Eschaton

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘Mio Dio!’ gasped Da Recco.

  ‘Time dilation,’ whispered Thomas. ‘He’s just regressed thirty years.’

  The chief opened the lid of the box and reached out to the sphere. It seemed to shrink in his hand as he held it and in that instant, they all saw his expression change. He turned to them, his eyes dark pools of infinite black, and a moment of ecstasy passed across his face.

  Everyone felt the effects of time slowing; seconds turned into minutes that stretched into hours before suddenly it was gone, and the engine was inside the box, and a fragile old man stood where the younger one had been.

  ‘How long was I gone?’ he asked, his hands shaking as he held the case.

  ‘Too long,’ replied Alixia, taking the box from him and handing it to Thomas.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ he muttered, his skin mottling as he continued to age.

  ‘Did you know?’

  MacKenzie nodded, smiling at something over her shoulder, something none of the others could see. She watched his eyes whiten with cataracts.

  ‘I saw everything.’

  His skin had become paper-like and transparent, and his fingers swollen and deformed as arthritis twisted them.

  ‘Tell the founder the Nihil are coming.’

  He collapsed to the floor, his desiccated body turning to a pile of ashes where he knelt.

  Alixia collapsed into Da Recco’s arms.

  ‘We have to leave now!’ cried Thomas.

  69

  Shaman

  [Bohuslän, Sweden. Date: 8.500]

  The night sky was dark and full of stars.

  They’d travelled back three and a half thousand years in the blink of an eye, and appeared in the middle of winter with a biting cold wind that sliced through their travel robes without mercy.

  ‘We need to find some shelter until morning,’ Caitlin said, nodding to a cave halfway up the rock face.

  Josh remembered the last time he’d been in a cave with her; he’d inadvertently pulled her into the Mesolithic while trying to escape from a Monad. Back then it had seemed like the right thing to do, and she’d teased him about what they got up to for weeks afterwards. This was another time and another Caitlin, although it was becoming harder to tell them apart now, the differences between them blurring. He realised she’d stopped asking questions about her other self.

  ‘Yeah. It’s freezing,’ he said, shivering and blowing on his hands.

  Luckily, the cave was unoccupied. Josh went out to scavenge wood to make a fire, and while he was gone Caitlin scouted around for something to eat. There was some strange looking fungus growing in the back of the cave, but she opted for the mushrooms growing near the entrance.

  ‘Are you sure they’re not magic mushrooms?’ Josh asked when he got back with an armful of kindling.

  Caitlin smiled and began threading them onto a thin twig. ‘They’re Chanterelles. Wild ones are the best.’

  She showed Josh how to light the kindling with flint, taking great pleasure in his failure to get anything to ignite.

  ‘So you and your dad used to come back here?’ he asked as they warmed themselves in front of the fire.

  ‘Way further back than this. This is positively recent compared to where we used to go.’

  When he was younger, before his mum became ill, Josh used to imagine what it would be like to have a dad who took you on adventures. There were the grand expeditions that he would plan in intricate detail, expeditions that involved going away for the whole summer, like the ones Caitlin went on, and then there were the simple day trips, to the zoo or a football match — nothing too extravagant, but still moments he felt he was missing.

  There were a few times, early on, when he’d been invited along to other boy’s birthday outings. They had given him a sense of what it should have been like: loads of six-year-old kids high on fizzy drinks charging around a network of foam-covered climbing frames while their dads hung out at the bar comparing fantasy football teams, but it wasn’t really what he’d had in mind.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what he would’ve looked like?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your dad,’ she said, smiling. ‘Remember, I can read you like a book.’

  ‘No, not for a long time.’

  ‘When my parents disappeared, I used to see them in crowds, but they were always much older. It’s weird when you’re thirteen — you think everyone over thirty is ancient.’

  ‘When my mum first got sick, I was looked after by my Gran, and Mrs B, who used to live next door. Now she was properly ancient.’

  Caitlin pulled a kebab out of the fire and blew on it to cool the mushrooms down. ‘Like over forty?’

