Time Riders: The Doomsday Code (40 page)

She carefully started to unroll the parchment. ‘You may light your candle now if there is inadequate light for you to see.’

Cabot shook his head impatiently. ‘’Tis not necessary. The moon is enough. Please … continue.’

She resumed, turning the wooden spindle and spreading out the long curled sheet of parchment on the ground. By the moon’s wan light the pale parchment seemed to almost glow, the dark spider-lines of ink across it every bit as clear and legible as they needed to be.

‘The unidentifiable language is located here,’ said Becks, pointing to a passage three-quarters of the way down the scroll. She put rocks out along the edge of the parchment to stop it curling up again and then leaned back so that her shadow didn’t fall across it.

Cabot squatted down and inspected the writing closely. ‘This here,’ he said, running his fingers along the curls of writing, ‘’tis a form of Gaelic, I believe.’

‘You know this language?’

He grimaced. ‘I know
some
words of it. And there are many forms of this language. I could perhaps translate this for ye if I had some time – and a library of other Gaelic works to compare to.’

She cocked her head and her eyebrows locked in concentration for a moment. After a minute of silent consideration she nodded slowly. A decision silently made. ‘The contamination risk is acceptable for the moment,’ she uttered.

‘What is that, my lady?’

Again she ignored him. ‘You will come with me, please,’ she said.

‘Where to?’

She got to her feet and began foraging among the tall weeds around the gravestone until she finally found what she was after: a long lumber nail. She crouched down in front of the gravestone and began scratching deep lines into the stone.

‘What are ye doing?’

‘Communicating.’

She carried on in silence, nothing but the sound of scraping and scratching and stone grit tumbling to the ground. ‘I am requesting an immediate portal.’

‘What is this? What are ye up to?’ asked Cabot once again.

She turned to look up at him impatiently. ‘You are coming with me.’

‘Coming with ye? Where to?’

‘The future.’

Sal looked at them both. ‘
Jahulla!
That was one,’ she said. ‘Another one. Did you feel it?’ The other two looked at each other. Maddy quickly got up from the table and went over towards the bank of computer monitors.

She sat down at the desk and downloaded the image again from the still-connected drive outside. As it flickered open on the screen, Sal leaned over and traced a finger along the faint new lines on the photograph. ‘There’s another message on your gravestone.’

Adam scribbled down the pigpen glyphs on to a pad of paper.

The girls watched him impatiently as he checked each symbol against the table he’d drawn up on the page of writing paper earlier. ‘Well?’

‘Just hang on!’ His eyes narrowed as he double-checked some of the symbols on the new row that had appeared on his photograph. There were faint lines there, lines that might not have been part of the original carving, and lines lost to nearly a millennium of weathering. He looked down at the page of letters he’d deciphered and realized there were mistakes in there.

‘First word is
extraction
,’ said Sal.

Maddy nodded. ‘The rest is a time-stamp. Twelve numbers, the first four a time, the last eight a date.’

Sal grabbed a pen and quickly scribbled the nearly-words as numbers: 0445 13061194.

Maddy checked her numbers against what Adam had decoded. ‘Yes … yes, OK. Quarter to five in the morning, 13th June 1194. Right?’ She looked at the webcam. ‘You get that, Bob?’

> Affirmative. I have been listening. Date stamp: 04:45, 13 June 1194.

‘There’re no geo-coordinates, though,’ said Maddy.

‘Same coordinates as last time, then,’ said Sal.

Maddy tapped a pen against her lips. ‘Yeah. You get that, Bob?’

> Affirmative. Same geo-placement coordinates.

She leaned back in her chair and glanced round Adam at the rack of equipment beside the empty perspex tube. The charge display showed a full line of green LEDs. ‘All right, we’ve got enough juice on the board to open it up, Bob.’

> Affirmative. Activating density probe.

Cabot looked around the field. Although the sun had yet to climb into view, the peach-stained sky was light now, a sky that would soon be a deep blue and cloudless – another hot summer’s day.

