Winter, Faerstice
Page 8
Agnes dismissed him early and then scrolled through her calendar. Staff meetings coming up, nothing that needed attention now. She had bought herself fifteen minutes.
Agnes closed her eyes and took some long deep breaths. She left her bag on the table and went to the back of the room where she felt blindly for the sliding glass door.
When she opened her eyes Agnes was outside on the sizeable balcony overlooking the city. The wind was strong and cold, and it perpetually blew Agnes’s hair into her face while she was trying to think. When it got especially bad she would close her eyes to the city below and feel the hair bat against her eyelids. She hated the tasteless, modernist feel of the balcony. It annoyed her even with her eyes closed.
The stream of candidates from the Overwitch wasn’t enough, and she was harvesting too many for them not to catch on eventually. Agnes needed her own source. Even with her own source in place, she couldn’t escape madness forever.
How much time did she have left, Agnes thought, a few years maybe? Nobody knew, and the contemplation of it was the contemplation of her own mortality. Madness, it was something that could come to any witch, more often to the powerful ones, and especially to powerful seeresses. Agnes was both powerful and a seeress, and throughout her life she had used powerful magic freely. When it came, did it feel like Alzheimer’s, perhaps? Would she still be herself? The promise of losing her mind ate away at her every day. She couldn’t tell if she forgot appointments because she was getting older or because she was losing hold of reality. There was no clear way to know and she felt her paranoia growing. She gripped the railing of the balcony.
The Agnes of a decade ago would’ve refused to hunt young witches to cure herself. Maybe this moral concession was another sign of impending madness. Maybe Agnes was trying to find something else to blame for her own moral failures. A mad witch, terrorizing the countryside, growing madder and madder with every spell, aimless and itinerant until put down. She couldn’t be responsible for what she did then, or who was harmed. It would be a horrifying existence. Agnes opened her eyes. The city flickered with movement.
Isobel checked the time. Agnes would be walking down the long hallway of the Spécieuse Générale building to make their eleven thirty. The bullet points she would have would all be points she had gone over with Isobel repeatedly.
It was a longer walk for Agnes, which Isobel didn’t mind. Agnes had given Isobel an entire floor (separated on either side by a “buffer” floor...for safety reasons), and made sure that her lab was outfitted with all the latest in gear.
Agnes thought that Isobel, like many task-oriented people, posed “unique management challenges.” First among them was Isobel’s preoccupation with self-experimentation.
For Isobel, part of the thrill of chemistry was the self-experimentation. New synthetics were always being published online, by amateurs and professional chemists alike. For a chemist like Isobel, these compounds were merely a jumping off point. A little ring substitution, a hydrogen atom replaced by a methyl group, sometimes even a magical flourish, and tada, a compound new to the world. How else would you know if it works? You could find a test subject, as Isobel had done before plenty of times, certainly, but the real fun was in testing the analogues yourself.
Isobel looked up through her safety goggles at the spiral-bound notebook documenting her experiences. She was good at guessing what was safe to take and what wasn’t, she had the logs to prove it, and anyway, on the rare occasion she made a mistake, there was magic for that, too.
Agnes was still gunshy about the time early on when Isobel had fallen to the floor, foam drooling into her purple hair, her heart stopping, and, what seemed to Agnes, going brain-dead. She wasn’t of course. Elodie had revived her, and Isobel spent the rest of the week curing herself in the lab, which was the failure plan all along. It wasn’t that abnormal of a way to detox. On the other hand, it also meant she didn’t do any work for a week, on top of her already “universally-recognized tendency to stay off-task.”
Isobel got her work done at night and this grated on Agnes since it made it difficult to coordinate with the rest of the team. What hours should witches keep? Such was one of the many questions Agnes grappled with as she corporatized the profession. She intended to be on the cutting edge of this change, sure to leave her mark as its founder.
