The Interminables Read online

  Fewer, if they were automated?

  He kept talking. “I’m sure you’re aware of the Twelfth Hour’s stance on the sale and export of artifacts from deep fracture zones, particularly Bernault devices, so I won’t remind you.” He tapped his lapel pin. “I’d like to come to a mutual arrangement, if at all possible. This doesn’t have to become a problem.”

  Flashes of red. Dark outlines moving through the shadows.

  Istvan touched his shoulder, a chill that instantly numbed. “Edmund…”

  The world lit up like the sun.

  Edmund threw himself sideways, expecting a hail of gunfire any second. He spent a moment to blink away blindness. Couldn’t outrun light. Spots danced before his vision.

  A popping burst around him. He spun around –

  – and then the area flooded with mist.

  He sucked in a lungful of it before he could stop himself. Sputtered. Coughed. Waved an arm in a futile attempt to clear the miasma, trying not to breathe, a familiar and unwanted panic rising in his throat.

  Gas. Tear gas.

  The light slanted in a swirling haze, shafts and strange shapes. The roadway rang with running feet. The seals of his goggles held, but his lungs burned. Not enough air. Not enough air, and outside there was nothing but water. Water and krakens.

  Drowning. Not again.

  He staggered away, face buried in a sleeve.

  A jagged shape rushed at him. It held a saber in one hand.

  Edmund fumbled for his pocket watch.

  “Come now,” said a voice like Dracula, “you aren’t finished with me, yet!”

  Steel met steel. A trench knife; skeletal fingers; a bloodied sleeve. A death’s-head, grinning, incongruously wearing an antique field cap and glasses. Vague figures stumbled through a stinking haze of bitter mustard and chlorine.

  “You know,” said Istvan, mud-spattered and bullet-riddled, “I was once told that a man wielding a knife would always lose out to a man wielding a sword.”

  The mercenary hesitated.

  Vulture’s wings flared in the mists, vast and rotten, tattered feathers tangled with trailing loops of barbed wire. Istvan shrugged a rustling shrug. “I suppose that only holds if both combatants are men, hm?”

  The mercenary bolted.

  Edmund scooted away, shaking, as Istvan laughed. Outstretched feathers passed through him. Poison swirled around blood-smeared bone.

  He was used to it – used to the sudden cessation of flesh, the smell, the cold, the phantom blast marks and bullet holes that appeared on every nearby surface – but he would never be comfortable with it. Never.

  Istvan was the ghost of an event as much as the ghost of a man. A soul torn to pieces and reconstituted by disaster. A member of a class so vanishingly rare that Edmund had heard of only three others: one tied to the Black Death, one to the Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, and the last to the atomic bombing of Japan.

  A sundered spirit.

  Istvan was tied to the First World War. He was by far the most active, the most combative, and the most far-ranging of his kind, and Edmund was the only survivor of an earlier attempt to capture him in 1941. In a very real way, he was violence.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  “Istvan,” Edmund tried to say, but his throat wouldn’t work.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  The horror that was now his closest friend leapt into an oppressive hover that scattered mud and wire all over the roadway. “I’ll deal with this,” he called, “Don’t you worry, Edmund!”

  He shot away. The memory of artillery boomed and flashed in his passage.

  Something else responded, blowing a hole in one side of the bridge.

  The roadway shook.

  “Go on,” Istvan shouted, still laughing, “God is on your side, isn’t he? Doesn’t he play national favorites?”

  Wind screamed through the gap. Spray. Saltwater.

  Edmund fled.

  * * *

  Istvan chased flashes of men through smoke and fire. Stray bullets zinged from the bridge supports. Grenades burst around him: flashes, more gas, a few that exploded with a sharp snap and roar. The mercenaries shouted in a language he didn’t know. The wind tore at his wings. The memory of pain – Edmund’s pain, chemical fire clawing at the wizard’s innards – tingled in his awareness like the afterglow of a fine wine, spiced with a more present, broader terror.

