The Hidden Goddess

by M. K. Hobson

  “Let’s have a look.” He seized her chin, looking at the place on her throat where she’d been cut. “It’s not deep, and those heathen blades of glass cut cleanly, at least.”

  He dipped one of the pieces of linen in the warm water, and began to wipe the blood from Emily’s throat without particular gentleness.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Safe,” he said. “A restaurant, actually. The pelmeni with smetana are particularly good, if you are hungry.”

  Emily winced as the cloth touched the wound. She thought about all the death she’d seen that day. “I’m not,” she said.

  “Certainly a healthy young Witch isn’t going to let the death of a few dozen strangers ruin her appetite?” Dmitri said. He did not sneer, or speak with anger, but the bitterness of the words made Emily press her lips together. Dmitri dipped the cloth into the bowl again. The water turned abruptly red. He wrung the cloth and began wiping her face, removing scratchy chunks of bone and, Emily knew now, Heusler’s brain. Over by the stove, the woman was cutting potatoes into the soup unconcernedly, as if brain-spattered girls came to sit in her kitchen every day.

  A door opened, and the smell of a brown cigarette preceded the opener into the kitchen.

  As she watched Perun enter, Emily tensed. Even though the Sini Mira had saved her life, and even though her father had been a member of that group, they continued to make it very clear how they felt about her and her kind, and she continued to distrust them.

  Perun came to Dmitri’s side and cast his husky-dog gaze down on Emily.

  “Miss Edwards, it is good to see you again,” he said. His accent was even thicker than Dmitri’s. “You remember, we have met before?”

  “Yes, we’ve met once or twice,” Emily said, pushing away Dmitri’s hands. “Once when you tried to kidnap me. The second time before you kidnapped Emeritus Zeno.” She paused. “Where is he?”

  Perun gestured obliquely with the cigarette, smoke making patterns in the air. “How are your eyes, Miss Edwards? No permanent damage, I hope?”

  “My eyes ache,” Emily said. The words sounded too angular, too foreign. This place, with its smells, reminded her of her father. “I will be fine,” she added, letting the words form themselves in Russian. Perun looked startled.

  “Miss Edwards!” he returned, in Russian. “I did not know.”

  I didn’t either, until last night, Emily thought. But now the sonorous tones of Russian were familiar and homey.

  “What have you done with Emeritus Zeno?” Emily asked the question again, though it tasted no better in Russian.

  “We do not have him,” Perun said. “The Institute is mistaken in thinking that we do.”

  “I think the Institute can be forgiven for that,” Emily said, “since he was kidnapped using one of your machines. Something called a Nikifuryevich Ladder.”

  Perun shook his head ruefully.

  “The Institute does not seem to understand that our technologies can be used against us, as any technology can.” He fell silent for a moment as he watched Dmitri pick bits of bone from Emily’s hair. Then Dmitri stood silently, moved back to the box from which he’d gotten the supplies, watching his own hands as he replaced them slowly, item by item. Emily lifted her head to look Perun full in the face. The man bore the scrutiny, taking a long drag off of his spicy-smelling cigarette.

  “Then if you don’t have Emeritus Zeno … who does?”

  “The same people who just tried to kill you, most likely.”

  “The Temple of Itztlacoliuhqui,” Emily said softly. She remembered the vision she’d had in the Institute’s conservatory, the vision of a knife-edged goddess of black glass. Then it was she whom Ososolyeh had been warning Emily against.

  “The High Priest said that she commanded that I be killed. But if she’s got the hair sticks, why does she want me dead into the bargain?” Emily shook her head. “Just for fun?”

  “Hair sticks?” Perun reached for a chair, pulled it close to where Emily was sitting. He sat down and leaned forward. “What are you talking about?”

  Emily snapped her lips shut. What did he know? What should she tell him? Her mother had been taking the hair sticks to the Sini Mira … at least, that’s the best sense Emily could make of her jumbled memories. But her mother had also killed her father, to destroy the secret of the poison … so why hadn’t she destroyed the sticks while under Cowdray’s terrible possession?

  Unless she’d never known.

