by Paige Orwin
“Can you do anything about it now?”
“No, but–”
“Then don’t worry about it.” He pulled his gloves off. They passed 1940 and a framed black-and-white picture of him at twenty-one, sporting a wispy beard and a fedora. There had been about fifty members that year.
He was hatless in 1945, and haunted.
“And if someplace is blown to bits because I didn’t act?” demanded Istvan.
Edmund jammed his gloves in a pocket. “I don’t know.”
“All twenty in one place would be bad enough, but what if they were to be split up? Twenty explosions like that, all over the city...” He snarled to himself. “Oh, I should have paralyzed the bastard, not tried to fence with him.”
In 1950, Edmund wore a top hat and opera cape. In 1955, he wore the same thing but in color. In 1960, he wore the same thing again and still in color. And again in 1965. 1970 was the Year of the Ill-Advised Mustache, but he was back to normal by 1975, and after that there was no change at all save for the ever-increasing weariness of his expression – the smile more fixed, the eyes more ancient – and the ever-growing sea of new faces surrounding him. By 2010, the Twelfth Hour was nearly two hundred strong.
Only sixty survived to 2015.
Edmund glanced over the candles arranged in the alcove, to make sure they were all still burning. They were.
Much of the Twelfth Hour’s present wizarding membership came from the wreckage of other cabals. The teaching of magic, dangerous at the best of times, had all but halted. The majority of those on roster now weren’t wizards at all.
Istvan paused beside him. “I always hated that picture.”
“Your cheekbones are fine.”
“No, they’re hideously Mongolian, but that isn’t the worst.” He sighed a long sigh. “You’re all in color and I’m still in black-and-white.”
Edmund shrugged. “I’m still in just black.”
“That’s by choice. That’s different.” He plucked at the decorative piping on his sleeve. “You’ve no idea how splendid all this looked in the old days, Edmund. How it shone. How terribly attractive it was to fair maidens and snipers.”
Edmund rolled his eyes as bullet holes flickered across the specter’s chest. “I think I’ve done well enough the way I am.”
Istvan chuckled. “I never said you haven’t.”
Edmund reached for his pocket watch again. Go home. Rest up. Take care of yourself, or you won’t be able to help anyone else. We both know that you won’t be able to focus tomorrow. He wished that none of that was right. “Istvan?”
“Hm?”
“I’m going to head home. I don’t want to inflict this smell on anyone else.”
He flipped the watch open.
Istvan touched his sleeve. “Ah… before you go, I was wondering if you might be open to chess later. With all that’s happened, and the visit to the memorial tomorrow, well...” He glanced at the candles. “I thought you might like some company.”
Edmund took a breath. Right. That. There was that, wasn’t there. He’d been trying not to remember that. “I’m open to chess.”
“Oh, good. I’ve been meaning to test that new rule for the knights, you know.”
“That’s cheating, you know.”
Istvan cast him a lopsided grin. “You cheat, you know.”
“I do.” Edmund tipped his hat. “Just not at chess. Evening, Istvan.”
He snapped the watch shut.
* * *
The wizard vanished in a golden haze.
Istvan fiddled with his wedding ring, twisting it around and around his finger. There had been something more in Edmund’s movement, the coiled reluctance of it, the tightly-wound grief and dread and anger: a raw and oaken sweetness edged with citrine spice, hazing about him like the lingering smell of tear gas.
He hid it well, but Istvan always knew.
Tomorrow was the seventh anniversary of the end of the Wizard War. Edmund had seen it through – as Magister Templeton, elected unwillingly after the disappearance of Magister Geronimo – but it had taken its toll on him.
He’d been the only one to know anything about Shokat Anoushak. He’d obsessed over her, before the war. She was only example of a truly long-lived immortal anywhere on record, and during the years he came to visit Istvan in the Demon’s Chamber he would almost always bring sheaves of dusty documents with him, translating old stories from faded Arabic and trying to make a map of historical sightings.
Of course the wizards had chosen him as Magister when she came back.
And then there was the matter of Grace...
Oh, Edmund had been dreading the memorial visit all week. Best to provide something other than gin to keep him occupied the night before.
Ten minutes before a return to duty.
Istvan started for the wall.
The headquarters of the Twelfth Hour glittered. From scarlet carpet to stacked wall sconces to sunburst railings, it was a study in the worst excesses of Art Deco, an aggressively sterile structure of gold, chrome, marble, and mahogany paneling that seemed to have obliterated all of its curves in favor of yet more triangles. Blocky columns bore repeating images of stylized books and staves. Interlocking patterns spread across the ceiling, almost Moorish, lit by sunken yellow glass panels instead of proper chandeliers. The central library was three stories high, all of them dreadful.
It had once been a gentleman’s club of sorts, named for its hours of operation and its dedication to combating magical disaster. What arrives at the end of the eleventh hour? None other than the Twelfth.
