Secondhand Sorcery

Ayşe was doing schoolwork in her cabin when she heard the ship’s engine start up. It was hard to concentrate, and she knew she wasn’t doing a good job. She threw her books and pencils down to dash to the bridge, where Mila told her what she already guessed, that the radio beacon on the island had cut off and they couldn’t reestablish contact.

Mila had more to say too, because Mila always had more to say, but Ayşe wasn’t listening. This was what they’d been waiting for. They had Police Captain Toprak and his men by their side, and she would have the mighty Pangu; there was nothing to fear. The two days of tedious waiting were over. Now she could get justice for her father, and for Turkey.

If only the stupid boat would get there quicker! That was the big weakness of the plan, that the boat couldn’t stay hidden and still be there quickly. It had to chug across the water for several agonizing minutes, first getting out of the natural hidden harbor on the north side of the lake, then closing the distance to the island. They were only just now clearing the headland; the island was a speck on the horizon.

She’d studied the layout of the prison. It was made of a new kind of material that could be put together very quickly without spending a lot of money, since they’d needed to get the building together in a hurry. Ayşe didn’t really understand the details. It had two doors: a front door you got into over a narrow bridge, and a back door you could only access with a boat. The back door was hidden and kind of a secret, Mila had told her. It was designed for delivering bulk supplies once a week, but their ship could dock there as well.

“We are almost there,” Mila said beside her. Ayşe jumped; she’d forgotten the woman was there. But she was right. The island was clearly visible now, its towers sparkling in the sunlight. It was very pretty, for a prison. There would be a space around it where the enemy jinn’s magic would have control of everyone’s mind. They couldn’t just walk into that. It would be Ayşe’s job to bring up her own jinn.

“I’m ready,” she said. And she was. The Americans had four jinn. She knew what they could do. She’d seen pictures of the four people using them, and they were only teenagers, younger than her cousin Demir. Two of them barely looked older than Ayşe. She was not scared of them.

“Just say when,” Mila told her. She had a funny little jar in her hands, full of … jinni food, she’d said. Her agency had pulled strings somewhere to get it, but if she popped it open just as Ayşe called Pangu, he would come out much stronger.

Ayşe watched the island drawing closer, counting out the seconds. She didn’t know what she was waiting for. How big was a jinni’s magic space? She didn’t know. There were a lot of things she didn’t know. But it was too late to take this all back, even if she wanted to. The prison break was happening now. Somewhere inside that pretty iced cake of a fortress, the Americans would be killing guards, opening cells, maybe holding hostages. “Now.”

She didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Usually when she called Pangu, there was a long moment where he told the story about the climber on the mountain, and the cold wind, and the sun shining on the ice. It took a minute. This time, with his special food, he rattled it all off in barely a second, and then Ayşe opened her eyes and he was crouched beside her on the bridge, bent double to avoid bumping his shaggy purple head on the ceiling.

She always forgot how Pangu made her feel until he was with her again. It wasn’t exactly a good feeling, but it wasn’t bad either. He was a very old spirit, she could tell. Old enough that he didn’t have much patience for humans and their short lives. He was willing to help her with her problems, and she was grateful, but he thought they were too small to bother about, really. Ayşe couldn’t blame him. As long as he was out, she understood perfectly.

It was very cold now, from his mist, but they were all wearing coats. Ayşe made sure the white fog rolled back from their path, so they wouldn’t have to break through ice to get there. The boat’s engine struggled a little from the sudden drop in temperature, but they kept going until they got to the special support, the enormous fat spine of glassy stuff sticking out of one side of the building into the water. You had to get close to it to spot the little tunnel where it joined the main structure, and the size of the thing made it look too small to get down until you were almost inside it.

It wasn’t a long tunnel, only just long enough so the cargo boats could unload in a sheltered space. The captain slowed the boat carefully down and they stopped against the end of it with the slightest little bump. The policemen were moving out even before the anchor was down. Ayşe followed them, feeling perfectly calm. Whatever happened here, it wouldn’t matter.

There was a big heavy door, made of the same stuff as the rest of the building; it looked like glass, or clear plastic. Whatever it was, it was locked from the other side, with a bulky long-levered latch they could see through it, and nobody was there to open it for them. Captain Toprak looked at it, then turned to Ayşe. A couple of Pangu’s punches made hairline cracks, and his mist made ice grow inside those cracks until they spread out and shattered the whole door.

The floors here were deliberately slippery, so escaped prisoners couldn’t run. Pangu could help with that, too, by covering the glassy stuff with a solid sheet of pure ice. Just as slippery, but all of Toprak’s men had crampons, and Ayşe was wearing a new pair of ice skates. It was very fortunate that the ice-jinni had made friends with a girl who loved to skate.

