“You,” he said, almost in a groan. “Wouldn’t you just know it? It’s the Necroscope Harry Keogh. And just when I thought it was safe to go back to sleep!”
The apparition, however, didn’t seem to be in the mood for jokes of any kind; and taking Scott’s arm—Scott’s boy’s arm—he walked him through another door and out again onto that same Scottish riverbank where they’d dangled their feet in the water during an earlier visit. This time, however, it was the dead of night; and standing back from the riverbank perhaps one hundred yards away, an old house was blazing like a bonfire and sending up smoke, flames, and showers of sparks to a starry sky.
“That was my old place,” said Harry then, as a sort of sad shadow crossed his face. “My last vestige on Earth—and that’s what my friends did to it when it was my turn to fail. Huh! But it didn’t stop me trying, fighting for them, and that’s why I’m here.” He grasped Scott’s arm that much tighter, almost hurting him. “Because this was my life, my world . . . but now it’s yours, and you’re letting it slip away!”
“I’m what?” Scott answered, tugging himself free. “Letting it slip away? Are you kidding? I’m trying as best I can to save it!”
“Hey!” Harry snapped. “A small part of me is part of you, remember? But even a small part of me is one hell of a lot more than you! So don’t go trying to justify your actions—or lack of action—by telling any half-truths to me! You might as well try lying to Ben Trask! It simply doesn’t work, Scott.”
“You really fancy yourself, don’t you?” Scott narrowed his boy’s eyes at his visitor. “What, you’re calling me a liar? You want to get it on with me? Well just say the word. I mean, what do you think I’m doing here, or there, in that Swiss hellhole? Do you think it’s some kind of holiday I’m having?”
“It’s not what I think, it’s what I know!” said the Necroscope. “Didn’t you tell Trask that he’d be on his own after you go looking for Simon Salcombe? Yes, you did. But that’s not why you got my dart, Scott! That’s like me: only a small part of the reason. The Big Part is my world, mankind, humanity itself! I showed you the Möbius Continuum—and what have you done with it? Nothing! I’ve given you deadspeak, and have you used it? No way—in fact, you’re avoiding it! What’s wrong with you, Scott? Do you think you have nothing to live for? And what about Shania? Isn’t she worth living for? Man, you’re loved by an amazing woman and a beautiful animal, by two creatures now! Do you want to be the ultimate loser? Better listen to me, Scott, because I know what it’s like to lose, and believe me I would rather have won!”
I’m talking to myself! Scott thought. I know I’m dreaming, and in my dream I’m talking to my stupid bloody self!
“To a part of yourself,” said Harry, but more calmly now. “Okay, so explain yourself. But make it quick, because I can’t stay here much longer; there are deserving cases elswhere, and I go where I’m told to go. So what’s your problem, Scott? Don’t tell me you still don’t believe.”
“No,” said Scott. “I believe. How can I do otherwise when the proof is piled six feet deep all around me? I believe, yes, but I’m not the Necroscope! I can’t do the things you did.”
“Why not? You have the power.”
“But not the skills, and not the humility. The dead loved you because you were humble. Oh, you were hard, but at the same time you were humble. Me, I don’t know how to talk to the dead! I mean, maybe I’m afraid to; it’s not . . . not natural! Natural? God, what am I saying!? And anyway what good can it do? I don’t know the dead, and even if I did I couldn’t call them up out of their graves . . .” And pausing, Scott wondered how he knew about all that.
“You know about it because I’m in you!” said Harry. “Part of me, anyway. And as for not knowing the dead: well maybe not, but they know you. You’re the warm one, Scott, and you have the power! If you call on them, they’ll answer you.”
Not wanting to even think about it, Scott changed the subject. “And then there’s this Möbius Continuum thing. Even if I could break into it—”
“Conjure it,” Harry corrected him.
“—I wouldn’t know how to use it. Coordinates? I know a few. My place in London; places I’ve worked; embassies in Japan and other countries where my father worked when I was just a boy . . .” He glanced down at himself. “This boy, in fact! But to try going to any of them would be meaningless now.”
