Immortal Architects

by Paige Orwin

  Grace flashed a triumphant look at him. She was right. She knew she was right.

  What did you think you were trying to do, Eddie? Barrio Libertad is clearly the best option, Eddie. I thought you were the Hour Thief: what have you done over the last few months aside from not a whole lot?

  We’ll do everything you can’t, Eddie. Diego and I.

  Everything.

  Something tightened in Edmund’s chest. Empty-handed, all this time. Hiding in his house. Not answering calls. Not doing anything he was supposed to, and interrupted even when he tried. One mission on top of another and all of them stalled.

  Now he was supposed to go back to the Twelfth Hour – to Mercedes – admitting that he’d turned this, too, over to Barrio Libertad?

  He tugged his tie straight. “Grace, I appreciate the offer, but I’m taking the kid.”

  Grace shook her head. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’ve been in this business since before you were born,” he retorted. “I know what I’m doing.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Really, Eddie?”

  “I’m the one that got us here. I was pulled out of a meeting to be here.”

  “Yeah, well–”

  “I went through that storm to get him, and I caught him, and I’m the one who is going to decide where he ends up because, Grace, I feel like hell right now and I’m done arguing with you.” He reached for his pocketwatch before he could change his mind. “I’ll drop you off outside the walls.”

  She dodged, blurring–

  He was faster.

  As long as he had time, he was always faster.

  When he returned, Clark was bent over the boy, checking his breathing. She startled when she saw him – only him, no Grace – and produced a nervous chuckle. “So. Uh.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Edmund said.

  “Right. Right, I won’t.” She stood, smoothing her jeans. She didn’t seem willing to look at him anymore. “Oh,” she said. “Thanks for helping to keep that tower up, by the way. Lockhart reminded me.”

  Edmund frowned. “Tower?”

  “The cell tower. While you were out here mapping the place, oh… six years back?”

  He considered. He’d covered a lot of ground, then. Mercedes had wanted to know what places were in one piece and might be helpful allies, and he’d been able to go further, faster, than anyone else in the Twelfth Hour.

  “Full of those trapdoor spiders?” Clark added.

  Right.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  A pause.

  “Thank you for having us,” he finished. He stepped to the kid, wondering how long he’d stay sedated. “And for driving,” he added to Rosales.

  Rosales gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Give our regards to your Magister,” said Clark.

  “I will.”

  Edmund pictured fallen leaves of blinking red and green.

  * * *

  Thunder called him. It rolled from peak to peak and cliff to cliff, the echoing roar of artillery fire and the lighter patter of small arms, a pass under siege. Stray shots chipped off shards of rock. Other shots struck softer things.

  It was when the rockslide fell, burying a supply convoy winding up the cliffs, that he awoke.

  Blood. Agony.

  A wheel, spinning down into the canyon.

  Artillery crews scrambling down from the other side of the pass.

  Figures in burnished armor shouting, backpedaling. Shots rang through him. Amplified voices calling demands in a language he didn’t know.

  Istvan hovered, above the fall, drawing in every flavor – the sweet fluttering panic of labored breathing, the rich dread of crushing darkness, the burning ecstasy of pulverised limbs – and sighed, and shuddered with the sighing (oh, it was wonderful) and wondered which side he ought to join.

  This one?

  The other one?

  Which was it, and which was more outnumbered, and which would be more sporting?

  “Who’s winning?” he called.

  Gunfire answered him.

  He skipped down the fall, poison trailing in his wake. The air was choked here; almost orange, thick with coal smoke, acrid and burning. Fires threw odd shadows across the rocks. The artillery hadn’t stopped.

  Those firing at him retreated. Soot stained spiked pauldrons, spiked crests, ratcheted seams at shoulder and elbow. Scarlet lights flashed behind closed visors. Some wore capes, torn and faded.

  Triskelion. Armor like that only came out of Triskelion.

  Not nearly so splendid now, were they? Difficult to keep up a polish while waging a siege, wasn’t it? Even if they were the winning side, would it matter?

