by Paige Orwin
Lead the founding of another Twelfth Hour branch, the Magister had said. Keep an eye on Barrio Libertad, she’d said. You were Magister during the Wizard War, Mr Templeton, and you survived that well enough. How hard can this be?
Sometimes he still woke up shaking. Or worse.
He hadn’t asked to be elected.
He’d never asked.
He threw the stone at the water. It didn’t skip.
“Edmund?” asked Istvan.
“Let’s go have a look at the place,” Edmund replied. He pulled out his pocket watch and flipped it open, focusing on its weathered face instead of the ripples on the waves. Past noon. “Might as well. Sooner rather than later. Near that cathedral, you said?”
Istvan nodded. “Not walking distance, but I can show you.”
“All right. I’ll meet you there.”
The specter hesitated. “Pardon?”
Edmund fixed the familiar room in his mind: upright radio, well-stocked bookshelves, green couches he’d never bothered to replace. Ineffable calculations bubbled in the back of his brain, just beyond conscious thought. Safer that way. “I have to feed the cat.”
He snapped the watch closed–
– and vanished.
* * *
Istvan watched golden glimmers fade, outlines that sputtered out where Edmund had been, and kicked at sand that flew only begrudgingly. Very well. If the wizard didn’t arrive when and where he was expected, Istvan knew where to find him.
At least he’d agreed to the walk. Come outside, a bit, like a normal person, instead of skulking about at night, doing what he did. It was a start.
There would be no backslide, not if Istvan had any word in it. Once was enough. Once, years past, lost and drowning in the depths of those wine-rich fears…
Istvan sighed. He looked across the water, where krakens dwelled, and then up at the gulls, wheeling. A fine walk, while it lasted.
He wished it had been longer. He wished he didn’t wish that.
He jogged four steps, ran two, and leapt at the water, pinions scattering bloody droplets from their tips. Poison streamed behind, barbed wire looping in glittering contrails. One shoe struck the waves. Nothing grabbed for him. Disappointing.
He skimmed the surface a moment longer, water rippling red below him, then tilted and shot upwards. The seagulls scattered. One wingbeat and he was level with the pagoda on the hill. Another and he circled it, peering through paper windows at a haze of color and motion beyond. A third and he rose above it, New Haven rendered down into features on a map, Edmund’s house at the end of its road and the mountainous edifice of the Twelfth Hour – once a modest library, now mingled with the lines and stonework of a Hindu temple – overlooking fields scratched in and around Yale and its gargoyles.
To the west billowed the smoke and steam of the Generator district. To the south a pine forest grew below a great crystal dome. To the east stretched the sea… and on the horizon, the Black Building, a mirrored spire three miles high. Its auroras crackled even in the daytime, now.
City, all of it. City where there hadn’t been any before. City that shouldn’t have existed, parts of it fallen to rubble or rent by enormous claws, beautiful in its very state of dissolution, its struggles, its terrors. Mixed-vintage misery was the flavor of the day: not at all unpleasant, darkened by dread, textured by small annoyances and flashes of hate or pain. Even the abandoned stretches and the wastes were grand, in their own way.
Istvan was the only one who ever saw it from this high, this far. He’d never met another flyer who wasn’t trying to fight him. He hadn’t seen any aircraft in years.
Oh, if only Edmund could fly as well…
Istvan shook the thought away. He rolled to place the Black Building on his right and sped northwards, wind sheeting through his ears. The Twelfth Hour’s domain receded, replaced by the tenuous alliance of sheltered enclaves it oversaw. Fourth and Black. Oxus Station. The Magnolia Group and their crashed spacecraft. The Wizard War memorial, the concrete corpse of the felled beast stretching across twelve city blocks.
The ossuary cathedral lay eighty or so miles to the north. Istvan reached it in five minutes.
Edmund was there already.
Istvan alighted beside him. The man was staring at the building’s stained-glass windows, their elaborate mosaics glorifying an invisible God of sun and storm, Mary the mother of sacrifice, penitent saints Istvan didn’t recognize. Feathered serpents framed each panel.
