by Gwynn White
“So who’s eating the great Houses’ risk, Boris? You figured it out?”
“WFEC.”
“WFEC?”
“The Wessex Far East Corporation. It’s a perfect risk dump. It’s got a big, diverse portfolio of assets. The implicit backing of the British Crown. And someone in a position of power who’s either the smartest man in the market, or the dumbest fucker alive.”
“The Wessexes again,” Filip said. “They seem to be at the bottom of every crisis.”
“So what I was thinking is, we could take WFEC down.”
“How?”
Bounce, bounce went Boris’s yo-yo. “I figure they’re at full stretch. They’ve sold so much insurance that all their collateral’s got to be on the line. So we need them to have a big, public disaster. Which’ll force them to put up new collateral. Which they definitely haven’t got. Then…”
“… the great Houses will run. They’ll have to move their risk back onto their own balance sheets. That’ll put their wealth divisions over the line, which will trigger their insurance policies. Round we go, everyone swaps assets, and we get paid along the way. And they’ll all have to stop making these stupid, murderous loans. Boris, you’re a genius.”
“Yeah, but I’m still stuck on one thing. How do we cause a big, public disaster for WFEC?”
“Oh. Right.”
“I’ve actually. Got an idea.” Boris let his yo-yo dangle on its string. “Might involve an initial layout of cash. But I’m pretty sure it’ll work.” He hesitated. “I got a letter yesterday from Cousin Anton …”
5
Ran
Ten Days Later. June 2nd, 1989. Kinshasa, Congo
Ran and Sonya waited at dawn outside Camp Zama for a taxibus. Congolese children materialized out of the gloaming. “Hungry. No mother no father. Hungry.” Sonya gave them some sweets she’d saved from yesterday’s ration pack. Vultures confabbed on the telephone poles.
The taxibus was a van held together with rope and prayers, painted in fealty patterns that acted as secular wards to fend off soldiers and predatory paramilitaries. Kinshasa was a Black town, as in the Black Terror—a river-straddling metropolis, once an entrepot, now a city of fear ruled by rogue army units who theoretically answered to the Mukunza, the Emperor’s Bane. Congolese politics was complicated.
The stereo played galloping dance music. The sun rose, transforming the ghostly landscape into a red plain dotted with trees. In the distance lay bald hills, like fractured skulls once buried and now exposed by the relentless wind. Once, the Congo had been covered with jungle. Same thing as happened to Asia had happened here. Magic wars. Difference was, here the magic wars were still going strong, despite the best efforts of the German ex-colonial authorities.
They drank bitter, grainy coffee at the Imperial Garden, a café reckoned to be safe for whites, while they waited for the shops to open. Beggars worked the outdoor tables. Sonya picked the mosquito bites on her neck, drew circles with her spoon on the grubby tablecloth.
“If you hate it here so much, why did you come?” Ran said coldly.
He had not asked her to come. He would not have dreamed of asking any of his friends to follow him into exile. But Sonya had decided that they could not be parted, and had worked on her parents with every weapon at her disposal, from tears to threats, until they finally agreed. Mihal had told Ran: Look after her. If you let anything happen to her, I’ll come to the Congo and find out for myself just what it takes to kill you.
“Didn’t you ever go to the nomad encampments back home?” Ran said. “It’s just as bad there. The poverty, I mean.”
“No, it’s not. At home, poor means you don’t have one of those new VCR things. Here, it means you don’t have any food.”
A leper tried to enter the café and was roughly turned away by the security guards. Sonya shuddered.
“Amanzo’s should be open by now,” Ran said. “Let’s go.”
They found Preciousblood Amanzo lounging in his hammock on the porch of his shop. The elderly witch-doctor sold them a phial of puffabra venom, a packet of boliberries, and what he swore blind was a goblin’s tailbone. “Probably a baboon,” Ran muttered under his breath. They also picked up a packet of the special tobacco that Amanzo mixed for Val Sullivan.
