Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  She would have cowered from the hand he rested against her temple, had she been able to move. The rage surrounding this man slammed into her senses. She cried aloud, as though from a physical blow.

  “No need to be afraid, my dear. I certainly won’t be harming you.” He laughed softly, at some joke she could not fathom. “Tell me your name.”

  Her tongue moved with a will of its own. “Ianira . . .” The drugs in her veins roared through her mind, implacable and terrifying.

  “Ianira? Where are you from? What last name have you?”

  They called her Cassondra, after her title as priestess of Artemis. She whispered it out, felt as well as saw the surprise that rippled through him. “Cassondra? Deuced odd surname. Where the devil did you come from?”

  Confusion tore through her. “The station—“ she began.

  “No, not the bloody train station, woman! Where were you born?”

  “Ephesus . . .”

  “Ephesus?” Shock tore through his eyes again. “You mean from the region of Turkey where that ancient place used to be? But why, then, do you speak Greek, when Turkestani is the language of that part of the world? And how is it you speak the Greek of Pericles and Homer?”

  Too many questions, blurring together too quickly . . . He leaned across, seizing her wrist in a brutal grip. “Answer me!”

  She cried out in mortal terror, struggled to pull away from the swamping horror of what she sensed in his soul. “Artemis, help me . . .” The plea was instinctive, choked out through the blackness flooding across her mind. His face swam into focus, very close to hers.

  “Artemis?” he whispered, shock blazing through his eyes once more. “What do you know of Artemis, the Many-Breasted Goddess of Ephesus?”

  The pain of his nearness was unendurable. She lapsed into the language of her childhood, pled with him not to hurt her, so . . .

  He left her side, allowing relief to flood into her senses, but was gone only for a moment. He returned with a leather case, which he opened, removing a heavy, metal tube with a needle protruding from one end. “If you are unable to speak with what I’ve given you already,” he muttered, “no power of hell itself will keep you silent with this in your veins.”

  He injected something into her arm, tore the sleeve of her dress to expose the crook of her elbow and slid the needle in. New dizziness flared as the drug went in, hurting with a burning pain. The room swooped and swung in agonizing circles.

  “Now then, Miss Cassondra,” the voice of her jailor came through a blur, “you will please tell me who you are and where you come from and who the man was with you . . .”

  Ianira plunged into a spinning well of horror from which there was no possible escape. She heard her voice answer questions as though in a dream, repeated answers even she could not make sense of, found herself slipping deep into prophetic trance as the images streamed into her mind, a boy hanging naked from a tree, dying slowly under this man’s knife, and a pitiful young man with royal blood in his veins, whose need for love was the most tragic thing about him, a need which had propelled him into the clutches of the man crouched above her now. Time reeled and spun inside her mind and she saw the terrified face of a woman, held struggling against a wooden fence, and other women, hacked to pieces under a madman’s knife . . .

  She discovered she was screaming only when he slapped her hard enough to jolt her from the trance. She lay trembling, dizzy and ill, and focused slowly on his eyes. He sat staring down at her, eyes wide and shocked and blazing with an unholy sort of triumph. “By God,” he whispered, “what else can you do?”

  When she was unable to speak, he leaned close. “Concentrate! Tell me where Eddy is now!”

  The tragic, lonely young man flashed into her mind, surrounded by splendour such as Ianira had never dreamed might exist. He was seated at a long table, covered with gleaming silver and crystal and china edged in gold. An elderly woman in black Ianira recognized from photographs presided over the head of the table, her severe gaze directed toward the frightened young man.

  “You are not to go wandering about in the East End again, Eddy, is that understood? It is a disgrace, shameful, such conduct. I’m sending you to Sandringham soon, I won’t stand for such behavior . . .”

  “Yes, Grandmama,” he whispered, confused and miserable and frightened to be the object of her displeasure.

  Ianira did not realize she had spoken aloud, describing what she saw until her jailor’s voice shocked her back into the little room with the expensive coverlets and the gas lights and the drugs in her veins. “Sandringham?” he gasped. “The queen is sending him to Scotland? Bloody hell . . .” Then the look in his eyes changed. “Might be just as well. Get the boy out of the road for a bit, until this miserable business is finished. God knows, I won’t risk having him connected with it.”

