Immortal Architects

by Paige Orwin

  A trail of unlit candles across a field of mud confirmed the presence of… someone. Dusty light filtered in from above, dim but manageable. Flickerings of green lightning sparked across the opposite eye socket. Crude attempts at wards were carved into the softer materials: concrete, plastic, wood. None looked functional; true protective wards were never there when you were looking for them.

  Edmund stepped softly, keeping to the shadows as best he could, and tried not to think about being inside a giant skull. The edges of it merged smoothly with the earth, sunk through rock as though it were water.

  The candles led to the start of artificial vertebrae, a ridged passage considerably darker than he would have liked. Still no sign of anyone.

  It was the middle of the day. What were the chances of anyone actually being here in the middle of the day? What kind of cult would meet at noon?

  He got out his phone and forged ahead anyway. Maybe he’d run across a straggler or two. Special meeting. Cults were usually just groups of desperate people hoping to salvage some measure of power from the one who’d brought the world down. They weren’t known for tactics.

  His heart sank as he reached what had to be headquarters.

  Empty.

  Nothing but a few benches, more attempts at warding, salvaged bits and pieces from at least one mockery laid reverently on a cloth, and an end table holding two hammers and a chisel. A block of concrete stood in the center, tipped so it was taller than it was broad, with vague attempts at carving gouged into it.

  Edmund circled it. If they had been trying to make a statue, they either hadn’t been trying very hard or they had just started.

  No one around to ask.

  He took a measured breath. He could almost feel moments slipping away.

  Maybe he should try closer to the spellscars: at least there he would probably find something, and the something would be likely to attack him, and it might even be a creature capable of giving unwitting consent to his thievery.

  Or it might be a manhole cover, like last time. Istvan had asked if he’d run afoul of a bear trap and he’d said yes.

  Edmund shook his head. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

  He really wasn’t.

  Really.

  He started back up the passage, hoping that he’d run into someone on the way out.

  * * *

  “The present circumstances are regrettable,” boomed Lucy, “but I am certain that his most gracious Lord Kasimir would be pleased to assume the burden of this most powerful of Conduits.” She spread her arms over the picnic table, armor flashing in the afternoon sun. “Never let it be said that my lord shirks from danger.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Edmund.

  “Failing that, I still think we should contact Barrio Libertad,” said Roberts, taking up the rest of the bench beside her. No Istvan: Edmund had asked Roberts to go see if the ghost wanted to attend, and Roberts had come back alone. “If that boy really is Shattered, that’s their field. They have a dedicated mental reprogramming ward. Lucy’s been through it – she can vouch for them.”

  “It is a most expeditious facility,” agreed Lucy.

  Edmund shook his head. Mental deprogramming could just as easily spin into mental programming, and while he was stuck with Lucy for the time being, at least she couldn’t level towns on her own. “I don’t think the Magister would agree to that. Istvan will have to do what he can.”

  “With all due respect,” said Roberts, “Dr Czernin isn’t a psychologist.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I know he works with you, but–”

  Edmund clasped his hands on the table, pointedly. “Let’s not turn this into a personal discussion.”

  Bad days happened. He was fine.

  He eyed the crowd milling along the road to the Twelfth Hour, but they didn’t seem inclined to enter the courtyard. The Yale campus was common ground now, its greens tilled and planted, and while harvest might have made a fine excuse for an interruption, the blue-striped, bear-sized big cat crouched some twenty feet from the table on a sheen of frozen cobbles did much to dissuade any attempt.

  Citizens’ revolt, Mercedes had said. What were they using as leverage?

  Janet Justice pushed over a notebook. “I went through that box of yours before I had it dropped off,” she said. Her tone of voice was carefully neutral, to the point of flatness. “Collated what seems like our best bets for the site.”

  Edmund took the notebook, hoping it would detail “best bets” with the kid in the picture so that he wouldn’t have to ask her about it. He didn’t want to ask Janet much of anything right now.

