Teresa pursed her lips, looking as though she might scream. Instead, she smacked him in the arm again with the book.
“Now why didn’t you just say that to begin with?”
“I thought I was being clever.” Gabriel’s anger seeped away to be replaced by a surging sense of hope.
“Just because you’re right doesn’t mean you’re clever.” Teresa stepped closer to Gabriel. “When I was facing Kumaradevi today I thought I was going to end up dead. Or that you were going to end up dead. And I felt stupid knowing that I hadn’t told you I love you. That one of us might be dead and you’d think I didn’t love you.”
Gabriel didn’t wait for any more words or try to think of words of his own. Words were never going to convey the upwelling of emotions in his heart. His slid his hands around her waist and he kissed her.
They broke apart from the kiss an unknown time later, wiping tears from their eyes and holding each other close. The book had fallen from Teresa’s hand and balanced precariously at the edge of the table.
“We should put that back.” Gabriel held tight to one of Teresa’s hands. “Wouldn’t want to create a bifurcation.”
“Right,” Teresa frowned. “The cover reminded me of something, but I don’t remember what now. You annoyed me too much.” She made to place the book in an open slot among the others stacked on the table. As she did so, another book caught Gabriel’s eye.
“Hmmm.” Gabriel reached out to the book that had attracted his attention, sliding it carefully from the pile. The title read Nostradamus — Les Propheties. He flipped it open and fanned the pages. As he did so his space-time sense tingled. “No.”
“What?” Teresa looked at the title of the book. “What’s the matter?”
“I never told you this, but Nefferati didn’t write the prophecy of the Seventh True Mage.” Gabriel handed Teresa the book. “She found it in the castle library. In this book.”
“Wait.” Teresa looked at the book more closely. “If she didn’t write the prophecy, then who did?”
Gabriel said nothing. The tingling of his space-time sense continued to vibrate in his mind.
“No.” Teresa looked up to Gabriel in disbelief. “Even I can’t figure out how a paradox like that would work.”
“Do you have a pen? I have some paper.” Gabriel fished a small notebook from his pocket and ripped a clean sheet free from the binding.
“If you write out the prophecy and put it in the book and this is the book that Nefferati finds, then where does the actual prophecy come from?” Teresa looked uncharacteristically confused as she handed Gabriel a pen from her pocket.
“The better question is, if I write down a different prophecy, whether I’ll suddenly remember the new words, or whether it might change my entire personal timeline.” Gabriel began carefully writing out the words that had been etched into his memory. Words that had defined who he had become. Words that would continue to define him.
“Write it down exactly.” Teresa sounded adamant. “We don’t want to risk changing our timelines and finding out we suddenly hate each other.”
“Not a possible universe,” Gabriel said as he finished writing out the prophecy. He looked at it for what he realized would be the first time in the prophecy’s own timeline.
“He shall come without warning
And leave without sign.
His coming shall mark the dawn of the endless night.
He shall walk among them, but be not of them.
He shall bestride the night and day.
Twilight shall be his world,
And all lands shall be his domain.
He shall pick of both trees
And eat of all fruits.
He shall plant new seeds
And harvest new crops.
He shall be the Breaker of Time
And the Destroyer of Worlds.
And all things shall hang in his balance
Until he is no more and yet is again.”
He slid the prophetic piece of paper into the book of Nostradamus’s prognostications and placed it back in the pile of books on the table. The tingling of his space-time sense faded.
“This is too much paradox for one day, personal and otherwise,” Gabriel said. “Knowing something before you know it makes no sense to me at all.”
“Perpetually cascading causality loop,” Teresa replied. She stopped. Turned back to the books. Touched the one she had held so long. Her hand trembled. “Is this what it feels like to be you all the time? It’s terrifying.”
“What’s terrifying?” Gabriel felt Teresa’s other hand tighten on his own.
“I know why Kumaradevi thought I was holding something back when she interrogated me.” Teresa’s eyes were wide with wonder. “I did know something. Do know something.”
“What?” Gabriel’s unease came not from his space-time sense but from the look on Teresa’s face.
“I know how to locate all the anchor points for The Great Barrier.” Teresa’s voice came out as a whisper. “I know how to find them because I’m the one who discovered where to put them in the first place.”
Chapter 26
Black smoke, rich with sulfur, stung Gabriel’s eyes and nose as it drifted off the field and between the leaves of the walnut trees, full and green in the height of summer. With the smoke came the sounds of battle — cannon fire, Gatling guns, explosions, rifles, screams, cries for help, the wails of wounded horses, and calls for men’s mothers.
Gabriel turned away from the scene. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 2nd, 1863. The pivotal battle of the American Civil War. A place where many things happened at once. A place where events in the timeline of history could easily be changed. A place where a young man appearing nearby would never be noticed.