“The workmanship is fine, though, isn’t it?” Istvan tried.
“It wouldn’t have felt right,” Edmund replied. He turned, the sun overhead and the brim of his hat casting part of his lean face into shadow. His goatee and sideburns seemed neater now; his smile readier, faint but pleasant. Beneath it churned the truth, the bittersweet roil of familiar fears: fear of the task at hand, fear of past failures, fear of darker things he hadn’t yet and would likely never escape.
He was, on the whole, unfairly handsome.
“Ah,” Istvan said. “Shall we be off?”
A nod. “I’ll follow you. Let me get on the roof.”
Another snap of that pocket watch. In a moment he was gone, and a small dark figure stood on the cathedral roof, stumbling a bit on loose tiles before it straightened, cape snapping in the winds.
Istvan took to the air again, fleshless and awful. Try as he might, he couldn’t fly any other way: he’d never had wings in life.
He led Edmund across a district badly rent by the recent earthquakes, abandoned like the other wastelands, great fissures plunging into the earth along with parts of roadway, tenements, overgrown parks. No dramatic maneuvering, this close to the ground. Not now. Edmund followed in flickers: atop a clock tower and then standing on a market roof and then leaping a gap between alleys, a still portrait stepping from panel to panel, just near enough to keep Istvan in sight.
It wasn’t the power that had given the man his name, but sometimes Istvan wished it were. It asked so much less of him. So much less of those around him. Oh, it would take ages for him to make up the shortfall, and of the means to go about it, well… the less thought about that, the easier it was.
No better, but easier.
At least Edmund didn’t kill people.
Istvan folded his wings and dropped, landing with a billow of chlorine and the booming memory of distant artillery fire. The worst faded with the feathers; only the wire remained, twisting in place of a shadow. He peered out over the edge of a stucco balcony, vines spilling down its sides in a verdant cascade.
A tiny courtyard opened below. In the center, a shaft: spiraling stairs, electric lights that guttered, walls lined with steel and glass. The buildings around it leaned inward, as though drawn towards it.
“Well?” said Edmund, appearing beside him.
Istvan nodded. “Yes, down there. Look.”
Edmund glanced over the edge. “Ah. I can see how you’d miss it at first.” He tugged his cape over a protruding vine. “You said you’ve gone inside?”
“Partway.”
“Hm,” said Edmund.
“I thought you might like to come along,” Istvan blurted. “And I, ah… I didn’t want to go any further alone. It seemed abandoned, but what if…”
Edmund waited.
Istvan rubbed at his wrists, where the chains had been. Twenty years bound. He hadn’t even been able to leave the Twelfth Hour basement until the Wizard War, eight years ago. He’d been a prisoner. A trophy. They had locked him to a pillar in the Demon’s Chamber, forced to his knees, barely able to move. No one had come to visit him but Edmund.
Even after, when Istvan was given more leeway, when he had all of the Twelfth Hour’s claimed territory to patrol… he had worked in the infirmary, and gone out only rarely, either to respond to disasters or to accompany Edmund. He was what he was. He was too dangerous. The wizards had seen what he’d done when they told him to fight, even if he himself couldn’t remember anything but a euphoric blur, and he couldn’
t blame them at all, because they were right.
For twenty years he’d had his orders. Disobeying them meant agony.
“There’s nothing stopping me, you know,” he finally said. He realized what he was doing and crossed his arms on the balcony instead.
“You’d stop you,” Edmund said.
“I haven’t,” Istvan told him. “Not before. You know that.”
“I’m still here.”
Istvan punched him in the shoulder, which had roughly the same effect as a blow from a housefly. “That doesn’t count.”
Edmund stood there. He rubbed his shoulder.
Then Istvan’s rational self caught up to what he’d done. “Oh,” he said. He coughed to stifle an idiotic chuckle. He folded his arms on the balcony again, looking down at the well.
“Are you all right?”
