by P. S. Power
Not that Dareg could. Not yet.
People were in shock, which he understood, having been there before himself. He'd sat for two days next to his mother, when she'd died. Crushed under that focus stone roof. Now he stood, and looked around. No one knew exactly what to do, so they just stood and paced. Even the biomechanical people did that.
He spoke, his voice rough, and old sounding. Ancient.
"Clear the room. We need to write down all of this, so we don't forget. Now. The time field... It... It's making it hard to think and remember. In the next room. Can we save anyone?" He knew that Johan was alive, and healing, but he wasn't sitting yet. Kolb was breathing, but it was a strained and damp thing. One far too close to death for anyone to place a bet on, one way or the other.
"Move." He managed to limp out, not healing now. Dareg hurt, but would survive. He just wasn't certain about the others. Tor managed to get up on his own, though it was clear that he was more injured than anyone else standing there.
The weight of the deaths, of Karen and Erid, they didn't affect him much yet. They'd been people he knew, but they weren't close, which saved him a bit of the suffering that was starting to hit everyone else.
Outside the door he saw Sara, Tiera, and Havar running up. No one else could speak, and it was clear that something very bad had taken place in there.
Dareg grunted, looking at the blonde woman.
"Paper and pen, now. Right now. Don't ask. Just... Do it." He was being rude, but it really was clear that the whole thing was trying to escape his mind already. In ten minutes it would be gone, the time stream falling away from him already. People, real ones, weren't built to function like that.
The Ancient of the Martian Circle ran, and came back with a small pad of focus stone, and a stylus made of the same stuff. She scribbled on the top of it, showing that it made marks.
"Write, like on paper. When you want a new page, tap the lower right side."
It took a few moments, but he sank onto a chair that she got him and wrote, trying to do it fast, and not making it. He wrote the whole thing down in a few paragraphs, then went back over it, trying to recall what had been said. Who'd fought when, and how bravely everyone had died.
Then, when it was all down, as well as he could make it happen, he forgot. Not the pain, or how he'd followed Tor into time itself to fight something, but other than that, it was all a blank. A thing that he couldn't remember.
Lyone, the serving woman, who was also a clockwork person, stood beside him, looking at the strange stone paper in his hands.
Crying, with tears dripping down her face, she smiled. It was happy and miserable, both at the same time.
"I need to contact my people. May I copy your words?"
He nodded, and was about to ask her not to lose them, when she glanced at the pad, tapping the upper right hand side of the thing to make the pages roll back, and then did it downward again. After that it was held out to him, still intact.
"No one else has ever gotten that much of a report on an encounter. Not even close. No one has ever survived either. Now we know why. Possibly. Time. They're in all time. Of course. I need to go. Do you need aid?" She looked at him, and took in the obviously broken places, but there wasn't a lot that could be done for the moment. It would take time to recover enough to heal.
"Go. Come back here, when you're done?"
"Certainly. Can you help me get some of my people? The others too? We need to prepare, if we can."
"Yeah. If not me than someone else will." It was, after all, possible that he was going to die still.
There were things that weren't supposed to be done, and he'd just managed one of them. Tor had too, so it was kind of reasonable to think that they might not make it. He felt like dying, if that was any sign. Still, there were things to do, so, reaching over slowly, he tried to pull his handheld from his hip pocket. It was in about fifteen pieces, with some stone dust at the bottom. Holding that in his hands he just looked at it, feeling helpless for a bit. Finally a man walked over to him, and took the bits.
Terry. His uncle.
The man looked horribly sad, since friends of his had died in that room. They might still be dying, since Kolb hadn't been removed yet. He took out a device of his own and looked at Dare, his gaze holding for a moment.
"Who do you need?"
It took a few seconds, but he looked at the device, thinking. Who did they need?
"King Richard. Alice Orange. Prime Minister Foley. I don't know who else to talk to. Them first."
Terry, instead of doing the normal thing and typing out names, just held up the device and spoke into it.
"Emergency. Emergency. Breaking in on all command level systems. Emergency report." Then he handed the thing to Dareg, waiting for something.
Dare was silent for a moment, then nodded, not knowing what to say.
"There has been an attack. The Adversaries. We... won. Barely. Several people are dead. Commander Karen Derring. High Servant Erid,.." He looked up, to see Taman walk out of the room, being half carried by her mother. The dark haired lady, who looked so much like a child herself shook her head.
"Baron Kolbrin didn't make it. High Servant Johan may, or may not. It's too hard to tell." Then she started to cry too.
So did Terry.
"Baron Kolbrin didn't live. There were two of them. Shields were useless. I... Here..." He read off the report he wrote out, going over the whole thing, including the part about how hard it was to remember.
Then he looked at the thing in his hand, wondering if anyone had heard him.
"I... I'll get off of this now? Or... how do we do this? I don't know what to do." There was a plaintive note to his voice, but Dareg didn't care if anyone thought he was weak now. Really, he doubted that would ever bother him again.