The American Civil War began in 1861 when seven Southern states seceded from the United States of America over the issue of slavery. These seven states, where the enslavement of Africans and their descendants remained legal and supported the dominant agrarian cotton industry, declared themselves a new nation called the Confederate States of America. Four more Southern slave states soon joined them. President Abraham Lincoln and the Northern government, referred to as the Union, refused to accept the secession or recognize the Confederacy. Fighting began on April 12, 1861, at the Union held Fort Sumter in South Carolina. By the summer of 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had invaded the state of Pennsylvania. Union Major General George Meade's Army of the Potomac first defended the town of Gettysburg, then defeated the Confederate forces, driving them back southward in a military rout that signaled the end of the war. By the time of the Confederacy’s surrender on April 9, 1865, some 750,000 American soldiers had lost their lives, nearly 50,000 of them at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Gabriel looked from the horror of the battlefield before him down to the map in his hands and then up to the faces of Ohin and Akikane.
“This is going to take some time.” Gabriel glanced again at the map. It detailed the battle taking place around him. It also marked off 107 places with events that all took place at the same time. Events that could be altered easily to create a bifurcation. Akikane and Ohin had spent considerable hours in a space-time bubble hovering over the battlefield to assemble its contents.
“Take your time,” Ohin said. “We have thirty-seven hours. We can afford to use a few here.”
“Indeed, indeed,” Akikane added. “Better to be slow and careful.”
“I know we’ve gone over this a dozen times, but it still feels wrong.” Gabriel wiped his sweaty palms on his pants lest he stain the map. “This many bifurcations in one place at one time is exactly what the Apollyons were doing when we stopped them the first time.”
“They made no attempt to sever their new worlds within thirty-seven hours.” Ohin flinched as a cannonball exploded nearby. “We will. But we need to move quickly.”
“Yes, yes.” Akikane patted Gabriel’s shoulder. “But not so quickly that we make mistake
s. Take your time. You have the relic, yes?”
“Yes.” Gabriel tapped his pocket with the brass bullet casing that would be used during the battle in a clump of trees opposite the field from where they stood. He took his pocket watch out and checked the time. “You should both go. We’ll meet you back at the fort.” He paused a moment, feeling again like the pupil before his mentors rather than the leader of an army of mages. “I’m not looking forward to this.”
“Meeting yourself once would be frightening enough,” Ohin said. He seemed to think for a second before amending his statement. “No matter who you were.”
“Quite right, quite right.” Akikane smiled brilliantly at Gabriel. “However, you are who you are, so I am certain it will go well between all of you.”
Gabriel nodded silently, hoping Akikane’s assessment of his character prove correct. Akikane and Ohin disappeared into time, back to the new fort, leaving Gabriel to begin his dangerous task alone. He checked the hands of the watch again. Not long. Not long at all.
The days since the attack on the Apollyons had been hectic and confusing. As much as the arguments presented to him made sense, his mind continued to rebel against them. It did seem plausible that he would create The Great Barrier of Probability. It also seemed reasonable that if the Apollyons could manage to kill him that the resulting paradox would not only destroy the Barrier but could also irreparably damage the Primary Continuum. He even acknowledged the need to make 107 copies of himself in order to simultaneously establish the anchor points that held the Barrier in place. While he accepted all these things, their cumulative improbability, and the inherent paradox for his own personal timeline, left him with a growing sense of unease.
He had stifled that disquiet by keeping busy. There had been much to do. Teams of Grace Mages worked around the clock to locate and retrieve the comatose Apollyons and deliver them to Vicaquirao. Gabriel feared that the two missing Apollyons might attempt to rescue some of their brethren, but that had not been the case, or at least not yet. As the days passed, more and more Grace Mages defected from the Council’s authority to join the forces at the new fort. Each new Time Mage who arrived was dispatched to help in securing the slumbering Apollyons.
While the various teams engaged in prison duty, as it became known, Ohin and Akikane had begun their search for a suitable place in time for Gabriel to copy himself. Meanwhile, Nefferati and the newly recovered Elizabeth helped Gabriel in hunting down the relics needed to travel to all of the 108 anchor points. Finding these anchor points in the first place fell to Teresa.
The cover of the book that Teresa had clutched for so long outside that bookstore in London proved essential to understanding how the anchor points were placed in time and space. The image of the Golden Mean led her to realize that her long-standing suspicions about a geometrically expanding distance between the anchor points were accurate. The placement of the anchor points followed a widening spiral through time and space. Knowing of even one anchor point allowed her to predict where all the other anchor points should be located. The math involved completely escaped Gabriel, but he understood her excitement as each anchor point she calculated coincided exactly with those they already knew the location for. As she revealed each new anchor point, Nefferati, Elizabeth, or Gabriel were dispatched with a team of Grace Mages to track it down and locate a relic for travel to and from its location.
It required nearly two straight days of work, but Teresa finally presented a list of all the anchor points. All except the final point in time, which secured the Barrier. Teresa referred to this as the Alpha Point. Her calculations indicted that it needed to be placed far before the planet Earth had even evolved from the interaction of gas and debris and gravity. The Alpha Point seemed to rest at the moment of the universe’s creation, at the beginning of time. At first, it seemed impossible to create an anchor point at the moment space-time came into existence. Even if he could project himself through time, as Nefferati suggested, the vantage point to do so would need to be outside the Primary Continuum. Then he remembered his experience escaping the alternate reality where he and Teresa had been trapped by the Apollyons.
