Authors: Paige Orwin
The book was just sitting in the vault.
He was curious. It wasn't a crime to be curious.
What if it worked? At least one other person had done it. What if it really, actually worked?
Really all of foreverâ¦
Such a good idea at the time. Such a good idea. Since then, he'd heard it argued that the universe might never end, only cool into a dark and dead expanse of drifting ashes.
Edmund fought down the old panic. Not now. Please, not now. “No one gave me the right.”
“No one,” Istvan echoed. “No one⦠but you.”
“Istvan⦔
“You took it,” the specter continued, leaning closer still, close enough that Edmund shivered. Poisonous mists swirled around him, obscuring the forest, the river, the sky. “You didn't want to be like the rest of them.”
Edmund's fingers slipped on his watch. He couldn't breathe. “Istvan, stop it.”
“Small. Weak. Withering.”
“Istvan!”
“
Finite
.”
The mist swallowed him. He fell into dust. Choked on dust. Tried to claw his way out, tried to reach for the hands that sought him, but everything he saw turned to dust. Everyone. It smelled like the archives â
his bloody dust obsession
, Istvan had called it, and he was right â and now there was nothing but the records, words written and rewritten in fading ink, illustrations of ancient ruin, paper that crackled and fell to pieces in his hands.
And her.
She plummeted toward him on a beast of her own making, its harness jangling, sword and quiver buckled at her belt. Dozens of braids whipped behind her, jet-black, capped in gold, each one longer than she was tall. Bright green, those eyes, almost glowing. Mad.
Shokat Anoushak.
E
dmund hit the deck
.
Just the Susurration. Just the Susurration. It was only the Susurration.
Scythian.
Oh, hell. Oh, hell, oh, hell, oh, hell â
Hot breath on his back. A growl, lion-like. The sweep of steel-shod wings. A chuckle, unamused and uncaring, an expression by rote.
He was hyperventilating. Too much dust. He couldn't breathe, for all the dust.
He tried to get up.
A huge paw slapped him down. Into the dust. Into the ages.
His ribs creaked. He coughed.
Inevitable. It was all inevitable, wasn't it? Who could stay sane for all of forever? Who knew better than anyone the price of reaching too far? It was only a matter of time.
Everything was a matter of time.
Run, immortal
.
That's all you can do
.
So much for that.
Something thudded.
The beast atop him whirled, crushing him deeper. He wheezed. Scraps of paper whirled past his face. A snap: an arrow loosed, two of them. A roar, definitely leonine.
What was comingâ¦? That was a strange, mechanical hammering, likeâ¦
Edmund covered his head.
The impact shattered the ground beneath him. Glass cut his hands. An abyss yawned below, black and infinite. He pinwheeled. Voices filtered from above. A Scythian curse. Shouting, mostly Hungarian that he couldn't catch. His own name.
The abyss ended, with a crack to his collarbone, only a few feet down.
He wheezed, stars sparking before his eyes⦠and then he saw them. Emperor For a Weekend and The Baltic Chef. The clasped hands of the Twins. The obsidian-tipped blades of Purpose in Precision. Wears That Sweater, in plaid and purled glory.
Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands.
The walls of the fortress rose behind them, solid amidst a landscape of mists and molten glass. The fading outlines of destroyed buildings stood amidst the even fainter memories of forests. He could see where the roads of Providence had been, if he squinted hard enough.
The Conceptual.
Whatever Diego had done, it had worked.
He looked at his hands, gloved in darkness. Here, he was like them. Like Istvan. Conceptual. An idea. He had become the recurring role in so many stories: liberator, lover, thief, mysterious rogue who always meant well; motives and origins hidden in the dark of the cloak he wore; he who went by many names and none â the Man In Black.
That had been Istvan, back there, on the attack, shattering the Susurration's illusions. It couldn't have been anyone else. Snapped out of it, maybe, or at least distracted. For now.
No time to worry about that.
Edmund found his feet. He still had his satchel, tightly closed, and everything in it. He still had his pocket watch.
The self-images of half a million trapped smilers milled around him, no doubt mired in illusions of their own.
Time to change that.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” he told the nearest Concept, Yellow-Souled One, an anole in lightning. Then he moved on to the next, Girl With a Braid, her hair a serpentine body of its own. “Take as long as you need to escape Providence.”
Thunder roared through the clouds, leonine. Cracks etched themselves in the glass beneath his feet. He tried to pretend he couldn't see ghostly snarls of barbed wire, jagged and fading, burned across his eyelids where there should have been lightning.
