Around the lab, lights flashed on as boards powered to life. Digital readouts came on in sequence, and the staff hurried to initiate systems checks.
“Can we catch it? Can we grab onto it?”
“Don’t know yet,” said the grim-faced technician, his fingers going like lightning over the controls. “God help us if we do catch it. I’m not sure just what we’ll have.”
The woman stood at his shoulder, glancing back only once at Noel. Her face was pale with concern. “And the time destination?”
“Final programming going in now,” he replied absently, his fingers working the keypad. “London, England…1697. Got that. Now for the specific month and day…”
“Can you find Leon’s wave pattern?” asked the woman anxiously. “Can you pinpoint it?”
“No…it’s scattered worse than it’s ever been. None of these readings look right. Look at how they’re fluctuating back and forth. They should be steady.”
“If we boost?”
“No! It won’t work. Too dangerous to send him like this. We’ll have to abort.”
“But, Bruthe—”
“I said abort! Close it down.”
Even as the technician reached for the controls, the distortion came. The walls rippled and shuddered. One moment Noel’s surroundings looked normal; the next they became bizarre and incomprehensible. The shapes that had once been equipment, tables, and chairs bulged and mutated into abstractions. Then they shattered into fragments that went spinning around him. Light came, so blinding his eyes watered and squinted, and he could hear a thundering roar.
He wasn’t sure how long the disorientation lasted, but at some point the light dimmed by steady degrees, becoming less blinding, then tolerable. It coalesced into a ribbon of sparkling light that coiled in a tight spiral, then unfurled across the lab with unbelievable speed. The curls in its length snapped taut and arrow straight as it came toward him.
Fear drew him up. He faced it, mesmerized, his heart hammering wildly in his chest. He knew instinctively that it was aiming itself directly at him, that it wanted him. In that instant his fear battled with curiosity. This was something new, something never before witnessed by mankind. Nature always sought to bring aberrations back into line with her laws. He and Leon had created such an aberration, and time itself was reaching for him now.
His pulse hammered. His breath felt locked inside his chest as though his lungs had turned to stone. In his life he’d been able to face most crises with courage, but before this onrush of raw cosmic energy, his fear grew overwhelming. He turned to run.
The ribbon of light pierced his back like a spearhead, its violence so unexpected, so sharp, he could not find enough breath to cry out. Impaled on it, lifted by it, he felt the radiance surge through him, filling him. He flung up his arms, his back arching against the force of this energy man was never designed to experience. It seared through his body with a coldness like fire, and he thought he would explode from the pressure of it inside him. Just when he could stand it no more, it burst from his chest and careened to the far side of the lab. Now he was threaded on the stream of light like a bead. Twist and struggle though he might, he could not pull free.
Catching his breath at last, he screamed.
The sound issuing from his throat was absorbed into the energy band. The fiery stream continued flowing through his body while the front tip of the light ribbon swept up and down, probing the far corners of the lab. Still suspended on it, being lifted or dropped as it undulated and coiled, Noel held out his arms and saw himself bathed in an eerie backwash of colored light. His skin had taken on a radiance of its own, lit by the energy flowing through him. Sparks danced from his fingertips, and a blazing corona surrounded his head. His hair blew back from his face, and he could feel his skin hardening into something brittle, like a carapace.
Across the lab, the open portal filled with a strange, unearthly luminescence. Within it, ripples of multiple energy bands crossed and sparked. The plasmic maw began to swirl, to roil with gathering force, feeding on the distortion itself yet supplying it in turn as a loop was generated.
With a mighty crack of sound that could have shattered the world, the tip of the light ribbon found the open portal and speared through it, clearing a pathway through the heaving, swirling mass of cloud and energy vapor. For an instant Noel saw to the other side with unexpected clarity. The shapes there were no longer peculiar and frightening. They were now in sync with his own dimension. They matched his reference concepts of reality. They became comprehensible for the first time. He saw people jostling along a muddy street. There were horse-drawn wagons, pigs rooting in the sewage, and vendors crying their wares. He smelled the stench of unwashed humanity, garbage, and animals. Their voices and clamor reached him like a beam of hot sunlight.