  No such luck.

  She kept watching him. If she had a personal opinion on the mess – which he was sure she did – she’d kept it to herself the entire meeting.

  He pretended to study the notebook. “The kid?” he asked.

  “The kid makes it a little harder.” She shrugged. Her earrings jangled. “To be honest, Mr Templeton, I’d say it’s looking like either Barrio Libertad or taking Kasimir up on that offer. We could use some tracts of land right about now.”

  Edmund smiled, blandly. “Mercedes doesn’t want anything to do with Barrio Libertad.”

  Janet smiled back. “She doesn’t, or you don’t?”

  “She told me–”

  “I know what she told you. We’ve got that stairwell monitored.”

  “Templeton,” rasped a voice.

  Thank goodness.

  Edmund turned, trying to conceal his relief at the interruption. A roughly man-sized lizard in a purple parka leaned on a cane several paces distant from the Tyger. “Vasquez. Glad you could join us.”

  A tongue flickered. “Went around. Didn’t want to ruin the protest.”

  “All the same.”

  Vasquez pointed at the Tyger, who was typing again. One letter at a time. “We had some questions about the boy.”

  The Tyger turned his screen around, blocky green letters on black. A cursor blinked at the end.

  is he the only one

  Edmund let out a breath. There were some things he didn’t want to think too much about, and that was one of them. He’d have been able to get away with that before Mercedes decided to give him a title.

  “Director” Templeton had to consider all the angles.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but if he isn’t we’ll have to be ready to take in others like him. Stop them first, if we have to.”

  what of the mockery

  “What mockery?”

  The Tyger bared his canines, tapping laboriously at the keyboard. Ice cracked beneath his paws.

  the one you killed.

  Vasquez bobbed her head. “We were thinking: there were cults before the Shattered came along, but they never managed to bring a mockery back to life. They never had any powers. What if the old cults are taking advantage? What if they can piece together Shokat Anoushak’s magic from different people?”

  Edmund swallowed. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  The Tyger had been part of Shokat Anoushak’s forces, and while no one was sure what Vasquez was, she’d taken a liking to him for understandable reasons. They were both freaks. Both monsters. If there were established cults looking to replicate Shokat Anoushak’s feats in full, the Twelfth Hour might soon find itself encountering more than bootleg mockeries and strays from the spellscars.

  It wasn’t a surprising train of thought, all considered.

  Edmund brushed at his upper arm, mostly healed, where the Tyger’s over-sized canines had affixed themselves some two months past.

  Using the Shattered to duplicate Shokat Anoushak’s magic? Could they really piece together enough of the old rituals from the ramblings of the Susurration’s last victims to make it all work? If it didn’t stop with mockeries, then what?

  Shokat Anoushak had done more than make monsters…

  trying to cover all the angles, typed the Tyger.

  “I’ll… keep that i
n mind,” said Edmund. He looked down at the notebook Janet had passed him. Sell out to Barrio Libertad or sign on with a warlord. Not choices he liked. There had to be a third option.

  He wished Istvan had come.

  “Let’s meet back up on Tuesday,” he said.

  Roberts put his elbow on the table. “I thought we were on a timetable.”

  “We are. Janet, make an offer to the Magnolia Group. Explain the situation. Maybe they can come up with something. Vasquez, William, go ahead and look into somewhere further afield.”

  “You’re expecting Dr Czernin to stay down there for a week while we do research?” asked Roberts, not moving his elbow out of the way.

  Edmund closed the notebook more sharply than he intended. “No one’s making him stay.”

  “Kyra is.”

  “It’s still Istvan’s choice. You and Lucy do whatever he says.”

  Lucy held up a mailed fist. “The offer from Lord Kasimir yet stands.”

  Edmund stood. “I know. We’ll decide Tuesday.”

  Janet took the notebook back. “What about you?”

  He sighed. That was the kicker, wasn’t it?

  “I’ll be paying a visit to Barrio Libertad,” he said.

