Terzian had given her magic and the best version of herself. It was liberating, intoxicating, exhilarating, infatuating. She learned everything she could about sorcery, spells, the Flame, Terzian himself. It took digging, and patience, for there were things too terrible for even the most jaded to divulge. But rumors and legends swirled about Terzian like dust in a windstorm, and eventually she heard them all. Little wonder, then, that even today she felt a frisson of awe, or perhaps trepidation, when she gazed across the empty warehouse to the wizened little man with the booming voice, hunched in a battered metal folding chair.
Though spring had arrived, winter had not yet relinquished its chilly hold on the city. It kept one last finger hooked around Prague, like a destitute dowager clinging to her last pearl. Zerena could see her breath; it made her grateful for the wig, and the extra warmth it afforded her. Normally she’d have used a glamour charm to disguise herself on the way to the meeting, but Tanya and her Ice cohort would be alert to such tricks. Wigs required no magic.
Sasha huddled near the pair of oil heaters Zerena had arranged for Terzian’s comfort. But the old man had spurned the accommodation, instead sitting on cold metal with no coat and his shirt unbuttoned halfway to his waist, revealing wisps of silvery chest hair over papery, liver-spotted skin. Meanwhile Edvard, who was easily twice Terzian’s size and half his age, shivered like a newly shorn lamb.
Maybe he was remembering what had happened to Karel.
Zerena suppressed the urge to tremble, herself. Terzian hadn’t come to Prague for a friendly visit. He’d come because things had gone wrong. But she had to keep her head, had to show Terzian that she was the true and proper steward of the Flame’s efforts in Prague. And, eventually, worldwide.
And that meant being strong. So, unlike the others, she didn’t flinch when the old man berated them.
“Have you found the vigilante, as I ordered?”
Edvard swallowed. Zerena could read the expression on his face, see him recalling how Karel begged for mercy even as his body disintegrated. “No, sir. But we will.”
“Your operations in this city are pathetic, and this unknown player knows it as well as I.” Terzian’s Armenian accent boomed from the dusty corners of the room, belying his frail and withered frame. “Nothing but sheer incompetence can explain how, in a city that draws Hosts as grain draws rats, you consistently fail to establish control over them.” His quiet rage had the man sweating.
Terzian’s forehead glistened as he turned his unsettling gaze upon the KGB station chief. “I have yet to address how your bungling doomed one of our most well-placed colleagues.”
Dominic Alvarez was still missing and presumed dead.
Sasha blanched. He cleared his throat. “To be fair, sir, the failed defection was a political triumph—”
“I care nothing for your politics.” The old man glared at his subordinates as if lecturing a particularly dimwitted group of students. “Empires, unions, democracies, republics—they’re all equally pointless. And all equally flammable. I care only about recouping our losses.”
Terzian had been just a young man during the genocide perpetrated against his people, but already well on his way to being a Flame adept. Apocryphal or not, the stories about what he’d done during those dark years made it clear that he embraced a blazing contempt for the politics of empire. And a tireless drive to see the institutions of man reduced to ashes.
Zerena cleared her throat. “I submit, sir, that the raid on the barge was not the unmitigated disaster it first appears. Not remotely.”
There had been a time when being the sole focus of his attention had made her tingle. But now when she met his eyes, she recognized the unblinking, predatory gaze of a shark. Sharks were killers, but they hadn’t evolved in eons. They were good at one thing. They weren’t clever, they weren’t adaptable. So she kept the quaver out of her voice, and continued.
“With the Hosts dead, their elementals have come untethered. I’m sure you’ve already noticed, during your short time here, how unreliable certain charms and spells have become.”
“Stop beating around the bush, Wraith. I’m old, not immortal.”
“Right now Prague is rife with free elementals. This is an opportunity, not a catastrophe.”
The silence was heavy as a brickbat. Even Edvard’s shivering fell quiet. After the others took a moment to absorb her full meaning, Sasha said, “Are you completely out of your mind?”
