The Interminables (17 page)

Edmund squinted at him. “This doesn't have anything to do with–”

Istvan flinched. “No! No, not at all!”

“–what you are, does it?” Edmund finished. He waved at the woods, suppressing the thought of last night. No more fighting. Not over that. If Istvan wanted to keep worrying over Grace, he could do it alone. Edmund had used up his gin allowance for the day. “Most animals don't go to war, Istvan. I was just thinking that might be why you have so much trouble with them.”

Istvan stared at him. Then he drew his knife and resumed his search of the trees, muttering, “Perhaps.”

Edmund followed his gaze. Mist curled through the ferns. Pine needles shivered. “Does it seem colder to you?”

“You know, now that you–”

Branches cracked. Edmund spun around. A maw that could encompass a human head gaped wide, fangs glistening like icicles. The ground below enormous paws froze solid. He yelled. He took a moment to run – and slipped. Scrabbled on the ice. Fell over, scrambling backwards while his brain gibbered about six-inch canines. A hurricane of snow-pale fur hammered into his chest. At least a thousand carving knives slashed into his left forearm. Blood flew, froze, and pattered down like crimson hail.

Istvan was shouting. Hungarian. Nothing Edmund understood but his own name, over and over, and a plethora of curses. Wings beat around his head. A blur of cloth and uniform piping. The flash of a blade. The beast roared. Icicles shattered on Edmund's skin. Black spots danced across his vision. The stench of rotten meat seemed to have frozen inside his nostrils.

Was his arm gone? He couldn't tell. Would it hurt like that if an arm were torn off? He had never lost a limb before. It was different from drowning, he was pretty sure.

The beast whirled about, yanking him sideways across the dirt.

Arm still attached. OK. OK.

His top hat tumbled away. Frost blew past, followed by frozen pine needles and showers of stones and branches. He couldn't feel his face, or his hands. He flailed his best approximation of a teleport –

– and slammed into a tree.

Blue-striped death hurtled towards him. Not a bear.

A tiger.

H
is fault
. This was his fault. His idea, his insistence, his fear of the Susurration's return, his blood-hazed delusion that if only he and Edmund could fight together, everything would be rendered right. If the creature was one of the last survivors of its kind, a relic of the Wizard War, ought not Edmund – the perennial last survivor, the impossible soldier, the unwilling general who had overseen every battle, every loss, been there for the final act at Providence – be the one to capture it? He and Istvan, a war himself, together?

Closure. The man deserved some bloody closure.

Not this.

Istvan threw himself before the beast and it barreled straight through him. Teeth and cold – killing cold, worse than his own touch in its permanence. He spun, throwing out a wing before he toppled sideways, grabbing at anything he could. His fingers sank through fur and muscle and hooked around the lowermost part of the beast's ribcage. His other hand found its spine.

He had a moment to reflect that this may not have been the wisest decision.

Then he was airborne. Dragged on the ground. On the beast's back, scrambling over churning hindquarters, a tail as thick as his arm whipping through trailing wire. Branches rushed at his head. Flecks of ice and snow ripped through his greatcoat. He cursed. He'd ridden horses. This was nothing like a horse. A glimpse of Edmund's face – startled, pain-glazed, his agony the fiery rippling of a drink savored – and then Istvan threw himself forward, jamming his knife between the beast's teeth.

It roared, whirling around in a shower of dirt and frosted needles, rising to its hind legs and then slamming back to the ground. It had shoulders like a bear. Claws like a bear. Pines splintered as though shell-struck. Istvan held onto its spine, still cursing, trying to find its unnatural equivalent to human nerves. They all ran in the same places, but the chemistry was off and the frame was so much bigger–

A snarl. A spin. Another splintered tree, springboarding them both back around to the only living prey in the park.

Istvan gave up and cut off every impulse he could find.

The beast slapped at nothing, then struck the ground with a crack and a shatter, its shoulder carving a trench into frozen earth. A snarl died in its throat. Istvan almost fell on his head before he remembered he had wings.

He righted himself, kicked at the creature to be sure it was incapacitated, then took off running. “Edmund!”

The wizard leaned against a broken pine. Standing, but barely. “I'm all right,” he said, and that was a lie because he was clearly in shock, flesh chapped and burnt by cold, and he cradled a left forearm soaked in congealed blood just beginning to run liquid. His cape lay in a heap beside him, rent and torn. “I'm all right,” he repeated.

Istvan was at his side in an instant, tracing his fingers across the wound. A bite. A deep, frozen bite, all the way to the bone. All the dragging around had almost dislocated his shoulder. The pain of it was intoxicating; Istvan reflexively siphoned it away even as he despaired at his own reaction. Taking any pleasure at all in the poor man's agony wasn't right. “Why didn't you teleport?” he demanded. “Why didn't you take a moment to escape?”

Edmund slumped as the pain faded. “Lost my hat,” he muttered.

