The tribune knelt near the bed, but not too close. No one wanted to catch the dying man’s contagious disease.
“My liege, I have come for tomorrow’s watch word,” the tribune said, enunciating each word slowly so the dying man would be sure to hear.
The man on the bed opened his eyes and turned his pock-marked face to the tribune. He struggled to breathe, his voice faint as he strained to make words. “Go to the rising sun. For I am already setting.”
The dying man closed his eyes, and the tribune bowed his head and rose to his feet. He stared at the dying man for a moment, his face filled with grief. He seemed deeply affected by the other man’s impending death.
Straightening himself, the tribune nodded curtly to the two attendants and walked quickly from the room, the red curtain swaying with his departure. In the corridor outside, Gabriel could see two more legionaries standing guard at the end of a long hallway.
“It’s time,” Marcus said quietly, drawing Gabriel’s attention back to the man on the bed. He watched with a mixture of sadness and horror as the man exhaled his last breath, his chest becoming still.
“Now, Gabriel,” Ohin said, stepping closer to the bed.
Gabriel clasped his grandfather’s silver pocket watch in his hand and reached for its imprints, using it to concentrate his own magical energy. He expanded his time-sense and focused his mind on willing into existence a small bubble that gently distorted the space-time continuum around the room. The bubble held at the edges of the walls, and Gabriel could feel the space within settling slightly out of sync with the time around it. Whatever happened in the time-bubble now would be imperceptible to those outside.
On an extraction mission like this, with so much to be done with witnesses standing nearby, a space-time bubble would help the team remain unnoticed and reduce the possibility of accidentally creating a bifurcation of the Primary Continuum.
Ohin could sense the stability of the space-time bubble, and he gave Gabriel a quick nod of approval before turning to the others.
“It is safe. Quickly.”
Gabriel observed, with his magic-sense as much as his eyes, as Sema, Marcus, and Ling began the carefully orchestrated extraction procedure. Sema clouded the minds of the two attendants, who turned their faces away from the bed while Ling used Wind Magic to lift the dead man from the mattress and quickly strip him free of his robes. As the naked man floated to Marcus, a simple white sheet wrapped the body. Marcus embraced the corpse with Heart-Tree Magic, and the man slowly began to breathe again. The Replacement, looking exactly like that of the man who had been dead only moments ago, floated toward the bed.
“Someone is coming,” Teresa said from the doorway. “Three soldiers.”
Gabriel snapped his head around to stare at the doorway. There should be no soldiers arriving. From inside the space-time bubble, the world outside should appear frozen, or slowed to a near stop. Any soldiers should appear to be halted in mid-step.
If they were walking toward the room that could only mean one thing.
“Malignancy Mages,” Ohin said, turning to face the doorway.
“I’m almost done,” Ling said, magically wrapping the candidate’s robes around the Replacement. “Just need a second.”
“I can’t see who they are with their helmets on,” Teresa said, stepping back from the doorway. “They’re almost here.”
Gabriel felt her reach for the imprints of the golden bracelet on her wrist.
“Follow procedure,” Ohin said, placing himself between Gabriel and the doorway.
“Done,” Ling said as the Replacement settled beneath the covers of the bed. She turned to face the doorway as the first of the three soldiers improbably crossed the space-time bubble and entered the room.
“Now,” Ohin said, and Gabriel released the space-time bubble as he felt Ohin impose his own will on the space-time continuum.
A moment of utter darkness and a flash of brilliant light, and Gabriel stood in the forest trees below their observation outpost. The rest of the team from the room stood around him, facing the three helmeted soldiers. That was procedure. If problems arose during an extraction, retreat — and take the problems with you.
The problems stood before the team and slowly removed their helmets in unison. Gabriel was not surprised to see they were all Apollyons — duplicates of the Malignancy Mage determined to destroy the Council of Time and Magic and cross the Great Barrier of Probability that sealed the past from the future in the year 2012.
He was, however, surprised with how determined they were to kill him.
Chapter 2: Fighting to Flee
The Apollyons attacked with a unity of thought and purpose impossible for normal human beings to achieve. As duplicates, created by doubling the original Apollyon through repeatedly splitting the Primary Continuum, the men’s minds were linked throughout time. This allowed for a level of coordinated attack that even mages as experienced as the Chimera team could not hope to match. And, as fully trained True Mages, who were able to use all six magics, the duplicate Apollyons fielded a far greater range of magic than the Grace Mages assembled against them.
Gabriel strove to limit the magical power of the Apollyons by reaching out and claiming hold of all the Grace and Malignancy imprints in the surrounding land. Several battles had been fought over the town of Vindobona through the preceding centuries, and there were plentiful imprints — positive and negative — to be commanded.
Gabriel held a concatenate crystal in his pocket, as did all the members of the team. It was a precaution Councilwoman Elizabeth insisted upon when Gabriel was on missions. As he grasped the imprints flowing through the crystal and reached over his shoulder to draw the ancient, highly imbued katana from its sheath, the Apollyons began their silent attack. The attack was not quiet in the sense that no noise arose, but because the three Apollyons never uttered a word.
