The Interminables (6 page)

E
dmund sat
by himself in his usual corner at Charlie's. It wasn't quite noon, but he'd made sure to arrive early, clad in his full regalia. He'd taken the time to wash it again, just in case the gas smell lingered.

Unlike Istvan, he preferred to make a more pleasant first impression.

It was a quiet lunchtime. Pairs and loners straggled through the doors. A party of workmen took up most of the center tables, dirt-spattered and soaked through. A couple of women in what looked like East Command fatigues sat at the bar. Edmund wondered how they'd gotten through the spellscars, and what they were looking for this time. Most of the people left in Big East were there because they couldn't leave, they wanted something, or they were too stubborn for their own good. Anyone from outside – sent by the federal government, no less, or what was left of it – had to be wanting something.

The coat rack near the door dripped puddles on the floorboards. The same people as always strolled along in the windows outside, their streets whole and dry. Rain drummed on the roof.

Edmund checked his pocket watch. Noon, on the dot.

A woman stepped through the door. Raindrops rolled off her umbrella as she folded it. She was tall, fair-skinned, and dark-haired, and wearing a style of dress beneath her artfully unzipped coat that matched the era outside. Yellow. Plaid. It looked good on her; brought out her smile. She looked at his booth – directly at him – and started over, weaving between tables like she'd been there a hundred times before. Like she belonged there.

Lucy.

He stood, adopting a well-practiced smile of his own as she approached. His hat was already off, set on the seat near the wall, and booths didn't have chairs to pull out. “Good morning.”

“And to you,” she replied. She spoke with the lightest hint of a southern drawl, her words rich and measured. When he moved to help her with her coat and umbrella, she let him, like she'd been expecting it. “I'm glad you chose to meet me here. To meet me at all.”

“My pleasure.” He waited for her to slide into the seat opposite, then sat down again himself. “Would you like anything to drink?”

She shook her head. Her hair just brushed her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said, “but not now.”

“I'll take that rain check.”

She smiled. “It's true, then, what they say.”

He raised his eyebrows, a gesture only partly visible behind the mask. “Oh? What might that be?”

“That you are as charming as you are dangerous, of course.” She leaned forward, crossing her arms on the table. “A real Man in Black. Like the ones in the movies. Do you fence, too?”

He leaned forward as well. “Would you like me to?”

“Not here.” Her eyes were hazel. She glanced across the pub – no one watching, or at least not openly watching – and then dropped her voice to a hushed contralto. “Can we be frank, Mr Templeton? I don't have much time to talk.”

“Please, call me Edmund. All I know is your first name; the least I can do is return the favor.”

“Edmund, then. I know where those Bernault devices are, and where the mercenaries are taking them. They're being transferred. Tomorrow.”

He pulled his cape closer. There was a chill draft coming in from somewhere. “All twenty?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Lucy reached below the table and withdrew a piece of paper, pushing it over to him. He unfolded it.
North City, Oxus Station, 3:15 pm
. The words were penned in the same hand, elegant in its simplicity.

He shook his head admiringly. “Where did you learn to write like this? No one writes like this anymore.”

She shrugged. “Practice. I always thought it was important to make a good impression.”

“You've certainly done that.” He folded the note again and tucked it into his lapel pocket. He wasn't familiar with Oxus Station but it would be easy enough to find it. He had time.

Lucy drew back. Hesitated. She appraised him, eyes lingering on the Twelfth Hour pin, his smile, his sideburns. He knew the drill; he waited. Finally, she picked herself up. “I'm sorry, but... I should go.”

He stepped out of the booth and straightened his cape in an eyeblink, offering her a hand out. “Thank you for your help.”

She jumped at his sudden change in position, then smiled. Her dress really did accentuate the expression perfectly. “Of course.” She took his hand.

He helped her up. “Where are you from?”

“I can't say.” She glanced at the door. “It was dangerous to even come here.”

He nodded. He could be a dangerous person to associate with, at times. “I understand.”

