Tanglewreck (11 page)

‘Wretch, have you forgotten who ruled over you? Have you forgotten this?’

Abel Darkwater turned to one of his cabinets and took out what looked like a short leather truncheon. Silver saw Micah wince. Darkwater laughed.

‘Have you forgotten this already?’ With a sudden swing, Darkwater hit Micah on the side of his head. Blood spurted out on the carpet as Micah fell on to his knees. Silver dived at Abel Darkwater, who grabbed her wrist. She bit him. He pushed her away, nursing his hand.

‘Foolish child! None of you can stand against me. I will bide my time, oh yes, for I have more of it than you, Silver. You will lead me to the Timekeeper, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not.’

Micah stood up unsteadily, mopping his face. He said to Abel Darkwater, ‘Be she the Child with the Golden Face?’

‘Ha ha ha, ha ha ha,’ laughed Abel Darkwater, ‘so you
remember a thing or two after all, do you? Well, I will tell you as much as you will tell me: nothing! Now, go back to your filthy underground bog, and take the child with you. You will spare me the expense of feeding her.’

Micah and Balthazar did not speak. They shuffled out of the door and down the stairs as though they had been broken by something heavy and evil. Silver followed them, not knowing what she should do. Abel Darkwater stood at the top of the stairs watching them go.

She turned round. ‘Where is Mrs Rokabye?

‘Mrs Rokabye is at the theatre. She has gone to see
The Lion King
. Sniveller has taken her. She quite grew to like Sniveller when she discovered he is a poisoner by profession. You remember Sniveller, don’t you, Micah – although you knew him as the White Lead Man in those days?’

Micah did not reply.

‘Doesn’t she care about me at all?’ asked Silver, who knew Mrs Rokabye was bad, but had held out a faint hope that she was not all bad.

‘Of course she does,’ said Abel Darkwater cheerfully. ‘We all do, very much, but it would have been a pity to waste the tickets.’

He turned and went back into his study and closed the door.

As soon as the three of them were back down in the tunnel, Gabriel, waiting for them patiently, could see that things had gone very badly, but he did not break the oath of silence.
They rode back on the Petrol Ponies, and parked them without speaking.

Only when he was back in the warm circle of the Chamber, with a bottle of something strong-smelling to drink, did Micah speak.

‘Certain it is that he has not discovered that pin, that hand of the clock.’

‘Then where is it?’ demanded Silver.

‘That I know not,’ said Micah.

‘But what can we do now? Shall we go back to Tanglewreck?’

‘I know not,’ said Micah. ‘I must dwell on this awhile, but there is something I know.’ He paused to light his pipe. ‘Someone else has knowledge of the Timekeeper. Someone who thy mother and father and sister met with on the day you tell us of, the day they were journeying to Abel Darkwater.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Silver.

‘They vanished, yea. The Timekeeper vanished, yea. The one man who has sought it for centuries has lost it once more. Someone else must be nearby.’

‘But who?’ wondered Silver.

Regalia Mason liked to be early to meetings; it was an interesting way of making others feel uncomfortable. If the most important person in the room is early, even those who are on time feel as though they are late.

It amused Regalia Mason to manipulate someone’s idea of Time in these small ways. Soon she intended to be manipulating Time in much bigger ways too.

She was reading through the notes supplied by the Committee. Since the first Time Tornado had hit London Bridge and the school bus had disappeared, there had been a number of other incidents, and in all of them the pattern seemed to be the same; Time stood still, then jerked forward at terrific speed. There had been seven sightings of a Woolly Mammoth on the banks of the Thames, and yesterday, as well as the disappearance of several buildings and cars and people, certain artefacts from the past had been found in the street.

She made a note on her pad. ‘Time is coming forward, coming towards us. We are not going back in Time.’

The advisors were coming into the room. She knew some of them; the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees. The Cambridge Professor of Cosmology, Stephen Hawking; the
quantum physicist, Roger Penrose; the neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield, always elegant in her short skirts and long boots – Regalia Mason made a note of the boots. Then there were two members of the Government, and a senior civil servant everyone knew as Sir Bertie. A last-minute addition was a man from MI5, whose name was a secret, and who suspected that the whole thing had something to do with the Chinese.

