Secondhand Sorcery

Kizil Khan could do a lot. He could heal any injury, instantly and seamlessly, up to and including regrowing limbs. A few gunshot wounds in a healthy young man like Hamza was simple by comparison, and as for restoring normal body temperature, that was nothing at all.

She was more worried about what the Red King couldn’t do. He could make Nadia’s body warm again, because it was flesh, but he couldn’t dry her clothes or warm the air. And he couldn’t heal his anchor Ruslan at all, any more than Nadia could fly by reaching down and picking up her own feet.

The bloody eagle only stayed manifest for a few seconds before disappearing again. Nadia could barely wait for Hamza to cough and sit up, poking at the holes in his damp shirt. “The dowser’s gone,” she snapped as he pawed at his jacket pockets. “The guns too. Seawater. They will be coming any second now. Can you walk?”

Hamza looked puzzled, but nodded and pushed himself to his feet. Ruslan was a shivering wet ball on the ground, and would not stand up on his own for any coaxing or bullying. Hamza would have to help him walk. But before he made the attempt, he unstrapped a little metal canister, the size and shape of a thermos, from his belt, and handed it to Nadia.

“You’re giving me the kitty?”

“Two hands free,” he grunted as he hoisted Ruslan and threw his limp arm over his own shoulder. The difference in their heights made it especially awkward. “Just don’t crack it until I tell you.”

“Of course not,” she said, feeling proud of the responsibility in spite of everything else. “Where are we going?”

“Out of the park,” he said, focusing most of his attention on the dead weight he was hauling. “Don’t care about … direction. You lead, make it fast—would you lift your feet, you son of a bitch!”

The worst part, she thought as she took point, was that the Golden Horn was right there, less than a quarter-mile away. But Ézarine couldn’t carry Nadia across the water, and Ruslan was in no shape to be trusted with the job. Until he was warmed up and conscious, they were stuck in the district.

The park wasn’t very wide, really, just a forested ribbon at the northeastern tip of Fatih’s peninsula. Nadia decided to make for the Topkapi Palace just to the south. Out of the wind, and large enough to hide in. She thought she could see a bit of it already, a glimpse of a white facade shining in the light of the setting moon. If they could just get there before the park was overrun by men with guns, or Myriad …

Even as she thought it, there was a brilliant light in the west, and the colossal metal flower unfolded herself in the air above the Kremlin, disgorging her thousands of shining children in symmetrical streams to circle around her. The drones were not straying far yet, but their range would expand with their mother’s halo, commanding more and more of the city until it reached the park, and then (if they were not very well hidden) they would be spotted for sure.

“Just keep moving,” Hamza said, before Nadia could ask. She swallowed, and pressed on. Myriad’s children lit up the whole park in flickering rainbow hues as they circled closer and closer, out and back and out again like the tide coming in. They were very pretty, really, and graceful too: each had a single shining eye at its core, with two long, narrow wings of light extending from the sides, and an even longer tail behind. They ran in a precise sequence, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple-red-orange …

You could get hypnotized, watching them flit and flicker like fish in a tank. So she didn’t. Head down, push forward, don’t look up at the pretty lights, above all don’t think how they could swoop down and vaporize you. That was the trick.

It was very cold; she was already shivering again. And the Topkapi Palace didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. She looked at Hamza and Ruslan, staggering together, and wondered when and if she should run for it. She could jog for the Palace and be under cover in less than a minute—but she expected Myriad’s halo to swallow them up in a minute and a half. If that.

The sound of a gunshot took the decision out of her hands, and her mind out of her head. Before she properly recognized it her feet were running. A second shot went off, but she was already behind a tree, breathing fast and knocking pine-bark loose with her shaking hands. She turned her head, saw Ruslan lying on the ground alone, not moving. Had they shot him? She couldn’t tell. There was no tree protecting him. Hamza was nowhere in sight, but the guns were still firing, bang-bang-bang, very fast. She peeked out, very quickly, and saw muzzle flashes from the Palace’s big, beautiful arched windows. No shelter there.

She pulled her head back before they could blow it off. Ruslan was down, Hamza gone. Myriad’s swarm was still billowing out in their direction. Soon it would be on them, and Nadia would lose her mind staring at patterns in the fallen leaves until she died of exposure or the Russians found and killed her.

There was nothing for it. She still had the “kitty” in her hands, promising help. Sorry, Hamza, she thought, and twisted the lid off. The pressurized ectoplasm inside flashed out into a thick white fog—a familiar’s feast. She barely had to so much as think about her irritation before the keystone sequence rushed through her mind like a freight train, and her lovely Ézarine condensed out of the fog with a twirl of her night-dark hair, her halo ballooning out to cover the park, the Palace, and probably everything else in at least a three-kilometer radius. She was at least fifteen feet tall this time, and bright as a spotlight where her hair didn’t cover.

