The Long War

Blood was dripping from McCool’s arm, but he wasn’t paying it any attention. McCool stood up, face-to-face with Joshua – and Joshua realized that something had gone very wrong. ‘Pathless-ss one! I kill you many!’

The war around them was ceasing. Elves and kobolds alike had paused in mid-slaughter to watch them. ‘Now look—’

Finn McCool flung back his head and screamed. The flying kick he launched could have killed Joshua in a second.

But Joshua had already set off running, heading for that ladder again. He threw himself into the air and grabbed a rung, and to his credit, Bill raised the ship immediately. Joshua looked down from a few yards up, to see Finn McCool sprawled cursing under a tree, his injured arm leaking blood.

Then Joshua was rising up through the sparse canopy and into the sunlight, and the montane forest, the messy, sprawling battleground, receded from view.

He climbed up the rest of the ladder, through the hatch and into the sanity of the gondola, stood up, and cracked his head on the ceiling. He started pulling up the ladder in great tangled armfuls.

‘That is you, isn’t it, Joshua?’ Bill asked anxiously. ‘I’ve been out of touch since you used the radio to bust that elf’s jaw—’

‘Just go, go!’

Only when the ladder was up did he let himself sag down on to a couch, fighting for breath. There was no sound up here but the squeaks and groans from the gasbag as it warmed up in the morning’s heat. Below him the Shillelagh’s shadow drifted peacefully across the forest roof, as if all sorts of hell weren’t going on down there in the gloom.

He kept seeing Finn McCool’s face, a contorted Noh mask of fury and hatred. ‘I saved his life. McCool. Somehow that made me a deadly enemy. Where was the logic in that?’

‘It’s kobold logic, Joshua. Like human honour, but in a distorting mirror. You shamed him by saving him, when he was supposed to be saving you. You want to go down and have a bit of an old chat about it?’

‘Just get us out of here.’

The forest below blinked away.

46

NELSON’S FIRST STOP in Wyoming, where he had driven in his rental Winnebago on the trail of the Lobsang Project, was at Dubois, cowboy country.

Alas there was a shortage of cowboys nowadays, Wyoming folk having been particularly quick to head for the new stepwise worlds where land was free and government interference infrequent. It was almost reassuring for Nelson to read on a truck bumper sticker, ‘In This Neighbourhood We Don’t Just Watch.’

He found a LongHorn, and ordered a beer and a burger. The TV in an upper corner, largely ignored, was showing images of continuing geological problems in Yellowstone, in another part of the state. Swarms of minor earthquakes, an evacuation of some small community, landslips, roads cut. Dead fish in Yellowstone Lake. Bubbles, rising languidly in some pool of hot mud. But many of these incidents, Nelson slowly gathered, were in fact occurring in stepwise versions of Yellowstone in the worlds next door. The geologists, scattered over a band of worlds with instruments stripped from long-standing stations on the Datum, claimed to be learning a huge amount from comparative studies of the differing behaviours of the stepwise calderas. The newsreaders, vacant and pretty, mimed exaggerated relief that the still-overcrowded Datum itself didn’t seem to be seriously affected, and cracked silly jokes.

Nelson looked away, retreating into his own thoughts. It had taken him a month to get here from Chicago, a slow, rambling journey, and a very pleasurable one. He had needed the time to shed his past, the very intense experience of his years as a priest in St. John on the Water. He had been like a deep sea diver decompressing, he imagined. In the meantime, the world’s mysteries could wait . . .

To his mild irritation, just outside Nelson’s window was an animated billboard fixed to an iron rail fence. It cycled through various distracting messages, which he did his best to ignore. Distractions everywhere: that was the modern world, on the Datum anyhow. Then one message caught his eye: ‘Can you see the humour of this iron railing?’

He nearly dropped his burger, which would have been a wicked waste. ‘A G. K. Chesterton quote? Here? . . . Good afternoon to you, Lobsang. So I’m on the right track.’

The Winnebago wasn’t the fastest machine on the road, but once out of Dubois Nelson floored it.

He said aloud, to anybody listening, ‘Strictly speaking I am doing an amazingly dumb thing. I might be dealing with a madman. Well, I’ve met one or two of those, but very few of them quoted me the works of one of the best writers Britain ever produced . . .’ Gazing down the empty road, Nelson wondered how long it was since anyone other than a scholar had read the works of G. K. Chesterton. He’d not even read much himself since he’d devoured the best of them in his teens, after a chance discovery in a public library in Joburg.

Devil’s Tower was visible on the horizon ahead when a motorcycle cop pulled him over.