The Sea Peoples(87)

Then the rest of what was around him really sank in. The air stank of burning and rot, and the room was canted—the floor buckled, but the walls out of true in ways that suggested the whole building had been knocked off its foundations and twisted. The only thing he knew that could do that was an earthquake, but that didn’t seem to be what had happened, somehow.

“Let’s get out of here,” Deor said, coughing in the smoky haze that filled the room.

“Right,” Toa said.

He slung his weapon over his back—on second glance it wasn’t a rifle, and the translation supplied machine gun, a name he belatedly recognized from his studies—and began to press on the spot where the door’s outline rested. For a long moment nothing happened except the Maori’s long exhalation of breath as he strained motionless, like a statue labeled effort in some allegorical set piece.

Just before John thought they’d have to look for something to act as a battering-ram or a lever, Toa gave a long guttural:

“Huuuuuuh!”

There was a long crackle and crunch, and the door swung outward. Deor pulled the long knife from his belt in one gloved hand and pushed forward, with Thora flanking him. John fumbled at his rifle.

Pip noticed. “Just imagine you’re drawing a sword,” she said, and coughed as she worked the bolt of her own weapon. “Or loading a crossbow.”

John did, and felt his fingers move automatically through a series of motions that brought a click-clack-clunk sound, and a knowledge of what the weapon he gripped could do, and how to do it. He raised it almost to his shoulder, ready to snap-shoot. It wasn’t altogether unlike a regular crossbow, except that he knew there were ten more rounds in the magazine and that all he needed to do was work the little side-lever again each time his finger pulled the trigger.

Plaster gritted under his boots, and then glass amid a heavy stink of medicinal alcohol as they went into the next room.

“This was a study, a room for books, when we came through,” Pip said. “Part of Wilde’s chambers. I think that was long ago by local reckoning, generations.”

It had shelves around it now as well. They held glass bottles and flasks, with things in them. John swallowed and let his eyes slide out of focus as he realized that most of them had been bits of people. A sign on one wall advertised Conversation Pieces and Devotional Objects.

“There’s a body in the corridor,” Thora said.

They all followed. The man was lying down curled into a ball, surrounded with a sticky pool of dried blood and other fluids; John thought the man had been dead for four or five days, though there hadn’t been as many insects as he’d have expected, mostly flies drowned in the pool. It was unpleasant, but he’d seen worse.

Then he looked a little more closely. All the man’s hair had fallen out, except a patch over one ear, and there were bubbly lesions and sores over much of the visible skin. It didn’t match any disease he knew of, but there were no other signs of violence. He’d crawled here, puked and bled—from every orifice—and then died with his hair falling out and teeth falling out and skin sloughing away.

“Leave it,” Deor said.

Thora nodded. “We haven’t the time. Whatever killed him, our best chance is to keep going. When we get back, we’ll be . . . in our real bodies again.”

Pip murmured in his ear. “Though what happens to us here can hurt our real bodies. Through the soul to the flesh; psychosomatic, the old word for it was.”

They went out through another room of ghastly things in glass bottles, or their smashed remnants glittering on the floor like stars of red fire, and out into a new corridor. That had more light, because most of the roof and attic above had been smashed off the house, though parts had fallen in. Thick black soot like snowflakes filtered down slowly, and more black was above, like low clouds underlit by fire.

“You came to me through this?” John said. “Thank you!”

Pip shook her head. “It . . . it wasn’t like this then. I think whatever happened was just after we came through this . . . this version of 1998.”

“The year of the Change?” he said.

Deor paused as he clambered over a pile of wreckage, testing each piece of footing. “It’s a time that resonates across the cycles, I think,” he said. “Catastrophes cluster around it. Now quickly. We must reach a point where we can make the next step, and soon. This is not a good place to be.”

“You don’t bloody well say! And here I thought I was our Queen of Ironic Understatement,” Pip said dryly.

John felt himself almost grin as they clambered over the pile of shattered timber and splintery lath and roofing tiles and brick. They found the remains of a staircase and descended it one by one, sticking close to the wall. John found himself covering their back-trail on one landing, rifle to his shoulder and the Boisean close behind him facing the other way.

“She’s your intended?” the man asked.

“Evidently,” John said quietly.

“I think . . . I think I have someone. She’s tall and fair-haired . . . I think. But I don’t know her name any more than I do mine. I’m . . . I’m thinking a bit better, but it won’t come clear.”

“Well, we’re headed back to the real world, friend,” John said. “St. Michael, aid us! And when we’re there, you’ll have a friend.”