by Paige Orwin
Shokat Anoushak had survived since the days of ancient Greece. Shokat Anoushak had been mad. Pitiless. Uncaring and unyielding, like a storm.
Edmund took a breath. A nightmare was just a nightmare.
He flung the curtain open. Motes sparkled in the September sunlight, a dawn just past eight. It had rained overnight, it seemed, and wet cobbles glowed reflected orange. Masts already bobbed out to sea.
Another day.
Edmund pushed his chair back, poured himself a glass of gin from the bottle at his bedside, and went to get a shirt and pants. About three-quarters of his wardrobe was black. About half of it had been mended at least once. He wasn’t as good with a needle as Istvan, maybe, but in the old days taking an opera cape to the cleaners with bullet holes in it would have raised questions.
He pushed aside the jacket with the ripped-up sleeve from the tiger attack. Still needed to figure out what to do with that one.
The glass of gin went with him when he left for the bathroom. The grey in his hair was still there. He’d have to heat more water if he wanted to take a bath and his barrels were running low, which meant another trip upriver. No working plumbing made everything take longer. He’d been there before, growing up during the Great Depression, but he didn’t have to like it. Washing his face was immediately doable, at least.
He was drying his hair when the tea kettle whistled.
He spent a few moments to–
–no, he spent the normal amount of time to dress, comb, and brush, and then headed for the kitchen, where Istvan stood staring up at an enormous black cat that hissed at him from atop one of the cabinets.
Edmund set his empty glass on the table. “Beldam, come down from there.”
The cat flattened her ears.
“I put the water on,” said Istvan. He caught a map that drifted down from the cabinet, one of many papers now scattered across the room. “Were you ever planning to use any of this?”
Edmund glanced over the collection of survey maps, utilities diagrams, attempted census reports, notes from interested parties, and lists of necessary items, potential personnel, and assorted resources unique to various sites. Some of it – not disturbed by cat – lay in neat piles on the kitchen counters. More of it spilled over into the living room, where a scale model of a possible layout for Twelfth Hour North lay in never-reassembled pieces in a box next to the couch. “I have used it.”
“To collect more of it?”
“Sometimes.” Edmund reached for Beldam. “Come on, cat. I know you hate him, but you don’t have to act like this.”
She hissed at Istvan again, but allowed herself to be picked up and lowered from her perch.
“There we go.”
Istvan set the map on the table, looking critically at the empty glass.
Edmund scratched behind Beldam’s ears. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I would have come earlier,” said Istvan.
“I’m fine,” Edmund said. “How was your night?”
The specter shifted more papers aside and sat in his usual chair, turning his face to hide the scarring. He wasn’t wearing his field cap or his bandolier. “The cat,” he sighed, “isn’t the only one who wants nothing to do with me.”
Beldam squirmed; Edmund set her down. She shot into the living room.
“It isn’t personal,” Edmund said.
“She’s a cat,” Istvan replied sourly.
“And you’re a doctor. You’re still doing good out there, aren’t you? How many people have been through that hospital now?”
“More than there ought to have been. I don’t know what you thought might happen, Edmund, but that battlefield isn’t going away.”
Edmund picked up some of the scattered documents, stacking them in the nearest clear space. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Istvan.
“I am telling you that. I mean it. I wish we hadn’t had to do it.”
Barbed wire wrapped around the legs of Istvan’s chair. The specter crossed his arms on the table, more in resignation than anger. “I know.”
Edmund cleared up the last of the mess and then went to get a pan out for breakfast. No good dwelling on what they could have done better. That never made anyone an omelette.
He’d focus, today. He’d get something done.
“You’re certain you’re all right?” asked Istvan.
Edmund retrieved the empty gin glass. He needed to wash it, anyway. “Fine. Just fine. Mercedes gave me a deadline, Istvan, and I’m not about to slide back into the old trap.” The kitchen window was closed; he opened it. Get some air. “Thank you for yesterday, by the way.”
“What, for the cultists?”
“For coming by.”
“Oh.”
Edmund turned on the water. Still cold. “I do appreciate it, really.”
The part of Istvan’s face that could move bent in a faint smile. He looked away. “You are rather more interesting when you leave the house, Edmund.”
“I thought I was always interesting.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
Breakfast passed in a companionable silence. Edmund ate his omelette and Istvan cradled a cup of coffee that wasn’t real, conjured up somehow through force of habit. A breeze blew gently through the window, carrying the pine smell of the hedge with it. There were no plants in the house, just as there were no photographs; books would do, and books in abundance, even though at the moment it was hard to see all of them under the preparatory paperwork Edmund had collected.
He’d use it. Nothing would go to waste. He had a collection of tin cans based on that same reasoning, and they’d served him well over the years.
He thought about putting the record player on but didn’t want to risk the usual disagreement over jazz or waltz.
Thank you for yesterday. One of those phrases he could only use around Istvan, who had no time left to take.
“Will you be able to come to Charlie’s?” he asked once he’d finished eating.
“Hm?”
