At the top of the stairs, Jonathan came from dark to light, half-blinded by a searing blue sky, the sun a blazing halo.
Through the black spots that floated across his eyes like intrepid explorers, he made out the curving stone wall of the top of the tower, with crenellations for archers or riflemen. The vague, burnt-out silhouettes of people. More soldiers? He hesitated, leaned there half in the shadow of the steps, where he could still only be seen as a forehead looming out of darkness. If he were seen at all.
At eye level, thirty feet away along the far wall: the unlikely sight of a folding canvas table, atop which sat a wooden tea tray with a blue porcelain pot, two cups, and a plate of small pastries.
He stared at the tea tray as his eyes adjusted to the brightness, shook his head as if that would be any help clearing the cobwebs, tried to slow his breathing.
Focus on what’s important, discard the rest, as his mother would say. The important thing. Not the carrot creature. Not the potato person.
The door was gone and he had no sense of where he was.
The table shuddered, shifted, settled, every few seconds as the tower shook. Hostage to whatever was happening beyond. Which sounded like rocks smashing together, like a pitched battle.
His vision improved against the glare. He saw that the battlements were obscured in part by curling vines and in part by a half-dozen people mostly in motley tunics and trousers. Not modern clothing. Not a costume drama. Not Vikings. Not Visigoths. Not ren faire. Not Britain. Not European. Vaguely … Persian? No, that wasn’t right, either. Clearly, Poxforth hadn’t been very good on Middle Eastern history or military fashions.
They watched whatever lay beyond the ramparts. Some with spyglasses, some with binoculars, both of which looked very non-Earth-standard. Some were in feverish discussion or argument and another frustration re the European emphasis at Poxforth: he couldn’t tell if they spoke Arabic or Farsi or Urdu or something else entirely. He just knew they had the look of battle-hardened soldiers; they read like “army.”
Right. Nothing for it but to plunge ahead.
He stumbled out onto the open top of the tower, a stiff breeze cool against his face, but bringing with it the smell of burning. The tower was perched atop a forested hill. Rough-laid stones bruised his feet through his shoes. He realized there had been a time change. From the quality of the intense sunlight, it was late afternoon here, wherever “here” was.
At his back through the crenellations lay a fringe of dark forest and then the sea—a vast, blue-green sea, sparkling and roiling, with a fleet that floated on it, and small boats rowing out to the ships, while there came the white puffs of cannon firing from the shore. He could see little of the landward side from that vantage, with the watchers standing there, other than that blue sky cut through now with a scattering of metallic gray clouds, columns of black smoke, and a faint cacophony, as of distant but furious battle.
Then he saw Lady Insult. She was splitting her time between looking out beyond the turret and talking intensely to a stranger, the tea tray between them. He wore a sophisticated, silverish armor over his tunic and riding breeches tucked into scuffed black boots. The boots and trousers could’ve been from anywhere. But the armor evoked Persian miniatures to Jonathan, although he so distrusted his paltry knowledge in this arena he felt once again at sea. The armor truly was a marvel, more like advanced tech than protection from the past, so finely wrought as to almost be invisible.
The stranger was of average height, well put-together, with dark hair, deep-set friendly hazel eyes, firm chin, neatly trimmed beard. Maybe just a few years older than Jonathan?
The man saw him. He straightened, brought his hands up in greeting.
“Welcome to Aurora, Jonathan Lambshead!” the man said in a cheerful tone. “My name is Mamoud Abad and I am the one trying to ensure this retreat does not become a rout. So I’m afraid we’ve not laid out what might be considered the customary hospitality.”
Aurora?
Yet he looked as if he’d been expecting Jonathan, even if behind the cheer there was a thoughtful, appraising look. His English had a slightly clipped quality to it. Jonathan couldn’t place the accent.
The others all turned to stare at him. Not in an entirely friendly way. Mamoud waved them back to their work, whatever it was, with a hand gesture.
In the face of that, all Jonathan could manage in reply to the man was: “The carrot spoke to me.”
“And the potato, too, I imagine,” Mamoud said, clearly amused. “You don’t have talking carrots where you come from.”
“No,” Jonathan said, although it had been a statement, not a question.
The other problem: Lady Insult, who was glaring at him as if she’d be just as happy if he took a running start and jumped off the turret.
“Never mind a talking carrot,” Lady Insult said. “What in the blazes are you doing here? How did you follow me? It’s impossible. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Rich, coming from the person who was trespassing on my property all week.” It took all his energy to keep his composure, to say the words, to throw it back at her. Irritation warring with the almost giddy relief of not having lost his last connection to the world he’d left behind. She could’ve attacked him with a knife and he would’ve tried to be cheerful about it.
“You have no idea what you’ve stepped into, no idea at all, and if I had—”
Mamoud held up his hand like a referee, and Lady Insult cut off in midtirade.
“It is true that as I’ve said we’re a little busy at the moment, Jonathan, but no need to be rude, Alice. Perhaps he had a good reason to follow you. Give him a moment to acclimate.”
While she continued to glower.
Focus on what’s important, discard the rest.
“The door is gone, and I don’t know where I am.”
