A spectral apparition shot overhead on rotten vulture’s wings.
Edmund Templeton, perched atop a rusted orange gantry crane some eight or nine stories above sea level, folded up the map he’d been inspecting and tucked it into his black double-breasted suit jacket. Good. The mercenaries must be further inland. If he were them, he would have kept his distance, too.
He glanced over his shoulder at the faint, fog-softened outlines of crumbling towers that rose across the brackish waters of the sound. It was a skyline that should have been familiar – it was New York City, after all, or had been – but the Wizard War had changed that. Now the only constant was the dark spire that loomed over its lesser and ever-changing brethren, auroras crackling from its peak.
It was worse than Boston. He hated being this close.
He climbed back down to the crane’s cabin, holding onto his top hat. The evening wind tore at his opera cape, but he’d just replaced the buttons: it would hold.
His first official assignment since 2013, and it had to take him within thirty miles of New York. He’d lost friends in New York. He’d lost Grace in New York.
He was the Hour Thief, the oldest and one of the most powerful agents of the wizard’s cabal that now tried its hardest to be a government, and he had been put out of commission for almost eight years by New York.
He shook his head, admonishing himself. Not now.
Focus on those mercenaries. Their mysterious employer. The artifact smuggling that the Twelfth Hour had so far failed to keep in check.
Focus on 2020.
The apparition wheeled back into sight. It circled once, streaming contrails of barbed wire, and then alighted on the gantry above him with a booming rush that sounded like distant artillery.
“I’m in the cabin,” Edmund called, unfolding the map again. Less wind down here. He retrieved a thin marker and noted changes to the coastline. There had been a small enclave of survivors here, last he knew, but they seemed to have left in a real hurry some time ago.
And about those gouges on the beach...
A ghost swung down onto the cabin catwalk.
It was a man, bespectacled and broad-shouldered, wearing an army uniform tunic, field cap, and leg wrappings of a style not sported since 1916. Austro-Hungarian. The First World War. A medic’s cross banded one arm. He might have resembled a hawkish clerk, with broad cheekbones and a hooked nose, if the burn scarring that twisted the left side of his face into a ruined mockery of a grin hadn’t countered that impression. Barbed wire coiled at his feet.
Istvan Czernin. Best surgeon in the world, and one of the most dangerous entities the Twelfth Hour had ever captured. He was des Teufels Arzt, the Devil’s Doctor, the legendary apparition who had haunted battlefields across Europe and Asia for decades, leaving a trail of blurred photographs, tight-lipped veterans, unofficial unit insignia, and mysterious gashes in the wreckage of tanks and aircraft.
He’d tried to kill Edmund once, a long time ago. Edmund liked him better as a friend.
“I found the convoy,” the ghost began in a cadenced Hungarian accent more than reminiscent of Dracula. “Four tanks, just as Miss Justice said, and they’re having a terrible time trying to conceal their exhaust.”
Edmund marked “krakens” off the shore. “I believe you.”
“It’s the coal, you know. I don’t know what they do to refine it.” The ghost peered over his shoulder. “Is that a map?”
“Someone has to do it.”
“But the satellites–”
“–aren’t wizards, don’t know what to look for, and I don’t trust their accuracy. Besides, I thought you liked my maps.” He brandished it. “Which road?”
Istvan hesitated. “I liked you making use of your naval cartography,” he said.
“Gee, thanks. Which road?”
“The bridge,” Istvan said, reluctantly. He pointed at the stretch marked across the sound. “They’ve taken the bridge.”
Edmund took a deep breath. This kept getting better. “The bridge.”
He looked back towards the shore, where the latticed bracing of a steel cantilever bridge jutted into the water and stretched impossibly for miles, with no evident endpoint save the distant downtown skyline. Below it bobbed a tangle of floating piers, shipping containers cut apart and bolted to them, and a mess of abandoned rafts and canoes, and likely worse things.