Edmund pushed his chair back. “We’re on deadline now, Istvan. It might be time to reassemble our little team and see if anyone else has any leads.”
Istvan raised his eyebrows. “So, ready to deal with Lucy again?”
“She has her moments.” Edmund pushed his chair back. “Besides, it’s been over a month since I contacted any of them and that’s no way to administrate. They’re probably wondering where I went.”
“I think that’s a fine guess.”
“Also, I was thinking of working out a standard set of operations for the next couple sites. I know what we need to be looking for, but if I write it down–”
Istvan sighed.
Edmund paused. “What?”
“More writing?” asked the ghost.
Edmund picked up his plate. “I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”
Istvan pushed his cup away, where it faded and vanished. “Edmund, I don’t know where you’re finding all this paper. Can’t we simply look? You’ve lists of people who might be interested – have you ever spoken to any of them?”
“Not yet.”
“Then why don’t we–”
“Yesterday we did it your way,” Edmund interrupted, “and today I’d like to do it my way, all right?”
Istvan leaned back in his chair. Then he got up and started for the door, skipping over the shallow steps that divided the living room from the kitchen, snagging his field cap off a hook where it hadn’t been hanging before. “If my way is so bad as all that…”
Edmund immediately regretted his words. “Istvan, that’s not what I meant.”
“I did lead us into a den of Shattered, Edmund, you’re right on that.”
“You couldn’t have known. I know you couldn’t have known. Come with me, will you? Lucy’s easier to deal with when you’re around, and…” He paused at the lintel between rooms. “Istvan, please, stay here. It’s easier to concentrate when you’re here.”
Istvan stopped.
“It’s true,” Edmund added, because it was.
When the other man stayed only a man, when he weighed what he did over what he was, when he wasn’t a human face stretched across something bloody and terrible…
When he was Istvan. Instead of… instead of what Edmund had unchained.
He liked Istvan. He played chess with Istvan. Istvan had stayed by him during those months after the Wizard War, when no one else could – or would.
“Oh, Edmund,” the specter sighed, but he did step away from the door.
Beldam shot from behind the couch back into the kitchen.
“The sooner we start,” Edmund reassured him, “the sooner we’re finished. It will be just like the translation work we did in ‘95.”
“You translated. I watched.”
“You were good company and that was all that mattered.”
Another sigh.
“Right,” Edmund said. He fished his cellular phone out of a pocket. “I’ll call the others and we’ll meet them there as soon as we can, all right? We’ll make some headway today.”
Istvan hung his field cap back on its hook.
Edmund fiddled with the phone screen, a glowing panel about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He found the widget that would let him dial and punched in a number, which was a lot less satisfying when the buttons were just pictures of buttons, then held the contraption to his ear.
It rang a moment.
“Hello?” asked a woman’s voice.
“Hello, Janet? This is Edmund Templeton.”
A pause. “Mr Templeton? Good morning! Been a while.”
“It has.” He switched the phone to his other ear. “Look, how fast do you think could you get the others together and have them at Charlie’s? We’ve got a deadline now – a heck of a deadline – and there are some things I’d like to discuss.”
Another pause.
Edmund waited. He glanced at Istvan, who seemed to have resigned himself to sticking around. Lucy really was impossible to deal with without him.
“How’s two hours?” asked Janet.
“That will do.” Edmund looked over the stacks of documents he’d collected. “We’ll get everything together and meet you there.”
Istvan wilted. “We aren’t taking all the papers.”
Edmund flashed him a tight smile. “Thank you, Janet.”
“Sure.”
She hung up. The phone screen returned to its usual parade of tiny pictures.
Edmund dropped it back in his pocket. “All right, Istvan. I’ll find a box.”
“Edmund–”
“Don’t worry, I’ll carry it.”
Istvan crossed his arms over a build significantly heavier than Edmund’s own. He’d spent his formative years accompanying soldiers on brutal campaigns in the Italian Alps, and looked it: in life, he would have been much stronger than a librarian who ran a lot. “Thank you ever so much.”
“You’re welcome.”
* * *
Edmund couldn’t take all the papers. They wouldn’t fit in a single box.
Istvan suggested that perhaps he could take multiple boxes, one at a time, and leave them on the street in front of Charlie’s before carrying them in one by one. Perhaps Lucy could help. Perhaps Edmund could found his own delivery service.
Edmund didn’t want Lucy’s help and didn’t want to be in charge of anything else, never mind a delivery service. He sorted out what he thought most important – slowly and carefully, checking each document over with agonizing thoroughness before nodding to himself and placing it here or there – and took only one box.
This accounted for almost the entirety of two hours.
By the time they finally departed, Istvan was certain that he should have gone to Barrio Libertad instead, even if Grace were present. Edmund didn’t need him for this, not really. Edmund specialized in this sort of thing, and without going mad, too. Last time they had sorted documents together was when Istvan was chained in the Demon’s Chamber and couldn’t escape.
Edmund somehow managed his teleport while holding the box.
