Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Page 7

  ‘Cast “dispel illusion” if you’re so sure,’ repeated Simon.

  ‘I think not. We don’t have enough to waste, and we’re going to need them later. Plus, “Boris” isn’t doing any harm just yet. Who knows, he could prove useful. Might kill some illusionary monster for us with his illusion of an axe.’

  ‘Well played, sir!’ John said. ‘Neatly got yourself out of having to prove yourself wrong.’

  We pushed on through the dungeons, taking any stairs that presented themselves so long as they led up. I gave Boris ten gold pieces by way of apology for doubting that he was real, but mainly to check if he was solid. Solid illusions are much harder to cast and maintain than ones of the more ghostlike variety. Adding sounds and smells comes somewhere between those two levels of difficulty. I guess that technically, when an illusion shares all the aspects expected of something real then it is hard to say that it’s not in fact real, even if you are the one who magicked it into being. The only difference between an illusionist’s very best work and reality is that the illusion can be undone with the right spells – or rather that there are more spells that will undo it, as a fireball will burn up both sorts of real.

  Before long we came to an enormous chamber sporting no fewer than eight spiral staircases going up. We crossed the chamber to inspect the only other exit, a long tunnel leading off on a gentle upslope to what looked suspiciously like a distant circle of daylight.

  Although we wanted to come up into the tower, we all agreed that going outside to covertly establish its location relative to us would help us choose which staircase to take.

  I say we all agreed because everyone but Boris did, and Boris wasn’t real. In fact, I had been in two minds about going until he said it wasn’t safe to go outside.

  ‘Yeah, not taking advice from a figment of someone else’s imagination,’ I said, and started heading straight towards the distant daylight.

  ‘Have you considered,’ Simon said, ‘that one of your time experiments may have bumped you on to a different timeline in which Boris has been a part of our D&D game for years? I only ask because it’s an interesting alternative, not because I don’t think Mia is sneaky enough to have cooked this up with you.’ He shot her a narrow look.

  If it had been John who said it, I would have brushed it off immediately, but Simon was terrible at acting and this seemed quite polished. ‘I’ll give the matter due consideration.’ I moved my mage Nicodemus toward the tunnel Mia had added to the map for us.

  ‘The whole length of the tunnel fills with flames. They shoot from the walls, ceiling and floor.’ Mia indicated the region affected. It started just a yard in front of Nicodemus.

  ‘Can I feel the heat?’ I asked.

  ‘You can. You can also hear the roar of the flames and smell a charred odour on the air.’

  ‘I disbelieve it,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a go at disbelieving Boris, too, while I’m at it.’ Illusions can be disbelieved. You can get a saving throw on a D20, and having high intelligence gives you a better chance at making the object of your disbelief vanish, but the more powerful the illusion the less chance you have.

  Mia rolled some dice behind her screen. Even if neither Boris nor the flames were illusions, she would roll just to stop us deducing the truth. ‘Nothing changes.’

  ‘Damn.’ John moved Sir Hacknslay to join Nicodemus before the flames. ‘I’ll try, too.’

  More rolling. ‘Nothing changes.’

  Sometimes you have to up the ante. You can get additional chances to break an illusion using just your mind, but you have to risk something more each time. ‘Nicodemus closes his eyes and walks forward slowly, telling himself that the flames aren’t real.’

  Mia rolled again. ‘He gets very hot. The skin on his face feels as if it is starting to blister.’

  ‘The flames aren’t real. The flames aren’t real.’ I advanced the figure.

  Mia rolled again. ‘He’s in real pain now. Take a point of damage. The others can see that his hair is crinkling up and smoke is rising in wisps from his clothing. He’s very close to the fire now.’

  ‘Drink your fire resistance potion!’ Simon said.

  ‘That would just be giving in to the illusion.’ I reached forward to advance Nicodemus. ‘It would raise my saving throw and waste a potion to boot!’

  ‘Use one of the scrolls!’ John urged. ‘I mean, step back first, or it’ll spontaneously combust.’

