Caitlin winced at the mention of the secret police. ‘Why would the Protectorate get involved?’
‘Because of the damned book! The Copernicans will go whispering in the founder’s ear. Grandmaster Xaromord is always looking for a way to discredit us, and Ravana will be itching to interrogate this boy.’
Derado took out an ornate watch from inside his robes and flipped open the cover.
‘I would estimate we have two, maybe three weeks before they’ll have enough of a case to open an investigation. I will do my best to contest it of course.’
He closed the lid with his thumb and handed it to Caitlin. ‘Keep this. It was your grandfather’s. He estimated an eighty-four percent probability of you following your parents. I think he would want you to have it now.’
Caitlin took the watch and hugged Derado for a long time.
‘It appears your team was to be cut today,’ he said, stepping back. ‘That would be a mistake. Corporal Vedris deducted several points for your use of Vorpal. I believe she was driven by personal motives — somehow you have managed to get into her bad books. I’ve sent someone back to have it corrected.’
Derado released Josh’s hand, and suddenly it was over, the world snapped back into motion. There was still a glint in his eye as his gaze left Josh’s and moved on to the next in line.
‘This is Lisichka,’ Vedris continued, ‘not one of our most promising candidates.’
The Grandmaster nodded sternly to Caitlin and moved on down the line without a word. Vassili looked visibly relieved.
Josh let out a long, slow breath, the first in what seemed like an hour. Caitlin nudged him with her elbow and nodded towards the leaderboard: Aries were no longer below the line. Capricorn and Libra were now in the dead zone and looking very unhappy about it.
45
Trial II
The next trial came out of the blue — a week after the visit from the Grandmaster. They’d just completed a punishing five-day route march through fifteen centuries using shadow paths — untraceable routes, or ‘backdoors’, as Vedris called them.
Everyone completed their tasks successfully, and they were ecstatic about the forty merits they earned. The team was exhausted, collapsing wearily onto their bunks and comparing tactics as they kicked off their muddy boots.
‘So, you found the path from the Barbary Coast to Liverpool in the bottom of a cask?’ Darkling exclaimed, his voice rising above the others. ‘Why didn’t you use the chart?’
Aries were split into four groups of three, and each started from a different waypoint.
‘What chart?’ asked Michaelmas, the scrawny seer who always looked like he’d been pulled through a hedge backwards.
De’Angelo unrolled a large map and held it up for everyone to see. ‘You mean this one?’
They all laughed as Michaelmas chased De’Angelo out of the dorm.
Josh never grew tired of Caitlin’s laugh; it was as beautiful and warm as before. He lay back on his bed and listened to her chuckle, thinking about what Derado said on the parade ground. She didn’t know that he’d overheard their conversation, although she’d been acting weird around him ever since.
There wasn’t time to discuss what her godfather had said during their march. Bentley — and a girl that everyone called Fey, even though her real name was Wendell — hadn’t left their side throughout the entire five days. At one point, he had to chase Bentley off when he followed Josh into the bushes to take a dump.
Corporal Vedris appeared out of thin air just as Michaelmas and his team walked back in carrying a limp De’Angelo.
‘Ran into a wall,’ insisted Michaelmas.
She ignored them, cleared her throat and held up a mirror.
‘Does anyone want to tell me what this is? And before you answer, Darkling, this is not a mirror.’
The room fell deathly quiet — no one had a clue. Vedris had that anxious expression that Josh’s teachers always used to get when surveying a room full of blank faces — one that searched for a vague glimmer of hope: that just once their pupils would reward the years of sacrifice with an intelligent response.
‘The future?’ Bentley wondered aloud, just as everyone else realised that the mirror’s reflection showed an empty room.
Vedris was impressed. ‘Not bad, Bentley. Your father would be proud. For those that don’t know, it’s called a Lensing Plate — a form of temporal prism which allows us to look at other eventualities, other potential paths within the continuum. One of the specialisms you can opt for, should you graduate, is Lensman — a highly honourable position with the guild.’
A brass stand appeared from out of nowhere, followed by a table on which sat a curious looking helmet with an array of lenses over the eyes.
‘Bentley, please step forward and sit down.’ She motioned to a chair that conjured itself into existence.
He did as he was ordered and Vedris strapped the helmet contraption to his head.
‘Now tell the others what you see,’ she instructed, adjusting the straps under his chin.
They all tried and failed to stifle their giggles — Bentley looked ridiculous, but he wasn’t listening to them. His jaw had dropped, and his hands were tracing imaginary lines in the air.
‘There are so-so many,’ he stammered, ‘like ghosts.’ He stood up and looked around, nearly tripping over the chair.
‘What private Bentley is trying to vocalise are the multiple timelines he is observing through the binocular lensing. He’s experiencing upwards of sixteen simultaneous alternatives. Something that,’ — she produced a large metal bucket and handed to Bentley as he went deathly pale — is known to induce nausea in the uninitiated.’
Bentley threw up.
They took turns to wear the helmet. Everyone reacted differently, which meant the bucket was required more than once. Darkling, much to his chagrin, found that he couldn’t stand more than a few seconds inside the multiverse, before barfing all over his trousers.
