Eschaton

by Andrew Hastie

  Now, as he was tossed around in the swirling storms of disjointed time, he realised how naïve he’d been, how nothing could have prepared him for this place.

  Without the limitations of time, everything could happen at once, or not at all — worse still, it could happen entirely out of sequence.

  One moment he would be standing in the middle of a city surrounded by buildings from different ages, each sitting side-by-side like the work of some absent-minded architect, and then a heartbeat later, his entire company were floating in a forgotten ocean miles from land.

  Moments of time collected around them like shoals of fish, gathering and then dispersing at the slightest change.

  His men’s faces were all covered by the Protectorate battle masks, so it was impossible to tell if they were as scared as he was. Dalton tried not to show it; as their leader he knew he must stay strong. But there was a voice inside his head screaming for it all to stop. He tried desperately to make sense of what was happening, his mind searching for a pattern, but it was too much for his brain to process, and they were all going to be driven insane.

  The ring seemed powerless, glowing weakly now and then as if sensing the Djinn were nearby, but nothing ever appeared.

  42

  Shimmering Sea

  [Ascension Island, Atlantic. Date: 11.927]

  When the Nautilus returned to the Draconian headquarters, they learned that the founder was missing.

  Edward Kelly had sought sanctuary within the walls of the lighthouse and brought news of events from the Order, as well as a large contingent of seers.

  Grandmaster Derado had clearly had enough of the man’s cryptic conversations by the time Alixia joined them in his war room.

  ‘Ravana has taken control of the Copernican difference engine. The Grand Seer tells me she’s determined to get the system running again, but the founder has disappeared, as, it seems, has the Infinity Engine.’

  Kelly was sitting opposite Derado, wearing a black hat with a veil that made him look like a Victorian widow.

  ‘Time is out of joint,’ he observed.

  ‘Now is not the time for your foolish riddles!’ barked the grandmaster.

  Alixia could feel the tension between them. They were like oil and water, a soldier and a poet, neither capable of understanding the other’s point of view.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ she asked Kelly.

  ‘Beyond the shimmering silver sea,’ he replied, wiggling the fingers of his hand like waves.

  Alixia ground her teeth as she held back the urge to shout herself.

  ‘Master Kelly, we have little time to decipher your riddles. A man’s life hangs in the balance. One who may have answers to the whereabouts of the Nemesis. Can you speak plainly for once?’

  The seer lifted his veil, revealing raven-black eyes.

  ‘In the room of no return, sits a citadel in a silver sea. The tulku will know the way.’

  ‘What’s a tulku?’

  ‘A Tibetan Buddhist term,’ came another voice. It was Sim. ‘The Dalai Lama is one.’

  Alixia smiled at her son, who seemed uncomfortable in the Draconian armour. It made him look more like a man, but yet still he was her little boy. She had to stop herself from running over and hugging him.

  ‘Thank you, master De Freis. At last a straight answer,’ said Derado, sighing. ‘Your son has been a most helpful assistant since he arrived.’

  Sim was not great at taking compliments, and she saw the colour rise in his cheeks.

  ‘So where is the founder?’

  ‘With the Augurs,’ said Kelly, shocking everyone with a reasonable reply.

  43

  Bergson

  Finally, after they’d travelled through a hundred battlefields, deserted cities and a thousand other forgotten moments, things began to slow. Dalton felt the vertigo receding, their free fall through the mayhem decelerated, spending longer in each world, until they came to rest in a necropolis of gothic churches and tombs.

  ‘Form a perimeter,’ Dalton barked to the others as he got to his feet. Some had taken off their headgear and were throwing up, while others were staring like awestruck tourists at their surroundings which continued to shift and change. ‘Deploy the stabilisers.’

  Dalton’s research team had done their homework. They’d combed through the hundreds of theories on the maelstrom, mostly inspired by the works of Daedalus, and although many of them were nothing but crackpot fantasists, like Belsarus, imagining a strange and unusual neverland, there were some that seemed to have a scientific basis. Dalton focused on those concerned with the control of time in non-linear environments, and particularly the work of a young Copernican by the name of Eric Bergson.

  Bergson was only in his early twenties when he published his first work, ‘On the fluidity of Time’. It was ignored by many, and those that did bother to read it claimed the work was too theoretical. Since it made no reference to the Djinn or Daedalus, many Daedalans ignored it entirely, but Dalton saw the man’s genius and knew that if he were going to survive in the chaos realm, he would need Bergson’s help.

  Bergson was nearer thirty now, and Dalton watched him organise the men as they assembled his prototype stabilising arrays, driving the long metal stakes into the shifting earth to help anchor the basecamp.

  It was a simple concept; all the best ones were. To create a static field within a non-linear universe one had to induce a coalescing field, a strange attractor, and the dynamics of chaos would do the rest.

  The mausoleums around them shifted slightly as they worked. Smaller structures were randomly replaced by larger ones, as though an unseen architect were refining a model of his work, while others aged rapidly and crumbled before their eyes.

