Edmund turned to sand in his hands.
No.
No, no.
Istvan spun away, grasping at nothing, landing paralyzed on his back. Was that what happened? No time left? When he ran out of time, he simply… he…
Something landed beside him. Skittered across the glass.
Istvan picked it up.
Edmund’s pocket watch. Brass, well-worn, the hourglass etched into its front ringed by lettering Istvan didn’t understand. It wasn’t magical. Edmund had said so. It didn’t do anything but tell time. It was something to hold, no more.
Nothing else.
Istvan sat there. Flicked it open. Flicked it shut.
A golden lion winged to a landing beside him, paws settling softly in the sand. “A shame,” said Shokat Anoushak. “He was handsome.”
Istvan vaulted up and over her mount’s head and plunged his knife into her throat.
A monster reared to his left, some horrific cross between a bull and a crocodile, and he killed it. One similar to the talking tiger, leaping – he killed that one, too, and then another, and another, the glassy crater of Providence falling away to what it had once been, seven years ago. A city embattled, its streets full of shrieking horrors.
He sped to meet them.
A wailing fury plunged toward him, rotors whirring, oil drooling from shark-toothed jaws. He tore it open from stem to stern, cables of gold and greenery spiraling outward like freed intestines. It thrashed like a living thing, which it would be until it struck the ground.
He didn’t wait for it. He couldn’t.
He dove.
A column of tanks roared below, black eyes glittering in the recesses of angular plating.
Not tanks. Those weren’t tanks.
He barreled into the first, ripping at every component he could reach in a blind frenzy. Mockery of his war! Hideous duplicate of what his battlefields had demanded!
It bled black, crude oil not suitable for use in an engine, not running through where the fuel lines should have been. He knew where they went. He knew where everything went. He knew every detail of its ancestral construction, who had developed it, who had fought in it, who had died in it, who had crawled out of wrecks stalled or burning to fight again – and this... this thing wasn’t even close!
<You dare,> he shouted at it as it screamed, <you dare!>
It had four seats for no reason, all empty. A turret with insides that boiled molten. Its roof was the top of a shell, peeled open, the ghost of a sun to shine on its false innards, sparking and broken. It thrashed. He savaged it until it couldn’t.
“Istvan,” called someone else, someone he knew. “Istvan, stop!”
He laughed. He was the suicide of nations, the end of empires, the long death by suffocation in shell-churned mud and snow and ruin. What was done couldn’t be undone. All that remained was attrition: the relentless, pitiless, senseless murder of generations.
Stop? Stop him? Hell itself wouldn’t have him!
The greatest monster of all loomed above, murdered Vienna sunk into its back. He leapt for it.
The Man in Black caught at his arm.
Edmund. Whole. Impossible.
Istvan whirled.
Desecration. All that was beloved and beautiful, despoiled and turned against him. First Pietro and now Edmund. It was, perhaps, fitting, in the end.
Another trick. Another illusion. That’s all there ever was.
No more.
Istvan lunged.
Edmund dodged around the blade. Barely.
Not the time. This wasn’t the time.
There weren’t any more smilers he could help – he had ringed the entire fortress, he could barely talk – and this last task was all he had left. Istvan, it’s done. Istvan, it’s over. Istvan, what are you doing?
Please, hold still. I can’t finish this if you don’t hold still.
“Istvan,” he croaked.
The specter didn’t seem like he’d even heard him. <Not you,> he said, voice cracking through the strange German of his home city. <Not you.>
His chains burned, calligraphy in white phosphorous. Smoke streamed from their shackles. He pursued well enough but he was slashing about wildly, a far cry from his usual precision.
Out of his mind. What had the Susurration done?
Edmund kept dodging. He’d done it before. He could do it again. No need for panic, not now, not until this was over and he’d gone home and had a shower and finished off two glasses of gin to start. Then he could panic. He would set some time aside for it.
Time.
He sweated cold. He was burning his own time, now. Unique. Irreplaceable. Go home? Take a shower? No, when this was over, he’d have to go back out, thief that he was, and what time he’d lost he could never–
Istvan ripped a gash in his shirt.
End this quickly. End this quickly.
Edmund pulled off his hat. Pulled down his goggles. Forced the words through his raw throat. “Istvan, it’s me. It’s really me. The impossible soldier, remember? You could never hit me then, you aren’t hitting me now, and you aren’t going to hit me anytime soon.” Keep dodging. Don’t think about the time. “Istvan, do you know anyone else like that? Istvan, can you hear me? Please, calm down.”
