She didn’t answer. Her eyes rolled up into her head until only the whites showed. She rocked in silence and two minutes passed.
Burton sat and watched. His thoughts ran over one another. What she’d told him was more incredible even than a tale from A Thousand Nights and a Night, yet, somehow, he found himself totally convinced of its truth.
Countess Sabina jerked in her seat. Her head snapped back then fell forward, revealing that her eyeballs had become utterly black. She smiled wickedly and said in a deep, oily, and unpleasant manner, “Well! This is a surprise! Hallo, Burton. How perfectly splendid to see you again. You look considerably younger. So you’re consulting with a genuine medium? Good chap! She’s a powerful one, too. Most gratifying.”
The explorer gaped. Plainly, whoever was now addressing him, it was not the countess. He couldn’t credit that her throat was even capable of producing such a voice, for it sounded as if hundreds of people were speaking the same words, in exactly the same tone, and in perfect unison.
“Who are—are—” he stammered. “El Yezdi?”
“I don’t know the name,” the other chorused. “You don’t recognise me, then? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. We met in Africa, my friend, under rather taxing circumstances, and I gave you my word it would not be our last encounter. I’ve travelled far to keep that promise. Regretfully, for you, it will not be a happy reunion. I feel obliged to prove myself, you see, so where before you witnessed my failure, this time the reverse must be true.”
“We’ve met?” Burton interrupted. “Where in Africa? When? Who are you? What failure?”
The countess emitted a nasty chuckle. “Do you play chess, Burton?”
“I have done.”
“Are you good?”
“Adequate.”
“Then brush up your game. I’m counted an excellent player, and as such, I’ll not forecast my moves other than to tell you this: I intend to break your spirit and drive you to your knees. For certain, it would be better to kill you outright, but I possess too much respect for you to do that. I don’t want you dead. I admire you too much. You could even call it hero worship. Perhaps that explains my desire to have you, above all others, as one of my pawns. I’m afraid it’s a fault of mine to demean the things I love the most. But we are what we are—and I am the Beast, Perdurabo; he who will endure to the end.”
The countess threw back her head and let loose a peal of laughter.
Flatly, Burton said, “I’m reminded of a pantomime I visited in childhood.”
The laughter stopped. The countess regarded him.
“Oh, bugger it!” she said. “I do it every time. I don’t know when to stop, Burton. Always, I stray into the melodramatic and end up looking like an ass. Let us say au revoir before I embarrass myself any further. I have the royal charter. I’m on my way. We shall meet soon. Say goodbye to the countess.”
Before Burton could respond, Countess Sabina’s eyes snapped back to normal and her head suddenly swivelled around until he was looking at the back of it. With the neck creasing and crunching horribly, the revolution continued through a complete circle, and the countess’s face swung back into view. Dead, she slumped forward onto the table and slid loosely to the floor.
The next day, Burton took the atmospheric railway from London to Yorkshire, and was then driven by horse-drawn carriage to Fryston Hall. Monckton Milnes greeted his friend’s unexpected arrival with surprise and delight, which quickly turned to shock when the explorer conveyed the news of Countess Sabina’s death. Indeed, Monckton Milnes was so deeply affected that, for hours, he could barely speak.
Burton distracted him with an account of the prognosticator’s revelations, which sent both men rummaging through Fryston’s library, piling Monckton Milnes’s collection of esoterica onto tables and leafing through every book and pamphlet in search of information pertaining to the evocation of spirits.
“I’m now of the opinion,” Burton stated, “that what we call magic is, at root, nothing less than a science of communication between multiple realities, but I do not believe it’s been well understood by its practitioners, and I think the truth of it is buried beneath an enormous heap of extraneous claptrap. We need to dig it out. If we can secure the working principles, perhaps we can employ them in such a manner as to discover where this Perdurabo has come from.”
Monckton Milnes, moving toward a table with a stack of books held precariously between his hands and chin, said, “We might begin with the premise that, through ceremonial actions, rhetorical exhortations, and a deep concentration upon the symbolic meaning of magic squares, one can literally will into existence a channel between alternate histories. That, after all, is what Oliphant appears to have done.”
“Quite so. But did he do it independently, or does such a feat require simultaneous rituals in both realities?”
Setting down the books, Monckton Milnes divided the tottering pile into two stable ones, then took up a volume and waved it at Burton. “And how can we account for this? De occulta philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Published in 1533. If history didn’t bifurcate until 1840, how is it possible that so many treatises about magic date from centuries earlier, before there were any realities other than the original?”
Burton, who was sitting Turkish-style on the floor with open books arranged in a circle around him, dug his knuckles into his lower back and stretched, massaging the muscles to either side of his spine. He groaned, got to his feet, and said, “I wonder—on how many occasions have you experienced what you might call a turning point in your life and felt it was predestined?” He stepped over to the fireplace and leaned with his shoulder blades against the mantle, pulling a cheroot from his pocket and lighting it.
“Many a time,” Monckton Milnes replied. “Back in ’twenty-seven, when I entered Trinity College, my falling in with Tennyson and his cronies propelled me into literary circles in a manner that felt utterly precipitous yet strangely appropriate. In 1840, Abdu El Yezdi’s exhortation, via the countess, that I should finance Disraeli’s opposition to Palmerston, had about it a whiff of the preordained, too.”
Burton blew smoke into the room’s already polluted atmosphere. “I’ve also had such moments. Being posted to India was one. Meeting Isabel. Berbera. As a matter of fact, I feel I’m at such a juncture right now, what with this king’s agent business and all.”
Monckton Milnes plonked himself into an armchair. “Your point?”
“That perhaps Time isn’t the unidirectional phenomenon we take it for. What if there exists, within any given history, certain moments—in the lives of individuals, of nations, of the world as a whole—that possess such potency they send out ripples in all directions? Thus, hints of a significant future event can be sensed long before it occurs, so when it finally happens, it feels as though it was always meant to be.”
“How does that relate to magic?”
“What bigger moment in Time can there be than the breaking of its mechanism? Surely the ripples caused by the bifurcation of history have echoed far into the past, as well as into the future. I don’t consider it inconceivable that Agrippa and John Dee and Edward Kelley and all the others who’ve presented their theories of magic were engaged not with what was then a feasible science, but with the foreshadowing of one that would, long after their deaths, become viable.”
Monckton Milnes grappled with the concept, scratched his head, grunted, and murmured, “Sideways, too.”
“Pardon?”
“Those ripples. If they extend backward and forward through time, then maybe they go sideways, too, into the alternate histories. The war the countess spoke of—you said she claimed it occurs in all versions of reality. I’m wondering whether it originates in one—perhaps the original—and the rest suffer as they are battered by the—the—”