Tonkins smiled broadly, nodded with relief, paused as a penny dropped and then frowned. By then, Corporal Riley was already halfway across the glade.
AFTER THE PADRE led a brief funeral service for Hopkiss and Jenkins, Everson called Atkins and Riley together, along with Nellie who, although he didn’t like it, seemed to speak for the crew of the Ivanhoe.
Hopkiss’ death had hit the Black Hand Gang hard, Atkins most of all. Everson needed something to keep them occupied other than mere survival.
As he waited for them to arrive, he fished in his tunic pocket and retrieved the scrap of bloodstained khaki serge cloth, and the Pennine Fusiliers button that had once belonged to Jeffries. He played it through his fingers, rubbing a thumb idly over the raised Fusilier badge cast on it as he pondered. With his petrol-fruit-heightened senses, Mathers had been able to divine Jeffries by some sort of psychometry. He had said Jeffries’ trail led into the crater. And here they were. If so, what did that make this, some kind of talisman, some sort of fetish? Did that mean it had some kind of eldritch connection with Jeffries? He shuddered and found himself stuffing the button away in his pocket again, as if to be rid of it, or at least put it out of sight.
“We need to decide our next move,” he said as the others turned up. “It’s clear we have several objectives. One, to find Private Perkins. Two, to see if we can pick up Jeffries’ trail.”
Nellie spoke up. “Napoo believes Alfie has been taken by urmen.”
Hesitantly, Atkins chipped in, “If we’re looking for urmen, sir, there was the tower we saw, towards the centre of the crater. That looked man-made. It should be easy enough to find.”
Everson nodded, relieved that Atkins was engaged. “It’s a start,” he said.
Corporal Riley nodded in agreement. “Don’t like leaving a man behind, if I can help it,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, they moved off, heading for the centre of the crater and the tower.
TULLIVER SAW THE remnants of the blazing kite balloon crash slowly into the treetops, then lost sight of it as the bus continued to turn into its climbing spiral. There was nothing he could do for them. He silently wished them luck, pulled back on the stick’s spade handle, hauled the nose up and raced after the Hun.
The Strutter was no real match for the Albatros as it was, but now Werner had the advantage of height and extra speed. And he used it.
The Albatros was now diving steeply on them from above. He would wait until he was almost on top of them before he opened fire. Tulliver had only moments to act.
He slide-slipped and plunged through an indolent cumulus as the mountainous cloud drifted by. The bright blue of the sky faded, and he found himself enveloped by a diffuse grey space. He kept his rudder as level as he could, or thought he had. He felt the negative plate at his feet slide across the cockpit. He was drifting, banking. Straighten up. Straighten up. The fog thinned to a mist and, through that, the ground gradually resolved itself.
He’d lost sight of the Albatros. Tulliver pulled up, climbing parallel to the great shifting white slopes of the cloud, the Strutter’s shadow rippling over its bright surface.
The Albatros burst out of a cleft between two cloudy peaks above and he climbed after it, contour-chasing though the misty canyons of a morphing landscape, landing wheels scudding along their insubstantial surface, leaving whorls of mist in their wake.
He’s leading me on a wild goose chase, thought Tulliver, as the Albatros stayed tantalisingly out of reach above.
They left the cloud behind as they continued to climb in a spiral. His ears crackled as the pressure changed, and the air got colder with the altitude. The sharp bite of the wind whistling through the wires was clean and exhilarating, at least to begin with. At this height, and at speeds of eighty to ninety miles an hour, the cold started to numb his extremities. Chances were his machine gun would freeze up, too, not that he had much ammo left. Still, he climbed hard on the Hun’s heels. Now, if he could just settle the bastard in his gunsight.
There was a brief burst of tracer bullets across his top plane. Werner roared overhead, and waggled his wings once – twice. When he came round again, he was pointing down insistently.
Tulliver banked and chanced a look. Eleven thousand feet below, crisscrossing the landscape, were vast intersecting lines, scoring the landscape. He had seen a few of them in reverse on the negative plate down by his feet, but they didn’t do the scale or the number justice.
Helped by the petrol fruit fumes from the engine, they were even harder to miss. The lines, however, weren’t continuous. They were broken and faint in places, sometimes marked only by a slight change of colour or thickness of vegetation, sometimes vanishing under forests or hills and valleys, reappearing fractured, miles away, half-hidden but concomitant. They seemed to run for miles, disappearing off towards the horizon until they were lost in the haze of aerial perspective. On the ground, they would have been invisible, but Tulliver knew that the new aerial photography could reveal geological features that had long lain undiscovered. What they could be, he had no idea. Were they evidence of ancient earthworks or geological processes?
There did seem to be unpleasant associations with Jeffries’ perverse appropriation of artillery to plot a pentagram on the landscape. Was this a pattern, too? There looked to be a geometric aspect to it all. Was this, as the Zohtakarrii claimed, proof of their world’s creation? Were these the strands of the world as woven by GarSuleth for his children? From their reaction to the plates, they certainly thought so.
But the sheer scale of it. It beggared belief.
As he and Werner circled each other, it was clear now that the Strip in the crater was part of it, too, an exposed part of a line.
This was what he had glimpsed before. This was what Werner had tried to tell him about. There was more to this world than met the eye, the German had said. Tulliver had thought it mere hyperbole at the time.
Werner hadn’t been trying to shoot him down at all. He’d lured him up here to show him, to let him see for himself, in order to corroborate it.
He turned to Hepton. Hepton had to see it, too. He couldn’t fail to. But the kinematographer was sat huddled in the observer’s cockpit, shivering, his hands cupped round his mouth, trying to blow on them to warm them. Tulliver pointed down, but Hepton wasn’t interested.
Out of the corner of his eyes, Tulliver thought some of the lines shimmered. He couldn’t be sure. Frustrated, he lifted his fouled goggles and looked again.
No, there it was. With his fuel-sharpened acuity, he could see an ephemeral energy flowing along the lines like water, towards intersections, building in intensity until a vast spastic column of lightning blasted briefly up into the sky. Across the planet’s surface, lightning bolts jagged up into the atmosphere in an inverted lightning storm, with a noise like an artillery barrage.
The Strutter’s rigging wires began to hum and sparks started arcing from one to another.
That wasn’t good.
Then, with a roar like Wotan’s furnace, a tremendous column of brilliant white lightning punched up from the ground into the sky between the Strutter and the Albatros, in a searing blast of heat and noise. It filled Tulliver’s world, obliterating everything, leaving his ears ringing and his eyes blinded.