Timekeeper

Chapter 4

The images continued to flicker past. The ship. The mountainside. The brook. The deserted street. The—battlefield?

She had not seen that one before. She leaned closer to peer at it. It looked for a moment like a painting one might encounter in a gallery—a huge landscape, storm-cloud sky and brown earth overwhelming the viewer’s attention, tiny figures of men and horses frozen in an instant of victory or bloodshed.

Except these figures moved. Men. Horses. Cannon. And Wellington monsters. Some wore red and some wore blue, and they were tearing each other to pieces, weapons flung aside, torn-off limbs hurled bloody to the ground. Elizabeth swallowed against a wave of sickness and looked away.

“Impressive,” Kent said at last. He lifted his head from his examination of the watch, and the flickering candlelight caught the silver strands among the tawny gold of his hair. “I must confess it is hard to disbelieve a story of time travel, with this sort of proof offered.”

“It could be a trick,” Katarina said between her teeth.

Kent shook his head—not in negation, Elizabeth thought, but in wonder. Light had kindled far down in his blue eyes. “And then there is the matter of Gavin having met Mr. Maxwell in Vienna.”

“Briefly,” Trevelyan said, “but memorably. He saved my life and my friend Zimmerman’s—on the second of April, 1882, by the way,” he added in Maxwell’s direction, “in the meithaus district, from a fire. You said I was to tell you when I encountered you and your two young friends in London. I thought him mad,” Trevelyan concluded, speaking once more to Kent, “but here we are.”

“Here we are,” Kent agreed. “That’s the second point. And the third—” He met Maxwell’s eyes. “—is that you continually begin to address me by a name not my own. That was the fifth time, just there. You catch yourself after a breath, but there is a name that rises to your lips every time you see me. I remind you of someone. Someone who looks like me, whose surname begins with an ‘S’.” The blue eyes watched Maxwell’s face.

“I knew you as Lord Seward,” Maxwell said simply, and Kent let out his breath.

“Indeed. That is…that was a title held by an ancestor of mine. Before.” He nodded toward the window and the world beyond it. The fingertips of his left hand began to beat a restless rhythm on his chair arm. “It would be my title, in a world where the French had not overrun us.”

“A fact someone sufficiently motivated could have discovered!” Katarina said. “Good Lord, you would think no one in this warehouse had ever engaged in a masquerade to obtain information!”

Trevelyan ignored her. “Kent’s name, Maxwell’s watch, my time in Vienna,” he said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “And finally—” He looked to Kent, and Kent nodded.

William, silent until now, addressed his first question to the air midway between them. “‘Finally,’ sir?”

“Finally,” Trevelyan said. He got up. “Come with me.”

“You are mad,” Katarina gritted.

“It may be I am,” Trevelyan said, “but not for believing their story. They couldn’t be crafting it from reading a treatise or peeking through a windowpane. Come with me,” he repeated, and Elizabeth pushed back her chair and followed him to the door, William and Maxwell behind her, the others trailing after.

Trevelyan led them down the bare whitewashed corridor to the door of what had been his laboratory in the other 1885. He produced a key, inserted it into the lock, and the door swung open into blackness. “Come in,” Trevelyan said, disappearing inside without a hesitation. “Stand just there.” There was a hissing sound, and then the lights came up—not all at once like a matchstick touched to a lamp wick, but slowly, a yellow glow burning away the shadows.

The room lightened from velvet black to gray studded with darker gray, revealing itself to be laid out more or less as Trevelyan’s laboratory had been in the other London. Elizabeth’s straining eyes discerned the outlines of worktables running down the length of the two long walls—the spiny curve of the enormous spinning-wheel-thing in the back—the bellows of the cold blacksmith’s forge. As well as something large and looming, standing still just in front of her.

It came clear as the shadows fell away from it, as the growing light shone off its burnished hide. This one was only eight feet tall, and constructed of a mismatched patchwork-quilt of metal scraps, but otherwise the details were sickeningly familiar. Elizabeth stared in horror at the mouthless mask-like face, the bolts driven into the chest, the cannon gaping at the end of the left arm, the slender cylinders of the Gatling gun grouped at the end of the right. A wagon of coal scraps was attached to one leg. Unseeing blue-tinted eyes stared forward, seeming to calmly meet her own.

Oh, no. She couldn’t find the breath to say it out loud. Behind her, she felt William freeze and heard Maxwell’s hiss of comprehension. No.

