The navigator (29 page)

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a massive steel door. Wesley threw his weight against it, and with a rusty protest it swung open. They stepped out onto a gangway above the engines. The engine room was a vast cavern of dangling cables and open sumps and broken dials. Pipes leaked great gouts of steam or oozed oil. Massive piston rods rose and fell, making the ground shake. Tappets clattered. In the middle of the engine room, two great boilers roared and hissed and flared.

"Come on!" Wesley shouted. Cati followed him. They went down a metal stairway until they reached the floor of the engine room. The heat was intense. Wesley walked purposefully toward the giant boilers. Huge fires blazed at the foot of the boilers. Even at this distance Cati could feel a sheen of sweat on her face, but Wesley kept going forward and she followed.

As they clambered onto the final catwalk, Cati could see the boilers glowing a dull orange, burning who knew what kind of fuel.

"Look," Wesley said. At the foot of the biggest boiler and dwarfed by its bulk, a figure crouched. Chancellor. He did not see them as they approached. They were three meters away from him and the heat was like a wall. They stopped. Even above the noise of the engine room they could hear his voice, thin and piercing.

"Cold," he moaned, "so cold, so cold."

"Chancellor!" Wesley called out.

The man spun around and as he did so he put his hand on the railing beside him. Cati was also holding the rail,

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but she snatched her hand away as sudden cold seared it. She looked down. Despite the heat, the rail was covered with frost. She looked up. Chancellor's face was whiter than anything she had ever seen.

"What do you want, Raggie?" Chancellor demanded. "Can a man not get a little heat in a cold world?"

"It was you tried to sink Boat, weren't it?" Wesley said. Chancellor did not reply. "And no one ever seen Owen with Johnston," Wesley went on evenly.

"We thought it was Samual!" exclaimed Cati.

"All damn lies," Wesley said, his fists bunched now.

"There was a spy all along," Cati said. "It was you!"

"Johnston got told every move the Resisters did make," Wesley said.

"I don't understand," Cati said. "Why are you working with the Harsh? After everything ... all they want to do is freeze us forever!"

"No," Chancellor said, "they aren't like that. You don't understand. They wanted to make an island in time for us. I went to see them, to save us."

"They wouldn't save us," Wesley said. "And even if they did, what about everybody else?"

"All the people who lived all through time," Cati said, horrified. "What about them?"

"That is true," Chancellor said, and this time his voice was full of sorrow. "All those people." Great tears welled in his eyes, which froze as he bowed his head. Wesley and Cati watched as the tears formed into long icicles.

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"We would have taken care of the future," Chancellor said. "There would have been someone left alive. There would have been hope. A small hope, but still a hope."

Cati thought of the loneliness of the man as he tried to make terrible decisions for the good of everyone. Chancellor raised a hand to his face as though to wipe away the long icicles that had formed on his eyes. Then, in one sudden movement, he snapped off an icicle and with a vicious flick of his wrist, his eyes filled with hatred, he sent the icicle speeding through the air, a stiletto of ice, with its long blade aimed precisely at Cati's heart. There was nothing she could do. It seemed she could hear the whistle of the ice blade as it cleaved the air, and she closed her eyes and waited for it to strike her.

Time flickered.

Cati opened her eyes. Once again she saw Chancellor reach up as if to wipe the ice tears away, but this time she knew what was going to happen. And so did Wesley.

"No!" he shouted, and lunged toward Chancellor just as the man started to flick the tear toward Cati. Wesley's shoulder hit Chancellor on the hip, throwing him off balance, and the deadly tear, instead of hitting Cati, struck the pipe at her shoulder with an icy clang.

Chancellor stumbled, his arms flailing as he sought to regain his balance. He reached out for a pipe to stop himself, but the ice that formed on the pipe the second he touched it formed a glaze so that his fingers slipped

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off. Cati and Wesley could only watch in horror as he staggered backward toward the fiery mouth of the ship's furnace.