  Josh laughed. ‘More like ninety I think. She would still chat up any bloke that passed near her front door.’

  Caitlin tasted one and handed another to Josh. ‘I guess you would say my grandfather was a bit more traditional. He did his best, and I loved him to bits, but it was a relief when he left me with Alixia — going shopping with her was a revelation.’

  Josh thought of all the times he’d been to the charity shop for his mother when her agoraphobia got so bad that she refused to leave the flat. With the clothes he could afford, he was glad his friends never got to see her.

  ‘We didn’t have a lot of money,’ he said. ‘There were things I had to do just to keep the lights on.’

  ‘Is that why you did those things with Lenin?’

  He nodded. ‘I did what I had to do to survive. Not bad stuff, but not strictly legal either.’

  ‘Like what?’ She shuffled closer until their hips were touching.

  ‘Stealing cars mostly,’ he said, idly picking up a branch and throwing it onto the fire.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I broke into a few places, mostly sheds, and then there was the Colonel’s place.’

  ‘You broke into his house?’

  ‘I needed three grand or Lenin was going to take the TV and anything else that wasn’t nailed down.’

  ‘Why did you owe him so much money?’

  Josh sighed. ‘Because dope helped with mum’s spasms. MS is a terrible disease and cannabis can relieve the symptoms. Except she wouldn’t go to the doctor to get it, so I had to buy it.’

  ‘And Lenin was your dealer?’

  Josh nodded. He was way more than that, he thought.

  ‘Lenin ran the Ghost Squad, and they controlled most of our estate. Me and him go back a long way.’

  Caitlin pulled another row of mushrooms off the fire and waved them around in the air. The smell was delicious, and Josh made a grab for one, but she moved it out of his reach.

  ‘You’ll burn your tongue. Have you always been so impatient?’

  ‘Always,’ he said, grabbing her around the waist. ‘Now give me food, woman.’

  Later, when they were lying in the makeshift bed she’d made from their clothes, Caitlin asked, ‘So how did Lenin end up in the future?’

  Josh was half asleep, thinking about whether they could just hang out here for a few days and forget about all the Eschaton stuff. He knew everyone was expecting him to pull some kind of rabbit out of a hat, but he didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to do. He wasn’t even sure how he got the job in the first place, and the thought of all that responsibility was beginning to stress him out.

  ‘I don’t know. I think he was working for the professor. We broke into Fermi’s lab at the university — that was when I lost the tachyon. I think he paid Lenin to find me, and when they couldn’t he kidnapped my mum.’ Josh intentionally left out the part where Lenin shot Caitlin and the terrible choice he’d had to make about Gossy.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, putting her arm across him. ‘He sounds like a real nasty bastard.’

  Josh lifted his arm so she could put her head on his chest. ‘I thought I’d left that behind, but it seems fate has other ideas.’

  She sucked air in through her teeth. ‘Don’t let Sim hear you use that word.’

  ‘I know, his
face goes all pinched like he’s bitten into a lemon,’ Josh said, pulling a grim expression.

  Caitlin laughed. ‘That’s it exactly.’

  She kissed him. ‘You’re such an enigma, Joshua Jones.’

  ‘Is that good?’ he asked with a cheeky smile.

  She twisted around until she was on top of him. ‘Oh, it’s more than good.’

  Josh woke before the dawn. The fire was low, nothing more than warm embers glowing in the half-light. Caitlin slept soundly in his arms, and he could feel her chest rising and falling against him.

  Figures moved in the shadows, furtively staying out of the light. Josh held his breath and listened as their soft feet padded across the stone floor. He thought about waking Cat, but she would make too much noise, and he didn’t need that. What he needed was a weapon, but there was nothing but the half-burned branches and a few rocks.

  There was a scraping sound like metal on rock, and two half-naked warriors came out of the night, their eyes wild, bronze blades raised above their heads.

  Josh pushed Caitlin behind him and reached for a firebrand, bringing it up to block the first attack and jabbing the glowing end into the man’s belly. The second held back as the first howled with pain. Josh bent his knees, dropping his centre of gravity.

