Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“-the sombre range

Virginal, ne'er by foot of man profaned,

Where rise Nile's fountains, if such fountains be.”

–JOSÉ BASILIO DA GAMA, O URUGUAY, CANTO V

Burton and Wells drew their harvestmen to a halt at the top of an incline and turned the vehicles to face the way they'd come. Beneath the mechanised spiders' feet, poppies grew in abundance. The red flowers weaved away in an irregular line, disappearing into the hazy distance, back toward the dirty grey smudge that marked the position of Tabora.

High overhead, looking enormous even though it was flying at a very high altitude, the L.59 Zeppelin drifted closer to the city.

It was a remarkable craft—a vegetable thing, like a gargantuan pointed cigar with ruffled seams on its sides. All along this join, oval bean-like growths swelled outward, and even from afar, it was apparent that they'd been hollowed out and fitted with portholes.

A giant purple flower grew from the rear of the vessel, similar in appearance to a tulip. Its petals were opening and closing, throbbing like a pulsing heart, driving the ship through the air.

“It's magnificent,” Wells said. “And utterly horrible.”

“Horrible because we know what it's carrying,” Burton replied. “I wonder how big an area the A-Bomb will destroy? Surely the spores will drift?”

“Perhaps they're potent for only a few minutes,” Wells mused. “But even if the effects are of short duration and confined to the city, thousands of people are going to die. There simply hasn't been time for everyone to get out. Look! Those dots rising up from Tabora—that's a squadron of hornets!”

“We need a rotorship.”

“There are none. Our last was brought down more than a year ago.”

The hornets—twelve of them—raced across the shrinking distance between the city and the German vessel. As they neared the bomb carrier, they exploded one after the other and fell to the earth trailing smoke behind them.

“No!” Wells shrilled. “What the hell happened?”

“There!” Burton pointed. “See the trails of vapour curving out from the Zeppelin? The Germans must have some sort of manoeuvrable shells.”

“By heavens, Richard. Has it reached Tabora already? I can't tell.”

“Any time now,” Burton replied. “Be prepared to—”

Without warning, the sun erupted from the ground beneath the city. A blinding light blazed outward, and though Burton squeezed his eyes shut in an instant and clapped his hands over them, still he could see it. He heard Wells scream.

“Bertie, are you all right?” he yelled.

Wells groaned. “Yes. I think—I think it's passed.”

Burton, realising that his friend was right, lowered his hands and opened his eyes. Wherever he looked, he saw a ball of fire.

“The damned after-image has blinded me,” he said.

“Me too.”

They sat with hands held to faces, waiting for their retinas to recover.

A strong wind hit them.

“Shockwave!” Wells exclaimed.

“No! It's going in the wrong direction,” Burton noted, puzzled.

They looked up, blinking, vision returning.

A dense yellow mass of Destroying Angel spores was bubbling up from where the city stood—and as the two men watched, the billowing substance slowly revolved, as if around a central axis.

“The wind!” Wells said. “It's the blasted Hun weathermen! They're keeping that damned mushroom cloud in check, concentrating it in the city, preventing it from drifting!”

Burton moaned: “Quips! Poor Quips! Bismillah, Bertie! How many have just died?”

“Tens of thousands,” Wells said, and his voice was suddenly deep and oily and unpleasant. “But I am not one of them.”

Burton looked at the little war correspondent and was shocked to see that every visible part of his eyes had turned entirely black. There was a terrible menacing quality about them, and Burton couldn't tear his own away.

Wells gestured at the dying city.

“The generals are eager to locate a safe haven,” he said, “so, regrettably, the SS Britannia is rolling in an easterly direction and will soon turn south, whereas you, I see, are heading north. Why is that, Private Frank Baker? Hah! No! That won't do! That won't do at all! Let us call you by another name. Let us call you Sir—Richard—Francis—Burton.” He enunciated Burton's name slowly, emphasising each syllable, as if to drive home the point that he knew the explorer's true identity.

“Bertie?” Burton asked, uncertainly.

“Obviously not! Tell me, how did you do it?”

“How did I do what? Who are you?”

“Control the lurchers—make them open up a route through the besieging German forces?”

“Crowley?”

“Yes, yes! Now answer the question!”

“I didn't.”

“What? You didn't control them? Then who—or what—did?”

“I have no idea. What do you want, Colonel?”

“I have seven black diamonds, Sir Richard, the fragments of the South American Eye of Nāga. There is much about them I do not understand.” The black eyes glittered. The king's agent felt them penetrating his soul. “For example, you, sir, who should be three decades dead—your metaphorical fingerprints are all over them. Are they somehow responsible for transporting you from your time to mine?”

Burton didn't respond.

Wells—Crowley—regarded him silently.

The wind gusted past them.

“I shall tell you a secret, Sir Richard Francis Burton—something that, were it known by the generals aboard this ship, would prompt my immediate execution.”

“What?”

“I am in contact with Kaiser Nietzsche.”

“You're a collaborator?”

“Not in the sense you mean it. The German emperor and myself share a talent for clairvoyance. We've both detected through the diamonds that other realities exist, and that other versions of ourselves inhabit them. We want to know more. Your presence here appears to have some bearing on the matter.” Wells gave an elaborate shrug and his oleaginous voice took on a carefree airiness. “But here we are: you fleeing in one direction and me fleeing in the other. Very inconvenient! I really should do away with this Wells fellow. He acted against me. But I shall allow him to live, for I sense that he's a vital ingredient in the shape of things to come.”

“Crowley,” Burton said. “Nietzsche dropped a bomb on you.”

Wells emitted a thick chuckle. “Ah! So you doubt his commitment to me? Do not concern yourself. He gave me fair warning, and it was preordained that I would get away.”

“You knew Tabora would be destroyed? You allowed all those people to die? Your countrymen?”

“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. The end of the British Empire was long overdue. I merely bowed to the inevitable.”

“In the name of Allah, what kind of man are you?”

“Allah? Don't be ridiculous. And as for what I am, perhaps the embodiment of the Rakes, who, if I remember rightly, prospered in your age.”

“You're an abomination!”

“I'm an individual who shares with Nietzsche the desire to create a superior species of man.”

For the first time since he'd taken possession of Wells, Crowley took his eyes from Burton. He looked at the yellow cloud enveloping Tabora.

“Multiple futures,” he said. “Different histories. Maybe some of them don't end like this. I should like to visit them.” He returned his dreadful gaze to the explorer. “Perhaps we'll get it right in one of them, hey?”

He made Wells stretch and groan.

“Ho hum, Sir Richard! Ho hum! I've been here long enough. It's not comfortable. Has he told you how his leg is perpetually paining him? I don't know how he can bear it. Anyway, I'll say farewell. We shall meet again, sir; in this world or another version of it; maybe in your time, maybe in mine, maybe in another. But we shall meet again. And when we do—”

Wells smiled wickedly. The expression lingered, then the black faded from his eyes, they slipped up into his head, and he fell sideways from his saddle to the ground.

Burton hurriedly dismounted and threw himself down beside his friend.

“Bertie! Bertie!”

The war correspondent rolled onto his side and vomited. He curled into a fetal position and moaned. “He was in my head. The filth, Richard! The filth of the man! He's the Beast personified!”

“Has he gone? Is he watching us?”

“He's gone. But he's going to come after you. Wherever—whenever—you are—he's coming after you!”

Burton helped Wells to sit up. The smaller man wiped his mouth and looked at the far-off mushroom cloud, and the flying machine shrinking to the south.

“It's finished,” he said. “The Germans probably think they've won, but they're wrong. Everything is ending. This world is done for.”

