Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (25 page)

       Rasil’s eyes narrowed, and he stroked the
dark stubble of his beard. “Do you realize the trouble you have caused here
already? I was to jump at the setting of the moon!” He pointed to the heart of
the cave, a flash of anger returning to his eyes. “Then you come fluttering out
of the sky with the Jordanian Air Force at your heels. I thought you were a
tourist at first, until I saw your cargo sled. You tell
me,
what is it
you were carrying?
Equipment? Must I have my men dig it up?”

       “Dig it up? Damn it man, I told you what it
was. It’s a fossil. An Ammonite. If you don’t believe me then go dig it up
yourself. You talk about trouble? We were minding our own business until
you
came along.
Now
where is my friend?”

       The Arab set his jaw, as if stifling a
rising anger. “We cannot quarrel here,” he said. “You think we are without means,
without resources after Palma failed. But, as you have seen, we are more
capable than you  may realize.”

       “What are you talking about?”

       “The war was going badly for you. In fact,
we believed that the issue was nearly settled at Palma. But it can never be so,
yes? It can never really be written while we struggle with one another. One
side or the other must prevail. You and I are warriors, meeting here in the
stream of life. Yet, now a chasm has opened and your friend has fallen through.
It is not for us to quarrel like spoiled children. He is the master of fate
now, and we must simply wait.”

       The professor was trying to sort through the
man’s words, and slowly, by degrees, the meaning was dawning on him. Rasil was
clearly angry about what had happened here, yet he was forcing some truce on
his emotion. A moment ago he wanted to kill me; now he accepts parley. It was
as if he saw himself as my opponent in some way. Yes. He said it himself.

       “What war do you speak of, Iraq? Iran? You
mean the fighting in Syria last year?”

       “Do not be coy,” Rasil berated him. “The
American occupation of the Holy Lands in this timeframe will be short lived, I
assure you. The Romans tried, and failed, just as the Byzantine Empire failed
after them. All of Europe failed with their pathetic Crusaders. The French
thought to carve out a kingdom there once. They held it for nearly ninety
years, but Salah ad Din took it back. We saw to that by letting a mongrel wolf
live out his fate, when we could have killed him at our whim. No matter! Now,
in this age, the West comes to our land once more. First the British, then the
Americans. It will not last. You will see. We had the solution in hand once, at
Palma. We will find another, soon enough.”

       The man’s words seemed to brand Nordhausen
with sudden realization. He was speaking like they were  mortal enemies. It was
as if there was an ongoing struggle between two factions for the long-term
control of the world. What was it he accused me of earlier? He said I was a
member of some order. Now he was talking about Palma. Could he be one of the
original conspirators? Could it be that they’ve got their hands on the Arch
technology somehow?

       “Palma? You mean you were in on that?”

       “It was our master stroke!” Rasil’s eyes
gleamed. “Yes! I have told you I am from the ninth age. I was a part of the
world that Palma made possible. I tasted the fruit of that victory—the grandeur
of Islam that spanned the whole of the globe. Oh, you tried to reverse our
achievement for many decades, but always failed. The alerts would come in and
we would rush to the safety of our Nexus Chambers to wait and stand the watch,
looking for transformation. It never came. I tell you that we were beginning to
think we had bested you at last. The Shadow was so impenetrable around the
island of Palma that it frustrated your every attempt to reach a criticality on
the Meridian. You could not get through—nobody could, and nothing that happened
after mattered. The key event was at Palma.”

       The look of satisfaction on his face
suddenly withered and he returned to the posture of guarded watchfulness, eying
Nordhausen with suspicion. “At least that is what we believed. Then the alarms
came in again—just another feeble blow, we thought, the last death rattle of
the Order. Imagine our surprise when we emerged from the shelter of our
chambers and found the whole world was lost to us once more. Everything
shattered, vanished, gone forever…”

       Nordhausen gaped at the man and, to his
great surprise, he saw how Rasil’s eyes clouded over with tears. The
consequences of the mission to reverse the Palma event had been
annihilating
. This man knew them—he had been
protected in a Nexus Point when it happened. Now everything he had been saying
connected in the professor’s mind, and he nearly gasped with the  awareness of
it all.
Time
war!
 This
man was talking about a struggle between some nefarious Arab faction and a
group he called ‘the Order.’  They were at war, running missions into the past
to alter the course of history one way or another. One side prevailed for a
time, and Islam spread throughout the globe, the West destroyed by the awful
catastrophe of the tsunami sequence generated by the Palma event.

       Like a massive rock hurtled into the ocean,
the ripples of change surged forth from that all consuming moment and made an
end of Western history. Graves said it himself—they were desperate. They
couldn’t get through the Shadow. Paul talked about that, and now it finally
made sense to the professor. Palma was so decisive, so final in its effect,
that the remnant of Western civilization struggling to be reborn risked all on
one last operation. And they came to us, he mused, to me. I was a part of their
plan all along; with Paul and Kelly and Maeve. We still don’t even know what we
did, but it turned this man’s world on end—it changed everything.

       He looked at Rasil, saw the tears, the pride
as he struggled to control his emotion, the
dignity of the man. He knew.
He saw it all
happen, and saw it all lost. It was as if all Western history had been
re-written in a night.

       “Do you have any idea what we lost?” Rasil’s
voice was a whisper now, and he stilled himself, head lowered with the shame of
his tears.

       Nordhausen reached out and placed his hand
on the man’s knee. “Forgive me,” he said softly. “This is a hard business.”

       Rasil nodded, recovering his composure. He
placed his hand on Nordhausen’s for a moment, and the two shared a brief
understanding. “A hard business,” he repeated. “And it needs hard men. My tears
were unseemly. But you see why I cannot reveal the breaching point to you
here—you understand now, one hard man to another.” He withdrew his hand and the
professor folded his arms. They sat there for a moment in the mouth of the
cave, feeling very cold and alone.

