John Schettler - Anvil of Fate

“Missing?” Kelly was looking at the screen now. “Well it hasn’t altered the outcome much. I mean, look at the chronology color bar. Nothing has really changed. It’s still shows first variation originating at this date on the Meridian and worsening as the time line moves forward. The outcome of the battle of Tours remains unaltered, a dramatic Arab victory, and it just gets worse from there. Maeve obviously did something to alter the Meridian, but what?”

“It looks as though she found the horse,” said Paul. “That would explain the missing data in the story describing Dodo’s mishap. Robert? Anything more?” He was hoping there might still be unseen effects emerging in the data stream as they waited.

Robert had been reading intently from the original source material in an on-line translation of the Carmen de Sancto Landberto, the “Song of Saint Lambert’, and seemed dismayed.

“Paul’s correct,” he said. “The story has changed, here and in the Vita as well. There’s no mention of the horse at all now, not even in the Arabic sources. Apparently Lambert was warned of the impending plot and escaped. Look here,” he began to read. “And one came in the middle of the night to give warning, causing Lambert to flee with his domestics, away over the river. And thus was Dodo’s revenge undone, and he was roundly condemned by the Saint, and banished from Pippin’s court.”

“Damn,” said Paul. “The history has changed again. Dodo was warned? By who?”

“Neither account provides any more details,” said Robert.

“The Assassins?” Kelly suggested. “You said they would most likely be operating with an agent in place on a night of this importance, perhaps even at the farm where Dodo was to have found the so called willful beast.”

“Right,” said Paul. “That was a fair assumption, but if Maeve got to that horse first, then she may have prevented the mishap. That said, it’s clear this Pushpoint was not decisive in altering any of these events.” Then his eyes brightened with recollection. “What about that loose twine? Search for that, Robert.”

A moment later the professor had found the entry. “It still reads the same—a loose twine, where the horses were brought to gather… But let me look at the image of the Rosetta stone again.” He opened a folder and called up the file he had stored there, searching the lines of hieroglyphics.

“Here it is… a loose twine…. then the wavy line separating the two stories, and it reads—damn! It’s not the same in this image! Now it reads: “a loose twine… where the horses were brought to gather at the water’s edge. What’s happened?”

Paul thought deeply, coming to some inner conclusion. “Alright,” he said. “So let’s assume Maeve got to that horse and made off with it. If you were the Assassins, what would you do in that instance?”

“They obviously had to do something else,” said Kelly. “And the data Robert found in the source material indicates that someone warned Lambert.”

“Undoubtedly the Assassins,” said Robert. “Damn, they must have perceived the variation the moment Maeve intervened. They ran a counter-operation!”

“Possibly,” said Paul. “Or their operatives on that Meridian must have decided quickly that they had to take some other action. They warned Lambert. That was very risky. It involves direct intervention to influence the behavior of a Prime.”

“Well they had no qualms about trying to knock Dodo on his ass,” said Kelly.

“We were talking about killing Lambert ourselves. Now that’s messing with a Prime, right?” Robert folded his arms.

“Dodo was obviously important,” said Paul, “but he was just an accessory, a means to an end. Lambert was the Prime Mover here. He had to be spared a martyr’s death, and clearly they have found a way to do that without the horse being involved at all. So we’re tilting at windmills here. The Pushpoint is somewhere else now, still a loose twine, but no longer the rein of that willful beast as we assumed.”

“If it ever was,” Robert chided.

“Then what do we do?” Kelly fidgeted, looking at the time. “We’ve been yakking here for ten minutes. In another ten minutes, our time, three hours will have elapsed in the altered Meridian. It will be 9:00 P.M. there, and Maeve should be back on her original manifestation coordinates if all went well. I can pull her out if the reading on her physical location matches up, otherwise we wait until midnight.”

“No,” Paul said decisively. “Don’t pull her out just yet. We’ll need her there.”

“For what?” Kelly complained. “There’s nothing more she can do in this situation. Hell, she doesn’t even know things have changed.”

“Right,” said Paul, up off his chair. “So I’m going back to warn her.”

Kelly blinked at him, somewhat surprised. “What? Another shift?” he said. “Look, we barely have the quantum fuel for Maeve’s retraction and perhaps one more re-entry to that milieu, unless you want me to forget about our fallback plan concerning Lambert. I’ve had the Golems working on those new coordinates and I can put someone very close to Lambert’s villa if we have to take more drastic action.”

“Keep that on ice,” said Paul. “Let’s hope we don’t need that shift. But can you manage a Spook Job? Can you put me on our original manifestation point for maybe ten seconds? That would give me enough time to warn Maeve about this variation, and perhaps she can do something about it from her end. We’ll have to postpone her retraction scheme.”

“Ten seconds? How are you going to explain all this to her in that much time?”

“Easy,” said Paul. “We’ll write it down—Robert, get busy with that, will ya? We’ll write it down and I can just appear and throw out the note.”

Kelly gaped at him. “Then what?” he asked, incredulous and obviously still worried about Maeve.

“Then Maeve has three hours in the altered Meridian to figure something out,” said Paul, “and if I know her, she will.”

Maeve was ridinghard now, away from the farm toward the river bank. When she first bolted away, she had turned south, thinking to avoid any possibility of encountering Dodo and his men should they be in the area. The farmer, or whoever the man was, might also take one of the other horses and try to follow her. Though she had little doubt that she could out run him in that instance. Neither the mare nor the brown plow horse could possible hope to catch her, but she nonetheless took a southerly route, thinking to double back and confound any pursuit once she reached the river.

When she first reached the Meuse she came to a small ferry where the river narrowed and seemed more shallow. After giving some consideration to using it to cross over to the east bank, she discarded the idea and decided to just wade into the shallows to mask her trail and reverse her course, heading north. There was no guarantee that she would find another easy crossing point south of the city, and fussing with the horse on the small wooden barge tethered to the tree stump there seemed more than she wanted to try and manage at the moment. She could not risk being trapped on the east bank, away from the point where she had shifted in with Robert and Paul. Kelly was trying to track her position, but that was a new program, untested and possibly unreliable at this point.

Satisfied that the farmer had not taken up pursuit, she was soon picking her way north along the river’s edge. At times she had to skirt inland around thickets of plants interspersed with heavy riverside brush and stands of trees. Yet she was making good progress and, after a while, began to veer inland, hoping to take up the old Roman road again as she drew near to Heristal.