Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘The sayer does not commune with mortals. We are his eyes, his ears, his mouth. You may ask what you wish, we will convey it to the blessed one.’

  Caitlin looked a little put out by this. Josh could see the flush of colour on her cheeks — that was always an early indication of her temper building.

  She bit her lip, the second sign of approaching anger. ‘Would you be so kind as to relay to the sayer, that Lady Caitlin of the Scriptoria requests a private audience.’

  Sybil seemed to take a moment to process the request before something changed in her expression.

  ‘My apologies, my lady, but you seem to misunderstand — only we may commune with the Sayer.’

  Josh wanted to interrupt, but knew that he was supposed to remain mute — Caitlin had made that very clear when she’d introduced him as a servant, but there was something wrong with the situation that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  ‘This is ridiculous, are we not blessed?’

  ‘You are, my lady. But we have to preserve the grace of his holiness. His state must not be corrupted with the affairs of the corporeal plane. I must ask you for the last time to speak your business or begone.’ There was a subtle underlying threat in Sybil’s tone.

  Caitlin turned towards Josh her eyes glowering. She drew a long thin blade from her skirts and disappeared.

  A second later she reappeared behind Sybil with the dagger against the pale white skin of her neck.

  ‘Where is he?’ she demanded.

  The circle of women surrounding them hissed and their skin began to crack and peel away as the hideous creatures beneath discarded their vestal virgin disguises and revealed the twisted bodies of haggard old crones. Their naked skin was scarred and covered in ancient tattoos. They leered at Josh, licking sharpened teeth with black tongues and cutting themselves with black edged knives.

  ‘Strzyga!’ Caitlin cursed, and pushed the blade a little deeper into Sybil’s neck.

  ‘Hold!’ ordered Sybil, who still retained her human appearance.

  Josh was surrounded by the ugliest collection of hags he’d ever seen. He choked at what he’d been fantasising about doing with some of them. Caitlin was shouting something at him — he was too busy trying to work out what the hell they were. The threat on their leader seemed to be holding them at bay, but Josh was too far from Caitlin and too close to the others. One of the nearest creatures reached out towards him and then reeled back screaming as its severed arm fell bleeding onto the white marble floor. Caitlin’s blade was stained black, but it was as if she hadn’t moved.

  ‘Nobody touches him,’ she threatened.

  ‘What are they?’ Josh shouted in English, hoping they wouldn’t understand.

  ‘Strzyga. Witches. Time whores. We’re in some kind of trap — I should have spotted it.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Don’t let them touch you. They won’t risk anything while I have this one — but they will try to get to you.’

  The Strzyga were growing impatient, their heads twisting from side to side as they tried to understand the strange language their prey were speaking.

  ‘Stand very still — I am going to try something,’ she said through gritted teeth.

  Caitlin disappeared, and Sybil immediately opened her mouth to command her followers to attack. As she did so, a vision of Caitlin appeared behind every one of the surrounding women and sliced off their heads. There may have been a heartbeat between each one as the thud of their skulls hit the floor, but by the time Sybil had uttered the first syllable her entire entourage had fallen.

  Sybil let her own disguise drop away, and the stench of putrefaction had Josh fighting the urge to throw up — it smelt like a corpse. The woman, if woman she had ever been, was a bloated mass of writhing body parts, as if many different bodies were being held within the skin of one being. Eyes and mouths appeared at random on various points on her body, while her head boiled with snake-like tentacles, each ending in a vicious-looking array of teeth.

  The many Caitlins had become one and she was busy laying a circle of black dust round the monster.

  ‘What are you doing?’ shouted Josh.

  ‘I’m binding her to this moment with coal dust, it will absorb her powers for a while. When they turn to diamond we’re out of time.’

  ‘Why not just burn her?’ said Josh before his brain had time to process the word ‘diamond’ properly.

  ‘Because I think somewhere in there —’ she pointed at the bulging mass — ‘is Uncle Rufius.’

