‘What has happened?’ asked Dora.
‘I filled the ridge with high explosive, which I just detonated. If I got my math right, the whole ridge is now gone. Just gone. No more ridge, no more cannons. I thank you,’ she said, and bowed to imaginary applause.
Dora felt her mouth drop open at the scale of what Quil had done, the number of people she had dispatched with a single button-press; it made Dora feel ill.
‘There was no need for that,’ said Jana quietly.
‘For my second trick, I will stop the cavalry,’ said Quil, with a smile in her voice, ignoring Jana. She pressed another button and said, ‘Open fire.’
There was a loud sound from somewhere above them, a repeated thud that sounded like nothing Dora had ever heard before. It had an almost musical tone to it. On the bottom right screen Dora watched as the horses and their riders were cut down by a devastating cannonade of what seemed to be explosive cannonballs. The bombardment lasted only two minutes, but when the guns fell silent and the smoke cleared, the field was littered with bodies, both human and animal.
‘God,’ muttered Jana.
Dora felt as if she were going to be sick.
Sweetclover was looking at the screen silently, but he had gone pale.
‘And for my encore, the pièce de résistance,’ said Quil. ‘This requires a little more finesse.’ Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard, which Dora noticed caused a grid of lines on the bottom left screen to move about. As she watched, she understood that Quil was causing the lines to move. She stared at the screen but could make no sense of what the lines represented, or what Quil was doing. Helpfully, Quil was happy to provide a commentary.
‘First we erect the forcefield around the wall, to prevent our soldier-boys from running away.’
Dora saw a shimmering plane appear across the gate through which the infantry men had so recently marched.
‘Then we erect a second field directly in front of them.’
Another shimmering plane appeared on the screen, this time between the soldiers and the house.
‘Then we add two more, to make the sides of the box.’
Another tap of the keyboard, and two more shimmering planes winked into being at the far edges of the line of soldiers. The last remaining cadre of parliamentary forces were now enclosed in a rectangle made of invisible walls.
‘Let’s give them a moment to work it out, shall we,’ said Quil, leaning back in her chair, folding her hands behind her head and putting her feet up on the table.
The aerial view showed a group of pikemen crash to a halt as they marched into one of the invisible barriers. Quil laughed, but Dora found the whole spectacle profoundly disturbing.
‘This is sick,’ said Jana.
‘Now you have them trapped with your magic, there is no need to kill them,’ said Dora. ‘Why could you not have done this with the cannons and the cavalry? It appears to me that you had the means to end this battle before it even started, without a drop of blood being spilled.’
‘Obviously,’ said Quil. ‘But where would the fun be in that?’
The calm, reasonable Quil who had agreed terms with Dora, and saved Mountfort’s life with the silver wand, had been replaced by a monster. Dora watched the screen, her stomach twisting in fear and disgust. The soldiers now knew they were trapped, and they were running back and forth in blind panic, pushing up against the walls of their invisible prison.
‘I thought I could witness nothing worse than the massacre you effected upon the green, but this cruelty is horrible,’ said Dora.
Quil turned her impassive mask to her. ‘Shall I put a stop to this, then?’
‘I wish you would,’ replied Dora.
‘Very well.’
The instant Quil said that, Dora knew something terrible was about to happen. ‘Please, don’t,’ she began, but it was too late. Quil leaned forward and hit a single key.
On the screen, the walls of the unseen enclosure began to contract towards each other, reducing the size of the box rapidly. The soldiers were knocked off their feet, rolled along, pushed and thrown and tumbled together into an ever-decreasing area.
‘Stop this,’ cried Jana. ‘Please!’
‘Dear God,’ breathed Sweetclover. ‘They’ll be crushed to death.’
‘Too much?’ asked Quil flippantly.
Dora turned her face away, unable to watch. She heard Jana gagging, as if to be sick.
After a moment Quil said, ‘Pasted!’
Sweetclover broke the long, appalled silence. ‘For all your talk of the battles you have fought, and the great war to which you must return, I had never … This is …’
‘You thought I was making it all up?’ replied Quil. ‘That it was just stories?’