‘Why, pray, are we standing in this field?’

Becks raised a finger. ‘Just a moment.’

Cabot looked around at the softly stirring ears of barley. They rustled and whispered among themselves as they waited in silence for … for what? Lady Rebecca had said ‘the future’.

Days yet to be.

To visit one of those … it was a concept he could barely get his mind around. A day simply
is
. And then after the day has ended, it merely
was
, complete with whatever one remembered of the day in question. To walk into what was
yet to be
 …

He shook his head at the impossibility of it. Perhaps this lady and her friends were afflicted by some madness. He’d come across holy men in Jerusalem who made claim of things just as impossible and nonsensical as this.

‘My lady, perhaps it would be best if we return to the grounds of the priory?’

She shook her head. ‘I am detecting tachyons, Cabot. It appears the message has already been received.’

Tack-ee-ons?
Another one of their strange words that he could only ponder the meaning of. He looked around the field, not sure what a
tack-ee-on
was, or what he should do if one were to approach him.

A fresh breeze stirred the barley, sending a gentle wave across the ears of grain.

‘The portal is coming,’ said Becks.

Cabot’s gaze flitted from one direction to the next. All he could see was the field they were standing in, the edge of the nearby woods and a thin smudge of smoke rising from the priory just over the brow of the hillside. Then all of a sudden he felt a strong buffeting wind, cool against his cheek.

A dozen yards ahead, above the chest-high sea of swaying barley, he could just make out the outline of a shimmering, undulating dome. Within it, he saw swirling dark details that flickered and twisted like the reflection in a disturbed pool of water. ‘What devilry is this!’ his voice croaked hoarsely.

‘It is a time portal,’ said Becks matter-of-factly. She started towards it. ‘Follow me, please.’

But Cabot remained rooted to the spot. Suddenly terrified of this thing that had no place being here in their field. He saw darkness in the middle of it, shapes he couldn’t understand, demon-like shapes that seemed to be waving malevolently to him, beckoning him on.

This can be of no good
, he cautioned himself. He glanced at Lady Rebecca and for a moment wondered if his more devout brothers in the priory had been right all along, that there were demons and devils and a dark place beneath the earth they stood on whither tainted souls were taken down and doomed to burn in torment for an eternity.

Becks turned and saw he hadn’t yet moved. ‘Now!’ she barked at him.

Cabot shook his head. ‘’Tis … ’tis an evil work!’

She pushed her way impatiently through the stalks and grabbed his arm roughly. ‘We are wasting time. The portal can only remain open for a limited period on one charge.’

‘No!’ He tried to wriggle free of her grasp. ‘No! Please!’ But her hand had closed around his lower arm like a vice. She began to wrestle him forward towards the churning darkness.

‘Oh, Lord forgive my sins!’ Cabot began to bellow, trying his best to dig his heels into the soft dry soil. ‘I renounce all evil! I renounce the Devil and his minions!’

Cabot threw a punch at her face. It landed firmly on her cheek, leaving a graze and a welt that was sure to turn into a dark purple bruise within the hour. Her eyebrows knitted disapprovingly.

‘Please do not do that again.’ With both hands she grasped his monk’s habit and lifted him up off the ground. His arms and legs began to flail frantically.

‘Ye are a demon!’ he screamed down at her face. His feet in sandals kicking her stomach, her thighs. ‘I knew it!’

She staggered forward, just about managing to keep her balance as he squirmed, kicked and punched in her grasp.

‘
No! Please!
Have mercy on –!
’

‘WHAT!’ roared John.

Liam looked at Bob, standing beside him. A quick warning glance to him to be ready for anything. There was no knowing how John was going to react to the news.

‘I said it’s gone, Sire. Lady Rebecca took it last night.’

The skin on John’s face raced through several shades of crimson anger, then it drained to a pallid grey. ‘Good God! She was a traitor! She was a spy of Richard’s! She was –’

‘No,’ Liam interrupted him. ‘No, she is nothing to do with Richard, Sire.’

