• • •
Nadia huddled against the back of the rooftop’s perimeter wall as night pulled tight around Prague. She tipped the glass bottle in her hand back and forth, watching the water slosh, gleaming under Prague’s streetlights. A bitter laugh escaped her. As if the wrecked barge wasn’t enough of a nightmare. Now this?
The roof access door popped open, and Alestair Winthrop strode through, umbrella clutched in one hand. “I do hope you have some answers for me.”
Nadia bounced to her feet with a fighter’s grace. “I was hoping for the same from you.”
He exhaled, breath fogging in the humid air. “All I know is what the barge’s surviving guard reported to my superiors. Seeing as how your people”—he drew a circle in the air, as if to indicate Prague and the Soviet Union at large—“are the ones in charge of the police work, then maybe you can provide some insight.”
“The local police were pretty quick to rule it an act of subversive criminal violence. Bourgeois criminals motivated by the blight of capitalist greed.” Nadia smiled darkly. “Morozova’s been assigned to dig into it more fully. Perhaps when we get the fire marshal’s report, we’ll have a better idea about who this mystery witch might be.”
“I certainly hope so. But we mustn’t forget that the Flame was involved in this, too.” Alestair tapped the end of his umbrella on the floor. “They knew about the barge. Its contents, its location.”
“Payback for smashing their plans with Alvarez and Sokolov?” Nadia asked. They’d been on the verge of disappearing with that Host before the Ice had conducted the ritual to bring down the plane. One less Host in the Flame’s clutches, but also one less Host under protection of the Ice.
“Perhaps in part,” Alestair said. “But they saw an opportunity to gather more of them, and they took it.”
“Planning something big, maybe.”
“Or hedging their bets.” Alestair sighed. “We’re running dangerously short on information about the Flame’s movements and plans. Still nothing concrete on what they want to use the Hosts for. And if someone within our ranks tipped them off about the barge—”
Nadia went very still. “Or someone on the fringes of our ranks.” She folded her arms. “You know as well as I do that we’ve been relying on outside help more than usual.”
Alestair arched one eyebrow. “You can’t honestly think Pritchard would—”
“I can honestly think whatever I like about the Americans. But Rhemes, as well.”
Alestair closed his mouth. “Mm. Yes. There is an unfortunate history there. Were it not for her bar’s location, I’d advise we cut ties with her entirely.”
“Still,” Nadia said, “if there’s a powerful new witch in the city, she might know them. Or at least, know of them.”
Alestair propped himself against the roof’s wall beside Nadia with a weary sigh. “Might I entrust you with the task of finding that out? We have rather a lot on our plate. And meeting is about to become more difficult than usual.”
“Why is that?” Nadia asked.
“The CIA investigator has arrived. They want to piece together what went wrong with the Flame fellow who absconded with the Host.”
Nadia laughed fully this time. “That should be fun for you.”
“I’m not joking. We must be extremely cautious. And you—and Morozova—” Alestair flinched. “Well. I don’t envy you working under Komyetski’s watchful gaze. He’s more observant than he looks, you know. Morozova’s lucky to be with us at all.”
“Lucky. Sure. That must be it.” Nadia glanced at the twinkling lights of the square beneath them. She had her doubts about that. She’d been so relieved to see Tanya alive that she hadn’t stopped to wonder how it was possible. Tanya shouldn’t have survived that firefight—couldn’t have. And the longer Nadia thought on that, the more doubt grew like a dark, thorny weed.
She shook her head and picked up the bottle from the rooftop. The Tanya mystery was something to keep her eye on. But for now, they had bigger concerns. “How many Hosts were we able to recover, by the way?”
“Five, I believe.” Alestair studied the bottle. “So five more are missing or dead. Why?”
“Because we have a problem.”
Nadia tilted the bottle slowly to one side. The water inside sloshed and shimmered, a rainbow sheen dancing across its surface. The colors warped, growing more and more intense, then collapsed on themselves as bubbles overtook the glass. It started to heat up, searing her hands, and she fought not to drop it. Then, just as quickly, the water hardened and froze.