“They are carrying Bernault devices,” Istvan pointed out, “Twenty of them. Edmund, the bridge is the shortest route. With a cargo that dangerous–”
Edmund put the map away. “I know.”
Twenty Bernault devices. Palm-sized spheres that were perfectly safe until jostled too hard, at which point they jostled back in a wildly uncertain radius of radiant destruction. The things had a habit of materializing in the middle of former city centers, where the worst of the fracturing held rein, and if there was a pattern to when and where, no one had found it.
One of the many, many new problems that had come along with the Wizard War.
On August 31, 2012, Mexico City dropped off the map. Torn apart. Sunk beneath a lake that had been drained long ago. Survivors insisted that there had been a monster made of stone, that it had come from below.
The news flashed around the globe. Governments expressed their concern, pledged to send aid, and promised that the matter would soon be resolved. Everyone else worried about the unknown: conspiracy, aliens, ancient curses, cosmic alignments, mass transcendence, the wrath of God.
Seven days later, she struck.
No announcement. No name. No one knew her name. Even the Persians had called her by title. The Arab mystics who defeated her in the Dark Ages had merely appended one of their own.
Shokat Anoushak al-Khalid. Glory Everlasting, the Immortal.
She targeted cities. Only cities. All cities.
2012 was a year of magic revealed after millennia of secrecy. A year that saw every major population center in the world ripped out of normal existence, drowned in the impossible, walled off by impassable spellscars hundreds of miles deep. A year of armies, of mockeries of machines with scything mandibles, twisted beasts of vine and earth and fire, skyscrapers shredded by steel claws and drawn upwards, tornado-like, new spires accreting on new skylines emerging with a roar from solid stone.
Fifteen hundred years of preparation. Long enough that even most wizards had never heard of her. Long enough to utterly divorce her from anything human.
The Wizard War lasted only eleven months.
Sometimes, most often at night, Edmund wondered if she were truly dead.
“Big East” now ran from Boston to Washington DC, a gaping wound in reality populated by structures and inhabitants torn from a thousand elsewheres and elsewhens, a crumbling patchwork of survivors’ enclaves and petty fiefdoms surrounded by broad swathes of anarchy and ruin. It wasn’t the only fracture – Greater Great Lakes and Fracture Atlanta were the nearest two others – but it was the only one clear of monsters. It counted among its many battlefields the former city of Providence, where Shokat Anoushak fell.
No one went to Providence.
Edmund had never thought of leaving. Not once. Home was here, and the Twelfth Hour was here, and the survivors who poured into the remote areas of the continent wanted nothing to do with wizards. She had been one, after all, however far removed from the knowledge and practice of her modern-day descendants.
He could still wish for an assignment further inland.
“You know, I could see to the mercenaries,” offered Istvan. He plucked at his bandolier, turning his head to hide the worst of the scarring as he did. “I’m sure that’s why I was permitted to come along; you don’t have to go out there.”
Edmund shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’m certain. I appreciate the offer, but I’m the Hour Thief, remember? I have a reputation to consider.”
He tried a smile. It fit into place like a well-used shoe.
Istvan regarded him a moment. He was impossible to fool – Edmund knew that – but they both had a job to do and Edmund was stubborn.
Finally, the ghost sighed and looked away. “They’re some miles out, still,” he said. “I’ll show you to them. Do mind the wind, won’t you?”
Edmund nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
He ran through his habitual checks. Shoes tied. Tie straightened. Cape properly fastened, buttoned to his suit jacket so it would tear off rather than choke him if something caught it. His Twelfth Hour pin, two crescent moons together forming a clock face marking midnight, shone at his lapel: as close to a police badge as it came in Big East.
Istvan had never understood why he added the cape to his ensemble, much less the aviator goggles or the fingerless gloves, but at least the other man could appreciate the conceit for what it was: an effort to disguise the truth as something more palatable. Mystery men were heroes, no matter their methods.
Magic didn’t care for morality. Magic demanded, and if disrespected it would simply take. Magic, and the ancient immortal wielding it, had destroyed civilization as most knew it in a single night and day.
