by Tom Doyle
“I didn’t hire a bloody third man. He didn’t show on any of our cameras, and I didn’t see him at the crash.”
“He ran off just now,” I said.
“A bloody Renfield,” she said, practically spitting the words. “Running our Ratchets. Here, put this on.” She handed me one of helmets. It was matte black with a tinted visor.
“No, nothing suspicious looking about this at all,” I said, but I put on the helmet, keeping the visor raised for the moment. “So he has serious stealth.”
She took off her fur coat and stuffed it in the duffle. She revealed a shoulder holster with a sidearm, perhaps a Walther PPK, that she had never drawn during the fight. My eye also caught the yellow of a golden cross necklace as she dryly said, “Yes, serious stealth, unless you’re lying about the third man in your car.”
In answer, I gestured at the scene around us.
“Right, then. Wear this.” She handed me an aviator jacket. On the back was stitched a Venus/female symbol with the cross pointed to the right side and a partial Union Jack within its circle.
“Um…” This seemed more embarrassment than even I should have to face in twenty-four hours.
She pointed at her own version. “I’m wearing the same,” as if that answered any objection. After an inadequate wipe at the blood on my arms, I put on my jacket, and it fit better than I would have thought.
“This for the security cameras?”
“It’s not for the summer collection in Paris,” she said. She tossed me an empty messenger bag and threw another one over her shoulder. “Let’s move.” She put down her visor and ran down the alleyway, and I followed her. We turned, and turned again. She opened a doorway—it was a twenty-four-hour sex shop. We cut through, and I was happy that everything was a bit dim through my visor.
Parked outside the sex shop was a touring motorcycle, a serious bike that would seat two people, but with excess chrome and a laughable number of mirrors on it. “What happened to your car?”
“It’s too well known,” she said. “This will be harder to recognize.”
Under the long seat ran a tube that may have been designed for the bike’s tools or rolled-up plans and posters or an umbrella, for all I knew. I secured my sword there, then gestured at the bike in the vain hope that Marlow might let me drive it. Marlow shook her head as she threw her leg over the machine and started the motor. I climbed on behind her. Marlow gave a single trial rev of the motor, and we were off.
“What is the farsight game that you’re playing, Major?” Marlow’s clear voice in my ear surprised me. Our helmets were rigged with wireless, so we could talk during the ride. Marlow sounded unhappy with finding herself on my side.
“You think H-ring told me?” I said. “Look, I’m on a flight out of Gatwick tomorrow. Just get me on it. We can deal with the fallout long distance.”
“You’re not getting on any flight tomorrow.”
What would they do, stop me at security? “I appreciate your concern, but…”
“Any passengers onboard with you would be at risk.”
“They’d blow up the plane?”
“They burned out your hotel room. Unless you did that yourself.” She paused, as if thinking something through. “How did you get those Ratchets to drop their guns?”
“Blasphemous prayer,” I said. Then, realizing that was actually a very good question, I said, “Sorry. Let me get back to you on that.” Other than an unexpected miracle, I had no idea where the power for that disarming prayer might have come from.
We were moving fast, west and north and away from the heart of London. The cold drizzle sprayed and accumulated across me; the wind stole heat even through my helmet. I was underdressed for conditions, and I had put the aviator jacket on over damp clothes. On the other hand, the chill was helping me to keep calm and carry on as I sat snugly behind Marlow and tried to hold my hands at my sides, whatever the difficulty in balance. I kept reminding myself that she was another spiritual soldier, just uncomfortably close. I tried my spiritual exercises as a preventative against pneumonia, attempting to control my breath and body heat. A weatherperson would have been nice right now.
We kept going at speed. Our destination was definitely outside of London. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“It won’t take too long.” Not an answer, but it fit with my guess, so I let it pass.
“Who are we going to see?”
“He’s the former C, the former chief of MI13.”
“What’s his name?”
“We call him the Don. You should address him as sir.”
The Don, as in the Professor? That almost confirmed our destination, but as a term of address, “Don” sounded more like a crime boss. He probably had touches of both. “What’s his family?”
“You don’t need to know.”
No surprise. But she could tell me one thing. “You trust him?”
“With the safety of the realm and my life, in that order.”
The tactical paranoia hit. It never did any good to try to play the farsight game when you were a piece in it, but since Marlow seemed to care about this man, I let some of my thinking slip out. “Maybe we shouldn’t bring him into this. Isn’t this exactly where farsight would see you heading? This could go badly.” Though whether for him or us, I didn’t say.
No matter. Marlow ignored me.
It was no surprise when we rode into Oxford. In the early hours’ dark, I could only appreciate snippets of gothic structures as we passed through what seemed to be the middle of town. After traveling mostly along back roads, this path seemed odd.
“Why this route?” I asked.
“It might confuse the trail.”
Through spiritual sight, I could see her point. The ghost map of the city differed surprisingly little from the current buildings, and the whole area glowed like Time Square instead of a college town. London was vast with history and power; Oxford was concentrated.
