The Interminables

A
spectral apparition
shot overhead on rotten vulture's wings.

Edmund Templeton, perched atop a rusted orange gantry crane some eight or nine stories above sea level, folded up the map he'd been inspecting and tucked it into his black double-breasted suit jacket. Good. The mercenaries must be further inland. If he were them, he would have kept his distance, too.

He glanced over his shoulder at the faint, fog-softened outlines of crumbling towers that rose across the brackish waters of the sound. It was a skyline that should have been familiar – it was New York City, after all, or had been – but the Wizard War had changed that. Now the only constant was the dark spire that loomed over its lesser and ever-changing brethren, auroras crackling from its peak.

It was worse than Boston. He hated being this close.

He climbed back down to the crane's cabin, holding onto his top hat. The evening wind tore at his opera cape, but he'd just replaced the buttons: it would hold.

His first official assignment since 2013, and it had to take him within thirty miles of New York. He'd lost friends in New York. He'd lost Grace in New York.

He was the Hour Thief, the oldest and one of the most powerful agents of the wizard's cabal that now tried its hardest to be a government, and he had been put out of commission for almost eight years by New York.

He shook his head, admonishing himself. Not now.

Focus on those mercenaries. Their mysterious employer. The artifact smuggling that the Twelfth Hour had so far failed to keep in check.

Focus on 2020.

The apparition wheeled back into sight. It circled once, streaming contrails of barbed wire, and then alighted on the gantry above him with a booming rush that sounded like distant artillery.

“I'm in the cabin,” Edmund called, unfolding the map again. Less wind down here. He retrieved a thin marker and noted changes to the coastline. There had been a small enclave of survivors here, last he knew, but they seemed to have left in a real hurry some time ago.

And about those gouges on the beach...

A ghost swung down onto the cabin catwalk.

It was a man, bespectacled and broad-shouldered, wearing an army uniform tunic, field cap, and leg wrappings of a style not sported since 1916. Austro-Hungarian. The First World War. A medic's cross banded one arm. He might have resembled a hawkish clerk, with broad cheekbones and a hooked nose, if the burn scarring that twisted the left side of his face into a ruined mockery of a grin hadn't countered that impression. Barbed wire coiled at his feet.

Istvan Czernin. Best surgeon in the world, and one of the most dangerous entities the Twelfth Hour had ever captured. He was
des Teufels Arzt
, the Devil's Doctor, the legendary apparition who had haunted battlefields across Europe and Asia for decades, leaving a trail of blurred photographs, tight-lipped veterans, unofficial unit insignia, and mysterious gashes in the wreckage of tanks and aircraft.

He'd tried to kill Edmund once, a long time ago. Edmund liked him better as a friend.

“I found the convoy,” the ghost began in a cadenced Hungarian accent more than reminiscent of Dracula. “Four tanks, just as Miss Justice said, and they're having a terrible time trying to conceal their exhaust.”

Edmund marked “krakens” off the shore. “I believe you.”

“It's the coal, you know. I don't know what they do to refine it.” The ghost peered over his shoulder. “Is that a map?”

“Someone has to do it.”

“But the satellites–”

“–aren't wizards, don't know what to look for, and I don't trust their accuracy. Besides, I thought you liked my maps.” He brandished it. “Which road?”

Istvan hesitated. “I liked you making use of your naval cartography,” he said.

“Gee, thanks. Which road?”

“The bridge,” Istvan said, reluctantly. He pointed at the stretch marked across the sound. “They've taken the bridge.”

Edmund took a deep breath. This kept getting better. “The bridge.”

He looked back towards the shore, where the latticed bracing of a steel cantilever bridge jutted into the water and stretched impossibly for miles, with no evident endpoint save the distant downtown skyline. Below it bobbed a tangle of floating piers, shipping containers cut apart and bolted to them, and a mess of abandoned rafts and canoes, and likely worse things.

“They are carrying Bernault devices,” Istvan pointed out, “Twenty of them. Edmund, the bridge is the shortest route. With a cargo that dangerous–”

Edmund put the map away. “I know.”