“Where…” Alestair moistened his lips. “What is that water from?”
Nadia grimaced and set the bottle down. The water turned liquid once more with that eerie shimmer. “The Vltava.”
The flicker of surprise on Alestair’s face was brief but substantial. He turned his gaze beyond the rooftops, toward the river that snaked north and south, fracturing the heart of Prague. “And is… the rest of the river behaving this way?”
“In patches, here and there.” Nadia jammed her hands into her trouser pockets. “I wonder if it has something to do with the deaths of the Hosts.”
“A fair guess. When a Host dies, their resident elemental is unleashed and wanders in search of a new Host. The ritual our friend Pritchard interrupted in Cairo, I think, was intended to take advantage of that fact to put the elemental into a Host more amenable to the Flame.”
“But without new Hosts available for them to latch onto…” Nadia trailed off.
Alestair drummed his fingers on the umbrella handle. “Then the elementals might be wandering lost. Wreaking havoc on the equilibrium here in Prague, as it were.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder how this might cause problems for our ritual work.”
“Pass it up the chain. Perhaps your superiors can give us guidance.”
“Consider it done,” Alestair said. “I’ll be working with our witches on my side of the Iron Curtain to try to make better sense of what’s happened here.”
“And I’ll see if I can figure out how the Flame learned about the barge in the first place. That, and what they’ve done with the Hosts they captured.”
“Careful how that thread unravels,” Alestair said coolly. “I worry we’re all more tangled in this than we realize.”
Nadia’s pulse trembled at her temple. How had Tanya miraculously survived the shootout at the CIA safe house a month ago, she wondered, even when the Ice had no real protection to offer her? It was something to press her thumb against, though she wasn’t quite ready to squash it down just yet.
“I worry you may be right.”
• • •
The Soviet ambassador’s home was, ironically enough, a show of glorious Western ostentation. French balconets crusted the Georgian-style etched stone like barnacles, while the foyer was crammed full of marble columns threaded through with arteries of gold. Bourgeois excess, Zerena was always quick to point out to visiting Politburo members, though she would note the way their eyes widened approvingly at the well-maintained parquet floors and the fresh flowers in the objet d’art alcoves.
Superior to the home’s beauty, though, were its other abundances—its layout that would be deemed inefficient and burdensome under a Narkomfin analyst’s calculations. Rooms with no real purpose, hallways that curled in on themselves like nautiluses, spaces that no untrained eye would spot.
Some were merely closets. Others, unevenly shaped guest rooms, a single narrow window onto the courtyard sparing them a complete feel of imprisonment. Perfect for stashing away drunken and disorderly guests until the bloodhounds and spies who were her frequent guests looked the other way. Even better suited, however, for nursing a coma patient back to health.
Something like a coma, anyway.
Zerena unlocked the guest suite’s door with a flick of her heavy brass key. The room smelled of well-oiled oak paneling and antifreeze—sumptuous and stringent all at once. She flicked the dimmer to low, illuminating the outline of the four-post
er bed within, and shut the door behind her. As she approached the foot of the bed, she pulled the leather ties off of a rolled toolkit and spread it out along the bench at the bed’s base.
Three crystals lay there, twined together with thin steel wiring. A thick paste of herbs had been smeared across them. Next to the crystals, she tapped her fingernail against a sheet of glass, into which had been carved and burned a series of runes. Twigs of different types of wood were lined up like screwdrivers in the leather loops.
Zerena’s mascaraed lashes fluttered against her cheeks and, shoulders thrust back, she spoke in low tones. Ancient words, twisting around each other, gliding like currents through the air. A spark of gold. A snap of wood from one twig—a smolder of flame from another.
The glass split down the middle and hissed as its energy released.
The figure tucked into the bed gasped with a wrenching, ragged noise.
