Secondhand Sorcery

Nadia only saw five men, but she was sure there were more, hidden in the shadows of the trees. And five was more than enough, when two were pointing rifles at Hamza, a third had his trained on her, and a fourth was sitting on Ruslan with a pistol to the back of his head. As for number five—possibly the leader—he kept his gun ready, but knelt down to pick up a dropped dowser and look it over. He had goggles on, but judging by his lower face he knew what he was looking at.

And Nadia was certain, without having even the time to put the thought into words, that this was simply it, that every Russian security tough knew all about the kids who had been burning their forward posts and executing their friends for the past half-year. There was no innocent explanation, no reason for random teenagers to be carrying dowsers while playing peeping-tom in the park at the dead of night. Let alone the pistols.

In a matter of seconds, everything would add up in that man’s head, every improbable interpretation of the evidence would be cast aside, and that grim clenched jaw would open up to say: “waste the little bastards.”

Then the other four, who would have been coming to the same conclusions themselves at their own speeds, would not hesitate to pull the triggers, multiple times, and Nadia’s world would end in a series of sharp pains in her chest, head, and stomach as the high-velocity rounds crushed bone, spilled blood, ripped muscle, turned internal organs to pulp, and finally liquefied her brain when they shot her three more times in the skull to be sure.

When it was all over, they would send someone down to explain to the pretty girl and her friend, begging her indulgence for spoiling her party with the deaths of three intruders. And she would go on laughing in the water, if Nadia’s death had not spoiled the mood too much, and Papa Titus would find out his mission had failed when photos of their three mangled bodies, shot in stark flashlight white against dead leaves and park mulch, became breaking news on the local propaganda nightly.

This entire ghastly chain of events took only the blink of an eye to suggest itself to Nadia; she had had practice, envisioning very similar outcomes while lying awake in bed for the past week or so. The inexperienced Russians were glacially slow, by comparison, clearly just starting to become indignant at the same moment Nadia was resigning herself to death.

But Hamza, who had been doing this since he was six, was the fastest of all. The soldiers’ slow-stirring rage and Nadia’s dying sorrow were both swept away by the sudden conviction, fierce and overwhelming, that three children dying in the woods was not justice. That there was work to be done here, ugly necessary work, and it would be done promptly.

Rhadamanthus did not need to manifest entirely to be deadly. The enormous white blade materialized even as it was beginning its initial cut, sweeping cleanly through the man threatening Nadia, arcing around into the two men on Hamza, catching all three in the same smooth rotation. The backswing was lower, but just as fast and precise, taking the head and one arm off the man sitting on Ruslan.

All this took just enough time for the kneeling man, the one looking at the dropped dowser, to lift his head and open his mouth, and to fumble with his gun. No doubt he was distracted, as Nadia was, by sudden thoughts of a man named Bernie Willard. An enormous white hand wrapped around his shoulders, and tossed him up in the air for the terrible scythe to slice him in two. His blood exploded out in every direction, but not a drop stuck to Rhadamanthus.

The woods lit up with muzzle flashes as the halves of the body fell; the gunfire’s thunder resounded all around them, so loud she ducked and covered her ears. That was the moment of greatest danger, and Nadia did not die only because they were not aiming at her. Several rounds gouged at the tree above her head, and a single stray thumped into the dirt at her feet, but all the men in the woods were aiming at the gangling spectral figure, glowing white and ten feet tall, who had suddenly appeared in the dark forest.

They couldn’t have done him significant harm if they’d hit him, and of course they didn’t. Nobody ever did. Rhadamanthus turned, cocked his head, and studied the men trying to destroy him as their bullets went howling past him. For two long seconds he stood, considering them with his twelve shining eyes. This was their last chance to run. But nobody ever did. They were caught up in the same story he was, only they were the heroes taking the monster down.

His enormous hand went up, palm out, and swept in an arc. The gunfire was silenced at once. Nadia couldn’t see any of the erstwhile shooters, but knew they were all frozen in place where they stood, not even breathing, everything but their minds trapped out of time. They would be able to see Rhadamanthus coming for them, and until the blade cut them open they would continue to feed him, but now with their terror. His doom was on them, and the guilty could not escape.

As Rhadamanthus stalked off after his prey—slowly, to savor their fear—Nadia’s head cleared enough for her to think of things besides vengeance and killing. The thought came to her that it had been idiotic to stand in place while men were shooting in her direction, but she brushed it aside, and turned to check on her brothers. Ruslan was standing straight, his fists clenched at his sides. Hamza was harder to see, half-buried in the foliage—was he leaning against a tree? Was he hurt?

