“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy life a little. We have forever. Should we really spend all of it working?”
It was a stupid question to ask. Aldous probably would spend all of eternity working.
“Magnus, you can’t have failed to notice that things are changing. Things are afoot. The Great Mundane War . . .”
“They always get into wars,” Magnus said, picking up the bases of a dozen shattered wineglasses and setting them in a row.
“Not like that. Not so global. And they are approaching magic. They make light and sound. They communicate over distances. It doesn’t worry you?”
“No,” Magnus said. “It doesn’t.”
“So you don’t see it coming?”
“Aldous, I’ve had a long night. What are you talking about?”
“It comes, Magnus.” Aldous’s voice was suddenly very deep. “You can feel it all around. It’s coming, and everything will break apart.”
“What’s coming?”
“The break, and the fall. The mundanes put their faith in their paper money, and when that turns to ash, the world will turn upside down.”
Being a warlock certainly didn’t preclude you from going a little funny in the head. In fact, being a warlock could easily make you go a little funny in the head. When the true weight of eternity really settled on you—usually in the middle of the night when you were alone—the weight could be unbearable. The knowledge that all would die and you would live on and on, into some vast unknown future populated by who knew what, that everything would always keep falling away and you would go on and on . . .
Aldous had been thinking about it. He had the look.
“Have a drink, Aldous,” Magnus said compassionately. “I keep a few special bottles hidden in a safe under the floor in the back. I have a Chateau Lafite Rothschild from 1818 that I’ve been saving for a sunny day.”
“You think that’s the solution to everything, don’t you, Bane? Drinking and dancing and making love . . . but I tell you this, something is coming, and we’d be fools to ignore it.”
“When have I ever claimed not to be a fool?”
“Magnus!” Aldous stood suddenly and slammed the tip of his walking stick down, sending a flood of purple bolts crackling along the wreckage of the floor. Even when he was talking crazy, Aldous was a powerful warlock. Stick around for two thousand years—you’re bound to pick up a thing or two.
“When you decide to be serious, come and find me. But don’t wait too long. I have a new residence, at the Hotel Dumont, on 116th Street.”
Magnus was left in the dripping remains of his bar. One Downworlder coming in and talking a load of nonsense about omens and disaster was to be ignored. But having that followed by a visit from Aldous, who seemed to be saying much the same thing . . .
. . . unless those two rumors were one and the same, and they had both originated with Aldous, who was not sounding like the voice of complete reason.
That made sense, actually. The High Warlock of Manhattan gets a little strange, starts talking about doom and mundane money and disaster . . . someone would pick that story up and carry it along, and like all stories, it would find its way to Magnus.
Magnus tapped his fingers on the cracked marble of his once-pristine bar. Time, he had noticed, moved more quickly these days. Aldous wasn’t completely wrong about that. Time was like water, sometimes glacial and slow (the 1720s . . . never again), sometimes a still pond, sometimes a gentle brook, and then a rushing river. And sometimes time was like vapor, vanishing even as you passed through it, draping everything in mist, refracting the light. That had been the 1920s.
Even in fast times like these, Magnus could not instantly reopen his bar. He had to keep up some pretense of normalcy. A few days, maybe a week. Maybe he would even clean it up the mundie way, by hiring people to come with buckets and wood and nails. Maybe he would even do it himself. It would probably do him good.
So Magnus rolled up his sleeves and set to work, collecting broken glass, throwing broken chairs and tables into a pile. He got a mop and pushed along puddles of mixed booze and dirt and splinters. After a few hours of this, he grew tired and bored and snapped his fingers, setting the whole place to rights.
Aldous’s words still preyed on his mind. Something should be done. Someone should be told. Someone more responsible and interested than him should take over this concern. Which, of course, meant only one group of people.