by Paige Orwin
Please, hold still. I can’t finish this if you don’t hold still.
“Istvan,” he croaked.
The specter didn’t seem like he’d even heard him.
His chains burned, calligraphy in white phosphorous. Smoke streamed from their shackles. He pursued well enough but he was slashing about wildly, a far cry from his usual precision.
Out of his mind. What had the Susurration done?
Edmund kept dodging. He’d done it before. He could do it again. No need for panic, not now, not until this was over and he’d gone home and had a shower and finished off two glasses of gin to start. Then he could panic. He would set some time aside for it.
Time.
He sweated cold. He was burning his own time, now. Unique. Irreplaceable. Go home? Take a shower? No, when this was over, he’d have to go back out, thief that he was, and what time he’d lost he could never–
Istvan ripped a gash in his shirt.
End this quickly. End this quickly.
Edmund pulled off his hat. Pulled down his goggles. Forced the words through his raw throat. “Istvan, it’s me. It’s really me. The impossible soldier, remember? You could never hit me then, you aren’t hitting me now, and you aren’t going to hit me anytime soon.” Keep dodging. Don’t think about the time. “Istvan, do you know anyone else like that? Istvan, can you hear me? Please, calm down.”
The ghost slowed.
“I need you. I need you more than ever.”
“You’re afraid of me,” Istvan said. He seemed surprised.
Edmund tried a smile. It wasn’t his best. “Sometimes.”
“Oh.” Istvan looked at his knife. He blinked. He dropped it, blade clattering on the glassy ground. “Oh, no.”
Edmund let out a breath. He wasn’t shaking. He didn’t know how he wasn’t. Maybe because the Man in Black didn’t. Here, after all, he was the Man in Black. He stepped closer, unslinging his bag from his shoulders. “It’s all right.”
“Edmund, I…”
He reached for Istvan’s shackles. “Just hold still.”
Calligraphy blazed beneath his hands.
* * *
Once before, Istvan had seen him as he strove to be. When the Wizard War took its turn for the worst. When Istvan’s chains trapped him, useless, within walls that might shortly cease to exist – and him along with them. Contractual oblivion.
Then... then, he’d met a figure of darkness, but not of threat: less nights of knives and more of whispered words, withheld violence, river crossings, sudden departures just before the dawn. Salvation at the last moment, one who (when thanked for the risks taken, the wounds suffered, the day won) waved away the praise and vanished with a promise: I’ll be back when I’m needed.
The Man in Black.
In one hand, he held an owl’s feather pen. In the other, a silver ritual knife. He bent silently to his task and parchment links fell away, rewritten and struck out and cut. Faster than any eye could follow. Watching him was like watching a mirage, just beyond real; to be near him was to wonder who he was, from where he had come, how long he would stay before he vanished (not long). Become, in perilous passage, purest Concept.
Edmund. Merely doing his duty, and fulfilling his promise.
The blade glistened, poppy-red, with his blood.
So sudden. So odd, to stand there, watching, and nothing else. So little Istvan could think but this: it was at once a thrill and a terror to behold such a strange and beautiful aspect of the man he loved so well.
Each scrap that fell burned. A bloodied horizon crouched in wait.
* * *
...except when such actions would stand in violation of the provisions of section 28. As detailed in paragraph 9 section 62, the Binder (the Innumerable Citadel, magisterial membership, [and] the Twelfth Hour) hold all rights to use, disposition, and disposal of...
Edmund had studied law at first, almost eighty years ago, before his focus shifted to language, and contracts of the metaphysical were no different once past the arcane writing, past the consequences. It was written, and it could be rewritten. Mightier than the sword, indeed.
Link after link. He took his time. It was his time, now.
It had to be done right.
Only when one last link remained, did he finally slow – finally allow himself to end at the same rate as anyone else.
“Istvan?” he croaked.
“Edmund,” the winged and skeletal horror before him confirmed.
