Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Read online

  In the end, we’d opted for a cottage, too. England seemed hot enough this summer, and our reserves of cash were more than adequate to keep us going for the planned week. Besides, I’d already assured myself, albeit via a woman I didn’t know, that Rust wasn’t even looking for us. He was in some dark place staring fixedly at the future, and would likely be doing nothing else for many years to come. At least until he hit my barrier. And by that point, if I was Demus, I would have been dead for decades.

  I found myself unable to take much comfort in that last part.

  ‘Well, Fineous doesn’t disbelieve in the existence of the Tower of Illusion as a whole,’ Simon qualified. ‘It would be rather inconvenient to have the entire thing vanish while we were on the tenth floor.’

  ‘Inconvenient for you,’ I said. ‘Nicodemus has a feather fall spell. He’d just waft down after you.’

  ‘Boris notes that only Fineous would fall if Fineous disbelieved the tower, and it was actually an illusion,’ Mia said.

  I shook my head. ‘I disbelieve Boris. I can’t believe you guys are keeping up this Boris shit.’

  Mia rolled behind her screen. ‘Boris doesn’t vanish.’

  John swigged his Coke and burped before commenting, ‘I still think it’s your own fault. You’ve done one of those time tricks. Like where we’ve all experienced different realities reaching this point. Maybe one of your explosions mixed things up somehow.’

  ‘They weren’t my explosions! There was only one, as far as I know, and I was trying to stop it.’ I shook my head and decided to play along with the Boris nonsense. Sooner or later one of them would slip up and admit that either Simon and John invented him to mess with me, or Mia introduced him as part of the tower’s illusions.

  ‘OK, so we ignore the dead end formerly known as fiery tunnel and head up the spiral stairs we found instead. It’s time we got into the tower proper. We’ve spent too long messing about in the basement. Onward and upward, lads. All we need is one measly time crystal and then I can get the lovely Sharia back.’

  ‘Hooray . . .’ Simon and John cheered half-heartedly. Neither of them shared my attachment to Mia’s old character, though they both agreed that having a cleric in the party to cure our wounds with spells was a lot cheaper than buying healing potions in bulk.

  I picked up the barbarian’s figure and advanced him to the stairs. ‘Boris can go first, of course, since he’s illusionary anyway.’

  And so we made our way up through the levels of the Tower of Illusion and the sun headed down towards the sea. The hour hand spun while imagination wrought its own version of time travel on us, unravelling another day double-quick.

  Some monsters we disbelieved, consigning them to memory without so much as raising a sword. Others, still less believable, stubbornly resisted our doubt and had to be slain the old-fashioned way. Sir Hacknslay was almost killed by a levitating pink dolphin in a sparkling blue top hat, but unless we all made a series of spectacularly bad saving throws, the damn thing was as real as we were.

  We found new cunningly linked illusions, too: illusions where two or more things were connected, like the flame-filled tunnel and the distant exit; where by disbelieving the flames I had made the way out vanish, too. That was an eye-opener in terms of just how powerful the Grand Illusionist who dwelt at the top of the tower was. If you believed his illusion of a passage through solid rock, then it would take you into one side of a mountain and out the other.

  In one room we were confronted by a three-headed ogre wielding a burning club longer than I was tall. Since it seemed more likely that the illusionist had made the thing up with a spell rather than found and employed such a monstrosity with all the additional housekeeping bills such a recruit entails, we all tried to disbelieve it. Against the odds, it was Sir Hacknslay and Boris who made their saving throws whereas Fineous and Nicodemus failed. Since the floor of the room was a linked illusion, it also vanished for both warriors and they fell through into a spike-filled sub-chamber, while the thief and the mage remained suspended high above them on illusionary floorboards being attacked by an illusionary three-headed ogre that they were poorly equipped to deal with on their own.

  On other levels of the tower, Hoodeeny, the Grand Illusionist, had gone to vast efforts to populate the place with real monsters and other genuine threats so bizarre that it was hardly possible to believe they were real. And of course, to give yourself a really good chance to disbelieve an illusion, you had to demonstrate your belief through faith. If you really don’t believe that this oversized glowing green pixie with the bright pink sword is real, then let it swing at your neck. If you make a move to defend yourself, then clearly you do believe it. That was the whole story of how Boris got stabbed in the gut with a bright pink sword and had to guzzle half our healing potions: something I considered a great waste given that he was the actual illusion.

  Another time, we reasoned that the icicles hanging high above us couldn’t possibly be real because the room was as warm as the rest of the tower and the floor beneath them hadn’t so much as a drip on it. Rather than advance cowering beneath shields and risk being injured by a particularly heavy blow we advanced boldly; Fineous even whistled, showing our faith that the icicles were illusionary. Sadly, the ice only vanished when we were below the area of ceiling festooned with the things, and although it disappeared, the very real stalactites beneath the ice did not. And they fell on us. Fineous, despite his extravagant and swift display of acrobatics, was struck a glancing blow that broke three of his ribs.

