The Mongolian Wizard Stories

by Michael Swanwick

  Kaśka seized Ritter’s hand and tugged him onward. “Through this door,” she said. “Up these stairs.” Ritter stumbled up three flights and down a long hallway. Keys rattled. Through the fog of pain, he saw that Kaśka was unlocking the door to a small, low-roofed room. “My home,” she said, “such as it is.” Then, with grim humor, “When my landlady learns I’ve had a man up, there will be hell to pay.”

  The room held a dresser with a pitcher and washbasin atop it, a wooden chair, and a narrow bed covered with a quilted white comforter. There was a single window, extending from knee-height almost to the ceiling. Ritter realized that this entire section of the floor was an afterthought, and had once been the upmost third of a much grander space.

  Ritter moved yearningly toward the chair but Kaśka shoved him onto the bed instead. His body crashed down on it, making the rope supports under its mattress tick groan. He struggled to rise but could not.

  “A garret is a terrible place to hide,” Ritter said weakly. Unseen hands of steel clasped his head and squeezed it so hard that he could no longer feel anything below his neck.

  “Not in Krakow.” Kaśka went to the window and threw it open. There was a heavy barred grille behind it which she unlocked and, with a grunt of effort, flung wide. Ice-cold air gushed in.

  With tremendous effort, Ritter managed to sit up. “What are you doing?”

  “Lie back down, you fool! Lie down and don’t move a muscle. Are you incapable of following a woman’s instructions?”

  “Kaśka,” Ritter said. “There is no sense in us both being caught. You can still escape.”

  “First of all, my name is Katarzyna Skarbek,” the woman said with some asperity. “Kaśka is a baby name, a diminutive. Bannik employed it because he was a pig and I put up with it because I was working undercover. These conditions no longer apply. So I will appreciate your never using it again.”

  “As you wish, Miss Skarbek. I was going to say . . .”

  “Secondly, your survival is the entire point. You should not even be here. The resistance went through a great deal to compile a report and pass it on to your Willoughby-Quirke. Did he even receive it?”

  “It was received but not believed.”

  “Gods! I should—hark! The witch finder is coming up the stairs.”

  Swiftly, Skarbek made sure the door was slightly ajar. Then she went to the window and stood facing outward, listening and waiting.

  There were footsteps in the hall outside. They stopped. The door was cautiously pushed open. A stocky man in black appeared in the doorway, pistol in hand. He gave Ritter a cursory glance, then looked toward the window. His eyes widened.

  The secretary had one foot on the sill and was about to climb out onto the roof.

  Slamming the door behind him, the witch finder crossed the room in three strides. He seized Skarbek by the shoulder and flung her back within. She collided with the dresser, sending the pitcher and washbasin clattering. Then he stood, back to the window, training the gun on her and blocking her only avenue to escape.

  A small smile of satisfaction played on the man’s face.

  Then it disappeared.

  Two stone hands closed about his throat. Then, so fast that he didn’t even have time to scream, he was hauled backwards through the window. Skarbek scrambled to her feet. She slammed shut the metal grate, locked it, and threw down the window.

  Blood spattered the glass.

  Ritter’s head was clearing now. He shook it and straightened. He looked out the window and saw three gargoyles fighting over the witch finder’s body, tearing open his flesh with talons and beaks. It took only an instant to be sure that the witch finder was dead. Then Ritter turned his back on the distressing scene. “That was an amazing piece of luck,” he observed at last.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it,” Skarbek said. “Every day, for months, I have been saving bits of my lunch and dinner and throwing them out on the roof for the gargoyles. The creatures come flocking at the sound of the grate rattling open.”

  ***

  It was evening when Ritter arrived in London, so he kenneled Freki and went to report to Sir Toby at his club. The hall porter at Boodle’s led him to a private sitting room where a fire had been lit and two glasses of cognac had been set out on a small table between green leather armchairs. Sitting staring into the hearth and holding the untasted drink cupped in both hands, Ritter thought back to Krakow and marveled that a single world could contain such disparities of condition.

  After a time, he saw the second glass rise up from the table. Consequently, he realized that the glass was held by a man sitting in the chair opposite him and that the man was none other than Sir Toby.

  Ritter laughed ruefully. “I’d almost forgotten you could do that.”

  “Entering rooms unseen is a small talent, but mine own,” Sir Toby said. “It was mere vanity that made me employ it now.” Then, all business, “What do you have for me?”

  Ritter relinquished the documents he had brought halfway across Europe and, as his superior perused them, narrated all that he had done and seen. The fire, meanwhile, burned low.

  When the report was made, Sir Toby said, “You realize that the young man you denounced as an arsonist was doubtless sent to the same camp you visited, and then killed.”

  “I am not proud of what I did,” Ritter said. “But neither do I feel guilty. There were children among those I saw slaughtered atop that damned pyramid.”

  “Of course.”

  “I do not feel guilty, I tell you!”

  “Ritter, I am neither your father nor your priest-confessor. Indeed, it is too often my job to convince you of the necessity of such acts.” Sir Toby slapped his jacket pockets, produced a cigar case, and flipped back the top. “Smoke?”

  Wordlessly, Ritter accepted the gift and then a light from his superior. The two puffed in silence for a time. Finally, Sir Toby sighed, evened up the papers, and tied them up in a bundle. “I will have these copied and distributed to the proper officials but . . .”

  “But?”

  “I believe you, Ritter. But will anybody else?”

  As coldly as he could manage, Ritter said, “Then all that I have seen counts for nothing? All the sacrifices that the Resistance made to bring you evidence, the men that had to be killed to get me out of Krakow alive, Miss Skarbek’s being driven into hiding, were just so much lost effort?”

  Sir Toby removed the cigar from his mouth and considered it thoughtfully. “You mustn’t think that, Ritter. In all confidence, you have made my job much easier. These past months I have been struggling with myself. There were certain actions which I hesitated to put into effect, some on moral grounds, others because they were simply so very dangerous. But now that I know the nature of what we are fighting, I can only conclude that I could do nothing worse than to let the Mongolian Wizard win this war. I think it is safe to say that absolutely anything is justified. Don’t you agree?”

  There was a serene expression on Sir Toby’s face. It was that of a man who had been fighting the darker angels of his nature for a very long time and was at long last given license to set them free.

  The Phantom in the Maze

  “But I already have as fine a pistol as is made anywhere,” Ritter said.

  “Not any more.” Sir Toby dropped the reluctantly surrendered flintlock, its barrel exquisitely engraved with stags and ivy leaves and its unicorn ivory grips carved with wolf heads, into a desk drawer. Then he handed his subordinate an oddly shaped and brutally unadorned sidearm. “This is called a ‘revolver.’ It wasn’t supposed to be invented for another forty years, but a team of scryers in Covington foresaw it and provided His Majesty’s engineers with blueprints. It loads easily and you can get off five shots, one after the other, without reloading.”

  “It hardly sounds gentlemanly.”

  “Being a gentleman,” Sir Toby said with some asperity, “is something I am trying to cure you of. Here is a box of percussion cartridges—another gift from
our friends to the north. Which is where I’m sending you next. There has been a murder.”

  “You suspect sabotage?”

  “Sabotage, espionage, sedition, treason, terrorism, incompetence, or happenstance. It must surely fall into one of those categories, unless it turns out to be something else. Finding out which is your job. Now hurry off to the firing range and get in some practice. You’re going to need it.”

  Ritter went.

  Buckinghamshire, in the early days of the war, was a grey and joyless place. To compound matters, an officer in an unfamiliar uniform who spoke with a pronounced German accent was an object of profound suspicion to the locals. As if their own military forces were incompetent to protect them from solitary invaders from the Mongolian Wizard’s territories! And to top it off, there was the food. Ritter was half-convinced it was what the locals fed to feared outsiders out of spite, and more than a little afraid that it was what they regularly ate themselves.

  “You don’t look like you’re enjoying your meal much,” Director MacDonald said. He was a sharp-featured man with lively eyes, whose idea, Ritter gathered, the entire operation had been. He seemed to be a civilian and a Scotsman as well. In Ritter’s opinion, he lacked gravitas.

  Ritter looked down at the boiled peas, boiled potatoes, and grey meat on his tin tray. “I assure you, parts of it are quite good.”

  MacDonald laughed. “You have a sense of humor! How unexpected.” Then, “I thought that perhaps you were put off by the looks that some of the girls are giving you. It’s only to be expected, you know. Most men with a talent for foresight are routinely attached to intelligence units at the front lines and consequently the ratio of women to men here is ten to one. The majority of them are single and of an age when one normally makes a marriage. So naturally they are interested in a strapping, good-looking fellow such as yourself.”

  “I honestly hadn’t noticed,” Ritter lied. Distracted, he pushed the tray away from himself—and knocked it off the table.

  From every corner of the room—baronial, high-beamed, and shabby in the way that takes generations of moneyed neglect to accomplish—girls burst into cascades of giggles. Coloring, Ritter realized that they had all paused in their meals to stare at him, waiting for the tray to fall. A canteen worker hurried to clean up the mess and he said, “Tell me about the murder.”

  MacDonald turned instantly serious. “Alice Hargreaves was the middle daughter of a dean of Christ Church, Oxford. She was identified as having a latent talent for foresight, recruited, and sent here for training and exploitation. She arrived at the Institute a week ago. The next morning, she was discovered dead.”

  “She had no enemies, then?”

  “There was no time for her to acquire any. Nor could it have been anything she foresaw, for her talent had yet to be unlocked. Of all the young women in our employ, she was the least likely to be murdered.”

  “Perhaps she discovered something—a spy in your operation or suchlike?”

  “On her first evening here? Highly unlikely.” MacDonald produced a thin metal rectangle, perhaps three inches long. “Here is what Miss Hargreaves looked like. Lovely, wasn’t she?”

  On the object was a monochrome image of a young woman—good looking, dark eyed, serious of expression. “What is this thing?”

  “A tintype. One of our less bellicose recoveries from the future. All our staff have their images recorded on arrival.”

  Ritter studied the image for a time, returned it, stood. “I will examine the scene of the crime now.”

  Freki had waited outside the Gothic stone building—originally a monastery, later converted to a mansion, then built over and added to by centuries of wealthy owners encumbered by not one whit of good taste, until the resulting whole resembled a witch-haunted mountain range in some treeless Northern land—while Ritter ate. Now, at a thought, the wolf trotted to his side. Together they followed Director MacDonald through the grounds and downslope to an oversized pond. Nearby was a yew maze, its hedges significantly taller than either man. They all three entered it.

  “The maze is left over from more opulent times,” MacDonald observed, “and I should warn you that the young ladies think it’s a romantic spot in which to rendezvous with their beaus. I suggest we keep up a steady line of chatter in order to warn anyone who might be lurking ahead. You have questions, I am certain. This would be a good time to ask them.”

  “Tell me about the method of precognition your ladies employ. My father always said that clairvoyance was the least of all magical talents, yet you seem to have disproved his thesis.”

  “Doubtless,” MacDonald said, “you think of the future as a country existing in a direction to which you cannot turn your eyes, and of precognitives as being able to peer ahead where you cannot. We look forward, yes—but into a blizzard. The future is always changing. You take extra time to shave one morning and as a result you miss the coach to Bristol and have to wait in London an extra day. So you strike up a conversation with an idler in your club, who tells you of a financial opportunity particularly suited to your talents. Thus you find yourself traveling on business to the Italian Alps, where a chance encounter with a brigand costs you your life. Every man makes such decisions every day and as a result, the future is in constant flux. Those brief islands of stability which people such as I have traditionally been able to glimpse, are rare and very particular to the individual: a vision of one’s future spouse, say, or the moment when one is about to set sail on a ship destined to sink with no survivors.”

