by Paige Orwin
“Mm,” said Edmund.
Mercedes walked further along the edge, commenting on bedraggled landscaping and the sorry state of the power lines overhead. They had already toured the road Edmund had taken to get here and the edges of the encampment still occupied by Kasimir’s forces, a sullen crew who acted like Edmund and Mercedes weren’t there as they prepared to return to Triskelion. The camp had clearly been intended to support a much larger contingent than worked there now: it was made of materials more permanent than canvas, took up most of the central island, and ran along the reservoir’s edge to the west. There were even fields slashed and burned into the surrounding forest.
Lord Kasimir, it was very clear, hadn’t been interested in the city or the falls themselves. He’d come for the dams. There were four of them, which Edmund wasn’t sure had been the case before the Wizard War or not, and they were enormous. They also hadn’t been fully repaired, were running well below capacity, didn’t have much in the way of amenities, and were frighteningly close to Lake Ontario and the monster-filled Greater Great Lakes fracture zone, which probably explained why Kasimir was willing to give them up in the first place.
Edmund should have known. Couldn’t trust despots to do anything but look out for their own interest. Too bad it had stopped being his decision the second Istvan showed up in his room, snooping in his ledger, getting bullet holes all over everything. Let’s be mercenaries, Edmund. Let’s solve this the violent way.
Edmund hadn’t stayed for the parade. If Istvan had, good for him. Edmund didn’t want any parades in his honor, thanks. Not now, not ever.
Mercedes turned from the river and headed for a squat building atop the center of the dam that they hadn’t toured yet. “Niagara Falls,” she repeated. “Niagara Falls. Mr Templeton, this is much further away than you had planned.”
Edmund followed her. “It is.”
“But,” she continued, “that might not be an obstacle.”
She still hadn’t asked how he’d gotten this place. She’d talk about plans for it, but not how he’d gotten it. She hadn’t said a word when they’d checked out Kasimir’s camp.
“Oh?” he asked.
She ran a thumb over the stump of her ring finger. “When you go to meet with the Barrio Libertad People’s Council, stress that this is a secure facility. It’s well away from any population centers. It’s surrounded on almost all sides by spellscars, in a stable ‘island’ between the effects of Big East and the Greater Great Lakes. If anyone intends to escape, they’ll have to cross at least five hundred miles of impossible terrain.” She glanced over her shoulder. “That’s security, Mr Templeton.”
Of course he was meeting with the People’s Council. Of course. “Right.”
“We’ll need somewhere to place a vault portal,” mused Mercedes. “To close the distance.”
He nodded. “Right.” Then he realized what she’d just said. “Wait. The vault? We can’t make another seal for the vault.”
“We also can’t rely on you and your teleportation for everything.”
Edmund shook his head. The seal on the Twelfth Hour’s high security vault was a masterpiece of mixed craftsmanship; nothing less would satisfy the dead corridors of the beast slumbering behind it. “Where are we going to find whalebone, Mercedes?”
“You aren’t,” she replied. “You focus on getting this place running and on the Conduit, once you get him back.”
She reached for the metal handle of a mostly intact glass door. Edmund stepped over and pulled it open for her. “So I’m not keeping an eye on Barrio Libertad, then?”
Mercedes smiled an acid smile. “We can do better than that.”
They walked into a museum. A ticket-taker’s booth sat to the left of the entrance. A hanging sign welcomed them to the “History of Niagara Falls.” Photographs of dams large and small graced the walls, together with portraits of prominent dam-builders – including a family of beavers. A scale model of one of the Niagara dams sat on a broad, low table, surrounded by explanatory plaques. One of them stated that construction had been completed in 2016, well after the Wizard War had left the area in shambles. There was even a gift shop.
“Headquarters?” Mercedes asked dryly.
Edmund spotted a restroom sign and wondered if they had working plumbing. He’d gladly set up in a gift shop if it meant having access to working plumbing. “Maybe.”
