Secondhand Sorcery

Nadia opened her eyes, and found herself staring at wooden beams holding up a somewhat water-damaged ceiling she did not recognize. Her head dipped down. She was half-sitting, half-lying in a chair with a torn cushion, around a small table in the most poorly lit corner of a poorly lit restaurant with maybe ten other people in it. The clock on the wall claimed it was 8:46, and the street outside the windows was dark. Evening, then. Her hair was still damp; the heavy coat she was wearing was dry, but overlarge, and smelled like tobacco.

She was more certain now that the boy sitting next to her, clutching a half-full cola and eyeing her nervously, was named Ruslan. The tall young man at the bar, chatting with a middle-aged man in very bad Russian, would be Hamza. And this, she had to assume, was somewhere in Istanbul. Hopefully still Fatih.

She returned her gaze to the ceiling as she asked the most pressing question on her mind: “Ruslan, how did we get here?”

“Nam nuzhno govorit' po-russki!” he whispered back to her.

“How did we get here?” she tried again, in the correct language. That was why they didn’t have Fatima along, after all. Her Russian was worse than Hamza’s and she had no Turkish at all.

“It wasn’t easy. You’ve been giggling and crying and talking real loud in English for over an hour now. Big brother Pavel there had to put a hand over your mouth to shut you up. Are you better yet?”

“I guess so,” she said sheepishly, though it depended how you meant the question. She was thinking more clearly, but she didn’t think her head had hurt before.

“Good. Pavel! I think she’s feeling better.” Hamza wrapped up his conversation in a hurry, threw a handful of change on the bar, and all but sprinted to their table.

“We’ve lost a lot of time,” he muttered in Nadia’s ear as he pushed them out the door.

“Yes, I can tell,” she replied. “But that will get their guard down, won’t it?”

“No, it’ll give them more time to miss the three men I dumped in the Horn.”

“Oh. Right.” She was glad she had only seen one of those three, while the ambivalent shock was still on her. Back in that … receiving room, was it? For “Kozlov’s Konvoy.” It was dark now, and one of the infamous deep runners might be pulling up to that little platform at this exact moment to offload the latest shipment of supplies that kept the besieged district from starving. They might wonder what had happened to the men who were supposed to open the door—assuming they didn’t see them bobbing in the water.

The street outside was broad, empty, frigid, and even more poorly lit than the dump they had just left. It had once been a busy highway, she was sure, but the apartment blocks on either side were all dark, and she could see, mostly by moonlight, that the entrance of the nearest was chained shut. That was surprisingly optimistic, going by what she’d heard of this place. It meant somebody valued what they had here, and was planning to use it someday.

Or else one of their three emissors was holed up in that building with a month’s supply of food and water, as safely hidden as a grain of sand on a beach. It didn’t seem likely, but it was possible. They only had a little intelligence to go on, and a lot of guesswork piled on top of other guesswork by men who had spent a lot of time reading the reports of poorly-placed spies and staring at satellite photos.

“Where has Alyosha got to, do you think?” she asked. That would be Akritas. Code names all around. She was pretty sure “Ilya” was Myriad and “Dobrynyna” was Kostroma, but she might have got them switched after almost drowning.

“Nowhere near here,” Hamza replied, jerking his head towards the great outer wall, easily visible down the street.

“We know where to find, uh … one of them,” Ruslan added hopefully. He couldn’t keep the names straight either. His hand pointed down the other end, where a simply massive complex of towers dominated the skyline, blotting out an unreasonable number of stars. The new Konstantinopol’skiy Kreml’ was extravagant even by Akritas’s standards. It was easy to get carried away when you could slap a city block’s worth of buildings together in thirty seconds.

