The vegetation was so dense that there was no easy path through it. Large, unlikely insects moved about in its shade, clinging to the underside of bedspread-sized leaves, or camouflaged against the trunks of plants like green spears. He did not care to venture in there amongst those horrors, but was hungry again, and certainly didn’t want to be down near the shore collecting shellfish.

‘Curse you,’ he muttered.

Tacitus removed, from the sack he had made from his tattered cloak a jug he had found on one of those past seashores and drank water collected from another age. Looking around, he noted how dank everything seemed inside the jungle, while at the upper edge of the beach extended a drift of bleached wood and other dried-out organic matter, including piles of triple-ribbed carapaces. Warily eyeing the shoreline, he collected some of these and, using a flint spearhead he had taken from some primitive who had been sent against him and tinder he had collected from a place as dry and hot as his native land in summer, he began the laborious process of striking sparks from his sword to ignite a fire. When it was going he piled on a log, from underneath which scuttled large horrible sealice with scorpion forelimbs, then turned back towards the jungle in search of food. Spotting a horrible insect the size of a flattened chicken, he pinned it with his gladius to one of the spear trees, then roasted it over the fire, before devouring its fragrant prawn-flavoured flesh. Later, having partially denuded the nearby jungle of similar creatures, he lay down and slept in bright sunlight, surrounded by the carnage of his meal. And dreamed of vengeance.

After carving the herrerasaur he had roasted with the microwave setting on his carbine, Tack tentatively ate a piece.

‘Chicken,’ he said.

‘Chicken’s grandad about a billon times removed,’ Saphothere replied.

Tack wiped his knife on fallen needles and rejoined the traveller.

‘What happened?’ Saphothere asked without raising his head.

‘From what point?’ Tack asked.

Saphothere now looked up. ‘My memory is completely blank from the moment we embarked until I came to and saw you fighting our dinner there.’

‘The interspace adjacent to Sauros was… rough. The second attack came earlier than Goron or his people supposed, and we went straight into torbeast incursion surfaces, displacement fields and spillover from the occasional tactical being employed. We came out of it here with actual momentum. The mantisal bounced a couple of times and came to rest against this tree. I got you out and the mantisal returned to interspace—on its second try.’

Saphothere nodded, then held up his injured arm enquiringly.

Tack went on, ‘I checked you over thoroughly. Besides vorpal draining you had suffered a broken arm—both bones—and some cracked ribs, and your heart had stopped. I used adrenalin and a discharger to get things going again and made some necessary repairs.’

‘You saved my life,’ observed Saphothere. ‘Yet your programming probably gave you a choice—you could have just gone on and left me.’

‘It seemed the right thing to do.’ Tack sat, staring at the fire and feeling uncomfortable. ‘I need you to take me as far back in time as possible by mantisal, so I can conserve my energies for the fight that follows.’ But his words fell on deaf ears, for when he looked up again, he saw that Saphothere was fast asleep.

Saphothere needed five days of rest before attempting to summon the mantisal again, and it was a relief when it appeared intact. The two surviving herrerasaurs, which had been lurking around the encampment all the time and twice had to be driven off, were left to dispute the ripe remains of their kin, and the bones the two men had stripped of meat. Interspace no longer seemed as dangerous as it had done, but Tack sensed in it a weird difference, like some presence. He gazed out at the grey void overlying midnight—the nearest interpretation his customary senses could put upon the view—and noted the terminus of the wormhole, looking like a distant sliver of silver inserted at what might be called the horizon. But whatever was bothering Tack wasn’t there.

‘Look to the interface,’ suggested Saphothere.

Tack peered at the black surface of the pseudo sea. Then, with that ability to distort perception he had acquired by riding the mantisal, he looked harder. There at first, infinitely deep, he observed a great tree like some vast water plant. Focusing on it was like trying to discern the final edge of a Mandelbrot pattern. Leviathan heads of tissue consisted of feeding mouths and wormish tangles of endless necks, surfaces of skin curved away into nether spaces. Thicker branches were at once serpentine torsos and the interior glimpses of bottomless intestines. Organs layered over and within each other like mountain ranges. And when at last Tack felt he was gaining some focus, some perspective, it all tumbled away and he realized he was seeing only that fraction of it his mind could interpret.

‘It’s quiescent at the moment,’ Saphothere explained. ‘Though “moment” is stretching the word—like us all it exists in its own time, and that time might bear no relation to any other.’

‘The torbeast,’ Tack stated.

‘Yeah,’ said Saphothere.

‘What are you going to do about this creature when Cowl is dead?’ Tack asked.

‘That is a question we have yet to answer,’ Saphothere replied, closing his eyes and truncating the conversation. Some hours later, personal time, the mantisal brought them down on a drizzly mountainside overlooking an endless sea of foliage. Wordlessly, Saphothere activated his tent. It self-erected into a ground-hugging dome a metre high and two metres wide—the entrance to the dome being an elasticated thing like an anus. It closed tightly behind him when he crawled inside.

Tack walked down into Carboniferous forest, armed with his newly acquired knowledge of the flora and fauna, in search of food. When he returned with a metre-long newt slung over one shoulder and a bag of cycad fruits like spherical red pineapples, he found Saphothere was fast asleep in the tent. Tack sat gazing out at the ancient forest and considered all he had now come to understand, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being lied to.

Perhaps that was just natural paranoia arising because he didn’t understand everything. He could see that, before Pedagogue’s education of him, he would have been suspicious about things that he now understood perfectly. The length of this recent jump was a case in point. To reach this forest they had crossed a hundred and fifty million years whereas, before, half that distance had crucified Saphothere. Now Tack knew that, prior to their first violent meeting in twentieth-century Essex, Saphothere had been hunting down Umbrathane for a long time, and draining himself—and his mantisal—down to the limit continuously. Five days sitting on his butt in the Triassic had been the most rest he’d enjoyed in five years. And stuffing dinosaur meat, roast nuts and some sort of root like Jerusalem artichoke into his face had increased his physical bulk noticeably. Also Saphothere explained that the energy detritus from the torbeast’s attack on Sauros had, once the danger passed, provided a rich feeding ground for the mantisal. But, no, it wasn’t apparent inconsistencies like that. It was the simple idea of himself being the most effective assassin the Heliothane could send against Cowl. Yes, he understood how they could not get through without a tor but, surely, with their technology there had to be another way…

‘Admiring the view?’ Saphothere asked from behind him.

Tack turned and nodded as the traveller left his tent.

Saphothere went on, ‘Fossil fuels, that’s all it becomes. And your profligate society burnt it all up by fuelling uncontained growth without making any serious effort to get out of the container.’