Burton could think of nothing to say, except: “I'm sorry, Bertie.”

Wells stood, swayed slightly, and reached up to the stirrup of his harvestman.

“Let's get back on the trail. I want to find out where these poppies are leading us.”

They clambered back into their saddles and turned their vehicles, sending them scuttling over the savannah.

For two days, they steered their harvestmen over what, to Burton, was eerily familiar territory.

He felt detached. All the connections to this world, formed over the past five years, were unfastening. Change was coming to him, of that he was certain, but he didn't know how.

Change, or, perhaps, restoration.

The Mountains of the Moon.

His destiny lay there.

Maybe it always had.

The trail of poppies led to those peaks, that was obvious even before the snow-capped summits rose over the horizon. He saw them, jagged and white, seeming to hover in the air above the blood-red base of the mountains.

“Red!” he exclaimed. “I remember this view—but the mountains were green!”

“That might have been true in the 1860s,” Wells replied, “but the Blood Jungle has grown since then.”

They raced over the empty landscape. Where there had once been villages, there were none. Were there had once been herds of antelope and zebra, there was nothing. Where fields had been cultivated, there was now rampant undergrowth.

Increasingly, they saw lurchers. The ungainly plants were shuffling over the hills and through the valleys with an unnerving air of sentience that prompted Wells to ask: “What are the damned things up to, Richard?”

“I know what you mean,” the explorer replied. “They look purposeful, don't they? Do you remember the one that attacked us at Tanga? See how differently they move now! The mindless thrashing has been replaced by shudders and ticks, as if they're operating under some sort of restraint.”

With so much of his memory restored, Burton recognised that the lurchers were the same species of plant as the vehicles the Prussians had used back in 1863—the same but horribly different, for there were no men enfolded in their fleshy petals—which meant, if there was something still controlling them, it wasn't necessarily human.

As they drew closer to the mountains, the vegetation grew thicker and wilder. Its flowers and fruits took on a reddish hue, deepening the farther they travelled, until blood-coloured blooms and berries and globular dew-dripping swellings of indiscriminate form surrounded them. The poppies guided the steam-driven spiders straight into the humid tangle, and, astonishingly, the chaotic verdure parted in front of them to allow their passage.

Shafts of light angled through the trees. Lianas drooped and looped and dangled. The air was heavy with scent, one minute perfumed, the next pungent with the stench of maggoty meat, then delightful again. Fat bees droned lazily through it. Dragonflies and butterflies flitted hither and thither. Seeds floated past on feathery wings. And in the canopy overhead, thousands upon thousands of parakeets squawked and screeched and cackled and whistled and cursed and insulted.

Burton started to laugh and couldn't stop.

Wells, who was at that point leading the way, looked back, raised his eyebrows, and asked: “What the heck has got into you?”

“Pox!” Burton cried out. “Pox and Malady! Ye gods! How many eggs did that confounded bird lay? Hah!” He raised his face to the sky and bellowed: “Pox! Pox! Pox!” then bent forward and was suddenly wracked by violent sobs, for too many memories were returning, and he knew for sure that he was going back, and he recalled what to.

Wells reined in his harvestman until it was beside the explorer's. “What is it, man? Are you all right?”

“I can't bear it,” Burton whispered. “I can't bear it. It would be too much for any man. I have to find a way to change everything, Bertie. Everything.”

“Let's rest here,” the war correspondent suggested. “There's some grub left in one of the packs. We'll eat and grab forty winks.”

They turned off their vehicles' engines and dismounted. Beside them, a thick mass of crimson foliage suddenly rustled and parted like a pair of curtains, unveiling a short pathway to a beautiful poppy-filled glade.

“By golly! An invitation, if ever I saw one!” Wells exclaimed. “Whatever's behind your poppies obviously has power over this jungle, too!”

They walked into the open space and sat down. Wells had carried one of the panniers with him, and now opened it and pulled out a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. The two men ate.

Burton appeared lost in himself. His dark eyes were haunted, his cheeks sunken. Wells, feeling concerned, was watching him from the corner of his eye when something else caught his attention. At the edge of the clearing, a tree, heavy with large pear-shaped gourds, was moving. One of its branches, with creaks and snaps, was extending outward, into the open space. Burton, upon hearing it, turned his head and watched as the limb manoeuvred a gourd above them, then lowered it until it hung between the two men.

“A gift?” Wells asked.

Burton reached up to the red pumpkin-sized fruit. It snapped loose from the branch—which swung back out of the way—with ease, and as he lowered it, a small split opened in its top and an amber-coloured liquid sloshed out. He sniffed it, looked surprised, tasted it, and smacked his lips.

“You'll not believe this!” he said, took a swig, and passed the gourd to the war correspondent.

Wells tried it.

“It's—it's—it's brandy!”

They drank, they ate, they were insulted by parakeets.

Night came. They slept.

At dawn, the two men returned to their vehicles and continued along the trail of poppies.

“Either I'm riding a giant steam-powered spider through a benevolent living jungle with a man from the past,” Wells pondered, “or I'm dreaming.”

“Or stark staring mad,” Burton added.

At noon, they came to a steep incline, bracketed on either side by tall pointed outcrops of blueish rock. Burton stopped his harvestman and peered through the branches at the mountains that towered ahead of them. He slid down from his saddle, bent, and examined the ground. The slope was comprised of shale bound together by a network of threadlike roots.

“This is it, Bertie.”

“What?”

“This is the path that leads to the Temple of the Eye.”

“Then onward and upward, I say!”

Burton remounted and steered his vehicle up the incline and into the mouth of a narrow crevasse. Thickly knotted vines grew against the rocky walls to either side and the ground was deep in mulch, from which poppies and other flowers grew in profusion.

As the walls rose and the shadows deepened, swarms of fireflies appeared, bathing the two travellers in a weird fluctuating glow.

They'd travelled for about a mile through this when the harvestmen passed a small mound of rocks—quite obviously a grave—and Burton, remembering who was buried there, was stricken with misery.

They went on, through thick foliage that parted as they approached, under hanging lianas that rose to allow them passage, over tangled roots that burrowed into the mulch so as not to trip the big machines.

And even in this place, so sheltered from the sunlight, parakeets ran riot through the vegetation, enthusiastically delivering their insults, which, as Wells noted, were invariably in English, despite that they were deep in the heart of German East Africa.

On, up, and the fissure opened onto a broad forested summit. Through the thick canopy, the men glimpsed distant snow-topped mountain peaks chopping at the sky.

“The Blood Jungle covers the whole range,” Wells noted, “and has been gradually expanding beyond it for the past couple of decades.”

The terrain angled downward, and the trail of poppies eventually led them into the mouth of a second crevasse, this one narrower and deeper than the previous. As they entered it, the verdure closed around them like a tunnel. Strange vermillion fruits hung from its branches, spherical and glowing with a ghostly radiance.

“I've never seen anything like it,” Wells muttered. “I have the distinct impression that this is all one single plant. I feel as if we're inside a gigantic living thing.”

Now the parakeets became less numerous, and a deep hush settled over them, broken only by the quiet chugging of the vehicles' steam engines and the buzzing of insects.

“We're being watched,” Burton announced.

“What? By whom? Where?”

Burton pointed to a gap in the leaves up to his right. Wells squinted into the gloom and saw, vaguely illuminated by the red light, a naked man squatting on a branch. His skin was black and looked reptilian. There was a bow in his hands.

“Chwezi,” Burton said. “The Children of the Eye. They won't harm us.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I'm sure, Bertie.”

They spotted more of the silent, motionless observers as they drove on, deeper and deeper into the gorge.

All of a sudden, there was daylight.

