Immortal Architects

by Paige Orwin

  “It’s an order.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that! It’s only… I can’t…” He thought of turning, thought of facing the other man, but the actual motion was impossible. “Edmund, I can’t fly over Triskelion. It’s too much. It’s… Edmund, it’s too much.”

  Oh, he wouldn’t come back.

  Oh, he wouldn’t remember anything.

  “Istvan. We’ll be teleporting.”

  Teleporting. Yes, Edmund could do that. But–

  Now, Istvan turned. Partway. He peered over his own shoulder. “You’ve been there?”

  Edmund nodded. “I have. I’ll aim for a straight shot, if it makes you feel better. We won’t go anywhere near the mountains.”

  But I want to go near the mountains, Istvan wanted to say. I would very much like to go near the mountains, just as I would very much like you to not stand off so far away.

  He didn’t say that. He leaned against the wall a moment longer – oh, he wanted to say a lot of things – and then turned, straightening a bandolier that didn’t need to be straightened.

  Edmund stood there, hat still in his hands. His fear had subsided to the usual unconscious wariness, an edge he never lost, a wound that wouldn’t close and that no one else could see.

  “I ought to notify the hospital,” Istvan said.

  “Then we’ll do that.”

  “Oh, I hate it there.”

  It slipped out.

  Edmund pulled out his pocket watch and flipped it open. “You don’t have to go there all the time, you know.”

  Istvan shook his head. The Twelfth Hour infirmary was relatively well-equipped and well-staffed. The hospital at Barrio Libertad was new, and though the fortress supplied a good deal of equipment, it didn’t have enough trained medics to account for the refugee population: some of them maimed, the vast majority with serious mental complications from years of Susurration control.

  He was needed there.

  Where his own patients feared him, Grace Wu despised him, the very walls raged at him, and everyone else blamed him in hushed whispers when he turned his back. Edmund had freed them; Istvan was simply the unpleasant means.

  “Right,” said Edmund. “Look sharp.”

  He snapped his watch.

  * * *

  The teleport whisked them into ankle-deep mud.

  “Aw, hell,” said Edmund.

  He’d only been to Barrio Libertad as often as he had to, which wasn’t often. He could have aimed for inside, but he wasn’t going inside. Not anymore. Not with them nullifying magic right and left.

  Unfortunately, outside kept changing.

  He put away his pocket watch, picked up his cape, and draped it over one arm, trying not to think about what else might be mixed into the morass. Istvan’s battlefield. The Great War made manifest, a too-real reminder of what took down the Susurration.

  “It’s only mud,” said Istvan. He slogged through the mess and stepped onto clear paving, completely unaffected. “Mostly,” he added.

  “Thanks, Istvan, you’re a real help.”

  Edmund started walking. The entrance to Barrio Libertad loomed before them, flanked by murals: fists of every color raised against an amorphous entity of reaching tentacles and hints of human faces, a shattered lantern spilling white light from behind rose-tinted glass. Cavernous elevator doors pounded open. Turrets, high above, rumbled on their mountings. A rib cage of stone and steel lay collapsed across them, five or six clawed limbs dangling from the roof or hooked ineffectually into the walls.

  The broken hulk of one of Shokat Anoushak’s greatest creations.

  Its body slumped across the fortress like a hybrid of snake, centipede and train; its remaining flesh composed of shattered roadways, crushed ships, rubble from fallen buildings, and stone gouged out of the earth by its passage. Towers crested its spine, leaning crazily, holes blown through them end-to-end. Wind whistled through dangling power lines. Bridge cables trailed away out of sight.

  It was a nightmare straight out of the Wizard War.

  It was still better than the fortress that had killed it.

  Edmund stepped onto solid ground. His shoes squelched.

  “I’ll wait here,” he said.

  Istvan nodded, and stepped into the elevator. The doors thundered closed.

  Edmund sat on a step and took a shoe off. The mud had seeped into his socks. “Great,” he muttered.

