Secondhand Sorcery

The wind came howling over the water, rattling the walls of the tent. Fatima shivered, and tried to elbow her way in closer to the heater, only to have the older women shove her back again. They were packed in tight, and there were three heaters, but Tatvan could drop to near zero after nightfall. When they first got in here, everyone had been all nice and sweet, and even squeezed aside to let Fatima in since she was one of the younger ones, even if she was a foreigner. But that was hours ago now, and fear and discomfort had brought out everybody’s inner selfish bitch. Even the local teenagers were getting left out in the cold now.

Which left Fatima with nothing to do but shiver close to the flapping white walls, and curse Bob and Rus once again for not talking her out of this stupid-ass plan.

She could still abort at any time; all she had to do was whip out Mister Higgins and blow this tent apart, and she’d be free. She might even waste a couple of Polat’s hired guns on her way out, and Rus was close enough to cover her retreat. Probably the women would scatter, and most would find shelter in the city where almost everybody was Kurdish, like them. But Polat himself would be almost guaranteed to escape, and they’d lose the element of surprise, which would pretty much make this night, and everything she’d been through so far, a big waste of time.

She looked around at all the frightened women and girls, all scooped up from outlying villages. None from theirs; the Amir of Diyarbakir’s turf ended more than a hundred miles from Tatvan, too far for a raid to be worth bothering about. They didn’t have to do this to keep credibility; it was a PR job, and reassurance for their own peasants who were freaking out about the news from their third cousins four villages over.

Someone bumped against her; she turned and saw this big-eyed skeleton of a kid who looked even younger than Nadia, her teeth chattering like castanets. She wasn’t really looking at Fatima, or anything else—as far as Fatima could tell in the lousy light. Wherever her brain had gone off to, the animal part of this girl was huddling up to whatever it could to stay warm. She didn’t even look old enough to call a teenager. Either she’d been caught by accident, or they were planning to sell her as a wife-in-two-years, or they had a little side hustle selling to out-and-out perverts.

Whichever it was, Fatima didn’t think the people responsible for all this deserved to get away with their lives. Before this night was over, she was going to have Mister Higgins hold this Polat fool in a bubble until the air was just about out, then dump him in the cold salt lake to drown. And that was being kind.

How long had it been, now? She hadn’t brought a watch or phone, since she figured Polat’s boys would frisk her and steal either one to sell. They hadn’t bothered, as it turned out; all she’d had to do was sneak in with this herd of human heifers as they were being run down the street into their current corral, and all these girls and women had already been checked. Two days ago they’d been living in their tiny little villages spinning wool or whatever; now they were just waiting for the ferry to land so its cargo could be unloaded, then they’d get shoved aboard in its place, to get sold to God-knew-who.

What Fatima didn’t get was how Binbaşı Polat expected to make this work in the long run. He could shut up his old army buddies with a cut of the proceeds, and not even a big cut; they didn’t give a damn what happened to random Kurds, or anything else here, as long as he kept order. And then another, bigger cut to the whatever Russian agents were bossing the local Kurd chiefs, to make up for the trouble he was causing them.

Then money for his men, money for food and supplies, money for his fences and contacts to find him more stuff to sell, money to just throw around to look like a big man because he had an image to keep up. Between Dad’s and Titus’s operations, Fatima had a pretty good handle on how expensive it was to set yourself up as a warlord—and the prices got a lot higher once you’d pissed off all the locals by, say, snatching all their women. Nobody became muscle-for-hire so he could spend all his time watching his back for a knife. There had to be easier jobs around here than that.

Binbaşı worked out to something like “major” in western ranks. Bob said this guy hadn’t even been on anybody’s radar until last week, and as far as she could tell he hadn’t even been working in the guns-and-tanks end of the army. Some intelligence analyst type. Now he was trying to set up as the big boss in a decent-sized town and transport hub like Tatvan? It didn’t add up. But here he was.

