Edmund hit the deck.
Just the Susurration. Just the Susurration. It was only the Susurration.
<Is it, stripling?>
Scythian.
Oh, hell. Oh, hell, oh, hell, oh, hell –
Hot breath on his back. A growl, lion-like. The sweep of steel-shod wings. A chuckle, unamused and uncaring, an expression by rote. <I am Glory Everlasting. Empire after empire has known my name. The Persians, the Romans, the Sassanids.>
He was hyperventilating. Too much dust. He couldn’t breathe, for all the dust.
<We, you and I, are eternal. We cannot be subsumed. Your Magister’s pet, for all its command of mind and memory, can barely contain my essence.>
He tried to get up.
A huge paw slapped him down. Into the dust. Into the ages.
His ribs creaked. He coughed.
Inevitable. It was all inevitable, wasn’t it? Who could stay sane for all of forever? Who knew better than anyone the price of reaching too far? It was only a matter of time.
Everything was a matter of time.
Run, immortal. That’s all you can do.
So much for that.
Something thudded.
The beast atop him whirled, crushing him deeper. He wheezed. Scraps of paper whirled past his face. A snap: an arrow loosed, two of them. A roar, definitely leonine.
What was coming…? That was a strange, mechanical hammering, like…
Edmund covered his head.
The impact shattered the ground beneath him. Glass cut his hands. An abyss yawned below, black and infinite. He pinwheeled. Voices filtered from above. A Scythian curse. Shouting, mostly Hungarian that he couldn’t catch. His own name.
The abyss ended, with a crack to his collarbone, only a few feet down.
He wheezed, stars sparking before his eyes… and then he saw them. Emperor For a Weekend and The Baltic Chef. The clasped hands of the Twins. The obsidian-tipped blades of Purpose in Precision. Wears That Sweater, in plaid and purled glory.
Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands.
The walls of the fortress rose behind them, solid amidst a landscape of mists and molten glass. The fading outlines of destroyed buildings stood amidst the even fainter memories of forests. He could see where the roads of Providence had been, if he squinted hard enough.
The Conceptual.
Whatever Diego had done, it had worked.
He looked at his hands, gloved in darkness. Here, he was like them. Like Istvan. Conceptual. An idea. He had become the recurring role in so many stories: liberator, lover, thief, mysterious rogue who always meant well; motives and origins hidden in the dark of the cloak he wore; he who went by many names and none – the Man In Black.
That had been Istvan, back there, on the attack, shattering the Susurration’s illusions. It couldn’t have been anyone else. Snapped out of it, maybe, or at least distracted. For now.
No time to worry about that.
Edmund found his feet. He still had his satchel, tightly closed, and everything in it. He still had his pocket watch.
The self-images of half a million trapped smilers milled around him, no doubt mired in illusions of their own.
Time to change that.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” he told the nearest Concept, Yellow-Souled One, an anole in lightning. Then he moved on to the next, Girl With a Braid, her hair a serpentine body of its own. “Take as long as you need to escape Providence.”
Thunder roared through the clouds, leonine. Cracks etched themselves in the glass beneath his feet. He tried to pretend he couldn’t see ghostly snarls of barbed wire, jagged and fading, burned across his eyelids where there should have been lightning.
He moved to the next smiler. And the next. English, Japanese, Arabic, German, Latin, Chinese, Russian, his terrible rusty Farsi. On and on, mystery swirling around his feet.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence.”
Years stolen. It would have to be enough.
Istvan tumbled through a fire that wasn’t the red of sunset, tangled with the immortal that wasn’t his. It wasn’t her, either – the real Shokat Anoushak had been a baleful beacon, a breath drawing ever-inward, a well of feeling so deep and so ancient it was almost alien, bitter and overwhelming – and this... this shadow of her was hollow, like the rest. A memory.
A fury!
She plunged and wheeled, her winged steed lion-like and snarling, its claws tearing at his tattered feathers and catching in his chains. He struck where he could; she met each strike with steel of her own, a sword with a tasseled pommel and an edge serrated like a shark’s tooth.
“Why should the Hour Thief alone possess such magics?” she demanded in twisted English. “How can you condone what he has stolen, and what he squanders?”
Istvan tried to tear himself away from her. He couldn’t linger here. He had to return to the ground, find Edmund – the man had vanished, fleeing, hopefully to do what he ought, but…
He ripped a score along her mount’s side. It shrieked, bleeding gold. An opening.
He dove.
Shokat Anoushak caught his chains.
“How is it,” she hissed, whirling him scrabbling in a tethered arc, “that a monster like you hopes to defend a monster like him?”
Istvan fought to right himself, wings churning. His knife struck sparks on entangling links of parchment. “He isn’t!”
She snapped his chains, whip-like, over her head – her strength as inhuman as her longevity – and Istvan with them. Her mount rushed to meet him, claws and fangs and fire.
He stabbed it in the eye.
It reared, claws tearing more gashes in his already ruined uniform. He slashed his blade across its face and rolled away, folding his own wings tight, diving as fast as he could: no subtlety, no grace, merely flight by the raw will to fly, ripping through the air like a modern jet fighter.
