Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ALSO BY MARK LAWRENCE

  Impossible Times

  One Word Kill

  The Broken Empire

  Prince of Thorns

  King of Thorns

  Emperor of Thorns

  Red Queen’s War

  Prince of Fools

  The Liar’s Key

  The Wheel of Osheim

  Book of the Ancestor

  Red Sister

  Grey Sister

  Holy Sister

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a trademark of WIZARDS OF THE COAST LLC.

  Title used with permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Mark Lawrence

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542016063 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542016061 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503946781 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503946789 (paperback)

  Cover design by Tom Sanderson

  CONTENTS

  THE STORY SO FAR

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE STORY SO FAR

  Here I present a catch-up for the previous book to refresh your memory and avoid having characters undergo ‘as you know’ conversations. This is in no way a substitute for reading One Word Kill. It is meant to help those who have already read book 1.

  Nick is a mathematical genius who lives in London and has turned sixteen between books 1 and 2. He is in remission from an aggressive type of leukaemia. The year is 1986.

  Nick’s D&D group consists of his two schoolmates, John (handsome, rich, somewhat shallow) and Simon (antisocial, obsessive, has a brilliant memory), plus Mia (witty, imaginative, streetwise) – the girl who became Nick’s girlfriend in book 1. Their former dungeon master, Elton Arnot, has withdrawn from the group after the death of his father, a security guard, made him unwilling to risk the rest of his family through continued association with Nick.

  Demus is Nick aged forty. In book 1 he comes back from the year 2011 in order to convince Nick and Mia to record her memories so that they can be reinstated after she suffers a terrible accident in the future.

  Demus steers Nick and his friends into stealing an advanced microchip needed to complete the memory storage device. During this robbery Demus and Elton’s father are killed by school psycho turned would-be drug lord, Ian Rust. Rust also dies. Demus knew who was going to die.

  Demus’s actions are constrained by the need for unfolding events to match his memories of the time (when he was Nick). If what happens does not match his memories, then the world has branched onto a new timeline and his actions cannot help the Mia he knows in the future.

  At the end of book 1 Nick uses the memory storage device to erase his memories of the events during the robbery at the microchip laboratory and of a number of days before that. This is in order to match the gap in Demus’s memory and to spare him the detailed knowledge of exactly how he dies in the laboratory.

  In order to make sure that Nick’s timeline and Demus’s timeline continue to be the same, Nick will have to become Demus as he grows older. This means he will have to invent time travel!

  One big reason that Nick wants to become Demus is that Demus clearly survives for another twenty-five years. Which is unlikely given the current state of Nick’s health.

  CHAPTER 1

  June 1986

  I never expected to die in a punt chase. But actually being in one had rapidly narrowed the odds. Currently fifty-fifty seemed fair. Drowning was a distinct possibility. The pole I was leaning on was a solid sixteen-foot piece of wet spruce. Most of it would have been dry, though, if I hadn’t fumbled it into the water in the early stages. The River Cam wasn’t even over-my-head deep where I made the turn, but the drunken toffs in the pursuing punt were promising to hold me under. So drowning would probably be listed on the death certificate.

  ‘Faster, boys! We’re gaining on the little shit!’

  When steering a punt it pays to plan ahead. They make steering shopping trolleys seem easy in comparison. It also helps to have had more than one previous go at punting. Generally it’s a leisurely pastime, but when six red-faced third years are intent on ‘ducking the oik’ it becomes a more hectic, albeit still rather sedate, affair. A car crash in slow motion. In any event I had not planned ahead, and now the bow of my punt was scraping the bricks of the grand building rising directly beside the river.

  I call it my punt. In truth all of us had jumped into rental punts and made off without paying. But, ownership aside, it was certainly my neck that was on the line.

  The boat juddered along, slowly turning parallel to the wall. All I could do was struggle to stay upright on the stern platform while not losing hold of my pole.

  ‘We’ve got the bastard now!’

  Several of the third years were aiding their puntsman along by paddling with their hands, and the great ginger lout in the front lay on his belly over the bow doing the crawl as if he were swimming. Only the fact that they were so drunk had kept me ahead this long. Like me they were all in bow ties and dinner jackets and the puntsman sported a deep purple cummerbund. The ginger giant had originally had a top hat in hand, though that was now floating hundreds of yards behind, the loss only prompting him to bellow even more murderous threats across the diminishing span of water between us.

  Just before the ‘incident’ that set them after me, Ginger had been attempting to impress the ladies by putting earthworms in his mouth. Apparently that’s how the upper crust do things at Cambridge college garden parties.

  I cleared the wall and leaned into the pole. Get the angle wrong and it digs into the riverbed, leaving you with the choice of either letting go or staying with the pole while the punt heads off. Unlike the sons of judges, lords and merchant bankers in the boat behind me, I had rented my outfit from Moss Bros and I doubted they would take kindly to having it handed back wet. Ahead of us the Mathematical Bridge loomed, an arched affair built entirely of straight timbers. A small but growing crowd of amused onlookers watched the chase over the railings.

