The Interminables

by Paige Orwin

  “All right.”

  Edmund stepped away. Istvan followed him. Good enough. Maybe it was just as well Mercedes’ solution hadn’t gone through – if the Susurration could damage its complete conceptual opposite so badly, Edmund didn’t dare guess what it might do to an ordinary person translated into its realm. To Mercedes. To him.

  They reached the bottom after four revolutions, passing into a sparse, small sitting room paneled in weather-worn pine. A tiny kitchen occupied one side, barely enough room for burners. Other doors led off into yet smaller areas. A drum of water occupied one corner. A chess board and a mostly complete set of pieces sat atop the lone bookshelf, which held a plethora of what looked to be mysteries, manuals of forensics and astronomy, cases for movies or maybe games, and the complete works of HP Lovecraft, none of it organized according to any clear system.

  Edmund resolved to stay away from it. Her problem, not his.

  She paused beside a round glass table, its edges cracked. “Now you know,” she said. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this. That it wouldn’t come so quickly.” She set her cup down. “Are you so certain you don’t want the position back, Mr Templeton? It might be for the best.”

  “That wasn’t my plan,” he said, focusing on the kitchen behind her.

  “Then what is? What would you have me do? The Bernault devices were the last thing I could offer that might have made a difference before the conjunction. If the Susurration is so set on its course that it will raise monsters, so powerful that the fortress can no longer prevent it from doing so, and so impossible to dissuade by the threat of that weapon, how am I supposed to keep everyone it’s captured over the last seven years from paying for my mistakes?” She gestured back to the stairway, to her office. “I never did figure out how to translate any more than a single person, and even if it were you, Mr Templeton, I doubt you could fight the Susurration to a standstill in its own territory.”

  Edmund tried to meet her eyes, and couldn’t. He swallowed. This was practically her house, as far as he could tell. She was wearing a bathrobe. Her hair was wet. He had broken into her house to tell her he didn’t like the way she was handling her office. He, Magister Jackson’s damn fool Templeton, interfering in what he shouldn’t.

  What would you have me do? Tell us, immortal, what we must do.

  Run.

  What was he doing? What was he doing here?

  A chill touched his arm.

  “We don’t... have a plan, precisely,” Istvan admitted. He drew his hand away, wavered, and then stayed where he was. “The grand sum of our intentions was speaking to you. We were hoping you might have some insight on how to, ah, convince it to abandon its plans, perhaps, or some weakness we could exploit, or… or, ah...” He looked away. “Magister, if you brought the creature here, you must know it better than anyone. All I know is that we can’t stand by and watch Barrio Libertad massacre all those people, and the Susurration, too. It isn’t right and I expect you know that.”

  “Is that tea?” Edmund asked.

  Mercedes looked down at her cup. “Of a sort.”

  “I can put on more, if you’d like.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Please do. Only one cabinet for the tableware, pot’s on the stove, the tin’s right beside. Thank you, Mr Templeton.”

  He started for the kitchen. Something warm to drink always helped. It was something to hold. Something to concentrate on. You couldn’t plan a good counterplan to mass murder without tea, or tea of a sort. Grace hadn’t agreed with that, but she’d been more of a coffee person anyway. She probably still was.

  She would thank him when this was done. She didn’t want to set off that weapon, either.

  He wasn’t leading anything. He was assisting. Enabling.

  The Magister didn’t serve tea.

  * * *

  “I don’t know,” said Edmund. “I thought everything was interdicted, but there are plenty of monsters scattered outside the effect. It might have sent a team of smilers to raise one of those. Within Providence... well, I’m pretty sure I still have that exception, though I don’t know what Barrio Libertad would think of us showing up to hit the ritual sites ourselves. They’re probably prepping for a bombardment or something. Grace won’t be sitting idle.”

  He sat on a bench across from Magister Hahn, cradling his steaming cup in his hands, the glass table drawn up before him. His goggles were off. He looked perfectly composed, smooth-faced save for the expected creases of thought and concern, but was still nervous, still prone to sudden flickers of a more powerful fear. The tea had helped. Distractions always did.

