The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi (26 page)

“Was Abdu El Yezdi the man?” Burton whispered.

“No. The traveller was a descendent of the assassin, Oxford, and was called by the same name.”

“But how could Oxford have descendants? He was killed at the scene. He had no children.”

“In our history, yes. In the original, no.”

Burton gestured weakly for the countess to stop. She waited patiently, holding her pose, while he struggled to process the revelation. When he indicated that he was ready for more, she went on:

“The traveller was in a bind. He couldn't return to his own time, for his own ancestor was dead, meaning he no longer existed there. This paradox, along with prolonged exposure to what, for him, was the distant past, drove him insane. He died.”

For a third time, Countess Sabina bumped her elbow, drawing attention back to her raised forearm and widely spread digits.

“It made no difference. The bifurcation he caused had already broken the mechanism of Time. Paths not taken and decisions not made no longer faded into non-existence but instead gave rise to multiple consequences.” She wiggled her fingers. “History splits and splits and splits again, and the farther these multiplicities grow from the path the single original history should have taken, the weaker the barrier between them becomes. Picture it as a tree, if you will, whose branches extend away from the trunk and keep dividing until they blur into a mass of twigs.”

Burton raised a hand in protest. “Wait. Let us suppose I accept all this. Where does Abdu El Yezdi fit into it? Who is he? What is this great purpose he spoke of?”

“I do not know who he is. He's as much a mystery to me as he is to you. But I know he's aware of you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he told me many times that I would one day meet you, and that I must tell you to seek out the poet, who will lead you to the truth.”

“You refer to Algernon Swinburne?”

She responded with a small shrug. “As for Abdu El Yezdi's purpose—his use of me, and now of your brother, as a means to communicate with the government and influence individuals—it is to prevent a war.”

“A war between whom?”

“Everybody. It will engulf the planet and barely a single country will escape it. He has seen it, sir. In some histories it comes sooner, in others later, but in all of them it comes, and entire generations of men are lost. Only in ours, perhaps, will it be avoided, for Abdu El Yezdi has guided us carefully.”

“Maybe so,” Burton responded grimly, “but he doesn't guide us any more. He's fallen silent.”

“I am aware of that.” She finally lowered her arm. “It is because the storm comes. The continuing deterioration of Time has made it possible for—” a tremor ran through her and she hugged herself, “—for a man to hop from one twig to another; to break through from his own version of existence into ours. You saw the lights that turned night into day. They marked his arrival. He is in our world, and Abdu El Yezdi must remain hidden from him.”

“This man is the storm? Who is he? What does he want?”

The seer shook her head wordlessly.

“Then where is he? How can I locate him?”

Countess Sabina's lips stretched against her teeth. She rocked back and forth. When she answered, her voice was hoarse and quavered. “If I reach out my mind to search, he will find me. Others have attempted it. They sensed his arrival and tried to contact him. They died.”

Burton remembered the newspaper headlines—the twelve dead mediums.

“But Abdu El Yezdi has made me stronger than most,” she went on. “And you are you, so I shall try.”

“Wait! ‘You are you'—what do you mean by that? What is my significance in this affair?”

She didn't answer. Her eyes rolled up into her head until only the whites showed. She rocked in silence and two minutes passed.

Burton sat and watched. His thoughts ran over one another. What she'd told him was more incredible even than a tale from
A Thousand Nights and a Night
, yet, somehow, he found himself totally convinced of its truth.

Countess Sabina jerked in her seat. Her head snapped back then fell forward, revealing that her eyeballs had become utterly black. She smiled wickedly and said in a deep, oily, and unpleasant manner, “Well! This is a surprise! Hallo, Burton. How perfectly splendid to see you again. You look considerably younger. So you're consulting with a genuine medium? Good chap! She's a powerful one, too. Most gratifying.”

The explorer gaped. Plainly, whoever was now addressing him, it was not the countess. He couldn't credit that her throat was even capable of producing such a voice, for it sounded as if hundreds of people were speaking the same words, in exactly the same tone, and in perfect unison.

“Who are—are—” he stammered. “El Yezdi?”

“I don't know the name,” the other chorused. “You don't recognise me, then? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. We met in Africa, my friend, under rather taxing circumstances, and I gave you my word it would not be our last encounter. I've travelled far to keep that promise. Regretfully, for you, it will not be a happy reunion. I feel obliged to prove myself, you see, so where before you witnessed my failure, this time the reverse must be true.”

“We've met?” Burton interrupted. “Where in Africa? When? Who are you? What failure?”

The countess emitted a nasty chuckle. “Do you play chess, Burton?”

“I have done.”

“Are you good?”

“Adequate.”

“Then brush up your game. I'm counted an excellent player, and as such, I'll not forecast my moves other than to tell you this: I intend to break your spirit and drive you to your knees. For certain, it would be better to kill you outright, but I possess too much respect for you to do that. I don't want you dead. I admire you too much. You could even call it hero worship. Perhaps that explains my desire to have you, above all others, as one of my pawns. I'm afraid it's a fault of mine to demean the things I love the most. But we are what we are—and I am the Beast, Perdurabo; he who will endure to the end.”

The countess threw back her head and let loose a peal of laughter.

Flatly, Burton said, “I'm reminded of a pantomime I visited in childhood.”

The laughter stopped. The countess regarded him.