We turned right—north, I thought. Marlow made a warding gesture. The only spiritually significant building I saw was a pub, with a sign featuring some raptor carrying a baby. Oh, that place: The Eagle and Child. C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings had met there regularly, as had some of the Oxford elite of British spiritual power. Far too much practitioner talk and too many code phrases had spilled out here along with the English beer, and the writers had been listening. As the Endicotts and Mortons knew, the writers were always listening.
We left the college area behind and came to a residential suburb. A couple of turns, and we pulled up in front of a quiet home with two gables facing front. A wooden slat fence was topped with a cross-hatched wood screen that might serve as a trellis of some kind, but was cleared now.
“What should I do with my sword?” I said. Bringing a sword into a stranger’s house was a touchy business.
“I wouldn’t leave it with the bike,” said Marlow.
“Thieves?” I asked.
“Owners,” she said. “On behalf of HMG, I borrowed the bike from the English people.”
“You stole a motorcycle?”
“One of my many gifts,” she said. “But we may need to leave by different means, and in a hurry. He has a place by the door for such things.”
As I removed my sword, Marlow added a warning: “Take care. The Don will detect any deception, no matter how covered with craft. It’s the gift he used to crush the penetration of MI13. You’d better be honest.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I said.
For a moment, her face betrayed the pressed lips and tilted glance of a mother disappointed at her prevaricating child. Then, all was smooth and cool again.
At the fence gate, I felt a ward. “Bhili,” said Marlow. The ward vanished, and she opened the gate.
“What did you say?” I whispered.
“It was proto-Indo-European,” she said. Why didn’t the English use their own language?
An archway of trees made a path from the gate to the door. The s
hape was as symmetrical and even as a cathedral’s nave, the perfect expression of constant and patient gardening. To the side of the door was a box that looked like something for old-fashioned milk delivery. Marlow took the sidearm from her holster and put it in the box, keeping me in view for all but an instant.
I gestured at the milk box. “Do you trust this man this much?”
“When the service was riddled with craft moles who maneuvered him into professional exile, he remained true. Then he came back and destroyed them all.”
That sounded familiar, so I just nodded my head. Despite my misgivings, I left my sword in the elongated milk box. Marlow had already demonstrated that she understood its value to me, and if I didn’t trust her at all, I should just hop back on the bike and go.
Marlow knocked at the door, seemingly unconcerned with the hour or whether the Don was at home. The house wards felt fresh and strong even if the stone was ancient.
A minute passed, then the door opened and revealed an old man wearing the incongruous combination of bed slippers and a tweed jacket. He had silver hair and defiantly good teeth for his generation. His face wasn’t so much wrinkled as economically etched with a few deep lines. He had a Roman nose long enough to detect malodorous schemes against the realm, and eyes that sparked with the good and evil that they must have seen. He was the perfect English image of a modern wizard.
“Grace, how good to see you.” He took her hand in both of his. His voice had a slight quaver. “We’ve been worried about you. Is this the American?”
Grace said, “Yes.” We came in from the cold.
CHAPTER
SIX
Attucks met the three civvies at a craft-service safe house in Georgetown on Dumbarton Street near Rock Creek Park. A narrow nineteenth-century row house surrounded by covert-friendly neighbors, including his own place, it was ideal for a meeting that had to be off the records of even H-ring and Langley, and more pleasant than his office below the Pentagon. He would have held the gathering at his own house (he hosted a regular Sunday brunch for practitioners), but he didn’t want to involve his wife, Katrina Hutchinson, cousin of the late colonel. Kat was a PRECOG captain, and probably would twig to something going on, but after what had happened to the Russians, he wasn’t going to read her into this op, much less bring her along.
He had arranged this meeting after Endicott’s call, when Langley confirmed that Endicott’s near-term return was even more unlikely than his survival. The four magi sat with their late-afternoon decaf coffees around a domestic, round dining table, assessing one another with skill both mundane and preternatural.
Attucks’s plan involved using the best that H-ring had to offer, but Eddy had told him that, without the Mortons and Endicott, no number of current military practitioners would ensure success, and that he’d have to find other world-class firepower whose loyalty could be trusted. His three guests weren’t currently in the service, but these others had cause to hate Roderick Morton and the Left Hand, as each of them had lost someone in the craft assassinations he had inspired through Madeline and Abram. They’d been content with quiet mourning only because they had thought that the perpetrators had died in the destruction of H-ring, but they’d all come to Washington when they’d learned of Roderick’s survival, and they all wanted to know the same thing.
“When and where do we get to kill him?” asked the woman called Queen. She came from Louisiana, land of so many magi, and dominated the craft world of New Orleans, mixing a blend of the African, Celtic, and Cajun lore of her ancestors with her American magic. The government had allowed her continued practice, as she’d served for a brief time and had sent her tribute of children to fight the craft wars, “to die for the magical descendants of dead white folks.” She hadn’t known the Left-Hand art of animating the dead, so she’d been as shocked as anyone when one of her sons returned home as a zombie, and even more surprised that the zombie had tried to kill her.
“Soon,” said Attucks. “And you’ll be there.”
