Secondhand Sorcery

They’d all been warned, several times, to watch for dogs. Not just to watch, but to listen, because Galata was a dangerous place, even for Hamza who’d been there several times before. Light would be inconsistent, hiding places many, and they would only get a half-second’s warning at best before a dog burst out of cover to maul them. A rustle in the grass, a clatter of debris shifting underfoot, and then the beast would be on them.

So Hamza led the way with silent steps, gesturing for them to stop or come with one hand while he held out his silenced pistol with the other, sweeping it around every corner he turned. And there were many corners. Galata was all corners now, corners and passages and dead ends, pits and craters, weeds and thorns. You couldn’t find thirty feet of it to walk in a straight line without squeezing through a gaping crack in a wall, or shuffling around a jagged hole in the asphalt where a stray shell had landed.

A year ago, it had been a lively part of the city, just north of the inlet they called the Golden Horn, the harbor of ancient Constantinople. There used to be three bridges across its narrowest point, and when Russia first took Fatih the Coalition had rushed those bridges many times. Galata inevitably died in the process, but they kept fighting for it, three straight months of attacks and counterattacks, raids and occupations.

The Greek traitor Akritas swept in and remade it in his usual way, slapping rubble together into makeshift bunkers and barriers for a Russian advance. Coalition forces took it back, smashing them down again, and were repulsed. The process repeated a dozen times before Russia gave in and destroyed the bridges, so there was nothing left to fight over, and the battlefront had shifted to the west.

Now nobody lived in Galata but the kind of men they called “irregulars,” human vermin dredged up from the vilest places eastern Europe had to offer. From time to time they would sneak out of their holes here to trouble the parts of the city that were still functional, robbing stores, bombing schools, and setting houses on fire.

Decent people moved away from the harassment if they could, and the death and blight of Galata came creeping north and west in their absence. The Coalition bombed the area, but the raids persisted; familiars flushed the thugs out, but they came back or were replaced; ground forces sent in to clear the area out found only dust and the odd landmine.

And dogs. Dust, and landmines, and dogs. Nadia was frightened of landmines, but more frightened of dogs. You had to step on a landmine before it killed you, and she felt sure it would kill you quicker, without the blood and pain and terror of teeth tearing at your throat.

Hamza put up a hand, and she froze in place; Ruslan ducked behind half a theater marquee. They both had pistols too, and all three of them had on night-vision monoculars, but neither was stupid enough to think they could use them as effectively as Hamza. Instead they watched, trying to breathe quietly, as their big brother peered inside the wrecked pillbox that blocked their shortest path to the Golden Horn. It was getting late, and the setting sun made long shadows to trick the eye; had he spotted a tripwire in the clutter?

At last he grunted, motioned for them to stay where they were, and ducked into the little bunker to investigate more closely. Thirty seconds later he whistled all-clear, and they hurried in after him. He’d been kneeling, but stood as soon as they appeared so he could cover them while they looked at the dead dog on the ground.

There wasn’t much to see. It was a good-sized male, black with brown around the muzzle, chest, and legs—Nadia didn’t know dog breeds, but she had seen similar animals before. This one was lying on its side, perfectly still, and she couldn’t see what had killed it. There were no visible wounds. “Was it poisoned?” she whispered.

Hamza put a finger to his lips, shook his head, and motioned for them to move on. Ruslan obeyed at once, but Nadia found it strangely difficult to move away from the body. She almost felt sorry for it. Hamza had to grab her arm and yank her to her feet.

A shortcut through the remains of someone’s basement. A careful slink down a scree-covered slope, into a pit full of burnt trash. A quiet detour around a shallow pool where a sewer line had busted open, and Mayakora’s murderous plants had staked a claim to the nourishing sludge. They weren’t active in the same way once they had left her halo, but the thorns were still long and venomous.

Progress was slow, and they were all torn between impatience and fear. It was almost ten minutes before Hamza spotted the second dead dog, in the shadow of a rusted-out dumpster. A different breed this time, longer-haired with big pointed ears, but again unmarked. Hamza shot them a frown, then moved on.

