Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘It’s still there?’ Holly asked. ‘Their breach?’

‘Sealed up.’ Drake nodded.

‘And you never tried to go through?’ Jonah asked.

‘No,’ Drake said. ‘My father saw no point.’

‘So the Inquisitor,’ Jonah said, trying to take it all in, trying to absorb the end of everything when Coldbrook was always meant to be the beginning of something wonderful. ‘He spreads the plague?’

‘No, no,’ Drake replied. ‘There’s not one Inquisitor, but many. They oversee the spread, record it, and recruit a new Inquisitor for every world killed.’

‘And that means we now have a chance to fight back,’ Moira said.

‘But how do you know all this is true?’ Holly asked.

Drake sighed. ‘It’s largely conjecture. But maybe now we’ll have the chance to test.’ For the first time he looked away from Jonah as he spoke. To Jonah, that didn’t bode well.

‘The woman,’ Jonah said. ‘The diaries.’

‘Her name was Kathryn Coldbrook,’ Drake said. ‘My father worked with her fifty years ago, just after she and her organisation had performed the first casting through the veils. The casters became very famous.’ He snorted. ‘I have her biography. Our world was open to wonder back then, so my father told me. Receptive to it.’

‘Not cynical,’ Holly said.

‘Well, I think we’d barely be human without healthy cynicism,’ Drake said. ‘I don’t think Kathryn was a very nice woman. Father told me she was an unpleasant genius — single-minded, arrogant, and didn’t suffer fools gladly.’

Holly glanced at Jonah, one corner of her mouth turned up. He raised an eyebrow.

‘But she was brilliant,’ Drake continued. ‘My father worshipped her memory, and he must have read her diary a hundred times. The experiments, the celebration when they made their first cast. The Inquisitor visiting her. That came over as a madness, of course, but now we know better.’

‘She’s viewed as a monster now,’ Moira said. Jonah was taken aback by such a comment, and surprised at some of their almost mystical phraseology — veils, monsters.

‘That’s not her fault,’ Drake said. ‘Understand, this is all gleaned from her diaries, with plenty of guesswork thrown in. But my father always said Kathryn had a unique mind. He said she was able to embrace the imagination in her scientific studies. She was even. .’ He frowned.

‘She had faith ,’ Moira sneered, as if the word tasted foul. Jonah thought that he would have to ask about that.

‘Maybe that made it easier for the bastard thing to take her,’ Drake said. ‘I’ve always wondered. Though she was a woman of science, she was also a slave to mysticism.’

‘So what the hell is that thing haunting me?’ Jonah said.

‘Someone who perhaps has a sense of humour. Your world had the Spanish Inquisition?’

Jonah nodded.

‘We believe that they are Inquisitors of the multiverse, from a version of Earth so thoroughly obsessed by and convinced of their own exclusive holiness that they cannot allow any other.’

‘Cannot allow?’ Jonah said.

‘Maybe they found the fury disease in one reality, grasped its potential, and encouraged its spread,’ Drake continued. ‘Or maybe they conceived and released it themselves. Nurtured it from world to world to destroy everyone not of their Earth.’

‘That’s. .’ Holly shook her head.

‘Genocide,’ Jonah said.

‘Billions killed across the multiverse,’ Drake said. ‘Trillions. Beyond counting. Infected, and waiting to rise again to attack those not infected. Every Earth explores, and when they break through to what they think will be somewhere similar they find furies.’

‘And there aren’t many worlds still holding out,’ Moira said.

‘Yours is!’ Jonah said. ‘Forty years you’ve been surviving, and-’

‘You can hardly call it surviving,’ Drake said, his composure slipping. ‘It’s barely existing.’

‘You said we might be able to fight back,’ Holly said. ‘What did you mean? How can you defeat something that’s already won?’

‘Kathyrn Coldbrook’s diaries,’ Drake said. ‘She sensed something observing her even before she and my father succeeded with their first casting. In later entries she reveals her belief that her Inquisitor guided her towards success, though not quite the success he intended. And following our eventual infection he courted her, preying on her guilt with nightmare images that she noted in her diary. Some of which you might recognise, Jonah, were you to read it.’

‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘The last few pages are very confused. Painful to read. So much self-doubt as she denied what she was seeing, what the Inquisitor was doing to her. As he was luring her. It’s as if she was trying to keep hold of herself, but also being torn in other ways. And one day. . she vanished.’

Silence descended, and Jonah glanced at the other three people around the table. Drake and Moira displayed a sadness that seemed to fit their hard faces well: a familiar emotion. Holly was staring down at her hands.

‘Bill Coldbrook died,’ Jonah said. ‘I took over his work.’

‘And have you ever felt watched?’ Drake said, leaning forward again.

‘Yes,’ Jonah said. ‘And so did Bill. I think that made him paranoid and drove him to suicide.’

‘And now an Inquisitor is after Jonah,’ Holly said.

‘They take you,’ Drake said. ‘That’s what Kathryn seemed to imply. Across secret bridges and through unknown wormholes those bastards have created with technology that must be so similar to yours, or ours. They take you back and convert you. And then you go out as one of them and oversee the destruction of another Earth.’

‘This was meant to be so special,’ Jonah said.

‘Countless Earths think that.’

‘So those things helped us to make the breach?’ Holly asked. She sounded hurt, and Jonah felt the same. He thought back to Bill before his suicide, what he had accomplished, the breakthroughs he had made, and Jonah tried to see where the tipping point had been. It had still taken them ten years after Bill died to complete the project, and there had been several failed attempts. But they could never have succeeded without Bill’s radical, groundbreaking work as their foundation. And somewhere in that foundation had been a rock cast by something alien.

‘It’s pure evil,’ Jonah said.

‘So you have to fight it!’ Holly said. ‘It might not be over.’

Holly felt a rush of hope. Drake had shown her views of her own blighted world in the casting room, and Vic had confirmed those images in their short conversation. But now they had a chance — a challenge — and they had to grasp it and make it work.

And Vic was coming back.

‘We need access to Mannan,’ Jonah said.

Moira and Drake leaned in close to each other, whispered something that no one else could hear: urgent, serious. Then Drake stood and shook his head.

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘We can’t bring him here.’

‘We don’t need to.’ Jonah stood as well, walked around the table and stood in front of the man from another world.

He held out his hand.

After a moment’s hesitation Drake took it, and smiled. ‘That’s something I thought I’d never do,’ he said. ‘Shaking hands is so. . mannered. It’s something we only ever see in memory casts.’

Holly found Drake compelling, almost hypnotic. He carried himself well, and had a natural grace and intelligence. But she realised now that there was something else — he was completely out of place here, no matter how relaxed he seemed.

‘You must go through,’ Holly said. ‘You have to, Jonah. I’ll stay here and wait for Vic and the others. I can check the systems, make sure the repair holds, run some diagnostics on the core. And I’ll try and figure out how to get them down here when they arrive.’