The men were only here for backup, to help the prison staff handle loose prisoners, and those prisoners would be totally helpless on ice. The actual fight was all Ayşe’s, and she set out as soon as all the men were through, zipping down the halls too fast for any of them to have a hope of keeping up. Only Pangu could do that, on his long, sturdy legs. The men would be along later.

Ayşe had a paper map, but the building was too big and complicated for it to be useful and she didn’t try. After skating a short distance she heard gunshots, and knew the way to go anyway. The danger might have frightened her before, but not while she had Pangu with her. Now she was a child of the north wind. This place was full of long, straight hallways, and once she built up speed they flew past in a blur.

The guns were firing higher up, on the second or third floor. She found a set of stairs, and had Pangu carry her up them, then scout ahead. Pangu was good at scouting; he could see through his own fog perfectly well even when others couldn’t, and if it got thick enough he could just disappear into it and reappear somewhere else.

The prison was like three hollow squares stuck together end-to-end, a courtyard in the middle of each, lined up east to west to follow the shape of the island. The bridge and the main gate were on the southern end of the middle square, while she and the men had come in close to the northwest corner. Pangu’s special space—his territory, where he could do his magic—moved around as the two of them did, but right now it was centered on the north end of the center square, opposite the front gate. He could feel the enemy’s space, a place where he could not go, across the central courtyard. Ayşe looked out the window and watched his ice settle on the bare ground. The line where it would go no further, where the mist only trickled across and disappeared in the sunlight—that was the end of it.

Mila had warned her this would happen. Mila had warned her about many things, in fact, but it was hard to remember all of them. She was smarter than Ayşe’s teachers, and seemed to know everything about every subject, somehow. She said that, when two jinn met, their territories would push at each other, and there were very complicated rules about which would win, especially if multiple enemy jinn were sharing one territory, in which case there would be multiple centers and the shape of the area would change based on some impossible math formula … Mila’d talked until Ayşe went cross-eyed, then broke it down into something very simple she could actually understand: the closer she and Pangu were to the edge of their territory, the harder it would push against the enemy’s.

Pangu alone could not quite reach the end of his “leash”; it got harder and harder to advance forward as he got closer to the edge. All he could tell her was that there were a lot of people moving around in the hallways across the square, and that he could not see another jinni there. That was good enough for her; she stood up, took her friend by the hand, and dashed forward. The corridor was lined with cells on either side, big cells packed with crowds of prisoners, their green and white walls now covered in smooth clear ice, icicles dribbling down from the ceiling. The prisoners sat and stared in shivering silence as Ayşe skated past.

It was not so quiet and peaceful up ahead; the closer she got, the more clearly she could hear the people shouting in anger. She could see them, too, a huge snarl of men brawling in the hallway, pushing and punching each other. Another couple of gunshots went off, but she couldn’t see who was shooting, or at who.

Pangu put an end to it. Once they had closed within a hundred yards, the whole ugly mob keeled over, clutching their heads and moaning, their foolish brawl forgotten. By the time they were actually his, and the white mist was around them, they were sitting quietly on the floor, unable to do anything but huddle together like sheep on a cold morning. Ayşe could simply skate around them, without them so much as lifting a hand to stop her.

The cell doors were all open here; these were escaped prisoners, obviously. A few of the men had guns, clubs, or other weapons, but she couldn’t tell if they were guards, or if they had disarmed the guards, or if the Americans had armed them. Either way, they were quiet now. Their lives were only little sparks in the first place, and now they knew it.

Pangu, scouting ahead as usual, spotted the jinniyah before Ayşe could even see her. She was a scrawny little thing, shaped like a naked woman with long dark hair barely covering her luminous body. She wasn’t doing anything, only watching them from the end of the hall, the better part of a kilometer away. Ayşe would have been ashamed even to look at her, normally. Now, seeing her through Pangu’s eyes, she just thought the creature would freeze without proper clothes on. Good.

Ayşe kept picking her way forward through the shivering prisoners, not in a hurry. She remembered the files Mila had shown her; this jinniyah answered to the youngest of the spies, and Ayşe could not see her anywhere. With Pangu by her side, she could just force the disgusting creature away, then herd the prisoners back into their cells. The jinniyah was already retreating, stepping back as the white clouds and frost came drifting down the hall. Soon she would have nowhere left to run, and would have to leave the whole prison to Ayşe and Pangu.

She didn’t even last that long, though. After a few seconds’ retreat, the jinniyah twisted in place and disappeared. Ayşe froze in place, peering down the hall in case she reappeared. When she didn’t, she set Pangu to work, kicking and prodding the miserable prisoners back into their cells. Some of them, she saw, were women, and a few were dead already. Ayşe didn’t care. All of these mortal affairs were stupid and meaningless to begin with, but if she was going to be bothered with them she would have it over quickly. Probably a lot of these men would be executed anyway, if they didn’t die from Pangu’s cold. And it would serve them right.

