by Bee Ridgway
She held the light as he turned the key in the lock. “Don’t lose that,” she said. “We’ll need it to get back.”
Nick tucked the key into his pocket to make friends with the acorn and followed her. “Where are we going?”
“Under Soho Square,” she said. “You’ll see.” She turned and shone her light on what looked like pantry shelves. “My pickling,” she said of the rows of jars. Then she set off, and quickly enough the shelves of pickles petered out. The white beam picked out rough, arched stone walls and a flagstone floor.
“Who built this?”
“Romans. Extended at various points across the Middle Ages. It is perfectly safe. Look here.” Alva lifted her bean up high, and Nick saw that a stone shelf running all along the corridor up near the ceiling was lined with carefully stacked bones, each topped with a skull that grinned down at them. “We took these catacombs over in 1320, but we didn’t feel that we could remove the bodies, so the silent majority are tucked away everywhere.”
“Creepy.”
“Some of them are Ofan, actually. People who wanted to stay here. Personally, I want a glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty.”
“That’s even creepier.”
“Different strokes for different folks!” Alva lowered her flashlight and trotted on.
After a few yards, wooden built-in bookshelves began appearing along the lower walls, crammed with leather-bound books and rolled-up scrolls, most of them looking much the worse for wear. “Skulls and books,” Nick said. “Nice.”
“Clear eyes, full hearts.”
“You’re sick.”
“Probably.” Alva stopped and shone the flashlight on another door. It was massive and perfectly round. It looked as if it were a cross-section of a single, enormous tree, and indeed, now Nick could see the hundreds of diminishing rings. In the very center was a big, black door knocker, its black patina rubbed to shiny brass where generations of hands had grasped it.
Alva banged the knocker against the wood three times, but nothing happened.
“Damn it.” She banged it again, more loudly. Nothing.
“Peter is supposed to be on duty,” she said. “But I’m sure she’s off somewhere, bumming cigarettes or boring someone with her latest obsession.”
“Peter is a woman?”
“Hopefully someday,” Alva said. “She’s fifteen, going on nine.” She lifted the knocker a third time and set up a continuous banging for at least thirty seconds.
Finally they heard the sound of a heavy piece of wood being lifted away from the door on the other side, and a series of muffled curses, then the door began to swing inward silently.
An older, South Asian woman in jeans and a ratty Aran sweater stood there, one fist firmly planted on a hip, the other lifting a hurricane lamp.
“Hello, Archana,” Alva said. “Sorry to trouble you. It’s just me.”
Archana turned without a word and marched away, her light disappearing as she turned left.
“She’s mad at Peter, not at us,” Alva said blithely. “Will you help me get this thing closed again?”
Nick lifted the heavy wooden board and slotted it into place. “Not very advanced technology,” he said, remembering the gleaming metal door of Bertrand Penture’s inner sanctum. “The Guild has a much fancier system for keeping out intruders.”
“Yes, well, they like to feel important. Now then. Follow me.”
The corridor now ran at a slant, deeper under the earth, and it was fully lined with shelves to about chest level, and then with glass-fronted cabinets, topped with the ubiquitous bones. The shelves and cabinets bulged with books and papers, interspersed with musical instruments, rusty clockworks, toys, piles of empty picture frames, dusty bottles, swords, a kettle, and here and there a misplaced femur. A corridor branched off to the left, which Alva ignored, then quickly another went to the right. Alva flicked a switch and, down the length of the corridor, eight or ten dim electric lightbulbs flickered to life.
“Electricity? How is that possible?”
“Generator,” Alva said, switching off her flashlight. “It’s only strong enough to light a few bulbs at a time, so hopefully no one will turn a switch on elsewhere.” This corridor was like the others, arched, with messy shelves and cabinets, but these were interspersed with low wooden doorways, five on each side. “These are our offices,” Alva said. “Everyone who is located primarily in this time gets one. Mine is the third on the right. But I barely use it. In fact, it’s full of Peter’s spillover right now and I might just let her keep it.”
