Operation Arcana

by John Joseph Adams

Kellur shook his head. “Only in a manner of speaking. I want you to make me what you are.”

  “You’re insane,” laughed the lady. “Or you haven’t read enough? Did the books not tell you that men cannot become what we are?”

  “I believe they can. There are tales of men who were bitten and were thereafter transformed into monsters. They gained such power.”

  “And they died,” she countered. “The magic does not work on them. They become like us for a few days only. Then the blood pours from their eyes and mouths and their bodies begin to burn.”

  “I know.”

  “They die in terrible pain. In agony. They die screaming, driven mad from pain before the sun burns them to ash.”

  “I know,” repeated Kellur. He jerked his scarf off and threw it to the ground. “And I come here asking for that.”

  “Father,” pleaded Kan, grabbing his arm.

  “You are insane,” said Celissa.

  “Perhaps. But those old stories spoke of what happened before those men died. They were like the titans of old legend. They had the strength of fifty men. Arrows and spears could do them no harm. They fought without swords or spears, and none could stand before them. And they could stand in the sunlight.”

  “For how long? A day? Two at the most?”

  Kellur nodded. “Yes. For that short a time.” He put a foot on the lowest step of the throne. “Give me this gift. Give it to my son. We will then give it to the hundred strongest of my soldiers. This we will do on the eve before the Hakkians reach this pass. They will come in their thousands and we few, we hundred of the damned, will meet them there. Each of us with the power of fifty men. Each us indifferent to their swords. They will march against us, and here, right outside of the walls of your church, we will meet them. One hundred monsters to defend your witches and our own folk.”

  Celissa was listening now. All of the witches were.

  “If the Hakkians feared you before, imagine how they will fear you once a hundred of your demon soldiers go howling among them, tearing them limb from limb. Smashing their siege engines. Killing them. Washing this mountain in blood. How long do you think they will press their attack? How long do you think their courage will hold?”

  Celissa watched, eyes bright as blood.

  “All we need do is hold them here throughout the daylight hours. One day. And then when night falls, you can come from these halls to avenge your fallen sisters.” Kellur bent and took her hand, kissed her fingers. The glamour that made her beautiful was for the eyes only and none of the other senses; his lips could feel the withered fingers and taste the ageless dust of her.

  Behind him, he heard his son weeping. It broke his heart, but this was the end of the world.

  “And your son?” asked Celissa gently.

  “He is a soldier of Argolin. He will die either way. As a man, he would be swept away and forgotten. As a vampire . . . he will live forever in the histories and songs.”

  Celissa got to her feet and descended the steps until she stood eye to eye with him. She was a tall woman and, in her magicks, so beautiful. Her eyes blazed with such intensity that he could actually feel the heat on his skin.

  “They say that the age of heroes has passed,” she murmured, brushing hair from his face. “It has been generations since we sisters met a man we could admire. A man with whom we would gladly share our gift if we thought he could share eternity with us.”

  Kellur said nothing. His heart was hammering in his chest.

  “Neither our goddess nor your gods are kind to us, Kellur, Champion of the Faithful. They bring you to us, and now we must cast you into the dust of history.”

  “Yes, my lady, but at least this way there will be history.”

  She nodded.

  Kellur reached back toward Kan and took his son’s hand.

  “Can you promise me that this will not hurt him?”

  A fresh tear fell down Celissa’s face. “No,” she said. “I respect you—and him—too much to lie. Not now. Not at this moment.”

  Kellur heard his son sob. Just once. Then Kan’s hand squeezed his. He believed that it was not the desperate clinging of a child but rather the firm grip of a man.

  “Then let us write the next page of history,” said Kellur.

  3

  Three days passed.

  On the morning of the fourth, the Battle-King of the Hakkians rode his chariot into the pass. Behind him were the knights of his host and behind them the legions he commanded. The cathedral rose above them, and beyond that stood the Red Gate.

  The Battle-King had expected the massed ranks of the Argolins to be waiting. He expected archers on the wall in their hundreds. He expected more than the hundred men who stood in a line across the throat of the pass.

  The sun was hot above them, but the day was cold. Steam rose from the hundred men, as if they stood on the smoking ashes of some great fire. But the ground beneath them was dirt and grass.

  Two men stood before the waiting hundred. A tall man and a boy. They looked like father and son, and they wore matching armor.

  A general reined his horse beside the chariot. “What is this, my king? A party to sue for terms?”

  “Who cares?” said the Battle-King in a bored voice. “These fools think they’re going to get into one of their songs.”

  He spat upon the ground.

  Movement caught his eye, and he turned to look up. On the walls of the cathedral several small windows opened, and the faces of old women watched from the shadows.

  “Witches,” he sneered. “Pass the word to begin assembling the siege towers.”

  The general nodded, then pointed his sword toward the Red Gate. “And what about those fools?”

