The Wizard of Time (Book 1) (8 page)

“Hand me the book,” Ohin said. “but keep your hand on it.” Gabriel did as told. Ohin used one hand to share the book with Gabriel and placed his other hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “In order to take someone or something through time with you, it is best to touch them. There are exceptions, but they are best tried only by powerful and experienced Time Mages.

“Also, a Time Mage can learn to ghost the movement of another Time Mage through time, to follow them to their destination, even without the use of a relic. That is for another lesson. For now, still your mind again and focus on the book. Try to bring back that time-sense vision of the room with the fireplace and the chair. I am going to move us through time to that place. I want you to pay attention and try to sense what it is I do. Do not watch with your eyes. Just be. There is only you and me and the book and that room.”

Everything around them went dark and Gabriel felt his stomach turning inside out even as a knife pierced his brain. There was something else, too. A sense of power. Power within himself. No, power outside himself. No, a power that was ever-present, of which he was merely one manifestation. Just as suddenly as the blackness came, blinding white light suffused him and Ohin and the book. Everything bled a brilliant white light. Then they stood in front of the fireplace, the leather chair nearby, the bookcases surrounding them. Only the book wasn’t on the chair, and there was no wine glass, and no fire in the fireplace. Gabriel looked around.

“Wow,” was all he could say.

“Exactly,” Ohin said.

“But the fire is out,” Gabriel said, looking around as he let go of the old book.

“I moved us to a different day,” Ohin said. “One when I sensed there was no one in the house.”

“You could sense that?” Gabriel said with amazement.

“Yes,” Ohin said. “As you approach a particular time, you will be able to sense what is different from one day to the next, how one hour differs from another, one minute from the last. Now, tell me what you sensed.”

“Between the darkness and the blinding white light there was a power,” Gabriel said. His heart quickened thinking about it. “I can’t describe it exactly, but I could sense this power bending and warping around me and through me. And a pain in my head like a headache, only worse.”

“The pain in your head will subside a little with each journey,” Ohin said. “It is your brain struggling to process things it was never intended to experience. The power you felt was the energy of an imbued artifact interacting with the fundamental energy of the universe, guided by my own subtle energies.”

“Magic.”

“Yes.”

“We’re really in London in 1895,” Gabriel said, staring out the window. Outside the sun was high in the sky and people walked along the sidewalks, horse drawn carriages and flatbed wagons rumbling down the street.

“Of course we are,” Ohin said. “Now let’s see if you can guide us to some other when and where.” Ohin held the novel out to Gabriel, who placed his hand on the worn cover of the book. Gabriel felt Ohin rest a hand on his shoulder as he closed his eyes and he tried to clear his mind.

“This time,” Ohin said, “I want you to not only hold a sense of place and time from the book, but sense the energy of my Talisman.”  Gabriel felt Ohin place the necklace of seashells on top of the book so that his hand was touching both. It was easier now to perceive the flow of the book’s passage through time. Maybe his time-sense was developing. Maybe Ohin was helping him. Either way, as he focused his attention on the book, he could see moments from where it had been and who had been near it.

One seemed clearer than the others did. He wasn’t sure when in time the moment was, but there was a beach and a woman was reading the book beneath the shade of a large umbrella, its wooden stake stuffed firmly into the sand. He held that image in his mind even as he reached out to try and sense the imprinted energy of Ohin’s talisman necklace of seashells.

“When you have a place and time clearly in mind,” Ohin whispered, “hold it as you focus on the power of the necklace. The necklace is like a magnifying glass for your own magical energy. Feel the power within you. Feel the power of the imprints of the necklace. Focus your mind and bring those two sources of energy together. And when you hold them together, focus your will upon that image of where and when you want to go.”

Blackness descended, and then blinding white light seared through his brain. When it ceased, Gabriel opened his eyes to see that he stood on a beach several hundred feet away from the water, near an overhanging bank of long grass. A woman sat near the water reading a book under an umbrella. She wore a full bathing suit of black with a bit of skirt around the waist. He thought he might have seen something like it in an old movie that took place in the 1920s. Ohin laughed. Gabriel looked up to see a wide, white-toothed smile spread across his mentor’s face.

