Josh sat down heavily on the bench and dipped his hand into the cool waters of the fountain. As he rubbed the cold liquid into the back of his neck he watched the swallows diving in and out of the eaves — it was good to feel the sun on his face, to chill out after everything they had been through.
Caitlin wandered around the herb garden, bending over to smell a flower or pick the odd leaf and eat it. His stomach growled at the thought of food.
Drowsy from the warmth of the sun, he watched her through half-closed eyes as she inspected the plants. There was an intensity about the way she examined everything, as if each petal were the most precious thing in the world.
She walked back over to him with a handful of strawberries. ‘Hello, sailor,’ she joked, popping one into his mouth.
He couldn’t reply. The taste of the fruit was overwhelming his senses.
‘Good?’
He nodded and took another from her.
‘Always got to keep an eye on your blood sugar after that kind of action. Don’t want you having a hypo.’ She dropped the rest into his lap and went off to search the other side of the garden.
‘Before,’ Josh began after they’d finished another batch of fruit, ‘when I was rescuing the colonel from the strzyga, he had a wound in exactly the same place as he has now.’
Caitlin lay beside him on the bench, her head in his lap as she watched the birds. A nun was wandering around the garden with a basket over her arm picking off the dead heads of the roses.
‘That was a fated wound,’ she replied dreamily.
‘A what?’
‘Some things will always happen, no matter what.’ She pulled back the sleeve to reveal a fine scar on her upper arm. ‘I got this when I was seven playing with one of my father’s swords. No matter what I did to try to avoid it, however many times I rewound and tried different ways — it still happened. My father told me later that there are certain events that cannot be changed. “The continuum will have its moment,” he used to say. The Order refers to them as cornerstones.’
‘Cornerstones?’
‘Moments that define who we are. They shape our future. We all have them — mine was losing my parents.’
Josh had never given it a name, but in that moment he saw that losing Gossy had changed his life irreversibly. Since the accident, his fate seemed to be a never-ending catalogue of disasters.
‘What if there was one thing that you could change? Would you do it?’
‘An intercession?’ she whispered as if it were a cursed word.
‘Yeah.’
‘No. There are too many consequences. Changing your own timeline is one of the cardinal sins. The Protectorate will lock you up in here and throw away the key.’
‘But what if it meant you could see your parents again?’
‘She opened her eyes and he could see tears welling in the corners.’
‘Don’t think I haven’t wanted to, but no matter what I tried they would still have gone on that mission. I couldn’t change who they were.’
They sat in the garden until the shadows reached their feet. It was a small moment of sanctuary, even if it was surrounded by the insane, which was something that Josh could relate too.
‘Got yourself a new one, did you?’ the colonel asked as he nodded admiringly at Josh’s tachyon. He was sitting up in a huge four-poster bed, bolstered by a hundred pillows. There was a large poultice pasted over his ribs and a series of glyphs written in ink over his bare chest.
‘Sim gave it to him for passing his second Millenial,’ lied Caitlin before Josh could think of a better excuse. He didn’t want to explain how he’d left his previous one with the professor at the university.
The nun was busy at the other end of the room, washing out a bowl and humming to herself annoyingly. The colonel waved them closer and struggled to sit up. He whispered so the woman couldn’t hear.
‘Listen, you two, I appreciate what you’ve done, but I have unfinished business back there — need to find out who’s been passing technology to the Greeks. Get yourselves back to Methuselah before someone notices you’re missing. I’ll be fine. Old Crooke’s medicine smells like bat shit, but it works wonders.’
He winked at them and peeled away the poultice to show a newly healed lesion underneath. Josh was impressed — a few hours ago the wound had looked pretty fatal.
‘Thank you for coming,’ the colonel said loudly for the benefit of the nun. ‘I should like to rest now.’ Again a wink.
‘Take care, Uncle,’ Caitlin said, and she bent to kiss the old man on the cheek.
He took Josh by the hand and looked earnestly into his eyes. ‘Be careful, Joshua. Your training may be over, but you still have a hell of a lot to learn.’
‘Shall we?’ Caitlin asked, taking Josh’s hand. As they walked out of the room, she whispered, ‘Rufius suspects that the old battle-axe is a spy for the Determinists. Did you notice how she was always hovering around us?’
‘Why would they be so interested in him?’
‘Oh, it’s not him,’ she said, turning to face Josh. ‘It’s you.’
51
Private Hospital
Professor Fermi left the nurse settling the patient into her private room. He’d already spoken to the clinical specialist and knew there was very little left they could do — other than continue her current treatment and make her comfortable. Multiple Sclerosis was a terrible illness, one that eroded the body and the mind. There were new therapies, ones that she would never be able to afford, trials that only those with the right connections could try.
‘It’s the fate of the poor to suffer,’ his father had once told him as they watched the grapes being harvested by the local villagers.