  Unless, after all, Emily had never told.

  “Miss Edwards?” Perun prompted, and Emily realized she’d been silent for a long time.

  “You first.” She brought her eyes up to meet his. “I want you to tell me what’s going on. What connection you had with my father, Vladimir Lyakhov. I know he was a member of the Sini Mira. I know you’ve been looking for him. Tell me why.”

  Perun let out a long breath. He let the stub end of his cigarette drop to the floor, and quenched it with his foot.

  “All right,” he said. “I will tell you what I know. As you said, your father’s name was Vladimir Lyakhov, but within the Sini Mira, he was known as Volos, after the God of Oaths. It was a title within our organization, a nom de guerre. My own name, Perun, honors the Heavenly Smith.”

  Volos’ Anodyne, Emily thought. That was what Zeno had called the poison.

  “The title of Volos was inherited by your father,” Perun continued, his voice breaking through the little firecrackers of connection that were popping in her brain. “From his mentor at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. After he was murdered, your father assumed his work. Thus, your father became Volos.”

  “Aleksei Morozovich,” Emily said. “That was his mentor, wasn’t it? The scientist who created the poison called Volos’ Anodyne.”

  Perun’s eyes widened. He glanced over at Dmitri, who had taken a position by the door and was watching Emily with arms crossed.

  “You know more than you are telling, Miss Edwards!” He reached into his pocket, extracted a silver cigarette case. He took out another one of his brown cigarettes, tapped it on the back of the case.

  “Aleksei Morozovich was indeed the creator of Volos’ Anodyne. It was his life’s work.”

  “His life’s work was to poison magic, to make it unpracticeable?” Emily stared hard at Perun. “Why? Why tamper with the natural way of things?”

  Perun lit his cigarette, gave it a few deep puffs before speaking again.

  “Until about a hundred years ago, the practice of magic was self-limiting. A Witch or Warlock could only channel the amount of power his or her body could stand. As you say, this is the natural way of things. But humans always seek power beyond what is given by nature. The lessons of science and engineering began to be applied to the practice of magic. Methods for extracting raw power were developed—and now have developed to the point where they can be implemented on a large scale, as with the Terramantic extraction factory you saw in Charleston. Raw magic can be sucked straight from the earth in vast quantities. Exponentially larger magical schemes could be brought to fruition—resulting in exponentially larger production of Black Exunge, overwhelming the Mantic Anastomosis’ ability to process it. And so there are eruptions of Exunge, and Aberrancies, and all manner of foul imbalance.”

  Perun swallowed smoke, exhaled.

  “But worse than that,” Perun continued, “is that the collection of such huge amounts of raw power makes possible unholy magical practices on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The Black Glass Goddess, Itztlacoliuhqui, who once required the blood of thousands of human sacrifices simply to manifest in a human body, can now easily be provided with enough power to wreak whatever havoc on the world she desires—all thanks to the bastard union of magic and modern technology.”

  “And just what kind of havoc does she desire?” Emily asked.

  “Temamauhti,” Perun said. Emily remembered hearing Sophos Mirabilis speak the word once before, and his scoffing dismissal of it.
/>   “The half-baked apocalypse?”

  Perun grunted.

  “It is now quite thoroughly baked, Miss Edwards. Do you remember all the power from the Terramantic extraction factory? Power that Captain Caul was amassing to oppose the so-called ‘half-baked apocalypse’? After Caul’s death, General Blotgate, the Army’s highest-ranking magical practitioner, advocated for a military alliance with the Black Glass Goddess. Instead of using all that power to oppose her, the United States Army has delivered it into her hands. And soon the calendar will ripen, and soon she will begin the Remaking.”

  Emily’s flesh went cold.

  A stair-stepped pyramid made of skulls …

  “The earthquakes along the Pacific Coast, the Aberrancies terrorizing cities and towns … they are just the first manifestation of the Goddess’ efforts,” Perun continued. “They will continue to spread.”

  Blood dripping down the sides of a frost-rimed altar … bodies piled all around it, hundreds of thousands of them …

  “The Army can’t have given her that much power,” Emily whispered.

