Secondhand Sorcery

The first burst of gunfire did almost nothing; the mob was too large and too focused on its anger for a few dead to deter them. They surged forward, hot with Ézarine’s rage, while the guards kept firing. It was only when Ézarine herself appeared beside the gunmen, and began forcing them to stop with her fists, that they yielded to Mister Higgins’s half of the halo and tried to leave.

By then it was too late; the mob was within rushing distance, and mad enough to use their own casualties as stepping-stones to close the gap. They fell on the guards like mad dogs, beating them with their own weapons. Ézarine didn’t move to stop them; Nadia didn’t even think of trying till they were done and moving on.

By then, she found, she had larger problems. Without a target to vent its anger on, the disoriented army of prisoners started turning on itself. Arguments—she couldn’t tell about what, maybe which way to go—sprang up at once, and once begun soon turned to blows. The men who weren’t trying to fight tried to push past the fighters instead, looking for an exit, and causing fresh brawls in turn. Ézarine tried to move here and there, breaking it up, but there was too much for her to handle. These people had been in her kind of mood, or Mister Higgins’s, for hours or days before they showed up. The halo was pouring gasoline on a brushfire.

Nadia was just wondering whether she ought to send Ézarine away when she felt, through her familiar, a new and unwelcome sensation she couldn’t put into words. It was nothing she could have felt with her own body, only a sense of … something like pressure, but also asymmetry, combined with imbalance. Like seeing a painting hang slightly crooked, if that were the sort of thing you could feel with your inner ear.

If she hadn’t been expecting the thing it stood for, she would have taken ages to recognize it for what it was. Impingement. There was another familiar nearby, and its halo was pushing against the edges of their own. As if she didn’t have enough problems, with the beginnings of a riot on her hands …

She spotted the source almost at once. All Ézarine had to do was glance, through the nearest empty cells, into the central courtyard. It was more than half-full of white vapor, like a cloud descended from the sky—except the skies were clear. The boundary was barely a hundred meters away, ridiculously close. That meant both emissor and emissant were right there to reinforce, and they would probably get closer.

In a different room on a lower floor, some distance away from both, Nadia put her head in her hands to think. It wasn’t Yefimov and Snowdrop, at least. That would have been much worse. But Pangu? He belonged to Polat’s daughter now. What on earth was she doing, playing enforcer for the people who ruined her country, and for the Kurds to boot? And what was Nadia going to do about it now?

The sense of imbalance and pressure grew rapidly, until even the men in the melee could sense it. One by one, then in groups, they gave up the fight and grabbed at their heads, groaning or yelling as the competing halos took them in two directions at once. Nadia could sympathize; even her brief brush with ambivalence outside Fatih, months ago, had been terrible.

But it didn’t last long. In seconds a large number had passed through ambivalence and into Pangu’s domain, and were sitting quietly on the floor, politely waiting for a cold death. Ézarine had already retreated, against her will, down the hall, but she could see the enormous shape of the emissant himself, shambling onto her former domain.

It was doubly discomfiting now; he was between Ézarine and Mister Higgins, bisecting the halo. Nadia didn’t know how long it could tolerate that kind of strain before collapsing, especially with Pangu robbing her half of the substrate. She didn’t know what was happening to Fatima outside; if all of Mister Higgins’s bubbles disappeared at once, there was a chance her sister would be shot before she could recover from the shock.

But Pangu was still advancing, and Ézarine, at a distance from her mistress, bereft of close support, had no choice but to retreat. Nadia shook her head, sighed, and called her familiar back to her side. They would be able to resist better with less distance between them, and Ézarine was doing no good where she was.

It wasn’t a solution, though. If Pangu kept advancing, he would very likely kill most of his own substrate, creating a classic “firebreak.” Which would put paid to him—but not at a price Nadia could tolerate! And if the halo collapsed before that, the cold mist would simply flood the whole prison, and Nadia herself would die with them. It was infuriating, but it couldn’t be helped. She only had one option, and it was in the little flask at her hip. She was pretty sure a kitty could be used to bolster an existing halo; it just wasn’t common practice.