“Noel?”
Hearing that cry, uttered here on this side of the portal, he managed to turn his head. Dr. Ellis was on her feet, her hair standing on end from the electrical discharges in the room. He saw the others—Wemble and Bruthe, Meissen and Amie, Pitsdon-Wells and even Speratkin—all crouching for cover behind tables. Their faces were seared with colors man was not meant to experience. Their eyes shone with fear and wonder.
He held out his hands, still streaming with the energy that coursed through him. “Send Trojan back!” he shouted with all his might. “He’s out of sync with time. He must go back. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” said Dr. Ellis. “But, Noel, you can’t—”
Lightning forked from the portal into the lab, jabbing raw energy into walls and setting circuitry on fire. Black smoke boiled over the pungent stench of burning optics. The street scene within the time portal vanished behind a curtain of smoke. Everything in the lab stopped still, even the energy stopped coursing through the ribbon. Noel felt as though he had been suspended on a frozen conduit. He found himself holding his breath, waiting…waiting for what?
The distortion began to recede, and the energy wave reversed itself.
Still speared upon it, he screamed again as the light ribbon was drawn backward through him. The smoke-wreathed walls rippled and twisted. Tables teetered and fell over as though the entire building were being shaken. Noel expected the energy wave to vanish, thus letting him fall to the ground. Instead he found himself moving with it, passing through solid objects without feeling them, flying straight for the swirling, roiling, horrifying mass of energy just beyond the open portal.
Fresh fear swept him, blotting out everything except the horror that he faced. Not like this. He didn’t want to go like this.
He forgot what lay at stake. He didn’t want to enter this wild time stream. It was engulfing him, absorbing him, killing him.
Pain sheeted him in waves, a pain so encompassing he could not endure it. Yet there was no blacking out, no means of escape. The LOCs on his wrists activated and grew hot, burning into his flesh. His skin, so thickened and hardened only moments before, now seemed to melt and run off his bones, the pool of it separating into individual globules that floated past his face. Images flashed through his brain too rapidly to comprehend; a blurred collage of faces, voices, and memories screamed past him.
He was becoming a different entity, transforming from matter to energy, changing from an object to a streak of light, leaving one dimension for another.
Then, with a mighty boom of sound, he was sucked through the portal into absolute, terrifying darkness, spinning around and around without reference point. The energy wave inside him vanished, leaving him drained and empty. He was nowhere, nowhen. He was nothing.
In that moment he went mad.
Lost, he fell into the darkness, sucked down and down into the vortex of no return, a place of no existence, the void between dimensions. Screaming without voice, his mind was driven to the stark edge by the terror of it.
From somewhere in that nothingness, there came Leon’s face, his face, laughing at him with wild lunacy. The glee, the satisfaction, the gloating all emanated from L
eon. Noel understood. They were trapped here together, chained to the perpetual hell of nonexistence. For Leon it was the ultimate joke; for him it was the end.
The last cohesive part of him cracked and began to crumble. He could not hang on, could not hold himself together.
Then, like a lifeline, he heard Tchielskov’s soft, precise voice: “Remember this, my boy. When you travel, you are stepping off the cliff of reality into the void of eternity. You must create your own reference points. None will exist there save those you provide for yourself.
“Think of where you are going. Find one clear image and cling to it with all the mental power you possess.”
For no reason at all, Noel thought of the pig. That huge, hot, smelly beast rooting in the muddy street.
He stopped spinning in the darkness. Like an arrow shot from a bow, he went hurtling through an ether that lightened into grayness, then into silver, then into a pale radiance, then into sunlight hot and fiery.
Spat from the time stream back into reality, Noel went tumbling head over heels through a mud puddle and smacked into a rickety fence made of woven sticks. He lay there a moment, winded and dazed. The ground was hard beneath his cheek. Damp mud soaked through his clothing. He felt sunshine burn into his back like an iron. The earth stank. The air stank. He coughed and dragged in a breath with difficulty. His lungs struggled as though they hadn’t operated in a long while. It was hard to believe that he’d survived his passage through the time stream, much less actually come out safely on the other side. And yet, here he was on solid ground.