  Behind him, Caitlin complained about being woken up and pulled the clothes over her. The first warrior was getting to his feet and Josh’s branch was cooling. He knew it probably wouldn’t survive another blow.

  He heard more footsteps behind the others.

  Then a crazy man ran into the cave shouting loudly and dropped something into the fire that flared up like a firework, and the two Neolithic thugs turned and fled.

  The shaman crouched down on the other side of the fire, putting his hands out to warm them. He was dressed in a cloak of fur and feathers, his hair matted and wild like he’d slept in a bush — he looked like a feral version of Caitlin’s dad.

  ‘You took your time,’ he said in English. His dark eyes shone out from a deeply lined face that was covered in runes. ‘Which crisis are you from?’ he asked, throwing more wood onto the fire.

  The new logs hissed and popped as they caught, finally waking Caitlin.

  ‘Dad?’ she said, covering herself with a robe.

  ‘Caitlin?’ the Shaman replied, looking surprised.

  ‘It’s not your father,’ Josh told her.

  ‘No,’ the stranger agreed. ‘I’m Marcus, his brother — which means you must be the Paradox.’

  ‘Josh,’ insisted Josh, quickly pulling on the trousers of his union suit.

  Marcus Makepiece picked up one of the short swords they’d dropped. ‘They’ve been watching you since you arrived. Local boys, kind of proto-Vikings, probably would have killed you and taken Caitlin for breeding stock.’

  Caitlin slipped on Josh’s shirt. ‘Breeding stock?’

  ‘Or sacrifice. They won’t be back tonight. They think I’ve got a direct line to their gods.’ He held up the palm of his hand, which had a crude circle of rays with an eye in the centre. ‘They’re mostly sun-worshippers, with a few pagan fertility rites thrown in for good measure.’

  He took out a flat loaf from a small animal-hide pouch and handed it to her.

  She broke the crusty bread in half and gave some to Josh. ‘Dad never really talked about you.’

  Marcus laughed. ‘I’m not surprised. We’ve never really got on.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Caitlin asked, taking a small bite of the food.

  ‘Same as you; following the eleventh crisis.’

  ‘No, we were on the eighth.’

  Marcus thought for a moment. ‘Isn’t that the discovery of a terrible power?’

  Caitlin nodded. ‘Heisenberg used a nuclear reactor to create a time machine and start the Aryan race.’

  ‘Ha. They’re so bloody arrogant, but I guess that does explain the three blondes that turned up last month. Don’t worry, the master race has already been taken care of.’

  Neither Josh nor Caitlin wanted to know how.

  ‘So we have convergence — that’s not a good sign,’ Marcus continued.

  ‘Convergence?’

  He threw back his feather cloak and sat down crossed-legged on the floor. They could see that his arms and legs were also covered in tattoos.

  ‘When crises overlap or intersect. I’ve been studying them for a long time, but this is the first I’ve heard that they were converging.’

  ‘I thought you lot were just dedicated to one crisis?’ asked Josh.

  ‘My lot?’

  ‘Augurs.’

  Marcus shook his wild hair, threw his head back and laughed. ‘I’m not an Augur,’ he said when he caught his breath.

  ‘What are you then?’

  ‘Once, a long time ago, I was a Dreadnought, but now I think of myself as an Anthropologist: I study languages and ancient cultures. I’m also the one that proposed the Eschaton Cascade — although no one took me seriously.’ He sighed. ‘I calculated the end of times, and they laughed at me.’

  ‘Well, they’re not laughing now. The founder created an entire guild to study your work,’ said Caitlin, poking the fire with a stick.

  ‘The Citadel. Yes, I’ve heard of it. Our paths cross now and then — they seem a little highly-strung.’

  ‘It’s become a religion to them. They’re obsessed with understanding how to stop it.’

  Marcus laughed. ‘You can’t stop it. It’s inevitable, like night following day. All we can do is prepare for the twelfth and hope the Paradox survives.’

