Secondhand Sorcery

Their first warning came early on Thursday, when Noorlan did his morning assessment. As always, he woke before the rest of them, to meditate and sweep the region with his clairvoyant gifts, before inspecting their backdoor Coalition feed for the more mundane sort of intelligence. He immediately saw that their enemies now had good descriptions of all four of them, complete with names, and called Yefimov in a panic.

Their commander had been up late the previous night, and reacted poorly to the news. “I see no reason why this should modify our established operational parameters,” he said in conference call. “All four of us have substantially altered our appearances since the Marshall defections. Moreover, our present mission has been designated with the highest priority. Alteration of the timeline would not be acceptable.”

Mila looked at Aziz, saw his expression, and voiced his objection before he could so so less delicately: “Pardon me, sir, but it seems to me that we are substantially compromised by this, to the point where I doubt we could effectively fulfill our duties. It might be better to rotate in new operatives.”

“An event which may very well come to pass,” Yefimov said, “but it will not be our decision, and until such time as that decision is made and put into action our duties remain unchanged. The timing is critical; the Bosporus must be rendered safe for submarine convoys within a week, even if all four of us should be eliminated as a proximate consequence. We are more readily replaced than our compatriots under siege within Constantinople. The knyazya have made their position on this matter perfectly clear. I do not intend to argue with them.”

“Nor do we,” Noorlan’s voice assured him, and that was that, for the time. Two hours later, Yefimov decreed that Noorlan should now conduct his combined assessments at semi-randomized intervals averaging one hour, with Mila and Aziz absorbing his other duties to compensate.

“Even at one-hour intervals,” Aziz grumbled, “he won’t catch an operation in progress except by pure luck. This is all a performance—doing something for the sake of doing something.”

“It may not be his decision,” Mila told him, though she suspected it was. “This, too, might be from the knyazya, or someone else in Moscow.” They were all under a great deal of strain, and it had fallen to her to grease the wheels within the group over the past three weeks. This was wearying, but she had undertaken worse duties for her homeland.

She only wished her diplomatic efforts could be more successful for the effort she put into them. Aziz gave her a look of frank incredulity—do you really think that would make it better?—and Mila was obliged to leave the room to salvage her own temper. With Noorlan more frequently entering his clairvoyant trances, the two of them would be obliged to spend more time on milch duty, a chore she could not perform effectively while upset.

Of course, milch-work was itself quite emotionally draining, and as the timetable for the liberation of the Bosporus became more urgent Snowdrop’s need for cached ectoplasm could well become greater than they could supply—which would contribute to further stress and further endanger the supply, and so on. There was a real risk of a feedback loop, a failure spiral.

They had made substantial progress already, in spite of a week lost to delays, miscommunications, and contradictory orders in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Ankara. Large sections of the European shore were now unusable, their docking facilities destroyed, roads obstructed, helicopters with ASW capabilities glassed in place so that they could not be either used or moved to make space for their replacements. The Asian shore was in much the same shape thanks to the past two days’ work, and Istanbul as a whole was demoralized, its remaining citizens mostly interested in ending the conflict by whatever means so that they could restore stability to their lives.

The continuous strain of valence shock here worked in Russia’s favor; repeated exposure to multiple opposing Tetzloff effects in rapid succession, at unpredictable hours, and at the cost of sleep, consistently induced a lasting state of exhausted apathy. Most of their own allies inside the city had long since passed into a similar mental state for that same reason, but Constantinople was once again held by three familiars, with Melkhisedek and Zubr joining Myriad to secure what remained of the perfidious Akritas’s walls. This, too, was the result of their own efforts—only last Sunday had enemy traffic along the waterway diminished enough to risk smuggling in two more irreplaceable emissors.

In short, they had much to be proud of, but all could yet be lost—all the more so now that their names and faces had been publicized. Mila assumed one or more of the Marshall children were the source of this revelation—presumably Fatima or Ruslan. Nadezhda was secure and under the eye of trusted observers in Kurdistan, while Yuri had drifted away from the main theater to wreak his usual brand of havoc on the Syrian border. The present scenario was still very favorable, strategically speaking, however inadequate it might feel.