“And what about Schloss Zonigen?” said Harry.
“I don’t know any coordinates in Schloss Zonigen!” Scott protested.
“But you will, in just a few hours’ time. And since we’re talking about time, I don’t have too much of it left myself.”
“A few hours?” said Scott. “You think I can learn a whole lifetime’s worth of maths—assuming I had that kind of mind—in just a few hours? Now who’s joking?”
“I seem to remember,” said Harry—his figure beginning to waver like the air over a hot summer road, so that the fires of the burning house along the river showed through him—“that I was once in a similar fix. I’d lost the knack, I couldn’t deadspeak and my maths had deserted me. But I didn’t let it stop me. I had friends among both the living and the dead who were there to help me out.”
“I don’t have any dead friends,” said Scott. “And not even a great many among the living.”
“You have me,” said Harry, wavering again. Then he sighed, and said, “I had a feeling this was going to happen. That’s why I called in a marker or two, favours I’m owed. I don’t know for sure if they’re able to help out, or even if they’ll get to you in time. But at least I tried. Which is more than I can say for you. Damn, Scott, but I’ve put really big money on you! A whole world’s worth. It comes hard now to have to admit that I picked a loser.”
Breathing hard, muttering to himself, tossing and turning on a hard floor under a thin blanket, Scott was angry now. “Why don’t you fuck off and let me be, Harry?” he said. “I’ve really had it with you calling me a liar and a loser. So now I’ll give you fair warning, don’t do it again!”
“Oh?” said Harry, suddenly as thin as a ghost, because he was a ghost, or at least a revenant. “So now you’re a hard man, eh? But why do you want to fight me when the really bad people are up there in that hollow crag? Wake the hell up, Scott! You can’t lash out at what’s not physically there, only at what is there—you loser!”
At which Scott did in fact lash out; he launched a blow at the suddenly grinning Harry, a blow that passed through him and took Scott with it! Such was the force behind his swing that he would have gone over the edge and straight down into the river, if a door hadn’t opened before he could hit the water—
—And if Ben Trask hadn’t given him another shake, saying, “Wake the hell up, St. John! And whoever it is you think you’re fighting, quit it now!” And there he stood—the shadowy figure of the Head of E-Branch—looming over Scott in the dim light, and holding Scott’s balled fist in a white-knuckled hand.
For a moment Scott remained disorientated, then he relaxed and slowly fell back off his left elbow until he felt the floorboards under his back again. “I was . . . I was nightmaring,” he muttered then, as his eyes adjusted to scan the gloomy dining room in what light came in from the foyer where the door stood slightly ajar.
“Oh, really?” said Trask, and from his tone of voice Scott knew he wasn’t the least bit fooled. “Well whatever, but in any case it’s time you were up.”
Close by, Shania stirred in her blanket and yawned, and in another moment Wolf came nuzzling. I slept a little, he whined, but the night is too strange, too still. I went out with one of the men people into the darkness to smell things out, to listen and see what I could see. Those lights in the mountain peak are quieter now, but I smell danger in the air. Things are again in motion, and bad minds are set against our minds.
Scott stood up, Shania, too, and four others who Trask had awakened. “You’ve got fifteen minutes to freshen up and do your thing, whatever needs doing,” said Trask. “Then we get togeth
er in the foyer for our last O-Group. Questions? No? Then get to it, ladies, gents. I’ll see you all in fifteen minutes . . .”
Scott and Shania freshened up in a hotel staff rest room on the ground floor at the rear of the building . . . and having done so immediately “dirtied up” again, daubing their faces with greasy soot and ashes from a small jar they’d filled from Scott’s open-hearth fireplace. But on their own in the hotel’s echoing emptiness and eerie stillness, as Shania was about to apply one last black smudge to her nose, suddenly she stiffened.
“What is it?” Scott stared at her intently.
Half closing her eyes, concentrating, she held up a finger and said, “Listen!” And then, “No, listen with me, in here.” And she tapped Scott’s forehead.
Scott “listened” and nodded. “What was it Wolf was saying? Things are moving again? Well, something’s moving for sure! But where?”
