by Paige Orwin
Istvan rubbed imaginary filth from his sleeves, his hands. He straightened his bandolier. He reflected sourly that the man asking wasn’t Edmund. “Perfectly.”
He took his bearings. All of the other Shattered were already dispatched, some still jerking convulsively and others battered into silence. The corn still burned. Smoke choked the light tubes, what of them remained intact. Oil spattered the rows of filters and hanging mosses over the pond. Grace Wu bounced in place, shaking out her gauntleted arms. The sphere from earlier hovered near her.
Edmund was standing next to Grace.
“This is just the pilot program,” she was saying. She patted the device’s round casing. “If we deploy a couple hundred of these, you could free up everything you guys have sunk into your border guard and focus on–”
“You’ll have to run that by Magister Hahn,” Edmund replied. He wasn’t looking at her; he crouched over one of the fallen cultists, checking for breathing.
She tightened one of the straps on her armor. “What are you doing all the way out here, anyway? You’re not looking for some kind of secret base, are you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Have you tried finding a nice, big cave, yet? Maybe with a waterfall?”
Istvan stepped over, wishing the twist and tangle of the wire at his feet would stop betraying his agitation. The man who had spoken to him retreated a step; the other three a few more. “Edmund, perhaps you ought to retrieve the woman from earlier. The one you moved away?”
The wizard glanced up. “Right. Right, I should do that.”
He vanished in a blur of gold.
Grace crossed her arms. “So. Doc.”
“We could have managed,” Istvan said stiffly.
“Uh-huh. How’s the battlefield treatment going?”
Istvan thought of the ruin surrounding Barrio Libertad, the service he’d taken upon himself to make it right. Imprisoning the Susurration hadn’t been a clean exercise. “You know very well how it’s going, Miss Wu. Slowly.” He crossed his arms. “I imagine you’ll be claiming this area, then, too?”
She waved at the smoke billowing out from the corn as some arcane part of the helicopter popped and exploded. “We can fix it. You can’t.”
Istvan stared down at broken glass, his reflection misted and distorted. Another reminder. “Of course.”
She sighed. “Look, the offer still stands.”
“Thank you,” said Edmund, “but that won’t be necessary.” He deposited the woman from earlier near the others, laying her down carefully. The watch went back in his pocket. “We’ll manage on our own.”
“Like you’ve been doing since Mexico City bit it?”
“We’ll manage.” He straightened. “Come on, Istvan. It seems we’re not needed here.”
Grace threw up her arms. “What part of ‘we’ll reconstruct New Haven’ don’t you understand? Don’t you want working plumbing?”
The wizard smiled tightly, a thin veneer over longing and frustration. “As they say, we can handle our own crap, Grace.”
“But–”
“Afternoon.”
Istvan followed him around the fish pond. The man was still bleeding, and now likely even shorter on time than before. “That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s all. They’re keeping the place?”
“Likely,” said Istvan.
“Then we’re leaving. They’ll take care of the Shattered folks. Nothing we can do.” The wizard walked faster. “You tried.”
Istvan glanced back at Grace, who met his gaze. He shook his head. She shrugged in disgust, and turned to her men.
No more. No site. No progress.
Bloody Barrio Libertad. No trouble at all until the Susurration made its move, and now its people were everywhere, flaunting their superior equipment and their expertise in seemingly all things. The Twelfth Hour hadn’t thought through the implications of freeing the largest settlement in Big East to pursue its own devices. Now it was as bad as the British.
Worse; the British queen had at least been human.
And Edmund… oh, Istvan had to work with them in one area, at least, but Edmund did his best to avoid them entirely, and Istvan couldn’t blame him.
In its own way, it was a sort of relief.
“That’s four times this month,” said Edmund. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I can’t get away from her.”
Istvan reached for his shoulder. “But you’ve said you’ve–”
“Don’t,” said the wizard. He brushed the hand away. “And I know what I said.”
“Edmund–”
“It shouldn’t be like this, and not finding anywhere is only making it harder. She’s right about one thing, Istvan, and it’s that we’re a long way away from where we should be.” He retrieved his pocket watch, snapping it open and then shut and then open again. “This isn’t working. I can’t be everywhere at once.”
Istvan dropped his hand to his side. The same complaint, again and again.
There had been a time when Edmund very nearly could be everywhere at once. When he’d spent years stopping one cult or another from breaking into the public eye. When he’d led armies against Shokat Anoushak at the breaking of the world. When he’d fought the Twelfth Hour’s battles all up and down the seaboard, one innocuous request at a time, on top of maintaining their library and running his own habitual patrols by night.
He’d even pursued love on the side, however inadvisable it may have been.
Now…
Well, if the man had decided to be inconsolable, so be it. Istvan would simply have to pry him out of his house to try again another day.
Grace Wu wasn’t helping.
Istvan stepped over a divider, skirting the edge of falling mist. Sprinklers. “Will you be going home, then?”
“I’d like to.”
“But…?”
Edmund sighed. The mist sheened his skin, droplets clinging to his goatee and sideburns. “Mercedes wants a progress report.”
