Secondhand Sorcery

Most of the time, Ruslan liked to be alone. He loved reading, obviously, but he hated when people made it sound like that was the only thing he ever wanted to do. He’d enjoyed messing around on his harpsichord—back when he had one—and cooking, too, a skill he’d picked up long before he learned to read. He would have cooked a lot more often if people didn’t keep making fat jokes every time he did it. He drew sometimes, he could paint a little, he liked movies and TV and sometimes a video game or two. There were a lot of things he could do to have fun by himself.

He didn’t always like being alone. He didn’t like driving alone, even though he knew why he had to. He didn’t like driving at all, really, having to control this big metal box that could kill you or somebody else if you messed up—and Ruslan knew he messed up, at a lot of things, he wasn’t dumb—and having to do it without anyone to talk to for a distraction was worse. It left him alone with his thoughts. Controlling a car just wasn’t demanding enough to keep his attention on it.

When he was driving, he couldn’t help wondering what he was doing, and why. He didn’t believe in this whole plan to cut off the Russian army in Istanbul. He was sure it was too reckless, and would get them all killed. But most of the details were his ideas, volunteered willingly, without anybody even asking for them! Why? Because he knew it would happen anyway, and it would be a better plan with him helping.

It had been his idea to take out the whole Crimean peninsula at once, so the knyazya couldn’t just shift the supply lines a little. He’d been the one to pore over the maps, find the weak points. It had been his idea to smash the Kerch bridge, and let the wreckage block all the ports in the Sea of Azov. If it worked, it would cost Russia millions of dollars and force them to reroute half their supply chain. It was a way more clever plan than any of them would have thought up by themselves—and much more ambitious, and much, much more dangerous.

His reward had been a friendly punch in the arm from Fatima, who told him it was badass and hardcore. Then, a little later, a kiss on the cheek, and a thanks. Then they’d basically forgotten all about it, about it being his plan, and left him to do whatever until they needed him. And—he was ashamed to think it now, on the road with his thoughts again—it had been enough. That was why they were risking their lives on his plan. A punch on the arm and a kiss on the cheek. The knowledge that he wasn’t useless, that he was part of the group in some small way. Nothing more.

Was that enough?

They got to a roadblock, which was just annoying. They had a whole drill worked out in advance for if ordinary forces tried to stop them, one too simple to need Ruslan’s help. Maria stopped at the first sight of anything military, they all put on parking brakes, Shum-Shum came out and burned everything to slag, Mister Higgins got their convoy past the melted patch, and they lost all of two minutes. Why did these stupid people have to throw their lives away on something that wouldn’t work?

Well, why was Ruslan doing it?

His knuckles ached where they gripped the wheel. The pain was bad, and getting worse. He couldn’t remember ever punching anybody for real before, and still wasn’t sure why he’d done it. Fat, timid Ruslan in a fight, a physical fight? Who would have believed it? Not Fatima. She’d told him it was a good idea, just the wrong time, and sounded like she meant it. Ruslan didn’t see why. He already regretted it before she hauled him off. He’d been glad she stopped him.

Ruslan hated fighting, and always had, since he was little, and doing the cooking in Komron’s camp. Men gathered around the fire every evening, and bragged, and sometimes the bragging got out of hand, and they started punching, or got out knives, sometimes even guns. Then good food, food Ruslan had worked on, would be trampled or knocked into the coals, and men would fall into the tents, and trip over Ruslan and curse him for a treacherous little bastard while he cowered anywhere he could.

Morning light would arrive to find shrimpy little Ruslan holding up the lamp while two or three others struggled with shovels. A hole, six feet long and three wide, in hard dry mountain soil. Sometimes more than one hole, depending. It was supposed to be six feet deep as well, but that was a lot to ask. If the dogs came by later and dug them back up, well, that wasn’t their business. The camp moved on.

It was a sick irony that made Ruslan a soldier. Irony, and bad luck. Komron’s bravos drifted into the way of a bigger, stronger band, led by a foreign sorcerer, and Komron didn’t even get a shallow hole at the end. Ruslan was bigger, but still doing the cooking, when the new pack clashed with Dzhoraev, the Mad Doctor of Qarshi. Titus picked Ruslan, not any of the other kids from the fringes of the band, to win the dead man’s prize. Why? Because Ruslan looked like the easiest to control. Ruslan the cook, scared of his own shadow. Ruslan, who hated fighting.

And that was the rest of his life, right there. Ruslan, who hated fighting, and went along with everything else, and bent to every little push, even now when he was over a hundred kilos and (he was almost certain) sixteen years old. He kept driving with the convoy, because he always did, because he had nowhere left to go.

