A shadow blocked out the light. “I’ll take care of him. I’ve seen this before.”
Jordan Rhemes set her hands against the booth tabletop and loomed over them. Silver strands in her dark hair caught the light.
Drahomir looked at her, astonished. So did the rest of the bar.
Too much, Gabe wanted to say to her. You’re attracting attention. Not that Gabe himself wasn’t, here and now.
“He is my friend,” Drahomir repeated. “I will take him to hospital.”
“You,” Jordan replied, “should leave, now. It’s past your bedtime, Assistant Undersecretary. Your wife is no doubt anxious. I’ll make sure he’s safe.”
“I cannot.” He held onto Gabe—why? Maybe Drahomir knew what Gabe wanted to say, maybe he wanted to agree, if Gabe could just get the damn words out.
“You can,” she said, and looked at him. The turning of her head left a trail of music, like soft bells, and her eyes were large. Drahomir paled. He tried to speak, but found no voice. “Go.”
Drahomir scooted from the booth, and stood. He backed toward the door, eyes fixed on Gabe, and in his gaze Gabe saw the wreckage of months of planning. Groping behind himself, Drahomir found the door, opened it, and staggered out into twists of fog and snow.
Jordan nodded once when he was gone, as if she had settled everything, or anything. “I was worried he might follow through with that hospital idea. That wouldn’t be good for any of us.”
“Do you have any idea how long it took me to get him here?” he whispered in Coptic.
“Won’t matter one damn bit if you drop dead in my bar.”
“You had no right—” But before he could finish his sentence, the world thinned and sped up at once, and the table rushed to meet his face.
• • •
Tanya sprinted back from the lead, just far enough that Nadia could see her, and met the other woman’s eyes. Confluence, she mouthed. The intersection of two ley lines, those globe-spanning sources of energy, several of which cut through Prague. They could be used to power everything from the tiniest charm to a massive ritual conducted by hundreds of sorcerers.
The particular confluence they were approaching happened to lie beneath Bar Vodnář, to the consternation of pretty much every sorcerer in central Eastern Europe. The bar’s owner, Jordan Rhemes, wasn’t exactly friendly to institutionalized witchcraft, no matter which institution it was. And for reasons Tanya found it best not to question, she was especially unfriendly to witches who happened to also be intelligence officers for the KGB.
Nadia held Tanya’s gaze just long enough: Message received. They could use the energy from the ley lines to power some of their rituals—hopefully enough to stop the construct. Easy. Then all they had to do was corner a creature formed of elemental magic for a single-minded purpose—the pursuit and capture of a Host. A task it would continue for eternity until it either acquired its target or had been completely smashed into its base components. Yes. Tanya twisted her mouth into a scowl. It’s as simple as that.
Nadia reached into her satchel and pulled out a small charm. Tanya couldn’t see it from this distance, but she had a pretty good idea which one Nadia had chosen—two stones sandwiching a dried paste of dirt, bound with a thin copper wire in an elaborate design. Nadia puffed out a sharp breath onto the charm to supply the final component, then lobbed it over the construct’s shoulder as hard as she could.
The charm plinked against the cobblestone street, several feet ahead of the creature. For a moment, nothing happened. Tanya used the delay to dart forward one block, evening her path with the construct’s once more. Then the creature’s foot landed just short of the charm.
A dagger of rock and hard-packed earth shot up from between the cobblestones, sending the monster flying as it pierced two stories upward into the air. The crack of shifting earth ricocheted across the ornate facades that lined the street. Tanya cringed at the noise—but the time for subterfuge had passed. They could not allow this abomination to reach the Host. The construct crashed onto its back in the middle of the street, limbs whirring frantically, its mechanical drone shifting into a dizzying screech.
“Poshli!” Nadia shouted at Tanya as the stone dagger submerged itself back into the street. Go. “Find the Host!”
Tanya sprinted forward into the fog. Only a block to Bar Vodnář. If the Host was nearby, he or she might feel drawn toward the ley lines, whether they understood why or not. And depending what type of elemental they hosted . . .
