The door was circular, half again as tall as he was, made of equal parts wood, steel, and ancient bone. Its lines were arrayed like a cross between a ship’s wheel and a dreamcatcher. Carved sigils marked every spoke and intersection. It sat in one of the original halls, a space long and narrow, filled with warm lamplight and low conversation.
The Magister stood framed before it, the sleeves of her too-large jacket rumpled over crossed arms. The Twelfth Hour’s double crescent and clock glittered at her neck, a symbol repeated no fewer than twelve times on the door. “Next time,” she said, “try to dispense with the dramatic.”
“I do try,” Edmund replied. He pulled the recovered crate on its shock-dampening cart to a careful halt, trying to ignore the offended expressions of passersby. Gassed twice in one week. “I always try.”
“Remarks the man in the cape,” Istvan chuckled beside him. “Oh, Edmund, you’re far more prone to the dramatic than you ever admit, even to your own bloody self.”
Edmund sighed. The ghost had returned to his usual appearance, though faint bloodstains still flickered across his sleeves, and he probably wouldn’t be fully sober for another few hours. He had earlier announced the lack of fatal casualties with a wistful relief bordering on disappointment and hadn’t stopped talking for more than a minute at a stretch since. “If it’s all the same, I’d like to get these devices locked away before we discuss my fashion sense. It wasn’t a flawless operation, I’ll grant, but we did our best.”
“A rallying cry for our age,” Mercedes said dryly. “Sometimes, Mr Templeton, I wonder how you’ve lasted this long.”
He shrugged. “Cowardice.”
“I’m sure.”
She turned. She wasn’t a tall woman and had to reach up a bit to set her palm in a central depression, all but her missing ring finger splayed. The door shuddered. Then it rolled back into the wall, despite the total absence of anywhere for it to go, and halted in place with a stony crash. The hallway was too small for so many echoes.
Beyond lay total darkness.
Edmund reached for the cart’s handle as Istvan started chattering again. No use offering an “after you” to Mercedes; he had very few rights where the high-security vault was concerned. Part of being on indefinite probation. Part of his penance for stealing a book from it, long ago.
He stepped over the threshold.
A moment of nausea. Vertigo. Of being stretched, or perhaps twisted, a sensation of watching eyes and cold water. He couldn’t see or feel it but he held tight to the cart handle he knew he gripped – and then he was through, the world beyond resolving itself like a room that had just stopped spinning. A cave, hollowed out of what appeared to be porous rock, like sandstone or pumice.
It wasn’t.
That the vault had been a prison once was just one of the many facts about it Edmund preferred to not dwell upon; that the walls were bone, hollowed out of a creature something like a toothed whale (if whales grew to the size of continents), was another. No one knew if it was alive, dead, or somewhere in the fuzzy in-between. The details of what exactly had been imprisoned were likewise uncertain. What was important was that it was a dimension all of its own, useful for locking away anything that needed locking away. Magister Jackson had won it in a game of cards in ’34.
Istvan appeared beside him, swimming into view like a heat mirage. Mercedes followed.
The door, showing only the same pitch blackness as before, rolled shut behind them.
Edmund drew his cape closer. He’d worked with the place for decades, but that didn’t make it any better.
Istvan patted a bone spur. “Oh, you strange, enormous horror. I can never tell if you’re in pain or not.” He sank a hand through the surface, drew it out again flayed, and then chuckled to himself. “Edmund, have I ever told you how it–”
“You have.”
“Oh. You know, I could have sworn I–”
“Trust me, you have.”
Mercedes gestured further into the vault’s gaping interior. “Lead on, gentlemen. Unfortunately Thinkable Matters ought to do for now.”
Edmund nodded. Istvan would have been stronger than him in life but a ghost couldn’t pull a cart and Mercedes was the Magister, a woman, and only there to keep an eye on Jackson’s “damn fool Templeton,” so that naturally left him to do the heavy lifting. The wheels rolled across the pitted floor with a sullen crackling, like the vault resented their presence. Istvan fell into step beside him. Mercedes, shod in the sensible sort of shoes worn by all wizards who survived any length of time, padded watchfully behind.