And if Yefimov was lurking nearby, waiting for her to deplete all her resources before swooping in for the kill? Better not to think about it.

Relief was partial, but immediate; beside her, Ézarine sparkled with fresh vigor, and Nadia sent her back up to push back. Polat’s daughter was nine. Nadia could remember being nine. Hopefully this girl wasn’t unusually resourceful or clever for her age; Nadia had just spent her only reserve.

By the looks of it, though, she wasn’t. Ézarine could see her now, a skinny child bulked up with a thick coat and hat, wearing ice skates (ice skates!) on her stringy little legs. She stumbled back to Pangu for safety, making indignant noises, while the men roused to fresh anger all around her. This wasn’t Ézarine’s space yet, but it wasn’t properly Pangu’s either, despite the persistent ice and fog. Nadia kept the pressure up, wondering as she did how she was going to get all these people to safety now that the floors were not just glass but thick ice. At least before they hadn’t been at risk of imminent hypothermia. Damn the girl, anyway.

The child was huddled back against Pangu now, snarling threats and demands in Turkish. Nadia didn’t have time to waste on her, whatever she said. She’d already started forcing the men back in their cells, where Nadia supposed they were meant to die safely of incarcerated exposure. Was the girl stupid, or deeply fussy and neurotic, or did she only have a vicious sense of humor? She pushed forward to intervene, and Ézarine drove her away with a contemptuous shove. She crawled away, still whining, while Ézarine undid what she could of the damage.

It didn’t take long for her to open all the doors again; once that was done, she grabbed the most miserable-looking and exposed man in her immediate vicinity, and moved him down into the courtyard. She went for another, then another. Then stopped. Did she really have to move hundreds of them one at a time? She might be able to take several of them in a trip, assuming Pangu and the girl didn’t interfere with that as well. By now Nadia was past hoping to find Kemal’s daughter and her husband; she only hoped that—was that another gunshot?

Ézarine popped back upstairs and saw the girl with a pistol in her hand, gloating and cackling over a spreading crack in the glass floor while addled prisoners sluggishly backed away. “Are you insane?” Nadia screamed, uselessly, from her room. The floor, completely unconcerned with her opinion, shuddered and collapsed. Ézarine tried and failed to catch the one man who didn’t make it out; he fell at least ten feet onto his face, landing in a jagged heap of ice and glass shards.

The Polat girl moved on, carelessly firing her pistol into random spots on the floor and skating away while they spread. The prisoners staggered back, dumb with the cold and the strain of alternating halos, but they were too slow and there was nowhere to run to. Ézarine pulled two to safety; five more fell, meeting the same fate as the first. And the mad girl skated on. The first hole wasn’t even finished spreading yet. The building groaned and creaked as its weight shifted in ways it had not been built to accommodate.

Ézarine was just getting ready to flicker over and put the horrible brat down when a snaking crack took out the floor under her feet, sending her plunging as well. Fifteen or twenty men fell with her, but she was unharmed, and she did not stop to check on them. The girl had run out of bullets, apparently; she was bending over to pick up a rifle while Pangu went on a rampage, stomping and punching floors willy-nilly.

The girl was already out of the ambivalent zone, too far for Ézarine to reach—with her body. Instead she found a decent-sized piece of glass and ice in the expanding zone of rubble, and flung it. Nadia had never had cause to test her familiar’s aim. It was fair, but hardly perfect. The jagged shard spun like a discus right past the child’s face. She screamed as she twisted and fell, and rose up again dripping bright red blood over the milky ice.

Behind her, Pangu hesitated, wavered in place a moment, then started stumping over to help or shield her. Too late. The second chunk hit dead-on, shattering on impact and sending her flying. Pangu wobbled on his feet just long enough for the floor under him to collapse as well; he vanished on his way down. Ézarine’s halo flooded into the gap, driving out the niggling sense of disorder at last. Her first act was to jump over to the horrid child and pull her to safety before the catastrophe she had started could kill her as well.