Almost there, he thought as the bridge came into view, the only positive thing he could think. The halo hit him like a cinderblock to the face, as he had known it would, and there was nothing he could do but drive through it. The bridge was eighteen kilometers long, and he would hate every second of the drive.

Before he was a kilometer in, he remembered her hands on his shoulders, kneading away at his muscles, while she told him he needed to relax. Her breath smelled like tobacco, the same as Fatima’s, and he knew he could feel the heat coming off of her body in the cold room. Relax, Ruslan, she said, right in his ear, as her hair tickled the side of his neck. Relax, she said, and shifted her weight on the bed so he could feel it, and he could imagine the movement of her hips. Her hands moved down to push at the spot between his shoulders, and he could not remember how she had come into the room, but he could feel his heart climbing up into his throat and cutting off the air to his lungs.

Two kilometers, and he wondered why he hadn’t thrown off those hands, and turned around, and used his own. She was there, and laughing at him, fat weak Ruslan, because he wasn’t even a man, and that was funny, and she was bored. He could have taught her to laugh at him, and worried about the consequences later. But that would have meant facing her, and Yuri, and Fatima, and he wasn’t strong enough for any of that and never would be. He couldn’t even tell her to go away.

Four kilometers in. Nadia pushing her way in, and looking at him with revulsion. Like he had chosen any of this. Like he hadn’t been reading his own book in his own room (or somebody else’s, because they were homeless now) when all this happened. Like he wanted her to be there—but he kind of did. Because this was what he could get. Mockery, from Maria. A dog will do tricks for table scraps, if he can’t get anything else.

Six kilometers, and the road ahead was longer than the road behind, and his hands hurt harder for clenching down on the wheel. He remembered Fatima coming back, and hiding from her in his room, a little child who knew he’d been naughty. Hiding. Why should she even be angry? Did she have some kind of monopoly on touching him? Why? She knew what he wanted, and she didn’t want it, and that should have been all. Why did Ruslan have to hide from her anger?

Eight kilometers, and Yuri was showing up late in the dacha’s driveway. Hey, bro! Remember that plan you came up with? That really careful plan that we all said was great? Well, while my girl was getting you hard for a laugh, I just messed it all up for ya! I made the Russians twice as mad and burdened us with a hostage. We’ll have to spend all our time worrying about running away and keeping somebody else from running away from us. Not that I thought about that when I did it. I don’t think about anything, I’m a total selfish creep who does whatever he wants and never gets hurt for it, and hey, why you mad, bro?

Ten kilometers, and he wondered if he would break the wheel from clenching. He deserved the pain, or wanted to. Feel those hands smashing right into Yuri’s face, over and over again, and it felt so good right up until it didn’t. Was he just like Komron’s men? No. If this didn’t work, Maria wouldn’t hang around to dig any holes, if this all went bad.

After twelve kilometers, he stopped counting. It was all he could do not to throw up, or jerk the wheel around to drive the truck off the bridge. He actually cried with relief when the end of the bridge came in sight. Then screamed in despair, when it was destroyed, and he knew he would have to endure the halo even longer. He didn’t pay attention to anything else, but drove automatically. Let them smash the lousy bridge to bits if they wanted. It wasn’t his halo, and this wasn’t his fight. He was tired.

That, more or less, was what Ruslan was thinking when his truck got torn in half. He didn’t see what did it, but it was pretty big and moving very, very fast. It hit the engine compartment dead-on—at least, that was how he figured it, later—and tore through the space just to his right, outspeeding its own shock wave that sent a thousand little bits of metal, plastic, and glass shredding into his body and face. The shockwave itself, just the way it shook the air as it went by, was enough to knock him stupid, so that he didn’t really feel it as the car shuddered and fell down in pieces. His seatbelt saved him from hitting either the doorframe or the bridge’s surface too hard when the newly made left and right halves of his truck fell apart. And that was all, for a while.

It took another halo to wake him, and that just barely, because it was so different. It hit Ruslan like a splash of scalding-hot water, so that he jerked upright, and knew at once that he was very hurt. There was pain all over inside him, and in his had, and across his face. He was sure he would look terrible, and that Fatima and Nadia would cry out in alarm when they saw him—the thought of their faces was strangely appealing. But that was a superficial detail, and did not matter.

A giant, a monster of black stone wrapped in fire, was stomping across the bridge less than a hundred feet away. Ruslan could feel faint tremors from every step he took. There was no sign of movement from the other two trucks. Evil approached, an obvious villain, and Ruslan had to assume he was the only person left to stop him. But how?

He tried to get up, and found he couldn’t; his midsection hurt too much, and the pain made him dizzy. After several tries he gave up and fell back against the asphalt, panting and struggling not to throw up. The black giant prowled around the scene, leaving a heat haze and steaming footprints in his wake. Against him, Ruslan, a feeble and inadequate figure, wracked by shame and now unable to rise to face him. You could hardly engineer a better mismatch! It was brilliant.