“A prototype,” Trevelyan explained, heedless of their shock. “Only to prove that it does what it should. I mean to make them stand twenty feet high, and yes, each one will need a team of three inside it. I’ve a plan for improving the boiler design, but I’ve not captured it even in my own notebook as yet. So no spy could’ve discovered it,” he added in Katarina’s direction. “Either our guests come from where they say they do, or they’ve the power to read thoughts.”

“No,” Elizabeth breathed at last. Trevelyan’s eyes dropped back down to her, interested but unconcerned.

There was no sense in trying to make him understand. She turned, pushing half-blind past Maxwell and William, to confront Kent.

His piercing gaze met hers—interested, she thought, as Trevelyan’s had been, measuring her reaction, evaluating whether it also seemed to prove the truth of Maxwell’s story—but also holding compassion for her distress. “You can’t do this,” she said, “you cannot do this, you can’t, you can’t. You’ve done it before—in the other London—it led to horrible things, and you mustn’t take a step down that road—”

“It’s a bit late for that, Miss Barton,” Kent said mildly, but he reached out to take her arm as though he feared she might turn faint. “The first step has already been taken, as you see, and several more besides.”

“But you don’t understand!” Elizabeth heard her own voice rise. “You have done this very thing before. In the other timeline, you did it in 1876. Nine years later, those who controlled the constructs had risen to power and held all of Britain with a boot to its throat.”

“That won’t happen this time,” Trevelyan said. “With the booted feet of the French so fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d hardly be making that mistake ourselves.”

“What will stop you? I’m sure your counterparts said just the same. You can’t do this, Mr. Trevelyan. We unmade a universe to undo this mistake. You can’t make it again!”

“I must agree with the young lady,” Herr Schwieger said unexpectedly from behind her. “She provides yet another argument to my cause. I do believe this is the wrong avenue for us to pursue. Again, I must say I would rather see us seek out the secret of the Genevese monsters, and restore Britain’s defenders to their motherland.”

Kent, still holding Elizabeth’s arm, used his other hand to wave the young Prussian silent. “Enough, Emil.”

But William had gone rigid. “I beg your pardon, sir, what?”

Schwieger glanced once at Kent before replying. Kent rolled irritated eyes, then gave permission with a nod. “The British special battalion retreated back to England with its masters, after the disaster at Waterloo,” the young Prussian said. “For a time they enabled Britain to hold the line against the Empire, but the Empire had learned men under its own employ. French soldiers managed to take captive a badly injured monster, and French scientists discovered the secret of its creation. They made a battalion to serve France. They brought it across the Channel. The Battle of Dover was…” Schwieger trailed off, as though at a loss for words. “I believe your watch showed an image of it,” he offered at last.

William nodded woodenly.

“The only thing that has ever been able to stop a monster is another monster,” Schwieger said. “Or—” He inclined his head to Trevelyan in studied politeness. “—perhaps a construct. Someday. But perhaps not; or perhaps as we now hear, the risk would prove to outweigh the benefit. We know, however, that monsters can run over anything in their path—even the Imperial Garde. By the time Wellington’s special battalion reached Waterloo, there was nothing left for it to save, but that was not the monsters’ fault, and they guarded Britain quite well in the years before France found a way to match them. Now Britain needs them once again.”

Elizabeth’s throat felt too choked to speak. William had gone paper-white, but he pushed onward. “But you said the French had a similar force—”

“Had,” Schwieger agreed. “The monsters destroyed each other at Dover. There are none living now. The notes made by the original creator—notes that might guide us in creating more—were stolen from the Empire by a pair of Englishmen some decades ago. No one knows for certain where these notes might be, but I have an idea or two, and if they could be found, why then, we could breed again a force sufficient to send the Empire packing home.”

“No,” Elizabeth choked out. She looked desperately at Maxwell, hoping he would find himself capable of a more eloquent argument, but he said nothing. He was staring at the construct as though the sight had drained the last bit of hope from his body. He looked suddenly old, the lines on his face and the pallor of his skin a match for his white hair. Elizabeth wrenched her eyes back to Schwieger. “No. That would be just as bad—”

“No,” Trevelyan said, in the tone of one engaged in an argument so familiar as to be boring. “We haven’t time to breed and train a monster army. British children are being born into French slavery right now. That must be stopped right now. We must bring it all down.”

