‘The book of deadly names?’
Josh shrugged.
Lyra went pale, and her hand shook a little as she took one of the pins out of his arm and held it up to him. A grotesque-looking demon’s head was cast in gold at the top of it. ‘Who is this?’ she asked.
‘Beelzebub?’ Josh guessed.
Her face paled even more and she put the pin down nervously. ‘Have you heard of the maelstrom?’
‘I’ve stared straight into it.’
Lyra made some kind of religious sign. It was a subtle, instinctive reaction that he’d never noticed her do before. She got up from the bed. ‘I have to go.’
Josh could tell he’d failed some kind of test. ‘Why?’
She didn’t seem to want to answer.
‘Lyra?’
‘There are certain places I cannot see within your timeline. Your past is sealed. Something that has never happened to me before.’ She picked up her book — the title on the cover read: ‘Malefactum Maelstrom - Daedalus’ — and turned to a page. ‘One will come who knows not the name of the old Gods, and his past will be a closed room — on him the future will turn, for he is the Nemesis.’
26
The Mage
Alixia and Methuselah were their usual hospitable selves giving him a room in the 11.980’s. Josh spent most of the next few days alone, watching television and bingeing on re-runs of old shows like Quantum Leap and Cheers.
He slept fitfully, his mind full of echoes and partial memories, some of which he wasn’t sure were even his. It felt like his old life had died, and there was nothing left but grief for everyone he ever knew.
The colonel told him that he would recognise when the continuum was flowing in the right direction, which it kind of was. Everyone else seemed perfectly happy, the timeline was nearly back to normal, and in some ways even better than before — his mother was well, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about the old man.
Being the Paradox seemed to be more of a curse than a gift, it left him to bear witness to all the changes and deviations of the timeline while carrying the guilt of knowing how it could have been.
He desperately wanted to talk to his Caitlin. She would have known the right person to go to; probably in some obscure sub-department of the Order, or hidden in a book buried in the deepest part of the library. He could picture her now, eyebrows furrowing as she concentrated on working out what to do.
The room looped on Thursday, 9th November, 11.989. The news was full of stories about the fall of the Berlin wall and with it the reunification of Germany. Josh watched as the two sides met and exchanged tokens of friendship. The screen showed an incessant stream of happy people: East Germans relieved to be free of the regime that had sealed them behind concrete and barbed wire for forty years. The East German Police stood in the background, their faces set like stone, ever-watchful eyes permanently scanning the crowd for trouble. Josh thought their uniforms looked remarkably similar to those of the Deterministry.
Josh had no idea who had interfered with the past. The memory of the astronaut still bothered him, as did the creatures that poured out of the breach. Josh shuddered as he pictured their haggard faces leering through the aperture. These were the memories that Lyra had trouble accessing — he’d looked into the abyss, and it changed him.
And it had taken the colonel and his team.
After sitting in the flat for three days with nothing but the same three channels for company he was beginning to go stir crazy. There were too many unanswered questions in this timeline and he was eager to learn more about it. So he decided to start with his birth, at least one of the few solid leads he had. He had the date and the name, and now all he needed was the place — and for that he had to find his birth certificate.
Except he didn’t have one — not one that he could get to easily, but the registry office would have.
The records department was a difficult place to find in the labyrinth of corridors within the council building. It reminded Josh of an Antiquarian storehouse: long silent passageways with unassuming doors that led to rooms of unimaginable treasure — except in the case of London’s municipal records department it was more likely to be cabinets full of index cards.
The clerk told him that everything was digitised and available online, or microfiche — whatever that was. Josh had preferred to see the real thing, which was an odd request for a millennial, but the clerk shrugged and gave him a note with a series of numbers and sent him up to the fourth floor.
Josh didn’t get on with computers: they were incompatible on some level. On a good day, he could use one for five minutes before it would breakdown — the same was true of mobile phones, anything that a typical teenager would take for granted. It made him different, and when he found out he could use his talent for disabling car alarms it got him into a whole load of trouble.
It would have been a dangerous place for a reaver, the records of so many births and deaths kept in one place, going back hundreds of years.
And somewhere in here was the first clue to his past, his birth — his own breach into the continuum.
The numbers on the card the clerk gave him were an index. He worked down the rows of wooden drawers, checking the labels until he found a match.
Pulling open the draw, his fingers shook a little as he flicked through the records.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ asked a matronly voice.
Josh turned to find Alixia standing behind him, wearing a long, dark raincoat and carrying an umbrella. She reminded him of Mary Poppins.
‘I have to start somewhere. I don't feel connected to this world — no one knows me here.’
She smiled and closed the drawer gently. ‘You know that bad things can happen when you start looking into your own past. That’s why it’s forbidden.’
‘I need to know who I am.’
She nodded. ‘From what Lyra has told me about you I’m not sure it would help.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She believes you’re an anachronist — a remnant of another time. That you’ve been involved in a significant temporal event.’
He nodded.
‘Which would make you rather interesting to a certain group of people.’ She took a large ring of keys from her pocket. ‘There is something I would like to show you — it may help shed some light on your predicament.’ She selected a key and slid it into the lock of a cupboard. ‘But first, you need to dress appropriately.’