“Shut up,” Terzian barked. He wobbled to his feet, leaning heavily on a mahogany cane. Into its handle were carved the scalloped spirals of the Armenian eternity sign, like twinned whirlpools of yin and yang swirling widdershins and deasil. Zerena would have given anything to study the enchantments packed within that object, hidden away like a Victorian dandy’s sword. Terzian hadn’t used a cane when last she’d seen him, several years ago. She suspected it wasn’t just the accumulated weight of his considerable age that stooped his shoulders. Terzian was no stranger to failure.
“And you’re the one to lead a new ritual. Is that so?”
And now for a dash of humility. “No, sir. But I would devote myself to its success, and lend my energies to it.”
Sasha found his voice again. “This is bold. Even for you, Zerena. Only a fool would even think about…” He trailed off as his gaze flicked momentarily to Terzian. An awkward beat passed as he obviously wondered if he’d misspoken. He limped to a finish: “…without years of preparation.”
“But it can be done,” she countered.
“You’ll fail, and you’ll leave nothing but ashes strewn in your wake. Are you truly so reckless, or have you simply forgotten the exponential scaling of risk?” Sasha shook his head and looked, pointedly, at Terzian’s cane. “One need only remember Cairo to find a disaster that eclipses our own failure to capture the barge.”
The senior magician said nothing for a long moment, raking both of them with his dead eyes. Sasha went deathly still. Beads of sweat trickled under Zerena’s wig; if Terzian unleashed his rage, it would shred her best protective wards. Shared history would not save her.
“In Cairo we lost blazing adepts compared to whom none of you are but the faintest ember. We lost others in Rome and Peking. I alone emerged from that disaster with my mind intact.”
“The attempt in Cairo to create a new Host was an experiment,” Zerena said. “A proof of concept. Nobody knew if it was possible.”
“It was and is.” Terzian’s voice boomed. “But somebody interfered, and now a crucial enabling artifact is lost.”
“Just as somebody interfered when we moved on the barge, and now those Hosts are lost. They drift across the city, an untapped resource that we can exploit.” Zerena steeled herself to meet Terzian’s scowl, eye to eye. “That we must exploit.”
Sasha rose to his feet. “Who are you to tell us what we must do? You seem to think your past failures have been overlooked. You’ve forgotten your place.” To Terzian, he said, “Do you know, sir, that she has personally taken an Ice asset under her protection? When I caught Tatiana Morozova with an illegal radio in her apartment, Zerena claimed it was at her husband’s behest. Yet this device was imbued with a powerful construct. One derived from Ice magic.”
“I have studied that construct,” said Terzian. “An amusing trifle. Nothing more.” He brushed off further discussion of the radio with a flick of his wrist and said, looking directly at Zerena, “I’m more interested in your relationship with Ice.”
“Sasha knows as much about Tanya as I do. After all, she works in his office, and reports directly to him.”
Now the senior magician turned his predatory gaze upon Sasha, who licked his lips.
“I enjoy a privileged perspective, from which I glean insight into Ice activities in the city.”
“And yet,” said Zerena, “you failed to discern the location of the Hosts kidnapped and incapacitated by Ice. Fortunately for us, I was not similarly blind.”
That the information had come to her anonym
ously was a very odd and very troubling detail. But, for the purposes of this conversation, only a detail, and one best not shared with present company.
“Not blind,” Terzian said. “Merely impetuous, careless, clumsy. You should have secured the barge and its contents.”
She bowed her head. “Things did not go as planned. But what is one small step backward on the eve of a major leap forward?” Now she dared to look up. “The dead Hosts will prove the key to achieving your long-sought goal. And, coupled with the experience you gleaned from Cairo, sir, a new effort is sure to succeed.”
Terzian paced, the clacking of his cane on the pitted concrete floor keeping time like a metronome. “It would require utilizing multiple ley lines in concert.”