  So familiar. So delightful. A meager trickle compared to the old days, but more than enough to make it all worth it. He couldn’t kill anyone – not chained as he was, not without direct order – but the chase...

  Oh, the chase!

  Triskelion mercenaries. Members of the only real army for a thousand miles. Fierce enough to occupy the spellscars, dangerous even in small numbers, coordinated and disciplined and so very splendid.

  He’d hoped this would happen. He hadn’t said anything – but he’d hoped.

  It would have been perfect if the mercenaries didn’t keep vanishing.

  A shell exploded on one of the overhead spars. Istvan swooped through a jagged hole in the bridge cladding and then back around and up through another blown in the roadway. Torn bolts and lengths of shrapnel pattered through him like ghastly hail.

  One of the men ducked the wrong way.

  Istvan pounced on him.

  The mercenary slapped at his right gauntlet. The air contorted about him, gas coiling into mathematical patterns with a clanging, ripping sound, like a bullet through iron – and then he disappeared.

  Gone. Teleported.

  “That’s cheating,” Istvan shouted. Edmund cheated, as well, but he was Edmund; he was permitted. No one else Istvan had ever encountered could disappear like that.

  Three more men vanished from his awareness. Istvan whirled about.

  One of the tanks sat there, squat and square and belching smoke from gilded stacks. Spikes jutted from its sides. Scorch marks marred its barrel. It was the only tank that had fired so far.

  The tanks couldn’t teleport, probably.

  Istvan darted for it. The Bernault devices were in there, if they were anywhere, and what else had he come for if not to help secure them? How they hadn’t burst already he had no idea – the things were terrifically temperamental – but that didn’t matter.

  Edmund would move them, of course. Later. Once Istvan cleared the way for him, and he had recovered.

  Poor, dear Edmund.

  The hatch of the tank was open. Istvan swung inside –

  – and discovered a tangle of wires attached to at least a dozen ominous bundles stuck to the interior walls.

  “Oh,” he said, “That’s clever.”

  Fire.

  Once, in life, he’d survived a near-miss by British artillery. The Boer War. That was where he’d ruined part of his face, his left arm, most of his left side, scorched and partially paralyzed... and that was what had landed him, for the next few years, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ceylon.

  Now, of course, explosions mattered less. He couldn’t recall how many times he’d been struck since the Great War, but it was a great many.

  It still hurt.

  Istvan found himself floating dazedly just outside the bridge. Smoke billowed from the rents in its armored sides. Sunset cast orange blazes across the sky. No hint of the mercenaries – that wonderful well-masked terror – or anything else living.

  He traced two fingers across where his dueling scars had been, scorched phalanges against bare bone. A cursory wingbeat revealed that more of his feathers than usual were still missing.

  Well-played.

  Oh, they would have to do that again.

  Istvan wheeled about and made for shore as pieces of tank and pieces of roadway fell, burning, into the sea.

  * * *

  He found Edmund back at the gantry crane. Hat off. Goggles off. Sitting down, back to the cabin, staring less at and more in the general direction of the bridge. The terrors still lingered but he wasn’t breathing too hard, which wa
s a good sign.

  Istvan had been forty-four on his last day of life and looked older, scarred and weather-beaten. Edmund, on the other hand, boasted an elegance almost feline in quality, dark-haired and dark-eyed, his narrow face framed by a trim goatee and sideburns. He looked every bit the thirty-five he insisted he still was... save for the near-permanent weariness of his expression, and the gathered shadows under his eyes.

  He smelled powerfully of tear gas.

  Istvan alighted beside him, folding wings that evaporated into wisps of wire and chlorine. “Edmund,” he said, breathlessly, “it’s quite all right now.”

  The reply was flat. “They’re all gone, aren’t they?”

  “They are. Teleported, of all things. I didn’t know they could do that – I think this is only the third time in a hundred years I’ve encountered an enemy who can do that. It’s so rare.” He sighed, savoring what he knew he oughtn’t. “Don’t they say you always remember your first?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You know, I don’t think they had the Bernault devices,” Istvan continued, dropping down companionably beside him, “The entire bridge would have burst, if they had. Did you know that they wired one of their tanks? I think they were expecting us.”

