Die Back Page 10

  Smythe gagged under Grimbald's forceful grip, struggling until he passed out. He let the boy drop in a heap to the floor.

  "Peace at last." Wiping Smythe's oily putridity from his hands down the sides of his coat, he scanned the room. A cot for the rare times he rested in this time and place, shelves with bottles and jars of various shapes and sizes filled with tinctures and alchemical formulations, the tall workbench, covered with the vials, bottles and tools of an alchemist, the hearth, its smoke twisting and curling to a vent in the ceiling.

  The strategy had been elegantly simple—cut the head from the snake, defeating a leaderless League, flailing blindly in what Grimbald learned from a mind several centuries in the future would be called space-time. He would orchestrate the murder of League Inkers and the acquisition of their pens, using others enslaved to his cause and in some instances, doing the deed himself. He would use the name 'Kairos' as a protection from being inked, leaving the League Inkers confused about their enemy. Things had been going to plan until he sent Roger Hornsby, an eighteenth-century British spy who should have lost his head to the French, to kill Alison McCullough and acquire her pen. Instead, the failed spy returned with a story of being overpowered by two women on a sailboat. Women. He considered introducing Hornsby to Vlad the Impaler, but remembered in Hornsby's present, the French had yet to adopt their swift instrument of execution, the guillotine. And so, Grimbald inked himself into Hornsby's executioner, taking care to dull the blade. He personally delivered eight swings of the ax, each blow marked by a deliciously meaty phut, until his failed associate's head plopped into an awaiting basket with a satisfying thud and the soft whisper of straining wicker.

  He had snatched victory from Hornsby's defeat when he lured Thomas Shaw to a third-century inking in Alexandria, his New York mobster playing an effective Roman soldier snatching the Alchimeía, while he snapped Thomas' neck in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, Thomas had anticipated the move, having switched the Alchimeía with a worthless philosophical tract, and safely transferring his pen to his son, Addison.

  Without the Alchimeía’s secrets, Grimbald needed Johann’s five pens to control the continuum. He assumed the son, as best he could tell, a physical and emotional cripple, would be an easy target. Which made the current circumstances that much more annoying. Twice he had opportunity to take down Addison Shaw and twice he had failed. Shaw must have delayed leaving the trench at Cantigney by a few seconds, which accounted for the shell blowing his host, Jake, all to hell before he could act. The second attempt, however, left him puzzled. Did Rebecca find a way to warn him? He had Addison cornered, his bloodied hand thrust into his victim's mouth. I could sense his mind. I was almost there. Something tore him away, forcing his die back to fifteenth-century London. Of course. Shaw didn't get a chance to die back. He was ripped right out of my grasp!

  With the sweep of an arm he knocked everything off his workbench, vials, jars, surgical tools scattering across the floor. "I attack and they counter. Attack and counter." He paced like a caged animal, then stopped suddenly. "Of course. I attack. They counter. What if the attack is so overwhelming, so momentous, the League must put all of their precious resources to bear?

  Grimbald turned back, taking a bucket of water by the hearth and dumping it on the unconscious boy. "Smythe. Wake up. Smythe!"

  The boy moaned, getting on his hands and knees. Grimbald motioned Smythe closer. "Come here, boy."

  Smythe struggled to his feet to edge near, licking his lips, his right eye twitching.

  "Quit twitching, Rebecca."

  "Sorry."

  His lips turned up in approval, self-satisfied at having quelled her resistant spirit. He nodded to the hearth. "Sit with me. While you were napping I had a breakthrough."

  Smythe moved to a bench by the fire. He spoke, rubbing his bruised neck with one hand, his voice hoarse from Grimbald's throttling. "To stop this madness?"

  Grimbald sat across from Smythe, glaring at the boy, Rebecca's consciousness clearly imprinted in his eyes. He almost reached back for his dagger, but didn't want to interrupt his train of thought. He relaxed.

  "No. I have been going about my task from the wrong direction, attempting a frontal assault on the people who stand in my way."