  ‘Shit.’

  The thing-that-used-to-be-Sybil writhed and cursed inside the black circle, she cursed them in many different voices, all speaking at once in a hundred different languages, the sound was like a demonic choir and made the hairs on the back of Josh’s neck stand on end.

  ‘So, I am going to need your help,’ Caitlin said, pushing the hair back out of her eyes. ‘We need to access the most recent part of the Rufius timeline, which I’m assuming is the night he appeared and gave you the co-ordinates.’

  Josh thought back to that event, running over the scene until he had it clear in his mind.

  ‘OK. Not sure how that’s going to help.’

  She gave him the look that meant ‘just do as your told’ — and held out her hands as if trying to do some kind of Jedi mind trick. The monster turned towards her, one of its hands blindly reaching out over the carbon barrier, and the dust began to turn grey.

  Beads of sweat started to break out on Caitlin’s forehead.

  ‘OK — now reach into the circle and grab her arm.’

  ‘Are you mental? That’s like saying stick your hand in the nice crocodile’s mouth! I thought you said I shouldn’t let them touch me.’

  Caitlin scowled again.

  ‘Do it. It’s not going to bite you. It doesn’t know you exist.’

  Josh slowly reached in and found the least disgusting part of her arm to grasp — the skin felt rough and leathery. It leeched the heat from his hand as he made contact.

  Lines of energy began to pour out of the point at which they touched. A collection of thousands of unconnected timelines unwound around him, each one an entire lifetime subsumed into the Strzyga’s body.

  ‘Now use the memory of Rufius as a beacon, a lifeline. Look for a pattern that matches.’

  There were too many lines to recognise any one individual timeline, but he knew better than to mention that to Caitlin. Instead, he went inside his own timeline and looked for connections. As he examined the moments around that night, he saw tendrils reaching out from the Strzyga. Like feelers they curved sinuously out from the central mass — as if attracted to a fresh victim.

  ‘There’s not much time,’ said Caitlin as the grey circle began to turn white.

  Suddenly one line struck out like an arrow from the turmoil, it connected with the moment and Josh recognised the signature of the colonel and pushed into it.

  He was still in the temple but it was the middle of the night. It was dark except for one oil lamp that flickered in the corner of the room. There was a body lying on the floor.

  ‘Do you see him?’ came Caitlin’s voice from somewhere far away.

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Wake him up. He needs to realise he’s about to be attacked — he should be able to do the rest.’

  The colonel was bald. Every hair on his head, including his beard, was gone. His skin was brown — he looked a bit like a reclining Buddha.

  ‘Colonel?’

  The old man stirred, but it was like trying to wake a drunk. Josh rolled him over onto his back and saw that he was totally out of it. He assumed that Sybil must have drugged him. The wound in his chest was only just beginning to soak through his toga — as if it had just happened. There was a dagger lying next to him — Josh recognised the handle immediately. It was the same one he had stolen from Dracula’s castle.

  On the floor around the colonel, someone had drawn a set of glyphs in blood. They were arranged o
n a five-pointed star, which was beginning to glow.

  ‘There’s a star on the floor. Made from his blood, and it’s glowing.’

  ‘That’s a summoning portal. You must wake him now!’

  Josh shook the colonel harshly, but got nothing more than a groan. He tried harder, this time accidentally touching the blood on the old man’s tunic and felt the immediate connection with his timeline. Knowing he had little left in the way of options, he focused on the twisting ribbons and entered the bloodlines.

  It was a chaotic mess, a jumble of intersecting events, experiences and emotions that seemed to have no beginning, middle or end. Josh could understand why seers went crazy trying to unravel the complex web of the human psyche.

  As Josh tried to make sense of the chaos, he noticed that certain events seemed to have more paths than others. Their collected memories stood out like large knots of light — marking them as times to which the colonel returned regularly.

