Secondhand Sorcery

It was a small town, and more than small, it was short—nothing over three stories. Shum-Shum had to be at least a kilometer away, and probably more, but Nadia could see him, a tiny sparkling speck of light amid clouds of dirty black smoke. The great bolts of lightning she knew he must be making were only faint and glinting hints from this distance, like bits of glass catching the sunlight. There were acres and acres of untouched wintry blue sky all around him. But that puny speck of light was surely killing men and women by the score, even now; left to his own devices, her brother would burn this whole town to ash.

The man Aare grunted from the backseat, his hand pointing to a spot well to Shum-Shum’s right. He’d thrown himself into their car without a word, while his erstwhile driver drove off with Maria in a sudden hurry; whatever the old lady believed about familiars, she didn’t seem to be eager to see one up close. “What is it? I don’t see anything.”

“Lamprey.” Therese shuddered, and lifted her head briefly from the steering wheel. But there was nothing there to see. Whatever the Lamprey did, he was more subtle than Shum-Shum. After a moment—just long enough for Nadia to see the tears running down her face—she slumped forward again.

“They are fighting? Then we need to intervene, don’t we?” Beyond a simple three-point turn to face them in the proper direction, Therese hadn’t done a thing since the music started. Only flopped down to sob against the wheel. They were losing precious time. Nadia put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Therese?” No response. She turned back to Aare. “What is she doing?”

The giant shook his head, and, still pointing at the same spot, said, “Four hundred meters.” His hand moved over to point back at Shum-Shum. “Twelve hundred meters.”

“To what? To the emissors, or the emissants?”

“To the centers of their halos.” He frowned, very slightly, then added, “Hers is moving, but not fast.” His face was flat and blank as a brick wall, or a sheer cliff face rising out of the sea, and his eyes looked right past her before he shut them again. Was this how clairvoyants were supposed to act? Dr. Gus hadn’t, but then, she couldn’t recall ever seeing him in a trance.

She took Therese by the shoulder again, and shook her. “Please, Therese, we have to—ouch!” A pale left hand darted out like a snake, and slapped her away. “Stop that! We have to go now.” No reply but a slur of indistinct and probably impolite French, addressed to the steering wheel. “Aare, please help.”

“Five hundred meters.”

“Damn it, I don’t care about that! What is she doing? Don’t you know this woman?”

Another frown, barely perceptible. “Pyotr is dead. She grieves. So do I.” And his face went blank again.

“Pyotr? Who is Pyotr? No, don’t answer that, it doesn’t matter. Don’t you see that we have no time for this? I thought you came here to help us!”

Therese lifted her head again. “It is too late for that,” she croaked. “The Lamprey hunts. You cannot stop him.”

“I can try.”

“We tried too. For years. We even shot her, once. She just came back. And now … now he is gone, and the Lamprey remains.”

Aare grunted, and swiveled his hand back to Shum-Shum. “He moves too. Faster. Impingement in—”

“Oh, you are useless!” Nadia snapped. “Therese, I am an emissor too.”

“You are a child with a stolen toy. He is fear.” She turned her blotchy face to glare at Nadia. “Do you understand that? Pure fear. You cannot even think in his presence, only run and crawl and die.”

“I have faced fear before. I beat Yunks. And I know Sovereign Protocol.” She put her wall back up as she said it. She should have done it earlier.

“You know nothing,” Therese corrected. Her hand was shaking as it moved back to the gearshift. “We are leaving now. We find shelter, space and time to think. Later, we can plan—“

“No!” Ézarine settled on the car’s roof with a loud thump. “We will not do that! That is my family, my entire family. I will not abandon them.”

Aare let out a loud groan, and fell forward against the back of Nadia’s seat. Therese’s face went pure white. “Look what you have done, you wretched little slut!” She grabbed Nadia by the hair and yanked her around so she could see the man clutching at his head. “Now we are blind! She could be right next to us and we could not tell.”

Ézarine was there in an instant, chopping down on the woman’s arm. Nadia wrenched her head free, leaving a good part of her hair behind. “He was not helping anyway. Are you done crying? Are you ready to do your job?”

“You are not my job,” Therese snarled back, leaning over and clutching her arm to herself. “And what would I do? Now I can’t even drive!”

“She didn’t hit you that hard,” Nadia said. Shum-Shum was definitely on the move, getting closer. He was big enough for Nadia to see his shape. And his opponent? “What does this Lamprey do, anyway? Can he attack from a great distance, like … like the one on the bridge?”