Edmund had been thirty-five for seventy years.
He retrieved his pocket watch. It was brass, attached to one of his buttons with a sturdy chain, with an embossed hourglass on the front that was starting to wear off again. “Right,” he said. He flipped open the watch. “Lead the way.”
Istvan vaulted over the catwalk railing.
Edmund eyed the bridge. The roadway seemed clear, but with mercenaries around, he wasn’t about to trust a visual inspection. He waited for the sight of vulture’s wings hovering near one of the upper spars.
Then he convinced himself that he was the center of all universes, just as he simultaneously convinced himself that the center was in fact the bridge spar, which would have been a useless mental exercise if he hadn’t made sure some time ago to catch the attention of someone or something (opinions differed) that cared about these things and didn’t like such a disjointed affair as two centers at once. An offering of cartographical calculations, based on a cosmological model proven comprehensively wrong long ago, and–
Edmund snapped his pocket watch shut.
He stood on the spar. The wind tried to yank him into the sea. He grabbed at his hat before it left his head, hastily eyed the next spot along the bridge, and repeated the same mental gymnastics as before, focusing on the smooth metal between his fingers. The flick of the wrist. The snap of hinges.
Again. And again.
That old model was wrong, sure, but compelling – an idea that worked wonders in its own blinkered context, and there was a power in ideas, if you knew how to ask them. If you didn’t mind how sharply-honed they were. If you had the discipline to sincerely believe multiple worrisome and contradictory notions and the stubbornness to not get nihilistic about it.
It helped to have a guarantee from another power that he wouldn’t spatter himself across the heavenly spheres if he slipped up. Teleportation was tricky like that.
Edmund covered what had to have been three miles of bridge in less than thirty seconds.
The structure seemed to be getting larger: broader, or more reinforced. Some parts of it were covered, clad in vast sheets of iron.
A skeletal hand grabbed his boot.
“Down here,” hissed Istvan. Tattered feathers tumbled into the murk below and vanished. The sun was too low, now; the fog getting thicker.
Edmund caught his breath. Great.
He peered over the edge, searching for hand-holds amid the metal latticework, and discovered that Istvan had led him to a ladder. He tucked his pocket watch away and swung himself down.
This section was covered, out of the wind, and he gave thanks for small favors.
He climbed.
The ladder stretched away below him. Iron cladding rose up around him. Red bulbs guttered along rusted beams. The bridge creaked with the wind, more claustrophobic by the minute, saturated with the smells of paint and grease.
He focused on breathing.
It felt like thirty stories to the bottom. It might have been five.
The ladder reverberated with the sound of engines. Headlights flashed below them.
“All right?” asked Istvan from somewhere further down.
Edmund paused where he was, holding tightly to the rungs. “I’m fine. How far away are they?”
Istvan dropped to the roadway. He turned towards the headlights, shaded his eyes, then called back up, “Not far.”
A burst of machine-gun fire ripped through his chest.
“I think they’ve seen us,” he added.
Edmund straightened his hat, only half-deafened. He fingered his pocket watch. Took a breath. Smiled. “Wholly possible,” he said.
Then the Hour Thief let go of the ladder.
Another burst, fired from a weapon he couldn’t see. He twisted out of the way – he couldn’t see the bullets, either, but that didn’t matter – and snapped his pocket watch.
He reappeared next to Istvan.
Plenty of time. Bullets were fast, but they couldn’t cheat causality, couldn’t fit an extra moment between moments, couldn’t rely on the protection of something best left unsaid. Focus, and he could outspeed anything he was aware of, no matter how implausible. Even if something did hit him, it wouldn’t kill him.
Nothing could kill him. Nothing but running out of time.
That was the agreement.
“Thank you for the warning shot,” he called above the dull roar of engines, “but I prefer to negotiate. Give me some time and I’m sure we can work something out.”
No return fire.
Edmund waited. They had to know who he was. Just about everyone in Big East did.
Or used to, anyway.
