The Interminables (9 page)

Edmund reached for his pocket watch. “You have my number if you need me,” he said.

Mercedes waved a hand at him.

“I'll see you when I see you, I suppose,” rasped Istvan, his accent lapsed back into that Dracula-like cadence he tried so hard to avoid. He tossed a rueful salute. “Enjoy your shower.”

Edmund nodded. “I'm sure I will.”

A snap, and he was home. Beldam regarded him lazily from the couch, not startled at all by his sudden appearance.

“Don't wrinkle your nose at me,” he told her. “It wasn't my fault.”

She sneezed.

Edmund hung up hat, cape, and goggles. They went by the front door, like they always had, and as he turned toward the kitchen he paused. There had been something new outside the front window.

He opened the door.

A white box sat atop a salvaged stool in the yard. Pinned to it was a note.

Inside it, for the second time in three days, was a perfect apple pie.

T
he infirmary was a madhouse
. That was just how Istvan liked it. He'd been working for hours with hardly a pause, through the night and into the morning, a pale dynamo whirling at the heart of a human machine that converted suffering into survival.

Six patients. Six cases of inexplicable frostbite. Twelve broken bones. Eighteen lacerations caused by animal claws. Four lines of puncture wounds caused by animal teeth. One crushed spine. Ten attendants propelled by little more than their sense of duty and near-toxic concentrations of caffeine. Bright lights, blue gloves, shouted orders echoing from pillar to ornate pillar. The meeting hall had once been the place to launch campaigns, but now it was the place that received their bloody harvest.

Habit and expectation remained in full force: his immaterial form was soaked to the elbows in crimson. The intoxicating atmosphere of pain and terror was almost enough to stifle his own worry; to drown it beneath a downpour of good cheer.

Almost.

Edmund was more than capable, he knew that. The man was a survivor. He had lived through a half-century and more of the most dangerous tasks the Twelfth Hour could set for him, and on top of that he was the very same enigma that had driven Istvan to distraction for years. The impossible soldier. The only one that had ever gotten away. Meeting alone with a strange woman – at his insistence, as the second note requested – shouldn't have been worrying. If anything, it should have been a sign of improvement. After a relapse so hellacious the man had all but locked himself in his house for fourteen months and refused to permit anyone living nearby.... well, if he wanted to see someone, so be it.

Edmund was entitled to do as he liked. It was none of Istvan's business.

Istvan stepped back from the woman with the crushed spine. “Careful with her, Torres. I did what I could, but I can't restore feeling in her legs until that bloody frostbite is dealt with. Keep her under sedation as long as you can – if she wakes up, she'll wish she were dead, and I don't want to risk another attempt at resuscitation.”

The nurse nodded once, expression behind her mask an even mixture of drawn and determined. “Dead to the world until further notice, Doctor.”

Gurney and occupant wheeled away. Istvan watched them go. While being a ghost had its benefits – an immaterial touch that negated the need for invasive surgery, no threat of bacterial contamination, the ability to shift blood and bone about with a precision only modified possession could grant – the fact remained that he couldn't support anything so heavy as a human being himself, much less move one. Wounded men had to be treated where they fell. Where shells, all too often, continued to fall.

He took a deep breath. Unnecessary in some ways, vital in others. Edmund would be fine. He could take care of himself.

Roberts stepped to his side. “Doctor, our first case is awake.”

“First today, or first at all?”

“The very first.”

Istvan wiped his hands on a cloth that hadn't been there before, then tossed it aside. It vanished. Oh, he hated frostbite. “Show me.”

A
t least the
poor man had stopped hyperventilating.

“I know what you might have heard, but I'm really not the malevolent sort,” Istvan repeated. He had reined in his more terrifying aspect, but that only helped so much. “Negative, oh, yes, but I've never felt any particular urge to, ah... murder
every
living thing in sight, as you seem to think. I'm as intelligent as yourself and I can very well make decisions as to who my next target may be, thank you.”

The man swallowed. He was still shaking, but that would cease in time.

Istvan patted his hand. Drawing off fear was a procedure rather like sucking venom from a wound – if venom were in fact wine – and the simple weakening of that particular emotion could work wonders. “Now, then, what was your name?”