“What’d I do wrong?” Gabriel asked, trying to figure out what the source of Ohin’s amusement might be.

“Wrong!” Ohin said. “Who said anything about wrong? That was brilliant.” He slapped Gabriel on the back. Ohin’s clothes shimmered and he suddenly wore loose cotton pants, a white cotton shirt, and suspenders.

“Really?” Gabriel asked. He focused on the amulet at his neck for a moment and his appearance changed, as well.

“Yes,” Ohin said. “I didn’t bring us here, you did. One second I’m talking to you, sensing how you’re manipulating the energy, and the next thing we’re standing here.”

“So I did it right?” Gabriel asked.

“Not just right,” Ohin said. “Perfect. You even moved us away from the book so we wouldn’t pop into someone’s view.” That was true now that Gabriel thought back. He had sensed the presence of the woman and willed himself to move away from it. “I’ve never heard of something like it before,” Ohin said.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

“No one has ever made a second jump all on their own,” Ohin said. “It usually takes weeks for an apprentice to learn how to jump under their own power. Sometimes months. You must be a prodigy.”

Gabriel didn’t know what to say. All he could think to do was smile back at Ohin and laugh along. Him. A prodigy. Of Time Magic. That was too crazy to think about. And wonderful. He couldn’t wait to tell...Well, the people he really wanted to tell he couldn’t. Even if he could find them in time, he couldn’t talk to them. But he could tell Teresa. And Sema and Ling. And Marcus and Rajan. He could tell them.

 “Well,” Ohin said, “Now that you’ve done it once, let’s see if it was a fluke. This time, I want to see if you can take us to a particular moment in time. I happen to know that on August 7th in 1960, this book was in the satchel of a young man watching the movie version of the novel at his local theater. See if you can take us there.”

Gabriel nodded and brought his attention back to the book and the necklace of seashells. He could not sense a distinct day or year, but the image of a movie theater flashed through his mind. Moments later, at least moments from their perspective, Gabriel and Ohin stood at the back of the balcony of a large movie theater. He recognized the movie projected on the screen immediately. Director and producer, George Pal’s adaptation of
The Time Machine
. He had stayed up late one Saturday night a year ago and watched it with his father. His father was an even bigger fan of science fiction than he was. It made him smile to remember it. He also smiled because he had just made his second jump through time alone and gotten it right. He grinned up at Ohin, who grinned back.

They jumped back and forth along the Continuum three more times. First to 1968 in San Francisco when the book was in the pocket of a young hippie dancing in Golden Gate Park. Then back to 1943 when it was in the knapsack of a pilot getting ready to take off for a bombing run across the English Channel. And finally to a bookstore shelf in Manhattan in 2006. The last thing Ohin showed Gabriel was how to move through space, jumping from one end of an empty aisle of books to the other. A Time Mage, Ohin explained, could move through any distance of space as long as they could see where they were going or if they had been in a particular place before.

As they stood together in the back of the bookstore, Ohin placed a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I think that is enough for our first lesson. Why don’t you see if you can take us back to the castle?” Ohin pulled a small orange-brown rock from his pocket. It was a piece of amber. A thought occurred to Gabriel as he looked at the dragonfly suspended within it.

 “How does the council keep the castle safe from the Malignancy Mages?” Gabriel asked. “Can’t they find it with a piece of amber like this or some other relic?”

“The castle is protected by layers of magic,” Ohin said. “A piece of amber or a relic from that time by itself is not sufficient to reach it. Only a Time Mage who has been there can sense it. You should be able to sense the time placement of the castle when you scan the piece of amber. ”

Gabriel started to reach for the amber fossil that would lead them back through time to the castle and stopped. There was something else he needed do first. Somewhere and some when he needed to go. If an object could be used to travel anywhere in time it had been, maybe a person could do the same thing. Maybe he could act as his own relic. He reached within and sought with his time-sense for the moment he was looking for, examining his own body as he had the copy of
The Time Machine
.

“I need to get something first,” Gabriel said.

