Secondhand Sorcery

It was brighter inside the mosque than Nadia would have expected; the interior was mostly done up in white, and its windows let in plenty of light. She still blinked in the sudden gloom, and gave herself a minute for her eyes to adjust. Then she stepped forward, carefully, onto the tiled floor. “Hello?”

There was no good place to hide in this tiny mosque, and Nadia didn’t think it would want to hide from a human anyway. But as soon as she spoke, a light appeared in the little bay in the wall—she forgot what Muslims called it—that showed the way to Mecca. Was it hiding, or only sheltering in a place people had strong feelings about? Nadia edged closer, shaking with every step.

There wasn’t much of it left to see, and what there was, was mostly … hair? Yes, hair. That would be inky-black hair, head-to-foot, when the familiar was strong enough to see clearly. Right now it was saving its strength. No. Her strength. “Mostly human, probably female.” Those had been Papa Titus’s words. Nadia thought she could see something like the ghostly shape of a woman’s figure, behind it all. Her skin, where it peeked out, was a brilliant gleaming white, like snow under moonlight.

“Who are you?” she whispered. The familiar gave no answer. The argument at the door had quieted down; some of the familiar’s light might be shining through the windows. Possibly there were Turks peering through those windows now, wondering why the French soldiers had let some grubby-looking girl in and not them. Let them wonder. Nadia did not mean to leave this building alone.

If only the familiar would help her out! Nadia could make out one white arm clutching at the long dark tresses, maybe a bit of a cheekbone, and the edge of both hips, but the rest was covered up and refusing to show itself. But it was not as if she could expect her to talk, anyway …

Nadia took a deep breath, trying to ignore the renewed clamor at the door behind her. It wasn’t easy; apart from distracting her, all that uproar would be bothering the familiar, if that wasn’t the valence she was used to feeding off. And that, Nadia supposed, was something: she knew that, whatever story this strange almost-woman wanted to tell, it probably wasn’t related to being indignant at getting shut out of a place you belonged. Which only left every other kind of feeling a person could have as a possibility.

That was the trick of synnoesis, the trick she hadn’t been able to pull off before as a silly ten-year-old with a half-dead spirit. Nadia had to get herself thinking along the same lines as this long-haired ghost to earn its trust. Not just the same feelings, but the same story about the feelings.

Being able to tell what she looked like would be a valuable clue. Shape and valence were supposed to be related. “May I touch you, please?” she asked, reaching out a hand. The familiar shrank back deeper into the alcove, and Nadia pulled her hand back.

Well, the familiar was probably a woman, with very long hair, and she didn’t look like she was wearing any clothes (not that many familiars did), so did that tell her something? She couldn’t think what. Was it just … no, it couldn’t be just that, could it? It seemed too simple. If the emissor had been a man … it still didn’t sound quite right, but she supposed she’d better try it.

Reluctantly she shut her eyes, very tight, and thought as indecently as she could of men from magazine ads, and of the one Lictor with the red-blond curls and the strong jaw. She was much more relieved than disappointed when she cracked an eye open again and saw that the familiar hadn’t moved at all. Possibly she only responded for longing after women? But (she felt her cheeks heat up still further as she thought it) nobody could expect Nadia to manage that.

Enough. What did the familiar want? Did it have something to do with fear, maybe? Nadia made herself think of Yunks, of that horrible feeling she got when the monster came out to loom over her, when the heavy paws reached out to clutch at her shoulder … no. No good. No change.

This was probably a pretty kind of spirit when it was healthy, so it might be something positive. They did have actually pleasant valences sometimes—that would be nice. Nadia tried to think of the satisfaction she got from finishing the trim on a skirt, of a good fire on a winter night with a quilt wrapped around her legs, of her real father swinging her about upside-down by the legs and the way she had cackled till she nearly choked. But the familiar was not impressed.

Sorrow? She had plenty of that to work with. A whole city’s worth and more. She thought back to the ashes of Guryev. Bright flashes in the sky, a hideous noise, fire and lightning ripping through block after block while Yuri took her hand and ran and the sanctuary of the church came smashing down when they were still two blocks away. Mother, gone. Father, gone. The corner store, her favorite swings at the park, old Mrs. Belyaeva two doors down who’d first taught Nadia to sew … all gone.

Still the familiar did not move.

Envy? Nadia tried to think of the Greek girls she had seen from the walltops with a telescope, walking freely around Thessaloniki with their friends while Nadia was trapped in her jail of a house with a ghoul for a father. Did those girls even appreciate what they had? Or Fatima, who was rude to Papa Titus and got away with it? Why was she allowed so many privileges the rest of them didn’t get?