“That’s our last resort,” Hamza said, and led them to the nearest crossroads instead. Fatih wasn’t a very large part of Istanbul, on the map—just one tiny little finger of land on the southeastern edge of the European half of the city, a city which had outgrown its medieval boundaries many times over. The part Russia actually controlled now—the bit which wasn’t covered with toxic brambles—was still smaller, but that meant it was “only” ten square kilometers, a massive space to hide three people in. Whether those three were Nadia and her brothers, or the three people they had been sent to kill.

Myriad’s emissor hardly needed to be found—he or she would certainly be holed up in that eyesore of a Kremlin, inaccessible without a perilous direct assault. Nobody even had a good idea what this person looked like (though they were assumed to be disabled or disfigured somehow), so Team Secundus would have to essentially bring down the whole thing and hope for the best. As Hamza said: a last resort, however much the Coalition offered.

They had a decent description for Kostroma (petite, blonde, green-eyed, snub-nosed and pretty) but she might not even be in the district; many nights she slipped into one of the convoy subs and ran up and down the Bosporus for several hours, making sure her lifeline wasn’t threatened by anything that looked like military equipment. When she was in town, she naturally liked to stay near the water, but Fatih was a peninsula so that hardly narrowed it down.

That left Akritas as the most promising. They knew his master was a middle-aged Greek man, short, dark-haired, and usually with a mustache but no beard. No two sketches agreed on other details. More importantly, he was known to be headstrong, ironically careless about security, and prone to touring the city in person to inspect the construction and see what needed repairs. That made him their best chance.

All three of them on Team Secundus had dowsers; Hamza pulled his out, trusting it would look more or less like a cell phone from a distance, and led them to Point Alpha to begin the search. He kept the passive dowsing function up along the way, in case they got lucky, but without much hope. Directional active scans were far better.

Nadia had expected Fatih to be like Zekeriyaköy, where she met Ézarine, but Zekeriyaköy had been a mostly-running small town that happened to be under occupation. Fatih, she soon realized, was very nearly empty. From a prewar population of almost half a million it was down to maybe twenty thousand, and over a third of those were Russian troops. Few enough to be fed indefinitely by a train of converted subs running down the Bosporus.

Those numbers on a dry report translated to long stretches of completely deserted streets, doors and windows boarded up or shuttered where they weren’t smashed open and the homes and businesses behind them looted. But there weren’t as many looted as she’d have expected; it was as if the looters had done a few and then realized they had nobody to fence the stuff to. They didn’t even run the street or traffic lights in most places. At one point they came across a long stretch of bare lots, where Akritas had devoured half a neighborhood for wall material.

Ten minutes’ walking in the dark brought them to a place where artificial light shone out of a handful of buildings, including the windows of a small market. Three soldiers stood at the door there, scanning ration cards and disbursing boxes of food to a long line of people. The whole line turned to look at them as they passed by; where were those three kids going at this hour on a chilly night? Which was a fair question, but they’d never know the answer.

Point Alpha was just past there, where a pair of six-lane highways met in the middle of a park. It was chosen for being close to the center of the district, and offering plenty of cover for them to skulk in. There was nobody there to see them as far as Nadia could tell, but they still moved off the road and well into the park before they got out their dowsers and started scanning for real, the three of them back-to-back, swinging the devices back and forth while they shuffled in a slow circle to make sure they covered every point of the compass.

This was Plan A, the low-risk, low-odds search. If they were fortunate, one of them would get a ping, as Akritas’s emissor—or somebody else, they weren’t choosy—got sloppy and pulled out his familiar to do trivial repair work, or simply to amuse himself making something small, like a toddler with a set of blocks. Akritas was known to do such things.

If they got a hit, they would move in that direction as quickly as possible, stopping at set intervals to check again and change course. If they didn’t get a hit after ten minutes, they were to progress to Point Beta and do it again, and so on until Papa Titus lost patience and told them to progress to Plan B.

Nadia hoped, very much, that they would not have to progress to Plan B.

“It looks like Alyosha stood us up,” she groused, when their time at Point Alpha was almost done. Hamza, to her surprise, grunted agreement instead of shushing her. Maybe all this spinning in circles was making him dizzy too.