Twenty Bernault devices. Palm-sized spheres that were perfectly safe until jostled too hard, at which point they jostled back in a wildly uncertain radius of radiant destruction. The things had a habit of materializing in the middle of former city centers, where the worst of the fracturing held rein, and if there was a pattern to when and where, no one had found it.

One of the many, many new problems that had come along with the Wizard War.

On August 31, 2012, Mexico City dropped off the map. Torn apart. Sunk beneath a lake that had been drained long ago. Survivors insisted that there had been a monster made of stone, that it had come from below.

The news flashed around the globe. Governments expressed their concern, pledged to send aid, and promised that the matter would soon be resolved. Everyone else worried about the unknown: conspiracy, aliens, ancient curses, cosmic alignments, mass transcendence, the wrath of God.

Seven days later, she struck.

No announcement. No name. No one knew her name. Even the Persians had called her by title. The Arab mystics who defeated her in the Dark Ages had merely appended one of their own.

Shokat Anoushak al-Khalid. Glory Everlasting, the Immortal.

She targeted cities. Only cities. All cities.

2012 was a year of magic revealed after millennia of secrecy. A year that saw every major population center in the world ripped out of normal existence, drowned in the impossible, walled off by impassable spellscars hundreds of miles deep. A year of armies, of mockeries of machines with scything mandibles, twisted beasts of vine and earth and fire, skyscrapers shredded by steel claws and drawn upwards, tornado-like, new spires accreting on new skylines emerging with a roar from solid stone.

Fifteen hundred years of preparation. Long enough that even most wizards had never heard of her. Long enough to utterly divorce her from anything human.

The Wizard War lasted only eleven months.

Sometimes, most often at night, Edmund wondered if she were truly dead.

“Big East” now ran from Boston to Washington DC, a gaping wound in reality populated by structures and inhabitants torn from a thousand elsewheres and elsewhens, a crumbling patchwork of survivors' enclaves and petty fiefdoms surrounded by broad swathes of anarchy and ruin. It wasn't the only fracture – Greater Great Lakes and Fracture Atlanta were the nearest two others – but it was the only one clear of monsters. It counted among its many battlefields the former city of Providence, where Shokat Anoushak fell.

No one went to Providence.

Edmund had never thought of leaving. Not once. Home was here, and the Twelfth Hour was here, and the survivors who poured into the remote areas of the continent wanted nothing to do with wizards. She had been one, after all, however far removed from the knowledge and practice of her modern-day descendants.

He could still wish for an assignment further inland.

“You know, I could see to the mercenaries,” offered Istvan. He plucked at his bandolier, turning his head to hide the worst of the scarring as he did. “I'm sure that's why I was permitted to come along; you don't have to go out there.”

Edmund shook his head. “I'll be fine.”

“You're certain?”

“I'm certain. I appreciate the offer, but I'm the Hour Thief, remember? I have a reputation to consider.”

He tried a smile. It fit into place like a well-used shoe.

Istvan regarded him a moment. He was impossible to fool – Edmund knew that – but they both had a job to do and Edmund was stubborn.

Finally, the ghost sighed and looked away. “They're some miles out, still,” he said. “I'll show you to them. Do mind the wind, won't you?”

Edmund nodded. “I'll be fine.”

He ran through his habitual checks. Shoes tied. Tie straightened. Cape properly fastened, buttoned to his suit jacket so it would tear off rather than choke him if something caught it. His Twelfth Hour pin, two crescent moons together forming a clock face marking midnight, shone at his lapel: as close to a police badge as it came in Big East.

Istvan had never understood why he added the cape to his ensemble, much less the aviator goggles or the fingerless gloves, but at least the other man could appreciate the conceit for what it was: an effort to disguise the truth as something more palatable. Mystery men were heroes, no matter their methods.

Magic didn't care for morality. Magic demanded, and if disrespected it would simply take. Magic, and the ancient immortal wielding it, had destroyed civilization as most knew it in a single night and day.

Edmund had been thirty-five for seventy years.

He retrieved his pocket watch. It was brass, attached to one of his buttons with a sturdy chain, with an embossed hourglass on the front that was starting to wear off again. “Right,” he said. He flipped open the watch. “Lead the way.”

