Overtime by Tom Holt Page A

Blondel said. ‘Plenty more where this is coming from. In fact, if you like, we can have the same bottle all over again.’
    â€˜No, really,’ Guy said, ‘a different bottle will do fine.’
    â€˜My agents,’ Blondel said, ‘saw at once that this new form of time travel had all sorts of possibilities. Commercial possibilities, I mean. The trouble was that if they told anybody about it, it’d be suppressed immediately; too dangerous. So they kept it to themselves. They used it for all sorts of clever financial deals, apparently. I’ve never been much of a money man myself so I don’t really understand it all, but it seems they move money about throughout the centuries.’
    â€˜Why?’
    Blondel shrugged. ‘Tax reasons.’
    â€˜Ah,’ Guy said. That, he felt, would account for it.
    â€˜What they used to do,’ Blondel said, ‘and please excuse me if I get the tenses wrong, was to take money from the future and invest it in the Second Crusade; you know, King Richard’s crusade. Well, don’t you see?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Oh. Well, I’m not a hundred per cent sure myself. But it occurs to me that if you start bringing lots of things - you know, gold coins, that sort of thing - back through time and depositing them in another century, then that’s going to make the century they end up in rather - what’s the word? - unstable. Volatile, even. You run the risk of upsetting the balance of nature, or physics, or whatever. I think that because they made rather a mess of time at about that point, they made the next bit of history go all wrong. It couldn’t happen the way it was supposed to happen, because of all these influences from the future upsetting it. On the other hand, it had already happened - because, well, it did - and as a result of it happening, history’s what it is today. Or then,’ Blondel scratched his ear, and continued. ‘Anyway, I think that because of this imbalance or instability or whatever you like to call it, the whole thing sort of blew a fuse. Since the Crusade could neither happen nor not happen, history just washed its hands of the whole thing and left a great big gap. A hole, if you like. And Richard fell into it.’
    â€˜My God.’
    â€˜Exactly,’ Blondel finished his glass of port thoughtfully. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘that’s beside the point. All I knew at the start was that my agents could take me about in time, so that’s what I did. Instead of just going all round the world, I went all round time as well, looking for the King, like I’d promised I would. And that, basically, is what I’m still doing.’
    â€˜I see.’
    Blondel lit a cigar and offered one to Guy. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘we don’t yet know how bad they are for you. After a while, I found out how to travel through time on my own, without any help from my agents, and it was about then that I started putting two and two together and wondering if perhaps Richard’s disappearance might have been their fault. Once I’d come to that conclusion, of course, I didn’t want anything more to do with them - well, you wouldn’t, would you? - so I gave them the slip and set off on my own. I set up a sort of base here where I can slip back and keep a change of clothes and so on. A sort of pied à temps. Otherwise, I’m mostly on the move, I have to be,’ Blondel added. ‘You see, they’re looking for me.’
    Guy frowned. ‘Who?’
    â€˜My agents,’ Blondel replied. ‘You see, they’ve got a contract. By the terms of it, I have to give two concerts a week for the rest of my life, and they get ninety-five per cent of the profits.’
    Guy whistled.
    â€˜Not only that,’ Blondel went on, grinning, ‘but they’ve invested millions and millions of livres in setting up concerts - gigs, they