The whole thing would be decided by a contest of brute force and resistance: what would break first—his ribcage or the creature’s mandible? The pain in his chest at least distracted him from the smoldering burn of the acidic poison on his arms, but the lack of oxygen, combined with the extenuating effort, was starting to exact a price. His vision was tunneling; he would black out in no time.
Suddenly, there was a violent crack, and the coils around him went limp. Gribardsun fell to the ground—the only thing that had kept him erect for the last few minutes being the muscular strength of the snake—and gasped. The skin of his forearms was fiery red.
The beast was dead, its mouth open in an unnatural angle of much larger than 180 degrees.
He went into the kitchen, looking for something that might mitigate the chemical burns, and found some ashes and coarse soap—as well as dead bodies and a gaping hole in the floor.
There was a track of bluish mud coming from the hole, and Peri did not need special deductive powers to conclude that the snake had come from there. The corpses were crushed, or blackened by poison, or both. It seemed obvious that the creature hadn’t killed them out of hunger, but out of fear and anger. Its world had been destroyed, and someone—even perfectly innocent servants—had to pay.
Satisfied that his hands and arms were in good working condition and the pain had subsided enough, he decided to follow the tracks, fearful of what other bodies he might find along the way.
The remains of Dom Antônio were in the library. He still had a sword in his hands, but his legs were crushed beyond description and his belly was swollen and black, split open. The snake had injected an astounding amount of venom there.
Gribardsun took the time to close the old nobleman’s glazed eyes before proceeding. The snake’s trail, however, only led back to the main hall. So, hopeful that Cecilia might still be safe upstairs, he bolted up the steps.
But the rooms were all empty.
Might she be in one of the huts in the back yard? Perhaps even in the torture cell?
Gribardsun was preparing to run down and find out when a great blast, followed by a shock that shook the castle to its foundations, launched him against the corridor wall. He banged his head, and lost consciousness.
* * *
Mud and water! Everywhere!
The time traveler awoke with the fresh spray that came from a crack in the corridor lightly striking his eyelids. There was a torrent coming down on the castle from on high, filling the space between the building, the defensive wall, and the mountainside.
It was already filling up the lower levels of the structure: the main hall, kitchen, and library already had water close to the ceiling.
Gribardsun’s lips twisted in a sad smile. He believed he knew what had happened: his fear of a “China syndrome” against a full-blown nuclear explosion had been a false one. There was a third option, a so-called fizzle—a small blast, caused by a critical mass that takes form too quickly for a “syndrome” scenario, but too slowly to free the whole power of the nuclear fuel.
The relatively small blast hadn’t been enough to pulverize the mountain, but it had destroyed part of the stone wall that kept the river on course, and now the Paquequer was falling, with all its might, directly over Dom Antônio’s home.
As it dawned on Gribardsun that anyone who’d been in the huts behind the castle had certainly drowned by now, he felt a weight in his chest for Cecilia. She’d been not only young and beautiful and delightful, but there was also a fire in her, in her eyes, in her heart, that he could relate to and, even admire. But now...
Her scream pierced his thoughts.
There was already water bubbling up from the stairwell. Peri ran into one of the bedrooms in the corridor, found a window, and jumped out. His body hit the water after a fall of less than a meter and he swam in the direction of the screams.
They came from the external wall. Looking, he saw that Cecilia was there, on the top of a pillar somewhat higher than the surrounding structure. She was crouching over it, surrounded by water on one side, and by a sheer drop on the other. She had both hands behind her head, fingers intertwined. She screamed in utter despair.
“Peri coming!” Gribardsun cried back, crossing the distance between them with powerful strokes, allowing the current to drag him a while, but always fighting to keep control. She looked at him. Her eyes went wide, and something that might be construed as a smile touched her lips.
As soon as he got onto the wall, she started, “I was in there, with the cannons. I...”
“Ceci shot fireballs?” The time traveler wasn’t drifting out of character, not yet. He would be Peri as long as Cecilia stayed with him. She’d lost her fiancé, her father, her land, her house; he wouldn’t deprive her of her imaginary friend.