  The Battle-King waved a hand. “Oh . . . kill them all. Bring me their heads. We’ll build a pyre with them. Let the witches and those behind the gate enjoy the smell.”

  The general grinned and spurred his horse toward his waiting captains. All of them laughed as they arranged their men for the charge. Only one of them did not. He frowned instead and when the general asked what was wrong, he nodded to the waiting hundred.

  “None of them are wearing swords, sir. Have you noticed?”

  The general shaded his eyes and looked. His smile flickered, but only for a moment. “Idiots. Ah well, it will be that much easier to cut them down. Signal the attack.”

  The call went out, and the knights moved aside to let the pikemen advance. Thousands of them.

  The general raised his sword and then slashed down. The pikemen broke into a run, each of them yelling the name of their king.

  The tall man and his son smiled at them as they came.

  Only the front line of the pikemen saw those smiles as they closed in to kill. They saw how wide those smiles were.

  And then they saw the teeth.

  Oh gods, they saw those teeth.

  By the time the general called up the heavy cavalry to try and rescue the pikemen, everyone had seen those teeth.

  The Hakkians were no longer chanting the name of their king.

  They were screaming it.

  And they were damning it.

  From the high walls, the witches of the Red Sisterhood watched the slaughter. And they waited for sunset.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of many novels, including Assassin’s Code, Flesh & Bone Dead of Night, Patient Zero and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of V-Wars: A Chronicle of the Vampire Wars. His nonfiction includes books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1,200 magazine feature articles, 3,000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club, and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at ma
jor writers’ and genre conferences.

  BLOOD, ASH, BRAIDS

  Genevieve Valentine

  1943

  t didn’t take them long to find a name for us; almost as soon as they knew it was women inside the rickety biplanes they couldn’t catch, the Germans called us witches.

  It was because of the sounds our idling planes made from the ground, the story went, as if the German soldiers had spent a lot of time with brooms and knew what they sounded like, engineless and gliding fifty feet above them in the dark.

  (The wires holding the wings in place made the whistle. The canvas pulled taut around the plywood made the hush. I still suspect the thing that sounded supernatural was the whirr of our engines starting up again, as they realized we had already struck them, and it was too late to escape the blasts.)

  The officer who told us had half a smile on his face; he’d thought of the job as a demotion—most of them did, at first, to be in a camp full of girls—but if the Germans were already bleating back and forth about bounties for the heads of the Night Witches, then maybe he had real fighters on his hands.

  Popova cracked a laugh when she heard, turned to me with grin that was all teeth. “I like that,” she said. “Should we start screeching when we sail through, do you think?”

  “I think not,” I said. “The best witches know not to give away their position.” And she laughed a little louder than she had to, as if she thought it was actually funny.

  A couple of the girls glanced over from across the runway. They never took Popova’s cue in being kind to me, but they were never cruel, and that might have been all Popova could hope for.

  “She’d love being called a witch by the enemy; she might already be one,” Popova said after a second, sounding circumspect, sounding a little reverent.

  (She was Commander Raskova; at some point, she hadn’t needed a name any more.)

  But Raskova was elsewhere now, with only her shadow cast over us. Bershanskaya was the commander who lined us up and sent us out. She was as steady as they came, and her humor was thin and dry as air.

  The first time Bershanskaya heard the name, she raised an eyebrow, and glanced quickly at me before she turned to Popova. Then she nodded, hands behind her, and said, “Let them call us what they like, if it suits them.”

  “Suits me, too,” said Popova.

  It suited all of them, I think, even if I was the only witch the 588th ever had.

  One of the important things about the 588th was how little it cared where you came from. If you could take the recruiter’s withering stare and the doctors’ lingering hands and the open loathing of the men who ran you through your paces, and you managed to crawl under the stalled train cars to reach the station from the farthest set of tracks they could find to park your train, by the time you got to Morozovsk they had no doubts about your nerves, and that was all they needed to know about you before they put you in a plane.

  I’d come to the 588th out of necessity; my village had reached the end of their patience for someone who seemed always to know when it was going to rain and yet couldn’t call it down for you even if you paid her. Easier to go find an open fight than to wait for the one that was brewing back home.

  There was no way I could have accommodated village needs. It’s too hard to do small magic.

  From a one-room farmhouse or a palace in Moscow, anyone you ask will talk to you until their tongues turn blue about all the magic they’ve seen or heard of, even if they say they don’t believe in it. They’ll all know how it’s being used against them even as they speak, and the hundreds of whispers shared in the depth of the forest by the witches, who gather there for market days and trade in secret spells in a currency of dirty looks.

  It’s all very well to keep people out of the woods at night, but it’s foolish.

  There are only three kinds of magic: water, ash, and air. For ash to work, you give blood. For water, you spill tears. For air, you give your breath. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.

  The woods will never be a gathering of witches. We don’t live long enough.

  Our planes were crop dusters, wood frames covered in canvas, held together with metal cords. They were the leftovers of aviation, planes given to people for whom no one had much hope.