Ézarine dropped her off in the room with her mistress, then flickered away to salvage what she could. Nadia looked down at the face of a nine-year-old murderess; it would have been easier to hate her if she hadn’t looked like she’d been mauled. The first hit had slashed her right cheek and upper lip almost down to the teeth; she was bleeding profusely. Shards of glass and frost glittered on her bloody face.

Nadia was tempted to simply let her bleed out. Only the knowledge that she would hate herself later—coupled with a dim hope that maybe, somehow, the girl was not at fault for what she had done—made Nadia pop open one of the plastic tubs she had been hiding behind. It held a bunch of brightly colored t-shirts. Nadia grabbed one and pressed it down hard with both hands. The girl groaned, and batted feebly with her hands. “If you survive this,” Nadia told her, “it will be more than you deserve.” She kept struggling. Nadia checked to make sure that she was not smothering the brat, then kept pressing down, and returned her attention to Ézarine upstairs.

It was already hopeless. Too many cracks had spread, too fast. Walls were falling now, bringing down the third floor with them to collapse on the men stirring feebly on the wreckage below. The few survivors on the second floor were all on hands and knees now, crawling painfully over the slippery ice, racing to stay ahead of the expanding cracks, climbing over each other and shouldering their neighbors aside in their desperation. Selfishness didn’t save them. Ézarine grabbed two men at random. A massive slab of floor gave way before she came back, bringing the last men down with it, and the ceiling fell in after to finish the job.

“This is your fault!” she screamed at the bleeding girl, who only twitched a little. But there was no more time for recriminations—the zone of destruction had now spread far enough that Nadia belatedly saw she was in danger herself. She could feel the rumble as the instability spread, and hear the ceiling fall in, far too close now.

Her hip still hurt from the fall earlier; she had to call Ézarine back to haul the girl out to the courtyard, then help Nadia to her feet. The hallway collapsed twenty feet away as she limped out the door of her hiding place. Flecks of glass and shards of ice rose up in a cloud, and she turned her face away to keep it out of her lungs. Then she looked up, and saw the cracks still spreading. There was nothing for it. She shut her eyes, held her breath, and had Ézarine pick her up and sprint for it.

The footing was terrible. Ézarine stumbled four times along the way, actually dropping Nadia once. Against her will, she gasped in shock, inhaling a mouthful of the dust, and gagged hard. It was probably for the best. She was coughing so hard that she did not notice what Ézarine saw beneath her as she picked her mistress back up. Only after, in the cold light of the courtyard with the dazed survivors stumbling about her, did she have a faint and doubtful recollection that the thing she had fallen on perhaps hadn’t felt quite like glass, or ice either. Had it moved beneath her? Had somebody else cried out at the impact, or was it just her? Best not to know.

The massive building was still, incredibly, continuing to collapse. Nadia didn’t see how, but it was. Every new hole, every stoved-in cell or chamber, created fresh instabilities, leading to another collapse, leading to another hole. The entire thing had been cast in one seamless piece, and in such a way that a single point of failure could lead to total destruction of the facility. How could Yefimov have built this place with such care in every other respect, yet make it so horribly unsafe?

On purpose, maybe. He hadn’t shown up himself. There was no sign of Snowdrop returning to shore up her masterpiece. And now Nadia suspected she had never planned to. Why should a senior oprichnik risk his life walking into such a deathtrap?

She spared a moment to look down at the battered Polat girl. Her face was still bleeding, if more slowly. Nadia picked one of the men around her at random, and ordered him, with her middling Turkish, to keep holding pressure. He scowled and balked, and she was inclined to hit him. Instead she added, “Please. She is a child, and hurt.” The man gave her a dead-eyed stare, so that she was on the verge of asking another when he shoved her aside and took the shirt out of her increasingly bloody hands.

