Breach

by W. L. Goodwater

  “I’m not here to save you,” Karen said. “I’m just trying to stop all this from going to hell.”

  Ehle nodded. “As am I.”

  It was complex magic, layers and layers of incantations precisely calibrated. Karen understood why Ehle had failed to cast this without a proper locus. It was masterful magic. She initially understood only about half of what he instructed her to do, but caught on quickly. After an hour, she could see the strands of logic in Ehle’s work and marveled at it. What a waste for such talent to be spent in service of the Third Reich or the USSR. Maybe it was finally being put to good use.

  When dawn stained the eastern sky beyond the Wall, Karen stood and dusted off her hands. “Is that everything?” she asked.

  “I believe so.”

  “Oh, wait,” Karen said, kneeling by the Wall one last time. She quickly traced out a few arcane symbols on the ground. These were deviations from Ehle’s plan, but he watched without comment. “There, that should be enough.”

  Emile gestured with his pistol. “We are out of time. Do it now.”

  Karen looked to Ehle. He surveyed their work, and nearly smiled. “You are an able pupil. I am pleased that I found you, Karen O’Neil,” he said, stepping out of her way. “Perhaps someday, you will feel the same.”

  She ignored him and moved closer to the Wall. Her hand touched her locus. Reading from Ehle’s notes, she began the spell.

  It did not take long. The Wall seized. Its gossamer threads turned brittle. Then a breach appeared and began to grow. It was a desecration, but no more than the Wall itself had been, a puckered scar on Berlin’s wounded face.

  Oh, God, I hope I’m not wrong, Karen thought. She pictured the refugees yearning for escape, and the soldiers waiting for them to try. She heard the echo of gunshots, tasted foul smoke. She had come to Berlin to prove herself; now she might be about to start a war.

  Too late now.

  The Wall in front of them was gone.

  Immediately she felt the knifing tang of the defensive spells that had been set like battlements around Auttenberg. The Wall was just a distraction, but now came the barricades meant to keep Auttenberg lost forever. Unlike the Wall, this was not subtle magic; it was raw and sharp, ironclad. Hard magic. Deadly magic.

  But they were ready for it. Her hands moved. Her palm ached as the points of her locus bit into her skin through the leather pouch, but she welcomed the pain. She heard the rush of blood in her ears and the thunder of her own heart.

  And the magic. Such magic. It had never felt like this before. It came over her like a torrent and rushed out of her like a tidal wave. Ehle provided the knowledge, but her own strength was shocking and tantalizing.

  The air around her shimmered and smeared, like heat, like light through melting glass.

  And then she was through. A small opening appeared, a path forward wide enough for a person to walk through. Auttenberg waited beyond.

  Karen stepped back, a little unsteady. Then her legs failed and she went forward, toward the growing breach. Ehle ran ahead and caught her before she collapsed.

  “Das war unglaublich,” he said, breathless. “That was incredible.”

  She looked up at him, though her eyes struggled to focus. Everything was bright and hot. Fresh blood from her nose streamed down across her lips. She could feel the magic seething off of her like a fever; her skin hummed with it under his touch. Something called for her, wanted her.

  And then the moment faded, the mists parted, and she was Karen again.

  She blinked. “Oh, you liked that?” she said, voice a little hoarse. She winked. “Well then, watch this.” Before Ehle could stop her, she whispered a brief incantation in a looping, vowel-heavy dialect.

  The Frenchmen’s car exploded.

  It is hard not to turn and stare when a pillar of fire erupts around your method of transport, even when you suspect it might be a distraction. It is human nature, after all. Emile probably hated himself for falling victim to it, but even the French are human, in the end.

  And in that brief moment, Karen grabbed Ehle’s shirt and pulled him through the breach. Emile heard it and was spinning back toward them, pistol rising, when Karen cast her final spell. The extra lines she had drawn in their magical diagram flared up, hissing like burning pitch. In an instant, a new wall, this one made of white fire, filled in the gap created by Ehle’s spell.

