“Okay,” said Jack. Michael deduced that the word was some kind of expression of consent.
Marlstone, however, said nothing, and did not change his position or his attitude. Not-Cecilia could do nothing against him, given the delicacy of her frame, but not-Escott raised his gun, not-Langstrade raised his walking-stick—apparently not having realized that it was actually a swordstick—and Jack looked around for a pebble with which to load his catapult.
Then not-Lady Phythian suddenly erupted from the gap in the hedge, hotly pursued by not-Hope, and for a moment, it seemed that chaos might erupt again.
There was, at any rate, a pause as the two newcomers skidded to a halt and surveyed the scene in front of him.
“Don’t shoot!” not-Langstrade shouted to not-Hope, urgently.
“It’s okay,” not-Jack shouted, presumably to not-Lady Phythian, almost simultaneously. “There’s a truce! We’ve all formed an alliance against him!” His dirty forefinger pointed at not-Marlstone. “We have to storm the tower and take the machine!”
Michael, who had lived in London ever since leaving boarding-school, knew enough about mob psychology to understand how easily common causes could be adopted when the right spur was applied. He was not surprised to see the entire party unite spontaneously, and then surge forward to join not-Cecilia, who turned her attention back to the lone man on the drawbridge.
“What about you?” not-Cecilia demanded. “Are you with us?”
“It’s no use,” the man on the bridge replied, his voice overwrought. “You don’t understand—the machine’s untouchable. I can’t even get up to the platform. Even if I could, I wouldn’t even know how to begin to tune it. It has nothing in common with any time machine I ever saw—or that any of you ever saw. I can’t believe that the fifty-oners can tune in to it, and if they can’t, your people have very little chance indeed.”
“In that case,” not-Cecilia, was quick to declare, “we have to play the hero and smash it before the optimum. Whatever the risk—even if we seven are trapped here—we have to smash it. If the way-downstreamers get their way.…”
She stopped, evidently having become aware that she was losing her audience. Some of them, at least, had been in the palm of her hand a few moments before, but the word trapped had given them pause for thought.
“Let’s see it,” not-Cecilia demanded of not-Marlstone. “Let us all see what we’re dealing with.
“No!” another voice shouted, urgently. Michael was surprised to find that it was his own. “Hold the drawbridge, Marlstone! Don’t let them in!”
The man on the drawbridge probably had no idea who “Marlstone” was, and could not possibly know why the instruction had been shouted, or on whose authority, but he was in no doubt that the words had been addressed to him. He stood stock still, quite nonplussed—still serving, if only by virtue of his inertia, as an obstacle. Michael charged forward, as if coming to his aid.
No one else knew who he was either, or what his agenda was—including not-Cecilia. That didn’t prevent her, though, from yelling: “Stop him!”
Not-Langstrade moved as if to intercept Michael’s charge, but rather half-heartedly, not sure that he wanted to obey someone he had considered an enemy only a few moments before. Michael lowered his head and butted the Earl’s body in the chest. The body fell backwards, and the walking-stick flew out of its hand. Michael changed direction just sufficiently to enable him to pick up the swordstick—to whose secret only he seemed presently privy—and continued in his course. Not-Cecilia seemed to consider trying to intercept him, but obviously thought better of it.
Michael bounded on to the drawbridge. Not-Marlstone finally moved, coming forward to meet him, with a scowl on his face that certainly did not advertise any friendly intent.
Michael tried to check his stride and draw the swordstick, but the maneuver went hopelessly wrong, His momentum caused him to stumble, and he lurched forwards, fighting with all his might simply to stay on his feet. He failed, and rolled over, cannoning into not-Marlstone’s legs. Not-Marlstone, who had been moving forward, lost his own balance, tripped, and fell off the drawbridge into the muddy moat.
Michael completed his forward roll, more by luck than by judgment, and came to his feet again. He turned around immediately, and placed his back to the door of the Keep. Finally, he succeeded in drawing the blade of the swordstick, and extended it before him, in what he intended to be a threatening manner.
It was only then that he realized the blatant absurdity of striking any sort of fencing pose, when two of his opponents had shotguns, and one of them had two cartridges as yet undischarged.
Not-Hope and not-Escott immediately raised their weapons, but hesitated.
“Shoot him!” not-Cecilia screamed.
Both men fired, almost simultaneously.
The “skippers” controlling the bodies of the optimist and the pessimist might have been expert marksmen while safely embedded in their own flesh and equipped with familiar weapons, but neither of them had ever seen a double-barreled sporting-piece before today, and they were cursed with the native incompetence of their borrowed flesh. The guns leapt up in their unpracticed grip, and fired higher than intended. Michael was untouched by a single pellet, although the door above his head and the walls to either side were liberally peppered.
Not-Cecilia had obviously inherited the legendary fickleness of womanhood along with her borrowed flesh, for she immediately revised her earlier judgment and shouted “Don’t shoot!” at not-Hope, who still had one shot in hand. When he looked at her with frank annoyance, she added, by way of explanation: “If the machine’s way up in the top of the tower, and the big guy couldn’t reach it, the only way to stop it is to shoot it. Have you got any more cartridges?”