  Nicodemus was able to banish some of the illusions with ‘dispel magic’ spells and identify others with ‘detect magic’ spells, but the scrolls of ‘dispel illusion’ were the tools best suited to the task, and without using those my mage was really just trying to knock in screws with a hammer.

  ‘How far up this damn tower are we?’ John asked. Outside the cottage windows, the shadows had started to stretch themselves out.

  ‘I reckon we’re about halfway, judging by the estimate of its height and the number of steps we’ve climbed.’ Simon didn’t take any notes or write down any sums, but we all trusted his accuracy.

  ‘That’s based on the assumption that the first floor of the tower that we encountered was at ground level,’ I said. ‘For all we know there are ten basement levels.’

  ‘So let’s poke a hole in the outer wall and find out!’ John grumbled.

  All of us were a bit rattled, as our map of the tower’s thirteenth storey had started to sprawl into an ugly maze of intersecting corridors extending well beyond the twelve previous maps that had all fitted into neat, albeit mysteriously expanding, circles.

  I glanced back at the cottage windows to see the sun dipping towards the horizon. Normally it would be the rooftops of Putney waiting to receive it, the sunset gilding an array of satellite TV dishes, but here only treetops waited. Reality pushed its way rudely into my thoughts, reminding me we were on the run.

  I leaned back in my chair, the game forgotten for a moment. Had Guilder and Rust already started their journey to the future? Were they even now frozen into a time trail that would keep hold of them for many years to come? I thought about how easily Natasha, if that even was her name, had fooled me. Demus had lied to me, too, though I couldn’t see why he would. His lie had painted a picture of his journey back as something from the sci-fi shows, a Terminator-esque appearance out of nowhere that had him standing in the middle of London. Perhaps the other woman traveller, Anna, who had punched the delicious if duplicitous Natasha on the nose, had also not told the whole truth, or any of it.

  ‘Lies!’ I said, startling the others from discussion of some finer point of cartography. ‘Illusions are basically elaborate lies.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said John.

  ‘A cleric would be useful, then,’ Simon said. ‘Clerics have the “detect lie” spell.’

  ‘See, I told you clerics are useful,’ I said. ‘This is why we need Sharia back.’

  Mia smiled at me
across the table and brushed her foot along my calf.

  ‘If we wanted a cleric that badly we could have just hired that priest of Suckit back in town,’ John snorted.

  ‘Sobek,’ Simon said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sobek, the crocodile-headed god.’

  ‘Sobek, Suckit, same thing.’

  ‘Sobek is one of only two gods to feature on the front cover of the early D&D expansion Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes,’ Simon continued relentlessly, ‘though oddly he is not one of the twenty-three Egyptian gods detailed inside—’

  ‘A quarter-share of treasure was all the Suckit priest wanted, and we could have been adventuring somewhere real with real treasure rather than all this smoke and mirrors shit!’ John said.

  I coughed pointedly. ‘So, here we are questing to save our beloved and beautiful Sharia and not bitching about it at all. But, returning to my point about lies’ – I found my character sheet and tapped my pencil on the entry in my equipment section – ‘Nicodemus happens to have a potion of truth. Anyone who drinks it is unable to lie while the effects last.’

  ‘Great.’ Simon slumped over the table. ‘So all we have to do is get every monster we encounter to take a sip and then ask them whether they’re real. And if they say “no” we can easily disbelieve them. I do hope they’re feeling cooperative!’

  ‘Not for monsters, micro-brain!’ I set my finger to the lead figure with the furs and the big axe. ‘Boris can have some, then try to tell me that he’s not an illusion. Let’s settle this once and for all!’

  John and Simon sat up at that and exchanged glances.

  ‘That’s a waste of a valuable potion!’ Simon made a poor case, since Fineous had campaigned vigorously for us to sell it at the first opportunity. Enforced truthfulness was not the friend of any thief. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to Mia.

  John pushed his warrior’s figure up to Nicodemus’s. ‘Sir Hacknslay throws a friendly arm around Nicodemus’s shoulders and begins to slowly recount the details of the last three times Boris saved the life of one or other of us.’

  Simon pushed Fineous up close, too. ‘And Fineous looks Nicodemus squarely in the eye, then says, “And let’s say for a moment that this ridiculous allegation of yours is true. Let’s think about that. Then, instead of wasting a valuable magic potion, you would have wasted a valuable magic potion and got rid of half of our fighting force, leaving us with just one overly muscled idiot to hide behind when the next bunch of monsters charge at us.”’

  I sat and chewed on that one as the sun vanished behind the treeline. I was a seeker of truth. By nature and by profession. Lies, falsehood, ignorance. These were my enemies. The idea that a lie could be a saviour . . . that was a new and alien concept to me.

  ‘But you’re both missing something,’ I said. ‘The real question is, WHY is Boris with us? If he’s an illusion—’

  ‘He’s not!’ said Simon.

  ‘Not Boris.’ John laughed. ‘No way.’

  ‘If he’s an illusion,’ I continued, ‘then even if he has helped us on occasion, that can’t be the reason he’s with us. And I want to know why he’s here. I’m sorry. I just can’t let this go.’