  He eyed the lay of the land, how much room there was in front of the doors, and especially where the paving ended. If he had to visit Landsea Cabal and fight a living thunderstorm to assuage Mercedes’ ego, he wasn’t going like this.

  He returned with clean socks just as Grace skidded to a halt before the doors, muck sliding from her boots like oil from water.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Edmund shook out his cape.

  She reached for him, hesitated… then tapped her own shoulder. “You missed a spot.”

  He wiped it off. Just mud. “Morning, Grace.”

  She stood there a moment longer. Every quirk of her lips, every shift of her weight, every curve below scarlet plating and dark undersuit, the whir of her gauntlets, the faint electric crackle of her hair in the wind…

  Resistor Alpha. State hero. Engineer and self-proclaimed genius. A mistake, and not the first one he couldn’t regret.

  He hadn’t known she’d survived the Wizard War. She hadn’t told him.

  For seven years, she hadn’t told him.

  “I don’t see you around here often,” she said. If she had an opinion on that, he couldn’t hear it. She hitched the strap of a messenger bag further up her shoulder. “What’s up?”

  He shrugged. “Waiting for Istvan.”

  “Should have known. Are you free today?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She stepped closer. “Are you free today?”

  He stayed where he was. He flicked mud off his fingers. “Actually, I’ll be headed to Tornado Alley. I don’t know how long.”

  “Great,” she replied. “I’m going with you.”

  Going with–

  He took a step backwards. Too close. She was too close, and he didn’t need another complication on top of everything else. “No.”

  “Eddie–”

  “No! Absolutely not!”

  She raised her eyebrows, a flash of pain in her eyes. “You don’t have to yell.”

  “Grace, I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but I’ve had about enough of it. If you want to muscle in on the Twelfth Hour, fine. If you want to save the world, go ahead. If you’re looking for someone, I won’t stop you. Just do it somewhere else.”

  “I thought you might appreciate the help,” she said.

  “Help with what?”

  “The storm, Eddie.” She pointed behind him. “Watch your step.”

  Edmund stopped before he landed a foot in the mud again. One thing on top of another. First a month to find a workable base site and now a thousand-mile jaunt to the west to prove something that didn’t need to be proved and now Grace. Every time, Grace.

  He didn’t know how to stop a storm, much less one that had a mind of its own.

  Did Mercedes think he was superhuman?

  Grace hadn’t.

  Grace had never–

  He took a breath. Yelling wouldn’t solve anything. He shouldn’t have done that. He hated doing things like that.

  He looked at the fortress walls that rose above them, monolithic, like the curved immensity of Hoover Dam. They looked like corrugated steel, though they were anything but. Slogans in English and Spanish splashed across their sides: Against the Control. Free Thought Deserves Protection.

  “What are you after?” he asked under his breath.

  Grace crossed her arms. “There isn’t a conspiracy here, Eddie. And if you start going on about gods and horrors and the evils of the modern database again, Diego might just decide to be a little hurt.”

  “He’s listening, isn’t he?”

&
nbsp; She shrugged.

  “Edmund,” said Istvan, stepping back through the doors, “I’ve the rest of the day, in return for–”

  He saw Grace.

  “Doc,” she greeted him.

  He shot a suspicious glance at Edmund. “Miss Wu.”

  “Not my idea,” said Edmund.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Istvan.

  “She’s coming with us. And this doesn’t mean anything.”

  Grace cracked a sudden grin. “It means you’ve got a genius aboard, Eddie – and I’d say that improves your chances of handling that storm by a good margin.”

  Istvan blinked. “How does she–”

  Edmund jerked his head towards the fortress.

  “Oh. Of course.” The specter hooked a thumb in his bandolier, not looking at either of them. Jagged tangles appeared in the wire at his feet. “Nothing but politics, then?”

  Edmund got out his pocket watch. “Let’s just go.”

  Two masses this time – Istvan weighed nothing – and he’d teleported Grace before. Some adjustment for her armor. Landsea maintained a team in that same remote station he’d visited on his mapping tour, last he’d heard. The calculations might have been called offerings, in another context, and they were more complicated for such a great distance (as a cartographer might expect), though of course all distances and indeed positions were relative. Don’t think about it too hard.