Edmund set the ritual knife down. “Are we always this interesting?”
Istvan knelt and retrieved his own blade, wiping it on the hem of his uniform before handing it to him. He was a doctor. It would be all right. “Oh, yes.”
Edmund slit a palm already bleeding. All the most powerful magics were paid for in blood freely given. That was the fine print. “I’m just a man, you know,” he said. He dipped the pen in the wound. “The rest is all bad choices and good press.”
Istvan clasped his hand and the pain faded. “I know.”
Edmund carefully wrote in the terms of cancellation and annulment. He knew his Classical Arabic. Translating the old works of the Innumerable Citadel, he’d had to. He was good at it. He swallowed, wondering how many people he’d missed. “Did what I could.”
“You did.”
“Are you...?”
“No.”
Edmund slid the bloodied knife through parchment. The lettering flared red, sputtered, faded.
“OK,” he said. He swayed on his feet. “Take it away.”
* * *
Istvan caught him.
Solid. He was solid, here – War brushing skeletal fingers across a cape black as the man claimed his soul to be, in endless debt – sinking down as Edmund fell and, wondering, kneeling, pressing him tight against a rotten breast, no heartbeat save in feeling. He breathed, yet. Oh, he breathed.
Istvan looked up to Pietro, delicate fingers holding closed a gash in his chest, watching forlornly as the last scraps of chain fluttered into flame. The Susurration.
Something thundered.
A whistling…
He ducked, hugging Edmund as closely as he could, blanketing him in wire-tangled wings that ripped and tore.
The first shells struck through a sea of poison.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t stop.
* * *
Four years forever. Armies crushed. Empires broken. Dreams and certainty dashed, families gutted, the future resting in the hands of the most ruthless, the most wronged. For the first time, mankind could destroy himself utterly – and he had.
Edmund, alone, was still breathing. Istvan dare not let go.
He could hold him, once in all the time he’d known him, and he did, not looking up. Not until smoke faded back to sky. Chlorine and mustard gas to something breathable. Shouting and bullet-chattering and tanks roaring and mountaintops collapsing and always, always the pounding of artillery... to silence.
It was then that Edmund slumped through him, onto the rubble.
Istvan shifted aside, kneeling beside him instead. Mud and worse things stained his handsome face, his eyes red and swollen, his skin burned from poison. Bloody scratches marred his cheeks and forehead, the results of barbed wire made solid. Istvan wished he had sheltered him better. He wished he could prop the poor man’s head on something more comfortable than stone. He tried to prod him over more into dirt, and then he saw it. His left temple.
A shock of grey.
Istvan brushed immaterial fingers through it. “Oh, Edmund…”
Edmund coughed, an ugly sound full of phlegm. The gas hadn’t done him any favors. “What?” he croaked.
Istvan took his hand away. “You’re all right. I’m... I’m glad, that you’re all right.”
The wizard coughed again, rolled over – Istvan got o
ut of the way – and spat into the dirt, scrubbing at his lips. Flakes of dirt tumbled from his goatee. His hat fell away, the headband Grace had given him sparkling in its place. “Don’t feel all right. Maybe… maybe quasi-right.”
He tried to sit up and Istvan couldn’t help him. He was hurting, and that Istvan could do something about.
“Hell of a job you’ve done with the place,” he said, blinking out at Providence.
Istvan busied himself lessening his headache, trying to ignore the agonies of many, many others wandering about, dazed, with the same problem or worse. Lost smilers. Too slow, battered and blinded. He would have to attend to them, too, once Edmund was safe. All of them. As long as it took. “Not an uncommon comparison,” he muttered.
A slam. The ground shook. Bits of broken glass and other things skittered down the slope beside them.
Edmund hit the dirt. Istvan shielded him – a pointless gesture, here, now, arm and wing outstretched, crouched just over the man’s prone form to intercept destruction that never came – and looked to Barrio Libertad.