“I am curious,” she said. “Coincidence doesn’t usually work in your favor, Mr Templeton.”
“It wasn’t a case of right place, right time,” he agreed, levering the cart over a shallow rise. “We had help.”
“Did you.”
Istvan threw up a hand. “Some bloody woman who bribed him with a pie. She left a note at the pub, they met, they got on, she gave him another note, and so on. Absolutely appalling. You should have heard what he said to her!”
Edmund cut in before he could say anything more. “She calls herself Lucy. I’m not sure where she got the information, but I can’t argue with the results. And,” he added, “it was good pie.”
“Your consummate negotiating skills at work, I’m sure,” said Mercedes. “Have you–”
“Oh, you never knew him before all that nonsense with Grace Wu,” Istvan interrupted. “It wasn’t for show, then.”
Edmund winced, feeling Mercedes’ eyes boring into his back. “Istvan, please don’t.”
The ghost ignored him. “Women, all the time, hanging off him like limpets. This Lucy is only the latest of dozens, mark my words!” He laughed that strange laugh, a sound he couldn’t duplicate in any other state. He scraped the blade of his knife along the wall. “I don’t like her,” he continued with sudden venom. “I don’t like her at all. She’s too happy and I don’t like her accent and I don’t like the way she–”
“Quiet,” said Mercedes.
Istvan cut off with a pained wheeze.
“He can’t help it,” murmured Edmund.
Mercedes drew even with the cart, watching with sharp eyes as he levered it off a bone protrusion. “Have you made arrangements to identify her? I can’t imagine the whereabouts of twenty Bernault devices to be common knowledge.”
Edmund edged the errant wheel back on course. “I haven’t just yet. I wanted to make sure that her information was good.”
“It seems it is.”
“So it seems, though I’d like to ask her about the four extra devices we found. If Triskelion’s gone into the conquering business, I’d rather know before they start.”
“When are you meeting with her next?”
“I’m not sure.”
They walked, freed wheels crackling in the newfound silence. Bone curved before and behind them, hollowed out by chisels and eons of slow weathering, the wind rippling its surface smooth. On every shelf lay the forbidden. A wooden mask, its mouth forming slow, silent words. The powerful scent of flowers and camphor drifting from an empty painting. A dowel of dark stone, hovering inches above its identifying card: Hovering Dowel, IC Sanctuary 4, March 11, 2016.
Every five minutes thudded a distant stroke, unless someone began listening for it.
Edmund paused – he shouldn’t have, but he did – at a length of white silk, yellowed with age. The Sanskrit painted upon it still trembled with remnant power. Blood speckled one silken corner.
“Do you have any guesses on the matter?” asked Mercedes.
He tugged at the cart, pulling away. An affair fifty years past and more. “I’m hesitant to assume anything until I know more about her.”
“Then you assume this ‘Lucy’ will make another appearance.”
He shrugged, somehow wishing the Magister hadn’t made the name sound like an alias. Lucy had seemed genuine, she really had. She’d been something special. He was hard-pressed to figure out how, exactly, but that could wait until he saw her again.
He was sure that he’d see her again. She knew where to find him after all.
“Have you checked the cabal rosters?” Mercedes asked.
Edmund shook his head. “She didn’t strike me as the wizarding type, but that is an idea. I’ll do that.”
The Magister raised an eyebrow. “I ask only out of concern for a venerable heirloom. We can’t have a mystery woman making off with the fine china.”
He smiled. “Thank you, but I’ll be fine. I’m the thief here, remember?”
Istvan gave another wheeze, which could have meant anything but was probably sarcastic.
A half hour more and they finally reached the proper set of shelving, which looked much like the rest of the vault save for the sign drilled into dry bone, hand-lettered in spidery script: Unfortunately Thinkable Matters, home to all manner of small, easily concealed, user-friendly doomsdays. Some of them came from the old Innumerable Citadel enclaves, the great magical power of the Dark Ages, Arabic calligraphy pressed into steel, brass, and stone.
