The navigator (32 page)

330

so ...
immature.
Then he heard a voice that was deep and hard and anything but immature.

"So the little Navigator navigated his way here after all."

It was Johnston. The man had entered the room behind Owen and stood there now, regarding him with cold amusement.

"You shouldn't have let him come in here, Johnston," one of the girls said.

"No," agreed another. "You shouldn't have. What do we do now?"

"Freeze him, I suppose," Johnston said. His voice was casual, but Owen sensed a tension in it. "Freeze him, and then I'll take him away and interrogate him, make him tell me where the Mortmain is."

This time Owen could hear the anxiety in Johnston's voice, and all at once it was clear to him. Johnston wanted Owen alive because he wanted the Mortmain for himself! Johnston gave the appearance of working for the Harsh, but really he was trying to double-cross them.

"Yes, I suppose we should do that," one of the drawling voices said.

Suddenly Owen didn't care anymore. He was sick of the Harsh, their cold childish voices, and their toying with time and people's lives as if they were playing a cruel game.

"You can freeze me if you like," Owen said furiously, "but that still makes you just nasty little children."

331

"I'd be careful what you say to them," Johnston said in a warning voice.

"I don't care! They can turn time back if they like, but they'll still be just as empty. It doesn't make any difference to them what kind of world they live in, whether they live in our world or in their own empty one. They'll still be cold and miserable."

Owen saw that the vapor surrounding the Harsh had started to change, swirling as if they were agitated. Their cold, pinched faces seemed twisted as though with pain.

"They're jealous of us, they're jealous of the heat and the warmth and the light!" Owen yelled. The Harsh seemed to be writhing inside their vapor clouds now, the vapor becoming denser and harder to see through. But as Owen looked, they seemed to age, the childish faces becoming old and sagging, and the room filled with a cold whispering of loss and despair and emptiness. And anger, Owen realized--an anger that was directed at him.

The icy vapor around the Harsh cleared and he could see their real selves clearly now. They were haggard and ancient, with long, wrinkled faces and sparse hair and empty, corrupt eyes. They were time lords, Owen realized, old beyond all imagining, subtle and corrupt. They waved their long, bony fingers as though to ward off his words, and the sound of their voices was a long, evil complaint.

One of the women turned toward Owen and he could feel her gaze like a cold weight on him. She pursed her

332

thin, proud lips, sucked in her breath, and blew. A great freezing maw of icy air blew toward him. Desperately he flung himself to the ground and felt the blast of foul, chilled air pass over his head. Owen's eye was drawn to the open door behind Johnston. He thought he could see part of the shaft containing the Puissance through the door. If only he could get through it.

The knife! he thought. The Long Woman's knife! If he could just get to the door ...

Suddenly, there was a loud crackling and an enormous crash. Johnston and the Harsh were momentarily distracted. Owen seized his opportunity and ducked under Johnston's arm. He reached the door. He slammed it shut, grabbed the knife from his jacket, and jammed it into the wooden door surround. The Long Woman had said it would hold, that they would not be able to open it. It held. Just. He could feel the strain in the wood, ice creeping across it, as the Harsh bent their will to it. The door remained closed, but for how long? Owen turned and raced down the corridor. The shaft was right in front of him, as was the staircase, and as he looked, Dr. Diamond, Cati, Pieta, and Wesley came racing out of a side corridor.

"The bang," Owen gasped.

"That was us," Cati said. The little gyroscope had worked. It had spun and spun, emitting higher and higher sound waves, until it reached a frequency that even the hard ice could not bear. With a great rending crack, the

333

ice walls had flown apart. They had not known where to go then, but Cati had felt the Harsh nearby and had led them, her face a mask of cold pain.

"Look!" Pieta exclaimed. The door with the iron knife in it trembled. Great bulbs of ice had formed in the apertures and in the lock.

"It can't hold forever," Wesley said.

