A dense yellow mass of Destroying Angel spores was bubbling up from where the city stood-and as the two men watched, the billowing substance slowly revolved, as if around a central axis.
“The wind!” Wells said. “It's the blasted Hun weathermen! They're keeping that damned mushroom cloud in check, concentrating it in the city, preventing it from drifting!”
Burton moaned: “Quips! Poor Quips! Bismillah, Bertie! How many have just died?”
“Tens of thousands,” Wells said, and his voice was suddenly deep and oily and unpleasant. “But I am not one of them.”
Burton looked at the little war correspondent and was shocked to see that every visible part of his eyes had turned entirely black. There was a terrible menacing quality about them, and Burton couldn't tear his own away.
Wells gestured at the dying city.
“The generals are eager to locate a safe haven,” he said, “so, regrettably, the SS Britanniais rolling in an easterly direction and will soon turn south, whereas you, I see, are heading north. Why is that, Private Frank Baker? Hah! No! That won't do! That won't do at all! Let us call you by another name. Let us call you Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton.” He enunciated Burton's name slowly, emphasising each syllable, as if to drive home the point that he knew the explorer's true identity.
“Bertie?” Burton asked, uncertainly.
“Obviously not! Tell me, how did you do it?”
“How did I do what? Who are you?”
“Control the lurchers-make them open up a route through the besieging German forces?”
“Crowley?”
“Yes, yes! Now answer the question!”
“I didn't.”
“What? You didn't control them? Then who-or what-did?”
“I have no idea. What do you want, Colonel?”
“I have seven black diamonds, Sir Richard, the fragments of the South American Eye of Naga. There is much about them I do not understand.” The black eyes glittered. The king's agent felt them penetrating his soul. “For example, you, sir, who should be three decades dead-your metaphorical fingerprints are all over them. Are they somehow responsible for transporting you from your time to mine?”
Burton didn't respond.
Wells-Crowley-regarded him silently.
The wind gusted past them.
“I shall tell you a secret, Sir Richard Francis Burton-something that, were it known by the generals aboard this ship, would prompt my immediate execution.”
“What?”
“I am in contact with Kaiser Nietzsche.”
“You're a collaborator?”
“Not in the sense you mean it. The German emperor and myself share a talent for clairvoyance. We've both detected through the diamonds that other realities exist, and that other versions of ourselves inhabit them. We want to know more. Your presence here appears to have some bearing on the matter.” Wells gave an elaborate shrug and his oleaginous voice took on a carefree airiness. “But here we are: you fleeing in one direction and me fleeing in the other. Very inconvenient! I really should do away with this Wells fellow. He acted against me. But I shall allow him to live, for I sense that he's a vital ingredient in the shape of things to come.”
“Crowley,” Burton said. “Nietzsche dropped a bomb on you.”
Wells emitted a thick chuckle. “Ah! So you doubt his commitment to me? Do not concern yourself. He gave me fair warning, and it was preordained that I would get away.”
“You knew Tabora would be destroyed? You allowed all those people to die? Your countrymen?”
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. The end of the British Empire was long overdue. I merely bowed to the inevitable.”
“In the name of Allah, what kind of man are you?”
“Allah? Don't be ridiculous. And as for what I am, perhaps the embodiment of the Rakes, who, if I remember rightly, prospered in your age.”
“You're an abomination!”
“I'm an individual who shares with Nietzsche the desire to create a superior species of man.”
For the first time since he'd taken possession of Wells, Crowley took his eyes from Burton. He looked at the yellow cloud enveloping Tabora.
“Multiple futures,” he said. “Different histories. Maybe some of them don't end like this. I should like to visit them.” He returned his dreadful gaze to the explorer. “Perhaps we'll get it right in one of them, hey?”
He made Wells stretch and groan.
“Ho hum, Sir Richard! Ho hum! I've been here long enough. It's not comfortable. Has he told you how his leg is perpetually paining him? I don't know how he can bear it. Anyway, I'll say farewell. We shall meet again, sir; in this world or another version of it; maybe in your time, maybe in mine, maybe in another. But we shall meet again. And when we do-”
Wells smiled wickedly. The expression lingered, then the black faded from his eyes, they slipped up into his head, and he fell sideways from his saddle to the ground.
Burton hurriedly dismounted and threw himself down beside his friend.
“Bertie! Bertie!”
The war correspondent rolled onto his side and vomited. He curled into a fetal position and moaned. “He was in my head. The filth, Richard! The filth of the man! He's the Beast personified!”
“Has he gone? Is he watching us?”
“He's gone. But he's going to come after you. Wherever- whenever-you are-he's coming after you!”
Burton helped Wells to sit up. The smaller man wiped his mouth and looked at the far-off mushroom cloud, and the flying machine shrinking to the south.
“It's finished,” he said. “The Germans probably think they've won, but they're wrong. Everything is ending. This world is done for.”
Burton could think of nothing to say, except: “I'm sorry, Bertie.”
Wells stood, swayed slightly, and reached up to the stirrup of his harvestman.
“Let's get back on the trail. I want to find out where these poppies are leading us.”
They clambered back into their saddles and turned their vehicles, sending them scuttling over the savannah.
For two days, they steered their harvestmen over what, to Burton, was eerily familiar territory.
He felt detached. All the connections to this world, formed over the past five years, were unfastening. Change was coming to him, of that he was certain, but he didn't know how.
Change, or, perhaps, restoration.
The Mountains of the Moon.
His destiny lay there.
Maybe it always had.
The trail of poppies led to those peaks, that was obvious even before the snow-capped summits rose over the horizon. He saw them, jagged and white, seeming to hover in the air above the blood-red base of the mountains.
“Red!” he exclaimed. “I remember this view-but the mountains were green!”
“That might have been true in the 1860s,” Wells replied, “but the Blood Jungle has grown since then.”
They raced over the empty landscape. Where there had once been villages, there were none. Were there had once been herds of antelope and zebra, there was nothing. Where fields had been cultivated, there was now rampant undergrowth.
Increasingly, they saw lurchers. The ungainly plants were shuffling over the hills and through the valleys with an unnerving air of sentience that prompted Wells to ask: “What are the damned things up to, Richard?”
“I know what you mean,” the explorer replied. “They look purposeful, don't they? Do you remember the one that attacked us at Tanga? See how differently they move now! The mindless thrashing has been replaced by shudders and ticks, as if they're operating under some sort of restraint.”
With so much of his memory restored, Burton recognised that the lurchers were the same species of plant as the vehicles the Prussians had used back in 1863-the same but horribly different, for there were no men enfolded in their fleshy petals-which meant, if there was something still controlling them, it wasn't necessarily human.
As they drew closer to the mountains, the vegetation grew thicker and wilder. Its flowers and fruits took on a reddish hue, deepening the farther they travelled, until blood-coloured blooms and berries and globular dew-dripping swellings of indiscriminate form surrounded them. The poppies guided the steam-driven spiders straight into the humid tangle, and, astonishingly, the chaotic verdure parted in front of them to allow their passage.