Secondhand Sorcery

Hampton barely made it to the bottom of the stairwell; Keisha had to grab him before he fell down the last three steps. Then ease him to the floor, so he could weep and whine like a small child for the next five minutes. Eventually he finished, and lay still for so long that she had to check to be sure he was still breathing. What in the world had Marshall done to him? This couldn’t be what happened at every meeting, could it?

Eventually they made it out, with Keisha all but carrying the staggering Colonel. The enforcers scattered around the courtyard, and inside the castle’s grimy institutional vestibule, watched in silence without offering to help. Apparently this kind of thing happened too often to be notable or concerning.

The parking attendant didn’t say anything either, only smirked and swigged his Coke. Keisha was too busy holding up half of Hampton’s weight to be bothered. Getting him inside the car was a special challenge—she stuffed him into the passenger seat. She wasn’t used to driving stick, but that was the least of her worries right now. She didn’t even know where to go.

“Colonel Hampton. Are you all right?” Silence. She shook him by the shoulder. “Sir. I need you to wake up and say something.” He obliged with an incomprehensible mumble. Damn it. She could go to the hospital, but they would ask too many questions she couldn’t answer, and the Numenate brass would raise hell. Likewise for the local consulate. She reached over to check his neck; his pulse was strong and steady, if a bit fast.

She had a number she could call, but it was only intended for last-ditch extractions from the country when the whole mission was blown. Everything else was supposed to be routed through her new CO, who was currently moaning and gasping uselessly in the seat next to her following an unprovoked assault by the contractor he was supposed to be liaising with. A contractor who had apparently just declared his organization a sovereign country in her hearing. What in God’s name was she meant to do with this mess?

It was tempting to just try and take Marshall down right now, and worry about rules of engagement later. She could do it, and with fair odds of success. All she had to do was get out of sight and bust her pic’ out of the glove compartment. Whistle up a little gnat-sized construct, send it flying innocently up into Marshall’s room, through his stupid mask, down his nostrils and into his vocal cords, where it would turn into a marble-sized wad of something like rubber cement. Shock plus asphyxiation equals permanent brain damage in five minutes—five minutes spent flailing on the floor in perfect silence. End of an empire, quick and clean.

She’d done it plenty of times before, but never to an emissor. If he kept his wits enough to call his familiar before blacking out, her little unanchored ectoplasmic pet would get sucked up like water by a dry sponge, and Marshall would in all likelihood go on a rampage to kill her and the Colonel, then declare a vendetta against the United States and maybe destroy half the city to let off steam.

Shaking her head, she pulled Hampton’s keys out of his pocket, buckled them both in, and started the engine. First, she would get where the metal-plated meter maid wasn’t watching. The rest could wait.

Keisha surprised herself by not leaving a trail of manual transmission parts all down the streets of Old Thessaloniki. Only a little grinding now and then, really. She got them to a spot that wasn’t in the castle’s line of sight, in a neighborhood that had real people walking the streets instead of henchmen. She parked in one of the quieter spots, where she could think it over.

Hampton was still out of it, babbling a few disjointed words she couldn’t make sense of. No telling when or if he’d recover. She had to proceed on the assumption that she’d be on her own. If she really worked at it, she might find a way to contact someone in authority without getting seen by one of Marshall’s informants … and they would respond by telling her to sit tight while they argued for the next week about appropriate and proportional responses. There was no guessing what Marshall would do in the meantime.

She was flying blind, and needed more information. She couldn’t get it from here, with what she had, which made her next step obvious. It took her another hour to find her way back to her hotel, and haul Hampton across the lobby, into the elevator, and up to her room, where she tossed him onto her bed to recover. They got a few dark looks along the way. Maybe Thessalonikians (Thessalonians?) didn’t approve of immigrant prostitutes who got their johns black-out drunk on Sunday afternoons. As long as they didn’t call the police on her, she didn’t care.

The Colonel was starting to come around; she asked him if he was okay again, and he responded with a weak “been better” before shutting his eyes and starting to snore. Vitals still stable as far as she could tell with basic military first aid training and no equipment. He didn’t feel feverish. She’d better try to get something done before he recovered enough to tell her not to do it.

Her “Benny” was where she’d left it, in a clarinet case shoved in the room’s closet. Right next to the green oxygen tank full of reserve ectoplasm. Hopefully Hampton wouldn’t wake up, figure out what it was, and wet her bed in terror. She snapped the pieces together, ran it through the usual test sequence, then strolled to the window and opened it. The sky was partly cloudy—good but not great. She could work with that.

A full-sized VRIL could do a lot more than a little piccolo model, creating constructs of greater size, complexity, and longevity at a greater cost in ectoplasm. What she wanted now wasn’t particularly big, though, only another little flying bug. Something like ninety percent of the standard construct listing was small enough to fit on a human fingernail. Easy to overlook until it blew up, or started digging into your eyeball.