  No lethal mistakes; he had time.

  “Hey, Eddie,” said Grace, “Diego was wondering – do you know what happens every time you use that teleport trick of yours?”

  “No. And I hope I can trust you not to tell me.”

  “Great,” she said.

  They were elsewhere.

  Chapter Six

  Light. Dust. Heat that beat upon him like molten copper. Gusts blew through him, a rattling hiss from all directions, a sound wind ought not to make over such a flat, featureless expanse. Had Edmund gotten his location right?

  Istvan shielded his eyes – a gesture more habitual than useful – and squinted at the endless gold that swam across his vision.

  Grass. It was all grass, hazed and shimmering. The whole of the landscape rolled and heaved, looking for all the world as though it might run liquid at any moment, if it didn’t catch fire first.

  He’d never seen anything that wasn’t water move like that. No mountains in sight at all. He wished he weren’t so disappointed. “Edmund, you haven’t taken us to Africa?”

  Edmund shook his head, holding onto his hat. “This is as American as it gets. You didn’t think ‘Landsea’ was a joke, did you?”

  “Amber waves,” said Grace. She took a deep breath, nose wrinkled. “I thought it would smell more like cows.”

  Istvan turned, slowly. Grass. A dirt road, stretching away for miles. Long shadows passing over the earth, the sleek white blades of an enormous windmill spinning high above. Other machines lay toppled in a line, their pieces tossed about as though by some great beast. A squat concrete building sat behind a low fence, a pair of battered automobiles parked before it, its roof bristling with radio dishes and antennae and whirling devices facing different directions. A flag featuring a stalk of wheat bent into a lightning bolt flapped helplessly on a pole raised near its front door.

  A dark smudge boiled on the horizon.

  He reached for Edmund. “Do you suppose that’s…?”

  Edmund wasn’t there. He was already striding towards the… station, Istvan supposed it was, his cape threatening to tear itself off his shoulders.

  “I’ve never been here, either,” confided Grace. She tugged at her sleeves, stopping just short of rolling them up. “Don’t think I’ll come back.”

  “No one asked you to,” Istvan said.

  He followed Edmund.

  All the way across the mountains. How often had Edmund come here? Where else had he gone? He’d been responsible for mapping much of what remained, after the Wizard War, but Istvan had never thought much of it – the Twelfth Hour’s boundaries were his own limits, and it had been easier to not dwell on how confining those limits were.

  He’d crossed oceans, once, to find the next war…

  Edmund knocked.

  A sunburnt woman in a white cowboy hat opened the door. “Who in–” She blinked. “The Hour Thief? That was… You’re as fast as they say, aren’t you?”

  Edmund smiled, that way he did: bland, pleasant, and transformative, a flash of white teeth that almost made him seem like someone else. Someone larger. “Not always,” he said. He stepped aside, a rush of black silk in the wind. “This is Resistor Alpha and Dr Czernin, sometimes known as the Devil’s Doctor. We’re here about that storm.”

  “Hey,” said Grace.

  Istvan wondered, again, if it were something about the way the man stood. It was like a switch, it truly was. “A pleasure.”

  The woman looked them over, started to say something to Edmund, then paused, glancing back to Istvan. Her eyebrows rose. “Wait. Is he–”

  Istvan sighed. “A ghost, yes.”

  “No, no, the… you know…” She bared her teeth and held her arms up, fingers hooked. “The ghost.”

  Istvan stared at her.

  Grace laughed. “Close enough.” She pushed forward, elbowing Edmund out of the way. “Hey, do you have air conditioning in there?”

  The woman backed up. “Sure. We kept one of the turbines running, didn’t we? Come on in. I’ll let the others know you’re here.”

  “Thank you,” said Edmund.

  Istvan followed last, again, enduring another clandestine stare on the way. She didn’t seem afraid of him so much as curious, which he supposed was an improvement over the usual fare. What had she heard? What had Edmund said about him?

  “I thought you had wings,” she said as she closed the door.