“The Herald recognizes your right to parlay,” boomed a voice from past the headlights, distorted by some kind of electronic filter. The accent suggested a native language somewhere between Russian and Japanese: nothing Edmund knew, which these days was no surprise. “Keep well-leashed the unquiet spirit you command and make good account of yourself.”Acknowledgment. Agreement. Implicit acceptance of the bargain. What they’d said about Istvan wasn’t strictly true, but that part didn’t matter.
Edmund nodded, relieved. “Thank you,” he said. He dropped his watch into a pocket, stolen moments secured and added to his collection. He hadn’t chosen “Hour Thief” as his moniker for no reason. “I’m glad you see the value in learning the whole score.”
A hatch clanked open.
Istvan neatened his bandolier and the ornamental buttons beneath it, brushing away the last of the bullet holes like they were stains. “Machine-guns,” he sighed.
Edmund squinted at the headlights, trying to make out the machines attached to them. They seemed to have filigree along their sides. Spikes. “Don’t take it too personally.”
“Have they no sense of history?”
“Less than a full dollar.”
Istvan winced. “Must you?”
Edmund realized he was grinning. Gratified at this turn of events. Harboring some genuine hope that his first run in a long time might turn out OK. “Sorry.”
“You’re not sorry.”
“You’re right.”A man clad in a cross between archaic plate armor and nineteenth-century military finery stepped into view, sharply back-lit: the shadow of a long coat, loose pants tucked into armored boots, an exposed breastplate that glittered gold. A scarlet cape fluttered from spiked shoulders. An elaborate crest crowned his helmet, fully enclosed, embossed cheek guards sweeping upwards to meet a visor that flickered with internal lights. A saber hung at his side.
A sharp inhale to Edmund’s left. Istvan. The ghost didn’t breathe anymore, really, but habit was hard to break. The barbed wire at his feet looped bright and bloodied: a sign of eagerness he couldn’t hide and that Edmund wished he didn’t recognize.
This was going to be something, all right.
The man before them was a mercenary of Triskelion. A member of a stranded army from an alternate history, rarely seen but widely feared. Edmund knew that Istvan had never fought one before.
With luck, today wouldn’t be his first chance.
The mercenary thumped a fist on the emblazoned eagle of his breastplate. “I am the Armsmaster,” he boomed in his distorted timbre. “What is it at this late hour that you seek?”Edmund smiled. “We received word that you’re carrying twenty Bernault devices for one of your clients,” he said, keeping his voice carefully even. “Someone called ‘the Cameraman,’ I believe?”
The mercenary stared down at him. “We do not give up names, Hour Thief.”
“I understand.”
An ominous clanking came from beyond the lights. Edmund tried to estimate how many men it would take to handle four tanks. Five to a machine? Four?
Fewer, if they were automated?
He kept talking. “I’m sure you’re aware of the Twelfth Hour’s stance on the sale and export of artifacts from deep fracture zones, particularly Bernault devices, so I won’t remind you.” He tapped his lapel pin. “I’d like to come to a mutual arrangement, if at all possible. This doesn’t have to become a problem.”
Flashes of red. Dark outlines moving through the shadows.
Istvan touched his shoulder, a chill that instantly numbed. “Edmund…”
The world lit up like the sun.
Edmund threw himself sideways, expecting a hail of gunfire any second. He spent a moment to blink away blindness. Couldn’t outrun light. Spots danced before his vision.
A popping burst around him. He spun around –
– and then the area flooded with mist.
He sucked in a lungful of it before he could stop himself. Sputtered. Coughed. Waved an arm in a futile attempt to clear the miasma, trying not to breathe, a familiar and unwanted panic rising in his throat.
Gas. Tear gas.
The light slanted in a swirling haze, shafts and strange shapes. The roadway rang with running feet. The seals of his goggles held, but his lungs burned. Not enough air. Not enough air, and outside there was nothing but water. Water and krakens.
Drowning. Not again.
He staggered away, face buried in a sleeve.
