The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume One

by Lindsay Smith

  He saw Earmuffs glance up the alley, but no shot came. Kneeling, head covered with one arm, Josh heard a man’s cry, and a muffled thud; when he glanced out from behind the trash bins he saw the Russian woman standing over Earmuffs, who lay bleeding on the ground. She blew on her knuckles, drew a handkerchief, and wiped the blood from them.

  She picked up the revolver, slid it into her purse, and raised one hand in greeting. Josh, confused, raised his back.

  Snow fell between them. Earmuffs, fallen, groaned.

  “Wait,” Josh said, and his words broke the spell.

  She ran. He followed.

  She was long gone by the time he reached the road.

  • • •

  “Can you explain,” Andula asked Tanya after they slipped out a café side door, having switched coats, “why we’re moving like this?”

  “To check for accomplices,” Tanya replied without turning her head. Rooftops clear, no watchers outside the café. The square was broad, and sparsely populated. On the one hand, they couldn’t melt into the crowd; on the other, it would make any surveillance team easier to spot. “I think he has none. That presents certain options.”

  “What options? Can you—will you—” She slowed; Tanya grabbed her hand and tried to pull her back to pace. “Are you going to kill him?”

  “No,” she said. “Violence attracts attention. We want you to disappear.” A juggler fountained balls in the shelter of a balcony. Tanya guided Andula through the audience, checking over her shoulder as they passed. If Tanya were tailing someone, if she’d just found herself doubled back upon without spotters to assist, she’d slow and sweep the square right to left, in the hope of catching a familiar pattern. So, if someone was following—there. She recognized the tail—a grim, brown-haired man in his forties—from the university party; she’d pegged him then for American intelligence, but now she was less sure. He did not even slow. He turned toward them and followed. Tanya avoided meeting his gaze by the narrowest margin. No sense in letting him know she was aware of his presence—if she let on, he’d be watching for her to try an escape.

  “He has your scent,” she said. “Like the construct did that first night.”

  Not American intelligence, then. Flame, perhaps. Deal with the current scenario before advancing to the next. “Follow me.” They slipped across the square. Andula burrowed into her coat. Tanya relaxed her shoulders. She could not waste energy on tension; when they moved, they would have to move with speed.

  They walked east, toward the towers of the Charles Bridge. “Is he still following us?” she murmured. “Don’t look. Can you feel him?”

  “He’s following us,” Andula said.

  “He is following your elemental. That gives us an advantage. He is trained in pursuit, but he’s not using that training now. Your elemental calls to him.” The Old Bridge Tower rose ahead, peaked and enormous, painted dark by age. Men and women and children drifted beneath it across the frozen Vltava, even in this weather, even at this time of night. Buses plowed furrows through the snow. “The world is wrapped in lines of force,” Tanya said. “Like electricity, but flowing without wires. This power is the air the elementals breathe, the ocean through which they swim. People sense these things without recognizing them. We build great roads and structures where they lie. A bridge has crossed the Vltava here for eight hundred years at least, because there is power in this place.”

  “Can that power . . . help us?”

  Tanya felt, in spite of herself, a stab of guilt. “I do not have the tools, or the time, or the comrades, I would need to use that power. Humans cannot call upon such might unaided.”

  They passed beneath the arch. He followed them. Tires ground snow to slush. She walked faster, following the burnt metal and cardamom smell of magic to the center of the bridge. A bus cleared the western bank, approaching. Barges lay frozen in the river far below.

  “But you,” she said, “are more than human.” She removed her glove, turned, and stared into Andula’s eyes. “Take my hand.”

  • • •

  Crossing the bridge was Morozova’s first mistake. She’d led Gabe on a good chase even with an untrained girl in tow. If the student was a plant, she’d been chosen for her total lack of field competence. Not even an expert could fail so adroitly. Gabe could have followed her with ease, even if he had not been able to feel her in his mind. Zlata was easy to spot, that was all. She moved wrong, turned wrong, looked at things the wrong way. Carried herself as if the sky were about to collapse, or the earth erupt beneath her feet. Morozova barely kept her in line.