The smells of roasting corn, burning dung, and hot peppers drifted through the streets. Ran and Sonya pushed through a slow-moving cyclone of commerce. The Mukunza’s beaming portrait swaddled women’s breasts and behinds, cradled babies slung on their mothers’ backs, and adorned the t-shirts of young men nursing cigarettes on the corner of the vegetables-and-electronics-and-auto-parts-and-secondhand-clothes market. Old women crouched over pitiful offerings of yams and spinach. Hand-lettered signs advertised free combat matches at Kinshasa Stadium. Val Sullivan had offered to take Ran and Sonya to the stadium. Ran had turned him down. If you let Val Sullivan be your guide to the Congo, you’d end up believing you had come to Hell.
Past the market, a colonial-era brick wall crowned with fancy iron spikes enclosed the Mukunza’s army barracks. A lioness padded along the top of the wall. There were lions everywhere in the Congo—this wasn’t even the first one Ran had seen in the middle of Kinshasa—but still he stopped dead, awestruck by the fierce beauty of her. He crossed the street. The reek of carnivorous breath washed over him. The enormous head descended.
A hand clamped the back of his t-shirt, dragging him out of range. “You crazy?”
A growl trickled from the lioness’s mouth.
“I’ve got the fancier’s knack,” Ran protested. “She wouldn’t have hurt me.”
“Fuck,” said the Hauptscharführer, ignoring Ran. “That’s a big mother. Stay right where you are, honey.” He drew his pistol, boots shuffling wider, chin clamping to his collar.
Ran slapped the gun sideways. “You can’t shoot her! Lions are sacred here. They’re allowed to wander wherever they want. People leave whole dead cows out for them at night. If you kill one, it’s bad luck.”
The lioness jumped down into the barracks and bounded away between the zaza trees.
The Hauptscharführer—Master Sergeant—fixed Ran with a cold stare. Then he seemed to decide that Ran wasn’t even worth the effort of bawling out. “I already got a bunch of trophies. Remind me to show you sometime.” He turned Ran around by the elbow. “Give you a ride back to base. You kids shouldn’t be wandering around by yourselves.” He pointed at Sonya, who was watching from the far side of the street. “How would you like to see your girlfriend gang-raped? They’d make you watch, then cut your balls off and stuff them down your throat.”
I bet you’d like to rape her yourself, Ran thought. The Waffen-SS was full of ex-cons and berserker types who’d been kicked out of the regular army.
“What was that you said, kid?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Ain’t you even got the balls to hit that?”
Ran sighed. “I respect women,” he said. “You don’t, because you’re a shithead.”
The Master Sergeant’s cold gaze fixed him. Ran became aware of other soldiers strolling towards them. The Master Sergeant said without turning his head, “Give the kid a blade.”
“But I—”
“You said something that you better be ready to back up with steel.”
A misericorde was thrust into Ran’s sweating hands. The traditional German blade had one curved edge, made for sickle-slashes. It was a disembowelling weapon. The Master Sergeant gripped his own misericorde in both hands, legs crabbing wide. The other soldiers redirected traffic to give them room.
“On guard, kid.”
Ran raised his hands to the level of his shoulders, misericorde loosely clasped in his right hand. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Nobody wants to fight. Don’t mean you don’t have to.” The Master Sergeant’s misericorde lashed out and ripped through the front of Ran’s smock.
Instinctively, Ran shifted onto his back foot, lowering his misericorde to
catch the backhand cut that would come next—
—and metal rang on metal, and the misericorde spun out of his hands. He yelped aloud and wrung his stinging fingers.
The Waffen-SS soldiers all laughed. The watching Congolese laughed. Even Sonya laughed, although she tried to hide it behind her hands.
“The name’s Weiss,” the Master Sergeant said. “Don’t you forget it.” He smiled for the first time, a grin that warmed his eyes. There was no malice in it. “Need a ride out to camp?”
* * *
Ran had already come to detest Camp Zama, which consisted of a perimeter fence around some rundown old buildings. With no duties except the occasional patrol, the soldiers spent most of their time drinking beer and playing pranks. Someone had partially buried a pair of boots upside-down just inside the fence; a sign above them read ESCAPE TUNNEL. There was no shade, the latrines were menageries of chiggers despite daily dousing with bleach, and the food consisted of ration packs tarted up with spices the soldiers bought in Kinshasa in a spirit of experimentation.
