The Infinity Engines Books 1-3

by Andrew Hastie

  His eyes were like glowing pools of starlight. ‘I am Wyrrm,’ he said, staring at her body.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  He continued to read the runes. ‘These are the names of the ancients, powerful ones.’ As he read them, the symbols peeled off her skin, floating towards his hand like a murmuration of starlings until only one remained on the palm of her hand.

  ‘And the nearest thing I had to clothes.’

  ‘I do not perceive you as a physical being.’

  She glared at him.

  He closed his eyes, and suddenly she was dressed in leggings and her favourite baggy jumper.

  ‘Er. Maybe something more practical?’

  The clothes were replaced with a standard set of travelling robes.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked, rolling back the sleeves.

  ‘I promised the Nemesis.’

  ‘Josh asked you to save me?’

  ‘It was the only outcome that guaranteed your survival.’

  Caitlin wasn’t entirely sure how this was much better than death. Entering the maelstrom was something that she’d dreamt of doing her whole life, but never dared to try. Since Josh had appeared with those memories of her other life, it was as though something had been awoken inside her.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Darkling appeared to shrug. ‘Elsewhere.’

  Great, she thought, staring out into the chaos. I’m stuck in a timeless nowhere with a cryptic, chronologically ambiguous super-being.

  The rapidly fluctuating timescape was slowing, as though Darkling’s presence was creating a gravitational field, stabilising the storm. Sim had a word for this kind of behaviour: he called them strange attractors; fixed points in an otherwise chaotic universe.

  A jumbled city gathered around them. Caitlin found herself standing on a street built from the architecture of a hundred different ages. Renaissance and baroque merged seamlessly into post-modernist concrete skyscrapers and Victorian hovels. It was the work of an insane architect, a graveyard of redundant and forgotten buildings.

  When she turned back, Darkling had disappeared.

  66

  Josh

  It seemed to Josh, as he stood amongst the teetering towers of junk that were stacked all around him, that he’d landed in the middle of the universe’s lost property department. Everything, from broken old cars to steam engines, aeroplanes to furniture and clothes, had been randomly dumped here by some kleptomaniac dragon with no sense of order.

  Caitlin was nowhere to be seen. The pharaoh however, lay on the floor a few metres away. He was manically whispering in an archaic language and clawing at his chest as if something was trapped inside his body. Josh saw the outline of tentacles under his skin and realised the Djinn had possessed him.

  Nynetjer’s eyes opened as Josh approached — they were burning red, like hot coals.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  There was a noise from behind one of the stacks, and Josh turned towards it. He had the strangest sensation that they were being watched. Picking up the copper sickle, he pointed it at Nynetjer.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Clumsily, the Egyptian got to his feet. He was like a broken marionette, his arms and legs moving independently of each other, sticking out at obtuse angles as the Djinn struggled to gain control of his body.

  ‘With the ancient ones,’ rasped the demon through the Pharaoh’s slack mouth. ‘They will devour her!’ He walked awkwardly towards Josh, strings of black bile dripping from the corners of his lips.

  Josh caught the flicker of something moving behind a pile of stuffed animals to his right. He stepped backwards and felt the edges of metal tracks press into his back. His way was blocked by a tank from World War Two. There was nowhere to go and the possessed pharaoh was rapidly mastering the art of walking.

  ‘Come on then!’ Josh shouted, his fists tightening around the handle of the sickle, wishing he’d paid more attention in combat training.

  Nynetjer’s mouth twisted into a grotesque grin, his hand reaching out with claw-like fingers. Before Josh could take a swing, the handle of a walking stick hooked around the pharaoh’s legs and pulled them from under him.

  ‘I wouldn’t let him do that if I were you,’ said a familiar voice.

  It was the colonel.

  67

  Daedalus

  It took all his willpower not to hug the old man on the spot. Josh was a mass of conflicting emotions, all running simultaneously through his head. It was like coming home after a long trip, or putting on your favourite pair of trainers. There was a sense of relief and disbelief that somehow, after all the shit he’d gone through over the last few months, it had actually been worth it.

  He wanted to tell the mad old bugger how much he’d missed him, and all the other things that had gone wrong since he’d blown himself out of existence. Yet there was something holding Josh back: not some macho reservation about hiding emotions, but the colonel’s expression, the way his good eye studied him. He wasn’t quite either version of the man he remembered; it might have been the lack of recognition in his face or the slightly eccentric way he was dressed: he was wearing a long trench coat, leather aviator hat, goggles, and a kilt.

  ‘He’s possessed,’ observed the colonel, putting his foot on the chest of the pharaoh to hold him down.

  ‘Djinn,’ Josh agreed.

  ‘Hmm. Pentachion to be precise.’ The colonel took out a long pair of leather gloves. ‘Did it touch you?’ he asked, pointing at the cut on Josh’s chest.

  Josh shook his head.

  ‘Then I suggest you stand aside. Pentachions tend to be a little unpredictable.’

