Curse the Dawn

Chapter Two

Most of the water fell on a nearby sailing ship docked for the night. But not all. I scooped fish guts out of my bra and glared at Agnes. She didn't notice, having already taken off.

"What's the rush?" I demanded, jogging to keep up.

"It'll be November fifth in another hour," she said as light erupted behind us. I looked over my shoulder to see lanterns being lit all over the ship. Sailors scrambled to the railing, staring alternately at the waves rocking them back and forth and at the mangled sushi that had splattered the deck and lay draped over the ropes.

I turned back to find that Agnes had almost disappeared up the path. I ran after her, rain slapping me in the face.

"And?"

"Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent, to blow up King and Parli'ment," she singsonged.

Something clicked. "Three-score barrels of powder below, to prove old England's overthrow." She looked surprised. "I had a British governess," I explained.

"Then you know the score. Some English Catholics want to blow up parliament and James the First along with it. They don't want a Protestant king, and they think his death will return the country to Catholicism. It might have worked, if one of the members of the plot hadn't had a relative in parliament. He received a letter warning him to skip tomorrow's session and ratted them out."

"And Fawkes was found in the cellar surrounded by the evidence hours before parliament met."

"But the Guild is here to see that this time, he succeeds."

"Why would they care about that?"

She put on a burst of speed instead of answering, probably in response to the candles appearing in windows all around us. We ran, slipping and sliding over mud and water-slick grass, until we reached the painted room. I slammed the door on a few shouts from outside and leaned against it, panting.

"They don't. It's their own history they hope to help," she said, glancing at me and grinning, the adrenaline rush sparkling in her eyes. "They were just getting started in these days. But before they could grow their numbers significantly, the Circle found out what they were up to and hunted them down, almost to a man. It took them centuries to recover. I suppose they think that a massive civil war might give the Circle more important things to worry about."

She headed down the stairs and I followed silently. By Circle she meant the Silver Circle, the world's largest magical association and an umbrella organization for thousands of covens. To most people in the supernatural community, the Circle represented order, safety and stability.

I wasn't one of those people.

That had a lot to do with the fact that the Circle was currently trying to kill me in the hopes that a more suitable Pythia would take my place. Suitable in their view, meaning someone brainwashed from childhood to believe that they could do no wrong. They'd had a few thousand years of treating the Pythias as their personal errand girls and weren't happy to have a more independent-minded type in office.

"Speaking of the Circle—" I began, before Agnes clapped a hand to my mouth. We'd reentered the outer room of the cellar, and I guess she didn't want us alerting the mage that we'd returned. Just as well. I'd gotten the impression that a little tension between the Pythia and her magical protectors was normal, but the whole I-want-you-dead thing might freak her out.

What freaked me out was the reappearance of the mage, pale and wild-eyed, exploding out of the gunpowder room at a dead run. He crashed into me and I instinctively grabbed him, getting a fist to the stomach in return. I kicked him in the knee and he yelled and reared back, fist clenched, but stopped when he felt Agnes' gun beside his ear.

"Go ahead," she told him. "The paperwork for a trial is a real bitch."

"So are you!" he snarled.

I clutched my stomach and covered him with my gun while Agnes pulled a pair of cuffs out of her coat. "I have a problem," I told her quickly, before she could shift away. "I really am Pythia, but I don't know what I'm doing and there's no one in my time who can help me."

"That's a problem," she agreed, snicking the cuffs shut.

"Yeah."

"Good luck with that." She grabbed the mage by the collar.

"Don't you dare leave!"" I said furiously. "I helped you!"

"You almost blew this place sky-high! Anyway, even if I wanted to help you, there are rules."

"Screw the rules! You stuck me with this godforsaken position—"

"I didn't hear that."

"— and now you think you can just walk away? You have a responsibility here!"

I'd been waving the gun around in my agitation, and it accidentally went off and took a chip out of a brick over the mage's head. He blinked. "Uh, ladies? Might I suggest—"

"Shut up!" we told him in unison. He shut up.

Agnes tried to shift, but I grabbed her wrist, wrenching us back at the same moment that she tried to go forward. "Are you crazy?" she screeched, only it sounded like she was talking in slow motion.