  Something buried under the rock pile shifted, sending more stone cascading into the canyon below.The warriors scrambled to keep their footing.

  Istvan laughed. A shot blew through him. He spread rotten wings in the dust.

  He’d just have to get a good look at the situation himself, wouldn’t he?

  He stepped forward – they held their ground this time, bless them – and dove sideways off the side of the road. Stones fell past him. Motor oil trickled down in thin cascades. Smoke billowed from the shattered shell of a domed spire toppled from its foundations: smoke with a thick, greasy quality to it. Bodies lay slumped beneath the twisted skeletons of iron gates.

  The thunder came from further up the canyon.

  Istvan snapped his wings open. Righted himself. Side-slipped around the broken pillars of a bridge, half-wishing there were something to chase him.

  Brass glittered below: shells littering cracked pools of alkali.

  Oh, he’d missed this.

  He’d missed this so much.

  Why, once he found the siege, all he’d have to do was ask to see the commander (or at the very least figure out which side was Lord Kasimir’s, the only name he knew), and then he would be free to…

  To…

  He slowed.

  There had been a boy. A Negro boy, in a battered jacket, just on the edge of manhood. Floating, amid the dust.

  And the storm…

  Where was Edmund?

  Something exploded nearby. A searing rush of unrefined terror flooded his senses. He gasped. He almost hit a cliff. He soared in it: a brilliant, crystalline sweetness, raw and sharp, the agony of it setting his sight to spinning and his breath to a wholly unreal and involuntary catch in his throat – where was it? How many? – and when he finally managed to alight he was shaking so badly he wondered if he were a haze to outside eyes, trembling with need and frustration and awful pleasure.

  There was more where that came from. Oh, so much more. Triskelion. Triskelion. A war, a real war, finally–

  He could lose so many weeks here. He could lose it all, let it overcome him, wash into him, sweep away all his worries in the rush of blood and fire.

  He clutched at his wrists. His forearms. Hugged his chest.

  No. No, no.

  Rock scraped at his back. He raised his wings to hide it – the doors set into the mountain, the armies that climbed perilous trails toward them, the flare and flash and fierce joy of it all, siege waged by vicious warlords for ends no one could say – but the feathers were transparent, and fraying.

  Did they all have the same peculiar armor that blocked his blade? Did their equipment have the same protection? Did all sides know of him?

  How many men could he kill before their generals took note?

  He tore away. He fled back through the canyon – sometimes through rock, stone scraping through his insides as he barreled onwards, blind – and back past the fall.

  He hadn’t meant to come here.

  He shouldn’t have come here.

  He couldn’t stay.

  He couldn’t stay.

  The Twelfth Hour never should have unchained him.

  Chapter Eight

  Edmund couldn’t help but wince when he snapped on the shackles. Black iron, they were, shaped like grasping claws, clutching the b
oy’s thin wrists with a tightness that seemed to draw blood when you weren’t quite looking at them. The links that dragged after them were thick as human fingers, chains wrapped around the chamber’s central column and bolted in a dozen places to the hewn stone of both the floor and the walls. Arabic calligraphy flowed across their surfaces. Steam rose from the anchor points, glowing as though backlit by flame and smelling of sandalwood.

  The Demon’s Chamber had been built to hold its namesake, before it held Istvan, and it looked it. Not a place for a kid who might have been barely fifteen.

  The boy didn’t fight back. He didn’t do much of anything but droop, bonelessly, eyelids fluttering. Whatever had been in that vial was powerful stuff.

  Again, Edmund wondered if he’d made the right choice.

  The kid was dangerous. There was no doubt about that. He was Shattered, and a Conduit, and the most powerful Conduit anyone had ever seen. Any one of those three by themselves would have been worrying enough, and the Twelfth Hour didn’t have anywhere else suited to that kind of threat. If Barrio Libertad was going to be out of the picture, the Demon’s Chamber was the next best thing.

  Which still left the matter of actually putting a colored kid in chains.

