The Interminables (21 page)

He covered his eyes – and slammed into a wall.

A barrier. A Conceptual barrier.

Istvan wobbled away, tumbling drunkenly across a solid nothing. A vast crowd gathered on the walls below, none of them looking at him. None of them feeling anything. Blocked. Empty. Surrounded by blankness masquerading as substance. Edmund. Where was Edmund? He had to find Edmund, had to–

Istvan regained his wings and angled straight at steel.

This time the report blew him backwards in a fuzzy haze of flickering mists and tangled wire.

Dazed, reeling, he tumbled past the walls. Striking the walls. Solid. All solid. How was it solid?

someone said, and it was a voice he hadn't heard in over a century, a low tenor bordering on baritone, perfect for singing if only the man had ever bothered to try.

It struck Istvan's heart like the shock that had killed him.

No. No, no, no....

He lunged for the fortress once more but it had gone, receding, replaced by a rippling like waves on the ocean. Curtains. Scrollwork. Tree branches and vines, hypnotic intricacy, winding about and about in a lattice of whispering glass that smelled of rain and coffee and old leather. Waltz, but wrong. There were holes in the rhythm... and it was empty.

“Edmund!” A yelp more than a warning. He didn't care. “Edmund!”

said Pietro Koller, long-lost, long-beloved.

The Susurration dragged him down, drowning.

A
t precisely ten o'clock
, the first rockets streaked heavenward. A thump and a whistle, repeated a dozen times across the horizon – and then the sky burst into sparkling fury directly above them. Thirteen ribbons of red and white. An offset flash of crackling blue, stars tumbling through stripes even as the image of the flag itself unfurled upwards. It lasted only an instant before collapsing into a great shower of sparks, but it was enough to startle him into a whispered, “Holy...”

“We're still not sure where it finds them,” she said.

“It's all half-starved smilers, running this?”

“Yup.”

More rockets were already on their way. Rings within rings within rings. Ovals laid out in zig-zags whose final edges barely touched. Patterns of tiny bursts sketched out like a field of blooming flowers. Screamers tuned to distinct chords. The detonations were so close he could feel the roar through his back, rattling the metal beneath them.

“Think how it looks from the other side,” Grace mumbled.

“Hm?”

“The show. You've seen the difference. It looks good from here, but outside... their skies are clear, Eddie. No glare from Barrio Libertad. Stars that go on forever. Smoke that highlights those colors just so, like a painting. That screamer that just went off? A choir of angels.” A sigh, almost wistful. “Absolute perfection.”

He turned to look at her, a silhouette outlined in red and gold. She lay with her hands behind her head, one knee up, chest rising and falling in gentle rhythm. The music had changed to a medley of strident patriotic tunes, and the night had deepened to a greater cold. Was she shivering?

He edged toward her.

She didn't look away from the heavens. “Don't. Please don't.”

He rolled to his side. “Why not? Why did you keep me here, if you don't want me around?”

“Because I need you,” she said. She dropped a hand to the surface of the turret, and it warmed at her touch: a radiant heat, like coals. She propped the hand behind her head again. “Just... not like that.”

“Right,” he said.

“Besides, I thought you'd like the fireworks.”

He rolled onto his back again, wishing he'd brought a pillow. Wishing a lot of things. “And keep in mind what's firing them, Grace?”

“That, too.”

S
he had
one more thing to show him after the fireworks were over.

“Come on,” she said. “Let me tell you a story.”

“OK,” he said. What else could he do? He'd followed her all day, listened to what she had to say all day. Not very well, maybe, but he had. It was almost worth it, to be close to her.

Istvan would have told him he was in denial and been right, too, but Istvan wasn't there. Edmund would take what he could get.

She led him back to a cable car as the crowds dispersed. “Remember how I told you it took two months to build this place?”

“I do.”

“Those were the two months after Providence. After the fallout settled.”

He leaned against one of the window slats as the car started downwards. “The dust.”

“That's right.” She took up position on the opposite side, watching strings of lights as they passed. “That explosion that leveled the city, killed Anoushak and her–”

“Shokat Anoushak. Names are important. Get them right.”

“Yeah, whatever. Listen: that was us, Eddie. That was Diego.”

Edmund scrubbed a hand across his eyes. It was too late for this. “Grace, that makes no sense.”

“Shut up and let me explain. Barrio Libertad was a combo deal: a bomb and a prison cell, all in one package. The fortress, the pylons, the whole shebang. Aerosol dispersion. The Susurration didn't even realize what was going on until it couldn't go anywhere – and it was here, Eddie, all along. As far as we can tell, it was here before Anoushak, maybe even since the Wizard War began.”

“Grace,” Edmund repeated, more slowly, “that makes no sense.”