  ‘I’ve only got two “dispel illusion” scrolls!’ I said.

  ‘So cast one!’ Simon shouted, no doubt worried that some of the few party valuables he wasn’t yet carrying might burn. ‘You’ll still have one left and you’ll know, one way or the other.’

  Sometimes you need to believe what your senses are telling you. Sometimes you need to go with your gut.

  ‘What you gonna do, Nick?’ Mia asked.

  ‘Nicodemus runs forward.’ I pushed the figure into the flames.

  CHAPTER 9

  1992

  The next time I visited Guilder’s cave I made the journey alone. I hadn’t learned to drive – you hardly need to in London or Cambridge – so I took the train to Bristol and got Dr Creed to pick me up. He and Professor Halligan had moved shop to our evil villain’s subterranean lair in the hope of making measurements that might allow them to reverse-engineer some of the physics. They could, of course, have easily outnumbered the naked time travellers with world-class scientists eager to help, but Guilder insisted on secrecy and paid well to keep it.

  Even so, understanding scientists as I did, I knew that no amount of money would keep either man quiet about their own successes for much longer. You don’t enter a career in research science for the money. If that’s what interests you, then banking is the way to go. More than Guilder’s millions, both Creed and Halligan wanted the acknowledgement and admiration of their peers. Both were terrified that somehow, even though there was no sign of it in the literature, some other group would scoop them and claim the discoveries for themselves. Someone else’s name would be carried into the future, forever attached to the work.

  ‘So . . . what have you found?’ I knew they had discovered something. Creed was bubbling with it, though keeping his lips firmly pressed together.

  ‘You let Guilder drive you for hours without making him spoil his big reveal. You can wait another forty minutes for our bit of theatre.’

  I sighed. ‘Show, don’t tell is advice for writers, not scientists.’ Even so, I didn’t argue. I liked to reveal my own discoveries with a touch of drama, after all.

  After twenty minutes I started turning round in my seat. The same black car had been on our tail for several miles of winding country lanes and multiple turnings – one of those new four-wheel drive things everyone had started calling SUVs. ‘I think we’re being followed.’

  ‘We are,’ Creed agreed, unconcerned. ‘Guilder’s men follow us to make sure we’re not followed. That man has dangerous levels of paranoia!’

  Dangerous was the word.

  We parked close to the small wood, waiting by our car as a black Land Rover with tinted windows passed slowly by: maybe the same car that had followed us, maybe another of Guilder’s patrols. When it had vanished around a corner, we slipped unobserved into the trees. The wood seemed quiet today; no birds, no bees, just branch and bush seething all around us in the grip of a cool northerly wind. Creed had his own controller for the elevator and went down first. I joined him in the darkness below shortly after, finding the silence and stillness eerie after the animation of the wood above us.

  ‘I don’t like this place.’ Creed seemed glad to have my company again. ‘Never been good with underground places, and those travellers, well, they unnerve me. No logic to it, but that’s how it is.’ He hugged himself and led off along the concrete path.

  We joined Halligan in the well-lit ‘statues’ cavern.

  ‘Ah, young Nick!’ Halligan straightened from his work at a folding table where he had been inspecting one of Creed’s constru
ctions. A forest of cables snaked underneath it and out across the damp floor. ‘Good of you to join us. Though, of course, you’ve been here the whole time, too. Along with Miss Jones.’ He waved an arm towards the silent onlookers.

  He and Creed had been calling Mia ‘Miss Jones’ a lot lately, even though they both knew her and called her Mia to her face. I suspected it was a professional distancing of themselves, given that they had spent several days in a cave with an older version of her standing nude before them. I wondered if they would start to call me ‘Dr Hayes’ next.

  ‘So.’ I hugged myself, wishing I had remembered to bring a coat. ‘What’ve you found?’

  Creed stepped up with some lumpy white object in his hand and a sheaf of glossy photographs. ‘Would you be so kind as to remove your left shoe and sock?’