A monstrous corpse lay sprawled across the closed roof, barely recognizable. No cathedrals. No cobbled streets. It was skeletal, its claws vast scythes of steel, and somewhat resembled a strange crustaceal crown, perched like that. Blue-white smoke leaked from molten caverns in its sides. Barrio Libertad’s turreted guns had seen some use after all. Hovercraft bobbed near the creature’s crests, rickety things like those in Triskelion, zipping backwards every time it twitched.
“Do you suppose...?” said Istvan.
“No,” said Edmund. “I think they got it.”
Istvan drew back away, wings dissolving. He squinted. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it or not, but it looked as though someone in spiked armor were planting a tiny flag on its head.
A figure in red and yellow picked its way across the wastes, jumping trenches and shell craters, scrambling past shreds of sheltering canvas. It moved much faster than a normal human. Istvan tried to summon malice, or at least disgruntlement, and discovered he couldn’t.
“You two all right?” asked Grace Wu, jogging to a wild-eyed stop.
Edmund, still prone, reached for his hat. “Quasi-right,” he said.
“Yes,” Istvan echoed.
Grace wavered, uncertain, clasping and re-clasping her hands. Nervous, wary, horrified at the destruction... but no hatred, no anger. Sorrow, at what and who had been lost. Any positives, Istvan couldn’t tell. She kicked at the earth. “Nice redecorating job, Doc.”
Istvan didn’t care to look at it. He knew. Just as he knew that through it, the maimed and wounded stumbled.
Edmund hadn’t saved all of them.
“Miss Wu,” Istvan said, patting the wizard’s caped shoulder, “could you... could you help him back?”
She stared at him.
He passed a hand through Edmund’s torso.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Sure.”
“Ow,” said Edmund, but there was no heart in it. He rubbed his side.
Grace crouched beside him. “You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible.”
“Can I get my tiara back or do you want to keep it?”
He gave it back.
Istvan left them, as Grace levered Edmund’s bad arm over her shoulder – and then, after protest, his good arm instead. She would see him back safely. She still cared for him, after all, though their affair was over, and she was quite capable in her own way. It would be all right.
Istvan was a doctor, and he had work to do.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The first grey always came as a shock. That was what they’d told him: his parents, his aunt and uncle. You expect it, they’d said, but you never really expect it. Edmund had believed them, but... well, he’d never expected it.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to him.
He turned his head, examining himself in his bathroom mirror. Cuts he could handle. Dirt came off. Chemical burns were worse, but as long as he didn’t turn out like Istvan, he’d be fine – and, according to Istvan, they would heal. There was nothing wrong with him that wouldn’t heal.
Nothing but the grey streak at his left temple.
He prodded it. It didn’t feel any different, though he half-expected it to be brittle.
Yesterday, as soon as he could walk straight and while Istvan was away on that new battlefield, he’d made a beeline for the nearest overcrowded gang enclave. Before washing. Before anything else. Before he could spin into a flat panic.
More time stolen. Starting over from zero... with a loss.
He’d told himself that the toughs he’d jumped wouldn’t miss just a few moments, but he knew that was a lie.
After that, and only after that, had he washed off the worst and slept the whole rest of the day and most of an exhausted, mostly dreamless night. Somehow. Now morning had come again – as mornings did – and he supposed that in addition to a new name plate his next five-year Twelfth Hour portrait would look different. Greyer.
Older.
A knock. “Edmund?”
“Door’s open, Istvan. I’m not doing anything.”
The specter stepped through. His hat was off and folded; his belt and bandolier missing. He halted at Edmund’s face in the mirror. “It doesn’t look so bad, you know,” he said. He ran a hand through his own hair, grey on grey. “It’s... distinguished, I think. It suits you.”
“It hasn’t gotten worse. That’s something.”
“As battle scars go, it could certainly have been worse.”
“I know.”
