Since Silver and Gabriel had gone away, there had been two more Time Tornadoes. Regalia Mason was about to get the power she wanted, and not by force. The world was going to give it to her.
The Sands of Time
Gabriel and Toby were fixing the bus. ‘Thazzit!’ shouted Toby, as the bus shuddered to life.
All the kids piled on. Gabriel and Silver ran back to get some supplies from the Caffè Ora.
Gabriel’s Mind Message from Micah had told him that he and Silver had to get to the Sands of Time today, and he had been working on the bus all night.
Toby had insisted they took all the kids with them, because he was afraid something would happen to them if they stayed round Checkpoint Zero. Hiding sixteen kids was not easy.
‘They’re like my duty, y’know, Gabriel? We can’t just leave ’em here to be Atomised or Fried or whatever.’
Silver nodded. She was deep in her own thoughts. She had a feeling that both Abel Darkwater and Regalia Mason knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly what she would do. Yet, she had to do it. Why had this strange quest fallen to her? What made her different to all the other people in the world?
Gabriel smiled at her. ‘Shall you know something about silver?’
‘About me?’
‘About the metal that is thy name.’
Silver nodded. ‘I was named after a pirate.’
‘That may be so, but the metal silver reflects nine-tenths of its own light. They fear you because you are shining,’ said Gabriel.
‘Who fears me?’ asked Silver.
‘Regalia Mason, she fears you. Abel Darkwater, he fears you.’
‘I don’t think I’m the Child with the Golden Face – I’m silver not gold.’
‘It is the shining that the prophecy means,’ said Gabriel.
Silver was silent. ‘But Gabriel – all I’m going to do is lead him to it. I can’t fight him – neither can you. Micah said so. Even if we succeed, we fail. I mean, if we find the Timekeeper, we just end up finding it for Abel Darkwater.’
‘Silver –’
‘I know I’ve got to do it. It’s just, oh, if this was a story, like The Lord of the Rings, I could throw the ring back into the fires of Mordor and that would be the end of it. But when I find the Timekeeper I don’t know what to do – except that Abel Darkwater will probably kill us both and then become Lord of the Universe, like Regalia Mason said.’
‘Do not trust her, Silver.’
Before Silver could answer, Toby was shouting and waving at them from the driver’s cabin of the bus.
‘Come on,’ said Silver, getting to her feet. ‘If I don’t go now, I’ll never go. But stay by me, Gabriel, whatever happens next. I can’t do this on my own.’
They climbed on to the bus, Toby turning the huge steering wheel by leaning across it with his body. Every time he changed gear there was a horrible grinding noise. But they were moving. They were travelling down the Star Road.
The children sang, then they slept, then they ate all their food, then some of them were sick, then some of them wanted to get off, then some of them cried, then some of them had a fight, then all of them were quiet at last, dreaming of home as they looked out of the windows, dreaming of other worlds.
Silver had the tight knot in her stomach again. She had worked so hard to get this far and now she just wanted to run away. Gabriel said she mustn’t trust Regalia Mason, but maybe Regalia Mason was right. Why was Silver interfering? Nothing would ever be perfect. Maybe the Quantum wasn’t such a bad thing.
‘Hey!’ shouted Toby. ‘A fairground!’
Silver was baffled. They were driving towards somewhere that looked like an ordinary seaside resort, with a beach and sea and donkeys and people strolling up and down. She pulled out the map Micah had given her and unfolded it. She leaned over to Gabriel, his long legs propped on the seat.
‘The Sands of Time on this map Micah gave me are wild and strange and stretch for miles. There are no buildings marked. This is like Disneyland or somewhere. Do you think we’re in the right place?’
Gabriel frowned and looked from the map to the scene outside the window, but Toby had stopped the bus right by the pier and he and the other kids had already roared off on to the beach.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Silver. ‘Nothing precious can be here. It’s just candyfloss and rides.’
Gabriel thought for a minute, then he said, ‘Like Bedlam hides behind Bethlehem Hospital.’
