"Go inside. Take seats," Marwan al-Baghdadi called. "I say again, no harm will come to you. This is a ... traveling chamber. It is like a ship or a wagon. There are seats inside. You will be comfortable as you go."
It wasn't like any ship or wagon Jacques had ever seen. He wasn't the only slave who hung back instead of going forward. But then, to his surprise, Khadija went in as calmly as if she were swinging up onto a horse. If she wasn't afraid, Jacques figured he didn't have to be, either.
As he was a couple of steps behind Khadija, so Musa was one step behind him. "Let no one claim you go where I dare not follow," the black man said. He sounded angry, not at Jacques but at himself.
Seeing that nothing bad happened to the first ones who went into the box, others went after them. Inside the box, a voice spoke in Arabic from out of the air: "Please take your seats. All passengers, please take your seats."
Try as Jacques would, he couldn't see anyone talking. What he could see was Khadija's face, shining as brightly as the lamps inside the box. What about those lamps? He saw no torches or candles—no oil lamps, either, such as they used in these southern parts. He smelled nothing burning, either. The whole top of the box—the ceiling, he supposed you'd have to call it—glowed. It wasn't too bright to look at, but it shed better light than anything he'd ever seen except the sun.
"Please take your seats," that voice from the air repeated. "All passengers, please take your seats."
Khadija sat down right away, still smiling as if she'd just been promised heaven. She knew about boxes like this—knew about them and liked them. That encouraged Jacques to sit down beside her. The chair was comfortable enough, but what was it made of? Something hard and smooth and . . . orange? It wasn't metal or wood or stone or cloth or even bone. What did that leave? Nothing Jacques knew of.
"What is this place?" he whispered to Khadija in French.
"It's a transposition chamber," she answered in the same language. That told him nothing he didn't already know. She went on, "It will rescue us. It will take us back to ... to where I come from."
"To Marseille?" Jacques said, more confused than ever. "It's only a box in the middle of an underground room."
"No, not to Marseille," Khadija said impatiently. "To . . . Oh, never mind. You'll see when we get out. And it's not just a box. It—"
As if to prove what she said, the door slid shut all by itself.
With all the people inside the box, the air should have got hot and stuffy in nothing flat. It didn't—it stayed fresh and cool. Jacques tried to decide whether that was more marvelous than the lamps or the other way around. He couldn't.
"What are you two talking about?" asked Musa ibn Ibrahim. He had no more reason to understand French than Jacques did to follow whatever language he spoke besides Arabic.
Before Jacques could explain—no, could answer, because he couldn't explain—some lights at the front of the box started winking on and off. They reminded him of candle flames seen through stained glass. Some were red, some amber, but most a clear green. "We're going," Khadija said. Now she spoke in Arabic, so Musa could also make sense of her words.
Jacques shook his head. "No, we're not," he said. "We're just standing still." He knew what motion felt like. He felt none of it here. The box might have been nailed to the floor of the underground room. Musa ibn Ibrahim nodded agreement with him.
But Khadija said, "Remember how the transposition chamber came out of nowhere at Marwan al-Baghdadi's? Well, when it stops it'll come out of nowhere someplace else."
She sounded very sure. Musa leaned forward so he could look at her past Jacques. "How do you know these things?" he asked in a low voice.
She bit her lip. "Never mind. It doesn't matter right now, anyway. But I'm right. You'll see."
Musa eyed Jacques. "What do you think?" the black man asked.
"I think she has to know more about this—chamber?—than I do, because I don't know anything," Jacques replied. "As for the rest... I don't know. Let's see what happens when that door opens again. One way or another, we'll find out then."
Musa ibn Muhammad pursed his lips. He looked up at the ceiling—the ceiling that glowed. Maybe the impossible but undeniable glow helped him make up his mind. He nodded. "This is good sense, Jacques of the north. When the door opens again—however it opens—we shall see what we shall see."
"How long will it take?" Jacques asked Khadija. If anybody knew, she did.
"It will seem like about half an hour," she said, an odd answer. Then she added something even odder: "It really won't take any time at all."
It seemed like more than half an hour to Jacques. By the way Khadija frowned and fidgeted, it seemed like more than half an hour to her, too. He wondered if something was wrong. He could only wonder—it wasn't as if he could do anything about it. Then a green light on the front panel turned red. A heartbeat later, the door slid open. "All passengers out," said the voice without a source. "All passengers please leave the chamber at once. All passengers out. All passengers please leave ..."
Jacques and Khadija and Musa and the others filed out. What else could they do? They found themselves in an underground room. But it wasn't the room where they'd got into the chamber. It was bigger and better lit. When Jacques looked up, he saw glowing tubes that shed the same kind of bright light as the transposition chamber's ceiling. Khadija was nodding to herself and smiling. She'd seen tubes like those before, even if Jacques and Musa hadn't.
"Over this way! Up these stairs!" a man shouted in Arabic. He wore a tunic and trousers of mottled green and brown. He had stout leather boots on his feet, and wore a helmet with a cloth cover of the same mottled fabric as the rest of his clothes. He carried what was obviously a weapon. It looked something like a matchlock musket, but was much shorter and more compact. And it had a knife sticking out below the muzzle, so it could double as a short thrusting spear. What a clever idea! Jacques thought, wondering why no one in the Kingdom of Versailles had ever thought of it.
"Be careful," Khadija whispered to him. "It can shoot many bullets quickly, without reloading between shots." Her smile had gone out. Whatever she'd expected, this wasn't it.
"Up the stairs! Get moving!" yelled the man with the gun-and-knife combination. Unlike the strange voice in the chamber, he didn't repeat himself exactly.
Up they went. These stairs were iron, and clanged under Jacques' boots. They must have cost a fortune. More men with weapons waited as people came up from below. "Male slaves to the left!" one of them shouted. "Female slaves to the right! Get moving, if you know what's good for you!"
"No," Khadija whispered. "No, no, no, no!" But the men with the weapons didn't look as if they would take no for an answer. Jacques and Musa went to the left. Still with that look of astonished disbelief on her face, Khadija went to the right.
Annette had thought she was living a nightmare ever since she got captured and separated from her parents. Now she discovered what nightmare really was. That had been a Crosstime Traffic transposition chamber. She'd thought it would take her back to the home timeline. She hadn't known why it was taking so many people from that alternate with her, but she hadn't worried about it. Why worry when she was on her way home?
But she wasn't. This seemed more like hell than home— industrialized hell. The rest of the slaves, the ones who really had come from the alternate of the Great Black Deaths, didn't realize what was wrong. How could they? The only timeline they'd ever imagined was their own.