Fuzziness clouded his mind. Something nudged his side, then nudged him again with more force. Noel tried to focus.
Survival. He was somewhere, in the past. Actually there, here, somewhere sent, without friends, had to move, had to live, had to find…had to find…
Leon.
Noel’s mind cleared so abruptly it was like a slap. For the first time in weeks he felt whole, freed from the uneasiness that had plagued him since his separation from Leon. His energy and optimism came bouncing back. Just getting here had been a tremendous achievement. And although he did not want to think about facing the time stream again, he knew that he could—he would—find Leon and restore the rip in the time fabric that their separation had caused.
He rolled over on his back, ready to sit up. But over him loomed something large and furry. It snuffled his ear and grunted. He found himself looking straight into the ugly snout of the largest sow he had ever seen.
Tiny piggy eyes stared back at him. She snorted, her large snout working. Her mouth chewed something, and he glimpsed wicked teeth.
With a gasp, he jerked out from under her, scrambling up to his feet with a stagger and turning around to find himself in a small pen holding several more swine.
A stick whistled through the air and crashed down upon his shoulders. The blow nearly knocked him flat. “’Ere, ye thief,” screeched a voice like a rusty hinge. “Bold as brass ye are. What’re ye doin’ in my pigpen?”
Whirling around, Noel ducked in time to avoid another blow. He found himself confronting a wizened old woman, her gray straggling hair bound back with a bright kerchief, her body shawled and gowned in rags, her stockinged feet kept above the mud in tall pattens, and a pipe stuck in the corner of her toothless mouth.
Her eyes blazed with fury, and she swung the stick at him again. “Get out o’ there, ye thief. Blackguard! Knave! Ye’ll no steal my shoats.”
The pigpen, as rickety and transitory looking as it was, stood at the corner of a wide juncture in the street. Apparently this was a meat market of sorts, for nearby was a pen full of honking geese, and beyond it hens fussed and cackled. On the other side, a boy in grimy rags guarded a basket of fish that looked none too fresh in the withering heat.
Numerous merchants and customers stood about in clusters. They haggled for prices, pinched merchandise, and shook their heads, but when the old woman started shouting and hitting Noel with her stick, they all gathered around to watch and laugh. The men were for the most part bearded and long haired, standing in doublets and baggy breeches. Dust coated their wide-topped boots. The women, white faced and tall on pattens to clear their long skirts of the dust and dung, wore broad, rather shapeless bodices that hung from their throats to their hips, then wide skirts, all layered and gathered down to their feet. The unflattering garb made most of them look fat. Faces powdered white with lead and rouged, their hair knotted and frizzed into a profusion of ringlets, they were garish and unfriendly, and their voices shrieked over the general din.
“Tear into ’im, old woman!”
“Ooh, isn’t ’e a strapping one? Fair makes me ’eart flutter.”
“With mud all over ’im? Pah!”
“I likes ’em like that, dark and dangerous,” said another, winking at Noel.
Distracted, he neglected to duck in time, and the old woman’s stick thudded into his back with enough force to make him yelp.
“That’s enough!” he yelled at her.
“Enough, is it?” she shouted back. “I’ll show ye enough, ye dirty—”
She swung wildly at him, but he dodged that one. In doing so, however, he tripped over his sword and fell to one knee. Mud splashed around him. The crowd roared with laughter.
“Well, now, Dame Grace,” said one fellow, his voice booming over the noise. “Is that any way to treat a customer?”
“Customer?” shrieked the pig woman, taking another swing at Noel, who scrambled out of the way. “Witch, more like! I seen ’im come right out o’ the thin air itself. ’E’s a familiar, workin’ fer Old Scratch!”