  I frowned, then with a shrug set to unlacing the shoe in question. ‘Is this some kind of weird initiation ceremony for a new underground cult?’

  They both ignored me. Creed motioned for me to sit in one of the camp chairs by the table. ‘Guilder expected me to come down here with a lorryload of electronics. He probably wants me to get out my sonic screwdriver and reverse the polarity of the neutron flow . . . But experimental science starts with the basics. Simple observation. I’ve been having a very close look at this place and the surrounding tunnels. More specifically . . . the mud.’

  ‘The mud?’ I had to admit that this was also more basic than I had expected. I sat in the chair as directed, sock and shoe in hand. Creed crouched before me, took my ankle and lifted my bare foot to rest alongside the white object he had in hand, which I could now see was some kind of plaster cast.

  ‘It looks like a good match to me!’ Creed announced. ‘Have to take some measurements for the record.’

  ‘That’s a footprint,’ I guessed.

  ‘Indeed. But if this is yours … haven’t you seen what it means?’

  ‘That these time travellers are not immediately starting new timelines!’ I tried to sound surprised.

  ‘Yes! It goes against all our theories!’ Halligan interjected. ‘These people. This older you . . . they could be here in this timeline right now. You could have been in the woods just now, spying on yourself. It’s incredible!’

  ‘Wow!’ I strained my acting muscle still further. ‘Incredible.’

  Halligan nodded enthusiastically. ‘Realistically, though, I doubt many of them do much more than say hello to someone before they break continuity and start a new timeline. The longer they stay on our timeline the more chance there is of them causing a split.’

  I gave a wise nod. ‘It would be very difficult to hang around for long.’

  ‘We found the footprint here.’ Creed pulled out what looked to be a map of the cave system and pointed to a number of X’s in one of the tunnels leading from our chamber. He put the paper on the table, then busied himself with his tape measure and callipers. I tried not to squirm, but my feet have always been ticklish. ‘I’ve found quite a few footprints, but this was the clearest. It’s in a depression in a passage about a hundred and fifty metres from the rear of the cavern. It’s yours, and what set me looking for it were the faint impressions leading away from you and Miss Jones, or at least from your time trails, as I believe we’re now calling them.’

  ‘Right!’ I got it. ‘These people are all headed for the past, so they will already have walked out of here. I’m surprised you found any of my footprints among the crowd.’

  ‘Well, maybe we just got lucky. Or . . . maybe you made an effort to leave an impression . . .’

  ‘Because you’ve told me about it now,’ I said. ‘And in the future I will remember it, and when I go back to however many years ago I’m heading, I could have left this footprint,’ I tapped the plaster cast, ‘just for you to find.’

  Creed frowned, puzzling through the logic. ‘But . . .’

  ‘Hurts your head, doesn’t it?’ I grinned. ‘So, you’ve established that the travellers do in fact leave at some point in the past.’

  ‘More than that. We can see that there are holes in the queue, implying that some of the travellers weren’t coming this far back. Six gaps, in fact – we assume left by travellers who will arrive at their destination time in some year we’ve yet to reach, and so their time trails don’t reach this far back. We did wonder if they might have been physically removed in some manner, but time trails seem impervious to force.’

  ‘They’re rooted in the Earth’s gravity well, so, yeah, without removing most of England along with them, they aren’t going to shift.’ I looked at the row of faces before me while putting my shoe back on, and wondered how far back the most adventurous of them had aimed. History always felt like a dangerous place to me, and emerging naked from an underground tunnel in the 1700s or any date before that seemed rather suicidal. Getting burnt as a witch might be a distinct possibility. Most of them were probably headed back to try something again, or to change something, perhaps just to tell someone once more that they loved them, or just to take a missed opportunity and tell that someone for the first time. Maybe some planned to return to a lost child. Or spend time with an underappreciated parent, or save someone close from a mistake. Most of them would alter the past in a way that created a whole new timeline and set them off towards a new, changed future. But some, like Demus, would try to be part of what had already happened, and thereby retain the possibility of changing the future they’d abandoned. ‘So hit me with the but wait, there’s more section of this presentation.’