He didn’t even stop when he found the dead men next, two of them, sprawled across the floor of a cafe. Hamza peered through the miraculously intact windows, scowled, and waved for them to keep going. She tried to peek too, and he shoved her on her way. But not before she saw sleeping bags on the floor, and a couple of AKs on dirty tables, and beat-up cardboard boxes and crates piled against one wall. Not a drop of blood on or around either man, though they had knocked over several chairs.

“Is someone helping us?” Ruslan breathed in her ear at the next stop, in the shadow of a graffitied wall. “Who?” His voice cracked on the word. Hamza was too busy texting Papa Titus to notice the breach of field discipline.

Nadia didn’t—couldn’t—answer Ruslan’s question, but she suspected. Beelzebub. Her sneaky new friend had offered her protection on this mission, but she hadn’t expected him to follow through at all, let alone this dramatically. She’d talked with him several times over the past couple of weeks, mostly from boredom and loneliness, assuming he was only leading her on for more information. There were his Yunks-blocking lessons, true, but she’d been too tired from endless mission prep to really focus on them. And there’d been no way to test if any of it actually worked.

They were moving faster now, less cautiously. Hamza was nervous, and wanted this over with. She thought he would have preferred to shoot a couple of mongrels, and dodge or kill their masters, rather than face this uncanny assistance. Nobody but the three of them and Papa Titus was supposed to know their route. Beelzebub hadn’t even been able to wring it out of Nadia; she wasn’t sure who he was spying for. Not Russia, apparently.

There would be trouble about this later, at debriefing. Papa Titus took security very seriously. But post-mission debriefing felt a long ways off, and she would have to survive the actual mission first. She felt more relief than fear. Maybe the spy was her friend after all. Was he hiding somewhere nearby, calling up little poison wasps to sting their enemies to death?

She was still wondering when the Golden Horn came into view at last—and it was, in fact, golden. The last rays of the sun, sneaking past the surviving city skylines, lit the waterway up till it dazzled the eye. The near shore was an ugly mess like the rest of Galata, cracked and empty streets strewn with ash where the local goons had made bonfires of rubbish by the waterside. A cold breeze off the water sent a half-burnt plastic bag tumbling across the road. The far side was an uninterrupted line of Akritas’s best and most imposing work, a faux-medieval wall a hundred feet high and who knew how thick. It was still a welcome sight.

Hamza had the dowser out at once, letting Papa Titus know that they were in position, or close enough. The reply was a while coming, long enough for Nadia to wonder what Hamza would see if he ran that dowser over the surrounding area. She assumed Beelzebub’s little friends would show up just like a familiar, but more faintly, so he could use them without raising alarms in Fatih. They would be on their own once they crossed the Horn.

“Primus, Secundus,” the voice came over the dowser, only faintly muddled by static. “Now.” Hamza texted an acknowledgment, pivoting slightly to the west as he did to watch and wait. Shum-Shum was up in seconds, lighting up the sky—Nadia was glad they were too far away to hear that odious music—and Myriad soon after, unfolding her shiny petals to send out her spawn. The rest of the monsters were not slow to follow, lighting up the west end of Fatih like a carnival.

All of them were little more than specks, kilometers away, and Nadia and her brothers were far outside their halos—which was still too close for Nadia’s tastes. Corollary effects could be just as dangerous as the fancy hypothetical stuff that went on inside a halo. As Shum-Shum’s old master had found out, choking on smoke from absolutely real physical fires that didn’t care who he was or what had made them …

Ruslan was less distracted than she was; his keystone sequence interrupted her fretting with his forlorn vision of the dead child in the tent. Kizil Khan was in the air, with Hamza clutched in his arms, bare seconds after the sequence finished. They sped across the Horn as fast as the black and bleeding beast could carry them—which did not look particularly fast, at the moment. Kizil Khan had only the three of them to sustain him, and Nadia would be out of his halo by the end, when he would need to fly up to the top of those forbidding walls.

This was the trickiest part of the mission. Hamza made the half-kilometer crossing first, because he was the likeliest to get the job finished alone if he had to. Nadia would be next. Then, if they had time, she would send Ézarine back for Ruslan, since his own familiar couldn’t carry him. Once he was over—if he made it over—that would be it, the three of them against all of Fatih.