“Ah.” Istvan considered. He’d be expected at Barrio Libertad again, soon, as he’d promised, but perhaps the meeting wouldn’t take too long. “Shall I come along?”
Edmund shook his head. He reopened his pocket watch, holding it up to light that flickered. “I need to clean up. You have your own project to handle.”
“You’re certain?”
“The buck’s got to stop somewhere, Istvan. I’ll manage.”
He put the watch away.
Istvan kept pace beside him as he headed for the exit. A delay, perhaps, but not an insurmountable one. At least they would finish one thing today. A walk was better than nothing.
A walk was enough.
Chapter Three
Edmund appeared near the stoplight on the corner. Leaves crackled under his boots, round things, blinking weakly between red and yellow. September after the Wizard War.
The Twelfth Hour lay just across a road cracked and buckled by steel roots.
It had been a library, once. Now it rose like a mountain over Yale, a strange fusion of classical colonnade and Hindu temple, its steps marked with Roman inscriptions and its windows trimmed with inventive statuary. Cracks shot through the stonework. Pieces of fallen mortar lay in a heap beside the stairs. Skeins of cable zigzagged up the walls and trailed from its windows, strung from the Generator district and then, pole by pole, to the rest of New Haven. The wards were only visible if you weren’t looking for them.
The door had a window that opened onto a very ordinary looking modern library, with metal shelves. It said “Pull.”
Edmund knocked on it. “You know who I am. Let me in, please.”
The lettering changed to “Push.”
He did. “Thank you.”
The library he stepped into was three stories high, tiled in scarlet, its mahogany shelves inlaid with barred patterns of gold and chrome that resembled opened books and splayed pages. The ceiling bore an aggressively geometric design of interlocking shapes, also gold, almost Moorish
in execution and lit by round chandeliers. The crescent moons-and-clock emblem of the Twelfth Hour lay set into the floor and repeated itself at the tops of each column. The remodel had been done at the height of the Art Deco craze, and it showed.
The only jarring features were the temple stonework – seamlessly overtaking more and more of the ornamentation towards the back wall, its carvings cracked by earthquakes – and the scavenged furnishings that outnumbered the worn but still perfectly serviceable originals.
The crowds probably violated fire code but no one paid much mind to that, anymore.
“Excuse me,” he said to a collection of women from the Magnolia Group poring over some kind of electronic map and taking up most of an entire aisle.
They started, recognizing him – most people did – and shifted to clear the way. They wore jumpsuits. They were all identical.
“Sorry,” one of them said.
Edmund tipped his hat at her and continued on his way.
A flock of ravens descended upon him as he started through the shelves, squawking that nothing had been taken but there was that silver thing again, browsing, and they didn’t like it.
He peered over his shoulder and there it was, hovering just before Symbolic Astronomy: a disc rimmed with blue lights, slim silvery tentacles sifting through pages with careful delicacy. If only everyone handled books like that.
“It isn’t hurting anything,” he told the ravens.
They didn’t like it.
“Keep an eye on it, then, but leave it alone. It has just as much right as you do.”
They still didn’t like it, but he was the head librarian and so they acceded. They whirled away in a feathered cloud and settled on one of the chandeliers.
He checked to make sure everything he passed was in place. It seemed to be. The ravens were doing a decent job, with him gone now more often than not. The dangerous books, the real books, were all in the vault, anyway – nothing left to the public eye held anything more powerful than wards, all carefully vetted for display but open to general use. The Twelfth Hour owed its allies that much.
He took a turn at Inexcusable Mathematics and headed towards the Magister’s office.
Cultists, she would say. Cultists again, Mr Templeton?
Cultists again. You know, Mercedes, I think we should call this off. It isn’t working, and I’ve already told you I don’t think I’m the right man for the job.
He sighed. Not a chance.
And Grace. It always had to be Grace. Shattered cultists, mockeries, and Grace. It was enough to make him miss the days when all he had to do was track down hapless conspiracy theorists in the dead of night and worry idly what the press would do if it discovered that he was the same Edmund Templeton who had been paying taxes for eighty years.
That and… other things. Things that happened when you were the only member who could be sent on suicide missions more than once.
Had to be careful not to romanticize the past. Or be lost in it.
He came to the Magister’s hall and paused at the new roster photographs for 2020, housed in an alcove that hadn’t been there the year before. There were more of them, which could only be good. They included, among their members, Istvan. In color.
As requested: flesh tones filled out along with the burn discolorations, eyes a dark brown, black hair faded to steel grey – he’d been forty-four, at the end. His uniform was a jarringly cheerful sky blue with scarlet trim and silver flowers embroidered at the collar. He could have led a parade. He called it “splendid.”
It was still a little disconcerting, but Istvan seemed happy with it, so it stayed.
Edmund’s only change was the grey streak at his left temple.
He walked quickly past 2015 and the candles that burned there. The roster for 2010 was almost three times larger, and past that the hall continued, an alcove for every five years, his own face repeated again and again, that same fixed smile all the way back to 1955. 1950 lacked the hat. 1940 lacked the sideburns. 1945 was best not mentioned.
At the end he reached a massive oak door, just past 1895 and the Twelfth Hour’s five founders. Its wood was dark and pitted; in places scorched. The Magister’s office.
