by David Mack
The master shook his head. “Not for us to know.” He pulled a flask from inside his jacket, unscrewed the cap, and downed a swig. “Mission one is taking back Europe. The Allies are gathering, but if we don’t knock out the last three Thule covens, it’ll all be for nothing. So you and I need to get in gear, lad—and take down those bloody cockwombles as fast as we can. After that, we can focus all our efforts on Kein.”
Cade couldn’t help but look askance at Adair’s crutches. “With all due respect, I don’t think you’re in any shape for combat.”
“And you are? I’ve seen corpses with more vigor, and your eyes are redder than a gobbler’s wattle.” He studied Cade with suspicion. “How many spirits do you have yoked?”
“Enough to get this job done.” He was in no mood to debate his condition or his choices, so he forced the conversation forward. “What do we know about the Paris coven?”
It was clear Adair knew what Cade was doing, but he moved on all the same. “More than we did a few days ago.” He reached inside his coat again, this time to pull out a map, which he unfolded and smoothed across his desktop. It was an annotated guide to the Catacombs under Paris, based on the notes Cade had photographed. Appended to the map were a ton of marginalia, recent corrections and updates to the maze, and notations of new access points. “Niko’s friends in the Maquis have been gathering new information.”
The extent of the man-made caverns staggered Cade’s imagination. “Jesus, who dug these tunnels, the Minotaur? I’m guessing it’d be easy to get lost down there.”
“Damned right. It’s why the Maquis started using them in the first place.” He tapped an ingress point. “This is the entrance second-closest to the Thule coven’s lair. Avoid the closer one, as that’s the one they favor.” His finger traced a path through the caverns that had been highlighted with dots of red ink. “This is the best route to the lair. It’s not the shortest, but it offers some cover.” His finger stopped where the dots ended. “This is the tunnel blocked by iron bars. The Maquis can’t go farther without cutting the bars—which would tell the coven we’d found them.”
Cade admired the simplicity of the coven’s defenses. “It won’t be a problem.”
“Are you sure? Because unless that coven installed the best secret door ever made, it means the people on the other side of those bars aren’t just dabblers—every one of them has to be a fully trained karcist with at least one yoked demon. They’re the linchpin of Kein’s defense of France. You’ll be walking alone into the biggest fucking cross fire you’ve ever seen.”
Cade cracked his knuckles. “I prefer to think of it as ‘shooting fish in a barrel.’ Just one question: How do I get to Paris?”
The master snapped his fingers, then pointed at the mirror behind Cade. Their reflections vanished. Green smoke churned, then yielded to reveal a dim space behind a towering curtain. Ropes dangled from above, and in the shadows Cade saw costumed mannequins, stacked crates, and mounds of bric-a-brac.
Adair gazed upon the mess with fond admiration. “Backstage at the Grand Guignol.” He cracked a sly smile at Cade. “You’re not the only one who’s been keeping busy.”
* * *
Five minutes before midnight, silence reigned on Rue de Sèvres. Dense mist choked the streets of Paris and blessed its streetlamps with halos.
Cade wore the fog as a cloak as he emerged from the shadows. In the middle of the street, where it met the Avenue de Breteuil, a cast-iron manhole cover protruded from the asphalt. He willed it upward; it rose from the pavement with a faint scraping.
Invisible hands supported Cade as he stepped into the manhole and controlled his descent into the sewers and tunnels below. As his head passed below street level, he guided the iron cover into place with a ponderous thunk.
Under the street, unbroken darkness. Cade looked through the eyes of SATHARIEL and saw the tunnel in gray-green twilight. It was mostly round and composed of bricks, but just as his map promised, there was a breach in the wall east of the manhole. Cade levitated himself above the muck, floated to the break in the wall, and stepped through it into the Catacombs.
Miles of claustrophobic passages, most not much wider than his shoulders, tiled from floor to roof with human bones and skulls, stretched away into endless shadow. No matter where Cade looked, Death gazed back at him. He checked his map of the centuries-old tunnels and followed the path of red dots through the subterranean labyrinth. In a place where most people would pray for the protection of guardian angels, he had only demons.