She shrugged her coat back on, again acting as though his assistance were perfectly normal, and took up her still-damp umbrella. “I wish you the best of luck. I'll try to keep in touch.”

“I'd like that.”

“I would, too.” She turned to go, but again, she hesitated. Looked him over. Mouthed something under her breath.

Edmund
.

Like she was testing the name for herself. Like she couldn't quite believe it.

Then she started for the door, weaving from table to table, and again it struck him just how much in place she seemed. Charlie's was from another time, an era only he, Istvan, and very few others could remember. It had more in common with the people outside its windows than the people who frequented it. Patrons who liked it because it was old. Because it was exotic.

He watched the door swing shut behind her, the clouded sunlight from present-day 2020 flooding through with the whisper of rain. Just a moment – droplets rolling from an opened umbrella, the polished heel of her shoe – and then the latch caught and plunged the building wholly back to 1939. That dress. That walk. That smile.

She was timeless. She was like him.

He reached for his hat, and found it after a few tries.

Well, not exactly like him. He was the Hour Thief. He lived on stolen time. Fled from an ever-increasing karmic debt he would never be able to repay and could never regret. Not now. Not ever. What he did was the blackest of magics, despite the best of intentions, and there was only one final destination he could look forward to meeting. One very convincing reason to keep doing exactly as he was doing.

Really all of forever was a hell of a long time, but he'd left himself no choice.

He patted Lucy's new note. It seemed he had a date tomorrow at 3:15 with twenty Bernault devices. Yellow-dress Lucy. He smiled to himself. Just because he was damned didn't mean he had to be dour.

The draft had intensified, somehow. It was coming from his right. The north. He looked over the bar but there didn't seem to be any holes. Something smelled odd, too, he realized; had the tear gas not come completely out after all?

Barbed wire coiled around the table leg.

“You,” said Istvan, “are acting like a complete nitwit.”

“‘
W
ould you like me to
?'” Istvan repeated as they rounded the corner of Charlie's, the woodcut with Edmund's masked face on it swinging above their heads. Steam billowed from pipes that cut off at the building's edge, as though it had dropped itself in with razors and never left. “Edmund, you don't know a thing about fencing.”

Edmund tipped his hat at a passing gaggle of well-dressed geese, droplets rolling from his goggles. “I never said I did.”

“And you've given her your name after one meeting.”

“She already knew it.” He slipped his hands in his pockets and then added, with a sly smile, “I appreciate a lady who does her legwork, Istvan, and hers weren't half bad.”

Istvan turned his scarring from a curious work crew perched on scaffolding the next block over, paused in the midst of patching holes in one of the hundreds of steam pipes. A tower rose behind them, white and curved and spouting great puffy clouds.

He didn't like this. Edmund had been a charmer as long as he'd known him – he had the looks for it – but after the death of Grace it had become perfunctory, another habit to add to a long list. No heart in it. The man certainly hadn't seen anyone since.

This time... oh, Istvan wished he could know for certain this time. His senses were keyed to violence and pain, not joy, love, and Christmas. Happiness and flat dispassion might as well have been the same. Lucy had come off as one or the other, blank as anything. And Edmund, well...

Istvan turned his wedding ring around and around a dead finger. “You realize she will now tell everyone that you can fence.”

“It's a risk I'm willing to take,” Edmund replied. He stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, pulled out his pocket watch, and vanished, reappearing in the same instant at the opposite side of the muddy street, beneath one of the larger pipes and an awning strung over it. Water streamed from its edge like a curtain.

Istvan slogged through the mud rather than startle everyone into running for cover. He hated rain. Ghost he might be, and it didn't hurt when it fell through him, precisely, but water didn't belong in one's lungs and it certainly wasn't supposed to slosh about one's ribs or spine or skull. Tangles of electrical wire hummed and hissed and spat above him: at least five people had been electrified by accident in the Generator District over the past month alone.

The work crew waved over a figure clad in an armored harness of garish reds and yellows, who leaned against a ladder and gazed at him through pilot's goggles. Istvan looked away. Had everyone come to watch?

