Secondhand Sorcery

Sergei Yevgenyevich Yefimov was familiar with his reputation among his colleagues. He was, it was said, too staid, too conservative, too inflexible to function in the modern world. Under the old regime, he had been correctly held under deep suspicion of reactionary sentiments—but these were the same sentiments which had led him to be recruited at all, had shielded his increasingly radical temperament from official scrutiny, and won him a place of some prominence after the overthrow of communism by men of greater wisdom and rectitude. Now he was their servant, and entirely dedicated to their mission; they welcomed his lack of ideological flexibility, provided it was accompanied (as it was) by an open-minded and generous appreciation of all purely tactical possibilities.

So it was that their late withdrawal from Constantinople had caused him no undue distress, in spite of the unfortunate loss of Aziz and the substantial trauma imposed on Lyudmila in the process. Sergei was sixty-three years old, accustomed to abrupt realignments and changes of fortune by the many radical disruptions which had shaken Russia during his lifetime. They had not been defeated as such, only moved to a stage in operations where their presence would be more useful elsewhere.

Their current theater was Turkish Kurdistan, an area ripe with promise. Even under Red rule the region had been generously seeded with intelligence assets and funding for revolutionaries, though never so generously as to allow its actual independence from greater Turkey. After the White Revolution the knyazya had seen fit to increase both, in preparation for their advance on Constantinople. Little happened in the eastern third of the peninsula without their becoming aware of it.

Thus they were perfectly aware of the Binbaşı Polat’s growing domain along the west coast of Lake Van, and reasonably certain that he had acquired paraphysical support of some nature well before it was revealed the Tuesday past. The knyazya had already elected, prior to Sergei’s arrival, to allow this particular nexus of power to emerge, with an eye towards eventual cooptation.

The reappearance of the four surviving Marshall children was likewise a matter of interest, and made the timing of their reassignment more fortuitous than it might otherwise have appeared. Sergei had followed, with distracted and distant concern, the recent descent of the American operatives on Kurdistan. Their apparent cooperation with the Marshalls at Tatvan, a mere day after Sergei’s arrival in the region, was a specimen of the most astonishing fatality, the more so in light of its catastrophic interruption by Polat’s own operatives, and Sergei was disposed to take the fullest advantage of the opportunity so offered.

The subverted emissant Pangu had caused considerable death in his irruption on the night of the attack, and many of the survivors had predictably reacted by fleeing the city. This, too, was fatality; the hotel Polat’s men had appropriated for a barracks was now surrounded by vacant housing units. Sergei established himself in one of these with little trouble on the evening after the attack, keeping both his surviving subordinates with him. Concerns of operational tempo and morale prompted him to have the Americans notified of the captured child’s location. The bait had in effect already been placed; all that remained was to wait in vigilance.

Faithful Noorlan’s noetic surveillance painstakingly documented every move of the American operative with her VRIL. They had her location precisely documented within an hour of her arrival in the apartment building adjacent to their own. It would have been a simple, if messy, matter to eliminate her at any point within the ensuing four hours, as she systematically eliminated any of Polat’s men who might have been in a position to threaten the child she had no choice but to send into hostile territory alone, then surveyed the area as he made his inept extraction attempt. She would be distracted and increasingly weary from the sustained effort.

However, their orders were quite clear on this matter: whoever else might perish this day, the woman Graham was to survive. This made their task considerably more protracted and difficult, but Sergei appreciated the challenge, even with the commensurate risk. The rewards would be proportionate—if their reports from Tuesday night, and the conclusions drawn from them, were accurate.

Noorlan maintained his clairvoyant trance for the entire period of the operation, leaving Lyudmila and Sergei himself to maintain merely visual surveillance of the hotel, from opposite sides of the building. It was not known for certain which exit the children would emerge from, though Sergei strongly suspected it would be the one closest to their American handler.

In the event, his surmise was incorrect, and Lyudmila’s voice spoke over the radio: “I see them, sir, coming out a side exit. The girl is alive, but obviously very weak. I don’t see anything that looks like a recent injury. They’re holding position, at present.”

Sergei did not trouble himself with a reply. Lyudmila would know soon enough that he had heard. He closed his eyes, drawing on the image of a flower, that dainty blossom of white on pale green shoots emerging from the snow, which he never allowed to entirely leave his waking consciousness.

He did not think of himself as a particularly ambitious man. He was pleased to be in a position of prominence, serving in a vital role, because he was a mortal man and subject to vanity. But that was secondary. It was right and healthy that some men—it did not much matter who, provided they were just and competent—be prominent, and that being prominent such men be respected, and those under the most prominent accorded a lower but ordinate degree of respect, and so on down to the dignity of the working poor. Good Russian though he was, Sergei felt himself a Confucian at heart; the deepest and most complex workings of a society were in a sense dependent on its children being taught to say please and thank you, on its working men pausing to hold doors open for their women.

It was, again, a matter of indifference whether Sergei happened to occupy a position near the top or the bottom of the prodigious natural hierarchy which comprised a healthy society; he flattered himself that he should be disposed to struggle with equal diligence for its good regardless. That same resolution, after all, had held firm in him when he was a mere technician of no significance, performing duties which did not require performance, under the diseased and corrupt law which had gripped his motherland for the better part of a century.