Something caught the giant’s eye, and he bent down to rummage inside the one undamaged truck. A girl screamed, and he drew back at once, looking horrified. Ruslan struggled harder, though it was no use. Who had screamed? He pictured Fatima, menaced by the monster, and managed to push his upper half off the ground, but only for an instant. Then he fell back down, defeated once more. But as he did, he felt something dig into his side, something small and hard.

The monster was in clear anguish now, and at a loss, pacing this way and that, starting in one direction, then stopping as he thought better of whatever plan he had just hatched. From time to time he peered back inside the truck, but he did not reach in, and there were no more screams. It would have been a fine moment for a speech, Ruslan thought—something to reveal what the colossus was thinking. But he didn’t. Possibly he couldn’t?

(Of course he couldn’t. The thing was clearly a familiar, and familiars didn’t speak. Ruslan knew that. But he couldn’t help feeling that to outright say as much spoiled the effect. The twenty-foot man was, dramatically speaking, a representation of his master, and now that he thought of it, rendering him mute in a moment of suffering added significant pathos. In that sense, it was wonderful linkage between plot and theme, though obviously inconvenient for exposition.)

The giant shuddered one more time, and melted into an equally huge bird, which took off and flew back across the gap between the bridge and the land. Ruslan understood: he was being given a chance to muster his resources for a last defiance, so they could learn if this was a comedy or a tragedy—only he seemed to be short on resources. He reached for whatever it was that he felt under him, and found a small silver flask in his jacket pocket.

It was, and should have been, Yuri’s. He’d used it many times in their escape from Syria, and forgotten, in his usual careless way, to replenish it after using it to get away from Lim Island. Only last night he’d discovered it empty, and foisted it off to Ruslan to refill, and forgotten to take it with him when he left this morning. It was entirely fitting, as Ruslan saw it, that Yuri’s incompetence and laziness could be their salvation for once. Such were the workings of chance and fate in mortal lives …

The giant bird had spent some time on the other side of the gap; now he returned, bearing something long and flat in his talons. Some kind of board? Whatever it was, it was already smoldering in his claws, and fell apart in flaming scraps before he could land. The monster gave a terrible roar of frustration, a noise like a jet engine, and flapped over to try and pick up the entire truck by its roof.

This was Ruslan’s moment. The stakes were clear, his strength was failing, and there was a simply magnificent symmetry in the way his opponent was a large bird as well. He was painfully aware that opening the flask now would entail a drastic change in the scene’s tone, but that couldn’t be helped. It was better to be bold and fail than cautiously and indifferently successful.

Kizil Khan emerged easily, banishing the manic energy that kept Ruslan going. At the same time, it was more difficult to sense the pain in his body as his own, or to care about it. The Russian familiar was knocked flying backwards across the gap, leaving Ruslan free to go about the business of life and death with a cold and dispassionate heart.

The Red King had fed reasonably well lately, on the leadup to the raid on the island. He gave life back with little effort, restoring all four of the girls inside the other vehicles to perfect health and vigor. Yuri was left as he was. Then, though he was not really hungry, he reached out and took the lives of the few surviving soldiers within his halo, before the emissor could reclaim them for his own uses. Some lived, some died. It was enough.

Only one life in the area now remained outside his power, on the other side of the hole in the bridge. It might be male or female, old or young, but it was alive, commanding an emissant of its own in a sovereign space a few meters wide. The thought scratched at Kizil Khan like grit in the eye, and he took to the air to banish the nuisance. Too late—and Ruslan had little strength left. When the enemy’s halo exploded back out, Kizil Khan not only retreated but faded away entirely.

Ruslan’s part, he saw now, was over. This was only the epilogue. He watched with his face pressed against the asphalt as the girl in the bloody brown apron burst out of the truck, shouting abuse at Yuri when he made to chase after her. An enormous ebony snake came rushing up to intervene, spitting sparks to force Yuri away. The girl shouted again, in joy this time, and ran towards the gap in the bridge, ignoring the snake entirely. He couldn’t see very well with the snake in the way, but there was no mistake in her tone. She was overcome with relief, running toward someone she knew and trusted. A touching reunion, perfect for an ending.

Then a gunshot sounded, just one shot. The enormous snake, which had been turning towards Yuri’s truck, shuddered, though there was no sign of damage on its glossy dark hide. The girl screamed, and faltered in her run, holding her hands to her face, then sinking down to her knees. Sudden tragedy—an admirable twist! But the black snake was already curling up on itself, convulsing in pain. This, Ruslan felt sure, would be the real and final end. The energy was ebbing out of him already. He closed his eyes and let sleep take him at the moment the curtain fell.