Fermi was a pragmatist. He took no pleasure in her suffering. He simply needed her to get to her son. She’d no idea of his whereabouts, the sedatives had made her confused, so it was just a case of waiting for Josh to resurface and come looking for his mother — which Lenin had assured him he’d do very soon.
52
The Text
Caitlin had left Josh at the colonel’s house and gone back to the Chapter House. She’d promised to come back after dinner, or if she couldn’t then they’d agreed to meet the next day in the local library. Josh had forgotten that she had a day job, and that in terms of the present they’d only been gone for a few minutes.
Josh sat alone in the study. The room was still a mess. He had set a fire in the grate, which was slowly warming the unheated room; the house had no central heating, and the nights were cooling quickly as the summer came to an end.
He sat in the colonel’s worn leather armchair and flicked through his old diary, rereading the notes he’d made all those years ago. Amongst descriptions of his mother’s symptoms and daily medication schedules were doodles of knights and spacemen, dragons and castles. As Josh ran his fingers over the badly drawn figures, he could feel the pen in his eleven-year-old hand, drawing them on his mother’s bed as she lay sleeping. They were quiet moments of escape when he let his mind wander — daydreams of adventures he thought he would never have.
He came to a week of blank pages, June 12th, 2011, the day of the accident. He couldn’t remember much about that day. The doctor told his mother it was some form of post-traumatic stress that would heal in time — it never did. The empty pages were like a mirror of his memories, a missing week in his life. All he knew was that when he came home his best friend was dead, and there were no more doodles in the diary after that.
The coals on the fire sputtered and hissed as rain fell down the chimney. The Grecian storm seemed to have followed him back to the present. It was sheeting rain outside, and there were flashes of lightning behind the curtains.
The house was too quiet, too empty. Josh went over to the stereo, which was some kind of retro-turntable model. He knew the colonel was a purist when it came to music. He was always complaining that digitising sound lost something — preferring vinyl to MP3s or CDs.
Jos
h thumbed through the collection of albums and picked Ella Fitzgerald Live at Mister Kelly’s. It reminded him of his gran. She was always singing — her favourite song was called You Don’t Know What Love Is.
He pulled the shiny black disc out of its sleeve and placed the needle carefully on track six of the B side. The speakers crackled into life. The music was a pure, beautiful tone that surrounded him. He stood in the middle of the study and let the warm notes flow over him. It was as if the band were in the room — playing just for him. He’d never experienced anything quite as moving as when Ella’s deep velvet voice sang the first words of the song.
In his mind Josh could see her standing in a dimly lit nightclub. Her blue dress shimmered in the single spotlight, and her eyes were closed as her red lips trembled over every word.
His consciousness reached into the event, using the timeline that expanded from the sounds of the music, and suddenly he was inside Mister Kelly’s club, could smell the cigars and the whisky. He was so surprised to find that he could enter the moment without any physical object that he pulled back. This was something new, an ability that none of the others had ever told him about, and he wasn’t sure whether he was even supposed to be able to do it.
An hour later there was a knock at the door. Josh woke with a start, not realising that he had fallen asleep on the sofa. Assuming that Caitlin had forgotten her key, he jumped up in total darkness and fumbled blindly for the light switch as he went in the hall.
There was a package on the doormat. The knock had been someone posting it through the letterbox. Josh picked it up and turned it over. It was badly wrapped in the torn pages of a Dark Knight graphic novel. Batman stood high above the cityscape of Gotham. Written over the sky were the words ‘open me’ in a thick black marker.
He tore off the packaging to find a cheap Nokia phone nestling in bubble wrap. It was already powered up, and there was a message waiting for him.
‘WE HAVE UR MUM. U OWE ME 20K. L.’
Josh read the message twice before chucking the phone at the wall. It bounced off a stack of newspapers and landed in one piece on the floor.
He went over to stamp on it, but then thought better of it. The colonel had no landline — he was convinced that they were continuously monitored. Josh picked up the Nokia and went back into the study and dialled the hospital. It was a number he’d memorised a long time ago.
‘Neuro,’ the ward sister’s voice crackled through the crappy speaker.
‘Hi. My name is Joshua Jones. Can I talk to my mother, please?’
‘One moment.’ There was a click and the line hissed a little. Josh looked at the bars on the display; the signal was weak. He moved closer to the window.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Jones, your mother has been transferred. Her notes say it was processed this morning.’
Josh was looking out into the garden as he listened to the woman’s voice. A flash of lightning lit it up, and for a split second he saw the silhouette of someone standing with what looked like a gun pointed straight at him. Josh dropped the phone and ran for the back door, grabbing a carving knife from the drawer as he went.
By the time he got down into the garden, whoever it was had gone. The rain soaked him to the skin as he searched the bushes, shouting and slashing at anything that moved.
When he finally came back into the house, he was drenched. He grabbed a towel, threw more coal onto the fire and sat down in front of it, trying to rub some warmth back into his hands.