“No,” Therese groused back, “but she doesn’t need distance. She will have an ample supply of ectoplasm. Oprichniki keep an enormous reserve. How much does your jackass of a brother have?”

“None at all, we spent ours yesterday. How much do you have?”

Therese’s laughter was halfway to a shriek. “No reserve? ‘None at all’? When I think of all we lost to help you, and you pathetic worthless brats don’t even have the sense—“

Ézarine clapped a hand over her mouth. “How much do you have?” The woman struggled uselessly a moment, then skewered Nadia with a venomous glare. “Show me.” Still glowering, she extracted a silver cylinder from under her coat, thunking it down in one of the cupholders. Then another, which landed more lightly. “How full?”

Ézarine let go, and Therese said “The first is full, the second perhaps half.”

“Thank you,” Nadia snipped, and picked up both kitties to stow in her coat. She thought for a moment, then dismissed Ézarine, leaving only her wall behind.

Therese shuddered, and fell limply back into her seat, still ghastly white. “What are you going to do?” Her voice was weak and flat. Valence shock would be worse, when she’d been all worked up right before the emissant came out.

“I don’t think she can find or track me with just Sovereign Protocol up. Can she?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Aare, can you see me now?” But the big man was still hunched over with his head in his hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that would happen. But I couldn’t leave my whole family to die. I hope you can underst—”

“What are you going to do?” Therese repeated.

“I want to go deep into her halo, get as close to her as we can, and break open the kitty. The full one,” she added, hoisting it for emphasis. “What do you think she will do then?”

Therese looked up at the roof of the car. “I do not know for sure. But she feels her valence the same as anyone else. I think a sudden attack would terrify her, and send her running, at least for a while. She has always been a coward. Nobody else could make such a beast.” She turned her face to Nadia; she looked like she hadn’t slept in three days. “Not that it matters. Your plan won’t work. As soon as we enter the halo you will be as weak as she is.”

“I won’t,” Nadia corrected her. “I won’t feel anything but Ézarine’s anger. But I can’t shield you without the full halo. You will feel everything. The question is, are you strong enough to face it? For your husband?”

Therese sat up and reached for the clutch again, her hand steadier now. “I will not be condescended to by the likes of you,” she said, and put the car back into gear. “We will probably die, you know.”

“I might not want to live if we don’t try.” The car lurched violently into motion, and Therese cursed under her breath as she eased off the gas. “Can you do this?”

“Yes, I can drive!”

“Fine.” She knew she ought to be feeling more compassionate for this woman, but right now Shum-Shum was the only thing between her family and an oprichnik. “What does the Lamprey do, anyway?”

“He melted my husband’s flesh clean off his bones,” said Therese, not taking her eyes from the road. Her knuckles, too, were white, against the black of the wheel. “Slowly. He screamed for a very long time, as did I, while I ran for my life, because I could do nothing else, nothing at all. And the very same thing will happen to you.”

“I’m sure you’re looking forward to it. Does he make fire, or some kind of acid, then?”

“Acid, poison, something like that. Whatever he likes. Nothing in a halo is real, it doesn’t have to make sense. Didn’t you know that?”

“Let me know when you feel the halo,” Nadia said, refusing the bait.

“Oh, you will know.”

They were not going nearly as fast as they could, but Nadia didn’t want to risk pushing her harder. It was still faster than Nadia could run. They were the only car on the road now, and had been for some time. A few faces appeared at windows as they passed, but not looking at them. A pregnant young woman stood in a yard holding her small child, covering his face with one hand so he would not look at the pretty flashing lights she stared at herself. The woman’s expression was not so very different from Therese’s … but their car moved on, and Nadia lost sight of her.

Ten seconds later, Aare simply fell over in the backseat, still holding his head, and Therese braked hard. “Here,” she said, and jerked her head around to look over her shoulder, then swung back to check the road ahead again. There wasn’t a person in sight, only a row of houses, a post office, and a pretty little church on the corner. The sun shone down brightly everywhere, but Therese was shaking. “We are here. Do what you came to do. Now.”

“We need to be nearer—“

“No, we don’t! Do it now!”

“She will barely notice it here. I need to be up against the center of her halo.”

“You don’t know where he is! Nobody does. He goes where he likes.” She was twitching, looking this way and that, her head never still. “I warned you. He is death.”

“No, fear. Only fear, you said. You are stronger than this, Therese. Keep driving.”

