“I left home the day of their wedding and never returned. I often wonder where my life might have gone if I had only followed the call of my heart.”
An awkward silence fell over the table as Marcus’s words faded into the night. Sema seemed on the verge of saying something. Marcus sighed and looked up, realizing Sema still sat there. He cleared his throat and rose to his feet as she stood.
“That’s a very illuminating story,” Sema said, her voice sounding strained. “I’m sure Gabriel will find it most edifying. It’s late. I should get to bed. I’ll see you both in the morning.”
Marcus sat back down as Sema disappeared onto the crowd. He placed his face on one hand and sighed. “Seems I’m still no smarter than that young farm boy I used to be.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to take your advice if I ever find myself in that situation.” Gabriel looked down into his empty bowl and wondered if he should lick the melted ice cream from it. He was working very hard to ignore all the implications of Marcus’s words and the effect they seemed to have on Sema. Maybe he needed a second dessert.
“I wanted to compliment you on saving my namesake.”
“What?” Gabriel looked up from his bowl and into Marcus’s eyes.
“My father named me for Marcus Aurelius.” Marcus checked a nearby beer bottle, found it empty, and frowned. “He thought an imperial name might rub off on me. Seems to have had the opposite effect. Regardless, that was a fine triage the other day. You made the right call. Three lives were saved when it might have been only two.”
“I don’t think Ohin was so happy with my decision,” Gabriel said.
“Ohin wouldn’t have let you make it if he didn’t agree.” Marcus squinted as he looked around Gabriel’s head and laughed. “Seems our leader is in need of a little saving himself right about now.”
Gabriel turned around to see Ohin standing near a well-groomed shrubbery and talking with Paramata, a lovely, diminutive Indonesian woman from the 18th Century. She had joined the castle and the war shortly after Gabriel. More swiftly than most, she recognized that the castle provided an insufficiently small pool of potential mates for the mages who lived there. She had also quickly realized that Ohin was one of the most eligible men to be found. Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet questioned why this might be the case.
Gabriel would never have broached the subject with Ohin himself, but it seemed to have taken decades for his teacher to get over losing his wife with his extraction from the timeline. Finally, he had opened his heart and married again, another Time Mage from the Olmec civilization of 1000 BCE. Unfortunately, she died on a mission after only a year together. Since then, he had remained resolutely single. This, of course, did not keep the single women of the castle from attempting to convince him to alter his resolution.
“Excuse me, I just remembered something I wanted to talk to Ohin about.” Gabriel wiped his mouth with a nearby napkin as he stood up.
“Smart lad.” Marcus laughed. “Get him in your debt.”
Gabriel strolled over to Ohin and Paramata. She seemed to push the conversation along with an act of sheer will power. Ohin glanced around as she spoke, as though looking for an exit to dash through. The look on his face reminded Gabriel of an ensnared animal. He hoped Ohin wasn’t considering chewing off his own leg.
“Have you ever been?” Paramata asked Ohin, who barely had time to shake his head, much less open his mouth in response. “It’s a lovely place, especially in spring with the trees and flowers in bloom. The sunsets are breathtaking. I’ve always wanted to go back. It’d be a wonderful spot for a getaway. No people for centuries. Isolated. Very romantic.”
“Well…” Ohin looked around as Gabriel stepped forward. He almost sighed with relief. “Ah, Gabriel.”
“Hello.” Gabriel presented Paramata with his most charming smile before turning to Ohin. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“It can’t wait for the morning?” Paramata asked with a slight pout.
“Unfortunately, no.” Gabriel contorted his face to its most apologetic continence. “It’s mission related. Kind of important.”
“Duty calls,” Ohin said, trying to seem remorseful, but looking as though he’d narrowly escaped a Malignancy Mage’s curse.
“Well, I’m glad we had this chance to talk again.” Paramata’s soft eyes looked up to Ohin’s face. “We should do it more often.”
“Ah…yes.” Ohin blinked in surprise at his own words. “I should see what Gabriel needs. I’m sure we’ll talk soon.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” Paramata said, her face radiant. She winked at Ohin, then walked back into the party crowd.
“Thank you,” Ohin said as Paramata stepped out of earshot.
“Teammates have to look out for each other,” Gabriel said.
“You might remind your other teammates of that.” Ohin frowned. “They all ignored my pleading stares.”
“She’s not so bad,” Gabriel said. “She’s nice, actually. Tough, but nice.”
“Yes, she is,” Ohin began. “But I’m not…” Ohin let that thought hang between them, unfinished. “You said you needed to discuss something. Or was that merely a ruse?”
“Totally a diversionary tactic.”
“Well then, there is something I would like to discuss with you.” Ohin breathed deeply and raised himself to his full height.
Gabriel felt his stomach tighten instinctively at the shift in Ohin’s posture, but he relaxed a bit at the soft tone of his mentor’s voice.
“What you did the other day, risking yourself to save the team, disobeying protocol, it angered me at the time. You are too headstrong, and you refuse to see how important you are in the larger strategy of the war. However, as you were recuperating, someone said something that made me realize how lucky I was. Paramata, actually.”