  Edmund retrieved a cylinder of table salt from the toolbox he’d brought down the stairwell and started spilling lines of it along the paths marked on the floor.

  What the kid looked like shouldn’t matter. The question of segregation was long over and done with – hell, almost everyone he knew at this point had been born after the marches, and had never seen the signs in shop windows or over water fountains. Anyone could use whatever door they wanted, now. This was 2020. The Twelfth Hour’s own Magister was a woman with brown skin. Edmund had thought well of the civil rights movement, and done his best all his life to treat everyone he met with equal dignity.

  It shouldn’t matter.

  Edmund spilled the salt faster. He tried not to imagine the kid waking up suddenly and demolishing the entire Twelfth Hour basement before he could get the room warded. At least this version of the ritual wasn’t the one that required an animal sacrifice. They were running low on gerbils.

  Salt lines finished, he lit a match and held it to a bowl laid in a depression near the door. Its contents caught fire almost immediately, throwing the stench of burning hair into the air. He held back a sneeze. Scattering salt all over the room wouldn’t do at all.

  “Right,” he muttered to himself.

  He rose, stepped carefully over the lines, and checked the notes written on a clipboard hung by the door. They were written in Classical Arabic, one of those languages that he knew by necessity. This was Innumerable Citadel magic. They were the mystics who had defeated Shokat Anoushak the first time, in the mid-600s. They had catalogued her works, adapted them, expanded on them, and passed them down to form over a full quarter of modern Western magical canon.

  Edmund closed his eyes.

  The first kind of magic was Conceptual magic, which drew on the known: perfect solids, logical extremes, ideas sharpened to a razor point. Istvan was Conceptual. The Susurration was Conceptual. Conceptual magic was dangerous, because fire burned hotter than flame.

  Then there was the other kind of magic.

  The words flowed easily, but not gently. They entreated the invisible and the unknowable, with such power that granting them names made the world shudder. They drew attention where attention was best not drawn at all.

  His had come from the lake.

  The last word left his lips. He’d said it right. He knew he’d said it right.

  He still reached a hand for the wall, dizzy and dry-mouthed.

  The chains clanked. The steam vanished, as though sucked in by a hungering maw. He imagined he saw eyes in the spaces of each link and hastily looked away.

  A rushing, like enormous lungs drawing inward–

  –and then there was only a spindly young black kid, propped on his knees, head drooping, wrists fixed by iron claws to a central column of stone.

  Edmund swallowed.

  This was how he’d met Istvan, the second time. After his capture. A man, however translucent, bent to his knees and chained immobile in that very same place.

  You don’t look at all like I remember, Edmund had told him.

  The specter had smiled, then.

  You do, he’d said.

  Where was he? Istvan would have known what drugs Grace had used. He would have had an opinion on what to do. He would have had ideas of his own. He wouldn’t have approved of this.

  Too late now.

  Edmund took a few steadying breaths. He bent down and closed the toolbox with a click that seemed far too loud for the space. The kid really was dangerous. No doubt about it. No matter his color. This was the best Edmund could do with what he had. It wouldn’t be permanent.

  He picked up the toolbox, cast one last glance at the chains – Istvan’s chains, for twenty years, before the Twelfth Hour had resorted to the pure Conceptual, anchored to the pillar that rose from the room’s center, bathed in hellish firelight – and then shut the door behind him.

  Now to tell Mercedes what he’d done.

  * * *

  Istvan had figured out what happened by the time he reached New Haven. The boy in the storm – Kyra – had done something to him. Trapped him. Tore at him. Ripped away at his substance. How, he didn’t know, but that he had done it was certain.

  This wasn’t wholly new. Istvan had been torn apart before. Once, at death, when he’d had no idea what he was doing or what he’d called up, and several more times over the course of his career, mostly struck by bombs he hadn’t been expecting.

  It was as close to unconsciousness as he ever came.

  Kyra had reached for something, tried to do something… and Istvan had forgotten how young the boy was, and that he himself was invincible.

