The Interminables (28 page)

T
he ritual circle
lay drawn where Edmund last remembered it, still intact. The offering remained in their bowls, old blood congealing beneath Chinese lanterns. Only Mercedes' phone was missing... and Mercedes herself.

“You can teleport into the Magister's office?” demanded Istvan.

Edmund picked his way across the chalk, making sure not to scuff any of it. The window was open, for the first time since he recalled, and he had a sinking feeling he knew where Mercedes had gone. There had always been something odd about that window. “Unfortunately.”

“But–”

“I took the wards down for convenience's sake and never got around to putting them back up. I'll talk to Mercedes about it first thing after this is over, I swear.” He reached the seat below, set a knee on the cushions, and leaned forward to push the window open. It swung away on hinges, twin panels of glass reinforced by weathered wood and strips of iron. The waves roared. Salt spray stung his lips. Open ocean, as far as he could see.

Istvan skimmed over the ritual circle, alighting beside him. “You don't really think she went out there, do you?”

Edmund tugged at the curtain rod. Solid. He held tight to it with his good arm and swung through the window like it was a shipboard hatch.

His feet struck wood. He staggered. The drop had been much shorter than he'd anticipated, and the position of the window seemed to have reversed itself: the waves were, once more, outside, though the inside he now occupied was vastly different. Before him stretched a carved wooden railing, curving back around to both left and right before leading down a spiral stairway. Above him, slats radiated outward from a conical roof. A tremendous heat burned at his back: heat, and a brilliance that nearly blinded him when he turned to look.

A lighthouse.

The window sat incongruously between two panes of glass, looking out over the same ocean as all the rest. He peered over the railing. Whitecaps broke on barnacle-razored rocks below.

Istvan burst backwards from the window, pinwheeling, like he'd tried to dive through and it had hurled him in reverse into elsewhere. His spine struck the lighthouse lamp; he staggered away from it with a curse. “Edmund, what is this?”

The stairs creaked.

“Do tell,” said Mercedes.

Edmund whirled around, automatically pulling off his hat. Istvan snapped to attention. Mercedes stood at the top of the stairs, holding a chipped mug and clad in a blue fluffy bathrobe. Her hair was wet, down, and lacking its customary pens. Her pockmarked face – and her eyes – were sharp as ever.

Whatever Edmund had been planning to say flew out of his head. Did she live here? She'd gone home, after that conference, and taken a bath?

Could he blame her?

I'm sorry, we'll come back at a better time. We didn't mean to bother you. I'll get right to fixing those wards – we shouldn't be in here at all, I know. Sorry. Forget we were ever here. You're the Magister, not me.

“I imagine you're here about the Susurration,” she said.

Edmund took a deep breath. “That's right.”

“I didn't know you could teleport into my office, Mr Templeton.”

“It's a loophole from my tenure. I'll show you how to put the wards back after this is over, I promise.”

“I'll hold you to that.” She started back down the stairs. “Come on, then.”

Edmund realized that Istvan had remained ramrod-rigid throughout the exchange, staring straight ahead with his field cap clasped in one hand and the other clutching his own wrist. All normal but for that last detail. He frowned. “Mercedes?”

“I don't like the idea of taking chances with the ones who will be telling stories about me after I'm gone. Besides,” she called as she vanished from sight, “I took a shower. I always think better after a shower.”

Edmund looked to Istvan.

“So long as I'm not ordered about again,” the specter muttered.

“I'll see what I can do.”

They followed her down the staircase, a tunnel of brick and iron that spiraled around and around at dizzyingly steep angles, creaking. Edmund watched his step. Istvan followed closely behind.

Mercedes strode ahead, cup in one hand and the other on the rail. Her feet were bare. “I didn't create the Susurration,” she said. “It was already there, waiting to be given form and purpose, and a way into the world. I gave it that. I brought it here, and I tasked it to kill Shokat Anoushak and her armies. Bring peace. End suffering. Save us all. You can see the problem already, I'm sure.”