  ‘Got you!’

  As we passed beneath the bridge the pursuing punt came close enough for Ginger to lunge out over their bow to grab at the stern of mine.

  A coldness ran through me and it happened again, that thing that had started with the running girl and had been happening ever since with steadily increasing frequency. The coldness wasn’t a chill finger up the spine, it was more like liquid nitrogen running through the marrow of my bones. Enough cold to freeze the moment and fracture it, sending a dozen cracks running into the future, a dozen glimpsed maybes, no two the same. In one I was drowning, t
he surface of the river an impossibly distant two feet above me, the sunlight wavering down through the water, someone’s hands locked about my throat. In another I was free and clear, my pursuers capsized in my wake.

  Ginger scrabbled at my punt. I won free of my paralysis and stamped on his hand before his wet fingers could find a hold on the platform.

  ‘I say!’ declared a chinless wonder from further down the boat. A result of aristocratic inbreeding, no doubt. If only he’d had a monocle he could have stepped straight from the pages of a nineteenth-century edition of Punch.

  ‘Grab his pole!’

  That got some homosexual innuendos and sniggering, but one of them grabbed it all the same. All I could do was let it go and deliver a kick to Ginger’s chest. I shoved off him, hoping to aim my punt at the grassy slope coming up on the left.

  Pursued by roars of indignation I ran the length of my punt and made a desperate leap for the bank. I almost made it. The top half of me did, landing on the grass with a thump that drove all the air from my lungs. My legs landed in the water.

  To jeers and catcalls I scrambled out onto the path along the bank. My plan was to run. I’m not good at it but fear is a great tutor. My first step on the gravelled path let me know I’d lost one half of my only pair of black shoes. I ran even so, dodging past students and tourists. I made it a good fifty yards along the riverbank before someone tripped me from behind. Rolling over I saw the puntsman with the purple cummerbund looming over me, a tall guy with sharp features and oiled black hair scraped back in a 1920s style. He looked remarkably pleased with himself.

  ‘I’d say it’s time for a damned good thrashing.’

  I couldn’t tell if he really talked like that or if he were playing the role for effect. My hands were bloody and embedded with little bits of grit. I raised both defensively as he drew his leg back like a footballer taking a penalty.

  ‘Fuck off.’ She came out of nowhere, a girl in jeans and a black T-shirt, slightly built, strangely familiar, and a head shorter than the puntsman. Without pause she set both hands to his chest and gave him a hard shove. He made an enormous splash. Ginger arrived just in time for a very meaty kick in the balls. He staggered backwards and joined his friend in the wet. I knew how cold the water was. Probably just what he needed between the legs. ‘Who’s next?’

  Apparently none of them were. The remaining four suddenly decided that pulling their friends out of the river was top priority.

  The girl helped me up. She really did look disturbingly familiar. ‘Come on then.’

  And a moment later I was following her into the Queens’ College halls of residence overlooking the Cam.

  That’s how I met Helen.

  CHAPTER 2

  She never asked me why they were chasing me.

  The answer isn’t particularly edifying. I’d come unwillingly to the garden party, an open-air affair of the strawberries and cream and string quartets in pagodas sort. Summer dresses and champagne al fresco rather than ball gowns twirling beneath vaulted ceilings. The taffeta and silk would come out next week for the end-of-term May Balls . . . which are . . . of course . . . in June. Garden parties are the warm-up, then it’s the balls. Every college seemed to have them and my presence was in demand, at least with the staff if not the students. The party had done nothing to improve my mood, which had already been soured by the phone call I’d had earlier with John about Mia’s new boyfriend. I shouldn’t have asked, but that wound had yet to heal and I couldn’t stop scratching it.

  It had been the chinless wonder without the monocle that sparked it off.

  ‘Why, if it isn’t Professor Halligan’s new pet, hot foot from Moss Bros!’

  I would have let that slide. It was largely accurate. I was only at the university because the acclaimed professor had demanded it and sworn to resign if he didn’t immediately get his way. And I had hired my dinner jacket from Moss Bros. It wasn’t dress code for a garden party, but the thing was supposed to segue neatly into an evening do later and many of us had come prepared.

  ‘And the pet’s dog,’ he added.

  He said it just as Henrietta approached. God had given Henrietta the same angular lack of grace he’d given me, along with an unfortunately large nose, and lank hair to frame a face that was nineteen going on forty-five. She also happened to be a genuinely nice person, shy but with a great sense of humour. In addition she had been the only one of the students in my new college to have acknowledged my existence as I hung rather lost at the corner of the quad on that first day. She’d approached me with a ‘Hello!’, left shoulder slumped in premonition of a handbag from which Kleenex and wine gums would one day be dispensed in equal measure.