  Creed and Halligan exchanged a glance. The professor nodded, then grinned as if he were a schoolboy rather than a world-famous mathematician. ‘There is more!’ He took the photos from Creed’s hands. ‘We’ve been able to do some dating and we found that at least one of the travellers left their spot within the last few months! We had an actual time-traveller in our “now”! And it’s possible that they’ve done nothing to break continuity, in which case they could still be in our timeline. Theoretically we could find them and speak to them!’

  ‘That would be something.’ I tried hard not to sound blasé about it. It would only be my third encounter with a time traveller but given that the first two were me and my own paradoxical daughter, and that I’d spent a long time with both, it really wasn’t that exciting a prospect. ‘And what do you mean by “dating”?’ I asked. ‘You guys have become expert trackers in less than a week? You have a machine that tells you how old footprints are?’

  Halligan tapped the topmost photo.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ But then I saw it: the track of Guilder’s wheelchair intersecting the faint impression of a bare foot. The kicker, though, was that if you looked closely enough you could tell that the footprint lay on top of the tyre mark. ‘Do you think Guilder knows?’

  ‘If he doesn’t, he will soon.’ Halligan pointed to one of the video cameras bracketed high on the cave wall. ‘The real question is, does he have that person, or persons? Did his men catch them before they could leave? And that really depends on how quickly after the discovery of the cave our traveller arrived at their destination time and tried to leave.’

  I nodded. If Guilder had hold of a traveller, he could learn all manner of things about whatever operation my future self was running. He would know more about it than I did. And that could only be bad.

  The distant rattle of the rising elevator plate interrupted any further thoughts I might have had on the matter.

  ‘That’s not right.’ Creed immediately started back towards the entrance, a definite urgency to his stride.

  I followed closely enough to see Creed break into a run as he spotted the elevator platform being swallowed by the shaft and rising out of view. Creed gave a despairing shout and raced to the controls.

  ‘I expect someone’s just summoned it.’ I didn’t think there was a real prospect of being trapped in the caves, but Creed’s fear was beginning to infect me.

  We listened to the silence after the plate drew level with the ground fifty y
ards above us and stopped.

  Halligan joined us with a puzzled expression. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Not us,’ Creed muttered.

  More silence, staring up at the shaft while Creed pushed uselessly at the buttons on the control panel.

  I flinched at the clanking sound of the plate descending again. Creed managed a strangled laugh of relief. And all three of us waited to see who our guest was.

  The sight of Charles Rust’s sharp face and malicious smile, while perhaps more welcome than the elevator never coming down again, was certainly not what I had been hoping for. He wore his customary dark tailored suit and black eyepatch. That single snake eye of his found me immediately, despite the swift transition from daylight to gloom.

  He stepped off lightly as the plate descended its last foot. ‘Nicholas, just the man I wanted to see.’ Glancing towards Halligan he added, ‘If we could have the room.’

  The fact that both Halligan and Creed crowded on to the elevator plate in defiance of its stated weight limit and safety instructions left me in no doubt that Rust had given them his intimidation speech at some point in the past. However Creed felt about caves, it was clear that he was more keen to get away from Rust than from any sense of claustrophobia.

  Rust let them rattle their way up into the cavern’s ceiling, content to watch me, unspeaking but smiling that little smile of his that probably meant he was thinking of ways to hurt me.

  ‘This couldn’t have waited?’ I asked.

  ‘My employer is running out of time,’ Rust said. ‘Which is why he spends so much money researching it.’ He set off along the path to the statue cave. ‘Walk with me.’

  He halted at the front rank of travellers, which I was grateful for. I didn’t want his cold gaze slithering over Mia and me at the back.

  ‘Mr Guilder is worried,’ Rust said.

  I didn’t answer. A man in his position had a lot to be worried about.