The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  Three tall, gilt-edged mirrors surrounded them, their silvered surfaces grey with dust. Brushes and pencils lay on a nearby bureau table, abandoned. This must have been a dressing room, Winter imagined, trying to focus on anything other than the pain crippling his body. It still had a waxy, greasy smell, mingling with the scent of must and rotten wood.

  He could feel a breeze on his skin. Glancing up he saw that part of the ceiling had gone, the plaster ripped apart, another souvenir of the great siege. The first spits of rain were coming through, hitting the exposed floorboards.

  Alessandra shook out her black bob. And then she began to unfasten the buttons of Winter’s shirt, flipping his tie to one side.

  He held her wrist. ‘No. Leave it.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Hart.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘I can look at it, can’t I? What are you, embarrassed?’

  Winter sighed, letting his arm fall to the floor. He had no energy for arguing. His chest rose and fell as she unbuttoned him.

  ‘Just be careful, alright?’

  Alessandra reached the last button and spread the sticky halves of the shirt either side of his chest.

  Winter heard a sudden catch in her throat.

  ‘What in God’s name are these?’ she asked, softly.

  He knew what she had seen. The scar tissue of John Dee’s runes, still vivid in his flesh. Karina had carved the Enochian symbols into his chest in that ruined basilica in Bavaria, nearly two years ago now. Some mornings they still bled. There were times he suspected they would never entirely heal.

  ‘Collateral damage,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’

  She stared at the markings, concerned but clearly fascinated. ‘Why would anyone do this to you?’

  ‘Because there was no other choice.’ Winter coughed, and blood came through his teeth.

  She spotted a ribbon of discoloured skin above his belt. ‘There’s another one here. This one’s older, more faded. It looks like a knife wound. Someone else tried to kill you, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a precedent. Maybe I just have one of those faces.’

  Alessandra smiled. It was a private smile. ‘I always liked your face, Hart. But some days I wanted to kill you too.’

  Her mouth tightened as she saw the extent of the injury. The bullet had punched through his torso, leaving a raw crater the size of a small coin. The wound itself sat on a swollen whorl of skin, the heart of the rupture thick and black with blood. It flexed as he breathed.

  ‘Turn over,’ she told him.

  Winter rolled on his side as best he could, the movement sending fresh spasms of pain through his chest. He stared at the far wall, concentrating on a tattered bill poster that showed an impeccably moustached man juggling flaming torches.

  ‘There’s no exit wound,’ said Alessandra, examining his back. ‘It’s still inside you.’

  Winter made himself turn again, scowling with the effort. This was bad. The bullet might be lodged in his pleural cavity, possibly even embedded in lung tissue. There was a strong chance of haemorrhage, let alone infection. The wound was open and sucking in air, too. That could trigger total lung collapse.

  He was lucky he’d been shot by a Makarov pistol. At least 9mm bullets remained intact, didn’t rip through arterial thoroughfares in a burst of shrapnel. Of course, there were more appealing definitions of luck.

  ‘We need to get you to a hospital.’

  Winter shook his head sharply. ‘No chance. State security has my face now. I’ll be dead in their hands anyway. They’ll torture me first.’

  ‘For God’s sake, you can’t just stay here like this.’

  He took his eyes from her, staring up at the shattered ceiling. ‘If I’m captured then you’re captured,’ he told her, measuredly. ‘I screwed up, that’s all. But it’s alright. They’ll send somebody else. Some other asset. You’ll get to the West.’

  ‘I don’t need to get to the West.’

  ‘Well, then. I’m glad it was all for nothing.’

  Alessandra was legitimately angry with him now. ‘You’re going to die here, Hart. You’re going to die here in this dead place. And you’re going to make me watch it.’

  He met her gaze again. ‘My name,’ he insisted, quietly and firmly, ‘is Christopher Winter.’

  Alessandra’s eyes looked older than her face, older than the darkness that framed her.

  ‘You can use magic.’

  It didn’t sound like a suggestion. It sounded like a provocation. A dare.

