The Interminables
Page 12
What about the glass? The rumored concentration camps? The warnings?
“Grace,” he said, “what’s really out there?”
A shrug. “Providence.” She dropped her voice to a dry mutter. “And don’t look now, Eddie, but I think your spook’s a little spooked.”
Edmund glanced over his shoulder. Istvan hung back, clutching his knife to his chest as he stared, whispering something over and over to himself in Hungarian.
Grace cast the ghost a scornful look. “Wonder what it found for him.”
Edmund held up a hand – just a moment, a stand-in for words he could no longer safely say without consideration – and turned back, a little spooked himself. He didn’t like seeing Istvan nervous. That meant he was in the same general vicinity of something that made Istvan nervous. “Istvan? Are you all right? Is there a problem?”
Grace propped a fist on her hip. “Care to translate from Nazi-ese?”
Istvan jerked, ripped from fear to fury in an instant. “I was never–!”
“He wasn’t, and Grace, please don’t,” Edmund interrupted. He looked over the neighborhood again. The perfect skies, the perfect streets. An old woman was watering her roses down there, peering up at him with no evident opinion – only a mild, incurious acknowledgment of his existence. He was very glad, now, that Istvan had come along. The worst horrors were the ones you couldn’t see.
Susurration. A whisper, so quiet you barely knew it was there.
Grace was real, though, right? None of this was real but Grace. And Istvan.
And him, he supposed.
“Grace?” he asked, for confirmation, or maybe just to hear her say something in response. She turned, Lucy’s blonde locks sweeping over her shoulder like a bullfighter’s cape, and strode away. “No loitering, Eddie. If you’re coming, you’re coming.”
He took a steadying breath. “How’s the border treating you, Istvan? You’ll manage?”
The ghost still clutched his knife. Tightly. “Yes. Go on. I’ll follow you.”
Edmund nodded, and caught up with Grace’s departing figure. She had a point. Wherever they were now didn’t seem like the best place to linger exactly because it did seem like the best place: it was peaceful, it was inviting, it was beautiful, and it felt like he could happily spend lifetimes there.
Those kinds of places didn’t exist after the Wizard War.
He found himself wondering what Shokat Anoushak would have seen. If she’d seen anything before she died with Providence.
They walked. The path zig-zagged down the crater wall, the neighborhood proper beginning where it flattened out, just as perfect on closer inspection. Heat rose from the pavement, but it wasn’t an unpleasant heat. The flags flapped in a breeze just strong enough to display the Stars and Stripes at their best. Someone, somewhere, was playing a saxophone. Solo jazz. Good enough to be professional.
“The Susurration is what we in the business call a sapient, parasitic, extradimensional thought-concept,” said Grace. She waved at the distant crater rim. “We’ve got it trapped here, so it can’t directly affect anyone outside – that’s what it uses the smilers for – but it’s basically got total control of the rest of the crater. Give it half a chance and it gets in your head, rifles through your hopes and fears and most secret memories, and uses them against you until you break. I mentioned a safe path? That’s the pylons.”
She nodded at the next one in line, its antennae humming. “What these things do is shield us from the whole conviction-eroding, mind-controlling, preachy I-am-the-world’s-salvation schtick. Leave the path and you’re in the same boat as ‘Lucy,’ here.”
“Istvan told me he fought it.”
Grace snorted. “Yeah, well, that’s what he does, isn’t it?”
Extradimensional thought-concept, nothing: this thing had to be Conceptual, if Istvan could fight it. A representative of Memory, maybe. Control. Peace. How had it gotten here?
Edmund fingered his pocket watch. “Salvation, Grace?”
“We’ll get to that. What does Doctor Pain see, anyway?”
“Vienna. With gashes ripped in it.”
She laughed. “Yeah, it would have trouble with him, wouldn’t it? Tries to offer something pleasant and peaceful and normal, but what can you do with a guy who drools over death and blood, am I right?”
Edmund glanced over his shoulder. Istvan was still there, trailing some distance back, his features wavering between flesh and bone. If he had heard Grace’s comment, he gave no sign. “He’s on our side, Grace.”
“That’s what you said when you let him loose.”
Edmund grimaced.
“I thought so,” Grace said. She brushed a hand across the next pylon in line. “Anyway, these people you’re seeing? They’re the only thing about this that’s real. The pylons throw a bit of a wrench into the idyll, make the disjunction a little more obvious.” They passed the old woman from before, still watching with that same incurious expression on her face. Water poured from her hose; she stood like a statue, head barely turning. Grace nodded at her. “There’s thousands of them trapped here, Eddie. Hundreds of thousands.”
He blanched. “Oh.”
“In fact, our best guess right now is somewhere right around half a million.”
“Oh.”
“We try to warn people off, but the Susurration hamstrings our efforts every chance it gets. Those counter-rumors of paradise you probably dismissed as crazy ramblings? Yeah. It’s been growing. More people, more influence.”
Edmund tried to pretend that they weren’t surrounded by half a million puppeted observers staring in slow motion. He couldn’t imagine how Istvan was coping. “I see.”