  "They will not stop, Grimbald. The League will never allow you to control the space-time continuum."

  "Of course not. But what if they have more to worry about than my humble plans?"

  Rebecca's eyes searched him. "What do you mean?"

  "I have an advantage over the League. They strive for homeostasis, equilibrium. I, however, stand for change, shifting reality to meet my needs. One-on-one, the League Inkers and I are well-matched. But if I disrupt their world, turn it on its head, unleash the gates of hell upon them, in the chaos, League Inkers will rush to the distraction while I gather the pens." He laughed.

  "They will be wise to your machinations. What could you possibly do to distract them so much they would allow the League to be destroyed?"

  Grimbald rose, taking a flagon and a quill from a shelf on his way to the workbench. "One word. Technology. You and I have inked through time. We have seen many wondrous things. Imagine a great empire with technology centuries ahead of its time." He poured a small amount of ale into the flagon. "They would dominate the world, crush any threats, radically shift the space-time continuum. The League would be compelled to respond. And while the cat's away…"

  He raised a quill to his wounded hand, drawing in blood. "You've had time to consider my proposal."

  "You ask too much, to choose between my son or the world."

  "Ah, but to a mother, isn't her child the center of her world?"

  "Please. Don't ask this."

  "Time is up, Rebecca. A simple yes or no will suffice. In exchange for not pulling your son's consciousness into an everlasting hell, do I have your full and complete loyalty?"

  Smythe, tears streaming down his cheeks, glared at Grimbald. He took in a deep breath, then looked away. "God, forgive me. Yes. You have my loyalty."

  "I knew you would see things my way. Now drink up. Time for us to take flight." Grimbald swirled the bloody quill in the ale, and handed the flagon to the boy.

  Smythe closed his eyes as he brought the ale to his lips, Grimbald pronouncing his litany like a priest at the altar. "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the first and the last…"

  Smythe gasped as Grimbald's consciousness flooded into him, pushing Rebecca's mind into a cramped, dark place. Grimbald, his consciousness now in the boy, quickly turned to catch his own body, lowering it gently to the floor. The boy's lips continued the litany. "No one enters either the kingdom of life or of death, except through me."

  Kairos had five hundred years of inking to create Armageddon. Five hundred years to get back to Addison Shaw, acquire the pens, the Alchimeía, and gain control of the world for all time. He stood over his resting body, smiling.

  Five centuries or five minutes.

  It matters not to the Alpha and the Omega.

  Mission Up

  After the first day of training, Addison's life fell into a predictable pattern of sleep, wandering city streets to get some grounding in reality, and late-night sessions of Nikki's twisted regimen. Jules and Addison were crushed by mountains, swallowed by the sea, obliterated by nitroglycerin, crushed by various modes of transportation—the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile being the weirdest—shot by everything from an eighteenth-century dueling pistol to a Glock 9mm, and hung by ropes, belts, power cords, and in another odd twist, a grapevine at a nineteenth-century French chateau. In contrast to the traumatic inking he experienced in Cantigny, Addison knew Nikki had their backs, placing them in situations with sufficiently short time frames to keep them from being emotionally overwhelmed. Still, the constant inkings and die backs took their toll.

  Jules and Addison sat on a bench at Sunset Park overlooking Puget Sound, white triangular sails moving slowly across gray water, the Olympic Mountains hidd
en in a gray overcast. "I don't know if I can keep going, Addy."

  "We'll get used to it." He wasn't sure if the filtered light created the effect, but a sadness obscured her usual cheerful demeanor.

  "Why would I want to get used it? Dying over and over again? The pain? The loss? I feel like I'm a hundred years old. No human being should see what we've seen. And for what?"

  "To protect the temporal flow. To stop Kairos."

  "Right." She shook her head, staring across the water to the island shoreline beyond. "I don't know how my mom does it. There's so much…pain."

  "Don't give up on it, Jules. If your mom could be an Inker, we can do it too."

  "Maybe we shouldn't be messing with this stuff at all." Anger rose in her voice. "I mean, who died and left us in charge of reality?"