She wanted this done now for the PR, yeah, and to make an example of the bastard. But if she didn’t kill Polat tonight, she had a feeling somebody else would beat her to it, and Fatima wanted the credit.

Patchy as services were, they kept electric lights shining bright by the jetty, bright enough to project the shadows of men patrolling outside against the ghost-white walls of their prison pavilion. She could see them sauntering past in heavy coats, or gathering around burn barrels. These girls weren’t the only goods for sale tonight; he had shipping containers lined up and ready to slide in when the ferry showed up.

It was a rail ferry, used to connect Ankara to Tehran back in the days when you could actually keep a train moving through this miserable country. That was long past, but you could still slide a car or two aboard nice and easy and roll it off again on the far side. Once the ferry arrived to pick them up, all these ladies would be done with the relative luxury of this nice little tent with buckets to piss in and everything; they’d be packed in like anchovies for the trip across, with no light and no heat except from their own bodies crammed together. Probably a few of them wouldn’t survive the trip. Hell of a way to go.

On the far side of the tent, someone was crying. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Fatima waited for one of the other women to shush her, like before. Nobody did. The woman—the girl?—kept on wailing, and wailing, and wailing, while Fatima gritted her teeth and silently prayed to God or anybody else who would listen for a cigarette. After about a minute had passed and a few other women took up the cry the men outside got pissed and started shouting at them. It sounded like cussing.

But they kept on crying and moaning, and it spread till girls Fatima’s age were just plain screaming, and the tent flap ripped open and a couple of men came in, slapping and shoving at random to shut them up. The women jumped back from them like they were poison snakes, and Fatima was forced back until her head smacked into one of the poles holding up the walls. She gave a hard shove to win back space, and for an instant she was about ready to call Mister Higgins to end it, but she got her cool back in time and the bitches shut up and the men left the tent after a few more snarls. A bit of falling snow swirled in through the closing flap, and there was silence, real dead silence.

Then there was noise again, the distant sound of a motor throbbing in the distance. Coming from across the water. A few whimpers inside the tent, whispers and prayers in a language Fatima didn’t understand. She didn’t whimper; she was relieved. Action at last. She shoved and sidled her way up to the tent-flap so she could peer out.

There were a couple of inches of snow on the ground, lit blinding white by the portable floodlights, and the headlights of cars pulling up now that the wait was over. One would be Polat; word was he always showed up to watch the swap, to make sure nobody snitched. The cargo was different every time. A little bit would always be drugs, and there were usually guns, but the rest could be counterfeit designer clothes and handbags, jewelry, booze, a car or two, maybe little stuff like drums of gas to fill in around the edges. Some looted, some “honestly” traded.

And tonight, for the first time, he’d branched out to moving Kurd girls. Why not? He could get them basically for free, and get rid of unwanted non-Turks at the same time. The moron …

Fatima ducked back just in time to avoid being hit in the face as the men came back, first shouting for the women to move, then shouting and dragging when they didn’t, encouraging the slow ones with casual slaps on the ass. She caught a glimpse of a few faces as they passed; they looked like they’d gone stupid with fear, didn’t even see where they were going.

She hung back as long as she could, so she could be last out and get a clear field of fire. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a lot of competition for the “last out” title, and one of the assholes saw her ducking back, reached in and yanked her out by the arm. He damn near dislocated her shoulder pulling her through the press of people, and threw her clear so roughly that she fell and planted her face in the snow.

She got up calling him a bunch of things in a bunch of languages he didn’t understand, but he got the message anyway. He raised an eyebrow underneath his black wool cap, looked around at his buddies with a smirk. Then he tossed his head: get in line with the other bitches. When she stood her ground, he reached into his coat and drew out a folding knife, added a few words in Turkish. Probably telling her what he could do to her with it without hurting her sale value too much.