They'd emerged into a wide natural amphitheatre. Sunshine filtered through leaves and branches and slanted across such an unruly mass of vegetation that both men cried out in wonder. Branches and leaves and creepers and vines and lianas and stalks and stems and fruits and flowers were all jumbled together, all red, all climbing the surrounding cliffs, carpeting the ground, and drooping from overhead.

A colossal trunk rose from the centre of it all, dividing high above them into many limbs from which big fleshy leaves grew, and among which bizarre vermillion flowers blossomed. One of the branches was moving down toward them, with much groaning and screeching as its wood bent and stretched. It manoeuvred a giant flower, a thing with spiny teeth in its petals and odd bladder-like protuberances at its base, until it hung just in front of Burton.

The bladders inflated. The petals curled open to reveal a tightly closed bud-like knot. The bladders contracted. Air blew from between the lips of the bud making a high-pitched squeal, like a child's balloon being deflated. The lips moved and shaped the squeal into words.

The plant spoke.

“My hat, Richard! You took your giddy time! What the blazes have you been up to?”

From the deep indigo of the African sky, a thin line descended.

It wobbled and wavered through the hot compressed air, arcing down into the crevasse.

Sidi Bombay shouted, “Spear!” an instant before it emerged from the heat haze and thudded into his chest, knocking him backward. He sat on the rocky ground, looked at the vibrating shaft, looked at the sky, then looked at Burton.

“Wow!” he said. “Mr. Burton, please send a message to my fourth wife. Tell her—”

He fell backward and the shaft swung up into a vertical position.

Blood gurgled out of his mouth. His eyes reflected the azure heavens and glazed over.

“Ambuscade!” Burton bellowed. “Take cover!”

The Englishmen dropped their packs and dived into the shadow of an overhanging rock. Spears rained down, clacking against the rocky ground.

From behind a boulder, Burton peered up at the opposite lip of the gorge. Figures were silhouetted there. A spear thwacked against the stone inches from his face. He ducked back.

Spencer was beside him. “Are you all right, Herbert?” Burton asked.

“Yus, Boss.”

“William!” the explorer shouted. “Are you fit?”

“As a fiddle! But I'd feel a lot better if our bloody rifles worked!” came the response from behind an outcrop some hundred and eighty feet away.

“Algy?” Burton called.

Swinburne—who'd thrown himself behind a rock off to Burton's right—leaped back into the open. He looked up and waved his arms like a lunatic.

“Hi!” he hollered at the shadowy figures overhead. “Hi there! You Prussians! Why don't you do us a favour and bloody well bugger off out of here?”

His voice bounced off the high walls. Spears descended and clattered around him.

“Algy!” Burton yelled. “Get under cover, you addle-brained dolt!”

Swinburne walked casually over to Burton and joined him behind the boulder.

“I'm trying to make them throw more of the bally things,” he said. “They don't have an infinite supply.”

“Actually, that's not too bad an idea,” Burton muttered, “but poorly executed. Try to remember the difference between fearless and foolhardy.”

He examined the rock-strewn fissure. The expedition's packs lay scattered, with multiple spear shafts rising out of them.

“There's not going to be much left that's usable in that lot—least of all the water bottles!” he grumbled.

Trounce's voice echoed: “How many bloody spears have they got up there?”

“Far fewer than before!” returned Burton. “Algy had it right—the more they waste, the better.”

“Perhaps not such a waste,” Swinburne said. “They're purposely trying to keep us pinned down, which suggests to me that some of them have gone on ahead.”

Burton called: “William! Can you make it over here?”

“Watch me!” came the response.

Trounce leaped into view and sprinted across the intervening space, weaving from side to side as spears started to rain around him. He swept up three of the packs as he passed them, dragging them along, then, batting a falling shaft aside, hit the ground and slid into shelter in a cloud of dust.

“Phew! Am I in one piece?”

“Not a single perforation as far as I can see. How do you fancy a little bit more of that?”

The Scotland Yard man handed over the packs for Swinburne to check. “I don't much. My legs are still afire with damned sores. What's the plan?”

“We'll dart from cover to cover and keep moving. Don't so much as pause for breath in the open or you'll end up a pincushion!”

“Right you are.”

The king's agent looked over at Sidi Bombay's body. Another death. Another friend lost. Another part of his world ripped out of him.

He wondered how much more of it he could take.

There was no option but to leave the African where he lay. Perhaps there'd be an opportunity to bury him later, if animals didn't get to the corpse first.

Trounce watched Swinburne reorganising the contents of the three bags, fitting it all into one pack. “What do we have?” he asked.

“Not a lot!” the poet replied. “One intact water bottle, a dented sextant, Herbert's key, an oil lamp, a box of lucifers, the field glasses from the Orpheus, and a small stock of food that looks as if it's been trampled by a herd of elephants.”

“What took a hundred and twenty men to carry at the start of the expedition now takes one!” Burton muttered. “Throw away the sextant, and let's get on with it.”

He took the bag, slung it over his shoulder, and pointed at fallen rocks farther up and to either side of the faint trail that wound through the middle of the crevasse. “William, you leg it to the base of the cliff, there. Algy, you dive beneath the overhang, there. And Herbert, you make for that boulder, there. I'm going to try for the rock at the bend in the trail—do you see it? From there, I'll survey the next stretch and call instructions to you. All ready? Good. Get set! Go!”

The three men—and one clockwork device—burst out of cover and dashed toward the locations the explorer had indicated. Spears started to fall, their points shattering as they landed.

Swinburne dived into cover first.

Burton was next, though his allotted position was farthest away.

Trounce stumbled when a rebounding shaft cracked painfully against the side of his face but made it without any more serious injury.

Herbert Spencer fared less well. Hampered by his damaged leg, his run was more of a fast shuffle, and three spears hit him. The first bounced from his shoulder with a loud chime.

“Ow! Bleedin' heck!” he piped

The second ploughed a furrow down his back.

“Aagh! They've got me!”

The third sliced through his left ankle, leaving his foot dragging behind him, attached by a single thin cable.

“Cripes! That's agony!” he hooted, falling into the shadow of the large boulder Burton had assigned to him.

“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” he said, and, reaching down, he tore the foot off completely and held it up so the others could see it. “Look at this!” he cried. “Me bloomin' foot's been chopped off!”

“Can you still walk, Herbert?” Burton called.

“Yus, after a fashion. But that ain't the point, is it?”

“What is the point?” Swinburne asked from his nearby position.

“That me bleedin' foot's come off, lad!”

“I'm sure Brunel will have you polished and repaired in no time at all after we get back to Blighty,” Swinburne responded. “There's no need to worry.”

“You're still missin' the point. Me foot's come off. It hurts!”

Burton, who'd identified points of cover among the rocks ahead, shouted instructions back to them.

They ran.

Herbert Spencer hobbled along, scraping his stump over the hard ground. A spear clunked into his hip and stuck there.

“Yow!” he cried. He yanked it out and threw it aside.

Another clanged off his head.

“Bloody hell! Bloody hell!”

He reached the sidewall, where it bulged outward, and collapsed into its shadow. He lay there, groaning.

“Herbert,” Swinburne called. “For the umpteenth time: it's all in your mind! You can't feel pain!”

“Ready for more dodging?” Burton called.

“Wait a moment!” Trounce shouted. A spear tip had scooped a furrow across his thigh and blood was flowing freely. He tore off one of his shirtsleeves and used it to bind the wound. “All set!”

Another mad dash, more spears—but far fewer this time—and they reached the space beneath a leaning slab without further injury.

“They must have stolen every spear from every village they pillaged,” Swinburne noted. “Either that or they have a portable pointy-stick factory with them.”