It came to her, as she wearily sent Ézarine back to rescue work, that any number of innocent people had probably died while she lost time trying to preserve this reckless little murderer’s life. She couldn’t really justify it. Of course, Keisha had made similar arguments about Yuri … and, now that she thought of it, she hadn’t been able to justify him, either.

The conjoined voices of Ézarine and Mister Higgins inside her told her it was all stupid and pointless, that she ought to give it up and leave. But give what up? Was she supposed to go crawling back to Keisha, or let the girl die now to prove a point? The familiars had no answers to those kinds of questions. They never did, and never would. Nadia could not help agreeing with them, but she didn’t stop sending Ézarine back in, over and over, to haul out prisoners two or three at a time. And the familiars didn’t object, so long as she could frame the act as a kind of rebellion, as a refusal to engage with life on somebody else’s terms. They would comply just as cheerfully if she were sending Ézarine around to snap the men’s necks.

A violent coughing fit interrupted her gloom. She had almost certainly inhaled powdered glass. That would mean another “deduction” from the Bank of Khan, later. The thought filled her with a cynical glee she hated even as she felt it. But she kept Ézarine working. And working. One more here, two more there, a family of five all huddled together, a screaming toddler with no parents in sight picked roughly up and saved against her will.

Some time passed before she turned at a motion in the corner of her eye, and saw a cascade of bubbles pouring out of one upper gallery, bearing struggling men and women down to the increasingly crowded courtyard. She looked up, saw Mister Higgins bouncing in place above the devastation, and gave him an exhausted salute. Almost half of the prison looked to be gone by now, and the collapse was still spreading. The transepts dividing the yards were collapsing into little hillocks as the death-spasm ate its way across, leaving a single open space.

What was the point of this? To make Nadia into the killer of the people she had come to save? Why did he go to so much effort? She didn’t want to participate in whatever sick head game Yefimov was playing, but her mind wouldn’t leave the riddle alone.

She turned at a tap on her shoulder. The man she had detailed to take care of the child stepped away to show her the girl sitting up, holding the saturated shirt to her own face. “Good,” Nadia said, and turned back to her work, but the man grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back around. She managed not to hit him, but it was close. “What? What do you want?”

The man pointed to the child again, then handed her a slip of paper from a little pocket notepad. It was smeared and dappled with blood, but she could make out the writing in the center: Cinlerinizi kovun. Benimki duvarları taşıyabilir. “Dismiss your jinn. Mine can hold up the walls.”

Nadia looked at the bloodied child, who shot her a defiant glare for just a second before dropping her eyes to the ground. “Can I trust you?” The girl didn’t answer. It was a stupid question, anyway. Nadia spared one more moment to look at the still-disintegrating prison. What option did she have? She took a deep breath, and sent Ézarine away.

The disorientation that always followed a dropped halo barely had time to fade before a new vision replaced it. A frozen mountainside, ice shining in the sun, and a deep, bone-chilling cold. With no competition and a crowd of hundreds to draw from, the white fog blanketed the whole island in seconds. It was too thick to see even ten feet away, and Nadia found she did not care to look anyway. It was easier to sit down and shiver in place, and wait. She realized she had put her life in the hands of a girl who had every reason to be her enemy—but the fact didn’t seem especially significant now.

Presently she became aware that she could not hear the noise of collapse any longer. A moment after that she noticed she was not cold, and looked up into a clear blue sky. She glanced down, and saw that the ragged end of the transept was plugged with an absolutely colossal mass of ice, twenty feet thick at least. It would take hours to melt in this temperature. Long enough for the surviving population to evacuate at reasonable speed.

She felt that it would be polite to thank the child, but she couldn’t find the words, and it would have been awkward, with the girl huddled over and sobbing into a bloody rag. It seemed kinder to leave her alone. She looked away instead, to the place where the prison’s entrance had once been, and where Fatima and Maria were currently picking their delicate way over and through jagged hills taller than their heads.