“At least it’s summer,” Jane said, removing her jacket and tying the sleeves over her waist. She no longer needed my support to walk, although she looked as shocked as I’d felt.
“We need to get off the street.” But where could we go? We didn’t speak the language, we had no local money, and I still had no idea what was going on… but, like my drill had once said, “Solve one problem at a time or die trying, maggots.”
It was blind luck that made us stumble into a tavern a couple streets away from the market. The two drunkards by the porch were a dead give-away. “Quick,” I said, “we better get inside.”
Jane nodded and we stepped into the tavern. It was dimly lit, as such places should be; there were maybe a dozen people here, speaking Latin, or maybe Ancient Greek (all I spoke was English and bad English), but when I showed the innkeeper two fingers, he poured us wine from a clay jar into a couple of mugs like the professional that he was, and we retreated to a table near the back.
“So, your name’s not Jane Wesson, is it?”
“How are we going to pay for the drinks?”
I took a sip from my mug. The wine was sweet to the taste, more pleasant than what I’d expected to find in a seedy bar two thousand four hundred years into the past. “Really? That’s your main concern, that we won’t settle our tab? Ms. Wess… Jane, what the hell happened back there? You almost shot that Holmes fella.”
She sat back on the wooden bench and sipped her own drink. “Hmm.” Jane raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t bad!” I let her take her time as she drunk, gathering her thoughts. “No,” she said finally, “my name’s not Jane Wesson, not really. I’d only learnt that half a year ago myself, when I’d gotten the inheritance from my dad, my real dad. I was raised by Mr. Wesson, you see, an officer of the Chicago P.D. until he was killed in the line of duty when I was nineteen…” She took another long drink. “He got a full honors funeral. That makes me doubly an orphan, I suppose.” She sighed.
I knew there was something about her that made me feel the way I did. We orphans were like that, I supposed… almost telepathic in how easily we spotted each other from crowds of men and women who were blessed with families they could call their own.
“So your dad, your real dad, this Moriarty, who was he?”
“A professor of mathematics, a real genius if some papers are to be believed. But… but that’s not all he was. ”
“A criminal mastermind, huh? And this Sherlock Holmes of yours killed him?”
“It wasn’t easy to piece together, but I found out they’d fought by the Reichenbach Waterfalls in Switzerland, my dad and Holmes, until both fell to their deaths.”
“Only Holmes didn’t die… and now the world’s coming to an end?”
“So it seems. My inheritance was a huge pile of money, especially for a cop’s daughter. I could’ve done anything I wanted.” She slammed her mug on the table. Two drinking buddies at the opposite table gave her a disapproving stare. I thought nothing of it at the time, but I couldn’t have known the role they’d play in the events that followed. In the single glance I allowed them then, I’d only noticed that they both wore brown cloaks and the bulges under the cloaks indicated they were probably armed.
“So you hired me?” I asked.
“So I made the Smith & Wesson Detective Agency and hired you, yeah. There are perks to being a copper’s brat too. I knew Sherlock Holmes was coming to the States. I needed answers out of him. I have to know what really happened in Switzerland, do you understand?”
“And so you try to kill him?”
“You’ve heard what The Doctor said! The world’s disappearing!”
“And he killed your father.”
“And he murdered my—”
Mid-winter wind cut through the summer heat. Jane shivered. All conversations died and it became quieter than in a dead man’s tomb. I looked around: all the tables were empty except for the two drinking buddies across the room, who stared intensely at the door.
Three men materialized by the entrance. They hadn’t simply popped into existence like I’d seen the TARDIS do, it was more like as if they’d been wearing some kind of camouflage that perfectly blended them into the room, and now they’d chosen to disengage whatever magical technology had made them invisible. They wore black cloaks, reinforced with metal plates, and their faces were hidden behind protective helmets. Strange tubes hung on their belts like the hilts of bladeless swords. They headed straight for us.
“Well,” I said, “the good news is that we probably don’t have to worry about the bill now.”
One of the drinking buddies across the room stood up. A scar ran down from his eye, almost touching the lip. “It is not time yet,” he said.
“It is as good time as any, Jedi,” the leader of the three said. He didn’t as much lounge at the scarred patron as he flashed towards him. One moment he was three feet away, the next – he’d moved five feet, and was no almost touching their table. Before I had time to blink, the scarred man disappeared into a blur of motion, reappearing at the back of the tavern, three tables away from his attacker. His partner hadn’t even bothered to stand up.
“I am not a Jedi.”
The sound of a high voltage transformer from one of Edison’s or Tesla’s experiments cut through the silence as a bright ray of concentrated light appeared from under the scarred man’s cloak. It continued to emanate a menacing hum as the man brought it up in front of him, adapting a defense position.
A light sword, I thought, looking at the three-foot ray of silver light glowing around a core of impossible white.
The man in the black cloak removed his weapon from his belt, and a blade of red light extended from the two-handed hilt, pulsating with unrestrained energy. And then again, DZHHHHHHHHEEEEEEE, as an identical ray protruded from the other end.
He twirled the light staff, slicing through the wooden tables in an arch of fire. The scarred man’s friend jumped back and produced his own energy sword, shining the brightest blue I’d ever seen.
“Not a Jedi, are you? Well… neither are we,” said the man with the double bladed light sword as his two friends lit up their red swords.
All hell broke loose. The men in black delivered an onslaught of blows, driving back the scarred man’s companion towards the back of the tavern in a hellish assault. The attack was perfectly orchestrated, the three men moving in a complicated dance of death… I imagined their faces, twisted in berserker grins under the masks. “Get down!” I shouted, and pulled Jane to the floor.
I only saw the combatant’s feet, but it was obvious from the way they moved they were no ordinary people: they were faster, smoother… better. They fought in silence above us until I heard a brief whimper, and the scarred man’s partner fell to the floor, his light sword extinguished. He raised his eyes, looked at me, and smiled before the twin-bladed sword ran him through.
“Noooooooo!” his friend screamed. He crouched, and a hard wall of air hit me with the force of a train, throwing everything and everyone into the walls. The table we were hiding under shot up to the ceiling; I hit the wall with my back – my poor back – and then Jane smashed into me.