“There are only ten of you?”
“Yes, give or take. Others travel through. We can’t really support more than ten right now in this location. But we’re hoping to expand. We have our eyes on a couple of properties. . . .” She reached to turn the light off, but they went out with a pop before her fingers touched the switch. “Crap.” She turned her flashlight back on. “I’m not even in favor of the generator. It’s Archana’s pet project. But it’s funny how you’ll use things if they’re there.”
Nick’s head was reeling. “What is this place? What are you all doing here?”
Alva held the flashlight under her chin, turning her face into a ghoulish parody of her beautiful features. “Destroying the future,” she said in sepulchral tones. “Ruining it for everyone!”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “So they told me.”
“I bet they did. Come along.” Alva sped away like the White Rabbit, trotting past the ubiquitous shelving. “These all lead into libraries,” she said, flinging a hand toward a series of low, wooden doors on the right.
“Libraries? So what are all the books along the corridors?”
“Overflow. None of it’s really well organized, to be honest—even in the libraries. We haven’t had an archivist in a generation or two. Ah.” She pointed to a door with a thread of electric light spilling out from underneath. “That’s Archana’s lab,” she said. “If she was in a better mood I’d introduce you, but I don’t think it’s a good idea just now.”
“How can she bear to work in a hole in the ground?”
“Don’t assume that because this is a hole, it is damp and cold like a grave! Archana’s lab is warm and full of light.”
“Okay, but . . . this is a graveyard. I’m just saying.”
“Technicalities!”
They passed by.
“All right, here we are. The transporter.” Alva touched the handle of a square door. “Someone dubbed it the transporter because this is where we enter and leave from other times. It’s like in Star Wars, you know. ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’”
“That’s Star Trek, not Star Wars.”
“Oh, they’re different? Someone watched a lot of TV in Chile.”
“It was practically all they had us do.”
Alva sighed. “Lucky. I adore TV. But I jumped to 1790. I was illiterate, I only spoke Swedish, and all I knew how to do was tote water and grow beets and pray. The Guild locked me up in the most dreary castle in Scotland with a redheaded stepchild from Azerbaijan and a sex fiend from Alsace-Lorraine. I learned to read with the New England Primer, which is enough to drive anyone mad, and then advanced to an endless course of David Hume. . . . But, enough of that.” She threw open the door to the transporter. “Nice, isn’t it?”
Nick stepped inside. “But it’s a pub!” And it was. At first glance it was like the perfect country inn from his own time. Beautifully cozy, with low-beamed ceilings, fires crackling in the fireplaces, and big comfortable chairs set by the hearths. There were solid oak tables laid for eating, and candles flickering here and there in wall sconces. But on second glance, there was a pinball machine in a corner, a dartboard on one wall, and a mantelpiece piled high with paperback novels, a skull teetering on top. In another corner a wind-up Victrola opened its enormous red mouth into the room, and against a wall by the bar there stood a yellow upright piano with an intricate symbol painted above the keys: a many-spoked wheel, surrounded by eyes. A tuba and a trombo
ne were crammed on top of the piano, and a banjo lay on its bench. A dusty disco ball hung off to the right.
Nick turned around, taking it all in. “What’s the idea?”
Alva leaned in the doorway, her arms crossed. “This is where we gather most nights. The Ofan who are visiting and those of us who are making our homes here. We hang out, drink, talk, make music, dance—fight, laugh, fall in love, break up—we argue about who the Ofan were and who we are and what we should aim to become. It’s a place of community, I suppose. It’s been here forever, and it’s got such a strong feeling to it, such a powerful sense of place and belonging and purpose, such a constant flow of feeling outward in every direction, that it’s very easy to jump to. People come and go from here as easily as hopping on and off a bar stool. And for those of us who gather here of an evening—well, we know we’re feeding the atmosphere, keeping it going.” She smiled at him. “Make sense?”
Nick nodded. “It does. I can almost feel it.”
