Karen Chance: Curse the Dawn

She leaned her head wearily back against the column. "I can do that for myself."

I crossed my arms but said nothing. Her breathing was still heavy and her color wasn't good, but I was in no position to give a lecture. She wasn't the only one who had left a partner behind.

Pritkin hated my trips through time for the same reason I did—the conviction that, sooner or later, I was going to screw up something we couldn't fix. I'd decided to save myself some grief and just not mention this to him, but it was a decision I was starting to regret. He carried enough firepower for three people, if those people happened to be Rambo. He'd have come in pretty handy right about now.

After a minute, Agnes struggled back to her feet. She stood with one hand braced against the column, her head bowed, her forehead knotted in pain. "Can you make it back to your time?" I asked. "Because if not, I can—"

"I have a job to do," she repeated, straightening. Her slight shoulders squared. "We need more light."

"We need to get out of here!"

"Then go. Nobody's stopping you." I stared at her for a moment, really tempted, before cursing and scurrying back for the lantern. For a wonder, nobody shot at me.

It had a ring welded into the top, so I grabbed a long stick from one of the piles of firewood that crunched underfoot and hooked the light on the end of it. After opening the door as wide as it would go, I poked the contraption out into the room while remaining behind the column with Agnes. I'd been hoping to illuminate a crumpled body on the floor. Instead, the warm golden glow fell across dozens of casks and barrels.

Some of them were almost buried under the mounds of wood and coal that nearly filled the room. But a few were stacked nearby, as if the camouflage attempt had gotten to be too much work. Or maybe the problem was that these barrels were leaking.

The nearest one had a crack as large as my finger in the side. The floor around it was covered in tiny grains that sparkled in the light like black diamond dust. My hand shook as I realized what they were, and a couple sparks spilled from the open side of the lantern. I had time to think, Oh, shit , before flames leapt up from the floor and ran straight toward the heap of barrels.

I dove for Agnes and we hit the floor together as a wave of force swept over us. A roar of sound deafened me, fire bloomed behind me and a wash of heat flooded the air. Dead, I thought in a rush of nausea.

And then nothing.

After a stunned moment, I opened my eyes to see a room filled with what looked like red and gold glitter. It took me a second to recognize it as flaming bits of wood and powder thrown off by the explosion, frozen in the air like confetti on the Fourth of July. A small piece was resting beside my cheek and it was hot. I knocked it away, and it moved a few inches before stopping, hanging suspended and molten as a tiny sun.

"You know, you're a real pain in the ass," Agnes mumbled. I belatedly realized that I'd squashed her face against the floor.

"Sorry. I—"

"Get off me."

I rolled to the side and stopped, blinking. A couple feet away was a freeze-frame out of hell. A ball of fire hung in space, surrounded by burning bits of wood that had once formed the sides of a barrel. Sparks were everywhere, turning the dull old stones around us bloodred and highlighting the pissy look on Agnes' face.

"What happened?"

"What does it look like?" she snapped. "You almost blew us up!"

"You didn't tell me there was gunpowder in here!"

"There was gunpowder out there!" She waved an arm wildly in the direction of the other room. "And someone threw a barrel at us from in here! What the hell do you want, a diagram?"

"I want to know what's going on," I said heatedly. "All I know is that I followed you into a cellar—"

"Which you had no business doing."

"— and now some crazy man is trying to kill us!"

"At the rate we're going, he won't have to," Agnes said, staggering back to her feet. Her hair had come loose from its once neat chignon and floated down over her temples and cheeks. It moved delicately with her breath, giving away how fast her heart beat. She put a hand to her head. "I'm going to feel like hell tomorrow."

"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."