The horror in Swinburne’s eyes gave way to puzzlement.
Oxford started to raise his Gatling gun.
The poet hesitated. He suddenly understood. A wail of anguish escaped him.
Burton winked.
Swinburne pointed the pistol at him and said, “Heart. Kill.”
An impact.
Sir Richard Francis Burton died.
Burton stepped out of his tent, straightened, stretched, and surveyed the distant horizon. It rippled and shimmered behind a curtain of heat. For a brief moment, the sea, which was many miles distant, eased into the clear sky. The mirage pulsed, folded into itself, and vanished.
Adjusting his burnoose, Burton knelt, reached into the tent, and pulled out a cloth bag. It contained cured meats, dried dates, and a flask of water. He sat cross-legged and broke his fast.
Movement caught his eye, a scarab beetle at the base of the tent’s canvas, pushing a ball of camel dung across the scorched sand.
The beetle as the motive force. The manipulator.
Time is not an independent equation. Time requires a mind to give it form.
There was work to be done.
Burton opened his eyes.
The House of Lords was wrecked, fire-blackened, smoking and empty except for Algernon Swinburne and Sadhvi Raghavendra. Standing some distance from him, they were both aiming their pistols straight at his head. The poet’s face was as white as a sheet.
Raghavendra said, “Two grenades will certainly destroy you.”
“I don’t doubt it, Sadhvi,” Burton replied. His voice sounded like tumbling bells.
He looked down at his hands, five of them and a stump. “But you have no need to shoot.”
His friends lowered their weapons and walked cautiously toward him.
“Richard?” Swinburne asked in a quavering voice.
“Yes. Thank you, Algy. My life may not have been saved, but I am, thanks to you, at least preserved.”
The poet stumbled, dropped his weapon, fell to his knees, put his face into his hands, and began to weep. Raghavendra stepped past him, gently patting his shoulder, and stopped in front of the king’s agent. She looked up at him, frowning. “It’s really you?”
Burton tried to offer an encouraging smile but found he had no muscles with which to do so. Ruefully, he reflected that such impulses had never in the past offered much comfort to anyone, anyway. People had always found his smiles rather too predatory.
“It is,” he said. He raised a hand—feeling disconcerted by his arm’s whirs and hisses—and tapped the side of his head. “It worked. My brain’s terminal emanation overwrote the electromagnetic fields in Brunel’s diamonds. Oxford was erased from them.”
“You took quite a gamble.”
“He was holding my head right next to his own. I had no other cards to play.” He examined the room. “I appear to have been oblivious for some time. How long?”
“About twelve hours,” she replied. “There was some sort of backlash from his—from your—babbage device. The chronostatic energy ignited the room. Everything in it—apart from you, of course—burned ferociously. The time suits are destroyed.”
“Resonance, I suppose. It started all this, now it has ended it.”
With visible reluctance, Raghavendra pointed to the floor on Burton’s right. He looked and saw what appeared to be a large and twisted stick of charcoal. Horrified, he recognised it as his own corpse.
“Your and Herbert’s bodies were cremated,” Raghavendra said. “There’s little chance of cloning, apparently.”
Burton acknowledged the revelation with a grunt that came out as a clink. He extended a metal foot and dragged a line through the ash. “The diamond fragments from the Nimtz generators and helmets must be among the ashes. We’ll have to collect them. Where are Trounce and Bendyshe?”
“William went some hours ago to find Mr. Grub, the vendor. Unless someone gives the Lowlies focus, riots are inevitable. We’re hoping Grub will spread the news that the prime minister and his cronies have been overthrown. Mr. Bendyshe, meanwhile, has taken Jessica Cornish to the Orpheus. Captain Lawless flew it here and landed in Green Park. We’ve all been waiting to assess your status.”
“My status?”
“We could see the Brunel body was still functioning by the glow of its eyes, but we didn’t know whether it was you or Oxford inside it.”
“Ah, I see. And Bendyshe is all right?”
“Lorena Brabrooke did something to the nanomechs in him. ‘Deactivated’ is the word, I believe. As for the rest of it, all the equerries and constables have stopped functioning and the palace’s inhabitants are wandering around like lost children.”
“Would you see if any of them knows where Brunel’s battery pack is, Sadhvi? It must be somewhere in the palace, and I feel I might require it soon.”
She nodded, glanced at Swinburne, and looked back at Burton. “I’ll organise a search party, if necessary. There’s a well-appointed lounge one hundred floors down, which we’ve chosen as our base of operations. I suggest you settle in there to recover from your ordeal.”
She smiled at him and left the chamber.
Burton clanked over to Swinburne. He felt disoriented and clumsy.
Isabel betrayed me.
He dismissed the thought. Time for that later.
I have all the time in the world.
With a hiss and ratcheting of gears, he squatted beside his friend, reached out, and prodded the poet’s arm. “Hallo there.”
Swinburne raised his wet face from his hands and smiled weakly. “What ho.”
“Quite a rum do, hey?”
“I suppose so. You sound awful. Ding dong, ding dong. I hardly know if it’s you or Brunel or Oxford. We shall have to make it Gooch’s top priority to fashion for you a more human-sounding vocal apparatus.”
“Thank you, Algy.”
“Don’t thank me, thank Daniel, he’s the one who’ll create it.”
“I mean for what you did.”
Swinburne suddenly giggled. “My pleasure, Richard. Any time you need shooting dead, don’t hesitate to ask.”
Burton whirred upright and held out a hand. Swinburne grasped it and got to his feet. He looked over to his friend’s still-smouldering corpse and emitted a groan. “By God, Oxford aged you thirty years in a matter of minutes. I saw you become an old man.”
“And I witnessed my life as it would have been had Oxford never altered history.”
“And?”
“Let us just say, it had a theme.”
Swinburne gave an inquisitive twitch of his eyebrows.
Burton ignored it and turned toward the doors. “I want to get out of this chamber, never to see it again. Lead me to the lounge, will you?”
They left the domed room, walked to the nearest lift, and entered it, a massive man of brass and cogs and pistons, and a diminutive red-haired poet.
“What a strange insanity,” Swinburne mused as they started down, “to create a future from a jumbled, misunderstood vision of the past.”
“Isn’t that what we all do?” Burton asked.
His companion had no answer to that, and for the rest of the descent they stood in thoughtful silence.
The lift stopped, and they passed from it into a vestibule, and from there the poet led his friend to the grand lounge, which was filled with couches, armchairs, bookcases, tables, cabinets, and statuettes of the erstwhile queen. The walls were hung with portraits, every one of them depicting Jessica Cornish.
Gladys Tweedy, the Marquess of Hammersmith, Minister of Language Revivification and Purification, was the room’s sole occupant. She stood as they entered.
“Prime Minister?” she asked doubtfully.
“Dead,” the king’s agent chimed. “I’m Burton.”
“Really? How thoroughly singular. You’re joking, of course.”
“No.”
Swinburne scampered over to a drinks cabinet and eagerly examined its contents.