As for the additions that had appeared with the Wizard War, well... Hindu temple architecture was sturdy, at least.
Istvan strode past scattered tables and took the stairs rather than make a scene, enduring questioning glances from surviving wizards, allied citizenry of New Haven, and stranger things: an animated floor lamp, a giant lizard in a purple parka that stumped along on a cane, a posse of armored policemen from a possible future. A flock of ravens hopped from shelf to shelf after him, cackling to each other.
They had all known that the Hour Thief was finally returning to real field duty after fourteen months missing and then years of sticking to nothing more than librarian work and his usual mysterious excursions by night. He was former Magister, after all. The Twelfth Hour’s calling card. The “wizard-general,” dashing and unkillable.
It was nice that he kept the library so neat and clear of casualties, but that wasn’t why he was famous.
Where was he now? Had something happened?
Istvan found himself grateful that he had his own brand of fame, and no one present dared approach to ask.
He climbed to the highest story, closest to the above-ground entrance, and found the map wall where the shelves ended. The map itself was fabric stretched over a frame, studded with colored pins that marked recent mission sites, artifact sightings, and known movements by enclaves the Twelfth Hour had an interest in watching. A table before it held the pin box, a notebook, a tray of pens, hot water, and what passed for tea.
A tall, heavyset black woman stood before it, filling a chipped coffee mug. Greying hair spilled down her back, braided into dozens of strands.
“Miss Justice,” called Istvan.
She glanced up. She spotted him, and raised the mug to him. She wore a glittering green shirt and glittering green earrings and didn’t look at all like she had lived through the ruin of civilization. She also wore pants, but women did that now.
Janet Justice. The Twelfth Hour’s primary information and surveillance specialist. She wasn’t a wizard, but what she did was as close to magic as modern civilization had ever produced.
“Guten Tag, Herr Chirurg Czernin,” she said in schooled German.
Istvan took his hat off, folded it, and tucked it beneath his bandolier. “Grüß Gott, Fräulein Justice,” he responded in the same tongue.
She stirred her tea. She was one
of the few non-medical people on task often enough late at night to encounter Istvan regularly, and over the years had proven both fearless enough and good-natured enough to humor a ghost asking about computers in return for an opportunity to practice her second language.
She raised an eyebrow.
Istvan nodded, regarding the map. It covered a rough approximation of the northeastern United States, divided into fracture zones, spellscars, and what remained of the nation before.
Big East followed the new coastline, a half-flooded urban wasteland home to, among other things, the Black Building, the Magnolia Group’s crashed spaceship, the Wizard War memorial, and dozens of tiny survivors’ enclaves, scavenger camps, and odder things that came and went. The Twelfth Hour claimed former Yale University, much of New Haven, and the nearby Generator District as its own, though its ambitious patrol territory covered most of Big East. The crater that marked Providence loomed in the north, forbidden ground dominated by the fortress-state of Barrio Libertad.
Beyond Big East stretched the spellscars, a vast band of twisted wilderness and deadly magics, and past that lay what passed for “normal” regions, administrated by government remnants and flooded with refugees.
The pattern was the same for the Greater Great Lakes fracture, Chicago through Toronto: impossible cityscape ringed with impassable horror, its original population fled, transformed, trapped, or dead.
It was the same the planet over, as far as anyone knew.
He pushed the pin into an area thirty miles outside former New York City, where he and Edmund had lost the mercenaries. Triskelion itself lay in the spellscarred Appalachian mountains of former Pennsylvania, further west, sandwiched between Big East and the Greater Great Lakes.
What were they after? One warlord or another had been trading Bernault devices from both fracture regions for years, as far as anyone knew, but not once had a Bernault-powered weapon been deployed against anyone. It was as though whoever was behind it collected the devices merely for the sake of collecting them. Or stockpiling them.
For what? Against what? How many did the Cameraman have now?
Was he planning to sink all of Big East into the sea?
Istvan shook his head.
Miss Justice grimaced.
She set her cup down.
She nodded.
Istvan scribbled the date and a note on the day’s events in the notebook. June 28, 2020: Failed interception of Triskelion mercenary Bernault convoy, x20; Mr Templeton, Dr Czernin. Decoy. Red NYC, 30 m.
Istvan chuckled.
He winced. He rubbed at wrists that burned in their shackles, the chains he couldn’t see enforcing orders he couldn’t break.
Ten minutes, and then I expect you back on duty until midnight.
He put the notebook back with a grimace.
Miss Justice frowned, but took it in stride. She’d seen it happen before.
Istvan nodded his thanks, retrieved his field cap, and bolted for the infirmary.
Chapter Three
Edmund’s front door was locked. It was always locked. His primary point of entry was inside and had been since he’d moved in fifty years ago. Aside from the sudden conversion from apartment block to free-standing structure, unreliable utilities, the usual difficulty in procuring anything not used or broken, and the occasional giant tentacle washed up on the beach, not much had changed since before the Wizard War.