He moved to the next smiler. And the next. English, Japanese, Arabic, German, Latin, Chinese, Russian, his terrible rusty Farsi. On and on, mystery swirling around his feet.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence.”
Years stolen. It would have to be enough.
Istvan tumbled through a fire that wasn't the red of sunset, tangled with the immortal that wasn't his. It wasn't her, either â the real Shokat Anoushak had been a baleful beacon, a breath drawing ever-inward, a well of feeling so deep and so ancient it was almost alien, bitter and overwhelming â and this... this shadow of her was hollow, like the rest. A memory.
A fury!
She plunged and wheeled, her winged steed lion-like and snarling, its claws tearing at his tattered feathers and catching in his chains. He struck where he could; she met each strike with steel of her own, a sword with a tasseled pommel and an edge serrated like a shark's tooth.
“Why should the Hour Thief alone possess such magics?” she demanded in twisted English. “How can you condone what he has stolen, and what he squanders?”
Istvan tried to tear himself away from her. He couldn't linger here. He had to return to the ground, find Edmund â the man had vanished, fleeing, hopefully to do what he ought, butâ¦
He ripped a score along her mount's side. It shrieked, bleeding gold. An opening.
He dove.
Shokat Anoushak caught his chains.
“How is it,” she hissed, whirling him scrabbling in a tethered arc, “that a monster like you hopes to defend a monster like him?”
Istvan fought to right himself, wings churning. His knife struck sparks on entangling links of parchment. “He isn't!”
She snapped his chains, whip-like, over her head â her strength as inhuman as her longevity â and Istvan with them. Her mount rushed to meet him, claws and fangs and fire.
He stabbed it in the eye.
It reared, claws tearing more gashes in his already ruined uniform. He slashed his blade across its face and rolled away, folding his own wings tight, diving as fast as he could: no subtlety, no grace, merely flight by the raw will to fly, ripping through the air like a modern jet fighter.
An arrow sped past. The ghosts of serpents writhed and spat in its passage.
Then a rolling thunder like an avalanche blasted from below, a roar that split horizons end to end, that shattered windows in their frames and then carried the frames away, that turned weaker matter to pulp, that far too many had only heard once. Briefly. Grating, metallic, risingâ¦
Jaws the size of a stadium lunged through the clouds.
Istvan slewed sideways, skidding between steel teeth and entangling cables and flashes of actinic green, escaping the maw just before it snapped shut with a shock that sent him tumbling. Oh, not this. Not here. With the realms collapsed, such a monster would cause hideous devastation in what was real.
He shouted at it. “I thought you cared for your people!”
came the reply, everywhere at once.
The beast fell back to earth, horned head swept low before hunched shoulders, its many legs squat beneath the impossible weight of the city cresting its crocodilian back. Stone and brick, peaked roofs of faded red, dense blocks and narrow cobbled streets broken by skyscrapers of modern glass, copper-green domes and park walks torn up with the skeletons of trees, all ringed about by the cracked ribbons of highways. Broken tiles tumbled from the mosaic-laden roof of a Gothic cathedral, its sides soot-stained, its south tower immense and knobbled and surmounted by a familiar double-headed eagle supporting a double-armed cross.
St Stephens.
She hadn't. Oh, she hadn't.
it. What do you think will happen to them if you're unchained?>
A tail swept at him, studded with thousands of broken gravestones.
E
dmund staggered
, ears ringing and jacket coated in dust, trying not to look up. It wouldn't help to look up. Up there wasn't his business.
He looked up.
Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Just a roof. It was just a roof. With legs. An earthquake. A walking disaster. One of hers. The Susurration could animate them here?
Or was it her?
Oh, hell.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” he shouted. He didn't know if anyone could hear him, but he couldn't stop. He had a job to do. He'd promised.
He leapt across rubble and kept running. He tried to keep Barrio Libertad on his left: its walls were the only solid navigational markers there were.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence.”
Again, and again, and again. Some of the smilers didn't take it. Some of them didn't move, still trapped, the Susurration seeping over warped and weakened selves like whispering amber. Most were confused and huddled, too dazed to understand what was happening just above their heads. Freedom, after months or years enthralled, in such a strange place as this... he couldn't imagine.
The monster stretching across the sky bellowed; he shouted louder. Bricks cascaded like hail and he moved faster.
Take it, take it, run, go.
Keep the Susurration occupied, Istvan. Keep it off me.
He was going hoarse.
Istvan reflected that Lucy's cited feats of glory on his part were, sadly, somewhat hyperbolic. He had killed one of these monsters, once, but that was after it had suffered days of assault and had been driven to a more pastoral area, trapped and held there at considerable cost. He was dangerous. He wasn't that dangerous.