Point Beta was near the old Grand Bazaar, twenty minutes away. The world’s oldest continually operating mall was (as far as anyone outside Fatih knew) still open, but running at much lower volume, and it was nearly 2200 now; the stalls would be mostly closed. Nadia and her brothers were under strict orders not to actually enter the bazaar, or even the metastatic snarl of narrow, vendor-clogged streets outside it, unless they pinged an emissor inside. Nadia was not tempted. It looked like a good place to get a knife in your ribs.

Even hanging around outside it was a calculated risk, as it was reputedly a popular place for soldiers to move contraband. Their hope—a thin hope—was that Akritas might have a hankering for some kind of illicit fun after the battle, and hang about in the area with his friends after while he partook. It seemed more likely to Nadia that he’d have a stash at home already, but it wasn’t as if she did this kind of thing herself.

Ruslan sniffed the air. “It smells like pee,” he complained as they stared down the road where the mess of open-air shops began. “I bet there are bums sleeping under the awnings in there.”

“Bums or drunks,” Hamza agreed. He kept a hand inside his jacket, where he’d stowed his pistol. “You two, dowsers out. I’ll watch.”

“That wasn’t—“

“Shut the hell up, Ruslan. I know the plan. I’m changing it. Back to back. I’m keeping my eyes offscreen.”

Nadia sighed and got out her dowser, shuffling her feet as she did to warm them up. The sooner they got their ten minutes done, the sooner they could move on.

Point Gamma was another long walk to another park, north of the old Topkapi Palace and the great church of Hagia Sophia. They were at the east end of Fatih now, banking on the possibility that one of the emissors was enough of an egomaniac to make him- or herself at home in an actual palace, and perhaps show off a bit at the exact moment the three of them were in place to catch him.

That sounded like a stretch to Nadia, but she could also feel fatigue creeping up under the constant coat of adrenaline her body kept lathering on over it. You could only be on edge for so long before a constant tinge of fear stopped behaving like fear and turned into more of a nuisance, like a pulled muscle or pinched nerve, an aggravating feeling at the edge of your consciousness that you just wanted to go away. On and on they walked, down one dark miserable empty street after another, and every shadow had dogs or soldiers hiding in it only they never did, and with an hour and a half till midnight there was still nothing to show for it all.

But Papa Titus wasn’t ready to give up yet. And did she really want Plan B?

They were barely inside the shadow of the trees when Ruslan shouted, “I got a hit!” Hamza punched him in the arm to shush him, but both of them swung their own dowsers around. Yes. There was a signal, very clear, not a kilometer to their east. But what was east? Not a lot, except the water and the wall.

She had to run to keep up with Hamza as he chased his dowser’s signal down the path, his pistol already out in his right hand. The park had clearly not been maintained, and grass was sprouting in big tufts out of cracks in the pavement. Ornamentals spilled out of untended displays, and in one place a bit of topiary had stretched out its arms to nearly block the path, forcing Hamza to stop and duck under it. He was barely visible in the gloom by faint traces of light from his dowser’s screen, flicking crazily over and around his shoulders as he jogged. Ruslan was panting beside her.

At last Hamza halted them by the park’s edge, and they caught their breath while he peeked between some overgrown bushes. The signal was very strong now. “Is he repairing the outer wall?” Ruslan wheezed. They could see it easily from here, looming over them. But it looked untouched, as it should be; this was the northeastern corner of Fatih’s wedge, at the spot where the Bosporus met the Golden Horn on its way to the Sea of Marmara. Who would bother shooting at an easily-rebuilt wall across such a broad span of water?

And Hamza shook his head. “It’s not even him. Look.”

Nadia poked her head through the bushes. The ground sloped down steeply at the park’s edge, giving her a clear view of the little pocket of land between it and the outer wall. Here, she saw, Akritas had constructed it a little further out than necessary, enclosing a portion of the sea inside the protected zone. And in that sheltered pool, right now, two people were playing in the moonlight.