There was the usual rustling of papers and clattering of coffee cups and eyeing up of the biscuits that went on at important meetings, and even though the world might be coming to an end, the men still chatted about their golf and their children.

Regalia Mason smiled to herself. She never chatted and she never ate biscuits.

She waited to be introduced. She waited to hear the facts she already knew about the Time Tornadoes and yesterday’s perplexing events. Some of the physicists thought that Time had ripped – that a hole had appeared in the fabric of Time, rather like the hole in the ozone layer.

The geophysicists, who studied the impact of volcanoes and earthquakes on the spin of the Earth, were asked if the tsunami in Thailand had anything to do with the strange behaviour of Time. Everyone agreed that after that disaster the Earth had shifted about one millimetre on its axis, but no one could agree that such a thing could make a difference to Time.

The sinister man from MI5 wanted to know if human
activity could affect Time, just as human activity had affected climate change.

Regalia Mason could see the impatience on the faces of the scientists. They wanted equations, calculations, not James Bond-style plots.

Regalia Mason spoke. ‘I think it highly likely that human beings
have
affected Time.’

There was a pause in the room.

‘Is it not strange that the faster we have learned to go, the less time we seem to have? The whole of the Western world is in a hurry, and the developing world is racing to catch up.’

‘I said all this was something to do with China,’ said the sinister man from MI5.

‘I do not believe it is anything to do with China,’ said Regalia Mason.

‘Well, Pakistan, then.’

She ignored him. ‘Which of you here has not said, this week, that you are running out of time, that you have no time, that time is short, or how time flies?’

‘Those are merely figures of speech,’ said Sir Bertie, adjusting his red silk white-spotted tie with irritated fingers.

‘I disagree,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘I believe they are clues.’

Stephen Hawking tapped a single sentence into his voice computer.

‘Einstein and the clock in the city square?’

‘Of course, of course,’ Regalia Mason nodded.

‘What’s that story? I don’t follow,’ said the sinister man
from MI5. Regalia Mason smiled at him. He had the vague idea that this was frightening, but he didn’t know why. She was such a beautiful woman. She began to explain, as though talking to a rather nice child she might eat afterwards.

‘Einstein’s Theories of Relativity always began with simple pictures in his mind. As a boy, he wondered what it would be like to race alongside a light-beam. Later, he imagined himself zooming away at the speed of light from the big clock in his city square. As he looked back, he realised that the hands on the clock were standing still. This is because when we travel at the speed of light, Time seems to stand still. Travelling faster than the speed of light, Time would appear to go backwards.’

‘Could you just remind me what is the speed of light?’ said Sir Bertie.

‘300,000 kilometres per second,’ the whole room answered at once.

‘That’s quick,’ said the man from MI5.

‘Indeed it is quick,’ agreed Regalia Mason, ‘and it is a paradox that at the speed of light Time slows almost to a stop, but at lower speeds, our speeds here on Earth, we seem to be forcing Time to move faster.’

‘You’re saying that our planes, our computers, are speeding up Time?’ said Sir Bertie.

‘I am saying that Time is distorting. We have evidence of that. I am saying that people commonly perceive Time differently than they once did. We feel that our days are not long enough. Well, perhaps they are not.’

‘What Dr Mason says about perception is absolutely right,’ said Susan Greenfield. ‘The human brain is highly subjective.’

‘But Time is not subjective!’ said one of the men. ‘There is such a thing as Time, and it passes! However we perceive it, it exists outside of ourselves.’

‘I am not sure of that,’ said Regalia Mason simply.

‘The human race has only a fifty-fifty chance of survival,’ said Sir Martin Rees. ‘Perhaps we will never reach the future, however much time we have, or however we perceive it.’

‘That would be a pity,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘A future where we could control Time would be a future worth having.’

‘If we could control Time – we could travel in Time,’ said the man from MI5, ‘and this isn’t
Doctor Who
, you know, this is real life.’