  Edmund stared down at the barbed wire twining around one of his shins. “Great.”

  “Where do you suppose they learned to teleport?”

  “Why don’t you ask one of them?”

  Istvan paused. “Edmund, they’ve all gone.”

  Edmund sighed. Then he sneezed.

  Istvan patted his shoulder. Tear gas was nothing, really. It didn’t destroy vision or burn flesh or drown victims in their own bodily fluids or anything of that nature, after all. The poor man would be perfectly fine.

  “What did it look like?” Edmund asked once he’d stopped coughing.

  “What, the teleport?”

  “Yes.”

  Istvan considered. “Lines in the smoke,” he said. “And a sort of clanging. A rush, like a train. Do you know it?”

  The wizard shook his head. “You’re sure the devices aren’t there?”

  “If they were, they would have burst by now.” Istvan glanced at the horizon, which hadn’t gone up in a blue-white conflagration, and then shrugged. “I truly don’t think they had the devices with them in the first place.”

  “Go make sure.”

  Istvan nodded. He swung himself up onto the catwalk rail. “Edmund?”

  “Yes?”

  “The Magister isn’t going to be happy about this, is she?”

  Edmund retrieved his pocket watch. “Not at all.”

  Chapter Two

  “You lost them.”

  Edmund turned his hat in his hands, aviator goggles dangling from his elbow. The Magister’s office was a foreboding den of dark wood and stained glass, heaped all about with collections of dusty brass instruments, Chinese lanterns, and severed bird’s wings, its single window looking out over choppy waves. “That doesn’t mean we can’t find them again,” he said.

  “They were ready for us,” Istvan added, standing beside him at rigid military attention, “They were expecting us.”

  A pen tapped on coffee-stained oak, an ancient desk scarred by generations of smoldering cigarette butts and more lethal things. The woman behind it was small, brown-skinned, clad in a grey business suit two sizes too big for her gaunt frame. More pens strained to keep her hair wound in a tight bun. Pockmarks across her cheeks spoke of a past battle with illness, while a missing ring finger spoke of battle of a different sort. She was in her mid-thirties, as far as anyone knew, but had the sort of face that time dared not touch for fear of laceration.

  Magister Mercedes Hahn. Self-appointed overseer of everything magical and strange in Big East. Edmund’s successor, and a far better Magister than he had ever been.

  The woman who had killed Shokat Anoushak.

  She had just showed up one day, announced that the Wizard War would be over within the week, and it was. One stroke. Providence leveled in a titanic blast. No one knew how. Anyone who might have asked was no longer on roster.

  Her election to office had been immediate and unanimous.

  “Mr Templeton,” she said, “I permitted your friend to accompany you on this assignment in hopes that you had recovered both your health and your senses. Is this not the case?”

  Edmund reached for his pocket watch, clasping it in a gloved hand. “I’m fine.”

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t restrict Doctor Czernin back to infirmary duty alone and insist, for the last time, that you take a position in administration.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “You’ve done it before.”

  The skull of Magister Jackson stared at him from one of the bookshelves. He tried not to look at it. “Mercedes, with all due respect, a year in your chair was enough.”

  Her lips thinned. “Not every year is 2012, Mr Templeton.”

  “Magister,” said Istvan, “we will find the Bernault devices, I promise you. I’ll talk to Miss Justice to see if her satellites have found anything else, and I can fly a search pattern besides. Once Edmund recovers, we–”

  Edmund tightened his grip on the watch. “Istvan, I’m fine.”

  “No, you aren’t.” The ghost stared straight ahead. “After an attack like that, you need to rest, and we both know you won’t be able to focus on anything tomorrow.”

  Mercedes twirled the pen through her remaining three fingers. “Doctor Czernin, none of that would be necessary if you hadn’t decided to give in to your baser impulses rather than use your considerable medical talent to incapacitate a captive for questioning.”