The women were still getting hustled out of the tent, half-thrown in some cases. A couple had broken down crying again, and were being passed along just the same. Fatima glanced around, saw a few more men standing around holding guns. Two were caught up in a conversation at the far end of a shipping container; three others were watching the girls get shoved around from a distance. Fatima caught the eye of one of them, a kid about Ruslan’s age but skinny, holding an old M1 Garand. He looked away in a hurry.

The asshole grabbed her by the arm again, shouting in her face, and without even thinking about it she swung her knee right up into his balls, then backhanded him in the face as he staggered. He dropped the knife, but recovered right away and swung at her hard. She bobbed back, then stepped away and ducked as he swung again. He was too mad to think straight, and he wasn’t thinking like a fighter, just looking to teach this little slut her place. Sloppy punk. Still, he was twice her weight, and she wasn’t packing. Polat might or might not be in one of the cars, but her time was up.

The keystone sequence shot right out of her, probably because she’d been thinking about just walking away from this crap for at least the last hour. Mister Higgins came out fighting, belching bubbles every damn which way. Her buddy who thought he was Rocky got the first trip on the compression express, naturally, followed by a couple of his friends. Squish, crunch, pop, and there was a pulpy red sign on the snow for anybody who came to look at the aftermath: Mister Higgins was here. And also some woman-beating, slave-trading jerkoffs, but good luck figuring out who was who now. They didn’t deserve to be remembered.

Fatima would have liked to stay and watch it all happen, but she wasn’t a total idiot, so she was off and running the second her familiar showed his ugly face. She had to be content with the shadowy feedback in her mind, while she scrambled to hide in the clump of women. Unfortunately the women weren’t staying in one place, just scattering in all directions like the bubbles. That was the trouble with his halo. Running into each other, bouncing off guards—a hell of a mess. Fatima lost a lot of bandwidth making the bubbles bouncy instead of lethal whenever a woman ran into them, bandwidth she couldn’t really spare. She was trying to keep her minion from squishing a pair of girls when a panicking woman knocked her flat.

The next thirty seconds were a nightmare of shoving, tripping, screaming, and shooting, as half the guards opened up with their guns and the other half bolted. Fatima gave up trying to control anything, set all the bubbles to bounce, and focused completely on getting her ass under cover before a ricochet went through her skull. In the end she crawled through bloody snow for five yards just to crouch on the far side of the tent and wish it was made of kevlar. Not exactly her proudest moment.

Once she wasn’t at risk of being trampled she took a moment to breathe, then glanced over at the entrance. The cars were struggling to back out of the area, but it looked like the last fool to come in had come in an automatic, and blocked off the exit nicely. Great job, jackass! Fatima would be sure to send his widow a box of thank-you chocolates, assuming she had time to loot some from the containers here. Meanwhile, she kept the bubbles flying, and pretty soon she had the entrance blocked a bit more permanently. She found the bozos with the spastic trigger fingers too, turned them to more red paste.

And that was it. Silence. Sweet, clean, silence.

The ferry was dead in the water less than fifty feet from the shore, and starting to drift. It’d probably wreck eventually on its own, but just to be safe she tossed a few greetings from Mister Higgins that way. The first couple burst on the back gate until it dropped open, and a half-dozen more blew up inside the cargo compartment, bam-bam-bam. The whole top half of the thing blew apart, and the rear end started to droop. The men had already abandoned ship, probably to die in freezing salt water. The wrecked ferry would clog the approach for any future traffic on the dock, shutting down this little swap meet for good. If they tried starting it up again somewhere else, she’d smash that one up too. They’d run out of men and boats eventually; Mister Higgins wasn’t going to run out of bubbles.

One of the burn barrels had been knocked over, but the coals were still glowing against the steaming snow. Fatima tiptoed over to catch some of the heat before it died. The surviving guards were long gone, taking the hint that now was a good time to find other employment. One was shot dead, and she dug through his pockets for cigs. She found a pack, but the bullet had passed right through it and the few that hadn’t been shredded were soaked with blood. Dammit.