There wouldn't be time for that now.
They had an enemy, and if they could be believed, they were everywhere. In all times.
That was going to be hard to beat. If they could at all.
A single voice came at him then, which took him a moment to recognize. It was Connie. Her voice was thick, like she'd been crying already.
"Is... Did Tor make it?"
He'd gotten out of the room and sat not that far away, being held by Alyssa. Looking over he got a somber nod from the man. It could have been funny, but it wasn't at the moment. Dareg, more than anyone else there understood what it meant. Tor, the wizard, didn't think he was going to die from what had happened.
"I think he'll live. That... What he did, the time thing? It might still kill him. Me too, but he was in it longer. I can't heal now. Magically. There's nothing left. He's in the same situation."
"Oh! I'll be right there... I'm coming."
It was nice to hear, even though he knew it was all about her being in love with Tor. It was good that he had people to care for him that way. Terry got off the line, then shook his head.
"So, we need to prepare. How, I don't know. I'll get your notes to everyone. We... Should find you a bed." There was honest worry when the man really looked at him, as if it suddenly hit him that his claim that he might not make it and couldn't heal wasn't a joke.
Still he forced a grin, not meaning it.
"Like I can lay down? If I do that I'll probably stop breathing. I... Can you help me move? I kind of want to be alone." Not that he could cry at the moment.
There was nothing left for that.
Tor had several people around him, and even after Terry helped him switch to the front room, and sat him on a comfortable sofa, that was all white and soft, no one came for him. Not for a very long time. That was fine though. He was the new person, and even if they weren't serious about him being family, it was enough to know that Tor had people to love him. They all did. Not him, but he was used to it, so didn't let that bother him.
When a person finally came looking for him, it was Alice Orange, dressed in combat gear, with a belt that held at least six weapons. The rest was a shiny black, that re
minded him a bit of the big black beetles he used to play with as a boy. It hugged her body, but when she noticed him looking she didn't assume he was looking at her in a sexual way.
Slapping her chest, she stared at him.
"Pician armor. Totally physical, so their ability to get around magic won't work on it. I don't know if the weapons will work. We need something though, and until we find it, we have to be willing to fight with anything we can. Even sticks, if that's what it takes. If fists worked, then that trick of Tor's and knives might." She sat next to him, a bit away, not touching and waved at him. "You look mostly dead. I read your report."
She didn't go into how it made him look. That wasn't good, he knew, having written it. The whole thing was as honest as he could make it, sparing nothing for how he felt about it. How he'd just sat there for a long time, while people died, not understanding what was needed. It was, in the end, what had happened, so he didn't beg for the woman, or anyone, to fix that for him.
They couldn't. Worse, he could tell already that if he'd leapt in at the start, then he would have died instantly. The only thing that had saved him was Tor, figuring out a way to fight. Taking him with him, so that he could live too. That... Probably hadn't been an accident or some power of his own that had allowed it.
There it was then. In that moment, when helping him might have meant the difference between living and dying, Tor had tried to save him. Like Taman had.
That part was going to hurt her, he knew.
She was smart. Like he was. Better educated, and a wizard. One brilliant enough to know that she couldn't save Dareg on her own. So she'd sacrificed an already dying Kolb to do it. A man that had seen thousands of years. One that had torn himself apart for some kid that he'd met less than a week before. Probably knowing he was doing it the whole time.
He looked at Alice, not able to move enough to do anything emotional. Finally, after a bit, he looked into her bright green eyes.
"Kolb. He sacrificed himself to save me. Taman helped." It was in the report, but not his personal conclusions as to how it must have happened. It would have been temping to think that the girl had done it coldly, knowing it was the best, maybe the only, way. That wasn't the case, and he knew it.
Not that there had been lots of options, or that the old fighter would have lived. No one could know that really. It was just clear that Taman Baker, while she might be a lot of things, wasn't cool in her soul. He probably seemed like that now, not crying or able to seem upset.
Alice reached out, very gently and touched his shoulder.
"I read that. That... He was probably the greatest human fighter left in the world, Dareg. Oh, some days that might be me, but I hold no great illusions there. There may be some Remy left. The one at the Lairdgren School. We need to find them, and bring them to our side." She shook her head, and then gave him a very hard look. "If those two could do that, in that room, facing all of you, then we are in real trouble. I don't wish to be mean to you, but I think you are clever enough to understand me. We don't have time to mourn our losses. Or to feel the sting of betrayal. Now it is time to ready ourselves, and to fight. That is all there is time for. At least for those of us that can manage it. We must try."
Then she stood up, and walked away. The light glinting a little off of her all black outfit. Even her boots looked like that. Strong, and different, being made of real material.
She wasn't wrong, so he stood, on his own, and walked, slowly, to find the others. Tor was still being held, where he had been before, in the large hallway. Now it was by Queen Constance, though as soon as he came into view Karina left her side and ran to him. She tried to hold him, managing it, but doing it so lightly it nearly didn't count.
