AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You stopped time.” I’d seen her do it once before; I’d even done it myself on one memorable occasion. Of course, in my case, it had been an accident.
She eyed the suspended fireball. “What gave it away?”
I decided to ignore that and retrieved my stick. I used it to push at the burning splinters. They were radiating outward from the blast in a concentric ring, like spores off hell’s dandelion. They bent at my touch but didn’t go out or fall to the floor. I stared at them for a moment, a strange echoing vertigo in my mind when I thought about the distance between this new life and everything I’d ever known.
“Look,” Agnes said, pointing at the far wall. The mage stood pressed against the stones, caught midscream. “I told you we didn’t get him.”
As she spoke, she was starting to gather the wooden shards and bits of lit powder from the air. She looked pretty steady on her feet, but I knew from experience how much strain even a small hiccup in time could cause. “How long can you hold it?”
“Long enough if you help. And be careful—if we miss even one . . .” She didn’t have to finish the sentence.
I swatted the stray sparks like fireflies, knocking them to the ground and stomping on them before I realized that it wasn’t doing any good. Time had stopped, meaning that I could jump up and down on the damn things all I wanted, but they weren’t going to go out. I settled for gathering them into the tail of my T-shirt while Agnes dug into the barrels closest to the explosion. Flaming shards of wood had penetrated their sides, causing fire to boil up around their edges as the powder caught.
The embers I held were uncomfortably warm. I finally resorted to stripping off my T-shirt and using it as a net to trap them without burning myself. I made a dozen glowing piles in the empty outer room before I had them all. By then Agnes had dealt with the barrels, and we turned our attention to the big boy.
She poked the fireball with a stick, but it remained frozen in place, like the shadows on the ceiling and the clouds of smoke in the air. “I can handle that,” I told her, taking the stick. To my surprise, she gave in without a fight. From the little I knew of her, I guessed that meant we were running out of time. “If you want something to do, you could tell me what’s going on.”
“You really don’t know about the Guild?” she asked, watching me whack at the ball like an oversized piñata. It wasn’t elegant, but it seemed to work. The exploded cask and its attached flames slowly began to move through the air.
“I don’t know anything. That’s my problem!”
“They’re a bunch of utopians out to create a better world through time travel. Stop plagues, wars and famines before they start—that kind of thing.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” I panted as the explosion moved in fits and starts into the outer room.
“Maybe you should sign up. Except they don’t like women much. Might have something to do with the Pythias thwarting their plans for the last five hundred years. Send it up the stairs,” she added as I stopped to get my breath.
I eyed the staircase without enthusiasm. “Why? The other one exploded in here and nothing happened.”
“The other one was a lot smaller. This could bring down the ceiling on our heads.”
I sighed and started thumping the fiery thing again. “And you might want to check out their manifesto,” she continued as I battled my way upward. “Not all of us like the idea of living in a Stepford world where if we do anything the Guild doesn’t like, they go back in time and change it. Repeat offenders are to be snuffed out of existence. Couples are to be denied the right to reproduce if their child is seen as a future threat to the Guild.”
“Okay. That sounds a little less enticing,” I admitted.
“And it goes on and on. They aren’t big on free will. They don’t care that one person’s utopia is another person’s hell,” she said as we emerged into a long room.
It was covered wall to ceiling in biblical-themed murals. The light of the explosion brought the colors to life, glinting off gilt paint and causing the jewel-colored glass in the high, arched windows to shimmer. I blinked, staring around like a tourist until Agnes poked me in the back.
“That way.” She pointed at a door I hadn’t noticed. “And hurry. I can’t hold things much longer.”
I gave up hitting the cask and started pushing it instead. It had a weird, spongy feel in the center, I guess from the ignited but not-yet-burned gunpowder, which didn’t make for great leverage. But I nonetheless managed to maneuver my bomb-on-a-stick through the long, narrow room and outside. Three- and four-story buildings of stone and wood hemmed in a courtyard. Frozen smoke belched from their chimney pots, reaching pale fingers toward a leaden sky.
It was bitterly cold and the air hit my face like a wet rag. It took me a moment to realize it was raining. Sheets of water hung suspended in the air like a beaded curtain, gleaming in the light we threw off. Heavy drops dangled like cabochon diamonds from the edge of rooftops, spangled low-hanging limbs and congealed half-in, half-out of puddles. It was strangely beautiful.
“The river,” Agnes gasped, from cold or exhaustion. “That way.” She pointed toward the right, where a line of scattered trees blocked the view.
Mud squelched under my feet as I started forward. I kept my head down, but it didn’t help. Soon water ran down my forehead and dripped into my eyes, its movement the result of my own forward momentum. The rain wasn’t falling on us; we were running into it as we hurried forward, leaving a path of clear air behind us like the wake of a ship.
To make the going even tougher, there was very little light. Only a few stars were visible in the cloud-covered sky, and while we shed a glow, it didn’t extend far in any direction. Everything beyond our immediate vicinity was lost in shadow.
That was a problem because the place was a minefield of carts, wheelbarrows and junky lean-tos. I kept running into things and slipping on slick paving stones, which became worse after we left them behind for dirt. But Agnes turned to glare at me every time I slowed down, so I hurried after her.
We navigated across a more or less open area, around a rickety-looking fence and down a path to an iron railing. Below us was undoubtedly a river. I couldn’t see much, but the smell was unmistakable: a mixture of rotting fish, sewage, mold and damp.
Agnes gave me a shove. “Get rid of it!”
I looked around. A mass of dark buildings clustered along the water’s edge in either direction, just waiting to be firebombed. The only safe