Aziz felt, if anything, worse than she did. Officially, each of the four operatives had separate quarters, spaced more or less evenly along the Asiatic shore of Istanbul, but she did not care to live alone as a young woman in this unsettled and dysfunctional country, regardless of security “best practices.” So she spent as much time as possible in the company of her physically imposing military-veteran colleague, even if it meant added emotional friction and risked one capture becoming two. Both of them found it preferable to the misery of solitude.

“I am not sure we can trust him,” Aziz said that afternoon, as she emerged from trance and put the cap back on the canister.

“Yefimov?” She raised an eyebrow, but her mind was sluggish, drained; she couldn’t guess how her actual expression read. “Why do you say that? He’s the last man I’d suspect of disloyalty.”

“Of course he’s loyal,” Aziz snapped. “The man is a fanatic. He hasn’t got the imagination to change his mind or adjust his principles. Which is why I don’t trust his judgment. He might have some sense of self-preservation, buried deep, but he’d throw the three of us into a grain thresher for the Motherland without a second thought. Or even a first.”

“I’m not sure that’s fair,” Mila said, and closed her eyes so the room would stop spinning. This was all part of the price she paid to protect her home and family. When her stomach settled, she went on: “Sergei is conservative, certainly, and possibly even inflexible. He wouldn’t be trusted with this amount of independence if he weren’t. But he’s also—“

“He’s trusted with this amount of independence because he was an utter reactionary before it was popular,” Aziz said. “He was a believer in the cause before the cause existed. He is completely, totally ideologically reliable. That is all the knyazya want or expect. Competence is an optional extra.”

Mila tried not to sigh. This kind of attitude was to be expected in a man of military background during a time of trial, but it was very inconsiderate of Aziz to express it so openly. It put her in a very difficult position merely to listen to it. “I don’t necessarily agree, but even if I did, I feel it would be more helpful to frame it differently. How can we, as individuals, in the situation as it now stands, increase the odds of operational success?”

His face told her a great many things he would like to say to that, but was not quite emotionally exhausted enough to let slip. Mila appreciated his prudence, even as his attitude annoyed her; she repaid him by getting up on tip-toe to kiss him on the cheek. “I think you’re tired, Aziz. If you like, you can take a rest; I’m still good for a few more hours.”

“No, you’re not,” he said, but went off to his bedroom anyway. Mila elected not to escalate the situation further with a reply.

The day went well enough, whatever he thought; Snowdrop was able to strike three separate targets, so that by sunset the most plausible threat to Kozlov’s undersea operations was the main Coalition fleet, stationed well south of Istanbul in the Marmara. That would be a much more difficult target, protected by round-the-clock noetic surveillance—but it was also poorly positioned to detect or strike submarine traffic. Or so she was told. Mila had never received any formal military training, and didn’t think of herself as an expert.

Aziz, to her irritation, assumed milch duty only once that day, and for a brief spell, forcing Mila to make up the difference to fill the canister. By the end of the day she was tempted to bring the matter to Yefimov’s attention, but decided against it; after so much time in milch-trance, she didn’t trust her own judgment, and Aziz might have a better day tomorrow.

When he went to bed, she joined him as usual, as though nothing were wrong between them. She took a moment to think of her dear Misha, and their children far away, and hoped that she would live to see them again. It wasn’t quite a prayer, as Mila was agnostic, but she found that the nightly ritual grounded her, and helped her remember why she put herself through all this.

When it was done, she slipped into bed in her nightgown, and wrapped her arms around Aziz. This, too, was a duty, even if it wasn’t official, and probably Yefimov did not approve (and she was sure he knew). She was a therapist by training, and saw unit morale and cohesion as falling under her jurisdiction. There had been nights when she had her own psychological well-being to think of, and Aziz had been her only comfort.

She was relieved when Aziz did not want her to be his, that particular night; he was still agitated and upset with her personally. He shrugged her arms off, and gratefully she rolled over. Her last memory before her eyes shut was of her colleague getting out of bed to pace the halls, peering out of windows through the blinds, checking locks, cleaning his guns. She only kept awake long enough to be sure he wasn’t planning to leave the apartment.

