The navigator (14 page)

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turn hard and frozen, so close that he could feel the vibration of the terrible power projecting from it.

And then it became aware of Owen. He could almost feel its attention turn to him. Not only that, but it felt as if it knew who he was. With lightning speed the beam turned on him, and he barely managed to leap out of its way. Again it sought him out, and again, striking like a snake, eager for his warmth. He ran up the slope, slipping, gasping for breath, the air around him full of frozen earth and shattered timber. With his last strength he threw himself at the dressing table. The beam seemed to rear above him, and he could feel its sense of triumph at cornering its prey. With the strength of desperation, Owen pulled the dressing table across his body and felt the terrifying jolt as the beam hit the mirror, just above his heart.

For a moment there was nothing except the sound of the beam, then it doubled on itself, reflected back along its own path, back toward the Harsh and their ice cathedral. It struck like a thunderbolt. The Harsh's voices changed. The structure began to vibrate violently. The Harsh's movements became frenetic and their voices changed to an eerie wail. At the same time the mirror shattered and the cathedral structure exploded with a terrifying boom.

Owen was thrown backward. Shards of ice rained on him. He scrambled to his feet. Down below, the attackers were looking about them uncertainly. The men and women defending the Workhouse seemed to shake

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themselves as though waking from a nightmare. Standing at the very front of the Resisters was Pieta. Even from a distance Owen could see the light of battle in her eyes. She raised the magno whip above her head and in one easy movement flicked it forward over the heads of the attackers, the lash extending until the tip of it covered the first three ranks. She threw her head back and laughed, and as she did so the attackers' uncertainty turned to fear. The rest of the Resisters, no longer afraid, started to laugh as well and, raising their weapons, started forward in a wave. Johnston's men dropped their weapons, turned, and ran.

Wesley was dazed but unhurt. By the time Owen got him to his feet and back to the Workhouse, the sounds of battle had faded into the distance. Johnston's men had been driven back across the river. The landscape in front of the building was unrecognizable, broken stone and trees scattered all over, the ground churned up into frozen ridges of earth. In the Workhouse they were tending to the wounded. Exhausted men and women sat everywhere. The Sub-Commandant and Dr. Diamond stood in the entrance to the Workhouse.

"I saw what you did," the Sub-Commandant said. "It was brave and it was clever. Thank you. If you are not too tired, perhaps you would find Cati for me and bring her here."

"It wasn't just me," said Owen, "it was Wesley as well." He saw gratitude in Wesley's wary eyes. Wesley

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had gone along with him without ever questioning what he was doing.

"Cati's at the warehouses," Wesley said. "I'll go." The Sub-Commandant smiled and turned away.

Owen suddenly realized he was starving. But as he turned to Wesley to suggest going to the kitchen first, Dr. Diamond drew him aside. "Good fight," he said enthusiastically. "That was a clever thing you did. Wouldn't have thought of it myself." Owen felt a glow of satisfaction. Perhaps people like Samual might start accepting him now.

"Come with me now, Owen," Dr. Diamond said. "There will be a Convoke in the morning and hostility to you. I want you to be prepared."

Owen groaned inwardly. He thought that his trick with the mirror would have convinced them that he was on their side. Part of him had even secretly hoped that he would be carried shoulder high into the Convoke.

"Never mind," Dr. Diamond said in a kindly voice, as if he had read the boy's thoughts. "You do have friends as well."

Owen followed Dr. Diamond up the Nab until they reached the gleaming Skyward. Once they were inside Dr. Diamond disappeared, reappearing a few minutes later with a large plate of excellent cakes. Neither of them spoke until every crumb was gone. Dr. Diamond brushed the fragments off his karate suit and looked at Owen seriously.

"I have some idea of what will happen in the morning

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at the Convoke, and it is time for you to know some of your story. For that you must know something of the Mortmain. And of Gobillard et Fils."

Owen remembered the cold voice of the Harsh in his head from the night he had crossed the river, the way it had spoken the word
Mortmain.

"I have heard of it," he said, "but I don't know what it is."

"The Mortmain has been many things to different people through the ages. It has taken many shapes as well, but usually it is an object about twice the size of a man's hand, made of brass or bronze. Quite often it is in the shape of a household object or a tool and appears quite battered until you look at it carefully."

"What does it do?"

"For the Resisters it is always the means to turn back the advances of the Harsh. Either it points the way or it fulfills some purpose. In our present case, I suspect that it is the object that can be used to turn off the Great Machine in the north and set time back on its proper course--or courses, since we know of at least five different states of time."

"But Dr. Diamond," said Owen, as much to stop another bewildering lecture on time as anything else, "if we could find it, we could stop the Harsh and I could go home. Where is it?"

"Where is it?" Dr. Diamond's face was grave and he leaned forward and studied Owen, his eyes suddenly dark and gleaming. "Where is it?"

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"Is it missing?" Owen said, suddenly feeling unaccountably worried.

"Is it missing?" cried Dr. Diamond, getting to his feet and towering over Owen. "Yes, it is missing and that is the central part of the problem, the nub, the crux, the salient point. It is missing, and the reason it is missing, Owen, is that your father took it!"

There was a long silence. Owen could hear the ticking of the five clocks and the moan of the wind against the brass walls of the Nab. How could his father have taken it? And yet ... In a part of his memory something stirred.

"When your father was a young man, he used to come fishing in the river. He met the Sub-Commandant as the Harsh were threatening. The Sub-Commandant had just Woken us, for he had detected tremors in the fabric of time. We had to be cautious. Something was interfering with time, but life--your life--was going on as normal."