  That’s what he told himself.

  His head ached as he approached the river, but he pressed on. While the two women crossed the Charles, Gabe could close the distance. If they boarded a bus, he’d see it. They couldn’t even make the desperate jump off the bridge in this weather. The ice would break them, and if by some chance they broke the ice first, they’d drown.

  He felt them stop before he saw that they had.

  They stood by the railing, facing downriver. He slowed, approached. Don’t spook them, don’t draw attention to yourself. Damn Josh, dashing off like a greyhound after a metal rabbit. Gabe could have used a partner here.

  He felt another tug in his brain, a gentler twin to his pull toward Zlata, from the ice-locked barges on the river. He ignored it, and sidled closer.

  Morozova and Zlata joined hands.

  When they touched, the world shook.

  He’d been caught in an earthquake before, in Burma. The same queasy terror corkscrewed through his gut now as then, this shaking not some random ragged pulse like a drum set thrown down a flight of stairs, but a rhythm. He felt himself move in harmony with it, saw the river too pulse, not with light but with something like light, sound made visible, made tangible by this new sense, this presence inside his brain—welding him together only to pry him apart again.

  The world was an instrument and God’s hand plucked the strings.

  Gabe fell to his knees on the Charles Bridge like Saul on the Damascus road, and clapped his hands over his mouth to contain his howl.

  How long does the end of the world last?

  Forever, and no time at all.

  When Gabe recovered, his legs were wet with melting snow. A crenellated wall of black fabric surrounded him. Concepts righted themselves slowly, filtering his senses’ bloody report. The battlements were coats, the crenellations concerned faces, locals peering down as he knelt on the Charles Bridge. His watch told him ten minutes had passed.

  He roared to his feet, furious, unsteady, scattering Samaritans—but Zlata and the Russian were gone. Not on the sidewalk; buses and passing cars had long since cleared the bridge in both directions. He couldn’t feel them anymore.

  Gabe ran to the railing; foot traffic had mushed away the women’s footprints. He set his hand on the stone rail, where he remembered seeing Zlata’s rest, and found it warm, though the stone to either side lay cold.

  He swore into the dark, into the river.

  • • •

  Tanya could have skipped to the safe house, laughing like the girl she’d never been. She did not. She kept her head. She forced herself to work, to be a spy, an officer, an acolyte, when every cell in her body wanted to sing. An ecstatic symphony of silence vibrated within her as she led Andula Zlata to the safe house.

  Tanya had to keep herself together—Andula was glowing and giddy as a first-time drunk in love, or a first-time lover, drunk. She gaped at spires of buildings that were once churches and at castle battlements, she ogled the cold-scarred faces of passing ancient women in the street, she hummed, poorly, tunes Tanya did not recognize but which sounded like nursery rhymes. “I have never,” she said for the third time as they rounded the last block to the safe house, and she decided she loved the word and repeated, “never never never never nev—” flying up the tonal scale and down again, now elated, now furious, now laughing too hard to finish. “Never! Felt anything!” She left like that before
implied.

  Not that Tanya was in any condition to argue. She could barely frame words without shouting. Barely imagine the possibility of pursuit and ambush, barely watch the streets ahead. They must seem drunk. They were drunk, just not on liquor. She’d taken part in rituals before. You spoke the words when others did, you moved the knives in sync as well, you performed the strange and broken math and arrayed the ritual apparatus. But she had never led the work before. She had never held a Host’s hand while she twitched the reins of the world.

  They reached the green door and she raised her fist to knock, but before she could Andula caught her by the wrist and she stumbled against the wall, remembering the power of Andula’s touch. And this girl with the power of a god, she giggled. “Is that how it always feels?”

  “I hope so.” Those weren’t the words she’d thought to say, they were too naked. “I’ve never been this close to the center. And we didn’t do anything—we didn’t play a chord, just plucked a string. In real work, you’d move in concert with other Hosts, and with acolytes better than me.”

  “You”—Andula grinned—“are fantastic.”