A wailing scream suddenly echoed and a body thumped into the gorge near to where they squatted. It was a white man, blond-haired and blue-eyed and dead. An arrow, striped red and black, was sticking out of his chest.

Shouts and screams sounded from above.

“They're being attacked!” Burton exclaimed.

“Who by?” Swinburne asked.

“Let's not dally to ponder that! Come on!”

They dashed out of their hiding place—the king's agent giving support to Trounce, and Swinburne to Spencer—and hurried along the cleft, leaving the embattled Prussians behind.

After they'd traversed perhaps two miles, the ground angled steeply upward. It was tough going.

Burton's stomach rumbled. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose.

He tried to remember what it felt like to sit in his old saddlebag armchair by the fire in his study.

“We're gettin' close, Boss,” Spencer announced. “I can feel the Eye's presence.”

The group struggled on through the fissure. By mid-afternoon, its walls had opened out and they emerged onto a low summit. The temperature plummeted, and suddenly they were shivering. The low mountains and hills they'd trekked through humped away to the rear; to either side, a long ridge zigzagged away to rising snow-covered peaks, which jaggedly heaped into the distance; and ahead, a long slope of crumpled strata plunged steeply downward and was split by a second shadowy crevasse.

Footing became precarious now; the ground was very uneven, with patches of loose slate-like rock that slipped from beneath their feet and rattled away down the incline.

They reached the fracture in the mountain's side and entered it. Darkness closed around them. Sheer rock faces soared up to the left and right, reaching such a height that the sky was reduced to nothing but a thin line of serrated blue.

They stopped for a moment while Burton rummaged in the pack for the oil lamp. Its glass was broken but it was functional. He struck a lucifer, put it to the wick, and moved on, illuminating the cracks and irregularities in their path.

“That's rummy!” Swinburne muttered. “No echoes!”

It was true: their footsteps and voices, the knocks and scrapes of displaced stones—every sound was sucked into an overwhelming silence.

The eerie atmosphere increased as the party moved ever deeper into the gloom.

“If Speke went on ahead while the Prussians tried to stick us with spears, then surely we must be hot on his heels by now,” Trounce whispered.

Burton clenched his jaw and fists.

After a while, they found themselves catching swift movements from the corners of their eyes—indistinct things flitting through the shadows—but when they looked, there was nothing to see.

The thread of sky was so far away that the darkness was almost complete. Burton raised his lamp. It illuminated men, naked but for loincloths and necklaces of human finger bones, standing dark and motionless against the cliffs to either side. Their faces were scored by networks of scars, making their skin resemble the segmented hide of reptiles; they were holding bows fitted with red-and-black-striped arrows, and their eyes were fixed on Herbert Spencer.

“How many?” Swinburne hissed.

“Hard to tell. A lot,” Burton replied. “Chwezi. It was obviously they who attacked the Prussians.”

“Look at the way they're all a-gogglin' at me,” Spencer said.

“I'm not surprised,” Swinburne responded. “With all those dents and scratches, you're quite a sight!”

“Thank you, lad. But it ain't that. I reckons they can feel the diamonds what's in me head.”

“They're closing in to the rear,” Trounce warned.

The others looked back and saw a number of the Chwezi slowly moving toward them.

“But they've left the way ahead open,” Swinburne observed. “Seems to me like they're here to escort us. Or do I mean herd us?”

“To the Eye?” Burton asked.

“It's in this direction, Boss,” Spencer confirmed. “The emanations are very strong now.”

“Then I suggest we allow ourselves to be guided.”

The king's agent continued on along the narrow path, and Swinburne, Trounce, and Spencer trailed after him. The Chwezi stood in eerie silence, not moving until the Britishers had passed, then falling in behind.

Untouched by the sun, the mountain air grew increasingly frigid, and the men's breath clouded in front of their faces. Snow, piled at the sides of the crevasse, reflected the light of Burton's lamp, stark white in the black shadows, and ice glittered on the walls.

“This fault line,” Swinburne said, “we climbed up through it on the other side of the mountain, and now we're descending through it on this. It's as if the whole peak has been split down its centre. What unimaginable energy must have caused that?”

“Not volcanic,” Burton mumbled, distractedly. “This is metamorphic rock. You can see from the angle of the strata how subterranean pressures have pushed it upward.” He frowned and looked up at the thin strip of blue sky high overhead. “You're right, though, Algy. There are very powerful geological forces at work here!”

Half a mile farther on, the chasm suddenly opened out to form a broad, bowl-shaped arena into which the sun shone, warming the air dramatically.

“Look!” Trounce said softly, and pointed ahead.

Across the space, the high wall was cut through as the great crack in the mountain's side continued, the mouth of it blocked by more of the silent Chwezi. Burton glanced about. He and his companions were surrounded.

“There's a cave,” Spencer announced. He pointed to the right, at a gap in the ranks of encircling warriors, where a shadow in the rock concealed a blacker patch of darkness.

“Bombay said the temple was underground and accessible through a cave. I suppose that's it,” Burton said. “And our escort obviously wants us to go down there.”

He moved warily to the opening and extended his lamp into it, illuminating a deep hollow at the back of which he saw a narrow opening.

“Come on,” he called, and ushered the others in with a wave of his hand. They filed past and he followed, stepping through the aperture in the rear wall while watching to see if the Chwezi were going to come in after them. They didn't.

He turned and saw a smooth rocky passage.

“Wait,” he instructed. His friends stopped and he squeezed past them until he was in point position.

They moved on, following the irregular tunnel. It descended, bending to the right and to the left.

There were no sounds of pursuit.

After a while, the detective became aware of something peculiar. He ordered a halt and blew out his lamp's flame. By degrees, a faint bluish luminescence became apparent.

“What's that?” came Swinburne's whisper.

“Some sort of phosphorescent fungus or lichen, by the looks of it. Let's proceed without the lamp. Our eyes will adjust.”

Gingerly, measuring every step as the passage inclined more steeply, they inched onward. As they did so, the glowing fungus became more prevalent until, a few yards farther on, it covered the walls entirely, lighting the way with a weird, otherworldly radiance.

The crooked corridor veered sharply to the left and plunged downward at a severe angle. They struggled to maintain their footing, slipping and stumbling until they were moving faster than they could help. Almost running, they plunged down and out onto the level floor of a fantastical chamber—a large domed grotto—so filled with ambient blue light that its every feature stood out in sharp focus.

They gasped, astonished at the spectacle.

Stalagmites, ranging from tiny to huge, rose from the floor, stretching toward stalactites of similar proportions, which hung from the high roof. Many of them had met and melded together to form massive asymmetrical pillars, giving the chamber the appearance of a gigantic organic cathedral.

Veins of glittering quartz were embedded in the walls, and serrated clumps of the crystal rose from the floor. On the far side of the chamber, a small fountain of clear water tinkled as it bubbled up from its underground source, spreading into a pool, roughly oval in shape and about twenty feet across at its widest point. Draining from it, a narrow stream had cut a channel through the stone floor to the centre of the cavern, where the kidney-shaped forty-foot-wide mouth of a sinkhole opened in the floor. The stream plunged into the darkness of this cavity, disappearing back into the depths of the Earth.

A number of tall wooden posts with roughly spherical masses stuck at their tops stood around the hole.

At the base of the walls, mushrooms—probably white but appearing pale blue in the light—stood clustered in groups; mushrooms of wildly exaggerated proportions, many of them more than twelve feet tall.

Trounce gasped: “Somebody pinch me!”

“Incredible!” Swinburne spluttered. “If an emissary of the fairy nation stepped forward and, on behalf of his monarch, welcomed us to his kingdom, I wouldn't be a bit surprised!”