  “The power they have provided her is merely a match set to kindling,” Perun said. “We believe the Goddess has discovered some means by which she can filter Black Exunge. Release the power trapped within it, just as the Mantic Anastomosis does naturally, except much more quickly, and far more efficiently. And as she does this, channeling evermore enormous amounts of pure raw magic, the more Black Exunge the Mantic Anastomosis will produce, and the more Black Exunge she will have from which to draw power.” He paused once more, letting his silence hang. “Until, of course, the entire earth has been transformed into an Aberrancy—a sphere of lifeless filth.”

  Emily remembered another vision Ososolyeh had shown her. A lake drained, leaving nothing but foulness behind, poison pumped into the deepest places, clogging them with filth and venom …

  At the time, she had thought it referred to the Black Exunge the Terramantic extraction plant was pumping deep into the earth to extract refined pockets of chrysohaeme … but it had meant this, too.

  “Morozovich did not live to see these days come to pass, but he foresaw their coming. That is why he developed the Anodyne. It is a toxin, yes. But the toxic effects are aggregative. A practitioner doing a small work—a healing for example—might feel no effects. A practitioner doing a larger work might feel slightly ill from the exposure to a larger amount of the toxin. A practitioner manifesting a spirit as powerful as Itztlacoliuhqui’s, giving her the blood and body she needs to wreak havoc on the world, would die like a rat given cyanide.”

  “And someone like my fiancé?” Emily said. “Someone burned?”

  “That is not our concern,” Dmitri said from his corner of the room. “And given what we know about your fiancé—”

  Perun lifted an abrupt hand, and Dmitri fell silent.

  “Miss Edwards, your fiancé had had ample opportunity to remove that baneful blight,” Perun said. “He chose not to, and now, with Zeno gone, it is too late.”

  Emily’s eyes darted between the men.

  “What are you talking about? There’s no cure for his condition. He told me so himself.”

  Perun frowned at Emily for a moment, then grunted a mild concession.

  “Then I am mistaken, and I apologize,” he said. He paused before continuing. “There is no way to know what the poison will or won’t do to your fiancé. But I can promise you, if we do not stop temamauhti, your fiancé, and you, and I, and your pap and the very earth itself will suffer and die in miserable agony under the cruel reign of the Black Glass Goddess.”

  There was a long, horrible silence as Perun finished speaking. The sound of clinking china made Perun look over at the head-scarved woman, who was spooning heaping portions of food into large white bowls.

  “It smells of heaven in here, Irina Sidorovna,” he called to the woman. He looked at Emily. “Are you hungry, Miss Edwards? The pelmeni with smetana—”

  “I know. Delicious,” Emily said. “But for some reason I’m not hungry.”

  Perun shrugged as the woman called Irina Sidorovna slid a plate in front of him. Fat steaming dumplings were topped with a mound of glossy sour cream and sprinkled with fronds of dill and black dots of caviar. A bottle of vodka from an icebox and a small glass completed the meal. Without a word, Emily took the bottle of vodka and poured herself a glass. She tossed it back. Perun looked at her, but didn’t comment. He ground out his cigarette and picked up a fork.

  “When news of Morozovich’s work leaked out, the Temple marked him for death. He went into hiding, of course, but Warlocks from the Temple found him. They tortured him, forced him to surrender every scrap of paper in his possession and made him swear that he had given the information to no one else. Satisfied that they had wrung the truth from him, they dragged his bleeding body to his laboratory in Saint Petersburg and burned it down with him inside. They believed that by destroying him, they had destroyed the poison.”

  Emily shuddered, the vodka spreading warmth through her gut. She watched Perun stab one of the small dumplings and pop it into his mouth. “But if no other copy existed—” she began.

  “Of course the notes still existed,” Perun interrupted curtly, touching a napkin to his mouth. “Morozovich had entrusted copies to his assistant—your father—then wiped his own memory clean with a cheap elixir bought from one of the old koldunyas around Gostiny Dvor. When the Temple Warlocks found him, he knew no more about the poison than you or me. They confronted him with his own notes. He said he did not recognize them. The torturers thought he was withholding information and redoubled their efforts.”