She clasped her hands behind her back and strolled over to inspect the plaques.
“Excuse me a moment,” Edmund said. He edged around the table and a display of Niagara Falls keychains. He stuck his head around the corner, located the men’s room, and pushed open the door so he could flip on the light. The light worked. He tried turning the tap on the sink.
The water flowed.
He’d done mercenary work for a warlord. He’d inflicted the ghost of the Great War on a group of people he knew nothing about, for a cause he knew nothing about, for no better reason than making up for his own poor attempts at administration. He’d taken time from dying men and women, mutilated for that very purpose. He’d left early so he wouldn’t have to face the suicides.
Now he’d have running water.
He shut it off.
“Mercedes,” he said, returning to the museum proper, “I don’t know if you were ever planning to ask where this place came from, but I can tell you right now that I don’t know when or if Istvan is going to be back.”
The Magister stood behind the gift shop counter. She had somehow jimmied the cash register open, and was inspecting bills with faces on them that Edmund didn’t recognize. “Isn’t that interesting,” she said.
“I won’t have to patrol again for over a year.”
“Look at this – they elected someone else Prime Minister the year the robots came.”
Edmund sighed. Silence it was. “Robots, Mercedes?”
“I hope he did better than ours did.” She pocketed the bill. “Now, Mr Templeton, ask yourself this: if you aren’t going to be keeping an eye on Barrio Libertad, what do you think you might be doing here?”
“Fixing the place,” he replied.
“And?”
“Keeping an eye on the kid.”
“And?”
“Mercedes, I am not teaching my teleport. That’s not on the table.”
She shut the cash register and walked out from behind the counter. “You aren’t thinking big enough. What does the Twelfth Hour still hold over Barrio Libertad, Mr Templeton? What do we still do better?”
“Aside from magic,” he began–
He stopped.
Not just magic. Anything strange. Anything that no one else knew how to handle. Istvan might be a sort of magical being, but he was more like a mobile disaster. The Tyger fell in the same camp. And the kid, the Conduit…
“You want me to collect them,” he said. He looked around the museum. It wasn’t nearly big enough. Hydroelectric dams weren’t known for their spacious accommodations. “The kid’s only the first, isn’t he?”
“Security,” she said. “We can offer security. Niagara will be a safe place, Mr Templeton, for everyone.”
“I’m not a jailer.”
“I never said you were. Besides, we’ve needed somewhere to train new wizards for some time.”
Edmund stared at her. You didn’t just “train” new wizards. Magic was a deadly dangerous, corrosive, mind-breaking thing. People turned to it because they were either stupid or desperate, and there was precious little in-between. There was plenty of literature, sure. Plenty of theory, sure. But actually learning something? Actually doing something that would draw attention – Conceptual or otherwise – and surviving the results?
You weren’t a wizard until you regretted it. Anyone who claimed to be taking an apprentice was assumed to be up to something.
Edmund himself had never had any kind of teacher. He’d stumbled across something he shouldn’t have, and they’d told him he could either keep his mouth shut for the rest of his life (whic
h, they hinted, might be short) or go with them, and help them put away the real bad guys, and keep his mouth shut for the rest of his life (which might be longer). He’d chosen the latter. Most of the Twelfth Hour’s membership, even in those days, had been supporting staff and co-conspirators rather than actual wizards. You had to be a special kind of depraved to be a wizard.
And then… then he’d stolen that book, and he could never go back.
He drew a steadying breath. “Mercedes, I’m not overseeing anywhere that we send people to die.”
She searched his face. She had to look up a fair distance. “The old way of doing things isn’t the only way,” she said.
“I know that it isn’t the only way. There are plenty of other ways. I’ve read all about them and they’re all just as – if not more – dangerous. You can’t produce wizards on an assembly line, Mercedes. You can’t open those books to anyone who wants to give it a shot. Do you know what happened to the Innumerable Citadel? They tried opening a college, and to this day no one knows where it went.”
