The Long War (33 page)

‘Well . . . Purposeful.’

There was a flash of teeth, Finn McCool faded for an instant, and was gone. Joshua could have been wrong, but it seemed that McCool’s grin was the last bit of him to go.

And out of the mists . . .

The rising sun sent spears of reddish light across the grassland, and the altitude of this summit lent a faint chill to the breeze. A few shreds of mist stirred down among the trees that marked the stream.

And there were shapes among the trees.

They began as mere suggestions of motion in the mist, and then solidified. The general effect was of a wheel slowing from turbine speeds to stillness. When they were still—

They were not much taller than a man, but the beanpole thinness gave an exaggerated impression of height. Their skin was greyish, and they wore their ash-blonde hair Afro-style. They could have passed muster in some of the badly lit discos Joshua had, if rarely, attended in his youth back in Madison.

Except for the ears. Which were large and pointed, and constantly flicking back and forth as though seeking the faintest sounds. And except for the eyes, that glowed a very faint green. They carried long thin double-bladed weapons of wood – swords, for want of a better word. They weren’t yelling, or waving their weapons. They just looked quietly determined.

Any child could have put a name to them.
Elves
. Not relatively friendly music-loving conversationalists like Finn McCool. The elves of nightmare.

And they were closing on Joshua, from every direction.

Joshua had nowhere to run. He had encountered various species of elves before. He knew that stepping wouldn’t help, not when faced with an enemy that was a
better
stepper than he was. His gun was somewhere in the scuffed-up sleeping bag. Only the radio was in reach, a plastic block the size of his fist. Not much of a weapon . . .

The first elf to reach him brought back its sword for a killing arc – and hesitated, as if relishing the moment.

Joshua, frozen to the spot, stared back. Close to, the creature looked like something out of a book on prehistory, though a Neanderthal would have considered it ugly. Its face was a network of wrinkles. It wore a short fur tunic, some sort of knapsack, and an expression of calculation. Maybe it was hesitating as it tried to work out which way he was going to step, so it could follow him and kill him anyway.

All this in a heartbeat. Then Joshua’s reflexes took over.

He ducked, grabbed the radio, and brought it around in a rapid swing that was interrupted by the elf’s jaw. Bits of glass and plastic erupted in a shower of golden sparks. As the elf staggered back, Joshua’s leg came up for the classic strike favoured by women’s self-defence teachers everywhere, and a high-pitched squeal of agony added to mankind’s tiny stock of anatomical knowledge of Long Earth humanoids.

And suddenly there was action all around Joshua.

McCool was back, he had brought more kobolds, and they were already fighting. The cavalry, Joshua thought with a rush of gratitude. But this was a cavalry that
stepped
, like its opponents. Suddenly figures from both subspecies were flashing past Joshua’s view, like fragments of nightmare.

Joshua got out of there. He ran head-down for the ladder which came dangling from the descending ship. He had to knock one fighter out of the way; he couldn’t tell if it was a good guy or a bad guy.

Only when he got to the ladder, and, with the security of an alloy rung in his hand, was already rising in the air and out of the battle, did he look back down.

The elves favoured swords, while the kobolds tended to fight barehanded – which showed rather more intelligence in Joshua’s view, because if you were grappling with your opponent he couldn’t step without taking you with him. Besides, the kobolds seemed to have elevated unarmed combat to the point where weapons would merely get in the way. He saw one kobold vanish momentarily as a blade nearly beheaded him, then reappear, grab the sword arm and with balletic grace send a kick into the elf’s chest that must have killed immediately. As usual with a humanoid fight, it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. If a fighter was victorious he sought out another opponent, but would be quite oblivious to the fact that a colleague was being backed into a corner by overwhelming odds.

And then Joshua saw Finn McCool downed by a wooden sword thrust through his arm. Maybe he tried to step, but he was stunned, confused. His elf opponent dodged a disembowelling swipe from McCool’s horny toes, and withdrew the sword for a second thrust.

Again this elf paused before the moment of the kill. His back was to Joshua.

And Joshua had a chance to intervene.

‘Damn it!’ Joshua let go of the ladder and his chance of safety, dropped heavily to the ground, picked up a fallen branch, and ran across. It wasn’t that Finn McCool had endeared himself to Joshua. But if Joshua had to choose, he’d take the side of someone who hadn’t actually tried to kill him. Had, indeed, come back to fight on his side.

