Timekeepers: Number 2 in Series (23 page)

The ground shook, knocking him to one side. Within a few seconds the tremors passed, but he had recognised the opening shots of a Waywalkers’ battle. Start off with big, impressive stuff that doesn’t really have much effect, see if you can shock the enemy. He pulled himself back up – and bit his own tongue in shock.

The eyes of the woman in the ceiling were now wide open, bright blue, and staring straight at him. Sam waved. The face didn’t move.

He heard a click at the door again and curled up hastily, lying still. Footsteps approached, pausing near him. Then a hand reached down and placed something by his side. He felt the same hands touch his wrists and heard the click of the locks coming undone, even though the weight of the chains still remained. The footsteps began to retreat.

He rolled over to look at his rescuer, and the chains clinked. The man froze, his back to Sam, but still Sam recognised him. He looked from Tinkerbell to his free hands and feet, to the silver sword and dagger at his side.

Finally he said, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to ask this.’

‘Best not to ask, then.’

‘Perhaps if you could save me the bother? Begin with “because” and let your imagination do the rest.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think you can win. It’s far too late for that,’ said Tinkerbell, not moving.

‘But?’ prompted Sam.

‘I think… you deserve a chance, even though I know it’s a false one.’

‘Hum.’ Sam considered. ‘I take it you don’t want Jehovah to know about this.’

‘No. It doesn’t matter, though. You’re still gonna lose your mind. Inevitably.’

‘If I know where to find my mind, how can it be lost?’

‘Where will you find it, when so many other minds are drowning you?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘That’s a lot to look through.’

‘I won’t be alone.’

‘Yes, you will. You’ll be together with other minds, but you’ll be more alone than you’ve been in your entire life. I thought you deserved a chance to avoid that.’

‘Even though you think I stand no chance anyway.’ Sam smiled and pulled himself up a bit further. ‘Thanks, Tinkerbell.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ the other man said, and hurried from the hall before Sam could say anything more. Tinkerbell, Sam concluded, was not comfortable with being at heart a good guy.

He waited a good few minutes before carefully pulling himself to his feet. Tinkerbell, he found, had even supplied his old sheaths and straps.

Feeling happier, he looked up at the face on the ceiling. It was still staring at him, but now something else had changed. It had acquired, he realised, a hand, where before there hadn’t been one. It seemed to be open, as if in a greeting.

The world shook again. Strike and counter-strike. Sam kept staring at the hand. He could taste on the air the bitter tang of magic. But it wasn’t magic with aim or intent, just a general background roar that rose from the floor like mist and filled the room. He waved a hand up and down, and sparks flashed from his fingertips. Something was building up a charge like nothing he’d ever seen before. He backed away from the centre of the room and bumped against the wall.

It was burning hot.

Holy Hells.
Sam back-pedalled hastily as the figures across the wall began to move. Tiny degrees of motion at first, hardly noticeable as one outline twitched along the side of the wall. It was flowing like oil in water, as seen through very clean glass that kept everything two-dimensional. Sam kept on backing away, suddenly aware that he was surrounded on every side by moving figures. He felt more magic, of a different taste, and glanced towards the entrance. Through the crack between the two doors, what little light had shone was now dimming, passing into shadow and then through to darkness. With it came an unnatural cold that rolled across the floor in a tide and made his breath condense.

This wasn’t part of the general background charge, though. This was Seth and his power. Sam tried to call out. Whatever spell Seth was involved in, it was too deep for Sam’s voice to penetrate.

He looked round the room again and felt his stomach do a little backflip as a figure
reached out of the wall
. A single, pure white hand clutching a pure white sword extended itself from the wall and flailed in the air for a few seconds before returning to the wall.

Please tell me this isn’t as bad as it looks
…
 

More hands now were flailing, turning the walls into some strange animal with black skin and white spines that protruded and flapped about like fish out of water. After the hands came white arms, sickly white, followed by white shoulders and white chins and white faces capped with white hair. From every side they came, men and women of every age, all as white as ghosts, stepping from the walls.

