“What?” I said. “No, Lucille, listen,” but she was already surging forward, her claws slashing out. They shredded the sleeve of my jacket as I brought my arm up to block. The other vamps descended on Megan, and though I could tell she was trying to compel them to stand down, her battle of wills with Marla had obviously taken its toll. I created a portal beneath Lucille and dropped her halfway across the room. Then I grabbed Megan and portaled us back to the alley behind HQ. We collapsed on the ground as the portal sizzled shut behind us.
“There is no way Lucille could think either one of us actually killed Bruli,” I said. “What was going on there?”
“Whatever was compelling Marla was still in the room somehow,” Megan said. “I felt it enter Lucille’s mind.” She got to her knees and rubbed her head. “It was much subtler there, though. Like it was just planting a suggestion instead of controlling her outright.”
“So what have we learned, really?” I asked as Megan helped me up.
“We’ve learned that we can’t go to the vampires for help,” Megan replied. “Let’s assume that the upyr were the ones compelling the Midnight Clan. That means they have a much larger force than the eight we’ve gotten reports of.” She rubbed her chin. “We should assume they’ve infiltrated the Blood Runners as well.”
“Well, this day is just getting better and better, isn’t it?” I said as we pushed through HQ’s doors. Megan went up to tell Galahad what had happened while I went into Medical. Once I found Mrs. Rita, I asked, “How’s Doc doing?”
“See for yourself,” she said, gesturing me into his room. I stepped inside and froze. The man sitting up in the bed had Doc Ryan’s stern countenance, but he looked twenty years younger. His once-gray hair was now black on the sides and silver on top, and the lines were gone from his face.
“Take a picture, Corinthos, it’ll last longer,” he said. His voice was the same, and that snapped me out of my stupor.
“How?” was all I could ask.
“I suspect it has to do with the tachyon energy we were experimenting with just before you healed Joseph’s cancer,” Mrs. Rita said. “We were seeing what would happen when the tachyon around you was reduced, remember? Joseph was holding that device that you had, er, borrowed from the Chroniclers.”
I thought back to that afternoon. Doc had been using the Chronometer I’d taken from Wheatson. He’d been adjusting the tachyon around me while we checked to see if it impacted my healing fever.
“Okay, so you’re saying that the tachyon around Doc was impacted. But why didn’t he get younger then?”
“When the tachyon around you was reduced, your healing increased significantly. I think what happened is some of that healing energy got trapped inside the tachyon around Joseph, and was released when his body needed it most.”
“So you’re saying that the tachyon sort of, what, held the healing energy in place until Doc was injured?”
“Yes. I thought it took you longer to heal Joseph than it should have.”
“Mrs. Rita, it took us less than ten minutes to wipe the cancer from his lungs.”
“Yes, and my initial guess put it at five. I did not say anything because I did not want it to go to your head.” She waved a hand. “But this explains why. The healing energy was being held in reserve by the tachyon.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t know you could do this, Corinthos,” Doc said.
“No,” I racked my brain. “But this… this means I could store power for use later, doesn’t it?” I snapped my fingers. “When I was on the Bright Side, the Tempus put me in a temporal sheath. It stopped my powers from triggering right away, essentially paused them from taking effect until later. This sounds like something similar.” Could I do that? Keep a temporal sheath on me of kobold tricks, so that when I inevitably run out of faith at the wrong moment, I’ll be able to have an emergency reserve to tap?
“That’s all well and good,” Doc said, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, “but there’s work to do. Mrs. Rita, I trust you don’t have any more tests you’d like to administer?”
“No, Joseph,” Mrs. Rita replied with a smile. “You are free to get back to work.”
“About time,” Doc grumbled as he walked over to where a spare set of clothes had been laid out for him. “Chilly out here.”
I averted my eyes as Doc’s posterior peeked out from the flaps of his hospital gown.
“I must say, Joseph, you are certainly more pleasant to look at.”
Doc actually blushed as he spun around and held the hospital gown tightly against his body. “Don’t you people have jobs? Go on, let a man get dressed in peace.” He waved us away, and laughing, Mrs. Rita and I left Doc’s room.
“Do you think he’ll continue to age normally from here on out?” I asked. “Or is he paused at whatever age that is?”
Mrs. Rita wiped a tear from her eye. “I think he’ll continue normally, but I shall keep an eye on things. You may have discovered a fountain of youth, Vincent Corinthos. ”
I nodded. This was something I’d reflect more on later, but right now, I had more immediate concerns. “I wanted to talk to you about Herb,” I said.
Mrs. Rita nodded and led me into Herb’s room. The melted remains of the Rosario were on a table near where he lay. “There has been no change to Herb’s condition,” Mrs. Rita said. “His soul is still bound to this broken weapon. We need to repair it if he is to be brought out of the coma. Have you found any sources of celestial metal?”
I shook my head. Thad and I had come across a foreign dimension that contained celestial metal, and though I could Open a portal back to it, we had no way of locating the metal once there. “Thad’s building a new celestial metal detector, it should be done soon. Hopefully we can find enough to fix the Rosario and Cynthia.”