Not chained.
What if Edmund was wrong? What if there were no survivors?
The remains of Vienna's Central Cemetery slammed into him. Through him. Istvan clawed through absolute darkness. Dirt and rock scraped across his skin. Beneath his skin. Within his stomach, his throat, his lungs. It didn't hurt, but that made it all the more unnerving. He tried to imagine he was swimming, or flying, but that didn't help.
Some of the rock wasn't rock.
They reached for him. Tore at him. Grabbed at his chains and hauled him backwards, dragging at his wings, hands he couldn't see and voices he wished he couldn't hear. Friends, instructors, wartime allies, family he'd fled from, colleagues he'd decried⦠and Franceska.
He burst from the other side with both hands clutched tightly around his wedding ring. He was upside-down. The glassy ground sped towards him. He couldn't correct himself in time.
“
T
ake
as long as you need to escape Providence,” Edmund said, and suddenly he knew.
It didn't hurt. It didn't feel like anything pulled away from him, or out of him, or through him. There was no taste, no texture. Not even a temperature. All those many tongues he'd studied, and he knew only one way to describe it.
Time, running out.
A bloody horror slammed into the ground beside him, rolling, tattered. Bony fingers hooked into his jacket front. “Edmund! Edmund, you mustn't!”
Edmund dodged the wild beating of wings. Snapped his watch. Teleported.
Shokat Anoushak no longer pursued him. She didn't have to.
Circle the fortress. Offer escape, and run.
Run.
All the time he could give, and more. They took it: gauzy figures of silk and fans, souls shivering like branches in autumn, hard-edged brilliant outlines of neon â how they were, how they saw themselves, strange and beautiful. He had a promise to keep.
He would have collapsed long ago if he wasn't the Man in Black.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” he said, and he kept running.
E
dmund turned
to sand in his hands.
No.
No, no.
Istvan spun away, grasping at nothing, landing paralyzed on his back. Was that what happened? No time left? When he ran out of time, he simply⦠heâ¦
Something landed beside him. Skittered across the glass.
Istvan picked it up.
Edmund's pocket watch. Brass, well-worn, the hourglass etched into its front ringed by lettering Istvan didn't understand. It wasn't magical. Edmund had said so. It didn't do anything but tell time. It was something to hold, no more.
Nothing else.
Istvan sat there. Flicked it open. Flicked it shut.
A golden lion winged to a landing beside him, paws settling softly in the sand. “A shame,” said Shokat Anoushak. “He was handsome.”
Istvan vaulted up and over her mount's head and plunged his knife into her throat.
A monster reared to his left, some horrific cross between a bull and a crocodile, and he killed it. One similar to the talking tiger, leaping â he killed that one, too, and then another, and another, the glassy crater of Providence falling away to what it had once been, seven years ago. A city embattled, its streets full of shrieking horrors.
He sped to meet them.
A wailing fury plunged toward him, rotors whirring, oil drooling from shark-toothed jaws. He tore it open from stem to stern, cables of gold and greenery spiraling outward like freed intestines. It thrashed like a living thing, which it would be until it struck the ground.
He didn't wait for it. He couldn't.
He dove.
A column of tanks roared below, black eyes glittering in the recesses of angular plating.
Not tanks. Those weren't tanks.
He barreled into the first, ripping at every component he could reach in a blind frenzy. Mockery of his war! Hideous duplicate of what his battlefields had demanded!
It bled black, crude oil not suitable for use in an engine, not running through where the fuel lines should have been. He knew where they went. He knew where everything went. He knew every detail of its ancestral construction, who had developed it, who had fought in it, who had died in it, who had crawled out of wrecks stalled or burning to fight again â and this... this thing wasn't even close!
It had four seats for no reason, all empty. A turret with insides that boiled molten. Its roof was the top of a shell, peeled open, the ghost of a sun to shine on its false innards, sparking and broken. It thrashed. He savaged it until it couldn't.
“Istvan,” called someone else, someone he knew. “Istvan, stop!”
He laughed. He was the suicide of nations, the end of empires, the long death by suffocation in shell-churned mud and snow and ruin. What was done couldn't be undone. All that remained was attrition: the relentless, pitiless, senseless murder of generations.
Stop? Stop
him
? Hell itself wouldn't have him!
The greatest monster of all loomed above, murdered Vienna sunk into its back. He leapt for it.
The Man in Black caught at his arm.
Edmund. Whole. Impossible.
Istvan whirled.
Desecration. All that was beloved and beautiful, despoiled and turned against him. First Pietro and now Edmund. It was, perhaps, fitting, in the end.