  “I hear what you’re saying Jules, but something tells me we can't run from this. It's our destiny.”

  They stared ahead, watching a massive container ship lumber down the channel.

  “Jules, I’ve been meaning to say something.”

  She glanced at him, and returned her gaze to the water.

  “I behaved badly on our first date, if you even want to call it a date. I jumped to some conclusions.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Yeah, I guess sometimes it feels safer to blow things up than make them work. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  She locked eyes with him, a slight smile crossing her lips. “Apology accepted.”

  “Maybe we can start over again.”

  “Without you being an asshole?”

  “Yeah. Without me being an asshole.”

  She turned back to the water, but her hand slipped over his. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  ***

  In the evening, he entered The Shop, as Nikki liked to call her lair of death and destruction. With Jules’ words still fresh in his mind, he hoped tonight would involve less dying and more living, just for a break.

  Nikki sat at the small table with a laptop, engrossed in her work, not looking up when Addison stepped inside.

  "Hey, Nikki."

  She nodded. Addison went to the fridge, grabbing a PowerJolt to keep him going after what had already been a long day. The door creaked open and Jules came into the room. She looked like her old self, not the life-worn Jules from earlier. Again, Nikki barely shifted her attention.

  "Nikki's got something going on over there, Jules. She hasn't said a word."

  She looked up from her laptop, not with the expected scowl, but a furrowed brow and sadness in her eyes. "Okay, you two. You want to get your hands dirty? I really shouldn't be letting you do this, but I don't have a choice. The other Inkers are tied up on a mission, so it looks like you're up to bat."

  Jules grabbed Addison's drink, taking a swallow. "You don't sound too enthusiastic. If you feel that way, I for one am more than willing to pass, just so we don't have to die back one more time for your entertainment."

  Nikki gave Jules the knowing smile of a British nurse in a war movie— 'stiff upper lip and all that'. "The repetition has been for your own good. When it's time to go, you can't hesitate."

  "We know." Addison's frustration seeped through his words. "What do you need us to do? Something real this time, I hope."

  "Oh, it's real enough. The algorithms tell me this morning we had a breach in 1908."

  Addison snatched the PowerJolt back from Jules. "These algorithms of yours must be pretty precise. The exact year, I'm impressed."

  Nikki stepped over to an espresso machine, pushing a button that was followed by some mechanical humming and steam. She turned back, lifting a steaming demitasse to her lips, her eyes closed as she always did when drinking coffee.

  "November 7, 1908, Ft. Meyer, Virginia."

  Addison inclined his head. "So, you're saying something’s happened in 1908?"

  Jules sat down, propping her feet on the table. “No, I think Nikki means something happened this morning 103 years ago, changing the present."

  Addison raised an eyebrow. "You really understand what Nikki's talking about?" While they hadn't rekindled their early attraction, they had seemed to form a truce at Sunset Park. Maybe murdering each other, again and again, is the perfect way to heal the relationship. Even so, Addison couldn't be certain if she actually understood Nikki's convoluted words or if she was just sucking up to their mentor. Nikki smiled at Jules, the proud tutor with her prize pupil.

  Nikki frowned while looking into her cup, as if reading her future in the remnants. "Are you ready for your first mission?"

  "We're ready, aren't we Jules? What do we need to fix?"

  "Good, mon cher. You two will need to work together on this one."

  Addison bobbed and weaved like a boxer, a tease in his eyes. "That's what you've been training us to do."

  Nikki only offered a blank stare. "Yes, training. This is the real deal."

  Jules opened the fridge, digging around for a snack. "Finally. I was beginning to think you just liked jacking us around."

  Nikki rinsed out her cup before setting it upside down on a draining rack. "Have either of you heard of the Wright Brothers?"

  Addison shook his head. "No, never heard of them. You, Jules?"

  "Is it a singing group from the 50's?"

  "No, Jules. And that none of us, me included, know who they are is our problem. The brothers, Wilbur and Orville, according to our archive, invented powered heavier-than-air flight in 1903 and are responsible for the emergence of aviation in this country."