Nadia squinted. Kizil Khan was ideal for this kind of thing. Not only would he not show up on radar, he didn’t give off a bit of light; from a distance, he looked almost like one of the seabirds meandering over the water, until your brain caught up and you realized how huge he was. Or he flew over you, and you got hit with “droppings” that turned out to be phantasmal blood. Nadia soon lost track of them against the dark walls.

Ruslan sighed, and sat down with his back against a gutted pickup truck. “Okay, he’s over. But it was close.”

“Good,” Nadia said. “Me next.”

“In a minute. I need to rest. I know we don’t have a lot of time,” he added, before she could nag him. The battle for the wall still looked plenty hot, from what little Nadia could see from kilometers downstream on the opposite shore.

“Not if we want all three of us over,” she said, and he made a face at her. She didn’t say it, but they both knew he didn’t want there to be enough time to get him across. Not that she would ever accuse him! Out loud.

“Who do you think killed those dogs?” he asked. “And the two men? Did he tell you that was going to happen?”

“No. Papa Titus must have decided to clear the way at the last second,” she improvised.

“Cleared it how?” Ruslan said, literally scratching his head. “How’d he poison all of them at once? I didn’t see any marks, did you?”

So he didn’t know about the whole VRIL thing either. Nadia gathered, from talks with Beelzebub, that it was an older technology which got less attention than familiars these days. Or something like that. Just as well, but Ruslan was still looking to her for an answer for some stupid reason.

“I don’t know!” she said. “Do you have any better ideas? I don’t think they all dropped dead by themselves. Come on, that’s enough rest, get me across.” She thought that sounded awful defensive, so she added, “We’ll all be for Yunks if we bungle this.”

Dropping the hated name did the trick; Ruslan looked pouty, but got back to his feet.

Getting off the ground in Kizil Khan’s talons was awkward, but much more pleasant than dropping out of a plane with him. Even if, with only her and Ruslan to sustain him, he got about twenty feet into the air before braving the crossing. That should have been terrifying, but his halo morbidly assured her that, if she fell and drowned, her corpse would feed a multitude of fish. Somehow, at that moment, the thought was comforting.

She still didn’t see how he could hope to lift her all the way up and over those walls, even if she wasn’t scared of failure at the moment. The idea hadn’t seemed so farfetched during their practice runs, before she saw firsthand how ridiculously tall the barriers were. Calmly she wondered if the mighty Red King would simply dissociate himself trying to fly that high, leaving her to fall to her death, or if he would get her halfway, stall out, and smash them both into the stony vertical face.

She was about a hundred and fifty feet out from the wall when she noticed two things. The first was a clear gap in the barrier where she was sure none had been before, a neat little rectangle at the bottom edge where white light shone out like a beacon. The second thing she noticed was that the first thing irritated her immensely.

Someone had gone to the bother of building this perfect, beautifully regular wall which protected the whole of the town from contaminants, and here was a hole some contemptible human being had made, spoiling the whole thing! Whoever it was, they would not get away with it, with this vile deviation—

but there was no deviation everything was in a pattern already patterns were beautiful and death was a pattern and life was a pattern constructing itself but there was no need for justice the order reasserted itself with regularity and to speak of right and wrong was an absurdity in the face of life’s eternal rhythm which persisted in spite of all ah life’s beautiful rhythm the rhythm the rhythm all was well—

the bird was flying lower now not so regular another deviation dirty red drops clouding clean water wings flapping wrong no symmetry nothing metronomic the tablecloth was on crooked the pictures did not hang straight the water was closer the wall was closer but the wall was not so regular she could see the stones did not line up not all the same size different alignment shaped like pain why dammit why why did the shapes attack her—

dirty bird ought to die damn his ragged feathers—

Kizil Khan disintegrated less than five feet above the water, moving fast enough in his last efforts that Nadia actually skipped like a stone, once, before crashing through the water’s surface and starting to sink. Like a fresh discovery it came to her that she did not much want to die, no matter what the fish did to her, provided they bit at both sides of her corpse evenly. Or … did that matter? She was not sure, but the cold water flooding into her mouth and nose was aesthetically unpleasant.

