The Left-Hand Way

by Tom Doyle

  So Lara, embedded with a Left-Hand craft antithetical to that sustaining Roderick, would destroy the American’s body. Then Roman could use the sliver of neurons to bind Roderick’s spirit and prevent him from finding another host. Roman knew from experience that Roderick would be quite vulnerable bound to such insignificant flesh—he was not as adept at jumping or hijacking bodies as his sister had been. Roman would then hide that sliver away from the world, and Roderick would be imprisoned and helpless for as long as the Left-Hand craft sustaining the neurotissue lasted.

  Or perhaps Roman would die like all those women, if not immediately, then in whatever Left-Hand wrath pursued him after this attack on their leader. But he had risked death before for a far worse cause: to bring this monster to his homeland. Today’s risk felt good, and he would not shame himself with cowardice with Lara’s sacrifice imminent. Roman watched his monitors, readied the needle, and waited.

  PART IV

  KICKING EDGAR ALLAN POE AND MURDERING THE ORIENT EXPRESS

  Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns

  To energy of human fellowship;

  No powers beyond the growing heritage

  That makes completer manhood.

  —George Eliot

  The French are polite, but it is often mere ceremonious politeness. A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness, both of phrase and expression, that compels belief in their sincerity.

  —Mark Twain

  Yes, poisonous thing! Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins with poison!

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  In the British Museum after nightfall, a compact, thuggish-looking man in a security uniform entered one of the gallery rooms of the ancient Greece and Rome collection. The day before, this same man had served as the muscle during Michael Endicott’s interrogation. Despite broader recruitment, the agents of MI13 hadn’t completely escaped the class weaknesses of their forebears and, in the way of aristocrats with their servants, they tended to discuss matters in front of him that he didn’t officially need to know. But for the Oikumene, he needed to know a great deal.

  The man looked about to be make sure no other guard was in the vicinity. Standing in the room’s one blind spot, he took out a small remote and clicked it at the cameras so that they’d continue to show an empty room. He brought his mind to an intense focus and touched a bronze statuette, a half meter in height, purportedly of Alexander and originally dedicated at Delphi. Quietly, almost subvocally, he gave his call sign. “Herakles calling Pythia. Come in, Pythia.” He paused, repeated the message, paused, and repeated again.

  Finally, a response. “Pythia here. Herakles, dear, are you well?”

  “I’m fine, ma’am. I thought you should know this at the first opportunity. The American, Endicott, has disappeared, along with his minder, Grace Marlow. There’s been some trouble with Dee in Oxford, but either the higher-ups don’t know the details or they don’t dare discuss them. And early this morning, there was an incident in the service tunnel involving some Gabble Ratchets, the border ghosts, the French, and a large summoning of the national power to unknown hands.”

  “You were quite right to report, Herakles.” Good intelligence was 90 percent timing, and belated news wasn’t news at all. She asked a few questions to check his sources, but she never kept him on the line longer than he could plausibly be on a round and off camera.

  But before she signed off, she said, “Herakles, be ready. We will be at war soon, and it sounds as if the Left Hand may again be active in MI13.”

  “Will do, ma’am. Herakles, over and out.”

  As he resumed his round, Herakles reflected that he might soon die for the Oikumene and the Pythia, and he smiled. That he loved his leader from afar did not surprise or distress him, or give him a single sleepless night, for he knew his history. Englishmen liked their heroes, but worshipped their heroines.

  * * *

  “Paris, this is Pythia. Come in, Paris.”

  Merde, merde, merde! thought the old man with “Légion Étrangère” tattooed on his arm and a smell of Gauloises about him, though he’d quit smoking years ago. The call had been coming in every hour on the hour. Well, only one way to make her shut up. Stealing the museum security uniform, forging the identity, and getting into the Louvre after closing was almost too easy—the temptation would probably haunt him the rest of his life, as so many temptations already did. With the focus that only extreme annoyance could bring, he touched the bronze statuette of Athena the Warrior. “What is it? Are you trying to wake every sensitive in the city?”

