‘A small, small while.’
‘Time to breathe,’ agreed Adam.
‘What happened after…?’
‘I woke up with your magic all over me and a vague memory along the lines of, er, trying to kill you. There seemed no sign of the spirits, so I went looking for you. You were comatose – you’ve been in a regenerative trance for almost a week. None of us could wake you. So we packaged you up and flew you home.’ Adam smiled, nervously. There was awe in his eyes, bordering on fear. ‘You won.’
‘For the moment.’
‘Still a victory. A battle, if not the war.’
Sam said nothing.
‘What… was it like? The Light.’
‘It was… almost peaceful. I heard the minds of everyone. Their combined love, trust and charity. And then – I felt Hate and Greed and Suspicion trying to flee the Light, and I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t anything – we were one.
‘But…’ Sam smiled faintly. ‘But I don’t know whether this is my own memory, or me recalling what someone else remembers.’
Silence. Then Adam said, ‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. Seth chased Andrew halfway across the world, to tear the information on Cronus from his mind before he left him dead. It’s fair to say Seth won’t let that information rot for ever.’
‘You really think he has the guts to go after Cronus?’
Sam thought. Cronus isn’t the end of everything, he’s the end of everything as we know it. An end of Time – an end of death, an end of destiny, an end of the imprisonment we live with. Seth had glowed when he spoke of it. There’d been a fanatic’s gleam in his eye, much as Sam had often noted in Jehovah’s. The look of a man determined to carry a mad scheme through to the end. ‘Yes, I think he will. But not yet. He can’t.’
‘What about Fran?’
Sam shrugged. ‘She betrayed Freya to those three. She told them what Freya had done, how Freya was going to bring them down.’
‘Will you go after her?’
‘She’s a third-generation Child of Time. There are more convenient occasions for revenge. She’ll meet her fate, just like Asmodeus and Seth. But Cronus…’
‘If Cronus gets out.’
‘Then I probably will be forced to use the Light again. Something which, I might add, I’m opposed to on principle.’
‘What principle?’
‘Lucifer’s Principle of Survival, complete with footnotes and a special illustrated edition for the dedicated collector. But Cronus won’t get out.’
‘Why?’
A grin. A faint memory of the boyish smile that had once gone before, a spark of the old Sam. ‘Why? I’ll be waiting with a big sword and a lot of motivation, that’s why. The second someone moves, I’ll be there. I’m darkness incarnate, after all. After thousands of years of being told that I’m inescapable, I’m almost ready to believe it.’
‘You don’t think thousands of years of hearing about your dark power has given you a case of egomania?’
‘That’s no way to address a man who’s possibly saved the world from a minor apocalypse.’
‘For the moment.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Sam. ‘For the moment.’
There was a long silence. Adam broke it in a voice that, had it been human, would have been frightened. ‘What now?’
‘Now?’ Sam almost laughed. ‘Now I have breakfast. I’m starving. And there’s a tomorrow, isn’t there?’
‘While there’s life, there’s hope?’
‘While there’s Time,’ corrected Sam quickly. ‘And even then the proverb needs an editor. “While there’s Time, there’s motion on a space-time graph,” perhaps?’
‘And hope?’ persisted Adam.
‘You’re not becoming a romantic, are you?’
‘Not yet.’
‘But tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know whether there’s such a thing as a romantic spirit.’
‘Time changes everyone, Adam. You should have learnt that by now.’
Silence. ‘And tomorrow?’
‘There’s hope,’ he agreed. ‘New threats, but hope.’
‘For the moment.’
‘Until tomorrow. And maybe beyond.’
Silence. Sam smiled vaguely and lay back, listening to the voices still buzzing around his mind. Cronus isn’t the end of everything, he’s the end of everything as we know it.
I know, brother. But things as we know them aren’t totally bad, are they?
He slept.
Not so much a memory, but a dream. A dream of the past, and possibly the future too.
Dreams signified something, so he’d been told. But memories made you who you were. So, he remembered.
The Room of Clocks was empty, the only sound the steady ticking of timepieces. He stared around it, and his eyes lighted on the clock where, a few centuries before, he’d found a sword and crown. Then, for the first time, his gaze lifted to the huge empty throne at the far end of the hall. Behind the throne was the very largest clock, made of nothing but light. Its dial looked strange; he’d once been told that the second hand didn’t measure the gap between one beat and another, but the oscillation of a wave of light.
Sam stood there, staring at the empty throne.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘You don’t care, do you?’ He sighed, and began pacing round the hall, talking as though to himself.
‘It’s very complicated, but I think the nub of the matter is this. You are the process by which we live and eventually die. You are the beginning and the end, and of course there has to be one of those. Alone, however, you are nothing more. But with life, especially sentient, self-aware life, you are something more. Every thought I think takes time, takes a little bit of you, so of course you remember it as though it were your own. So it is that every thought and every feeling is your own, jumbled up inside you.