Overhead, Myriad’s children were jostled gracelessly back in disarray; the gunmen in the Palace stopped firing while sneering Yvonne-in-the-cafe exploded across their souls. Ézarine took the opportunity to move Ruslan behind another tree. Hopefully the useless crybaby hadn’t gotten himself killed already, or this would all be for nothing.

The guns resumed. Ézarine jumped into the space over the historic building and let out a yell that blew the glass out of every one of those big pretty windows. The guns stopped. What next?

She was still cold and wet, for one thing. There was a military jeep parked in the Palace’s overgrown lawn; Ézarine grabbed it and dropped it from the treetops to smash on the ground, fifty feet behind Nadia, then screamed at it until the spilled gas shook itself alight. It made a bigger blast than she expected, and set several of the trees on fire. So much the better. Nadia felt warmer already.

Myriad’s swarm was still reeling; Ézarine’s violently expanding halo had made a dent in her own, which would be disorienting even for a familiar who wasn’t obsessed with order and symmetry. No threat for now. When several seconds passed with nobody shooting at her, Nadia went to check on Ruslan. She didn’t see any injuries, but the light was bad and he was still curled up like a pillbug.

Hamza limped out of the shadows, right arm clapped to left shoulder. “You set the forest on fire?”

“It was cold!” Nadia snapped back. “What happened to you, and where did you go?”

“What do you think? They shot me! I ran to draw their fire off Ruslan, and tripped in the dark, so now my ankle’s jacked up too. And now you’ve used up the kitty, after I told you—”

“He’d be dead now if I hadn’t, and Myriad would be all over us!” Hamza didn’t seem to have a good answer. Exhaustion, stress, and pain were making Ézarine’s valence harder to tolerate for both of them, but Nadia was still just rational enough to understand that. Instead of pressing the point, she inched a little closer to the wreck of the jeep, which was still blazing. If she could just dry off her clothes, she would only be underdressed. Maybe she could go get her jacket and dry that too?

“We can’t hang around here,” Hamza said, as if guessing her thoughts. “There’s bound to be more troops headed this way, and Myriad won’t stay confused forever.”

“I know,” she said, and moved Ruslan to the ground right beside her. The fire was already spreading to nearby trees; before long the whole park would be in flames. “But we can’t leave just leave him, can we?”

“Or contact anyone, with our dowsers gone. We’re pretty screwed, here.” He coughed; the air was getting smoky. “To hell with this. We move. Take him with us, let Ézarine juggle him. I can’t carry him with my shoulder like this.”

“Is it bleeding?”

“I’m holding pressure on it. Nothing else we can do, so don’t waste time. Move!”

He didn’t give her a direction, and she didn’t dare ask. They made for the Topkapi Palace again; probably all the men in there were dead, or at least deaf. Hamza was still slow with his bad ankle, so Nadia had Ézarine move him too. He swore at her for doing it without warning, but not very much. Nadia wondered how badly that shoulder hurt, and if he was going to black out and leave her alone again.

The temperature plummeted as they moved away from the burning trees, and Nadia looked up nervously at the sound of thunder in the distance. Rain would get them wet again. But there was no sign of a cloud in the clear night sky—and Myriad still wasn’t getting any closer. In fact, her pretty minions were all flying away from them now, wheeling out to the western horizon and back.

“Yuri,” Hamza grunted, and now that she was looking, Nadia saw it too: a series of sparkles against the skyline. Papa Titus had noticed the commotion, and sent Shum-Shum in for a distraction the Russians could not afford to ignore. She felt a little less despondent as she jumped Hamza and Ruslan past the broken windows, then stepped carefully through herself.

The interior was very elegant, with pretty patterned tiles on the walls, but more importantly there were big couches in the window bays, and most of the glass had been blown outward. Nadia went to work with her knife, and soon had herself wrapped in a ragged upholstery poncho. She offered a big strip to Hamza for his shoulder, but he waved her brusquely away. Ruslan, who was still a catatonic lump, got dropped onto a carpet and rolled up.

The former headquarters of the Ottoman Empire was as enormous as you would expect, with literally hundreds of rooms clustered around a series of four courtyards. Most of them like the first, with couches, carpets, stunningly intricate patterns on the walls, and a mishmash of pillars, domes, and arches. All filigreed, curlicued, plated, jeweled, or tiled, top to bottom. They could probably hide out here for some time, with Ézarine’s help. Nadia intended to send her ahead to scout everywhere they went; if any of the men who shot at them were still alive in here, they would hardly be a match for her.

But they found only dead men, scattered here and there with their weapons beside them in gorgeously appointed rooms whose original function she couldn’t begin to guess. The bodies were unmarked—Ézarine’s work. Somehow. Maybe that one scream had rattled their brains into mush, or stopped their hearts. She knew she would have nightmares about it later, which only made her angrier now, in the halo. Why did she need to feel guilty about these men who had tried to kill her?