  The Pythia sighed. “Who is this?”

  “Hermès Cubed.” Then he gave the code phrase. “The Empire never ended. Plutonian Shore died last week—no funny business, just his age and kidneys, and his replacement won’t be back from Indochina until next month. You’re calling about the American and the Anglaise noire?”

  “Yes,” she said. So Hermès Cubed told her why the foreign couple wasn’t his problem anymore.

  * * *

  In Delphi above the Oikumene’s bunker, the tourists came and went. Scherie could watch them on the HD screen in her room. For some ineffable reason it was comforting, lessening her disorientation, which must be why they had this view.

  But now, Scherie had turned her attention to her host, the Pythia, who had come to her artificially sunlit room. With her apocalyptic words of craft war, the Pythia had left Scherie hanging for a day, claiming that Scherie should rest and that she needed to “make some calls.” Now Scherie had to make some calls too.

  Scherie held her phone up to illustrate. “I need to report in. Also, I need to call my husband.”

  The Pythia smiled with kindness but no joy. “Roderick is monitoring all conventional communications, and when he chooses, he can control them.”

  In a flash, her memories of the trauma-packed hours in Istanbul came together to support this new information. “He controlled my phone.”

  “Yes,” agreed the Pythia. “We could pass word unconventionally, but you said Major Morton is in the Far East, and our network doesn’t extend there. Besides, we need to talk first.”

  “Yes, let’s talk.” Without prelude, Scherie sat down on the edge of her bed. Talking to this Greek woman might violate Scherie’s oath of secrecy, but the Pythia seemed to know a great deal already, and Scherie was desperate for help. “Who are you?”

  The Pythia took the room’s only chair, sitting next to a potted laurel tree. “I’m the current head of the craft Oikumene. The position used to be called ‘priestess,’ but now it more resembles the secretary general of the craft UN. Over the centuries, we’ve had many roles, but one role has remained constant. We fight the evil known as the Left-Hand way.”

  “Centuries?” asked Scherie.

  The Pythia nodded. “We don’t know who first recognized that the Left-Hand way is evil; that discovery, like the discovery of craft itself, predates history. We began as one group of practitioners in mainland Greece. We watched for the monsters who demanded young men and women to feed their energy-draining labyrinths, or who chopped the living limbs from sleeping guests to create ichor-filled new bodies, or who made stews of their own rendered children to extend the lives of themselves or others. When we found them, we destroyed them.”

  “Then all the old stories…”

  The Pythia waved a hand. “Far from all are true. Many are true only in some small detail. But it’s not just our actual work that was preserved in myth. Some of those ancient stories are propaganda we created against Left-Hand ideas. You would recognize those stories as well—cautionary tales about attempts at immortality gone wrong, spread throughout the Greek, then Roman world. Then, the Christians, as little as we thought of them at first, proved very effective against attempts at earthly immortality.” The Pythia nodded at Scherie. “Islam followed the same course, and all was well in the Western world, at least in the narrow terms of bat
tling the Left Hand with the support of the mundane religions.”

  “Forgive me,” Scherie said, “I’m very grateful for your help when I had nowhere else to turn. But that was an exceptional circumstance. What do you do in today’s world that the craft services can’t?”

  “As you must know in your very bones,” said the Pythia, “craft is tied to Mother Earth. But even before the fracturing of the Mediterranean world, the craft has also been subject to human territorial boundaries, and those divisions have only sharpened with time. Still, a few powerful practitioners are not subject to such limits, and others manage from their homelands to threaten many nations. The Oikumene strives to maintain the old union of practitioners in order to respond to such global threats. Roderick Morton is such a threat.”

  “Then you’ll help me kill him,” said Scherie.

  The Pythia looked bemused. “How do you intend to do that?”

  “I drove his spirit from his head.”

  “Yes, I know. But we’ve seen the result of that.”