After eight cumulative hours of trance work, Mila couldn’t have stayed up any longer if she’d wanted to. Her sleep was deep—so deep that the first gunshot, at three in the morning, barely woke her. She lifted her head from the pillow, and saw that Aziz was not beside her. She put her head back down, rolled over, heard shouts. Then gunshots. She sat up, her head full of fog, holding the sheet to her chest. The door of their room flew open, something heavy fell across the bed, and without thought or understand she leapt up and away from under it, still holding the sheet, and tripping over its bottom edge.

Only her training saved her; even with her mind half-asleep and too stupid to think, her body knew there was trouble, and to reach up onto the bedstand for her phone. The device was programmed to send out a distress single in response to a single coded word—trubkozub—and she spoke it clearly, three times, before more dark shapes crowded into her room, gripping her roughly, throwing her against the wall and thrusting cold metal in her face.

She was glad to still be tired. It was very difficult to be afraid, when she had so little energy left to think with. There was a great noise as they tore through Aziz’s apartment, turning on lights and shooting off locks. They asked her questions, in Turkish and bad Russian, and hit her when she tried to answer, and then when she kept silent. Her glasses weren’t on her face, and she did not know where they were, but she saw a great blotch of bright red across the white sheets on the bed. Whatever had fallen across it before had been moved. There was no sign of Aziz.

When they were done searching they put handcuffs on her, to drag her out into the street where a car was waiting. Mila did not resist when they put her in the backseat; that would only make them hit her more, and accomplish nothing useful. Once the car was in motion she laid down across the back seat, since they had not troubled with seatbelts, and passed out. They shook her awake when they arrived, dragging her out and slapping her. They made threats, but she did not listen; ridiculously, all she could think was that she must look frightful.

Once they were inside again, they put her in a chair in a dark room, still handcuffed and in her nightgown, while they argued with each other, and with men on the other end of a radio. She did not know who the men were, but it hardly mattered. She shut her eyes again, only to find that she could not sleep any more. So she thought again of her Misha, and their children, because it would not do to think of Aziz. It did not help to think of her family, either, but there was a fair chance she would be shot in the head very soon, and it seemed better to think about pleasant things.

She opened her eyes again when the lights came on, cried out when they threw her onto a cluttered tabletop. She hit her head, and heard the crash of coffee mugs shattering on the floor. Three men loomed over her, shadows against the caustic fluorescent light. She had expected this as well. She shut her eyes as they pawed at her nightgown; what they could not get off around her handcuffs, they cut away with knives, nicking her skin in the process. She squeezed her eyes tighter, trying to breathe slow and deep while they did their work. One of them ran his hands over her body, and she felt herself shake. A natural reaction, but not helpful.

Not training, but pure force of habit saved her this time; after so many hours spent in milch-trance already that day, it was simple even under terrible stress to slip back into the stupor. The men shouted, and slapped at her backside, and spat, but her mind simply vanished away. At last one of the men leaned down, grabbed her by the face, and twisted her head around to kiss her. She opened her mouth, and exhaled a little wisp of gleaming white ectoplasm.

The man screamed in her face, and stumbled back shouting insults. They shoved her, naked, onto the floor—her cuffed hands could not catch her, and her face cracked against the tiles—and kicked her at every spot they could reach until she passed out with the pain.

It was still dark when she woke yet again, filled with a strange and inexplicable glee. She was too far gone then to question it, but she heard men shouting once more, and felt certain that they had encountered an unfortunate mishap, and the thought was very amusing. From the hallway outside came the sound of manic giggling, and she felt compelled to join in, though her ribs hurt abominably. There were rapid footsteps, and another gunshot, then silence. Her own laughter receded to a merry contentment, and she laid back against the hard floor to wait.

