The Interminables (18 page)

He should have teleported. Dodged. Something. How was he supposed to do his job with a bum arm? Istvan kept blaming himself, but Edmund had agreed to come. Stupidly, but he'd agreed. It was already arranged. He'd done more on less sleep before and he was needed.

Maybe he'd hoped that going along would take his mind off Grace.

Finally, Istvan withdrew his hand, wiping away the memory of blood. He dropped a tiny fragment of something on a tray for tiny fragments. “I believe that's all of it,” he said.

Edmund tried to sit up straighter, then realized putting any weight on his wounded arm was a bad idea. He would have to spend some time recovering, for sure.

He mentally tabulated what he had listed in his ledger, and what increment would be best suited to the task. He had time. He healed no faster than anyone else, but his days weren't limited to twenty-four hours.

Legendary resilience, and all a sham.

“Was it one of hers?” he asked, thinking of Shokat Anoushak and Providence.

“It was.” Istvan pulled a length of gauze from beneath the tray, white spangled with red and black flowers arranged in almost liquid flecks and spatters. “How the beast survived so long, I've no idea. I expect I'll be looking it over soon, but...”

“But?”

“Oh, Edmund, I'm so sorry.”

“Would you stop apologizing?”

“Edmund, you don't understand! With you in such pain, and I... The… the way I am, Edmund, all this time, I've been enjoying it! It isn't often you're hurt this badly, and it's... it's...” He tugged a needle from the fabric, threaded it, and jabbed savagely at the material. It kept him in practice, went the claim. Edmund doubted he'd ever had cause to perform surgical stitching so intricate.

Edmund leaned back on his pillows. Istvan would never complain about his abilities in front of his staff – he performed miracles with them, after all – and that left only one person to talk to about it. It was a conversation so old Edmund knew it by rote.

The tray rattled. Istvan stopped his work. Edmund almost told him to stop kicking the bed before he remembered that the specter couldn't, that it wasn't a poltergeist responsible for the swaying lights overhead, for the rumble of rolling wheels, for the crashes and cries beyond the trembling curtains. The tray rattled to the edge of the table. Slid and fell.

Oh, hell. Not another one.

Edmund clutched the edges of the mattress as the bed bucked like it was trying to throw him off. Istvan did manage to catch the tray, but not the curtain support that fell through him. Chrome detailing pinged off the pillars, stained glass cracking. Dust showered from the ceiling. The ground rolled. The way ground shouldn't roll, floor and earth and rock no longer stable and no longer certain. If rock wasn't certain, what was?

It was nothing like the swaying deck of a ship. Nothing like the sudden tilt of catastrophe.

Nothing like. Nothing like.

Edmund squeezed his eyes shut. Books. Some of the Twelfth Hour's books would be falling off the shelves again. Probably the ones on the upper story, where the shaking would be more severe. He didn't need both arms to shelve books.

He was running a mental catalog of written inventory by the time the earthquake subsided.

Istvan set the tray and embroidery back on the table. “Edmund, stay here. You're in no shape to help with emergency response.”

“I wasn't about to volunteer.” He released his death grip on the bed. “You know, Istvan, I'm really starting to get tired of these. We never had earthquakes before. Not here.”

“You aren't released until I tell you,” Istvan continued. “Don't go home.”

Edmund sighed. “Istvan–”

“Don't go home!”

The specter took two running steps forward, spread tattered wings, and shot through the infirmary doors.

H
is house was intact
. Only a few new cracks, running through the hall and bathroom. Hairline. The broken windows had lost a few more shards of glass, but the cardboard patches remained attached. The horseshoe Istvan hated still hung in its place above the door. The lights weren't working, but they sometimes didn't.

He lit some candles. The stove was working, one of the benefits of not being electric. He drew some water from the barrel outside and put the kettle on.

“If anyone comes by, I'm not home,” he told Beldam.

She made one of her usual lazy attempts to trip him. He sidestepped the cat's efforts and made for his room. His damaged cape, jacket, and shirt went on one side of the closet, to be repaired or used to make replacements when he got the chance. He had three spare jackets and one spare cape left. Five shirts. It would have to do for now.

He took a shower, put on his robe, put his arm back in its sling, and made a cup of tea. The gin could wait until later, when the bite started to hurt again in earnest. Alcohol was a painkiller. He'd have a drink then, for that reason. Maybe two. It depended on how badly it hurt.

No one at the door for dinner. Istvan worried too much.

Edmund finished his second cup of tea. He'd shelved most of the fallen books and made note of those missing, but he did have some archival work waiting in the vault. It was technically on hold, what with his recent return to duty, but was something Mercedes did want finished, eventually, under the usual supervision. He could do that tomorrow. That was a good plan for tomorrow.

Tomorrow was the Fourth of July, and that meant dressing for the occasion. He returned to his room.

