I clutched my stomach and covered him with my gun while Agnes pulled a pair of cuffs out of her coat. "I have a problem," I told her quickly, before she could shift away. "I really am Pythia, but I don't know what I'm doing and there's no one in my time who can help me."
"That's a problem," she agreed, snicking the cuffs shut.
"Yeah."
"Good luck with that." She grabbed the mage by the collar.
"Don't you dare leave!"" I said furiously. "I helped you!"
"You almost blew this place sky-high! Anyway, even if I wanted to help you, there are rules."
"Screw the rules! You stuck me with this godforsaken position—"
"I didn't hear that."
"— and now you think you can just walk away? You have a responsibility here!"
I'd been waving the gun around in my agitation, and it accidentally went off and took a chip out of a brick over the mage's head. He blinked. "Uh, ladies? Might I suggest—"
"Shut up!" we told him in unison. He shut up.
Agnes tried to shift, but I grabbed her wrist, wrenching us back at the same moment that she tried to go forward. "Are you crazy?" she screeched, only it sounded like she was talking in slow motion.
Time wobbled around us: one second, we were back where I came in, with bullets whizzing around our heads; the next we were in the future, watching a party of cloaked men in funny hats examining the ruined door. One of them caught sight of us and paled, and then we were gone, bouncing backward once more.
Agnes somehow managed to put on the brakes, wrenching us out of the time stream with what I swear was an audible pop. For a moment, we stood there, white-faced and shaking, back where we'd started but a little worse for the wear. I don't know about the others, but I felt like I'd just stepped off a roller coaster—light-headed and a little sick.
"I need to go to the bathroom," the mage said weakly.
Agnes took a deep breath and let it out, glaring at me. "You're a lousy liar. If I'd trained you, you'd have known better than to pull a stunt like that!"
"Didn't you hear me?" I demanded. "You didn't train me. That's the problem. You gave me this lousy job and then died before—"
"La-la-la. Not listening." She stuck a finger in one ear, which didn't help much as the other hand still gripped the mage's shirt.
I stared at her. My last image of Agnes was her heroic death to keep a rogue initiate from laying waste to the time line. Somewhere in my hero worship, I'd forgotten how deeply weird she could be. Of course, if I kept this job as long as she had, I might not be too normal, either. It wasn't a comforting thought.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" I asked, honestly worried that my last chance for a mentor was headed down the toilet along with her sanity.
"What's wrong with me?" She took the finger out of her ear to shake it at me. "You're not supposed to tell me these things!"
"I haven't told you that much—" I began, only to be cut off with a savage gesture.
"You've told me plenty! I have an initiate in training and she isn't you. You said I got you into this, so what happened to her? Is she dead? Did she turn dark?" Her hands waved around, banging the mage's head into the wall. "I don't know!"
"Sort of both," I said uneasily. Agnes' second heir, Myra, had turned dark and began using her time-travel abilities for her own and her allies' gain. Agnes would be forced to kill her to remove the threat to the time line but would die herself in the process. And that would leave an untrained nobody in the Pythia's position—me.
"Don't tell me that!" she whispered, clearly horrified.
"You asked."
"No! I didn't! I was explaining how much information I could get out of this meeting if I thought about it, which I'm absolutely not going to do because I may have already learned too much. What if something you say causes me to change the way I deal with the present—my present—which then alters your future? You might shift back only to find out that you don't exist anymore! Hadn't thought of that, had you?"
"No," I said, working to keep my temper under control.
"But that doesn't change the fact that I need training!"
"The early Pythias didn't have much in the way of training, but they managed to figure things out. So will you."
"Easy for you to say. You were trained. You never had to figure anything out!"
"Like hell." She put the hand not choking the mage on her hip in a familiar gesture. "No amount of training really prepares you for this job."
"But at least you know how the power works. I didn't get the manual!"
"There is no manual. If our enemies ever figured out everything we can do, they would be much more successful in opposing us. And time isn't all that easy to screw up any—"
She paused as, somewhere on the far side of the gunpowder room, a key turned in a lock. Agnes drew her gun and pushed it into the mage's temple hard enough to dent the skin. "Say one word—make one sound—and I swear. .," she whispered. He looked conflicted, ideology warring with self-preservation, but I guess the latter won because he stayed silent. Or maybe he couldn't talk with her fist knotted in his collar.
The three of us peered through the missing door and caught glimpses of fire. A dark-haired man stood at the far end of the room. He sat a lantern that looked a lot like the mage's well away from the casks, which he started shifting around. He was dressed like the mage, too, except for a long dark coat, and he had boots on. The spurs chimed softly in the quiet.
"Fawkes," Agnes whispered. She nudged the mage with the barrel of her gun. "Did you change anything?"
He stayed silent.
"Answer me!"
"That's not how it works," he said irritably. "You can't say you'll shoot me if I talk and then ask me a question!"
We froze as the man paused, looking our way but not seeing anything. It was pitch-dark at our end of the cellar. We'd left the mage's lantern behind when we took our stroll with the bomb and it must have gone out, because the only source of light came from Fawkes'. He paused, sniffing the damp air, where the acrid smell of the explosion still lingered. But after a moment, he went back to work.
"We've got to hurry this up," Agnes whispered. "Where was I?"
"You said time is hard to mess up. But hard isn't impossible. Some things can make a difference." On a recent trip through time, I'd accidentally changed one little thing, merely meeting a man a few hundred years before I was supposed to, and the results had been insane. The results had almost gotten both of us killed.
"Of course they can," she said impatiently. "That's why we're here."
"But how do I know what can safely be changed and what can't?" I asked desperately.
Agnes frowned. "What is this?" she demanded, her voice suddenly going flat and hard. It matched the icy color of her eyes. "Some kind of elaborate hoax?"
"What? No! I—"
She jerked the mage down to the level of her face. "Did you recruit a woman to try to fool me? Was that was this was all about?"
He glanced at me and then back at her. "Yeah," he said slowly. "You got me."
"I should have known! I knew the power wouldn't allow two Pythias to meet!" she hissed, and turned her gun on me.
I stared at her. "He's lying!"
"If he was lying, you wouldn't have asked me that!" she spat. "No Pythia would."
"Asked what? All I want is some help!"
"Oh, I'll help you!" she said, and lunged for me. The mage took his chance and ran into the gunpowder room while Agnes and I went down in a flail of limbs, her trying to cuff me while I attempted to get free without either of our guns going off. It wasn't easy. I swear the woman had an extra arm, because she somehow managed to hold both my wrists while a tiny fist clocked me upside the jaw.