  ‘Me?’ Josh asked.

  ‘Both of you, actually. Caitlin is as important to this as you. Which reminds me,’ he said, looking at her, ‘I must go back and tell your parents they have to leave you.’

  Caitlin’s cheeks flushed. ‘So, it was you — that night in the kitchen?’

  ‘It will be — now I’ve met you,’ said Marcus, staring deep into the fire. ‘There are so many variables to consider, but one thing was clear in every scenario that I ran. You would never meet the Paradox if you remained with your parents, and without you, he won’t have the strength to achieve his destiny.’

  Caitlin glared at him, finding no words to express the pain she was feeling.

  ‘What exactly is my destiny?’ asked Josh. ‘Since you mention it.’

  The shaman leaned back and spread out his arms, his eyes glazing over as he spoke. ‘There are many roads to choose from, and it is your fate to find the right one.’

  ‘So basically, you can’t tell me.’

  Marcus shook his head. ‘All I know is that your future path is entwined with hers.’

  ‘Maybe we should go,’ Caitlin suggested, putting one hand on Josh’s shoulder.

  ‘No,’ Josh replied through clenched teeth, shrugging off her hand. ‘I want to know why — why me? What the hell did I do to deserve this?’

  Marcus snapped out of his trance and got to his feet. He was over six feet tall, and the shadows he threw across the cave walls were full of menace.

  ‘I cannot tell you because I don’t know. I’m not a seer, just a Draconian that saw the light.’ He pulled open his cloak to reveal the twelve symbols of the Eschaton tattooed across his hairless chest. ‘Whatever the reason for your existence, it’s nothing more than an abstract set of probabilities to me. Whatever you do will be shaped by everything that has already happened. You’re the sum of your life experiences, and you should trust yourself — certainly more than anyone else, including the Order.’

  Caitlin sighed. ‘The Order is falling apart.’

  ‘And especially not the founder,’ Marcus added.

  ‘What?’ snapped Josh.

  ‘There was a mission, back in the time of Solomon. I found an out-of-place artefact — the Antiquarians call them talismans — it showed me things, visions of the crises to come, and the founder was there.’ Marcus pointed at the end of the map on his chest. ‘I’m not entirely sure what part he plays, but he’s a significa
nt factor.’

  With that, he moved his fingers across the tattoos on his arms and vanished.

  Caitlin sat staring into the fire while Josh thought about what Marcus had said. Neither felt like talking, so they watched the flames, both lost in their thoughts.

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ said Josh eventually.

  ‘I don’t think we have to.’

  ‘It’s not like we know him — how do we know he discovered the Eschaton?’

  ‘He convinced my parents,’ she said, pulling on her robes. ‘They owe me an explanation.’

  She turned towards him and held out his shirt. ‘Are you coming?’

  70

  The Grand Seer

  Ravana paced impatiently around her office like a caged tigress. She wasn’t accustomed to waiting for anyone, let alone the ridiculous fool of a Grand Seer, and every minute that passed made her hate him even more.

  Dalton had been missing for over three days now, and it was growing increasingly unlikely that she would ever see him again. Her only hope was that the crazy old buffoon had some way of reaching him.

  There had been many times when she’d wished he’d never been born. The product of a loveless marriage, arranged by her parents before she was twelve, Dalton was a burden from the day he came mewling into the world.

  From the very beginning, he was spoiled. At first, by his grandparents, aristocrats who refused to leave their pre-unified Prussia. Ravana was treated like nothing more than a wet nurse by her in-laws, and all their love and compassion went to their only heir — and so they created a monster.

  Their son, her husband Valtin, was no better. A bully with sadomasochistic tendencies, she did her best to protect Dalton from his explosive outbursts, but as Dalton grew older, his father’s rages got worse.

  She’d always known it would end badly. The day of the accident had been a long time in the making, and when Dalton had returned smothered in his father’s blood, she’d wept, not for her husband, but for her son, who had done the one thing Ravana never had dared to do herself.