  ‘You’ve done it before,’ she urged. ‘I saw you do it. I was there, in Tangiers. In the souk. You took a bullet then too. The Persian assassin. You cast a hex of restoration and—’

  ‘Not me. Another man. A long time ago.’

  She grunted dismissively. ‘You’re the same man, you obstinate bastard, whatever name you call yourself.’

  ‘That man would have taken me to Hell. I’m nothing that he was. Nothing!’

  Winter started to cough again. The bare wound widened, even as his chest felt tighter still.

  ‘You were powerful,’ said Alessandra, practically under her breath.

  He gave a brittle smile. ‘I was lost. Believe me.’

  Alessandra lapsed into silence, her frustration cooling as she considered this. ‘What happened to you?’ she finally asked him. ‘Tell me the truth.’

  The rain drummed on the floorboards, building now.

  ‘I died,’ said Winter, reaching for the simplest words he could find. ‘Just for a moment, but I died. And I came back. But he was gone. Tobias Hart. All his memories. All his gifts. Whatever part of me he was. My soul, my spirit, whatever you call it, was cut in two, and he was gone. So don’t ask me to use magic, because I wouldn’t begin to know how. Not even to save my life.’

  Alessandra lifted his hand from the floor. She slipped her long fingers between his. Her skin prickled like a murmur of static.

  ‘Magic doesn’t live in memory,’ she stated, calmly. ‘It lives in blood. In the bones. It sinks into you and roots itself. You told me that when we met, just before we made love for the first time.’

  ‘That’s one hell of a seduction.’

  ‘You were once a very charming man.’

  Her fingers tightened around his. He felt the touch of metal. A ring, cold and hard, pressing against his skin.

  ‘Let your body remember,’ Alessandra urged. ‘I’ll help you.’

  Winter saw how huge her pupils were in the dark. They consumed her irises, so deeply black they were almost luminous. He had seen eyes like that before, he realised. The woman at Scratch Hill Junction, the one who had come to trade money for Frontenac’s heart. Suddenly he felt a rush of questions, in spite of the killing pain.

  ‘I couldn’t save myself from a knife wound. What makes this so different?’

  ‘Usually it demands a considerable blood sacrifice to a higher entity. Luckily for you, I’m not that needy. And the only blood you’re sacrificing right now is your own.’

  Winter searched her gaze. ‘What are you? You’re not human, I know that.’

  ‘It never bothered you. Not back then.’ There was something defiant in her voice as she said that.

  ‘I’ve met demons before.’

  ‘Demons,’ she echoed, coldly. ‘There’s no nuance to that word. I could just as easily call you an animal. That’s how most of us see you. But then your fellow animals don’t claim moral superiority over us. That distinguishes your kind, at least.’

  ‘So you are a demon.’

  Winter felt the edge of the ring cut into his skin, a prick of pain that registered despite the agony in his chest.

  ‘Once you could have listed the Houses of the Unbound Sun,’ she told him, dismayed at everything he had forgotten. ‘The grand dynasties of the Dusklands. The Burning Saints and the Children of the Great Defiance. You knew our names and our truths.’

  ‘All gone,’ said Winter, his breathing rapid now, the coppe
r tang of blood on his tongue. ‘Tell me. What are you?’

  Alessandra’s mouth curled with hauteur. ‘According to your myths I’m a succubus. I’ve always found that such an ungainly word. I’m a daughter of Lilith, the Firstborn Woman. The bloodline of the Archangel Samael is within me. My queen is Na’amah of the Silken Thirst. I’m not some common demon, Mr Winter.’

  Her fingers twisted around his. There were filaments of gold in her eyes. ‘I’m an Erovore.’

  Winter was dragging air into his throat more urgently than before. His chest felt like a snare around his lungs, tightening by the minute. Flashes of white dotted his vision, like static corrupting a television signal.

  He had often wondered how he would face death again. Of course there was every chance the next bullet you took would be your last, brisk and anonymous. That was just the law of averages. But he never imagined it would come quite so soon, or feel quite so arbitrary, so incidental.