“Fear and death.” She was scrunched over, trying to make herself physically smaller. “Fear, death, pain. He moves in the dark, and you don’t see him, you don’t hear him, but he comes from behind and rips the life out of you, you mad child, and I am mad, mad to have let you bring me here. He will find us, he is hunting now—“

It was hopeless. Nadia made sure she still had both jars, and got out of the car to walk. Before she had gone three steps the car reversed into a sharp turn and drove away with the tires squealing. It was all Nadia had expected. Maybe Therese would feel differently when she got free, but she wasn’t going to count on it. She was on her own.

Nobody was looking out their windows here. The street was silent, and nothing moved but the wind blowing a few dead leaves over the grass. In the distance, the sky was one great black cloud of smoke, but she couldn’t see Shum-Shum, and his awful music was gone as well. Normally a good thing—and maybe he had simply retreated, to let Mister Higgins fight instead—but it still struck her as ominous. She broke into a run, so that the two kitties clunked against her chest.

She was afraid, and that was a problem. There was plenty to fear here; she could fear for Yuri, for Fatima, or poor ailing Ruslan, or even her own self, but the moment she became more frightened than angry her wall would come down like Jericho’s, and she would be no better than Therese. And then—no. She could not think about it.

Instead she concentrated on the shuttered windows she passed, on all the people who must be cowering inside, fearing for their lives, because of this woman and her sick, sick mind. What kind of familiar—whose whole mentality, boiled down—was propelled by being afraid of everything, all the time? And who put such a lunatic in charge of security for a whole region, with millions of people?

She could be frustrated with Yuri, too, for breaking out Shum-Shum in the first place, even at the risk of terrible death and devastation. She could be angry at herself, for never trying to stop him, never fighting harder to convince him to even try to be a better person, for so easily forsaking the promise she had made to Metakken’s master in exchange for her life. She could be angry at Maria for her treachery, at Fatima for her callousness, at Ruslan for his weakness. And at the world, for making her dwell on all this, this poison in her heart, just to stay alive.

After three blocks of jogging, she was out of breath, and had to stop. It came to her that she had no way of knowing that this Lamprey was still active and in the area; he might have moved on. The only way to find out would be to drop her wall and risk falling into his power. Another unanswerable problem. Of course, she could still open the kitty, and force the confrontation, at any time … but not yet. Instead she went back running, making the smoke on the horizon her north star.

Where was she now? She didn’t even know this town’s name. Her mind went back to that evening in December, on her way into Fatih to find Ézarine. She’d had tools then, and a dowser—had Therese had a dowser she could borrow? Too late to check now. There was no backup on the way, no Ruslan in the plane; now she was coming to help him. She felt more alone than she had ever been.

She was crossing the street near the town’s high school when she heard the scream. Not the cry of a teenager, but a small child’s, long and hysterical and high-pitched. It kept going as she ran towards it with one hand on the lid of the heavier jar inside her coat, pausing only to draw breath. It cut off abruptly before she could reach it, as if an adult had simply clapped a hand over the child’s throat. By then she did not care, because she had rounded a corner, and seen what they were screaming at.

A tall and slender man stood at the crossroads, a bare two blocks away—a man so tall he brushed his top hat against the traffic lights, setting them jiggling and not even noticing. He wore a dark old-fashioned coat as well, with a long tail down to the knees in the back, and pinstriped pants, and a matching black cane, all very elegant. Something on the ground seemed to catch his eye, and he bent over, his back curving like a hoop.

It happened in a blink: one moment he was leaning down, the next he was racing along the ground like a gigantic black snake, a streak of darkness rushing across the road too fast for the eye to follow. By the time her mind and eyes caught up he was a man again, a man like a black obelisk, standing directly over her and looking down. His cane was tucked under his right arm, while his left hand pulled back the brim of his hat so he could see her. But she could not see him—at least, not his eyes, which remained in darkness. His teeth, on the other hand, were brilliantly white, and extraordinarily pointy, and simply gigantic, even compared to the rest of him. He looked like he could bite a normal man in half.

“You would be the Lamprey,” she said, looking up at him calmly. It was nearly noon now, a bright and clear day in early March, with scarcely a shadow to be seen, and she knew she could defend herself. She had her hand on the jar-lid already. In the darkness, with the full strength of his halo to draw on, he would probably be terrifying. By day and without it, he was only a silly freak. A silly freak who had threatened her family, and subjected hundreds of people to needless terror.

He cocked his head at her, evidently puzzled. She wondered if he had any eyes at all under that hat, and what kind of expression they had now if he did. “No,” she told him, forcibly stretching her face into a smile to match his own, “I’m not afraid of you.”

And she turned the lid.