       “So, what do we do now?” said Nordhausen.

       “We wait.”

       “How long?”

       “Until the resolution, and it will not be
long, I fear.”

       “And my friend?”

       “You may have seen the last of him.” Rasil
looked him full in the face now. “A hard business.”

       “What? You mean to say that you can’t pull
him out—you have no retraction scheme?”

       “He was not prepared,” Rasil explained. “You
know this as well as I do. I’m afraid he is on his own now. It is not within my
power to reach him from here. This is a one way journey, and his time will be
short. A man who jumps into the Well of Souls does not return—at least not
here.”

       Nordhausen was flabbergasted. “One way? But
how can that be? Paul told me time would hold the door open for him. He doesn’t
belong there!” The professor pointed to the depths of the cave.

       ”Surely not. It was my place to jump, but
that was  foiled.”

       “Then let me go after him, if you will do
nothing to save him.”

       “Don’t be foolish. Did you not hear? The
Well is dissipated. It takes  a full month for the reaction to build. It will
not open again until the next full moon—in fact, it must
never
open again.”

       “What are you saying?” Nordhausen was
desperate for some way out of the dilemma.

       “If the well remains—if
we
remain—after the
transformation, then I will order my men to destroy this place. It must not be
allowed to come to the attention of the Order, you understand. I could kill you
instead, but that is against our code of honor. A walker must not be harmed.
The repercussions are too difficult to fathom. So the well will be destroyed,
and that will be the end of it.”

       Nordhausen slumped with resignation, a
deflated look of pain on his face. “Then I’ve doomed him,” he whispered. “I’ve
killed my friend.”

       “No,” Rasil corrected him. “It is very
likely that he will survive the jump. We have caretakers at the other end. They
will do what they can for him, if he survives the fall. Then time will decide
his fate at the other end. It is
our doom you have sealed, not that of your friend.”

       “Our doom?”

       “None of this was written,” said Rasil. “It
was not supposed to happen, this chance meeting in the desert. We did not
expect you, so that is why I believe you when you say your coming here was
unplanned. Yet you yourself have said it: your friend does not belong there. He
is a Free Radical now. Remember—time is jealous; time is vengeful. It may be
that the dogs will have our bones before the dawn.”

21

Thankfully
, Jabr’s sanctuary was not far. They moved through
the thickness of the night, first winding their way down a twisted gorge, and
then climbing again, by a narrow rock-sewn pathway that eventually withered
away to nothing. Paul thought it odd that along the route he had not seen any
other sign of life—not a road, a house or even so much as a telephone pole.
While it made sense that this group would hide away in these remote mountains,
the rugged, unfinished nature of the ground seemed strange to him.

       “What is this place?” he asked when they
finally halted for the night. It was the dark hour before dawn, and the chill
lay heavily upon them, in spite of the thick, coarse robes they had donned.

       “This is Wadi el Jan. That would be the 
Valley of Demons in your language. Let us hope the jinn have ceased their
restless walking in the night and returned to their haunts, for the new day
will be upon us soon. I am sorry to have pressed you to such discomfort this
night. You must be very tired. Come, there is a deep cave hidden in the face of
yon cliff. It is known to very few—perhaps not even the Sami. We will be safe
here for a time, Allah willing.”

       They found the entrance, well hidden behind
the twisted remains of an old cedar tree, its trunk cloven by lightning and
scored by fire, the long limbs barren and charred to black and ashen gray. One
of the two guards continued on, leading the horses away as if he were just a
weary traveler in the mountains.

       “The horses would be too easy to spot from
yonder ridge,” Jabr explained. “Poor Hamza still has long hours ahead of him
before he takes his rest. Yet, he will be rewarded. Aziz will remain and guard
the entrance to our sanctuary.
Come, we
will
prepare a meal. I’m afraid it will not be so sumptuous. We cannot light a fire
here just yet, so cold biscuits will have to do. Perhaps it will be safe to
brew kahwa when the sun is up.”

       Another cave, thought Paul as they slid into
a narrow crack in the face of the sheer cliff. He soon found that, once through
a constricted tunnel, the interior of the cave opened up to a wide chamber.
Jabr disappeared into the shadows for a moment and Paul caught the scrape of
flint on stone
. A spark flared in the distance and
the soft light of an oil lamp suffused the chamber.
To his great
surprise, he saw that the walls had been shaped and smoothed by artisans, and
squared to the semblance of a typical room. There were crude wooden tables,
chairs, and recessed shelves hewn into the rocky walls, stacked high with many
bound leather volumes and rolled scrolls.  He saw doorways leading to other
rooms deeper in the heart of the cliff, and caught a glimpse of an ornate
arabesque, hung with richly colored tapestries. There were thick carpets in one
quarter of the room, dressed out with pillowed bolsters. A few wooden tables
were scattered with archaic instruments,
quill
pens, a pair of calipers and something that appeared to be an astrolabe. Paul
saw several sketched documents, which he took to be maps of the stars. They
were illustrated by elegant drawings of the heavens, dominated by a large
sickle moon.

       “A library, of a kind,” said Jabr, seeing
how he was drawn to the tables.

       Paul was amazed. “These books must be very
old,” he said, his finger tracing a path in the ash white dust covering a
leather bound book.

       “Some,” said Jabr. “Others are very recent,
the handiwork of the Kadi’s scribes and mapmakers. This is a secret archive he
has set aside from the world. The days are careless, and wisdom is too easily
lost in the heat of our quarrels. Such a sanctuary is a place of peace, where
Allah may watch kindly over all that is set here for safekeeping.”