Gabriel looked at his watch again, the hands counting down the seconds until he needed to act. He tried to forget for a moment everything implied by Teresa’s math. There would be time to figure that all out later. At least a few hours. And he would have help.
As the second hand reached its designated mark, Gabriel embraced the imprints of the Sword of Unmaking and gestured with his hand toward the sky with a thin wave of Wind Magic. A cannonball, descending at a speed beyond sight diverted slightly, falling in an empty section of the battlefield instead of the cluster of Union soldiers it had originally been destined to kill.
Gabriel felt an uncomfortably familiar bending of space-time and knew he had created an alternate reality where he now stood. Because his personal timeline did not affect the Primary Continuum where he created the bifurcation, unlike that night so long ago in Venice when he had saved Ling from death, he shifted entirely into the new reality. He no longer stood in the woods beyond the Battle of Gettysburg in the Primary Continuum. This signaled the moment when he would change the course of his life by violating the central rules of time travel he had worked so hard to learn and obey.
He took the brass shell casing from his pocket and focused his space-time sense on the moment in its timeline that he needed. Warping space and time in a flash of darkness and brilliance, he returned from the alternate reality and back to the Primary Continuum. He appeared in a barn not far from the battlefield, close enough to where he had stood, but out of sight from any possible onlookers. He arrived, not at the moment of his departure, not an instant later, but a full minute beforehand.
As he appeared in the barn, hay strewn beneath his feet, the smell of horses filling his nostrils, his mind reeled with two simultaneously overpowering perceptions. The first impression impinging upon his consciousness was one he had encountered before — a jangling sensation within his mind, his space-time sense rebelling against paradox.
The second perception exceeded his previous expectations.
So this is what it’s like.
Yes.
Odd.
Very odd.
I can’t wait…
For more voices…
To join the chorus.
Gabriel perceived himself in the barn.
He also stood in the woods beyond the battlefield half a minute before he had deflected the cannonball to create the alternate reality from which he had traveled to the barn.
We need to hurry
I need to hurry.
Yes, I know…
Let’s not go down…
That path.
Gabriel Prime, as he decided he should think of himself, the Gabriel who would not end up in an alternate reality, stared at the map in his hands, looking for the next location indicated by a red X and a number 2. A hilltop. He jumped through space to appear behind a bush, shielding his arrival from those on the battlefield. He checked the map again, seeing the instructions for the subsequent bifurcation. Looking down to follow the hands of his watch, Gabriel reached out with Fire Magic to cause the gunpowder of a Confederate soldier to fail to explode, his rifle sitting useless in his arm. Reality shifted as the expected bifurcation split away in a new continuum.
All the while, in the barn, Gabriel Number 2, as he thought of himself, watched the mental image of Gabriel Prime on the hilltop. A moment later, his consciousness wavered as Gabriel Number 3 opened the barn door and entered. With this third Gabriel came the shared memory of having arrived a full minute earlier a hundred paces from the barn. And more confusingly, the memory of having left the hilltop for the following location indicated on the map, a ditch to the north of the battlefield.
This is…
Going to…
Get very...
Confusing…
No wonder…
He went…
Mad.
; Each new Gabriel from each new reality appeared a little farther from the barn, using the varied travel of the shell casing to ensure that each new arrival would not run into his other versions before entering the barn.
With every duplication, with every fresh voice added to the ever-expanding mental cacophony, Gabriel, the Gabriels, all of them, began to collectively wonder if this endeavor would prove a grand blunder. Only a fool or a madman would attempt what they were doing. Only a sense of duty, and the knowledge of how bad things could be for everyone else in the Primary Continuum if he failed, allowed him to proceed, time after time, to create one alternate reality after another.
The psychic connection between the shared thoughts and memories made concentration increasingly difficult for Gabriel Prime, the one who needed to do more than stand and wait in a barn for versions of himself to arrive. The thought finally occurred, simultaneously among them, that it would be easier if the duplicated Gabriels in the barn meditated, letting their minds rest in an ever-present awareness, rather than reacting to, or contributing to, the thoughts they now constantly shared.
Eventually, after nearly two hours of creating bifurcations, the last version of Gabriel stepped into the crowded barn. Gabriel Prime joined his duplicates a moment later.
We should…
Continue to…
Meditate as long…
As possible…
A few of us…
Doing what is…
Needed while the others…
Remain as they are…
So our minds…
Do not…
Drive us mad…
Mad…
With voices…
Voices…
They stood throughout the large barn, sat in piles of straw, teetered at the edge of the hayloft, all 108 of them, waiting a moment, enjoying the silence of their shared mind.
Okay…
Let’s get…
To work…
The Wizard of Time Trilogy (A Fantasy Time Travel Series) Page 87