“R- Ross.” The man took a deep breath, staring over Istvan's shoulder at where Roberts waited. Solid, ordinary, living Roberts, parked like a kindly brick wall. “Ross Fillmore.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Yes. This is... this is the Twelfth Hour.” He pointed at Roberts. “That's what he told me. He said I was brought in days ago. That I almost died.”

Istvan chuckled. “Oh, hardly. You were in good hands.”

Mr Fillmore peered up at him. He had brown eyes, darker than Edmund's hazel; his pupils were darting pinpoints of disbelief. “You're really a doctor? The… the Devil's Doctor?”

“I'm really the one who stopped two heart attacks while we thawed you out and ensured you didn't lose any of your higher faculties, yes.”

“Oh.” The texture of the man's emotions had shifted; now it was as though he couldn't decide between continued fear or embarrassment, and was doing his best with a whorled blend of both that wasn't at all unpleasant. “Thanks. I guess.” He scrubbed his hands across his face. “Sorry, I don't think my brain's working at a hundred percent right now. Kind of woozy.”

“That's normal,” Roberts pitched in.

Istvan nodded. It was a good thing the nurses had seen fit to assemble a curtained partition around the bed; the overdone opulence of the greater infirmary may have burned out Mr Fillmore's exhausted synapses. Plain cloth was far easier on the eyes than inlaid chrome. “Do you remember what happened to you?” he asked.

Mr Fillmore stared down at the sheets. His skin was still blistered, but healing nicely.

Istvan drew off as much pain as he could. “Do you remember anything?”

“I was walking,” the man finally said. He frowned. “Going home, I think. Near Cheerful Gardens. I'm not a New Haven man; I help maintain the Generator district. Patch pipes, keep an eye on the water collectors, you know. I was... I was passing the gardens, and...” Panic surged; Istvan clasped his hand tighter. “Claws. Out of nowhere. It just… It was a… a bear, or something. Huge and cold and... I think I fell on ice, but...” He shook his head, rubbing shaking fingers across the gashes ripped into his chest. “I don't know. I don't know what it was.”

“A bear?” repeated Istvan. He looked to Roberts.

The nurse shrugged broad shoulders. “I checked with the perimeter and they said something could have gotten through during that dysentery outbreak. We're a long way from the spellscars, but that didn't stop the monsters before.”

Istvan looked back to Mr Fillmore. “Do you remember what the bear looked like? What color was it?”

The man swallowed. “White. All white. With… with blue on.” He hesitated, as though fearing ridicule, then added, “I think it had stripes. Blue stripes.”

Istvan nodded, slowly. “A striped bear. One that freezes flesh by mere proximity.” He didn't remember ever fighting a beast like that, but then again the creatures had come in dizzying variety during the Wizard War and there was no telling what the spellscars might produce next. It was a wonder the perimeter guard hadn't missed more of them over the years. “Tell me, Mr Fillmore, why do you think it–”

The curtain whisked open behind him.

Istvan turned. “Roberts, what are you...”

“Doctor Czernin, I'd like to see you in my office,” said Magister Hahn. She eyed Mr Fillmore. “As soon as you're finished here.”

Istvan exchanged an uncertain glance with Roberts. “Yes, Magister.”

The curtain swung shut.

“That was the wizard president,” said Mr Fillmore.

“Yes,” said Istvan. “Yes, it was.”

L
ucy knew French
, Edmund discovered. She had a passable accent, but more importantly she got all the tenses right and didn't misuse the subjunctive. He knew fourteen languages himself, a course of study part hobby and part necessity (he couldn't take time if the target didn't know what he was asking), but French was a good place to start.

She turned down his offer of a drink for a second time, sat at the same booth as before – his booth, of course, there was no other place he could possibly invite her – and showed off the contours of her dress quite nicely. It was yellow again. Not the same pattern, but yellow. She liked yellow.

Again, he asked where she was from.

Again, she deflected the question. She was good at that. Almost as good as he was.

“What an unusual
boutonniere
,” she said, nodding at the purple flowers on his lapel.

“It's thyme.”

She laughed.

“Your information was good,” he told her, and he meant to bring up something about Istvan's concerns, but this didn't seem like the time. Nothing had happened to his house yet, right? “I can't thank you enough.”

“You're welcome,” she said.

“Would you happen to know anything else? There were twenty-four devices in that shipment, not twenty. Who's behind this? What's the target?”