“And replace it with what?” William demanded. “What will fill the hole once you blow up Parliament—or trample it underfoot, or whatever it is you intend to do? Surely to goodness it would be better to work from within, grains of sand grinding rock smooth, a slowly diverted stream—”

“I haven’t seventy years to play with,” Trevelyan said sharply. “Even seven years is too long to wait. The constructs are the only solution I can see that has a hope of doing Britain any good in the next seven months. I’ll keep my hand to the plow I’ve chosen.”

“You’d—you’d keep your hand there still, when we’ve brought you something better?” Elizabeth said to Kent.

Her heart was hammering so hard and fast she could hardly breathe. But she tried to lift her chin confidently, tried to smile at Kent as though she were sure of her words.

She had to stop them doing this, had to. If Maxwell wouldn’t speak, she must. And Kent was the one to convince—there was no point in trying to sway Trevelyan and she did not know Schwieger and Katarina might as well have been a stranger—but it had been Kent’s conspiracy in the other 1885, and it still was here and now. The others would follow where he led. If she could give him a third option, surely he would turn away from the two paths fated to end in disaster—and the third option was ready to hand, nothing less than obvious. By the look in his eyes, he was thinking the same thing she was.

“Mr. Kent,” Elizabeth said, “haven’t you ever wished for a way to warn those who fought at Dover?”

“I’ve prayed for such a thing,” Frederick Kent told her. His smile made her think of the sun coming up. They might have been the only people in the room. “Are you an angel come in answer, then? Or a genie granting wishes?”

“I’ve certainly never been called an angel,” Elizabeth said.

“A genie, then. I somehow wasn’t expecting they’d look so prosaic.” Kent started to pace. “A warning. You could take a warning back in time. Dear God. You could tell me what I wish I’d known during the mine revolts—or what Carter wished he’d known during the ’41 Rising—or if you go back further, you could even stop Dover as you say. You could take dossiers, maps—I could get my hands on memoirs—”

“Because your jinn made such good use of maps and memoirs at Waterloo?” Katarina’s voice cut like glass.

Kent paused mid-step.

“Katarina’s right,” Trevelyan said. He folded his arms and leaned back against the empty-eyed metal giant. “I might be owing sanctuary to Mr. Maxwell and his companions—I agreed to that in Vienna—but I can’t say I think much of letting them mine the ground I’m standing on. Whatever world they create next might well be a mess I can’t fix.”

“You can’t fix this one,” Elizabeth shot back. “Not with constructs. Set constructs loose on British soil and you’ll create a world worse than this. That’s exactly what happened last time.”

“Under entirely different circumstances.”

“Under exactly the same circumstances! A threat that made it worth the risk, constructs that first seemed like protective angels, and then later—later it didn’t matter about intentions. The—the crank turned itself, that’s what Katarina told me.” Elizabeth turned back to Kent. “Mr. Trevelyan wants you to use metal monsters, and Herr Schwieger wants you to use Wellington monsters, and I can offer you something better. Send us back with your warnings, and—”

“—and I won’t have to stand here choosing between devils. Yes, I’d already grasped that’s what you offer me.” Kent looked off into the shadows. “It would be a risk,” he said. “But if I could send you with good reconnaissance, the risk would be lessened—and I think I can. As it happens, I know someone who fought at Dover. A very old man now, but alert enough of mind for all that. While I can’t answer for the accuracy of his memories, his cottage is stuffed full of memoirs from the old days. He has all the maps and battle plans and firsthand accounts you could want. If I can get you up north to see him—”

Katarina made a hissing sound of dismay. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Oh, come, Kat,” Kent said to her, genially enough. “Are you not always wishing us to act more boldly?”

“Always,” Katarina said. “And you always tell me why we can’t, and you’re changing your strategy now, like this? Even if the watch proves their tale, nothing speaks to their motives, and you’d deliver Mr. Carter into their hands? What can possibly make you believe you can trust them?”

“The same way I trust everyone else who turns up on my doorstep and wants to aid my cause,” Kent said, his voice dropping into a lower, more dangerous register. “On the word of someone already in my service—Gavin in this case—coupled with my own observation. When you command your own company, Katarina, you may of course employ different criteria, but I see no need to change the one that has served me well so far.”

“Most of the people who turn up on your doorstep don’t admit to having betrayed the British at Waterloo!” Katarina flung back.