She didn’t get the chance to find out; she took all of two steps toward him before a thought struck her, a sudden image in her mind of the man cut in half in mid-air by Rhadamanthus, his arms and legs waving separately as he fell. The thought was so funny that she had to giggle, then to laugh out loud, then put out a hand to catch herself on a tree as she bent over in mirth. Kick, kick, go the legs on the ground, and the upper half five feet away with the mouth popping open and shut like a goldfish! It was too much. Ruslan was laughing too.

The sea came rushing up through the bushes, knocking her feet out from under her. How silly, to fall over like that! She couldn’t help laughing, even as the water started pouring into her mouth and nose. The moon was bright above her, and the stars too, and the bare trees were graceful, and she could feel the world singing a joyful song to her as the flood swept her away, dragged her back through the tangled brush that scraped and scratched at her arms and face.

When the rushing waters released her, she was lying in a heap of wet sand and grimy branches on the beach. It was still a little bit funny, the kind of thing you would tell stories about ten years later at a party with a smile on your face. Ruslan had come up ten feet away, chuckling convulsively on his hands and knees even as he gagged up seawater.

The girl in the bikini ignored them both, standing confidently with her hands on her hips as she scanned the treeline she’d just washed them out of. The water swirled and danced around her ankles, tossing little droplets up to spatter on her calves. Nadia didn’t see Hamza anywhere, but after a moment Rhadamanthus emerged from the trees.

He didn’t look amused, though Nadia wasn’t sure how he would look if he were. He wasn’t especially big or bright, either. The girl extended one hand, twitching the fingers in a taunting come-here gesture. Kostroma was nowhere in sight, but Nadia could feel her presence, ready to spring up into action on the girl’s command.

Rhadamanthus made a gesture of his own, the same one he had before: his giant right palm extended, its freakishly long fingers splayed. But the girl only tossed her head and laughed. With her own familiar even half-out, she could only be the anchor for Kostroma’s halo; nobody else could hijack her for their own ectenic narrative.

Still the white figure stood at the top of the hill, holding out his hand, as if he were the one frozen in time. He definitely looked dim now. Dim, and small, hardly more than human-sized. Even with just Hamza around, he should look larger than that. Had something happened to her brother?

If it weren’t for Kostroma’s halo, she would be terrified, but the effect wasn’t so strong that she didn’t realize that. The now-subdued wry humor of her perspective still colored everything Nadia thought, but she could still be aware of normal things—in the way she might if, while laughing at a good joke, she suddenly recalled that she’d left the stove on or the faucet running in the other room.

The pretty girl wasn’t looking at her or Ruslan now. As soon as Rhadamanthus went away, that would change, and the familiar was helpless against her anyhow. The girl—the enemy—was vulnerable only to ordinary physical effects. Such as the silenced pistol Nadia should … yes. She still had it in her jacket pocket somehow. It was definitely loaded. The girl wasn’t far away, maybe twenty feet, looking the other direction. The mission could still succeed!

Nadia was sure she would never normally have had the courage to do this. But now everything was a laugh, and knowing that the enemy was giving Nadia the resolve to kill her only made it genuinely funny. Cheerily she pulled it out, trying to lean over so it wouldn’t be visible, and flicked the safety off.

Then she lifted it smoothly up, thinking all the while what a ridiculous story this would make later, and brought it to bear on center-mass like she’d been taught. The girl saw the motion from the corner of her eye, and turned to look. Nadia quickly adjusted her aim, overcompensated, did it again when the girl tried to dodge—slippery, wasn’t she?—got something close to a good shot as the girl threw herself to the ground, and pulled the trigger.

The gun’s action made a very quiet, squelching sort of noise, and did nothing. Jammed.

The girl threw back her head and laughed, and the water around her surged up with fresh vigor as she got back to her feet, brushing the mud off her legs. What a stupid thing to have happen! Nadia was smiling herself, not even mad, as again and again she pulled the trigger. Repeating the punchline only made it more absurd. Rhadamanthus wasn’t even there anymore, Ruslan was giggling uselessly, and now they were all going to die because she hadn’t thought that maybe a flood of dirt and seawater might not be good for a pistol.

The water seemed to rise very slowly behind the girl, forming a bubbling, churning column. Nadia knew it would erupt into Kostroma, who would do whatever she wanted, and that would be the end of Operation Wolf’s Teeth. So much for all her worrying. Why had she ever worried in the first place? This was the end of all her problems.

Even Ruslan, fussy whiny Ruslan, was getting into the spirit. “Hey, Nadia!” he said, shaking his head at it all. “Get a load of this!” He pulled out his own pistol, aimed it right at the girl, and pulled the trigger. Bang! A “silenced” gun, Nadia had observed before, was really not very silent. Only quieter than the deafening normal kind. One more silly thing.