“Oh, bugger it!” she said. “I do it every time. I don't know when to stop, Burton. Always, I stray into the melodramatic and end up looking like an ass. Let us say
au revoir
before I embarrass myself any further. I have the royal charter. I'm on my way. We shall meet soon. Say goodbye to the countess.”

Before Burton could respond, Countess Sabina's eyes snapped back to normal and her head suddenly swivelled around until he was looking at the back of it. With the neck creasing and crunching horribly, the revolution continued through a complete circle, and the countess's face swung back into view. Dead, she slumped forward onto the table and slid loosely to the floor.

The next day, Burton took the atmospheric railway from London to Yorkshire, and was then driven by horse-drawn carriage to Fryston Hall. Monckton Milnes greeted his friend's unexpected arrival with surprise and delight, which quickly turned to shock when the explorer conveyed the news of Countess Sabina's death. Indeed, Monckton Milnes was so deeply affected that, for hours, he could barely speak.

Burton distracted him with an account of the prognosticator's revelations, which sent both men rummaging through Fryston's library, piling Monckton Milnes's collection of esoterica onto tables and leafing through every book and pamphlet in search of information pertaining to the evocation of spirits.

“I'm now of the opinion,” Burton stated, “that what we call magic is, at root, nothing less than a science of communication between multiple realities, but I do not believe it's been well understood by its practitioners, and I think the truth of it is buried beneath an enormous heap of extraneous claptrap. We need to dig it out. If we can secure the working principles, perhaps we can employ them in such a manner as to discover where this Perdurabo has come from.”

Monckton Milnes, moving toward a table with a stack of books held precariously between his hands and chin, said, “We might begin with the premise that, through ceremonial actions, rhetorical exhortations, and a deep concentration upon the symbolic meaning of magic squares, one can literally will into existence a channel between alternate histories. That, after all, is what Oliphant appears to have done.”

“Quite so. But did he do it independently, or does such a feat require simultaneous rituals in both realities?”

Setting down the books, Monckton Milnes divided the tottering pile into two stable ones, then took up a volume and waved it at Burton. “And how can we account for this?
De occulta philosophia
by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Published in 1533. If history didn't bifurcate until 1840, how is it possible that so many treatises about magic date from centuries earlier, before there were any realities other than the original?”

Burton, who was sitting Turkish-style on the floor with open books arranged in a circle around him, dug his knuckles into his lower back and stretched, massaging the muscles to either side of his spine. He groaned, got to his feet, and said, “I wonder—on how many occasions have you experienced what you might call a turning point in your life and felt it was predestined?” He stepped over to the fireplace and leaned with his shoulder blades against the mantle, pulling a cheroot from his pocket and lighting it.

“Many a time,” Monckton Milnes replied. “Back in 'twenty-seven, when I entered Trinity College, my falling in with Tennyson and his cronies propelled me into literary circles in a manner that felt utterly precipitous yet strangely appropriate. In 1840, Abdu El Yezdi's exhortation, via the countess, that I should finance Disraeli's opposition to Palmerston, had about it a whiff of the preordained, too.”

Burton blew smoke into the room's already polluted atmosphere. “I've also had such moments. Being posted to India was one. Meeting Isabel. Berbera. As a matter of fact, I feel I'm at such a juncture right now, what with this king's agent business and all.”

Monckton Milnes plonked himself into an armchair. “Your point?”

“That perhaps Time isn't the unidirectional phenomenon we take it for. What if there exists, within any given history, certain moments—in the lives of individuals, of nations, of the world as a whole—that possess such potency they send out ripples in all directions? Thus, hints of a significant future event can be sensed long before it occurs, so when it finally happens, it feels as though it was always meant to be.”

“How does that relate to magic?”

“What bigger moment in Time can there be than the breaking of its mechanism? Surely the ripples caused by the bifurcation of history have echoed far into the past, as well as into the future. I don't consider it inconceivable that Agrippa and John Dee and Edward Kelley and all the others who've presented their theories of magic were engaged not with what was then a feasible science, but with the foreshadowing of one that would, long after their deaths, become viable.”

Monckton Milnes grappled with the concept, scratched his head, grunted, and murmured, “Sideways, too.”

“Pardon?”

“Those ripples. If they extend backward and forward through time, then maybe they go sideways, too, into the alternate histories. The war the countess spoke of—you said she claimed it occurs in all versions of reality. I'm wondering whether it originates in one—perhaps the original—and the rest suffer as they are battered by the—the—”

“The resonance,” Burton offered.

“Yes! Resonance! Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge!”

Burton frowned. “What?”

Monckton Milnes slapped the arm of his chair enthusiastically. “When an army marches over a bridge, it breaks step so as not to establish a rhythm that'll resonate through the structure and cause it to swing—potentially to such a degree that it'll collapse. Wind blowing at the right speed and angle can have a similarly disastrous effect. Brunel built dampeners into the Clifton Suspension Bridge to prevent such a phenomenon. Don't you see?”

“See what?”

“That Abdu El Yezdi is attempting the same! He's been manipulating people and events in order to dampen the resonance. He must know the causes of the war in the other histories and, in this one, just as the countess claimed, he's been trying to change them. He's making our version of history break step!”

Burton considered for a moment before answering. “In which case, I think we can discard entirely the idea that there exists an Afterlife, for it seems far more likely to me that El Yezdi is a visitor from the future.”

Monckton Milnes emitted a whistle and shook his head. Sotto voce, he quoted Plato: “How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?”