The ghost slowed.
“I need you. I need you more than ever.”
“You’re afraid of me,” Istvan said. He seemed surprised.
Edmund tried a smile. It wasn’t his best. “Sometimes.”
“Oh.” Istvan looked at his knife. He blinked. He dropped it, blade clattering on the glassy ground. “Oh, no.”
Edmund let out a breath. He wasn’t shaking. He didn’t know how he wasn’t. Maybe because the Man in Black didn’t. Here, after all, he was the Man in Black. He stepped closer, unslinging his bag from his shoulders. “It’s all right.”
“Edmund, I…”
He reached for Istvan’s shackles. “Just hold still.”
Calligraphy blazed beneath his hands.
Once before, Istvan had seen him as he strove to be. When the Wizard War took its turn for the worst. When Istvan’s chains trapped him, useless, within walls that might shortly cease to exist – and him along with them. Contractual oblivion.
Then... then, he’d met a figure of darkness, but not of threat: less nights of knives and more of whispered words, withheld violence, river crossings, sudden departures just before the dawn. Salvation at the last moment, one who (when thanked for the risks taken, the wounds suffered, the day won) waved away the praise and vanished with a promise: I’ll be back when I’m needed.
The Man in Black.
In one hand, he held an owl’s feather pen. In the other, a silver ritual knife. He bent silently to his task and parchment links fell away, rewritten and struck out and cut. Faster than any eye could follow. Watching him was like watching a mirage, just beyond real; to be near him was to wonder who he was, from where he had come, how long he would stay before he vanished (not long). Become, in perilous passage, purest Concept.
Edmund. Merely doing his duty, and fulfilling his promise.
The blade glistened, poppy-red, with his blood.
So sudden. So odd, to stand there, watching, and nothing else. So little Istvan could think but this: it was at once a thrill and a terror to behold such a strange and beautiful aspect of the man he loved so well.
Each scrap that fell burned. A bloodied horizon crouched in wait.
...except when such actions would stand in violation of the provisions of section 28. As detailed in paragraph 9 section 62, the Binder (the Innumerable Citadel, magisterial membership, [and] the Twelfth Hour) hold all rights to use, disposition, and disposal of...
Edmund had studied law at first, almost eighty years ago, before his focus shifted to language, and contracts of the metaphysical were no different once past the arcane writing, past the consequences. It was written, and it could be rewritten. Mightier than the sword, indeed.
Link after link. He took his time. It was his time, now.
It had to be done right.
Only when one last link remained, did he finally slow – finally allow himself to end at the same rate as anyone else.
“Istvan?” he croaked.
“Edmund,” the winged and skeletal horror before him confirmed.
Edmund set the ritual knife down. “Are we always this interesting?”
Istvan knelt and retrieved his own blade, wiping it on the hem of his uniform before handing it to him. He was a doctor. It would be all right. “Oh, yes.”
Edmund slit a palm already bleeding. All the most powerful magics were paid for in blood freely given. That was the fine print. “I’m just a man, you know,” he said. He dipped the pen in the wound. “The rest is all bad choices and good press.”
Istvan clasped his hand and the pain faded. “I know.”
Edmund carefully wrote in the terms of cancellation and annulment. He knew his Classical Arabic. Translating the old works of the Innumerable Citadel, he’d had to. He was good at it. He swallowed, wondering how many people he’d missed. “Did what I could.”
“You did.”
“Are you...?”
“No.”
Edmund slid the bloodied knife through parchment. The lettering flared red, sputtered, faded.
“OK,” he said. He swayed on his feet. “Take it away.”
Istvan caught him.
Solid. He was solid, here – War brushing skeletal fingers across a cape black as the man claimed his soul to be, in endless debt – sinking down as Edmund fell and, wondering, kneeling, pressing him tight against a rotten breast, no heartbeat save in feeling. He breathed, yet. Oh, he breathed.
Istvan looked up to Pietro, delicate fingers holding closed a gash in his chest, watching forlornly as the last scraps of chain fluttered into flame. The Susurration.
Something thundered.
<I’m sorry,> Istvan said.
A whistling…
He ducked, hugging Edmund as closely as he could, blanketing him in wire-tangled wings that ripped and tore.
The first shells struck through a sea of poison.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t stop.