Golden edges re-outlined the world–
–and they arrived on a street corner under a clouded sky crisscrossed with precarious masses of electrical wire. White towers rose, tiled and strangely curved, and vanished into swirling fog. Pipes of all sizes grew from the ground, coiled over and through the street’s rows of low buildings, or ran overhead, hissing and dripping with condensation. What structures weren’t part of the tangle had been built around and under it – or, in the case of the one before them, had displaced it, cutting off pipes mid-length, the sheared ends billowing columns of steam.
Over oaken double doors swung a woodcut with Edmund’s face on it.
Charlie’s, it said. So Vintage We’re the Real Deal.
The proprietors had done rather a good job of the reproduction – the sideburns, the pleasant smile, tired eyes hinted at beneath the aviator goggles – but Istvan still wasn’t certain what to make of an endorsement in exchange for bottomless gin.
Passersby halted, pointing and whispering. A baroque tank of a vehicle sat squarely in the middle of the concrete road.
“Get the door?” asked Edmund.
Istvan eyed the tank. He knew that tank. He took hold of the door handle, worn smooth by many hands, and pulled; it swung smoothly, reflections flashing across the glass portholes in its top.
Edmund edged the box through as a pair of orange-clad workers on the roof across the way waved others over to see. Istvan waited until he was clear and then let the door swing closed behind them.
The smell of tobacco came first. It was all-pervasive, lingering, powerful in a way more recent years had abandoned, seeping from every crevice in dark wood and scorched into pressed tin, burning in the hurricane lamps. Smoke-fogged chandeliers did their best but only managed a dull overhead glow. A brass footrail swept around the bar. A mechanical cash register sat above it.
The windows, through the fog, displayed trees in the first bloom of spring. Men loitered in dark suits and hats, lighting cigarettes as automobiles with rounded headlights rolled past. A newspaper boy stood at the corner.
It was always the same, through those windows. The same players, the same day, played out again and again.
April 11, 1939.
A rail-thin old man wearing a cowboy hat that had probably been black once leaned over the bar. “Templeton. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I’m here now,” said Edmund. He took a step towards a particular booth opposite the piano and in easy view of the door, and then caught himself. “The others are here?”
“Back room,” said the bartender. “I got the heater on, but I don’t know what good it’ll do. That’s a hell of a cat you got there.”
“Something like that,” said Edmund. “Thank you.”
The bartender shrugged. “Let me know if you want anything.”
A pause, however brief. “Will do.”
Istvan followed him down the hall, shaking his head. He’d tried to stop him, a few times, on the worst days, from fleeing here. There were better ways to manage terror: reading, chess, a hobby that wasn’t late-night violence, ways that wouldn’t wreck him in the morning, ways that wouldn’t leave his eyes red-rimmed and his words slurred and his breath rancid, poison oozing from his pores…
…but Edmund insisted he deserved to have one vice to lose himself in, and at least he wasn’t hurting anyone but himself.
An argument that had some merit.
An argument he knew Istvan couldn’t counter.
Telling him that at least one person in this world didn’t want him to be hurt led only to “I don’t know anyone who better deserves it.”
Istvan didn’t like Charlie’s.
The hall to the back room grew colder and colder as they approached the lamplight leaking from under the door at the end. Mist curled along the planks at their feet.
Istvan reached for a frozen bras
s handle and pressed the latch. It descended with an icy crack. “Perhaps we ought to meet somewhere else,” he muttered.
“The wood will be fine,” said Edmund. “It’s always the same day here, remember? Come half-past one, everything will go back to how it was yesterday.”
“Everything.”
“How did you think they have unlimited stock? It will be fine.”
Istvan got the door open for him, reflecting sourly that of unlimited anything that might have appeared after the Wizard War, it had to be gin.
Snowflakes blew through him.
The chamber beyond looked as though it had been designed for fine dining – a long oval table, a tiered crystal chandelier, chairs with high ornamented backs – but the proprietor had at some point forgotten its existence. No sign of tableware. Photographs of wagon wheels and rusted vehicles abandoned in fields adorned the walls.
Frost sheened every surface, slick and glistening. A low fog hung over the floor.
“Doctor Czernin!” A Polynesian man as broad as he was tall, which was very, stood up from one end of the table, bundled in a patched jacket and knitted hat. Mr Roberts: nurse, liaison for the Twelfth Hour’s infirmary, and Istvan’s go-to assistant for seeing patients in that building, regrettably much less common as of late. His eyes were just visible over an upturned collar. They crinkled. “How’s work at the fortress?”
Istvan got out of the way so Edmund could get the box through. “Busy, and–”
A hurricane clatter and whirr of mechanical armor rose and clashed a gauntleted fist against its breastplate. Spiked shoulders flashed in the lamplight. A scarlet cape rippled behind golden filigree.
“Er,” Istvan said. “Good morning, Miss L–”
“Hail, ravager of the pale beast, lord of the long war, ender of complacency.” The voice boomed, synthesized and strangely-accented. Blood-red lights flickered behind a blank visor. “Your infirmary continues its proud tradition of service in your absence, with not a single misdeed requiring discipline. My service, as always, remains yours, viewer of my last mask.”