  “That was bigger than I expected,” Karen said, her voice now almost gone. She stared at the flames. “Something must have been wrong with my calculations or with . . .”

  “Miss O’Neil,” Ehle said. “Karen.”

  The sound of her name brought her back. “Right,” she said, shaking her head. She felt as though she could barely stand, let alone run, but she wasn’t about to stop now. “We need to go. That won’t hold them long.”

  They were tired, spent, and soon to be pursued. She was a traitor now, perhaps; at least a fugitive. She was scared: of death, of success, of failure; that she had made a terrible situation far worse; that she had made the wrong choice; that she had made the right one. But there wasn’t any room left for fear or hesitation or doubt. It was time to act, and to see how the knucklebones fell.

  Behind them, the Wall’s collapse spread in all directions.

  Together, they limped into Auttenberg.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  He did not sleep well on the best of days, and these were far from the best of days. Moscow was not kind to heavy sleepers, but it was more than caution that kept him awake. Age ached in his bones and regrets stalked his dreams. Some nights he stared for hours into the dark, wondering if this was what death would be like: an endless, restless sleep. So when he saw Leonid’s somber face at the foot of his bed, he was not sorry to be interrupted.

  “Krauss?” he asked, already reaching for his uniform.

  “He is here, sir, waiting for you,” Leonid said. “Arrived moments ago.”

  So the terrible little man had come back in person. What did that foretell?

  He had been dreaming, but of what? He could only remember flashes: cracked reflections, the illusion of memories. He saw a great open hole before him, black as death, empty as a newly dug grave. The earth around it sagged inward and called to him, not with words he could hear, but with a voice his body knew. And could not deny. As he tied up his boots, he tried both to remember and to forget but succeeded in neither.

  His new pet magician was pacing the floor when he entered. He looked less like an official of the GDR and more a wild itinerant prophet, calling the masses to repent or face the fire.

  “Sir,” he said, quickly coming over. “There is news. Tremendous news.”

  “Out with it,” he said.

  “The Wall,” Krauss said. The man’s voice was so eager, he sounded almost childlike. “It is collapsing.”

  “That is hardly news.”

  “No, no,” Krauss said, waving his hands. “More. It is collapsing more. And quickly. And the collapse is centered on Auttenberg.”

  That name stopped him. He knew what the reports said about the forgotten district. He had read the evidence, the theories, and the fears. “Is something from inside Auttenberg causing—”

  “No, of course not,” Krauss said. His excitement was great indeed, as he apparently thought nothing of his interruption. “Sir, it is not just the Wall. The rest of the magic that surrounds the district is failing. Someone has undone the spells.” He paused, staring at the colonel as if he thought he was a fool. “Do you not see? Someone is entering Auttenberg. From the West.”

  Pieces were coming into place. The enemy was on the move.

  “If the Wall is failing . . .” the colonel said.

  “Yes,” Krauss said, eyes gleaming. “My men are already at work.” The German magician offered a hungry, porcine smile. “The way will soon be clear.”

  He alread
y could feel the crackle in his veins, the cold burn on his skin. It was the hunter’s rush as he watched a carefully stalked prey emerge from the underbrush; it was the validation of patience.

  “Show me.”

  FORTY-NINE

  They stopped beyond the park on a quiet avenue lined by empty houses. With the Wall safely behind them and no sign of pursuit, this deserted corner of Berlin felt strangely serene, like they had wandered unwittingly into a painting. The rough scrape of her shoes on the street and the rapid drumbeat of her heart made Karen feel like an interloper, like she was violating some sacred calm.

  “The statue you put in my pocket,” Ehle said when they had both caught their breath. “That was clever.”

  “I knew he was going to take you,” she said, brushing a strand of hair back from her sweaty brow. “And I needed a way to track you.”