  Alessandra’s pale face blurred and doubled, then resolved itself as he concentrated on her.

  She had offered him life. She had offered him magic. The two were indivisible, it seemed. And magic scared him. It had been in his veins before, so powerful, so intoxicating, and part of him hated the thought of tasting it again.

  But he didn’t want to die, he realised. Not tonight, not like this, in some forgotten room, on a dead-end mission that had meant nothing. There had to be another death out there, years from now. A better, smarter death. One with at least a scrap of meaning.

  He pressed the bones of his hand against her. ‘Tell me how I can live.’

  She smiled and drew the hand close. Winter’s knuckles brushed the silk of her blouse, the firm warmth of her breast. Their wrists were parallel. He could feel her pulse against his, steady through the skin. Briefly they beat out of step. And then they synchronised, keeping the primal rhythm of blood.

  ‘Search your body,’ she told him, her voice barely louder than the rain. ‘Flesh is memory. Bone is memory. Blood is memory.’

  Winter repeated the words, his eyelids flickering. He sensed her lean in, her breath on his face. The powdery scent of Guerlain perfume blended with the sweet, leathery trace of Sobranie cigarettes, still in her hair. He knew this woman. He had known her for so very long.

  Alessandra’s mouth found his throat. Her lips closed around his flesh, her tongue darting wetly against him. For a second he experienced a flare of memory. It came like electricity torn from darkness: the two of them, joined naked, the scent of sweat and incense, a hot sun through a high Moorish window. Then it was gone, stamping an afterimage in his mind’s eye and a shiver of recognition in his body.

  ‘Flesh is memory,’ he said again, reciting her words like a mantra, his voice cracking with the effort. ‘Bone is memory. Blood is memory.’

  The rain was hitting the tall mirrors that stood watch around them. It trailed down their surfaces, scoring through the dust, revealing slivers of reflected light. But the glass was darkening. The rain had become the colour and consistency of ink. It was turning the mirrors black.

  Alessandra moved her mouth lower. She placed kisses across his chest, her tongue playing over the scars. Winter experienced another grenade-burst of memory: cold forest air, a grey-blue dusk, a ring of pines, the first stars. The two of them were in the snow, the heat of their bodies turning it to slush. Alessandra’s legs were locked around his back and she was urging him closer inside her, murmuring as her pleasure built. He glimpsed her eyes. They were gold, sightless.

  ‘Be with me,’ she told him, and Winter didn’t know if that was a memory too.

  The black liquid dripped from the mirrors, pooling beneath them. And then it slid across the floorboards, seeking Winter’s hand. It sank into his pores, found his veins, chased its way through the maze of arteries and capillaries, nerves and synapses. Soon it was swilling inside him, heady and dark.

  It was so easy. He remembered that now. Magic was ink. You wrote the world with it.

  Alessandra guided his other hand to where the bullet had pierced him.

  ‘Flesh is memory,’ she chanted, softly. ‘Bone is memory. Blood is memory.’

  She pressed their hands together against the wound. Blood swam from the gash, smearing their knuckles. Winter sensed a tremor of some unknowable energy, building between their palms, radiating through their bones. Whatever it was it began to calm the relentless burning.

  Something trickled against his fingers. It was wet but it had a different texture to the blood. Harder, more granular. He lifted his hand and saw a dull silver fluid, oozing from the hole in his chest. It took him a moment to realise what it was. The 9mm bullet, rippling out of him like mercury.

  ‘My God,’ he sighed, struggling to process all this.

  There was a brittle crack of glass. The mirrors had splintered into cobweb patterns. Light bled from the fissures, white and blinding. It filled the room, every abandoned corner. And then, just as quickly, it faded.

  Alessandra returned his hand to the wound. Her skin was glowing now, lit by her veins. They looked like fairy lights inside her.

  Winter could feel his torn flesh reuniting. With the bullet expelled the tissue was knitting itself back together. The pain steadily receded, replaced by a wave of pleasure. If this energy was demonic he surrendered to it regardless. Magic was ink, he told himself again. You wrote the world with it. No, you rewrote the world with it.