  Their little group split up, each going their separate ways. Roberts to the Twelfth Hour infirmary. Janet back home (she had a sick husband to attend to, she explained). The Tyger and Vasquez to… wherever the Tyger kept himself. Maybe the Twelfth Hour’s holding cells, still. Edmund hadn’t asked.

  Lucy made a beeline for the crowd milling on the road, drawing her saber.

  Edmund stepped before her. “Let them be.”

  She cocked her helmet down at him. Behind that visor, grids of flashing scarlet played across the faint shadow of eyes. “The Twelfth Hour tolerates this rabble?”

  “Mercedes is dealing with it. If you want to help, you need permission from her.”

  A slam: gauntlet against breastplate. “Understood.”

  Edmund watched as the Triskelion warrior-woman marched off without another word. He’d seen her out of that armor, before her treatment, still under thrall, smiling and laughing and making small talk in French. He was glad she wore the helmet, now. Made it easier not to remember.

  A piece of paper blew against his pant leg, lost from somewhere in the crowd. He leaned over to pick it up.

  A brochure.

  “On Wizards:” it said, “The Concentration and Misapplication of Power After the End of the World.” The heading repeated itself in Spanish.

  He flipped it over. The rounded sigil of Barrio Libertad marked the back.

  Great.

  * * *

  They would want him back at the fortress. Istvan knew that.

  He put the final touches on an embroidered convoy, dust-coated, smoke rising from its passage. The outlining was finished; the border finished; the larger details finished. The work spilled over his knees, all the colors he himself couldn’t possess.

  Every day he stayed in this chamber was a day he wasn’t doing his duty.

  He didn’t even know what day it was, anymore.

  Kyra slept beside him. Istvan checked his vitals each time he finished another part of the scene. He kept an eye on the IVs: the tubing, the needles, the fluid levels. Every so often he adjusted the boy’s position – what little he could – in an effort to combat chafing at his wrists and knees. He took wastes and set them outside the door. If it seemed as though the boy might wake, Istvan put him under again.

  Injections. Altered dosages. Tweaks to one set of nerves or another.

  Kyra was terribly thin, gaunt in the eerie light. He didn’t deserve this.

  Only fifteen.

  Istvan finished the smoke and the wheels and the figures walking alongside their vehicles, distant caricatures of men – and women – in spiked armor. He was almost out of grey thread.

  The stone pressed in around him. Twelve blocks to the door. Four major rounds of salt lines, sixteen smaller circles-within-circles, one sigil that resembled a face, another a flower. Fire-lit steam rising from the shackles, each link of each chain bearing Arabic script he could write from memory but still couldn’t decipher.

  He couldn’t hear the beeping of the machine anymore unless he listened for it. At times Kyra breathed so shallowly Istvan had to check to be sure he still was.

  Above rambled the Twelfth Hour. Minor annoyances and gnawing fears, faint pains from the infirmary, losses of all varieties, envy of the wizards’ comfort, anger at a cruel world or a traitorous friend or one’s own failings… all of it, the lives of everyone who passed through its doors, trickled down through the rock.

  More variety usually meant it was day. Less, night. Sometimes Istvan could trace specific emergencies from one side of the building to the other, different worries rising and falling as the situation changed.

  He was out of grey thread. He substituted blue.

  Roberts came by to ask how the boy was doing; Istvan asked for more saline. Kyra’s chances of emerging from the sleep unscathed dropped by the day.

  Istvan was doing fine. Tell Barrio Libertad that he would be unavailable until further notice. Tell them he was making a foolish point. Tell them he was holding grudges. Tell them it was Edmund’s fault.

  The infirmary staff – Roberts, Parker, Mendoza, Dr Orlean, the three roving emergency teams and Lucy, assistants and volunteers that came and went as the situation merited – flowed in and out like a tide. The Magister remained in her office, except when she disappeared. Edmund came through the building intermittently, less and less often. Sometimes to wander the shelves. Sometimes to visit the Magister. Sometimes to approach the basement stairwell, and hesitate, and pace in circles, and depart.