The women were mostly gone too, after climbing over the fence around the docks. Two had been hurt too bad to move, and got left behind. One shot clean through the head, another hit in the guts multiple times and bleeding out fast. Both too far gone to help. Mister Higgin might have squished one or two in the confusion, too. This maybe could have gone better.

Fatima hadn’t had a good look at the cars as they were being crunched, but she assumed at least a couple hadn’t got out in time. One of them might be Binbaşı Polat, and if he hadn’t died he was sure as hell going to be running scared. Could have gone better, could have gone worse. She took a look around, and spotted a few things that looked like they might be security cameras. Smashed them, smashed the lights, blew open the shipping containers for good measure, then helped herself to a fur coat and a carton of some foreign brand she couldn’t make out. Probably should have waited to kill the lights. Whatever.

Mister Higgins vanished again, and she hopped over the fence on the west side to make her way back to the rendezvous. The women would be finding shelter already, with sympathetic local families. The men? Eh. If they were lucky Rus had got up the courage to eat a few runners on their way out, to earn some credit at the Bank of Khan. If they weren’t so lucky, he’d eaten some of the women by mistake.

Bob would probably be mad at her, but if Bob wanted it done better she could have done more than recon work for this. She could have shut down the whole op a lot cleaner with her VRIL, if she hadn’t been so scared of tipping the American hand here. If Nadia was right, she had other tricks up her sleeve too, so any excess casualties or foulups were on her.

Fatima was just getting ready to hop another fence when downtown Tatvan vanished, and she found herself clinging to the side of a cliff with much harder snow blowing against her face. The valley was a good two hundred feet below her feet, the crest of the mountain twice as high above, and the wind whistled past her frozen ears so loud it hurt. The safety line was still in place, and the pitons were holding, but the storm had come up sudden and Dave was gone already. Help couldn’t come till the storm had passed, and it might find her frozen body glued to the mountain’s side by a solid mass of ice.

This, this here was the world: not the quiet suburb she’d grown up in, not her barely-bigger college town, not the narrow highway with its neat trimmed grass shoulders, but the hard stone mountain and the biting wind. It had been here for millions of years, would still be here in another million when she was long gone, and maybe the human race with her, and the mountain wouldn’t care if they were around to peck at its flanks or not.

In an instant the wind died, and the clouds parted behind her for a lance of golden sunlight to pierce through. She turned her face the other way, and in the far distance below the milky-white glacier lit up with a blinding gleam—

Tatvan returned, and Fatima found her eyes already adjusted to the murk of a cloudy night. The wind had died down as well, replaced by a clammier kind of cold. Mist. Mist and fog, all around her, bitter cold and clinging. Something about it was familiar, though she couldn’t say how. Crystalline frost gathered on her filched coat, and she drew it around her closer. There was frost on the fence too, and she spurned to put a hand on it now, for fear it would burn her fingers.

In the distance she saw a light, a single speck of brilliant yellow like the sun. She made her way towards it, hoping it was a fire. Even if it wasn’t, it would be something incredible, a light that could survive the primeval cold. She shivered, and held the least icy parts of the fur up against her face as she stumbled forward.

It was hard to track time in the fog, but it didn’t feel like long before she saw golden light reflecting off the snow under her feet, and looked up again. The little mote of warmth had grown into a huge shining star in the darkness, staring down at her out of a face of pure white bone. The jaw opened, favoring her with a smile of bristling curved tusks. He was immense, twenty feet tall at least, and all but his face covered in long, dull purplish locks of fur.

At once she recognized him, and shrank back. “Pangu,” she whispered. The wild god, the lord of the indifferent cosmos. She’d heard about him from Bob—but only the name. She’d already met him once before, during their escape from Ankara almost three weeks ago. When she had personally, with her own eyes, seen Kizil Khan rip his emissor to pieces.