Then it was Josh’s turn.
He kept his eyes closed as Caitlin help strap it to his head, praying to at least beat Darkling’s record by a few seconds. Nervously, he opened them, only to find he was staring at the same scene as before. At first he thought that the device must be broken; he blinked and swivelled his head to see if he could induce some kind of second or third image — but nothing happened.
‘Hey, I think they’re busted. I’m not seeing anything differently.’
Which was not strictly true. The mirrored arrays were set up to reflect a one-hundred and eighty degree view — so he was effectively looking at a slightly distorted panoramic of the room.
Caitlin helped him take the lenses off and tried them on herself. ‘Nope, nothing wrong with that,’ she said, removing them quickly and giving them back to Josh.
‘Is there a problem?’ Vedris came over to them.
‘It doesn’t work on Josh,’ Bentley chipped in. The other members of the team gathered around.
‘What makes him so special?’ Darkling moaned, sitting on his bunk and holding his head between his knees. Fey applied a cold compress to the back of his neck, confirming what everyone else had guessed — that they were an item.
Vedris strapped the helmet back onto Josh’s head and spoke quietly.
‘Tell me what you see?’
‘Easy. The room, you standing in front of me. Darkling getting pawed by Fey.’ Some of the others laughed. ‘Everything is normal.’
‘Now look closer at my face.’
As Josh focused his attention on her, she seemed to blur. It was a weird sensation: she literally split into two, three, then four — each one doing something different. The multiples were ghost-like and transparent, but one image was clearer than the others, reaching for a knife, and he knew instinctively that she would bury it in Caitlin’s chest if he didn’t try to stop her.
Reflexively, his hand flashed out and caught hers — stopping the blade an inch from Caitlin’s breast.
‘Very good, J
ones.’ Vedris put the knife away. ‘Aries, I think we have found ourselves a natural.’
Josh took off the helmet to find everyone looking at him in amazement, including Caitlin, who was still stunned about being the target.
‘To be a good Lensman, you must have a keen sense of the most likely eventuality,’ Vedris explained. ‘This is not something that can be learned. It is an inherent quality, and it’s very rare.’
Josh was beginning to feel uncomfortable with all the attention.
‘But this next mission will require more than a Lensman… you will need to work together in ways you never imagined.’
46
Kaffa
[London. Date: 11.664]
The abandoned church loomed over them, shrouded by a sombre grey sky. Ravens perched on the roof, cawing at the uninvited guests. They stood in the cold, cloying mud watching the rain turn the gravestones slick and black, and in the dim light of pre-dawn they looked like rows of broken teeth.
The graveyard was somewhere near London in 11.664. It had taken them two days of dead-ends and false starts to find it, and when they did, they all wished they hadn’t.
Signs of plague were everywhere. Inverted white crosses had been painted on all the houses they’d passed. The stench of disease permeated everything, and nothing could stop the smell, not even the ridiculous bird masks they wore — whose beaks were stuffed full of herbs.
‘Yersinia pestis: the Black Death,’ cursed Darkling, sitting down on a nearby grave and pulling off his mask. ‘Only Draconians could have sent us on a mission into the worst bloody pandemic in history! Do we know how many died in this time?’
‘Fifty million,’ Josh answered, unstrapping his mask. His mother’s TV game show addiction was nothing if not educational.
Caitlin pulled her own plague mask off and took a long slow breath. ‘I’m impressed. I never had you down as a historian.’
Josh winced as the wind picked up, blowing a smokey miasma of funeral pyres in their direction. It smelled just as bad as Kaffa — the city they had just escaped from 11.347.
Two days ago, they’d found themselves in the middle of a siege. The Golden Horde was trying to conquer an Italian trading city on the Crimean peninsula known as Kaffa. Caitlin, as usual, gave them all a quick history lesson on the place: The Horde was the Northwestern arm of the Mongol Empire and sold the city to the Genoese in the late thirteenth century. The city flourished under the Italian administration, becoming a powerful trading port, and controlling access to the Black Sea while prospering off the back of the slave trade.
At some point, the Mongols decided they’d made a terrible mistake and tried to take the city back. The ensuing siege was a long and protracted affair, not helped by a terrible disease that was withering their army.
‘It was the first ever use of biological warfare,’ Caitlin explained as they watched another body fly over the outer wall and disappear into the city.
Another, less successful shot, rebounded off the high stone parapet they were standing on and landed in the street below them. ‘They’re using their dead?’
‘Not just dead — infected. The horde is riddled with the bubonic plague.’
Everyone stopped talking and followed the next body as it arced across the blue sky and exploded against a stone tower.
‘Shouldn’t we be taking precautions?’ Bentley asked in Italian — they’d all been allowed to intuit the basic dialect.
‘Don’t you know anything, Red?’ Darkling scoffed, ‘The moment you’re contaminated the medics pull you out. One of the benefits of non-linear medicine. I’ll give three-to-one it will be you.’ He turned to the twins who shook on the wager.