“You felt it?” said Shania. “That sly, creeping sensation? Something moving, yes, but all shrouded in a thick, threatening fog. I think I know what it is. Mordri minds are at work covering some sort of covert activity!”
Again Scott nodded. “Didn’t Wolf say something about that, too? About minds set against our minds? But I’ll ask you again: where?”
“I don’t know,” said Shania. “But come, let’s hurry. For I think I know someone who can help us find out.”
The locator David Chung was already in the foyer when they got there, likewise Trask and Millie Cleary, and both of the techs. Paul Garvey followed fast on their heels, bringing a large urn of coffee from the kitchen, and behind him Frank Robinson with a huge rack of hot toast and a bowl of warm butter.
“Okay, we’re a little early,” said Trask, “but that’s all to the good. Breakfast is served and we have time to talk, sort out what’s what.”
As he spoke the rest of the team appeared: the precog Ian Goodly rising up from a long, wide shelf that he’d cleared off under the desk, and Wolf from the kitchen, gnawing on a bone.
Then Scott spoke up. “Trask,” he said, “before you begin. We think something is happening and it could be urgent. Shania has sensed some sneaky activity, and so have I. If we can work with Chung, maybe we can find out what it is and where.”
Glancing at his watch, Trask nodded. “Very well, but you’d best make it quick. We’re okay for time—maybe fifteen minutes to the good—but very little to spare.”
Chung seated himself between Scott and Shania at the table they’d used last night and clasped hands with them, and as they grew still and concentrated the locator closed his eyes and let their psychic probes guide him. It took only a moment before he gave a start, letting go their hands and jerking back away from them.
“Well?” said Trask anxiously. “What is it?”
“Wow!” said Chung. “I’ve never before got anywhere as fast as that in my life!” He looked at Scott and Shania in awe. “You two are really something! Are you sure you needed me?”
“I can locate,” said Shania, “but I’m far from accurate.”
Aware that time was fleeting, Trask was impatient. “Well?” he said again, looking at Chung. “What the hell is it!?”
“It’s to the east,” said the locator. “And I wasn’t simply locating just now; I actually saw it, and clearly! A sprawling, two-storied, chalet-style building with a fancy balcony, standing all alone on a shallow slope. It’s something a little over a mile, maybe a mile and a half away.”
And Ian Goodly said, “Ah! Do you remember on our way here, as we drove up that last spur? There was a reentry on the other side, with a ski lodge tucked away in the foothills.”
Trask snapped his fingers. “You’re right! And at the back of the ski lodge I saw a cable-car station. And the cars—”
“—Go up around the back of the spur to Schloss Zonigen,” said Chung. “And what goes up can come down!”
“As you and your agents drive up the mountain road,” Scott joined in, “or maybe even before then, they’re planning to send men down behind you—behind us—cutting off any retreat.”
Tech Graham Taylor was at one of the circular windows. Now he called out, “Hey, boss! Come and look at this.”
Trask and the others joined him where he gazed through his binoculars at the crag. “The approach road,” said Taylor, handing Trask the binoculars. “Take a look at the approach road.”
Trask looked, adjusted the focus, and said, “Damn! They’ve blockaded the road! One large coach, and two minibuses, slewn across the road at the highest bend. And I see people, movement in and around the vehicles. Well, we knew it wasn’t going to be an easy job getting up there, but now”—he looked at Scott and Shania—“thank God for you two!”
“What about the ski lodge?” said Scott. “Why do they want to cut off our retreat? You’d think they’d be happy just to see us leave, because surely from their point of view nobody is going to get out of this alive and we’re all dead meat anyway!”
“It isn’t just that they’re eager to get off this planet,” said Frank Robinson. “Yes, they want to destroy it, but that’s not all: they’d like to be absolutely sure that we are finished before they go!”
“No, not you particularly,” said Shania in a hushed voice. “It’s me. I’m the one that Gelka Mordri wants dead. She doesn’t know that I’m powerless to follow her—as I followed her here—and so wants me finished before they go, to make sure I can’t possibly follow her!”