Righteousness had lain dormant within him like a seed under snow, waiting for the spring, and other men of like mind had seen his potential, and created the conditions for his seed to grow, to sprout, and finally to bloom. Mere material adversity was as nothing. The only question of consequence was the steadfastness of men as individuals in their adherence to a greater collective moral order. That resolution had brought Russia out of her long winter; that same resolution led Snowdrop to sprout from his heart yet again, to set the crooked world right once more.

The American was not unskilled. She would be tired, operating alone, and (unless something had gone badly awry) she would have had no way of anticipating their presence in this arena. Noorlan had detected three of her drones still active, sweeping the hotel building for threats to her charges. Snowdrop’s emergence would have given her the earliest possible alert, as she promptly consumed the small portions of unanchored ectoplasm to fuel her own birth.

Here—if their surmises were correct—the woman faced a choice. Their agents in this town reported, from multiple accounts, that she had been seen moving through the north end in the company of an emissant. She was doubtless, after the embarrassment of Tuesday night, equipped with an ectoplasmic reserve, as was Sergei himself. She might choose to contest the territory with him, subjecting all the civilians in their vicinity to the discomfort of ambivalence. Or, if they were compatible, she might prefer the route of harmonic synergy, sharing a halo of combined valence.

He was pleased to see that she opted for the latter, and to feel that her valence was delightfully similar to his own; he had a moment’s glimpse of a bedroom, and another sort of flower unfamiliar to him, before a figure appeared on the pavement behind the children. An old woman, of an unseemly complexion, but clad in spotless white. Her presence overlaid a certain warmth over his halo, a sense that all would be well in the end. Which was very often true, he had found. Certainly it had been true in his own life. But it did not do to take such things for granted.

Snowdrop had been threatening the children with more ostentation than Sergei typically cared to employ, very slowly erecting a barrier to immure them. The American’s familiar burned a hole through the glass in moments—though not without causing a measure of diffraction, an interesting optical phenomenon—and promptly incinerated Snowdrop. This did not trouble him. His lady was accustomed to shedding her form for the purposes of movement, and with their halo shared between them she could not truly die unless one of them lowered the Tetzloff Field on purpose, at which point both emissants would disappear. He regrew her a moment later in a location around the corner of the hotel.

“Noorlan?” His subordinate frowned and opened his eyes very slightly to trace his finger over the simple map laid out on the table before him. As expected, the woman was in motion now. Having chosen to harmonize, she could not simply drive him from the contest by crude domination; their familiars were conjoined in one narrative. Each of them being resistant in the usual fashion to all purely paraphysical effects, her surest path to victory would be to find and kill him in person.

That thought did not trouble him either; with Noorlan’s aid it was simple enough to track her location by observing the shifting balance between their respective familiars and the epicenter of their combined field. It was a broadly similar method, he was told, to that employed by astronomers to detect distant planets. Noorlan was sufficiently experienced to perform the needed calculations by intuition at this range, and Sergei resolved to commend him to their superiors upon completion of the mission.

It was not, could not be, a fair contest. He had the assistance of Noorlan, while she was alone; he had surprise, and she was exhausted; he had been an emissor for more than ten years, while she was young and presumably unpracticed. To the extent the halo allowed it, he extended her a certain measure of pity, even as he set out to destroy her as efficiently as possible.

Snowdrop could erect barriers at speed; they began as emanations of pure force, and condensed into glass forms in any desired proportion if he so chose. She herself could grow back only slowly, and the four of them passed a tedious few minutes in pursuit around the hotel, Sergei regrowing his mistress in this location or that while her crone destroyed each in turn. Necessary, but wearisome nonetheless.

In the meantime (he glanced at the map) the woman herself had left her building and retreated across the street on the far side. Naturally, being caught by surprise, she would begin by moving out of the arena to gather her thoughts. This was acceptable, but he did not care to have her venture too far from their battle, and perchance see things she should not. Sergei abandoned their foolish pop-up game to verify that the children had wisely abandoned the street; once the black crone killed that form, he regrew her inside the hotel itself, where she could not see so far, and glazed over every one of its exits, beginning with the one the children had so lately left.

He did not know for certain that they had returned to the hotel, where it was possible that Polat’s surviving men would find and kill them. For his present purpose, it sufficed that they might be within, and that she should fear so, and she evidently did; Noorlan’s finger wavered on the edge of the map for a moment, then moved along the periphery of the block west of the hotel with fresh urgency. Her familiar moved to burn through the glass on the first door; Sergei, anticipating the strategy, abandoned the hotel and regrew Snowdrop behind the old woman to manifest a half-ton of solid crystal directly over her head, then let it drop.

He could not kill her either, naturally, but that was immaterial; the gesture served to frustrate and confuse. When the familiar did not reappear, he looked to Noorlan, who pointed a second finger to the inside of the hotel, waving it up and down. Of course. The children were her first priority. She would be using her familiar to search the building for them.