The house still boasted only a single floor. It still had all of its original furniture. It was still comfortable for two people, yet more suited to one. Despite multiple recommendations over the years, he had never arranged to replace the wallpaper. Fading shafts of twilight slanted in through the blinds. He hung his hat and cape on their well-worn peg by the door, tossed his goggles on the table, and laid out new bowls of food and water for his cat. He put the map he’d drawn in a folder with others like it and put the folder away. Then he heated some of the water he’d drawn from the river that morning, lugged it to the backyard, dumped it in a strategically-placed plastic tank, and drew the curtains.
Shower. He desperately needed a shower.
Once he felt more like a human being again, he threw on a plain white bathrobe, poured himself a glass of gin he assured himself he deserved, and retrieved his ledger from the desk in his bedroom. The mercenaries had at least graciously given him what time he’d requested, and he noted it down in its proper column to form a running total.
Some Time. A Few Moments. Enough Time. Time to Spare. Time to Think About It. All the Time I Need.
Each phrase formed a distinct semantic unit, together with many other permutations less common and even more unforgivable. Each was worth a somewhat flexible but unmistakable span of moments, hoarded and spent like anyone else might spend coin.
The ledger held thousands of notations. Other ledgers, filled and emptied in turn, occupied the desk’s upper shelf.
Years of time. None of it acquired honestly.
Oh, he asked for it, sure. And it had to be freely given. But no one who agreed to it knew what he was doing, or noticed that he was doing anything at all.
He was, for all intents and purposes, a conman who dealt in stolen moments. The hours that slipped away when no one was watching. Lives, plain and simple. He’d been thirty-five for seventy years, and he could say that only because none of the time he’d lived since 1954 was originally his.
As long as he had marks in that ledger, he could dodge bullets, survive drowning, appear just at the right moment, give others all the time they needed, live forever. If he ran out... well, that was time he wouldn’t get back.
He didn’t plan to run out.
He hadn’t spent any that day beyond the usual. He marked it off.
The ledger went back into its drawer. The tome that bound together long-ago events, good intent, and terrible power requested foolishly was elsewhere, well-hidden among other books that seemed much more interesting.
He poured himself another glass of gin on the way out.
The hallway outside his room, like the rest of the house, was bare of photographs. The kitchen still looked like it had in the Seventies, dark and mood-lit, with spare wooden cabinets painted avocado green, flowered tile, and a chrome gas stove with a jury-rigged tank he kept carefully rationed. A small table took the place of a kitchen island, three chairs drawn up beneath it. The lone windowsill was empty: no herb garden, no flowers, no decorative bamboo. All suggestions at one time or another. T
he sill stayed empty.
No photographs in the den, either.
What he did have was books. Hundreds of them, written in or about almost fifty different languages, packed floor to ceiling. A filing cabinet full of copied Innumerable Citadel records sat in the corner. A half-dozen boxes of others sat nearby, yet awaiting translation. A few slim folders held collections of wards, magical inscriptions vetted by centuries of use that were mostly safe to copy.
Copying was always safer. Innovation in magic was best done in tiny increments, based on what was already well-established. The task of inventing wholly new rituals – wholly new ways of breaking reality – fell exclusively to people so driven and so desperate that they accidentally tapped into forces more than themselves, caught the attention of something... and survived long enough to pass down the experience.
Spellbooks – real, original spellbooks – weren’t books so much as collections of notes and mad ramblings, the rituals they detailed encoded in esoteric ciphers and lost within tracts of poetry, political commentary, and other nonsense, doodles adorning the margins. Even the Twelfth Hour had a limited number of those. Those were dangerous. Those stayed in the vault. Edmund knew; he had cataloged them.
Stolen one, once.
He retrieved a Sherlock Holmes novel, put a jazz record on (his old upright radio could only catch one station at nine in the morning), put his glass on the coffee table, and collapsed on the couch. An enormous black cat jumped up beside him.
He scrubbed a hand across his face. “Evening, Beldam. I hope your day went better than mine.”
She wrinkled her nose at him.
He sighed. He could still taste the bitterness of tear gas in the back of his throat, he swore, even after two drinks. Three drinks?
He ran over the last few minutes in his mind: two drinks.
“Sorry about the smell,” he muttered.
Beldam headbutted his side. He scratched her ears.
She lived here, and Istvan was the only one who visited. As far as anyone else knew, Edmund Templeton was the reclusive bachelor at the end of the block who kept strange hours, suffered strange fits, and never entertained. He would help with harvest and he wouldn’t shirk latrine duties, and he’d offered an opinion when they tilled the green, but not much else. He never took any shares from the commons. Cordial, but distant. His house was haunted.