  Ianira lay trembling, too exhausted and overwhelmed by horror to guess at her fate, trapped in this madman’s hands. He actually smiled down at her, brushing the hair back from her brow. “Your friends,” he whispered intimately. “Will they search for you?”

  Terror exploded. She flinched back, gabbled out the fear of pursuit, the gunmen in the hotel, the threat to her life from faceless men she had never met . . . Fear drained away at the sound breaking from him. Laughter. He was staring down into her eyes and laughing with sheer, unadulterated delight. “Dear God,” he wheezed, leaning back in his chair, “they daren’t search for you! Such a bloody piece of luck! No doubt,” he smiled, “someone influential was disquieted by what you can do, my dear lady. Never fear, I shall protect you from all harm. You are much too precious, too valuable a creature to allow anyone to find you and bring you to grief.” He leaned close and stroked the back of her hand. “Mayhap,” he chuckled, “I’ll even take you to wife, as an added precaution.”

  She closed her eyes against horror at such a fate.

  He leaned down and brushed his lips to hers, then murmured, “I’ve work to do, this evening, my lovely pet, very serious work, which must take me from your side. And you must rest, recover from the shocks to your system. Tomorrow, however . . .” He chuckled then stroked her brow, the chill of her wet cheek. “Tomorrow should prove most entertaining, indeed.”

  He left her, drugged and helpless, in the center of the bed and carefully locked the door behind him. Ianira lay weeping silently until the medication he had given her dragged her down into darkness.

  * * *

  They didn’t intend to stay long.

  In fact, they hadn’t intended to take the train to Colorado Springs with the rest of the tour group, or ride all the way out to the derelict mining camp in the mountains far to the west of the train station, not at all. Not with Artemisia and Gelasia asleep in a big, awkward trunk, sedated and breathing bottled oxygen from the same type of canisters they’d sent with Ianira into London. Marcus, terrified for his children’s safety, had packed away a spare oxygen bottle for each of the girls, just in case something went wrong. And it had. Badly wrong.

  They’d been followed through the Wild West Gate.

  Just as Noah had predicted.

  “His name’s Sarnoff,” Noah Armstrong muttered, pointing him out with a slight nod of the head. “Chief of security for a real bad sort named Gideon Guthrie. And Guthrie’s specialty is making people disappear when they’re too much of a threat. Real sweet company, Jenna’s Daddy keeps. We can’t do a damned thing yet. If we bolt now, he’s just going to follow us. Then he’ll choose the time and place, when there aren’t a truckful of witnesses nearby. But if we head for that mining camp with the rest of the shooting competition tour, he’ll have to follow us, with all those up-time witnesses lurking everywhere. Then we can choose the time and place, jump him when he’s not expecting it.”

  “I can stick a knife through his ribs,” Julius offered, glaring out from under the calico bonnet he’d donned in his role doubling for Jenna.

  The detective said sharply, “No, not here!” When Julius looked like arguing, No
ah shot a quelling look at the down-time teenager. “Too many witnesses. If we have to explain why murder is really self-defense, it’ll just give the next death squad they send after us the chance they need to hit us while we’re cooling our heels in the station’s jail. So we wait until we’re up in the mountains. Marcus, you’ll be riding with the baggage mules when we leave the train station. Keep the trunk with the girls at the very back of the mule train. It’s a long ride out there, so we’ll have to switch out the oxygen canisters partway. Tell the other porters the mule’s thrown a shoe or something, just get that trunk open and switch out the bottles. They’ll both sleep until sometime tonight, but they’ll need air in a few hours.”

  So that was what they did, Marcus trembling at the thought of the danger to his little girls. And he had no assurance that Ianira was safe, either, that no one had followed her to London. He bit one lip, wishing desperately they had all been able to go through one gate together as a family. But Jenna Caddrick and Noah Armstrong had argued the point forcefully.