Time was hard to gauge in this dark world beneath the City of Light. Cade moved with haste, but his progress felt slow as he paused to verify every other step. The markings the Maquis had etched to guide their compatriots were subtle, so as not to betray their secrets to the Nazis should the Germans learn of the Resistance’s movements through this sepulcher.
At last he found the tunnel the old maps said should not exist, the one Niko’s allies had discovered by tailing the dabblers. Just as the Maquis had warned, the final downward stretch was blocked by a grate of iron bars. An inch thick and joined with solid welds, they stretched from floor to ceiling and wall to wall to form an impassable barrier. The shoulder-width passage of bones continued for a dozen meters on the other side before disappearing around a sharp turn.
Cade noted no wards on either side of the bars. Apparently, the Thule karcists considered the bars a sufficient deterrent for the curious. Maybe they think this is all it takes to protect their lair. Or maybe this is just the outer defense.
Only one thing was certain. He would learn nothing more from this side of the barrier. He shifted into the ghost form of VESTURIEL and stepped past the bars. On the other side he became corporeal again. No alarms sounded; no defenses rallied. Satisfied, he pressed ahead.
Bones and skulls, everywhere. There was an art to their arrangement. Some were sorted by color, darker bones around lighter ones; skulls scorched black were used to make geometric patterns. A thousand skulls formed a mosaic of one grinning specter.
He craned his neck to peek around the turn. He glimpsed a yawning space from which came ominous chants and shadows dancing in firelight. He stole around the corner to creep forward, only to halt when he felt the ground under his feet crunch ever so slightly. He looked down. In this unmapped passage, the path was paved with bones large and small, and the walls and ceilings were composed of skulls of all sizes. The lair was a house made of death.
He stalked to the edge of the pit and looked over its precipice. A few dozen yards below, at the bottom of a path that spiraled downward clockwise from his left, a circular platform of black granite had been laid. A grand circle of protection had been scribed upon it in limestone chalk, and at its northern point had been erected an altar of basalt.
Inside the circle stood three persons in hooded albs: an operator and two tanists. Facing inward along the spiral pathway were dozens of robed initiates, coven members invited to bear witness to that night’s experiment, each inside his or her own pentagram of protection.
Based on the sigils and offerings he saw, Cade deduced that this hall was sworn to the service of ASTAROTH. The demon’s seal was embroidered on all of the adepts’ robes, no doubt as a sign of protection—one that Cade lacked and, by the rules of magick, could not appropriate simply by stealing one of the robes.
What if Adair was right? Maybe I’m taking on more than I—
His self-doubt ended as he saw one of the coven’s adepts lead in the sacrifice: a young girl, a child of no more than five or six years of age. Barefoot, shivering, clad in nothing but a white nightshirt. She was crying, terrified, and all too aware of where she was and what was happening. The adept laid her upon the altar, bound her, and set a crown of holly on her brow.
The choice before Cade was haunting in its clarity.
He could fall back and return later, better armed, perhaps with Adair at his side. His odds of survival would be better. But that would mean surrendering this child, an innocent, to
a gruesome death at the hands of a demon.
Or he could enter the pit of bones, make himself the focus of the coven’s attacks, and risk his life in a mad assault that had no preparation, no plan, and no exit strategy.
He remembered all the pain and tragedy that had come from Stefan and Niko’s defiance of such hard realities. And he recalled all of the lives that had been lost because he’d failed to heed Adair’s warnings in Oxford. Forfeiting the battle to win the war was the smarter tactic. And it was exactly what Adair would tell him to do: Sacrifice the child. Give up one life to save countless others. The sum of the moral calculus was clear—but not one Cade could live with.
Fuck it. I never liked calculus, anyway.
He leaped off the precipice, over the warded threshold, into the chasm.
All that he saw, all that he sensed, became his weapons. Flames from the circle’s candles and the cavern’s torches became tongues of hellfire lashing out at adepts on the walkways. Two dozen forks of red lightning sprang from Cade’s open palms, linking dozens of Thule dabblers in a chain of lethal suffering. Necks snapped with wet sounds of splintering bone as Cade meted out merciless justice with the many hands of JEPHISTO. Shouts of fury and alarm filled the pit.