Alva put her hand on his arm. “Don’t. Not yet. But . . .” She stepped into the room. “Would you like a beer? I know it’s early. . . .”
Another morning beer with another powerful time-traveling woman who was about to blow his mind. Nick opened his hands. “How could I possibly refuse?”
Alva went behind the bar and pulled them each a silver tankard of beer. Nick hooked his leg over a bar stool and watched. “Where does the smoke from the fireplaces go? I don’t remember chimneys sticking up out of Soho Square.”
She pushed his tapered mug across to him. “We’re not under the square anymore. Our catacombs extend under the surrounding streets. These chimneys are connected to a house up top.” Alva sipped her beer. Behind the bar, with her glasses perched on her nose and her careful coif beginning to slip, she looked, Nick thought, less and less real and more and more like a creature from a dream. She ought to have cat’s whiskers, or wings.
“What is the Guild?” She asked it as if she didn’t know, as if she were the most innocent of children.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” He curved his hand around the tankard. It wasn’t silver, he realized. It was pewter. Nick hoped it was twenty-first century pewter and that the Ofan knew about lead poisoning. He lifted it and drank, and enjoyed how gentle the alloy felt against the teeth, how the beer flowing from it tasted smoother. Another set of sensations he’d forgotten.
Alva propped her elbows on the bar, made a cradle of her interlaced fingers, and rested her chin in it. “I’m waiting for your answer.”
“The Guild is an organization,” Nick said. “A corporation. A government.”
“Yes . . . it’s all of those things. But what else?”
“Alice Gacoki—she is the Alderwoman in the early twenty-first century—”
“I know who she is.”
“She said the Guild is gearing up to be at war with the Ofan. So I suppose the Guild is also an army.”
“War . . .” Alva sighed and all the magic went out of her face. She looked like what she really was—a woman with cares and frustrations. “She used the word war, did she?”
“Yes.”
“Alice can be so blind!”
“She says the same about you, you know. And the rest of them seemed to agree about the coming war. Penture and Ahn and Arkady and the cheese inspector—”
“The what?”
Nick held up a hand. “You don’t want to know.”
“From the look on your face I’m fairly sure I do want to know!”
“Her name is Marjory Northway.”
Alva made a sour-milk expression. “She’s a real . . . well. Let’s just say she isn’t nearly warm enough to be the thing I was about to call her.”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Wow. You really don’t like her.”
“That’s an understatement. I’m surprised you do.”
“I don’t.”
“But you slept with her.”
“Oh, my God.” Nick scraped his bar stool back and stood. “You know that, too?”
Alva laughed and clapped her hands. “I didn’t! I guessed! And you fell into my trap!”
“You are all crazy. All of you. Guild, Ofan . . . total nutters.” He drank.
“Yes, probably. But we are crazy in different ways. Shall we sit?” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, picked up her tankard, came round to his side of the bar, and pulled out a chair at a small table.
Nick took a seat across from her. The tabletop was quarter-sawn oak, and the tiger stripes of the grain shimmered in the firelight. The warmth from the crackling flames enveloped Nick. He could feel the currents and eddies of time all around him, gentle, inviting. “I like it here,” he said, stretching his legs under the table. “If this is insanity, it feels good.”
“Yes, and we want it to last. It used to last. Before everything changed.” She propped her elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “Have they told you?”
“About the Pale?”
“Yes. About the Pale, and the Talisman, and all of it.”
Nick laced his hands behind his head and leaned back. “I doubt they’ve told me all of it, Alva. The Guild is stingy with its information. But yes. When you say ‘Pale’ and ‘Talisman’ I understand you. I’m supposed to get you to tell me what the Talisman is and where it is. Perhaps you keep it in your bodice with your glasses.”
She gave his sally a perfunctory smile, but it died immediately. “I do not hold out much hope that a magical object will save us from the Pale. But we get ahead of ourselves. You were answering my question. The Guild is a corporation, a government, I think you said? And according to Alice et al. it is now also an army preparing for war.”
