The Interminables (5 page)

Below him whirled Big East, collective desperation clad in concrete. Horizon to horizon, it sprawled, blockaded by spellscars: a city of sputtering light, shanties and skyscrapers, crashed spacecraft and solid fog, highways that crawled like snakes, chimerical beasts and stubborn people that had somehow survived it all, scraping by side by side. Rubble stretched in great scars across the old paths of engagement – some deep and furrowed, rock ripped away by enormous claws.

Somewhere down there rolled a convoy of mercenaries with twenty Bernault devices, provided they hadn't split forces to throw off pursuit. That wasn't what Istvan had crossed a hundred miles to find.

Not yet.

Before him, where the city ended, lay the last battlefield of the Wizard War.

Buildings scoured to their foundations. Bridges collapsed. Ships and the skeletons of gargantuan horrors rusting half-sunk in murky water, all of it shimmering with unnatural heat. A new dam closed off the harbor: the rim of a crater that enclosed acre after acre of glass and dust. A circular bastion armed with immense turreted guns glowered in the center, shining pinprick spotlights across fields of crude shelters, faint scratchings of agriculture, and the remnants of yet more monsters. Its walls were higher than the original skyline, and had indeed replaced it.

Providence.

What was left of Providence.

No passage. No permissions. Barrio Libertad ruled there now, an implacable fortress-state that offered only garbled snippets of travelers' warnings in halting Spanish and vague rumors of either concentration camps or some sort of paradise lurking just beyond or just within its walls. No wizard that had gone there had ever returned. Magister Hahn had blacklisted it the moment she was elected.

Istvan hadn't been able to return to his own battlefields for over thirty years. He didn't even know if they still existed.

His chains caught at wrists and neck. Too close to the border. He rolled away before discomfort became pain, banking southwards into the start of a half-hearted search pattern.

Oh, it wasn't right. Such an important place, and not even a proper dedication. Nothing offered, nothing taken, nothing solid to bury.

Barrio Libertad could have at least allowed the collection of some dust.

T
he next morning
, Edmund found a pie box in his fridge. The pie inside was half-eaten. It had a note attached to it, written by someone named Lucy who claimed to know where the Bernault devices would be.

At noon, look for me. I know your booth.

Edmund stared at the note for a long while. He felt like he'd read it before. He couldn't remember eating the pie.

It had been at Charlie's, hadn't it?

He never had visitors. Certainly not female visitors. Not since...

Edmund closed his eyes, wishing his head would stop buzzing. Then he put the note on the table, put the pie back in the fridge, and went to go get dressed.

He'd have to spend some time. No way around it. Couldn't be seen in public with a hangover, especially not on a day like this.

A Good While
did it: hours of recovery slipped stealthily into the gap between nine and nine-thirty. Real hours, experienced like any others. Stolen hours, put to the kind of use he'd never considered when he first started. It wasn't right, was it, using part of someone else's life just to feel better after a night out?

At least it didn't make the process of recovery any less miserable.

Once he could think again, he made and finished breakfast, washed the dishes, left Beldam more food and water, tucked the note from “Lucy” in his pocket, and opened his door.

The remaining inhabited homes of New Haven wound along cobbled streets to the seashore, power lines strung in zig-zags from roof to roof. Boats bobbed in the harbor. A pagoda perched on the bluffs above, painted scarlet.

It wasn't raining. Not here.

Edmund nodded and closed the door again. Then, a moment of concentration, the snap of metal on metal – and he was on the bluffs, looking down at the rolling waves of the Atlantic. The pagoda reared against the rising sun. Wiring strung from below ran up and through one of its windows.

Lilies grew around it, escapees from flower beds. Edmund picked one. He tipped his hat at the nearest window.

Then...

He took a breath. Had to do it.

A snap–

It was raining. It wasn't even a real, earnest rain: it was a misted drizzle, grey water dribbling sullenly from grey skies, pooling in grey puddles that reflected the few mourners who had come to pay their respects. Some held umbrellas to ward off the weather; the rest simply endured it. Most of them were human. They wandered across the rubble, small crowds that huddled and spoke in hushed whispers, glancing at him, pointing, and then doing their best to pretend that he wasn't there.