Not-Hope and not-Escott exchanged guilty glances. They had obviously paused long enough in the gun-room, after smashing their way into the locker, to load the weapons, but they had been in too much of a hurry to fill their pockets with spare cartridges. They had only one shot left between them, and they dared not waste it on Michael.
I’m not Theseus after all, Michael thought, but Horatius Cocles, who defended the bridge to Rome’s main gate against an army. Was he killed or not? I can’t remember. Hope would know, and Escott too—they’re Eton men.
In the meantime, the six-man “army” assembled on the grass closed ranks, while not-Marlstone—who obviously had to be counted as its seventh member now—stood up in the ditch, covered from head to toe in horrid slime. The other six gathered at the end of the drawbridge, but did not set foot on it, while Marlstone refrained from taking hold of the wooden platform, fearful of being stabbed.
“I’ll get him,” said not-Jack, who had found a pebble with which to load his catapult and was already stretching the elastic string.
Michael did not suppose that non-Jack was any more familiar with catapults than not-Hope and not-Escott had been with shotguns, and he knew from distant experience that they were notoriously inaccurate weapons, so he stood his ground like the hero he was—and then howled in pain as the missile grazed the top of his left ear before smashing into the wood of the door, with more than enough force to convince him that a direct hit might have killed him. He had reckoned without the boy’s reflexes, trained by killing rabbits.
Fortunately, not-Jack needed time to fit another pebble into the cradle of his weapon and draw back the elastic. During that interval Michael reached behind him to clutch the door-handle, opened the door, and slipped inside, cursing the thrift that had forbidden the younger Lord Langstrade to equip his mock-Keep with a functional drawbridge, or even to put a bolt on the door.
He was immediately aware that the atmosphere within the Keep was intensely charged with some unspecifiable force. When he had felt something similar in the Maze he had not been sure whether it was actually the Maze or merely himself
that was charged, but he was in no doubt now that he was inside the Keep, at the core of the temporal field, that the phenomenon was both objective and subjective. He was sure, too, that there was a world of difference between being “charged” and being “possessed”. The Mistress of the Labyrinth—Marlstone’s time machine—had not taken possession of him at all, and was not even crowding his head with alternative versions of himself, let alone any alien presence, but he was in no doubt that she had enhanced his own capacity somehow.
Unfortunately, that enhancement was no vulgar matter of mass or physical strength. Placing his back against the door in order as if to make a tokenistic—but obviously futile—barricade, Michael looked around to see if there was anything to hand that might serve the purpose better.
It was dark inside the building, in spite of the pairs of loophole-windows set high in each of the four walls, but there was enough light to enable him to make out something swinging from side to side in front of him. Michael realized, to his astonishment, that the swinging object was a pendulum bob. It was suspended by a cable from an axle fitted into the walls of the tower, beneath a platform accommodated in the space beneath its fake battlements. He could not quite make out the escapement mechanism to which the pendulum was presumably attached, nor the form of the machine that the escapement must be regulating, but he could see two other objects suspended in the gloom: two leaden weights whose gradual descent from a spindle set at a similarly great height must be powering the machinery regulated by the motion of the pendulum.
Gregory Marlstone’s time machine, Michael realized, was not powered by steam. He recalled that Marlstone’s father had been a manufacturer of clocks, of the gross kind accommodated within church towers. Marlstone’s time machine—the mysterious Mistress of the Labyrinth—was powered by clockwork.
Rickety scaffolding set against the side-wall of the Keep to his right, equipped with a network of ladders, provided a route of sorts up to the platform where the time machine and its clockwork driving-mechanism were housed, but the light filtering through the loopholes showed him that the ropes securing one of the ladders had come loose, and that the ladder was now dangling down, uselessly. The machine was inaccessible—from the floor of the Keep, at least. It was quite possible that seven Vikings working in association might be able to get the ladder back into place and hold it firm while one of them climbed up—but how could a mere foot-skipper be expected to render effective assistance to his allies downstream, when confronted with a clockwork-driven time machine and having no more than a few minutes in hand?
Michael felt a sudden urge to laugh, and actually opened his mouth in response—but then something heavy slammed into the batten of the door from the other side, and the reaction to the impact was communicated to his back with brutal force, causing his teeth to snap shut, trapping the tip of his tongue. He experienced a sharp stab of pain, and felt the taste of blood on his mouth. More blood was running down his right cheek, from the graze inflicted on his ear, but it was no more than a trickle. He had inflicted worse wounds on himself in the past, with pen-knives or mere sheets of paper.
Even a few minutes, he thought, might be time enough for one of the Vikings to smash the machine. There were bound to be tools of some kind on the platform, and not-Hope still had a cartridge in his shotgun.
He pressed himself backwards against the double-door of the Folly, bracing himself against the second impact that was sure to follow the first, although he was not optimistic about his ability to prevent one or other batten from being broken down.
Surely it must be noon by now, he thought. It seems like an eternity since Cribden Church chimed eleven!
