crowds that huddled and spoke in hushed whispers, glancing at him, pointing, and then doing their best to pretend that he wasnât there.
He knew that a lot of people blamed wizards in general for everything. He also knew that very few of them would be willing to make a point of it to his face. Not to the wizard-general. Not to the Hour Thief.
He was one of the âgood onesâ ... but still not one to approach off-hand.
Istvan leaned against the memorial inscription, waiting for him. âYou are directly on time,â he said. The barbed wire around his feet looped loose and bright: he was in a better mood again, like any ghost surrounded by grave markers.
âA wizard is never late, nor is he early,â Edmund automatically replied. He stepped to the inscription, adjusted his hat, and touched it.
In Commemoration , it said. June 29, 2013.
That was all. The end of the Wizard War. Nothing about Shokat Anoushak. Nothing about her sudden defeat at the hands of Magister Hahn. Nothing about transformed beasts or torn skies or streets coming to life to choke those who walked on them.
The memorial itself was enough.
Edmund lifted his fingers from the letters. Pressed in steel, they were a scratched footnote on a talon forty feet high. It arced over his head, serrated in scalloped and smoky glass. It joined a toe, a foot, a stout foreleg, a torso that had crushed twelve blocks when it fell, a skull that lay blown apart by far too great a sacrifice over the rerouted Hudson Canal. Craters peppered concrete-scaled hide, sections of exposed ribcage braced like the frame of a ship and dripping with elevator cables, electrical wire, and utility lines. Its rearmost sets of limbs and most of its tail werenât visible, sunk into bedrock. A crest of steel bridge towers and sleek white windmills jutted skyward from its broad back. If cities could be raised again after death, this was it.
The names of the lost covered its surfaces like so much graffiti.
No state or government had decided that this should be the place for a memorial. It had just happened, in aggregate, one name added after another until there was nowhere else logical to put them. No one was even sure who had carved the inscription.
âLetâs go find Grace,â Edmund said.
Istvan nodded. He swung into his usual place on Edmundâs left, setting a hand on his shoulder. âI am sorry for last night,â he said quietly. âI didnât mean to set you off like that.â
Edmund drew his cape closer. âDonât worry about it.â
âIâm glad that you came.â
âI made a promise, Istvan. Wouldnât miss it.â
Flattened rubble crunched beneath his shoes. A surviving bridge lay over the canal, a delicate covered thing of latticed wood with shrapnel holes punched through its roof. The water below it ran mostly clear. A broken trail to the east still hadnât been rebuilt. Above it all towered the beast, rough sides quiet, windmills turning lazily in the winds.
A slow procession wound its way up a set of salvaged fire escapes. Edmund and Istvan joined it, climbing, people retreating from them before and behind.
Edmund concentrated on the railings. On not slipping. The Hour Thief was the only wizard more celebrated than feared... but he was still a wizard. Still so rarely seen in the public eye that no one quite knew what to do with him.
âItâs mostly me,â muttered Istvan.
Edmund shrugged. Istvan was the one who had pushed him into this, years ago, insisting that it would help. Istvan was the one who had noticed, after some months, that someone had chiseled âThe Hour Thiefâ next to Graceâs name, and insisted on seeing the mistake corrected. The whole fiasco had only reinforced the popular notion that he and Istvan were somehow connected, that the Hour Thiefâs powers included the summoning and control of vicious spirits, that a dread pact between himself and
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