The Left-Hand Way

by Tom Doyle

  Time to use all the spiritual gifts I had. How had I gotten that extra power outside the club? I had been desperate—check. Submitting to God’s will, I had prayed. God, you’d know best, but I think this one is important. Please help us. Check.

  I felt something. It bubbled up through my feet the way the spirit entered me in my own home. I felt like singing. Oh God, no, anything but that.

  The force of it wouldn’t be denied. I raised my sword, opened my mouth, and burst into tuneless song:

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green?

  And was the Holy Lamb of God

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

  And did the Countenance Divine

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here

  Among these dark Satanic mills?

  In my atonal ecstasy, I was dimly aware that Grace was singing too—something different. Her mellifluous voice was everything mine wasn’t. She was singing “God save the Queen.” So I kept going with my own song.

  Bring me my bow of burning gold!

  Bring me my arrows of desire!

  Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!

  Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

  I will not cease from mental fight,

  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green and pleasant land.

  I felt a rumble that was no train, more like a giant tossing in its slumber. The car was nearly on us, bullets everywhere. I was scared for Grace, and afraid of what I might do next.

  But it was my sword that acted. My Family’s totem was very important to me, but it never had been a separate object of power. Magical objects were rare, and usually Left-Hand. So I was shocked when my sword glowed like a new sun, and flashed lightning at the oncoming car.

  The car made a sound like an electric transformer exploding, and the smell of ozone filled the air. Its six passengers scrambled out and advanced on us, guns firing with deliberation. Car Man, the one Grace had called a Renfield, was with them, this time conspicuously in the lead.

  Grace returned a few shots; then as one, we rushed them. “Try not to kill them,” I yelled as I sliced at the gun-wielding hand of one of our pursuers. Grace grunted skeptically in acknowledgment as she blew out a woman’s kneecap. Having gotten this far, I wanted to exit the UK without killing anyone and improve the odds of patching things up later.

  I was a holy terror. I said my prayers of breaking and wounding, and each prayer hit home. Grace was again her artistic martial self. Car Man was the last to go down. He was good—despite my commands, he got off a shot at me at close range. I stabbed him in both legs to keep him from again leaving the scene. This time, I wanted him to have to deal with the consequences of others fighting. If we had a minute, I also wanted him to answer some questions.

  Only after all of our opponents lay strewn about the tunnel did I see that Grace had taken grazing shots to her shoulder and leg. “Are you OK?” I asked.

  She gazed at me in unabashed horror. I looked down. Blood was soaking into my shirt. My blood. I’d been gut shot, right into the scar of my old sword wound from the Pentagon fiasco. I had felt nothing. This power has some serious safety issues, I thought, as I slumped to the ground.

  The line of French ghost soldiers moved into a file and the knitting woman spirit got out of the way as the midway door began to open. Grace dragged me to the other side of the door, and punched the button. She yelled, “Keep that bloody thing closed!” as the door slowly shut.

  On the French side, a line of British soldier ghosts extended from the border. They stood at an attention that would have put the old Buckingham Palace guards to shame. Grace applied pressure to my bleeding gut with one hand as she spoke in French to her phone with the other, saying something like “Mayday.”

  I was fading out, perhaps dying. I might have accepted this death if Grace had looked down upon me like an angel and given me her blessing. Instead, to the confusion and distress of my weakening mind, she hissed at me in continued horror.

  “You drew the power of Albion,” she said. “Who the hell are you?”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  In the Baba Yagas’ headquarters in Kiev sat the haunted man. He was not haunted by a ghost, but by a voice. The voice said, “I am Ukrainian, like you. Don’t do this to me!”