Well, Tanya didn’t want to think about what might happen to an unsuspecting Host if he or she tripped a ley line without proper training. Especially with a construct homing in—who knew what they might unknowingly unleash while trying to protect themselves? The power of two ley lines coursing through someone who didn’t know enough to channel them properly—it’d make the cover-up for their last intelligence op look like a stroll in Gorky Park.
With the construct down, Tanya now had to rely on the charms in her trench coat pockets to track down the Host. Not that they were much more reliable, this close to the ley lines, than any of her other field equipment—the static-snarled bug detectors, wonky signals scans, improperly ciphered codes that passed as standard issue. One charm vibrated the closer it got to anything powered by elemental magic, but unfortunately, that description applied to a surprising portion of Prague. Two things this city was lousy with: spies and witches. And more than a few, like Tanya and Nadia, who qualified as both.
The humming in her pocket grew fainter, then stronger as she crossed from one side of the street to the other. The confluence was only a few blocks away now, so accounting for its pull . . . Tanya took a deep breath and plunged around the corner of the next building. Right into a young woman.
“Oh! Omluvte mě!” the girl cried, reeling back. Her blonde hair, only a little lighter than Tanya’s own, was tucked into a knitted cap, and she wore a thick, boiled wool coat over flared trousers. A university student, if Tanya had to guess. Working class, probably a good little junior Communist who supported the Party and attended all the right rallies and didn’t associate with those Prague-Spring, Aleksander-Dubček types who only ever made trouble.
But the charm was vibrating madly, threatening to drill a hole in Tanya’s thigh. This had to be the Host.
“Come with me. Quietly, please.” Tanya’s Czech was filed off at the edges, prickly with her Moscow accent. “Do not make a sound.” She looped her arm through the girl’s and ushered her toward the next block—the back alleyway and service entrance for Bar Vodnář.
Tanya knew she looked terrifying right now, her face flushed with exertion, blonde wisps of hair snaking free of her braid, her lips pulled back in a painfully false grin. But sometimes fear was a necessity. Fear got people to comply.
The girl resisted for only a second before her limbs softened in resignation. “Who—who are you?” she whispered, as they approached the alley’s mouth. “No. Let me guess. Státní bezpečnost?” The Czech secret police. “KGB, with that accent.”
“Quiet. I need you quiet for one minute.” The darkened alley enveloped them, but now they were only yards from the confluence: Whether the Host girl could feel it or not, Tanya could sense every charm and talisman jammed in her pockets coming to life. “I can explain everything.”
• • •
The touch of cold metal cleared Gabe’s head and righted the spinning bar, almost. The room still danced behind him and around him, but less forcefully, and the ache in his head dulled. Jordan’s hand was on his hand, her long, dark fingers pressing a charm into his palm—a closed eye in iron, with a narrow white feather wound through the metal.
“Does this help?”
“You,” he said, finding words came more easily now, “had no business chasing him away.”
“Don’t give me too much credit. You did more than enough.” He’d heard doctors sound that way before, when operating on patients they judged terminal. “I just helped the process along. Follow me.”
“No,” he said, but she was already leaving. He hated this feeling: drowning in foreign waters. It reminded him of Cairo, of smoke-filled basements and impossible visions, of 1968 and the year he’d first met Jordan Rhemes. Back then he’d thought the only secret world was the one where he lived and worked. He slid out of the booth and pursued her, shakily, one hand always touching something solid: the side of a booth, a table, the wall, a bare water pipe. Jordan’s skirt swayed ahead of him, but her shoulders were fixed and steady as a battleship prow. “It’s only a headache.”
“Even you do not believe that,” she said. “I did not save your life back in Egypt to watch you decay now.”
“I can handle this on my own,” he said.
She laughed.
• • •
Tanya steered the girl toward a stack of wooden pallets. “Climb. Get up high.” They climbed up to the low roofline of Bar Vodnář and settled on the edge of slate tiles; Tanya kicked away the pieces of lumber closest to them so no one—or rather, no thing—would find an easy path up. “All right. Can I trust you to stay put long enough for me to explain?”
