Depleted, yes. The thing inside him needed, and Dragosani knew what it needed. He felt Batu’s hand on his shoulder and could almost hear the blood surging in the other’s veins. Then Dragosani saw the sharp, curved surgical tool with which he would have slit the ewe’s throat. It lay there close to his hand, silver against the black earth. Ah, well, he had intended this eventually. It would be so much sooner, that was all.
Two things I need from you, Max,’ Dragosani said, and looked up.
Max Batu gasped aloud and his jaw fell open. The necromancer’s eyes were scarlet as those of the fiend he had just killed! The Mongol saw them – saw something else that glittered silver in the night – and saw . . . nothing else. Ever . . .
INTERVAL TWO:
‘I have to stop,’ Alec Kyle told his weird visitor. He put down his pencil, massaged his cramped wrist. The desk was littered with the curled shavings of five pencils, all of them whittled away to nothing. This was Kyle’s sixth and his arm felt mangled from frantic scribbling.
A thin sheaf of papers was stacked in front of Kyle, with pencilled notes and jottings covering each sheet top to bottom and margin to margin. When he had started to write all of this down (how long ago? Four and a half, five hours?) the notes had been fairly detailed. Within an hour they’d become jottings, barely legible scrawl. Now even Kyle himself could scarcely read them, and they were reduced to a listing of dates alongside brief headlines.
Now, for a moment resting his wrist and mind both, Kyle glanced at the dates again and shook his head. He still believed – instinctively knew – that all of this was the absolute truth, but there was one massively glaring anomaly here. An ambiguity he couldn’t ignore. Kyle frowned, looked up at the apparition where it floated upright on the other side of the desk, blinked his eyes at this shimmering spectre of a man and said: ‘There’s something I don’t quite understand.’ Then he laughed, and not a little hysterically. ‘I mean, there are a good many things here which I don’t understand – but until now I’ve at least believed them. This is harder to believe.’
‘Oh?’ said the apparition.
Kyle nodded. Today’s Monday,’ he said. ‘Sir Keenan is to be cremated tomorrow. The police have discovered nothing as yet and it seems almost blasphemous to keep his body, well, lying about in that condition.’
‘Yes,’ the other nodded his agreement.
‘Well,’ Kyle continued, ‘the point is I know a lot of what you’ve told me to be the truth, and I suspect that the rest of it is too. You’ve told me things no one else outside myself and Sir Keenan should ever have known. But -‘
‘But?’
‘But your story,’ Kyle suddenly blurted, ‘has already outstripped us! I’ve been keeping a record of your time-scale and you’ve just been telling me about the coming Wednesday, two days from now. According to you, Thibor Ferenczy isn’t yet dead, won’t be until Wednesday night!’
After a moment the other said, ‘I can see how that must appear strange to you, yes. Time is relative, Alec, the same as space. Indeed the two go hand in hand. I’ll go further than that: everything is relative. There is a Grand Scheme to things
Some of that escaped Kyle. For the moment he saw only what he wanted to see. ‘You can read the future? That well?’ His face was a mask of awe. ‘And I thought I had a talent! But to be able to see the future so clearly is almost unbe-‘ and he stopped short and gasped. As if
things weren’t incredible enough, a new, even more incredible thought had crossed his mind.
Perhaps his visitor saw it written in his face. At any rate he smiled a smile transparent as smoke from a cigarette, a smile that reflected not at all the light from the window but allowed it to pass right through. ‘Is there something, Alec?’ he asked.
‘Where . . . where are you?’ Kyle asked. ‘I mean, where are you – the real, physical you – right now? Where are you speaking from? Or rather, when are you speaking from?’