As they debussed from the APV, Master Sergeant Weiss held Ran back. “What’re you working on at the moment?”
“Mr. Sullivan, Miss Zalyotin, and I are assaying relics for the local authorities,” Ran answered, still on his dignity.
“No, you’re not.”
Ran said nothing.
“You’re not an assayer, kid. You’re a magician. So’s Sullivan. So’s your girlfriend, I bet.”
“Excuse me.” Ran started to walk away. “I don’t have time for this crap.”
“Hey.” The Master Sergeant’s hand fastened on his t-shirt, jerking him to a stop. “Didn’t I just teach you back there: don’t give me that fucking lip.”
Ran worked on keeping his face perfectly blank. “Let go of me.”
“It’s OK,” the Master Sergeant said. He was like a coin, flipping from violent to easygoing and back again. His warm grin split his face. “You maybe weren’t told what you’re here for. Not to rate saints for a bunch of raggedy-assed blacks. You’re here to work magic for us. Wipe that craven look off your face! No one’s gonna turn you in. There ain’t no law out here. No loyalty cops. Hell, we ain’t even got an executioner that can swing an axe worth shit.”
To his disgust, Ran found himself faking a laugh at the sinister quip.
“So, what I’m getting at is your orders have come through. Finally. No one’s seen ‘em yet but me and the colonel, but I’ll give you an advance peek. I figure you’ll want to get started ASAP.”
* * *
“The Mukunza?” Val Sullivan said. He propped himself higher on his camp bed and coughed into a dirty handkerchief. “They’re asking us to curse the Mukunza?”
“Not asking. Ordering.” Ran sat down on the floor. The tiles were marginally cooler than the air. “The dispatch had the Kaiser’s seal on it.”
“Did it mention the IMF by name?”
“No. It just said ‘utilizing local resources including civilians.’”
“Then we don’t have to do it,” Sullivan said. “’Ordering.’ Saints on high, the nerve of them.” He went back to his book.
Ran squashed a chigger with his thumbnail. He was very disappointed in Val Sullivan. He remembered Sullivan, of course, from long ago. Sullivan had rescued Ran after the IRA kidnapped him from Dublin Castle when he was nine. He had been instrumental in exfiltrating Ran to Hamburg. In those days, Sullivan had been dashing, glamorous—or that was how Ran remembered him, anyway. Now he was just a cynical drunk. As it turned out, he’d been working in the Congo all these years, and when Mihal needed someone to look after Ran and Sonya, it was his old friend Val Sullivan he’d turned to. Mihal probably didn’t know about the booze, much less the special cigaretttes.
“Why shouldn’t we do it? It’s just a curse. That shouldn’t be hard for an ace magician like you,” Ran said, smiling.
Sullivan splayed his book on his chest. Not yet forty, he was prematurely white-haired. His limbs, in shorts and a dirty singlet, were thin and wasted. “Just a curse! Curses are black magic. We don’t do black magic, and there’s an end to it.”
“If we don’t, the Waffen-SS will probably kick us out,” Ran pointed out. Before they got here, Sullivan had lived in town. He had moved out to Camp Zama after the Gold Terror fire-bombed his office. But the Waffen-SS didn’t have to let them live here.
Sonya spoke up. “If you’re going to get all ethical about it, the Mukunza deserves it!”
“No need to bring ethics into it,” Sullivan said, raising an eyebrow. “A death curse is the most difficult type of spell there is. For starters, you need something belonging to the victim. The Mukunza’s lording it at the Catoca diamond mines, four hundred miles from here. He’s got the Emperor under lock and key, and he’s not budging in case someone lets the poor old imperial soul out. He’s switched on, too: they still take magic seriously in this country. He’s got a lackey who walks behind him, sweeping up the dust from his sandals. So, you see, it’s impossible.”
“The new banknotes,” Ran said. “They’ve got the Mukunza’s portrait on them. So do the wraps the women wear. His face is everywhere.”
