Time's Demon

by D. B. Jackson

  By now, she had abandoned all to the voice. It was sure, fearless, guided by instincts she barely fathomed. It had kept her alive, earned her food and warmth. Why would she abandon it now? Without it, she would never escape Orzili.

  “Search the castle. Every corner of it. I want her found. Don’t harm her, don’t make her feel threatened. Treat her as you would this Lenna, but find her.”

  The guard before him was young, beyond his depth. His gaze flicked to Lenna every few moments, and Orzili half-expected him to point at her and say, “My lord, there she is.”

  Instead, he sketched a stiff bow, assured Orzili that the woman would be found, and hurried away.

  “She can’t have gone far,” he said.

  “Is that what you’re telling yourself?”

  “She must be close by. The guards won’t let her leave the castle.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Lenna asked. One might have thought he was the addle-minded one. “They let me leave whenever I want, as you instructed I imagine. You wanted to keep me happy, and thus keep me here.”

  Too much asperity there.

  “This isn’t my fault, Lenna.”

  “No, it’s mine. Mine for Walking back in time twelve days from now. Mine for allowing you to keep me here, in this past, when my place is fourteen years in our future.”

  He had no stomach for this fight. He didn’t know when he would, but certainly not before the other Lenna had been found.

  “Where do you think she’s gone?” he asked.

  She crossed to the window and stared out at the ward, arms across her chest. “I don’t know.”

  “Where would you go?”

  She eyed him over her shoulder and he wished he hadn’t asked.

  “You think she’s Walked back to your time?” He didn’t know if he meant twelve days from now, or fourteen years.

  She didn’t ask him to clarify. “Maybe. I’ll try to Walk again in a short while. If she has…”

  If she had, Lenna would go back, and warn them both of this coming catastrophe. If she hadn’t, if she continued to exist in this time, mad, lost, alone, this Lenna would remain trapped here, and the young Lenna, the third Lenna, unaware in Fanquir, would be unable to Walk at all.

  “Don’t assume that if she’s Walked forward everything will be all right,” she said, after a short, taut silence. “Walking through time is rarely so… clean. If she goes all the way back to the time in which we belong, she could set in motion new historical forces that we can scarcely comprehend.”

  “You said yourself that you can undo whatever damage she does. You can go back, warn me, prevent her from going mad or Walking forward in time.”

  “I know what I said, and now I’m telling you that it doesn’t always work out so well. Time is…” She opened her hands. “It’s messy. It branches, changes. It’s subject to currents that we can’t always see, much less understand. I can try to prevent this from happening, but every time a Walker goes back to change one thing, she risks altering five others. You can’t let her leave this time on her own. Find her, bring her back, allow me to fix what’s happened. Then we’ll send her back to a specific time. One from which she can’t do any further damage.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “The problem is,” she went on, “I can’t know what this Lenna might do. Her mind is…” She pushed both hands through her hair. “She leapt from this window! There’s no predicting where she might go. Maybe she’ll behave exactly as I would, but more likely she’ll find her own path, one shaped in part by my instincts, and in part by her madness.”

  This sobered him. Rational Lenna would have been hard enough to find. She was as accomplished an assassin as he, and as brilliant as anyone he knew. Irrational Lenna… if this Lenna was right, they might never find her.

  “So…”

  “So have your men look far beyond the castle walls,” she said. “Scour the city. Follow lanes into the countryside. Search vessels tied in at the wharves.”

  Orzili muttered a curse. It was Tobias all over again, except this time his quarry was unencumbered by a child and trained to kill.

  “I’ll lead the search of the castle,” she said. “You go into the streets. If I leave here, I’ll cause more confusion.”

  “Yes, all right.” He started toward the door, halted and faced her again. “We will find her, Lenna. And as soon as we do, we’ll bring her here, give you her chronofor, and send you back to keep all this from happening. You won’t spend the rest of your life crazed. I won’t allow it.”

  She acknowledged this with a stiff nod, her body coiled with trapped emotions. He was sure she would have preferred to join his pursuit. Staying here would leave her feeling helpless, and ever more enraged with him.

  He left her, relieved that she hadn’t said more.

  Despite her certainty that the castle guards had let the mad Lenna leave, Orzili stopped at the main gate to question them.

  She was right, of course. They let the other Lenna pass without a second thought. His misgivings deepened. How much more had Lenna been right about?

  When two Sheraigh guards told him of the dead man, his fears multiplied. They led him and a group of soldiers to the byway where the body still lay. He knew what to look for: the shattered larynx, the barely formed bruise on the man’s side, the broken neck. This had been done without a weapon, to a man in the prime of his life. He had no proof, but this had to be Lenna’s work. How many others in this city could kill with such efficiency?

  The man’s pockets were empty, as was the sheath on his belt. Orzili guessed that this Lenna was now armed and carrying coin, which would further complicate his task.

  He straightened.