Another trick. Another illusion. That's all there ever was.
No more.
Istvan lunged.
E
dmund dodged around the blade
. Barely.
Not the time. This wasn't the time.
There weren't any more smilers he could help â he had ringed the entire fortress, he could barely talk â and this last task was all he had left.
Istvan, it's done. Istvan, it's over. Istvan, what are you doing?
Please, hold still. I can't finish this if you don't hold still.
“Istvan,” he croaked.
The specter didn't seem like he'd even heard him.
His chains burned, calligraphy in white phosphorous. Smoke streamed from their shackles. He pursued well enough but he was slashing about wildly, a far cry from his usual precision.
Out of his mind. What had the Susurration done?
Edmund kept dodging. He'd done it before. He could do it again. No need for panic, not now, not until this was over and he'd gone home and had a shower and finished off two glasses of gin to start. Then he could panic. He would set some time aside for it.
Time.
He sweated cold. He was burning his own time, now. Unique. Irreplaceable. Go home? Take a shower? No, when this was over, he'd have to go back out, thief that he was, and what time he'd lost he could neverâ
Istvan ripped a gash in his shirt.
End this quickly. End this quickly.
Edmund pulled off his hat. Pulled down his goggles. Forced the words through his raw throat. “Istvan, it's me. It's really me. The impossible soldier, remember? You could never hit me then, you aren't hitting me now, and you aren't going to hit me anytime soon.” Keep dodging. Don't think about the time. “Istvan, do you know anyone else like that? Istvan, can you hear me? Please, calm down.”
The ghost slowed.
“I need you. I need you more than ever.”
“You're afraid of me,” Istvan said. He seemed surprised.
Edmund tried a smile. It wasn't his best. “Sometimes.”
“Oh.” Istvan looked at his knife. He blinked. He dropped it, blade clattering on the glassy ground. “Oh, no.”
Edmund let out a breath. He wasn't shaking. He didn't know how he wasn't. Maybe because the Man in Black didn't. Here, after all, he was the Man in Black. He stepped closer, unslinging his bag from his shoulders. “It's all right.”
“Edmund, I⦔
He reached for Istvan's shackles. “Just hold still.”
Calligraphy blazed beneath his hands.
O
nce before
, Istvan had seen him as he strove to be. When the Wizard War took its turn for the worst. When Istvan's chains trapped him, useless, within walls that might shortly cease to exist â and him along with them. Contractual oblivion.
Then... then, he'd met a figure of darkness, but not of threat: less nights of knives and more of whispered words, withheld violence, river crossings, sudden departures just before the dawn. Salvation at the last moment, one who (when thanked for the risks taken, the wounds suffered, the day won) waved away the praise and vanished with a promise:
I'll be back when I'm needed
.
The Man in Black.
In one hand, he held an owl's feather pen. In the other, a silver ritual knife. He bent silently to his task and parchment links fell away, rewritten and struck out and cut. Faster than any eye could follow. Watching him was like watching a mirage, just beyond real; to be near him was to wonder who he was, from where he had come, how long he would stay before he vanished (not long). Become, in perilous passage, purest Concept.
Edmund. Merely doing his duty, and fulfilling his promise.
The blade glistened, poppy-red, with his blood.
So sudden. So odd, to stand there, watching, and nothing else. So little Istvan could think but this: it was at once a thrill and a terror to behold such a strange and beautiful aspect of the man he loved so well.
Each scrap that fell burned. A bloodied horizon crouched in wait.
...
e
xcept
when such actions would stand in violation of the provisions of section 28. As detailed in paragraph 9 section 62, the Binder (the Innumerable Citadel, magisterial membership, [and] the Twelfth Hour) hold all rights to use, disposition, and disposal of...
Edmund had studied law at first, almost eighty years ago, before his focus shifted to language, and contracts of the metaphysical were no different once past the arcane writing, past the consequences. It was written, and it could be rewritten. Mightier than the sword, indeed.
Link after link. He took his time. It was his time, now.
It had to be done right.
Only when one last link remained, did he finally slow â finally allow himself to end at the same rate as anyone else.
“Istvan?” he croaked.
“Edmund,” the winged and skeletal horror before him confirmed.
Edmund set the ritual knife down. “Are we always this interesting?”
Istvan knelt and retrieved his own blade, wiping it on the hem of his uniform before handing it to him. He was a doctor. It would be all right. “Oh, yes.”
Edmund slit a palm already bleeding. All the most powerful magics were paid for in blood freely given. That was the fine print. “I'm just a man, you know,” he said. He dipped the pen in the wound. “The rest is all bad choices and good press.”