  ‘We have achieved a stable time field,’ reported Bergson in his curt Norwegian accent. The man was nearly ten years older than him but seemed more naïve somehow.

  Dalton nodded his approval. ‘Now all we can do is wait.’

  His men moved within the boundaries of the temporal field and started to unpack supplies. A guard duty rota was agreed, and the first watch took their places as the world around them continued to evolve.

  Dalton sat staring at his ring, watching for any signs of Djinn. There was a terrible power within its history, and he sensed the long lines stretching back into a distant past, but he wasn’t ready to find out what powers were waiting there.

  The rations were passed around, and everyone began to relax as they acclimatised to their environment. It was an uneasy peace though; these were highly trained men who kept one eye on the shadows, always wary of the threat of an attack.

  ‘I have spent the last ten years dreaming of this moment,’ said Bergson, looking around at the chaos. ‘Nothing in my wildest dreams could have come close to this.’

  Dalton wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing the scientist. ‘The maelstrom is nothing more than a temporal scrap heap, a junkyard of abandoned moments, so what on earth can you find so endearing about such a place?’

  ‘It’s the ultimate foil. Everything we believe to be normal within the continuum is missing in this place. We are opposites, and you cannot have one without the other.’

  ‘You sound exactly like my mother!’ Dalton scoffed. ‘Why does everything have to be in some kind of cosmic balance? What all of you fail to admit is that you have no idea why this exists and spend all your time trying to validate your position by hiding behind some equation.’

  44

  Citadel

  [Spiti Valley, Tibet. Date: 11.587]

  A calm serenity filled the temple as the third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso, knelt praying in the chaitya. The ancient walls were carved a thousand years before he was born, yet the sacred texts etched into their columns were as relevant now as they had been the day they’d been struck.

  His daily ritual always ended with a walk between the columns of the great prayer hall, a practice known as pradakhshina, where he reflected on their enlightened wisdom.

&
nbsp; The arrival of the founder had troubled him. His presence, though always welcome, was like that of a harbinger, a bringer of change, and the old monk had spent many hours contemplating what it could mean.

  ‘Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment,’ he repeated the words of Buddha to himself.

  There were times when the monk had wondered what kind of future his old friend was trying to protect.

  It had been an unusual request to make on the day they’d first met. Sonam was only nineteen-years-old when the founder walked into their monastery with his book of forbidden knowledge and told him that one day he would be the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. Fifteen years later Altan Khan invited him to Mongolia to teach his people the ways of Buddhism.

  Now, as Sonam felt the ache in his old bones, the founder had returned to enter the room he’d hidden for all those years, never allowing anyone to disturb it.

  His reverie was broken by a tremor that shook the stones beneath his knees. At first, he thought it might be an earthquake. They were quite rare and his temple had survived long enough to know it could stand all but the most violent shocks.

  But the vibrations grew stronger as if a herd of yaks were stampeding across the plains of the valley below.

  The old monk got slowly to his feet as the dust began to drift down through the shafts of sunlight. Perhaps, he thought, I would be safer outside.

  As he turned to leave, the conning tower of a small submarine broke through the floor of the temple.

  There had been a moment when they had stepped out of the timeship when the old monk had considered it wiser to retreat. The strangers who had destroyed his beloved temple floor were dressed in unusual clothes and looked desperate.

  There were two women, a girl and two men carrying a wounded man on a stretcher. The men were nervous, their eyes searching the room as if they were being hunted.

  A lady approached him and bowed respectfully. She had a kind face, her eyes full of questions, but her smile spoke of peace and friendship.

  ‘Holy one. We require sanctuary,’ she said in fluent Mandarin.

  The Dalai Lama bowed in return. ‘Of course, my house is yours. What is left of it.’

  She nodded her thanks and turned to her companions.

  Her instructions were in some other language, but her intentions were clear. The other woman, dressed in men’s clothes, took out a metal device and their ship retreated below the stones once more, leaving them as if they had never been disturbed.

  He bent down to touch the slabs, marvelling at their restoration.

  ‘What is this magic?’ he asked.

  ‘Time flows in two directions,’ the lady replied.

  They were the watchwords, the passphrase that the founder had told him was a signal of his allies.

  ‘My master?’ she asked. ‘Is he still here?’

  The monk shook his head. ‘No he has entered the room of no return.’

  Her expression became thoughtful. ‘We need his help. Can you show us this room?’

  ‘The founder left it with me many years ago,’ the Dalai Lama explained as he stood before the ancient-looking door. ‘He instructed me to allow no one to touch it.’

  Alixia smiled sympathetically at the old monk. ‘I’m assuming he revoked that order when he returned.’

  The monk nodded. ‘He told me that others would follow and that I would know the ones by their words.’

  Standing before the door, he studied the other members of her group: the two men carrying the injured one were eager to be gone; the man was obviously gravely ill. Sonam had tried to examine him, but they wouldn’t let him touch their patient. The lady explained that he had some kind of plague and that only the founder would know how to cure it.

  The young girl they called ‘Lyra’ seemed fascinated by the temple and by him. Her eyes had been wide and full of wonder when she arrived, and they had hardly changed since.