Istvan took off his glasses. “Oh, you oughtn’t ask that of me.” The lenses weren’t dirty – they didn’t, strictly speaking, exist, save in memory – but he wiped at them anyway. “‘I’m still here.’ Of course you are. Of course.” He put his glasses back on. “Edmund, you’re a terrific bloody cheater and I shouldn’t be glad of that.”
The wizard stared at him, confusion dueling self-hatred battened down by denial. “Right,” he said. He flipped open his pocket watch. “Let’s see about that facility.”
A snap. They stood four stories below at the edge of the well of glass.
“You could have said something,” said Istvan, reorienting himself. The steel railing spiraled down beside him. He trailed a hand over it. It was cold, hidden down here in the shade.
“Sorry,” said Edmund. He took a step down the stairs, paused as though testing his weight, and then took another. “There’s still power,” he commented.
Istvan tried to focus. Electricity, yes, even though there hadn’t seemed to be anyone down there before, and he couldn’t make anyone out now. Anyone save Edmund.
Oh, he shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have said that.
Cheater, indeed. Don’t bloody remind him.
Shouldn’t have touched him.
“I thought that was interesting,” Istvan finally said. “That the power still works.”
“Hm,” said Edmund. He started further down the stairwell.
Istvan checked again: still no hint of any stray suffering, any human emotion he could taste. All bland and abandoned. That didn’t rule out other beasts, of course, but monsters were usually easier to manage.
Edmund’s apprehension suggested he didn’t share that opinion.
“It isn’t unheard of,” Istvan said, though he wasn’t quite sure that it wasn’t.
“Eight years running through these kinds of earthquakes with no maintenance?”
“Perhaps the Germans built it.”
“Ha,” said Edmund. His top hat vanished from sight.
Istvan rubbed at his wrists, half expecting the burn of chains that weren’t there. Oh, he hated such tight quarters. One never knew what might jump out. Likely innocent, too, and only frightened.
“Coming?” called Edmund.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Istvan flitted down the stairwell, taking the steps two and three at a time. The harsh light flickered, spiraling in glowing tubes around and around. Sometimes they ran behind the glass rather than on the outside.
Edmund stood before a steel hatch. A green light blinked above a windowed slot in it, coated in a dull patina of smoke. The labeling was no language Istvan had ever seen, hooks and horns and little squares, tiny lines pressed into the metal.
“Tocharian,” said Edmund.
“Can you read–”
“No.” The wizard tugged at the wheel. “And I don’t think it’s coming open, either.”
Istvan inspected it. Someone had welded the seam between wheel and door together. “Oh.” He hooked a thumb in his belt, somewhat at a loss. “I… didn’t see that.”
“You wouldn’t.” Edmund squinted through the window slot. “I think I can manage, but if this pans out we’ll have to fix that.”
He retrieved his pocket watch and vanished in a golden blur.
Istvan sighed. He hadn’t looked. It hadn’t mattered. He couldn’t move anything that heavy himself, anyhow.
He stepped through the door, steel dragging through his ribs, the chill of the metal rather like stepping through a waterfall while the waterfall simultaneously stepped through him.
He almost ran into Edmund. The wizard had stopped cold on the walkway beyond, staring out at cube after cube of glass-walled hydroponics gardens, lit by great coiling arcs of those same strange tubes. Each cube could have housed a squadron of aircraft. Ventilation hummed.
“Power still works,” Edmund said, weakly.
Istvan straightened his uniform, though nothing was out of place. “I did fly across it, some,” he admitted. “I suppose it self-maintains somehow, or…”
Wait.
Wait, there was someone here – something–
Footsteps fell on the walkway.
Istvan whirled. He should have known it earlier – he always knew, he couldn’t miss even the most banal of suffering, the smallest annoyance, the merest hint of the human condition–
– except for in one circumstance.
