“You see,” said Vallicose. “The Blessed Colonel ordered two people killed today. Smart was one.”
And I was the other, Chevie realized. They were always going to kill me.
Vallicose holstered her weapon. “Shoot the child and be done, Sister Lunka. There is something not right with this place.”
“I’m just going to reach into my pocket,” said Witmeyer, whose hands were still over her head as though she were a prisoner. “And pull out a gun to shoot you with. I sincerely wish this wasn’t necessary. But orders is orders, as they say.”
If there can ever be a good time for a house to convulse, this was that time. Smart’s house shook as though in the grip of an angry giant, sending the occupants bouncing off the walls. Chevie came to rest on top of the dying professor. His blood seemed to draw her closer, like crimson tentacles.
“I’m sorry,” she said as the kitchen dissolved around them, revealing that they were no longer in London but some other dimension composed of matter that seemed solid, liquid, and gas, but also somehow aware. Smart space.
“Smart space,” said Charles Smart, as if he could hear Chevie’s thoughts. “And my name is Smart. Geddit?”
The professor chuckled, blood burbling over his teeth.
There was something familiar about this whole insane situation, but it eluded her still. Tantalizingly close, but not close enough, and she chased it like a seagull feather down Malibu beach on a windy morning.
Relax, said Traitor Chevie. We’re in the tunnel now. My time is coming.
The Traitor is coming. Great.
Chevie remembered the Thundercats. She rolled off Smart and looked around for them. Witmeyer lay folded almost double, like a discarded coat, wedged into a corner of ceiling that used to be floor, floating away into the smart space. Vallicose stood ramrod straight, her arms overhead like a diver. There were tears on her face, but they were tears of fanatical joy.
“I am ready, Lord!” she cried. “Take me to your arms. I am ready.”
It seemed as though the Thundercats were occupied. Chevie should see if there was anything she could do for the dying man.
The professor’s breath was ragged and irregular.
“The key,” he said, surely his last words. He was pawing at her weakly. No, not pawing, giving her something. A plastic pendant.
“And the table,” whispered Smart. “Lie on the table. It will anchor you.”
“Okay, Professor. I will lie on the table.” It was crazy, but not the craziest order she’d had today, not by a long shot.
His mission accomplished, Smart’s eyes rolled back, a long sigh rattled in his gullet, and he was gone.
Again, said Traitor Chevie. He has died in the wormhole before. Remember?
And she did remember something. It seemed like a déjà vu or maybe a dream fragment.
Don’t worry, said Traitor Chevie. I’m coming any second now. All will be revealed.
Chevie clasped the key tight in her fingers, and orange light glowed through her skin, because her skin had become translucent.
Translucent skin. Rarely a positive development.
The table! Chevie threw herself spread-eagled on the metal kitchen table and hoped that whatever the term anchoring meant in this situation, it would be good.
She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t terror-stricken.
I am afraid, yes, but not terrified.
Covered in blood in the midst of some supernatural event—and yet, while she had been shaken to her core a minute earlier, Chevie felt as though she was discovering a core of steel.
That’s me. I’m coming.
The Traitor’s voice seemed louder now, part of the real world.
No, that was wrong. She was part of the Traitor’s world.
Take me, God. Take me to your bosom.
That was Clover Vallicose thinking out loud.
You are not rid of us, Chevron Savano. We have a mission.
And there was Witmeyer—not dead, then. Wishful thinking.
The orange glow spread until it filled the space inside and outside Chevie’s head.
Perhaps I have shrunk.
A wind howled around her, tossing Chevie like a twig in a hurricane, then the orange light exploded, lifting Chevie and the table on the head of a giant geyser. Maybe liquid, maybe imaginary; but there was no pain, just the balm of helplessness.
Whatever is happening is going to happen, no matter what I do.
She saw Smart fall away below her and felt herself borne far away from everything she knew.
Traitor Chevie tutted. Isn’t there anything familiar about all of this? Haven’t you dreamed about orange light?
It was true. Chevie had woken several times in the past weeks with a quickly evaporating sense of orangeness, which had seemed stupid to think about, but maybe wasn’t so stupid now.
The geyser was suddenly spent, and Chevie found herself suspended by something in a sea of something, and that was about as well as she would ever be able to describe it.
This could not get any stranger, she thought. A notion that held true for a moment or two, until a second version of herself appeared in front of her. It was definitely her, but different. Harder. More combat miles.
Traitor Chevie, she thought, and the thought carried outside her head.
Her doppelganger reached out, grasping Chevie’s skull in both hands.
“I’m gonna open your mind,” she said. “It might not hurt.”
But it probably will, thought Chevie.
And she was right.
Time travel causes chaos, and chaos doesn’t follow your rules. That’s why it’s called chaos, dummy.
—Professor Charles Smart
THE ORIENT THEATRE, HOLBORN, LONDON, 1899
Anton Farley firing at his lord and benefactor with some kind of futuristic multi-shooter? Well, it was more than a brain could comprehend. Meek and mild Farley? Farley the ink man, who was content to be the butt of jokes? Farley the complacent, who bore without complaint the jibes of the Battering Rams, who could often be a cruel bunch, especially when the grog took control of their tongues?
Malarkey had a vague memory of one drunken night in the Hidey-Hole when Pooley had referred to Anton Farley as that doting simperling with his bag o’ colors.
Malarkey was not certain whether or not the word simperling was an actual soldier in the army of the queen’s own lingo, but it got the message across. Farley had never so much as batted an eyelid.
It’s been simmering, thought the Ram king now. All the slights been festering in his gnarled old heart.
Still, festering slights could not explain this sudden display of marksmanship, not to mention the fantastical weapon currently being brandished to devastating effect by the disgruntled tattooist.
In the twinkle of an eye since Farley had set his weapon a-spitting bullets, Jeeves and Noble had been cut down by the deadly hail. Virtually sundered, poor Noble had been.
And yet the gun made no more noise than a hacking consumptive, Malarkey thought now from the shadows of the orchestra pit into which he had flung himself, caring little as to the depth of the hole.
Had it been the pit of Hell itself, I would have taken the leap, he realized.
In truth, he did care now about the pit’s depth. Otto would have preferred a sight more depth and a sight more shadow, too.
I am trapped like a fish in a barrel down here. A blind man with a slingshot could nail me.
Malarkey felt a tear gather in one eye. Imagine. Great King Otto served his papers by a sixty-year-old tattooist. It don’t seem right. I always imagined that it would require a legion of bluebottles to drag me under, or perhaps an escaped lion from Regent’s Zoo. At the very least a hostile bunch of traitorous cohorts doing for me like Julius Caesar’s mates did for ’im. But no. A ruddy ink-jo
ckey.
It was an ignoble way to go, and Malarkey had always been uncommonly worried about posterity.
Farley can make up any old yarn, he realized. He could swear I died whimpering like a puppy in a sack. He could say Otto Malarkey soiled himself.
Otto’s pride urged him to call out to Farley, to offer parlay, but his soldier’s sense cautioned him to keep his big trap shut, as it was possible that Farley was not altogether certain as to where his king had disappeared.
Where is my brother? wondered Malarkey, not for a second considering that Barnabus could be dead. Inhumane had once found himself in the path of a Chinese blunderbuss during a skirmish behind an opium den, and the scattershot had only made him angry.