“Out!” Bradlaugh barked.
Blood dribbled into Burton’s eyes. His head had impacted against the windscreen. He couldn’t move.
“Out!” the Cannibal repeated. She hit a switch, his door swung upward, and she pushed him into waiting hands.
“This way, Sir Richard,” Tom Bendyshe said. “Lean on me.”
Burton had little choice. His legs were like rubber.
Bendyshe half-dragged him across the yard, through a door, over rotting floorboards, out of another door, and into a quiet street where the minibus waited.
Sadhvi Raghavendra and Herbert Wells hauled him into the vehicle. Kat Bradlaugh followed and collapsed onto its floor. The door slid shut. Bendyshe clambered in next to Odessa Penniforth and said, “Not too fast. Don’t attract attention.”
The king’s agent felt the minibus move forward. Sadhvi applied a cloth to his forehead. He heard Wells say, “Are we going to make it, Mr. Bendyshe?”
“My colleagues are laying a false trail. Irregular BioProc signals racing westward. We, in the meantime, will be at Battersea Airfield in a few minutes.”
Sadhvi put a hand on Burton’s shoulder. “Richard?”
Sadhvi is alive. Wells is alive. Lawless is alive. Krishnamurthy is alive. Gooch is alive.
He sucked in a shuddering breath.
But Mick Farren and—
He couldn’t think it. Couldn’t allow any acknowledgment of the fact.
It came anyway.
William Trounce is dead.
Algernon Swinburne is dead.
Days went by. Sir Richard Francis Burton lost track of them. He and the surviving chrononauts were safe aboard the Orpheus in Bendyshe Bay, but their mission had come to a disastrous halt. The king’s agent remained in his quarters. He refused to speak to his colleagues. He didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t sleep.
He sat.
Cross-legged on the floor, eyes fixed straight ahead, for hour upon hour, he sat.
Not a thing went through his head. His thoughts were utterly paralysed.
Sadhvi Raghavendra did what she could for him. She brought food and took it away untouched. She sat beside him and spoke of the things she and the others had learned from the Cannibal Club, of the plutocracy that now ruled the Anglo-Saxon Empire, of the rapid physical and mental degeneration of the lower classes, of the many techniques employed by their overlords to keep them subservient and pliable, of the terrible destruction wrought during the failed revolution of the 2080s.
“The British Museum was among the many establishments destroyed,” she said. “Access to it had long been denied to the general public. It became a symbol of everything that was being withheld. As we saw in 2022, knowledge was distributed through the Turing devices, but it was strictly controlled, and that control became so increasingly draconian that by the 2070s even the Turings were discontinued. Not surprising, then, that the museum became, at one point, the focus of protestations. In 2083, the people, in their fury, determined that if they were to be denied the knowledge it held then the government would be, too. They blew it up. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was buried beneath the rubble.” She placed her hand on his forearm and gave it a squeeze. “It’s peculiar—I’d come to regard him as a point of consistency, an old friend who never changed. But I must contrast his loss with our encountering of all these new Bendyshes and Bradlaughs, Murrays and Monckton Milneses, Brabrookes and Hunts, Bhattis and Honestys, Slaughters and Penniforths. How oddly touching it is to see our old friends peeking out from behind all the new faces. Life goes on, Richard. Life goes on.”
This latter sentiment, expressed during her most recent visit, caused something deep inside him to stir. A thought whispered as if from an immense distance:
Not Algy’s life.
Not William’s.
Not Isabel’s.
Emotion stirred. It wasn’t grief or self-pity or despair but a black and iron-hard anger that settled upon him with such subtlety that when Raghavendra next visited she didn’t notice it at all, though she saw his dark eyes had become strangely shielded, as if he were looking out through them from much farther inside himself.
He started to take a little water, a little brandy.
Gradually, he regained awareness of who he was, where he was, and what he was supposed to be doing.
He ate a meal. He smoked a Manila cheroot. He stood, stretched his stiff legs, and regarded himself in the mirror over the basin. His internal silence was broken by two words:
King’s agent.
He snorted disdainfully.
Burton washed and started to shave, pausing frequently to gaze at his reflection.
Like an aged steam engine, his mind slowly built up heat, fuelled by his rage, its gears creakingly engaging, motion returning to it.
You failed. They were under your command and they died. You failed.
It wasn’t my fault.
Everything that makes you, you lose. Whenever you value a person, it’s their death sentence. Wherever you settle, that place will change. The things you hold dear forever slip out of your grasp.
I cannot endure such loss!
Whenever you feel certain of something, the only certainty is that it will become something else.
No!
There is only one truth, and that truth is Time, and Death is Time’s agent.
No! No! No!
He dropped the cutthroat razor and leaned with his fists against the bulkhead to either side of the mirror. He glowered at himself, one side of his jaw still frothy with shaving soap, water dripping from his moustache.
John Speke. William Stroyan. John Steinhaueser. Isabel Arundell. Algernon Swinburne. William Trounce.
He leaned forward until his forehead rested against the cool glass, shut his eyes, clenched his teeth and drew back his lips. Suddenly he was shaking and his respiration became strained. He wanted to find Edward Oxford and strangle him, hammer his face until he felt the bones fracturing beneath his knuckles, rip him apart until there was nothing remaining, but in his mind’s eye, the man he envisioned himself battering with such ferocious brutality, the man he called Oxford, possessed his own features and was named Sir Richard Francis Burton.
With an inarticulate cry, the king’s agent reeled from the basin, stumbled to a chest of drawers, snatched up a decanter, and poured himself a generous measure of brandy. He swallowed it in one and stood leaning on the furniture until he stopped trembling.
He returned to the basin to finish shaving.
He felt acutely aware of the edge of the blade as it slid across the skin of his throat.
I met Swinburne and Trounce just over half a year ago. How can I be so broken by their loss?
It felt as if he’d known them forever. They were family.
“Half a year?” he mumbled. “Nearly three hundred, more like.”
Had the attachments formed across multiple histories? Were they so important to him because they had been important to Abdu El Yezdi?
After changing his clothes, Burton crossed to a Saratoga trunk, opened it, lifted out its top tray, and took a small bottle from one of the inner compartments. He pulled the cork, downed the tincture, moved to the middle of the floor, lowered himself, and sat cross-legged again.
He didn’t need Saltzmann’s anymore. His addiction had completely left him. But he wanted it.