Istvan vaulted over the catwalk railing.

Edmund eyed the bridge. The roadway seemed clear, but with mercenaries around, he wasn't about to trust a visual inspection. He waited for the sight of vulture's wings hovering near one of the upper spars.

Then he convinced himself that he was the center of all universes, just as he simultaneously convinced himself that the center was in fact the bridge spar, which would have been a useless mental exercise if he hadn't made sure some time ago to catch the attention of someone or something (opinions differed) that cared about these things and didn't like such a disjointed affair as two centers at once. An offering of cartographical calculations, based on a cosmological model proven comprehensively wrong long ago, and–

Edmund snapped his pocket watch shut.

He stood on the spar. The wind tried to yank him into the sea. He grabbed at his hat before it left his head, hastily eyed the next spot along the bridge, and repeated the same mental gymnastics as before, focusing on the smooth metal between his fingers. The flick of the wrist. The snap of hinges.

Again. And again.

That old model was wrong, sure, but compelling – an idea that worked wonders in its own blinkered context, and there was a power in ideas, if you knew how to ask them. If you didn't mind how sharply-honed they were. If you had the discipline to sincerely believe multiple worrisome and contradictory notions and the stubbornness to not get nihilistic about it.

It helped to have a guarantee from another power that he wouldn't spatter himself across the heavenly spheres if he slipped up. Teleportation was tricky like that.

Edmund covered what had to have been three miles of bridge in less than thirty seconds.

The structure seemed to be getting larger: broader, or more reinforced. Some parts of it were covered, clad in vast sheets of iron.

A skeletal hand grabbed his boot.

“Down here,” hissed Istvan. Tattered feathers tumbled into the murk below and vanished. The sun was too low, now; the fog getting thicker.

Edmund caught his breath. Great.

He peered over the edge, searching for hand-holds amid the metal latticework, and discovered that Istvan had led him to a ladder. He tucked his pocket watch away and swung himself down.

This section was covered, out of the wind, and he gave thanks for small favors.

He climbed.

The ladder stretched away below him. Iron cladding rose up around him. Red bulbs guttered along rusted beams. The bridge creaked with the wind, more claustrophobic by the minute, saturated with the smells of paint and grease.

He focused on breathing.

It felt like thirty stories to the bottom. It might have been five.

The ladder reverberated with the sound of engines. Headlights flashed below them.

“All right?” asked Istvan from somewhere further down.

Edmund paused where he was, holding tightly to the rungs. “I'm fine. How far away are they?”

Istvan dropped to the roadway. He turned towards the headlights, shaded his eyes, then called back up, “Not far.”

A burst of machine-gun fire ripped through his chest.

“I think they've seen us,” he added.

Edmund straightened his hat, only half-deafened. He fingered his pocket watch. Took a breath. Smiled. “Wholly possible,” he said.

Then the Hour Thief let go of the ladder.

Another burst, fired from a weapon he couldn't see. He twisted out of the way – he couldn't see the bullets, either, but that didn't matter – and snapped his pocket watch.

He reappeared next to Istvan.

Plenty of time. Bullets were fast, but they couldn't cheat causality, couldn't fit an extra moment between moments, couldn't rely on the protection of something best left unsaid. Focus, and he could outspeed anything he was aware of, no matter how implausible. Even if something did hit him, it wouldn't kill him.

Nothing could kill him. Nothing but running out of time.

That was the agreement.

“Thank you for the warning shot,” he called above the dull roar of engines, “but I prefer to negotiate. Give me some time and I'm sure we can work something out.”

No return fire.

Edmund waited. They had to know who he was. Just about everyone in Big East did.

Or used to, anyway.

“The Herald recognizes your right to parlay,” boomed a voice from past the headlights, distorted by some kind of electronic filter. The accent suggested a native language somewhere between Russian and Japanese: nothing Edmund knew, which these days was no surprise. “Keep well-leashed the unquiet spirit you command and make good account of yourself.”Acknowledgment. Agreement. Implicit acceptance of the bargain. What they'd said about Istvan wasn't strictly true, but that part didn't matter.