Edmund thought of perfect clouds. How wonderful had Lucy been, while it lasted? Before he realized what she was doing, what she was? No more fears, no more abyss lurking behind every too-close wall, every person who grew too familiar, every drop of water in the dark. He could talk to her about anything. Laugh. Feel normal again.

Wasn't that almost worth living in a realm of birds and sunlight and boys on bicycles while his body toiled itself to rags?

“It wants to finish what you brought it here to do,” he said, more to himself than anyone.

Peace, over the whole world, a final end to suffering. An indescribable toll lurking just beyond the illusion. But if no one knew, what would it matter?

Jailer, betrayer, and beloved…

“Bingo,” she said.

“Mercedes, it's Conceptual. It's like Istvan. You gave it a goal like that and then let it loose, and hoped it would stop at Shokat Anoushak?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

He ran a hand across his eyes. “It always does.”

She chuckled darkly. “They say you're not a real wizard until you regret it.”

“It didn't want to kill her,” murmured Istvan.

She glanced back at him. “I know.”

Edmund watched his feet. How many circles had they descended now? Two? Three? At this point he wouldn't be surprised if there were seven… or nine.

“Mercedes,” he began, “you didn't seem surprised by anything I said about Barrio Libertad. I can see now why you took credit for the blast, but as far as I can tell you've left everything else up to the fortress since it appeared and, conveniently, you've never been mentioned by anyone there – even though the Susurration has to know who summoned it.”

A blue-robed shrug. “Your point, Mr Templeton?”

“Diego.”

“What of him?”

“He must have come from somewhere.”

“I'm sure he must have.”

He spent a moment to step in front of her. “Mercedes, I've been in this business for a hell of a long time and I'd really like to know if we're being somehow double- or triple-crossed here. How long have you known about Diego?”

She looked down at her cup, which was mostly empty. She sighed. “After my election, Mr Templeton, I received a single text message from Barrio Libertad, with an aerial photo of the Providence crater attached. It said – and I quote – ‘Keep Out.'”

“That's all?”

“This was before we restored power,” she said. “Before I had a working phone. It turned on, flashed the message, and then went dead again. I figured we had an agreement and blacklisted the fortress the next morning.”

“What about the smilers?”

She waved a hand. “What would I have done about the smilers? Made an announcement? Started a witch-hunt? Caused a panic?”

He exchanged glances with Istvan. “So you let people disappear.”

“Smilers don't become tyrants,” she said. “Whatever danger it poses unchecked, the Susurration is still a creature of peace and order, Mr Templeton. Don't forget that.”

She stepped past him and started back down the stairs. “I almost worry about what might happen to Big East without it.”

Edmund rubbed at his forehead. Grace had said something about that. That things were too stable. That people were adapting too easily. That it shouldn't be like that after something like the Wizard War, and that he should have noticed that something was wrong.

He'd hoped things were just getting better.

“I didn't recognize that ritual circle in your office,” he said.

Mercedes kept descending, step by step. “Two powers can't occupy the same metaphysical space,” she replied. “When I realized that Doctor Czernin can fight it – deal with it on its own level, resist its temptations by the simple virtue of being something it is not – I thought I might replicate the effect. Send others into the Conceptual realm to engage with it and then, once it was weakened, re-bind it properly.” She finished off the last of her drink. “You've done that yourself, as I recall. I was hoping to do the same on a larger scale.”

Edmund almost fell down the stairs. It had taken a lot of archival searching to come up with the means to do that. He was no binder or summoner or portal-walker. It was a wonder it had worked at all, and even then he hadn't done it alone. Most people back then had liked the idea of getting Istvan out of the besieged Twelfth Hour – and into battles, to turn the tide where living defenders could barely hold their own – and the ritual itself had required five wizards to complete. Five, to send one.

Mercedes, alone, had tried to do the same? Bigger?

He shook his head, steadying himself. “You know, you could have asked for help.”