They moved farther into the grotto and peered into the well. Trounce picked up a rock and dropped it in. They waited, expecting to hear a crack or splash echoing up from the darkness. Neither came.

“A bottomless pit,” the Scotland Yard man muttered.

The men stepped over to the pool. Burton knelt and lifted a handful of water to his lips.

“Wonderfully pure,” he said. “Thank heavens!”

They slaked their thirst.

“Boss,” Spencer said.

Burton looked at the philosopher and saw that he was pointing at the nearest of the upright poles. The king's agent examined it and let out a gasp of horror.

The lump at its top was a desiccated human head. Though wrinkled and shrunken, it was unmistakably that of a European.

There were seven poles and seven heads. Burton examined them all. He recognised one. It was Henry Morton Stanley.

“These others must be the five men who travelled with him,” he said. “Which leaves one extra.”

A harsh voice rang out: “Ja, mein Freund! It is the head of poor James Grant!”

They whirled around.

Count Zeppelin stepped into view from behind a thick stalagmite. He was a tall and portly man with a completely bald head and a big white walrus moustache. His hands were gripped tightly around the neck of a second individual. It was John Hanning Speke. The vicious-looking claws at the end of Zeppelin's fingers were pressing against, but not yet piercing, the skin of the Britisher's throat.

“Es ist sehr gut!” said the count enthusiastically. “We have reached the end of our journey at last!”

“You bastard!” Swinburne hissed. “You've the blood of Tom Bendyshe and Shyamji Bhatti on your hands!”

“I do not know those people,” Zeppelin answered. “And I do not care.”

Burton whispered to Spencer: “Herbert, if you can make your revolver work, now is the time. On my command, draw it and shoot him.”

“Rightio, Boss.”

“And what is the death of one man,” Zeppelin was saying, “or two, or even a hundred, when we—how do you say it, Herr Burton?—wenn wir mit der Welt spielen?”

“When we are gambling with the world. I would say the death of one man might make all the difference, Count Zeppelin. Hello, John. Your erstwhile ally seems to have you at a disadvantage.”

Bedraggled and skinny to the point of emaciation, with his beard grown almost to his waist, Speke's pale-blue right eye was wide with fear. The left was a glass lens—part of the brass clockwork apparatus that had been grafted to his head, replacing the left hemisphere of his brain. It was a prototype constructed by Charles Babbage, designed to process the electrical fields stored in two fragments of the Cambodian Eye of Nāga. Those diamonds had been stolen before the scientist could properly experiment with them, so he'd passed the device over to a cabal of Technologists and Rakes, and they'd fitted it to Speke in order to gain control of him. Later, Babbage had constructed a much more sophisticated version of the device, and that now sat in Herbert Spencer's head, along with all seven of the Cambodian stones.

“Dick!” Speke gasped. “It wasn't me! It wasn't me! I didn't do any of it!”

“I know, John. You've been the greatest victim of them all.”

“Please! We have to get out of here! They'll come for us!”

Zeppelin grinned. “He believes there are monsters in this place.”

“I see only one,” Swinburne snarled, stepping forward with his fists raised.

“Remain where you are, kleiner Mann,” Zeppelin growled.

Burton said, “Let's not waste any more time. Now, Herbert.”

The clockwork philosopher drew his revolver, aimed it at Zeppelin's head, and did nothing.

Burton sighed. He turned to William Trounce and asked, in an exasperated tone, “Have you noticed how he winds down at the most inconvenient of times?”

“I have!” the Yard man grumbled.

Count Zeppelin laughed nastily. “Your clockwork toy has become a statue. Sehr gut! Now, let us get to business. I want your little assistant to go around the rock behind me. He will find there a pack, and in it some lengths of rope. Have him fetch them, if you please.”

“Up yours, you murdering git!” Swinburne spat.

“It would be more convenient for me to keep the lieutenant alive for a while longer, Herr Burton, but I am prepared to inject him with venom now, if necessary. It will cause him to transform in a most painful fashion. He is your enemy, ja? But he was once your friend. Are you prepared to watch him die?”

The count applied pressure to Speke's neck. The Englishman started to choke.

“Stop!” Burton barked. “Algy, fetch the ropes.”

“But, Richard—”

“Just do it, please.”

Swinburne hesitated, then stamped past Zeppelin and his captive, found the pack, retrieved the coils of rope, and returned to his former position.

“Don't—” Speke began, but was cut off and shaken hard.

“You will be quiet!” the count said. He looked at Trounce and demanded: “You there! Who are you?”

Trounce scowled. “I'm Detective Inspector William Trounce of Scotland Yard.”

“Ha-ha! A policeman in Africa! Most amusing! You will kneel down and the little man will bind your wrists.”

“I'll not kneel for you!”

“You are of no consequence to me, Detective Inspector. If you allow yourself to be tied, I give you my word that I will leave you here alive. Perhaps you will manage to free yourself and make your way out of this cavern, ja? But if you resist, I shall most certainly kill you like a dog.” Zeppelin transferred his attention to Burton. “Do not doubt that I can defeat all three of you, Herr Burton!” He took his right hand from Speke's neck, held it up, and flexed his fingers. His claws gleamed in the phosphorescent light. “It takes but one scratch!”

“William,” Burton said, quietly. “Do as he says, please.”

Trounce looked shocked. “We can overpower him!” he hissed.

“The risk is too great. As he says: one scratch. I would prefer to keep you alive while this affair plays itself out.”

“Kneel with your back to me, Herr Policeman. I wish to see that the rope is made tight.”

Trounce slowly obeyed, his face livid with anger.

Burton said: “Go ahead, Algy.”

The poet, whose eyes were also blazing with fury, squatted behind Trounce and began to tie his wrists.

“Nein! Nein!” Zeppelin shouted. “Das ist ein slipknot! Ich bin kein Narr! Do not try to deceive me! Do it properly!”

Swinburne cursed under his breath and started again.

When he'd finished, the count ordered the poet to rejoin Burton. He then dragged Speke forward, still holding him by the neck with just his left hand, and inspected the handiwork.

“Das ist besser!” he exclaimed.

He pulled a revolver from his belt and pointed it at the back of Trounce's neck.

“No!” Swinburne shrieked.

Burton looked on, his face mask-like.

Zeppelin noticed the explorer's expression and grinned at him. “You think perhaps that my pistol is useless, ja?”

He received no response.

“You are wrong, Herr Burton. Observe!”

The Prussian sliced the weapon upward into the bony side of Speke's head. The lieutenant slumped, and the count let him slip senselessly to the ground.

“Effective, do you not think?”

Zeppelin reversed the weapon and held it in his left hand like a club. He stepped closer to Trounce, pressed his knee between the detective's shoulder blades, and, with his right hand, reached down over the Yard man's face. He curled his fingers under the bearded chin and levered Trounce's head back until his spine was agonisingly arched and the Prussian's claws were pressed dangerously into the skin of his neck.

“Now, Herr Burton, you too will kneel and your assistant will tie you. If you do not do this, I will break this man's back.”

“You gave your word!” Swinburne shrilled.

“I gave my word that I would leave him here alive. I did not say anything about the condition of his spine.”

“Damn the man!” Burton muttered. He knelt, facing away from Zeppelin.

“As before, little assistant. None of your tricks!”

Swinburne bent over Burton and began to bind his wrists.

“What's the plan, then, Richard?” he whispered eagerly.

“I was hoping you'd tell me, Algy.”

“Be quiet!” Zeppelin commanded.

Swinburne finished the job and stood back.