The girl nodded. Her face was still soft around the edges, but her eyes sparkled with youthful determination. Tanya remembered that feeling from her own days as a student back at Moscow State. Back before she was assigned here, at the frontlines of the stalemate.
“My name is Tatiana Mikhailovna, but please, call me Tanya, if you like. I’m a cultural secretary at the Soviet Embassy”—the lies flowed easily as water these days—“but that isn’t why I’m here tonight. There are people hunting for you. I want to protect you from them, but I need your cooperation.”
The student hunched her shoulders forward, drawing back from Tanya. “Hunting for me? People from your . . . embassy?” She said the word plainly enough—not dipped in the venom Tanya would expect from one of the Dubček sorts, but the distrust was clear.
“No. No, nothing like that.” Tanya shook her head. “Let me ask you . . . uh, Comrade . . .”
The girl hesitated, then shoved her hands into her pockets. “Andula.”
Tanya gave her a sheepish smile—a well-worn tool in her kit for softening up a potential asset. “Andula. Děkuji.” Thank you. “Have you experienced anything strange lately, perhaps when you cross through Staré Město?” She gestured toward the winding street beyond their alleyway. “It might be more intense during periods of low tide, or when there is a full moon, or—or perhaps when Venus is visible in the—”
Andula’s stare was inching wider and wider, the sort of expression usually reserved for dealing with ranting lunatics.
Tanya cleared her throat. “What I mean to say is, have you noticed any strange sensations in this part of town? A headache, perhaps, or a tug of some sort, deep in your gut.”
“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. I . . .” But then Andula’s eyebrows drew downward. “Wait. No, now that you mention it, I did feel ill the other day, when I was collecting my stipend at the university offices not far from here. And then tonight, it was like this—I don’t know, this . . . pressure, just in the back of my skull.” Her eyes narrowed. “Your friends at the ‘embassy’ haven’t done something to me, have they?”
“No, I assure you, it isn’t that at all.” Tanya laced her fingers together, the leather of her gloves squeaking. Where the hell was Nadia? She should have dismantled the construct by now and joined them. Somehow, for all her brusqueness, her partner was always better at explaining these things. The best Tanya could hope for was to spin an intriguing enough tale that the girl’s curiosity or confusion would keep her from running. “There is no easy way to explain this, Andula. You are what is known as a Host. A vessel for one of the thirty-six elementals that power the world’s sources of magic. Because of what you are, you are in danger from those who would use you to—”
Andula scrambled to her feet, tiles crashing to the alley floor beneath them. “All right. I think I’ve heard enough.”
“Please. Just let me finish.” Tanya pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s very important that you hear me out—”
“Get back!” Nadia roared in Russian as she tumbled into the alley’s mouth. She wasn’t alone—she was coiled around the main body of the construct, ungloved hands clawing desperately at the copper components that traced strange shapes all around its trunk. The construct lurched, menacing, toward the roofline, and leapt at them. For one moment, the phosphorescent eyes and gash of a mouth carved into its rocky face seemed to fix right on Tanya and the girl before Nadia was able to throw enough weight to send it crashing back to the alley floor.
“Wait right here,” Tanya said to Andula—no more softness, no apologetic tone. No more time. She clenched her teeth and jumped down from the roof.
Tanya dug a charm out of her pocket and snapped the twigs on it in half to activate it. As she tossed it against the construct, the twigs turned into vines, flourishing over the construct’s trunk, tangling around its limbs. Nadia bounced to her feet, nimble as ever. “Are we close enough?” she asked in Russian.
“It’ll have to do.” Tanya pulled out the components bag and dumped it open on the construct’s twitching form. Flashing metal filings, herbs, flint, more twigs. She added a gob of saliva to the mix, then stepped over the construct to join hands with Nadia.
