by Paige Orwin
During the war itself, men had asked him how the Emperor was doing, where the enemy was, what the other regiments thought of their progress – and he knew, because he always knew, experiences that weren’t his surging through him at all hours in a confusing flood of disjointed images, countless experiences seen through other eyes.
The Great War. The fate of millions – the means, the hopes, the ends – all poured into what was left of him, a Hungarian surgeon from Vienna who hadn’t wanted any of it. What had seemed almost a strange omnipotence had ceased, suddenly and forever, at war’s end. Now it was only history.
They’d just finished haggling a range compromise when Edmund cast a glance at the clean glass sitting next to the kitchen sink and sighed. “Istvan, what if they use gas again?”
Istvan paused mid-move. “You know what to expect now. You’ll manage.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Edmund, I’ve known you for thirty years and I know you can manage.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Edmund.”
“Twenty-eight and some, if you must count the Ukraine.”
Istvan reached for him. “Edmund, please don’t give up over this.”
Edmund jerked away, terrors roaring to the fore. “I’m not giving up!” he shouted. “I never said I was giving up. I can’t, Istvan. You know I can’t. Not now, not ever.” He pushed his chair back. He was shaking. “Not tomorrow.”
“Edmund–”
“It’s been seven years, Istvan, and seven is a bad, bad number. I don’t like seven. July is coming up, and that’s another seven, and only seven days after that there’s the seventh, and…” He ducked past the zeppelin hanging from its string and started for the hat and cape hung on their hook near the door. “I’m going to Charlie’s.”
Istvan stood, cursing his choice of words. The pub. The anniversary. The memorial visit. Oh, he shouldn’t have said anything. “I’ll come with you.”
“Don’t.”
A blink – and Edmund was the Hour Thief, his jacket donned and his hat straightened and his pocket watch in his hand, motion between moments, fueled by the time that he stole on his nightly patrols using methods he never talked about. A ritual, he’d said, performed long ago. A good idea at the time. Immortality... and a debt he could never repay.
“Don’t,” he repeated. He flipped his watch open. “I’ll be at the memorial in the morning.”
A snap. He vanished.
Istvan sat back down. Barbed wire knotted itself around the table legs. The zeppelin spun overhead, ponderous and ineffectual, its mission suddenly absurd.
Bloody Grace. This was her fault.
Far be it for Istvan to speak ill of the dead, but Edmund would have never suffered so, those fourteen long months in the watery dark, if not for Grace Wu.
* * *
No one bothered him at Charlie’s. Everyone knew who he was – the woodcut outside even had his image on it, signed, beneath the proclamation “So Vintage We’re the Real Deal” – but Edmund had a booth of his own and everyone knew to leave him be. The deal was simple: he kept an eye on the place and allowed the use of his face, and, in return, gin was always on the house.
In return, he had a place where he could forget.
He sat in his booth, in a corner facing the door and opposite the piano. Other patrons drank and talked and sulked a safe distance away, surrounded by dark wooden panels and pressed tin, lit by hurricane lamps, the air smelling powerfully of tobacco. The bar stools had swept legs, designed to accommodate the brass rail footrest running along the bottom of the counter. Smoke-fogged chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The cash register was mechanical, and never used. Barter was the order of the day now.
Outside loitered men in suits and hats, lighting cigarettes beneath the street lamps. Cars rolled past with bulky lines and rounded headlights, designs that Edmund hadn’t seen outside a showroom in sixty years. At Charlie’s, it wasn’t summer. It was spring. April, in fact.
April 11, 1939.
No one could reach the people in the windows. Step out the door, and you were back in Big East, back in the rain you couldn’t hear falling from inside.
Edmund didn’t think about it too hard. All that mattered was that the stock in the back rooms reappeared every day. The same bottles, over and over, without fail. Nowhere else could match Charlie’s for sheer consistency and utter lack of shortage.
He sat with gin in hand and booth solidly under him and listened to disjointed words smear themselves across a strange haze of arms and teeth. Already he wasn’t quite sure how much of the day’s stock he had put away himself.