Behind them they left nothing, not a dot to suggest they’d been there. Some carried white swords, some white axes. The majority, however, carried scythes. Endless tiny scythes, as white as the hands that held them. And when the last figure had stepped from the wall they all turned towards the centre of the room and stared with pupil-less eyes at nothing.

Sam waved a hand up and down. Still they stared at nothing. He stood on one leg and stuck his tongue out. Still they stared. He felt a mad surge of laughter well up inside him and he bit his lip to keep it in.

The white figures stood, and did nothing. Sam remembered Jehovah’s words.
Time, for their crimes, bound the souls of the slaughtered citizens to their city for ever.

Tartarus. I’m in Tartarus. And these are the local residents.
 

He remembered something else.
Anyone entering the city who doesn’t bear the mark of a Greater Power will be destroyed by the spirits that guard it.

As if reading his mind, every eye in the room suddenly seemed fixed on him. Heads turned in unison, a hundred empty eyes stared at him. There was a thud as a hundred feet took a step towards him, again in perfect unison. He looked up at the figure above, who had lost her pupils and irises yet still managed to stare at him as though reading him like a book.

He looked to the people advancing, chose one at random and spoke in a low, urgent voice in Elysian. ‘I am a Son of Time and the Bearer of Light. You cannot harm me.’ Another step, another. ‘I bear the marks of every Greater Power in the whole sodding universe! Their minds are inside mine, mine is inside theirs, we are One!’

Another step. A ring closing around him. He shut his eyes and cried in a tight, scared voice, ‘I am the intention and the act, the strength and the weakness, the individual and the whole! I am…
becoming
… all that lives! It is becoming me!’

Silence. No death, though, which was a pleasant reassurance. He opened his eyes just a bit. A hundred empty eyes stared back at him. A hundred blades hung poised for the kill, and remained exactly that – poised. Then, with an audible snap, the scythes went down and the eyes flashed past Sam as if he wasn’t there. The white people wheeled about and began to march to the doors, streaming by, parting and closing around Sam like a river round a boulder.

Sam waited until they were gone, and looked at the figure above. Still the empty eyes were open, but they seemed less intent on him now. The ground shook again and he turned, heading for the doors.

Outside, darkness had fallen. Thick, cloying darkness, cold in more sense than one. Night was the Incarnate of more than just an absence of the sun. She embodied everything that was fearful in the dark, all the childish nightmares, all the creatures that stalked under the moon, all the magic and the mystery. Seth was a Son of Night, and could call on this.

Even though the darkness was complete, deeper patches moved within it, and sounds rose and fell, half-heard and gone as soon as Sam turned to find what made them. Although no light was present, still it managed to play tricks. Sam thought he saw teeth flash. He thought he saw a hand with a knife dart out of a shadow and disappear again. He thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes. He thought he saw… and knew it was silly, prayed it was silly. He wasn’t seeing a corpse. To prove it he summoned a small sphere of light and marched boldly towards it. The corpse turned out to be nothing more than a white shutter in a black marble house, on which a pair of stone pillars had thrown peculiar shadows.

By the warmth of his little sphere of light, he managed to penetrate more of the darkness. He was in a street of houses. On some, white figures were pulling themselves free, stepping off the walls, at least one figure per house. Bound for ever to Tartarus, they had been called in its defence against Seth.

Which reminded him. He looked up and saw fires burning along a high black wall, eclipsed occasionally by figures passing across them. Ashen’ia, no doubt. They, having sold their souls to a Greater Power, would be safe within the city from the city’s guardian defenders. To some small degree they could use its walls to defend themselves.

Poor fools. If by a chance you look like winning, the Powers you sold your souls to will simply take control, and ensure that you die anyway.
 

Another thought crossed his mind.
Cronus is a Greater Power. Thor
…

Sam began to walk, quickly. He found the nearest fires and headed towards them, breaking into a run as the street shook again. It wouldn’t be long before they began the serious magics, the real world-breakers. He saw a phalanx of white people ahead and pushed through them. They offered no resistance.