"No! No!" he cried out. Cati hid her eyes, wishing that time would flicker again and bring them back to before all of this happened. There was a roar, a huge hissing sound, and the heat of the furnace dimmed. Cati opened her eyes. The furnace was almost black now, and it seemed as if the cold in Chancellor's bones had almost extinguished it. Then suddenly the flames leapt up again and a huge cloud of boiling steam billowed out at them.

"Come on!" Wesley yelled. "Let's get out of here." He pushed Cati in front of him as they dashed toward the exit, just ahead of the scalding steam. They stumbled through the door and Wesley threw his shoulder against it. With a protesting creak, it swung shut. Wesley slumped to the floor.

"Is he ... is he gone?" Cati asked. Wesley nodded.

"Like ice thrown on a fire. Good thing the way time flickered when he threw the tear at you. Or else ..."

"He must have been working for the Harsh all along," she said.

"Aye. Remember the fight by the river? The way they always knew what we were going to do next?"

"He always took the other side against Owen too, acting like he was just being reasonable."

"He done the stopcock as well. They turned him good. You got to watch them Harsh. There's more to them than ice. ... What's that?"

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The ship was slowing, the great engines juddering to a halt, the hull creaking and groaning with a sound of rivets popping. They ran quickly up the gangways, trying not to slip on the oily deck or fall into one of the gaping holes. Eventually they burst into the open air. Cati gasped in astonishment. Even Wesley swore quietly to himself and took a step backward. Somehow they had reached the Great Machine in the north, and the object they had seen on the horizon towered above them, bigger than anything Cati had ever seen, a great whirling, twisting mass that grew bigger as it went up and up, rising from a point on an island. As it disappeared into the sky, massive storms raged, sheets of lightning crackling about it. And as it spiraled upward, a roaring filled the air. On and on it went, its vastness humbling and terrifying. If it had been night, Cati thought, then even the very stars would be sucked into it.

"Goes on for ever," Wesley breathed.

"Yes, it does," the Sub-Commandant said. "It goes on to eternity. In a way, it is eternity."

"It's like a giant waterspout or something," Cati said.

"That's a good comparison," Dr. Diamond replied, "except it's not made of water, it's made of time." The scientist's face was pale with excitement. "Look closely."

Cati stared at it as it writhed over them. It seemed that she could see vast oceans appearing and fading, stars being born, planets dying. There were continents covered in trees that seemed to wither in an instant. A great city went from shining citadel to ruins in the blink of an eye.

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Dr. Diamond's notebook was in his hand and he was scribbling furiously. Cari saw that her father was looking at her.

"What is it, Cati?" he said quietly. "What's wrong?"

"It's Chancellor," Wesley said. Quickly he told the Sub-Commandant and Dr. Diamond what had happened. The Sub-Commandant turned away and bowed his head. Dr. Diamond opened his mouth to say something, then he too turned away. They stood in silence for several minutes. The ship drifted on the cold, black ocean and chunks of ice struck its hull with low thuds.

"He betrayed us all," the Sub-Commandant said bitterly.

"He went to the Harsh to parley and was corrupted," Dr. Diamond said. "Don't be too hard on him."

"I should have seen it." The Sub-Commandant's fists were clenched. "I should have read it in his eyes. It was there, you know. His treachery was there to be seen for those who looked."

"He was a proud and subtle man," Dr. Diamond said. "He knew how to hide his duplicity from us."

They might have stood there forever had the sound of the great spout of time not changed, adding an ominous and ever-increasing shriek to its tumultuous roaring.

"We have to hurry!" Dr. Diamond exclaimed. "Or the Puissance will reach a pitch that we can't stop."

"We have to get to the Machine itself," the Sub-Commandant said.

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"Where's that?" asked Wesley.