  Something about Auttenberg unnerved Karen. After Ehle’s descriptions, she was ready to be on edge here, but this wasn’t just caution; something was wrong in this place, something that tickled her spine like a warning. Karen remembered something her mother would say whenever she got a chill: like someone was walking over my grave. Staring into Auttenberg, those words echoed in her head like a stranger’s footsteps.

  “I remember Agent Fletcher coming into the room, he unlocked the cell, and then . . .” Ehle touched a red welt that had sprouted just above his hairline. “How did you escape?”

  Karen heard the jolt of Jim’s gun. And then felt the surge of power that had stopped the bullet mere inches from her forehead. “Just lucky, I guess,” she said.

  Ehle did not look convinced, but he did not press.

  Something else bothered Karen as they continued deeper into Auttenberg: she should be feeling worse. She had a headache, sure, and she knew she still had dried blood around her nose and mouth. But between the bullet at BOB, the spell to distract George, deconstructing the barriers beyond the Wall, and stopping the French from following, not to mention blowing up Emile’s car, she had used more intense magic in the last few hours than she would normally in a month. She should be spent. She shouldn’t be able to walk.

  And yet she felt mostly fine. In fact, she felt better with every step. The magic she’d done tonight had been easy. Too easy.

  When she expressed this to Ehle, he did not seem surprised. “Magic has behaved oddly around Auttenberg ever since that day. There is a great surge of energy here. It is what we used to fuel the Wall.”

  “But where does that energy come from?”

  He shook his head. “Any answers lie farther in,” he said.

  As they traveled eastward, the marks of the war on the city became more apparent. They passed shops that had been burned to black bones and stone buildings that had been bombed to rubble. Old newspapers fluttered in the road like wounded birds. The rest of Berlin had done its best to recover from the Allies’ onslaught, but ragged Auttenberg had been left to fend for itself.

  Karen took a deep breath and realized what felt so strange: there was no smell. In her experience with Berlin, West or East, the air had been heavy laden by cookstoves, tailpipes, and chimneys. It had been hard to breathe at first, though she had gotten used to it since her arrival. Each city block had its own scents, pleasant and otherwise, a pungent patchwork made up of overflowing trash cans, disheveled street vendors, and wet cigarettes. It could water the eyes or the mouth and it made the city feel alive.

  There was none of that here. Nothing, not a whiff of smoke or dirt or decay.

  They kept forward, pausing at every corner to watch for any sign of movement, ahead or behind. They saw none. It was as if the whole world was empty except for them. It made Karen want to scream, but she feared the sound of her voice echoing hollowly back. The silence was like a physical thing, a dark watcher stalking them through dead city streets, and Karen could not abide it anymore.

  “I need to ask you something,” she said, only able to manage a whisper.

  “Go on,” Ehle replied.

  “You said at Ravensbrück,” she said, sensing him flinch at the word, “that you were trying to discover the secrets to healing magic.”

  Ehle did not look at her, but eventually said, “Yes, I was.”

  “I don’t want to know what you did,” Karen began. “Those secrets are yours. But I need to know if . . .”

  “If we succeeded?”

  Karen nodded.

  Ehle sighed. It was the only sound that stirred for miles and Karen felt the weight of it settle on her shoulders. She wanted to regret asking him, to regret digging up the sorrows of his past, but it meant too much to her to stay silent. Her research excited her, challenged her, motivated her; but it had turned up nothing. Not even a single moment of possible progress. Since man had first begun to wield magic, he’d wanted to use it to live forever. Her goals might not be so lofty, but she still believed in a world where such power could bind up wounds as well as it created them.

  “No,” Ehle said, breaking the silence and her heart. “We did not. I wish I could tell you otherwise.” She did too. She wished he had something to offer in exchange for what he’d done in that place. The scales would never balance, but it seemed worse that one side remained utterly empty regardless.

  She felt tears stinging their way to her cheeks. “Do you think we’ll ever find it?” she asked, erasing the tears with a thumb.

