Read Online Chaos Clock by Gill Arbuthnott - Free Book Online Page B

have lived here continuously since 1348 by your reckoning. I have been John Flowerdew for eighty-two years now – the longest I have been any one person. I was born as him so that I could come to know your grandmother, Kate. We thought for a long time that Alice would turn out to be the one, but we had the generations wrong: you and David are the keys, not her.”
    “What do you mean, we’re the keys?” Kate asked incredulously.
    “From time to time certain people are born whose fate it is to aid or thwart the attempts of Chaos to destroy time. You and David are two such people. Look …”
    As he spoke, the room turned misty around them, and in the mist they saw figures, people dressed in skins, standing on the edge of a loch. Behind them, a great fire burned down to embers.
    A woman and two children moved away from the group towards the pyre and bent to pick up ash and smear it on their faces. The children were crying, the tears making streaks through the ash. Their faces were so alike it was obvious they were brother and sister; the girl about eight and the boy six or so.
    The three of them walked back to the water’s edgewhere a man and another woman waited and bent to pick up objects from the ground. One by one they threw them into the water, light glinting on the metal as they did so; axe-head, spearhead, knife-blade and lastly, the broken remnants of a sword, were all cast away by the children.
    The mist swirled more thickly and the vision faded, and they were once more in Mr Flowerdew’s study.
    “How did you do that?” asked David, wide-eyed.
    “That does not matter. It is what you saw that is important. That was the aftermath of the first great battle of the Guardians and the Lords in Edinburgh – at Duddingston Loch. The weapons you saw thrown into the loch are part of the Duddingston Hoard.”
    “But what does it have to do with us?” Kate asked, baffled.
    Mr Flowerdew held up his hand. “You are the descendants of the children you just saw: the last descendants in Scotland apart from Ben. They were the children of the man who made the weapons, the village Smith – and he died during the battle.
    “But we’re just friends. We’re not related.”
    “You are, but very distantly. You share the Smith’s children as your ancestors. The Hoard must return to the loch, and the two of you must do it; that is why you are the keys.”
    There was a moment’s silence, as they tried to digest what they had just seen and heard.
    “You said earlier aid
or
thwart. You mean we could do either?”
    “Yes. You could be the means whereby the Lordstriumph, or by which we defeat them once more. Make no mistake; both sides will seek to persuade you to help them.”
    “What if we decide not to be on anyone’s side?” asked David.
    Mr Flowerdew looked uncomfortable. “I wish I could say you would be left alone to get on with your lives, but I am afraid you are too valuable to both sides for that to happen. You are unavoidably a part of this. You cannot watch from the sidelines.” He gripped the arms of his chair hard and got to his feet. “I am sorry. I thought there would be more time before we had to call on you, but the Lords have stretched us so thinly that we can barely contain them. If there had been another one of us in Edinburgh we might have been able to hold them off without your help even yet … The echoes of the past have grown so strong since the Millennium. There were never so many minds focused on time before … and the clock in the museum draws power to it like a magnet, and has become a tool to help the Lords open the door to the past. When its time was disordered for that television programme it helped their cause even more.
    “We are already fighting as hard as we can to close the door to the past. We need your help, or it is likely that we shall be defeated.”
    Breaking the tense silence that followed, Kate spoke.
    “What happens if you win?”
    “Nothing. That is, no one would be aware