“I’ll be choosing candidates,” said Mercedes. “We won’t be taking just anyone. We won’t be promoting it to the public at all. There are far more cults than ever before, Mr Templeton – and anyone that comes to you will already be broken.”
Edmund clenched his teeth. “We can’t do that.”
“We can’t rehabilitate people? We can’t teach the lost and angry to do good?”
That wasn’t what it was. He couldn’t do that. He wasn’t a role model. He’d let Istvan drag him into a war and hack people almost to death so he could steal what was left of their lifespans. All he could do was tell people what not to do, even as he did it himself, even as he kept doing it forever.
He was a hypocrite. An unkillable hypocrite.
Maybe that was why Mercedes was putting him in charge of the world’s first-ever prison for the exceptionally strange and dangerous.
“I’m glad you understand,” she said. She flicked a pinwheel with a turbine design stenciled across its wings. “I’d like to check the generator room. After that, I’d suggest you prepare for your visit to Barrio Libertad. They’ll be expecting you – and Dr Czernin, if he’s available – tomorrow morning.”
“He won’t be,” said Edmund.
Mercedes started towards the back of the building. “It’s interesting to think,” she said, “the flow of water over the falls is completely controlled by these dams. You could shut off one of the most spectacular sights in the world any time you liked.”
Edmund shoved his hands in his pockets.
* * *
The parade began at Kasimir’s drab fortress and wound down through the worker’s barracks and the factories and the sharp fences that kept anyone from escaping either of them. It was grey and sooty, the sides of the road packed with gaunt crowds celebrating a brief respite from labor, but the greater part of Triskelion’s splendor was concentrated in its armor and its weaponry – and now everything that could be spared from the siege was on brilliant display.
A band preceded the grinding treads of burnished tanks. High-ranking warriors led captured prisoners on ropes. Enemy flags burned overhead, run up just for the occasion and coated in some odd substance that ensured they would smolder most of the night. It created a merry crackling sort of light that was most agreeable.
Istvan rode part of the route atop Lucy’s tank, now festooned with empty helmets, and when he grew bored of that, he leapt skyward to show off some proper aerobatics, flitting through the beams of spotlights that struggled to track his passage. When Kasimir’s spokesman asked him to cut apart a captured piece of artillery for the crowd’s benefit, he chopped off part of the man’s helmet crest and laughed. He was War! He was the Great War! He was attrition’s revelry, death and carrion, battle waged in open graves from peak to field to tundra!
They couldn’t do anything to him. No one could.
After the parade was over, Kasimir invited him to his hall for a feast, and… well, Istvan couldn’t say no to that, now could he?
A roasted creature of some unknown persuasion served as the centerpiece. Favored warriors sat on cushions along either side of a long, low table cast of concrete, helmets removed. They were uniformly dark-haired, their skin smooth and pale. None of them seemed to have ever spent much time exposed to the elements. Kasimir himself sat at the table’s head. He kept his helmet on. Perhaps he had eaten earlier, or planned to eat later, or there was a cleverly-disguised straw somewhere.
Istvan was ushered to sit at the warlord’s right – opposite his ever-present spokesman – and when he asked for Lucy, she was brought in as well, and placed beside him. The feast began with a speech, as all good feasts do, and then those in attendance started delicately upon their meal with a sort of long fork.
Kasimir boasted, through his spokesman: he would now have unquestioned control over the passes. He could raid into both Big East and the refugee-choked regions beyond with impunity. He could carve out greater and greater stretches of the spellscars, burning everything living to bare rock and then setting off Bernault devices to quiet the earth once and for all. In his wisdom, he had stockpiled enough of the strange, near-nuclear-level artifacts to rid an entire kingdom of Shokat Anoushak’s taint.
Istvan asked why he hadn’t used the devices during the siege… but of course Kasimir wanted the place intact. There had been rather an odd blue-white glow in the lower levels, come to think of it. Bernault devices glowed that same blue.