Then came a storm of retaliation.
Bursts of fire, bolts of electricity, cones of cold, swarms of shadows circling like raptors—all converging on Cade in a tempest as the ground rushed up to meet him.
This might have been a mistake.
He turned to smoke just before he hit the bottom, then resumed his shape standing on solid ground, bearing a broadsword in one hand and a trident in the other, both spectral and glowing with power. Demonic projectiles rained down on him from above and about, all deflected by his shield—until Cade turned his defenses reflective, turning the storm of attacks against their authors, who fell in droves.
Cade severed the young girl’s bonds with a flurry of unseen demonic knives.
Bloodcurdling cries—men and demons charged toward him from several passages that radiated from the pit’s killing floor. With a thought he surrounded himself and the girl with his shield, then channeled the martial prowess of CASMIEL and the strength of MEUS CALMIRON.
He swung his spirit sword and severed limbs and heads from torsos; he thrust his trident to gut an attacker and break his spine. Foes behind him he cut down with hellfire and lightning. Blood washed over the floor and sprayed his face.
Automatic gunfire ripped through the din of magickal slaughter. Cade used JEPHISTO’s hand to hold the child down, for her own good. The gift of SABAOTH meant metal couldn’t touch Cade, but the girl needed him to be her shield—he was her aegis against evil.
Demons poured from every crevice of the pit. Dozens of spirits spilled over the ledges above, a torrent of evil raining down.
There was no stopping them all.
Cade could stretch his shield only so far. To protect the girl completely required him to risk the narrowest of gaps in his own defense—and the enemy found that gap over and over.
Unseen blades slashed wounds into his arms and legs. Tongues of fire stung his face and left him smelling his own singed hair. Needles of ice pierced his back. A demon’s hand closed around his throat until he cleaved it with VAELBOR’s blade, banishing it to the inferno. Burnt, bloody, and forced to his knees, Cade locked eyes with the karcist who stood inside the operator’s circle, orchestrating the coven’s Goetic nightmare.
Briet stared in fascination as her horde rained down on top of him.
Then Cade cracked a predator’s grin—and unleashed utter mayhem.
All right, MARCHOSIAS—let ’em have it.
As promised by the grimoire of Honorius, the great duke had granted Cade command over its Infernal legions: thousands of spirits, an army of fallen angels—a release of power that overwhelmed the onslaught of shadows in which Briet had taken such pride only moments earlier.
Her smirk contorted into a grimace. She disappeared in a blast of flames and a pillar of ink-black smoke, leaving her minions to die without her.
Cade gathered the girl in his arms and soared upward. The coven’s stragglers harried them with missiles in the shape of flaming skulls, storms of phantasmal arrows, spurts of chaotic magickal energy. Only a handful slipped past Cade’s shield, but they were enough to leave him coughing blood by the time he reached the top of the pit.
Staggering toward the tunnel with the weeping child at his side, he answered the coven’s parting jabs with a fireball brighter than the dawn. It rocked the Catacombs and shook the bedrock of Paris. Dust rained down as the bone pit and all its secondary passages caved in, erasing them not just from the map but from existence.
He knew Adair would not approve of this, but he no longer cared.
Three years earlier he had told the master, This isn’t my war. Now it was—and he was determined to fight it his way.
He guided the girl down the tunnel to the iron bars, which he blasted into shrapnel with a thought. Then he slumped against the tunnel wall while giving her a gentle nudge onward.
“Go straight,” he said. “Men from the Maquis. They’ll take you home.”
She trembled as she asked, “What about you?”
“Forget me.… Forget this place.… It was all … just a bad dream.” Cade left a smear of blood on the wall of bones as he collapsed to the floor. “Run.”
The girl disappeared into darkness.
Cade let himself do the same.