Time wobbled around us: one second, we were back where I came in, with bullets whizzing around our heads; the next we were in the future, watching a party of cloaked men in funny hats examining the ruined door. One of them caught sight of us and paled, and then we were gone, bouncing backward once more.

Agnes somehow managed to put on the brakes, wrenching us out of the time stream with what I swear was an audible pop. For a moment, we stood there, white-faced and shaking, back where we'd started but a little worse for the wear. I don't know about the others, but I felt like I'd just stepped off a roller coaster—light-headed and a little sick.

"I need to go to the bathroom," the mage said weakly.

Agnes took a deep breath and let it out, glaring at me. "You're a lousy liar. If I'd trained you, you'd have known better than to pull a stunt like that!"

"Didn't you hear me?" I demanded. "You didn't train me. That's the problem. You gave me this lousy job and then died before—"

"La-la-la. Not listening." She stuck a finger in one ear, which didn't help much as the other hand still gripped the mage's shirt.

I stared at her. My last image of Agnes was her heroic death to keep a rogue initiate from laying waste to the time line. Somewhere in my hero worship, I'd forgotten how deeply weird she could be. Of course, if I kept this job as long as she had, I might not be too normal, either. It wasn't a comforting thought.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" I asked, honestly worried that my last chance for a mentor was headed down the toilet along with her sanity.

"What's wrong with me?" She took the finger out of her ear to shake it at me. "You're not supposed to tell me these things!"

"I haven't told you that much—" I began, only to be cut off with a savage gesture.

"You've told me plenty! I have an initiate in training and she isn't you. You said I got you into this, so what happened to her? Is she dead? Did she turn dark?" Her hands waved around, banging the mage's head into the wall. "I don't know!"

"Sort of both," I said uneasily. Agnes' second heir, Myra, had turned dark and began using her time-travel abilities for her own and her allies' gain. Agnes would be forced to kill her to remove the threat to the time line but would die herself in the process. And that would leave an untrained nobody in the Pythia's position—me.

"Don't tell me that!" she whispered, clearly horrified.

"You asked."

"No! I didn't! I was explaining how much information I could get out of this meeting if I thought about it, which I'm absolutely not going to do because I may have already learned too much. What if something you say causes me to change the way I deal with the present—my present—which then alters your future? You might shift back only to find out that you don't exist anymore! Hadn't thought of that, had you?"

"No," I said, working to keep my temper under control.

"But that doesn't change the fact that I need training!"

"The early Pythias didn't have much in the way of training, but they managed to figure things out. So will you."

"Easy for you to say. You were trained. You never had to figure anything out!"

"Like hell." She put the hand not choking the mage on her hip in a familiar gesture. "No amount of training really prepares you for this job."

"But at least you know how the power works. I didn't get the manual!"

"There is no manual. If our enemies ever figured out everything we can do, they would be much more successful in opposing us. And time isn't all that easy to screw up any—"

She paused as, somewhere on the far side of the gunpowder room, a key turned in a lock. Agnes drew her gun and pushed it into the mage's temple hard enough to dent the skin. "Say one word—make one sound—and I swear. .," she whispered. He looked conflicted, ideology warring with self-preservation, but I guess the latter won because he stayed silent. Or maybe he couldn't talk with her fist knotted in his collar.

The three of us peered through the missing door and caught glimpses of fire. A dark-haired man stood at the far end of the room. He sat a lantern that looked a lot like the mage's well away from the casks, which he started shifting around. He was dressed like the mage, too, except for a long dark coat, and he had boots on. The spurs chimed softly in the quiet.

"Fawkes," Agnes whispered. She nudged the mage with the barrel of her gun. "Did you change anything?"

He stayed silent.

"Answer me!"

"That's not how it works," he said irritably. "You can't say you'll shoot me if I talk and then ask me a question!"

We froze as the man paused, looking our way but not seeing anything. It was pitch-dark at our end of the cellar. We'd left the mage's lantern behind when we took our stroll with the bomb and it must have gone out, because the only source of light came from Fawkes'. He paused, sniffing the damp air, where the acrid smell of the explosion still lingered. But after a moment, he went back to work.

