“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 everywh
ere. 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.”