The Interminables (27 page)

“Doctor Czernin, silence the smiler. Now.”

His chains snapped taut. Wrists, ankles, neck. Shackles that burned. Hooks that dug into his stomach. He slewed sideways, choking, crashing into and partially through the catwalk's rusting rail. Too slow. Too late.

He snarled to himself. Oh, this was Edmund's fault.

Edmund whirled around. “Mercedes, what are you doing?”

“What I must.”

Istvan clung to the rail, thoughts spinning. The Susurration, gone, without even the chance to surrender; even the chance to explain what it was on about. It hadn't had a choice in the matter. All it wanted was peace. A second chance. A measure of happiness, for everyone, however misguided.

War wasn't the calculated extermination of the helpless and confined. That was something else.

He was awful. He wasn't that awful. He couldn't be that awful.

The chains winched tighter. He strained backwards, resolving to make every inch as hard-fought as those on the Western Front.

“Mercedes Hahn,” called the Susurration's agent, “still you silence the truth? You lie to your own people, as you lied to me?”

She stood. “Doctor Czernin!”

Lightning. Fire. White phosphorous. Chains of parchment calligraphy blazing around his bones.

He let go of the rail, stifling a cry. Silence him. Silence the smiler. Now. He leapt for the mercenary's spine, reaching –

– and struck steel. No further.

The man's armor was solid. Just like last time, at Oxus Station. Just like Barrio Libertad.

“I came when you called,” the Susurration said, grief ringing in its host's processed tones, “and now you force others to assault me when I arrive unasked? You conspire with those who seek to destroy me?”

Shouting. Everyone was shouting. Edmund at the Magister. Grace at Edmund. Kasimir's spokesman at everyone, amplified accusations of obstructing justice. Himself at nothing, as his chains burned. Through it all sizzled the Magister's terror.

“Doctor Czernin, silence it now! Silence it!”

“Mercedes! Mercedes, think about what the hell you're doing!”

Istvan drew his knife.

The mercenary brought up his sabre, lights flickering through the eyes of his helmet. “You wanted peace, desperate one, oath-breaker, shaper, betrayer – and I brought it.”

“Mercedes!”

Let it talk. Please let it talk. Sometimes, it spoke in Pietro's voice.

Istvan lunged.

“I did as you commanded,” the Susurration proclaimed, parrying, empty. “I destroyed in sorrow, and saved what I could. Why should anyone else have to die? Why should anyone else suffer?”

Blade striking blade. He had sheared through metal, once, the armor of tanks and airplanes, the cold skin of sorcerous mockeries that fell from the heavens. He couldn't, now. He couldn't. He couldn't.

Don't kill it.

“I did what you wanted,” it said. “Soon... I'll do what is right.”

The mercenary trembled. The sabre fell from his grasp, a flash that tumbled from the catwalk. Clanged. Tumbled further, whirling over and over, vanishing into the rusted depths. Its owner slumped, a heap of nerveless armor.

Silenced. Not by Istvan's hand, but silenced.

Istvan sheathed his knife and sank down beside him, clutching at his wrists. The man was unconscious... but not empty. The Susurration was gone. It had given him up. Freed him. Judging from what Kasimir's spokesman was shouting, would it be enough to avoid a summary execution? Traitor, traitor. Deal with him. Take him away.

The pie box lay crushed, its contents spilled and dripping.

Edmund drew up behind him. “You all right?”

Istvan watched the fluids fall, pale syrup and cinnamon. Apple. It was apple. “I miss pastries.”

“You wouldn't want that one anyway.”

“It's American, isn't it? Apple pie?”

“As much as baseball and men in funny masks. Would you like a hand up?”

It was a pointless gesture. A formality. Silly, offering such a thing to a ghost.

Istvan took it.

“Magister Hahn,” said Grace Wu, “I'm starting to think you weren't being level with us.”

Lord Kasimir and his spokesman stood beside her, the third mercenary making his way across the catwalk towards their “traitor.”

The Magister remained at the table, sitting down, slowly. Terror yet churned, hidden. An old fear, old grief, old desperation. “It lies,” she said. “You've fought it this long. You know that.”

The mercenary drew closer, blade drawn, intent on the fallen man.

Istvan tapped the butt of his knife on his breastplate. “Harm him,” he hissed, “and terrible things will happen.”

The mercenary sheathed his sabre.

“Mercedes,” said Edmund, ignoring the altercation and, to his credit, not edging away, “blaming you for its very existence here doesn't sound like a minor fabrication to me.”

“It intended to disrupt our efforts and that it has done,” she replied. “I suggest we return to discussing the ritual we–”

“You say you stopped the Wizard War,” interrupted Grace, “and if the Susurration was your plan, what was the plan for afterward, huh? What if we hadn't been there to stop it? What then?”