Ohin paused for a moment and seemed to consider something.
“She said she felt glad that she didn’t have the responsibility of leading a team, of making the hard decisions necessary to protect them. I realized I am glad I do not face the decisions you must make. My primary responsibility is to the Council and the war, but my ultimate responsibility is to the team. To all of you. To make sure you all return safe from every mission. I am more than willing to risk, even give, my life to make sure you are all safe. And if the Council determined that one of you must be sacrificed to further the goals of the war, it would be an order I would not hesitate to disobey.”
Ohin stopped again, thinking about his next words.
Gabriel’s mind felt empty in the silence. Ohin had never spoken to him like this before. As an equal rather than a pupil. A sadness softened Ohin’s eyes as he placed his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders.
“I realized I am lucky that I am not you. You will face decisions I will never have to consider. You will need to make choices affecting countless lives. Mine, the team’s, the castle’s, the Continuum’s. I realized that I cannot ask you not to risk your life to save the people you care about when I would do the same.”
Gabriel stared up at Ohin a moment before he heard himself speaking.
“So I’m not in trouble?”
“Not today.” Ohin laughed as he clapped Gabriel’s shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll rectify that tomorrow.”
“You never know,” Gabriel said as his teacher’s words and advice sank in. “I may hold off until the end of the week.”
“Hold off what until the end of the week?”
Gabriel and Ohin turned in simultaneous surprise to see Councilwoman Elizabeth standing behind them, smiling as she cradled a small teacup in her hands.
“Hold off getting in trouble,” Ohin said, still smiling.
“I’d be surprised if he could hold off until the end of the evening,” Elizabeth said.
Gabriel laughed along with Elizabeth and Ohin. The truth was, he rarely got in trouble. Of course, when he did, it tended to be for reasons that could threaten the balan
ce of the war and the stability of the Primary Continuum. It wasn’t all that funny, which is probably why they were laughing about it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Ohin said as he patted Gabriel on the back. He nodded to Elizabeth as he walked away. “Goodnight.”
Gabriel and Elizabeth called their goodnights to Ohin as she led him deeper into the garden and away from the revelers. His space-time sense tingled. He had a good feeling for when a Time Mage was about to jump through time or space. Thanks to his training with Akikane, he was also getting better at sensing where a mage might go when leaping instantaneously through space. He knew they were headed to the top of the Round Tower moments before flashes of darkness and brilliance delivered them there.
Chapter 4: Teacup Tempest
As soon as they arrived at the edge of the crenellations atop the Round Tower, Elizabeth enclosed them in a magical seal of air, shutting out the night sounds of the castle and the party at the far end of the grounds. The presence of a sound seal concerned Gabriel. Why would they need to worry about being overheard atop the ancient tower? And why would Elizabeth not choose her office for a private conversation?
“Do you recognize this?” Elizabeth handed Gabriel the small porcelain teacup in her hands.
“It’s a cup from the castle kitchens,” Gabriel said, staring down at the blue floral pattern of the empty white teacup.
“It is,” Elizabeth said. “Now put it to your ear.”
Gabriel cocked his head in curiosity, but did as requested. As soon as he held the teacup to his ear, he heard Teresa’s voice.
“I’m not sure.”
“I figured since it was a day off for both of us, maybe we could do something together.” That voice belonged to Jan. Gabriel frowned.
“What kind of something?” he heard Teresa say.
Gabriel felt a powerful temptation to continue eavesdropping on the conversation, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know how it would end. Besides, he wanted to know something else far more. He pulled the teacup away from his ear and looked at Elizabeth, her face illuminated but unreadable in the soft light of the half-moon above.
“How did you do that?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s a very subtle bit of magic,” Elizabeth said. “But there is a better question.”
Gabriel thought about it a moment. “Why show me? Why here?”
“Exactly,” Elizabeth said, her lips curling slightly. “Why don’t you see if you can answer the first question before I explain the second?”
Gabriel turned his attention and magic-sense to the teacup in his hand, discovering an enchantment both elegant and brilliant. A bond of magic linked the cup through time and space to something somewhere else. He probed along that link to find what he had expected — an identical teacup on a table back at the party. A teacup Teresa and Jan happened to be sitting near.
As he continued to examine the magical space-time link between the cups, he realized they were not merely similar cups. They were the same cup. Somehow, the teacup in his hand was also the exact teacup sitting on the table beside Teresa. The original teacup had been duplicated in a manner that left the two resulting cups connected through time and space. He knew Teresa would have some mouth-mangling scientific explanation for it, but he didn’t need words to understand the phenomenon — he instinctively comprehended the connection between the teacups.
“This is amazing,” Gabriel said as he handed the teacup back to Elizabeth. “Did you come up with this?”
“Unfortunately, no.” She sighed. “That brings us to the second question, which I will explain with a third. Do you remember the teacup on the bookshelf in my office?”
“Sure.” Gabriel could picture the teacup in his mind. “The one Nefferati gave you as a birthday present.”
“The very same.” Elizabeth raised her eyes, but said no more. It took Gabriel a moment, but the question suddenly made a sickening amount of sense.
