‘What are you suggesting?’
‘Nothing just yet. But if we needed to replace him, would you be prepared to tell him to step down?’
Reid shook his head. ‘There’s nobody else in the Cabinet I’d like to see in the top job. Unless you’re putting yourself forward as a candidate?’
‘If I did, it would just be as an interim measure to see this crisis through. We need to get a grip, Reid. Five days tops and it’s all over. I’m going to need to issue the order on the nukes within twenty-four hours.’
‘Don’t do anything hasty, General. You might regret it.’
‘None of us is going to live to regret anything, Reid, if we don’t stop this. Don’t forget that.’ The General’s cold stare condemned Reid in an instant and then he walked away with the air of a man who had reached his limit.
In the depths of the Ashmolean Museum where the most powerful Government computers were housed, Kirkham watched the screen as the modelling wound towards its conclusion. Manning tapped her red nails on the desk top with irritation.
‘I find it very hard to concentrate while you’re doing that,’ Kirkham said with controlled exasperation.
‘And I find it very hard to wait while you continually come up with nothing.’
‘You know it’s not that simple,’ Kirkham protested. ‘This would have been nigh-on impossible even before the Fall when we had endless resources and unlimited time-’
‘No more excuses!’ she snapped. ‘Before the Fall, you wouldn’t have had a whole range of supernatural artefacts, energy sources and a whole new way of thinking to draw on. So stop whining.’
‘What you’re asking for is an understanding of the underpinning of reality, but even to begin to explain the concepts in layman’s language is-’ he began, but Manning cut him dead again.
‘I don’t want the mechanics, Kirkham.’ She prowled around the desk like a big cat, claws barely sheathed. ‘We know now that there are different levels of reality. Different dimensions. This is not theory any more. We know that there is a certain fluidity to these other dimensions-’
‘Dimensions isn’t really the right word-’
‘Shut up. We know that so-called magic — or the “new science” as you like to call it — can affect reality, too. So, is what I am suggesting possible?’
‘We’re talking about non-limited consciousness causing an effect at the quantum level. If reality is phase-locked like the light in a laser, then consciousness can-’
‘Is what I am suggesting possible?’
‘Yes, it is possible.’
Without another word, Manning turned on her heels to snatch up her furs and then she was gone. Kirkham breathed deeply. For a second, he thought he had seen something else standing where Manning was, something in her and around her, gone in the blink of an eye. He rubbed his tired eyes and returned to the flickering light of the computer screen.
Sophie experienced a sensation of floating in water and a second later she was standing on the flagged floor of the Watchtower corridor. The chilly air smelled of damp stone and her footsteps echoed loudly off the rough-hewn walls.
‘That was weird.’ Harvey steadied himself beneath a hissing torch.
Caitlin appeared at Sophie’s side, clutching her axes, her gaze flitting back and forth as she searched for danger. ‘Are you anticipating trouble?’
Sophie still found it unnerving to hear Caitlin’s voice emanating from a body that resembled Caitlin but was clearly not her. The muscles of her face were tauter, her brow regularly knitted, her eyes piercing and unblinking; subtle changes that altered not just her demeanour, but who she was.
‘No idea. The Watchtower was always a waystation between T’ir n’a n’Og and our world, but that doesn’t mean it’s deserted.’
‘Then we had better proceed with caution.’
‘How do we get back home from here?’ Harvey asked.
‘You can get to all times and places through the doors that line the corridors,’ Sophie said. ‘Somewhere there’s a door leading back to where we want to go.’
‘We could be looking for ever!’ Harvey whined.
‘Look at this.’ Thackeray was standing at a window. The others fell silent as they gathered round. The view filled them with a deep dread: there was emptiness, emptier even than deep space, a spiritual emptiness, but here and there fires occasionally burst and faded like stars with their lifetimes diminished to fractions of a second. ‘Where are we?’ Thackeray said quietly.
‘Let’s worry about where we’re going,’ Sophie said firmly, leading the way down the corridor.
It twisted and turned in a manner that made no architectural sense. Each section they came upon as they rounded a bend looked exactly the same as all the others through which they had already passed. Doors, oaken and studded with black iron, broke the monotony of the walls at regular intervals. The majority were locked, but the first one Sophie discovered to be unlocked released a blast of freezing air into the corridor. They looked out over a frozen hilltop where a gnarled figure stood, a crone dressed in rags, clutching a wooden staff, her hair wild in the wind. Icy blue light washed off her. Every now and then she would lift up her staff and shake it as if angry at the gods, and another fall of snow would come from the slate-grey sky.
Another door opened on to a scene of Caitlin, covered from head to toe with clay, beside an open hole in the ground. It was night, and raining, and she had her head back as if she was howling, her face transformed into some animalistic expression. They only had a moment to glimpse the scene before Caitlin grasped the door and pulled it shut so fast that she almost knocked Sophie to the floor.
Other doors showed scenes from their past lives, and one or two appeared to reveal future events, though they were bland and uninsightfuclass="underline" Harvey and Thackeray talking in a small room; Sophie standing next to an Asian man in a snowy street.
But then they came upon something that disturbed them immensely. When Thackeray threw open the next door, it revealed nothing at all, no scene, just a black void that appeared to go on for ever. The second and third doors revealed the same vista.
‘OK,’ Thackeray said. ‘If we can only open doors that show aspects of our lives, past or future, what does it mean when the doors show nothing at all?’
‘You know what?’ Harvey said as they all silently mulled over the question. ‘Who cares? There’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s just get home.’
They trudged on disconsolately with Sophie keeping a close eye on Caitlin. Every now and then, Sophie had heard her quietly answering questions no one had asked, and as they walked she was growing even moodier and more introverted, ignoring any advances from the others.
After the monotony of the long corridors, they were surprised when they found a flight of stairs breaking off to one side. Harvey eagerly led the way, skipping up the steps two at a time. He soon disappeared from view, then called back excitedly for them to join him.
The others found him lounging on a heap of sumptuous cushions in a large chamber with intricately illustrated tapestries lining three of the walls and floor-to-ceiling windows with leaded diamond panes on the other.
‘What’s the point in windows if you’ve got nothing to look out on?’ Thackeray asked, tired and irritated. He collapsed on to the cushions next to Harvey.
Sophie ignored them and looked around with interest. She was struck by several unusual items in the room, but the most prominent was a three-legged piece of furniture with a dome on top, constructed from gold and silver and covered with finely detailed workings.
Thackeray saw her approach the piece and warned, ‘I wouldn’t go touching anything in this place.’
Sophie ignored him. Increasingly she was learning to trust her instincts and now she could feel a subtle vibration at the base of her skull, like the buzz of power lines only more pleasant. It emanated from the object.