‘And yet you do not care.’
‘Why are you here?’ The voice exclaimed at him from all around, filled the room, deafened him.
He cowered away from it in fear, but when he spoke it was with defiance. ‘You should know! You’re in my mind!’ he yelled over the echoes.
The room seemed to darken, its shadows lengthening and melding. Sam suddenly felt very cold.
‘Insolent boy! You dare to come to me now? You dare to assume I will help you?’
‘I am your son!’
Something ran across Sam’s foot. Something else grabbed him from behind – but when he turned it was no more than shadow. Something heavy struck him across the shoulders, and he fell to his hands and knees.
To hands and knees, directly facing the empty throne, he realised. Then a hand, cold as ice, unyielding as marble, caught him by the hair and pulled his head up hard. He felt the pressure of a blade across his throat, and the pain of the cut as though it had really happened.
‘No one has spoken to me as you have, boy. No one has ever taken such risks with my pleasure!’
‘You brought me on yourself!’ he yelled back, shaking with fear. It wasn’t his fear, for at that moment he felt only calm, but an older dread drawn from his memories and being replayed across his mind by a furious father over and over again.
‘Am I not your necessary child? Did you not make me to serve your purpose and your purpose alone? Was not Light too gentle for you and is not Magic the one power that can play your deadly games? Am I not yours?’
‘You defy me! Me! With every breath you draw you defy me, and every thought you think is bent towards outwitting me. Me!’
Sam opened his mouth to speak, but the voice lashed across his ears before he could do so. ‘Do not deny me, for I am in your mind and always have been!’
‘Then you will know why I defy you! How can you be in my mind and not care?’
Pain shot through him like fire. Sam struggled weakly, but the grasp was impossible to break. ‘You know I have no intention of serving you and yours! So if you don’t care, why don’t you kill me and save yourself the trouble?’
The grip was abruptly relaxed and he toppled forwards, gasping for breath. The fear was gone, so was the pain. But the shadows still danced around him. He looked around the room. There was no one there.
‘Why do you defy me?’ whispered a voice, and it seemed so sad and weary that he felt a pang of guilt for having contributed to this ancient power’s woes.
‘You don’t even care for your own children, do you? They’re destroying themselves, and if their destruction will make a certain future happen here instead of there, then so be it. The only reason you haven’t destroyed me for the act of defying you is because you need me.
‘So. I destroyed the Eden Initiative. Whooho. Good on me. At least your son can feel something, even if the father has the emotional competence of a brick. So what now? If you let me live you really ought to ask my nice brothers if they’ll let me live. And if you let me live, let me live for my sake, not for yours. Father? You cannot have me believe that I was created as… as a machine, to perform a task and so die. At least pretend you care. Father?’
Silence. With a sigh, Sam clambered to his feet and gave the throne a frankly dirty look. ‘You don’t care, do you? You never have. You never will.’
‘You will serve me.’ It was a whisper, nothing more. ‘Whatever you do, you will serve me. There is no escape.’
Sam’s eyes turned to the light-clock beyond the throne. And he smiled a humourless, empty smile.
‘You can escape from anything, if you know how to go about it.’
He got to his feet. He broke into a brisk trot, then a run. Magic rose around him as he moved. Shadows lengthened, clawed at his feet. The fear was back, and the pain tenfold. And the roaring voice that filled the room, filled the universe with its anger.
‘You will not defy me, Bearer of Light! Not this time!’
Images were played across his mind in a blur, horrible images extracted from the memories of a billion other souls, but Sam ignored them. He knew who he was and he focused on that one identity amid all the others. As he ran he changed. Sparks flew off his fingers and when he opened his arms out wide it was as if a cloak of pure light moved with him, creating the effect of wings.
‘Lucifer! You cannot defy me!’
With a laugh born of desperation and despair Lucifer plunged straight through the clock of light, and out the other side.
So he’d been right after all, and as he opened his wings of magic and felt the thermals catch them and pull him skywards, he wondered what his brothers and sisters would think if they knew how thin Time built his walls, and how much they took on faith.
Somewhere in London, a doorway of silver light opened, shimmered on the air for a few seconds, and vanished again. He knew who the enemy was, where to go, what to do. Three of them, playing with fire. Scorched, but still out there.
It was a million to one chance, but he’d make it happen.
Sam’s story continues in…
TIMEKEEPERS
The battle for Earth, Heaven and Hell has only just begun
And don’t forget to look out for Catherine Webb’s brilliant debut series. Set in the realm of dreams and starring the unforgettable sorcerer Laenan Kite, Mirror Dreams and Mirror Wakes are stunningly imaginative stories that sizzle with magic, mystery and fantasy adventure. If you’ve enjoyed Waywalkers you’ll love these two books.
www.atombooks.co.uk
Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series Page 28