  Still clutching his hand, Alessandra rose and sat astride him. Winter felt the pressure of her body but to his surprise there was no discomfort, no protest from his ribs. Her eyes had turned to gold again, blank and gleaming, and as he heard her breathing deepen he knew she was feeding on him, taking his pleasure for her own. She squeezed his chest between her thighs and began to slide against him.

  The downpour was fierce now, pelting through the break in the roof. It streamed down their skin and saturated their clothes. It had a summer warmth, in spite of the hour.

  Alessandra leaned in again, rain running from her lips.

  ‘All magic is seduction,’ she said, and Winter believed her.

  6

  Winter pushed the coins into the slot and heard them tumble through the innards of the payphone.

  There was a state propaganda picture glued to the kiosk wall, just above the cradle for the receiver. It showed a worker’s fist breaking through the soil to meet the hand of a soldier. In Uralic alphabet it declared ‘Forward Through Cooperation’. Someone had scrawled ‘1956’ across the worker’s knuckles, then beneath it ‘aratás’, the Hungarian word for harvest. The graffiti was blood red. Winter picked at the gummy edge of the placard.

  ‘Hello?’ said the muzzy voice at the other end of the line. It was two am and Bernard Gately had obviously been woken by the call.

  Winter dutifully recited his half of the clearance protocol, a line of poetry by Sir Francis Bacon. It felt as ludicrous as ever in this context. ‘The man of life upright, whose guiltless heart is free…’

  The line hummed, awaiting Gately’s response. Winter glanced out of the grimy kiosk window. Alessandra was standing on the empty boulevard, one arm across her chest, a cigarette pinched between her fingers. She met Winter’s eyes and exhaled a casual drift of smoke. The rain had gone but the street glistened like black marble behind her.

  Gately remembered the words. ‘From all dishonest deeds, or thought of vanity. Hello, Winter. What do you need?’

  Winter wedged the handset closer, analysing the sound of the connection. He could hear faint fluctuations in the background hum. Sonic artefacts, probably, glitches in the cables, but you could never be entirely sure. The state always had its ears pressed to the city.

  ‘Hello?’ said Gately, a little rattily now.

  ‘This is a secure line?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  A standard wiretap tended to produce a tiny but detectable echo, riding just behind a voice. Gately sounded clean, but there was reverberation in the signal that made it hard to be sure
.

  ‘When was the line swept?’

  ‘Two days ago. Junction box too.’

  Winter spoke quickly. ‘My cover’s gone. The mission’s compromised. They know I’m here.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I made an intervention. It was problematic.’

  ‘What the hell did you do?’

  ‘Read the report when I bloody well write it.’

  ‘Are you injured? Is the woman?’

  Winter’s eyes fell to his shirt. The blood had dried to a sprawl of a stain that his tightly buttoned jacket couldn’t quite conceal. It was the only remnant of the wound. That and a lingering sense that he’d reawakened something dangerous, unwanted, inside him.

  ‘I’m fine. She’s fine. I’m still going to get her out. But there’s something else. This is more than a defection. She has some kind of agenda beyond that.’

  Gately paused and static chittered on the line. ‘What agenda? What does she mean?’

  ‘I’m just about to find out.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Again the insect whisper of static. ‘Look, we need to forget the rendezvous. I’ll get her to the West as arranged but it’s too much of a risk for you. They’ve got my face on film. They’ll be scouring the city for me, every station, every border. We can’t be seen together.’

  ‘I’ll be careful. For God’s sake, Winter, I’m always careful.’

  There was a barely suppressed petulance in Gately’s voice. Winter recognised the sound of a second-tier operative craving a little more adrenalin in his life.

  ‘No. You need to dead-drop the tickets and the papers. Do it now. I’ll pick them up in the morning.’

  ‘But, Winter…’

  ‘Do what I say. Fallback protocol.’

  Gately sighed, then grunted his acceptance of the situation. ‘Alright. I’ll let London know. You were given a potential drop point, I take it?’

  ‘Of course. Part of the mission brief.’