Still running, he hit the elf across the neck as hard as he could. Joshua had anticipated a satisfying thunk of timber on flesh. Instead there was a soft necrotic splat, as the rotten branch disintegrated in an explosion of fungus spores and angry beetles. The elf, totally unharmed, turned slowly, its face puckered in astonishment.

Finn McCool’s good hand flashed out once, twice, and where it hit there was a sharp crack of bone. The elf folded up on itself, and stepped away before it died.

Blood was dripping from McCool’s arm, but he wasn’t paying it any attention. McCool stood up, face-to-face with Joshua – and Joshua realized that something had gone very wrong. ‘Pathless-ss one! I kill you many!’

The war around them was ceasing. Elves and kobolds alike had paused in mid-slaughter to watch them. ‘Now look—’

Finn McCool flung back his head and screamed. The flying kick he launched could have killed Joshua in a second.

But Joshua had already set off running, heading for that ladder again. He threw himself into the air and grabbed a rung, and to his credit, Bill raised the ship immediately. Joshua looked down from a few yards up, to see Finn McCool sprawled cursing under a tree, his injured arm leaking blood.

Then Joshua was rising up through the sparse canopy and into the sunlight, and the montane forest, the messy, sprawling battleground, receded from view.

He climbed up the rest of the ladder, through the hatch and into the sanity of the gondola, stood up, and cracked his head on the ceiling. He started pulling up the ladder in great tangled armfuls.

‘That is you, isn’t it, Joshua?’ Bill asked anxiously. ‘I’ve been out of touch since you used the radio to bust that elf’s jaw—’

‘Just go, go!’

Only when the ladder was up did he let himself sag down on to a couch, fighting for breath. There was no sound up here but the squeaks and groans from the gasbag as it warmed up in the morning’s heat. Below him the
Shillelagh
’s shadow drifted peacefully across the forest roof, as if all sorts of hell weren’t going on down there in the gloom.

He kept seeing Finn McCool’s face, a contorted Noh mask of fury and hatred. ‘I saved his life. McCool. Somehow that made me a deadly enemy. Where was the logic in that?’

‘It’s kobold logic, Joshua. Like human honour, but in a distorting mirror. You shamed him by saving him, when he was supposed to be saving
you
. You want to go down and have a bit of an old chat about it?’

‘Just get us out of here.’

The forest below blinked away.

N
ELSON’S FIRST STOP
in Wyoming, where he had driven in his rental Winnebago on the trail of the Lobsang Project, was at Dubois, cowboy country.

Alas there was a shortage of cowboys nowadays, Wyoming folk having been particularly quick to head for the new stepwise worlds where land was free and government interference infrequent. It was almost reassuring for Nelson to read on a truck bumper sticker, ‘In This Neighbourhood We Don’t Just Watch.’

He found a LongHorn, and ordered a beer and a burger. The TV in an upper corner, largely ignored, was showing images of continuing geological problems in Yellowstone, in another part of the state. Swarms of minor earthquakes, an evacuation of some small community, landslips, roads cut. Dead fish in Yellowstone Lake. Bubbles, rising languidly in some pool of hot mud. But many of these incidents, Nelson slowly gathered, were in fact occurring in stepwise versions of Yellowstone in the worlds next door. The geologists, scattered over a band of worlds with instruments stripped from long-standing stations on the Datum, claimed to be learning a huge amount from comparative studies of the differing behaviours of the stepwise calderas. The newsreaders, vacant and pretty, mimed exaggerated relief that the still-overcrowded Datum itself didn’t seem to be seriously affected, and cracked silly jokes.

Nelson looked away, retreating into his own thoughts. It had taken him a month to get here from Chicago, a slow, rambling journey, and a very pleasurable one. He had needed the time to shed his past, the very intense experience of his years as a priest in St. John on the Water. He had been like a deep sea diver decompressing, he imagined. In the meantime, the world’s mysteries could wait . . .

To his mild irritation, just outside Nelson’s window was an animated billboard fixed to an iron rail fence. It cycled through various distracting messages, which he did his best to ignore. Distractions everywhere: that was the modern world, on the Datum anyhow. Then one message caught his eye: ‘Can you see the humour of this iron railing?’