The count released Trounce. “Das war einfach!” he said. “It is more convenient to kill a man when he is on his knees, nein?”

He raised the revolver over Trounce, still holding it like a club, looked at Swinburne, and asked, “Do you wish to say goodbye to your friends?”

The poet's mouth fell open.

“Your word, Zeppelin!” Burton yelled.

The count laughed. “Who heard it except the men who will die here today? I will leave this place, by myself, with the Eye of Nāga in my hand and my honour intact! I will be a hero to the Germanic people!”

He swung the pistol up and back.

Swinburne let loose a scream of rage and flung himself forward. The Prussian turned and swiped at him, but the poet, with astonishing speed, ducked and rolled through Zeppelin's widespread legs. Snatching up a lump of quartz, he bounded to his feet and threw it with all his might into the side of his opponent's head.

Zeppelin staggered and groaned. He turned and hit out, blindly. Swinburne was already scampering clear and scooping up a fist-sized stone. He threw it and it cracked off the bigger man's kneecap, causing him to scream with pain.

“Bravo, lad!” Trounce cheered.

“Your aim is improving, Algy!” Burton called.

“I was trying to hit his nose!”

“Oh!”

“Come here!” Zeppelin roared, hopping on one leg.

“Not bloody likely!” Swinburne answered. Maintaining his distance, he picked up more crystals and rocks and started pelting the count with them.

“Gott im Himmel!” Zeppelin cried out. He backed away, coming perilously close to the lip of the sinkhole.

“Send him over the edge, lad!” Trounce urged.

In desperation, the Prussian hurled his revolver at Swinburne. It flew wide of the mark.

“Ha!” the poet squealed. He aimed at Zeppelin's uninjured knee, and, putting all his strength behind it, launched another stone. It caught the count in the middle of his forehead. The big man groaned and sat down hard, his eyes glazing over. Blood poured down his face.

Swinburne bent and lifted a large serrated lump of amethyst, heaved it over his head, and staggered toward the Prussian, intending to crack it down onto the man's skull.

“Algy!” Burton yelled. “Stay away from him!”

His assistant, oblivious to all but revenge, ignored the command and reached his opponent's side. He swung the amethyst higher.

Zeppelin's fist lashed out and caught him in the stomach. The crystal shattered on the rocky ground as Swinburne dropped it and doubled over. The count grabbed him by the neck and dug his claws in. He pushed himself to his feet and, standing behind the poet, yanked him around to face Burton and lifted him into the air.

Swinburne's eyes bulged. His face began to turn blue. He jerked and kicked in Zeppelin's grip. Black lines of venom crawled under his skin as the talons sank in.

“Don't!” Burton screamed.

“He is very irritating to me, Herr Burton!” Zeppelin explained, shaking his victim.

Swinburne's tongue protruded. His eyes started to roll up into his head.

“Let him go!” Trounce bellowed.

“I will be certain to do so, Herr Policeman—when he is dead! But see! He has a little life left in him still! How he kicks!”

With his last vestiges of strength, the poet reached into his jacket and pulled from it Apollo's gold-tipped arrow of Eros. He jerked it upward and backward over his shoulder. The point sank into Zeppelin's right eye.

With an agonised shriek, the Prussian reeled back, teetered on the edge of the sinkhole, and plunged into it, dragging Swinburne with him.

Suddenly: silence.

Burton and Trounce knelt, staring, unable to comprehend that their companion was gone. An incalculable interval passed; perhaps a moment, maybe an hour; to the two men, it felt as though time wasn't moving at all; then John Speke moaned and shifted and everything snapped back into focus.

“I say, chaps!” came Swinburne's voice. “Culver Cliff!”

Burton loosed a bark of laughter. On a previous occasion, when his assistant had been dangling over a precipice and holding on by his fingertips, he'd referred to that youthful escapade of his, when he'd climbed Culver Cliff on the Isle of Wight. It had become a symbol of his apparent indestructibility.

“Hold on!” Burton called. He struggled to his feet, his wrists still bound behind him, paced over to the lip of the well, and knelt beside it. Swinburne was just below, hanging on to a narrow shelf with both hands. His neck was bruised purple, and blood flowed from the puncture marks in it.

“William!” Burton snapped. “Get over here, put your back to me, and untie these confounded knots. Can you hang on there for a little longer, Algy?”

“Yes, Richard. But I feel jolly peculiar.”

It was no wonder: the capillaries of the poet's face were black and appeared to be writhing beneath the skin. Small white buds were pushing through at the corners of his nose, and, even as Burton watched, leaves started to open amid his friend's long hair, like a laurel wreath.

“Hurry, William!” he hissed as he felt Trounce's fingers getting to work.

The whites of Swinburne's eyes suddenly turned green.

“I'm thirsty,” he said.

“Almost there!” Trounce grunted.

“And my arms are aching,” the poet added.

“Got it!” the Scotland Yard man announced, and Burton felt the ropes loosen. He yanked his wrists free, threw himself on his stomach, and reached down to his assistant.

“Grab hold!”

Hanging on to the ledge with just his left hand, Swinburne stretched the right up toward Burton.

“My hat!” he exclaimed and drew his hand back a little, for a bright-red flower had suddenly bloomed from the back of it. “It's—it's a poppy, Richard!”

His fingers slipped from their hold.

Swinburne dropped into darkness.

“Have you got him?” Trounce asked.

Burton didn't reply.

“Richard?”

The Yard man crawled around on his knees to face the explorer.

“Richard? Richard? Do you have him?”

The king's agent remained still, his tears dripping into the void beneath his face.

“Oh no,” Trounce whispered huskily. “Oh no.”

Burton untied Trounce.

John Speke stirred and sat up.

“Dick,” he groaned. “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for everything.” He touched the babbage embedded in his skull. “It was this damned thing. Every time I wound it up, it forced decisions upon me. I've been like an opium addict with it. Unable to stop!”

“But now?” Burton asked, dully. He felt remote. Disengaged. Broken.

“It was all about coming here,” Speke responded. “The wretched thing was designed to make me fetch the black diamond for the Technologist and Rake alliance. When you killed the madmen behind that scheme, the compulsion to come here remained, but I had no sponsor, so it forced me to find one.”

“The Prussian government.”

“Yes. I guided Zeppelin here, and as soon as I set foot in the place, the device, having realised its purpose, stopped working.”

An expression of sheer torment passed over his face.

“I still have the addiction, Dick. I'm on fire with the urge to wind it up again! But Babbage booby-trapped it. If I use it even once more, a timing mechanism will activate and it will explode!”

Herbert Spencer broke his pose and stepped forward. He spoke in an uncharacteristically precise voice: “The man you refer to was rather precious about his contraptions, wasn't he? I understand he booby-trapped them all to prevent others from discovering the secret of their construction.” He aimed his pistol at the king's agent. “This revolver will operate perfectly well while it's in my grasp, Sir Richard. Don't you think it rather regrettable that destructive forces must so often be employed to achieve one's ends?”

Burton gasped and clutched at Trounce's arm for support.

Spencer made a piping noise that may have been a chuckle. “Pretending to have lost motive energy is by no means an original trick but it is an effective one. As you can see, I have power in my mainspring.”

“What—what are you playing at, Herbert?” Burton stammered. “Why didn't you help us?”

“The song must be sung in the proper manner.”

“Song? What are you talking about?”

“The Song of the Nāga. Let us not stand here discussing it. A demonstration will be far more effective. If you would all please step over to that outcrop of blue crystal—” The brass man gestured with his revolver toward the wall of the cavern where a tall formation of amethyst hunched up from the floor. They moved to it. There was a low opening in the wall behind, a space big enough for a man to crawl into.