Grace pressed on, relentlessly. “It uses the smilers to find new targets and get close to them, convince them to make a little trip into the crater... and then they never leave, or if they do, it’s as a double agent. It’s a big deal, Eddie. Haven’t you ever wondered why Big East is so stable?”
He blinked. “Stable” wasn’t the word he would have used. “Excuse me?”
She flashed a grin. “All I’m saying is, for being trapped in a post-apocalyptic hellscape overrun with monsters after a war that shattered everything we ever knew about the world, a lot of people are taking it pretty well, don’t you think?”
Edmund smiled back, blandly. “How often do you get out of that fortress, Grace?”
She gave him a look.
He shrugged. He wasn’t the one who was completely ignoring the efforts of the Twelfth Hour and the other enclaves. They had worked hard to get where they were.
“The Susurration is after you,” she said. “It heard about you coming back.”
“I didn’t know I was so popular.”
She spun, prodding at his chest. “It wants you, Eddie. It wants the Hour Thief. The guy who can go anywhere and survive anything and is handsome and charming and so experienced that people just assume he knows what he’s talking about even when he doesn’t. The guy who’s so famous he’s got his face on a sign. You were Magister, Eddie! Can’t you see how that makes you a perfect target?”
Edmund turned his watch over in his hand, still buried in his jacket pocket. No teleporting, but the smoothness of the metal made him feel better.
It was worse than that. The Hour Thief run amok could mean an untouchable, uncatchable, immortal serial killer running around with the favored weapon of marriage proposal. Given time – and privacy – it would be laughably easy to ask for the rest of someone’s life.
He’d thought about this. Too often.
“Can the Susurration learn magic?” he
asked.Grace’s lips thinned. “It’s interdicted, Eddie. Magic doesn’t work here. You need to stop obsessing over your little time-stealing trick.”
“You made an exception for–”
“I didn’t.” She swept a hand at a pylon, at the walls looming closer. They were immense, Edmund realized, stained and dilapidated, like the newspaper photos he’d seen of Hoover Dam while it was under construction. “Barrio Libertad did.”
“Grace…” he began, and then everything he didn’t want to say rushed in to interrupt.
Grace, how did you survive? Why didn’t you call? Grace, I loved you. I still love you. I took that chance, and I spent seven years still loving you after you were gone. Now you’re going to make me mourn you twice?
Grace... where were you?
“How did you find me?” he finally asked. He looked away. He was a coward; he knew that already. “How did you know this Susurration creature was coming after me?”
“We have our ways.”
“Grace, that’s Barrio Libertad! What have you been doing all this time in Barrio Libertad?”
She looked at him. A long look, measuring behind her goggles. Her mask. “Fighting the good fight,” she said. “Same as you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What? Someone has to do it.”
“Grace, I thought…” He pressed his lips together, staring at the walls. Self-defense. She did it out of self-defense. They’d been able to talk, once, without any of that, but now... now, it had been a long time. Why bother? She had to have made up her mind by now. Found someone else. If she’d wanted to see him again, she would have come back, wouldn’t she?
Unless... unless something had stopped her, unless somehow...
He shoved both hands in his pockets. “Grace, please understand. I don’t know where we stand. I don’t know where you’ve been. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, or with who, or why you…”
The memorial. The candle, floating on the river. Fourteen months an invalid. Had she thought about him at all? How had she survived?
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve missed you a lot.”
She didn’t reply. She walked, Lucy over her shoulder like a loose puppet. The hero, like she’d always been, returning with her spoils. The walls towered before them. Her walls.
“Grace…” he began again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Eddie, I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t have come if this wasn’t so important. You would have never seen me again.” She still wouldn’t look at him. “You’re the one who said it would never work out. Not me.”
The words escaped before he could drown them. “That was before I fell in love with you, Grace.”
She stepped around an oncoming bicyclist, a boy careening forward without touching the pedals, frozen, floating.
“We all make mistakes,” she said.
Chapter Twelve
Istvan scrabbled after them, his vision narrowed to twin blurs, a mad dash through the semblance of his home city draped over Hell. Glassy tendrils reached for him, whispering in a dozen languages. Chasms yawned on every side. Buildings ended where they shouldn’t; men and women strolled past, clad in his era, like dolls. The emptiness suffocated, smothered, spun apart, whirled into spinning vertigo, and he feared he might come apart with it. Nothing. Nothing, nothing....
Edmund was straight ahead, a mirage of dark silk and faded gold. Not gone – not even mired in such horrors – but distinctly distant, skimming like a fish just below the water’s surface. It was all Istvan had. He’d promised he would follow him. He was following. He would follow him anywhere.
They finally reached the wall.
Not wood. Not brick. This was a vast pile of concrete and corrugated steel seven hundred feet high, rough and angular and held together by crude rivets. It curved outward like the hull of a battleship as it rose, terminating in spiked battlements and some sort of radio antennae: strange, twisted, nonsensical structures of bent wire. Faint seams suggested folding panels. The metal was painted in bright reds and yellows, marked every few dozen feet with slogans in English or Spanish or both that read things like “Against the Control,” and “Free Thought Deserves Protection.” Turrets the size of railway cars, mounted far above, rumbled just below the threshold of hearing as they rolled on their bearings.
