Chapter 1: The Rain on Wykeham Road

The rain did not fall so much as it assembled, gathering in the hollows of the cart-track and turning the clay to a slick, brown grease. Tom Ashwick stood at the mouth of the loading bay, the fluorescent hum of the warehouse at his back, and watched the last of the evening shift cycle past him on their battered bicycles. He had a clipboard in his hand, a half-eaten sandwich in his coat pocket, and a headache that had been drilling into his skull since Tuesday.

Then the light failed. Not dimmed—failed. The sodium glow of the yard lamps, the distant glitter of the motorway, the steady orange smear of the city to the south: all of it blinked out like a snuffed candle. In its place came a raw, earthy darkness, and the smell of wet straw and horse dung and woodsmoke.

Tom dropped the clipboard. It landed on something that squelched.

He took a step forward, out of the bay, and his steel-capped boot sank into mud. Not the hard, packed gravel of the yard. Mud. Deep, clinging, stinking mud. He looked up. The sky was not the grey sodium-washed ceiling of an English autumn. It was black, vast, and pricked with a thousand stars he had never seen from within the glow of a city. A wind moved through the dark, carrying the sound of a dog barking—a raw, frantic sound—and beyond it, the slow creak of a cart wheel.

The warehouse stood behind him. His warehouse. The one he managed, the one with the corrugated roof and the fire-safety certificates and the forty-year lease. It was still there, but it was wrong. The walls were the same, the loading-bay door gaped identically, but the ground beneath it was churned earth, and the tarmac apron had become a ribbon of mud bordered by hedgerows that had not existed ten minutes ago.

“Fuck,” Tom said, with feeling. The word vanished into the dark, swallowed by the vastness of the night. No one replied. No one was there. The shift had gone. The bicycles were gone. The city was gone.

He walked back into the bay, his heart thudding against his ribs with a rhythm he recognised from the night his wife had left him. That same hollow, sliding sensation. That same sense that the floor had been pulled out from under him, and he was falling, and falling, and falling.

Inside, the warehouse was a cathedral of ordinary things. Pallet racks stacked with shrink-wrapped crates. A forklift, silent and useless. Boxes of turnip seed from a Danish agri-co-op. Steel ploughshares, galvanised, gleaming. Forty cases of willow-bark tincture, bound for a health-food distributor in Reading. A dozen leather-bound veterinary manuals—a special order from a collector in York, or so the paperwork claimed. And, in the far corner, a pallet of high-nitrate fertiliser that he’d never got around to logging.

Tom stood in the middle of it all, the cold air raising goosebumps on his arms, and tried to think. He was a logistics man. He had spent twenty years solving problems of flow, of storage, of delivery. This was a problem of flow. He had been delivered somewhere. The where was unclear. The how was irrelevant. The next step was the same as it always was: assess the inventory.

He took a deep breath. The air inside the warehouse smelled of plastic and dust and, faintly, of the rain that had followed him in. He walked to the nearest rack and ran his hand along a crate. Turnip seed. Good. He moved to the ploughshares. Steel, gleaming. Good. The tinctures—he uncapped one, sniffed it. Salicylic acid. Willow bark. The precursor to aspirin. Good.

He was halfway through the veterinary manuals when he heard the voice outside.

“Ho, there! In the name of the Virgin, what devil’s craft is this?”

Tom froze. The voice was male, gruff, and spoke with an accent he had only ever heard in films—a burred, rolling, archaic English that made his spine prickle.

He walked to the doorway and looked out. A man stood in the rain, twenty feet away, holding a lantern. He was short, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a rough woollen cloak that streamed water. His face was lined, weathered, and his eyes were wide with a fear that Tom understood completely. Behind him, a cart had halted on the track, its wheels sunk in mud, and a thin horse stood with its head bowed, steam rising from its flanks.

“I asked you a question,” the man said, his voice trembling. “What manner of place is this? Are you a sorcerer?”

Tom raised his hands, palms out. A gesture of peace. He had read the history books. He knew what happened to sorcerers in the fourteenth century, if that was indeed where he was. The thought was absurd, impossible, and yet the rain was real, and the mud was real, and the man’s fear was real.

“I’m not a sorcerer,” Tom said, his voice steadier than he felt. “I’m a… steward. A warehouse manager. My name is Tom Ashwick.”

The man’s eyes flicked to the glowing mouth of the loading bay, to the strange, flat light within. “A steward of what? This… this great barn of light? There is no such barn in Wykeham. I have walked these roads for forty years.”

“Wykeham?” Tom repeated. The name meant nothing to him. “Where is that?”

The man stared at him, then laughed—a short, bitter sound. “You stand on the manor road of Wykeham, in the county of Hampshire, in the kingdom of England, under the good grace of King Edward the Third. And you ask me where you are?” He shook his head. “Either you are a fool or a devil, and I am not sure which is worse.”

Tom’s mind was a blank, white sheet. King Edward the Third. His history was rusty, but he knew the dates. Edward III had reigned from 1327 to 1377. The Black Death had struck in 1348. The Hundred Years’ War had been raging. He thought of the crates of turnip seed, the steel ploughshares, the willow-bark tinctures, and a cold, terrible clarity settled over him.

He had not been lost. He had been delivered.

“I’m not a devil,” Tom said quietly. “And I’m not a fool. I’m a man with… goods. Useful goods. And I need to know the year.”

The man’s face contorted with suspicion. “The year of our Lord, thirteen hundred and forty-eight, and the harvest is rotting in the fields, and the sickness is coming. The sickness that they say comes from the east, carried on the wind, and it kills a man in a day.” He took a step back. “If you have brought it with you, in your devil’s barn, then I will burn it to the ground myself.”

Tom looked at the man—the fear in his eyes, the trembling hands, the thin horse steaming in the rain—and made a decision. He was a logistics man. He knew how to move goods, how to allocate resources, how to keep a supply chain alive. And he knew, with a certainty that surprised him, that his warehouse was no longer a business. It was an arsenal. And the war was not in France.

It was here, on this rain-slicked road, in the year of our Lord 1348.

“The sickness,” Tom said slowly, “is not in my barn. But I have medicine that might help. And seed that might feed. And steel that might plough.” He took a step forward, into the rain. “Take me to your reeve. Let me prove it.”

The man stared at him for a long moment. Then he spat into the mud.

“The reeve is Baldric,” he said. “And he will hang you from the oak if you lie to him.”

Tom nodded. “I’m not lying.”

The rain continued to fall, relentless, as the man turned and gestured with his lantern toward the track. Tom followed, his boots squelching in the mud, and behind him the warehouse glowed like a beacon in the dark. He did not look back. He was afraid that if he looked back, he would see it gone.