  Istvan wilted. He rubbed at his wrists. “Magister, I–”

  “Quiet.”

  He cut off with a pained wheeze.

  Edmund winced, though this wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. Istvan had been chained now for almost thirty years; twenty of those spent locked away in the Demon’s Chamber, the Twelfth Hour’s most secure prison. Edmund had gone to visit him, sometimes. Edmund had helped put him there.

  He hadn’t expected to feel bad about it, but that was a hard feeling to avoid when a man seemed earnestly happy to see you again, invited to you to coffee, and then was marched away to be magically shackled, hand and foot, bound so tightly that he could barely move before he was abandoned, alone.

  The Twelfth Hour had only agreed to release him so he could help with the overflow of wounded during the Wizard War. Later, so he could fight.

  Edmund was responsible for that, too.

  He’d held those chains, once. Only the Magister could give Istvan orders.

  “Mercedes,” Edmund began in the new silence, “Those men were Triskelion mercenaries. Those don’t come cheap, and they were hired by someone with enough resources to provide a working method of teleportation, magical or otherwise. That might even have been their payment. Bernault devices or not, our ‘Cameraman’ just got a lot more dangerous.”

  She gazed at him a moment. The pen tapped on the desk.

  “I’m going to need Istvan’s help,” Edmund said.

  The ghost cast him a grateful look.

  “Remember, Mr Templeton,” Mercedes replied, “without you our field of operations has been limited. The number of people trying to use what they don’t understand has grown, along with the notion that we shouldn’t be ‘hoarding’ the dangers that we do. Even now there are forces who would seek to have us removed altogether. Regardless of whether you intended it or not, the Hour Thief has become representative of all wizards and I expect you to comport yourself as such.”

  Edmund flashed a tired smile. “I do my best.” She set the pen down. “That said, I want those twenty devices found. I want whoever is behind this caught, and I want it made very clear to any other potential buyers that we do not take artifact smuggling lightly. I don’t care what you have to do, but do it soon.”

  Edmund glanced at the room’s pict
ure window. Outside rolled the waves of the Atlantic, though the office was underground. They seemed choppier than usual. “I understand.”

  Istvan nodded, still unable to speak.

  “Good.” She leaned back in a puff of ancient incense. “Mr Templeton, go home. Doctor Czernin, you may speak. You have ten minutes and then I expect you back on duty until midnight.”

  “Yes, Magister,” said Istvan. His voice was raw.

  “You are both dismissed.” She reached in a pocket for her phone, tapping a quick tattoo on the screen. “See to it that this incident is added to the wall.”

  Istvan started out before Edmund did, turning stiffly on his heel like the military man he had become. Edmund scrubbed at his aching eyes and followed, instinctively avoiding ghostly barbed wire. It really could have gone better. He’d taken some time to get over the worst of it but he could still taste a heavy bitterness in the back of his throat. Being gassed was like drowning. He’d drowned once.

  The door shut and latched behind him with seven ratcheting clicks. Mercedes’ office – and the office of all eight of her predecessors – sat at the end of a long hall, leading back towards the library and opposite the vaults, lit by wrought-iron lanterns. Photographs of Twelfth Hour Magisters and membership hung in alcoves spaced every few feet or so, one for every five years of the cabal’s existence.

  The first held seven pictures and was dated 1895.

  “I’m sorry for leaving you to choke,” said Istvan as they strolled past the nook for 1925, which held thirty pictures. His accent, a soft, cadenced Hungarian he normally quashed as best he could, had thickened into full Dracula-esque force, a sure sign he wasn’t paying attention. “I oughtn’t discount the effects tear gas can have on a man, I really oughtn’t. I know how painful it can be.”

  Edmund swallowed. It didn’t seem to help much. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I simply haven’t... You know I fought duels once, and...” The ghost scraped a hand across the scarred half of his face, tracing a pair of raised ridges across cheek and jaw. “If I had been in my right bloody mind at all, Edmund, I would have kept at least one from getting away.”