Ah, well. Edmund had left long before that. If Edmund didn’t care, there was probably nothing for Istvan to worry about.
Kasimir repeated a great deal how impressed he was with Istvan’s service, how honored he would be to have such an ally in future battles, and Istvan told him that of course he would be. Who wouldn’t?
Lucy stayed close to him all night, listening as the fires burned down.
The feast was over when the last of the guests had excused themselves, one by one, and Kasimir retired to (presumably) his own repast, leaving a great deal of the food still on the table. Istvan wished everything he tried didn’t taste like ash. He tried picking up one of the long forks; it had only two tines, and felt more like a rapier than any utensil he had ever used.
“You will stay, then?” Lucy asked.
“Oh, I can’t,” Istvan said. He managed to pick up the fork somewhat, but could only manage a few inches before it tumbled through his hand again. He had never been able to handle anything like a rapier.
Lucy prodded at the last of the beast on her plate. “The wizards do not laud you as we do, Devil’s Doctor.”
“Well, they can hardly afford to do that.” He vaguely remembered a crowd, along the route; men and women not granted splendid armor, who seemed malnourished. The Twelfth Hour didn’t have nearly so many laborers, certainly. “Besides, Edmund will be expecting me back, you know.”
Lucy leaned towards him. “Was it not they who entrapped you? Was it not they who commanded you like a slave? You should head a mighty kingdom, not answer to the whims of those who abused you so. Even our mighty Lord–”
“Yes?”
Lucy looked around, furtively. “We must retire,” she said.
Istvan nodded. He put the fork down. Oh, he had to remind Edmund that the man had missed his own party – and wasted a good meal, besides. It was a shame that he had left so early. Istvan had hoped to tour Niagara with him, afterwards. It would have been a fine capstone to the campaign.
Lucy led him out of the fortress and onto the parade ground, littered with cinders and scorch marks. Her tank was there, parked where it had been left after its role in the parade was over; she waved him towards it and bade him climb inside. Surely they weren’t going to ride all the way back?
“Thank you,” he said as he seated himself back in the commander’s chair, “but you know that I can fly back to–”
Lucy swung in beside him with a clang. “You are war,” she hissed.
Istvan blinked at her
. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. The Great War. Yes.”
“You are invincible,” she said.
He thought of Kyra and the storm. “Well, yes, but–”
“Lord Kasimir fears you, Devil’s Doctor, just as the wizards do. He has seen what you are and he knows that he – mighty as he might be – is only a man. But you!”
She dropped to a knee. There wasn’t much room in the tank, but she managed. Why she was telling him the obvious was another matter. Istvan leaned away from her. “Er–”
“You have proven yourself this day, free of chains and contracts,” she continued. “The face you bear is a mask over your true being. You are an ending spirit, Devil’s Doctor, the first we have found in this world. Whether Lord Kasimir wills it or not, it is your right and duty to claim dominion over all warriors, living and dead. Their voices granted you wisdom. Their sacrifice granted you power. You are War, and nothing and no one shall stand above you.”
Istvan sat there a moment. An ending spirit? An avatar, who ought to bear the authority to match? A mask over something almost divine, channeled through the shell of a mortal man long dead… was that really what he was? He’d never thought of the memories as wisdom, before.
Istvan peered through one of the gun ports at the charred parade ground. “You’re suggesting that I ought to conquer everyone, then?”
“If it pleases you,” Lucy replied.
He wasn’t sure that it would; it seemed a great deal of trouble. People didn’t like to be conquered. “How do you know all of this?”
She closed a fist over her chest. “I am Banner-Bearer. I carry the standard, the stories, the founding. Lord Kasimir would have you as ally, true – but he has grown bold in this place, and forgotten his obligations. He boasts before you. He grants you your titles, and little else. It is the task of those who remember to set things right.”