  He turned. “Did I catch your name?”

  “Clark.”

  He waited for a first name, but she didn’t give one.

  “I’m the bells and whistles specialist,” she continued. She skipped through the short front hall and into an interior just as utilitarian as the outside. “Wait here a sec.”

  She disappeared down a stairwell.

  Istvan crossed his arms. Panels of switches blinked and popped on each wall; blobs of blocky color stuttered over screens, overlaid on maps or grids, labeled with numbers and symbols he wasn’t quite sure were meteorological. Books lay jammed anywhere that would fit them: on top of televisions, stacked in the corner, stuffed between reels of wire, a particularly thick volume propping up a chair with a short leg. A folding table sat to one side, littered with tubes and gauges and other machinery only half-assembled.

  A horseshoe hung over the door.

  “Eddie,” said Grace, “I thought this was a wizard’s cabal.”

  Edmund took off his hat, suddenly just Edmund again. “You said the same thing about Janet and I’ll say it again: we’re not anti-technology, Grace. Technology’s great. It’s safe. We like it just fine.”

  “Sure you do.” She tapped one of the screens. “Good show, there, by the way. You really do put that on every time, don’t you?”

  Edmund didn’t answer.

  Istvan peered through a dirt-crusted window. The cloudy smudge was still there, dark against the sky’s brilliance. Violet lightning sheeted into the ground.

  Oh, it couldn’t have been anything more human, could it?

  He tried to make out any sign that anyone lived nearby, but those in the building were all he could taste. Edmund, Grace, and three others. Godforsaken place. Deserted as the open ocean.

  “So, what,” continued Grace, “Landsea’s just the news and weather folks?”

  “They’re the ones that keep some of the settlements out here in one piece,” Edmund replied, curtly. He wasn’t looking at her. “They’ve got some of the best warders in the business. Have you ever seen one of those storms, Grace?”

  Clark’s voice came from downstairs. “Yes, the Hour Thief! I’m s
erious!”

  “Well,” Grace said, “it’s not acting like a storm, is it?”

  Edmund scrubbed a hand across his face. “I never said–”

  “And if it’s not acting like one, what makes you think it actually is one?”

  The wizard shoved his hands in his pockets. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, all right?”

  Istvan thought of snow on mountains.

  Clark returned, an equally sunburned man and a somewhat shellshocked-looking woman in tow. “Rosales, Lockhart, meet the Hour Thief. And friends. Hour Thief: the team.”

  Edmund tipped his hat. “Thank you for having us.”

  “Rosales is our primary warder for this station; Lockhart handles predictions. We’ve got most of Iowa and part of Nebraska covered between us, and I do not envy the folks in Kansas.”

  “Three Force 14s in the last year,” said Lockhart, staring at a box fan set into one of the windows.

  Clark stepped to a panel and indicated one of the color blobs as it advanced in stop-motion. “This here’s your storm. You probably saw it outside – it’s not vectored towards us, but it’ll be close. I assume you wanted to have a look?”

  “I don’t know that want plays into it,” said Edmund. He was smiling again.

  Rosales produced a set of keys, along which dangled a piece of petrified bone with odd coils scrimshawed onto it. “I’ll go get the truck ready.”

  Hot air blasted into the station as he opened the door. It closed behind him with a slam and the scream of frustrated breezes.

  Clark adjusted her cowboy hat. “If one of you can drive, Rosales was hoping to get some better readings. I know you can probably just pop in right next to it, but I’d like to advise against that. The storms pick up a lot of grit and rock and… other things, and I’d hate for you to lose all your skin getting in too close, too fast.”

  Grace smirked. “Yeah, that would be a shame.”

  “I can drive,” said Edmund.

  Istvan blinked at him. He’d never seen the man behind a wheel, ever. “You can?”

  “I doubt my license is current, but yes.”

  “Oh, great,” said Grace. “What did you learn on, a tractor?”

  “We didn’t have a tractor.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Eddie, but there’s a thing called power steering now, and I really don’t want to be veering all over the road, thanks. I’ll drive.”