Zerena rolled the toolkit closed and bound it once more with the leather thong. The figure thrashed beneath the deep pile of blankets. Zerena pulled a lighter from her pocket and lit a scented candle on the dresser, then slowly went to the side of the bed as the figure finished thrashing.
“What the hell—” the figure cried.
A girl, early twenties; damp blonde hair stuck to her face and neck. The whole bed, in fact, was soaked, as if she’d been in the throes of a sweaty fever. But Zerena knew better.
The girl reached for Zerena’s wrist and latched on to it with a clammy palm. “Where am I? What happened?” She peered around Zerena with white-framed eyes. She was trembling; it started in her arm, but worked through her chin and lips, quivered in the tears brimming in her lashes. “Please, tell me she isn’t here.”
“Who is not here?” Zerena asked calmly.
“The woman from the Ice.” The girl’s eyebrows drew down. She released Zerena’s wrist and jammed her fingers into her damp hair, curling in on herself, rocking back and forth.
“There is no Ice here.” Zerena held her hands at her sides, showing them to be empty. “Only me.”
“She told me she’d keep me safe.” The girl’s mouth twisted into something bruised; her words, blunted. “She said I’d be safe with them. But then it was—cold. Dark. And this constant, endless aching.”
Zerena tipped her head to one side, straight hair cascading over her shoulder. “She told you what she believed you needed to hear.”
“Is the Flame real?” the girl asked. “Do they really want to—to cut me open?”
“Is that what Tanya told you?” Zerena tsked. “My poor girl. Andula, isn’t it?”
Andula paused her rocking. “That’s right.”
“The Ice is full of liars. Sycophants. People who would rather see you frozen and stagnant, suffering perpetually, than risk you spreading your wings. Realizing the power you command.”
“Spreading my wings?” Andula echoed.
Zerena’s upper lip twitched. “The Ice fears power. They lock it away. Let it wither and fade.”
Andula shook her head, eyes gleaming with tears. “I don’t want to go back.”
“And so you shall not.” Zerena curled her fingers around the girl’s chin. Gently guided her gaze upward. “The Ice will not bother you now. No one will clip your wings. You will become the true Host of power that you were meant to be.”
Andula nodded slowly, her breathing shallow. Zerena smiled, tight-lipped and feral, and adjusted the golden bracelet at her wrist.
“I’ll see to it personally.”
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold
Season 2, Episode 2
Complicating Factors
Max Gladstone
Prague, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
April 4, 1970
1.
The CIA needed a union.
Josh, on his fourth cup of coffee and second Tylenol of the morning, wobbly-limbed and poor of focus as he climbed the embassy steps, would go thirteen rounds with anyone who suggested otherwise. Back in the 1890s, when long factory shifts wrung blood from brows and tired men and women lost their hands to hungry gears, American workers unionized, fought, and died for a living wage and a forty-hour workweek. Unions saved lives.
And if unions saved lives on the factory floor, how many more would they save in the field? If Josh put his foot wrong on an assignment, he might die, and his assets might talk, then die, and an American carrier group somewhere might die too. If he misread a critical piece of paper, the whole world might fall apart. A buddy of his, who spoke better Russian, said that the whole “we will bury you” line hadn’t been meant so threateningly in the original—had been some kind of weird literary reference. One translator’s screwup and the world took a collective step toward mutual thermonuclear annihilation. And spies were translators, after a fashion: They interpreted the language of the world to higher-ups back home who decided what sense to make of it.
Forty-hour workweek? Maybe less. Josh had friends in private industry; they worked forty hours and joked about slips on the job. Joked! But then, of course they joked. In their world, a slip on the job didn’t kill.
There was, technically, a government employee’s union. But Josh’s headache suggested that the spy profession sported sufficient idiosyncrasies to demand its own collective bargaining.
Sufficient idiosyncrasies—damn. He really was tired.
As he searched his pocket for his office keys, he realized Edith had passed him, and said hi; he turned to respond, but she was already gone. He found his keys in the first pocket he’d checked, but only after he checked every other pocket and worked his way back around to the first. He shoved the key into the lock, but the doorknob didn’t turn when he turned the key.