Alixia opened the door to reveal a set of travelling robes.
‘What the hell?’ exclaimed Josh.
She smiled and held up one of the iron keys, with a date stamped into the fob. ‘Displacement keys, one of my husband’s little brainwaves. He’s a temporal architect.’
I know, thought Josh. He’d spent enough time in the Chapter House to be familiar with Methuselah’s many talents.
‘Turning it clockwise returns it to normal, like so.’ She closed the door and demonstrated, opening the cupboard to show it was full of arch lever files. ‘Anti-clockwise activates the temporal field.’
Josh struggled into the robe while Alixia went to the office door and selected another key. She opened it onto a bustling London street of ramshackle houses and shops from the sixteenth century.
The sun streamed through the open doorway.
‘Is it going to rain?’ Josh asked, nodding at her umbrella.
‘You’ll see,’ she replied with a knowing smile.
Alixia stepped out onto the dirt road carefully avoiding the piles of horse dung and rubbish that had been dumped into the street.
She put up the umbrella and waved at Josh to join her beneath it. It was a warm day, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but he did as he was told. She put her arm through his and nodded towards a line of shops.
‘First Cole and Sons, then perhaps Dalwhinney’s for lunch. No one makes instruments like Benjamin Cole.’
Josh wasn’t sure the air they were breathing could be classified as fresh. The pung
ent fumes of the gutter were certainly clearing his senses, if not making his eyes water.
‘It does take some getting used to,’ she laughed, ‘stay close!’
She pulled him inside the protection of the umbrella as a shower of urine cascaded down from of an upstairs window.
‘Seventeenth-century plumbing is still rather primitive.’
Cole’s shop was located next to the Globe Tavern on Fleet Street. It was an Aladdin’s cave of scientific and optical instruments: orreries, microscopes and gleaming brass telescopes were elegantly displayed on marble plinths and mahogany tables, while the shelves were stacked high with glass vials and jars of all sizes and shapes.
‘My dear Mrs De Freis, how delightful to see you this fine morning!’ They were welcomed by a short, stout man in a grey wig.
‘Mr Cole. May I introduce my new friend, Mr Jones.’
The shopkeeper’s face beamed as he shook Josh’s hand. ‘Delightful. Indeed, a perfectly serendipitous moment, for I have this very second finished wrapping your order.’ He clicked his fingers, and a young clerk in a long apron came out with a box elegantly labelled and tied with gold ribbon.
Josh guessed Alixia expected punctuality when it came to her deliveries.
‘Oh, how perfectly fortuitous!’ declared Alixia, ‘Now to another matter — I wish to introduce Mr Jones to the Turk.’
Cole’s smile dissolved, and he wrung his hands before putting them behind his back.
‘Y-Yes of course,’ he stuttered. ‘Please be so kind as to follow me.’
They walked through to the back of the shop, passing the engineers and technicians busily grinding large glass lenses and inspecting intricate clockwork mechanisms.
‘Your husband’s latest design is a most unusual challenge, as one doesn’t often get requests for a mirrored array of this magnitude or configuration.’
‘Indeed.’ Alixia smiled politely, but Josh could see she was eager to move on, unlike Mr Cole who seemed reluctant to meet the ‘Turk’. Josh wondered what an earth he was getting into.
The shopkeeper fumbled with a small ring of keys as they walked up a set of narrow stairs. The first floor was empty except for a large wooden cabinet that stood on the bare boards. Cole finally found the key he was looking for and handed it to Alixia.
‘As agreed.’
‘Thank you, Benjamin, you may leave us now.’
He needed little encouragement. The door slammed on his heels as he hurried out.
Alixia unbuttoned her overcoat and carefully hung it on a peg. She handed Josh the key. ‘Open it please,’ she asked, winding her long black hair into a bun and pinning it in place.
Josh inserted the key into the cabinet and turned it. Unseen clockwork mechanisms stirred and the cabinet doors folded back and away to reveal a metal figure dressed as an Arabian mystic. The face was jointed like a puppet with a painted enamel beard. His tin head was topped by a purple turban, and his body coated in a richly embroidered golden coat, trimmed with fur. His metal hands extended out as wooden panels slid from hidden compartments to create a felt-topped table onto which was deposited a deck of tarot cards.
Alixia took the cards and began to shuffle them. ‘This is the Mechanical Turk. An automaton created by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress an Austrian Empress. I think Mr Cole believes it to be possessed.’
She placed the cards in the open hand of the machine, and its head rotated towards her.
There was something quite eerie about the subtle movements of his mechanical eyes as they blinked and the head even tilted as if looking at the deck. With small, jerky actions the machine’s other hand began to deal five cards out face down before Josh.
‘You’ll have to forgive the somewhat unusual nature of this request, but I have to be sure. The Turk is the nearest thing we have to an unbiased randomisation algorithm. Please choose one card from the deck.’
Josh turned over a card. It was a picture of two people falling from a stone tower being struck by lightning.
‘Tower,’ Alixia noted.
The machine removed the other four cards and dealt out another five.
This time Josh chose a card with a wheel surrounded by symbols.