Trask looked at her and said, “You’re probably right, but it doesn’t change the fact that if we don’t stop them we’re all dead. On the other hand this blockade does make a difference to our plans, or rather my plan, which in any case was a bit iffy. It’s no longer a case of simply blasting our way up there; but hell, I’m not sure that would have succeeded even without this blockade! And we don’t know what the situation is up there. We don’t know what else is waiting for us behind the blockade, or how many defenders there are in total, or their locations. And that’s a hell of a lot of things that we don’t know! I hate to admit it but the whole thing is looking more and more problematic.”
“Ben,” said Chung . . . then hurriedly corrected himself: “I mean boss: I think maybe we can find those things out.”
“Call me Ben,” said Trask. “Let’s face it, this could well be the last chance you get! Okay, what do you mean?”
“But don’t you see? Scott and Shania might not be accurate locators, but they are powerful ones. I didn’t just locate that ski lodge, I actually saw it! So maybe we can do the same—”
“—With Schloss Zonigen?” Trask finished it for him.
But Shania, who had returned to her place at the table and had her eyes closed again, murmured, “A cable car is on its way down from Schloss Zonigen. It’s crammed with armed men. They no longer have Mordri Three cover, which makes it easier for me to read their minds. And their minds are full of murder! The Mordris can’t be too worried about us now; they think they’re safe, and they’re concentrating on preparing their departure and the destruction of your world—which is little more than an hour and twenty minutes away!”
Millie and Paul Garvey at once joined Shania at the table, and almost as quickly Garvey said, “She’s right. And these men in the cable car are actually in the pay of the Mordris: dupes, true mercenaries, dumb, stupid, murderous bastards who have no idea what’s going on here and don’t care what they’re doing—but determined to do it anyway!”
“Listen,” said Scott. “Maybe we should give them something to think about, show them we’re still fighting. We’ve hurt them once, caused them to retreat, beaten them back. I think that ski lodge should be an easy target, and it will only take minutes.”
“You want to take out the ski lodge?” said Trask.
“And the cable car.” Scott nodded. “With these.” He indicated the grenades attached to his belt. “It’s a shame I’ll have to use them for they’re all we’ve got, but—”
“—Hold on there!” cried Tech McGrath. “Me and W
olf were oot in the nicht earlier.” He dipped into a shoulder pack, came out with four more grenades. “Ah took these frae a dead’yin who doubtless intended them for use on us. So go right ahead, Scott, Gi’ ’em hell, lad! And these beauties are all yours when ye get back.”
“If we’re going to do it we’d better go now,” said Shania, checking that her shotgun was loaded.
I’m going, too! said Wolf, jumping up onto the table, which made it easier for Scott to hoist him onto his shoulders.
Trask looked at Scott, Shania, and Wolf, all three of them together, and just for a moment seemed hesitant; until the precog reminded him, “This is how I saw it, Ben. And it’s how it’s going to be.”
“Very well.” Trask finally nodded. “Let’s do it. And good luck. We’ll be waiting here for you, but not for long. You have ten minutes, no more than that.”
“Just one thing,” said Scott. “What I said to you before—about my own agenda—forget it. Whatever you need, if we three can deliver it, we will. Simon Salcombe will have to wait until we’ve stopped all three of them. And then with any luck it will be my turn to stop him personally.”
And right then it seemed as if something or someone whispered inside Scott’s head, I knew that I’d get through to you in the end, Scott. I just knew it!
42
With only one hour and sixteen minutes to go before Idossola’s false dawn, Shania used her depleted localizer and transported herself, Scott, and Wolf to that location east of Idossola remembered by her Khiff from their psychic “visit” of just a few moments ago.
By no means instantaneous, still the trip was as fast as a lightning flash, the blink of an eye, a radio transmission; and yet in that single instant of darkness, still Scott was able to think, I am moving faster than any man ever moved before! Which wasn’t quite true, because Harry Keogh and those of his friends who had experienced the Möbius Continuum had moved a great deal faster, as fast as thought itself. And that was a thought that had crossed Scott’s mind previously: