Secondhand Sorcery

They went back to war on Monday, the twenty-fourth of March. It was the day before Nadia turned thirteen. She could think of a lot of other ways she would have preferred to celebrate.

The plan was as simple as they could afford to make it. “Simple is best,” the Imam told them. “The more complicated the plan, the more small moving parts, the faster it will go wrong.” But it couldn’t be too simple; they needed overwhelming force to be sure of taking down an oprichnik. The Imam, correctly, didn’t want Yuri anywhere near populated areas, so that left Nadia and Fatima to do the heavy lifting. Therese and the Imam together would arrange the bait.

They had no clairvoyants, only a bunch of black-market dowsers which wouldn’t work inside a halo. To make things worse, Pugachev’s power was unusually good at keeping him safe; the illusory worlds he generated would have would-be assassins running into walls and tripping over curbs.

What about Nadia and Fatima? Would sovereign protocol keep them safe, or did the illusions generate actual light which didn’t count as a paraphysical effect? The Imam freely admitted he had no clue, and there was no way to find out. They would have to figure it out as they attacked, and react accordingly.

“Sure, it’s a gamble,” Fatima told her as they wheeled Ruslan back down the mountain trail to civilization. “But everything’s a gamble, isn’t it? Gotta roll the dice sometime. Anyway, you’ve got me backing you up. Worse comes to worst, we straight-up know this son of a bitch can’t affect anything outside his own halo. All he does is play tricks. He’s nobody.”

“Don’t let your hubby hear you say that,” she muttered, taking care that Fatima couldn’t hear either. Apparently Pugachev was in the habit of using his power for propaganda purposes, inflicting full-immersion ‘educational’ experiences on local citizens, illustrating how regressive and barbaric Islam was supposed to be. His valence—contemptuous disbelief—made it all that much more effective, even when it appeared during Friday prayers (as it usually did). The mosques in the capital, and every adjacent town, were now deserted, when they hadn’t been demolished. Ramzan Magomed wanted Pugachev dead with a venomous passion, and Fatima agreed.

That made Nadia nervous—and seriously annoyed her as well. How often had her sister called her a zealot, or obsessive? But after less than a week on that mountain, Fatima had practically gone native, and wouldn’t hear a word against any of these people. Especially not Ramzan Magomed al-Murid, who was very attentive to her, and trying to learn a bit of Pashto. Ugh.

Nadia put out a hand to steady Ruslan’s wheelchair as they rounded a curve. He looked up at her, and smiled. He was smiling a lot, these days. Talking a little, too. Not sentences, not anything brilliant, but little words. He said ‘cup’ when he was thirsty, things like that. He could also walk a little, with help to hold him steady, and he was almost past the need for diapers.

All that wasn’t enough, in her opinion, to justify taking him to Petrovskoye with them. But Fatima didn’t want to leave him behind in Gamsutl’ with Yuri and Maria, for some mad reason, and the Imam actually listened when she said he might be able to heal someone if things went downhill. The indulgent bridegroom—Nadia tried not to think about it. It was just too revolting.

Fatima was humming some tune or other for the whole last kilometer of the trail; once or twice she even sang little snatches to herself, some Afghan song Nadia had never heard her sing before. Nadia kept her mouth shut, and her eyes ahead—only the Imam was leading, naturally, so she tried to focus on Therese instead. She’d been listless ever since they came to Dagestan, simply sleepwalking through every day. They had phone reception in Gamsutl’ somehow, which she was using to check on Aare now and then, but as for their plans, or the future in general? She was content to do anything, as long as it hurt or embarrassed the Russian government. As though her life had ended with her husband’s, and she was simply amusing herself going through the motions. It wasn’t any more reassuring than Fatima’s mad enthusiasm.

At last they reached the dilapidated little town at the foot of the mountain, where Ruslan, with a lot of coaching and help from Fatima, shakily hoisted himself into the back of a car. Fatima clapped, cheered, and kissed him on the cheek when he succeeded, and did a little dance as she wheeled the chair around to stow it in the trunk.

Nadia bit her tongue the whole time, but something must have shown in her face, because when Fatima came back around to get in she added, “Hey, he’s making progress already, and this is going to help a lot. You just watch.”

“What’s going to help? Taking him on a mission, into combat?”

“He’s not going to be ‘in combat.’ He’ll be staying on reserve, with Amina watching him.” She gestured to the nurse, who was buckling herself into the passenger seat up front. “But he’s always had my back before. It makes me feel lucky, you know? Me and Rus, together again.” She reached into the car to tousle his hair, like he was a dog or a baby, and he gave her another big smile. Nadia took the opportunity, while Fatima wasn’t looking, to roll her eyes. Her face was straight again when Fatima turned around and added, “’Combat,’ my ass. Ain’t gonna be no combat. Today, we’re assassins. That little bitch can’t even fight.”

You said you wanted Ruslan as a backup healer. But she smiled, and said, “I hope you’re right.” Then turned away to get in her own car.

Fatima called after her, “Wait and see, baby. I bet I won’t even need to do anything. You’ll take him right down.”

The refinery was at the extreme north end of Petrovskoye. Nadia’s car had the shortest drive, dropping her off at a public library a little ways to the south, with a phone and four small kitties in her jacket pockets. She knew she looked perfectly innocent, and tried to act it as she walked in to peruse the shelves until everything was in position.

The two adults, in their own car, were headed straight for the refinery—the Imam to comprehensively wreck it while Therese tore up most of the roads leading to it, forcing Pugachev to approach slowly, from a limited number of directions. Of course, it would also make the situation much more dangerous for the two of them; any retreat would be just as slow and difficult. Nadia couldn’t deny that the Imam had courage, or say that he wasn’t committed to helping them. When it came to Therese … Nadia wondered if the woman simply didn’t care any more what happened to her.

That left Fatima, and Ruslan, who would be headed north and west of the refinery to wait as reserves in some coffee shop or other. Pugachev was almost certain to come from the south; there was hardly any city to speak of north of the target, and he usually stayed in Petrovskoye. But if he did come that way, Fatima would be in position to take him down. And it would all start within the hour, as soon as the Imam gave the call.

So far, so good; nobody was even looking at her. She didn’t really know her way around, but walked quickly to seem like she did. She wound up in the adult section, where she walked around until she got to the section with sewing patterns. God only knew where the dress was that she and Fatima had worked on for so long. Probably they would never start another; whatever happened, Nadia was not going to help her make a wedding dress.

The minutes passed slowly. She finished leafing through the pictures in one book, put it back, got out a denser one with more text to read and sat down. Not that she could really take it in, but it made her look busy. Her eyes flicked over the pages, and she wondered if she was being unfair, or if she really had a reason to think this wouldn’t work. The Imam’s people had never yet attacked the capital, or anywhere else more than a few miles from their hideouts. Pugachev had no reason to expect them to attack here, now or ever. They really should have high odds of winning, or of retreating safely even if Pugachev got away.

And what then? That, maybe, was what was really bugging her about this. If she was being honest, she really didn’t like any part of this. She didn’t like being tied up with these people, she didn’t trust them or their fanaticism or their oh-so-sophisticated political plans to have grown men marry teenage girls.

Most of all, she didn’t like what was happening their family. Ruslan was getting better, and that was great, but he wasn’t all there yet. Yuri and his whore were barely even part of the group anymore. The last person she could really talk to, the last person besides her who really believed in them as a family, had been Fatima—and now this pervert in his stupid furry hat was putting up a wall between them as well. What if this worked? Was she going to be some kind of Christian auxiliary to their mountain-barbarian jihad she didn’t even believe in?

She knew that didn’t excuse her not trying her hardest to help today, or rooting against its success. She believed with all her heart that the Knyazya had no right to trample on these people and make a mockery of their beliefs. But, all the same …

If this had to happen, she would rather it happened quickly, so she didn’t have to worry. A glance at her new phone; it had been twenty minutes, more or less, since she stepped out of the car. She messaged Fatima: “R U in position?”

A few seconds passed. “4 last 5 mins.”

For heaven’s sake. “Smth wrong w imam?”

“No msg yet. Dont want 2 call n distract.”

“Ok. 5 more mins?”

“Sure.”

She went back to her book, and got three or four more lines in before abruptly getting up, leaving it open in the chair. She quick-walked to the closest bathroom—people hurried to the bathroom all the time, it was fine—locked herself in a stall, and whipped out her dowser. It was old Soviet junk, and took twenty seconds to warm up, but when it did it found something right away. Northeast, it said. It didn’t have a GPS or map, just a compass. There were some numbers too, but she didn’t know what they meant. Field size or strength, number of signatures, something like that.

What were they thinking, starting without calling them? Fatima could be deferential and polite if she wanted; Nadia wasn’t going to bother. She messaged Therese right away: “What R U doing???”

She sat down on the toilet, pants up, and stared at the screen. The message just hung there, unanswered, until she started counting in her head for something to do: one, two, three, four … she got up to thirty-five, checked the timestamp on the message. A full minute ago.

A second message, to the Imam. No answer. Too busy spinning out monsters to check their phones? But why had they started early? Or was it even them making the dowser ping? She thought of trying to call Fatima a half-second before her own phone rang. “Hello?”

“Hey, girl. So … it’s not you. Huh.”

“No. You tried your dowser too? Where is yours pointing?”

“Southeast.”

“So it’s where they’re supposed to be. Can you read the numbers and stuff?”

“What numbers? Hold on, homegirl’s fussing at me on this end. What? What is it?” Nadia heard snatches of Russian, but nothing comprehensible. “Hell. I don’t know what’s got her losing her shit here.”

“Put her on.”

Amina’s voice came through. “Your brother has gone insane! He’s using his jinni!”

“What? Did something upset him? What was he doing before he started?”

“How should I know?”

“Because he’s right there with—no, wait. How is your phone working, if he’s using his familiar?”

“Not the one in the wheelchair. Your other brother!”

“Yuri?”

“They just called me. Gamsutl’ is burning.”

“Oh. Oh. Oh my God.” Nadia might not have wanted this alliance, but she was dead certain this wasn’t how she wanted to end it. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but there was no reason why Amina should know the answer to any of them. “Put Fatima back on, right now.”

“How bad is it?” Fatima asked. “Sounded pretty bad.”

Nadia braced herself. “It sounds like Yuri’s brought out Shum-Shum, back on the mountain.”

“That mother—“ Nadia clapped her hand over the speaker, and turned her head away for good measure. She wasn’t much worried about random library patrons at this point, but English conversation was conspicuous enough without loud English profanity. The Imam had a lot of agents in this town—spies, mostly, but some armed men shipped in as backup for this operation. Like the drivers they were relying on to get them out of town. How would they react to this?

Fatima sounded like she was winding down. Nadia cut off the rest. “We need to contact Therese, now. She’s the only adult ally we have left. I think I should call her. I’m going to hang up, okay?”

“Whoa, whoa. What do you mean, ‘only adult ally’?”

“Seriously? If you don’t get it, I’m not going to waste time explaining it to you.” She hung up, and dialed Therese in a frantic hurry, praying to get through before Fatima called her back. But all she got was a message telling her that the number couldn’t be reached. She hung up and tried again, and got the same result. Damn it.

She let the message loop while she sat back against the toilet tank, feeling tired. Therese wasn’t answering texts, her phone couldn’t be reached, the Imam wasn’t answering texts, the dowser was pinging nonstop and

oh God

She stood up, shoved the door open, and dashed out, dialing Fatima as she went. Her sister answered with, “Might need a second here, Amina’s being a royal—“

“It’s a halo,” Nadia said. “Get out.”

“What?”

“I can’t reach Therese’s phone at all, and neither of them has messaged back. Our dowsers aren’t reading VRIL constructs. It’s a halo.” She was speed-walking through the library’s lobby now, getting lots of stares for her loud English conversation. She had the dowser back up, but it was directional and she didn’t want to take the time to mess with it.

“A halo? Why the hell would there be a halo? They just knocked down a cell tower or something, girl. Don’t be crazy.”

“We’ve been betrayed! Plenty of people knew about this operation, one of them leaked, whoever it was knew where we were going too, so get moving, right now, before you get yourself killed!” She was out of the library now, hanging out in the entrance with a beeping dowser in her pocket while she struggled not to shout her English conversation too loudly.

“The Imam vets his people, Nadia. Even if it is a halo, for all we know Therese was holding out on us, like Kei—“

“Why in the hell would she keep that secret? If she had a familiar, why didn’t she use it against the Lamprey? Nothing about that makes any sense. Pugachev has them. Get out!” She hung up, took a deep breath, and dialed for her driver. If he was hostile—damn that Yuri—he was still less hostile than whatever the oprichnik would send. Assuming the driver wasn’t a mole himself … God, she hated thinking like this.

But the driver agreed to come without comment. As soon as the call ended she called Fatima again. There was nothing for it but to keep trying until she talked some sense into the girl. In the meantime, where to? Back to base? No. She had to stay in range to back up Fatima and Ruslan, and if the enemy had a halo around Therese and Magomed, well, she knew where he was. She owed Therese, at least, and probably the Imam too, if only for a few days’ hospitality.

She was so caught up in her thoughts that it took her several seconds to notice that her phone was telling her, in a dry recorded voice, that the number she was trying to reach was not available.