‘Wheel of fortune — once more, if you please.’
Again the machine reset the cards, dealing out the final hand.
‘Magii,’ she whispered, as he showed her the image of a wizard holding a wand and staff.
‘What does it mean?’ Josh asked, giving her the three cards.
‘Nothing and everything,’ she muttered, examining each one individually. ‘Lyra has an uncanny gift for seeing the true nature of a person: it’s what makes her such a powerful seer. When she told me that she thought you were the Nemesis I have to say I was a little sceptical. But she’s my daughter, and a mother always knows when her child is lying.’
She went to the cabinet and pulled a lever, and the cabinet doors unfolded and reclaimed their contents, drawing the automaton back inside and sealing it shut.
‘These cards are part of the Major Arcana. Twenty-two cards in a deck of seventy-eight. For you to draw these specific three cards, the chances are less than one in one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand. Pretty unlikely odds wouldn’t you agree?’ She handed him back the Magii card.
‘You’re the Magician. See how his wand points to the sky and his other hand to the ground. He’s the channel between two worlds — the physical and the metaphysical.’
She held the second card. ‘The wheel of fortune represents change. For better or worse, you’re the change-bringer. A dangerous thing to be in terms of the continuum, especially when you associate it with the Tower,’ — she held up the last card — ‘which is indicative of disaster or upheaval.’
‘But this doesn’t mean anything, right? It’s not like a science.’
‘No, it is not. But despite the Copernican’s many hours of statistical computation, I still believe that random systems like this can give us signals about things yet to happen.’
‘Or, I could be just about to hit the big time in Vegas?’
Alixia laughed. ‘Maybe the fool would be a better card for you. I can see why she’s interested in you.’
‘Who, Lyra?’
‘No. Caitlin. She’s been asking for updates every day since she’s been away.’
‘Away?’ Josh was intrigued. Perhaps she hadn’t been ignoring him after all.
‘It’s the anniversary of her parents’ disappearance. She always spends this time at their memorial in the Moon Garden — it’s a very special place.
Josh looked at the Magii. It was the name that Lilz had used. ‘So, I’m the Nemesis?’
‘Perhaps. For now, I would keep that to yourself. There are many who would see you as a threat. That damned book has created disharmony within the Order, between those who favour Nemesis and others who believe it is Daedalus who holds the key to our survival. The discord could prove catastrophic.’ She held up the Tower card once more. ‘The Copernicans will start to pick up their own signs of your arrival soon enough, and they will involve the Protectorate.’
Josh took the card from her, and noticed the girl falling from the tower had auburn hair.
‘What should I do?’
Alixia put her hand on his. ‘You’re not alone. You’re a member of the Order, so you will always be welcome in my house.’
There in his hand was a bright, shiny new tachyon.
‘I think the best plan would be to lie low while I consult a few of my colleagues. Professor Eddington is a man of principle — he can be trusted. But while I do, we need to put you somewhere safe.’
Alixia put on her coat and handed him the umbrella. ‘Let’s discuss it over lunch. I think it’s time I introduced you to Mr Dalwhinney’s marvellous pies.’
27
Skull of Daedalus
[British Museum, London. Date: 11.960]
Lyra stood staring in awe at the skull sitting on a velvet cushion in the middle of the exhibit.
; ‘Don’t you find it deliciously mysterious?’ she whispered to Caitlin, who had no idea why she spoke so quietly considering the museum was closed and Sim and Josh were browsing a collection of stone age weapons on the other side of the hall.
‘Not really,’ replied Caitlin. ‘You know I think they made the whole thing up. Demons and elder gods are nothing more than stories to scare children. Daedalus is just playing on your need to believe there is something more to the universe than us.’
‘But there is!’ Lyra gushed. ‘The maelstrom is full of ancient beings, ones that time has forgotten.’
‘So he says.’ Caitlin nodded towards the head.
‘Just because your parents never came back doesn’t mean he couldn’t have.’
Lyra was the only friend brave enough to say such things and Caitlin respected her for it. Everyone else skated around the subject as if they’d died, but Lyra had a unique perspective — she saw the world differently, and Caitlin loved her honesty.
‘The only thing that came back was the book,’ Caitlin corrected.
‘And his head.’
‘Yeah, literally just his head. It’s not like he actually returned whole is it?’
Lyra pouted and crossed her arms. As a seer, she was tuned to a different wavelength — as Sim would put it so delicately. Her world was full of fairies and demons, and Daedalus’ revelations about the maelstrom were nothing but fuel to an already raging fire.
Caitlin watched Josh out of the corner of her eye. He intrigued her: there was something unconventional about him, nothing like the other boys in the Order. Lyra said that his timeline was incomprehensible, so damaged that she couldn’t read him — which was unheard of — Lyra was one of the best seers in the Order.
‘Has my mother taken you to meet her mechanical friend?’ asked Sim, pretending to stare at a collection of stone jars full of bones.
‘The Turk? Yes, that was weird.’
‘It’s one of her tests. She believes that fate can be divined from systems of chance. I’m not sure what real scientific basis she has for it. The thing is too subjective, too open to interpretation.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 45