Barrio Libertad. Forbidden territory, floating in a sea of terrors.
Istvan stumbled beside Edmund and stayed right by him as they approached the entrance. It was barred, but unguarded. Flanked by two murals. The first depicted fists of every color raised against a pale, amorphous entity composed of reaching tentacles and hints of human faces. The second depicted a shattered lantern, brilliant white light spilling from behind rose-tinted glass. Both were blocky and stylized, laid out with mechanical precision. As Grace approached, the doors between them slid sideways with an electric whine and the pounding of powerful motors. Beyond lay a cavernous elevator.
No one to greet them. Helpful raised lettering on one wall suggested that passengers keep all limbs inside the conveyance, followed by what Istvan assumed to be a similar note in Spanish.
Grace walked in, propping Lucy in a corner and leaning against the wall opposite the notice. Edmund followed her, and Istvan followed him, perversely grateful for Edmund’s old, distinctive terrors: their richness was bracing, their mere existence confirmation that Istvan hadn’t lost his senses entirely. A focal point. An anchor. That single light in the darkness.
Grace had her own miasma, he supposed, but that wasn’t the same.
The doors clanged shut behind them. A boom, like a weight released, and then the elevator rumbled downwards.
No music.
Grace said nothing. Edmund said nothing. The floor, it seemed, was the most interesting part of the elevator, and neither one of the former lovers had any comment to make on it.
Istvan stayed where he was, so close to Edmund they were nearly touching, and glanced back and forth between the two while trying to pretend he was doing nothing of the sort. They must have spoken during the walk. Only a walk, for them, through a nightmare they couldn’t perceive. Grace, much as before, radiated hard resignation, regret, and disappointment, self-loathing she did her best to bury... but Edmund...
Grief. Confusion. A longing, seven years seasoned, old wounds ripped open by a woman’s claws.
Istvan wished he didn’t feel quite so relieved. So vindicated. Grace was nothing but trouble and she always had been. Edmund had to realize that, now. Poor bastard.
Istvan touched his arm.
“Rude,” said Grace.
Istvan opened his mouth in retort – and paused. It was faint, but he thought he could detect the barest hint of other emotions somewhere beyond the elevator’s walls. Real, feeling, suffering, human beings. Particularly anger, which was odd, but in an enclosed populace...
Then, it was as though they crossed a threshold. The whispering presence around him vanished, wiped away as though it had never existed. A weight – no, a pressure, more omnipresent, pressing in from every direction – lifted. But, more importantly, there was pain. Less than in Big East – far less – but to Istvan’s starved perceptions it was a great rush of distraction and distrust and despair and domestic annoyance, a grand bounty of human experience laid before him like a flight of wines. The anger was almost overpowering, an acid edge to every interaction, but even that was preferable to nothing. Vastly, vastly preferable.
He laughed in abject relief, leaning into Edmund’s side. Oh, to be awash once more in life and living!
Grace edged away, and her fear was icing. “Eddie, remind me again how he’s not a B-movie villain.”
The elevator shuddered to a halt.
“Good afternoon,” crackled a man’s voice, though there was no speaker – human, mechanical, or otherwise – in sight. “Welcome to the neighbor
hood-fortress of Barrio Libertad. State your business, please. It is r- recommended that you consider your current position in a small box suspended over a fall of one hundred forty-two meters.” A pause. The statement repeated itself in Spanish. The voice was heavily accented, hesitating in odd places and shot through with static.
“It’s me,” Grace said. “One to beam up. And... guests.”
“Yes,” came the reply.
The elevator began moving again.
* * *
A short tunnel awaited them at the bottom, as ramshackle as the walls and lit by strips of orange set deeply into the roof. A team of people with a stretcher rolled up, calling for the smiler, congratulating Resistor Alpha on another successful retrieval.
Then they stopped, staring at Edmund. The Hour Thief? What was the Hour Thief doing here? A wizard? He knew about Diego’s stance on magic, didn’t he? How did he get past the interdiction?
Edmund tipped his hat to them. Istvan had gone invisible, claiming that he didn’t want to start a panic, and Edmund had agreed: under the circumstances, the Hour Thief alone was bad enough. No need to make it look like an invasion.
I’m not an army, Istvan said.
I think they would prefer an army, Edmund said.
Grace waved. Smiled. Handed Lucy over with a gentleness that Istvan asserted she had never shown in her previous encounter with the woman. Explained that the Hour Thief was here because he was Lucy’s target and therefore permitted – he was the one the Susurration had taken such a powerful interest in, according, again, to Diego. Whoever the man was, she seemed to think highly of him.
Edmund had a sinking feeling about the whole business.
Once Lucy was taken away – for healing, deprogramming, and rehabilitation, Grace claimed – he and Istvan were finally permitted to leave the elevator. Faint seams in the tunnel walls trembled but didn’t split as they passed, marking protective panels mounted over who-knew-what. Edmund didn’t ask. Istvan stayed close by him, which was both European and understandable under the circumstances.
The afternoon sun awaited them at journey’s end, its glare blazing high over the dark curve of the far wall.