  “But you changed all that.”

  “I did. When I reached adolescence and the talent came upon me, I was equally struck by its weakness and its potential. So I began to experiment. It was my innovation to create those islands of stability by training a precognitive to focus her thought backward toward her earlier self, sitting quietly in that identical same room at a specific time and thinking forward to herself where she would later be. I quickly learned that messages regarding the actions of individuals were wrong as often as not. But transmissions of simple material fact were inerrant. So I have created an institution that passes technological information backward in time for as long as a century, handed from seer to seer, like so many heliograph stations in time.

  “I see you carry one of our revolvers. Its design is something that we can confidently expect will not change between now and the moment one of our ladies sits down to sketch its workings for her younger self to read. Hence, its existence today, a hundred years before its invention.”

  “You dizzy me, sir.”

  “I intend to dizzy the world. Ah! Here we are. This is where Miss Hargreaves’ body was found.”

  Ritter looked about him. The center of the maze was the center of a maze. The hedges were hedges. The grass was grass. There was a bronze sundial with the motto Tempus Vincet Omnia. “How was she killed?”

  “With a rock to the back of the head.”

  “You have it still?”

  “Good lord, no! That would be morbid. It was promptly thrown into the pond as soon as the corpse was removed.”

  “Pity. Sir Toby has some excellent forensic wizards we could have called upon.” Ritter sent Freki nosing about the grass. “Could it have been a crime of passion?”

  “We brought in a hedge-witch specializing in midwifery. She verified that the corpse was still virgin. It had not been molested either before or after death.”

  “Was she able to establish the time of death?”

  “Midnight, or slightly thereafter.”

  The wolf picked up faint traces of human blood, the faded scents of many visitors, and nothing else of any interest. “There have been a lot of people through here.”

  “As I said, it is a popular place for lovers to meet.”

  “I will speak to the victim’s roommate now.”

  “Don’t speak to me!” Margaret Andrewes scowled down at a sheet of paper covered with mathematical formulae for a very long time. Occasionally she glanced up at the wall
, where hung a hand-drawn pasteboard chart showing thick colored lines that flowed in and out of one another. Finally, she turned over the sheet and, looking up, said, “I know why you’re here. Ask me what you will. I know nothing that will be of any use to you.”

  “You foresaw that, did you?”

  “No, of course not.” Andrewes’ eyes darted away from him but her voice was firm. “I met the girl only the once. We had dinner together in the commissary and then she went out for a walk and never came back. I was weary and went to sleep early that night. In the morning I saw that her bed had not been slept in. That was the first I knew that something was wrong. I notified Director MacDonald’s secretary, Miss Christensen, the grounds were searched, and her body was found. That’s all.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Where she could put her things. How to acquire a permanent meal card. Nothing personal, I’m afraid.”

  The office in which the interview was held was small, tidy, and without personality. The door to the back room (created, Ritter saw, by the addition of a wall halfway down the original space) was slightly ajar, revealing a bunk bed. The lower mattress was covered by a bright quilt. The upper one was empty.

  “I thank you for your cooperation, Miss Andrewes,” Ritter said at last. “We shall take our leave.” They stepped outside and down a long hallway of rooms, all small, each housing a pair of precognitives.

  Miss Andrewes had not looked at the director once. That meant something. Exactly what, Ritter had no idea, but he knew that it was significant. When they were out of earshot, he commented, “That was a striking woman.”

  “She can be quite likeable under ordinary circumstances.” Almost to himself, the director added, “A trifle plump, mind you. But pleasantly so.”

  “Excuse me, sir.” A lean, older woman, slight of profile and disapproving of mien, handed Director MacDonald a sheet of paper. “This just came in.”