“No?”

“Not unless Magister Hahn has been taking credit for your...”

Grace raised her eyebrows.

Edmund leaned more heavily. Mercedes had never mentioned anything like this. She had never detailed what she did to end the Wizard War at all.

But... then again, she
was
the Magister, however she had attained the title. It was almost a requirement for the position, to be distrustful and dangerous and, as the years wore on, just a little crazy. Magister Jackson had won the vault in a card game with God-knew-what, after all, with consequences no one cared to ponder if he had lost. Mercedes was far from the worst.

Besides, if the Susurration had always been here, and if Diego had really...

He watched the great metal sails overhead recede. “Grace, are you saying that killing the most powerful wizard of all time was
incidental
?”

“No, I'm saying that we did our part and that now we need some help to do our part again. Just wait for it, Eddie – I'm not done.”

“You're not?”

The cable car stopped and she led him out. Out and down, down, down to a large circular structure standing apart from the living blocks, far away on the lowest terrace ring. A sign in both English and Spanish declared it to be “The Center for Existence Improvement,” which sounded grand enough, but rows of decorations strung across the door suggested that no one came or went on a regular basis.

Edmund ran a finger across the doorknob, expecting dust, but the metal was spotless. “Grace, what is this?”

She tugged the streamers down. “You'll see.”

The interior resembled the halls of a battleship. Gunmetal-grey. Exposed piping. Strange depressions in the walls, man-sized, filled with jointed steel arms and sheets of filmy material. Most of the machinery clustered around the head region. Several of the wires and needles looked as though they were meant to be inserted inside the skull. Edmund stayed close by Grace, focusing on breathing. The walls were plenty far apart and there was no water. No motion. No need to worry. At the back of the building Grace waved him into another elevator.

He hesitated. “Grace?”

“You'll see,” she repeated. “I just need you to not panic, OK?”

That was never a promising request. Edmund followed her in and took his fedora off, trying to pretend he wasn't as tense as he was. “Grace, you know what I do for a living.”

“I also know what you do when you remember that for yourself.”

He flinched. “That wasn't what I meant.”

She didn't reply. She struck a switch on the wall and they plummeted.

Edmund clutched at his fedora, wishing he'd brought his top hat instead. Wishing he had his cape and mask. He was a librarian with one good arm – he was fine for watching fireworks, but this? Don't panic? Make sure your shoes were tied before enacting the ritual? Grace could say what she liked; this place was sounding more and more like magic all the time, and as the Hour Thief he'd spent the greater part of his career combating magical threats. The very worst kind. After Magister Jackson, the Twelfth Hour had realized that having an immortal on roster meant having someone who could be sent on suicide missions more than once. He was an expendable asset guaranteed to came back.

He'd seen things. Don't panic, hah.

He still wished he had his other hat.

The doors slid open. A soft blue-white glow spilled from beyond, pooling in the air as though each particle were illuminated from within.

Edmund knew that light. He knew it very well.

He stepped forward – and Grace slapped an arm across his chest. “Don't,” she said. “Stay in the elevator.”

He backed up again, straining to see past the glow. It wasn't coming from spheres, he thought... more like filaments, or tubes, lines that ran straight but seemed curved. Maybe the other way around. The elevator trembled with the same indefinable hum that emanated from the pylons outside. He gritted his teeth against it. “This is the part where you tell me what you really do with the Bernault devices, Grace?”

“No,” she said. “This is the part where I tell you that Barrio Libertad was designed from the ground up to collapse the Susurration's home dimension into this one and then blow it and its entire domain straight to Hell.”

He hadn't heard that right. He couldn't have heard that right.

He turned to stare at her. The blue light made it look as though all the blood had drained from her body.

“Do you understand now?” she asked.

Edmund opened his mouth. Closed it. She reached for him. He backed away, dizzy, his pocket watch slippery in his fingers. The deck trembled beneath him, the smell of grease and diesel filling his nostrils. She looked dead. The light made her look dead. She was dead.

“Look,” she said, and he didn't, he couldn't, he reeled around to face the light so he wouldn't have to, “we need those devices, Eddie. We need to keep the Susurration under control or a lot of people are going to die. The option to fire the weapon comes up every year and we've voted it down every year and it's gotten worse and worse, and Eddie, Diego isn't going to wait anymore. You saw how many smilers are out there. Do you understand now? Eddie? Eddie, are you listening to me? I know you don't want to hear it, Eddie, but I'm serious. If you don't believe me, I can show you. Here.”

A switch clicked. The elevator pitched forward.