‘What?’
‘This be a painted show, a hiding place. Something lies behind what you can see.’
Silver closed her eyes. She thought about what had happened to her on the Star Road, when she had begun to dissolve. Could she dissolve the surface in front of her?
Deep underground, Micah was pouring over the map he had copied. He was sending Silver the true geography of the place.
‘See it for what it be,’ he said, over and over again, ‘See it for what it be …’
Silver opened her eyes, and the pier and the rides and the candyfloss started to bend and distort like someone was pulling them out of shape. Then everything went quiet, like someone had switched off the sound. Then everything went black, like someone had pulled the plug. When the light came back, there was no seaside, no donkeys, no trams going up and down; there was a desert stretching into the distance. A soft wind blew through the sand dunes.
‘Oh yes,’ said Abel Darkwater, looking into his crystal ball. ‘She has gone through.’
Regalia Mason read her computer screen with interest. The child had learned to shuffle realities – or at least she had learned that there is more than one reality.
She checked her own frequency. The reality she was in was vibrating quite slowly. Silver was about to enter a different reality that lay on a different wavelength. Regalia Mason prepared to re-set her own frequency, like tuning a radio, and then she too could enter another world. It was so simple; everybody knows that all the radio stations are playing at once, but we only tune in to one at a time. Why did they not understand that reality was just the same?
She made the necessary adjustments on her quantum computer. The time had come.
Silver looked back. She could see her own footsteps pad-marked across the sand, and Gabriel’s next to hers. What was this place, where the sands seemed to roll like waves? Just walking made her feel seasick.
They walked, and they walked, and they walked, and they walked, and they walked and they walked and they walked and they walked.
Night came. Desert night, cold and pitiless. She shivered inside her coat and pushed her hands deep into the pockets. Gabriel was curled up asleep in his blue coat. How had her parents ever got the clock here? Could they be here too? Could they be still alive? Had they been taken in a Time Tornado, the clock with them?
If she could find them, they could all go home together, and live together again. She sat up, huddling her body against the wind that never ceased.
She was very thirsty. She felt weightless in her body again, like she had on the Star Road.
What was that ahead? A light! A shape! A shape she knew! The shape of a house in the distance. It was Tanglewreck!
She scrambled up and ran as fast as she could through the shifting sand. Her shoes and her socks were gritty with sand and her nose was full of sand.
But just ahead, there was the house, and she was nearly at the drive, and although she was stumbling, and her breath was coming in gasps, and her mouth was drier than death, she would get to the house, she would go in, and her mother and father would be there, and … and … the mirage vanished.
Silver sat down and cried hot tears that stung her face, dry and sore with the sand and the wind. Gabriel, who had woken up and found her gone, came running behind her, putting his arms round her, comforting her, telling her they must go on.
‘I can’t, Gabriel.’
‘I will hold you up.’
‘I thought I was home. I thought I was happy.’ Silver was crying so much t
hat she couldn’t see. Gabriel wiped her eyes with the dirty sleeve of his old blue coat, and put out both his hands to help her up.
She got up and they walked on.
She fell, and they walked on.
They walked on.
There was nothing in the world but tears and blisters and thirst and sand. She no longer knew who she was or why. And Gabriel held her as Micah had held him in the Black Hole. If he could only hold her just a little longer.
‘Help me, Micah,’ he whispered, and Micah heard, and walked with them, if they had known it, every step of the sands.
It was nearly morning when Silver fell flat on her face, tripping over something that was not a mirage.
It was a round stone sticking out of the sand.
She scraped at it with her fingers. It was big under the sand, whatever it was. Gabriel was excited and started to dig through the sand with his palms like a mole’s. He smiled at Silver, and she forgot her pain and tiredness and dug and dug alongside him, trying to use her hands as he did, palms square like a mole. He laughed at her efforts, they both laughed, and soon the sand was flying everywhere, and they had uncovered something marvellous and strange: first it was an ear, then it was an eye, then it was a head, then it was a crouched body.