  He swooped low over the house. No Edmund. Boats skimmed through the bay beyond, dragging nets behind them, and he wished them better luck than in the days before. The mountains rose jagged to his left. He tried not to look at them. They hadn’t been so dramatic before the Wizard War. Not like the Alps at all.

  He shivered at the thought. It wasn’t an unpleasant shiver. He realized that he was drifting to that side and course-corrected.

  Don’t think of the Alps.

  He whirled around the Twelfth Hour’s crumbling superstructure – its earthquake-toppled facade, its cracked windows, the rows of stone dancing-girls that lined its upper stories, the wires trailing down towards New Haven – and then shot upwards, towards the mist of thin clouds that veiled the sun. They broke in a shower of bloodied droplets.

  He wheeled in a slow circle, trying to gather his thoughts.

  Edmund was down there, unmistakable. Was Kyra? Was Grace?

  He didn’t think so, but…

  Oh, how was he to explain himself? He hadn’t meant to leave. He hadn’t meant to take so long to come to his senses. He hadn’t meant any of it, and the simple fact that Edmund would likely forgive him and then do his best to forget it only made it worse.

  At least he’d found the man. At least no one else had been hurt.

  He hoped.

  The Twelfth Hour’s doors opened for him, and the crowds cleared away from his presence – as always, his reputation from the Wizard War preceding every good deed he’d done since. Did he look worse than usual? Was he having more trouble maintaining his own facade over what he truly was?

  Edmund wasn’t in the Magister’s office. Neither had he entered the high-security vault, the other most common destination.

  He seemed to be in the basement. What on Earth was in the basement, aside from unsorted archival documents and the Demon’s Chamber…?

  The stairwell circled round and round, cut into dusty stone; Istvan skimmed over it more than stepped down, reflexive dread rising even as he descended.

  “We can try to keep him dosed,” came a voice, “but I’d worry about his health. It’s dangerous to k
eep anyone under longer than you got to. I’d have to run more tests to figure out what Barrio Libertad put into him, and… well, this isn’t really the kind of place that makes caring for someone easy, y’know?”

  Istvan rounded the last spiral.

  And stopped.

  “Istvan,” said Edmund, gone suddenly pale. “I can explain.” He put an arm across the doorframe, cape whirling after it, as though trying to hide the chains and the hellish light beyond. As if that could be hidden. As if either of them had forgotten that place by now.

  Istvan took a step towards him. “You didn’t.”

  “This isn’t permanent.”

  “You bloody didn’t!”

  Edmund flinched. “Istvan–”

  Istvan flared wings that filled the stairwell, not caring as bone scraped through solid rock. “You put him in there, didn’t you?” Mud and worse things splashed across phantom bullet scarring. Gunfire rattled the hall. “You put him in there!”

  Edmund held up his hands. “I didn’t have time to think of anywhere else! I told you, it isn’t–”

  Istvan caught at his lapels, shouting now. “He’s Shattered, Edmund! You should have bloody given him to Barrio Libertad!”

  Edmund tried to draw away, heart racing against Istvan’s grip, terror rolling off of him like overflow from a pot, and Istvan considered reaching into him – grasping that heart as the blood pounded around it – hitching fingers around the other man’s ribcage and snarling at him: This, Edmund, is what those chains felt like. This, but burning!

  Kyra was barely conscious! He slumped before that pillar, held up by nothing but iron, shackled so he couldn’t stand. Couldn’t bring his hands together. Couldn’t turn sideways more than a few inches.

  How could Edmund?

  How could he?

  “Dr Czernin,” said Magister Hahn, “you’re gassing us.”

  Istvan realized that Edmund was coughing, clouds of poison hazing the chamber so thickly it seemed to be underwater. Not real, any of it, but the sight, and the smell…

  He let go of him. He looked to the Magister. “I hope this was your idea.”

  “I didn’t know until the deed was done,” she replied. Her eyes were watering, but she made no move to wipe the tears away. “Mr Templeton did this on his own.”