  “Return to the castle,” he told a guard. “Tell the captain I need two dozen more soldiers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He followed the lane to the broader street and headed southward. The soldiers who remained followed, awaiting orders. Orzili didn’t know what to tell them. He had never expected to pit himself against Lenna. The idea of it daunted him, something he wouldn’t have admitted to anyone, not even her at her sanest. Pride.

  “Continue your search,” he said, sighing the words. “A standard pattern from here east, to the waterfront. When the additional men arrive, have them scour the streets to the west, just in case.”

  They would never find her, but if they could herd her in a predictable direction, he might corner her and bring her back.

  The soldiers left him and he crossed through the city, searching for that red gown, and for additional corpses. He made a quick pass through the marketplace, but by now it was mostly empty. Lenna would have been easy to spot.

  He didn’t bother with the wharves. She wouldn’t be there. Chances were she had fled the city, but something kept him from ordering men beyond the walls. She would be easy to track in the countryside. Either she would follow one of the few established roads, or she would cut across open land. A crazed Lenna might ignore these risks.

  But if the missing Lenna was responsible for the murder, then she was more rational than they had assumed. She might have been mad, but she was also calculating. That begged a simple question: If he was being hunted as she was, where would he go?

  His answer was the same one Tobias had found, whether by luck or guile. He continued to the waterfront and followed it away from the city in the direction of the Notch.

  He traversed a crescent-shaped strand that was strewn with huge boulders, intent on the cliff face at the end of the cove. The tide advanced, narrowing the gap between stone and breaker at the distant outcropping. If he took too long to reach it, he would be unable to make his way around the bend to the strand beyond.

  He pressed on over rock and sand, navigation of the uneven shoreline demanding all of his attention.

  Only when he spotted the indentation in the sand directly ahead of him – a perfect imprint of a shod foot, fresh, clearly visible in the failing light – did he think to slow. By then it was too
late.

  “I thought she would be with you.”

  The words stopped him, raised the hairs on his neck. Odd that a voice that had warmed him and fired his passion for so long should now chill him so.

  He turned. How long had she marked his approach?

  She emerged from behind a boulder, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The sea breeze swept her hair back. She stood tall and straight, lovely in the cool light of dusk. Even here, under these circumstances, she stole his breath.

  Her eyes, though, troubled him. Distant, unfocused. He saw the madness in her.

  “She’s in the castle,” he said. “She feared that having two of you in the lanes would confuse things. One of you might have gotten hurt.”

  “I came to tell you things.”

  “I know. You have told me. You’ve done well, Lenna. You can come back with me now.”

  “I don’t… I’m not sure what I told you. My memories are… They’re muddy. The only clear thing is the voice.”

  “What voice?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You should leave. I won’t go back with you, and by yourself you’re not strong enough to take me.”

  Odd that this woman, crazed, out of her time, unmoored from any moment in history, sounded more like the Lenna he loved than the sane one had at any point since arriving in this time. Her self-assurance belied the doubt he read in her gaze, yet he sensed both were genuine.

  “It needn’t come to that,” he said, his hand creeping to the handle of his flintlock.

  She grinned. “You’re not fooling me. You won’t shoot, because you know what might happen to the other me. I heard what the two of you said back in the castle. You want to kill me, but she won’t let you, not until she’s certain that my death won’t bring hers as well.”

  He kept his hand within easy reach of the pistol, but she was right: he couldn’t risk harming her. She had them at an impasse. Her thoughts lurched from insanity to clarity and back again. Yet even addled, she was too clever.

  “I have no intention of harming you.”

  “Then why have you reached for your weapon? Why did you say those things to her?”

  He let his hand drop, edged closer. “You don’t belong here. You… you shouldn’t even exist.”

  “Two of us, when there should only be one.”

  “Precisely. And of the two of you–”

  “I’m mad.”

  He nodded, his heart aching for her. He took another slow step in her direction. “That’s right. You’re doing things that the Lenna I know and love wouldn’t do. You killed an innocent man tonight.”

  She blinked. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You did, Lenna. Perhaps you don’t remember. There was a man with yellow hair–”

  “On a narrow lane,” she said, her voice flat. One hand strayed to her bodice. Was his knife hidden there?

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t… I’ve killed before.”

  “You’re an assassin. You’re paid to kill. Killing innocents though, stealing their purses and their belongings like a common street thief – that’s beneath you.”

  Her face crumpled, and he thought she might cry. She recovered quickly, her eyes finding his. “I did what was necessary to survive. I took what I needed, and I left him dead so he wouldn’t tell anyone he had seen me.”

  Confusion followed by clarity. She was as changeable as sea winds.

  “Your mind isn’t working right. You remember the warnings: a Walker should never meet herself in the past. That’s what you’ve done. You didn’t mean for it to happen, but it has, and we have to find some way to correct the damage.”

  “With another Walk?”

  “Yes! As long as you continue to exist in this time, we can’t prevent the two of you from meeting. We can’t protect you from this madness. If we send you twelve days into the future – the time from which you came – you and she will become one, and the damage she – you – sustained may be irreversible.”

  “That’s why you want to kill me.” The words came out clipped, hard. He thought she might have been trembling.

