The Interminables (12 page)

Edmund sighed. Nothing for it. “I'm not a vampire, Grace.”

He took them to the rim instead. Two jumps, one to Ganges Station and another to where Providence began, its heat-hazed wastes visible from the station roof, a broken sidewalk baked by the afternoon sun. The razed foundations of the city that once was still bore scars from the blast, parking lots replaced by rough patches of farmland. In the crater, its rim shadowed by the stripped and rusting hulk of a toppled monstrosity, there was only glass.

There was supposed to be only glass.

“Grace, this can't be right.”

“Never said it was.”

“No, Grace, this…”

Edmund closed his eyes, recalling armies. Tides of monsters that poured through a storm-torn twilight, skittering below hulks that crushed cities in their iron jaws: lions that breathed fire, winged serpents, toothed mockeries of tanks and helicopters, green lightning flashing through pools of oil. Shokat Anoushak herself wheeled on her razor-winged mount, sword and quiver at her belt, dozens of black braids streaming behind her in golden fastenings, arrows sowing reinforcements where they fell.

Run
, she'd said.

Her eyes had been a bright, bright, sunken green, like buried emeralds. She wore the archaic regalia of a Scythian queen: a tapered headdress of cloth and feathers, a knee-length dress over pants and boots, heavy cloth worked in bold stripes of patterned color. Golden figures of fantastical beasts glittered about her neck and arms, molten and shifting. She rode like she'd never touched the ground. She spoke a language almost two thousand years dead.

Run
, she'd said,
and keep running, as the jaws of fate and madness close on your throat. That's all that awaits you, immortal. That's all you can do.

Run.

He opened his eyes again, blinking back gentle sunlight. “...how?”

It was a day more suited to spring than summer, warm and fragrant, just enough clouds floating across the sky to be picturesque. A flight of sparrows wheeled past as he watched. Before him stretched a sleepy, sprawling suburb, shaded by oaks, its winding streets marked by the mossy remnants of Colonial stone walls. Each flower-lined driveway held one automobile, similar makes and models as those that cruised outside Charlie's. Each freshly-painted home possessed its own decorative mailbox: some in the shapes of animals, others sporting American flags or sparkling pinwheels.

It was afternoon, but the birds were singing a dawn chorus, just like the one on his aunt's farm. He hadn't heard anything like that since.... well, they'd moved out there after the stock market crash. The Great Depression.

He'd been ten. Eleven, maybe.

Long time.

“How?” he repeated.

“We call it the Susurration,” said Grace.

Edmund glanced at her. Lucy still dangled from her shoulders. Beside her rose a ramshackle steel pylon twice the height of a telephone pole and some three times as broad. Strange, twisted antennae jutted from its sides, humming a tone that set his teeth on edge. “What?” he asked. “The neighborhood?”

“The creature that makes you think you're seeing whatever you're seeing. The neighborhood, sure. Whatever you think is most pleasant and peaceful and inviting. The Susurration pulls it right out of your head, whether you want it to or not.”

Edmund frowned. He looked back at the neighborhood with a more critical eye, noting the double row of pylons leading into it, the mirage of walls looming far off in the distance. A safe path, she'd said.

What about the glass? The rumored concentration camps? The warnings?

“Grace,” he said, “what's really out there?”

A shrug. “Providence.” She dropped her voice to a dry mutter. “And don't look now, Eddie, but I think your spook's a little spooked.”

Edmund glanced over his shoulder. Istvan hung back, clutching his knife to his chest as he stared, whispering something over and over to himself in Hungarian.

<
My God. My God.>

Grace cast the ghost a scornful look. “Wonder what it found for him.”

Edmund held up a hand –
just a moment
, a stand-in for words he could no longer safely say without consideration – and turned back, a little spooked himself. He didn't like seeing Istvan nervous. That meant he was in the same general vicinity of something that made Istvan nervous. “Istvan? Are you all right? Is there a problem?”

came the reply. German, a drawling Austrian dialect that had taken Edmund some time to get used to. Istvan knew he was better with German than Hungarian. Ringstrasse
in Vienna, but there's rents in it, holes, like the entire city is nothing but a film or a sheet draped over a model, and Edmund…> The ghost shuddered. <…it's empty. This entire crater is empty.>

Grace propped a fist on her hip. “Care to translate from Nazi-ese?”