They regarded themselves, together. Edmund turned again to see the grey streak better in the light. He wouldn’t dye it, he decided. Better to keep as a reminder. Time, for once, spent honestly.
Istvan traced the parallel ridges where his dueling scars had been. A caress, almost. His expression – what he could move, what wasn’t twisted – was distant, not quite sad, and Edmund suddenly realized that the other man had lived a normal life for much longer than he ever had, absent magic and absent world wars, married and everything.
No wonder the Susurration had used that against him. He’d really had something... and Edmund barely knew more than her name.
“Did it hurt?” Istvan asked.
“No.”
“Did you know? Did you know it was happening?”
“I did.”
Istvan made as though to reply, then fell silent. “Oh,” he said after a moment.
Edmund frowned. “Istvan?”
The specter shook his head, dropping his hand back to his side. “The Magister wanted to meet with you. She’s used what she can of the materials she brought, and among other things would like some assistance transferring more from her office. Her, ah, lighthouse, rather.”
Something small and dark shot into the bathroom and twined around one of Edmund’s legs, hissing at Istvan. Beldam. Irate at the lack of attention – and food – over the last thirty hours, no doubt. Edmund bent down to scratch her ears, grateful for the interruption. “Is that all?”
“I don’t know.” Istvan rubbed at his wrists. “You saw it, Edmund. What I did. What I… Well, she was rather hesitant to talk to me at all, and with the chains gone, I…”
Edmund nodded, trying not to think about any of what had transpired and not doing so well on that. Istvan, unchained. The Great War freed once again to inflict itself upon the world. A Conceptual maelstrom, past horrors churning, trapped in amber. “I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
Cat. The cat needed her bowl refilled. Do that, then go meet Mercedes.
He had time.
Edmund stood back up. One last look at the mirror – it couldn’t be helped – and he started for the kitchen, Beldam zipping past with hair on end.
Istvan followed him.
* * *
“So,” said Mercedes, “I need you to chapter a new branch of the Twelfth Hour.”
Edmund choked on his Barrio Libertad coffee. “What?�
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“After all that’s happened?” demanded Istvan, stepping before him with a suddenness almost violent, “He hasn’t hardly recovered! Do you know what that magic of his might have done to him, running wild like that? I don’t! I think we ought to…to…” He trailed off, suddenly uncertain. “...Magister?”
Mercedes tossed another length of copper wire into her bag. “Expecting an order, Doctor?”
The specter backed away, worrying at his wrists.
“As I was saying,” she continued, “Someone has to keep an eye on Providence and I don’t want it to be Barrio Libertad.”
Edmund finally found his voice again. “Mercedes…”
“There’s no telling what that fortress will do, and you have a good idea what it can. I don’t want another crisis before I’ve finished locking away my own mistakes.”
Edmund wiped at the cup before anything else could drip on the floor. He’d spilled coffee on the floor. If it really was coffee. Grace had called it coffee.
Mercedes zipped the bag shut and set it on her enormous inherited Magister’s desk. She didn’t look very rested; he supposed rebinding the Susurration was a good excuse for that. At least she was still missing only a single finger. “You’re the Hour Thief, Mr Templeton. You have leadership experience, people listen to you, you’re not likely to need replacing in the next few years, and you get on well with Barrio Libertad’s liaison.”
He grimaced. “You had to use that word, didn’t you?”
“Everyone knows you’re back on duty, now, Mr Templeton. I suspect you’ll find yourself with quite a flock once you start recruiting.”
“No. No, Mercedes, this is a bad–”
“This is what I should have done a long time ago.” She spread her arms, encompassing the room he’d once held himself. The shelves, the lanterns, the portrait of Magister Whitfield and the tentacle that held the man’s hat for him, the open window in the alcove that led elsewhere. “You’ve always had this kind of stature, Mr Templeton, this kind of authority, whether you like it or not, and it’s about time the Twelfth Hour puts you back to full use.”