His desk was locked, but he knew how to find the key, and in short order he had the left drawer open. Packed in the back were photographs of his family. Letters from friends. A sampling of both from lovers, some yellowed and some fresh as yesterday. He ignored them all like they weren't there. He pushed aside the Yokata family tanto. Didn't look at Grace's picture or the signed photo of Rita May or the keys to Dan's car (entomologist to his etymologist, they'd always said, close as brothers). Beneath that hideous tie with clocks and cats he couldn't bring himself to either wear or be rid of, he found his old American flag pin. He pulled it out, and shut the desk.

The pin went on the lapel of the first of his spare jackets. Below the clock-and-crescent of the Twelfth Hour. Whether or not the United States still existed as such was a fine question, but the pin had always gone there and so that's where he put it.

He regarded it a moment. Then he went back to the desk and retrieved Grace's picture. Round. Framed. Just a tad larger than locket-sized, printed on poor-quality paper. She was smiling, her dark eyes exposed to the world, a gash on her cheek stitched closed the day before. Long after his sword accident. Two months before she'd been killed.

He poured himself a glass of gin on the way out.

Back to the kitchen. He set Grace's picture on the table, face-down. Then he pulled out his chair and sat in it. Beldam quested up beside him, tail flicking side to side. He scratched her behind the ears. A matter of seconds and then the enormous cat was in his lap, purring, cutting off circulation to both legs.

He regarded his glass.

He looked at the living room, where he'd once tried and failed to teach Grace how to dance foxtrot. It wasn't that she was a slow learner.

Is this Sinatra? Why do you have to be so old, Eddie?

I'm thirty-five.

Show me.

He regarded his glass again.

Grace Wu. Scarlet lightning. Dynamite on rails. Probably smarter than he was, and the only gal he'd ever met who could keep up with a time wizard in more ways than one. Istvan had feared for his safety, citing her speed, her strength, her generation of potentially killing current, all the unknowns of Conduit physiology. Edmund had reminded him that in the event he broke a few bones or came down with a case of St Elmo's fire, he knew a good doctor.

Less than a year they had been together. Spring and summer and into the fall. The leaves had turned and then she was gone.

The leaves had turned in 1941 and then he was trapped.

He downed his glass.

It wouldn't have lasted. Nothing lasted, not with him. That was what she'd said about Istvan – that the only reason Edmund kept him around was that the ghost was one of the few things that would last as long as he would. He wished he'd been able to argue that it wasn't true.

Beldam squirmed in his lap. He realized that he'd stopped patting her and resumed, muttering an apology.

The picture sat before him, face-down. It was over. She'd all but said it was over.

All but said.

He shouldn't have – he knew he shouldn't have – but he flipped the picture face-up. Stared at it.

Grace Wu. She'd come from New York City after the Wizard War changed it into what it was now, clawing her way out with the aid of that strange power that surged through her flesh and bones: power she was just learning to use, power that as far as anyone knew would kill her before the year was up. She'd lost everything.

She'd refused to let it stop her.

She'd called herself Shandian, “Lightning” in Chinese, even though she didn't speak the language and neither had her parents or grandparents. She'd thrown herself into the business of fighting the Wizard War with vigor and laughing wit, racing ahead so she wouldn't dwell on what was behind or before her, believing all the while that they could somehow win what didn't seem winnable.

She'd been like him, in his earlier days. Costumes. Code names. She suddenly had superpowers and she had grown up with same four-color influences that had inspired him to take up his own mantle all those years ago. Glossier pages, but the same.

Grace had become Shandian, and Shandian wouldn't take no from anybody. Shandian took what she wanted. Shandian never gave up.

He didn't know who Resistor Alpha was.

Edmund had been the Hour Thief since the mid-Fifties, when he'd realized what he'd have to do, where he'd have to find his time, how he should present himself so he didn't feel like a predator. Like a leech.

Edmund didn't take time. That was someone else, someone both better and worse than he was, someone strong enough to bear the pressure when he couldn't – and, so very often, he couldn't.

It was the Hour Thief who was famous, not him. The Hour Thief who was really employed by the Twelfth Hour, who had led so many of its members to destruction. The Hour Thief who formed the leading half of a strange and public partnership, paired with a much older and foreign friend who thought the whole business was faintly ridiculous.

The Hour Thief.

Edmund blinked. He set the picture down.

Oh, boy. Oh, this was a bad idea, but if he could just talk to Grace again...

Barrio Libertad was a rogue state. This was established. Mercedes had forbidden him to have anything to do with it – him and Istvan both – but who, exactly, was
him
? Who was Edmund Templeton, to the public? Who was forbidden to visit the fortress?

He stood, dumping Beldam off his lap. Wobbled on numb legs.

She grumbled at him.

“Sorry,” he said.

She sniffed a disparaging remark about his manners or parentage and minced away, tail in the air.

He snatched up picture and glass, empty now but no longer needed, and headed back to his room. That flag pin was on one of his black jackets, but it could be moved. The sole requirement for the Fourth of July was that he had it, not that he had it on that particular lapel. Only about a third of his wardrobe was black.

The Hour Thief was down for the count. Bound by orders. Forbidden to interact or intervene, and unable to throw a proper punch.