Zerena nodded. “Naturally. Based on my own reading of the charts, I propose Johannesburg, Xi’an, and Anchorage. Though of course I defer to your corrections, sir.”
There wouldn’t be any, she knew. She’d analyzed the charts accurately. She’d been preparing for this, dreaming of it, since long before they’d found the Ice barge and its illicit cargo.
Terzian asked, “When could you be ready?”
“Soon,” she said, fighting the urge to smile. “Very soon, sir.”
“Then do so.”
Sasha opened his mouth to object, but stopped short of contradicting Terzian. He muzzled himself with an audible click of the jaw. He gaped at her. It made him look like a goldfish. A goldfish who knew he’d lost.
Then Terzian changed the subject, the swerve so abrupt it threatened whiplash. “I understand you’ll soon be hosting another of your gatherings. Will your Ice protégé be there? I wish to observe her. Your claims of steadily growing influence have me intrigued.”
• • •
“About time.”
Gabe, cramped and numb in a telephone booth a hundred yards away, sighed with relief when the warehouse door opened and people began to trickle away from the covert Flame meeting. He had his back to the warehouse, as he had for the last hour, using a handheld mirror to monitor the comings and goings. The coins stacked atop the telephone were greatly diminished from when he’d arrived with bulging, jingling pockets.
So that the telephone wouldn’t announce that it was off the hook, he’d placed actual calls and kept them live with a steady stream of coins, listening to the time and temperature. He pretended to chat, too, lest passersby notice how the booth’s occupant never fogged the glass.
First out the door was Aleksander Komyetski. Interesting. Tanya’s ranking officer crossed the street, picking up his pace to reach the corner tram stop before it departed. A few minutes later, and heading in the opposite direction, went a tall fellow, late forties, his hands jammed deeply into the pockets of a thin leather jacket and his stride that of somebody eager to get inside. Next came a redhead wrapped in what passed for the Soviet version of a Burberry coat, the knotted scarf at her neck hiding her mouth, the rest of her face obscured by large tinted glasses.
He tried to get a closer look, but when she was just a dozen yards away, the next person to depart the warehouse blazed like a naked sun. The hitchhiker woke up and took notice. So did Gabe.
Terzian.
And he carried something that had the hitchhiker sniffing the air like a hound that had just scented a rabbit. Gabe shivered.
He closed his eyes, turned toward the street as Comrade Burberry strode past his booth on heels that clacked like castanets on the pavement. He ignored the noise, and after just a cursory glance at her through the hitchhiker’s senses—enough to know she carried a few minor charms, but nothing pressing—he turned the full brunt of his attention on Terzian, who was apparently more spry than he looked, for he’d already legged it around the corner and out of Gabe’s sight line.
He waited a few more minutes for the lady to pass out of earshot (no problem there—she walked quickly, as though she couldn’t wait to get out of there) and to ensure nobody else would be scurrying away from the Flame meeting. Then he slipped out of the booth—leaving the last few coins on the phone, lest they jingle in his pocket and give him away—and hoofed it to the corner where the warlock had disappeared. The hitchhiker gave him a steady progress report in what he’d come to think of as metaphysical barks and yips, though they felt more like tugs and yanks, a quivering pressure against his mind that he was slowly learning to interpret like a compass.
He turned the corner and glimpsed the old man. Each time his cane touched the pavement, the hitchhiker gave a little tug, like a pointer sighting a downed pheasant and straining at the leash. The wards woven into the cane radiated such ill intent they planted a sharp ache at the base of Gabe’s skull. Would Terzian be able to sense the hitchhiker? Gabe closed on the fellow slowly, narrowing his lead to just a few dozen yards. There he paused, examining the titles on display in a bookstore window, and checking the reflection for anybody tailing him. He hadn’t noticed any Flame or KGB watchers outside the warehouse, but that didn’t guarantee there weren’t any.
