continued, “someone tried to kill your father, Cameron Exeter. The attempt did not succeed, but an investigation revealed that he was mentioned in a certain well-substantiated prophecy, the Vurogty Migafilo. Vurogty is a formal, legal statement. Miga means a village, like the English ham or by, in the genitive case. So in English Vurogty Migafilo would be something like Filoby Testament. It has been around for many years, and many events foretold in it have already come to pass. Many more remain. You see that to be mentioned in such a document is virtually a death sentence?”

  He paused, as if to let Edward make an intelligent comment, which seemed an unlikely possibility.

  “Because anyone who does not like anything else in the prophecy will try to block its fulfillment?” That felt reasonably intelligent, considering the hour.

  “Right on! Good man! In this case, the specific prophecy about your father was particularly unwelcome to the Chamber, and of course that increased his danger considerably.”

  The trap jingled and joggled along the lane. A thrush sang in the hedgerow. The dawn clouds glowed in decorous pinks. It was all very normal—no genies going by on magic carpets, no knights in armor tilting at dragons.

  “What was that specific prophecy, sir?”

  “It was foretold that he would sire a son.”

  “Sir!” This was starting to sound suspiciously like a leg-pull in very poor taste.

  “Furthermore, the date was specified very clearly.”

  “June first, 1896, I presume?”

  “No. Sometime in the next two weeks.”

  Edward said, “Oh.” He studied the thick hedges passing by. Life had been much simpler a few days ago. “Well, that’s impossible, so this Testament has now failed?”

  Hrrnph! “No again. The date was a misinterpretation. The seeress may not have understood correctly herself, and she expressed herself poorly—the ordeal drove her insane and she died soon after. Prophecy requires an enormous amount of mana, which is why it’s so rare. The person who had given her the talent miscalculated. He was utterly drained by her outburst. Almost died himself, or so it’s said. That’s beside the point. Anyway, the Service decided that your father had better go into hiding until the danger was past. And so he did.”

  “He left New Zealand?”

  “He went back to New Zealand! Ultimately he went on to Africa. A year or so later he was blessed with a son, namely you.” Creighton spoke in sharp, authoritative phrases, as if he were instructing recruits in the mysteries of the Gatling gun. If he had been, then at least one recruit would have been totally at sea.

  Edward was tempted to ask if the prophecy had saved him from being a girl, but that would sound lippy.

  Creighton was still talking. “The Service has rather mixed feelings about the Filoby Testament, but all in all we tend to favor the future it describes. So
he fulfilled that element of the prophecy and stayed where he was, at Nyagatha, killing time until the—”

  “Killing time? Sir, he was—”

  “I know what he was!” Creighton barked. “I dropped in there in ’02 and met you. Cute little fellow you were, lugging a leopard cub around under your arm everywhere. Nevertheless, take my word for it, as far as your father was concerned, Africa was merely an extended working holiday.”

  “A twenty-year holiday, sir?”

  “Why not? Exeter, when I say that your father belonged to the Service, I am not referring to His Majesty’s Colonial Office. The Service to which I belong and your father belonged is something else entirely, and probably a great deal more important.”

  Edward muttered “Yes, sir,” wondering how to bring up the question of his father’s true age.

  Creighton did not give him the opportunity. “Now you understand why I waited until you saw your leg healed before I tried to tell you any of this.”

  “It will take a little time to adjust, sir.”

  Creighton might be crazy, but he seemed to know exactly where he was heading. The dogcart was entering a fair-sized village. A baker’s wagon was making its rounds, but otherwise the streets were still deserted.

  “Time is something we don’t have,” he said testily. “The opposition have tried three times to nobble you, Exeter. Five times, if you count the first attempt on your father and the Nyagatha massacre. They probably assumed they’d got you that time, by the way. That would explain why they left you alone for so long afterward. But this spring a certain building was buried by a landslide, and then everybody knew that the Filoby Testament was still operative. Your parents were definitely dead, so you must be alive. They set the hounds on you again. You can’t expect your luck to hold indefinitely.”

  “How can they find me now, sir? If I can hide from the law, then I can hide from…Who exactly are the opposition? I mean, if someone’s out to kill me, I’d like to know who.”

  Creighton directed the pony down a side road. He made his Hrrnph! noise. “Ultimately the people who are so eager to put your head over their fireplace are the group we refer to as the Chamber. It has no official name and its membership varies from time to time. This is a little hard to…Look at it this way. You know that His Majesty’s Colonial Office doesn’t operate in England. The Home Office doesn’t operate overseas. But the two would cooperate if—oh, say a dangerous criminal wanted by one of them escaped into the other’s territory. They’d pass the word. With me so far?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well the Chamber doesn’t operate here—its members have no power at all in this, er, environment. The Service that I belong to doesn’t operate here either, but we’re allied with a sort of local branch that we usually refer to as Head Office, although the relationship is informal. We help each other out from time to time—in matters like this, in recruiting, and so on. They were the ones who got your father appointed D.O. at Nyagatha, of course, as a favor to us. He, in turn, did certain favors for them while he was there. The two organizations have similar aims and goals, so we cooperate with them and they with us, but you understand that here I am only a private citizen, with no authority.”

  Hrrnph! “Now, the opposition here is as variable and poorly defined as the Chamber—knock one down and two more spring up—but at the moment Head Office is tangled with a really hard bunch they’re calling ‘the Blighters.’ It’s a very apt description! Blighters here and Chamber there both oppose the aims that the Service and Head Office aspire to, so they’re natural allies. It’s the Blighters who killed your father and who are after your hide, as a favor to the Chamber.”