Edmund picked up a tin can someone had discarded, looked it over, and shook water off it. “Now, we're not getting any drier. Preferences?”

Istvan shrugged.

Another flash of that watch–

The Twelfth Hour's roof post-Wizard War was a strange hybrid of stern Roman angles, modern glass, and exotic decadence, ringed about with elaborate carvings of stone nymphs entwined in sinful poses. Twenty stories high; miles away from where they had been. Sunlight glistened across pools and puddles, the storm just passed and rolling across the sky towards the west.

Edmund propped his elbows on a balcony wall. “Didn't I ask you to stay clear?”

“You did.”

“Istvan,
alone
is a very simple word. It means ‘with no one else around.' Not ‘with no one else
visible
around.'”

“I'm well familiar with the word, Edmund, and I'm not about to apologize.” Istvan drew up beside him and crossed his own arms on the stone. It was rough and pitted, even through the fabric of his uniform, and he knew that was because there was no fabric really there. No flesh to muddle relic sensation.

From here, the prow of the Magnolia Group's buried space vessel was just visible, a triangular slab of armor studded with spotlights and stenciled with what looked like primitive petroglyphs. They had helped the Twelfth Hour weather that first winter, trading produce from their hydroponic gardens in exchange for protection.

“I asked if I could trust you,” Edmund muttered, setting the tin can on the wall.

Istvan sighed. “Edmund, please. Why would she ask you to come alone if she meant perfectly well?”

“To minimize her risk. Information like this is dangerous. It was a more than reasonable request.”

“I don't like it.”

“Noted.” He was annoyed – had been annoyed since Istvan's appearance, a fine layer of citrine spice dusted across his usual mellowed resignation, itself a patina over fears old, dark, and oaken – but of course was trying not to show it. He turned around, leaning on the wall as he retrieved the note from his lapel pocket.

Istvan beat a fist on the stone. Soundless. How to explain it. How to put it in words. “Edmund, didn't she seem... strange to you?”

“She did leave that pie.”

“That isn't what I meant. She was blank, Edmund. Wholly blank. Bland. Tasteless.”

“Talk like that is why you never get a date.”

Istvan turned around. “Edmund, I am bloody serious!”

The wizard sighed. He tucked the note back in his pocket. “Can we hold the debate until after we know whether or not Lucy's information checks out? Please?”

“What, until tomorrow? That's like waiting to see whether or not the tiger will eat you after you've been locked in its cage.”

“Istvan, I'm the Hour Thief. I can teleport.”

“That hardly–”

Edmund changed.

It was the small things: a shift of his stance, a straightening of his shoulders, the flash of that faint, pleasant smile. An act. That was all.

And yet he was suddenly more than himself. Immovable. Unkillable. A man who could strike in an eyeblink; who could stand, in waiting, forever. Every detail carried a deceptive weight, from the silver and dark enamel of his Twelfth Hour pin to the groomed sideburns that framed his lean, masked face. His eyes were visible but only just, a plain hazel behind tinted lenses. Thirty-five and never counting. He'd led armies, once, and still hadn't quite recovered.

A real Man in Black, the woman had called him. She had no idea.

Istvan turned back to the wall. The city. The pools of rain. The stone around him flickered with bullet holes, barbed wire tangling around his feet. Edmund was doing it again. That…
thing
he did. Istvan wished he knew whether or not it was conscious, and knew he could never ask. “You intend to go forward with this,” he said.

“I see no reason not to,” said Edmund, who was now only Edmund again.

There wasn't. Not when reduced to the facts. The Bernault devices had to be found one way or another, trap or not, and the ever-pragmatic Twelfth Hour had sent Edmund on suicide missions several dozen times over his long career. An acceptable risk.

As for Lucy... well, blankness could mean either impartiality or happiness, after all. She had done the job she wanted to do. Met the man she wanted to meet. The results were only to be expected. Edmund had that effect, when he wanted. He always had. Even after Grace Wu, when his heart wasn't in it.