A jagged shape rushed at him. It held a saber in one hand.
Edmund fumbled for his pocket watch.
“Come now,” said a voice like Dracula, “you aren’t finished with me, yet!”
Steel met steel. A trench knife; skeletal fingers; a bloodied sleeve. A death’s-head, grinning, incongruously wearing an antique field cap and glasses. Vague figures stumbled through a stinking haze of bitter mustard and chlorine.
“You know,” said Istvan, mud-spattered and bullet-riddled, “I was once told that a man wielding a knife would always lose out to a man wielding a sword.”
The mercenary hesitated.
Vulture’s wings flared in the mists, vast and rotten, tattered feathers tangled with trailing loops of barbed wire. Istvan shrugged a rustling shrug. “I suppose that only holds if both combatants are men, hm?”
The mercenary bolted.
Edmund scooted away, shaking, as Istvan laughed. Outstretched feathers passed through him. Poison swirled around blood-smeared bone.
He was used to it – used to the sudden cessation of flesh, the smell, the cold, the phantom blast marks and bullet holes that appeared on every nearby surface – but he would never be comfortable with it. Never.
Istvan was the ghost of an event as much as the ghost of a man. A soul torn to pieces and reconstituted by disaster. A member of a class so vanishingly rare that Edmund had heard of only three others: one tied to the Black Death, one to the Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, and the last to the atomic bombing of Japan.
A sundered spirit.
Istvan was tied to the First World War. He was by far the most active, the most combative, and the most far-ranging of his kind, and Edmund was the only survivor of an earlier attempt to capture him in 1941. In a very real way, he was violence.
He couldn’t help himself.
“Istvan,” Edmund tried to say, but his throat wouldn’t work.
He couldn’t breathe.
The horror that was now his closest friend leapt into an oppressive hover that scattered mud and wire all over the roadway. “I’ll deal with this,” he called, “Don’t you worry, Edmund!”
He shot away. The memory of artillery boomed and flashed in his passage.
Something else responded, blowing a hole in one side of the bridge.
The roadway shook.
“Go on,” Istvan shouted, still laughing, “God is on your side, isn’t he? Doesn’t he play national favorites?”
Wind screamed through the gap. Spray. Saltwater.
Edmund fled.
Istvan chased flashes of men through smoke and fire. Stray bullets zinged from the bridge supports. Grenades burst around him: flashes, more gas, a few that exploded with a sharp snap and roar. The mercenaries shouted in a language he didn’t know. The wind tore at his wings. The memory of pain – Edmund’s pain, chemical fire clawing at the wizard’s innards – tingled in his awareness like the afterglow of a fine wine, spiced with a more present, broader terror.
So familiar. So delightful. A meager trickle compared to the old days, but more than enough to make it all worth it. He couldn’t kill anyone – not chained as he was, not without direct order – but the chase...
Oh, the chase!
Triskelion mercenaries. Members of the only real army for a thousand miles. Fierce enough to occupy the spellscars, dangerous even in small numbers, coordinated and disciplined and so very splendid.
He’d hoped this would happen. He hadn’t said anything – but he’d hoped.
It would have been perfect if the mercenaries didn’t keep vanishing.
A shell exploded on one of the overhead spars. Istvan swooped through a jagged hole in the bridge cladding and then back around and up through another blown in the roadway. Torn bolts and lengths of shrapnel pattered through him like ghastly hail.
One of the men ducked the wrong way.
Istvan pounced on him.
The mercenary slapped at his right gauntlet. The air contorted about him, gas coiling into mathematical patterns with a clanging, ripping sound, like a bullet through iron – and then he disappeared.
Gone. Teleported.
“That’s cheating,” Istvan shouted. Edmund cheated, as well, but he was Edmund; he was permitted. No one else Istvan had ever encountered could disappear like that.
Three more men vanished from his awareness. Istvan whirled about.
One of the tanks sat there, squat and square and belching smoke from gilded stacks. Spikes jutted from its sides. Scorch marks marred its barrel. It was the only tank that had fired so far.