  Which was all very clear, Edward thought, but it had told him nothing except meaningless names. “Would you mind defining a couple of terms, sir? Where exactly do you mean by ‘here’? If the Service you refer to is not the Colonial Office, then what is it? What sort of people make up the Chamber, and the Blighters?”

  “That’s a deuce of a lot of defining. As for what sort of people, well Mr. Goodfellow is one example, although he has always remained neutral until now.”

  This was definitely too much to swallow on an empty stomach. “Sir, are you telling me these groups are made up of gods?”

  Creighton sighed. “No, they’re not gods, not in the sense you mean. They may act like gods, and they do have supernatural powers. The one you met is a faint shadow of what he would have been in Saxon or Celtic times, and he cured your leg out of kindness, because he’d taken a fancy to you. Snap of the fingers, you might say.”

  “If he’s not a god, then he’s some sort of numen, or woodland spirit, or a demon, or—”

  “He’s a man, like us. Born of woman. He’s a stranger, that’s all.”

  “Well certainly! But—”

  “And I won’t define ‘stranger’ either. Not yet. He has a store of mana and I’m sure that a long time ago he was much more powerful than he is now. Yet he was probably always a pygmy in his class, whereas some of the Blighters are giants—look what they’ve achieved in the last month. This bloody war in Europe was provoked by them. Head Office have been struggling to prevent it for years. The Blighters outmaneuvered them. Now it’s happened, utter disaster. But on that level the battle is over, and the big bad wallahs can sit back and savor their rewards. They can also turn their attention to other things. Like you.”

  Mr. Goodfellow had said very much the same thing about the war, Edward recalled, and whoever or whatever Mr. Goodfellow was, he was no ordinary mortal.

  The dogcart had left the village and was bumping across a common on the far side, heading for some trees by the river.

  “You see,” Creighton added in a terse tone, as if he was tired of explaining things to a very thick child, “part of the trouble has been that both Head Office and the Blighters have been so occupied with political conniving these last few months, that they had no real assets to spare for peripheral matters such as doing favors for friends. That’s why they just sent a crazy woman against you. They say she truly is crazy, by the way. She’s a Balkan anarchist with a bad case of bloodlust. In other circumstances, they could have disposed of you without any trouble. On the other hand, had things been normal, Head Office could have defended you better.”

  “So it canceled out?”

  “Perhaps it did. But now Head Office are in disarray. They have lost badly and will need time to lick their wounds. The Blighters are about to reap an enormous harvest of mana. This is definitely a good time to do a bunk!”

  “But I don’t have any choice—” Edward said, and then stopped in astonishment. The dogcart had rounded the trees and was almost into an encampment of Gypsies—half a dozen wagons and a couple of tents. Smoke trickled up from a central fire. Small children were running for cover and several dark-garbed men had turned to inspect the visitors. Gypsies?

  “Any choice of what?” Creighton demanded, reining in the pony.

  “I mean I’m going to enlist, of course. There’s a war on!”

  Creighton turned to him with an air of exasperation. “Yes,” he said. “So there is. I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  35

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE TURNED OUT THE LAMP BEFORE YOU went to sleep,” T’lin grumbled. “Waste of oil. Come on.”

  Rubbing her eyes, Eleal stumbled out of the tent behind the big man and hobbled after him as he strode in among the sleeping dragons. There was no sign of Gim or Goober. She was stiff and cold. She must have slept a couple of hours, because the sky was bright, and she could see the mountains. The stars had almost gone, but Ysh’s tiny blue half disk and Eltiana’s fiery point still shone. It was going to be a fine day.

  “This is Lightning,” T’lin said, stopping so suddenly Eleal almost bumped into him. The dragon twisted his long neck around to inspect her. She rubbed the big browridges automatically, and he snorted warm hay scent at her, perhap
s approving of her size.

  T’lin inspected the girths. “He’s not as young as he used to be, but he’s wise, and he won’t even notice your weight.” He lifted Eleal effortlessly to the saddle and began adjusting the stirrup leathers.

  “Hill straps?” she said apprehensively. Lightning was large, making her feel very far from the ground already. She had never ridden except on the flat. Truth be told, her riding experience could be described as extremely limited.

  “Just buckle them loose for now, so they don’t flap. I’ll tell you when to tighten them. There. Now let’s see how far you can make him go. That way.” He pointed west, upstream.

  “That’s not the way to Rilepass.”

  T’lin’s big hand closed fiercely on her knee. His face in the twilight was hard as rock. “I know that, Little Missy. And understand one thing: You don’t argue or talk back on this journey, all right? This isn’t a joyride to amuse a usefully nosy little child anymore. This is serious, and I didn’t ask for the job of rescuing you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Good.” He snorted. “Your business is costing me a lot of money. It may cost me my life, or even my soul. And when I say ‘Do this!’ you do it. Don’t waste a moment. Clear?”

  If he was trying to frighten her, he was succeeding. She had never heard him speak so sternly. “Yes, Dragontrader.” She gripped the pommel plate with chilled fingers. “Lightning, Wondo!”

  Lightning turned his head around again and stared at her with big eyes, their glow still just visible in the fast-brightening dawn.

  “Wondo!” Eleal shouted.

  Lightning lifted his head high and looked over the rest of the herd. Then he faced Eleal and yawned insolently, showing teeth as big as her hand.