A good start.
Seventh anniversary. Seventh month after that. Seventh day. Had to be careful at times like this, when it all converged. Had to watch the sky.
Couldn’t have another Hour Thief. One was enough.
No more of that.
A shadow approached his table. It slid up and over the cracked wood, snuffing out reflections of the lamps that shone in empty glasses. When it went up the wall, it took the shape of a battered cowboy hat.
“Someone left this for you,” said an old man’s voice.
A white box appeared on the table, pushed over to him by gnarled fingers.
“A gal,” the voice clarified. “Pretty, too. God help you.”
The shadow receded.
“Thanks, pal,” said Edmund. “You’re a real friend.”
He stared at the box. It was paper. It was about the size of a pie tin. Pinned to it was a smaller piece of paper, with writing on it. A note. Beautiful cursive.
“Huh,” he said.
Mr Templeton, it read, I hope this note finds you in good health. I regret the recent loss of twenty Bernault devices as greatly as you do, and I would like to offer information on their whereabouts. Tomorrow, at noon, look for me. I know your booth. Come alone.
In hope and confidence, Lucy.
“Huh,” he said.
He got the box open. Pie. Apple pie, with the most perfect, straightest lines on top he’d ever seen.
He liked apple.
How had she known?
Clouds dimmed the night. The lights of New Haven, scattered like pearls, followed erratic paths to the coast, strung from the mountainous shadow of the Twelfth Hour. Fear of wizards had weakened, and fear of deprivation had grown: those that counted themselves under Magister Hahn’s protection had swelled closer and closer to its walls as the years passed. Yale’s crumbling Gothic towers hunched over irrigation ditches and plowed greens, wrought-iron gargoyles perched on its rooftops.
Istvan lingered by Edmund’s chimney a moment longer, holding onto the rough siding. Harbor waves crashed over the old docks, slowly rusting away drowned storage tanks and smokestacks. There were highways sunk under the sea now, too, storefronts and homes and churches. Auroras rose from distant Manhattan, spitting and crackling, the outline of the Black Building’s twisted spire silhouetted three miles high in their embrace.
Edmund wasn’t coming back.
Istvan turned and leapt. Tattered primaries clinging tenuously to bloodied bone flared, caught. One wingbeat. Two. He rose in a broadening circle. Beyond New Haven’s boundaries, the Generator district glowed like a beacon, pillars of steam billowing from curved towers. A storm rolled over it, dark and sullen. He couldn’t see Charlie’s from here, though that was where it lay, hemmed in between lengths of pipe and wire.
He tilted, streaming contrails of rusted wire – a maneuver more aircraft than bird – and spun into a straight vertical climb. Stray droplets scattered as he broke the cloud deck, flecks of muddied scarlet that dissipated into nothing.
The moon was waxing. The stars, at least, hadn’t changed.
Edmund wasn’t coming back.
Istvan swept his wings back and shot northward. The clouds below reminded him of coal-burning armadas, and in the moments after his passage they roiled with the remembrance of poison. Flying machines had first appeared in his war, and only grow
n faster since. Flight was his, just the same as massacre, mud, and grinding inevitability. Flight was the one undeniable positive of what he was. It had taken him months of tumbling off cliffs in the Italian Alps to convince himself he could do it.
Let Edmund not come back. Let him go to Charlie’s and drink. He was the Hour Thief; he could do that. No one could stop him from doing that.
Let him go.
Istvan dove. Clouds whirled past and through him. Rain sleeted by like bullets. Lightning flashed with a crack and roar. He shot through a flock of geese that squawked and scattered, readjusted his course, and broke the lowermost cloud layer like a falling shell.
Below him whirled Big East, collective desperation clad in concrete. Horizon to horizon, it sprawled, blockaded by spellscars: a city of sputtering light, shanties and skyscrapers, crashed spacecraft and solid fog, highways that crawled like snakes, chimerical beasts and stubborn people that had somehow survived it all, scraping by side by side. Rubble stretched in great scars across the old paths of engagement – some deep and furrowed, rock ripped away by enormous claws.