An arrow sped past. The ghosts of serpents writhed and spat in its passage.
Then a rolling thunder like an avalanche blasted from below, a roar that split horizons end to end, that shattered windows in their frames and then carried the frames away, that turned weaker matter to pulp, that far too many had only heard once. Briefly. Grating, metallic, rising…
Jaws the size of a stadium lunged through the clouds.
Istvan slewed sideways, skidding between steel teeth and entangling cables and flashes of actinic green, escaping the maw just before it snapped shut with a shock that sent him tumbling. Oh, not this. Not here. With the realms collapsed, such a monster would cause hideous devastation in what was real.
He shouted at it. “I thought you cared for your people!”
<I do,> came the reply, everywhere at once.
The beast fell back to earth, horned head swept low before hunched shoulders, its many legs squat beneath the impossible weight of the city cresting its crocodilian back. Stone and brick, peaked roofs of faded red, dense blocks and narrow cobbled streets broken by skyscrapers of modern glass, copper-green domes and park walks torn up with the skeletons of trees, all ringed about by the cracked ribbons of highways. Broken tiles tumbled from the mosaic-laden roof of a Gothic cathedral, its sides soot-stained, its south tower immense and knobbled and surmounted by a familiar double-headed eagle supporting a double-armed cross.
St Stephens.
She hadn’t. Oh, she hadn’t.
<Waste and ruin, War to End All Wars. I seek only to end it… but you are it. What do you think will happen to them if you’re unchained?>
A tail swept at him, studded with thousands of broken gravestones.
Edmund staggered, ears ringing and jacket coated in dust, trying not to look up. It wouldn’t help to look up. Up there wasn’t his business.
He looked up.
Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Just a roof. It was just a roof. With legs. An earthquake. A walking disaster. One of hers. The Susurration could animate them here?
Or was it her?
Oh, hell.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” he shouted. He didn’t know if anyone could hear him, but he couldn’t stop. He had a job to do. He’d promised.
He leapt across rubble and kept running. He tried to keep Barrio Libertad on his left: its walls were the only solid navigational markers there were.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence.”
Again, and again, and again. Some of the smilers didn’t take it. Some of them didn’t move, still trapped, the Susurration seeping over warped and weakened selves like whispering amber. Most were confused and huddled, too dazed to understand what was happening just above their heads. Freedom, after months or years enthralled, in such a strange place as this... he couldn’t imagine.
The monster stretching across the sky bellowed; he shouted louder. Bricks cascaded like hail and he moved faster. Take it, take it, run, go.
Keep the Susurration occupied, Istvan. Keep it off me.
He was going hoarse.
Istvan reflected that Lucy’s cited feats of glory on his part were, sadly, somewhat hyperbolic. He had killed one of these monsters, once, but that was after it had suffered days of assault and had been driven to a more pastoral area, trapped and held there at considerable cost. He was dangerous. He wasn’t that dangerous.
Not chained.
What if Edmund was wrong? What if there were no survivors?
<You’re a failure,> the Susurration whispered. <This is your better way? This is your kinder way? You’ve always been a failure, all your life and after.>
The remains of Vienna’s Central Cemetery slammed into him. Through him. Istvan clawed through absolute darkness. Dirt and rock scraped across his skin. Beneath his skin. Within his stomach, his throat, his lungs. It didn’t hurt, but that made it all the more unnerving. He tried to imagine he was swimming, or flying, but that didn’t help.
Some of the rock wasn’t rock.
<Istvan! Istvan, why didn’t you tell me?>
<Full retreat – call a full retreat!>
<Doctor, he’s gone.>
<Late again, Mr Czernin?>
<I don’t know you. I don’t know you any more.>
They reached for him. Tore at him. Grabbed at his chains and hauled him backwards, dragging at his wings, hands he couldn’t see and voices he wished he couldn’t hear. Friends, instructors, wartime allies, family he’d fled from, colleagues he’d decried… and Franceska.
<You’ve done enough. Please, go.>
He burst from the other side with both hands clutched tightly around his wedding ring. He was upside-down. The glassy ground sped towards him. He couldn’t correct himself in time.
<You’ll kill him,> said the Susurration. <If he doesn’t kill himself first.>
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” Edmund said, and suddenly he knew.
It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like anything pulled away from him, or out of him, or through him. There was no taste, no texture. Not even a temperature. All those many tongues he’d studied, and he knew only one way to describe it.
Time, running out.
A bloody horror slammed into the ground beside him, rolling, tattered. Bony fingers hooked into his jacket front. “Edmund! Edmund, you mustn’t!”
Edmund dodged the wild beating of wings. Snapped his watch. Teleported.
Shokat Anoushak no longer pursued him. She didn’t have to.
Circle the fortress. Offer escape, and run.
Run.
All the time he could give, and more. They took it: gauzy figures of silk and fans, souls shivering like branches in autumn, hard-edged brilliant outlines of neon – how they were, how they saw themselves, strange and beautiful. He had a promise to keep.
He would have collapsed long ago if he wasn’t the Man in Black.
“Take as long as you need to escape Providence,” he said, and he kept running.