She held up her bandaged hand with its missing ring finger. “I did.”

Edmund realized Istvan was no longer behind him. The specter had paused where he was, one hand clenched tightly on the rail, not looking at either of them. Edmund started back up towards him. “Istvan?”

Istvan shook his head, blinking. “Nothing. It's nothing.”

“All right.”

Edmund stepped away. Istvan followed him. Good enough. Maybe it was just as well Mercedes' solution hadn't gone through – if the Susurration could damage its complete conceptual opposite so badly, Edmund didn't dare guess what it might do to an ordinary person translated into its realm. To Mercedes. To him.

They reached the bottom after four revolutions, passing into a sparse, small sitting room paneled in weather-worn pine. A tiny kitchen occupied one side, barely enough room for burners. Other doors led off into yet smaller areas. A drum of water occupied one corner. A chess board and a mostly complete set of pieces sat atop the lone bookshelf, which held a plethora of what looked to be mysteries, manuals of forensics and astronomy, cases for movies or maybe games, and the complete works of HP Lovecraft, none of it organized according to any clear system.

Edmund resolved to stay away from it. Her problem, not his.

She paused beside a round glass table, its edges cracked. “Now you know,” she said. “I was hoping it wouldn't come to this. That it wouldn't come so quickly.” She set her cup down. “Are you so certain you don't want the position back, Mr Templeton? It might be for the best.”

“That wasn't my plan,” he said, focusing on the kitchen behind her.

“Then what is? What would you have me do? The Bernault devices were the last thing I could offer that might have made a difference before the conjunction. If the Susurration is so set on its course that it will raise monsters, so powerful that the fortress can no longer prevent it from doing so, and so impossible to dissuade by the threat of that weapon, how am I supposed to keep everyone it's captured over the last seven years from paying for my mistakes?” She gestured back to the stairway, to her office. “I never did figure out how to translate any more than a single person, and even if it were you, Mr Templeton, I doubt you could fight the Susurration to a standstill in its own territory.”

Edmund tried to meet her eyes, and couldn't. He swallowed. This was practically her house, as far as he could tell. She was wearing a bathrobe. Her hair was wet. He had broken into her house to tell her he didn't like the way she was handling her office. He, Magister Jackson's damn fool Templeton, interfering in what he shouldn't.

What would you have me do? Tell us, immortal, what we must do.

Run.

What was he doing? What was he doing here?

A chill touched his arm.

“We don't... have a plan, precisely,” Istvan admitted. He drew his hand away, wavered, and then stayed where he was. “The grand sum of our intentions was speaking to you. We were hoping you might have some insight on how to, ah, convince it to abandon its plans, perhaps, or some weakness we could exploit, or… or, ah...” He looked away. “Magister, if you brought the creature here, you must know it better than anyone. All I know is that we can't stand by and watch Barrio Libertad massacre all those people, and the Susurration, too. It isn't right and I expect you know that.”

“Is that tea?” Edmund asked.

Mercedes looked down at her cup. “Of a sort.”

“I can put on more, if you'd like.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Please do. Only one cabinet for the tableware, pot's on the stove, the tin's right beside. Thank you, Mr Templeton.”

He started for the kitchen. Something warm to drink always helped. It was something to hold. Something to concentrate on. You couldn't plan a good counterplan to mass murder without tea, or tea of a sort. Grace hadn't agreed with that, but she'd been more of a coffee person anyway. She probably still was.

She would thank him when this was done. She didn't want to set off that weapon, either.

He wasn't leading anything. He was assisting. Enabling.

The Magister didn't serve tea.

“
I
don't know
,” said Edmund. “I thought everything was interdicted, but there are plenty of monsters scattered outside the effect. It might have sent a team of smilers to raise one of those. Within Providence... well, I'm pretty sure I still have that exception, though I don't know what Barrio Libertad would think of us showing up to hit the ritual sites ourselves. They're probably prepping for a bombardment or something. Grace won't be sitting idle.”