  Contrary to the folklore about the residence of their namesake, the building on Independence Square that held the Baba Yagas’ headquarters did not move. It merely appeared to do so, to the extent it appeared at all—a natural security precaution by a craft service known for its stealth skill. To a sensitive enough mundane observer, it most often looked like an old stony wing of a neighboring structure instead of its stand-alone modern glass and metal reality. Only an authorized employee could find it without craft. One aspect of the shape of their ancestral namesake’s hut survived in the ’90s structure. The walls of the first-floor lobby of the building were all glass, and the two thin, naked elevator shafts with adjacent low-angled escalators might give a predisposed mind the impression of feet.

  The ten-floor building was also used by Ukrainian intelligence and hackers. From this one location, an astounding portion of the world’s cyberattacks and extortions originated. These concentrated hackers were only the tip of the Ukrainian spear. From all over the country and the world, independent hackers each day offered the services of thousands of their zombie machines. The Chinese might still dominate in cyberwarfare, but they had incredible numbers. Ukraine tried harder.

  The haunted man, Roman Roszkewycz, sat in a top floor sunlit corner office decorated with memorabilia from American Westerns. His graying goatee and mustache complemented his saturnine mien. Roman coordinated all of the craft (and some of the non-craft) hacking in the country, and many other dubious enterprises besides.

  Despite his coup in obtaining Roderick Morton, Roman was not in charge of the entire Baba Yaga service—he had been away too long, and anyway he was too busy to be in charge. Roderick was a powerful yet expensive weapon for Ukraine. He’d made many of Roman’s questionable enterprises possible, but the American also required their constant profitability to maintain his immortal frame and his peculiar pleasures. The Left-Hand biotechs conducted Roderick’s body work in a secret bunker below the basement—the Left Hand consistently craved burrowing into the earth and the land’s power. Too much of Kiev was burrowed like that, from medieval catacombs to underground shopping malls.

  As for Roderick’s pleasures, those had kept the American at home today; he was resting after his most recent affair.

  As long as Roman kept the hacker extortion and other rackets running smoothly, Roderick more than paid for himself. At least I’m not robbing the innocent, Roman thought, as the innocent don’t have much cash. The typical targets for Roman’s hackers were online gambling outfits operating offshore of the United States, several front operations for organized crime syndicates, and even other denial-of-service extortion operations. Roderick’s cyber-craft gave them that much of an edge.

  With his cowboy boots up on his desk, Roman followed a stream of text reports on his tablet. He seldom heard his hackers speak, as many of the men and woman who worked on this part of the Baba Yaga operation were uncomfortable with direct verbal interaction. They were practitioners too far along the autistic spectrum for army service or covert field operations, but well suited to DoS attacks.

  For Roman, thinking about the text reports acted as a cover for his plans. Roderick almost certainly couldn’t read minds, at least not directly. But from what Roderick had done to others, Roman assumed that Roderick could see him through tech-craft or farsight at any time he wished. Thoughts caused involuntary facial expressions and tells, and intentions brought certain timelines into prominence, so Roman didn’t consider Roderick often, and when he did, he didn’t focus on the American to the exclusion of other t
houghts and activities. When Roman spoke with Roderick, he used the affable cadences that had taken in the younger Morton.

  The list of things not to think about Roderick was growing. The Baba Yagas had wanted a Morton primarily for defensive purposes, but Roderick had been suborning key figures in the craft services of other nations, and usually not in the interest of Ukraine. When the craft services or, gods forbid, their mundane masters responded, they might do so collectively, and the Baba Yagas would again have to go into deep hiding, as they had when Stalin had killed Roman’s great-great-grandfather, a blind kobzar minstrel and craft leader.

  A few months ago, Roman’s colleagues had asked him to deal with the situation. Roman preferred renegotiation to treachery. He had indicated to Roderick (very politely—Roderick was obsessive on manners) that perhaps his ol’ pardner might lay off the international intrigues for a month or two, and perhaps slow down with his unique style of speed dating.

  Roderick had just smiled at him. “Thank you for your advice.”

  Perhaps Roderick had appeared to slow down, or perhaps some suasion had been used, because Roman’s colleagues now seemed to think everything was fine.