  Istvan sat beside him, cleaning his glasses for the third time.

  “We wouldn’t make a parade of it,” mused the Magister. She adjusted one of the pens in her hair. She had dressed while Edmund busied himself in the kitchen, darting into one of the many doors and reappearing less than a minute later in her usual men’s garb, the Twelfth Hour emblem affixed once more to her throat. “I think, if we were careful, most of the trouble would be the Susurration itself. You realize, Mr Templeton, that you wouldn’t have nearly so effective a defense as Doctor Czernin.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s native to the plane. Part of this world, part of that one. You aren’t. Last time you visited the Conceptual, as I understand, you weren’t there for long and you weren’t under attack from anything living there, much less anything like the Susurration.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Being able to perceive and communicate with it doesn’t mean you can fight it.”

  “I think we’re all aware of that,” Edmund muttered. He blew at the steam.

  Istvan sighed, holding sparkling lenses up to the light and feeling immensely useless. He wasn’t a wizard. He didn’t know anything of rituals or celestial conjunctions. He wouldn’t be able to help the Magister with whatever she meant to do, and Edmund refused to hear of him facing the Susurration again. No. No, I can’t ask you to do that. Not after what happened.

  Istvan couldn’t bring himself to argue with him.

  Worse, he kept getting distracted.

  The Man in Black was the logical one for the task. Edmund was. The man couldn’t be killed. Knew what he was on about. Bravery in spades, enough to face the worst and come out of it, and keep going, damaged but dauntless. If anyone could infiltrate Providence from the Conceptual realm and shut down those ritual sites, it was him.

  It was foolish – he knew it was foolish – but Istvan almost yearned to go with him. It would mean facing the Susurration again, yes. Facing Pietro. Facing… all of it, yes, but how was that any different than usual, really? Edmund strove for what he’d become every time he put on that cape.

  Oh, he’d been magnificent. Istvan wished none of it had ever happened.

  “I could do it,” the Magister said. A strange certainty filled her presence, tinged with terror. “I’d be able to get a better idea of the Susurration’s current state if I did. Besides,” she added with a tight smile, “I suspect I’d hold its attention better than both of you put together.”

  Edmund shook his head. “If anything goes wrong, I’d prefer to have you in a position where you could do some good. You’re the only one who knows the Susurration like this.”

  “Diego,” she pointed out.

  “A lot of help he’s been.” He gazed out at the room. “I appreciate what you’re offering, Mercedes, but before anything else, you’re the Magister. We can’t afford to risk you.”

  She picked up her cup, fear receding, self-hatred rushing into its place. Steam rose in whorls. “I thought you might say that.”

  Edmund didn’t reply.

  Istvan jammed his glasses back on, trying to get the memory of a bloodied blade and the taste of the pain that accompanied it out of his head. Pain suffered willingly. Suffered for him! “Is there nothing I can do?”

  “You could go with Mr Templeton,” the Magister said shortly.

  “I–”

  “You don’t require a
ritual circle to accompany him, you’ve fought the Susurration three times now and emerged sane, and – whatever else you might be, Doctor – you are a one hundred and fifty year-old Conceptual avatar of trench warfare.”

  He swallowed, suddenly acutely aware of the knife hanging at his side and sickened by the idea of drawing it on Pietro. “I’m… aware of that, Magister.”

  “Damaged or not, given the proper orders and enough incentive, I think you would pull through well enough. Mr Templeton may not agree with me, but Mr Templeton is convinced he can single-handedly evade a mind-controlling, memory-stealing, psyche-eroding extraplanar genius loci by running from it.”

  Edmund didn’t respond to the goading. Something new churned within him, the glimmerings of a deep uncertainty and horror. It didn’t seem like the start of another episode, but...

  Istvan eyed him. He was staring at the chess board atop the bookshelf.

  “Mercedes,” the wizard said after a moment, “You play chess?”

  She shook her head. “It’s ornamental, is all. Now, I know the state your friend was in when we summoned him back, but–”

  “We need to play chess.”