"The part at the bottom is the Great Machine," Dr. Diamond said. "It generates the Puissance, which is the vortex--what Cati called the waterspout." He hesitated. "Chancellor was a traitor in the end, but I think the Harsh exploited his desire to do good, to save something from the ruins."

Dr. Diamond took out a small pocketbook. Between the pages was a pressed and faded cornflower. "You were a friend and comrade once," he said. "This is how we remember you."

He cast the cornflower into the sea. For a moment it floated on the frozen ocean, a symbol of spring and hope, and then it disappeared beneath the black water.

Owen had lost all sense of time passing as the sleigh sped silently across the ice. The cover was stiff with ice, but it was pleasantly warm beneath the skins and he dozed on and off, waking once in the night and looking up to see a clear sky and thousands of stars. The dogs ran tirelessly, their breath streaming out behind them like pennants in the cold air. The next time he woke it could not have been more different. It was gray dawn and it was snowing hard. Pieta had pulled down the cover behind them so that it acted as a roof, leaving a thin slit through which they could see. They shared the food that the Long Woman had given him. It was warm in the sleigh and Owen started to wish that the ride would last forever.

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Pieta had thawed a lot from the ferocious warrior he had first met, and he felt brave enough to question her about the Long Woman. She told him that there were many islands in time, some small, some large. Some were dedicated to resisting the Harsh and their allies, and some were devoted to other, unknown purposes, like that of the Long Woman. "But if the Workhouse ever Ms," she said, "all of them will fall."

After a while Owen slept again. His body had taken a lot of punishment and he hadn't slept much since he had been captured by Johnston. But when he woke it was night again and he was confused.

"I didn't sleep all day, did I?" he asked.

"No," Pieta said with a frown. "Time is changing fast and both day and night are short now. I hope we aren't too late."

That dawn the snow cleared and they could see a great writhing column on the horizon. Arcana slowed the dogs to a halt. He sniffed the air cautiously, then lifted his muzzle and howled long and loud. The other dogs joined him and their cries split the air. Then the ice runner leapt forward again, twice as fast. A spray of ice crystals from the runners hung in the air long after they had passed.

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The ship moved slowly forward as Dr. Diamond studied die Puissance with his telescope. He had spotted the ice bridge that led from the mainland to the island.

"They'll be guarding that," the Sub-Commandant muttered. "We'll have to land on the island somehow." He seemed preoccupied and sad since the death of Chancellor.

Overhearing this, Wesley went hunting for a boat to take them ashore. The ship had once had lifeboats but now the shattered remnants hung from davits fused with rust. On the foredeck, though, Wesley found a small boat that had probably been used for painting the hull, for it seemed that gallons of multicolored paint had been spilled on it. Fortunately, the spilled paint had preserved

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the woodwork, so Uel and Mervyn started to repair a few sprung planks and fashion oars from old bits of timber they found around the place. The little girl stood in the bow and did not turn around. The Grim Captain stood similarly unmoved at the wheel.

Slowly they inched nearer to the island. Cati could see the mainland clearly. It was bleak and treeless. There seemed to be an opening into an estuary or a lake, and a fast-flowing river emptied into the sea not far from it. As she watched, an object emerged from the mouth of the river. There were people sitting on it.

"Look!" she said to Dr. Diamond, but he was engaged in a complicated calculation and did not turn around. "Wesley!" she called. Wesley came over and followed Cati's pointing finger. He looked, then deftly plucked the doctor's binoculars from his coat pocket.

" 'Scuse me, doc," he said, although Dr. Diamond didn't hear. Wesley looked through the binoculars, then whistled softly.

"Here," he said to Cati, "take a look for yourself."

She put the binoculars to her eye.

"That's Johnston, isn't it?"

"And two of his men. Looks like trouble for somebody."

Cati swung the binoculars around. At the mouth of the lake inlet she saw more movement. Then suddenly a sleigh came into view, a sleigh traveling at breakneck speed and pulled by a team of the biggest dogs she had