Water ripped through the shredded hull. Ship foundering. No light. No air. Decks lurching crazily beneath him, walls becoming floors and then ceilings that dragged him down beneath them. His lungs screaming. Himself, screaming. Bubbles he could feel but not see. He floundered through the darkness, seeking a hatch or a ladder or anything, anything that would lead out, lead up – and touched hair.

The corpse hugged him.

He yelled. Jerked away. A star-spotted yank at his bad arm brought him up short, dangling. Before him – below him – stretched metal supports that tapered and vanished, bands of elaborate latticed wafers suspended by nothing, bolts of blue-white particulates sheeting across vast mechanical vertebrae, an overpowering electric tremble that stood every hair on end and tasted of oil. Oil in water.

Istvan. Istvan. He had to find Istvan. Istvan could fix this.

He scrambled for his watch. No thought spared; the calculations for home slotted themselves into place by instinct.

A snap –

– and he vanished.

H
e fought
. Oh, how he fought, across one world and then another, scrambling between what was and what had been, fleeing from what might be. He was dead, but not gone. He wasn't wholly a man, nor wholly an event. Istvan Czernin was a patchwork crux of warring ideas who (as multiple past and extant foes could attest) was extraordinarily difficult to catch, much less be rid of forever.

Most opponents, however, existed in but a single realm. They weren't able to attach themselves like a glittering leech to his psyche. They couldn't strip away layer after layer of self-definition and rifle, relentless as the War itself, through his memory for ammunition.

The Susurration could.

Istvan fought and he fled, tripping over the rasping parchment of his chains.

“Stop calling me that!” He refused to speak German. It hurt too much in German. “You have no right to call me that!”

Pietro appeared before him again, seated on one of the benches in a park that gaped with sickening holes. His jacket shimmered, like stars in blackness, and his eyes were soft, his smile kind. Brown eyes, with flecks of yellow, ringed with a dark rim like a section of oak. He was slim, not thin. Delicate fingers. Hair to match his eyes, half-hidden beneath that bowler hat he'd taken such a fancy to in the last year. he said, and his Viennese was flawless.

Better than Istvan's own family. Better than Franceska.

Better than Edmund.

“No!” Istvan skidded about, wings trailing broken feathers. One of his chains caught on his ribs and snapped him backwards, through the grass, into the dirt and past it, face-to-face with Pietro again. Dead bones. Like him.

shouted another voice, short of breath and dashing after him as he left his practice.

Istvan tripped over himself.

Janos – it was Janos, disheveled and miserable – reached out to steady him.

Istvan drifted sideways. Sit down. He had to sit down. He felt like he'd just lost a boxing match and was newly awoken from a concussion. He couldn't see straight. he repeated. There was a flight of stairs nearby; he half-fell onto them –

– and then fell again, tumbling backwards into snow.

sighed the Susurration. The monster, the memory-stealing horror, not Pietro. Not dear Peti.

Istvan lay there, coughing. He wore a greatcoat now, torn and bullet-riddled, but it didn't seem to matter. It shouldn't have mattered. Oh, it was cold. “You can't do to me what you do to everyone else, can you?” he rasped. “Catch them? Control them? Work them until they die?”

Pietro, now clad in a greatcoat himself, crouched in the snow beside him. He shook his head, his expression a familiar quiet anguish.

Something whistled. The snow shifted beneath him. Istvan scrambled away, sprinting behind an outcropping as shellfire exploded where he'd just been. Where Pietro still was. Where he wasn't, any longer.

Chips of rock ripped through Istvan's fleshless bones; when he held up a hand, he was bleeding.

came the pronouncement. The cheerful notes of a Strauss waltz rang behind the words.

The sky snatched at Istvan's chains. Yanked him upwards. Hurled him against frozen stone. It was too late. The guns had already fired, the shells had burst among the Austrian column, the pass cracked and boomed and the snow roared down and down and down–

Istvan couldn't save them all. He couldn't even find all of what was left of them. The worst part was that he felt almost nothing, that there was so much pain and yet it didn't overwhelm him with euphoria, that – two years in – he possessed a tolerance for suffering so high that he could weep at the losses of one or a dozen or a hundred men. How much greater agonies were yet to come? Was this his sentence for demanding answers, for cursing the Almighty, for dying as he'd done? Torn to pieces... and returned, to watch others suffer the same?

Starry emptiness reached for him, the space between grown solid. Echoes.

Istvan stabbed it.

Laughter. Pietro's laughter, deep within his chest. The emptiness oozed around his knife, towards his hand. Climbing.

Istvan tried to rip his knife free. Couldn't.

Istvan froze. Past experiences used against him, fine. That was little different than what he could do to himself, that was guilt, it was all over and gone in the end. Over and gone. But this...

“No,” he said. “Stop it. And stop calling me that name!”

the creature continued, A sigh, low and wistful.