It was strange to hear that old familiar voice, would know it anywhere. Those dry, quiet tones in the dark, bringing back memories, bushels of memories.
"No, not the Colonial Office. This is another Service altogether. There's two Services, really. The one on this world we call Head Office, but it's not really in charge of the Service on Nextdoor. They're more just allies, sort of in cahoots. Service and Head Office are the goodies. There are also baddies, which on Nextdoor are the Chamber and here are the Blighters. I don't know very much about them here, except that they had a lot to do with starting this awful war. Mr. Goodfellow took us to his, er, residence, and he cured my broken leg."
"Snap of the fingers cured?"
"Pretty much. Yes. Then Creighton and I traveled down to Wiltshire. I didn't want to, of course, but he insisted I owed him that much. There's a portal there, a magic door. It let us cross over to Nextdoor. Trouble was, there were baddies waiting on the other side, and Creighton got killed. So there I was—stranded. Stuck. All washed up. Robinson Crusoe."
Ginger was following a lorry. Its stronger headlights were lighting the road for him, and they were doing a steady thirty at least.
"I really wanted to come back and do my bit in the war,” Exeter said. “But the only way I could come back here was to find the Service, and I didn't know how to do that. I had what I thought was a lead, but it didn't pan out. When I did get in touch, they were pretty reluctant to help me. Three years, it's taken. You see, there's a prophecy about me."
Houses now. Perhaps this was Canterbury already. Smedley was feeling dizzy. Perhaps he had banged his head falling off the wall. Perhaps he was suffering from lack of sleep. He wouldn't have nurses popping pills at him every night now, so he might not sleep much in future. But he did have a strange tingling in his head.
The car jerked, coughed, and then purred again.
Alice: “What was that?"
Jones: “Dunno."
Dirt in the petrol, likely. That would put the hen among the foxes, wouldn't it? If the car broke down with Exeter in nightclothes and him with blood all over his bags ... Even a modestly intelligent bus conductor might be suspicious enough to blow the whistle.
"You cross over,” Exeter was explaining, “by doing a dance, a particular mixture of chanting and rhythm and words, done at a particular place. It used to be quite a common accident, I think, because the nodes are very often holy places. You know that sort of awe you feel in old churches? You're sensing what the Service calls ‘virtuality,’ although no one knows what it really is. So in primitive times, when the shaman called the tribe together to do their sacred leap-about, they would do it at a node. And if the routine was good, they'd feel that virtuality more strongly. Why do you think people sing in church? The shamans would experiment with the ritual, I expect. Try different words, different movements, to increase that sense of the holy presence or whatever they thought it was. And one day—one night, more likely—someone would hit the right mixture and pouf! Clarence and Euphemia had disappeared. Big feather in shaman's cap! Do it again next Thursday."
The car coughed again, twice, and then resumed its low rumble. Everyone was silent, but nothing more happened.
Smedley jerked his head up. He seemed to be drifting off to sleep. His leg had stopped throbbing. Come to think of it, his leg was numb. Were legs usually numb?
"...set themselves up as gods,” Exeter said from a long way away. “I expect many of the old myths relate to strangers from Nextdoor or one of the others: Hercules, Apollo, Prometheus. And on Nextdoor, they may be from either this world or one of the others. The more worship they get, the stronger they become. The stronger they become, the more worship they can demand."
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Alice muttered.
"It certainly does. On Nextdoor ... Well, actually, the area I know is called the Vales. It's not much bigger than England and I haven't seen all of the Vales even. So there's an awful lot of the world I know nothing at all about. But in the Vales, there are five or six dominant gods. Well, they call themselves gods, but they're really just magicians."
Oh, that made things a lot more believable, Smedley thought drowsily.
"Each one has a retinue of lesser gods. Some of them are jolly nasty types. The Service refers to those as the Chamber of Horrors, and they're the ones trying to kill me, because of the prophecy. The worst is Zath, who calls himself god of death.” Exeter paused for a moment. “I know this must sound dodgy, but they caused the Nyagatha business."
"That sounds dodgy,” Alice agreed, “but keep talking."
"You know when the guv'nor was born?"
"Yes. Roly told me. He certainly didn't look his age."
"Because he'd spent thirty years or so on Nextdoor. You pick up mana even without trying.... He helped found the Service there. Then Zath tried to kill him, and failed. That brought the prophecy to light. The prophecy foretold that Cameron Exeter would father a son who would be a sort of messiah, who would kill death. It's very muddled, most of it, but that bit was clear enough."
The car coughed again.
When nothing more happened, Exeter continued. “So Zath was gunning for the guv'nor. He went to earth. That's a joke, actually."
"I expect you're out of practice. Carry on."
"Well, it was very ironic. Zath tried to stop me being born, but the attempt drove the guv'nor into coming Home—meaning home to Earth—and about the first thing he did was meet the mater and fall in love and, whoops, there was me. These things happen.
"If Zath had only known it, the guv'nor wasn't in favor of the prophecy either. It leads to all sorts of evil complications. So both sides in this business wanted to break the chain! The guv'nor thought that all he had to do was stay out of the Chamber's reach until after the prophesied date, which would have been August 1914 by our reckoning, and then keep Baby Exeter, that's me, from crossing over. Then the chain would be broken and nothing else would apply. Head Office wangled him into the Colonial Office and got him posted to Nyagatha..."
His voice kept fading away and coming back. Smedley was having a deuce of a job keeping his eyes open. Funny, that. Heavenly choirs.
"...like everyone to take Home leave every few years. A little refresher course as a mortal is very humbling, and it keeps people in touch with the language and customs, and so on ... Jumbo Watson and Soapy Maclean dropped in on Head Office in 1912. Jumbo inquired about the guv'nor ... when he heard about me the penny dropped. Edward is a common enough name in England, but it begins with a vowel, which would make it feminine in the Vales; the masculine would be D'ward.
"There's actually more about D'ward in the Filoby Testament than there is about the Liberator, but nowhere did the seeress say that they were one and the same chappie. Soapy headed for Nyagatha to explain this and find out if the guv'nor was still opposed to the prophecy. Somebody tipped off the Chamber's agents—or perhaps they followed him. Anyway, Soapy arrived the day before the massacre...."
Bad business, that massacre, but perhaps Exeter Senior had not been as much as fault as everyone had thought.... Smedley started awake. He had dozed off but not for very long. Exeter seemed to be talking about the gods again.
"Some of them aren't so bad. I've met a couple of the Pentatheon, the five Great Ones. When I first crossed over, Zath's assassins were waiting for me and almost nobbled me. They're rather like Kali's thugs, in India ... wander around killing people at random. Fortunately that was in Sussland. That's Tion's manor, and he was miffed.... Tion's one of the five, the Youth. He's a sort of Apollo figure, if you believe his advertisements, god of art, and beauty, and sport. He holds a big festival every year, like a miniature Olympic Games."