Curse the Dawn
Page 5

I shifted a couple feet to the right, expecting to leave the cuffs behind. I’d pulled a similar trick once before and it had worked great. But this time, the cuffs traveled right along with me. Agnes demurely rearranged her skirts as I tried again. My body moved another couple feet to the left, but my hands remained as tightly bound as before.
“What the hell?”
“Magical handcuffs,” she murmured.
“Get them off!”
“I thought you didn’t need my help.”
From the powder room, we heard the sound of angry voices and the clash of steel on steel. “You may need mine,” I pointed out.
She sighed. “Some days I really hate my job.”
I managed to get to my feet, but having my hands bound threw my balance off. I fell onto the steps, bounced off and ended up on my abused butt. “I hate mine all the time,” I said bitterly.
“Okay, you’re a Pythia.”
“We go through all that, and you believe me because I have a bad attitude?”
She started working on the cuffs. “That and the fact that the Guild can’t do spatial shifts.”
“So why did you attack me?”
“Because you aren’t supposed to be here! This isn’t even supposed to be possible!”
“Maybe the power thinks I need training, too,” I pointed out.
“The power doesn’t think. It isn’t sentient. It follows a strict group of rules, such as those built into any spell. One of which is that you can’t interfere in a mission that has nothing to do with you!”
“I’m not interfering,” I said crossly. “I just wanted to talk! You’re the one who—”
“And in case you didn’t get the memo, we’re the good guys!” she added furiously, cutting me off. “We don’t go around changing time!”
“Never?” I asked skeptically. Because if Agnes hadn’t broken that rule, I wouldn’t be alive.
“Oh, God.” She threw up her hands. “Here we go again. Every initiate starts out thinking she can save the world.”
“Can’t you? You’re Pythia. You can do anything you want.”
She laughed. “Oh, you are new.” She tugged on the cuffs. “Damn.”
“What?”
“They’re stuck.”
“What do you mean stuck?”
“I mean, they won’t open,” she said patiently.
I pulled on them until it felt like my wrists might pop off. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. I don’t design these things. I just use them.”
“What kind of dumb-ass philosophy is that?!”
“You drive a car, don’t you? Do you know how that works?”
“The general principle, yes!”
“Well, I understand the general principle here, but for some reason they aren’t releasing.” She worked on them for another minute until things suddenly went silent in the next room.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Do I need to explain the difference between clairvoyant and mind reader?” She gave up on the cuffs and dragged me to my feet, almost dislocating a shoulder in the process. “I still don’t trust you,” she said flatly. “But if you help me with those two, I’ll give you a hint.”
“A hint about what?”
“What did you come here to ask?”
“I need a little more than that!”
“Tough.”
We glared at each other for a few seconds, until I sighed and gave in. A hint wasn’t what I was after, but it was better than I had now. And it didn’t look like I was going to get anything else. “Fine.”
We stared into the doorway together but didn’t see much. The lamp appeared to have gone out, and the sounds of fighting had stopped. That probably wasn’t a good thing.
Without warning, Agnes took off across the darkened room. I followed the best I could, but running through pitch blackness with bound arms and a sore butt is even harder than it sounds, and there were obstacles everywhere. Agnes somehow managed to avoid them, but I tripped over some firewood and plowed into a support column, scraping my cheek and stubbing my toe in the process.
I lost sight of her while trying to right myself and then almost ran right past her. A hand reached out from behind another column and dragged me over. “I think I lost a toe,” I gasped, waves of pain radiating up my leg.
“Shut up! They’re in a small room over there!” She gestured in the direction of the slightly-less-dark pouring out of an open doorway. “The mage doesn’t have a gun, but Fawkes might, so no heroics.” She paused for a minute. “Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.”
I glared, but she didn’t see it, having already started moving. I caught up with her and we burst into the small room together. The mage was sitting on a barrel holding an old-fashioned matchlock gun. His cuffs had come off nicely, I noticed jealously. They were on the floor, along with a sword and the lantern. Fawkes was standing alongside the wall and showed no surprise at seeing us; in fact, he didn’t appear to notice that we were there. Spelled.