The Whisperwing model was toothless; she needed the Benny to make it because it allowed precise control at long range, and fed back detailed images and sound. Keisha saw through its eyes as it emerged from the end of her instrument, then flitted out the window. Caution was called for here; it had a very dense body, but even partial sun would eat into it fast, and she had some distance to cover. She made quick dashes between the shady sides of buildings, minimizing time in the light.

Marshall’s base was easy enough to find even from an insect’s perspective; it was on the highest point in the city. She got the ‘wing up there with at least an hour’s lifespan to spare, by the feel of it, and decided against checking on the man himself right away. If he was a seasoned PPO, he’d want to kill insects even when he didn’t have reason to suspect them, and he was already paranoid.

Instead, she took a leisurely tour of the grounds, wiggling her way in through broken windows and cracks under doors. The castle courtyard was divided into five partitions, most with grim-looking modern buildings inside, flushed up against the inner face of the walls. She sent her bug through these first, but found them mostly empty. The rooms had bars on the windows and looked like they used to be prison cells, but had children’s clothes and toys scattered on their floors. Going by these, it seemed one building was for girl children, the other for boys. At least ten of each. There were no children currently in them, but the courtyard was also deserted. Interesting.

A third building, on the northwest end, had a few grown men in it, sleeping or watching TV. More henchmen. Nothing of interest. They’d met Marshall in the complex built into the northeast wall, where he presumably still was. That left the clutter of new buildings outside the castle, and the towers. She went for the latter; the outer area was less secure, and felt like riffraff territory.

The first tower she checked had a teenage girl in it, lying on a bed watching local television. From time to time she paused it with a remote and flipped through a Greek-English dictionary, repeating a word or phrase. The girl might have been anywhere from thirteen to sixteen, with slightly curly black hair and a complexion not much different from Keisha’s, only with a bit of acne. She looked bored, and didn’t seem to notice the bug flying around her ceiling. Her walls were covered with framed pictures of mountainous landscapes, and one small city with a mountain in the background. Keisha hung about for three or four minutes before deciding there was nothing more to be learned, and leaving.

The next tower had a pudgy boy of around the same age in it. Slightly lighter skin, short straight black hair. His room was cluttered with books, half of their spines labeled in Cyrillic or Arabic. One corner was occupied by a harpsichord, which the boy plinked away at intently while he squinted at sheet music. It took Keisha some time to recognize the piece as Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” played slow and halting on a completely inappropriate instrument. He, too, took no notice of her construct, and she expected she would have to land on his nose to get his attention.

A third tower room was empty—of people. It did have an electric guitar, a large television (left on) with a DVD player, several used plates and forks crusted with food, two soccer balls, a humongous and expensive-looking stereo rig, some remote-control airplanes (one busted), an open box of Greek cigars, several partially-full liquor bottles including eighteen-year-old Talisker, and a very wide assortment of magazines scattered all over the floor and bed. This room’s usual occupant, judging by their covers and the posters on the walls, was interested in sports, cars, hunting, fishing, guns, manga, and international pornography. A life-sized Playboy pinup hung next to the bed.

She thought she saw the pattern: a large number of younger children, kept in tiny cells and given basic necessities and little toys, and a few older children who were indulged with expensive luxuries in private rooms. It was tempting to assume the latter were the ones with familiars, and that she had just seen two of Marshall’s pet paraphysical operatives. But it was too soon to say for sure. She moved on.

The last tower she checked had not one but two children in it, a boy and a girl, both adolescent, and having a lively argument. The boy was skinny and good-looking, maybe thirteen, with pale blond hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. The girl was taller and more tan, her face very narrow, almost gaunt, with thin lips. Her hair was mostly black but had a bit of much paler color showing at the roots, and her eyes were as pale blue as his.

It would have been nice to eavesdrop, but they were speaking something that sounded Russian to Keisha. At least, he was speaking it, with a smug grin on his face; she was almost shouting, jabbing her finger at an object on the floor next to her foot. A cigar? The boy put an arm on the girl’s shoulder, said something in conciliatory tones. She wasn’t having it, and asked him a question. The answer seemed to startle her; she looked stricken, and stammered out another, much shorter question, which he answered with malicious glee.

After a few more exchanges—which the boy seemed to enjoy to an indecent degree—she drove him out of the room, then stormed over to the far corner and started jabbering, very fast, still in Russian, at something Keisha couldn’t see from her current position. After a little while she threw herself on her bed and started sobbing into her pillow.