“The Guild hasn’t gone to war before? There’s never been a grand Guild-Ofan confrontation?”
Alva shook her head. “No, never. We haven’t been enemies, exactly. More like rivals. Sometimes even friendly rivals.”
“Friendly rivals? But Arkady hates you. And when I say he hates you, I mean he hates your guts. Says the Ofan killed his daughter.”
Alva winced. “Oh, Nick,” she said. “You don’t understand because you have joined us . . . after. After Eréndira died. After the future turned on itself and the Pale began moving toward us.” She pinched the bridge of her nose under her glasses and closed her eyes. “Everything is different now. Before, the Guild was the Guild and the Ofan were the Ofan. We were experimenting with the talent, they were insisting that we already knew enough. We stood for knowledge, they stood for stability. We were little, they were big. We were hip, they were stodgy. Blah blah blah. We disliked each other cordially, but we coexisted. Now . . .” She dropped her hand and her glasses readjusted themselves. Her eyes were wet. She looked at Nick and for just a moment she looked helpless and lost, this woman who lived her life on the edge of time.
“Just tell me,” Nick said gently. “Now?”
“It’s hard to say what ‘now’ is, when the Pale is coming closer and closer. I suppose I mean that now the battle lines are being drawn, all up and down the river. The rumors are flying—the Pale is the fault of the Ofan, there is a talisman that could save us, the Ofan are hiding it. . . . Everyone is desperate, and desperation is dangerous. The Guild is arming itself against us—as if we are to blame for what’s coming. Fools! Fighting us won’t stop the Pale.” She pressed her lips together, struggling with some strong emotion.
“How do you know the Ofan are not to blame?”
“Nobody knows who is to blame! Perhaps we are. Perhaps our experiments disrupted something. I doubt it, but I can’t say for sure. But that isn’t even the point. If we caused the Pale we don’t know how we did it, or when. It will be no good killing us all. The Pale will still come.”
“But Eréndira—”
“Died after the Pale began. She was trying to pierce it. Trying to learn about it. The Pale isn’t Eréndira’s fault.” Alva bit her lip and the tears spilled over her cheeks. “It was her killer. And now the Guild will go to war agains
t us—they say it is to save the world, but Arkady’s grief is behind it. It is revenge.”
“Surely not,” Nick said. “War . . . it is not a game.”
“No, but it is a business. The Guild has always thrived on war.” Alva’s voice was bitter. “Now they are simply doing the work themselves.”
“I’m completely lost, Alva. The Guild thrives on war?”
“Of course! The Guild exists because of the wars Naturals fight. Wars of conquest. The Guild funds war, and it harvests war. Indeed, who can say which came first? Armies or the Guild?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She let out a long breath. In the firelight, her magnified eyes glowed with luminous intensity. “All right. I’m sorry. Let’s back up.” She opened her hands. “We endlessly say that time is a river. We describe it that way so often that we tend to forget it’s just a figure of speech. But what else besides a river is described as having flow?”
“Hair?”
The violet eyes blinked, once.
And Nick knew. It was that feeling, when understanding begins to trickle in, when you know that soon it will burst the dam and that in a moment or two more you will see the world entirely differently from the way you do now. “Money,” he said slowly. “Money flows.”
Alva nodded.
“The Guild is . . . a bank?”
“Yes. It trades in futures. Actually, the plural is wrong. It trades in future. In the future. In one, singular, unalterable future.”
“Okay,” Nick said, excitement taking hold. “I get it! So the Guild speculates on the uncertainty of future markets. Hedge funds. Hedging your bets.”
“Yes.”
“But the Guild doesn’t have to speculate, does it? It doesn’t have to hedge its bets because it knows the future.”
“Right.”
“And that’s why the past must stay the same. So that the future stays the same. I thought they were rich because they knew the past. But it’s because they know the future. They know every single thing that’s going to happen, right up until the end of the world!”