Somewhere down there rolled a convoy of mercenaries with twenty Bernault devices, provided they hadn’t split forces to throw off pursuit. That wasn’t what Istvan had crossed a hundred miles to find.
Not yet.
Before him, where the city ended, lay the last battlefield of the Wizard War.
Buildings scoured to their foundations. Bridges collapsed. Ships and the skeletons of gargantuan horrors rusting half-sunk in murky water, all of it shimmering with unnatural heat. A new dam closed off the harbor: the rim of a crater that enclosed acre after acre of glass and dust. A circular bastion armed with immense turreted guns glowered in the center, shining pinprick spotlights across fields of crude shelters, faint scratchings of agriculture, and the remnants of yet more monsters. Its walls were higher than the original skyline, and had indeed replaced it.
Providence.
What was left of Providence.
No passage. No permissions. Barrio Libertad ruled there now, an implacable fortress-state that offered only garbled snippets of travelers’ warnings in halting Spanish and vague rumors of either concentration camps or some sort of paradise lurking just beyond or just within its walls. No wizard that had gone there had ever returned. Magister Hahn had blacklisted it the moment she was elected.
Istvan hadn’t been able to return to his own battlefields for over thirty years. He didn’t even know if they still existed.
His chains caught at wrists and neck. Too close to the border. He rolled away before discomfort became pain, banking southwards into the start of a half-hearted search pattern.
Oh, it wasn’t right. Such an important place, and not even a proper dedication. Nothing offered, nothing taken, nothing solid to bury.
Barrio Libertad could have at least allowed the collection of some dust.
Chapter Five
The next morning, Edmund found a pie box in his fridge. The pie inside was half-eaten. It had a note attached to it, written by someone named Lucy who claimed to know where the Bernault devices would be.
At noon, look for me. I know your booth.
Edmund stared at the note for a long while. He felt like he’d read it before. He couldn’t remember eating the pie.
It had been at Charlie’s, hadn’t it?
He never had visitors. Certainly not female visitors. Not since...
Edmund closed his eyes, wishing his head would stop buzzing. Then he put the note on the table, put the pie back in the fridge, and went to go get dressed.
He’d have to spend some time. No way around it. Couldn’t be seen in public with a hangover, especially not on a day like this.
A Good While did it: hours of recovery slipped stealthily into the gap between nine and nine-thirty. Real hours, experienced like any others. Stolen hours, put to the kind of use he’d never considered when he first started. It wasn’t right, was it, using part of someone else’s life just to feel better after a night out?
At least it didn’t make the process of recovery any less miserable.
Once he could think again, he made and finished breakfast, washed the dishes, left Beldam more food and water, tucked the note from “Lucy” in his pocket, and opened his door.
The remaining inhabited homes of New Haven wound along cobbled streets to the seashore, power lines strung in zig-zags from roof to roof. Boats bobbed in the harbor. A pagoda perched on the bluffs above, painted scarlet.
It wasn’t raining. Not here.
Edmund nodded and closed the door again. Then, a moment of concentration, the snap of metal on metal – and he was on the bluffs, looking down at the rolling waves of the Atlantic. The pagoda reared against the rising sun. Wiring strung from below ran up and through one of its windows.
Lilies grew around it, escapees from flower beds. Edmund picked one. He tipped his hat at the nearest window.
Then...
He took a breath. Had to do it.
A snap–
It was raining. It wasn’t even a real, earnest rain: it was a misted drizzle, grey water dribbling sullenly from grey skies, pooling in grey puddles that reflected the few mourners who had come to pay their respects. Some held umbrellas to ward off the weather; the rest simply endured it. Most of them were human. They wandered across the rubble, small crowds that huddled and spoke in hushed whispers, glancing at him, pointing, and then doing their best to pretend that he wasn’t there.