It was the crouched body of a stone sphinx. In its chest was a door, and behind the door was a passage.
Down, they went, down and down, into darkness and silence.
Lit by a single flare to the entrance to a chamber was the statue of a man with the head of a falcon.
The temple of the great god Ra.
So strange, the crumbling silent walls of the sacred space, lit by low-burning cruses of oil set in niches hammered out of the rock.
So strange, the smell of dust and incense and bandages; the ceremony of the dead before the night-journey to the pyramids.
There was an altar covered in a rotting cloth. Silver touched it and it shivered like a spider’s web and turned to dust.
There was a painting on the wall, its colours faded, its lines hardly visible, but she knew what it was as soon as she saw it; it was a drawing of the Timekeeper.
‘It is the prophecy,’ said Abel Darkwater, stepping out of the shadows behind her.
Silver twisted round in panic. What she saw made her more afraid still. Abel Darkwater was in the robes of the High Priest of Ra.
‘What began in the pyramids of Egypt will be completed today.’
‘Sorcery,’ said a voice that sounded like a snake. Pope Gregory XIII was in the ante-chamber.
‘Your own Moses was a sorcerer,’ said Abel Darkwater to the Pope, and then he turned his round and orb-like stare on Silver.
‘Silver, do you know what I am?’
She thought of a crocodile, cold and cunning in the waters of the Nile.
Abel Darkwater read her thoughts and laughed.
‘Perhaps I am a Leviathan, but I am something else too; I am the last of the Arcana. The last of the alchemists. I and my kind have turned base metal into gold, but we have sought something else, of infinitely greater value. We have looked into the secrets of life itself.
‘Tempus Fugit is dedicated to knowing the mystery of time. Time Past and Time Future will be in our control. There are so few of us left now, so very few, and we have waited so long … for … the … clock.’
‘I haven’t got it!’ said Silver.
Abel Darkwater hardly seemed to hear her.
‘It was not made in Egypt, and it was not made in Israel. It was not made in the times of Romans, nor by St Augustine, though he had the drawings. The prophecy began to unfold in the year 1375 in France, when the Timekeeper was commissioned as a curiosity by Charles V, who as you will recall, had a great interest in Time.’
Silver didn’t recall.
‘In those days, the Timekeeper was a pendulum clock with a double face, showing the hours of midnight until noon, and noon until midnight. It kept time well, and it kept its other secrets well; secrets known only to myself and the sorceress Maria Prophetessa …’
Regalia Mason! thought Silver.
‘Indeed!’ said Abel Darkwater, reading her mind again. ‘But Maria Prophetessa she was in those days, and to me she will be so always – the mysterious priestess of the Nile, the dark advisor to the Jew Moses, the whispering confidante of Joan of Arc, the mistress of Charles V of France. Oh yes, Silver, without her the Timekeeper would never have been made; it was made for her, it belonged to her, until this man smashed it into a thousand pieces.’
Pope Gregory stepped from the shadows, unsmiling, proud, hawk-faced, dark-eyed. ‘And I would do it again,’ he said.
‘And what would it profit you?’ Abel Darkwater laughed. ‘Once made the Timekeeper can be broken, but it cannot be destroyed until the End of Time itself. That is the prophecy.’
‘I destroyed it,’ said the Pope.
‘Oh no, you did not!’ said Abel Darkwater.
It was night in the Vatican. Maria Prophetessa had been locked up. Pope Gregory had gone to hear a Te Deum in thanksgiving for the massacre of eight hundred Protestant Huguenots. The Jesuit priest Christopher Clavius opened the door to the Pope’s study with his own key. Inside, he took the pieces of the Timekeeper from the drawer and hurried away with them. He was not interested in the clock or its prophecy; he was interested in the fabulous wealth of its jewels and its lapis and gold face. There was a man he needed to bribe – an Englishman, a Catholic, a pirate, a spy. It was a useful combination.