Spencer said, “Go in first, please, Mr. Speke; then you, William; and you last, Sir Richard.”

One by one, they entered what proved to be little more than a winding tube. Patches of phosphorescence illuminated its length.

Burton fought to quell his rising panic. He had an irrational fear of enclosed spaces. The passage into the grotto had been bad enough, but this was far worse.

As they inched along, flat on their stomachs, the clockwork man explained: “The fact of the matter is that I'm not Herbert Spencer and never have been. When he died in close proximity to the Cambodian diamonds, his mind was imprinted onto them, just as you thought, but it never had the power to motivate this mechanical body. It was I who did so, using his personality as a bridge—or a filter, if you will—through which to interact with you. Spencer is, I'm afraid to say, thoroughly suppressed. The poor man! I can feel his frustration, his eagerness to help you!”

“Then who are you?” the king's agent asked, fighting to keep his voice steady.

“I am K'k'thyima, high priest of the Nāga.”

Burton, whose mind had barely functioned since the loss of Swinburne, struggled to make sense of this revelation.

“I dreamt of you. You sounded different.”

“As I said, I employ the mind of Herbert Spencer in order to communicate. I could chin-wag more like what he bloomin' well does, if'n it'll make you feel more comfy, like.”

“I'd prefer it if you didn't.”

“A little farther, gentlemen. We're almost there.”

Moments later, the three men wormed their way out of the tunnel and got to their feet. They stood paralysed, with hearts hammering and eyes popping.

What confronted them was virtually incomprehensible.

They were standing on a ledge, hundreds of feet above the floor of a vast cavern, which was ablaze with the strange azure radiance; and if the previous vault had seemed magical, then this one appeared miraculous!

A megalithic temple rose from the centre of the massive space. Its soaring walls, spires, and columns were decorated with complex geometrical designs and friezes. The men gazed in awe at its sweeping arches and curving arcades; at the many gargoyles and representations of lions and oxen and other, extinct, animals; and at the thick round central tower that rose to the distant ceiling and merged with it.

The entire temple complex—for there were many outbuildings squatting around the base of the edifice—was hewn from solid rock, and for many minutes, Burton, Trounce, and Speke stood silent and confounded, wondering what manner of tools had been employed to achieve this eighth—and foremost!—wonder of the world.

As the brass man scraped out of the tunnel behind them, Speke whispered, “I never knew! I never got this far! Both times, when I reached the grotto, the things came and dragged me out of it.”

“Then when did you see the Eye?” Burton asked.

“I didn't. Not physically. But I had a clear vision of it.”

“What? All this we've been through began with nothing but a vision?”

“I planted it in Mr. Speke's mind,” K'k'thyima said.

“Things?” Trounce interrupted. “You said things dragged you out, Speke?”

“Yes. They were—they were—”

“They were the Batembuzi,” the brass figure interjected. “Long ago, they served the Nāga and had an empire that covered all of the Lake Regions, but now this—” he swept out his arm to indicate the temple, “—is their home.” He gestured to their right with his revolver. “The ledge goes down here and slopes around the wall to the floor. Follow it, please.”

They walked slowly, as necessitated by the condition of the clockwork man's left leg.

The ledge narrowed for a stretch, and they had to press themselves against the cavern wall to navigate along it.

“Allow me to tell you a little of the Nāga,” K'k'thyima said. “Long, long ago, we lived where the three Eyes had fallen: here, and in South America, and on the continent of Kumari Kandam—and though our colonies were separated, we bonded in a Great Fusion through means of the diamonds.”

“Until Brahmin Kaundinya came along,” Burton murmured.

“Ah, of course, you have studied the legend. Yes, your spy Kaundinya broke the Kumari Kandam Eye into seven fragments, causing the physical death of all the Nāga on that continent. Their essence lived on in the stones, of course, but now they were isolated, for the other two Eyes were whole, whereas theirs was shattered.”

“Your Great Fusion requires the three Eyes to be in the same state?”

“It does.”

The group was now about halfway down the path. Speke led the way, self-absorbed and tormented; Trounce followed, listening to what he considered a fairy tale; Burton was third in the line; and the clockwork man hauled himself along behind, holding his pistol aimed steadily at the back of the explorer's head.

K'k'thyima continued: “When a Nāga completes its lifespan, the Great Fusion offers the choice of true death—which many prefer—or a transcendence. Kaundinya's act of betrayal denied us all these options, and condemned us to eternity and eventual madness. Obviously, this is a situation that has to be corrected.”

“Only equivalence can lead to destruction or a final transcendence,” Burton said. “You can't put a broken diamond together again, so you have to shatter the other two stones to achieve equivalence.”

“And restore the Great Fusion, yes. Incidentally, your friend Spencer is a very determined man. He is not happy that I borrowed his personality. He tried to leave a clue for the unfortunate Mr. Swinburne in his First Principles of Philosophy. It was all I could do to stop the poet from telling you about it.”

“How did you do that?”

“I've been radiating a mesmeric influence to make you all consider me harmless and friendly.”

They reached the cavern floor, and K'k'thyima directed them along a well-worn path toward the buildings at the foot of the temple.

“So we were at an impasse. We couldn't shatter the other two Eyes while our South American and African colonies still lived, for it would have physically killed them. Nor could we stand to exist in a state of disconnection. We thus lost the will to survive in the material realm, and allowed you soft skins to hunt us to extinction.”

“But the essence of you continued to dwell in the Eyes?” Burton asked.

“Yes, and now we had to wait for your species to discover the diamonds.”

“Why?”

“So that we might use you to bring equivalence. As high priest, I was the only one of my people whose essence spanned all of the stones, and I was able to channel the mesmeric abilities of my species through any of them. I was thus able to manipulate you soft skins. Ah, look! Here come the Batembuzi!”

Up ahead, figures were slouching out of doorways and sliding out of glassless windows. A large crowd of them gathered and loped forward to meet the approaching party. They were small and ape-like, with skin of a dull-white hue, and their eyes were strange and large and greyish-red. Shaggy flaxen hair descended to their shoulders and grew down their backs, and they moved with their arms held low, sometimes resorting to all fours. Thoroughly nightmarish in aspect, they proved too much for Speke. With a wail of terror, he threw himself backward.

“Hold him!” K'k'thyima ordered.

Burton and Trounce grabbed the lieutenant. He fought them, emitting animalistic whines of fear.

“They aren't going to harm you!” the priest said. “They'll just escort us into the temple,”

Speke finally quietened down when the hideous troglodytes, rather than attacking, simply fell into position beside the group.

As they entered among the squat buildings, the brass man instructed the Britishers to walk straight ahead to the central thoroughfare, then turn right and proceed along it. They followed his instructions and saw, some way ahead, the tall double doors of the temple entrance.

“Everything!” Burton suddenly exclaimed. “Bismillah! You orchestrated everything! You planted in Edward Oxford an irrational obsession about his ancestor so he'd travel back in time and cause all of the Eyes to be discovered! You manipulated Rasputin so you could occupy that clockwork body, commandeer Herbert Spencer's mind, and shatter the South American Eye! And you caused that damned babbage to be grafted onto Speke's brain so he'd lead me here!”

“That has been my song,” K'k'thyima confessed. “And now we shall shatter the last of the Eyes and the Nāga will be free.”

Passing blocky, unadorned buildings, they came to the foot of a broad set of steps leading up to the temple's imposing arched entrance. They ascended, and a group of Batembuzi put their shoulders to the doors and pushed. As the portals swung slowly inward, Burton asked, “But what of the fragments Oxford cut from the South American Eye for his time suit? Surely they unbalance the equivalence you seek?”