“Father brought the ammo and gunpowder... Told me to stay. Said it would be safer if... if...”
As she started to cry, Gribardsun noticed that the waters, crashing in small waves against the top of the wall, were depositing blue mud in the cracks and depressions of the stone. He scraped some of it up and started to rub it on Cecilia’s body.
“Peri... what...?”
“Medicine. Good medicine,” he replied.
The rubbing was quite professional, the traveler’s powerful hands manipulating nerve nodes and muscle groups, inducing a deep sense of relaxation. And the mud had a good chance of really being medicinal. It might even save her from radiation-induced diseases, if his deductions were correct.
The water kept rising. It was already high on the outside of the fortress; it was almost level on both sides, which meant that the current must have weakened substantially.
He looked at her, smiling.
“Ceci wait. Peri will get boat.”
“What...?”
Before she could complete the question, he jumped. Holding his breath, down and down he went. Dead bodies floated all around, most of them too weighted down with weapons and gear to rise all the way to the surface. One day, they’d rot enough so that the heavy materials would sink all the way down, while the buoyant flesh went all the way up. Until then, however, they’d stay there suspended in the middle.
Down and down Peri went. He’d seen what he wanted: a good-sized tree. He dived to its roots and dug into its sides with his powerful, acid-burned fingers. It pained him, and the stale air he stubbornly kept in his lungs cried for release, but he paid no heed. He dug his fingers in the bark, in the wood. And pulled. The flood, the impact of the rushing waters, had already destabilized the tree. And for years small animals had burrowed around and under its roots. Now, the tunnels were full of water, sapping it, loosening its grip on the earth underneath.
Once, twice, he pulled. The sheer effort kept his feet firm on the muddy ground, despite the tendency of his body to float.
His lungs ached. Burned. He kept pulling.
Then, in what seemed like one powerful lurch, it came out at the roots and shot upward, propelled by the natural buoyancy of the wood. Gribardsun just kept his fingers dug in, and went with the ride.
Cecilia saw the tree suddenly breaking the water’s surface a few meters ahead. For a moment it seemed that the shaft would fly away, but no: it fell in a horizontal position, rolled a bit, and stayed.
“Ceci! Come!” Peri’s voice came from the tree.
“Peri made boat, we float to safety!”
She jumped in the water, swimming without much elegance. But it was a short stretch. Peri helped her to get aboard.
They were both tired and in pain, and Cecilia had just lost everything she had ever known. She was shaking and nearly slid off the trunk more than once. Peri decided to carry her to the canopy, where the soft branches and leaves the current hadn’t swept away made a kind of safety net that would support her slender body.
This was a tricky proposition, since walking on a wet trunk with the girl in his arms was somewhat akin to walking on a tightrope, and a slippery one. He might’ve tried to swim along the tree wit
h her, but to put her back in the water didn’t seem a good idea.
The feeling of her cold, wet, trembling flesh, of the goosebumps on her skin, against his bare chest was certainly pleasurable, however. And his warmth was doing her some good. Her teeth unclenched, and her lips regained some color.
When he kneeled to lay her down on the leaves, she grabbed him by the arms. Cecilia wasn’t letting him go. She needed human warmth... his warmth... too badly. Her breasts heaved.
He smiled. “Ceci need rest.”
She shook her head, saying, “I need you.”
And he felt the need, too. Among all that death, the need for a reaffirmation of life. And of the pleasures and of the reasons for being alive.
So, he grabbed Cecilia, raising her once more and, as she cried in surprise, made a dangerous and exhilarating maneuver, turning on tiptoes while holding her above his head. In the end, he had his back to the canopy net and she was in front of him.
And then Peri let himself down, pulling the girl above him as he felt the strength of the branches and leaves, allowing the net bedding to slowly adapt to his weight. And hers.
The girl would have to stay on top, and to do most of the effort, and to do it lightly. Otherwise, they would just buck themselves through the canopy and to the bottom of the flood.