‘No,’ replied Sweetclover. ‘But hearing a story of battle is a very different thing to witnessing one, especially one conducted in such a manner. Is this considered honourable in your future, killing from a distance, looking down upon the deaths of men who cannot defend themselves?’
‘Says the man who just executed an unconscious man on a sickbed,’ snarled Jana.
‘He struck me down in my own house. Honour demanded recompense,’ said Sweetclover, but Dora thought his protestation lacked conviction.
‘Honour is overrated,’ scoffed Quil. ‘Victory is all that matters. Once you commit yourself to a fight, it’s certain death to retreat from it. If the cause is just, any means at all are justifiable. We couldn’t let them take this house. There are still things I must do here.’
‘Like what?’ asked Jana, her voice weak.
‘Like get the data from your chip,’ replied Quil. ‘Oh, and fix Dora’s mother, of course.’ She turned to Dora with an expression of insincere regret. ‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Don’t think your bro’s going to be part of the package after all. He just got either blown up or squished. My bad.’
Dora could say nothing. Her words stuck in her throat. All she could see was blood. She felt as if she were not entirely present within her own body, as if the horrors of the day had shaken her soul loose from its cage.
She turned away and walked back to her mother, sat down beside her once more, lifted her head back into her lap, stroked her hair and began to sing a lullaby.
28
‘I think I broke your pet,’ said Quil.
‘Screw you,’ spat Jana. She could feel the none-too-gentle pull of shock herself, but was determined not to give in to despair, guilt, homesickness or any of the other options that her confusion and terror kept tempting her with.
Quil stepped forward until her mask was only inches from Jana’s face. Through the slits in the stone Jana could see the fervour and excitement in Quil’s eyes. ‘We don’t need to be enemies, Jana. In fact, we should be allies. If you knew my story, if you knew why I was fighting and whom, you’d support me. Together, there’s nothing we couldn’t achieve. This’ – she swept a hand at the blood-soaked fields visible on the monitors – ‘is nothing compared to what is coming. We could stop a far greater war from ever happening. All the bloodshed, the destruction, the hatred that I’ve seen – we could stop it all, Jana. You and me. Come with me to the future. Help me fix it.’
Jana stared into Quil’s cold eyes, fruitlessly searching for a hint of compassion, kindness or sense. She saw no madness, not quite. Determination, certainty, passion, but no madness.
‘What you just did … you want me to believe that you’re the kind of person who wants to stop a war?’ said Jana.
‘This petty local conflict is a sideshow. My war’s on a scale you can barely imagine. These parochial idiots, with their muskets and their horses and their cannons, they’re not my enemies. They’re merely an inconvenience. The real enemy’s waiting for me back in the future. I’ll do anything to get back there. So what if I have to dispatch a few unimportant soldiers in a minor war in a minor country in a minor century? It’s no skin off my nose. And if you want to come with me when I leave, you’ll need to get used to that.
’
‘Earlier today, some random guy tells me there’s this woman called Quil who’s hunting me, but won’t tell me who she is, or why,’ replied Jana. ‘So I came to find you. Thought I’d ask you to your face. Sorry, sorry … mask. I have to stop doing that. And here I am, your prisoner. You want my chip, but you won’t tell me what for. You say I can’t go home, but won’t explain why. You tell me you want us to be allies, but you won’t say against whom. All I know about you is what I just witnessed – ruthless cruelty. And I can tell you here and now, we will never be allies. Somebody who can do what you just did is nobody I want to know. So if you want my chip and the information in it, you’re going to have to take it. I know I can’t stop you, but I’m not going to help you either.’
Jana held Quil’s gaze for long moment, clenching her jaw and her fists, refusing to let her nerves betray her resolve.
‘OK,’ said Quil, nodding slowly with regret that Jana could not say for certain was faked. ‘If that’s how you want to play it. Hank, give me the knife.’
Quil held out her hand, all the while maintaining eye contact with Jana. Sweetclover, still staring at the screens, lost in thought, did not respond.
‘Hank. Knife.’
Sweetclover twitched back to reality and handed his wife the blade without a word.