“Soon, Sir Richard, you will discover the beauty and elegance of paradox. Those shards were cut in a future where the stone was complete. I changed that future when, earlier in the same diamond's history, I broke it into seven. Thus the pieces could not be cut from it.”

“I don't understand any of this,” Trounce grumbled.

The clockwork man gave a soft hoot. “Do not be embarrassed, William. Non-linear time and multiplying histories are concepts that most soft skins struggle with. For your kind, it is virtually impossible to escape the imprisoning chains of narrative structure. We have come here to address that deficiency.”

“Oh. How comforting.”

They entered a prodigious and opulent chamber. Its floor was chequered with alternating gold and black hexagonal tiles. The walls were carved into bas reliefs, inset with thousands of precious gemstones, and the ceiling was a solid blanket of scintillating phosphorescence from which hung censers forged from precious metals and decorated with diamonds.

Oddly, though, the chamber reminded Burton and Trounce less of a temple and more of Battersea Power Station, for there were strange structures arrayed around the floor and walls; things that appeared to be half-mineral formation and half-machine, with, dominating the centre of the space, a thick floor-to-ceiling column made up of alternating layers of crystalline and metallic materials.

Despite the abundance of precious stones on display, there was an air of abandonment about the place. As they passed through the chamber and started up a winding stairwell, Burton noted that many of the gems had fallen from their housings in the patterned walls and were lying scattered around the floor. There were cracks and crumblings in evidence everywhere, and at one point they had to step over a wide hole where the stone steps had collapsed and fallen away.

“Straight ahead, please, gentlemen.”

“My bloody legs!” Trounce groaned as they climbed higher and higher.

The stairs led up to a long, wide hall with gold-panelled double doors at its far end. Fourteen statues stood against the walls, seven to each side. They depicted Nāga, squatting on short plinths, some with one head, some with five, some with seven.

At K'k'thyima's command, the three men approached the doors. The brass man clanked past, holding his gun levelled at Burton's face, took hold of a handle with his free hand, and pulled one of the portals open far enough for the men to pass through it.

“Enter, please, gents.”

They stepped into what turned out to be a medium-sized room. It was square and the walls were panelled with oblongs of phosphorescence. The tall ceiling was shaped like an upside-down pyramid, with an enormous black diamond the size of a goose egg fitted into an ornate bracket at its tip.

“The last unbroken Eye of Nāga!” K'k'thyima announced.

A stone altar was laid out beneath the gemstone. Metal manacles were fitted to it, and there were stains on its surface that Burton didn't want to examine too closely. Gold chalices, containing heaps of black-diamond dust, stood to either side. The explorer noted nasty-looking instruments, like something one might find in a surgery, arranged on a nearby block, and there were other items around the room that, again, looked somehow more machine than architecture or decoration.

“William, Mr. Speke, if you would move over there—” K'k'thyima gestured to one side of the chamber, “—and Sir Richard, I'd be much obliged if you'd climb onto the altar and lie down.”

“Do you intend to sacrifice me, Nāga?”

The clockwork man gave his soft hooting chuckle. “Rest assured, you'll leave here alive. On you get, please, or—” he moved the pistol, aiming it at Trounce, “—or do I have to shoot William in the leg before you'll comply?”

Scowling ferociously, Burton sat on the altar, swung his legs up, and lay down. Immediately, he felt an energy, like static electricity, crawling over his skin.

With one hand, K'k'thyima closed the manacles around the explorer's wrists and ankles.

Speke, who'd been detached and withdrawn since they'd entered the temple, suddenly spoke up: “Wait! Whatever you're going to do, do it to me instead!”

“I'm afraid that wouldn't be at all satisfactory,” K'k'thyima responded. “Only this man is suitable for the task.”

Speke fell to his knees and held his hands out imploringly. “Please!”

“Quite impossible. Stand up, Mr. Speke, and be quiet. The song will not require you again until the final verse.”

“Task?” Burton asked.

K'k'thyima picked up a wicked-looking knife from among the instruments on the nearby block.

Trounce stepped forward.

“Back, William! I intend no harm to your friend! See, I'm putting down the pistol now—” he placed his revolver next to Burton's head, “—but I'll slice his throat if you come any closer.”

Trounce bit his lip and gave a curt nod. He returned to his former position.

The brass man took hold of Burton's hair and, working quickly, began to slice it off.

“You have a most remarkable mind, Sir Richard,” he said. “When you wandered into this diamond's range of influence during your first expedition, we immediately recognised that you were the soft skin we'd been waiting for.”

Burton winced as the blade scraped across his scalp.

The priest continued: “The one with an open and enquiring intellect; an observer, sufficiently separated from his own culture to be able to easily absorb the ways of others; one not disorientated by the unusual or unfamiliar.”

“Why is that of any significance?”

K'k'thyima removed the last few strands of hair from the explorer's head and said, “William, Mr. Speke, I have to perform a delicate operation now. Do not interfere. If you try anything, he'll die, and so will you. Is that understood?”

Both men nodded.

The clockwork man put down the knife and took up a small bowl. It was partially filled with a sticky paste.

“Excellent!” he exclaimed. “The Batembuzi prepared everything well!”

He dipped the bowl into a chalice, scooping black diamond dust into it, then used a small instrument to work the dust into the paste. Limping to the head of the altar, he employed the same instrument to paint an intricate hieroglyph on Burton's naked scalp.

“It is of significance, Sir Richard, because it gives you the wherewithal to remain sane while experiencing history beyond the boundaries of your natural lifespan.”

“Beyond the—” Burton began. He stopped and his eyes widened. “You surely don't intend to send me through time!”

“I intend exactly that.”

The Nāga priest finished painting, put the bowl aside, and reversed the instrument he was holding. Its other end was needle-sharp.

“This will hurt,” he said, and started to jab the point over and over into Burton's skin, working at such speed that his hand became a blur.

Burton groaned and writhed in pain.

“Time, Sir Richard. Time. Time. Time. You soft skins have such a limited sense of it. You think it's the beat of a heart, that its pulses are regular, that it marches from A to B to C. But there's much more to time than mere rhythm and sequence. There's a melody. There are refrains that arise and fade and arise again. Time can change pitch and timbre and texture. Time has harmonies. It has volume. It has accents and pauses. It has verses and choruses. Your understanding of it is tediously horizontal, but it has all these vertical aspects, too.”

William Trounce snorted. “Even if all that gobbledegook is true,” he growled, “so bloody well what?”

“Just this, Detective Inspector: when the ripples of consequence spread out from an action taken, they go in all directions, not just forward, as you soft skins would have it. All directions.”

“Ruddy nonsense!”

K'k'thyima straightened up from his task and said, “Do you happen to have a handkerchief?”

Trounce shook his head, but Speke reached into his pocket, pulled out a square of cotton, and passed it to the clockwork priest. K'k'thyima used it to wipe the blood and excess paste from the explorer's freshly etched tattoo.

“All done,” he announced. He picked up his revolver. “We shall now send our friend Sir Richard Francis Burton into the future, where he'll witness the music of time in all its glory. It is a gift from the Nāga to the race that destroyed us.”

Burton said, “Why?”

“Because you have to learn! If you don't, this world is doomed! It is in your hands now, soft skin—teach the lesson you learn today.”

“Hogwash!” Trounce spat.

“It's a terrible shame,” K'k'thyima said, “and I'm truly sorry, but, as has ever been the case, the Eye requires a sacrifice to activate it. Your essence will, however, be imprinted on the stone, if that's any consolation, William.”

He raised the pistol and shot Trounce through the head.

Burton screamed.

There was a blinding white flash.