They were wearing the same kind of gear as Kostroma’s bodyguards—not that that meant anything, but she supposed they’d retreated from Rhad here. She switched out her sofa rags for one of their jackets, and snitched a couple of guns and a phone. Hamza wouldn’t let go of his shoulder, or move his injured arm, but let her strap a holstered pistol onto his belt. He leaned against the wall as she did it; his breaths were fast and shallow again. And Ruslan was only starting to stir inside his carpet roll. Damn it.

She kept moving—dutifully scouting with Ézarine first for every room, then shifting Ruslan ahead while she took an increasingly weak and dizzy Hamza by the arm and escorted him in—but even if she was safe for the moment, she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t wasting her time. She had no idea where she was going, no means of leaving the city, and Hamza was going to go into shock or bleed out without prompt medical attention.

There was nothing for it; she couldn’t do this on her own. She needed help, and there was only one way to get it. When she had gone through six more rooms and met nobody, Nadia gave up and dismissed Ézarine. Then she turned on the soldier’s phone … and found she had to put in a PIN to use it.

It was too much. She let out a scream that would have done Ézarine proud, and threw the useless phone against a gilded table, where it shattered. Sliding down the wall next to Hamza, Nadia put her face in her hands and started to sob. Without the strength of her familiar’s rage holding her up, she was nothing. Hamza said something that might have been meant for comfort, but it came out as slurred gibberish. Soon he would black out and die, and leave her alone …

She did not know how long she had been sitting there crying when the gorgeously appointed room vanished, and she was sitting at the feet of an elderly man in a wheelchair as he declaimed excitedly to her in Greek. Nadia did not speak much Greek, but somehow she knew what the old man was talking about. She could see the stories as he told them, the same stories he had told so many times that she knew them down to the last characteristic gesture, the phrase he would repeat for emphasis, the joke he always laughed at after telling it himself.

Here were the heroes of Marathon, charging across the sands to strike the Persians like a thunderbolt, and their brothers at Thermopylae, dying to a man so that Hellas might live. The bloody waters of Salamis, the long march of the Ten Thousand, Alexander charging at Gaugamela, the valiant advance of Herakleios … and last and best of all, beautiful and tragic, the great emperor Constantine, standing on the walls as the cannon broke them down and the janissaries came storming in.

A loud cracking noise, and the shifting of the ground under her feet, brought Nadia back to the moment. She lifted her head and saw that the roof of the Topkapi Palace was breaking open, the dome tearing away and floating off into the air. The entire floor she was sitting on, and the wall behind her, rose like an elevator to follow. It should have been frightening, but she felt only exhilaration; whatever was happening, she would stand and face it. Beside her, Hamza sat up, and Ruslan stirred enough to pull his arms out of his carpet.

Up, up, up they went, the section of tiled floor spinning slowly as it ascended, revealing more and more of Fatih as the Palace disassembled itself around them. Marble pillars and paneled walls flew apart and reformed into new configurations in the air, then broke and fused again, as if whatever invisible giant moved them were dissatisfied and must experiment.

Gradually their little platform halted its rotation, and Nadia found herself looking in the eye of a great golden dragon’s head as it favored her with a smile full of fangs. Akritas, was it? She would show him how a Marshall died; she raised her stolen rifle and pointed it right at the slit pupil of his shining garnet eye. It responded only by lowering its lid once, then raising it again. Was he … winking at her?

Below the neck, Akritas had the physique of a bodybuilder, golden skin over rippling muscles. The sculpted arms gestured sharply, imperiously, and the pieces of the Palace hastened to obey his commands. A dome ripped itself in half, and the two parts slammed into either side of their platform; the bit of wall broke away, and a set of gilded railings attached themselves to the other two sides, the edges of the floor curling up until the three of them were standing in the bottom of something shaped a bit like a boat.

Akritas waved his hand, and the bizarre craft went sailing through the sky, accelerating smoothly to bear them over the now-raging fires of the park. Nadia hurried to the “stern” and saw Akritas walking slowly after them, still waving his arms to conduct them on their way. Below the waist his marvelous form became vague, a slender and tenuous strand that gradually merged with and became the tail of his base—an ugly, squat grey lizard with a face like a toad’s. The four bent legs moved slowly. Akritas did not hurry.

Their absurd little ship floated easily over the ramparts its master had made, then drifted gently down to splash in the waters of the Golden Horn. Only a little cold water slopped over the railing as they landed. Somehow, there were no leaks in the slapdash construction.

“What’s going on?” Nadia turned and saw Ruslan struggling to extricate his legs from the carpet roll. She did not move to help him. Hamza slumped against the extravagant railing, breathing hard. “Where are we? Guys?”

Nadia declined to answer. The little boat floated on, drifting north towards Galata. They were not safe yet, of course. Galata was still a hellhole, and Hamza was hurt. She could not begin to guess why Akritas had elected to save them—was he Beelzebub, or working with him? But it had to be after midnight, the jacket had a good fleece lining, and she was tired. Nadia closed her eyes, and surrendered to the night.