John’s anger was already spent, gone in a moment, leaving him quivering and looking lost.

‘She …’ John’s jaw worked silently. ‘She … But I thought we were … in love.’ He looked slowly up at Liam and he could see tears filling the man’s hooded eyes. ‘But, do you say she was taking me for a … for a fool?’

Liam couldn’t deny that bit. Yes, she had been using him.

‘Lady Rebecca has taken it to a safe place,’ said Liam. The fluttering of nerves in his own voice had gone. John didn’t look like a tyrant about to order his head be cut off. Liam had expected a torrent of abuse, a face full of royal spittle. Instead, John looked all of a sudden like a child, abandoned, frightened and lonely.

‘She told me to … to be
strong
,’ he said quietly, a tear rolling down his cheek into the wispy bristles of his beard. ‘For her … you know? I would have been.’ He swiped at his cheek with a sleeve. ‘For her, you understand? For her … I would have stood up to Richard.’

Liam looked over John’s slumped shoulders at the arched alcove and the balcony beyond. In the heat-shimmering distance beyond the walls of Nottingham, he could see the endless rows of multicoloured tents and marquees of Richard’s assembled army, the sturdy lumber A-frames of half a dozen catapults, being swarmed around and finished by carpenters. Like ants at this distance.

‘I have to surrender to him,’ whispered John. ‘I have to capitulate. The longer I leave it … the angrier he will get! He will –’

‘No!’ said Liam.

John looked up at him sharply, a flash of irritation in his eyes at Liam’s insubordinate interruption.

‘Listen, Sire … if you
do
surrender while you have no Grail, you have
nothing
to bargain with!’ Liam didn’t need to finish that thought for John. By the look in John’s red-rimmed eyes, he knew exactly what
that
meant for him.

‘But, if you stall …’ Liam continued.

‘
Stall?
’ A word John was unfamiliar with.

‘If you wait. Let Richard think you have it … maybe even threaten to destroy it if he attempts to attack –’

‘
Destroy it?
’ John’s eyes looked like they’d glimpsed the very bowels of Hell. ‘Can you imagine, Sheriff – can you imagine what he would do to me? If I … If I were to …’

‘Would he dare risk that, though?’ Liam cocked an eyebrow. ‘Really? After all that he’s done to get hold of it, would he risk you putting a candle to it?’

John swallowed nervously. ‘He … he would know I
daren’t
.’

Liam looked at the man, trembling and pale.
Perhaps he would at that.

‘You still have to be strong, Sire. You have to arrange a meeting with him. You have to tell him we have it here – and, unless his army disbands, you will burn it yourself.’

Bob opened his mouth to say something. Liam knew what it was: a warning about time contamination. The way history was
supposed
to go, Richard’s siege was successful and John surrendered to his older brother. Liam patted his good arm to hush him. John didn’t need to hear that right now, that he was destined to surrender.

‘Buy us a little time, Sire,’ said Liam. ‘Meet with him …
convince
him that you will destroy it if he attempts to attack us.’

John stroked his chin obsessively, the faint tremor of a nervous tic in his quivering jaw. Liam wondered if the poor man could convince anyone of anything right now.

‘Lady Rebecca will be back, I assure you. She’ll be back with the Grail.’

I hope.

‘And then you can arrange a truce, Sire. You’ll have something you can use to bargain with.’

Sébastien Cabot kept his eyes firmly clenched shut, not daring to get his first glimpse of the underworld and the Devil’s workings. Through his closed lids he could sense it was a dark place. His ears picked out sounds he’d never heard before, soft beeps and hums that could only be the devices of evil stirring, ready to tear his mortal soul apart.

‘And who’s
this
?’ a female voice echoed. He sensed they were standing in some cave, perhaps on a ledge that overlooked an infinite cavern filled with a squirming sea of tormented souls below, burning in agony, prodded, stabbed and tortured by demons wandering among them.