The Doomsday Code

with. If it was true, if both John and Richard were converging on Nottingham, then presumably Locke was hoping to get an audience with Richard — and then what? Try to steal Richard’s cardan grille? Or offer to share the Grail’s secrets with him?

It occurred to Liam that that would be the worst possible outcome. Someone as mad and as powerful as Richard … privy to whatever revelations, prophecies might be hidden in the Grail?

I really have to get out of here. I have to get back to Nottingham. More than anything, he wanted to find both Bob and Becks and return home to 2001. All of the things that Locke had told him about the future he needed to share with Maddy and Sal. Particularly Maddy. She would make more sense of it than he ever could. She’d have a far better idea of what they needed to do next.

He wondered what Bob was doing right now. Whether the support unit had yet found out about the ambush and was in the middle of Sherwood Forest already searching for him … or whether he was waiting in Nottingham Castle, still expecting him to return.

What about Becks? Where’s she? With John?

If she was, then presumably she’d also be able to make the rendezvous if John was travelling north to Nottingham. He had a horrible feeling both support units were going to turn up in that field in a week’s time without him and go home, leaving him here as Locke’s prisoner.

Locke nodded at Liam and beckoned him over as the gathered men dispersed to the various morning tasks: foraging for food and firewood, boiling up a meagre pottage for breakfast.

‘Liam,’ said Locke, ‘come inside and have some breakfast with me.’

He ducked down through the entrance and followed Locke and the robot inside, back into the stuffy smoky gloom of Locke’s humble shack. Locke sat down on his bench; the robot hunkered down by his side like a loyal dog.

‘You heard?’

Liam nodded. ‘I heard what you said just now.’

‘Apparently the streets of Nottingham are buzzing with the news. The people favour John. They see Richard for what he is — an absentee ruler who’s ruined the country.’

‘Mr Locke, can I ask … do you have this Grail here? Is it somewhere in this camp?’

Locke eyed him cautiously. ‘That’s for me to know and you to mind your own business.’

‘What do you intend to do with it?’

‘I will do whatever it takes to unlock it.’

‘You’d do a deal with Richard?’

He shrugged. ‘I would … I’d betray all those gullible morons outside if that’s what it takes.’

‘But you have no idea what’s in there. Have you considered the prophecy you’re hoping to find might just be a message from someone like me … another TimeRider?’

Locke frowned. ‘And is it? Do you know?’

‘No … I — no, I don’t know. But that’s my point — it could be anything! Surely it would be dangerous to give someone like King Richard that kind of knowledge? It could completely change the course of history — ’

‘And is that such a bad thing, Liam? From where I’m sitting — the time I come from — maybe giving King Richard a brand-new history, a new destiny, will give us an entirely different timeline and a different … better future. It certainly couldn’t be any worse.’

‘But there could be a worse, so.’

Locke shook his head. ‘What? What’s worse than an overheated, poisoned, dying Earth?’

‘I don’t know! All I do know is what we were told. That to mess with time like this, to change it, weakens the walls between us and … and Chaos.’

‘Chaos?’

Liam didn’t know enough to explain himself any better. Not for the first time he wished Foster had stayed around long enough to talk them through all the things they needed to know. ‘It’s what we travel through when we travel in time. A dimension … a place that is just … chaos. Perhaps even what some people call Hell.’

Locke’s eyes narrowed. ‘I recalled only a falling sensation.’

‘It’s more than that. Look, Mr Locke, I’ve … I think I’ve seen things, so I have … things in there.’ Liam couldn’t find any better way to say it than that. But in that milky nothingness, he’d seen them, entities swimming closer and closer to him each time he travelled. As if they were growing familiar with him. As if they sensed a regular traveller, someone who might offer them a way into the real world.

‘Mr Locke, the only thing I know for certain is you can’t just mess with time. If this Holy Grail of yours was meant to be lost in the woods and end up nothing but a myth, if that’s the history that’s meant to be, then so be it. And maybe what you want to do, and what I came back to do — to find out what’s in there … maybe that’s a big mistake. Maybe it’s best that no one finds out what’s written in there.’

‘Liam, we’ve waited since the discovery of that scroll in Jerusalem, eleven hundred years of waiting to know … I’m not going to walk away from that now.’ He shook his head almost sadly. ‘I can’t walk away from that.’

Liam was about to reply that Locke had no choice, but then the pause in conversation was suddenly filled with a crack of snapping branches and the clatter of an avalanche of dislodged dry mud from the shaking wattle- and-daub wall. Another loud crack and a ragged uneven circle of daylight appeared.

Locke’s jaw dropped. ‘What the — ?’

A round head topped with dark shaggy hair pushed through the hole. ‘Liam O’Connor?’

CHAPTER 59

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

Liam gasped. ‘Bob!’

Bob’s head turned to look at him. In a flurry of noise and showers of cascading mud, and a cloud of dust and flying splinters, he burst through the wall. Liam was wiping grit out of his face when he felt big fists grab him roughly and pull him on to his feet.

‘STOP HIM!’ he heard Locke scream in the confusion.

But suddenly they were outside in the blinding daylight. Liam grunted, the wind knocked out of his chest as Bob picked him up and flung him like a sack of cornmeal over his shoulder. He ran with heavy loping strides across the camp past wide-eyed men and boys, stunned into inaction at the sight.

‘STOP HIM!’ Locke’s voice pealed across the camp. ‘HE HAS THE SHERIFF!’

Liam’s face banged and bounced heavily against the rough chain mail draped over Bob’s chest. He managed to twist his neck enough to glance around at a world upside down: men scrambling for weapons, men scrambling out of Bob’s way. A large man with a mane of ginger hair twisted into greasy rat-tails chose to remain in Bob’s path. He held in two muscular arms a long-handled woodcutter’s axe.

‘Yield!’ he challenged. But Bob’s loping pace remained unchanged.

With a roundhouse swing he brought the axe’s blade around on a trajectory that was going to end up smashing directly into Bob’s chest … and Liam’s face.

‘Jay-zus! Bob, look ou-!’

Bob blocked the swinging axe blade with his forearm. The weapon’s blade biting deep through the chain mail. Sharp hot splinters of shattered iron rings stung Liam’s face and he screwed his eyes shut instinctively to protect them.

He felt Bob’s body lurch beneath him and heard the thud, crack and grunt of several exchanged blows landing home, then the agonized scream of someone — presumably the unfortunate ginger-haired man — suddenly cut short with the snapping of cartilage and bone.