The professor was trying to sort through the man’s words, and slowly, by degrees, the meaning was dawning on him. Rasil was clearly angry about what had happened here, yet he was forcing some truce on his emotion. A moment ago he wanted to kill me; now he accepts parley. It was as if he saw himself as my opponent in some way. Yes. He said it himself.
“What war do you speak of, Iraq? Iran? You mean the fighting in Syria last year?”
“Do not be coy,” Rasil berated him. “The American occupation of the Holy Lands in this timeframe will be short lived, I assure you. The Romans tried, and failed, just as the Byzantine Empire failed after them. All of Europe failed with their pathetic Crusaders. The French thought to carve out a kingdom there once. They held it for nearly ninety years, but Salah ad Din took it back. We saw to that by letting a mongrel wolf live out his fate, when we could have killed him at our whim. No matter! Now, in this age, the West comes to our land once more. First the British, then the Americans. It will not last. You will see. We had the solution in hand once, at Palma. We will find another, soon enough.”
The man’s words seemed to brand Nordhausen with sudden realization. He was speaking like they were mortal enemies. It was as if there was an ongoing struggle between two factions for the long-term control of the world. What was it he accused me of earlier? He said I was a member of some order. Now he was talking about Palma. Could he be one of the original conspirators? Could it be that they’ve got their hands on the Arch technology somehow?
“Palma? You mean you were in on that?”
“It was our master stroke!” Rasil’s eyes gleamed. “Yes! I have told you I am from the ninth age. I was a part of the world that Palma made possible. I tasted the fruit of that victory—the grandeur of Islam that spanned the whole of the globe. Oh, you tried to reverse our achievement for many decades, but always failed. The alerts would come in and we would rush to the safety of our Nexus Chambers to wait and stand the watch, looking for transformation. It never came. I tell you that we were beginning to think we had bested you at last. The Shadow was so impenetrable around the island of Palma that it frustrated your every attempt to reach a criticality on the Meridian. You could not get through—nobody could, and nothing that happened after mattered. The key event was at Palma.”
The look of satisfaction on his face suddenly withered and he returned to the posture of guarded watchfulness, eying Nordhausen with suspicion. “At least that is what we believed. Then the alarms came in again—just another feeble blow, we thought, the last death rattle of the Order. Imagine our surprise when we emerged from the shelter of our chambers and found the whole world was lost to us once more. Everything shattered, vanished, gone forever…”
Nordhausen gaped at the man and, to his great surprise, he saw how Rasil’s eyes clouded over with tears. The consequences of the mission to reverse the Palma event had been annihilating. This man knew them—he had been protected in a Nexus Point when it happened. Now everything he had been saying connected in the professor’s mind, and he nearly gasped with the awareness of it all. Time war! This man was talking about a struggle between some nefarious Arab faction and a group he called ‘the Order.’ They were at war, running missions into the past to alter the course of history one way or another. One side prevailed for a time, and Islam spread throughout the globe, the West destroyed by the awful catastrophe of the tsunami sequence generated by the Palma event.
Like a massive rock hurtled into the ocean, the ripples of change surged forth from that all consuming moment and made an end of Western history. Graves said it himself—they were desperate. They couldn’t get through the Shadow. Paul talked about that, and now it finally made sense to the professor. Palma was so decisive, so final in its effect, that the remnant of Western civilization struggling to be reborn risked all on one last operation. And they came to us, he mused, to me. I was a part of their plan all along; with Paul and Kelly and Maeve. We still don’t even know what we did, but it turned this man’s world on end—it changed everything.
He looked at Rasil, saw the tears, the pride as he struggled to control his emotion, the dignity of the man. He knew. He saw it all happen, and saw it all lost. It was as if all Western history had been re-written in a night.
“Do you have any idea what we lost?” Rasil’s voice was a whisper now, and he stilled himself, head lowered with the shame of his tears.
Nordhausen reached out and placed his hand on the man’s knee. “Forgive me,” he said softly. “This is a hard business.”
Rasil nodded, recovering his composure. He placed his hand on Nordhausen’s for a moment, and the two shared a brief understanding. “A hard business,” he repeated. “And it needs hard men. My tears were unseemly. But you see why I cannot reveal the breaching point to you here—you understand now, one hard man to another.” He withdrew his hand and the professor folded his arms. They sat there for a moment in the mouth of the cave, feeling very cold and alone.
“So, what do we do now?” said Nordhausen.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“Until the resolution, and it will not be long, I fear.”
“And my friend?”
“You may have seen the last of him.” Rasil looked him full in the face now. “A hard business.”
“What? You mean to say that you can’t pull him out—you have no retraction scheme?”
“He was not prepared,” Rasil explained. “You know this as well as I do. I’m afraid he is on his own now. It is not within my power to reach him from here. This is a one way journey, and his time will be short. A man who jumps into the Well of Souls does not return—at least not here.”
Nordhausen was flabbergasted. “One way? But how can that be? Paul told me time would hold the door open for him. He doesn’t belong there!” The professor pointed to the depths of the cave.
”Surely not. It was my place to jump, but that was foiled.”
“Then let me go after him, if you will do nothing to save him.”
“Don’t be foolish. Did you not hear? The Well is dissipated. It takes a full month for the reaction to build. It will not open again until the next full moon—in fact, it must never open again.”
“What are you saying?” Nordhausen was desperate for some way out of the dilemma.
“If the well remains—if we remain—after the transformation, then I will order my men to destroy this place. It must not be allowed to come to the attention of the Order, you understand. I could kill you instead, but that is against our code of honor. A walker must not be harmed. The repercussions are too difficult to fathom. So the well will be destroyed, and that will be the end of it.”
Nordhausen slumped with resignation, a deflated look of pain on his face. “Then I’ve doomed him,” he whispered. “I’ve killed my friend.”
“No,” Rasil corrected him. “It is very likely that he will survive the jump. We have caretakers at the other end. They will do what they can for him, if he survives the fall. Then time will decide his fate at the other end. It is our doom you have sealed, not that of your friend.”
“Our doom?”
“None of this was written,” said Rasil. “It was not supposed to happen, this chance meeting in the desert. We did not expect you, so that is why I believe you when you say your coming here was unplanned. Yet you yourself have said it: your friend does not belong there. He is a Free Radical now. Remember—time is jealous; time is vengeful. It may be that the dogs will have our bones before the dawn.”