"We've got to hurry this up," Agnes whispered. "Where was I?"

"You said time is hard to mess up. But hard isn't impossible. Some things can make a difference." On a recent trip through time, I'd accidentally changed one little thing, merely meeting a man a few hundred years before I was supposed to, and the results had been insane. The results had almost gotten both of us killed.

"Of course they can," she said impatiently. "That's why we're here."

"But how do I know what can safely be changed and what can't?" I asked desperately.

Agnes frowned. "What is this?" she demanded, her voice suddenly going flat and hard. It matched the icy color of her eyes. "Some kind of elaborate hoax?"

"What? No! I—"

She jerked the mage down to the level of her face. "Did you recruit a woman to try to fool me? Was that was this was all about?"

He glanced at me and then back at her. "Yeah," he said slowly. "You got me."

"I should have known! I knew the power wouldn't allow two Pythias to meet!" she hissed, and turned her gun on me.

I stared at her. "He's lying!"

"If he was lying, you wouldn't have asked me that!" she spat. "No Pythia would."

"Asked what? All I want is some help!"

"Oh, I'll help you!" she said, and lunged for me. The mage took his chance and ran into the gunpowder room while Agnes and I went down in a flail of limbs, her trying to cuff me while I attempted to get free without either of our guns going off. It wasn't easy. I swear the woman had an extra arm, because she somehow managed to hold both my wrists while a tiny fist clocked me upside the jaw.

"The mage is with Fawkes!" I gasped as another pair of cuffs clicked shut around my wrists. "They're going to set this whole place off and we're all going to die!"

"Yeah, and if I let you go, we'll die faster!"

"I'm not going to help them!"

"I know you're not. You're staying tied up here until I deal with this."

I glared at her. "I'm Pythia! I don't really need you to release me!"

She sat back on her heels, surveying me mockingly. "Okay, Pythia." She waved a hand. "Do your thing."

"Okay, I will!"

"Okay, then."

One of the few upsides of an otherwise hellish job is the ability to shift spatially as well as temporally. That's a fancy way of saying that I can pop in and out of places as well as times, something that's saved me on more than one occasion. I'd used the ability to move across continents; getting out of a pair of handcuffs was child's play.

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.

For once, my aim must have been pretty good. He screamed and shot out of the hedge of barrels like he was on fire. He sprinted past me, shedding sparks in his wake and—Oh, crap. "He's on fire!" I screamed.

Agnes tripped him up and he went sprawling just outside the door. She sat on his butt and clocked him upside the head with her gun. He collapsed like a sack of sand.

"You wanted a hint," she panted, batting out the flames on his back. "Here it is. You're clairvoyant. Use your gift."

I waited a few seconds, but she didn't say anything else. "That's it? That's your big hint?"

"What did you expect?"

"Something else! Something more! There has to be. . I don't know, some kind of trick to it!"

"You're the trick," she told me, retrieving his cuffs. "Why do you think clairvoyants are chosen as Pythias? If anyone could do it, these morons wouldn't screw things up every time they try to 'improve' things. They can't see what effect their actions will have; they have to guess. We can know."

A headache started to pound behind my eyes. I hadn't realized how much I'd been counting on Agnes to help me until this minute, when she refused. "Maybe you can know," I told her. "My gift doesn't work like that. Some days, it doesn't work at all!"

"Maybe you need to exercise it a little more. And to answer your earlier question, fiddling with the time stream usually causes more problems than it solves. Trust me on that one."

"So that's it?" I asked furiously. "That's what you have for me? Don't mess with time and trust my gift?"

"That's all you really need." Agnes dragged the mage's hands behind his back and clicked the cuffs on. Once he was secure, she looked up at me, and for the first time, her gaze held a flicker of compassion. "Your power will work with your natural ability, training it—and you—over time. Eventually, you will learn what you need to know."

"If it was that easy, you wouldn't spend decades training a successor!" I said quickly before she could shift out on me.

"I never said it was easy. Nothing about this job is. I said you will learn."

"And what if I don't last that long?!" I screamed, but Agnes was already gone.