A bluish-gold glow seeped out of the spell components. It swirled into the air and wrapped itself around the two women, gilding the construct, the pile of discarded crates, the edge of the roof as they began to chant. Old Slavic words tangled into Latin; Aramaic put in an appearance. The longer they chanted, words droning as the intensity swelled, the more the glow illuminated, until it was pouring out of their mouths with each phrase and slicing through the cold night air.
The construct rattled beneath them, trying despite the vines to continue its grim march. Just a few seconds more, Tanya prayed, as she let her chant punch through the night.
Then the vine snapped, and the construct lurched forward.
2.
Following Jordan through the bar’s back rooms, Gabe clutched the charm and told himself that the metal’s temperature made the difference. Gave him something to focus on. Or perhaps it was the pain of the amulet’s edges digging into his palm that clarified his mind. The symbol did not matter, nor did the feather. He would be mad to think so.
Maybe he was.
She led him through a door, lit a candle, and continued down a sloped passage lined with shelves piled high with stock. Most of the Vodnář’s customers would have been surprised to see what stock, precisely. The hall’s first turning held the usual: beer bottles and cleaner, pallet boxes of chips, a vat of nuts, liquor. After the second turn bar supplies gave way to drying herbs and fruits, and what he hoped were roots—the light down here wasn’t good, and some roots did look like mummified hands.
After its third turn, the hall might have been a museum stockroom. Wrought metal charms filled one shelf; along another rested a line of ancient nails sorted painstakingly by size and type of head, each tip stained with what Gabe hoped was rust. Large stylized masks in the shape of birds’ and lions’ heads, or in shapes he did not recognize at all, rested on the top shelves, staring down like angels in judgment. Beneath them lay drums and flutes made of beechwood, God, that had to be beech, though the grain looked more like bone. One shelf sported only gleaming knives. He could almost hear the candlelight against their edges.
At the hall’s end stood another door, which opened into an office: leather chair, fine old desk, packed with so many herbs and unguents the smells clashed and overlapped and all he could think was jungle. Jordan fit the candle she carried into an iron holder.
“Close the door. Sit.”
“What,” he said, “no skull? I thought the candle’s supposed to, you know, sit on the skull.”
“Perhaps I will have yours out for the purpose. Sit.”
He sat. The throbbing headache returned. He pressed the talisman to his forehea
d.
She grabbed a bronze bowl off one shelf, tossed it on the desk, lit a small gas flame under a black kettle, and circled around the room, gathering herbs and screwed-shut jars.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to keep you in one piece. This is the worst the headaches have been, yes? The worst since Cairo?”
He crossed his arms. “That’s none of your business.”
She slathered a scoop of what looked like black tar into the bowl, added three handfuls of three different herbs, and mixed them into a paste with a flat blade. “It is all of my business, and very little of yours. By rights you should never have been drawn in to this world. You have tried to ignore it. You have tried to cowboy through, and perhaps now you may see that this is not helpful? Ignoring your difficulty hurts you, and your mission.”
“I know this talk,” he said. “You’re buttering me up for a pitch.”
“I am trying to help you.”
“I won’t betray my people.”
The kettle whistled. Jordan poured water into the bowl, mixed the paste as if she were making cocoa, then added more water. “No fresh goat’s milk, sadly, but this will have to do. Drink, quickly. It will help the pain.”
He set down the charm, and raised the bowl. The bronze warmed his hands. “This is steaming.”
“It will not hurt you. I promise. Try not to breathe the fumes.”
He met her eyes, and drank. Oily liquid, gritty with powder, ash, and herbs, slithered down his throat. The pain receded. His vision cleared.
“I am not pitching you,” she said. “And I do not wish you to betray anyone. There are people who have dealt with problems like yours since long before you were born—and long before your country was born, as well. They will help you, and then you will be able to do your job again. Will you listen to what I have to say, at least?”
Gabe finished the bowl, set it down, and slid it back to Jordan. The pain felt like a radio on in another room—easily ignored. “Fine,” he said. “Tell me.”
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume One Page 2