Gabriel simultaneously felt one of the Apollyons creating a space-time seal around the team as he sensed Ohin struggling to keep the seal from fully forming. Amber bolts of lightning erupted around Gabriel. He shielded himself against them as they formed and leapt through space.
He appeared behind the middle of the three Apollyons and stabbed his sword forward. The sword pierced nothing but air as the Apollyon disappeared. Gabriel’s space-time sense told him the Apollyon was appearing behind him. He threw himself to the ground and spun backwards, swinging the sword blade into the space he could feel the Apollyon appearing in.
The man gasped in surprise as the metal bit into his left thigh. The Apollyons on either side of Gabriel turned to attack, but he was already gone. He reappeared ten feet away and unleashed a simultaneous onslaught of magics against the three men — blasts of blue-white plasma energy from the tip of the sword, crushing gravitational forces to squeeze the men, vile curses to make their bodies collapse and their hearts stop, magic to cloud their minds and induce sleep, energies to turn their talismans and concatenate crystals to ash, and a space-time lock to hold them in place while the rest of his team attacked them with near identical assaults, matching and reinforcing their attacks with Gabriel’s. They had practiced this kind of encounter many times. They knew the battle needed to be swift and merciless.
For a moment, while he watched the three Apollyons fight to beat back the numerous magics assailed against them, Gabriel believed he and his team might be winning…that they could defeat these three Apollyons and strike a blow against the entire army of duplicates.
Then he sensed something that frightened him. He could feel, with his magic-sense, a change in the imprints the three Dark Mages drew upon for their magic.
They were no longer only accessing the imprints available through the concatenate crystals around their necks. The imprints they touched were too numerous and powerful for that. The three Apollyons drew their powers from a large pool of strategically placed twins holding negative imprints in wars and battles throughout time. Gabriel and his team would need dozens of concatenate cryst
als to even approximate to the magical power the three Apollyons linked to.
As evidence of this newfound power, all of Gabriel’s magical attacks shifted and turned back against him. He felt a space-time seal fall into place like an iron door slamming shut. The blade of his sword glowed as energy flowed into it and him. He felt gravity pushing at him from all sides, trying to collapse him into a miniature black hole. He struggled against the desire to sleep, even as pain like being dipped in lava erupted throughout his body. As he wrestled with the dark magic of the Apollyons, he saw his companions falling to the ground, felled by the overwhelming magical power loosed against them.
Gabriel knew he could not hold out long against the three Apollyons, and he was certain his team would be dead in seconds, if they were not already. With the space-time seal in place, there was nowhere to run. He grasped at all the imprints he could, clutching at the imprints of his own body from when he had sacrificed his life to save others. He focused his mind as best he could on amplifying his own magical energy as Akikane and Ohin had taught him.
It was useless. Not nearly enough time or magical power to mount a defense. He struggled to hold the three Apollyons at bay a few seconds longer. He would never know when they had concluded that killing him was preferable to capturing him, but that decision had clearly been made.
Gabriel panted from the effort of concentration, feeling his strength wane. He realized the War of Time and Magic was about to end for him, and for the team.
His team — people who had come to be more than family to him. Ohin, who had become a second father. Sema and Marcus, the aunt and uncle he had lost. Rajan and Ling, the cousins he would never see again. Teresa, the friend who might have become something more.
Gabriel stared through tear-filled eyes as his friends and teammates writhed on the ground, their faces turned so they could watch his demise moments before their own.
One face was missing. Where was Rajan?
The ground opened up beneath the three Apollyons and sucked them down, the soil undulating like the esophagus of some massive earthen beast. The magic afflicting Gabriel ceased, along with the space-time seal.
Gabriel looked upward to the tree house observation deck to see Rajan, hands outstretched, his face clenched in concentration.
In the confusion of the fight, Gabriel had forgotten Rajan had been above them in the trees. The three Apollyons had also failed to notice him. His well-timed attack might now give Gabriel the chance to do the thing he had trained for, the thing Ohin, Akikane, and even Teresa had insisted he do if ever such a situation arose — flee.
That’s what he had agreed he would do. As the Seventh True Mage, the only mage able to control imprints of both Grace and Malignancy, Gabriel was too valuable to the War of Time and Magic to risk his life saving his team members. Escaping alone, he might have a chance to elude the three Apollyons. If he tried to take the team with him, it would be easier for the Dark Mages to track his passage through time, ghost his trail, and eventually catch up with him.
Part of him, the selfish part, the part of him that didn’t want to die and would do anything to survive, wished he was the kind of person who could abandon his friends to certain death in order to save his own life. But he wasn’t that sort of person. Teresa had been right when she suggested he had lost his life the first time because he had not hesitated before diving back into the water to save his classmates in that sunken bus. It was the right thing to do, so he did it. Abandoning his friends was not the right thing to do, even if they all said it was.
The image of his last death flittered through his mind as the thought of his next death solidified. Something about that last moment underwater, drowning despite all his efforts, elicited a memory. A memory of another body of water — an ocean beside a beach. A beach he had been to thanks to a coin Councilwoman Elizabeth had given him. A coin that had been beneath the water as well as beside it.