  All others remained jumbled together, coming and going, groups migrating from one space to another, growing closer or more distant as they travelled up or down stairways, bearing stories in their worries and pains he could only guess at. No faces, no names.

  Istvan speculated. Perhaps that large gathering was from the Magnolia Group. Perhaps that odd one wasn’t human. Perhaps that particularly angry person was here to ask about Dr Czernin, and where he was, and why he wasn’t doing what he’d promised.

  It was like tracking shadows by where the sun’s heat didn’t reach.

  For twenty years he had done almost nothing else.

  Edmund’s fault.

  It was Edmund who had helped to chain him in the first place. If Istvan hadn’t recognized him – a face, just the same, from sixty years earlier – the attempt would never have worked. Other wizards had tried before, and none of them had survived to try a second time… except one.

  Istvan had told himself it was only the shock of such an impossible reunion that let them take advantage. He had been certain that, if the opportunity presented itself, he would be more than willing to combat his seemingly ageless foe once again. Perhaps even finally kill him.

  Now he knew that he would never be able to do that.

  Edmund would simply continue to do as Edmund had always done, remaining blissfully ignorant of the absurd notion that a World War had come to love him beyond all reason or righteousness and would do anything for him – anything – to the point of sparing him the embarrassment of knowing anything of the sort for the last thirty years.

  He didn’t know what had driven Istvan towards the mistakes that had made him what he was, made him into that terrible scourge that deserved capture and imprisonment. He didn’t know about the happiest years of Istvan’s life, when he was still flesh and blood. He didn’t know about his own similarity to a man long-dead, that he and Pietro would have gotten on famously, that Istvan had married under terrible pressure and never had children for a reason.

  It was best for everyone that he never know. Even when the Susurration sought to use Pietro’s memory as a weapon, Istvan had never explained a word – and Edmund had never asked about the brief lapse since. Not once. Not ever.

  Instead, he had returned the favor
by locking a second prisoner in the same chains that had once held his best friend.

  His best friend.

  Istvan finished the scene he had set out for himself. A mountain pass, under siege. A tapestry just under his own height, an arm’s length wide, every inch bearing as much detail as he could manage. How many hours had gone into it, he had no idea.

  Beside him, Kyra slept.

  He slept, and Istvan wondered: what would happen if he woke him? What was the worst the boy could do? No one had bothered asking him, testing him, giving him any chance to defend himself. Kyra was bound, hand and foot. What would be the harm?

  Aside from to his psyche. To his spirit.

  Istvan wished he could unlock the boy and carry him up the stairs and out the door and away to a serene cottage, perhaps, or a field of flowers, and wake him there. Then Kyra would only have to face a dead man, and the destruction of everything he thought he remembered.

  Istvan asked for another canvas, and more thread.

  Chapter Eleven

  “No,” said Istvan, standing up from the table, “I’m going away. You shall simply have to be by yourself forever.”

  “But we weren’t finished with the game,” said Edmund. He pointed at the chessboard, furnished with pawns and rooks and bishops and plastic battleships and Monopoly cannons. A zeppelin hung from the ceiling. “You were winning.”

  Istvan went for the door. “I don’t care.”

  Edmund chased after him. “Wait! If you leave, who am I supposed to play chess with?”

  “Go find a nice table in a park somewhere and play by yourself,” said the ghost. He put his cap on and peered disdainfully at Edmund over his glasses. “That’s what old men are supposed to do.”

  “I’m thirty-five.”

  “No, you aren’t. You spent all of your time, remember?”

  Istvan produced a mirror and held it up.

  Edmund woke. He clawed for his pillow. He clung to it, halfway under sweat-soaked sheets, staring at the still-dark window and counting each breath until he could stop shaking.

  Then he reached for the bottle of gin on his bedside table and spilled it anyway.