Now and for Never (13 page)

She stopped and blinked down at the iron cuffs biting into the flesh of the big man's burly, muscle-corded wrists. His thick fingers—Clare knew from having watched him create a delicate piece of jewellery that they were superhumanly dextrous—hung limply in front of him.

There were livid bruises on his face, around his eyes.

“Um. Yeah. Okay … We should probably get
you
the hell out of here, too,” she concluded, a flare of anger adding an edge to her voice. “And maybe punch whoever did this to you on our way out the door.”

“What happened?” Al asked, working the last scarf knot free. “Where is this ship headed? And where's Marcus? Is he here?”

Blood rushed back into Clare's fingertips, making them tingle painfully, and she gasped at the sensation before Llassar had a chance to answer. In the silence that followed she peered around in the gloom. The glowstick cast its greenish illumination in a little circle that barely encompassed the three of them. Clare couldn't see what else the ship's hold might contain. But then, as she made herself concentrate, she
heard
what else it contained. People. Al heard it at the same time she did. Above the sounds of the creaking planks of the ship's
sides, Clare could hear breathing, the murmuring of voices, whispered questions.

As Al slowly lifted the glowstick over her head, the thin wash of eldritch glow reflected back from the staring eyes of more than a dozen faces. Celtic prisoners in chains and Roman legionnaires both, they all worked together in a kind of fire-brigade line of bailing buckets.

“Do not fear them.” Llassar grinned wanly at the girls as Al lowered the chemical light and turned back to Clare, her eyes white-rimmed.

“Why?” Al asked in a dry whisper. “'Cause they're too busy keeping the ship afloat to deal with a couple of unarmed teenage girls?”

“They might be” came Paulinus's voice as the governor appeared above them. With swift, sure motions, he swung himself down through the hatch and nimbly descended the ladder. “But I'm not.”

“Damn.” Clare was kind of hoping the swaggering Roman had been swept overboard.

“No such luck,” Al muttered out of the side of her mouth, reading Clare's expression with her usual uncanny accuracy.

That wasn't the only uncanny thing. The ship felt as though it had stopped bucking. In fact, it felt as though it had stopped moving altogether. The rough planking beneath their feet no longer shuddered and groaned. Llassar and Paulinus exchanged a glance. The Druid smith's expression remained impassive, placid even, but the Roman commander's eye narrowed.

“Yes,” he said. “We've entered another abyss.”

“A
what
?” Clare and Al asked in tandem.

Paulinus jerked his head in the direction of the ladder. “You should probably see this,” he said. “Perhaps you can even shed some light on it.”

Well … no. No, they couldn't.

Because once they climbed back up on deck, neither Al nor Clare had the faintest idea what they were looking at. The square blue-and-white sail billowed at midship, straining at the ropes as if filled with a gale-force wind. But there wasn't even the hint of a breeze where they stood. The water, only moments ago a roiling cauldron of frothing, gnashing, massive grey waves with high peaks and dread troughs, had turned koi-pond smooth. Barely a ripple marred its surface, tinged a deep, glassy purple from reflecting the sky above.

And
what
a sky.

9

A
llie heard Clare gasp.

She would have done the same, except that it's hard to gasp when your mouth is already hanging open.

The Roman merchant galley looked as though it was sailing into a tunnel on a cosmic amusement park ride. It was like a massive, sky-sized version of Clare's personal shimmer effect, Allie thought. As if someone had showered the aurora borealis in pixie dust and rolled it up into a tube. The tunnel seemed to be rotating in a slow-mo barrel roll, but it was hard to tell. The clouds overhead swirled in a large-scale version of Milo's temporal barrier rift in Glastonbury. The air rippled in sheets—just as it had when she'd been on the open moors with Marcus, running for her life, waves of temporal distortion sweeping over them.

As Allie stared upward from the deck of the ship, she thought she could discern ribbons of different-time-of-day skies. Windows of bright noon-blue sky studded with puffball clouds swirled side by side with a slash of moonlit midnight glittering with stars. In one place there was a thunderstorm, in another, gentle rain. Or ice pellets. Blazing sun. Fog …

But none of it touched them. The ship was shrouded in a faintly glimmering, crepuscular light, a hazy-purple luminescence more than fitting for the
Twilight Zone
-y-ness of the
moment. The deck was crowded with soldiers, all standing, staring into the tunnelly abyss. None worked the rigging or the rudders; it seemed there was no need. The ship just zoomed along as though set on some kind of ancient, mystical, nautical autopilot.

The men's expressions were less fearful than Allie had expected. More like … resigned. She got the sense that any panic the soldiers may have felt had long been leached from them, as if they'd accepted the epic journey they were on, like Jason and the Argonauts, or Odysseus. It was eerie.

“This is eerie,” Clare said.

Allie turned to Suetonius Paulinus. “I'm guessing this kind of thing has happened before?”

“It has.”

He stood gripping the wooden railing so hard he was practically making finger marks. She supposed she could hardly blame him. As advanced and disciplined and logical as the average Roman military mind must have been—and Paulinus was likely head of the class in that department— she also knew, from all the reading she'd done, that the soldiers of the Empire were even more superstitious than regular civilians. And it was, after all, the first century. They didn't know anything about electromagnetic pulses and the theory of relativity and, really, what did it matter that
she
did?

They're caught in a giant magical vortex, and so are you.

And first century or twenty-first, everyone on that boat had the right to be terrified out of their wits.

“Al?” Clare murmured out of the side of her mouth. She was leaning slightly over the side, peering down at the water rushing past far below.

“Yeah?” Al said quietly, leaning over to see what Clare was looking at.

“How fast would you say a boat like this usually travels?”