"Quick, run!" Dr. Diamond spoke urgently. "We'll hold them for as long as we can."

"I can't leave you; they'll kill you," said Owen.

"You have to go, Owen." Cati spoke quietly, and there was a new authority in her voice. He turned to her, surprised. She seemed to have matured in the past hour.

"Would you go on," Wesley said, "till I get a good go at these Harsh." He spat on his hands and rubbed them together.

Dr. Diamond took up a karate stance. Pieta cracked the magno whip by her side.

"Go," Cati whispered. "You are the Navigator. Everything depends on you, don't you see?" Then she gave him a quick peck on the cheek and turned to face the door.

"Run, Owen!" Dr. Diamond said. "Run!"

Owen turned away from his friends and ran to the stairway. He put his foot on the first step and looked at them one last time. If he failed, he would never see them again. And if he succeeded, he realized, he would not see them again.

334

But I will succeed, thought Owen grimly. I will succeed.

Down he fled, down the staircase that spiraled around the Puissance, all its power concentrated in a writhing coil now, a coil of deep, black nothingness. Down he fled, his heart racing, his legs buckling with fatigue. And from above him came the sounds of battle. He slowed as if something was dragging at him. He knew that his duty was to stop the Puissance, but he had left his friends in mortal danger.

A long, cold, triumphant howl echoed in the stairwell and the sounds of battle stopped. Half running, half falling, Owen cleared the final steps. In front of him was a doorway that seemed somehow familiar. He threw himself through it and slammed it, turning the key in the lock, and let his head rest against the shut door, sobbing for breath. Then he straightened and turned around.

Owen rubbed his eyes. He did not believe what he was seeing. It was all as it had been, but it should not have been here, not at the bottom of a long shaft in an island in a frozen sea. But it was here. In every detail. It was his own bedroom. It seemed as if he could see everything more clearly than he had ever seen anything before. Every faded flower on his bedspread. Every dust mote. The old chest. The guitar. The dartboard. The replica fighter hanging on fishing line from the ceiling.

Owen moved forward in wonderment, letting his fingers trail over the familiar surfaces. He put his hand into

335

his jacket and took out the Mortmain. But what was he supposed to do with it? He looked around but could see nothing new. Desperately he paced the room. A clue, he thought, a clue. Then something came back to him. What was it the Long Woman had said? Look for the fleur-de-lis. The fleur-de-lis was a flower with three leaves, he remembered, and he had seen one before in this room. He went quickly over to the chest and looked at the lettering--J M Gobillard et Fils. What had Johnston said--Gobillard's box of tricks? This had to be it. It had been there all the time. His father had entrusted it to him. He stared at it. Just above the broken lock Owen saw it.

A fleur-de-lis.

He knelt down and looked at it. He saw that there was a tiny opening in the center of the fleur-de-lis, and above it some kind of disturbance in the air. The air was moving round and round, and as he followed it from its tiny beginning to a small hole in the ceiling that he had never noticed before, it got a little bigger, a miniature vortex, and he knew that if he followed it up and up, it would eventually become the raging Puissance that towered over the island. All of time was being sucked into the tiny aperture in the fleur-de-lis. Gobillard had somehow managed to contain in this chest whatever enormous power was needed to turn time backward. But what now? He looked at the Mortmain, and it dawned on him. It wasn't in the shape of a propeller. It was in the shape of a

336

fleur-de-lis. And the hole where the lock had been torn out was in the same shape!

Quickly, he placed the Mortmain in the hole where the lock had been. It fitted! It fitted, and as he watched, it began to turn slowly, then more quickly, then faster than the eye could follow, a blur of terrible speed. Above his head the roof seemed to dissolve until he was looking right up through the center of the vortex, black lightning crackling from one side of it to the other. Owen put his hand on the chest to steady himself. Suddenly he could see scenes of his own past appearing and disappearing in the walls of the Puissance, the Sub-Commandant disappearing into the Puissance, the Long Woman, Johnston, the battle for the Workhouse.