He knew that a lot of people blamed wizards in general for everything. He also knew that very few of them would be willing to make a point of it to his face. Not to the wizard-general. Not to the Hour Thief.

He was one of the “good ones” ... but still not one to approach off-hand.

Istvan leaned against the memorial inscription, waiting for him. “You are directly on time,” he said. The barbed wire around his feet looped loose and bright: he was in a better mood again, like any ghost surrounded by grave markers.

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early,” Edmund automatically replied. He stepped to the inscription, adjusted his hat, and touched it.

In Commemoration
, it said.
June 29, 2013.

That was all. The end of the Wizard War. Nothing about Shokat Anoushak. Nothing about her sudden defeat at the hands of Magister Hahn. Nothing about transformed beasts or torn skies or streets coming to life to choke those who walked on them.

The memorial itself was enough.

Edmund lifted his fingers from the letters. Pressed in steel, they were a scratched footnote on a talon forty feet high. It arced over his head, serrated in scalloped and smoky glass. It joined a toe, a foot, a stout foreleg, a torso that had crushed twelve blocks when it fell, a skull that lay blown apart by far too great a sacrifice over the rerouted Hudson Canal. Craters peppered concrete-scaled hide, sections of exposed ribcage braced like the frame of a ship and dripping with elevator cables, electrical wire, and utility lines. Its rearmost sets of limbs and most of its tail weren't visible, sunk into bedrock. A crest of steel bridge towers and sleek white windmills jutted skyward from its broad back. If cities could be raised again after death, this was it.

The names of the lost covered its surfaces like so much graffiti.

No state or government had decided that this should be the place for a memorial. It had just happened, in aggregate, one name added after another until there was nowhere else logical to put them. No one was even sure who had carved the inscription.

“Let's go find Grace,” Edmund said.

Istvan nodded. He swung into his usual place on Edmund's left, setting a hand on his shoulder. “I am sorry for last night,” he said quietly. “I didn't mean to set you off like that.”

Edmund drew his cape closer. “Don't worry about it.”

“I'm glad that you came.”

“I made a promise, Istvan. Wouldn't miss it.”

Flattened rubble crunched beneath his shoes. A surviving bridge lay over the canal, a delicate covered thing of latticed wood with shrapnel holes punched through its roof. The water below it ran mostly clear. A broken trail to the east still hadn't been rebuilt. Above it all towered the beast, rough sides quiet, windmills turning lazily in the winds.

A slow procession wound its way up a set of salvaged fire escapes. Edmund and Istvan joined it, climbing, people retreating from them before and behind.

Edmund concentrated on the railings. On not slipping. The Hour Thief was the only wizard more celebrated than feared... but he was still a wizard. Still so rarely seen in the public eye that no one quite knew what to do with him.

“It's mostly me,” muttered Istvan.

Edmund shrugged. Istvan was the one who had pushed him into this, years ago, insisting that it would help. Istvan was the one who had noticed, after some months, that someone had chiseled “The Hour Thief” next to Grace's name, and insisted on seeing the mistake corrected. The whole fiasco had only reinforced the popular notion that he and Istvan were somehow connected, that the Hour Thief's powers included the summoning and control of vicious spirits, that a dread pact between himself and Death was responsible for his supernatural speed and near-invincibility.

Not true, but not too far from it.

Edmund checked his pocket watch. It was a quarter to eleven.

Tomorrow, at noon...

Istvan peered over his shoulder. “Are you quite all right?”

Edmund put the watch away. “Fine.” He stepped off onto the beast's neck, its “flesh” not giving way in the slightest. “I'm just fine.”

Istvan looked at him oddly, but didn't say anything more.

Edmund adjusted his hat again and pressed on. He had his lily, everyone was still casting surreptitious glances at him, and it was better to get this over with. He'd made a promise.

The ruin of the beast's skull could have cupped a Little League game. The eerie whistling it made was just a trick of acoustics, the wind again. He swung down over exposed vertebrae, stone and iron, a mockery of anything living, and traced the ridge of its shattered eye socket.

There. Chiseled.

Grace Wu.