The girl, however, didn’t seem to appreciate the humor. She looked down at her nice flat tummy, where a little red hole had appeared on the left side a bit under the ribs. Then she said something that sounded a lot like “Fuck!” Nadia didn’t like jokes with swear words in them, but Ruslan snickered and shot her again, making another red mark on her right leg. The girl screamed and dropped to the ground, the little baby waterspout behind her collapsing as she did.

Instantly the temperature around them fell by at least twenty degrees, and Ruslan dropped his gun into the mud, looking horrified. Nadia still had hers, but it was useless even if she’d wanted to use it, and of course the girl wasn’t hiding anything on her bikini. She was up on both hands and her one good leg now, awkwardly lurching away from them as quickly as she could. Trailing an awful lot of blood across the ground.

Nadia and Ruslan looked at each other, and without a word set off running up the hill, away from the young woman they had just shot and the horrible exposed beach they had done it on. Even the great wall felt like it was watching them.

For the second time that night, Nadia was soaked in icy-cold water, and if there was no ambivalent shock this time the whiplash aftermath of two opposing familiars still had her dizzy. Ruslan looked like he was only doing a little better, and stumbled several times on the way up. Nadia was stumbling too, and her teeth were chattering already. And Hamza?

They found lying him in the shadow of a myrtle bush, eyes shut and breathing fast. The stink of blood ruined the pleasant myrtle fragrance. Their dowsers were gone, and she had no other source of good light, but he did not respond when they called him, and when she touched him—on a spot she could see—he felt as cold and damp as she was. He’d been soaked too, or else it was cold sweat. It hardly mattered which.

Nadia was careful not to look at Ruslan, because she knew he would be freaking out, and seeing him would make both of them panic worse. This was, possibly, not as bad as Guryev. They were cold and wet and unarmed and there was no way Rhadamanthus had killed all those men before he winked out and Hamza was shot and even if all the men had died there would be more enemies coming because their espers had to have noticed Rhad oh Jesus—

No. No panic. The cold would kill her first. Off with her useless soggy jacket. Instead she would put on … oh, damn it. All the dead soldiers had been soaked too. And cut in half first. No dry clothes. She stamped her feet to warm up, and tried to think while her whole body shook. And Ruslan was just sitting there whimpering.

Ruslan was just sitting there.

“Call him,” she said, as best she could with her jaw quaking. “Call him now. Save Hamza.”

Her brother looked up dully, with that stupid cross-eyed look on his face, the one she hated most. The one that said he was waiting for someone to come rescue him. “My dowser’s gone,” he said helplessly.

From the shore, she heard a man’s voice scream, “Olga! Olga!” So there would be a third way to call Russian reinforcements onto their position now. Wonderful.

She sat on the thought. “I don’t mean Papa Titus. Get Kizil Khan, Ruslan. He can save Hamza. Maybe me too.”

Ruslan looked at the ground, as if the thought took consideration. He was shivering too, and hadn’t taken off his coat. At last he said, “If I call him, it will alert the—“

“They’re already alerted!” she snapped. “They’re headed this way right now, I promise you. Hamza is also dying, right now. Get Kizil Khan!”

Again Ruslan stared stupidly at the ground before saying, “Papa Titus wouldn’t like it. Security.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?” she screamed. “We are all going to die, you idiot! Get off your useless fat ass and save our lives!”

Ruslan’s only response was to look down again and start shaking a little harder. The cold was starting to affect Nadia’s brain; it took her a long time to realize he was crying. Saying something, too, under his breath, but it was in Uzbek. On the beach, the man was still babbling loudly to Olga, trying to reassure her.

There was still a knife on her belt, she realized. She considered jabbing Ruslan with the tip until the pain made him cooperate. But he might only cry harder. Instead she leaned in close and hissed in his ear, “Call Kizil Khan now, or I will call Ézarine. Ézarine can’t help us now. I don’t care. I will call her and have her scream at you until all your bones break, do you hear me?”

He kept on crying. Either calling her bluff, or too far gone to care. “And then I will go back to Thessaloniki,” she went on, “and I will tell Fatima you let our brother die with your cowardice, and … and then I will tell Papa Titus and he will send Yunks to get you!”

That didn’t even begin to make sense, but it worked. Just the word Yunks was enough to make him jump, cold and miserable as he was, and in a few seconds her despairing sense of futility was replaced with the drearily reassuring futility of the Red King, as once more she saw the doctor run crying out of the tent with the dead child.

Soon she didn’t feel cold. It was either more hypothermia setting in or Kizil Khan, and thanks to Kizil Khan she didn’t care which. She sat down on the ground to wait while he healed their brother. She knew he would demand his fee, to keep the balance. Most likely that would mean the unlucky couple down by the water would die, and so in a very roundabout way the mission would be successful. Now they only needed to get out of the district alive.