Page 77 of Time's Fool

One tripped up a young woman, causing her to drop the armful of pots she had been clutching, and shattering a piece of crockery into a dozen pieces. The other caught a man, jerking him backward and causing his nightshirt to ride up, and him to moon the street. If the Circle was trying to endear themselves to England, I thought, watching his furious face as he scrabbled uselessly at the cobbles, they had a strange way of doing it.

“This is Morgan’s work,” Rhea said, as if she’d heard me. “The Circle has rules, and this violates most of them.”

“They’ll memory charm everyone,” I pointed out.

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!”

I started to reply, then stopped, trying to imagine the world she and the ghost came from, where some minor pain and humiliation was this anger inducing.

I failed.

But at least the chaos had opened up an opportunity. The nearest mages hauled off their captives, briefly clearing the street in our direction. And we pelted toward the bend in the road while the coast was clear.

Only to have the street in front of us suddenly wobble.

The air looked like the surface of a pond when a stone is thrown into it, only there was no water here. Except for the rain, which it bent into much the same pattern. And that meant only one thing.

“Portal!” I yelled, but Rhea had seen it, too, and she learned fast. She hit the ground just before a great mouth opened in the night, not a dozen yards away.

But the distance meant little, as this wasn’t one of the normal sized portals, which tended to be small to reduce their power needs and thereby their cost. This one could have swallowed a house. I stared at it in disbelief, knowing that whatever came out of there, we weren’t going to be able to handle.

And I was right, because a moment later—

We were almost run down by a horde of enraged witches.

I hadn’t thought there were that many left in England, and maybe there weren’t. These were dressed oddly, more like women from the Low Countries, and the curses they were shouting sounded like the Antwerp dialect. Not that I heard them for very long, since the little battle had just become a war.

So that’s why the locals were so bold, I thought, as a flurry of spells flew in both directions.

They had already called for reinforcements.

The witches stormed by us, with several going down from vicious Corps’ hexes, and another falling in front of her sisters who were still flooding out of the portal’s mouth. Her body tripped some of them up and they went down, too, almost on top of Rhea. Who smiled at them weakly.

But the absence of a Circle cloak and the presence of a wand in her hand seemed to reassure them. One even returned her smile before they scrambled back to their feet and surged down the street toward the Corpsmen. And after a brief moment of staring after them, Rhea did likewise and we pelted in the opposite direction.

Only to be abruptly reminded of something before we’d gone ten yards.

Portaling into London was a no-no, and triggered an immediate response. And the bigger the portal, the bigger the counter measures were likely to be. Which was probably why smaller portals had begun opening in the air all around us, likely from multiple Corps strongholds, as word of a major incursion ran across the city.

You couldn’t fault their speed, I thought, as we swerved and ducked and were almost trampled—and that was before one of the gaping mouths appeared right in our path. But Rhea didn’t lose her nerve, as I had half feared. She hit the road again, scrabbling forward on shins and forearms until the portal was churning directly over top of us, and she was getting splashed by dirty water as dozens of pairs of war mage boots hit the stones mere feet away.

Their owners never looked down. And the brilliance of the portal helped to hide us, while the boldness of the move had me reassessing the young witch. I looked at her and she looked back, her eyes huge, while the thrumming power overhead blew her hair around.

Then we turned to look at the street ahead, where the same thing was happening.

“Rooftops?” I mouthed, and she grimaced.

But the next thing I knew, we were popping into a higher vantage point, three stories up—and right in front of a group of the mad bombers.

I said a bad word, which Rhea echoed. And, for an instant, three of them—a frazzled looking friar, a massive man with bare legs like tree trunks, and a sly looking girl with a red petticoat—gaped at her in shock. I supposed she didn’t look the type.

Or maybe they just weren’t used to having people appear out of thin air in front of them.

But they recovered fast, and reached for her, and she tried to get her wand up, but that was a little hard when she was about to slide off a wet roof. And with a ghost clutching her around the neck and screaming. And with a disembodied spirit yelling “Another roof! Another roof!”

But the trio didn’t attack. Instead, strong arms grabbed hers, pulling her up beside them. An act that was followed by slaps on the back and congratulations, because they had apparently had a good view of her jail break.

And had an idea for a second act.

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