“Umm … Before we shimmered I asked Milo about that— because of the whole ‘meet us on the island' thing—and he said that wherever we snapped that photo, it couldn't be that far because a first-century merchant vessel powered exclusively by sail”—she glanced down the rail and saw no banks of oars—“would only clock maybe five or six knots out of a good stiff wind. That's nautical miles.”

Clare frowned down at the water. “I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say we're going faster than that.
Way
faster.”

Al frowned down at the thick, froth-crested wake that spread out from the bow of the ship. “Yeah … This sucker is moving at like … jet-boat speeds. We are seriously motoring.”

“And how long have they been at this do you figure?” Clare asked quietly.

“Umm … Judging from the rampant stubble on the generally hygiene-happy legionnaires?” Allie said, glancing around at the faces of the Roman soldiers. They stood in clumps along the railings in less than their usual spit-polished uniform gear. “I'd say a couple of weeks at least.”

“Seventeen days,” Paulinus said.

Allie was shocked to see the bleak, naked vulnerability on his face. Here was a man who'd evidently never found himself at a loss for words or actions. And now he was just plain lost. Period. The lostest you could ever be, she thought. Even when she'd found herself stranded in the past, all she'd had to do was look up at the terraced contours of Ynys Wyddryn— Glastonbury Tor—and she'd know where, geographically at least, she was.

The governor shrugged. “As near as I can tell.”

Clare tilted her head, regarding him keenly. “What do you mean ‘as near as you can tell'? Are you really bad at math or something? Or did you just lose count? I mean, seriously, seventeen isn't that high a number.”

“It is once you run out of fresh water,” Paulinus grunted.
“And my uncertainty arises from these … these
things
.” He swept one hand at the weird time tunnel phenomenon.

Clare followed the gesture with her eyes. “What
is
this?”

Paulinus's eyes narrowed as his gaze raked Clare's face. “I was hoping you could tell me, little witch.” His gaze shifted to Allie. “One of you.”

Allie shook her head. This went beyond any Shenanigans she or Clare had experienced. This was big. She glanced up at the silent, swirling chaos. Really big. And if the Romans had been sailing for seventeen days at intermittent speeds, then Milo's calculations were way off. That couldn't be good.

“Where
are
we?” she wondered, fear tracing a cold finger up her spine.

“Nowhere,” Clare answered in a strained voice. “Everywhere. Every
when
…”

“The vertex appears without warning,” Paulinus said. Allie understood that by “vertex” he meant whirlpool or vortex, as apt a description as any. “One moment the sea is normal. Of this world. Then … a sudden crack of lightning, darkness descending, and the ship is once again hurtling through this Stygian passage. When we emerge, it is never the same as when we entered. The sun, if it was up, is often down. Or in another part of the sky. The phases of the moon and the placement of the stars will differ. The weather, the winds, the water, the temperature … all will have altered.” Paulinus paused. “Are we in Hades?” he asked quietly. “Is that why you are here? Have you come to guide us into the infernal realm, as in the old stories?”

“Nope,” Clare said with a firm shake of her head. “Mr. Paulinus, sir, we are just as much in the dark here as you are. Right, Al? No idea what's going on.”

“Right. None.”
Good,
Al thought.
Let's keep him on a don'tneed-to-know basis.

“Really.” His gaze went a bit flinty, as if he sensed he was being stonewalled.

Clare returned the stare, crossing her arms over her chest. The silent battle of wills went on for a good half-minute.

“Where did you go after you disappeared from the top of the hill?”

“Uh …” The question took Clare off-guard. “Nowhere …?”

“What she means is,” Allie jumped in, “we don't know. We can't remember. Look … this
isn't
our fault. It's probably that Druid woman's doing. Like you said. Some kind of curse. We're just a couple of girls”—here she did her best not to gag—“and we just want to get home. That's all.”

“I'm afraid that is unlikely.” The governor shrugged. “We are in pursuit of a cargo of stolen gold and I very much doubt we'll be turning around until we capture that vessel. Whether we want to or not.”

“The gold from the Druid sanctuary on the island of Mona.” Tactfully, Clare didn't point out that
that's
who the gold had been stolen from. The Druiddyn. Not the Romans.

“What remains of it, yes.” Paulinus's eyebrow twitched as he regarded the girls. “You know of this gold?”

Allie shot a look at Clare. “Uh, sure. Word gets around about that sort of thing, y'know. So … it's where now?”

“On board the ship we've been chasing.”

He nodded in the direction they were heading, and although they couldn't see the other vessel, Paulinus seemed certain it was there. The girls didn't have much recourse but to believe him. They were lucky enough he'd even told them that much. Perhaps it was the abundant weirdness of the situation that seemed to have inclined the governor to chat, or maybe he just didn't see the point in keeping information from them when they were all part of the same captive audience.

“That impetuous young protégé of Quintus Postumus's led us to retrieve it.”

Clare and Allie exchanged a hopeful glance.

“Do you mean Marcus Donatus?” Clare asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“I believe that's his name, yes,” Paulinus grunted, apparently unimpressed with the young soldier. “He'd been quite infected with Postumus's insubordinance. I almost had to kill him. But the wild man with the oddly constructed costume convinced me to let him live, if only to lead us to the booty. I'm still not sure if that was a mistake …”

Wild man?
Allie wondered. She glanced at Clare who mouthed
“Morholt”
at her.

“We transported the gold to a port on the Severn,” Paulinus continued, “and were to sail with the tide the next morning. I left Donatus and a detachment of my men on board that ship. I had been told of the siege of Postumus's camp by the Druidess and her Amazons—they call them scathach, a barbaric name—and I thought it best not to take chances. The rest of us stayed onshore to guard against any attacks.”