Yet.
“Doc. What do you have on Baltrice?”
“Uh, you do remember that I can’t see her unless you can, right?”
“Sorry.” I swooped around to another spot, where the frozen form of Baltrice was in my field of vision, a dozen meters beyond Renn. “A little busy here.”
“I still hate that guy.”
“I still agree.”
Renn shot from his other hand rectangular sheets of azure fire, one after another, like playing cards or baffle curtains. They expanded as they came at me, and went from transparent to translucent, heading for opaque. My best guess: some kind of at-range shield, possibly an exotic flavor of telekinesis.
I used my left hand to intercept the rectangles with a twisting chain of lightning. The lightning seemed to stop their approach, chewing through their middles, again one after another, on its way toward Renn-though each rectangle held longer than the one before it had, which wasn’t promising. I had no way to know how long my sangrite-supercharged power would last, and Renn wasn’t even breathing hard. “Doc. Baltrice?”
“Got it,” he said. “Nothing fancy-time’s running about a tenth of a percent of normal for a couple of yards on all sides of her. Each second for her is about seventeen minutes for us. Cold storage.”
“This could be a problem,” I said through clenched teeth, opening every mana channel I had to pour power into my continuous writhe of lightning.
Renn canceled his blue torrent-whatever in the hells it had been-and gestured with his right hand, drawing blue sigils that danced in the air like fey-charmed runes. My lightning hung transfixed on one of those blue rectangles-which didn’t look inclined to fail-and there were still at least two more of them between Renn and grievous bodily harm. “What are those damned shields, then?”
“Same kind of thing,” Doc told me grimly. “Hypotemporal boundaries. Each one marks a downshift of about half. Between those last two… let’s see, a quarter, an eighth… yeah. One two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth of normal.”
Damn. “How long can he keep them up?”
“How should I know? You’re the one who said he could have spent subjective weeks or even months getting ready; best to assume he can do whatever he’s doing as long as he feels like doing it.”
“Yes.” I tried to loop my lightning and hook it around the outside of the rectangles, but they moved instantly to intercept, seemingly without requiring any attention from Renn. Worse news. “What about those glowing runes in the air?”
“Shrug. More clockworking?”
The runes were still dancing, but as Renn added to them, they began to organize themselves into a curving band… bent into a broad half-circle arch. “A gate?”
“Hey, that’s it! A temporal gate!” Doc chirped. “He’s going for another time line-we got him on the run!”
“I don’t think so.” Flee? From me? Not Silas Renn.
He stepped into the gate and vanished.
“The gate’s still open-go get him!”
“I don’t think so,” I repeated. The only plausible reason for the gate to still be there is that he wanted me to go after him. I’m just not that gullible.
Those time shields were still between me and the gate-but I had a work-around. I did my new reality-rip trick in front of my chest, and opened another one at the mouth of the gate-sighting through the warp showed me Renn crouching on the far side, so he wouldn’t get caught in the kill zone of the five (!) etherium drakes he had waiting for me, who would have made very short work of me indeed, supercharged or not.
I extended my power through the reality warp-into the one in front of me and out of the one fronting the gate-like a hand of lightning, and just grabbed the smug prick and hauled him back here where I could uncork another swing or two. Or five. Or eight.
However many it took until the bastard stopped moving.
My lightning hand couldn’t breach his personal shields, and I couldn’t seem to drag him into the warp itself-but that was no reason to just let him go. I’d never get a better chance to test his personal shields against the altered physics of an area where time was passing, say for example, at roughly one tenth of one percent of normal. It was worth the experiment.
I threw him at Baltrice.
He flailed wildly in the air, magic flashing and blasting out of him in all directions, seemingly at random, but some of them must have accomplished something, because suddenly everything was happening very… very… slowly… the crackles and blasts of battle deepening to a grinding, almost subsonic rumble.
Renn inched through the air toward Baltrice, and I got it: he’d thrown some sort of temporal distortion to give himself time to figure out what to do-but in his panic he’d accidentally caught me in the spell’s fringe, for which I was grateful, because I was about to be in a great deal of trouble. Those damned etherium drakes were heading into Renn’s gate.
Coming for me.
Four of them unfurled their wings with the majestic grace of schooners raising sail. The fifth, showing either better reflexes or more initiative than his comrades, had turned his wide-gaped mouth toward the reality warp and now belched forth a roiling burst of flame. I canceled the warp instantly, but my reflexes, no matter how enhanced by Renn’s spell, couldn’t force the warp to close all at once. As the ragged edges of reality gradually sewed themselves back together, I was treated to the unusual view of dragon-fire boiling slowly toward me, creeping through the warp, and unfolding like a thunderhead until it pillowed into me and blasted me backward and up into the sky.
Slowly.
The lightning from my skin protected me from anything worse than sunburn, but matters would be different when they all ganged up on me. And I was in no mood to waste my limited powers fighting e-drakes. I had a better idea.
Renn, meanwhile, stretched a hand toward Baltrice, and he must have canceled the hypotemporal field that restrained her to avoid catching himself in it like a fly in magical amber. She lurched into motion, though still (subjectively) very slowly, pitching forward over the nose of her sled, heading for the dunes face-first. Renn came tumbling glacially after her.
This looked to me like a chance to get up close and personal.
I grabbed reality between them and yanked it to within one step, arriving directly in the path of Renn’s cold-molasses tumble, which I intercepted by leaping forward to grab the back of his neck, yank his head toward me, and smash his face into my knee.
The slow-motion squash of Silas Renn’s nose was possibly the most exquisitely satisfying sensation I will ever experience.
Suddenly-though not unexpectedly-time around us regained its normal flow when my knee broke Renn’s concentration along with his nose. Back in full speed with no time to react, he and I crashed together with stunning force. His greater momentum carried us backward, and we hit the sand in a heap. Renn somehow had gotten his head into the pit of my stomach, and the impact drove all hope of breath from my lungs and made ragged patches of black skate across the cloudless sky above.
I rolled over on top of him and hooked his etherium collarbone with my left hand, which was all I could manage before I had to simply lie across him and try to force air back down my throat. Fortunately, Renn was in no better shape; he lay with only whites showing through his slitted eyelids, and his open mouth bubbled with blood from his nose.
“Tezzeret…?” Baltrice rolled over with a grunt and sat up. I was passingly pleased to note that her face, unlike the rest of her body, had no powdered glass on it-because her ear-and-eye device was still working. “What happened to me? What’s wrong with my back? What the hell’s going on?”
I tried to tell her, but could manage only a strangled croak. I gestured weakly at Renn with my free hand.
She stood up. “Well, all right, then. Get off him and I’ll take it from here.”