“That would be…” Ohin started to say, but the pitch-black darkness, followed by the blinding white light, cut off his words.

They stood in Gabriel’s bedroom.

“...Unwise,” Ohin said, finishing his thought that had been interrupted by decades in one moment. Gabriel’s room looked just as it always did. The small desk, the unmade bed, the bookcase, the stack of comic books and magazines, the baseball and glove on a chair. It was night and the room was dark, but the light of the moon cast enough of a glow through the windows for them to see. Gabriel walked over to the dresser.

“This is your house, isn’t it?” Ohin asked in a whisper.

“Yes,” Gabriel said. He could hear voices, now that he took the time to notice. He had arrived exactly when he wanted to. The voices he heard were his parents and his own. He was downstairs having dinner with his parents. His previous self. The self of a few days ago. Gabriel had taken himself and Ohin to the night before he had the dream about drowning.

“We always feel most comfortable in our own time,” Ohin said, the tone of his voice blending both anger and understanding, “but you know the risks. It is too dangerous to be here, especially in this house.”

“I needed to get this,” Gabriel said, picking up an aged and dented silver pocket watch from the dresser and holding it by the chain for Ohin to see. The pocket watch spun on the end of the chain, reflecting moonlight around the room.

“Taking something from this time and place could create a bifurcation,” Ohin said. “If it is missed or needed for some future action, the result will be a new branch away from the Continuum.”

“I already took it,” Gabriel said, realizing that didn’t necessarily make sense to Ohin. “I mean when I looked for it the morning...the morning I drowned, when I looked for it, I couldn’t find it. Anywhere. I know I put it on the dresser when I came home. When the me downstairs came home an hour ago. So I must have come through time to take it.”

“Do you remember seeing it before you went to bed?” Ohin asked, curious.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I never even looked at the dresser that night. Tonight.”

Ohin looked at the pocket watch and then reached out his hand and held it a moment. “This is a greatly imbued artifact. The imprints on it are very strong.”

“It was my grandfather’s,” Gabriel said. “It was given to him by a friend, a soldier in World War Two who died saving my grandfather and four other men. It was my good luck charm.”

 “And now it is your talisman,” Ohin said, his voice a deep whisper.

“I remembered I couldn’t find it and I suddenly realized why,” Gabriel said. “I should have said something, but I was afraid you wouldn’t let me come here to get it.”  Gabriel could feel the imprints of the pocket watch now that he knew what to look for and was impressed to find that the simple heirloom handed down from his grandfather was nearly as powerful as the imbued seashells that Ohin used as a talisman.

“You need to learn to trust me,” Ohin said. “And me to trust you. You made the right choice coming here, but next time, give me some warning.”

“Sorry, it won’t happen again.” He looked up at Ohin in the dim light. He didn’t like the idea of disappointing Ohin. “I’m ready to try and take us back to the castle now.”

“We should do something first,” Ohin said, clasping a firm hand on Gabriel’s shoulder.

A moment of blackness and blinding white and they stood outside the kitchen window looking in on his previous self and his parents having dinner. The tears rolled down Gabriel’s cheeks before he even felt them in his eyes. He saw his mother laughing at something his father had said. A story about their marriage, Gabriel remembered. How Gabriel’s father had gone out shopping for a baby crib and had come home with a camping tent instead. Gabriel’s grandfather had shouted, “What’s your boy gonna sleep in, an orange crate?”  He could see himself laugh, as well. And his father’s wide grin as he retold the often-told family tale. Gabriel felt his face break into a smile as he watched through the window. So much happiness, so much pain, all bound up together in the same moment.

“I want to go home,” Gabriel said, extending his hand.

“I wanted you to see this now, so you wouldn’t be tempted to see it later on your own,” Ohin said as he placed the small chunk of amber in Gabriel’s upturned palm.

“I know,” Gabriel replied as he closed his eyes, holding the amber fossil in one hand and the pocket watch in the other. He felt the energy and imprints of the pocket watch as easily as he felt Ohin’s hand on his shoulder.

“Make sure you return us after we left,” Ohin said. “Arriving too early could be...awkward.”