31
OCTOBER
After more than two months of urban combat, little remained of Stalingrad but a maze of ruins, yet the fight to control it slogged on. Everyone, including Anja, knew why: Not only was the city vital to the control of oil resources in the Caucasus, it had propaganda value because it bore the name of the Soviet premier. For the sake of morale, the Red Army couldn’t let it fall to the Germans; for the sake of regional dominance, the Germans couldn’t afford not to capture it. And so the battle dragged on, one building and street at a time, day after bloody day.
In spite of bombings and shellings, the skeletons of large structures towered over the devastation. Much of the city’s street grid remained recognizable because buildings erected during the previous two decades tended to collapse inward on their own architectural footprints. Even so, heaps of rubble and debris littered the once wide-open boulevards, providing cover to guerrilla fighters and impeding the movements of the Nazis’ feared panzer divisions.
Smoke often obscured the worst of the devastation, but there was no escaping it. Coated in a film of pulverized concrete, the German and Russian armies both had taken on the pallor of ghosts haunting the city’s remains, distinguishable from rats and stray dogs only by their size and their infrequent habit of moving on two legs when the absence of sniper fire permitted it—which was not very often, thanks to Premier Stalin’s long record of advocating that every Russian be, first and foremost, a sharpshooter.
It was an edict Anja had grown up with, and one she had taken to heart.
No one had asked her many questions when she’d volunteered for the Red Army three months earlier. The city had been in chaos. Civilians were being evacuated in droves as troops arrived in battalions, all of them underfed and poorly equipped. Everything had been in short supply, and still was: uniforms, boots, rifles, ammunition, food, medicine, shelter.
Survival hinged on adaptation. Soldiers who hadn’t been given rifles followed those who had into combat; if an armed soldier fell, an unarmed comrade picked up the weapon and carried on. Troops traded clothing, mixing and matching uniform pieces until they found some that fit. Boots, though—the only way to get a decent pair was to take them off the dead. Now winter was imminent, which meant this Hell on earth was doomed to freeze over, and neither Anja nor any of her comrades could find a warm coat literally to save their lives.
That was a problem for tomorrow.
Anja was proud of what she’d done this night. While her comrades skulked through the shattered remna
nts of the city, she had soared above it, disguised as a humble pigeon thanks to the charm of ANDREALPHUS. From high overhead, a tiny speck passing through rising columns of smoke and ash, she had observed the latest round of Nazi troop movements. Three companies from the German Sixth Army were flanking wide to the south in search of a fresh angle of attack on the Russian commanders, while their slave laborers cleared a road that would let the Nazis move half a dozen panzers nine blocks north along the city’s western periphery.
Her scouting mission accomplished, she alighted upon a half-collapsed rooftop that overlooked the current redoubt of the German command division. There was no way for one who couldn’t fly to reach the upper floors of Anja’s gutted perch, never mind its roof: all of its interior staircases had collapsed, making it little more than an obstacle to incoming fire.
Which made the Nazis’ surprise all the more rewarding to Anja as she put a round from her Mosin-Nagant through the skull of an SS officer who doffed his helmet while passing through her scope’s field of vision. Before any of the Nazis could pinpoint the shot’s origin, Anja transformed into a sparrow and swooped away into the dark.
On nights when she was unable to sight a suitable target among the enemy officer corps, she satisfied her appetite for payback by summoning hordes of rats to infest the Nazis’ food stores, spread disease in their camps, and chew the cloth coverings off the wires in the Germans’ tanks. It made the rats happy, kept them away from Red Army positions, and provoked a slew of short circuits and power failures in the Nazis’ armored units.
By necessity she had learned to be judicious in her use of magick. The battlefront offered little privacy and few safe places in which to conduct the rituals needed to summon and yoke spirits. Consequently, even with sparing use, her reserves of magick had waned rapidly.
Another reality Anja had come to accept was that surviving as a karcist in a war zone required subtlety and discretion, not firepower. She had learned to avoid being seen working visible magick. Unleashing miraculous powers in full view of civilians or her comrades would without a doubt get her arrested, sent to a gulag, and dissected by agents of state security. And no matter how much power she might wield, she knew from experience that one magician was rarely if ever a match for a large number of professional soldiers in open combat.