But Turpin had said the boy’s world was like ours in almost every detail if set a few years back along the wave. And yet they didn’t have the balance. The idea that they could get along without it, that their great powers had, presumably through mere accident, in his world still preserved the status quo enough for consciousness and society … well, there was a subversive tidbit. No wonder Turpin felt a little vulnerable at having opened that door. No wonder he himself seemed to be leaning less and less on the balance.
Hamilton chided himself. These musings were not appropriate when in the field. He found his bearings in the forest as it stood, if anything could be said to stand on its own now. He quartered it and, moving as silently as he could, explored the territory down to the river, all the angles of the estate. He found nobody.
He used the covers in his eyes to move to the next nearest option after the servants’ world. This would be one of those chosen for His Majesty’s sport.
The house was much the same, with a few minor architectural differences. A flag with some sort of meaningless symbol flew over it. Hamilton didn’t want to know what it meant. He quartered the ground again, and found only some old men in a uniform he didn’t recognize and some young women in entertainingly little. Presumably that situation would get more extraordinary as the season arrived. He wondered if ladies would be brought here, or if they would be offered their own options of tea and mazes.
He changed his eyes again, and this time when he searched he found Columbians walking the paths, that quaint accent that reminded him of watching Shakespeare. These people, as he crouched nearby and listened to them pass, spoke with a horrid lack of care, as if there was nobody to judge them, no enemy opposing them. Some of them would know of the interest of a King in their world, some would surely not. For His Majesty to venture into any of even these carefully chosen worlds should be for him to go on safari, into territory that was not his own. And yet the choice was everything, wasn’t it? These worlds must be utterly safe. Unless one of them had the boy in it.
He searched through several worlds. He kept all their meanings at bay. He considered where he would go if he were in the boy’s shoes, and in so considering realized there must be something he was missing … because he couldn’t imagine coming here at all. He finally found, among the dozen or so options, somewhere empty. There was no house visible through the trees, the river was in a different place, the height of where he stood above sea level was different, and yet, according to the bare information about where he was on the globe that his covers insisted upon, he was in the same place. He looked around slowly, made sure he was hidden from all angles. Not only was the house gone, there were no houses on the plain, as far as he could see. And there was something … something extraordinary about—
“So they did send you.” The voice was his own. It came from up the hillside.
Hamilton couldn’t see its source. He stepped to put the trunk of a tree between it and himself. He took the Webley Collapsar from its holster.
“Where’s the Herald?” he called.
“You won’t find her—”
That told Hamilton she wasn’t right there beside him. He dropped to his knee as he swung out from the tree, his left hand on his pistol wrist, and fired at the voice. The report and the whump of the round going off made one sound. And then there was another, a crash of branches as the boy broke cover. Hamilton leapt out and fired twice more at the sound, foliage and undergrowth compacting in instants, momentary pulses of gravity sucking at his clothes, newly focused light dazzling him like a line of new stars blossoming and then gone in a moment.
Without looking for a result, he swung back behind the tree. Then he listened.
The movement had stopped. Of course it had. He wouldn’t have kept moving. He’d have lain there for a few moments, then lain there a bit longer.
He heard small movements from up the hill. With these rounds, it was likely that if the boy was still alive, he was also unwounded. He began to slowly make his way through the trees, making sure he also wasn’t going to be where the boy had last placed him. As he walked, he started to wonder about his surroundings. There was indeed something very strange about this empty world. He’d sometimes heard, at parties, at Court, back when he’d been invited, the sort of people who had nothing better to do talking about the glories of nature, about some mysterious poetic energy that looking at the simplicity of it could inspire in them. Hamilton thought, and had once ill-advisedly said, that nature wasn’t simple at all, that the billions of edges and details and angled surfaces in any view of it were the essence of complexity, much more so than any of the artifacts of civilization. To him, nature was cover, and all the better for its detail. Liz … Her Royal Highness … had made some joke on that occasion to cover the fact that he’d just bluntly contradicted the French ambassador.
But here was some strange feeling of glory. The trees all around him, the undergrowth he was paying such attention to as he stepped through it, it all seemed to be shouting at him. The colors seemed too bright. Was this some flaw in his covers? No. This was too complete. But it wasn’t about simplicity. The objects he saw nearby, even the river glimpsed down there, they were all … there was more detail than he was used to. He recalled a time when he’d injured one of his corneas, the fuzziness of view in one eye, until they’d grown and fitted a new one. It was like he’d suffered from something like that all his life, and now he could see better. God, it would be good to be able to stay here. Such relief and rest would be his.
No. These were dangerous thoughts.
There was a noise ahead of him and he brought the gun up. But he swiftly saw what it was. A fox was staring at him from between two bushes. Of course, he’d been downwind of it, and it had turned to face him in that instant. Better luck than he’d ever had on the hunt. But the eyes on this thing, the sheen of its fur, the intensity of every strand, that he could see from here …
The fox broke the instant and ran.
Something in the world broke with it and Hamilton hit the ground hard, realizing in that moment that his eardrums were resounding and being glad they were resounding because that meant he was still alive, and he threw himself aside as the soil and leaves still fell around him and were sucked suddenly sideways, and he was rolling down the hill, crashing into cover and grabbing the soil to stop himself before the noise had died.
The boy had nearly had him. The boy had the same gun. Of course he had.
He lay there, panting. Then he lay there some more. The boy couldn’t be sure he was here or he’d have fired by now. He wondered, ridiculously, for a moment, about the life of the fox. He killed the thought and started to push himself forward on his elbows. He realized, as he did so, that he wasn’t injured. This might come down to a lucky shot. It was a contest of blunderbusses and balloons.
He felt, oddly, that it was apt his life should come to this. Then he killed that thought too. It would be more bloody apt if his life came to this then continued after the death of the other fellow.
“You could just stay here.” That was the boy again, hard to trace where it was coming from beyond the general direction. He’d placed himself somewhere that the sound was broken, some trees close together, a rock wall.
Hamilton kept looking. “Why do you say that?”
“Don’t you know where you are?”
“An optional Britain.”
“Hardly, old man.” The affectations he’d lost along the way. “It’s not a country at all if there’s nobody in it.”