The discarded phone lay on the mat, and he picked it up carefully, his hands shivering. He swore under his breath as he read Lenin’s message once more, then hit ‘reply’ and typed: ‘Where? When?’ and hit ‘send’.
Josh found that there was less than a thousand pounds in legal currency in the colonel’s petty cash. He’d always assumed the Order had some kind of bank account, although he’d never seen the old man with a credit card or go anywhere near a bank — let alone a cashpoint. There was probably some kind of treasury at the Chapter House, but he had no chance of getting near that.
It was the middle of the night, and Josh was so tired his eyes ached. Neither the colonel nor Caitlin had returned — which they guessed might happen. She’d been away without permission so he was sure they had grounded her again.
The Nokia sat inert on the desk. There had been no reply from Lenin and, no matter how many times he checked, it refused to give him the answer he needed.
Josh tried not to think about where his mother was or what they were doing to her. There were hundreds of places Lenin could have hidden her. He had a network of empty flats all over the estate, evictions or sublets — the kind the council had given up trying to work out who should be the legitimate occupier. Every one of them would be a damp, squalid hole with no running water, heating or electricity. Josh just had to hope that Lenin would keep her warm, that he still had some remnant of decency.
Josh went into the curiosity collection looking for something valuable — anything he could trade or sell. As he went from one cabinet to the next, he realised that most of the objects were just everyday things, old and well loved, but not especially valuable in their own right. It was as Mrs B had said: they were only priceless to those that had owned them.
There were, of course, items such as Blackbeard’s sword, but that would need a specialist buyer, and he really didn’t have time to find one of those.
Josh thought back to the treasure that Selephin had taken off the Roman galley and cursed the fact that he hadn’t thought of keeping any for himself. It wasn’t like him at all; he’d spent too much time with these people, and it was making him soft. He needed to look after his own now — no matter what the cost.
Then he remembered the key that Marie Antoinette had given the colonel. Hadn’t he said something about the treasure of her children? He tried hard to recall the old man’s exact words. Something to do with Bourbons, which he thought was odd at the time — he had always thought of that as a biscuit.
He began looking through each cabinet carefully, trying to remember what it had looked like; it had not been a big key, but it had been ornately carved with a motif in the fob. The letter ‘M’ and an ‘A’ were intertwined, the insignia of the Queen of France.
It took a long time to find it. The colonel hadn’t actually labelled it as yet. In his usual disorganised way, it had been thrown into a tin box with a dozen other random mementoes from 11.792.
Josh took the key out and felt the history radiating from it. Patterns of energy arced around his hand. He knew Caitlin would say this was wrong, but he had no choice. His mother needed him, and the only thing Lenin understood was money. He would have to get enough to pay him off and set them up somewhere far away from London. There were a lot of new advances in MS treatment in America, he thought. Anywhere that was far enough away from his old life.
As he turned the key over in his fingers, he watched its history unfurling: Marie Antoinette locking the chest in front of her children, a nobleman taking it away towards some kind of church in the middle of nowhere. Then years of darkness, watching the stones around it age and crumble to ruin. No one had ever found it. The crypt in which it had been hidden had collapsed over the centuries. He wound back to a point a few days after the courier had left it in the crypt and let himself step into that part of history.
53
Orval
[Orval, France. Date: 11.795]
The crypt smelt of rotting wood, or so he told himself.
The chamber was damp, moss coated the crumbling stone walls and water dripped down on hair-like roots that had penetrated the roof where it had begun to sag and crack. There were tombs on either side with the illegible names of dead French nobles slowly fading from the crumbling surface of the stone. In another hundred years there would be nothing left to identify them — time and nature were erasing them from history.
The crypt was pitch black, and he had to step carefully between the rubble that was strewn across the flagstones using the glow from
his tachyon to light the way. He swept it slowly across the room, looking for any sign of the chest.
The beam found the base of an iron-bound wooden box, but as he moved the light up to the lid he found that there was a foot placed squarely on top of it.
Josh jumped back, nearly dropping the tachyon. Someone switched on a torch and he found Phileas staring back at him.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Josh said in a whisper, as if trying not to wake the dead.
‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ Phileas replied.
Josh’s mind ran through a whole list of lies and excuses and then settled on a simple one.
‘The colonel, Rufius I mean, he sent me to collect the treasure.’
‘Caitlin said you might say that.’
‘And how would she know?’
‘I’m afraid that was down to me,’ said another voice from the shadows.
Josh jumped again and turned towards the second voice — it was Sim.
‘Jesus! You’re going to give me a heart attack! Is there anyone else in here that I should know about?’
‘Only little old me.’ Lyra appeared next to Sim and winked.
There was only one person missing.
‘The Protectorate has put her under house arrest,’ Lyra answered his unspoken question, ‘while they investigate what happened in Greece.’
Lyra always made Josh a little uncomfortable. Her eyes always had that look, like she knew all his secrets.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 28