  He blessed them all and opened the door to the room, knowing full well that he would never see any of them again.

  The room was a simple stone cell with a metal plinth at the centre. On it rested a shallow copper basin filled with a silver liquid.

  ‘Mercury?’ asked Lyra, going up to inspect the bowl.

  ‘The silver sea,’ Alixia muttered.

  ‘Mercury was thought to prolong life — they found a massive cache of it in a Teotihuacan pyramid. The ancient civilisations were obsessed with its healing properties,’ explained Thomas, lowering Rufius down onto the floor.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ warned Alixia. ‘Quicksilver is highly toxic.’

  ‘The founder wouldn’t use mercury as a vestige,’ Juliana said, going over to join Lyra.

  Alixia looked around the cell. ‘There’s hardly anything else in the room to use. Kelly told me he was here.’

  ‘Whatever it is, we need to find it quickly,’ Thomas interrupted. ‘All this linear time is not helping Rufius’ condition.’

  Alixia went over to examine him. His skin was ashen, and his hands were drawn up and claw-like where they had gone into spasm.

  ‘His pulse is feeble. Thomas is right. We need to locate the founder as soon as we can.’

  ‘It’s not quicksilver,’ Da Recco said, holding his hand just above the rippling liquid. ‘This is hot, while mercury is cold to the touch.’

  ‘And how would you know that?’ Lyra asked with a sly smile.

  ‘A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime of mercury?’ Da Recco raised one eyebrow. ‘It is true that many of my crew had used it for the treatment of the pox — but myself, I am a navigator, and the barometer is an essential tool of my calculations.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Juliana confirmed. ‘This is molten metal being kept in a liquid state.’

  ‘Too hot to touch. A perfect way to keep anyone from using it as a vestige,’ agreed Thomas.

  Alixia stared at the bowl. ‘What would keep it in this way?’

  Juliana was inspecting the base of the pedestal, which seemed to be cast out of iron. She tentatively touched the stand feeling, the temperature as she moved up towards the basin. ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘You’re thinking about this too linearly,’ said Lyra.

  Alixia snapped her fingers. ‘Of course.’

  She approached the basin and put her hands on both sides, searching for a timeline

  ‘Well?’ asked Juliana impatiently.

  ‘You were right,’ Alixia said, smiling proudly at her daughter. ‘There’s a switch hidden in its past.’ They watched as the silver solidified, returning to its original form. It was a tower made up of concentric levels, each one smaller than the last.

  ‘A citadel?’ wondered Lyra.

  ‘Molten silver, using an induction loop — no need for heat at all,’ noted Juliana, tapping the copper bowl and making it chime.

  ‘Exactly,’ Alixia said, turning to Da Recco and Thomas. ‘Now you’re going to have to carry him I’m afraid.’

  Between them they managed to raise the unconscious man, each taking one arm over their shoulder.

  ‘Let’s see where this takes us,’ said Alixia, opening the timeline of the silver statue.

  45

  Reverse Exorcism

  The passage of time was impossible to measure within the maelstrom. Bergson had brought a variety of chronometers with him, but they’d all failed, even his tachyon had stopped at the moment they had left the chronosphere.

  By Dalton’s estimation two days had elapsed, and still there was no sign of the legendary Djinn. The initial excitement they’d experienced when they arrived was quickly turning to disappointment, and the sustained apprehension was beginning to tell on the men.

  The guard still patrolled the edge of the stabilising field, watching the ever-changing, hypnotic landscape around them. More than once his officers had reported seeing ‘strange things’ on the periphery, but nothing came close. Whatever was out there was being cautious, staying out of
range of the talisman at least.

  By the end of the third day, Dalton was growing bored. The provisions they had brought would last another week or so, but the lack of action was bad for morale, and he could see the tension taking its toll on their mood. Men were beginning to have disagreements over nothing, and fights broke out over stupid remarks that would have been shrugged off in any other situation.

  ‘We need to drop the barrier,’ Dalton suggested to Bergson.

  ‘But we will lose temporal cohesion.’

  ‘I didn’t come here for a bloody sight-seeing tour. The Djinn are here, I can feel them. But your damn field is keeping them at bay.’

  Bergson shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s wise —’

  In one fluid motion, Dalton took out his sword and held it against Bergson’s neck.

  ‘Shut down the grid,’ he ordered through gritted teeth. ‘Or I’ll feed you to the first Djinn we see.’

  Bergson nodded and ran off to his equipment.

  ‘Mallary!’ Dalton barked at his lieutenant who was sleeping, slumped against one of the kit bags. ‘Get the men ready. We’re going to drop the shield.’

  There followed a rush of activity, as his well-drilled team donned their battle armour and prepared their weapons.

  As the others formed themselves into a circle around Dalton, Bergson flipped the switch, and they felt time begin to drain away. Like air slowly leaking from a balloon. Each man sighted along his gunsabre, scanning their surroundings for any sign of attack.

  But nothing came.

  Bergson seemed to relax, walking around the perimeter as he checked his equipment.