‘I was going to get the data painlessly,’ said Quil, holding the knife up before Jana’s eyes. ‘But if you’re going to be such a pain in the ass about it, I’ll cut the damn thing out and take that with me instead. At least I’ll solve the biggest mystery of my life.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Jana, conscious that she was starting to cry but unwilling to acknowledge it.
‘How you died,’ replied Quil. ‘I spent years trying to figure it out and, wouldn’t you know it, I was the one who killed you all along.’
She slid the blade cleanly in between Jana’s ribs.
Jana remembered what it was like to feel a knife slicing through her flesh. It didn’t hurt much, not if it was sharp and the blade didn’t bounce off the bone. As she felt the strange, familiar pressure creep up into her chest she thought how ironic it was that her second death was so very similar to her first. If she had to die again, she would have liked to try something different. A fall, perhaps. But she’d attempted that and it hadn’t worked. A gunshot, then. That’d be different.
Her vision went black at the edges; the sound of her heart beat loud in her ears. She felt dizzy. She knew what was happening and welcomed it. As she felt herself begin to die she realised that it had been inevitable all along. What her parents had done after her first death – bringing her back the way they had – was wrong, but it didn’t matter. You can’t cheat death. Fate doesn’t forget you, and it can’t be fooled. It had waited patiently for Jana, and now it had claimed her again.
She felt her knees buckle, and the ceiling spun around above her as she began to fall. Her eyes were still sending signals to her brain, but the brain wasn’t really paying much attention to them. Which is why it took a moment for Jana to realise that she had seen a bright rose-bloom of blood burst from Quil’s left shoulder.
Jana hit the floor and the impact, which she had expected to be the last thing she ever felt, had the opposite effect. Her head cracked against the tiles and the pain in her skull lent her momentary clarity. She felt her chest spasm as she took a deep, ragged, excruciating breath that provided nowhere near as much air as she needed. The blackness retreated from her vision and her heartbeat began to fade out, replaced instead by shouts and screams, the clash of metal and the report of pistol fire.
Her chest spasmed again and she coughed, a terrible, racking convulsion that filled her mouth with blood. But still she managed to draw another breath. The pain was so intense she couldn’t believe it. She knew what death by knife felt like, and this was not it. This was far worse, a pain so intense and immediate that death would come as a relief.
Then there were hands under her arms and she felt herself being dragged across the floor. She looked up and saw a blurred face looking down at her. She tried to focus and for a moment she was able to pick out the features. It took her a moment to recognise him, with his long hair and bum-fluff beard, but it was Kaz.
She liked Kaz …
… she coughed and screamed and frothed blood …
… he was nice.
And then her world went dark.
29
Kaz held the flintlock pistol awkwardly. It didn’t sit as comfortably in his right hand as the gun from his own time had; something about the curved smoothness of the grip felt unnatural. It didn’t help that the sword he held in his left hand was throwing his sense of balance off. You never saw cops on TV holding a gun in one hand and a sword in the other. They held the gun in both hands; it improved aim and response time. He uncocked the pistol and shoved it into his waistband, shifting the sword to his right hand. That was better; the sword felt good.
‘This way,’ he said, pointing through the trees. Thomas Predennick and the men of Pendarn, still wearing their white armbands and carrying their arsenal of makeshift weapons, followed him. Before they set out Thomas had shown Kaz how to walk silently in the woods. The secret, he said, was to place the whole foot down at once, not to roll your foot from heel to toe as you walked. Apparently it was the rolling that snapped twigs, and a snapping twig would startle the birds, which in turn would alert whoever was on the lookout for poachers. Kaz felt faintly ridiculous as he tried to walk flat-footed, like Frankenstein’s monster or a Lego mini-figure, but stealth was important.
He glimpsed the door to the ice house through the trees and held up his hand to signal a halt. The men behind him stopped in a cacophony of rustling leaves and one particularly loud twig-snap. Kaz flinched. A partridge burst from cover, flapping clumsily and squawking an alarm, displaying the kind of survival instincts that made them the easiest birds in the world to shoot. Kaz glanced over his shoulder, and old man Squeer grimaced apologetically and mouthed ‘sorry’.