The wall still seemed a very long way off when the catapults let fire. They were clearly aimed to smash a way through the walls. But the first shots were misjudged, and the flaming missiles from the catapults flew straight over the walls and exploded on the houses inside, raining down fire on every side. Or perhaps that was the point – destroy the houses that the spirits are tied to in order to destroy the spirits themselves.

The Ashen’ia on the walls, seeing that the attack had really started, began to yell. It was, Sam suspected, supposed to be a war chant, but sounded more like a very bad close harmony chorus trying to do rap.

He heard drums beating in the distance, and recognised them as belonging to one of the Princes of Hell. Troops were attacking…

More balls of flaming death began to descend. There was a direct hit somewhere on the walls and the Ashen’ias’ war chant faltered. Missiles rained down on the city behind the wall, turning the artificial night orange as they passed. Yet when they hit there were no screams. There were no living creatures to suffer.

Sam felt new magic join the already suffocating stench that filled the air along with the smell of smoke and sulphur. From all around, complementing the night, fog began to rise; Sam’s narrow range of vision shrunk yet further.

The fog, against expectations, didn’t dull the noise of the drums. It seemed to amplify it, and their low boom carried through every street, bounced off Sam’s ears and hummed up through his feet. He smelled death and fear.
Odin. This is Odin’s work. He’s a Son of War, he’s trying to get to you.

The walls shook again. The rain of burning stones and sulphur had turned into a storm. They didn’t stop coming, filling the sky with fire as they poured down. Sam heard the hiss of the catapults being released, the crackle of the stones racing through the sky, the thud and roar as they struck, the drums, the battle cries of the Ashen’ia, and he marvelled at how deathly silent the city would otherwise be. Without war, it would be utterly still, the endless sunlight of the desert catching the black marble and the sleeping figures within to make the city rather beautiful. If anything, that made him more desperate. He ran faster.

Sam saw a dark stairwell leading into a tower in the wall, and sprinted up it. He reached the top as Seth’s army began their own war cry, hammering against their shields and sounding no more convincing than the Ashen’ia.

There were more of them than he’d imagined. Seth must have been pressing thousands into his service as he swept through Hell, threatening to destroy them with the power of the Pandora spirits unless they did what he wanted. They stretched across the desert, looking almost pretty, a hundred thousand specks of fire in the darkness, like a galaxy seen from Earth. Hundreds of catapults, loading and firing. Sam could sense demons, angels, avatars, even some humans in the throng. All going to charge the Ashen’ia, all going to die. For One. Many dying for the One, the ultimate inversion of the noble ideal. Many dying for his father’s cause.

He could hear the Pandora spirits singing through the air. They circled over Seth’s camp, waiting to attack. Suspicion, Jehovah’s spirit, was there too. No doubt Jehovah was with it, pretending to be one with Seth’s ambition, steering events to his own end. And yes, here came Jehovah’s power, filling Seth’s army with the fervent belief that they were dying for the greatest cause ever. Filled with that kind of magic, they could eat their way through the walls.

It was weaker than it had been, however. Jehovah had clearly been shocked by Sam’s attack.

screamed Sam wordlessly.

No one heard him. He felt the song of the Pandora spirits reach a pitch, and as one they hurtled towards the city. Still the catapults kept on flying, turning the city ablaze and shattering the night and silence. Fractured stone fell from the black walls of Tartarus, cracks spreading through the marble. Sam looked along the wall and saw a couple of lights go out. Saw the gates open. Knew how.

he screamed.

Silence, but he knew Thor had heard him. whispered an answer in his mind.

Sam’s mind stayed focused on the gate. Perhaps the Ashen’ia would find it. Perhaps they’d close it in time. Perhaps Thor hadn’t managed to do his work properly, perhaps… perhaps Sam had distracted him enough.

he sent, privately willing Thor away from the gates.