The door to the room flew open, and a little boy bounded in—a boy with a big, round, ruddy-cheeked face, and brilliant blue eyes the size of her palm, and an adorable mop of shining golden curls atop his head. He wore a clean white shirt with a curious sort of suspenders over them, connected to knee-length brown leather breeches, all of it embroidered. It was ridiculous, and she laughed, and he laughed with her, but as he laughed he reached down into his shirt and whipped out a big fluffy white sheet, and threw it over her. Then he pulled out undergarments, and socks, and shoes, and a great big sky-blue dress, all shining in the light from his skin, and tossed them carelessly in her direction.

More shouts came from outside; the boy rolled his eyes, and made a silly face at her, and winked to let her know that some people simply couldn’t take a joke. Then he bounded out of the room again, pulling something out of his pants pockets as he did. Mila smiled, and moved as quickly as she could to get dressed. Which was not very quick at all. Loud explosions shook the building as she did, and by the time she put on the pretty clogs the boy had given her the building was silent once more.

He soon came back, offering her a hand up, and jigged to his own tune on a tin whistle as he led her out of the building. Mila was still smiling, but she was mortally tired, and hurt too badly to do more than a stumbling limp. When they got outside, it was frigid; the boy smacked his forehead and gave her first a little bow of apology and then a gigantic, luxurious fur coat from his knickers.

“Are you all right, dear?” said a voice from the darkness. Mila leaned on the boy for support as she put the coat on, only turning to see who had spoken when she was covered. It was an old lady, her hair white under the streetlights, dressed in a coat matching Mila’s own. “I’m afraid I only got into the country a few hours ago, my darling. Peer and I would have been here sooner if we could. Oh, your face!” Her voice was still cheerful under the veneer of concern, and Mila noted she spoke Russian with a strong German accent.

“That is Peer Pfeffernusse, then?” She said it mostly to be friendly and make conversation, since she had no real doubts on the matter. She was familiar with all the oprichniki, including those from old Warsaw Pact satellites.

The boy made a deeper bow by way of reply, then dissolved into a flock of chirping bluebirds, who flew off in every direction. A second later his halo was gone, and Mila fell against the side of the building, clinging to brickwork to keep from slumping all the way to the ground. Irrelevantly she wondered if the birds were real birds now, or if they had simply vanished, and if they had not, whether they would start a new population in Istanbul.

She heard footsteps, and Noorlan was beside her, taking her arm. The old lady took the other, and together they guided her to a small truck, its motor already running, the heat going full blast. With some effort they hoisted her up into the back seat. There was no sign of Aziz, and she did not ask, but … “Yefimov?”

“Oh, he will be fine, my darling,” the oprichnik assured her. “He only had a spot of trouble with my fellow-countryman. Eisengrave,” she explained, when Mila looked confused. “Such a terribly serious fellow! Snowdrop was needed to divert him while I got you out. But I do not think either will defeat the other; they will only cause more damage to Istanbul until your Yefimov gets away. Such a shame!”

“We are being reassigned,” Noorlan said quietly.

The old woman nodded. “Yes, I was headed this way as soon as we got the news this morning. I am glad I was able to help you on your way. Do wish me luck!”

Mila nodded, and leaned back against the headrest. She suddenly felt very dizzy. Pfeffernusse did not have the sheer power of Yefimov’s Snowdrop, but he was known to be quite capable in his own way. She wondered that they did not simply sneak him into the city, so that he could feed the garrison indefinitely. Perhaps they feared everyone would get ill on a diet of pure spice-cake and chocolate?

She was shaking again. Noorlan, who did not have a mark on him, looked at her with some concern. She frowned, and turned her face away, trying not to think of Aziz. It would not help the mission to get upset now, and she was tired. Better to rest, and process it later. To stop his fretting, she said, “Where are we headed?”

“East,” Noorlan told her. “In Kurdistan, we will have far more safety, and still be able to help.”

Safer? Perhaps. The idea was difficult to fathom, at the moment. She let Noorlan buckle her in. There was more last-minute trouble, as they summoned Pfeffernusse back for a new pair of glasses and odd supplies. Then they were off, the old lady assuring them that she would be fine and that she would send Dear Sergei after them as as soon as he was free.

Mila’s last memory before sleep reclaimed her was of morning frost on the road out of Istanbul, glittering in the light of the rising sun.