The city was well fortified. A series of concentric stone walls with tall, thin buildings wedged in between — each one trying to reach beyond the shadow of its neighbour. The streets were narrow, dark and full of the dying. Open sewers flowed along the main avenue where rats swarmed in large groups attacking anything that didn’t have the strength to fight back.
The siege was in its second year, and there was a look of the damned in the eyes of those they passed. Josh tried not to stare, but their haunted faces disturbed him — they had the same look as the Shade.
‘Where are we going exactly?’ he asked Caitlin as the team turned down another gloomy alley.
‘The administrative quarter.’ She nodded towards a tall group of towers at the heart of the city. ‘We need to get to the safe zone as soon as possible.’
As they neared the inner defences, the packs of roaming infected increased. Josh had to use the Lensing helm to avoid them while navigating through the maze of alleyways. It was hard work, and focusing on sixteen different possibilities — each of which nearly always ended with one or more of the squad being contaminated — was exhausting. His head was pounding by the time they reached the gates.
They were closed. A heavy iron portcullis barred the entrance.
Steel helmets glinted off the battlements high above. It was a fortress within a city. Guards and archers watched for anyone who came within range. The ground between them and the gate was strewn with bodies bristling with arrows, making it abundantly clear there was no negotiation when it came to the enforcing of their quarantine laws.
Darkling took the twins off on a scouting mission while the others waited out of sight in an abandoned shop.
After they had checked for occupants, the team made themselves comfortable and cracked open the rations.
Josh took first watch at the window, which was made of small panes of randomly coloured glass held in with lead strips. The glass was old and distorted the image of the plaza like something from the hall of mirrors at the seaside.
Caitlin came and sat opposite him on a packing case, holding a glass tube with what looked like a bone inside it.
‘What’s that?’
‘One of the many fingers of John the Baptist,’ she laughed, giving him the tube. ‘There are about fifty of them back there.’
Josh held it up to the light. ‘Why would anyone want this?’
‘Holy relics were a massive tourist attraction in these times. People would travel for hundreds of miles to visit relics that had performed miracles. Towns would even steal the bones of saints from churches just to boost their economy.’
‘Fascinating.’ Josh stared at the whitened bone. ‘I’m sure the Grandmaster will be very interested to read about that.’ He was angry and tired, and the conversation with her godfather was gnawing at him like a mosquito bite he couldn’t scratch.
Caitlin’s eyebrows knitted into a frown. ‘Why would I tell him about it?’
‘When you write up your report about this mission — after all, you’re his eyes and ears, KitKat.’
‘You heard that?’ She looked genuinely stunned.
Josh wondered if admitting to overhearing their conversation had just confirmed everything that the Copernicans suspected.
‘Every word.’
Her cheeks flushed. ‘Well, I’m not going to tell him anything he doesn’t already know. Vedris will have already reported your aptitude with the Lens. It’s not like it makes you some kind of superstar.’
‘You’re still going to spy for him though?’
‘Is that why you’ve been so weird lately? Would you prefer he asked someone else? Better me than Darkling or Dalton, don’t you think?’
She had a point; if anyone were going to shadow him, he would rather it be her. But it created an uneasy friction between them — he didn’t know if he could trust her.
‘I don’t want anyone spying on me! I don’t want to be different.’
That wasn’t strictly true. When his mother had been ill the first time, he was so desperate to cure her that he’d wished every night for some kind of superpower. He had promised whatever gods were listening a whole list of good deeds, but they’d been too late — even now when he had one, it couldn’t make her better.
Caitlin’s eyes softened, and she put her hand on his sho
ulder.
‘If Lyra is right, you may not have any choice about that.’
‘About being the Nemesis? What’s so bloody important about him anyway?’
‘Well, if you believe Daedalus — he can travel outside of time, that he’s not bound by the laws of the continuum.’
‘Go into the future?’
‘Yes.’
Josh sighed deeply; he’d been here before. This was the Paradox all over again.
‘I never wanted this.’
‘It’s just a prophecy — a bunch of stories someone wrote in a book. It doesn’t make it true. My grandfather used to say that you made your own fate. Others may write about it afterwards, but you’re the master of your own destiny.’
‘If I tell you something, do you think you could keep it a secret, at least for a while?’
So, while they sat watching the birds pick at the bodies in the square, Josh told her about his mother and the life he had before.
A half-dead man shuffled out of a nearby alley and into the sunlight, moaned at the brightness and lifted his hand towards the light. They watched in silence as the shaft of the first arrow skewered him through the chest. He didn’t appear to notice, lurching zombie-like towards the gates. There were shouts from battlements as the threat escalated and more arrows flew.
Josh counted every one of the fourteen hits it took to put him down.
‘So, I guess a frontal assault is out of the question?’ Caitlin groaned.
The scouting party returned a few minutes later.
‘There are only two gates: North and South.’ Darkling drew a line across the table with his knife. ‘Both are equally well guarded. Basically, they’re in lockdown. Our only chance is if Jones can get a vector on the last time the gates were open and hope we can get inside without too much fuss.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 51
