The Sterkarm Handshake (25 page)

All the guards kept still. Windsor's eyes rolled, white edged, in his red face.

Per breathed fast, excitedly. He was winning and alive, but knew how quickly both states could end. “Tell them all to gan their ways!”

Try to be calm, Andrea thought. And calming. For Per to be so excited was probably not a good thing.
“Yi skal, Per, yi skal.”
Raising her voice, she called, “You'd better let us through. Just go away and let us through!”

Per tightened his arm around Windsor's neck, using his knee in the man's back to pull him backward and jabbing the dagger into his neck. “Tell them to go! Tell them!”

He's going to kill him, Joe thought, and looked around for somewhere to run. Unless he ran over to the security guards and allowed himself to be arrested, there was nowhere. God help me if he kills him and I'm here! He looked at Per and wondered if he could overpower him—but he'd sworn to guard him and anyway, if he tried, he'd probably only make sure that Windsor was killed. So he just stood there, sweating and feeling like an idiot.

Windsor choked and gagged and gasped for breath. His heart hammered in fear and the blood swelled in his temples, half blinding him. He was in the hands of a barbarian. Through all the panic, he reached out for calm. Keep calm or end up dead. Gripping Per's arm to ease the choke hold, he tried to speak. Per relaxed a little, to let him speak, but Windsor could feel the tension throughout Per's body. He could feel the dagger's point at his neck.

Windsor couldn't see Andrea, but knew she was close by somewhere. Breathlessly, he said, “Cut my throat and, and”—he didn't think threatening Per with a custodial sentence, with time off for good behavior, would have much effect—“and they'll kill you. So you can't win, can you? We can talk about this. If you give up—”

“Stilla!”
Per said. “Entraya! What says he?”

Andrea was taken aback by Windsor's courage. In his position, she was sure, she wouldn't have dared to say anything like that. She wasn't sure it was wise to translate, but what excuse could she give for refusing? She hadn't time to think of one. While she translated Windsor's words, she watched the security guards and noted that her mind was working smoothly and quickly while she and everything around her seemed to have slipped into some other dimension of craziness.

Per's eyes widened when he understood what Windsor had said. He shifted the point of his dagger, setting it behind Windsor's ear. With a flick of his hand he snicked the earlobe from Windsor's head, releasing a copious flow of blood down Windsor's neck. Windsor cried out and struggled, and Per rode him and choked him, setting the point of the dagger back at his neck. Windsor and the guards—who had taken a step forward—froze again.

Per's voice, broken with breathlessness, shook with both fear and the excitement of being prepared to do anything to win. “Will no cut his throat. I'll cut off his ear. Then his nose. Carve off his cheek like a pig's! I'll take out his eye. Tell them to gan their ways!”

Joe, catching some of this, said, “Bloody hell!” He looked around again, for an escape. Following Per had been a mistake.

Andrea was sickened. She was too close to what the words meant to feel at all casual about them. She didn't even want them in her mouth.

Per looked at her. She saw by the glitter in his eyes that he was very scared. It was clear to her then that whatever he said he would do, he would do. She hurried to tell Windsor what he'd said, to let him know the danger he was in. All the time she spoke, she was thinking: I should be doing something to stop this.

Windsor hadn't understood Per's words, but he'd understood the tone and the shaking in the voice, the tension in the body that held him. When Andrea told him what the words meant, the severed head floated in the air before his open eyes, so vividly did he remember it. The panicky, rackety mixture of anger and fear he'd felt before took a sideways lurch into a colder, slower kind of fear altogether.

“Go away!” he said. It came out in a croak. He dragged in as much breath as he could with Per hanging around his throat, and yelled, “Get out of their way! Let them through! Move!”

Joe and Andrea looked this way and that, to see what the guards would do. The men looked at each other, shifted from foot to foot—and backed off. What could they do? They were merely strong-arm men, poorly paid and not trained at all. They didn't know what to do. The guards blocking their way to the Tube fell back down the corridor and vanished through a pair of fire doors.

“They be gone!” Andrea said to Per. Her heart was beating so fast and hard, she felt sick. Especially when she thought that they had to follow the guards through those fire doors, and the men might be waiting on the other side.