Behind Isobel Agnes swung open the door to the lab. Above Isobel on the desk shelf was the photo of her by her ex’s hospital bed, which she knew Agnes hated. The face of the photographed Isobel was already smiling at Agnes, so the real Isobel put her goggles on top of her head and turned and smiled to make it two.
As she turned she also squeaked the chair for Agnes’s benefit. The discontinued swivel chair, like the Kuài Shí 4B stacking point pencils and the Lördagsgodis children’s licorice, were all necessary for her work. Sometimes cheaply available and sometimes impossible to source, Agnes understood that all of Isobel’s perks were needed for her best work.
Isobel stared at Agnes in the eyes and Agnes stared back. Isobel looked away and tossed a treat to her small dog. “You hungry, buddy?” He was a Sulimov dog: part-jackal, medium-small, and very cute, with a discerning nose. The Moscow airport used them for bomb sniffing. Agnes had had to negotiate with the Aeroflot company at great expense. In the end it was the right business move. Isobel wanted little Hideo to detect any anomolies in the lab, far better than a canary for chemical leaks, with his highly sensitive nose. If anything went wrong, Hideo would tell them. Good for safety, and very, very cute.
“How’s our research project coming?” asked Agnes.
“Eh,” said Isobel, “It’s coming. I’m testing the yield of the harvest we requisitioned. The farm Didrika found did a good job. They grew a convoy of trucks’ worth, and nearly all of the rye was infested with ergot. This is really something, I knew I made a good choice opening a lab here. Forget controlled-substance allowances, it would’ve been impossible to get this in quantity on the open market. There just isn’t enough of it.”
Didrika had told the farm they were doing research into anti-fungals, and that had been the end of that discussion. Their deal as a CIA research lab provided the real cover, and it let them avoid scrutiny from all sorts of other agencies, DEA, ATF, DHS... Even so, they would be aghast if they discovered what was in use here, and Isobel worried constantly about the prospect of a raid, however remote.
“Is Violet still getting the plants I need?” asked Isobel.
“She’s working on it,” said Agnes, “and I’ve been working on removing obstacles for her. We’ll get there. Please excuse me, I need to make my one-on-one with Elodie.”
“Elodie? Why would you waste time meeting with that glorified mortician? I had more anatomy than her in my gen ed requirements. I can take on her work if you want me to try,” said Isobel.
“That won’t be necessary. Anyway, the reason I came by, not to bore you with the same old agenda items. I think we need your prisoner soon. Can you bring her up ASAP?”
“Sure can,” Isobel said.
Elodie made another incision in the cadaver. It was better to cut into live bodies, the story went, but kidnapping was not an exact science, and quite often the bodies that reached Elodie were already dead. You had to give Agnes credit, for as few witches as there were in the world, Agnes kept them coming, though the body count was undoubtedly inflated by non-magical abductees. The capture team worked on hunches, primarily, that’s just how it was, and a non-witch would deny up and down being a witch just as strongly as any actual witch. Many regular people must have been taken by mistake; the exact number would be hard to pin down. Elodie resented this, not only because it increased her workload unnecessarily, but, because it killed indiscriminately. Elodie confessed this to Didrika once, who blathered something about “operational bottlenecks” and “process optimization”—she totally didn’t get it, or chose not to. Agnes and Didrika were a remorseless combination: Agnes to dream the atrocities and Didrika to perfect them.
Even though she wasn’t really into punk Elodie had an old punk mix playing. It was better than the Judas Priest Violet played on the PA accidentally. Not by much maybe. Elodie stuck her hand in the abdominal cavity and fished around. She suspected that the current program was never going to work. If there was anything in these witches, wouldn’t they have found something by now? The whole thing was started on the thinnest of info. What witch lore they did have was scanty, and it was wrong all the time to the point where you basically couldn’t trust it. Agnes acted on it as if it were absolute truth. She was convinced they would find a stone, and no amount of failure seemed to persuade her otherwise. In front of everyone she accused Elodie of keeping the stones for herself. If Elodie had been especially self-interested or greedy that might have been a valid concern, but no one present genuinely believed Elodie would do such a thing—she just didn’t care enough. The accusation wasn’t the only erratic behavior Elodie saw coming out of Agnes. There was another piece of witch lore that explain how powerful witches went crazy. This one popped up more often. And Agnes seemed to match the description. Maybe.