“Ah, yes, Jake’s young ward,” Mrs. Rita said. “That one is quite charming. Jake introduced me to her last night.”
“Well, she’s been toddler-sized since 1854,” I said. “I’m sure she’d like to grow up.”
“Building her a new body will be more complicated than re-forging the Rosario, I think.”
I shook my head. “Cynthia’s body absorbs celestial metal,” I said. “She touches it, and it becomes part of her. If I gave her a big enough piece, I’m sure she’d grow right in front of our eyes.”
“That would be something to see,” Mrs. Rita replied as she checked Herb’s vitals.
I was quiet for a moment as I watched Mrs. Rita work. “Megan seems like she’s holding up pretty well, considering everything,” I said.
Mrs. Rita sighed. “Megan is holding things together as best she can. Herb’s condition is bad enough, but now that we know Treggen is somehow attached to her, it is worse.”
“What have you been able to learn about that?”
“She was not possessed, nor was she compelled. It is almost as if Treggen accesses her mind as if it were a book. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before. I even tried to follow the connection back to Treggen, see if we could somehow use the connection against him, but…” She shook her head as she traced runes over Herb’s head.
“Any way to sever that connection completely?”
“I am working on that, Vincent Corinthos. You may have noticed things in this office have been a bit hectic today. All of you getting shot, blown up, and attacked has kept me from doing much else.”
I put up my hands. “Sorry,” I said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Find some celestial metal,” she replied. “And be supportive of Megan.”
I headed back up to my office, thinking about Doc and the tachyon. I’d accidentally created a temporal sheath. Could I do that again? Shutting the office door behind me and taking a seat at my desk, I closed my eyes and opened my mind to my followers, feeling their drinking-song
prayers recharge my faith reserves. After a few minutes, I conjured a ball of elemental fire in my hand, letting it hover a few inches above my palm. Okay, step one, check. Now, how to wrap it in tachyon? I imagined a chronometer, one of the Chroniclers’ twelve-handed watches that they used to manipulate time, and pictured myself encasing the flame in tachyon energy. I watched as the flames slowed, then stopped moving. It was like I was now holding a sculpture of pure flame in my hand. I passed my other hand over it and found it had no heat. Then I realized it wasn’t giving off any light, either.
I imagined uncasing it from the tachyon, and the flame began dancing merrily in my palm again. I froze and unfroze it a few more times, and even tried touching it against some paper when it was frozen. The paper didn’t burn. I emptied the metal wastebasket next to my desk, then placed the frozen fire inside it. I stepped back and checked my Timex. How long would it stay like that? Five minutes passed, then ten. I made a few more frozen fires, arranging them decoratively around my office. It looked like the tachyon didn’t wear off on its own. How had Doc’s known to react when it did? I was going to have to think on that further. I gathered up all the frozen fires, released the tachyon and quickly extinguished the flames with a quick burst of kobold faith.
I was running through the applications of this tachyon freezing when a rift opened next to me. Not like one of my portals, but a slit like a cat’s eye. I didn’t feel extradimensional energy coming from it; I couldn’t feel anything at all. I was about to shout an alarm—HQ is warded against teleportation for this specific reason, when I recognized the person standing on the other side of the rift. His purple robes were immaculate as always, and the hourglass on a chain around his neck shimmered as if it were a disco ball. His blond hair was parted neatly to the side, his blue eyes were sharp, his face ageless.
“Tempus,” I said coldly.
Chapter 6
I trust you have seen what is coming, old friend. The Dodici Prophecy is nearly upon us, and yet my cards still show uncertainty. The Broken Hourglass appears again and again in my divinations, and I believe that Vincent Corinthos will somehow interfere with what must come. I cannot underscore the importance of this prophecy enough; it must come to pass. For the sake of both our prophecies and the time stream, I implore you to take precautions to ensure he does not interfere.
— From a letter from Stranger Wolfram to the Tempus
“We need to talk, Vincent,” he said.
“My world’s kind of exploding right now,” I said, turning my back on him. “Why don’t you—”
And then I was standing in front of him. The rift sealed itself behind me.
“What the hell?” I demanded. “How did you do that?”
“Temporal rifts are different from portals,” the Tempus said. “I created an opening at your location hundreds of years before the Caulborn’s wards were implemented, and then brought that opening forward in time.”
“And so it stayed open, because it had always been there? Wait, wouldn’t anyone have been able to just walk through it?”
“No, because only Chroniclers and deities with ties to time can travel through rifts like this.”
Man, dealing with the Chroniclers always made my head hurt. I waved a hand. “Fine, whatever. What are you doing here?”
He put up his hands. “I apologize. You’re right, you and your organization are under attack right now, and I did not want to waste any more time.”
I threw up my hands in frustration. “You don’t want to waste any more of my time, so you take me out of headquarters while we’re trying to get our legs back under us and bring me…” I glanced around. Where was I, exactly? The room was like some CEO’s office, with a massive obsidian desk dominating the far wall. Next to it was a globe on a stand. Behind that, an enormous window offered a view of a starry sky. I stepped up to the window. No, not a sky. Just stars. “Are we in space?”