Istvan glanced around and discovered it laying in the dirt some paces distant. “Edmund, why are you still here?”

A shrug. “Have to catch the monster. 'Less you can carry it.” He stumbled forward, weaving side to side.

“Edmund, stop it. You can't–”

The wizard tripped on a fallen branch.

Istvan's hands went through him. No use. No use at all. He swallowed. “Edmund, if you fall, I can't help you. You know I can't help you.”

Edmund wavered away. Towards the fallen beast. “I'll be fine.”

Istvan followed him, aching to draw beside him. Take his arm. Put it over his shoulders. Be there like anyone else in the world could be there, so the poor man wouldn't have to wobble forward, stump by stump, edging perilously across each dip and rise in the icy ground. Oh, fighting monsters was easy. Istvan could fight anything. He should have come alone. He should have let Edmund sleep.

It took days to reach the fallen hulk. Weeks.

Finally, Istvan crouched beside the beast's enormous skull as Edmund leaned on its shoulders, calculating teleport measurements. Clouds of mist rolled from lungs like glacial bellows. Those scarlet-smeared canine teeth were longer than his hand. Edmund was shivering. Istvan had a coat – it was cold enough to warrant one, as cold as the Italian Alps – but he couldn't offer it. There was nothing to offer.

He stripped the thing off and hurled it aside.

Edmund glanced up. “I think I have it,” he said. His handsome face was blistered, red and raw. Dirt dusted his goatee and sideburns. He hitched his chewed arm at his side, clenching and re-clenching fingers Istvan knew he couldn't feel. “I hate to ask, but... my hat?”

Istvan fetched his hat.

H
e sat
, embroidering. Steel striking, fabric parting, thread leaking from a thousand wounds. A stain of petals. Poppies, this time. Red. No pattern, no plan. Grand maneuvers always ground to stalemate. The point of the needle was all that mattered, all that determined what came next and where. The rest was inertia.

Istvan had run out of follow-up cases long ago. Grown tired of wary eyes and worried whispers. The beast was gone, locked in a secure cell, and its victim slept in the bed beside him, a heap of blankets and drug-dulled misery. Hours had passed since the attack. Since Edmund had staggered across the frozen ground, bruised, bleeding, and bare of all that made him look bigger than he was. Hat. Cape. Confidence. The man had collapsed moments after returning to the Twelfth Hour, and someone else had caught him.

Now Istvan sat. Waiting.

Beauty spread before him, inch by bloody inch.

He was three-quarters through his thirteenth pattern when Magister Hahn ducked through the ward's curtains. She wore the same too-large jacket as always. Men's clothing, acceptable in this day and age for reasons he no longer cared to fathom. Worry simmered just below her hard facade, fears too rich to be recent, too deep to be passing. Exhaustion pooled beneath her eyes. “How is he?”

Istvan finished off the black, slicing the thread on the blade of his knife and tying it off. Thread weighed almost nothing, like him. “He'll live. He always does.”

She gazed down at the bed. “Cowardice is his great talent.”

“He isn't a coward, Magister, and with all due respect if you say that again in my presence I can't speak for what I might do.”

Her lips thinned. She didn't ask what had happened. She wouldn't. The only time the Hour Thief returned from a mission in such a state was when he made a foolish mistake. When someone close to him made a foolish mistake that encouraged more mistakes. Three hours of sleep. Dragged into a tiger hunt after Lucy. After meeting the Susurration. After finding Bernault devices at Barrio Libertad. After learning Grace Wu was alive, had been alive for all this time, and had never once called. Istvan hadn't blamed him for sneaking that drink. Hadn't said anything.

Hoped.

“Full recovery?” she asked eventually.

Istvan jabbed the needle into a half-finished poppy and set his work on the bedside table. “Yes. In fact, he ought to be clear for release by the end of today. He won't have full use of the arm for some time, of course, but the rest is in working order.” He watched the rise-and-fall of breath under blankets. “No thanks to me.”

“I read his report.”

“Then you know that Barrio Libertad is surrounded by an uncommon horror, and intends to make a second Providence of it.”

“I know that is a possibility, yes.”

Istvan let out a breath. “Magister, what Edmund neglected to mention is that the fortress holds a card over him. Grace Wu.”

The Magister raised an eyebrow.

“I don't know how she survived, Magister, but she has. I've tried talking to Edmund, but I don't know that he can be trusted to make impartial decisions in this matter. And, ah... in his condition, I... I wouldn't care for leaving him alone. Not with this Susurration creature about and still after him.”

The Magister pulled a pen from her hair. Tapped it against her pockmarked cheek. “Doctor, Mr Templeton mentioned in his report that you fought it. I was hoping you could provide details.”

Istvan brushed at the remnants of his dueling scars. “Details, Magister?”

She nodded.