  Scherie felt a little angry and embarrassed at this summary of her action in H-ring. “If I can summon the Left-Hand revenants of the House of Morton, they could consume him as they did Madeline.”

  “Madeline?” The Pythia shook her head. “She, or they, have been manifesting about the shrine’s outskirts, waiting for you. Even if I trusted their intent, I’m not certain of their ability. Roderick’s immortality has been different than Madeline’s was. We’ll need to carefully consider this.” The Pythia stood and stretched, for once moving more like a Greek peasant than a queen. “Hmm, I need to get some exercise. The perils of sitting still for so much of the day for my oracle work.”

  Scherie stood up as well. “One other thing. There’s someone else you should contact. He promised to aid Dale and me against Roderick.”

  The Pythia’s eyes narrowed with intensity, and the smile left her face. “Who?”

  “Major Michael Endicott.”

  The Pythia closed her eyes and nodded. “Then I have news for you. Please, sit down again.”

  * * *

  By the time his train pulled in to Narita airport, Dale had fully and firmly realized that, though the news had come through H-ring, it was Roderick who was calling him out like a schoolboy, and that Dale was responding in almost the rashest way possible. Roderick was a probable explanation for the interference and delay in communications and for Scherie’s disappearance. The surface response to Roderick’s survival was to search for Scherie, help her, then go to Endicott (Sorry, Mike, he thought, those are my priorities). But anyone like Dale would go quickly to the next level of response; the best defense was a good offense, and the only sure way to protect his wife and friend was to kill Roderick as swiftly as possible.

  So far, so good. Killing sorcerers was what Dale did best. But Roderick would expect Dale to come charging as soon as he got word, and Dale couldn’t even know where the trap was: in the journey, at the goal, or both. To have a good chance of success, Dale needed to see another level of response, a further move ahead.

  He couldn’t do it. If H-ring was right, Roderick or his minions had attacked Scherie and Endicott, and Dale’s mind couldn’t get past that outrage. Maybe Dale could figure out some better moves as he traveled, but he had to get within striking distance of Roderick as soon as possible.

  From his farsight or his deep schemes, Roderick would know Dale was coming, but would Dale’s old semi-treacherous friend Roman know too? Dale imagined that, by now, Roderick and Roman might feel some tension in their working relationship. Before Dale boarded his flight, he sent a message to the handle Roman had used during the years he had worked for Dale. “We need to talk,” he said. This message worked for Dale whether Roderick intercepted it or not and whether Roman read it or not.

  From Tokyo, Dale flew to Seoul. He would stick to short hops. If he went east back to the U.S., someone in authority might try to stop him. Going west, only bad guys would try to interfere. His route had some obstacles. Landing in China was out of the question, but overflight was a risk he was willing to take.

  At Seoul’s Incheon International Airport, Dale made it through the floating security ghosts—long-haired, legless, and faceless—and found a flight to Ulan Bator. A nonbeliever, he still had a weatherman’s fondness for the old Mongolian god of the open sky. A plainclothes Korean practitioner, his sins arranged with Confucian orderliness about his person, stopped Dale at the gate. “This way please.” He must have seen the flight-or-fight decision on Dale’s face, because the man added, “No worries, Morton. We just want to give you a message.”

  “Couldn’t it wait?”

  The man’s eyes flicked toward the plane. “Maybe not.”

  They entered a small security station. The man’s face regarded Dale with placidity and inappropriate amusement. “The message is simple. We’ve made no decision regarding your ancestor’s technology, but if we decide to use it, we’d prefer to work with you instead of him. You have certain advantages.”

  “Which are?”

  “You are mostly sane.”

  “Some would dispute that.”

  The man nodded in a bow-like motion. “Yet our offer stands.”

  “I’ll consider it,” Dale said, which he knew could be a polite way of saying “no” in the region, and therefore wasn’t a lie.

  “You could stay here while you consider it,” the Korean said. “No strings attached. We have reason to believe our neighbors will not be as reasonable, and it would be such a waste if you did not make it home.”