Istvan jerked, ripped from fear to fury in an instant. “I was never–!”

“He wasn't, and Grace, please don't,” Edmund interrupted. He looked over the neighborhood again. The perfect skies, the perfect streets. An old woman was watering her roses down there, peering up at him with no evident opinion – only a mild, incurious acknowledgment of his existence. He was very glad, now, that Istvan had come along. The worst horrors were the ones you couldn't see.

Susurration. A whisper, so quiet you barely knew it was there.

Grace was real, though, right? None of this was real but Grace. And Istvan.

And him, he supposed.

“Grace?” he asked, for confirmation, or maybe just to hear her say something in response. She turned, Lucy's blonde locks sweeping over her shoulder like a bullfighter's cape, and strode away. “No loitering, Eddie. If you're coming, you're coming.”

He took a steadying breath. “How's the border treating you, Istvan? You'll manage?”

The ghost still clutched his knife. Tightly. “Yes. Go on. I'll follow you.”

Edmund nodded, and caught up with Grace's departing figure. She had a point. Wherever they were now didn't seem like the best place to linger exactly because it did seem like the best place: it was peaceful, it was inviting, it was beautiful, and it felt like he could happily spend lifetimes there.

Those kinds of places didn't exist after the Wizard War.

He found himself wondering what Shokat Anoushak would have seen. If she'd seen anything before she died with Providence.

They walked. The path zig-zagged down the crater wall, the neighborhood proper beginning where it flattened out, just as perfect on closer inspection. Heat rose from the pavement, but it wasn't an unpleasant heat. The flags flapped in a breeze just strong enough to display the Stars and Stripes at their best. Someone, somewhere, was playing a saxophone. Solo jazz. Good enough to be professional.

“The Susurration is what we in the business call a sapient, parasitic, extradimensional thought-concept,” said Grace. She waved at the distant crater rim. “We've got it trapped here, so it can't directly affect anyone outside – that's what it uses the smilers for – but it's basically got total control of the rest of the crater. Give it half a chance and it gets in your head, rifles through your hopes and fears and most secret memories, and uses them against you until you break. I mentioned a safe path? That's the pylons.”

She nodded at the next one in line, its antennae humming. “What these things do is shield us from the whole conviction-eroding, mind-controlling, preachy
I-am-the-world's-salvation
schtick. Leave the path and you're in the same boat as ‘Lucy,' here.”

“Istvan told me he fought it.”

Grace snorted. “Yeah, well, that's what he does, isn't it?”

Extradimensional thought-concept, nothing: this thing had to be Conceptual, if Istvan could fight it. A representative of Memory, maybe. Control. Peace. How had it gotten here?

Edmund fingered his pocket watch. “Salvation, Grace?”

“We'll get to that. What does Doctor Pain see, anyway?”

“Vienna. With gashes ripped in it.”

She laughed. “Yeah, it would have trouble with him, wouldn't it? Tries to offer something pleasant and peaceful and normal, but what can you do with a guy who drools over death and blood, am I right?”

Edmund glanced over his shoulder. Istvan was still there, trailing some distance back, his features wavering between flesh and bone. If he had heard Grace's comment, he gave no sign. “He's on our side, Grace.”

“That's what you said when you let him loose.”

Edmund grimaced.

“I thought so,” Grace said. She brushed a hand across the next pylon in line. “Anyway, these people you're seeing? They're the only thing about this that's real. The pylons throw a bit of a wrench into the idyll, make the disjunction a little more obvious.” They passed the old woman from before, still watching with that same incurious expression on her face. Water poured from her hose; she stood like a statue, head barely turning. Grace nodded at her. “There's thousands of them trapped here, Eddie. Hundreds of thousands.”