  Henrietta shared my utter lack of fashion sense, but where the boys had only one option when it came to evening dress, the girls had more than enough rope to hang themselves. And she’d chosen to do the hanging using a rose-patterned monstrosity of a dress with puffed sleeves.

  It wasn’t the way her tentative smile died on her lips that made me do it. It was the way her face told me that she expected the slap-down and accepted it as her due. I took a champagne glass from a passing waiter and upended it slowly over Chinless’s head. At the time I would have claimed I was doing it for Henrietta, but really I don’t think I did her any favours. I was just having a bad day. And besides, Chinless was a weedy little guy with a big mouth. What was he going to do? That’s when six foot six of ginger worm-eater tapped me on the shoulder and spat his mouthful into my face as I turned.

  ‘Get him!’ someone called, and suddenly there’d been half a dozen of them converging from all sides.

  ‘Get your trousers off.’

  ‘What?’ I asked. It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard her or that I didn’t understand, I just used the word to buy time.

  ‘You’re dripping on the floor.’

  I stood at the door to Helen’s room on a girls-only floor of the hall of residence. She’d stepped into the carpeted interior and turned to block my entrance. ‘We pay deposits on these rooms and the college uses any excuse to keep them.’

  I looked up and down the corridor. A tall blonde girl was studying me critically from the far end as if I were a new sort of bug.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Your choice,’ Helen said with a shrug. ‘You can walk home in wet trousers if that’s what you want to do. Or come in without them.’

  I didn’t want to squelch my way home. The material was cold and clung to my legs, and, besides, she was very pretty.

  ‘I just didn’t want to get you a reputation,’ I said, struggling out of my trousers in the hall. It required as much balance as punting and I came just as close to falling over.

  Helen turned and went inside. She had long brown hair with a slight curl at the ends. It swished around her shoulders as she moved. ‘You can wring them out in the sink.’ She pointed to a cubbyhole near the door.

  I followed her in wearing wet Y-fronts and a dinner jacket. The dripping trousers filled one hand and I used my other to wave a cheerful goodbye to the blonde at the end of the hall.

  ‘Nice!’ It was her collection of posters I was referring to rather than the room, which was boxy and modern, unlike the antiquated tower room that Professor Halligan had somehow acquired for me overlooking the quadrangle at Trinity College.

  She shrugged. ‘Better than the Athena wallpaper most of them put up.’

  I grinned and nodded. My posters were at least things like Bowie and The Cure rather than Wham and that tennis girl scratching her bare bum, but they had come from the Athena chain. Helen’s, on the other hand, were bill posts for local gigs by bands I’d never heard of.

  ‘There’s a towel.’ She nodded to the rail beneath the sink.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To protect your dignity while you wring out your pants.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was a very small towel and I was far from sure it would protect any shreds of dignity I had left or indeed hide any future developments. I wasn’t even sure
I could trust the tiny piece of cloth to stay up while I used two hands to squeeze the river from my underwear.

  ‘I won’t look.’ She sat on her bed and turned away with a small smile, leaning forward to hit play on her stereo. Marillion started up on the tape deck, the song ‘Garden Party’ somehow just at the bit where they sing about the joys of punting along the Cam. Chance or design? Was she teasing me?

  I wrung out as much water as I could with stinging hands. Helen picked up a large text book and opened it at a marked page.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I’d learned that at Cambridge you ask what someone is reading rather than what they’re studying.

  ‘Biochemistry.’

  I’d expected her to go on for longer so I could use the opportunity to manoeuvre the towel over myself. ‘Really?’ I prompted.

  ‘You’re posh, too. I’m not sure I would have saved you if I’d known.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to sound a bit more London. ‘Not posh-posh.’

  ‘Private school?’ She had a regional accent. Somewhere north. Not quite Liverpool.

  ‘OK . . . yes. But I’m not like those morons you rescued me from. Thanks for that, by the way.’ I hitched the towel around my hips with a rather insecure tuck and continued to twist wet clothes over her sink. The water smelled . . . rivery.

  ‘You look very young.’ She had turned around and two dark eyes studied me over the top of a book titled Integrative Human Biochemistry.

  ‘Ah!’ I grabbed at my towel just as it started to slip. My skinny, very white legs were off-putting enough without adding the full show.

  ‘You look very young, too,’ I added. She didn’t really, but I wanted to put her off the scent.

  ‘I’m seventeen. My school let me skip a year.’

  ‘Well done!’ I turned back to the sink, pressing against the edge to help anchor the towel. ‘And did you always want to do biochemistry? It sounds interest—’

  ‘So. How old are you?’

  I changed tack again. ‘I’m sure I know you from somewhere,’ I said. She did look maddeningly familiar, but it wasn’t like I knew many girls. Certainly not enough to forget one. I hunted for the connection but it remained just out of reach like an unremembered name tickling the tip of my tongue. ‘Do you have a twin?’