"What was he like?" Owen could hear the tremor in his voice.

"What was ... ? Did your mother not ... ?" Owen shook his head mutely. Dr. Diamond looked surprised.

"They say he ... they say he killed himself," Owen said miserably.

"Suicide?" Dr. Diamond stroked his chin thoughtfully. "No, I don't think so. Not your father. He was brave, like you, and resourceful as well. He was, well, he was a happier person than you, I suppose, but that can't

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be helped. He fought side by side with us and we succeeded in repulsing the Harsh one more time. We were puzzled by that attack at the time, but now it seems it was part of a grander scheme, and that its purpose was for the Harsh to get their hands on the Mortmain. At which, of course, they failed."

"Where was I?"

"You were a baby. At home with your mother."

"What happened then?"

"We had a gathering in the Convoke, as we normally do before we go back to Sleep. Usually everybody is a little distracted, thinking about the long Sleep to come. Nobody missed your father. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. And with him the Mortmain."

"Are you sure it was him?"

"What people say is that it must have been, otherwise why did he sneak off?"

"And what do you think?"

If the question discomfited Dr. Diamond, he didn't show it. "If your father did not take the Mortmain, then we have somebody very dangerous in our midst. If he did take it, he must have had a very good reason."

"I don't remember my father," Owen said quietly.

Dr. Diamond put a hand on his shoulder. "Then you aren't in a position to judge him. Let's deal with the present and let the past--or is it the future?--look after itself."

"What about Gobillard?"

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"I almost forgot," Dr. Diamond said, frowning, "and time is short. Gobillard was the first Navigator and the Keeper of the Mortmain. Much of the knowledge about him is lost, as is his lore about the Mortmain."

"But the chest in my bedroom!" Owen burst out. Quickly he told Dr. Diamond about the old chest.

"Your father's?" asked Dr. Diamond. "I'm afraid I do not know what it means. And remember, it is gone, lost in time along with many other things. We may never know how the chest might have helped us. But quickly. I brought you here for two things--to give you information about your father and the Mortmain, but also to see what you can discover yourself. I want you to sit in that seat."

When Owen got into the tatty old leather plane seat he thought that the levers were familiar-looking.

"I adapted them from gearsticks belonging to old school buses and lorries," Dr. Diamond said proudly. Owen was starting to get used to the way that Dr. Diamond adapted things.

"What's it for?"

"It's for ... let me think how to describe it... I can't say it's for looking back in time, because once you're out of the present, of course, there is no backward and forward." Dr. Diamond stopped, seeing the blank look on Owen's face.

"I'll try again." He frowned with effort, then brightened. "I know--it's like turning on a television and flicking through the channels with the sound turned down so

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you have to guess what's going on. Except the television here is time itself."

Owen thought he knew what Dr. Diamond was talking about, and the man was looking at him so eagerly that he nodded.

"You might see something useful and you might not," Dr. Diamond said, "but it's worth a try. Now, concentrate!"

Dr. Diamond began to move the levers and the Skyward started to rotate, slowly at first, then at bewildering speed so that Owen could feel his own head starting to spin.

"Now!" cried Dr. Diamond, hauling back on a lever. The periscope started to descend from the ceiling. As it reached Owen, he grabbed the handles on either side of it and, feeling like a submarine captain from an old film, pressed his face to the eyepiece.

At first he could see nothing. Or rather what he thought was nothing but was in fact nothingness, which was a different thing altogether. It was like he imagined outer space to be, except that was cold and black and this was just ... well, he thought, no temperature at all, really, and no color.

"Turn the periscope," Dr. Diamond said, his voice seeming to come from a great distance. At first the images were a blur but then Owen realized that he could catch them if he went very slowly. There was a vast herd of some kind of deer silently crossing a frozen tundra. He saw a building with flames coming from its windows

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and a flag fluttering from its highest point. He saw a boy and a girl holding hands beside a sun-dappled pond.

"You're getting it now," said Dr. Diamond. "Concentrate!" Owen didn't know what he was supposed to concentrate on exactly, but he kept rotating the periscope. He discovered that if he turned the left handle it acted like the focus on a camera. As he turned it, he momentarily glimpsed a house and knew that it was his own home. Then he lost the image and tried to go back to it, but he couldn't find it.

"Keep going," Dr. Diamond said urgently. The next image that came up was of a man's hands, one on the steering wheel of a car, the other shifting gears urgently. After that, the images came faster and faster. Something dull and gold flying through a window and landing with a clank on metal. The swaying sensation of a car being flung round corners. Owen was aware that Dr. Diamond was shouting to him, but he couldn't hear the words. In his nostrils it seemed that he could smell salt water, and then it was as if he was floating through air, and the image was of the world outside the car, spinning upside down.

The final image was the most frightening. The car was filling with dark water. There was sunlight coming through the windscreen, but it took on a greenish tinge and started to fade. The water rose higher and higher, and Owen imagined that it was rising toward his nose and mouth and he shouted out. As he did so, he saw the hands that he had seen on the wheel desperately hammering at the

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side window until it broke. Then he knew what was happening. That he was the person in the car and that the hands belonged to his father. The hands lifted him and thrust him through the broken window. For a moment all was watery darkness, then sunlight flooded the eyepiece of the periscope. Owen felt Dr. Diamond gently removing his hands from the handles. He lay back in the chair and his chest rose and fell as he drew great shuddering breaths.

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