  Roman read his e-mail. Everything was not fine. It grew more difficult to avoid thinking about the women he gave to Roderick. His mind kept coming back to them. Irrational. They would have been destroyed anyway; most were halfway gone when he found them. Sacrifices of war. But Roman hadn’t known there’d be so many, so quickly.

  Roman always watched them, in part to establish the pattern of watching, so Roderick wouldn’t suspect if he ever had a reason for particular attention. He also watched to honor their unwilling sacrifice. But mostly, he watched because, if he couldn’t, it meant that he had to stop sending them to Roderick. Each woman was like a mouse introduced into a sentient snake’s cage. For a while, the predator might make a pet of the prey, but whatever Roderick’s variations on the theme, it always ended the same way.

  The last (no, most recent) woman they had given to (fed to) Roderick, had been different. It had been a rush job; she had known something was wrong. “I am not a whore,” she had said, as two large men had frog-marched her into the waiting van. “I am Ukrainian, like you. Don’t do this to me!”

  But Roman had done that to her. It had ended this morning, in the darkness before the dawn. By tomorrow, Roderick would be expecting another delivery.

  Poker-faced as his Western heroes, Roman read some more texts; the money kept rolling in. Gods, he wanted a drink now. He kept a full bottle in his desk, untouched, the way some depressives kept a loaded revolver. No vodka for him. One shot, and he’d start laughing about Roderick, because that man of many women and long nights might fear only one person, and she was named Scherezade. Then, Roman wouldn’t stop laughing and sobbing until Roderick came for him and solved all his problems forever.

  Roman did not want such an untimely death, so instead, he read some more messages and tried to forget the last straw. No, not the women—after a few decades of troubled dreams, he probably could have taken their murders with him to his grave. The final insult: perhaps sensing some disaffection, Roderick had visited Roman the other week in his office to offer him a gift. “You have not asked for the ichor serum,” he’d said.

  Roman had given a one-armed shrug. “I’ve got time.”

  Roderick had smiled thinly. “You have realized that with the others, it is a tease: life extension with an implicit promise of my patented-brand of immortality, a promise which we may or may not choose to fulfill. But you have done everything I have asked, and more. I haven’t had that sort of aid in two centuries, and the universe does not respond well to karmic debtors. When you are ready, just say the word, and it is done.”

  Roman had allowed an ambiguous but intense emotion to reach his face. “Thank ya, pardner. I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Roderick had said, and left, seeming pleased with himself.

  It had been then that Roman had realized that, though he could’ve born the weight of his sins for a lifetime, he couldn’t bear them forever. How dare this American offer what no one should have, in return for what no one could forgive? I’m not a whore. I am Ukrainian.

  Roman had also realized that his Baba Yaga colleagues must have been as compromised by Roderick’s promises as any foreign practitioner. Whatever he would do next, he’d have to do it without them.

  After five more minutes of his reading messages, a new report came in. Roman read it, then stopped, frozen with fighting the horror and hope that were welling up to express themselves in his face, in his blush response and pupil dilation. Through indirection and careful charting of its blind spots, Ukraine’s indie farsight now predicted that the timelines of his American former friends were converging toward Kiev. They couldn’t see whether any of those lines actually made it to Ukraine. But the Americans were coming, and Roman doubted their business was with him.

  Roderick would see this future too. Probably he had already seen it, or even planned it. Roman hoped he’d focus on it to the exclusion of much else. In any case, Roman didn’t have much time. He picked up the desk phone for internal communication, and punched the number for the hacker-floor minder. “Send Lara up. I’m tired of her marking up my memos.”

  He hung up. What he had said was true—Lara kept sending him corrections to the Slavic cowboy grammar in his department instructions with a persistence that was extreme even among her peers. That was how she had attracted his attention among all his other autistic-spectrum programmers.