He didn’t touch it. He tapped at it with the toe of his boot. “Mercedes?”
The door swung open with a malevolent creak.
The office beyond was empty. The desk, claw-footed and smoke-stained and belonging to the original Magister was neat, if not clean, the usual diagrammatic clutter stacked to one side. The collections of bird’s wings and dusty brass instruments stayed in their corners, still not sorted. The paper lanterns overhead weren’t lit.
Edmund took a careful step over the threshold. His gaze, as always, drifted inexorably to the skull of Magister Jackson, staring at him from one of the bookshelves.
You damn fool Templeton, it seemed to say.
“This is why I hung a sheet over you,” he muttered.
He turned his back to it. The window was open. Breezes off the Atlantic fluttered the curtains, though the Twelfth Hour was nowhere near the ocean.
Edmund leaned over the windowsill. Waves crashed below. “Mercedes?” he called.
“Shut the door behind you,” came the response. A woman’s voice, low and even.
“Is this an invitation?”
“I thought you wouldn’t want Magister Jackson staring you down. Shut the door.”
He eyed the office door. It seemed to eye him back. “All right.”
It took some doing, but he got it closed.
Nursing bruised knuckles, he swung through the window–
–and landed solidly on the upper level of a lighthouse far off the coast.
Magister Mercedes Hahn was waiting for him. She wore a grey suit two sizes too big for her gaunt frame, sleeves rolled up, the emblem of the Twelfth Hour clasped at her throat. She was brown and sharp-faced, probably Indian, though he’d never asked, pockmarked from some past sickness. Pens stuck out of her black hair, done up in a tight bun. One of her fingers was missing.
She barely came up to his collarbone.
“It’s just a door, Mr Templeton,” she said.
He straightened his hat, grimacing. “We have a history.”
“Don’t you always.”
She turned and started down the spiraling stairs.
He scanned the horizon – he couldn’t even see the Black Building, which dominated the horizon anywhere else he usually went – and then followed. He wondered if there were krakens out there, too.
“No luck, I’d imagine,” said Mercedes.
“No luck.”
“At the rate Barrio Libertad is expanding its influence, Mr Templeton, I’m going to start needing some very good excuses.”
He tugged his cape over a loose nail. Barrio Libertad had been an isolated city-state a few short months ago. No one went in, no one came out. Now it was a regional power and everyone knew it, and as far as he knew they still hadn’t changed their stance on magic or their plans for what future ought to await the human race, and then there was Grace…
“Shattered cultists,” he said.
Mercedes didn’t look back. “You’ve tried that one.”
“Wizard War mockeries, under Shattered control.”
A pause. “How many?”
“One. That I saw.”
“What happened to it?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “It blew up.”
“Mr Templeton.”
“I blew it up. They’re armed, Mercedes, it wasn’t easy.”
She said nothing.
“The facility was a hydroponics farm, still operating, and now it’s a total loss. Nothing we can repair. At least a couple dozen Shattered, on top of the mockery. Too many for Istvan to handle.”
She lit an oil lantern at the landing. It smelled faintly of fish.
“Grace was there,” he added.
Mercedes licked a finger and pinched the match out. Her palm was heavily scarred. “Mr Templeto
n, I need to see progress on this and I need to see it now.”
He found his pocket watch. “I know.”
“We have reports of flying machines inspecting neighborhoods, squads appearing out of nowhere, strange devices building themselves overnight. We’ve found two more artifacts stripped of their powers. One of our best warders has been asked to leave his post, go back where he came from. Some of our allies are getting worried, Mr Templeton, and the rest are thinking of jumping ship. Barrio Libertad is more populous than us, has more resources than us, and espouses a philosophy a lot of people would like to agree with, at least on the surface. On top of that, they’re the Susurration’s jailers, and don’t forget how insistent they’ve been about tying us to that.”
“I haven’t.”
“We don’t have the numbers, Mr Templeton, and I don’t have the time. I would think you of all people would appreciate that.”
She stalked away.
Edmund didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He followed her down the last round of stairs, across the last landing, and into the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters. She lived there, as far as he knew, and he caught glimpses of the evidence – unwashed dishes, clothes hung up to dry, a well-thumbed collection of horror novels – as Mercedes walked straight through and out the front door.
The rocks outside were razored with barnacles. Mercedes didn’t seem to notice.
“I won’t see the Twelfth Hour undermined by a machine,” she said.
Edmund held onto his hat. “I can’t blame you.”
“If I had known… but too late for that, and probably just as well.” She stared out at the horizon, then adjusted the emblem at her throat. “Mr Templeton, you are the best public relations resource we have. Everyone knows you. Everyone followed you, when it mattered. Once you’ve established yourself, you’ll have no shortage of recruits, I’m sure, and then we might be able to make some headway.”
“I understand that,” he tried. “It’s just a matter of finding somewhere to start. Istvan’s been looking, and so have the others, and I do have a list of–”
“Where have you been hunting?” she asked.
He paused. “Excuse me?”
Mercedes brushed a thumb across her stump, looking at him straight on. “Your nightly patrols, Mr Templeton. Where have you been hunting?”