“Kom!”
Per said, and dragged Windsor on again, choking him. He swung Windsor around and made him walk in front of him, so that Per could look over his shoulder and see where they were going. With the length of that dagger at his neck, Windsor cooperated. To Joe, Per said, “Watch our backs!”

“I'll watch!” Andrea said, seeing Joe look puzzled. “All's clear.”

Per's heart raced, his breath came fast, and he felt giddy, exhilarated, tall and very strong and very weak at the same time. He was going home. Nothing was going to stop him. He knew that with great conviction and simplicity.

Leadership, Andrea thought, as she and Joe scuttled after Per, was mostly knowing your own singleminded mind. When you did, other less singleminded people followed you, even though they might be brighter than you, even though they had serious doubts about what you were doing.

Per stopped before they reached the fire doors. “See what lies behind there,” he said to Joe.

Joe understood enough, together with Per's intent stare at the doors, to know what was wanted. He wasn't happy about going near the doors. He pictured big security men lurking behind them, with clubs. Going closer, craning his neck, he tried to peer through the windows—but the men might be crouching down. Standing back, he booted one door open hard, and it swung back enough for them to see that there was no one behind it. Joe kicked the other. “All clear!”

“Klahr?”
Per said.

Joe held the door open and Per hustled Windsor through, Andrea following. She was sick with fear that this was going to end with Windsor being murdered by Per and she would have to see it done. She hadn't meant it to happen this way. Where were the police? Surely they should be here by now and
doing
something?

It seemed to take forever, and they had to go through another pair of fire doors, but they came in view of the doors that would bring them outside and close to the Time Tube. Per was out of breath from the effort of holding on to Windsor, half supporting his weight and shoving him along with knee and hip. Per could feel his grip loosening, and found every step a greater effort. He was wet with sweat and closer than ever to trembling. Windsor shifted within his hold, and Per called out, “Tell him I'll cut him into collops!” He pressed the edge of his long blade against Windsor's cheek, let him feel its sharpness. “I'll burst his eye!”

Andrea couldn't say it.

Joe pushed open the doors, letting in brighter light. He peered out onto a graveled path, and looked across the path to a portable office on the other side, with a strange round tube thing stuck at one end. With a shock—he actually felt his hair rise—he realized that was it. That was the Tube. If he was going to change his mind, it was going to have to be soon.

Some security guards were standing near the Tube, at the foot of a ramp leading up to it, but they didn't look like men who were ready to do anything. Joe waved to Per and Andrea to come on.

Per dragged Windsor out onto the path, stumbling on the step, their feet crunching in the gravel. Per ignored the pain to his bare feet. Windsor was sweating, almost purple in the face, spluttering and gasping. His tie and hair were awry, his shirt pulled open to show the black hair on his chest.

Per looked left and right, noting the guards. The little prefabricated office and the Tube beside it he saw with relief, recognizing them from the similar office in his own world. As Andrea followed them out onto the path, he shouted at her, “Tell them to gan their way!”

Andrea began to shout and wave at the guards. Windsor, who had heard the shake in Per's voice, shouted too. “Let them through!” he yelled. “God's sake, get—” His voice choked off as Per's arm tightened across his throat. Windsor's heart lurched as he felt the point of the long dagger sting his neck. But then the guards shuffled back from the ramp, leaving it clear, and Per relaxed.

They crossed the gravel to the foot of the ramp. Andrea saw faces at the window of the control room, peering at them. This is when they're going to try and stop us, she thought. This is where they have to stop us.

Per went sidelong up the ramp, holding on to Windsor and holding the knife at his neck, so that Windsor scrambled to keep up with him. Andrea followed, and Joe dropped back into last place, pushing Andrea on ahead of him and watching the guards, who were slowly coming nearer again.

On the platform at the top of the ramp, Per hesitated, made uncertain by the rustling strips of plastic that hung down to screen the Tube's mouth. Andrea went over to them, gathered several strips together in her hands, and lifted them, so they could see into the Tube itself.