  Unfortunately, they hadn’t brought anything like enough supplies to take his precious children all the way out to the rugged mining camp where the shooting competition was to be held. They’d planned for Marcus and the girls to bolt out of Denver, to ditch the tour and take a train east into the Great Plains which he had seen in so many cowboy movies. They would hide in one of the big cities like Chicago or St. Louis for three or four cycles of the Wild West Gate, just long enough for Noah to eliminate any threat which might come through from up time on the next cycle of the gate.

  Then they could slip back onto the station, after Noah had gone back up time, taking to the legal authorities the proof which the detective had brought onto the station. Only when the men responsible for the murderous attacks had been jailed, would Marcus and his little family be safe again. And Julius, too. The teenage leader of Shangri-La’s Lost and Found Gang had come through the Porta Romae, same as Marcus had. Julius was playing his part as Jenna’s double with superb skill, laying a false trail for their pursuers to follow. His act at the departures lounge, dressed as an aggrieved lady tourist bawling about her injured foot had convinced onlookers, while Noah, acting the role of the drunken Joey Tyrolin, had drawn all attention away from Marcus, who’d needed to remain anonymous until safely on the other side of the gate.

  Marcus had taken Julius’ own station identification, so he could act as “Joey Tyrolin’s” baggage porter to disguise his own identity. Julius had used a fake ID produced by the ever-resourceful Noah Armstrong. Jenna Caddrick had furnished it, as well as the money for the Denver Gate tickets. Marcus’ throat closed, just thinking of the risk Noah and Jenna and young Julius were running to keep his family safe. Ianira and his children had never seemed so fragile to Marcus, never more precious to him. They had agreed to the charade, because they’d had no other choice.

  But Marcus had never ridden a horse in his life. And while he had once been accustomed to the burning brilliance of a Mediterranean sun, he’d lived for several years in the sunless world of TT-86. Despite the broad-brimmed hat which shaded his face, by the time they were an hour out on the trail, Marcus was sunburnt, sore in more places than he’d realized his body possessed, and miserably homesick for the station and his wife and his many ‘eighty-sixer friends.

  “We’ll go through with the itinerary we set up,” Noah Armstrong told them on the trail. “That way, the bastard following us will think we haven’t twigged to who he is. Any edge we can find, we need.” Dressed in a cowboy’s gear, Noah Armstrong was more difficult than ever to pigeonhole as a man or a woman. Each time Marcus thought he’d gathered enough clues to decide, the up-time detective did or said something which threw all his theories into chaos again.

  Marcus had seen individuals like Noah Armstrong before, in the slave markets of Rome. Ambiguous in the way their bodies grew into adulthood, developing into neither man nor woman, such people were exceedingly rare in nature. But they were pitifully common on auction blocks. Boys in Roman slave markets were routinely castrated as children to preserve a child’s sexless features and mannerisms, so they would grow into eunuchs. Neither male nor female, such artificially created eunuchs were valuable slaves. But those born that way fetched astronomical prices in Roman slave pens. Marcus had seen one such slave fetch half-a-million sesterces at auction—ten times the going rate for a highly educated scribe or Greek tutor. Romans, Marcus had learned over the years, were avaricious collectors. And the more unusual the item, or the individual, the greater the status in claiming its ownership. Whoever Noah was, the detective was luckier than he or she knew, to’ve been born up time, not down the Porta Romae.

  As they rode out of Colorado Springs with dust from the horses’ hooves hanging on the hot air, Julius frowned slightly under his calico bonnet brim. “Do you want me to go ahead and enter the shooting contest, then? I’ve watched a lot of movies, but I don’t really know how to shoot a black-powder pistol.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Armstrong reassured Marcus’ young friend. “I’ll show you how to load and operate the pistols tonight at camp, and I’ll teach you to fire them. You don’t have to shoot well enough to win or even qualify. Just make it look good, that’s all we need. Long before the competition’s over, we’ll have nailed this bastard Sarnoff, so we can go back to Denver. When we’ve eliminated him, I’ll want you to go with Marcus and the girls to the nearest train station. As soon as the men responsible for this have been arrested, I’ll send word and we can bring everyone home again.”