She looked around, as though she feared she might be followed. As though she feared someone – perhaps invisible – might be listening. “I don't know if I can say.”

“You can say.”

“How do you know?” she asked. “How do you know if it's safe?”

“It's all right,” he replied, and for the first time in a long time it felt like it really was. “You can trust me.”

She smiled, then. Her teeth were perfect. “How,” she asked, “can I trust a man who wears a mask?”

I
stvan stood
, at attention, while Magister Hahn turned a pen between her fingers and stared at him. Through him. Finally, she set her pen on her desk. “Doctor Czernin.”

“Yes, Magister.”

“Has Mr Templeton gone to meet Lucy again?”

He frowned. “Yes, this morning.”

“As I thought.” She stood, pushing away the high-backed chair of her office and stepping around the desk towards one of the bookshelves. She stopped at the skull. She didn't touch it, but she did regard it for some time.

Istvan stayed where he was.

“Doctor Czernin,” the Magister began again, “I want you to keep an eye on him. Follow him, if you have to. If he leaves Twelfth Hour territory, you will accompany him. If at any point it seems as though he's acting contrary to our interests, you will do whatever you must to ensure that our people aren't hurt.”

“Pardon?” Istvan wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't this. Usually he was the one on the chopping block. He peered over the corner of his glasses, not turning his head. “Magister, he wouldn't do that. I don't understand what–”

She turned. “Mr Templeton has been a member of this organization longer than anyone else in our history, and there is a reason for that, Doctor Czernin. He isn't on indefinite probation for nothing. Magister Jackson didn't give up his life for nothing. Mr Templeton is our seniormost wizard precisely because he knows one of the subtlest dark magics that has ever bubbled up from nightmare.” She strode nearer to him, leaving the skull on its shelf. “Yet when Shokat Anoushak returned with her armies and her war, you will note that the Twelfth Hour followed him to near-extinction without protest.”

Istvan's jaw tightened. “Magister, those losses haunt him more than anyone. More than you can imagine.”

“That hardly matters.”

He faced her. He wasn't a giant of a man, but she barely reached his collarbone. “You forget, Magister, I put him back together. I was there, all that year when he wouldn't see anyone else. When he was terrified he would lose everyone else. When he wouldn't leave the house, when I had to prod him to eat or sleep or exercise, to do anything at all that wasn't sitting and staring, when he couldn't stand the dark, jumped at every drop of water, when he was drowning, Magister, every bloody night!” He realized he was shouting. He clasped his hands behind his back again. “I know, if anyone knows, that Edmund would never – never – do anything contrary to you or your people, not unless something was terribly wrong and he were sorely pressed.”

“Qualifiers don't make for a very convincing ‘never,' Doctor.”

He held out his hands, intending to make some point or other, then stopped. He knew Edmund worried. Worried about his influence, his longevity, his sanity, the state of his soul. The man didn't talk about it. He did his level best to never think about it.

Some of those nights he had woken sweat-soaked and shaking. Shouting. Not of his shipmates and not of the battles, but of the enemy they'd faced. The one Edmund had studied so obsessively. The immortal, like him, who had struck the first blow of the Wizard War... and shattered the world. Millions upon millions dead. Not even coastlines running where they had been.

“He wouldn't,” Istvan repeated.

The Magister nodded, not in assent but in confirmation. “Your friend may not be as famously lethal as you are, Doctor, but he is a dangerous man. I can't have him compromised further. Watch him.”

Istvan looked away. He rubbed at his wrists. “Yes, Magister.”

“You are not to tell him of this conversation.”

“I will not.”

“Good.” She returned to her desk, drawing close a stack of papers with odd diagrams drawn upon them. She always seemed to have those about. “You are dismissed, Doctor.”

Istvan took a half-step backwards, preparation to turn about.
Gone to see Lucy
, she had asked. She was so suspicious of the woman's motives as well? Enough to worry that she might turn the Hour Thief himself against them? That was… rather more extreme than Istvan's own misgivings, wasn't it?

If Magister Hahn knew anything more, she wasn't saying. Typical wizard. Not even the rest of the Twelfth Hour knew what she'd done to end the Wizard War at Providence, and it seemed like that was a detail that perhaps ought to be recorded for posterity, if nothing else.

“Magister?” he asked.