It was their records, painstakingly copied during Edmund’s one and only trip to the Middle East, that detailed all that the ancient world had known about Shokat Anoushak. She had been the greatest wizard of her time – perhaps ever – and the only successful immortal ever mentioned in any occult history. For eleven recorded centuries she lurked, page after page, empire after empire: the Achaemenid Persians, the Parthians, the Greeks, the Romans, the founding of both Christianity and Islam. She rode with her own cadre of Scythian warriors, and then with the Huns. She burned cities. She created monsters of every stripe ever imagined by Man. It was the Rashidun Caliphate who cast her down during the conquest of Iran in 651 AD, erasing her from common memory.
The Innumerable Citadel, and through it the foundations of all modern Western magic, was built on her works. She’d been brilliant, a genius like no other… but utterly, irredeemably mad. Pitiless. Uncaring as a storm.
Immortality: an example in action.
Istvan had accused Edmund of staring into the abyss, studying her. “Your bloody dust obsession,” he’d called it. He was probably right.
Edmund drew the cart up next to the nearest open space, between a set of marbles and what looked like a rug that breathed shallowly in its shackles. The shelf was too high to slide the crate onto it and he didn’t dare try to lift it on his own. Not with twenty Bernault devices inside. Teleportation was likewise out: wherever the vault was, it didn’t take kindly to reinterpretations of its strange geometry. He tapped bone, wishing it didn’t feel so wet when it didn’t look it. “Excuse me, if you don’t mind...?”
The shelf rumbled downwards, a section the width of the crate sagging into a new configuration.
“Thank you.” He didn’t know what he was talking to, but when in doubt, be polite. Where magic was concerned, there was no such thing as a rude wizard. Not for long.
A few careful minutes, and he had the crate fitted in place. The shelf eased itself back upwards.
He dusted his hands. “All right.”
Mercedes set a notecard in front of it, lettered in her own blocky script. Bernault Devices x20, Oxus Station, June 30, 2020.
The vault was smaller on the way out. They reached the door within ten minutes, and had it closed behind them not long after that.
“Mercedes…” Edmund began.
“Go home,” she said, retrieving her phone from her pocket. “You look like you’ve been dragged through a demolition site and smell like you’ve been protesting the regime. Think of the ladies.”
He snorted. “I try not to.”
She turned to Istvan, who was pacing before the door in silent, translucent frustration. “As for you, feel free to burn off the last of that energy and then I expect to see you on duty until further notice.”
The specter drew to a stiff halt and saluted, then glanced pleadingly at Edmund.
Edmund sighed. “Mercedes, he can’t work if he can’t talk.”
“He’s managed before,” she replied, but she did nod at him before flicking a finger across the screen of her phone. “Speak.”
Istvan winced. “Thank you.” The words emerged raw.
“Doctor Czernin, I am willing to tolerate a great deal, but regardless of mental state you will not interrupt me again. Do you understand?”
He rubbed at his throat, as though shackles were fastened there. “Yes, Magister.”
Edmund shook his head. The chains had come to seem a bit harsh over the last two decades, and it would have been nice if such measures weren’t necessary, but... well, Istvan was what he was.
Sundered spirit. As much event as man. He, like Edmund’s teleportation, was Conceptual: the magic of ideas, of perfect forms, of Plato’s geometry, drawing from a perilous plane of being “above” the real world where fire became Flame. It was the less dangerous of the two types recognized in the West, but that didn’t mean it was safe.
Edmund had first met him in Ukraine, in 1941, as part of the ten-man “777 Brigade.” All young. All out to save Europe from evil.
Only Edmund had survived.
Sixty years later, word came in that the Devil’s Doctor had been sighted in the Persian Gulf... and Magister Geronimo wanted Edmund to help catch him. To bind him. To step into the Conceptual realm with five steely-nerved specialists, and face the memory of a world war distilled and magnified into the archetypal War to End All Wars, death in a thousand forms, a maelstrom screaming around the skeletal remnants of a man that still thought of himself as human.
The chains drove a divide between ideas. They distanced man and event, forcing a calm like the eye of a hurricane. The man could be controlled. The War couldn’t. It was a blessing that conventional reality was too imperfect for it to spill over into anything other than Istvan’s shocking capacity for violence.
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.