“I understand,” she said, smiling delightfully, even a little wickedly. “I promise to be gentle to my poor little Peri.”
A few hours later, the sun was setting right in front of them, the tree trunk moving almost imperceptibly downstream, the glint of twilight everywhere in a world fresh and ready to be made whole again. The Spirit of God floated on the waters just before the Creation, after all. Cecilia noticed that Peri was looking not ahead, where nature offered its performance, but behind, to the blasted mountain they had left.
“What are you thinking, my love?” she asked.
He turned to look at her, and smiled. Gribardsun had been thinking about the camera setup he’d left on the stone ledge before jumping into the fight, after his adventures inside the mountain tunnel. He’d been wondering if the equipment had been destroyed and, if not, maybe he would have a picture of a miniature atomic mushroom—the first one of all time. He’d have to come back, someday, to check.
But not now.
“Peri not thinking,” he replied. “Peri just waiting.”
“Oh? And waiting for what?”
“Ceci’s kisses.”
The trunk kept floating on for quite a long time after that.
WOLD NEWTON ORIGINS/
SECRETS OF THE NINE
THE WILD HUNTSMAN
BY WIN SCOTT ECKERT
Philip José Farmer was nothing if not ambitious. He wrote biographies—so meticulously researched they were worthy of Ph.Ds.—of two of his heroes, Tarzan and Doc Savage. More amazing still was his discovery during these researches of the Wold Newton Family, a group of influential men and women—and their descendants—who happened to be in Wold Newton, England on the fateful day when a meteor fell from the sky: the heroes and heroines of the Wold Newton Universe.
In his introduction to Lord of the Trees (Secrets of the Nine #2, Titan Books, 2012), Win Scott Eckert posited that the continuity of Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban was in fact parallel to that known as the Wold Newton Universe. In his chronology in The Mad Goblin (Secrets of the Nine #3, Titan Books, 2013), he expanded on that notion, suggesting that the two universes shared a common past which diverged in distant ages, as a river branches into two, and that the secret cabal of immortals known as the Nine predated the divergence.
“The Wild Huntsman” brings the two universes back together, in a tale that ties the Secrets of the Nine series to Farmer’s Time’s Last Gift (Titan Books, 2012), The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (Titan Books, 2012), Christopher Paul Carey’s prequel to the Khokarsa trilogy, Exiles of Kho (Meteor House, 2012), and the present volume’s “Into Time’s Abyss” (by John Allen Small), and reveals exactly why seven couples in two carriages, their coachmen, and several others on horseback were at the precisely correct location, at the precisely correct time, to be exposed to the ionization of a meteorite in the out-of-the-way village of Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on 13 December 1795—an event that led to a beneficial genetic mutation that was reinforced by their descendants, the supermen and superwomen of the Wold Newton Family.
The Greystokes, like the present Queen of England, can trace their ancestry through Egbert, king of Wessex, to the great god Woden in Denmark of the third century A.D.... The founders of the Greystoke line were secret worshippers of Woden long after their neighbors had converted to Christianity...
Thus, Tarzan has as ancestor Woden. It would be difficult to find a more highly placed forefather than the All-Father.
Perhaps the great god of the North is not dead but is in hiding. It pleased the Wild Huntsman to direct the falling star of Wold Newton near the two coaches. Thus, in a manner of speaking, he fathered the children of the occupants. The mutated and recessive genes would be reinforced, kept from being lost, by the frequent marriages among the descendants of the irradiated parents.
— Philip José Farmer, Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke
AFRICA, REMOTE MOUNTAINS NEAR UGANDA, 1720
The Old Man sat quietly in his secluded cavern. His one good eye was closed and he appeared to be meditating. His other eye was covered by a black patch.
The Old Man was a giant. Or rather, although he was a large man, there was a strength about him that gave the impression he was a giant. His white beard fell to his waist. His hazel eye was strong, and protean, shifting color in the flickering candlelight.