He blanched. “Oh.”

“In fact, our best guess right now is somewhere right around half a million.”

“Oh.”

“We try to warn people off, but the Susurration hamstrings our efforts every chance it gets. Those counter-rumors of paradise you probably dismissed as crazy ramblings? Yeah. It's been growing. More people, more influence.”

Edmund tried to pretend that they weren't surrounded by half a million puppeted observers staring in slow motion. He couldn't imagine how Istvan was coping. “I see.”

Grace pressed on, relentlessly. “It uses the smilers to find new targets and get close to them, convince them to make a little trip into the crater... and then they never leave, or if they do, it's as a double agent. It's a big deal, Eddie. Haven't you ever wondered why Big East is so stable?”

He blinked. “Stable” wasn't the word he would have used. “Excuse me?”

She flashed a grin. “All I'm saying is, for being trapped in a post-apocalyptic hellscape overrun with monsters after a war that shattered everything we ever knew about the world, a lot of people are taking it pretty well, don't you think?”

Edmund smiled back, blandly. “How often do you get out of that fortress, Grace?”

She gave him a look.

He shrugged. He wasn't the one who was completely ignoring the efforts of the Twelfth Hour and the other enclaves. They had worked hard to get where they were.

“The Susurration is after you,” she said. “It heard about you coming back.”

“I didn't know I was so popular.”

She spun, prodding at his chest. “It wants you, Eddie. It wants the Hour Thief. The guy who can go anywhere and survive anything and is handsome and charming and so experienced that people just assume he knows what he's talking about even when he doesn't. The guy who's so famous he's got his face on a sign. You were
Magister
, Eddie! Can't you see how that makes you a perfect target?”

Edmund turned his watch over in his hand, still buried in his jacket pocket. No teleporting, but the smoothness of the metal made him feel better.

It was worse than that. The Hour Thief run amok could mean an untouchable, uncatchable, immortal serial killer running around with the favored weapon of marriage proposal. Given time – and privacy – it would be laughably easy to ask for the rest of someone's life.

He'd thought about this. Too often.

“Can the Susurration learn magic?” he asked.Grace's lips thinned. “It's interdicted, Eddie. Magic doesn't work here. You need to stop obsessing over your little time-stealing trick.”

“You made an exception for–”

“
I
didn't.” She swept a hand at a pylon, at the walls looming closer. They were immense, Edmund realized, stained and dilapidated, like the newspaper photos he'd seen of Hoover Dam while it was under construction. “Barrio Libertad did.”

“Grace…” he began, and then everything he didn't want to say rushed in to interrupt.

Grace, how did you survive? Why didn't you call? Grace, I loved you. I still love you. I took that chance, and I spent seven years still loving you after you were gone. Now you're going to make me mourn you twice?

Grace... where were you?

“How did you find me?” he finally asked. He looked away. He was a coward; he knew that already. “How did you know this Susurration creature was coming after me?”

“We have our ways.”

“Grace, that's
Barrio Libertad
! What have you been doing all this time in Barrio Libertad?”

She looked at him. A long look, measuring behind her goggles. Her mask. “Fighting the good fight,” she said. “Same as you.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“What? Someone has to do it.”

“Grace, I thought…” He pressed his lips together, staring at the walls. Self-defense. She did it out of self-defense. They'd been able to talk, once, without any of that, but now... now, it had been a long time. Why bother? She had to have made up her mind by now. Found someone else. If she'd wanted to see him again, she would have come back, wouldn't she?

Unless... unless something had stopped her, unless somehow...

He shoved both hands in his pockets. “Grace, please understand. I don't know where we stand. I don't know where you've been. I don't know what you've been doing, or with who, or why you…”

The memorial. The candle, floating on the river. Fourteen months an invalid. Had she thought about him at all? How had she survived?

“I've missed you,” he said. “I've missed you a lot.”

She didn't reply. She walked, Lucy over her shoulder like a loose puppet. The hero, like she'd always been, returning with her spoils. The walls towered before them. Her walls.