The Flames of Time (Flames of Time Series Book 1) (39 page)

When all was irretrievably lost they prepared to leave us, turning all their vehicles around with the exception of the car they’d given us to transport Harry. As they climbed into their respective vehicles, the grey-haired Mother Agostine addressed us again.

‘You have achieved far more than most of those with whom we have become involved,’ she began, almost complimenting us. ‘But you should not make the mistake of thinking this is an end of our… concern, or that we will tolerate your continued pursuit of these goals. We are everywhere gentlemen, watching you from this day forward. So take this warning in the spirit in which it is intended, abandon this quest of yours, seek no more of these tablets or scrolls, because next time we will be neither so tolerant, nor so lenient in our response.’

And with that final threat she stepped into her waiting car and drove away, back toward the lodge, leaving us alone again in the night.

We had a long way to go if we were going to get Harry any kind of help, so we quickly set about preparing the car to carry him as comfortably as possible. Unexpectedly they’d left a small medical kit on the back seat, with some drugs that might help. But as soon as he was in and we were ready to go, I noticed Marlow wasn’t getting in the car with us.

‘I’ll catch you all up, I need some time,’ was all he’d say.

I could see in his eyes there would be no arguing with him, so after making sure he had a rifle and ammunition, we set off without him.

I watched him briefly, as our car moved away. He watched us for a moment only before walking back over to the burning car, to stand and watch his own personal sunset.

CHAPTER 25 – ASHES

It was the end of everything. We managed to get Harry to the hospital in Nyrobi, where he was given the much needed medical attention he needed, not only for his fractured skull and broken ribs and assorted other injuries, but also for the ensuing complications that had arisen due to the delay in getting him there.

It was much the same for the rest of us, the doctors insisting upon checking us out thoroughly, as well as treating our various and respective injuries. And all despite the insistence that we had to get back for our friend who’d stayed behind.

Eventually though we managed to get them to contact the police, who immediately sent a car out to collect Marlow, only to find him gone, and a message left in his place.

‘My dear friends,’ it read.

‘I am most sincerely sorry to abandon you at such a time, but I need to walk for a while more in this land of broad horizons, before I think I will be ready to consider what I might do next.

Yours in earnest

Rob’

I think the police were almost as concerned as I was myself when I read this note. The idea of Marlow heading off into the bush to do something foolish sprang immediately to mind.

Jean was convinced otherwise though, and managed to persuade the police that it was not worth organising a search party, or posting a bulletin for him.

All of which left us at a bit of dead end. We’d lost a good portion of our possessions and other personal effects, had several rather nasty injuries between us, and in many respects had lost the main reason that had kept us together.

Harry was going to take a while to recuperate, and even when he was up and about again, the doctors were unsure how long he might take to mend properly, and with that news the last ties holding us together started to loosen and slip.

Androus and Peter were the first two who decided to head back to their respective homes in Jerusalem and Edinburgh. It was a strangely emotional and yet numb moment when they were finally ready to leave, but came back to the hospital to say goodbye to Harry first.

He was still quite ill, but he stirred himself when they arrived, and managed several minutes worth of conversation and goodbyes before once more succumbing to tiredness and fatigue. But just as I thought he’d slipped off, he suddenly came back to us to urge us to arrange a reunion while we were still all together.

‘A year and a day my friends,’ he said with determination in his voice, ‘let us not part without first agreeing that we will meet again.’

‘Excellent!’ chimed in Jean, ‘Let it be in Paris a year and day from today. I shall arrange all, and at the very least we can drink some fine wine and speculate upon what might have been.’

It was a nice idea, and we all readily agreed to the appointment.

I was hoping we might have heard something more from Marlow before we all finally separated, Jean back to his home in Paris, me to Shropshire, and Harry via boat back to New England. But it was not to be, and before too long I found myself back in England again, and the house in which I’d grown up.

It didn’t seem as dark or as dreary as it had done when I’d left, though the soil was too dark and the horizon too close, and the domestic issues that demanded my attention far too numerous. For a while I almost enjoyed being back, and looking out over that rolling and verdant landscape from the tiny window in my father’s old room. But it was only almost. I had a bit too much of Africa in my blood now, and Jerusalem, and even Corinth.

A year and a day would pass quickly, though perhaps not quickly enough for my liking.

The story continues in

‘The Embers of Time’

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Peter Knyte

And finally:

In the next few pages you’ll find a taster of one of my other stories also set in the 1930s ‘Through Glass Darkly’.

Here’s the back page blurb, followed by a sample chapter.

‘On the brink of destruction a once elegant airship of unknown design appears in the storm riven night sky above New York.

But this is not the city or the world that it left, and these are not the people that dispatched their best and bravest on a desperate mission to stop an enemy of unimaginable strength and ferocity.

How can the crew get back to their own world in time, when the mighty airship that has been their home now lies in ruins, and when the enemy that has nearly destroyed their own world appears to have followed them to the city that has taken them in.’

THROUGH GLASS DARKLY

CHAPTER 1 – ARRIVAL

A storm plays over New York, the booming rolls of thunder echoing off the tall buildings before escaping out past Liberty Island to the Atlantic. Strangely coloured flashes of lightening streak across the night sky in well-choreographed time with the thunder, striking first one building then another on their way to earth.