“The return door isn’t gone, you fool,” Alice said. “It’s in the basement.”
By now the man had smoothly put himself between Jonathan and Lady Insult, proffered his hand as if to ward her off. Jonathan shook it.
Mamoud’s grip was firm, professional. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, if in urgent circumstances. My grandfather knew your grandfather. They were both in the Order, of course.”
“Did you ever meet Dr. Lambshead?”
“No, but I wish I had. I am glad I’m meeting you now, though.”
Standing closer to Mamoud, Jonathan could see that from a belt at his waist hung a silver pistol and a short, curved sword in a scuffed black scabbard. But he also had a burnished copper device, inscribed with symbols, shoved into the belt that looked suspiciously like some type of phone or shortwave receiver.
There came another explosion, and Jonathan flinched, but Mamoud moved not at all, and somehow his calm steadied Jonathan. He had the demeanor of a doctor or a civil servant, in a useful way.
“Apologies—one moment, Jonathan.” Mamoud turned to the others, barked out a command, and the rest all headed for the stairs, and were gone in a blink.
“Didn’t know that you’d be in the thick of it, did you?” Alice said. She’d leaned back against the wall, arms folded, calmer now but no less intense.
“But where, exactly, am I?”
“Aurora. Spain. In the middle of a rout, a massacre.”
But whatever Jonathan might have said in reply fell away from him. For now, beside the tea tray, Jonathan was close enough to peek out through the rifle slots on the landward edge of the turret to see for miles.
“Bloody hell.” His stomach lurched, and he felt as if he were falling all over again, the carrot and potato dancing atop his head. He didn’t hear whatever Mamoud said to him next.
Against a backdrop of burning fields, long columns of enormous elephants, three abreast, bestrode the earth, making the ground quake. They smashed the world flat beneath their tread, made Jonathan want to turn and run. But to where?
Even from this distance, Jonathan could see that they were not natural—there came the glint and glitter of metal parts, and the heads held gleaming green eyes like vibrant emeralds and had the aspect of repurposed black beetle carapaces, startling against the gray and striated red of their massive bodies. The creatures were so heavy they sank a little into the ground with each step.
Mechanical battle elephants, their frames made of metal and their insides animated by something uncanny. A faint green-and-orange light enshrouded their many moving parts, coursed in a path around and around as if goading each beast onward.
As the elephants trumpeted their wrath, they also spewed forth a kind of hellfire from their trunks, the purest gold, flecked with red, to scorch what he realized must be wheat fields, to clear the path ahead of obstacles. Some of these obstacles Jonathan could tell were people seeking only to flee, while others turned and fought, briefly, before falling either to the fire or the mechanical onslaught.
Dust under that mighty tread sent up clouds. The heat shimmered all around, but even that could not account for the quavering dark drifting shapes on either side of the elephants. But surely it must be a mirage that made the grass around them turn black. It must be an illusion that they floated forward, unmoored from the ground.
He recoiled from the ghastly sight, with the impact of something heavy closing in with incredible velocity, smashing into him. His legs felt weak and his mouth dry.
People were dying out there, beyond the tower.
Jonathan could hear the distant screams now, beneath the claxon shriek of the elephants’ battle cry and the whooshing discharge of the hellfire.
“Would you like some tea, Jonathan?” Mamoud asked, breaking in on Jonathan’s thoughts.
“And stand away from the edge unless you want a cannonball through the skull.” That last from Lady Insult.
Jonathan took a step back.
“Perhaps a pastry, then?” Mamoud suggested, both solicitous and somehow ridiculous at Jonathan’s shoulder. The smile said he knew how his comment might appear.
“It’s admirable you can be so calm as to stand here and sip tea,” Jonathan said.
“Do you think it takes bravery to stand here and drink tea?” Mamoud replied, eyes narrowing in thought. “Or a certain cowardice?” Not unkind, but as if the question had just occurred to him. Or as if he’d read Jonathan’s mind.
“No, I just mean—”
“In any event, it’s good you are here to witness this. To know what the Order is about.” Worry lines Jonathan hadn’t noticed before radiated out from the corners of Mamoud’s eyes. His hands were not quite still most of the time. Cracks in the calm.
“But it’s … chaos, not order.”
“No. We’re helping our allies retreat in an organized manner. As organized as is possible under the circumstances. As calm.”
“I don’t understand what I’m looking at,” Jonathan said.
Among the things he didn’t understand: how the cannonballs fired from the ships at the elephants could have such an incredible physicality scudding through the air … but then change into something else before reaching their targets. Into explosions of harmless feathers, drifting in the air. Into drops of water, forming miniature rainfalls.
Or how rebel infantry in the wheat fields now wrestled with rifles that had become alive like serpents.
Mamoud stole a glance at Lady Insult. “Your friend can help you understand. But, in short—very short—it’s what happens when a very powerful but deranged magician gains the reins of power. It is a classic formation for the enemy: The war elephants have no subtlety, so they smash through the front door. They become almost like moving fortresses. Then the wisps or wraiths you see—Emissaries—come in around the sides and spread fear. The demi-mages and the mercenaries bring up the rear—the latter because they are the least effective and the former because they are, loosely speaking, the brains of the operation. Not including the demi-mages atop the elephants.