  But they were so flimsy, and so slow, that they made a kind of magic—gold out of hay. The German planes couldn’t drop down to our speed or they’d stall out and plummet, so when they aimed for us we turned and they hit nothing but air; their anti-aircraft bombs would pop right through our canvas wings and keep going, bursting a hundred feet above us as we banked a turn and the explosion illuminated our path back home.

  Raskova courted us with those planes, showed us how to make them spin and make lazy loops in the air like the plaits of a braid, leapt down from the cockpit with her dark eyes glittering behind her goggles, and you could hear her heart pounding even from where you were standing.

  It was easy to want to go to war, to make Raskova proud.

  And once you learned them, those planes were kinder to us than horses, and to sit inside one was to feel strangely invisible, a thrill crawling up the back of your neck like a ghost every time you settled in.

  You settled in four, five, eight times a night: the plane couldn’t carry more than two bombs at once, and you had work to do.

  “You go out at sundown,” says Bershanskaya.

  Her lips are drawn thin, her hands folded behind her, her buttons marching a straight line to her chin.

  (She didn’t want to lead, when Raskova appointed her. She hated sending us out to die.)

  It’s a bridge; we all know why it has to disappear—the Germans can’t be allowed to move anything else into place.

  But they’ve stopped underestimating us, witches or not. They’re prepared to throw us a flak circus now, every time they see us coming.

  It’s rows of guns blooming outward from the ground like flowers made from teeth, and searchlights by the dozens that flood the sky for fifty miles in each direction, and you can’t get free of it no matter how you try; when you twist long enough this way and that way like a rabbit, you start to panic for your life.

  We lost a team that way, not long back. Their cots are still folded up on the barracks, two thin mattresses for girls who won’t be needing any more rest.

  “You’ll go in three planes at once,” says Bershanskaya.

  Next to me, the muscles in Popova’s jaw shift as she realizes what Bershanskaya means.

  Decoys. We’ll be drawing fire in our little ghost planes.

  We lost our hair to be here.

  They made us cut it when we were first preparing for combat; for practicality, the commander said, though I had seen one or two of the training men glare at a line of girls walking off the field those first days, their long glossy braids swinging at their waists, and I always wondered.

  I didn’t mind, for myself—my hair was the watery brown of old deerhide, and there was no husband or want of a husband to stay my hand from the knife. For me to cut it just meant fewer pins I’d have to scramble for every time the sirens went up. But you can’t tell girls for a hundred years that her hair is her crowning glory and then one day tell her to hack it off and not have her pause before the scissors.

  We all did it, in the end, every last one of us submitting to the shears, slicing one another’s braids off to the jaw.

  Recklessly, I offered to burn the hair for any girl that wanted. It was forbidden to leave the base alone—it wasn’t safe—but some things go deeper than regulations, and some superstitions aren’t worth testing.

  You never leave so much hair where anyone can take it from you; petty magic has uses for that, and none of them are good.

  I was an odd fit in the barracks, just strange enough that we all knew I was strange, but this superstition was so well-known that not even Petrova looked twice at me as they each thanked me and handed me their braids of brown and black and gold.

  As I headed for the wo
ods with three dozen braids draped like pelts across my arms, Bershanskaya saw me.

  She was standing outside, near the engineers who were patching the planes. Her hands were behind her, and she had the narrow-eyed look of someone who had been watching the sunset longer than was wise.

  I held my breath and kept going. If she called out to stop me, I’d keep walking until she shot. Some orders are holy; I had a duty deeper than hers.

  She didn’t say a word, but she watched me carry the plaits like a sacrifice into the cover of the trees.

  In the woods, I built a fire and burned them—one at a time, until there was nothing left. I didn’t start a new fire for each plait (we were tied close enough to withstand a little ash), but it was powerful enough that I was careful. I breathed steadily in and out; I thought carefully about nothing at all.

  When I came back after dark, stinking of singe, Bershanskaya was standing outside the barracks and scanning the edge of the woods, waiting.

  “Commander,” I greeted when I was close enough, and waited for whatever she would do to me.

  For a long time she looked me in the eye until it felt like I was canvas stretched across a wooden frame, and I could feel the question building on her tongue in the space just behind her front teeth, where people’s worst suspicions lived.

  If she asks me, I thought, she’ll have her answer.

  (I could cut myself deep enough to bleed. Blood and tears would summon something, I could hope I had enough willpower to make her forget what I’d done.)

  She stepped aside, eyes still on me, and as I passed she said my name low, like she’d checked my name off a very short list; like a spell.

  Raskova would have asked me.

  I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

  In 1938, when I was still in school, Raskova had flown across the country for glory with Polina Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. When they were recovered after their landing, the news was everywhere: that she and her copilots had broken flight records in the Rodina, that it was a marvelous feat of flying, that they were heroes of the nation.