Four years forever. Armies crushed. Empires broken. Dreams and certainty dashed, families gutted, the future resting in the hands of the most ruthless, the most wronged. For the first time, mankind could destroy himself utterly – and he had.
Edmund, alone, was still breathing. Istvan dare not let go.
He could hold him, once in all the time he’d known him, and he did, not looking up. Not until smoke faded back to sky. Chlorine and mustard gas to something breathable. Shouting and bullet-chattering and tanks roaring and mountaintops collapsing and always, always the pounding of artillery... to silence.
It was then that Edmund slumped through him, onto the rubble.
Istvan shifted aside, kneeling beside him instead. Mud and worse things stained his handsome face, his eyes red and swollen, his skin burned from poison. Bloody scratches marred his cheeks and forehead, the results of barbed wire made solid. Istvan wished he had sheltered him better. He wished he could prop the poor man’s head on something more comfortable than stone. He tried to prod him over more into dirt, and then he saw it. His left temple.
A shock of grey.
Istvan brushed immaterial fingers through it. “Oh, Edmund…”
Edmund coughed, an ugly sound full of phlegm. The gas hadn’t done him any favors. “What?” he croaked.
Istvan took his hand away. “You’re all right. I’m... I’m glad, that you’re all right.”
The wizard coughed again, rolled over – Istvan got out of the way – and spat into the dirt, scrubbing at his lips. Flakes of dirt tumbled from his goatee. His hat fell away, the headband Grace had given him sparkling in its place. “Don’t feel all right. Maybe… maybe quasi-right.”
He tried to sit up and Istvan couldn’t help him. He was hurting, and that Istvan could do something about.
“Hell of a job you’ve done with the place,” he said, blinking out at Providence.
Istvan busied himself lessening his headache, trying to ignore the agonies of many, many others wandering about, dazed, with the same problem or worse. Lost smilers. Too slow, battered and blinded. He would have to attend to them, too, once Edmund was safe. All of them. As long as it took. “Not an uncommon comparison,” he muttered.
A slam. The ground shook. Bits of broken glass and other things skittered down the slope beside them.
Edmund hit the dirt. Istvan shielded him – a pointless gesture, here, now, arm and wing outstretched, crouched just over the man’s prone form to intercept destruction that never came – and looked to Barrio Libertad.
A monstrous corpse lay sprawled across the closed roof, barely recognizable. No cathedrals. No cobbled streets. It was skeletal, its claws vast scythes of steel, and somewhat resembled a strange crustaceal crown, perched like that. Blue-white smoke leaked from molten caverns in its sides. Barrio Libertad’s turreted guns had seen some use after all. Hovercraft bobbed near the creature’s crests, rickety things like those in Triskelion, zipping backwards every time it twitched.
“Do you suppose...?” said Istvan.
“No,” said Edmund. “I think they got it.”
Istvan drew back away, wings dissolving. He squinted. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it or not, but it looked as though someone in spiked armor were planting a tiny flag on its head.
A figure in red and yellow picked its way across the wastes, jumping trenches and shell craters, scrambling past shreds of sheltering canvas. It moved much faster than a normal human. Istvan tried to summon malice, or at least disgruntlement, and discovered he couldn’t.
“You two all right?” asked Grace Wu, jogging to a wild-eyed stop.
Edmund, still prone, reached for his hat. “Quasi-right,” he said.
“Yes,” Istvan echoed.
Grace wavered, uncertain, clasping and re-clasping her hands. Nervous, wary, horrified at the destruction... but no hatred, no anger. Sorrow, at what and who had been lost. Any positives, Istvan couldn’t tell. She kicked at the earth. “Nice redecorating job, Doc.”
Istvan didn’t care to look at it. He knew. Just as he knew that through it, the maimed and wounded stumbled.
Edmund hadn’t saved all of them.
“Miss Wu,” Istvan said, patting the wizard’s caped shoulder, “could you... could you help him back?”
She stared at him.
He passed a hand through Edmund’s torso.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Sure.”
“Ow,” said Edmund, but there was no heart in it. He rubbed his side.
Grace crouched beside him. “You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible.”
“Can I get my tiara back or do you want to keep it?”
He gave it back.
Istvan left them, as Grace levered Edmund’s bad arm over her shoulder – and then, after protest, his good arm instead. She would see him back safely. She still cared for him, after all, though their affair was over, and she was quite capable in her own way. It would be all right.
Istvan was a doctor, and he had work to do.