The River of No Return Bee Ridgway (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Norman Conquest, you might meet someone from the age of Chirst, so we can talk to people from the past across a gap of roughly two thousand years.”

“And what is the window for jumping forward?”

Penture said nothing. The silence around the table was complete.

“My greeter jumped forward from Charlemagne’s empire. Ricchar Hartmut,” Nick continued.

“Yes, we still get people from a thousand years ago who jump to the twenty-first century,” Alice said. “Like Ricchar. But after the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the traveling begins to get very difficult. People make shorter jumps. People who jump from the twenty-first century . . .” She shook her head. “It gets harder and harder to jump forward, Nick. We don’t know why. Usually people make an initial jump like you or me. Several hundred years. Well beyond their natural life spans. But recently, people who jump from their natural time in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries can only make a small leap. A few decades at most. It’s very awkward; their spouses and children might still be alive. And for those of us who know how to travel in time, jumping past the twenty-first century is almost impossible. It takes incredible energy and concentration, and we have to find very specific places where we can latch on to a current that will carry us there. It’s as if there isn’t any feeling further on downriver that we can recognize. It’s as if the entire future is becoming a scar.”

“And this is new? You used to be able to go to the future more easily?”

“No, not exactly,” Marjory said. “It was always harder to jump after the twentieth century. Like the Alderwoman said, it’s scarred up in the future. Once you’re there it isn’t all that pleasant. Things are rough further along. Very rough. But we used to be able to go there. And some people were still making their initial jumps there, poor things.”

Nick watched as Alice reached her hand out to Arkady, beside her. He took her hand and stroked it. “What’s changed,” Alice said, “is that after a certain date, we cannot jump at all. It is like hitting a moving wall. No matter where we go, no matter how hard we try, we cannot penetrate past a certain date. We don’t know if the Guild exists anymore after that date. If humanity itself exists.”

“Wait—after a certain date? What date?”

Everyone turned to Ahn in his glimmering golden clothing. “Today the Pale is at the nineteenth of December, 2145,” he said.

“The Pale?”

“The barrier. The moment after which we cannot jump.”

“Today it is at the nineteenth of December? What was it yesterday?”

“The twentieth.”

“And tomorrow it will be the eighteenth,” Marjory said.

Nick looked from face to face. “What are you saying?” His voice came out a hoarse whisper.

“We are saying that the future has turned around,” Penture said. “It is pushing back, consuming the past. Day by day. Our time is getting shorter and shorter.”

Everyone was looking at Nick. Everyone’s hands were now on the table. Everyone, he noted in his rising panic, was indeed wearing a ring. He pushed back his little chair and stood up. “What the hell are you people talking about?”

“The future, Nick,” Alice said. “It is pushing the river back against itself. Against us. Like a tsunami.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Julia looked down at the three men, frozen at her whim. They were fifteen feet away or more—much further than she had thought her powers could extend. In the bedroom to the left, Clare was probably frozen in her sleep. If the effect spread up as well as out, the servants upstairs were frozen in their narrow beds. And the mice in the walls. Julia crossed her arms, hugging her ribs, feeling her breath flutter, her heart beat. It was a fearsome gift she had. To pluck herself out of time and stand alone, at the center of a great stillness.

She let time start again and watched as the three men picked up where they had left off, the one writing on his paper, Jemison and the other man looking at the door in the narrow beam of the dark lantern. Then they moved on to the next house. Julia watched for ten minutes as the lantern bobbed slowly all the way around the square, winking out for long periods as the trees blocked her view, but moving steadily on. When they got back around to the Falcott mansion, Jemison closed the shutter on his lantern, shook hands with the other two men, and waited as they walked away down Berkeley Street. When they were gone, he turned back and looked up at the façade.

Julia ducked behind a curtain, peering out again cautiously. Jemison stood with his hands on his hips, scanning the house. Then she heard a window scrape open, and something must have been tossed down, for Jemison bent and plucked an object from the dust near his feet. He held it up to show that he had found it, and it caught the light of the moon: a key. He moved away around the house, toward the side kitchen entrance.

Julia grabbed her candle, and, shielding its flame with her hand, she flew to her bedroom door and wrenched it open.

There was Clare beetling down the hall, wrapped in a dressing gown and carrying her own candle in a holder with a glass shade. She stopped when she heard Julia’s door open, then turned slowly. “Oh. Hello, Julia.”

“Hello, Clare. Are you sleep walking?”

“I’m . . . hungry. I’m going down to raid the kitchens.”

“You threw a key down to Mr. Jemison!”

“Ah. Yes. Yes, I did.” Clare frowned. “And I must go meet him in case he runs into difficulty. Go back to bed. Forget you ever saw anything.” She started off down the hall again.

“I’m coming with you.”

Clare turned, exasperated. “Go to bed!”

“No! I’m not letting you meet a man alone. Who knows what might happen?”

Clare leaned forward, holding her candle out to illuminate Julia’s face. “Who knows? You don’t. And that is