  Josh opened one and realised why: it was the birth of a child — there was a woman cradling a newborn baby in her arms. Josh left the event and moved to another more powerful one. This time, it was a funeral, a grave surrounded by the De Freis family and many others — again he extracted himself from the memory and moved on.

  As the lines of the colonel’s lifetime wove around each other, they were drawn towards one point, a terminus. It was a dark, black hole into which every winding path was drawn. There was a powerful force at work within it — Josh could feel the pull of unknown events emanating from inside the infinite darkness. He knew it represented death, the country of no return, and fought back the urge to explore its depths. He realised this was what drew the reavers, this was what Lyra had become obsessed with.

  As he tried to resist, Josh noticed that nearly all the paths were moving in a slowly decaying spiral into the darkness, all but one. He moved his mind across the dark space towards it and as he reached it he knew what to do.

  He’d taken the colonel back into his own timeline — Josh was the one who’d brought the old man back to his house that day, breaking God knows how many rules. He looked around the study — his earlier self had yet to enter the room; the colonel was as he remembered, laid out, bleeding, on the sofa, his hand covering the wound.

  ‘Rufius. Can you hear me?’

  The colonel grunted.

  ‘You’re about to be absorbed by a Strzyga — someone set you up — I think it was Dalton. Caitlin says you would know what to do.’

  The colonel opened his eyes and nodded. Josh heard himself talking to the cat in the other room and guessed that bad stuff would happen if they met.

  ‘I’ve got to go. Caitlin is holding back one ugly queen bitch while I’m connected to one of your lifelines inside it. Tell the other me these coordinates — I’ll work it out eventually.’

  He repeated the co-ordinates to the old man and jumped back into the darkened temple.

  The colonel’s body had disappeared, which Josh assumed was a good sign. He was searching the room for clues of when he heard the howling. Strzyga began to materialise inside the circle, each one more hideous than the last. Josh found himself facing the horde instead of the old man and was on the verge of pulling out of the event when he heard the colonel’s voice.

  ‘Stay very, very still.’

  Josh turned to see the colonel holding a strange-looking vase. It was clearly ancient; there were lead seals around the lid and arcane symbols across its surface, ones that he could tell were warnings without being able to read them.

  The colonel waited until the last of the Strzyga had appeared, then lifted the vessel above his head and smashed it down onto the floor at Josh’s feet. A faint wisp of smoke rose from the ashes inside the broken pot. The hags hardly paid it any attention as they fought each other to reach Josh. The swirls of dust began to gain mass — collecting other motes together as it moved through the air until it had taken a shape. Slowly, a grotesque spectre formed above the Strzyga and Josh saw them shrink away from it. The ghostly apparition waited a long, painful second before descending on them like a bird of prey.

  Josh turned towards the colonel who simply winked and said: ‘Probably best if we go now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the colonel said to Caitlin and Josh as they tucked into the trays of food laid out on the floor in front of him. ‘You took a great risk coming after me.’

  ‘What an earth were those things?’ Josh asked with a mouth full of pitta and hummus.

  ‘The Strzyga? They’re one of the elder races. They prey on the lost and the fallen. They’ve a sweet spot for members of the Order, feeding on their extended timelines. A sort of quantum vampire, I suppose.’

  ‘So you sent a monad after them?’

  Caitlin looked up from her food. ‘Monad?’

  The colonel looked uncomfortable, as if Caitlin wasn’t going to like the answer.

  ‘It was awesome — they were shit-scared of it.’ Josh waved his hand around where the bodies of the Strzyga would have been a few minutes before.

  ‘You released a monad!’ exclaimed Caitlin.

  The colonel shrugged and nodded. ‘It seemed like the only thing to do at the time,’ he said sheepishly.

  ‘What’s so bad about that?’ Josh asked, dipping his bread for the second time into the hummus.

  ‘No double-dipping!’ Caitlin said, slapping his hand away. ‘A monad is a seriously dangerous entity, and stealing a captive one is highly illegal.’