The counterattack came without warning. One moment, Ayşe was directing her jinni to pick up a stubborn convict and heave him back into confinement; the next, she was on her knees, clutching at her head with both hands so hard she nearly tore her hair out, caught up in a kind of pain she had never felt before. Her skull throbbed with it. Her stomach twisted, threatening to throw up her lunch.

The floor beneath her was still sheathed in ice, and the mist still drifted through the air, but everything about it was wrong. This was not Pangu’s land any longer. The pure and snow-white mountain was gone from her mind, and his cold peace with it. Instead she felt angry, angry and helpless. The girl, the American spy, she had done this somehow. She was trying to take Pangu away from her, to take his land, his place, the place of the ancient wild. How dare she?

All the men around her were hurting too; she could hear them writhing and groaning. Pangu was alive still, but weak. He slumped against a wall some ways down the hallway, breathing hard, his bright yellow eye now dim and pale. She crawled toward him on hands and knees, feeling the cold against her skin in a way she hadn’t before. It wasn’t fair. But there was safety, not far away, where the evil jinniyah could not disturb them. Pangu could feel it, and he led the way, crawling just as she did.

By the time they got back to the crossing, the corner of the square, Ayşe felt a little better. Not perfect, but well enough to stand, and wobble forward on her skates. She looked behind her, and saw the jinniyah was back again, staring at them in their weakness from a few hundred paces away, in the shadowy place where she had defiled Pangu’s wild kingdom. Her eyes, Ayşe noticed, were black empty pits in her face.

“You can’t do this,” Ayşe told her. “I won’t let you.” The jinniyah gave no sign that she had understood, or even heard. After a moment, she walked over to the nearest door and slid it open again, letting the prisoners back out. “Stop that, you horrible bitch!” But the jinniyah kept moving.

Ayşe sent Pangu to stop her; he took a few steps forward, then fell to his knees again, giddy and helpless. Somehow, this was not his territory any longer. His ice was still there on the floor, and the air was cold and damp, but it wasn’t his any more. She tried stepping forward herself, to try and reclaim it, but her knees went weak and the jinniyah popped up right next to her and knocked her over easily, with one hand. She hit her backside, then her head, on the icy floor. Before she could even get back to her feet, the jinniyah had returned to freeing the prisoners, throwing open doors. And the men were back to grumbling, cursing—cursing!—the cold Pangu had brought to stop their fight.

“I can’t let you do this!” she said, but nobody heard. After a minute she found herself stumbling back in retreat, back away from the jinniyah, full of rage and helpless pain. That was the jinniyah’s work; she was an evil spirit, and brought frustration and hate instead of Pangu’s wisdom. Ayşe kept staggering away from it until she was back in her friend’s furry arms, and those arms were wrapped around her in a comforting embrace. When she looked up, the jinniyah had vanished.

At least, her body had gone. She could still feel the horrible aura off the creature, poisoning her soul. It was evil, and doing evil things. It would have to die, so Pangu could reign again. But how? Neither of them could touch her. The prisoners were getting up, walking away, brushing past her like she wasn’t even there, helping each other over the slippery floor. Soon they would escape.

“No!” The nearest couple of men flinched, and glared at her, but only for a moment. Then they turned back to their own business. Ayşe bent down and picked up a handgun from the floor—somebody had left it behind. Would it kill a jinniyah? She didn’t think so. She didn’t want to kill the prisoners. But she could stop them, make them pay attention. She picked one at random, an older man limping away on his own, pointed the gun at the floor right in front of him, and pulled the trigger.

It was a lot louder than she expected, and it kicked in her hand. She stepped back, wincing and putting a hand to her ear. But so did the prisoner, and all the men around him. They stopped and stared at her, glowering. There was a jagged hole in the floor where she had shot it. It put her in mind of the door downstairs, where Pangu had smashed his way through.

Was Pangu powerless here? She didn’t think so. Slowly, carefully, she sent a little tendril of the white mist drifting into the crack; she was pleased to see the men back away again, muttering. The mist trickled in, and in, hardening and filling it. The little hole shuddered, and sent out a spiderweb pattern of cracks. Now the men were not just backing away, but running.

Ayşe laughed, and pushed past them to rejoin Pangu. The jinniyah flickered back into being less than a hundred paces away, but Ayşe ignored her. The crack was still spreading, even though she had stopped spreading the ice inside it. She skated away, quickly but calmly now, the jinniyah’s curse spent. Behind her, the cracks gave way, and a whole section of the floor fell in with a crash. Then another, and another. The prisoners knocked each other down in their haste to get away, and one fell through the collapsing floor, screaming. As if one human life mattered that much!

And Ayşe smiled, because she had found the way. So the American wanted to fight? Fine. Ayşe might not know all her vicious tricks, but she was pretty sure she knew enough to bring this whole building down on her head. She would make this prison into a tomb.