Playing. It took her a moment to come to grips with it, that they were playing, at the edge of this godforsaken city under the shadow of the world’s tallest military barrier. The woman was in her twenties, quite short, and wearing a very immodest two-piece suit. She got a running start as the water swelled up into a hillock, then leapt into it with a shriek of laughter as it burst into a waterspout, sending her flying up into the air. A wave rose up to catch her, and she landed with a tremendous splash.

The man in trunks was laughing too, but hung back a bit, not quite trusting. Little swells danced around his ankles as he watched her sidestroke, then flip over on her back to float, contented. Or maybe not so contented; as the young woman came into the shallows again she sat up and spoke to him, beckoning him. Nadia could not hear what she said, or what the man said back. His tone was cheerful, but he held up his hands palms-out.

The girl pouted, hands on hips. Behind her, another waterspout exploded, and Nadia caught a glimpse of another girl in the spray, a lovely young woman shaped out of foam and spray, and the falling water was her long, long hair, twirling around her and flicking out drops as she tossed her head. Her hands were also on her hips, in the instant before she disappeared in the subsiding waters, but Nadia knew she too was laughing. Kostroma always laughed, even when she was popping up to throw a destroyer fifty feet into the air and send everyone aboard it to the bottom. She was the sea, always joyous and never still, as beautiful as she was treacherous.

Now the girl, the real girl, ran at the man, and dragged him by both hands deeper into the foaming water. He struggled a little, but not seriously, and another little wave came up behind his knees to knock him into her arms as they wrapped around him, one leg swinging up around his as she stretched up to kiss him. Behind them Kostroma surged up again, flinging out her arms this time, exultant.

The waters spun around the two lovers, churning themselves up into a fine mist. Nadia was sure it was pleasantly warm down there, too. If the sun were up, they would be surrounded by rainbows—but this could never be a scene by sunlight. Not with only the two of them to feed her. Or was it just the two of them? Nadia thought she felt the slightest urge to giggle herself, though she also felt a bit wistful.

Might that be her in ten years, dancing and playing with a man she loved? Maybe not with Ézarine, who did not make people laugh, but could this be her? Would anyone allow it? Would anyone want her, when she had the blood of many other men on her hands? She did not think she would be as pretty as the girl down there.

And would there be someone like Hamza, sitting in the bushes a short distance away, holding a pistol and eyeing the intervening cover to see if he could get close enough to pull off a headshot and leave his own familiar hidden?

Nadia shook her head and stepped back to let Ruslan watch, if he wanted. She didn’t want to see any more. They were there to kill that beautiful, smiling girl, because she had killed a thousand people at least, and was prolonging a war that would kill more. This was a better opportunity than they could ever have hoped for. They had to take it.

Something hard bumped into the back of her head. She was reaching up to swat the offending branch away when a voice said, very quietly, “Don’t.” Automatically, she dropped the hand, then realized the voice hadn’t been Hamza’s or Ruslan’s. She was going to turn around when a hand clenched down on her shoulder, and she understood. And she was frightened, yes, but mostly sad.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Hamza drop his pistol and put up his hands, retreating into an azalea as the barrel of a much larger gun tried to shove its way up his nose. Ruslan whimpered and tried to turn around, to say something, to beg, to explain, but the butt of another gun hit him in the face, then in the chest, and then he was on the ground with a man in a tactical vest on top of him.

Of course Kostroma’s mistress would have a guard around her—wherever she was, whatever she was doing. That should have gone without saying. The security team had been terribly careless even to let the three of them get this close, and now they were angry, with themselves and with the three brats they had just caught skulking in the shrubbery.

Papa Titus would be angry too, when and if they saw him again. They had been careless as well. And now, Nadia was afraid, it was time for something that looked even worse than Plan B.