There was a story here. Keisha set the whisperwing fluttering a little closer to whatever it was she’d been talking at. She found only pictures on the wall—odd ones. Bright but flat portraits on the front of people in weird clothes. All of them with gold-leaf circles framing their heads. But they looked familiar … memories spoke to her from missions past, in Lithuania, Armenia, Romania, all over the Eastern Bloc.

Icons. They were icons. The girl had been praying. And it didn’t look like those prayers had been answered. Keisha turned the ‘wing’s eyes back to the bed, and remembered a bit farther back, half a lifetime past, when another girl laid down on another bed and cried because she was all alone in the world. This was the part of the story when the old lady came in and said her line. And Keisha waited, half expecting it to happen. But the minutes passed, and the girl kept on crying in her room alone.

Keisha could never recall clearly afterwards whether she meant to or not. Possibly one part of her did, and another didn’t. Possibly it was a total accident. Either way, the beloved words came back to her, and they flew across several miles of air over Thessaloniki and came out the other side, quiet but clear: “All is well, child, and all will be well, now and forever, till the end of the world.”

And as soon as the words were said, just as Keisha was wondering what in the hell was wrong with her, and just how big a heap of trouble she had landed herself in, the girl on the bed froze, mid-sob, and lifted her head. “Kto eto skazal?” she said, looking wildly around the room. Keisha had already flattened the whisperwing against the wall, ordering its wings to lie perfectly still. It was, by design, the kind of drab grey color that might blend perfectly well with anything.

But the girl wasn’t put off. “Who said that?” she demanded, rising from the bed and wiping tears off her face with the back of her hand. “Yuri, if this is one of your tricks … “ Keisha kept quiet. No sense making a bigger mess of this than she already had. “Who is this? Who said that?” Her eyes flickered over the ‘wing in the corner, then moved on. She took a deep breath. “Do you think this is funny, whoever you are? Hiding electronic snoopers in my room? Do you think Papa Titus will think it is funny too?”

Damn. Damn damn damn. She had screwed this one up proper, hadn’t she? Blown the whole operation in one stupid sentimental moment. The girl was turning away already, setting her face to the door. But she seemed reluctant to go; she clenched her fists at her sides, then looked behind her again, raking the whole room with a long scowl. “Don’t think I won’t do it! Yuri, or whoever you are! There will be consequences for this!”

She was lying. However angry she was at being interrupted in a snit—and Keisha remembered her own teenage years well enough, and knew how furious she would have been in that girl’s place—she plainly didn’t want to get ‘Papa Titus’ involved. Which meant this whole operation was not (yet) totally ruined after all. In fact …

To hell with it. The whisperwing detached itself from the wall and fluttered gently down to hover in front of the girl’s astonished face. She held out a trembling finger to point at it—or maybe to poke it—and Keisha accepted it as a perch. “You don’t really want to talk to Papa Titus, do you?”

The girl stared so hard she nearly went cross-eyed, and did not answer. Judging by past experience, she would probably stay that way for a good thirty seconds, maybe a little longer. Keisha had that long to keep her from screaming and running out of the room telling the whole damn castle about the talking bug. High stakes. “You want help. I can tell. I might be able to give you that help.”

The girl swallowed visibly, then said in a low, angry voice, “My godmother died years ago, and she was not a fairy. I don’t take help from strangers. Who and what are you?”

There wasn’t much to be lost by telling something like the truth; if this child ran and talked right now, anybody with any experience in paraphysics would be able to guess most of it, and ‘Sarah Lawrence’ would be the chief suspect. What happened after that, she didn’t like to think. Titus Marshall would be very angry, and she had no idea how far an angry Titus Marshall would go. “This creature you are talking to isn’t me. It’s a construct made of ectoplasm. Like your familiar, but not permanent. It will disappear in an hour or so.”

“How do you know I have a familiar?” the girl said.

She hadn’t, but didn’t say so. “I am very good at finding out information. Could you use that ability?”

“A spy. You are a spy, aren’t you? And you want to use me against Papa Titus.” She flicked her wrist, and a cage of fingers rose up around the whisperwing in an instant. The girl’s voice came in a ferocious whisper, very close: “What will happen if I crush you, little bug?”

“This construct will disintegrate into loose ectoplasm, and I will be unhurt. You can then tell your friends and family about me, without proof, and if they believe you that will set me back, but it will not help you at all. And I will not come back to offer help a second time. You don’t seem like a stupid girl. Are you?”

For a long time, nothing happened, and Keisha waited, silent and patient, tickling a teenage girl’s hand with her fragile wings. Then the world tumbled around her as the child started walking, light shifting through her fingers in crazy patterns. There was the sound of a door opening, a pause, then the door closed again. No, this did not seem to be a stupid girl.

The fingers opened up, and blue eyes stared down at her coldly. “I am listening.”