Stephen Hawking was nodding. He reminded everyone of what he had often said – that if Time travel were possible in the future, we would have visitors from the future, visiting us, now, in our present and their past. As there were no visitors from the future, there could be no Time travel happening in the future.

‘That’s right!’ said the man from MI5.

‘That’s not quite right …’ said Regalia Mason.

As the scientists fell to arguing, Regalia Mason smiled to herself and looked at her watch. There would be another Time Tornado this evening, and then the arguments would
stop. They would come to her, to Quanta, for help.

Deep underground, Silver and Micah and Gabriel had crawled along the tunnels and under the river. Micah’s spies had found out about the meeting, and Micah had told Silver that they might discover some clue that would help them. He had been particularly interested in one of the advisors to the Committee who had been flown in from America. More he would not say.

The three had crept inside a secret passage that Micah said had been built for the first Astronomer Royal to use to visit his mistress on the other side of the River Thames.

‘What’s a mistress?’ asked Silver.

Micah hesitated. ‘A mistress be the woman you love even though you not be married to her … The whole of London be digged with such Lady Lanes, so that a man may travel in secret to his mistress. Some be deep, some be shallow, some be creeping for miles through the gloom of the pit, some be connecting two houses that rubs next to one another, and all lit by love.’

There was a crash above them as Sir Bertie dropped his coffee cup on to the floor.

In the confusion in the room of I’msosorry … letmehelpyou … slippedthroughmyfingers … sokindthankyou … dearme Micah hastened Silver and Gabriel to a wide opening in the room itself. Silver realised they had come up inside the fireplace.

‘Many believed Sir John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer
Royal, be an alchemist,’ said Micah, ‘and that he could disappear into the fire. In truth he disappeared into the fireplace.’

Micah and Gabriel were further back than Silver. They could hear but not see what was happening. Silver was able to peep through the ornamental guard that sat in front of the fireplace that nobody used nowadays, either because of central heating or because the Astronomer Royal no longer kept a mistress.

‘Your proposal startled me,’ Sir Bertie was saying, still mopping up the coffee from his papers.

‘My proposal is a practical one. That old saying
Time is Money
is true enough. I am here to buy Time. If Quanta invests the necessary billions in the research your scientists need to stabilise time, Quanta will want a return on that investment. Any “discoveries” will belong to us. Any surplus Time will belong to us. If I am buying Time today, I want to be able to sell it tomorrow – if you understand me.’

‘I do not,’ said Sir Bertie.

‘Then I will be plain. I believe that what is happening to Time gives us a unique opportunity to control Time. We will be the ones who decide on the lengths of the seasons – if we want summer all year, we shall have summer all year; if we prefer our enemies to live in winter all year, they shall. If some countries are short of Time – if some people are short of Time – we will sell them Time from people who have too much Time on their hands. But all this trade in Time must be controlled by Quanta.’

‘You cannot trade in Time,’ said Sir Bertie.

‘Why not?’ smiled Regalia Mason. ‘We trade in everything else.’

Silver leaned back into the fireplace and whispered to Micah, ‘Who is she?’

‘I fear I do know,’ said Micah, ‘but I cannot be sure until I see her face.’

At that moment Regalia Mason got up from the table and walked towards the fireplace. Silver thought she would die of fright, but she kept absolutely still. At the very second when Regalia Mason would have been looking straight at her, a voice called from the room.

‘Dr Mason – a word in private, please.’

Regalia Mason turned round. Silver shrank into the depths of the fireplace. Micah had glimpsed the woman he thought he knew. His face was serious.

‘If he be the devil, she be the serpent.’

‘What? Who?’

‘If Abel Darkwater be the devil, then she be the serpent. Her true name is Maria Prophetessa – One becomes Two, Two becomes Three, and out of the Three comes the Four that is One.’

‘What?’ said Silver.

‘That woman be in Jamaica, when I be in Jamaica, and they say her voodoo magic comes from the pyramids of Egypt. And when I boarded ship homewards, she be there, kept to herself in a closed cabin, and I seen her visit Abel Darkwater in Bedlam many times. She it was who began the
Experiments.’

‘What experiments?’ said Silver, whose head was spinning, either from too much information or not enough air.