  The Magister looked at him oddly. “Mr Templeton, I said I don’t play.”

  He leaned forward, setting down his cup. “No, no, we need to play chess. That’s what the Susurration’s done. That’s what we need to do, too.”

  Istvan frowned. Edmund enjoyed the matches, but he wasn’t a compulsive player by any means; he enjoyed metaphors, but this one made no sense. “If the creature is playing chess, Edmund, I should like a rematch with better oversight. It hasn’t played a fair game at all – it’s always bringing in new pieces and changing the rules to... Oh.”

  “Right?” said Edmund.

  Istvan sat back. “Oh,” he repeated.

  “Istvan, we need a zeppelin.”

  “I should think Barrio Libertad was the zeppelin.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s the largest single piece, the primary object of terror among a confined civilian populace, and a wholly civilized means of waging war so long as you pay no mind to what you’re actually doing.”

  The Magister looked back and forth between them. “Zeppelin?”

  Edmund held up his hands, tracing half-formed pieces in the air. “Right, if that’s that, then we… We need... your knights. Istvan, your knights. Same piece, acts differently, more powerful.”

  “Yes, but what–”

  “Park the zeppelin, give it different munitions, modify the terrain to our advantage, and instead of taking corners, we charge straight. What was it you said that time you fielded fifteen cannons?”

  “Something about ‘desperate times call for more cannons.’ But Edmund, we don’t have…”

  Edmund leapt to his feet. “We have a zeppelin and a battleship, Istvan. A dreadnought. We just have to flood the field.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the Magister, “I’d say this is no time for games, but I’d dearly love to be mistaken.”

  Edmund turned to her, eyes wild for all their permanent look of exhaustion. “Mercedes, if this works, I think we can pull off Grace’s evacuation, Istvan will get his chance to press for surrender, and we can cripple the Susurration badly enough that you might be able to bind it properly.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Go on.”

  “Yes,” echoed Istvan. An evacuation? A dreadnought? He had never used a piece like that save for shore bombardment and he could only think of one possible equivalent. Surely Edmund didn’t mean to raise one of Shokat Anoushak’s monsters himself.

  “Mercedes,” the wizard continued, “you know how to bind the Susurration but can’t weaken it or stall it enough because you can’t hit it on the right scale. Diego can. The weapon itself might be lethal but some part of it collapses the physical and the Conceptual together, and that would put everyone on the Susurration’s level, wouldn’t it? All the smilers. Who, like you said, can’t fight it, necessarily, but might be able to resist it long enough to get themselves out of Providence.”

  “How long is long enough?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  She set her cup down. “Mr Templeton, are you saying–”

  “I am.”

  Istvan stared at him. An evacuation. All of those people. All that time. He couldn’t, he’d said. That would burn through everything he had. He couldn’t risk it.

  He couldn’t.

  “You weren’t so eager to volunteer your time earlier,” said the Magister.

  Edmund shrugged. It was a loose shrug, broad and exaggerated, the type of shrug Istvan had seen from airmen in the days before parachutes. “It won’t kill me.”

  He didn’t know that. How could he know that? He’d never done this before! Thirty-five for seventy years, and he’d never–

  “Edmund, you can’t.”

  The wizard brushed at his shoulder, and Istvan realized that he’d grabbed at it, that he was half-standing, that he was trying to shake him but of course it wasn’t working. He sat down again. He couldn’t bring himself to let go. “Edmund, think, please. You can’t know what–”

  “It won’t kill me,” Edmund repeated, “and I’m not done.” He turned to the Magister, almost conspiratorial, caught up again in that strange surge of desperate vitality. “Mercedes, you have to talk to Diego. See if the collapse can be separated from the weapon, or stalled, or reversed, or whatever else would give us an intact Providence merged with the Conceptual. No killing. Just the collapse. I don’t know anything about how that works and I don’t want to go any further with this until I know that’s possible.”