Probably because he looked ready to shatter if even one more thing happened.
"Hey." He looked at her and nodded, trying not to worry about how messed up his face had to look at the moment. Bad enough that Alice hadn't minded him even without a disguise on. "Can you get a ship to the new fleet? We might need to pick some people up. We need all the help we can get, I think."
There were several other people there, he noticed, including a bunch of Royal Guards, all with weapons in their hands, like it would help if they had to fight. It probably wouldn't.
Then, anyone could be one of those things, or so it seemed. Now that he thought about it, Bill had been a bit strange the entire time. Too bold and willful for a commoner, even as he tried to seem meek. If high Servant Straughan had been that way it was hard to know. He'd seemed to like sex however, and not cared how he gotten it. At any rate he'd enjoyed making people suffer.
That... It was a minor enough point. The men had seemed physical, until they'd died. If they were in all times however, then how did they not see that coming? There was no way for him to know that, and as it was Dare had to work off of his notes totally now. It was like trying to figure out what to do about characters in a story or play.
Karina nodded, and then held him for a bit.
"This... It's hard for us all. I... No one saw this coming. Can we now even? We could all die, at any moment. I don't know what to do." She looked at him then, as if he might.
That would be due to his fancy bit of magic not being around his neck. Still, he let himself seem confident, or to do that as much as he could and looked back at her.
"We prepare, and then when they come for us, we bring a fight to them that they can't even begin to imagine. I know it doesn't seem like it, but this, this horrible thing today, was them losing, for what was almost certainly the first time ever. That means that we can win. It might not be cheap, or easy, but we can do it, and we will."
Then he got up, his body in agony. It was time to see to the living, and tend to the dead.
Then they needed to get ready.
If they could.
That part, well, Dareg wasn't all that sure they really could. Not that he was going to let on to that. He had a family now, and if that wasn't worth fighting for, or dying for, then nothing he knew of was.
So he would. Even if it killed him.
In the end, it was all he could do.
It was all anyone could, really.
To find out more about what's going on in the fast paced world of P.S. Power please go to" pspowerbooks.com (Also, come joint the forum! It will be fun.)
Other books by P.S. Power that you might like.
(All books are in the suggested reading order by series.)
Young Ancients: (The First Cycle)
The Builder (Tor's first book)
Knight Esquire (Tor)
Knight of the Realm (Tor)
Ambassador (Tor)
Counselor (Tor)
Slave Line (Tor)
The Dark Half of the Sun (This is the first book with Timon as a main character)
A Simple Darkness (This one has Tiera)
Ancient Kings (Tor)
Lord of the Sky (Timon)
The Silence Within (Tiera)
Kingdom of Stars (Timon)
Goddess of the Moon (Tiera)
Envoy to Earth (Gerent)
Strange Land (Sara)
Young Ancients (The Second Cycle)
Lineage (Dareg Canton)
The Infected: (The super-hero stories)
(The Beginning Arc)
Proxy (Brian)
Gabriel (Denis)
Cast Iron (Marcia)
Proxy: Reunions (Brian)
Cellophane (Penny)
Goblin (Tobin)
Reunions (Brian)
Ghost Girl (Becky and Scott)
Impulse: A Whole New Day (Bridgette)
War Day (Brian)
Dead End: (Zombies, people with powers and the end of the world. Everything Jake!)
A Very Good Man
A Very Good Neighbor
A Very Good Thing
A Very Dark Place
Dead End: Stories from the End of the World the Definitive Collection (This has all of the above books, plus a load of short stories from ot
her perspectives.)
Gwen Farris: (The story of a woman who wakes up in a magical steampunk world. Into a better life than she ever dreamed of. Which is still pretty darned dark and gritty.)
Abominations
Monsters
Strangers and Lies
Tremble in the Dark
Friends and Enemies
Keeley Thomson: (The Greater Demon Universe, in suggested reading order. There are several sub series, marked in bold below)
Demon Girl
Keelzebub
Mistress of Souls
Demon Trap
Demon Bait
Related works:
Christmas of the Vampire
Friendzoned (Becky Hoader. This book takes place in the Greater Demon Universe, but isn't supernatural, and is instead a coming of age novel. You'll recognize a lot of other names however! Also there are some things that will be very different once you know what's going on...)
Other Places: (Zack Hartley)
Shortcuts
Road Blocks
Detours
Alternate Places: (Zack Hartley, but a totally different one! These were the first three books written by P.S. Power. Then everything changed.)
Mr. Hartley
Between
On The Line (Kaitlyn's first book.)
Eve Benson: (Everything Eve!)
Finally Dead
Dead and Everything
Dead Certain
Tyler G.: (All Tyler!)
Living Proof
The Living and The Dead
Among the Living
The Lament: (This is a stand alone, complete series.)
Without Rhythm
Off Center
Missing Elements
The Greasepaint Chronicles: (Mystery series. It's about a clown that solves crimes. The whole thing is rather dark.)
A Fear of Clowns