  It sounded so simple . . .

  But Marcus had learned the hardest way possible that nothing in life was ever simple, least of all a high-stakes game in which religion, political power, and human life were the stakes. During the long hours it took them to reach the mining camp, refurbish the ghost town to a livable state, and set up the shooting course, with Marcus periodically checking on his precious little girls to be sure they still slept and breathed comfortably in their snug cocoon, Marcus couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder every few minutes, expecting disaster to strike them down at any moment.

  He searched the faces of the others on the tour, the eager college-age kids who had gathered for a try at the medal, the older shooters who’d clearly been at this sport longer than the kids had been alive; he studied the guides supplied by Time Tours, the baggage handlers and mule drovers who tended the line of stubborn, slack-eared mules which had toted the equipment and personal baggage of the entire competition; and wondered what it must be like to be free to come and go as one pleased through the up-time world, through any gate, so long as the money was there to pay for a ticket. And each time the silent, hired killer who’d come through the gate with them glanced sidelong at Julius and himself, Marcus sweat into his dungarees and swallowed back sour fright.

  Some of the tourists were talkative, laughing and bragging or sharing stories about other competitions they’d participated in. Some of them talked about re-enactments of historical battles involving thousands of people and weapons ranging from pistols to full-sized cannons. Marcus had seen cannons only in photographs and movies. Other tour members were loners, keeping to themselves, cleaning and oiling their guns regularly, working hard at tasks assigned to get the competition’s complex course of fire laid out and the buildings refurbished, speaking little and wolfing down their supper in silence at mealtime. Impromptu sing-alongs and amateur musicians provided entertainment for those with the desire to socialize.

  There was even—and their happiness left Marcus feeling more lonely and isolated than ever—a young couple who planned to marry during the competition. They had brought along a wedding dress, a bridesmaid, a best man, an officiant, and photographer for the happy occasion. The photographer snapped pictures of everything and everyone in sight with a digital camera, much to the irritation of Noah Armstrong. The one person in the tour Marcus avoided like plague was Paula Booker, the station’s cosmetic surgeon. She was preoccupied, at least, by the fun of her
vacation, and paid little attention to the baggage handlers where they sat in the shadows, eating their meal in silence.

  But when Artemisia and Gelasia woke up from their long, drugged sleep, all hell broke loose—and Paula Booker recognized him. Her eyes widened in shock and she opened her mouth to speak . . . then closed it again, looking abruptly frightened. She understands, he realized with a jolt of hope, she understands we are in danger, even if she is not sure of the cause.

  Meanwhile, the whole camp had erupted and the baggage manager, who was not an ‘eighty-sixer, but an up-timer hired by the tour organizers, demanded to know what insanity had prompted him to bring two toddlers off the station. The uproar echoed off the black-shadowed mountains hemming them in.

  Nearly stammering under the close scrutiny of Sarnoff, aware that Noah Armstrong’s hand was poised on the grip of a pistol at the detective’s side, Marcus offered the only explanation he could: “I am a down-timer and we are never allowed off the station, sir. My little girls have never seen the sun . . .”

  It was true enough and more than a plausible reason. In fact, several women burst into tears and offered the sleepy girls candy and ribbons for their hair while other tourists, irate at such a notion, vented their wrath on the head baggage handler, protesting the cruelty of enforcing a law that didn’t even permit down-timers’ children to leave the station.

  “It’s not healthy!” one woman glared at the hapless Time Tours guides, men who lived full time down the Denver Gate, rarely returning to the station. They did not recognize him, thank all the gods. One woman in particular, the wedding photographer, was thoroughly incensed. “I’ve never heard of such an awful thing in all my life! Not letting little children go through a gate for some real sunshine! When I get home, you can believe I’m writing my congresswoman a nasty letter about this!”

  Julius, playing the part of Cassie Coventina, added, “You certainly can’t expect two little girls to sleep in that disgusting, filthy livery stable!” The disguised down-timer boy glanced at him, giving him and the children a winning smile, “They can stay in my cabin tonight. Every night, in fact. I’ve got plenty of room.”