The ephemeral thoughts began to coalesce into a single idea, one Gabriel sought to implement even before it cohered in his mind. He could feel the first pricklings of his space-time sense telling him the three Apollyons were about to teleport themselves from the deep earthen grave Rajan had created for them. With no time to explain, Gabriel gestured with the blade of the Sword of Unmaking, using a hand of invisible force to knock Rajan from his perch within the limbs of the tree house. Gabriel had no time to create a soft cushion of air for Rajan to land on. He was already turning the full power of his magical energy toward another task even as Rajan plummeted, screaming, to the ground.
Rajan would not have time to dissolve the tree house that had been their observation platform for the last week. But it could not be left standing. It was too likely to create a bifurcating branch of the Primary Continuum if discovered by a Roman soldier or Celtic villager. They could not hope to come back to destroy it at some later time as the Apollyons would surely stand guard over it, waiting to ambush them yet again. It needed to be dissolved quickly and completely.
Unfortunately, Gabriel had never dissolved a structure like this before. Like the walls of the Council’s Windsor Castle, the magic Rajan had used to fashion the platform made it both resilient and easily disintegrated. Gabriel had seen him make it, and watched him unmake a similar outpost, but it had been a process requiring minutes, not seconds, to accomplish.
To compensate for his lack of experience and the shortness of time available to him, Gabriel focused all of the magical energy at his disposal toward the task of vaporizing the entire platform in a single moment. A cloud of ash fell from the treetops revealing suddenly empty branches.
The three Apollyons appeared above ground as Gabriel put the riskiest part of his plan into action. Before the Apollyons could attack, Gabriel did as he had promised and withdrew from that time and place.
He reached into his pocket and clasped the familiar coin. It had become a good luck charm, always kept near at hand. He felt for a place along the timeline of the coin, and made his retreat.
His evacuation was not solitary, however.
As the blackness of time travel pervaded everything, it specifically engulfed his fallen teammates. When the blinding light of their concluding transit faded, the fullness of his retreat revealed all three Apollyons present, as well.
This had been intentional. He had taken them with him for a reason — because of the place he had taken them to.
Gabriel, his teammates, and the three Apollyons floated twenty feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone except Gabriel struggled, gasping for air, sucking in water against their wills. Gabriel knew the feeling, and how disorienting it could be. He also knew it would not confuse the three Apollyons for long. He had little time to work his plan.
His friends were already convulsing and sinking toward the seafloor. Gabriel saw a flash of light and felt a burning sensation along his left side, but ignored it as he swung the Sword of Unmaking toward the three Apollyons, still floating together as they grappled with their sudden immersion. He focused the considerable magical energy at his command on one single task — making the water around the three men instantly boil.
The sea surrounding the three Dark Mages exploded in a ball of roiling white steam bubbles as Gabriel concentrated again on the coin, jumping through time with his companions, first to a deserted beach, then a barren desert hillside, then an empty ship deck at night. Then he switched relics, choosing a button from the same pocket. And then switched again. He took the team through several more relics and time frames until he was certain the three Apollyons had not been able to track their trail through time.
When the white light of time travel faded for the final time, Gabriel and the team rested on a small, grassy hillside overlooking a vast savanna in southern Africa sometime in the Paleolithic age.
Gabriel collapsed to his knees in exhaustion. The whole left side of his body burned with an incredible pain, but he ignored it. There was no time to see what the source of the pain might be. He scanned the hills
ide and his teammates.
Teresa struggled to sit up, still coughing and spitting water. “Just because I was talking about how you died drowning doesn’t mean I wanted you to show me.” She gave Gabriel a weary but thankful smile.
“Show her all you want, but leave me out of it,” Ling said, shaking the water from her hair and blowing snot from her nose into her hand. She wiped it on the grass and gave Gabriel a wink.
“I seem to remember mentioning a fear of water.” Rajan took long, deep breaths to reassure himself that air, not liquid, flowed into his lungs.
“I am thankful,” Ohin said, straining to stand on his feet. “But you must learn to obey orders.”
“I’m trying the best I can,” Gabriel said, wincing at the pain in his side.
“What’s wrong?” Ohin asked, stepping closer.
“Nothing,” Gabriel said. “I’ll be fine.”
Sema, kneeling beside Marcus, called out.
“Gabriel! Marcus needs your help. He’s wounded.” She held up her hand, covered in blood, to make her point.
“No,” Rajan called from over Gabriel’s shoulder. “I need help over here. He’s dead. Again.”
Rajan crouched beside the lifeless form of the extraction candidate.
Gabriel spun around, looking between Sema and Marcus and Rajan and the candidate. With Marcus unconscious, Gabriel was the only hope of once more reviving the dead man.
Gabriel tried to stand, but a stabbing pain in his left leg brought him back down again. He crawled forward, holding the sword in his right hand, his left arm throbbing and largely useless.
“You are hurt!” Teresa said, getting to her feet and running to his side. She and Ohin reached him as his left side gave way completely and he tumbled into the grass. He yelped at the pain as Ohin rolled him over and Teresa pulled up the side of his tunic. She gasped and lurched back in surprise.
The Sword of Unmaking (The Wizard of Time - Book 2) Page 2