  Addison mindlessly folded a piece of paper on the table. "What? I'm no history major Nikki, but everybody knows about the development of the first airplanes. In the late nineteenth century an explorer from the Smithsonian Institute discovered drawings and artifacts in Peru outlining the development of an airplane. Based on those discoveries, several inventors got in the air in the early 1900s, but nothing ever came of it. The designs all proved impractical. I think some of them tried to sell their designs to the Army, but they couldn't compete with the much more durable and practical dirigible.

  Jules nodded in agreement. "Hughes created the first viable airplane in the 30's. Everyone's seen the iconic photograph of his first flight in the southern California desert…wait. You're saying Hughes didn't invent the airplane? How could you possibly know?"

  "We have a way of archiving history which, while not comprehensive, at least touches on the big events. And first flight was a big event."

  Jules lifted herself onto the counter top. "The archive must be wrong because I've read about Howard Hughes and the Hughes Flyer.

  "Your experience is based on an awareness of the current continuum. If time has shifted, which it has, our knowledge of the previous continuum vanished with it. The only way we know of the shift and the previous continuum is through the archive."

  "But wouldn't the archive change with the shifting continuum?"

  "Yes, which is why the records are kept here in the Tempos Refúgium—an alchemical vessel floating in neutral space-time, protected from shifts in the continuum. Our archives, and for that matter, you and I when we're in this room, aren't effected by shifts in the continuum."

  "Free-floating in space-time…" Addison ran a finger down a crease on his paper. "I inked at my house. I don't recall anything changing."

  "Inking protects you from a shift the same way the Tempos Refúgium protects you. Well, pretty much. You retain your memory of the previous continuum, so if you had seriously altered things, you would have known it. Fortunately, your little adventures made insignificant changes."

  Jules asked, "Inking protects us 'pretty much'? Does it protect us or not?"

  "If there's a significant continuum shift, your inking consciousness will be dominant, but the new continuum will want to float to the top and given enough time, will dominate your mind. You have to keep it in check."

  "So, I'm here in the Tempos Refúgium. A shift occurs and I leave. Won't I run into myself?"

  "No, there's only one you. It
's a quantum paradox, like a particle being in two places at the same time. There's a probability of your existence in an infinite number of continua and yet, you, Addison Shaw, exist in only one space-time continuum. As soon as you step out of the Tempos Refúgium your physical essence, and your conscious self, merge into the Addison Shaw of the new continuum. Initially, the ink enables you to repress the other consciousness, but eventually, usually a matter of days, the two will merge."

  Addison squinted as if to see whatever truth Nikki's words were supposed to have conveyed. "I think my head's about to explode."

  She reopened her laptop. "Since the League's inception, we have inked back as far as written records allow. The most ancient records have gaps of centuries, but as we inked toward the present, the League has been making annual records. We know, for example, Christopher Columbus' 1492 landing at St. Vincent Island in the Caribbean is accurate because we have documented the historical fact."

  Addison looked up from his paper folding. "You know because you inked Columbus?"

  "Correct. If someone inked prior to Columbus, shifting the continuum enough to prevent his discovery or moving it to say, 1495, we'd know. When the protected record fails to match present reality, we have evidence of an anomaly. The event in 1908 doesn't match our archival record—a good sign someone has diddled with the time continuum."

  Addison folded his paper in half. "Is 'diddled' a technical term?"

  Nikki gave no hint of amusement.

  Addison folded one corner of his sheet to the centerline crease. "So, what's the problem?"

  The Wright Brothers invent powered flight in 1903 and win a U.S. Army contract in 1908, which leads to an increased use of the airplane during WWI, marking the beginning of a rapid advancement in aviation technology. Air power becomes a defining component of our military success during WWII. But in the altered continuum, the Wright's mechanic, Charlie Taylor, dies on a test flight and the Wrights are not able to complete the trials. A failure that condemns aviation to the back burner for two more decades. As you know, we barely make it out of World War I and World War II becomes an unmitigated disaster."