Sullivan coughed. Bright blood spotted his handkerchief. “Ah, feck. I’m too sick for this shite. Sonya, sweetheart, would you pass me my baccy box? It’s just over there.”
To Ran’s astonishment, Sonya said, “Why don’t you just hurry up and die?” She pointed a shaking finger at Sullivan. “You don’t care about the people here. You don’t care about anything! All you do is smoke that gross smelly stuff and complain whenever someone actually asks you to do your job!”
Val rolled off his bed and hobbled across the room to fetch his baccy box for himself. “This conversation is a waste of time,” he said.
“Why?” Sonya demanded.
Val sat on the edge of his camp bed and rolled a cigarette. He sprinkled grains of Preciousblood Amanzo’s special tobacco along its length. “It’s political. The Gold Terror / Black Terror business may look like a local squabble. But there’s more here than meets the eye. The Mukunza is BASI’s champion, obviously. And the Gold forces loyal to the Emperor are in receipt of British funding. It’s a proxy war; a preview of the big show that is coming, I greatly fear, sooner or later. I’ll not do anything to bring that day closer. We are conciliators, not cursemongers for hire, and I will not betray the IMF’s neutrality, even if it means moving back into Kinshasa. We’ll ask Amanzo to find us a place.” He lit his cigarette.
“Then I’ll do it,” Sonya said.
“You will not.”
“I’m fully trained, but I haven’t graduated. I’m not bound by our stupid rules about political neutrality.”
Ran applauded. Sonya grinned at him.
“You don’t know how to mix curses,” Sullivan grated. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Actually, she does know how,” Ran said. “We used to have this thing going where we would fix tourneys …”
“The Congolese civil war is not a bloody tourney!”
“No,” Ran said. “As you pointed out, it’s political.” He remembered Jack Churchill telling him, Your cousin Madelaine Wessex sold you to BASI for a handful of communications technologies … “And I know which side I’m on. I’ll give you a hint.” He watched Sullivan’s face. “It’s not the side of House Wessex.”
“Damn straight!” said Sonya, who was after all half-German. “Deutschland uber alles!” She might have been hanging out with the Waffen-SS too long.
Sullivan breathed out smoke. It smelled like hash it. “Would it make any difference to you, Ran, if I reminded you that your father was a prince of House Wessex?”
“No,” Ran said. “My family keeps on trying to kill me. Why shouldn’t I return the favor?”
Sonya said, “I’m going to need a lot of materials, Ran. Could you help me find everything? I’ll make a list …”
Ten minutes later Ran crossed the camp, his hat wedged low against the blazing sun. Small arms fire
popped from the range. The local cooks lay flat on the concrete in the shade of the mess building, as usual. But in the parking lot, soldiers were crawling under the four-tonners, delving into engines, fixing camouflage netting. The base was coming to life.
Ran went into the staff block and asked to see Sturmbannführer Gottschaft. The camp commander received him distractedly, swamped by paperwork.
“I’ve spoken with my colleagues, sir,” Ran said. “We accept the task.”
“Good.”
“But there’s a couple of things you might be able to help us with.”
“Well, anything I can do,” the commander said sarcastically, throwing down his pen and rocking back in his chair. “Anything at all, just name it.”
Ran read from Sonya’s list. “Ten thousand Congolese marks in new banknotes. A color portrait of the Mukunza. A bottle of detergent. A bottle of tabasco sauce. A steak, but it’s got to be nice and rotten, and it should come from the Mukunza’s army barracks if possible. And … the claws of a freshly slain lion.”
He cringed apprehensively.
As he feared, Gottschaft had heard about the lion incident earlier. “Aren’t lions sacred to the Congolese?” he said with a smirk.
“Yes,” Ran said, temper flashing. He felt strangely ashamed of himself. “That’s the goddamn point.”
* * *
The story continues in The Disenthroned, Book II of the Chronicles of the Worldcracker! Find Book I, The Incurables, in the all-star Dominion Rising box set: http://hyperurl.co/dominionrising
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About the Author
Felix R. Savage writes hard science fiction, space opera, and comedic science fiction. He has also occasionally been known to commit fantasy.