He nearly dropped his burger, which would have been a wicked waste. ‘A G. K. Chesterton quote?
Here?
. . . Good afternoon to you, Lobsang. So I’m on the right track.’

The Winnebago wasn’t the fastest machine on the road, but once out of Dubois Nelson floored it.

He said aloud, to anybody listening, ‘Strictly speaking I am doing an amazingly dumb thing. I might be dealing with a madman. Well, I’ve met one or two of those, but very few of them quoted me the works of one of the best writers Britain ever produced . . .’ Gazing down the empty road, Nelson wondered how long it was since anyone other than a scholar had read the works of G. K. Chesterton. He’d not even read much himself since he’d devoured the best of them in his teens, after a chance discovery in a public library in Joburg.

Devil’s Tower was visible on the horizon ahead when a motorcycle cop pulled him over.

The cop wore a dark visor, carried a massive gun in a holster at his hip, and, as he sauntered over, he had an all-round air of menacing dominance. ‘Mr. Nelson A-zi-ki-we?’ He took a lot of care with the name. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Show some ID, please.’

Nelson drew breath. ‘No, sir! Show me your ID . . . Here we are, two strangers on an empty road, both uncertain of the other’s identity – and allegiance. A quintessentially Chestertonian moment, don’t you think?’

The cop’s eyes were invisible behind the visor. But he grinned and said, ‘In the breaking of bridges—’

More Chesterton. Automatically, the words coming straight up from the obsessive reading of his adolescence, Nelson said, ‘Is the end of the world.’

‘Good enough, friend. No further credentials necessary. Unfortunately a genuine patrol officer is on the horizon, so excuse me for running. You’ll find coordinates in your sat-nav.’

Thirty seconds later his motorbike was lost on the horizon.

Of course the kosher cop, when he arrived, was inquisitive. Nelson went into innocent-and-mildly-disorientated-tourist mode, and managed to stall him until
three
Winnebagos, all with
California
plates, zoomed past doing somewhere over eighty, low-hanging fruit that couldn’t be ignored by any Wyoming cop.

Nelson drove on.

It was the middle of the following day when he drove the Winnebago into the forecourt of an electronics factory, and faced locked, unmanned gates, marked with the logo of the transEarth Institute. A small speaker on a pole by his driver-side door demanded, ‘Identify yourself, please.’

Nelson thought it over. He leaned out and said, ‘I am Thursday.’

‘Of course you are. Come right inside.’

The gate swung open silently. Nelson took a moment to run an online search on that name:
transEarth
. Then he drove through the gate.

H
E FOUND A
door, which revealed a short corridor, which led to an elevator.

‘Please walk forward,’ said the voice – Lobsang’s voice? ‘Take the lift; it will operate automatically.’

Of course it could be some kind of trap. But had the voice purposefully called the elevator a ‘lift’, British style, to put him at his ease? If so, cute, but strange.

He walked ahead willingly. The elevator sealed up around him and descended.

Even now that disembodied voice spoke to him. ‘This facility used to belong to the US government. Since being bought by trans-Earth, somehow it’s slipped off the map. Governments can be so clumsy . . .’

The elevator door opened to reveal a kind of study, perhaps a rather English design, complete with fireplace and dancing flames – obviously artificial, but crackling fairly realistically. He might almost have been back in one of the grander of his parishioners’ houses in St. John on the Water.

A chair shifted, set beside a low table. A man of indeterminate age stood to meet him, wearing a monk’s orange robe, head shaven, smiling – and holding a pipe. Somehow, like the fire, he had an air of artificiality.

‘Welcome, Nelson Azikiwe!’

Nelson stepped forward. ‘You are Lobsang?’

‘Guilty as charged.’ The man waved the pipe vaguely towards another chair. ‘Please sit.’

They sat, Nelson taking an upright chair opposite Lobsang.

‘First things first,’ Lobsang said. ‘We are safe and discreet in this place, which is one of several such support facilities I own across the world – indeed, the worlds. Nelson, you are free to walk out of here any time you wish, but I would prefer it if you never spoke about this meeting – well, I believe a fellow Chestertonian will be discreet. Grant me the liberty of confirming your favourite novel –
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, was it not?’