Istvan clasped his hand and the pain faded. “I know.”
Edmund carefully wrote in the terms of cancellation and annulment. He knew his Classical Arabic. Translating the old works of the Innumerable Citadel, he'd had to. He was good at it. He swallowed, wondering how many people he'd missed. “Did what I could.”
“You did.”
“Are you...?”
“No.”
Edmund slid the bloodied knife through parchment. The lettering flared red, sputtered, faded.
“OK,” he said. He swayed on his feet. “Take it away.”
I
stvan caught him
.
Solid. He was solid, here â War brushing skeletal fingers across a cape black as the man claimed his soul to be, in endless debt â sinking down as Edmund fell and, wondering, kneeling, pressing him tight against a rotten breast, no heartbeat save in feeling. He breathed, yet. Oh, he breathed.
Istvan looked up to Pietro, delicate fingers holding closed a gash in his chest, watching forlornly as the last scraps of chain fluttered into flame. The Susurration.
Something thundered.
A whistlingâ¦
He ducked, hugging Edmund as closely as he could, blanketing him in wire-tangled wings that ripped and tore.
The first shells struck through a sea of poison.
They didn't stop.
They didn't stop.
They didn't stop.
F
our years forever
. Armies crushed. Empires broken. Dreams and certainty dashed, families gutted, the future resting in the hands of the most ruthless, the most wronged. For the first time, mankind could destroy himself utterly â and he had.
Edmund, alone, was still breathing. Istvan dare not let go.
He could hold him, once in all the time he'd known him, and he did, not looking up. Not until smoke faded back to sky. Chlorine and mustard gas to something breathable. Shouting and bullet-chattering and tanks roaring and mountaintops collapsing and always, always the pounding of artillery... to silence.
It was then that Edmund slumped through him, onto the rubble.
Istvan shifted aside, kneeling beside him instead. Mud and worse things stained his handsome face, his eyes red and swollen, his skin burned from poison. Bloody scratches marred his cheeks and forehead, the results of barbed wire made solid. Istvan wished he had sheltered him better. He wished he could prop the poor man's head on something more comfortable than stone. He tried to prod him over more into dirt, and then he saw it. His left temple.
A shock of grey.
Istvan brushed immaterial fingers through it. “Oh, Edmund⦔
Edmund coughed, an ugly sound full of phlegm. The gas hadn't done him any favors. “What?” he croaked.
Istvan took his hand away. “You're all right. I'm... I'm glad, that you're all right.”
The wizard coughed again, rolled over â Istvan got out of the way â and spat into the dirt, scrubbing at his lips. Flakes of dirt tumbled from his goatee. His hat fell away, the headband Grace had given him sparkling in its place. “Don't feel all right. Maybe⦠maybe quasi-right.”
He tried to sit up and Istvan couldn't help him. He was hurting, and that Istvan could do something about.
“Hell of a job you've done with the place,” he said, blinking out at Providence.
Istvan busied himself lessening his headache, trying to ignore the agonies of many, many others wandering about, dazed, with the same problem or worse. Lost smilers. Too slow, battered and blinded. He would have to attend to them, too, once Edmund was safe. All of them. As long as it took. “Not an uncommon comparison,” he muttered.
A slam. The ground shook. Bits of broken glass and other things skittered down the slope beside them.
Edmund hit the dirt. Istvan shielded him â a pointless gesture, here, now, arm and wing outstretched, crouched just over the man's prone form to intercept destruction that never came â and looked to Barrio Libertad.
A monstrous corpse lay sprawled across the closed roof, barely recognizable. No cathedrals. No cobbled streets. It was skeletal, its claws vast scythes of steel, and somewhat resembled a strange crustaceal crown, perched like that. Blue-white smoke leaked from molten caverns in its sides. Barrio Libertad's turreted guns had seen some use after all. Hovercraft bobbed near the creature's crests, rickety things like those in Triskelion, zipping backwards every time it twitched.
“Do you suppose...?” said Istvan.
“No,” said Edmund. “I think they got it.”
Istvan drew back away, wings dissolving. He squinted. He wasn't sure if he was imagining it or not, but it looked as though someone in spiked armor were planting a tiny flag on its head.
A figure in red and yellow picked its way across the wastes, jumping trenches and shell craters, scrambling past shreds of sheltering canvas. It moved much faster than a normal human. Istvan tried to summon malice, or at least disgruntlement, and discovered he couldn't.
“You two all right?” asked Grace Wu, jogging to a wild-eyed stop.