The Tempus chuckled. “No, we’re in the Chroniclers’ Citadel.” I’d been to the Citadel, the Chroniclers’ stronghold, a couple of times before, but never in the Tempus’s office. The Tempus continued, “We’re outside time here.” He gestured at the starry expanse beyond. “Time is still flowing there, but I can pop you back in at the moment I took you out. Like you never left. It’s sort of like time travel but without any repercussions.”
I gave myself a shake and turned my attention back to the leader of the Chroniclers. This was the man who had killed Commander Courageous. This was the man who’d tried to kill me when Laplace’s demon had corrupted the time stream. This was the man who’d ordered the use of tachyon to block my ability to portal. So in short, I didn’t trust this guy.
The Tempus seemed to read my mind. “I know you don’t trust me.” He actually looked saddened by this. “Please, Vincent, have a seat.” He gestured to a small circular table. I took a seat, and he sat across from me. The Tempus rubbed his chin after he sat down, as if unsure where to start. “You have been a bit of a challenge for me and my organization,” he said. “We are never quite sure what to do with you.”
“You could just leave me alone,” I said.
“That would be unwise,” the Tempus replied. “Your father came to me shortly after you were born. He’d realized you’d inherited some of his talents, and that a human brain would be unable to cope with those. A divine mind can adjust and compensate to see every single possible outcome of every single event play out; a mortal mind would go mad.”
“So you said you’d cloak me in tachyon—block the foresight, and in return, my dad had to leave time for as long as I’m alive,” I replied. Wheatson, the only Chronicler I was on friendly terms with, had told me this much during one of our last meetings. “You’d ‘save’ me”—I made finger quotes—“and Janus was out of your hair for a while.”
The Tempus looked at his hands. “I will admit, Vincent, that is exactly what went through my mind when Janus approached me. I felt this would be a simple matter. I looked into the future, saw exactly how and when you would discover your powers, and then flooded you with tachyon at those precise moments to block your pre- and retro-cognitive abilities. I thought the matter was done.”
He sighed. “I failed to consider the divine aspect of your nature. It pains me to admit this, but I had never dealt with a being like you before. I understand how time impacts men, and I understand how time impacts gods. But you were my first encounter with someone who was both. Time impacts you as it should a human; your lifespan is limited, and your body will degrade as you age, for example. But while time directly affects you as a human, it also treats you as a god. Which means it changes based on your actions. I did not anticipate this. I assumed that because you were affected as a human, you would be treated as one, as well. Imagine my surprise when, after I flooded you with tachyon on the key date, you began using your powers a mere week later.”
I blinked. “From what Wheatson said, you’ve been bombarding me with tachyon for my whole life.”
The Tempus nodded. “This time,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
The Tempus stood and walked over to the massive window. “Vincent, you need to understand something. The Chroniclers see all events in time. We know how civilizations are supposed to rise and fall, how benevolent leaders and tyrannical dictators come to power, when scientific breakthroughs will be made. We stop people from tampering with that flow of events. Even without us, time would heal itself if something were broken, but we speed up the process. Think of it like when you have an infection, like bronchitis. It’s unlikely that will be fatal, but it can take weeks for the infection to be purged naturally. But if you go to your doctor and he gives you a prescription for antibiotics, you heal more rapidly, and there’s less likelihood of lasting damage.”
“So the Chroniclers are like antibiotics for the time stream,” I said flatly. “Sorry, what does this have to do with m
e?”
The Tempus turned back to me. I was expecting him to have the haughty expression on his face, like when I fought him when Laplace’s demon was running rampant. Instead, he looked tired. “What it has to do with you, Vincent, is that time keeps changing around you. Every time I do something to control what you can and can’t access, time changes, and you get those abilities, anyway, in ways I didn’t expect.” His eyes took on a faraway look for a moment. “I have tried to guide time around you, throughout your life, over a dozen times now. And each time, it ends badly. It always ends with your death, but that death changes the course of your life. This last time, a future version of yourself was influencing your behavior in what you consider the present. That means you will not take the same course of action that he did, which means you have changed the course of your life yet again.”
“Wait, you mean I’m always becoming Commander Courageous and passing advice back to myself?”
The Tempus shook his head. “No. There have been times when you’ve traveled through time and destroyed or damaged an artifact that you were supposed to use later. Since it was no longer there, you couldn’t find it. Sometimes, there were people you met that you accidentally gave knowledge of the future to. Each change impacted the time stream, and altered the course of your life.”
I really thought about what he was saying. “It sounds like you’re talking about me time traveling,” I said. “I can’t do that.”
“Yet,” said the Tempus raising a finger. “You can, and you will. No matter how I try to stop it, you always gain the ability. In the past, I have been frustrated, even angered, by your actions. I have killed multiple versions of you for meddling too much in time. But each time that happened, something changed. Something that meant it wasn’t necessarily done; your past never stayed constant. In this latest instance, your future self prevented the Urisk’s extinction. Don’t you see? The course of your life is now completely different. You will not become that Commander Courageous, who suffered the loss of the Urisk. You will not face the same demons he did. You are a different person, which means time has changed, and I have to monitor you yet again, because I have no idea what may happen to the time stream as a result of your actions.”
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