Several people drew back with gasps, and some made furtive warding gestures, or crossed themselves. Noel, aware that this could get ugly fast, jumped to his feet and called out, “I’m nothing of the kind. All I want is a proper young pig for dinner, and this is how I’m treated.”
“Hah!” yelled the old woman. “Where’s ’is money, if ’e’s a customer? Where’s ’is servant, come forth to ’aggle fer ’im? Impostor! Scoundrel! Devil!”
Wound up again, and swinging the stick with every accusation, she chased Noel around the pen once more, sending disgruntled pigs trotting from one side to the other.
There was no point in talking to her, no point in making up an explanation. Calling attention to himself was not what a traveler was supposed to do. His job was to blend in and remain unobtrusive. It was, Noel told himself, time for a strategic retreat.
Ducking from the rain of blows that came down relentlessly upon his head and shoulders, Noel tried to leap the fence but caught his toe and came tumbling down. The fence fell with him, and with squeals the pigs bolted into the laughing crowd.
“Ham tonight, mates!” yelled someone, and the race was on after the fleeing animals.
“My pigs! My livelihood! Ye thief! Ye devil! I’ll ’ave yer ’ide nailed to my wall fer this,” she cried, beating him with more force than before. “Magistrate! Guards! ’Elp!”
Noel rolled beyond her reach, dodged a hand that reached for his coattails, and darted into the crowd as fast as his legs would carry him.
“Catch the blighter!” yelled someone.
“Catch the witch!”
A pair of women standing directly in Noel’s way shrank from him, screaming hysterically.
Muttering curses under his breath, Noel veered around them and picked up speed. A man came at him, but Noel thrust him off and ran down the street.
Behind him, he could hear the pig woman screeching and other women screaming, one claiming his touch had burned her arm. Their stupid superstitions annoyed him, especially since he knew they could whip themselves into a mob frenzy with very little trouble. He had no desire to be the target of a witch-hunt, and he ran as fast as he could with one hand on his sword hilt and the other on his hat. Within a few yards, his legs began to burn and stagger. His breath came in harsh wheezes, and his heart was bursting.
He knew he could not keep up this pace long, yet a glance back t
old him his pursuers were still coming.
“Seize that man!” yelled one. “That man running! Aye, the one in the blue coat. Seize him!”
An individual with a badly pocked face attempted to grab Noel’s sleeve. With a snarl, Noel shoved him aside and veered down another street that was narrower and choked with pedestrians.
He could not run in this crowd, and it was wise to slow down and call less attention to himself. Whipping off his hat, Noel tucked it beneath his arm and did his best to blend in among the thick of them.
Glancing back, he saw his knot of pursuers had dwindled and fallen behind. But they were still coming. He saw one spot him and point.
“There he is!”
“Damn!”
Cursing, Noel whipped between two mule-drawn carts laden with apples and turnips, saw an alley, and ducked into it.
At once, his gut shrank with dismay. Alley or street, it was narrow and dark, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, and it stank of raw sewage.
It had the look of a trap, yet he dared not return to the larger street. His strength was draining fast from the exertion. A stitch went through his side. The ravenous hunger that was a travel side effect gnawed deep within him, taking his resources too fast.
Dashing up a set of rickety steps, he flung himself into a doorway, panting hard and shrinking back into its recesses as much as possible.
The men plunged by the mouth of the alley a moment later, pausing to peer into it, arguing among themselves, then running on. Noel closed his eyes a moment in relief and stayed there a few seconds longer to catch his breath.
He was nearly faint with hunger and burning with thirst. Something to drink was not available, but he pulled out the food packet and devoured its contents greedily.
He knew he was taking a risk by staying here. The men might double back, and if they did he’d be in real trouble. But the food revived him a bit and he remained in the doorway until he’d gobbled every last crumb.
By then he had his wind back, but his legs were still trembly and cramping with fatigue. Concerned, Noel massaged his calf muscles. He was lean and fit. During the past few weeks of his hiatus at the Institute, he had worked out daily to keep himself in shape. Running this distance shouldn’t have taxed him at all, but he felt as though he’d gone a marathon.
Restoration Page 7