“You don’t trust us with the details.” said the man called Longhouse. A descendant of Hiawatha, he had traveled from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he had lived with the tall, pale Lumberman. The family of Lumberman’s father had cleared forests from Finland to the Midwest, but Lumberman had chosen to follow his mother’s peripatetic lineage and plant trees. One had to follow the times. Lumberman and Longhouse used their craft to protect and nurture their saplings. Lumberman’s surprise had come when his family’s ancient axe, now a weapon of defense, had seemed to turn on its master. But it had been Lumberman’s own hands betraying him. Longhouse had thanked the trees for their dead branches as he had burned his dismembered lover’s limbs, which had still twitched with the evil animus that had possessed them.
“Trust,” said Attucks, “has nothing to do with it. Our opponent is the greatest farseer in the world today. If too many people are even thinking about the details, the timeline will grow in farsight prominence, and our chance will be lost.”
“Is the chance real?” asked the man called Alchemist from San Francisco. He and his father had played with chemistries that conventional science and their unconventional Chinese ancestors had never combined. One day, a healing balm they’d developed had eaten away the father’s hands and then had rapidly consumed the rest of his body. Alchemist had tried to douse his father with possible antidotes, but while his father still had lungs and a mouth he screamed in terror the names of the transdimensional gods of the Left-Hand Mortons.
A real chance? Attucks decided he could throw these vengeful allies that much of a bone. “Langley sees no timeline for Roderick beyond this operation. When we act, he’s gone.”
Attucks wanted to add that he was probably sacrificing three of his finest officers overseas to bring about that outcome, but he didn’t, and not just from secrecy. His mother had warned him that “revenge was never grateful,” and he wouldn’t take the lack of gratitude of those present kindly just now.
* * *
Scherie slept. She had no idea if she flew by plane, sailed by high-speed vessel, or rode by ambulance. By the time she came to, cotton mouthed and confused but with her pain thoroughly managed, she was in something about the size of an airport shuttle van. She raised her head, and through the strongly tinted windows she saw a dry, hilly countryside that looked nothing like greater Istanbul. They were on a highway, and the snatches of signs had Greek letters. She was in Greece.
Though she was surrounded by medical supplies and devices, she also saw boxes marked in Greek and English with “Ministry of Culture.” So the van was not an ambulance, and she was being smuggled to her destination. But where was that?
Weak, and not sure of the craft of all present, she tried speaking English. “Where are we going?”
“Shhh.” A woman seated to the right of Scherie’s gurney smiled at her. “Rest. We’re nearly there.”
Scherie remained quiet, but she continued to assess her surroundings in case she needed to act. To her left, Madeline appeared, though she had faded back to black-and-white outlines.
“You didn’t kill me,” whispered Scherie.
“You are useless to us dead,” said Madeline.
“What use?”
But Madeline ignored her question. “We won’t be following you to your destination. That place is inimical to us. But we’ll be waiting for you. Time is short, so don’t be lazy.”
“Lazy?” Scherie’s anger had returned, but Madeline was already gone.
Scherie slept more, until their winding turns woke her again, feeling nausea along with everything else. They were driving up a roadway along a decent-sized mountain, great gray rocky outcroppings to one side and a long drop to the other.
They pulled to a halt. A Greek and English sign said that they were near the Delphi Archaeological Museum.
“Sorry, but we have to sneak you in.” They unfolded a “Ministry of Tourism” tarp and covered her with it. She felt herself being carried into the building,
then into an elevator that went down farther than a small museum’s basement should go. From the elevator, they bore her for another minute, then removed the tarp and placed her on a bed. Though underground with no windows, the illumination was like sunlight and seemed to carry warmth with it. She drifted off again.
Scherie dreamed. Dale was surrounded by darkness, and the darkness was going to consume him, eat him like acid until he was part of it.
“Fuck, no!” She was up with her hand at the man’s throat and a spell of death ready to speak.
“Easy, daughter.” A woman’s voice, as the man was having difficulty breathing, much less speaking. Aghast at herself, Scherie let go. “He’s a healer from the Asclepion. He came all the way up from Epidauros just to see you.”
The man cleared his throat and frowned. He was elderly and thin. He could have been ninety, though he radiated so much health that he might have been a thirty-year-old with wrinkled skin. “I was finished anyway.”
“I’m so sorry.” Scherie was feeling much more alive. “Thank you.”
The man, still frowning, nodded his head and left. Scherie turned her attention to the woman. She was heavy and round in the Greek fashion, but stood straight, like royalty, more regal than the craft aristos of America.
Scherie decided to introduce herself. “I’m Scherie.” She didn’t get into the complexities of last names. Then she said hello in Greek, which was about the limit of her knowledge, and added, “Thank you for saving me.” That she was saved, and not just in another trap, was a big assumption, but in this case it didn’t hurt to assume the best.
“You’re of Persia, aren’t you? A Persian at Delphi. The gods were always great ones for irony.” The woman laughed gently and smiled like sunlight on a wine-dark sea. “I’m the Pythia. You are here as a suppliant, but I have much to ask you, to ask of you. You have heard the bad news about Roderick Morton?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know we do not have much time. We have a lot to tell each other. I do not know yet whether we can trust each other, but perhaps we must. The Left Hand is rising again, and whether we wish it or not, we will go to war.”
