Something of his horror .transmitted itself to Harry, but still the necroscope could feel no pity for him. ‘I understand your motivation,’ he said, ‘but if he hadn’t killed you I would have. If I could. For my mother, for Keenan Gormley, for everyone you’ve hurt or would hurt.’
‘Yes, yes, of course you would,’ said Borowitz without enmity, ‘if you could. I was a soldier before I was a schemer, Harry Keogh. I understand honour even if Dragosani doesn’t. It’s because of all these things that I want to help you.’
‘I accept your reasons,’ said Harry. ‘How can you help me?’
‘First I can tell you all I know about the Chateau Bronnitsy: its design and layout, the people who work there. Here, take it all,’ and he quickly imparted to Harry all knowledge of the place and of the ESPers who worked there. ‘And then I can tell you something else, something
which you, with your special talent, can use to good advantage. I’ve said I was first a soldier. So I was, and my knowledge of warfare was second to none. I had studied the entire history of warfare from Man’s beginnings. I had traced his wars right across the face of the planet, and knew all the old battlefields intimately. You ask how I can help you? Well listen and I’ll tell you.’
Harry listened, and slowly his strange eyes opened wider and a grim smile spread itself across his face. He had been weary until now, burdened. But now a massive weight was lifted from his shoulders. He did have a chance, after all. Finally Borowitz was finished.
‘Well, we were enemies,’ said Harry then, ‘even though we never met in the flesh. But I thank you anyway. You know of course that I intend to destroy your organisation as well as Dragosani?’
‘No more than he’d destroy it,’ the other growled. ‘Anyway, I have to go now. There’s someone else I want to find, if I can . . .’ And his voice, too, faded into silence.
Harry looked at the rugged terrain all around and saw how the sun dipped lower in the sky. Dust devils raced along a ridge. Kites wheeled in the sky as the day turned towards evening. And for a long while, as the shadows lengthened, he sat there on the sand and pebbles with his chin in his hands, just thinking.
At last he said, ‘They all want to help me.’
‘Because you bring them hope,’ the Witch of Endor told him. ‘For centuries, indeed since time itself began, the dead have lain still in their graves and that was that. But now they stir, they seek each other out, they talk to each other in a manner you have taught them. They have found a champion. Only ask of them, Harry Keogh, and they will obey . . .’
Harry stood up, gazed all around, felt the chill of evening beginning to creep. ‘I see no reason to stay here
any longer,’ he said. ‘As for you, old lady: I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘I have all the thanks I want,’ she answered. The teeming dead thank me.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, and there are some of them I want to speak to-first.’
‘Go then,’ she answered. ‘The future waits for you as it waits for all men.’
Harry said no more but conjured the Mobius doors, chose one and walked through it.
He went first to his mother, finding his way to her without difficulty; then to ‘Sergeant’ Graham Lane at Harden, including a quick jump of only fifty yards or so to the grave of James Gordon Hannant; then to a Garden of Repose in Kensington, where Keenan Gormley’s ashes had been scattered, but where Gormley himself remained; and finally to Gregor Borowitz’s dacha in Zhukovka. He spent perhaps ten to fifteen minutes in each location with the exception of the last. It was one thing to talk to dead men in their graves but quite another to talk to one who sat there and looked at you with glassy, pus-dripping eyes.
In any case, by the time Harry was through he was satisfied that he knew his business, that he could now safely negotiate the intricacies of the Mobius continuum; and by then there was only one place left to go. But first he took down a double-barrelled shotgun from the wall and filled his pockets with cartridges from a drawer.