The woman that climbed the stairs to meet them, Oriental, clad in a belted robe of blue and silvery earrings, was a hall of mirrors. Whoever she might have been, whatever self lay beneath, now reflected her surroundings – reflected the fears and uncertainties of others, camouflaged her, hid her within the background flavor of the city above them.
It was as though she were multiple people. A city, herself.
“Afternoon,” she said, in perfectly understandable English.
Edmund raised a hand to tip his hat. Istvan grabbed his wrist.
The wizard glanced back at him. “What?”
Istvan backed away, trying to look everywhere at once. It was so hard to detect them. It was like searching through static.
“Istvan, what is it?”
The woman smiled at them.
Edmund looked to her, to Istvan, then back to her. “Oh, hell,” he said.
Chapter Two
“You don’t have to talk like that,” said the woman. “Have you come for answers?”
Edmund stepped back as she walked towards him, dull thuds and booms signifying Istvan’s increasing agitation. “No, thank you,” he told her. “We seem to have taken a wrong turn. My apologies.”
He elbowed Istvan’s general vicinity.
“What?” the specter hissed. He’d gone to bone already, somehow managing to look frantic with no real expression.
Edmund indicated the woman. “We don’t know if there’s more of them.”
“There’s always more of them!”
“We can’t leave her here like this, you know that.”
The woman drew closer. The fabric of her robe, its bottom edge tattered, rushed against the walkway railing. Her earrings were safety pins, still bloody. “Like what?” she asked. “Knowing? I know what you kept hidden. You wizards. I know it all, now. Our Lady of Life had a plan for us, and you were too jealous to see it.” She reached for Edmund.
Istvan leapt between them and jammed bony phalanges through her chest.
She gasped. Phantom blood trickled from the wound. Flickerings of uniform buttons, the edges of spectacles, a field cap that wasn’t hers… memories flitted across her form, as Istvan grew less distinct, more cloudy–
–and then she dropped.
Edmund caught her before her head hit the walkway. Worth a little time to prevent a concussion. Less than a second, was all. He lowered her down, gently.
Shattered. She was Shattered.
The Wizard War had birthed many horrors, but foremost among them was the Susurration: a horror from another plane of existence that could strip people of their pasts, their
personalities, replace years of their lives with happy falsehoods, use them as puppets while they dreamed. The Twelfth Hour had helped put a stop to it, but finding and treating everyone it had ruined was another matter.
They were Shattered, and they wandered Big East, their sense of self destroyed, resorting to all manner of disjointed efforts to recover what they had lost. Those who had known them suddenly didn’t. Those who had trusted them found that their friends, their family members, the ones they depended on for survival, could be trusted no longer. Worse, they seemed to remember things that they shouldn’t: snippets of memory culled from thousands upon thousands of other victims.
The first of those – the reason the Susurration had been brought to this world at all, in the waning days of the war – was Shokat Anoushak. The Immortal. The most powerful wizard the world had ever known. She had been ancient when Rome ascended… and now, after her death, three thousand sanity-blasting years burned in innocent minds across Big East like fever dreams: the Susurration’s last act of defiance before its imprisonment.
There had always been cults dedicated to her. Now they were spreading like plague.
“Bloody Susurration,” Istvan said. He tottered backwards to hold onto the railing. “If I’d known it wouldn’t make any difference, sealing the monster up like that, why I never would have–”
“It made a difference,” Edmund replied, partly to himself. He found himself running a hand through the grey in his hair again and transferred that motion to adjusting his hat. “And you’re right, there can’t have been just the one.”
Istvan scrubbed at his uniform sleeves, as though trying to remove stains. “Oh, Edmund, I hate it. You know I hate it.”
“I know. But if you could do another flyover, just to see–”
The walkway trembled.
“Never mind,” said Edmund.
A steel mantis scythe ripped through the railings. Helicopter blades tore through one of the light tubes, which blew like a firecracker. Edmund got an arm around the fallen woman, hitched her into an awkward carry, and managed to half-throw, half-fall away with her just as the walkway came apart below him with a grating metallic scream, serpentine jaws taking its place.