The familiar began drifting forward, and for a second Nadia thought she had done it. But the spectral outline of a woman only kept moving, passing clean through her towards the doors. Frantically Nadia tried to summon up a new feeling, but all she got was panic, and that wasn’t what the familiar wanted. Slowly, slowly, she drifted toward the doors, where the crowd outside was starting to shout in anger, and then to scream in terror. At the first scream the familiar halted, wavering in place. Nadia thought she might have gotten slightly dimmer, but she wasn’t sure.

Had the crowd attracted her, maybe? Something had changed about the way the crowd felt, or the soldiers, and the ghost had moved towards them, then stopped when they changed to being afraid. Afraid of what? Nadia tried to imagine it from their perspective, seeing it through the windows: the outline of some girl against a glowing spot in the wall—an important spot to Muslims. Then the familiar moved toward whatever they’d felt then, and they saw a glowing naked ghost and felt nothing but fear.

So what had they felt first? A strange girl poking around their mosque while they were kept out. Did they think something blasphemous was going on? Nadia made herself think of feet stepping on icons, of a mob beating a priest, spilling the sacrament on the ground. The familiar drifted back towards the bay in the wall. Nadia stamped her foot and shouted, “Damn it, what do you want from me?”

At once the ghostly woman stopped, spinning around to face Nadia. Her shape abruptly sharpened, and the hair flew back from a perfectly proportioned face, oval and lovely, with two night-black pits where the eyes should be. Not just ordinary holes but pits, flat dark spaces you could shine a flashlight into and still see nothing at all.

For half of a second Nadia felt only horror, then excitement as her mind caught up and she understood what had happened. The familiar blurred again, her hair sweeping like a curtain over her face. Nadia trembled, started to beg—but you did not beg a familiar’s friendship. What had she done? What had she felt? What had she said?

“What do you want from me?” Nadia repeated, as loud and confident as she could. The familiar froze, but did not get any clearer. The words were right, but not the feeling. Nadia had stamped her foot. Anger. This beautiful woman, with her empty nightmare skull-socket eyes, wanted to talk about anger. The only question was what she wanted to say.

“I can be angry,” Nadia told her. “About Papa Titus. About Yuri, and Varvara. About … about the soldiers, blocking the road when I’d only just got the bike! That wasn’t fair, was it?” Again the black hair parted, and the forever-deep sockets looked out. Nadia had her attention now. She swallowed down her excitement. “None of this is fair! I’m twelve! I should be in school, hundreds of miles away from here!”

The familiar cocked her head. No, this wasn’t quite right. Not quite. Nadia reached out to grab her by her shoulders—they were real enough to touch now—and snarled for the third time, “What do you want from me?”

A light might have flashed, or something like a light, deep inside the darkness of those eyes. It was only there for a second before the mosque, the night, and the dismal world outside all vanished, and it was mid-afternoon, and Nadia was in an upscale restaurant full of well-dressed men and women enjoying a late lunch.

Nadia’s arms were a man’s arms now, burly and hairy, but they were still reaching out towards a woman. A fashionably dressed woman, in her early twenties, with short hair and nice jewelry and a cold smile on her pretty face. Nadia’s strong hands clenched down on her bare shoulders, and for an instant the lady looked afraid. Then the sneer came slamming down over her face again, like a castle’s gate, and Nadia heard herself say something angry in a deep voice. It was in French, and Nadia still did not understand it, but she knew what the man’s voice was saying: “What do you want from me?”

The lady did not bother over the hands on her shoulders. She only curled her lip, and said something nasty in the same language. Nadia barked something back. The other diners were staring. She could see that she’d knocked her meal, her expensive meal, onto the floor when she got up to teach this fool of a woman some sense, but she was still smirking and the water was dripping down onto Nadia’s shoes.

Her right hand let go, pulling back and opening up for a slap. The lady’s eyes flicked toward it, but then she laughed and stepped away around the table, sidling out from under Nadia’s grip like it wasn’t even there. A waiter in a fancy jacket was pushing through the tables now, talking very fast, and the lady turned around with a final sneer and a few hard words as she marched toward the door.

