‘Come, friend Aton,’ the Minion hissed. ‘Come to Hulmu!’
With surprising agility he bounded forward and seized Aton in his arms. Fetid breath wafted across Aton’s face, but before he could react, the Minion had phased into the strat, taking Aton with him.
The Minion was amazingly strong. Aton could not break loose from his embrace. Down they sank, spiralling and plummeting, down, down, down. The four-dimensional screen of orthogonal time was left behind. Left behind, too, were the upper reaches of the strat where what was potential already bore some resemblance to what was actual. They went down, down, into the deeps where potentiality had less and less prospect of becoming actuality – that is, of materialising on to the orthogonal world – and had less and less in common with its forms. The pressure was frightful. They sank into gloomy six-dimensional regions where nameless things lurked and waited in the murk. Aton felt brooding hatred as they passed by; the potential quasi-beings sensed that he and the Minion came from the upper world and experienced a writhing envy.
The descent was timeless and Aton seemed temporarily to lose the will to free himself. Then he began to feel the presence of a vast overpowering intelligence.
Hulmu!
Hulmu was something impossible. A six-dimensional, nonexistent shape that lashed and danced in all directions in frantic convolutions. He was lord of this region; all bowed to him.
A voice he could almost smell spoke in Aton’s mind.
‘Know me and surrender your being.’
In that instant it came home to Aton with a certainty and conviction he could not analyse who the enemy was that had been spoken of by the Imperator and San Hevatar.
The enemy of the empire was not the Hegemony. It was not even the Traumatic sect, or the Minion.
It was Hulmu.
He could not define the ultimate evil that was Hulmu. He only saw, as if in a vision, that the struggle was relentless and would continue until victory was gained by one side or the other.
With newly regained strength Aton lashed out. The Minion sought to restrain him, but he broke free and soared upwards like a bubble, out of the reach of Hulmu’s lashing tentacles. Other powers snatched at him but he knew he was safe.
Up, up, up.
TEN
Aton was semi-conscious for the latter part of his ascent to the realm of materiality. He did not fully recover until he had already phased into ortho.
His subconscious mind had brought him to familiar territory. He was standing in the deserted court chamber of the Imperial Palace’s inner sanctum, Node 1. It was night and the chamber was only dimly lit.
Silence prevailed everywhere.
After some moments he saw a lone figure seated on a couch and stepped closer.
It was Inpriss Sorce.
‘Inpriss?’
She looked up. ‘You’re back!’
‘How did you get here?’
‘Prince Vro’s men brought me. They said I’d be safe here in the palace. I’m under imperial protection.’ A note of pride entered her voice as she said the last. She smiled. ‘It’s certainly a different type of life from what I’m used to.’
‘But it can only have been minutes ago that I last saw you.’
A slightly wary look crossed her face. ‘It’s been nearly three days.’
Three days. Had he been that long in the gulf?
Shaken, he glanced at a wall clock and frowned.
‘Where is everybody? Surely they don’t retire this early?’
‘They’re all in the churches and chapels, praying. The armada has set out.’
So matters were coming to a climax. And his mission had failed.
Disconsolately he paced the great hall. He tried to imagine the pace of events beyond the bounds of the palace in the eternal city and throughout the mighty time-spanning empire. Did he fancy he heard the structure of time creaking like the timbers of a crippled ship?
Unexpectedly there came the whirring of motors. The Imperator rolled out from its hidden compartment and towered over the man and the woman.
‘My servant, Captain Aton,’ the resonant voice murmured.
‘Imperator.’
‘It was a stirring sight, Captain. Powerful timeships, seemingly without number, coming one by one up the procession ramp to be presented to the people and blessed by the Arch-Cardinal Reamoir, before phasing into the strat. Now the three main wings are joining formation from the nodes where they were built. Very soon the Hegemony should feel their presence. If it does at all…’
‘May God go with them, Imperator,’ Aton replied dully.
‘If it does at all,’ repeated the Imperator fatalistically. ‘The Hegemony is also gathering all its forces. It knows the last card has been called. For the past few days it has been using the time-distorter at full aperture.’
‘Imperator,’ Aton said eagerly, though it now seemed rather late for this information, ‘the time-distorter belongs to the Traumatic sect and was given to them by the being they call Hulmu.’
The machine-emperor’s continuous hum undulated thoughtfully. ‘Orthogonal time is breaking up, Captain. If you were to journey through the empire now you would not recognise it. For the past two days it has been impossible to phase into Nodes Three and Four.’
Aton was aghast. ‘What?’
‘Nothing intelligible exists there. Orthogonal time has become totally deranged in the area. The strat is like an ocean in many respects, Captain Aton. The features we call the nodes are the regularly spaced ripples on the surface that hold the orthogonal world together. But there can be deeper waves that can overthrow everything. Tidal waves that tear the world of reality apart.’
Aton noted that the Imperator spoke more lucidly than on an earlier occasion. But if it had recovered its sanity it had done so belatedly. The picture it drew was frightening.
‘What will happen?’
‘What has happened will happen.’
Back to cryptic utterances, Aton thought in disgust.
Inpriss had crept forward to join them. She looked up overawed at the Imperator, which she could only have known as a semi-legendary ultimate authority. Her hand touched Aton’s sleeve as if seeking comfort.
Aton happened to glance to his right and with bulging eyes saw the east wall curve inward as though it were a wall of water. In seconds the heaving structure righted itself and stood rigid, but he knew the signs of spatio-temporal deformation.
‘Are we under attack?’ he asked sharply.
‘The whole empire is under attack. Time is under attack.’
Those were the last words the Imperator spoke before the great darkness descended on them all and expunged them from reality.
They returned still carrying the memory of their previous existence. ‘What happened?’ said Aton.
‘The empire was annihilated,’ said the Imperator, ‘and then put back.’
The entirety of the strain being put upon orthogonal time had been steadily building up into a wide-scale wave motion originating deep in the substratum. Eventually it had climaxed in a sort of tidal wave. The Chronotic Empire, and everything associated with it, was swept away.
But the giant time-storm was by no means over. On the contrary, the oscillations were building up and becoming more violent. As the wave entered the second half of its cycle the empire reappeared, almost exactly as when the wave had overtaken it.
But not quite.
There were innumerable small changes. And the difference between these and normal Chronotic mutations was that the inhabitants of the empire were aware of them.
Prince Vro Ixian had at last achieved his heart’s desire. Following leads found in the Traumatics’ temple in Umbul, the detective Perlo Rolce had traced the body of Princess Veaa to a rundown house in the outskirts of the city. Prince Vro, arming himself and taking only Rolce with him, entered the house and found it uninhabited.
Methodically he went through the dwelling room by room. In the second floor back he discovered a chamber draped in white silk. An open coffin of pinewood lay on a dais, and in the coffin, as beautiful as a pale rose, was the embalmed corpse of the young princess.
‘My dearest, my beloved Veaa!’ Vro swept towards the coffin.
And in that moment the tidal wave of potential time overcame the material world and swept everything away. The world came back in what, to the actors in it, could have been only an instant. But Vro was aware of the hiatus and understood what it implied.
In the coffin Princess Veaa opened her eyes, moved her head, and slowly sat up.
Vro gave a wild cry. ‘Veaa!’ he shrieked.
‘Vro!’ Her shriek was no less mortified.
The two stared at each other in utter horror.