The doorknob didn’t turn because someone else was holding it.
Josh followed the hand up the arm to the shoulder and, after losing his way once or twice, found himself face-to-face with Frank.
The CIA station chief did not look happy. Josh would not have included this information in a report: Not looking happy was sort of Frank’s baseline state.
“We need a union,” Josh said.
Frank looked even less happy. “We have a union.”
“We need a better union.”
“You need to get on the job.”
“I was on the job,” Josh said, “last night. Drahomir passed us production figures. It’s all in my report.”
“We have to back-burner Drahomir,” Frank said. “Come into my office.”
“I was just going to.” Josh made a vague gesture with his briefcase. “And then get coffee.”
“That can wait.”
The windows in Frank’s office seemed narrower than ever. Josh set his briefcase down by the door. “Sir, with all due respect, it’s been a long night—”
“Longer for the Russians.”
“Sir?”
Frank tossed a folder on the desk. Black-and-white photographs spilled out. Josh knew the Vltava’s course from maps, but he needed a breath to orient himself, looking at the photos. “This is the riverbend at Kralupy nad Vltavou. Is that boat on fire?”
“Flyover took these two nights ago,” Frank said. “With an experimental low-light film. This is as clear a picture as we could manage. Those sparks on the bank, we think they’re muzzle flashes. SIGINT suggests the Russians and the Czechs are hunting the culprits; we don’t know what was on that barge, and it sounds like they don’t, either. Between that and the firepower in evidence here, we’re seeing some interesting possibilities.”
As Josh paged through the photos, the barge burned, like some sick flip-book. What about the sailors? Had they survived? How had the barge smelled, at night, aflame? Were there screams? Irrelevant questions, for the moment. He forced himself to consider relevant ones. “Czech guerrillas?”
“Or organized crime. Either way, we suspect two groups at play, neither of which seems—and I want to stress the seems, here, Josh—”
“Yes, sir.”
“—to be on the Sovie
t side. We don’t have solid leads on the attackers, yet, but we think the barge passed through Prague a few weeks ago, which means its contents should have been registered—but the customs forms show it full of tapioca.”
Josh returned to the first picture, of the flames. “Seems a lot of trouble to go to for tapioca.”
“Some organization moved a shipment of something through Prague without the Soviets knowing, and another organization tried to snatch whatever they were moving. The Soviets and their cronies like being the only game in town. The way they see it, it’s one short hop from organized crime to armed resistance. And even if these aren’t guerrillas we could finance, they could be a way to move people, and information, across the Iron Curtain. So look into it. If there are Prague mobsters, let’s get them on our side.”
Josh stood. He needed more coffee, but the stuff in his system already wasn’t doing him any favors. His heart rate spiked. Furniture grew sharp edges. “Frank, I really don’t think that’s a good idea. This is really—this is not my line of work.”
Frank perched on the edge of his desk, and waited.
“I know I got more involved with fieldwork around ANCHISES, but that was a stopgap.”
Frank crossed his arms.
“And I had support, and you know the Russians will pay attention on this one—”
“You’ll have support,” Frank said. “You’ll do fine. We have leads. All I want is for you to look around. Make contact if, and only if, you feel comfortable. You’ve done a good job with Drahomir. The Czechs like you. Use that.”
“This is Gabe’s thing, not mine.”
“Gabe.” Frank, Josh realized, stood very still. “Gabe, much as I would wish otherwise, is… stuck with the counterintelligence investigation. Even though he was at the center of the botched op, the dead defector, Alvarez’s betrayal, our own suspicions. Langley wants him on the job. I passed it up the vine to my old buddy in SACEUR, but unless and until he can do anything, we proceed as ordered. Neither of us wants Gabe there, but we have to trust,” which he said with a straight face that clearly took effort to maintain, “the investigation. Edith is a very good officer. But Gabe is out of the picture for the moment. We need to move on this question, now. And that means you. Which is half my reason for bringing this to you.”
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 4