He wore a double-headed raven headpiece. The headpiece looked heavy for a man of his age—he appeared to be ninety, or perhaps even older. Despite the deep lines, like tiny crevasses crisscrossing his face, his neck was thick and strong, and cords of muscle banded his arms and legs.
He had been known by countless names, many of which even he had forgotten through the ages, and he had inspired legends, folktales, and myths. In these were varying degrees of truth.
For he truly deserved the appellation “Old Man.” He had been born in the Old Stone Age, and was at least twenty-five thousand, and perhaps thirty thousand, years old.
The candles wavered in a slight breeze and one extinguished.
There should have been no breeze here, twenty caverns deep in the labyrinth of the Nine.
The Old Man opened his eye and looked into the mirror directly across from him.
The cavern had had no mirror when he had closed his eye in meditation.
The Old Man and the reflection, the Other in the mirror, watched each other for a long, long time. It was an admirable exercise in motionlessness.
Then the Old Man extended a finger and tapped his own eyepatch pointedly. The Other’s eyepatch was on the opposite side of the Old Man’s, rather than on the same as in a true mirror image.
In the mirror, the Other Old Man grinned ruefully and gave a slight shrug of the shoulders, as if to say, Good one. You got me!
Then the Other in the mirror swiftly reached into the folds of his ancient robes, withdrew a horn-handled dagger, and launched it at the Old Man.
The wickedly sharp blade flew through the mirror, causing a slight ripple like that of a pebble tossed in a pond. It slipped between the Old Man’s ribs and penetrated his heart, causing instantaneous death.
Death. Thirty thousand years of breathing, fighting, lovemaking, scheming, thinking, killing, dreaming... snuffed out, with the flick of a wrist.
The Old Man slumped to the cavern’s dirt floor. His one eye, no longer protean, stared at the ceiling.
The Other Old Man stepped gingerly through the mirror and bent down over his counterpart. He lifted his own eyepatch, revealing a perfectly good hazel eye, in which gold flecks seemed to swirl and eddy. Singing quietly to himself—“I am he as you are he as you are me, And we are all together”—he closed the Old Man’s unse
eing eye and winked at the corpse.
A gentle knock came at the heavy wooden door separating the Old Man’s private chambers from the rest of those of the Nine. It was the Speaker for the Nine, summoning him to the annual ceremonies.
He told the Speaker to return in five minutes. Then he hefted the corpse with the ease of lifting an infant, hopped through the mirror, and landed in a substantially identical cavern. He concealed the body under a pile of furs and blankets, to be disposed of later.
He retrieved a pocket mirror—a real mirror—from a small wooden box carved with crawling and twisted serpents, and adjusted the eyepatch and the double-headed raven headpiece. He touched up his makeup, ensuring it exactly duplicated the crags and valleys on his late counterpart’s face.
Satisfied, he again bounded through the mirror that was not a mirror. He pulled an oversized nineteenth-century pocket watch from deep within the folds of his robes. The pearlescent lid was as protean as his eyes, the embossed constellation of Auriga—the charioteer—shifting around a tiny blue sapphire representing the brightest star, Capella.
He worked at the watch and the mirror-gate closed in upon itself, just as the Speaker called him once more.
“XauXaz, Old Father, it is time.”
BLAKENEY HALL, EAST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE, NEAR THE VILLAGE OF WOLD NEWTON 11 DECEMBER 1795
Shortly after the nine terrible and shattering clangings came again, John Gribardsun found the dead man hanging in the library.
To those the clangings summoned, the tolling was as loud as if it had been made while they were standing under the bourdon bell of the cathedral at Notre Dame de Paris. The unexplained, horrific clamor brought the men running from all over Sir Percy’s estate.
Sir Percy Blakeney, General Sir Hezekiah Fogg, and Dr. Siger Holmes arrived first, followed by some of Sir Percy’s other guests: Colonel Bozzo-Corona (accompanied, as always, by his man, Lecoq), Sir Hugh Drummond, and Honoré Delagardie, whom Sir Percy had saved from Madame la Guillotine.