“Ms Wu, your fortress will be facing a terrible choice less than two days from now and you are dwelling on may-have-beens.”

Grace slammed her fists on the table. “Because this is all your fault!”

The catwalk trembled. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. The telescope groaned, the deep bongs and pops of stressed metal.

Istvan drew closer to Edmund, curbing the urge to take hold of his arm but unable to stop the protective shadow of a wing. She hadn't hit the table that hard. She was strong, but not that strong.

Grace lifted her hands away. “It's doing what?” she asked the air, as she'd done before. She backed up. “I thought it was dead.” She searched the floor: the platform, the mechanisms below. “Diego, I thought they were dead!”

“Earthquake?” asked Edmund. He looked down, too, reaching for his hat.

“No,” Istvan said. “No, I don't think so.”

Edmund stared at him. “Oh, hell.” He turned to shout at the rest of the room. “Everyone, take a few moments to get out of the building, now!”

The ground exploded.

E
dmund ran for Grace
. Mercedes was more important, in a geopolitical sense, and the mercenary who had fallen couldn't flee, himself, but Edmund ran for Grace.

The machinery below rolled upwards, roaring.

He ran. Grace was faster.

She snatched up the fallen mercenary and bolted for the door. Right past Edmund. Eyes wide open, but not looking at him. Shouting, but not to him. He couldn't make out what she was saying over the sound of the building falling apart.

He spun around but couldn't touch her. Istvan swept through her path, mid-leap, and she didn't stop. Didn't pause. Electric arcs crackled along the rails, the door slammed open, and both she and her armored ally were gone.

Wheels and motors and rusting braces crashed into the catwalk – and kept going. Upwards. Pierced by jagged pillars of iron, curved, the light sparkling on smoky serrations of glass. Sparks spun away from smashed bulbs. The telescope toppled ponderously towards the platform, its underpinnings severed. The box of Bernault devices rolled towards the edge, one side shattered, spilling blue-white globes that tumbled in a dozen different directions. It wasn't the machinery that roared.

Lord Kasimir and his men vanished in a clang and a tearing of dust-choked air.

Mercedes remained. Magister by unanimous vote, never asked and never explaining what she had done to earn it. The end of the Wizard War. The beginning of a new world, battered but breathing. Not the blast. The convergence. Shokat Anoushak's strange, mad decision to cross the ocean with an entourage of armies, to search for something she had never found – until the last.

Peace.

The Susurration.

Mercedes jabbed an elbow into his hip. “Mr Templeton, are you looking to be re-elected?”

“No,” he said, glancing back at where Grace had gone. Istvan was rushing toward them, reaching, bony jaw wide open. “No, I'm not.”

He snapped his pocket watch as the observatory crumpled between iron teeth.

I
stvan wasn't fast enough
.

Time for everyone but him. Not possible, granting it to the dead man. That would be resurrection. That was well beyond Edmund's powers. No, instead he would give it to Grace – and the rest – and they would flash off, all at once, abandoning Istvan to the monster that burst from below.

He was what he was, after all.

It didn't matter.

The catwalk ripped through him. More machinery followed, cold steel and colder glass, a vortex of rough and jagged and rattling, stone breaking, waterfalls crashing, the tumbling-down of bridges and towers, noise so loud it was solid and solidity that drowned.

He tore at it. Beat forward. Up or down, he didn't know.

Dust. Part of the telescope whirled past him. Rubble sheeted through his wings, torn from the observatory and from the rock, a tornado screaming through a vast rotten ribcage. Glimpses of the mountains below and beyond spun through the gaps.

He dove. Out. Up. Cracked sheets of concrete and glassy scales sped past, elevator cables and guy wires dangling from exposed vertebrae. Telephone poles fringed a twisted maw of scythes and crushing mandibles. Emerald lightning boiled in a cavernous eye socket.

It ignored him. He doubted it noticed him.

The beast heaved itself halfway out of the mountain, rock running like water. It didn't move any further. It crouched there, its storms scouring away the peak, and complained to itself, a moaning millstone squall that echoed cliff to cliff and brought down landslides. It looked as dead as he was. A skeleton. A relic, falling to pieces. Even its lightning flickered. A crest of broken towers lined its hunched back, trailing smoke from three immense wounds blown through them end-to-end.

Nothing like the monsters Istvan remembered from the Wizard War.

Nothing left of the observatory.

He banked lower, searching for the others. They had all gone. A baroque Triskelion tank slid down the mountainside, empty.

The rents in the great beast's rusting sides blazed blue-white. It screamed.

“
A
nd you left me there
!”

“You're fine!”