Sometimes a little temporary disturbance was necessary, she thought, to preserve the greater equilibrium. And death … death was another victory for entropy, and entropy was … entropy was even, wasn’t it? Eventually all the universe would be one uniform field of equal heat and density. But then, life was self-organizing, wasn’t it? Think of seashells, imagine yourself counting the lines and ridges, flowers with every petal intact, a smooth calm unruffled field of grass.

Nadia sank a little further, her wet clothes dragging her down.

A giant white hand descended and plucked her out. She gagged and coughed horribly as she came up, and might have vomited a little. Twelve bright gemstone eyes, soothingly spaced around a blank empty face, twinkled at her as the white hand let her down. And now the little break in the wall, that could be fixed, couldn’t it? They could close the door so it all looked the same outside one solid wall they should do that now—

Hands picked her up by the shirt and gave her a little slap across the face. It stung. The world got brighter, came into slightly sharper focus, and she saw a young man’s lips were moving. “Nadia! Hey! We don’t have time for this shit! Wake the fuck up!”

Wake up? Was she asleep?

She was not. Now. She was lying on a hard floor and it didn’t feel good. So she sat up, and saw a big rough room all around her, half-full of pallets with a few plastic boxes on them. Boxes, and two twenty-kilo sacks labeled рис, rice. A portable kerosene heater was running four feet away, but her clothes were still cold and damp. Behind her the little door that had bothered her was closed.

“Awake now? Good. Move.” Hamza hauled her to her feet and held her in place until she gave up trying to flop down again. Her head was still spinning and it felt like there was a lot she couldn’t remember.

There was a dead man in the corner, she saw, with a great diagonal slash across his torso leaking blood all over the floor. That seemed out of place—and not just because the blood looked like it had leaked in a strangely regular pattern—but she let Hamza lead her to the door, which he kicked open. It led out onto a little platform on the water. It was a bit darker now than she remembered, and the wind was very cold. “It’s your turn now. Do it!”

“What? What do I do?”

“Goddamn it. The plan. Get Ruslan.”

“Ruslan?”

“Goddamn it,” he said again, and put a hand on his forehead. “Okay, look. You just got hit by ambivalence, all right? I tried to get a harmonic going with Myriad so I wouldn’t piss her off too bad, but it didn’t work right because I started past her sequence, and Kizil Khan flew right into the middle and kicked the bucket.

“You damn near drowned in some cold-ass water, and Rhad probably screwed your head worse fishing you out. I know you’re still a little out of it, but I can’t give you any more time. I just can’t, okay? Fight’s over, Myriad’s bailed, and surveillance will be up in minutes. I need you to get your shit together right now, and haul Ruslan over.”

“Ruslan.” She knew who Ruslan was. Pretty sure.

“Yes. Ruslan.” He strapped his own monocular roughly over her right eye, got the zoom going, and helped her find a small, chubby figure sitting alone on the other side of the water, his face held in his hands. Ruslan?

“How?” she said, turning back to Hamza.

“With Ézarine,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Oh.” That probably made sense. She had a hard time getting herself really worked up with her head feeling all full of cotton fluff, but he helped her along by hitting her a couple more times. Eventually she got good and crabby with him, and Ézarine winked into existence.

That made the monocular stop working, but she still had some idea where to send her. Ézarine vanished into her own hair—just like they’d practiced—and reappeared two seconds later to dump the chubby kid onto the floor. Then disappeared again.

As soon as it was done, Nadia sat down on the hard floor to rub her bruises. Hamza hit pretty hard. Ruslan came up to her and gave her a big hug. His eyes were red. He mumbled something she didn’t quite understand. Apparently he’d thought she was dead, and it was his fault?

“You’re weird,” she told him, and started to laugh. Ruslan looked shocked, and that made her laugh harder. Hamza sighed, slumped to the floor beside a pallet, and pulled a little flask out of his pocket. Nadia kept right on laughing, harder and harder, until suddenly she had to cry.