Between these flashes a great airship suddenly appears. Its nose tilted at a crazed angle toward the ground as though in some steep dive. But the craft simply hangs in the air, poised like a great dagger above the city’s heart. Only the countless cables and wires which hang down from its sides seem to move as they are pushed and pulled by the gusting wind.

The rain washes down the length of this wallowing hulk before cascading from its sides and back into the night air. But the city is looking down, the faces of its citizens buried beneath umbrellas, hats and high collars, as everyone thinks only of sanctuary from the storm.

And then a body is falling along with the rain. A sodden rag doll, dressed in a strange uniform that nobody would recognise and with a strangely ornate set of lenses and other mechanical devices partly obscuring her attractive but lifeless face.

Nobody sees the silent descent. The graceful tumble of elegant limbs that almost gives the fragile form the illusion of flight, until it crashes into the road between the gleaming rows of water bejewelled cars. The young woman’s body cracking the road where it first impacts, then bounces to the height of a man before landing a second final time a broken and battered shell.

In a world where airships have not been seen in the skies for decades it is difficult to imagine what the members of that unsuspecting public may have thought when they finally turned their eyes toward the skies, and saw the six thousand tonnes of steel, bronze and glass hanging above their heads, itself a broken and battered shell lying against the cracked night sky.

Perhaps more difficult still though, for those countless masses of tiny figures which now gathered beneath that great floating wreck, was the idea that this massive and unexpected mass might still contain some flickering traces of life. Of people like themselves, but different. From a world so very like their own, yet so distinctly not their own.

How we survived to appear above that tallest of cities I cannot begin to imagine but somehow we did. And somehow as those countless wonder and horror filled eyes gazed upward, some of us still clung to life, a faint and faltering pulse within so giant a craft.

But just as there could be no mistaking the ruined and distressed nature of the Khan, our ship, there could also be no mistaking the weapons and armour which clearly adorned her elegant bronze frame. Strange arcane designs unlike any they could’ve seen before, yet unmistakably deadly none the less.

I’d been aware of the rolling thunder and drumming rain for what could’ve been an age before I realised it was also tinged with the distant wail of sirens, a sound that was so uniquely mundane it helped to bring my mind back through the toxic fog in which it was surrounded, until I was again aware of the room around me. I thought I was still confused for another minute or two before I realised the shadows and angles within the room which seemed wrong, were wrong and that the ship was actually tilted at a dangerous angle. All the while the sirens grew louder, until, as I dragged myself up what had been the floor of my cabin, to the door, to the port hole window set within it, I could hear them clearly, with their familiar welcoming wail. It was dark outside, but at least it wasn’t the sickening darkness of the Expanse, it was the welcoming half-darkness of a city, beneath a storm-cloud filled night sky.

We were back, I’d no idea how we’d made it, I was just glad we had. Feeling around my neck for my lenses so that I could see through the darkness I was shocked not to find them, and then remembered them being taken from me before I was locked in my cabin. Without them it was too dark for me to figure out where we might be at first, and then the lightning came to my aid and revealed the startlingly close skyscrapers of what could only be New York.

There were cables and ropes trailing all over the place, some of which were clearly snagged around one of the nearby buildings, and along it, the unmistakable shape of a man climbing hand over hand toward us. It was a fleeting glimpse that also highlighted the sheets of pouring rain which were cascading off the ship all around.

The cabin door was still locked from the outside, and I knew if I tried to force it, I’d only speed the work of the poison in my system, so I waited and watched. The darkness punctuated by the occasional flash of light, in which I saw the figure moving closer and closer. I willed him on, willed strength into what must’ve been tired and frozen, rain slicked hands. Whether he had some kind of safety line I couldn’t tell, only that with each flash he moved further along that wind-blown hawser, until eventually with noticeably tired movements he made it over the railings to safety, just a few yards away from my door. Now was my moment, I hammered on the door, until I saw him start and look over, and then move toward me.

I don’t know what I was expecting when he unlocked the door and I saw his rain sodden face, perhaps joy or sorrow at our return, obviously some kind of concern at the state of the ship, in fact almost anything except fear, mistrust and incomprehension. He was shorter than I’d thought but clearly muscular, and immediately reminded me of an acrobat.

It was only after I’d explaining to him who we were for the third time, with the last of my life ebbing within my body, that he managed to understand that we needed help urgently, or many of those aboard would die, and he agreed to help me toward one of the cradles.

I could feel the toxins clawing at my brain again as we moved. I didn’t even dare to stop along the way to see to anyone else in any of the other cabins, I just forced my legs to move, then showed him how to operate the cradle in case I lost consciousness on the way down and we ended up crashing into the ground.

And then we were down and someone who must’ve been a doctor was asking me questions, and I was trying to explain what little I knew of how we’d been poisoned, and how the force generator had been activated before the ship or crew were ready, and the Expanse, and the betrayal. I realised I was trying to tell him too much, but by then the poison had me, and the fog descended upon my mind once again.