  ‘Alright then,’ Simon said. ‘Waste the potion then!’

  ‘Alright then!’ I said, my conviction waning.

  ‘Alright then!’ Simon repeated.

  ‘Nicodemus asks Boris if he will drink the potion,’ I said.

  ‘Fineous suggests he does,’ Simon said.

  Mia looked up from some mysterious dice rolling and shrugged. ‘He isn’t pleased, but he booms out, “I drink it. I drink it all if it shuts up stupid whiney magic-man!”’ She mimed him taking the flask from me, pulling out the cork in his teeth, spitting it aside, then throwing back his head and consuming it in a series of glugs.

  ‘Nicodemus asks Boris if he is an illusion!’ I said triumphantly.

  ‘No,’ Mia said in the Northman’s growl. ‘I’m as real as you are, magic-man!’

  CHAPTER 13

  2009

  Flamboyant supermarket magnate Ellery Elmwood came incognito to the Tower of Tricks towards the close of 2009. Actually, he was hidden inside a triple-seater sofa, since we were under observation by at least one police force regarding the disappearance of several billionaires. We were running down our operation at that point, both because of the growing surveillance and because there were only nine travellers left in the cave. Though of course those two facts were inextricably linked in a mind-twisting causal loop.

  I picked Ellery up myself as arranged on an anonymous stretch of B-road running through rural Somerset, and oversaw his concealment before setting off once again in the delivery truck. I drove him through our many acres of solar farm, beneath the slowly turning rotors of several dozen of the tallest land-based wind turbines in the UK, and into the courtyard of our faux medieval castle. The portcullises closed behind us: one, two, three, lowered by their own motors, the last word in automatic garage doors.

  We had met several times before, entering into discreet negotiations over his long-anticipated – at least on our side – travel plans. On those first occasions, Ellery had lived up to his reputation and had talked the proverbial hind legs off all our non-existent donkeys. Today, though, he seemed a shadow of that man, tight-lipped and nervous.

  Mia made him some tea before we went down and tried to set him at his ease. She spoke again about the reasons he wanted to return to 1979. She talked about the band he’d been the vocalist for. Somehow she’d managed to dig up an actual poster for one of their gigs, and there in glossy technicolour was a young Ellery in uncomfortable transition from something that looked half glam rock, half punk, towards the New Romantic vibe that the band had come to dominate with their new singer after Ellery quit.

  ‘Of course, it won’t be me that gets to make a different choice.’ Ellery raised his voice over the rattle of the descending elevator.

  ‘No.’ I had told him this the first time he explained his plan. I wasn’t sure why he was telling it back to me now. ‘It may not even be the younger version of you if you aren’t sufficiently persuasive. And even if he does choose music over a business career, there is no guarantee that the band will experience the same success with him as they did with the vocalist they hired after you.’

  ‘They bloody well should! They should be even bigger. Massive. I was much better than Ray Donovan. His falsetto sounded like he was in pain.’

  This was more like the Ellery Elmwood we first met. Even so, I had no clue why crawling naked, cold and muddy from a cave in 1979 to set a different version of himself on a different path had ever seemed like a good idea. The Ellery beside me wouldn’t get to sing to those crowds. He wouldn’t get the groupies backstage, and he already had the money here and now. Did his ego really need that success so badly he would give up what he had now to live it vicariously through a younger incarnation of himself? It had always seemed like a flawed plan, but he had been insistent, generous with his money, and, most importantly, he had been there in the cave all these years, waiting.

  We stepped from the elevator into the well-lit cave. Most of the travellers were gone now, just a dozen silver tubes standing to conceal those still to leave, and of course Mr Elmwood himself, now deep in the clutches of the electromagnet array that had been constructed around his time trail. Somewhere in among the towering magnets and forest of cables he stood waiting in his birthday suit, a sheet wrapped around his hips for modesty’s sake.

  We said our goodbyes and good lucks, tugged away the sheet, then guided Ellery to the spot from where he could step back and join his time trail; at which point he and his trail would fuse and vanish, leaving just the clothes he now stood in, slumping to the bare stone floor.

  Then he said it. Those five fateful words.

  ‘I’m not sure about this.’

  Clearly the choice had rested on a knife edge all along, and some tiny current in the time stream, some random eddy, had nud
ged him to come down on the wrong side of the decision.

  Perhaps we could have talked him round. Maybe I should have just shoved him into position. After all, his time trail had always looked rather shocked, and slightly off balance, as if the first thing he might do on arrival in the dying months of the seventies was to fall on his bare arse.

  But the decision was taken from all of us. The time trail vanished without Ellery. His moment to join it had come and gone.

  The entire cave shuddered as if there had been some detonation impossibly far beneath us. The lights flickered, dimmed, died, and surged back to life.

  ‘What happens now?’ Mia stepped back towards the elevator, gazing at the ceiling as though unsure it would hold.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I knew that Ellery had just hit the world with a paradox bomb. My daughter, Eva, who now existed only on another fork of the timeline, would have been able to calculate the impact but she was, though it pains me to admit it, much cleverer than I am.