“No doubt you know some of this already, Jonathan. Dr. Lambshead must have told you?”
No. Dr. Lambshead had told him nothing. Just hinted at bird-friends and vast secrets. But he nodded all the same.
“As for chaos,” Mamoud said, “chaos is not what is happening around you, but how you conduct yourself around … chaos.”
The earth erupted in explosion and flames not forty feet from the turret. Mamoud didn’t flinch, but Jonathan definitely did. Even Lady Insult put her spyglass down. The tower shuddered from the footfall of the elephants. There was a sour smell like sulfur.
There came to Jonathan an itch, a premonition, very subtle, that was familiar from meeting up with tricky animals back in Florida.
“The wraiths—the Emissaries,” he said. “I think they’re closer than you think. Or something is.”
The rippling in the wheat. The gray clouds in the sparkling blue sky. The tense, electric quality to the air.
Something in Mamoud’s demeanor, his stance, changed. He took out his communication device, jabbed a button, said two words, listened for an equally terse response, shoved it back in his belt.
Turning to Lady Insult, Mamoud said: “He’s right—something’s wrong. Something we’re not seeing. Take him back, Alice. Where he came from.” As if he didn’t entirely trust Lady Insult not to just drop him off any old place.
A wry smile to Jonathan. “And now that the chaos is about to come down on our heads: Goodbye and good luck. Or better luck.” Mamoud winked and ducked down onto the stairs, leaving Jonathan alone with Lady Insult.
The tray was shaking harder now, spilling tea. The gray clouds had come close, lit by the sun in a peculiar way.
Lady Insult’s electric blue eyes narrowed. “Shut it. I don’t want to hear it.”
“But I didn’t say anything!”
She opened her mouth to reply—but all that came out was an inchoate sound between a curse and a shriek.
“What did I do now?”
But she was staring behind him.
The front half of a mecha-elephant had appeared just fifty feet away, charging toward the tower. Then three fourths, then the whole thing, as if it had come toward their position under the protection of some cloaking barrier that only extended so far.
Then two things happened simultaneous, even as Lady Insult grabbed his arm, prepared to retreat to the stairs.
The tray upturned along with the table.
A shadow slipped across the sky, across the stones of the tower. As if the dark lining of the clouds had come free, drifting down, taking form. Fast.
A face inside the cloud. A face, inside the shroud that was the drifting darkness. A reaching down. The ache of it. The pull of it. The dissipation of the light.
A terrible scream of need, of loss, and a more terrible abrupt silence.
A peculiar chill cut the heat.
Nothing in Robin Hood’s Bay or Florida had prepared Jonathan for the sight. It brought him to a state of paralysis well beyond fear.
In that long, stretched-out moment, Lady Insult’s head tilted up to meet the trajectory of the incoming Emissary. There was a deep mingled contempt and surprise on her face.
“That’s not possible.”
She seemed shocked, even as she was still pulling Jonathan along.
She flung Jonathan at the stairs as more pale and glistening faces peered out from a sea of black right above them.
Down, down, down, in scrabbling headlong flight, Alice now ahead, dragging him toward the basement, him still staring back up, mesmerized, toward that unfolding darkness.
They’d reached the first floor when the elephant rammed the tower, and they went sprawling from the impact. Stones tumbled around, the beams creaked, but the wall held.
“Just one more floor,” Lady Insult said, pulling at his shoulder, him sprawled on the stonework, coughing up dust.
An elephant was trying to crush them in rubble. The wraith-cloud still chasing them from the stairs above.
He got up, followed her as best he was able.
Then they were in the basement, facing a rounded wooden door with a blue mosaic fringe. She wrenched it open.
“Through the door, Jonathan. Take my hand.”
“I don’t need to hold your hand.” A rebuke that sounded pathetic and naive, that came from shock.
She grasped his hand anyway. Her palm was warm and sweaty, and he could sense her pulse quick beneath the soft skin.
The elephant rammed the tower again, stones ricocheting down into the basement almost to their feet. A wooden beam snapped, and he heard a roar of more stones released. A terrible, deafening noise.
Yet even though he stumbled, Lady Insult was pulling him through the door. She was going to save him.
In moments, they would be through and gone.
But the darkness had spread, too, and he could not help looking back in that last instant before he left the tower behind.
The dark mist of its body beside him, the shining strangeness of its face. The chill on his shoulder, the black breath. It froze him to his core. It froze him on the inside in places he had not known could be cold.
He wanted it to be terrifying. He wanted it to make a choked gurgle like wet dead leaves caught in a storm drain. But, instead, the voice was human, the voice was plaintive and pleading. Like someone in need, walking across his grave. Someone he had already loved and might learn to love again. He tried to push against that, to push it away, made of his mind something hard, unwelcoming.
Some thing recoiled. Some thing drew back, but had already been too near.
The teapot came bouncing and spinning down the stairs, to shatter on the basement floor.
Then the door shut and he was in another place.