  He winced. “I don’t want to kill you. I want you to correct this error so that… so that you can go back to the way you were, so that none of this will have ever happened.”

  “You mean, so that there would only be one of me. The other one. The sane one.”

  “That’s right,” he said, his tone brightening. Another step. He was close enough to touch her now. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “How is that different from killing me?”

  Orzili’s smile died on his lips. She grinned again, bitter and knowing.

  “The voice said it: I may be crazed, but I’m not a fool. You want me gone. You see me as part of her, a part you want to excise, to cut out and toss away.” She shook her head. “I’m not part of her. Maybe I was, but not anymore. I’m me. Whatever that means. I don’t want to come back, because I don’t want to be removed. I want… I want to go back to my real time. I want to Walk fourteen years, to the time where I belong.”

  “You can’t,” he said, with too much urgency. The other Lenna’s warnings pealed like ward bells in his mind.

  “How do you intend to stop me?”

  He didn’t want to hurt her, and of course he couldn’t kill her. Not yet. But neither could he allow her to Walk forward so many years.

  He grabbed for her, his fingers closing around one forearm, grinding bone and flesh. He had no intention of letting go.

  She fought to break his grip, grappled with her free hand for something in her bodice. He seized that arm as well. She was nimble and smart and dangerous, but when it came to brute strength he still had the advantage.

  Lenna growled, a harsh rumble emanating from her chest, a sound he had never heard from her in all their years together. He thought he was on the verge of overpowering her.

  Then she reared back and smashed her brow onto the bridge of his nose. He heard bone break. Pain detonated in his face, his head. Blood flooded his mouth and ran over his chin, dripping onto his clothes and the sand at his feet.

  He didn’t realize that he had released her arms until her punch landed high on his cheek.

  The anguish in his head spiraled. His knees buckled and he fell, landing on his side. He tried to stand, but a kick to the gut made him fold in on himself. He forced his eyes open, tried to lever his hands beneath so that he could push himself up.

  Agony exploded at the base of his skull. He dropped back to the sand and knew no more.

  She breathed hard, her hands shaking, her gaze fixed on him. When, after a tencount, he didn’t move, she tossed the rock away. She would have preferred not to hurt him. Even now she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. They were in love. He said so. Her memories confirmed this. Yet she felt nothing for him, except perhaps lingering fear. Maybe the other Lenna still loved him. Or the other, other Lenna. He spoke of three. That stirred a memory as well.

  She cared as little for the others as she did for this man prone at her feet. She wanted to survive. She wanted to Walk to her rightful time. She trusted no one other than the voice.

  And the voice now told her to return to the city. He’d found her, and in time he would wake and resume his pursuit. She needed a new plan.

  The city will be crawling with soldiers.

  A ship then, or a path beyond the city walls. Her options were narrowing. She eyed Orzili, thought again of killing him. As he reminded her, she had taken one life this night. A desperate act, but one that struck her as necessary and had proven profitable. If she killed him, it might be days before he was found. If she dragged his body into the sea, it could take longer than that.

  Memories of what they had shared stopped her, vague though they were. The other Lennas loved him. That counted for something. She could proclaim her difference, her separateness from them, but she remained more like them than not, more tied to them than she wished to believe. That was what she thought, anyway.
The voice was silent on this matter.

  She left him there.

  CHAPTER 18

  24th day of Sipar’s Settling, year 633

  As she neared the wharves, still following the contour of the shoreline, she spotted a company of soldiers in Sheraigh blue. They carried muskets and stood before the docks. She halted, hidden from their view by the gathering darkness. Other soldiers would be nearby, patrolling the lanes, looking for her.

  She scanned this stretch of beach, but just as the gloaming hid her from the soldiers, it also obscured other paths off the strand.

  After a fivecount, she started forward again, cautious, surveying the coast, the wharves, those portions of the city she could see.

  She had taken perhaps ten steps when she heard a sound to her left, from the city. Halting again, she peered into shadows.

  She heard it a second time. A sibilant noise. A person, seeking her attention. She checked the soldiers to make certain they hadn’t heard, and took a step in the direction from which the sound had come.

  “Yes,” came a whisper. “This way.”

  “I can’t see,” she answered.

  A faint glow appeared before her. She couldn’t have said what color it was. It seemed to shift and slide, like oil on water. She eyed the soldiers one last time and angled toward that gentle radiance.

  She crossed over soft, dry sand, and then through a narrow copse of trees. Finally, she passed between two old buildings, emerging onto a lane lit only by candle glow from nearby houses.

  Two small figures awaited her there. One of them extinguished the oily sheen she had spotted from the strand.

  The street was empty save for the three of them.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They didn’t reply, but gazed at her, solemn, appraising. They were children, a girl and a boy. She thought they must be siblings, so similar were their faces and bearing. They had dark hair, pale eyes that looked almost white in the gloom. Their features were delicate, beautiful even, but their clothes were tired and too thin for this time of year.

  At a stirring of the wind, she caught the fetor of decay and she glanced around again. The smell dissipated as swiftly as it had come.