He knew that a lot of people blamed wizards in general for everything. He also knew that very few of them would be willing to make a point of it to his face. Not to the wizard-general. Not to the Hour Thief.
He was one of the “good ones” ... but still not one to approach off-hand.
Istvan leaned against the memorial inscription, waiting for him. “You are directly on time,” he said. The barbed wire around his feet looped loose and bright: he was in a better mood again, like any ghost surrounded by grave markers.
“A wizard is never late, nor is he early,” Edmund automatically replied. He stepped to the inscription, adjusted his hat, and touched it.
In Commemoration, it said. June 29, 2013.
That was all. The end of the Wizard War. Nothing about Shokat Anoushak. Nothing about her sudden defeat at the hands of Magister Hahn. Nothing about transformed beasts or torn skies or streets coming to life to choke those who walked on them.
The memorial itself was enough.
Edmund lifted his fingers from the letters. Pressed in steel, they were a scratched footnote on a talon forty feet high. It arced over his head, serrated in scalloped and smoky glass. It joined a toe, a foot, a stout foreleg, a torso that had crushed twelve blocks when it fell, a skull that lay blown apart by far too great a sacrifice over the rerouted Hudson Canal. Craters peppered concrete-scaled hide, sections of exposed ribcage braced like the frame of a ship and dripping with elevator cables, electrical wire, and utility lines. Its rearmost sets of limbs and most of its tail weren’t visible, sunk into bedrock. A crest of steel bridge towers and sleek white windmills jutted skyward from its broad back. If cities could be raised again after death, this was it.
The names of the lost covered its surfaces like so much graffiti.
No state or government had decided that this should be the place for a memorial. It had just happened, in aggregate, one name added after another until there was nowhere else logical to put them. No one was even sure who had carved the inscription.
“Let’s go find Grace,” Edmund said.
Istvan nodded. He swung into his usual place on Edmund’s left, setting a hand on his shoulder. “I am sorry for last night,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to set you off like that.”
Edmund drew his cape closer. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m glad that you came.”
“I made a promise, Istvan. Wouldn’t miss it.”
Flattened rubble crunched beneath his shoes. A surviving bridge lay over the canal, a delica
te covered thing of latticed wood with shrapnel holes punched through its roof. The water below it ran mostly clear. A broken trail to the east still hadn’t been rebuilt. Above it all towered the beast, rough sides quiet, windmills turning lazily in the winds.
A slow procession wound its way up a set of salvaged fire escapes. Edmund and Istvan joined it, climbing, people retreating from them before and behind.
Edmund concentrated on the railings. On not slipping. The Hour Thief was the only wizard more celebrated than feared... but he was still a wizard. Still so rarely seen in the public eye that no one quite knew what to do with him.
“It’s mostly me,” muttered Istvan.
Edmund shrugged. Istvan was the one who had pushed him into this, years ago, insisting that it would help. Istvan was the one who had noticed, after some months, that someone had chiseled “The Hour Thief” next to Grace’s name, and insisted on seeing the mistake corrected. The whole fiasco had only reinforced the popular notion that he and Istvan were somehow connected, that the Hour Thief’s powers included the summoning and control of vicious spirits, that a dread pact between himself and Death was responsible for his supernatural speed and near-invincibility.
Not true, but not too far from it.
Edmund checked his pocket watch. It was a quarter to eleven.
Tomorrow, at noon...
Istvan peered over his shoulder. “Are you quite all right?”
Edmund put the watch away. “Fine.” He stepped off onto the beast’s neck, its “flesh” not giving way in the slightest. “I’m just fine.”
Istvan looked at him oddly, but didn’t say anything more.
Edmund adjusted his hat again and pressed on. He had his lily, everyone was still casting surreptitious glances at him, and it was better to get this over with. He’d made a promise.
The ruin of the beast’s skull could have cupped a Little League game. The eerie whistling it made was just a trick of acoustics, the wind again. He swung down over exposed vertebrae, stone and iron, a mockery of anything living, and traced the ridge of its shattered eye socket.