As for the woman herself, she had entered another apartment building more or less at random, and was moving about it. Sergei could picture her now, running about with gun drawn kicking down doors like a police officer in an absurd American television show. He did not doubt that, if they actually encountered her and were recognized, she could kill them both. Fortunately she had begun in the entirely wrong building. They were at little risk here.

What they had done already was likely sufficient, but there was no need for haste, and he preferred to be thorough. He passed the time by setting Snowdrop to work on the neighboring blocks, obstructing doors in a stochastic pattern. It would impede her search somewhat without betraying that he knew her location.

Abruptly Noorlan recoiled, holding his hand up to his face. His hand waved wildly at the far edge of the map. At the same time Sergei had a sharp and unpleasant sense of impingement, asymmetry, unease—as though a great hand had grasped the lens of his mind’s eye and twisted it, applying an intolerable torque to his perceptions.

The sensation, distasteful as it was, was followed abruptly by one far worse, of the floor of the universe simply falling out from beneath him, leaving him unsupported in a space that was no space whatever. For an unquantified time he lost awareness, and lifted his head with some difficulty from the back of his armchair when sensation returned. Beside him Noorlan’s hands moved over the map once more, but with some difficulty, trembling and swaying this way and that. Sweat trickled down over his brow.

Sergei himself remained unconcerned. His sense of calm fatality had not left him, though it was curiously altered. It came to him, as he lay back in the chair, that he was not a young man any longer. Moreover, his career was hardly safe. The time would surely come, and sooner than he thought, that he would die. Was that any cause for shame, or sorrow? He thought not. An individual life was of no significance, provided life itself continued. And it would.

His ruminations were rudely interrupted by Noorlan, who fell over and struck his head against the table before rolling off it and falling against his superior’s legs. Moved by the faintest curiosity, Sergei bent down, and found the man was not breathing and possessed no pulse. Most peculiar, and without any sign of harm. But death came to all alike, in the end.

Some part of him told him that this was not his typical mode of thought, that perhaps he would react more strongly under normal circumstances. It was, from a certain point of view, indecorous for one’s subordinates to perish without warning in the middle of an operation. Surely decorum was an absurdity, in the face of universal demise—and yet not. He had a memory within him still, insistent and strong, of a minuscule flower sprouting out of the snow … that life, at least, could not die forever.

The sight of a canister on the floor—he thought it had been on the edge of the table before—tickled at the edge of his consciousness. He felt the most peculiar certainty, how he did not know, that within that metal cylinder lay the power to make his little snowdrop grow. The possibility of life beyond death intrigued him enough to bend down and pick it up.

He was on the verge of twisting it open when a dark shape blotted out the light from the window. He glanced up, and saw a shape like an enormous black bird driving through the pane, sending shards flying. One cut across the back of his hand in passing, and he cursed, then reflected with mordant humor that glass, in the end, might have killed him. But the great bird was advancing on him now, gushing blood across the floor with each step, and Sergei was eager to make his flower bloom in truth before the beast eviscerated him. So he removed the lid.

The bleak halo vanished in an instant, the dark god of the bloody wings was precipitated backwards with violent force, and Snowdrop was beside him once more, blessing Sergei with eternal renewal. He paused a moment to beg her indulgence for the late unseemly interlude, then sent her up to the roof of his building to reconnoiter.

It was still early afternoon in Tatvan, but Snowdrop could not see the waters of Lake Van in the distance; a milky whiteness covered the horizon. There was no sign of any other irregularity, but Sergei was experienced enough to know what to expect. The enemy would have her own ectoplasmic reserve. He sat down, and dismissed his lady before she could be overthrown. Soon he saw once more the house in America, and the old black woman leaning over the bed. Prepared as he was, he easily conjoined his own halo to the Graham woman’s, as she had to his, then got up to leave under Snowdrop’s protection.

This, too, was fatality—though Sergei was not sure whether he believed in the full implications of the word. Certainly events happened in war that were beyond foresight or control, though he might have foreseen that Polat’s child would endeavor to join the battle with her new plaything. From there, he could reconstruct the chain of events with reasonable confidence: Pangu’s impingement had prompted the American to drop their shared halo, leaving both of them temporarily incapacitated by the shock.

Ruslan, he supposed, had then taken advantage of the opportunity. Sergei had not known that Kizil Khan could recognize individual lives within his dominion, but it did not much surprise him. It was unfortunate; Noorlan would be difficult to replace, and if Sergei had not maintained his own defenses by reflex he would certainly be dead himself. Lyudmila might or might not survive, but she was of no irreplaceable utility at this juncture.

He made his way down to the bottom floor at a leisurely pace, while Snowdrop watched for threats. The black hag appeared to be occupied with Pangu at present, but one could not be too careful.

Possibly the knyazya would be annoyed with him, but not greatly or for very long. Fundamentally, the mission was almost certainly a success. He had kept the Graham woman’s heretofore unknown familiar occupied in public for some time, including on rooftops. Some of the men he had planted in the surrounding blocks with long-zoom cameras would surely have caught some of it. Enough to copy several times, and submit to the American congress and major media outlets. The Americans did so love their absurd little scandals.