I saw all that in the split second before Agnes shot the mage. The bullets would have taken him right between the eyes if he hadn’t been using shields. As it was, they just seemed to piss him off.
“I’d prefer you didn’t do that,” he said testily when she stopped.
“You can’t remain shielded forever,” she shot back. “And that gun only has one bullet.”
“But which of you gets it?” he sneered.
Agnes changed tactics. “What’s the plan, genius? Because you can blow this place up, but it won’t do any good. Parliament doesn’t meet until tomorrow morning. And at midnight, a party of the king’s men are going to show up and spoil your fun. That’s why Fawkes failed, remember?”
“But when they show up this time, they’ll be met with a few surprises.” He nodded at a line of little vials laid out on another barrel. They were the kind mages used in combat, and most of the spells they contained were lethal.
“I thought you people were against war,” I said, mainly to give Agnes time to figure something out. I had nothing.
“There’s going to be a civil war in about fifty years in any case. We’re merely speeding up the timetable—and building a better world in the process.”
“A better world that may not have you in it! If you start a war now, it could kill off your ancestors or alter the world in ways that guarantee they never meet. You could be committing suicide!”
“Not if I stay in this time.”
“You’d stay here?” I asked incredulously.
“Unlike you, I risked my life to get here!” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Of course I’m staying!”
Agnes glanced at me. “Stop trying to reason with this joker. Go ahead and do it.”
“Do what?”
“Stop time. I’d take care of it, but I can’t pull that trick twice in a row. It takes too much energy.”
I fidgeted. “Uh, Agnes?”
“Your bad luck to get the mission with two Pythias!” she said with a smirk. The mage began to look a little worried.
I felt the muscles knot around my spine again. Of course, that may have been from the cuffs. “Um, there’s . . . sort of a problem.”
“What problem? You’ve done it before, right?” she demanded.
“Well, yeah. But it all happened sort of fast, and I’m not sure exactly—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know how!”
She was glaring at me, so I glared right back. “Hello! No training, remember? That’s why I’m here!”
“That’s why you’re useless!” she yelled, poking me in the shoulder with the gun. Her expression was pretty fierce, but her head was doing some weird wobbly thing, like her neck was broken. I stared at her for a heartbeat before realizing that she was nodding at the mage’s little vial collection. Oh, great.
She poked me again, this time in the stomach, and it hurt. I stumbled away from her, moving a few steps farther into the room. “Oh, so what? I can’t perform on cue so you’re going to shoot me? Is that how this works?”
“Maybe I will,” she said furiously. “A Pythia who can’t do anything is no help to anyone. The people in your time would probably thank me.”
She had no idea. I retreated a few more steps, almost within arm’s reach of the vials. “You can’t kill a Pythia or her designated heir, or the power won’t go to you,” I reminded her. “Even I know that much!”
“News flash, kiddo,” she said, aiming for my head. “I already have it!”
Agnes let off a round and I screamed and ducked, only half acting the terror thing. I lurched into the barrel, tipping it over and scattering vials everywhere. The mage cursed and leveled his gun at me, but Agnes picked up Fawkes’ fallen sword and chucked it at him. He instinctively ducked and fell backward off his seat.
I dropped to the floor, trying to feel around behind me with tightly bound hands. My fingers touched two small vials and I grabbed them. I couldn’t see them, but it didn’t matter; I wouldn’t have known what they were anyway. I stared over my shoulder and, as soon as the mage popped his head up, I flipped them at him.
The first burst against his shields in a scattering of dry orange powder and didn’t appear to have any effect. But the second, a blue liquid, bit a chunk out of his shields. I started looking for more of those while Agnes kept alternating gunfire with throwing things: a wooden footstool, a burnt-out torch and a dead rat all sailed past my face to go splat against the mage’s shields.
I flinched back from the rat, and then I saw it—another blue vial, nestled up against the bottom of a barrel. I crouched awkwardly, scrabbling around on the grimy floor, and at last my fingers closed over it. I didn’t wait for the mage to pop back up this time, just chucked it over the pile of casks.