He couldn't remember what Edmund had written. He had read the report over Edmund's shoulder, but... oh, the man didn't know everything. He couldn't.

“Magister,” he began, “Miss Wu said that Barrio Libertad contacted you at least once. That they spoke to you about the Susurration. Did they not?”

“The name is new to me,” she replied flatly.

He nodded, not believing her, but with little say in what she would and wouldn't share. “Of course, Magister. The Susurration is, as near as I can tell, a sort of ethereal presence that lives in the crater at Providence. Trapped there, if Miss Wu can be believed. It controls people, creates mirages from their memories, and is trying to capture more of them. It has... There are a lot of people out there, Magister.” Istvan tried not to think about the overwhelming emptiness of the place, the wrongness of it. “Edmund thinks it's Conceptual.”

“Like yourself.”

“Yes, but rather opposite. Peace, order, nostalgia... that sort of vein.” Edmund shifted beneath the blankets. The medication was wearing off. Istvan reached through artificial wool and cotton to pat him on the shoulder. “I'm told it was only a fragment, but to be perfectly honest, Magister, I'm surprised I could attack it at all. I suppose horrors like that aren't on my list of–”

Edmund flinched away, shivering.

Istvan snatched his hand back. Damn his touch. Cold layered on cold, distilled despair and death. Always unpleasant, always distasteful, always unnatural. No sane man could take comfort in the embrace of a corpse.

“Doctor? You mentioned a fragment?”

“Yes. Yes, my apologies.” He dropped his hand in his lap, blinking behind his glasses. “The, ah, Susurration was inhabiting Lucy, rather like a spirit itself, and I... may have driven it off. I'm not certain. Grace Wu called her a ‘smiler,' a sort of agent, and insisted that what I fought was only a small part of the creature controlling her – and on that count, I'm certain she was telling the truth. The whole is far worse.” He shuddered. “I do believe that if only fragments can leave its territory, I could prevent it from affecting Edmund again. Or discourage it, at least.”

“Hm.” She inspected him a moment, then continued, “Did it say anything to you?”

He stared down at his hands.

When we meet again, Pista...

“It... offered peace. Nonsense, of course. All nonsense. I don't think it knew what I am.”

“And you drove it off.”

“As I said, I'm not certain. Perhaps.”

The Magister propped her elbow on a crossed arm, hand at her chin, peering down at Edmund again. Thinking.

“The fortress is a sort of presence, as well,” Istvan offered. “Not like the Susurration, I don't think, but certainly not inert and not at all peaceful. Nothing I would trust with Bernault devices, to be sure.”

A nod. Her affect had changed: still worried, but lessened, more calculating. No surprise at anything he'd said. Of course, she was the Magister: the office came with a frankly unnerving degree of power, and access to all sorts of information that even Edmund had refused to share with anyone.

But even Edmund didn't know what had happened at Providence. No one did. No one but Magister Mercedes Hahn, who had somehow destroyed Shokat Anoushak and an army of horrors in a single mysterious stroke.

“Carry on,” she said. She nodded at Edmund. “When he wakes, inform Mr Templeton that both of you are to back off. No deal on the devices. No dealings with Barrio Libertad until I tell you otherwise. Continue confiscating Bernault devices as you encounter them, and if the Susurration or any of its agents appear again, you are to bring the matter to me.”

Istvan rubbed his wrists. Direct orders. “Yes, Magister.”

“Oh,” she added as she turned to leave, “and tell Mr Templeton that he should be more suspicious of strange women from this day forward. You never know what they might be carrying.”

The curtain swung back into place behind her.

“Yes, Magister,” he muttered.

He reached for his embroidery again.

E
dmund winced
as something realigned itself in his arm. It didn't hurt, numb as it was, but the dull slither of internal motion wasn't pleasant. He grasped his own bandaged wrist, trying to keep it steady.

Istvan stopped. “Too quickly?”

“Would you please stop fussing and get it over with?”

“You nearly had your arm bitten off by a tiger – I believe I'm entitled.”

“It wasn't nearly bitten off, I'll be fine, and as I recall, when I was run through by that sword-claw and stuck in recovery for three weeks, you acted like it was a paper cut.”

“That's because I've dealt with sword wounds. More at university alone than you've ever seen in your life. Some of them mine.” He shifted something else. “This is different.”

Edmund gritted his teeth. Being crushed between fangs and then dragged at high speed through the dirt hadn't done his arm any favors, and he understood the need to get rid of any bits of rock or bone or whatever else that had lodged in it. That didn't mean he had to sing the experience any praises. “Happy to provide a learning experience.”

Istvan snorted.

Edmund tried to focus on something else. He would have to fix the sleeve of his shirt and jacket. Patch a cape trodden on by claws and torn off its fastenings. He had a few spares, but it was getting harder and harder to keep his ensemble in good condition. Double-breasted suit jackets and replacement opera capes weren't a typical consumer demand these days.