  They stopped at the edge of a brick building. An empty intersection awaited them ahead, still draped in the gloom of the end of night. Karen wondered why dawn was so long in coming to Auttenberg. Briefly, she thought she could smell smoke in the cool air.

  “I fear,” Ehle said, his voice dropping low, “that magic was never meant for anything other than to destroy.”

  Karen didn’t want to accept that; no, she couldn’t accept it. She was ready to say as much to Ehle when he held up a hand.

  “I have a final lie to confess,” he said. His voice was barely audible, but the words cracked like gunshots in the still air.

  Karen wet her lips. “Tell me.”

  “My wife and daughter,” he said. “I told you before that I lost them in the war, so I threw away my locus. Another lie. They survived the war and were even in East Germany. I could have gone to them. We could have been a family again.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I wanted to,” he said. “I tried. Once I was freed from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, I found where they lived. I went to them as quickly as I could, but when I arrived . . .” His voice was shaking now, a dry leaf about to fall. “I saw my wife from some distance off. My daughter, she appeared a moment later. I had not seen them in more than a year. I should have been overjoyed. They were so beautiful; I should have wept in delight. But do you know what I saw when I looked in their faces? The women of Ravensbrück. The women I hurt. The ones I killed. The ones I wiped away.”

  He was crying now, silent, swift tears. Karen felt an unexpected pang of pity. Ehle was the cause of so much suffering that she had not stopped to wonder how much he had experienced himself.

  “In an instant,” Ehle said, recovering his voice, “in a moment of clarity, I realized that it would be better for them if I had not survived the war. The best gift I could give them was the chance to start over, to move on, free of my shadow. Better a forgotten father than a monstrous one.”

  “I am sorry,” Karen said, though her feelings could not be so easily described.

  “Do not waste any sympathy on me,” he said. “I do not deserve it.” He coughed, trying to regain his voice. “I left. They never saw me. I hope they never do. Magic,” he said, “is no good thing, Karen. It is like gold, something we pretend has value, so that we can kill for it.”

  It was easy to miss it, masked by his unrelenting ambition to come to this forgotten place and right an old wrong, but she saw it clearly now: Ehle was broken, barely holding water. She wondered how h
e had remained sane, or even alive, all these years.

  “How much of this,” Karen asked, waving a hand to take in Auttenberg, the city, their entire quest, “is your attempt at atonement?”

  “All of it,” he said without hesitation.

  She too saw the faces of forgotten women lost in the vain search for impossible magic. Born in another time, in another place, she might have been among those girls who stood before Ehle and wept. “It will never be enough,” she said. The words were out before she realized it, but she did not regret them.

  “Of course not,” Ehle said. “Even if we succeed, there is no atonement for what I have done.”

  “Then what are you hoping for?”

  Before he could answer her, Ehle turned his head sharply and looked down the side street. “Do you hear that?” he said. “Voices.”

  FIFTY

  It was quiet as the colonel and his men cut through lifeless streets, rifles high and ready. It had been nearly morning when they passed through the Wall, but it remained dark here, dark and still. It reminded him of the war, when he had led such men through the ruins of Europe, always hunting their accursed enemy. The thought set his blood to race in an unexpected mixture of fear and excitement. A part of him had never felt more alive than at the siege of Leningrad or Breslau; how does a man truly return home to a loving wife and adoring children when he has held the mortal blood of brothers and avenged their deaths with his own crooked hands?

  “Sir.” It was Leonid. His scarred face loomed white in Auttenberg’s strange darkness. “Scouts reporting in. Still no sign of movement. The way forward appears clear.”

  He had not known what to expect. He had read the reports, of course, and knew the stories: no one who entered Auttenberg after the fall of Berlin had returned. Hardened soldiers and powerful magicians alike, all lost forever in this place. Yet so far it appeared to be nothing more than an empty shell, a long-dead limb.