He looked further up, realizing that he could see back in time. The scenes were indistinct, becoming more so, but he could make out his father's car as it veered into the harbor--and was that a figure swimming away? It was too hard to tell. Then it seemed that he heard his voice called. Right beside him in the vortex Owen could see what had happened several minutes ago. And he did not like what he saw, for it was the pitiful remnants of his friends who had fought so that he could get to the chest with the Mortmain. Wesley and Pieta limped in front, leaving a trail of blood on the ground. But behind them came a grim-faced Dr. Diamond, carrying what appeared to be a lifeless Cati.

"Cati!" Owen called out, reaching out to his friend, but as he did so the image faded, the Mortmain tightened

337

inexorably around the vortex, and it became fainter and fainter until in the end he could not see it all.

It was gone. It was over. The Great Machine in the north had been stopped.

The bedroom door flew off its hinges and crashed against the wall. There was a howl of outrage, a freezing blast. But Owen rested his head against the old chest and heard, and felt, no more.

338

It was the sunlight that woke him, streaming in through the high window. He was lying on his bed, fully dressed. He sat up and shook his head. The Harsh, the Mortmain. And then he remembered Cati being carried by Dr. Diamond. If he had dreamed all of it, then why did sadness sweep over him the way it did? He looked around. The room looked as it always had. He jumped to his feet and ran to the door and snatched it open, and saw the corridor, as it had always been, a little dusty, in need of a fresh coat of paint.

Owen jumped up onto the chest and looked out of the window. He could see the rooftops of the town, and beyond it the harbor and the masts of the fishing

339

boats. The empty windows of the Workhouse loomed over the river. And Johnston's scrapyard, half hidden by trees, did not look any bigger. He jumped down. Of course, he thought, the chest! Owen hunkered down and examined the lock. There it was. A lock in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. And yet it looked as if it had always been there, battered and scratched like the rest of the chest. Perhaps it had always been there.

Owen felt as if his head was going to burst. Quickly he grabbed some clothes from the pile of dirty washing on the floor. That hasn't changed, he thought. He couldn't find his trainers, so he pulled on an old pair of boots and ran downstairs.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs Owen glanced into the living room. His mother was kneeling on the floor, looking at something. She turned toward him. "Come here," she said in a calm, worn voice he had not heard for a long time. "Look!" She was holding a photograph of Owen as a baby with his parents. The lost photograph.

The photo had faded, but all three were still smiling, and his mother was smiling now too. She took Owen's hand, squeezed it, and looked into his eyes, and as she did so a weight lifted from him. The mother he had known was back. Things were going to be different now. Then she straightened up and looked around as though seeing the house for the first time.

"Look at the state of this place," she said. "Go on. Get out from under my feet until I get this place into

340

shape." He squeezed past her and slipped out of the front door.

Everything was as it had been: the neat housing estates in the distance, the three fields leading to the river. As fast as he could, he ran across the fields to the water. He straddled the tree that lay across the river and waited for the familiar tug of fear of the dark water below. But it did not come. Had he dreamed that as well? Owen crossed the river and ran to the Workhouse. Its damp stone walls were the same as ever. He went inside, but there was nothing but fallen timbers and grass and young trees growing through the ruins. He went round to the side of the Workhouse, pushing through undergrowth, looking for the door to the Starry, but he could not find it. Neither was there any sign of the fortifications along the river.

Owen searched all morning and then he followed the river down to the harbor, walking under the town bridge and listening to the sounds of the traffic overhead. He went down toward the warehouses, but somebody had put chain-link fencing across the entrance and he could not go any further.

He put his face against the fence and remembered Boat and the Planemen attacking it as the Raggies fished. Or did he remember it?

Owen sat on the harbor wall all afternoon, trying to work out what had happened, if he had dreamed everything. He couldn't have, he decided. There was too much, too much detail. And yet ...