Another year, another woman. And another, and another, but none of them stayed. In and out of her life—his life?—they came, some haughty, some angry, some only silent and apathetic. In between, all the other snide little faces: clerks holding out endless sheafs of fresh paperwork, officers raising an eyebrow as if to say, Why is that my problem, soldier? Doors slammed shut, eyes rolled, disappointment and an endlessly pathetic existence that could never hope to match his expectations. Or anyone else’s—if only they would tell him what the hell those expectations were!

Behind it all, one last woman, the woman, grey-haired and weary, looking out the window with a glum expression as her boy’s childhood rolled past her and she could not be asked to care. Writing in her damned journals and gossiping with her frog-faced friends on the phone. She was every bit as dutiful as the law required. Three meals a day, all served with a shrug. He’d known more love in the service.

But all those women were gone now. Abruptly, the dead solder’s memories left her, she was Nadia again, and there was another woman there, bright and clear and very real in the tiny mosque. Her skin still shone, but it was pale white no longer; now it was a gleaming chrome, glinting with rainbows around the edges, and her glorious black hair spilled down like a waterfall to cover her body, turning to a dark mist when it hit the ground.

Only the empty eyes were the same, and they did not frighten Nadia anymore. Those eyes were not ugly; they only kept their secrets, from a world that did not deserve to know them. She was all beautiful, from head to foot.

“Your name is Ézarine, isn’t it?” The familiar did not change her expression, but Nadia knew she was right. “And his was Claude.” And it was.

Nadia had expected to feel excited, or relieved, or happy, but of course she didn’t. Not now. She was in Ézarine’s halo, caught up in her valence, and everything else was muted. The halo extended outside, to where the people in the crowd were shouting, and loud voices were snapping back in French, telling them to move their worthless ingrate civilian asses before they got shot. All of it grated on Nadia’s nerves, like a fly buzzing away in a corner she couldn’t quite reach.

She spun around to glower out at the braying crowd, and the nine-millimeter clunked against her ribs. The stupid thing was heavy, and why did she even have it? What kind of irresponsible lunatic sent a girl her age into a war zone with a pistol? A man like Papa Titus, of course. To hell with him. She pulled the gun out and threw it against the wall. Which was a moronic thing to do with a loaded weapon, and that only made her more angry, but she pretended not to care.

Ézarine came up behind her, wrapping Nadia in her arms. Fresh shouts came from outside the door, then a rattle of gunfire, a three-shot burst. How dare they? It was Friday, and this was a mosque. Those people had a right to be here. There was no good reason for any of this nonsense.

Nadia was not conscious of giving her new familiar an order. For one instant, the two of them were in perfect agreement, and Ézarine gave a shout and the door of the mosque exploded in a cloud of tiny splinters. She was through the door before the dust settled, lighting up the street with her terrible beauty.

Nadia rushed out after her, caught a glimpse of her long black hair wafting out in a cloud of darkness to wrap itself around the nearest soldier. Then something flickered, Ézarine was gone, and with a scream the man came plunging down from high up to slam into the ground. There was a horrid crunch when he landed, and blood splashed across the pavement.

Nadia had not meant that to happen, but she could not be upset with Ézarine, who was now floating regally back to the street. As for the soldiers—pigs! So obsessed with keeping their country’s secrets, even if it meant killing people, or leaving Ézarine to die alone. Now one of the locals was lying on the sidewalk, clutching at her bleeding side where the bullets had gone in. Nadia wanted to help her, but she already knew that was not the kind of thing Ézarine could do.

The rest of the men were running away. They cursed and grumbled, but they ran. At least they could figure out that much. One of them stopped at the end of the road to shoot at Ézarine (did these clowns think they could hurt her that way?), who responded by rising up into the air again and letting out a scream that set the whole world shaking. Every car on the street had its tires burst at once; every window shattered; a fire hydrant shot a jet of water straight up into the air. Everyone but Nadia fell down hard, clutching their ears. She didn’t see what happened to the soldiers, but there were no more gunshots.

Belatedly, she thought to cover up; she’d been barefaced since landing, so as not to stand out. No chance of that now. She took out her handkerchief and covered her mouth and nose again. Ézarine was at her side now, a luminous protective arm around her shoulders. With the familiar close, Nadia was at least safe from cameras. On the other hand … she pulled the dowser out of her pocket, but it refused to turn on. Of course.

Shaking her head, Nadia trudged back up the street. As Ézarine’s anchor, she couldn’t be picked up and carried around as easily as she had moved the soldier. She had no choice but to walk on until she found a good spot to disappear. Then she could pull back her new familiar, and call Papa Titus to let him know that she was a real Marshall now.