Clavius slipped outside and made his way to where the red-bearded man was waiting. He gave him the bag.
‘What’s this you offer me? A broken clock?’
‘Only add the worth of the jewels to see what I offer you.’
Roger Rover tested one or two between his finger and thumb. He was satisfied. ‘I will do your spying for you.’
That night the Timekeeper left Rome.
‘Roger Rover had the Timekeeper!’ said Silver, her fear battling against her curiosity and surprise.
‘Oh yes, and in his turn he gave it as a bribe to a very powerful man named John Dee, astronomer and alchemist to Queen Elizabeth the First. Dee knew that at last he had the Timekeeper in his hands – and he knew of the prophecy and of its power. It was John Dee who founded our society, Tempus Fugit, and he was my Master for a time.’
‘Was Roger Rover an alchemist?’
Abel Darkwater laughed out loud. ‘He was a sea-faring fool!’
‘If you’re so clever why couldn’t you mend the clock yourself, and why didn’t you keep it when you had it?’
Abel Darkwater moved forward as if to strike Silver in the face, but the Pope restrained his arm.
‘Torture, yes, violence, no,’ said the Pope.
Abel Darkwater nodded. ‘It seems that the clock is true to its own power, Silver, but when I find it, you will give me that power. I have been searching for you for centuries.’
‘I’m only eleven years old!’ said Silver.
‘You have died and been reborn many times,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘Many times.’ And Silver, who didn’t understand this, shuddered and remembered that Micah had said this about Regalia Mason.
‘But this time, oh no, you shall not slip away. Let us prepare the alembic.’
Silver didn’t know what an alembic was, and she was regretting her angry outburst. She suddenly realised that Gabriel was nowhere to be seen. He must have hidden himself.
Abel Darkwater had lit a fire in front of the altar. He took out a thing like a glass bottle, with a narrow funnel neck and a wide bottom.
‘Now,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘look into my eyes, Silver, and you will find yourself moving across Time to the day when your parents had arranged to bring the Timekeeper to London – to bring the Timekeeper to me.’
Silver felt herself going dizzy, but she held her mind firm. She thought of Tanglewreck, put herself inside it for safekeeping.
Abel Darkwater frowned and tried again. He took her face in his small hands an
d made her look at him. How round his eyes were! What faint and yellow light came from them, like a fog wrapping round her. Tanglewreck was there in the fog, she could hardly see the house now, where was it? Where was she? She suddenly saw her father’s face. His expression, his eyes. Her mind cleared. She had nothing to say.
Abel Darkwater’s eyes were old and cold. She noticed how cold his hands were on her face.
‘Very well,’ he said.
He let her go and attached a glass tube to the alembic. He blew into the tube and the alembic began to expand like a balloon. It grew bigger and bigger until it was more than a metre across and a metre high. The narrow funnel flared open.
‘Your Holiness, please,’ said Abel Darkwater, and the Pope stepped forward, and picked Silver up from behind and pushed her into the alembic. As soon as she was inside, Abel Darkwater sealed the funnel with a lead stopper.
‘One hour is the limit for torture of any kind,’ said the Pope. ‘We must be merciful.’
‘One hour, then,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘Is it getting hot in there, Silver?’
She watched their faces, distorted by the bubbles in the glass; faces lined with centuries of cunning and greed. She could hardly breathe.
‘You will tell me, Silver. You will.’
But she couldn’t tell him anything, because something or someone was stopping her.
Across the Sands of Time, on a dromedary, Regalia Mason was travelling to the temple of the great god Ra.
As the alembic slowly heated up towards the unendurable, Abel Darkwater told Silver more of the story.
‘Oh yes, I stole the Timekeeper from my master John Dee, and fled with it from England’s shore, taking it to the best clockmakers of Italy and France, but none could repair it. Only in time, in its own time, was the clock mended. In 1675 Robert Hooke gave it a double-face, one in the body, and one in the lid, and he replaced the pendulum with a spring mechanism. For the first time in more than a hundred years its heart began to beat again!