  “There will be others around the world, working the same magic, together. You’ll save us all, piece by piece. And you,” Tanya said, and for once, just once, she did not spin this, did not control, “are fantastic, too.”

  She tried once more to knock, but Andula—the Host—Andula hugged her, fierce and hard and warm and young and good.

  “Thank you for this,” the girl said.

  At last they pulled apart. Tanya knocked on the green door four times, then twice, then three times, and the acolytes received them, and led Andula, smiling, to safety.

  • • •

  “Fuck,” Gabe said when he finally caught up with Josh in the Vodnář later that night. Josh was finishing his first drink; Gabe went to the bar, bought two pints, and settled in the booth across from him.

  “Fuck,” Josh replied. They tapped glasses. The beer tasted crisp and fine. Josh didn’t point—he was too well-bred—but he indicated Gabe’s torn trousers and dirty jacket, the bruise on the side of his face where he’d struck cobblestones, with a jut of the chin and a raised eyebrow.

  Gabe leaned back and let the whole evening, the chase and his plans and his hopes, out in a single long breath. “Fuck.”

  “You were right,” Josh said.

  “Of course I was.”

  “That woman running from the bus wasn’t her—it was some other Russian. She took out the two chasing her.” The way Josh clipped that story made Gabe think maybe there was more to it, but he didn’t press. “But she sure as hell wasn’t the student. So we have at least one more description to add to the Audubon Book o’ Spies, if nothing else.”

  “I tailed Morozova and the girl into the Old Town, but they lost me.”

  “Looks like they jumped you.”

  “I fell.”

  Josh leaned back and quirked an eyebrow. “You fell? What happened?”

  “I’ve been getting these headaches lately. Bad ones. Got another while I was chasing the student, real nasty, like a seizure, almost.” No sense telling him about the Ice, about the magic—not when Gabe wasn’t sure what to believe himself—but Josh had done him a favor, despite his misgivings, and deserved to know as much as Gabe could tell. And after so much silence, it felt good to tell someone something.

  “A seizure? Have you seen a doctor?”

  “I . . .” Gabe lifted his glass to his lips and tried to gather his thoughts. “More or less. We’re getting it under control. Isn’t yet, though.”

  “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have left you.” Josh pressed himself back against the booth, as if trying to topple it with his weight. “I was so sure, though. What the fuck are we going to do, Gabe? We split up. You lost the target. And I don’t imagine you’ve told Frank about these headaches.”

  Gabe set down the glass before the tremor in his hands could betray him. The jukebox started up a Joplin record—Scott, not Janis.

  Josh drummed his fingers on the table. “We checked out equipment for this job, so we have to write it up—and all this stuff is too weird to sweep under the rug. Good thing for us both that Zlata doesn’t look important, or we’d catch hell for losing her, even if you did start watching her on your own initiative. But this local group working against the KGB, Newspaper and Earmuffs, what are they about? Infighting among the happy family? Are they allies? Crooks? Crooks we could use? That gives us something. I’m still worried about you. Frank isn’t happy.”

  “I know.” He remembered Frank’s glower, pacing in that tiny office. “I have to give him a win.”

  “And soon. Losing Drahomir was a big hit. This—you found a Russian op, sure, but we lost the girl. We don’t think she was important, but we don’t know why they thought she was. It’s not clean enough to save you.”

  No tea leaves clustered in the bottom of his pint glass to be read, but if Gabe squinted he could see the concave wet bottom as a crystal ball; Mirror, mirror, on the wall; or maybe The Wizard of Oz: There’s no place like home—

  No. He did not need magic to win this thing. This was not Cairo. All he needed was simple tradecraft.

  “We don’t spin it at all,” he said, with a smile he knew would read as wicked.

  3.

  Nadezhda Fyodorovna Ostrokhina greeted every morning as a war. In war, you relied on plans and procedures, discipline and determination. You could not control the enemy. Often, in her line of work, you could not even control initial conditions—whether or not you had slept the night before, the prevailing political wind, ambient weather, and so on and so forth. So you offered the enemy, which for Nadia meant the world, as few openings as possible. Eliminate weakness with training.