  The Magister glanced from him to the chessboard. One hand dropped to her jacket pocket, where she kept her telephone. “What guarantee do you have that Barrio Libertad will agree to this?”

  “I don’t. But it’s been seven years since you and Diego last exchanged words, so I think it’s about time for a good conversation between you two about the Susurration.” Edmund picked up his cup again, glanced at its contents, and then tossed the remainder down his throat. “I mean, hell, it’s worth a shot.”

  It was tea, not gin, but the similarity in the act was unmistakable.

  He’d done this before. During the last days of the Wizard War, he’d been little more than a driven husk. Nothing to do but what had to be done. Nowhere to go but forward. No one and nothing to dissuade him, like a tank rolling into battle over wounded men: allies, enemies, anyone who couldn’t get out of the way, smashed into the mud with all the others.

  Istvan knew that had happened. He remembered it. He knew their names.

  His grip tightened on the man’s arm. Through it. Into it. Blood pounded past his fingers like the stroke of an engine, burning hot. “Edmund,” he said, “there are hundreds of thousands of people in Providence.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Diego didn’t come to the conference,” said the Magister.

  Edmund smiled. “I know how to find him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  They teleported into Barrio Libertad from the Magister’s office. Edmund could do that. He wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, but a combination of enemy negligence and past power could lead to a great deal of possibilities that weren’t supposed to be.

  It won’t kill me.

  That was all. That was all he would say. Over and over, like a mantra.

  And that smile… oh, it was the one he wore when he fought, when he distanced himself from himself, and Istvan didn’t like that at all. He changed when he smiled.They stood atop the wall, that tremendous barrier that separated Barrio Libertad from the Susurration, and from Providence. Fields of dust. Fields of glass. An orange sun setting over the jagged spines of dead beasts. Hundreds of thousands of innocents trapped, unaware, pawns in the same great game played between well-meaning powers since the dawn of time.Hearts and minds. Bodies, if that didn’t work.Istvan clasped his hands tightly behind his back, trying to focus through the choking fog
of ambient rage that seeped from every surface. There were so many of them. How could Edmund think to evacuate so many?The Magister crossed her arms over the strap of her messenger bag, staring out at the crater walls, the canvas shelters, the great skeletons heaped like mountains, the only remnants to survive the blast. If there were any pride mixed with the rest – the grief, the dread – Istvan couldn’t detect it.

  “Well,” she said.

  “That’s about right,” said Edmund. He turned, eyeing the turrets and walkways, cape swept in the wind. “Now, let’s see if this works.” He knocked on a nearby railing. “Diego?”

  Something clanged. It wasn’t the railing.

  “Diego, I’m sorry about the short notice, but Magister Hahn would like to speak with you and–”

  The clanging struck like a train, a rush and clatter. The air turned to crystal.

  Magister Hahn disappeared.

  The clanging faded.

  A path of glowing blue lit up beneath their feet.

  “Right,” muttered Edmund. He started off down the line.

  Istvan trailed him, wishing the fortress’ ambiance didn’t make it so difficult to concentrate. It was like forging through clouds of acid, and he wondered how in the world no one else noticed it. “That was the mercenary teleport.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “What do you suppose will happen to her?”

  “No idea. Hope for the best.”

  “How did you know that would happen?”

  Edmund walked faster. “I made a mistake once.”

  The light led to a cable car. It was difficult to pick out the fortress populace with much precision, but they seemed to be on a wartime footing: crowds milling far below, fire teams setting up defensive positions all across the walls and walkways. What for? Was something looking to get in?

  Istvan peered out the nearest window as the car began to move. Given the way the fortress was built, anyone or anything who appeared in the central plaza would be an immediate target for the upper terraces, provided anyone could shoot properly, and it took hardly any imagination at all to picture craters punched into the mosaics, steel roofs and adobe walls toppled into rubble, defenders manning makeshift emplacements that fired with a flash, a shock; short-lived suns that burst with scorching fury. Such an enclosed space would be ideal for gas: the wind couldn’t blow it away, and thus trapped it would spread, and settle, seep down into all the warrens dug out below…