  Josh shuffled along the side of the tank while the colonel twisted open the top of his cane and pulled out a long silver blade. In one swift move, he drove the point of the sword through the chest of the pharaoh, pinning him to the floor. Nynetjer’s mouth yawned wide and dark tendrils writhed out of from it. The colonel studied the creature as though it were an insect under a lens, then took out a piece of chalk and drew a circle around the body of the writhing man.

  Finishing the circle he walked around it, taking things out of his pockets and positioning them at key points along its circumference. Next to each object he wrote a series of numbers, and then stood back and uttered a phrase that Josh couldn’t quite hear. The white chalk line began to glow like a lit fuse. An orange, effervescent fire coursed along it and the floor fell away. The Djinn, still struggling to free itself from the pharaoh’s body, fell, screaming arcane curses into the darkness beneath.

  Josh carefully stepped up to the edge of the hole and looked down into the swirling mass of chaos — the body was gone. In the roiling clouds below he thought he could see the outlines of terrible creatures.

  There was a click from behind him, the unmistakable sound of the cocking of a pistol.

  ‘What’s to stop me throwing you in there?’ growled the colonel.

  Josh felt the end of the barrel on the back of his head. Instinctively, he raised his arms and dropped the sickle. He’d no idea what was going on. He was light-headed from the blood loss and wasn’t sure what to say to the old man. Then Darkling’s words came back to him: ‘I’m from page two-eight-five.’

  The barrel retreated, and there was a shuffling and mumbling from behind him as he heard the pages of a book being turned.

  ‘Ah, two-eight-five. Yes, of course, that explains it.’

  Josh relaxed and put his hands down.

  ‘Stand back, boy! TikTok front and centre,’ ordered the colonel, placing the copper sickle into a small shopping bag and shaking off his gloves. A bizarre-looking clockwork monkey appeared out of the fuselage of a partly restored Lancaster bomber and scuttled over to them. It clicked and whirred for a few seconds before beginning to repair the hole with an assortment of old doors, socks, bus tickets and broken umbrellas.

  ‘He tried to invoke an elder? What kind of fool does that?’ the colonel said, chuckling to himself as they walked through
the cavernous junkyard. Josh got the impression that the old man hadn’t had much in the way of company. A couple of times he thought the colonel had forgotten that he was even there.

  ‘He took Caitlin,’ Josh said defeatedly. The initial relief of finding his old friend was quickly replaced by concern as he realised the state of the colonel’s mind.

  The old man didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Many have tried, but they should know better. The Djinn have long since forgotten we exist, and waking them up is homicidal or worse.’

  ‘I’VE LOST HER! AGAIN!’ Josh shouted.

  The colonel span round and bellowed. ‘I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!’

  The old man was staring directly at him with a glazed expression, looking straight through him.

  ‘This is the place of the lost things. If she were here I would know. TikTok would’ve told me,’ he said, pointing back towards the clockwork monkey. ‘She isn’t here.’

  ‘So how do I find her?’

  ‘Now that’s a very interesting question — stuff generally tends to find me, and I can’t remember the last time I actually had to look for something.’

  Other than your marbles, thought Josh. ‘You don’t remember me do you?’

  ‘Would it be rude of me to say no?’ the colonel replied. ‘There’s something familiar about your face, but this place has a way of making you forget. Memories have a tendency to slip away — I used to keep them in tins, but even then I began to forget where I put them.’

  They came to a wall of keys, each one hung on its own numbered metal hook. In the middle of it was a small wooden door.

  ‘What I do know is that sometimes it helps to get a different perspective on the situation. Let me show you my observatory,’ he said, selecting a specific key and putting it in the lock.

  They stepped into an American-style elevator, it was like something straight out of the nineteen-twenties. The colonel pulled a series of brass levers, and it shuddered into life and began to grind its way upwards — at least that was how it seemed to Josh.

  The view through the metal cage changed as they ascended, scenes from different times and places sliding past as though they were climbing through floors of random scenes from history.

  ‘The maelstrom is not quite as chaotic as it first appears,’ the colonel explained like a tour guide.

  A gas-lit Victorian street swept by only to be replaced by an ancient woodland.

  ‘For the most part, it’s entirely empty, but there are clusters of reality here and there; small junctures of time that have been excised from the continuum. Lost moments set adrift, repeating their few precious minutes over and over again. It has taken a considerable amount of study, but I have noticed that their movements are not entirely random. There are forces at work even here. I believe that without the restrictions of time, the universe still tends towards some kind of order. This is my theory of chaos, as I like to call it.’

  The woodland was replaced by the inside of an aeroplane, then a picturesque beach somewhere in the South Seas. Each flashed by before Josh could really focus on it.

  ‘So how long have you been here?’

  The colonel’s expression soured. ‘Twenty hours. Four hundred years — it’s all the same. You’ll realise when you’ve been here a while that time is irrelevant. You don’t age; it’s hard to accept at first, but you get used to it. I’ve taken up a hobby,’ he said, tapping the bomber command badge that was badly sewn onto his coat. ‘Restoring the old Lancasters keeps me sane.’

  ‘And the Djinn? Where will they have taken Caitlin?’

  ‘That’s what we’re about to find out.’

  The elevator slowed to a stop, and the colonel pulled back the metal grille.