  It had been well past midnight when she finally returned to her small apartment, having shaken any potential magical or physical tail, yet Nadia nevertheless woke as usual at 5:29, one minute before her alarm rang, sat up smoothly, and flipped the switch before the alarm could speak. The kettle whispered on the burner while she performed one hundred push-ups. While the tea steeped, she held her plank.

  She read as she drank another cup of tea and ate her egg. She’d spent the last three weeks on East of Eden, her second time through. English frustrated her, but Steinbeck was worth it. This morning she reread the chapter about qualities of light. She balanced a knife by its tip on the middle finger of her right hand. When she finished the chapter, she closed the book and drank the last of her tea.

  Reading was like any other form of exercise: Too much, without rest, would destroy the very muscles one wanted to develop.

  And that was her morning, even after a night spent wandering through cold streets until she’d ground out every trace of mystic residue Flame agents might have left upon her. She had crossed and recrossed bridges until her legs ached and she was clean.

  Still, war or no, Nadia wanted nothing more from this day than to sit behind a desk, shuffle developmental papers, and drink strong tea until the end of her shift.

  So naturally, when she reached the rezidentura vault, she found Chief Komyetski waiting behind her desk in the otherwise empty office. “Comrade Ostrokhina! Early as ever, I see. I value your dedication.”

  “Good morning, Comrade Komyetski.” She sifted through the pile of mail in her inbox. Nothing urgent—information requests she’d issued yesterday, come home to roost—but the sorting let her lower her eyes to the desk and survey her papers, which seemed undisturbed. Not that she’d leave anything incriminating at her desk, no one would be so stupid, but if Komyetski had searched her desk and left a sign, that might indicate, for example, that his interest in her was personal—that he did not want to call an embassy team to give her papers a thorough search. Her brief glance revealed no obvious tampering. “I like to start work on the day before the day can start working on me.”

  His laugh echoed off the bunker walls. “I appreciate the attitude. Come. Let us speak in my office.”

&
nbsp; She followed him into his small room. Every flat surface supported at least one chessboard. He closed the door after her. She expected a quick debrief, down to business, but when he closed the door behind her she found herself waiting in front of his empty desk, listening to the wall clock tick. She wondered if he was watching her from behind—Sasha lacked the lascivious reputation of some of her previous commanders, but Nadia had lived long enough to know reputation only served so well as an indicator of human quality.

  She turned. Sasha stood in front of a chessboard balanced atop a stack of folders. His hand hovered over the black queen’s knight. His thick fingers twitched closed and open. His forefinger almost touched the carved horse’s head, but he pulled his hand back as quickly as if he’d brushed a hot iron.

  “I do not understand, Comrade,” Nadia said. “ You play over the post. You could touch the pieces if you wished, or move them. It’s not a formal move until you send it to your partner.”

  He looked over in apparent shock, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Nadia could have done without that particular bit of low-class subterfuge. He had not called her into his office to forget about her. Nor had he made her wait to impress upon her his power to do so: No officer of his skill needed resort to such pettiness. He wanted to convey, by his distraction and his easy old uncle’s smile, a sense of harmless vulnerability. Good, kind Sasha, regrettably forced into a position that sometimes makes him cruel.

  “I suppose I could,” he said, “but I respect the principle. The smallest touch is a commitment.” With a triumphant laugh, he took up the queen’s knight and captured a white pawn. “Thank you for waiting, my dear. I commend you; your work this last year has been exemplary. You are a model citizen and officer.”

  “Thank you, Comrade Komyetski.”

  “Sasha, please. It can be Sasha between us.”

  “I am only performing my duty,” she said, and because it was unwise to disobey a commander in his own office, “Sasha.”

  “Of course.” He rounded his desk, working the white pawn between his thumb and finger. “Your developmentals have progressed admirably. You are accumulating field experience at a respectable rate, and your occasional personal entanglements have posed at most the smallest hindrance to embassy security.”