“That is entirely beside the point and you know it!”

“What was I supposed to do, come back and try to punch it to death?”

“No!”

Edmund knocked his head back against a scraggly tree growing out of the mountainside, his irritation a thin layer of spice over a richer turmoil. “Then what would you have suggested?”

Istvan snarled to himself. How was he supposed to know? How was he supposed to know anything anymore?

He kicked at the trail. A pebble spun down into the new valley below. Heaped towers lay there, the serpentine curve of enormous ribs, the splayed claws of at least five stout limbs half-buried in landslides. Whatever force it was that animated the beast had sputtered out, leaving it silent, blackened, and still burning. He didn't know how many of the Bernault devices had detonated inside it, but he didn't want to delve through it again to check. Even Shokat Anoushak's sorcery had limits.

The Susurration had sent it. The Susurration had tried to kill everyone at the conference and destroyed any chance of using the devices to buy time – all after Istvan had tried to defend it! After Istvan had fought to let it talk! After Istvan had... had hoped, that, somehow...

Oh, he didn't know what he'd hoped. He didn't want to know.

He picked up another pebble and threw it.

“There's nothing we can do, anyway,” Edmund muttered.

“The Magister–”

“Istvan, it doesn't matter. The ritual, Mercedes, the people out there, whatever the Susurration has planned – none of it matters. Diego still has that weapon and he's going to use it. All we've done is move up the timetable. Two days, Istvan. That's it. It doesn't matter what we or Grace or anyone else says. The Bernault devices were the only thing we could offer. The only thing. It's over. We're done. We tried.”

He hitched his bad arm around so he could cross it with the other, leaning back against the tree and staring darkly at the next peak over. “You know that old saying about living long enough to become a villain.”

He was giving up. Overwhelmed. Paralyzed. Plunged into that deep, yawning pit of despair and grief, resigned to drowning. If anyone did something wrong, it would be his fault. If a decision couldn't be reached, best not to make one at all. Grace was alive, and she had left him – him and the conference both – and she had taken all of his confidence with her. Oh, he was so foolish.

Istvan kicked at the dust. “We can't sit here.”

“I know we can't sit here.”

“Have you no ideas at all?”

“Istvan, no one wants to cooperate. Mercedes stonewalled me when I got her back and no one else will want to talk to us again. I don't know what we can do if no one wants to cooperate.”

“That's because they don't understand! They don't understand what they're doing! Edmund, I've seen it. I am it! If we do nothing, and they do nothing, it's precisely the same as agreeing with the present course of action. The talking stops and all the rest rushes into action with banners and parades and before you know it you're invading Italy and it's awful and no one has any idea how it happened or how to stop it or what the fighting is for, and it's all inertia from there. Nothing is ever the same afterwards. And then no one learns and it happens again. Over and over.”

He blinked at his hands. His dead, bloodied hands. “All these years, Edmund, and I've never done anything to... Not once have I... We can't let that happen here, Edmund, we can't. It isn't right. It isn't right at all. I might be this… this horrible thing, but... but I – Edmund, I can't…” He ripped off his glasses with a curse, turning away to wipe viciously at his eyes. Soft, he was, after two bloody days with the Susurration, overwrought and womanish and weak. “Oh, I hate this.”

“You've seen me worse.”

“Yes, but you're…”

Shellshocked? A proper man at heart? Irresistible when in pain; handsome, tragic, and brave?

Istvan hooked his glasses on his bandolier and rubbed at his face. Flickering again. Not right, indeed. “I'm sorry.”

Edmund shook his head. “Don't apologize.”

“I... I simply want to find some other way, Edmund. For once. Something that isn't a massacre.” He leaned back against the mountainside, suddenly wrung-out, weary as the wizard beside him. He turned his ring around his finger, thinking of the tiger locked in its cage.

Edmund was silent.

Another landslide gave way, crashing and bonging down the fallen rocks. Metal glinted within it. Part of the observatory, Istvan thought. Would it still report its view of the heavens, even now?

“Maybe we should talk to Mercedes,” Edmund said.

“You said she didn't want to explain herself.”

“At this point it seems there's not a whole lot of room for want, Istvan. If the Susurration was telling the truth – and there's no reason to believe that it wasn't, given what I've seen – she might be our best bet.”

Istvan blinked at him. “You don't mean to...”

Edmund stood, turmoil yet churning but crushed beneath purpose. A blur: hat on, jacket straightened, cape cleared of bark and dust, snapping in the breeze. The Hour Thief. The impossible soldier. The Man in Black. He was bigger than he was, and Istvan still couldn't understand how he did it.

The man who had been Magister swung his pocket watch around his hand, caught it, and sighed. “Like I said. Not a whole lot of room for want.”