  In a few minutes, Lara entered his office without knocking and sat in a chair opposite him. She hadn’t been skimmed at the border from human trafficking or from the streets of Kiev, but her fate would be the same. One way or another, she would be the last woman he gave to Roderick.

  Roman had interviewed Lara the day after Roderick’s offer. Physically, she met Roderick’s preferred profile—tall, pale, and unpleasantly thin—which was a small and even suspicious miracle. Her long and wispy fair hair was virgin to stylist and rarely combed. She had some farsight ability and was difficult for others to farsee. Where she fell on the autistic spectrum was hard to say, as craft might reverse or amplify some symptoms such as sensory sensitivity. Her resting face was frozen in affect, like the mask of a stern queen, with no facial or other tells, though Roman had seen her fake some social reactions from necessity or choice.

  “I respect your right to privacy,” said Roman for the all-seeing Roderick’s benefit. As he had in the Pentagon an emotional lifetime ago, Roman created his strongest stealth bubble. In an instant, the view outside the bubble went fish-eyed. Within the bubble with him, Lara didn’t even blink.

  “As we discussed, you’re to report to Mr. Morton,” said Roman. “But first, for my own conscience, I need to confirm that you understand what this assignment means.”

  She stared at him—no, through him, and he felt like he’d been talking to a cat, with even less chance of a reaction. But, without breaking her gaze, she spoke. “It means pain and death. It is endurable for our land. You mean to rid Ukraine of him. You will succeed.”

  Like any craft veteran, Roman could hear the resonance of oracle in a statement, and he could sense horrible possibilities hidden within this positive augury. But he didn’t question her. If what she said was true, the benefit far outweighed the likely horrors to himself, and to interrogate her on the cusp of her sacrifice would be the sort of ingratitude that could lead to further disaster.

  As for Lara’s hard-to-read feelings, Roman believed she had less regard for her fate than he did for his. All that mattered to her was Ukraine and a plan to save it. Anyone who interfered with those things wasn’t a person, but an object for disposal.

  “I’ll have someone drive you over.”

  “No,” she said. “Everyday I get myself to work. This is no different. Do you have the injection?”

  Roman opened his office mini-fridge and, moving aside a couple of cans of Coke, retrieve
d a brass-colored metal syringe very similar to those manufactured in the basement of this building and sent to Roderick’s international allies. But it contained a different alchemical stew. Roman held the syringe out to her. “Shall I…?” he started to ask.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  She took the syringe that would make her one half of a suicide bomb. Even if she succeeded, Lara would not survive. First her skin, then her entire body, would melt into its target, nano-craft suffusing nano-craft, and their conjoined flesh would dissolve together into a protoplasmic puddle on the floor. Lara knew all this. He had explained it quite clearly to her at their previous meeting. As far as he could see from her face, she had no concerns as she injected herself. But this wasn’t the painful part.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  Roman thought there should be something else, something to say. “No. Thank you, Lara.”

  “I haven’t done it yet. But I will. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” said Roman. Lara had already risen and was on her way out the door. In every word she had said, he had detected no deception. What a rare person to lose.

  In the face of such unquestioning loyalty, Roman had still kept one secret. Even if Lara failed to touch Roderick, her death would trigger a nano-craft swarm that would burst through her corpse and home in on the nearest Left-Hand power source. He hadn’t dared tell her; he barely dared think it. It was his true best hope of destroying Roderick’s body.

  But the poisoned woman was just the first step of Roman’s plan. In another drawer of his warded desk, Roman kept a small needle-like tube of alchemical plastic. The needle contained the merest sliver of the craft-infused neurotissue that had held Roderick’s consciousness when Roman had brought it to Kiev. Roderick had politely demanded that it all be destroyed, but he seemed unaware that Roman had saved this sliver. An unsurprising but very fortunate blind spot. The alchemical needle reminded Roman of the hidden needle that had, according to the tales, held the soul of Koshchiy until its destruction killed the so-called “Deathless” one. Roderick would require something more multilateral and multistep.