Nothing in the abdominal cavity. Elodie reached for her bone saw to cut the sternum. All of her tools had to be manual, which made the work extra hard and time consuming, especially for someone Elodie’s size. She put the saw to the bone.
Agnes seemed fixated on the one they lost recently. It was a total freak accident. And anyway, what was so big about losing one girl when they had all these others coming in all the time? She was probably another empty anyway. But somehow Agnes had got it in her head that this one could be important. She made a special trip out of it. It was unlike Agnes to come along on a kidnapping, if she could avoid it, much less with Didrika and Elodie in tow. She didn’t usually bother herself with that kind of work, though, of course, their current staffing shortage (which was partly her fault) meant she was still contributing. So Agnes was extra angry when they got caught in the wave from the dam breaking. But how were they supposed to know? Agnes didn’t know. And then she blamed her for letting the girl get away, like it was her fault. She wasn’t going to risk drowning by fighting with an oxygen-starved girl under the water.
Of course Isobel had to run her mouth about it. As if she would have done any different. Isobel had hardly any field experience because nobody ever wanted her along. Elodie remembered Isobel standing there afterward, in a jean jacket instead of her lab coat, talking about Elodie as if she wasn’t even there.
There was something truly disgusting about Isobel. She was probably sitting at the desk in her lab, with the photo over her, the one of the college fling she had poisoned with a chemical from her lab. Dimethylmercury, she had used? Then she visited him every day telling him she was praying for him to get better as the doctors ran him through pointless chelation therapy sessions.
Isobel had taken a photo on every visit and she still would pull them out whenever she was feeling down. Once she had sprung them on Elodie and made her look through the album. The early photos showed a handsome boy with a smiling face. That was at the onset of neurodegeneration. The photo on her desk showed a handsome face contorted into a rictus, the mandibles trying to leave the body.
There was a knock on the door and Agnes entered. Elodie greeted her cordially.
“Well,” said Agnes, in a calm and cheerful voice, “Have you found anything?”
“Same story. Haven’t been able to find anything.”
Agnes nodded. “Is there anything I can get you that might help?”
“Not unless you can find new lore. I’ve been over the old lore a hundred times. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think we’re going to find anything. And the killings, this is a lot of killings, is that really necessary?”
“Keep up hope,” Agnes said, “they’ll come. Our mission is worth any price. Get clean, there’s a meeting soon. Isobel’s bringing the prisoner up.”
Isobel had a barely-magical witch captive in a sanitorium cell. She fed her research chemicals so that she constantly alternated between touching-the-face-of-God hallucinations and medically induced comas. It was a pathetic way to live, and Elodie felt sorry for her. Isobel planned to keep this girl on ice indefinitely, so to speak, for occasions like this when they were short of quorum for a seal. When they needed her she would bring her back up for a few hours, the dark bags following her eyes as she enjoyed a few moments of wakefulness. She was hardly necessary anymore now that they had the cadets, so Elodie wondered what this was about.
Isobel kept her on a starvation diet. She had fed her dogfood as a joke, and fungus-infested grain. She was so out of it she treated her time with Isobel and the rest of Agnes’s ring as a reward. Any resistance she might have had was broken long ago.
It was pathetic, and the whole thing made Elodie sick. Elodie wasn’t sure how she had gotten involved in this. I mean, she had a semblance of an idea: a predisposition to magic and a fascination with the dark arts will get you most of the way there. Now she was stuck. Where else was she going to go? There weren’t a lot of open positions online for “hellarunari.”