  ‘Well, the Strzyga weren’t too pleased to see it, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. The temptation of a three-thousand-year-old soul would be more than it could resist. Monads are particularly fond of Strzyga — but it won’t be long before it follows your trail to us.’

  The colonel shuffled uncomfortably and cleared his throat.

  ‘I left a note. The Xenos will have contained it by now. So, anyway, you took it upon yourself to come find me — why? I assume there isn’t a Draconian brigade waiting outside.’

  ‘Not as such no,’ Caitlin said demurely. ‘We’re kind of it — and the Xenobiology Department has better things to do than clear up after you.’

  Josh was intrigued. ‘Are they like Ghostbusters? How many other monsters have you guys forgotten to tell me about?’

  ‘More than I care to remember,’ sighed the old man, staring into the distance.

  ‘Methuselah sent us. He was concerned after the Council listed you as MIA,’ Caitlin added. ‘Something is going on in the Council. There is some kind of challenge by Dalton’s mother and the Determinists.’

  ‘That could explain why the Protectorate wanted you out of the picture,’ Josh mused.

  ‘How an earth is this related to the Protectorate?’ exclaimed Caitlin.

  Josh handed her the dagger. ‘I found this by his body and the last person I saw with it was Dalton’s mother — she asked me if I knew where you were.’

  ‘Ravana wouldn’t stoop that low,’ the colonel mused.

  ‘No, but Dalton would,’ Caitlin added. ‘Or one of his minions.’

  ‘Joshua may be on to something,’ said the colonel thoughtfully. ‘I think someone may have been trying to eradicate me. My research is seen by many as heretical,’ his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I believe someone may be intentionally manipulating the continuum, bypassing the Copernicans.’

  ‘We know about your research — we found the room, the one in the attic,’ Caitlin admitted.

  ‘What are they trying to do?’ Josh asked, helping himself to the meat. It tasted a little like chicken, but he was afraid to ask in case it wasn’t.

  ‘Your Greek is very good by the way — I’m impressed,’ said the colonel, trying to avoid the question. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘We used a mind,’ Caitlin interrupted. ‘We got here yesterday. Please answer the question, Rufius. What are “they” trying to do, and why here?’

  ‘Ah, a mind. I bet that was an interesting experience for you, Joshua.’
/>   Caitlin squealed in frustration.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ he said, picking up a fig and tearing it open, ‘although you may wish I hadn’t.’

  46

  Fates

  The colonel shifted on his seat as if to make himself comfortable.

  ‘Around 11.900, a group of sponge divers discovered a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera.’ He pointed out of the west window. ‘At first, they thought it was a Roman ship that had sunk whilst taking the spoils of the second Punic War back to the republic; the scientists carbon-dated the ship back to 9.795 — around 205 BC,’ he added for Josh’s benefit. ‘The treasure consisted mostly of statues and amphorae, as well as a whole cache of coins from around this period, but by far the most valuable find was nothing like anyone was expecting. Have either of you heard of anyone discovering an “out-of-place” object in the continuum?’

  They both shook their heads.

  ‘No, even the Draconians won’t admit they exist, but it has been a pet project of mine for many years. I’ve discovered there have been a number of incidents involving archaeologists who’ve uncovered modern items fossilised in much older rock — mostly things like steel bolts in the strata of four-million-year-old riverbeds. These sponge divers found a small wooden box on that shipwreck and inside was what could only be described as an analogue computer.’

  Josh coughed on the grape he was chewing and spat it out. Caitlin was not impressed.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t take technology back in time?’

  The colonel nodded. ‘You can’t, not physically. But you can take the knowledge back and teach someone how to do it.’

  ‘But that breaks the prime directive,’ Caitlin said with a look of astonishment.

  ‘Indeed it does, and no one in our Order would ever contemplate such a thing. Not even the Determinists.’

  ‘Are there others like us who haven’t joined the Order?’ asked Josh.