Per froze. There it was—the Elf-Gate. Its great round mouth gaped. His eyes roamed around the curve of the opening, and around the curves of the tiled inner sides. He had no memory of ever being so close to it before, and it was frighteningly strange to him, even smelling strange. It was supposed to be a gate, but he couldn't see his own world at its other end—only a smaller circle and another hanging screen of strips. His hold on Windsor relaxed, and the dagger wavered in his hand.

Joe, seeing Per falter, and also aware of the guards coming up the ramp behind them and the people gathering at the door of the adjoining control room, stuck his finger in Windsor's face and said, “Don't move!” He clenched his fist in Windsor's face and said to Andrea, “What do we do now?”

“It's shut down,” she said. The lights at the side of the Tube told her so. Beyond the screening at the other end of the Tube was the rest of the 21st: the Tube was “at home.”

“Boot it up!” Joe yelled at the people gathered in the control-­room door. He'd never seen a Time Tube before and had no idea how one worked, but he was used to machinery. Since Per was still nonplussed, Joe grabbed Windsor by his lapels and hauled at him, dragging him closer to the Tube's opening. Per was dragged along with him, his hand holding the dagger jolting against Windsor's shoulder.

“The knife!” Windsor said breathlessly. “The knife!” The long blade was waving wildly in front of and beside his face.

“Shut up!” Joe shook him, hoping Windsor took him for some terrifying, half crazed brute from the gutter. “Tell 'em to start it up, or I'll kick your effing head in.”

With the head-hunting young thug behind him, and this fierce, stocky, bearded yob spitting in his face, Windsor knew he'd be a fool to do anything but play along. He drew a breath but could hear his voice shaking as he spoke to the people in the control-room doorway. “Boot it up. Do as they say. Do it now.”

Some of the people turned and struggled to get back into the control room. Within a minute or so of their going, a humming, whining noise began to come from the Tube. Per started.

Andrea came close to him, pressed herself against his back. “It'll make a lot of noise. It will be deafening. But it be all right, all right. It be Elf-Work.”

The humming rapidly increased to a roar that made Per duck his head and twist it from side to side, trying to avoid the noise. The noise rose to a jagged scream that beat about their heads, and then abruptly stopped as the sound passed beyond hearing. The lights at the side of the Tube changed, flashing from red to green.

“Gan!” Andrea shouted. “Joe, go! Go!”

Per gave her a shove that sent her staggering into the Tube.
“Gaw!”
He thumped Joe and yelled at him.
“Gaw!”

Joe, startled, looked over his shoulder at the guards and the technicians, and then ran into the Tube, not really knowing what he was doing. Andrea, seeing Joe run, ran because he was running.

Per shoved Windsor hard, pitching him across the platform toward the ramp. Turning, Per took a jump into the Tube and raced for the other end, catching at Andrea's arm as he overtook her and pulling her along with him.

They burst through the screening covering the other end of the Tube, running onto the platform and pelting willy-nilly down the ramp. Before them was the trodden, worn grass of the compound, startled guards, the steel fence, smoking fires, and the great wide open bowl of the surrounding hills.

Joe stumbled to a halt at the foot of the ramp and raised his eyes to the hills' peaks and then on up, into the deeps of the gray skies above. A wind came and ruffled his hair and beard, traveling from God knew how many miles away. A minute ago he'd been in a city, hearing the ever-present rumble of traffic, with telephone wires overhead, brick buildings and tarmacked roads pressing all around, bringing sight up short. And now silence, acres of silence, echoed and reechoed, and he looked clear across a wide valley to tiny black sheep moving on the farther hill, following silent, drifting cloud shadows. The air he breathed was damp, chill and almost searing in its clarity. It stunned him.

Per felt the damp wind touch his face and smelled the rich smell of the wet grass and earth, and his eyes filled with tears. He could have wept with thankfulness if he'd had time. Already guards were coming toward them. “Careful!” Andrea said to both him and them. These guards, 16th side, carried pistols in holsters on their hips. One was fumbling to open the flap on his holster. Andrea remembered more than one guard grumbling to her that their pistols were nothing more than ornaments; they hadn't been trained to use them or issued with more than one bullet each. But, just at that moment, it was hard to be comforted.