Before the expected impact came, however, a temporal ripple ran through him—recognizable now—and he had to grit his teeth to fend off the associated wave of nausea and mental unsteadiness. Suddenly, it seemed that there was a direr enemy inside the Keep than those without: something invisible, writhing in the space beneath the sweeping pendulum like some kind of snake…or worm. Non-Cecilia had mentioned a worm, he recalled, and in Medieval terminology, “worm” was often used synonymously with “dragon”. There was an evil spirit working against the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and had been since she had first become active—but as not-Cecilia had complained, it was the most fugitive of phantoms.
Fugitive or not, it still had some notion of what it was doing. Whether it was working by instinct or intelligence, it had a part to play.
Because it was invisible, Michael could only see where it was not: a void vacated by the dust-particles that otherwise filled the air with a faint haze, faintly illuminated by the shafts of summer sunlight slanting down through the loophole-windows.
The worm—the dragon at the heart of the Maze—was climbing up the pendulum-bob in a slow but smooth spiral. Its blind snout reached into the gloomy shadows where the escapement and the time machine were nestling.
A bolt of lightning—or something very similar—suddenly erupted out of the darkness at the top of the tower, blinding Michael’s eyes. For several seconds, as the darkness resumed, everything was hopelessly confused—and then one of the battens of the door gave way behind him, sending him staggering forward into the path of the worm-burdened pendulum. Even though he could not see the bob, he evaded it somehow, feeling the wind of its passage as it swung past him, and he continued forwards, groping his way to the far wall, in order that he might use it for support.
Before his vision had cleared completely, other people rushed into the tower. He heard their footfalls pause, as if for dramatic effect. Then someone howled, apparently in wrath and disappointment. Evidently, the futuristic Vikings had never seen a clockwork time machine before, and were far from delighted to discover that such a thing was possible—except, of course, that it wasn’t. The clockwork could only be providing the tiniest imaginable impulse to the Mistress, who was actually drawing her power across time, from a whole series of time machines located in various eras of the turbulent future, by means of a scordatura tuning that the operators of those time machines, like Gregory Marlstone, had never previously imagined to be possible.
But what now? Michael thought. What NOW?
Not-Hope raised his shotgun, aiming upwards into the gloom, and fired. The gunshot echoed eerily in the confined space, seemingly multiplied tenfold and amplified by the reverberation. If the pellets hit any part of the time machine, however, they did not seem to do any significant damage. Not-Hope cursed his incompetence, volubly.
Not-Jack raised the catapult above his head and fired a second pebble, which certainly hit something metallic before it rebounded and fell back to the floor, clattering as it skittered over the flagstones—but that shot, too, proved impotent.
The howl of anguish had died away by then, but it was suddenly replaced by a howl of joy, this time from more than one mouth, as the invisible worm reached out again, and lightning flashed in ready response—or, at least, began to flash. This time, it was quite obvious that the flash was not really lightning at all, for it was far too slow, far too controlled. It was not as bright, and did not blind him, although he had to shield his eyes with his free hand, but as Michael watched the uncanny light expand and swirl within the space through which the pendulum was swinging, he was overwhelmed by a dire sense of dread.
“The fifty-fivers have broken through!” not-Cecilia cried. “They’ve cracked the lucky harmonic. We’ve won!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DANCING THE MAZE
Whatever the first lightning-bolt had been, Michael realized, it had been a horribly bad omen. It must, Michael deduced, have come from somewhere “downstream”, signaling that the warriors from the Era of Change were on the brink of completing their attunement, with the aid of their ghostly worm. A cross-time connection had been established, in the very nick of time, and now the invasion would begin in earnest, materially.
Obviously, the Mist
ress of the Labyrinth had had her own reasons for wanting to keep the time machine going, while simultaneously trying to make sure that none of the ghostly mental missionaries dispatched into the present from the future—who had employed tactics far more ungentlemanly than those employed by the Mistress’s own missionaries—could complete his allotted task. It was also obvious, though, that there had been a subtler race against time in progress, which had always been likely to be a close-run thing. Michael had to trust the intuition that told him that it was now one of the Armies of Change that was on the brink of victory: a victory that would be disastrous for the history that Michael knew, and whose future development he could not help but be anxious to protect. But what could he do about it, now that the battle was on the brink of being lost?
Somewhere in the remote distance, Michel heard the clock of Cribden Church begin to chime, and knew that it would chime twelve times—or that it would, at least, try to chime twelve times, like the heroic mechanical intelligence that it was.
Too late! he cried, silently—but somehow guessed, almost immediately, that it was not too late, and that the timing of the breakthrough had not merely been permitted but actually engineered by the Mistress of the Labyrinth. So, at least, he had to hope and believe.
The slowed-down lightning-flash suspended above his head seemed to dim, but that was only by comparison with a complementary swirl of light that suddenly emerged beneath his feet to fill the floor of the Keep—a floor that suddenly seemed very large indeed. Although the two floods of liquid light were not directly connected, there was some kind of mirror-relationship between them.
The Keep’s seven invaders—or eight, counting the worm—looked down.
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine Page 26