He’d just set off again, keeping Terzian in view, when the scrape of shoe leather announced a nearby presence. But he was alone on this side of the street; even the bookstore appeared to be empty. He paused to study his surroundings again, this time pressing the hitchhiker into service to join in the survey. It turned up nothing: nobody hiding nearby, and no magic in use aside from the ever-present thrum of the local ley lines and the silent scream of the old man’s ensorcelled cane.
Gabe hurried to close the gap with the Flame sorcerer. He’d come within fifty or sixty yards when he heard another scrape, this time from overhead, along with a hollow rattle, like gravel kicked into a downspout. He glanced up, but saw nobody. And still the hitchhiker gave no peep.
If somebody was following him, they were careless as hell. He sighed, gave up on the old man—he’d report what he’d seen to Alestair—and, as evening fell, set about losing his tail. Over the next hour he doubled back, circled the block, cut through a hotel lobby and exited through the kitchen, hopped on a tram, lurked in the deep shadows of the recessed entrance to a closed cafe, and hopped on a second tram. Twice he heard a footstep when he was alone, and once he felt the patter of broken masonry raining on him from a high rooftop. But he never saw his follower.
How could somebody with such awful tradecraft follow him so easily? The right charm could explain it. But not, as the hitchhiker insisted, if his follower’s shadow was magically barren.
• • •
Josh could feel the stares boring into his back as he shuffled into Frank’s office.
Edith hadn’t wasted any time getting chummy with the secretarial pool. In the two days since the disastrous social outing to the Vodnář, her indignation had become their indignation. He’d be lucky if he didn’t get a kick in the shin the next time he requested a file from the vault, or submitted a report to the typists. Maybe he should start remembering birthdays.
Frank had noticed, too. He closed the door, then dropped into his chair.
“Is it my imagination,” Frank said, “or has it been a little frosty out there, past few days?”
“I… I hadn’t noticed, sir. But the weather has been unseasonably cold.”
The station chief gave Josh a long hard look. Josh hunched his shoulders.
“Do I look like an idiot, Toms?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you acting like you think I’m stupid?”
“I’d never do that, sir, I assure you.”
After a moment, the station chief shook his head. He didn’t chuckle, exactly, but the sound he made was sheer bewilderment.
“Let’s cut the crap. Just what on earth did you say to her, son?”
“I, uh… It’s possible that I spoke intemperately. I realize now, with the benefit of hindsight, that I chose my words poorly.”
“And those words were what, exactly?”
“I’d rather not say, sir.” Josh could feel the heat rising in his face. “It was a personal observation, sir. Very perso
nal.”
Frank rubbed his temples. He leaned back in his chair until the springs groaned in protest. “Jesus. Maybe I don’t want to know.” When he came forward again, his stare could have pinned Josh to the wall. “Whatever you did or said to start this, you fix it. Make nice. Edith could be here a while. And I will not have you turning the entire secretarial pool against us. Don’t make me choose between the typists and you.”
“If it helps, I can type eighty words per minute.”
“It doesn’t. I don’t care how you do it, but make up with our new friend.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.” Josh stood.
“Did I say we were done?” Josh sat again.
Frank flipped through the newspaper on his desk, folded it open to the sports page, and examined it for a few moments. Then he tossed it down before Josh and said, casually, “So, I’m thinking about putting a few bucks on Castillo.”
Ah. This is a test. Conversations with Frank very frequently doubled as tests, he’d found. But this was no sweat. I’ve done my homework.
Chucho Castillo would be fighting Rubén Olivares for the world bantamweight title. Their rivalry was notorious not just in their native Mexico, but everywhere.
“It’s your money, sir, but I’d think twice about that. He’s already lost one title attempt. To an Australian, of all people.”
At this, Frank made a little harrumph of approval. “I see you’ve learned a few things. I almost believe you give a toss about boxing.”
“When in Rome, sir.”
“And your new friends?”
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 9