The tanks couldn’t teleport, probably.
Istvan darted for it. The Bernault devices were in there, if they were anywhere, and what else had he come for if not to help secure them? How they hadn’t burst already he had no idea – the things were terrifically temperamental – but that didn’t matter.
Edmund would move them, of course. Later. Once Istvan cleared the way for him, and he had recovered.
Poor, dear Edmund.
The hatch of the tank was open. Istvan swung inside –
– and discovered a tangle of wires attached to at least a dozen ominous bundles stuck to the interior walls.
“Oh,” he said, “That’s clever.”
Fire.
Once, in life, he’d survived a near-miss by British artillery. The Boer War. That was where he’d ruined part of his face, his left arm, most of his left side, scorched and partially paralyzed... and that was what had landed him, for the next few years, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ceylon.
Now, of course, explosions mattered less. He couldn’t recall how many times he’d been struck since the Great War, but it was a great many.
It still hurt.
Istvan found himself floating dazedly just outside the bridge. Smoke billowed from the rents in its armored sides. Sunset cast orange blazes across the sky. No hint of the mercenaries – that wonderful well-masked terror – or anything else living.
He traced two fingers across where his dueling scars had been, scorched phalanges against bare bone. A cursory wingbeat revealed that more of his feathers than usual were still missing.
Well-played.
Oh, they would have to do that again.
Istvan wheeled about and made for shore as pieces of tank and pieces of roadway fell, burning, into the sea.
He found Edmund back at the gantry crane. Hat off. Goggles off. Sitting down, back to the cabin, staring less at and more in the general direction of the bridge. The terrors still lingered but he wasn’t breathing too hard, which was a good sign.
Istvan had been forty-four on his last day of life and looked older, scarred and weather-beaten. Edmund, on the other hand, boasted an elegance almost feline in quality, dark-haired and dark-eyed, his narrow face framed by a trim goatee and sideburns. He looked every bit the thirty-five he insisted he still was... save for the near-permanent weariness of his expression, and the gathered shadows under his eyes.
He smelled powerfully of tear gas.
Istvan alighted beside him, folding wings that evaporated into wisps of wire and chlorine. “Edmund,” he said, breathlessly, “it’s quite all right now.”
The reply was flat. “They’re all gone, aren’t they?”
“They are. Teleported, of all things. I didn’t know they could do that – I think this is only the third time in a hundred years I’ve encountered an enemy who can do that. It’s so rare.” He sighed, savoring what he knew he oughtn’t. “Don’t they say you always remember your first?”
“Something like that.”
“You know, I don’t think they had the Bernault devices,” Istvan continued, dropping down companionably beside him, “The entire bridge would have burst, if they had. Did you know that they wired one of their tanks? I think they were expecting us.”
Edmund stared down at the barbed wire twining around one of his shins. “Great.”
“Where do you suppose they learned to teleport?”
“Why don’t you ask one of them?”
Istvan paused. “Edmund, they’ve all gone.”
Edmund sighed. Then he sneezed.
Istvan patted his shoulder. Tear gas was nothing, really. It didn’t destroy vision or burn flesh or drown victims in their own bodily fluids or anything of that nature, after all. The poor man would be perfectly fine.
“What did it look like?” Edmund asked once he’d stopped coughing.
“What, the teleport?”
“Yes.”
Istvan considered. “Lines in the smoke,” he said. “And a sort of clanging. A rush, like a train. Do you know it?”
The wizard shook his head. “You’re sure the devices aren’t there?”
“If they were, they would have burst by now.” Istvan glanced at the horizon, which hadn’t gone up in a blue-white conflagration, and then shrugged. “I truly don’t think they had the devices with them in the first place.”
“Go make sure.”
Istvan nodded. He swung himself up onto the catwalk rail. “Edmund?”
“Yes?”
“The Magister isn’t going to be happy about this, is she?”
Edmund retrieved his pocket watch. “Not at all.”