Come on
, she'd said,
live a little. Indulge a girl before she dies a heroic death battling the forces of evil. Preferably punching a dragon. If there's magic now, are there dragons, Eddie?

I can't say that I've ever met one
, he'd said.

She'd flashed that cocksure smile. Punched his shoulder, twice, gently, because if she wanted she could crack concrete. Bend steel.
Well
, she'd said,
if you ever do, you have my number.

He hadn't meant to fall in love with her. He'd known it wouldn't work out. He'd told her so. She was a Conduit, channeling power no wizard could hope to control through her very bones: neither one of them even knew how long she would live.

But Grace… Grace had been sharp in all the right ways and curved in all the right places, beautiful, brilliant, and brave. More than he was. More than anyone. Unforgettable.

That was the problem. That was what always happened if he didn't take the coward's way out.

He knelt, and set the lily down. Its petals drooped against yet more names: a sad, small, pathetic sort of offering, all told. Hollow.

She probably would have asked him what the hell he was doing. Why he'd vanished for so long. Why he would agree to come here, but go nowhere else except at night. Patrol and Charlie's. Guilt and oblivion.

Eddie, if you're going to do what you do, if there's really no way out of it – which I think is bullshit – you had better put that time to good use.

They'd gotten into more than one fight, near the end. He was trapped, and he had no interest in becoming a widower who-knew-how-many-times-over, and he'd told himself that this dalliance would be brief, and then...

So much he hadn't been able to say.

He still loved her.

“I'm trying,” he said. “I promise I'm trying.”

He patted his pocket, where the note was. Meeting at noon. If this Lucy woman was real, and sincere, and did know what she claimed to know, he could be back on the trail that day. A start. A fine new start.

A good use of time.

Istvan knelt beside him. “Are you certain you're all right?”

Edmund stared down at the lily a moment longer, then straightened. “I have someone to meet,” he said.

Istvan started. “What?”

“At Charlie's. Noon. Her name's Lucy.”

“What?”

Edmund held up his hands. “I don't know her and I've never seen her, but she makes a mean pie and left a note claiming to know something about the Bernault devices we lost.”

The ghost looked aghast. “What?”

“I'm sorry. It said noon. Maybe we can come back later and–”

“Edmund, some woman you've never seen gave you a pie last night and you ate it?”

“Istvan, a pie isn't going to kill me.”

The ghost stared at him. Then he advanced, loops of barbed wire following in rusted tangles. “What on Earth were you thinking?”

“Istvan–”

“A note? How could she have known anything about the devices? Why leave a pie? This is ridiculous! You're not really going to meet her, are you?”

Edmund tried to push the other man away, shivering at the proximity. “I'm not. The Hour Thief is.”

The shadows of feathers flared. “That's hardly–”

“If she has information, I want to hear it. If it's a trap, it's a trap. I've been through worse.”

Istvan snorted. “Oh, of course you have.” He turned away, throwing his hands up. “You know, Edmund, I wouldn't dream of telling you what to do.”

“No, you just go ahead and tell me,” Edmund agreed. He checked his watch again. It was almost eleven. “Istvan, can I at least trust you to stay clear? She said to come alone, and I don't want to start this off on the wrong foot.”

“Edmund–”

“Can I trust you?”

The ghost crossed his arms. He glanced at Grace's name, with the scratched-out mistake beside it, and then back to Edmund. He'd never liked her, and the feeling had been mutual, but he was what he was, and all of his favorite holidays involved the remembrance of one war or another. He seemed almost as disappointed as he was angry.

“So we're finished here, then?” he asked.

Edmund nodded. He'd come, he'd climbed, he'd commemorated. Grace wouldn't have wanted him to wallow in misery when there was a new lead to follow. “I think so,” he said.

Istvan looked away again, sullenly. “This is all a bit sudden, isn't it?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

The ghost sighed.

Edmund turned his pocket watch between his fingers, not looking back at the skull wall. Seven years of mourning. That was enough, wasn't it? That was enough for anyone.

Even Grace.

“I'll tell you how it goes,” he said. “I'm sure it will be fine.”

Istvan muttered something to the contrary in Hungarian. Edmund pretended he hadn't heard.