Kaz surveyed his army. It was pathetic, frankly. How they’d ever thought they stood a chance against even a small force of soldiers, he would never know. He reckoned ten of them might be useful in a fight. The rest would probably either clutch their chests, wheeze and collapse, or wet themselves and run screaming for their mummies the first time someone with a weapon so much as looked at them askance. But they were here, supporting him and Thomas, bravely and without question walking into danger in support of a single lost girl from their community. Kaz felt a sudden, stupid rush of affection for them, and prayed that his actions wouldn’t get any of them killed.
‘There it is,’ he told Thomas. ‘That leads into the ice house. There’s a door that leads to a corridor that will take us into the hall cellars. When we get inside, you follow my lead, yes?’
Thomas nodded. He still had this look of profound suspicion in his eyes, but he had at least stopped calling Kaz ‘wizard’.
Kaz led the way towards the door, relieved and slightly surprised that they had made it this far without running into either Quil’s guards or any outliers of the parliamentary force they had glimpsed earlier, progressing towards the hall down a narrow cart track. As long as this entrance remained a secret there was still a chance they would be able to get inside, rescue Dora and Jana and escape again, even if the house came under attack while they were still inside.
No sooner had this thought crossed his mind than the distant boom of cannon fire came ricocheting through the trees. There was no need for stealth now.
‘Come on,’ shouted Kaz, and he ran for the ice-house door, the Clubmen of Pendarn hot on his heels. They reached the door and Kaz held it open as the men hurried inside. When the last one was through he glanced around the woods one last time, to check they were unobserved. But they weren’t – a group of ten or so soldiers was running towards them through the trees, swords drawn.
He ducked inside and tried to pull the door closed behind him, but it didn’t budge. Inside the spherica
l brick ice house, the men of Pendarn were milling around uncertainly.
‘Soldiers,’ said Kaz. ‘Right behind us. We have to go forward, quickly.’
Before they could act upon his instruction, the sound of an unfathomably huge explosion penetrated the ice house and bounced around the curved walls as if in an echo chamber, making it impossible to tell which direction it had come from. The ground shook beneath their feet and dust showered from the ceiling, followed by clumps of dirt. At least two of the men screamed.
‘What was that?’ said Kaz, not expecting an answer. He felt someone grab his arm and turned to see Thomas, breathing hard but steadily, and in control.
‘We have to go in,’ he said.
‘Right, yes,’ said Kaz. ‘OK, I’m going first.’
‘Anybody with pistols, give them to me,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ll go last. It’s a narrow corridor, so the soldiers will have to advance in single file. Give me your pistols, I can keep them back.’
Three men handed Thomas weapons, but he refused to accept Kaz’s.
‘You know they have guns too,’ said Kaz, but Thomas pushed him towards the internal door with a snarl.
Deciding that he really rather liked Dora’s dad, Kaz shoved his way through the crowd of men into the dark tunnel. Without lamp or candle it was pitch black, but he remembered that it was straight and level so he forged ahead, one hand against the wall as he went. ‘Follow me,’ he called.
He reckoned he’d been walking into darkness for a minute or two when he heard a single pistol shot somewhere behind him. He increased his pace, not wanting to think about how Thomas was faring. A few moments later he caught a glimmer of light ahead of him, seeping around the edges of the still partially open internal door. He began to run, which wasn’t easy crouched down in a tunnel this low, until he reached the door and pushed through into the undercroft. To his left, light flooded from the doorway of the hidden chamber; the hologram had been switched off and the door was plainly visible.
There was another pistol shot behind him, then another. Then there was a fourth, which meant the soldiers were firing back. But the shots were almost drowned out by the onset of a series of oddly harmonic crashes from somewhere above them, in the hall itself. It sounded like some kind of barrage, and it went on and on, shaking the floor and sprinkling the Clubmen with dust as they filed out of the tunnel into the undercroft chamber. Kaz was hugely relieved when Thomas burst out of the tunnel after them and gave him a look that told Kaz exactly how close his escape had been. Together he and Thomas put their shoulders to the door and forced it closed, even as a ball-shaped bullet sang through the narrowing gap, barely missing them. Unfortunately once the door was closed there was no way to lock it, so Thomas grabbed two of the youngest men and got them to sit with their backs to the door. Two others stood above them, pushing the door closed.
TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Page 26