Back at the camp, Violet, gagged and cuffed and sitting on the ground, watched amused as the rest of the witches in Winter’s ring grew restless.
“If she isn’t back soon, we should think about what to do next. Staying here, with her, may not be the best idea,” Meadow said. Violet looked up at her and smiled around the gag.
They watched her in shifts, and the odd sleep schedule made them cranky. Violet slept or woke as she pleased, at odd hours, staying active whenever the weakest were on guard to put them on edge.
“She seemed like she had promise, but at the same time, she might not have been ready for this. I hope we didn’t send her to her end. The Old Line isn’t supposed to be a rough place. Even so, she was very, very green,” Ipsy said.
“You’re makin’ somethin’ out of nothin’,” Topple said, “It’s barely been a day or two and here you are ready to sell this girl out. We can wait a little longer.”
“Topple’s right. Even making good time it could take this long,” said Louisa.
They went on discussing while Violet quietly weighed her options. She found that silence unnerved her captors more than running her mouth, and so she wasn’t talking for the time being. Violet was annoyed that her capture was making her late on completing her task. Since she was under seal, her prolonged imprisonment also ran the risk that Agnes would suspect she had gone turncoat. Agnes was erratic at times, and whether or not this was something she might suspect, the possibility weighed heavily on Violet. Even if it wasn’t something Agnes was suspecting, the case was there for Didrika to make, if she chose, and Didrika had Agnes’s ear. Maybe it would be better for Violet if she did join the witches. They were broke, and completely boring, but the simple life was reputed to have its benefits...
Violet imagined herself sitting on the couch with her new friends during Friday Movie Night. They were eating kettlecorn, the slightly scorched smell filling the air, and laughing at the terrible movie they had chosen to play. Then she imagined herself in the mall, coming out of the dressing room with a perm and a new miniskirt. The other witches complimented her on how good she looked. The outfit really suited her, they said. Their kind words made Violet feel self-conscious and embarrassed. ...It was a stupid fantasy. She imagined the other witches lying across the sidewalk with their faces on the road. She was stomping their skulls into the gravel. Violet felt relieved.
Chapter 10
The young man’s name was Will. He had refused to give it t
o her until Winter promised that she wouldn’t use it in her sorcery.
“I thought you were the burglar,” Will said, “She almost killed some of us you know. Her playing around in the mine.”
“Agnes didn’t send you?” Winter said.
Will laughed at her. “I like mine heated better, how about you?” Will shredded some more of the pork into the pan and pushed it around with his fork over the fire.
Not that you could see it now, but the forest leaves were all red around them, making a beautiful red forest. It was dark and they were sitting in front of a fire. Winter was still bound. Will had made her drink from his water pack and stuffed a wad of shredded pork in her mouth without untying her.
“It is a shame you sent that pig of yours away. We could’ve had him too. I’ve been eating this one for days and it’s almost out.”
He had force marched her through the forest until well after it was too dark to see. Winter hadn’t been sure how he could navigate at all. The trees had blurred around her in the darkness.
“So if you weren’t out stealing from the mine, then what we’re you doing in the graveyard? Stopping for a photo op? That’s a sacred place to some people, you know.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. I wasn’t being disrespectful. I was checking out the carving on the tombstones. Seeing what I could learn from the names and dates.”
“Seeing what you could learn? What’s to learn? There are real people buried there, OK? It’s not a history exhibit. It’s a place of honor. We knew those people.”
“I know, I saw the dates on them.”
“You obviously don’t know. Stay out of there. That’s for us to pay our respects, not for witches. I swear. It’s always the straight up coots that turn out as witches. You can’t ever get a normal one. All defective. Then you add the magic into the mix. That’s great: arm the crazy ones. Then let them walk through portals so they can turn up where they’re not supposed to. ‘Help me, help me, I’m lost, Mr. Hunter.’ Rarely lost, usually up to no good.”