“Someone’s bugged your office!” Elizabeth squinted at him in question and he corrected himself to compensate for the difference in slang between Victorian England and 1980s America. “Someone is eavesdropping on your office with a magically twinned teacup.”
“Precisely. I only discovered it by accident when I moved the teacup to retrieve a book.”
“How long has it been there?”
“How long, indeed?”
“That would explain how the Apollyons knew about the extraction for Marcus Aurelius.”
“Among a number of other things, yes.”
“So you can’t speak freely in your office.” Gabriel looked at the castle grounds below the tower and realized something even more shocking. “You can’t trust anyone.”
“Well, not exactly.” Elizabeth joined him in looking over the tower parapet, the lights of the castle leaving most of the grounds in ominous-seeming shadows. “I trust Akikane, and Ohin, and your team. And clearly I trust you, as you are the only person I have mentioned this to as yet. But you are correct. I have no way of knowing who replaced my teacup with one that provides a direct means of listening in for Apollyon, assuming it is him.”
“There could be twinned cups and glasses and vases all over the castle.” Gabriel leaned against the stone of a tower crenel as a wave of despair swept through him. “They could know everything.”
“We must assume they do,” Elizabeth said as she pulled something from a deep pocket of her light blue tunic. She handed Gabriel a small, red leather notebook. “This is something I have mentioned on occasion to Akikane while in my office, which, until recently, is where I kept it.”
Gabriel took the book in his hands and flipped through the first few pages. The script looked strange and unreadable — like no written language he had ever seen. Elegant and arcane.
“What is it?” Gabriel thumbed through the book, but all the pages were composed in the same indecipherable language.
“It is my notebook.” Elizabeth reached out and Gabriel handed back the thin volume. “It contains everything I have ever learned about the Great Barrier of Probability. It is the only place where all of this information exists. I have been assembling it to help me consider how best to thwart Apollyon’s plans to destroy the barrier.”
“Does Akikane know what’s in it?”
“He is familiar with some of what the notebook contains, but far from all of it. There are things I have learned very recently, on a little excursion I took yesterday, for instance, that are only known to me.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Akikane is extraordinary in many ways. One of those ways is his ability to accept the universe as it appears rather than wonder why things are the way they are. To him, the Great Barrier is like a natural phenomenon. It simply is. I, on the other hand, am more interested in why things work the way they do.”
“What language is the notebook written in?”
“A dead language. One that only I and one other living person know.”
“A windtalker book.” Gabriel saw the look of puzzlement on Elizabeth’s face and explained. “During World War Two the United States needed a code that couldn’t be broken. Instead of trying to create a new code, they enlisted men from the Navajo tribe and used their language as the code. Only the Navajo knew their language, so the code was never broken.”
“Precisely,” Elizabeth said. “Except the notebook is written in the language of the Indus rather than the Navajo, and I write using an alphabet I created myself.”
“That sounds incredibly complicated,” Gabriel said.
“That was the point. You’ll discover how complicated when I teach you how to read it.”
“It seems like that could take a while.”
“Not as long as it took me to learn it. Nearly a year. Or a long lunch from the perspective of everyone in the castle. Regardless, you’ll need to know everything in this notebook to help figure out how to stop Apollyon.”
“Couldn’t you simply tell me?”
“I could, but a
t some point I’ll be turning this notebook over to you, and you’ll want to know how to write in it as well as read it. Fortunately, I’ve created a secret Rosetta Stone to help you.”
“Right.”
Gabriel stifled the sigh bursting to escape his lungs. He spoke a little Spanish, thanks to his Guatemalan mother’s insistence, but he had never had a knack for picking up languages. With the amulets all mages wore to telepathically translate their various tongues, he hadn’t seen a need to address that deficiency. He knew from his history studies that the real Rosetta Stone had been discovered at the end of the 18th Century, inscribed with duplicate Greek and Egyptian text. It had been the only way modern archeologists had managed to decipher the ancient written Egyptian language. He wondered what Elizabeth’s Rosetta Stone might be.
“As my office is no longer safe, we’ll meet in the east terrace gardens in the afternoons. We’ll begin tomorrow.”
The mention of Elizabeth’s office brought a thought to Gabriel’s mind.
“It’s possible Vicaquirao put the cup on your office. It sounds like something he would do.”
“Potentially.” Elizabeth considered this for a moment. “However, it doesn’t seem complicated enough for Vicaquirao. Not enough layers in that cake. If it’s not Apollyon, that means he’s found some other means to know about our missions. Not a comforting thought, even if we must consider it.”
“Kumaradevi, maybe?”
“No.” Elizabeth actually laughed. “If Kumaradevi could place a cup near me, she’d make sure it killed me as soon as I touched it. The hatred she bares me for her husband’s death wouldn’t leave room for the restraint of something like this.”
“He probably deserved it.” Gabriel couldn’t imagine what kind of man could love Kumaradevi. He found it even more improbable that Kumaradevi might care for someone other than herself.
The Sword of Unmaking (The Wizard of Time - Book 2) Page 4