Maybe Edmund Templeton could get some answers.

H
e had gone home
. Istvan knew Edmund had gone home. If there was one thing the man couldn't be trusted to do, it was abandon routine. He'd gone home, taken a shower, made tea, read a book, had a glass of gin, and gone to bed at midnight. He always did, on off days, and with his arm in that condition and his heart not yet recovered... yes, very much an off day. He'd gone home and done all the usual small things Edmund did when Edmund was able. Even when he oughtn't.

Oh, Istvan hoped he was all right. The Susurration was all too insidious for his tastes. Too gentle. Too quiet. A creeping, smothering doom, like snow.

he said. His Vietnamese was rusty and his accent as terrible as ever but thirty years in Indochina took some time to erase.

A cough in the darkness, the air close and stifling and the fallen beams of the apartment block closer still. Three people trapped in a small pocket, two adults and a child, as near as he could tell, barely enough room to breathe. Istvan himself crouched in the rubble, electrical wire and broken concrete scraping through his ribs. All three of them were afraid, but not of him. Not once he told them who he was.

one said, a low rasp choked with dust.

he replied. He finished staunching the last of the bleeding, navigating torn arteries by touch alone, a leg impaled by rebar. It would hold long enough. Already the scrapes and clinks of digging filtered down from above.

He patted a knee he couldn't see and then departed, angling upward through the collapse. Shoddy construction, all of it. Built of rubble itself. They were lucky it hadn't tilted into the nearest spellscar – that had been a horror, runaway magic cracking new shafts into the ground, leaking phosphorescent growth that changed to moss where it touched flesh – but, in survival alone, they would always be lucky.

Gradual settling, indeed. The earth ought to make up its mind and be done with it.

Lamps cast sallow light across exhausted faces laboring in the rescue shaft. A circular ring of white and blue hovered further above, weightless, a craft of some sort parked above operations and lifting away the heaviest beams with slender tentacles, strange assistance without a sound. Istvan told the man who looked to be coordinating efforts about those trapped: three directly below, two huddled in a doorway some ten meters off, several others beneath desks or tables, some wounded and some not. First efforts ought to be turned towards these people, and then these.
Save as many as you can. Do your best.

Agreement, noting down the locations on a chart he carried. Their best was all they could do, no?

Istvan winged away. More searching. More circling, straining the air for that distinct variety of helpless terror, descending and rising and descending again, bound by contract and simple human obligation to help. He couldn't lift anything himself, not anymore.

He hoped Edmund was all right.

E
dmund slept better
than he had in a long while. No earthquakes. No nightmares. No midnight surprises. Istvan didn't show for breakfast, but Edmund could put on his own water and he did, turning on the radio to catch nothing but faint static and then putting on a record instead. No requests for classical or waltz. The sun was out and he could dust his bookshelves without anyone making fun of him. His stolen spellbook was still there, still safe, and still distinctly less appealing than the book beside it, which seemed a far better read for anyone browsing.

He put out a new set of bowls for Beldam, washed his dishes, and mulled over the decision of last night with the satisfaction of knowing that for once he could do something about someone he'd lost. Grace might be over him, yes. She might be with someone else, yes. But he didn't know any of that for sure and people did change. He had to try. He'd done worse things for worse reasons.

His civilian ensemble was a bit musty, but serviceable: pressed khakis, vest, dress shirt, tie, and suspenders. Navy-blue instead of black, except the tie, which was red. The flag pin went on his lapel, next to a sprig of flowers.

Before he left, he wrote a note so Istvan wouldn't worry and stuck it to the refrigerator.
Extenuation
, said the word magnet. It was a good word to know.

No teleporting to Barrio Libertad. He thought, instead, of Providence. Murals painted before immense double-doors. Those pylons that made his teeth ache, that cleared a partial path through the Susurration and its pleasant illusions. Through perfection. Through peace. What else could frighten an avatar of war so badly?

He snapped his pocket watch.

The sun was out there, too, and the breeze ideal. The walls of Barrio Libertad loomed above him, ramshackle immensity topped by turrets aimed at nothing. He approached the doors and they slid open, just as they had before.
Keep all limbs inside the conveyance
, said the walls. English and Spanish. Raised lettering.

The doors slid shut.

Edmund leaned against the rail. He adjusted his tie.

The elevator didn't move.

“Good morning,” crackled the same heavily accented, stuttering voice from before.

“Good morning,” he replied. “This is Edmund Templeton. I was hoping to meet with–”

“You are ducks. Your current position is in a small box suspended over a fall of one hundred sixty meters.”

“Excuse me?”

Something crashed into place behind the walls. The elevator shuddered.

He clutched at the rail. Barrio Libertad. Insular, paranoid, and so staunchly thaumophobic that he required a special exception to enter with a single passive spell intact. Right. “Look, I'm not here to cause trouble, I promise.” Who was he talking to? “I just want to meet with Grace. Grace Wu. Resistor Alpha. Is she available?”

A clanging. A ripping. The air contorted around him, mathematical patterns gonging against the backs of his eyeballs.