  ‘Welcome to Vienna,’ he said, stepping out into a cobbled street.

  68

  Observatory

  The roof of the observatory reminded Josh of Alixia’s palm house; an enormous dome constructed entirely from glass and iron. Beneath it, on a raised rotating platform, sat a massive brass telescope and a threadbare armchair surrounded by piles of notebooks.

  ‘This is one of my favourite places. I discovered it, or rather it revealed itself to me, whilst I was looking for my name — not a simple thing to lose, by the way.’

  ‘And did it help?’

  ‘Not in the slightest, but it’s shown me many other things. One in particular that I might be inclined to show you — if you help me.’

  ‘What can you see?’ asked Josh, climbing up onto the platform. The dark, chaotic storm outside the dome was punctuated by intermittent flashes of lightning.

  ‘This is a Huygens.’ The colonel patted the metal cylinder tenderly. ‘Although, I have made some modifications: added an achromatic lens along with a Foucault parabola. It’s been very helpful with my research. I’m making a lengthy study of the maelstrom, from the darkest recesses of the primordial all the way to the mordant realms.’ He swept his arm theatrically across the arc of the dome. ‘You can even follow the continuum back to its origin if you know where to look,’ he added with a wink. ‘I’ve been making a map.’

  ‘Mordant realms?’

  ‘Clusters, like this one, where drifts of time have gathered like flotsam on the ocean.’

  ‘And you think she’s in one of those?’

  ‘That would be my guess. Now let’s find you some clothes, and I should probably have a look at that cut.’

  Josh sat in the armchair and looked into the eyepiece. When his eye touched the cold metal rim, there was an instantaneous connection with the device, drawing his mind into the void. The overwhelming emptiness of the chaos engulfed him, as if was a pinprick of light in a world of night.

  Hopelessly, he wondered where in all this Caitlin might be, and whether Darkling had managed to protect her. He tried not to linger on the look of fear on her face as the breach took her.

  The telescope shifted suddenly, sweeping around to focus on a sinuous ribbon of light that weaved through the darkness. The lenses clicked as they adjusted automatically, increasing the magnification until Josh recognised the continuum in all its glory.

  ‘Ah,’ said the colonel, pushing Josh back into the seat with his cane and breaking contact with the telescope. ‘Probably best if you leave the searching to me — until you get your sea-legs, as it were.’

  Disorientated, Josh struggled up out of the chair, and the old man took his place. The colonel produced a monocle from his pocket and polished it on his shirt sleeve. ‘Lensing glass helps,’ he explained, placing it onto his good eye and leaning into the device.

  ‘Pentachion?’ the colonel said after ten minutes of tutting, huffing and twiddling of various dials and levers. ‘That’s at least a nineteenth-level Djinn, which should put her somewhere in the third quadrant of the lower realms.’ He cranked a lever on the side of the telescope and the platform rotated so quickly that Josh nearly fell off.

  ‘Do you have anything of hers? Something we can use to track her.’

  Josh considered telling the colonel about Darkling, but wasn’t quite sure how to explain what had happened with the Wyrrm.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never mind. TikTok, bring me the blade of that ridiculous priest… he was headed in the same general direction.’

  The clockwork monkey appeared from nowhere and took the bloodstained sickle out of the colonel’s shopping bag and scuttled across the floor to his master.

  ‘Well, she’s not there either,’ the colonel said, sighing, and taking out the monocle then rubbing his tired eye.

  ‘But I saw her, I followed her in.’

  The colonel sighed again. ‘That was a courageous thing to do my boy, but as far as I can tell she’s not with the Djinn. Which should give you some hope. Although finding her in this place is nigh impossible without a tracer.’

  ‘Where else could she be?’

  ‘If my theory is correct,’ — he pointed at the circular wall that were covered in thousands of notes — ‘she should begin to influence t
he chaos, attracting and altering the pattern, and if we wait long enough her presence will reveal itself.’ He looked up into the dark swirling clouds above them. ‘Assuming that she can keep herself safe.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Oh yes, there are all manner of unmentionables out there. This is not a place to be wandering around alone.’

  69

  Lost

  Caitlin had only just begun to explore the unusual city when she noticed the first spectre. It was the name she’d given it to try and make it less frightening; she had considered ‘Harvey’, or ‘wraith’, but settled on spectre when she caught sight of the second one.

  They were pale, ghost-like creatures that drifted through the streets fading in and out of existence. She kept a safe distance, studying them from a suitably secure hiding place.

  Once she’d got over the initial shock, and realising they didn’t seem to pose a threat, she was fascinated. They were shadows of people just going about their daily lives: walking the dog, taking the kids to school, meeting friends. It was groundhog day, an echo of their routine caught in an endless loop.

  Caitlin discovered hundreds over the next few hours. The more she looked, the more her eyes became accustomed to finding them, as though tuning in to a different visual frequency. They made her feel less alone, even though she wouldn’t dare approach one. It was reassuring to know that there were other beings stranded in this place.

  She caught herself looking for Josh amongst the faces. Although she hadn’t seen him follow her into the maelstrom, she knew that he wouldn’t abandon her. He would be here somewhere — although she’d no idea what his plan was.