  Dmitri made a strangled sound. Perun shook his head, and picked up another little dumpling. He chewed it thoughtfully before continuing.

  “Your father fled to America. We kept him in a series of safe houses. The Kendalls—your mother’s family—provided one of the safe houses. There, he worked to complete Morozovich’s work on the Anodyne. It was quite unexpected that he would fall in love with their daughter.” He paused, reaching over to reclaim the glass from Emily. Uncorking the bottle, he poured some for himself. “He left their house and took your mother with him. And after that, we lost track of him.” He threw the vodka back with a jerk.

  “So you did not know what happened to him either?”

  Perun exhaled, shaking his head.

  “Our last contact with him was in 1856.”

  When I was five, Emily thought. So he’d contacted the Sini Mira just before he died. She remembered him telling her that he was going to meet his friends. Before her mother—before Aebedel Cowdray, Emily corrected herself fiercely—had killed him.

  “He had arranged to meet with us in San Francisco to deliver the formula,” Perun continued, “but he never arrived there. And we never heard from him again.”

  Perun was silent for a moment, his eyes searching her face as if to read an answer there. Emily looked away. She was not ready to talk about that night, that horrible moonlit night full of knives and blood.

  “We thought the poison was lost to us forever,” Perun said finally, “until the Indian Witch spoke of it at the Grand Symposium.”

  “You were not at the Symposium,” Emily said. “How did you hear of it?”

  “Zeno told us,” Perun said. “I’ve known him for a long time, Miss Edwards. In some ways, we were even allies.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Emily said, looking at Dmitri. “I know how you people feel about Witches and Warlocks.”

  “You know what you have been told,” Perun said, “but that does not mean you know everything.” Reaching inside his coat, he pulled out something round and golden. Emily gasped when she realized what it was. It was Komé’s rooting ball.

  Perun handed it to her, and Emily cradled it against her chest with her good hand.

  “Zeno gave it to me the night before the Investment, the night you saw us together.” Perun scraped the last of the sour cream from his plate, licked it from his fork. “
He was worried that something might happen, and he asked me to keep it safe.”

  Emily closed her eyes, feeling for the old Indian Witch’s consciousness within it. To her joy, Emily could feel the woman’s presence. She was there, but despite Emily’s efforts to rouse her, she would not speak. She just sort of … hummed.

  Emily looked at Perun. “What have you done to her?”

  Perun smiled softly.

  “Miss Edwards, we have done nothing to her. You are a Witch who knows the earth; surely you recognize the metamorphosis of nature. It was the very reason she was put in the rooting ball. She is sprouting, growing, transforming from what she was into what she will become. You cannot expect her to feel particularly conversational.”

  Emily held the ball tightly. She knew Perun’s words to be true as soon as he spoke them. The satisfied hum of roots growing outward—it was precisely what she’d heard. Frowning, she looked up at him.

  “I still don’t understand why Zeno would ally with you. Credomancers use magical power just like anyone else.”

  Pushing his plate away, Perun extracted a fresh cigarette and tucked it between his lips.

  “Of all the magical traditions, credomancy requires the least free magic—only a fraction of what is required by sangrimancy. It is theorized that the practice of credomancy will be only slightly affected if the poison is implemented,” Perun said. “Perhaps Emeritus Zeno thought that the poison might be a good way to advance the cause of credomancy over the long term.”

  “Quite convenient for the credomancers,” Emily said, waving a hand in front of her face to dispel the sudden cloud of smoke. “So you’re saying that Zeno wanted to see the poison implemented?” Emily said. “To set the practice of credomancy above all others?”

  “He was once a priest, Miss Edwards.” Perun smiled wryly. “Old habits die hard.”

  “Then Zeno had no more moral high ground than the sangrimancers he claimed to despise!”

  “He wanted to see the damage to the great consciousness of the earth halted.” Perun squinted as he lifted the cigarette to his lips. “That is not a matter of human morals, it is a matter of human survival.”