  “Thank you, but I have to leave, immediately. My wife…”

  “She’s in danger?” The man’s amused face fell. “My apologies. We had no intention of interfering with your family. Your plane is waiting, I assure you. Go.” Dale got up and left the room. The man called after him, “But if you have things you’d like to share, please remember us.”

  Dale trotted back to the gate. Upon boarding the plane and commencing his preflight sin examination of his fellow passengers, he saw a familiar figure standing in the aisle just behind his row, dressed in a World War II WAC uniform.

  Madeline, the voice of his ancestral dark spirits, smiled like death by sex. “There’s room for one more,” she said, pointing at his seat.

  “Hi, Auntie. I hope you haven’t come to gloat. It ill becomes you.” Dale took a last look around at the passengers’ sins and saw no would-be terrorists. Then he stowed his small bag and sat down. “Why are you here?”

  “Your wife says ‘hi.’”

  Despite his opinion of Madeline’s honesty, Dale felt relief. Scherie was alive, maybe. Unless Madeline was claiming to have met Scherie’s ghost?

  As if responding to Dale’s thoughts, Madeline said, “She’s in a place we can’t go. We’re waiting for her to come out and play again.” Madeline’s idea of play wasn’t reassuring, but her tone was lighter than any time since her ghost had entered the Left-Hand collective. “Don’t you want to know where Scherie is?”

  Ah, so that was the game. Dale lowered his voice to a whisper. “Auntie, don’t you want to kill me?”

  “Yes. But what has that to do with anything? I have my priorities straight. I want to destroy most of the living and the dead, but I’ve learned how to exist amidst alternative and chaotic tensions, and we have adapted. My brother seeks only absolutes.”

  “So, hypothetically, if I want to kill Roderick…”

  “Take your best shot, nephew. But we think you’d do better to retrieve your wife first. She’s the one who can really hurt him, and I do so want to hurt him. After she’s with you, we might have other advice. But we have nothing for your current trajectory.”

  They were interrupted by the noises and crew movements of departure, and Dale by his own thoughts. As the plane taxied and turned onto the main runway, Dale asked, “Where is she, Auntie? Please?”

  “Great dark gods!” said Madeline. “What ever happened to the Morton sense of fun? You could challenge me to a duel
of wits, impress me with your repartee, threaten me with your power, and instead you beg? You realize, we were the fun Family. That was why none of the others liked us.”

  “Yeah, that and a few too many corpses.”

  “True. Ah, well. She’s at Delphi.”

  “Delphi? The Oikumene?”

  “Still painfully very much in business,” she said. “We don’t expect that she’ll stay put, but we won’t be telling her where you’re going.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want you to, but why not?”

  “She’s too important to throw away like this.”

  On this, Dale felt strong weather craft like a fist punching out from the west toward the rising plane.

  “Ah, you feel that,” said Madeline, bending to look at Dale, her smile gone as feral as during the fight in the Sanctuary. “We’ll leave you to play with your Chinese friends. One way or another, we’ll be seeing you soon.”

  * * *

  Korean security had kept the flight free of explosives and assassins, but that was the only good news. The minute Dale’s flight passed into international air, the Chinese weathermen repeatedly aimed microburst-type phenomena at the plane. Then, when they were over China proper, they sent his old friend sandstorm for him, whipped up into the stratosphere. Dale had the image of the fine yellow sand of Inner Mongolia mixed with Beijing smog spiraling up in a helix, led by a fist of wind. He had to do more than calm the local winds; he had to redirect the sand, which, like volcanic ash, could destroy his plane’s engines.

  While Chinese weathermen were unrelenting in their attempts to kill him during the remainder of the flight over PRC territory, Dale had an interesting conversation with them through texts. Like everyone else, they said they were pursuing Dale because they thought he knew the Left-Hand secrets, and since he wasn’t selling them to the Chinese, he must be giving them to others. “But I don’t know anything about it.” Then you’re useless, they said, and kept attacking his flight.