The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  It seemed to Cade a perverse vision, a cruel way to order the cosmos. Thinking of himself as being complicit in its amorality left him queasy.

  Smoke spilled from Adair’s mouth as he said, “I’m glad you’re talking again. It’s been good to hear your voice.” He snuffed his Lucky on the side of the bench and stood. “But, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a war to finish.”

  Cade stood and faced his master. “What about me?”

  A mocking lilt: “What about you?”

  “Knowing what I know … what do I do now?”

  Adair locked his callused hands on Cade’s shoulders. The master beamed with pride and courage. “You get up. You go on. And you burn brightly.”

  55

  OCTOBER

  As heavy as the table in the villa’s study was, it shook like a leaf in a gale when Adair pummeled it. “This is fucking hopeless. We’ve dug through this shite for weeks.” He gathered up a fistful of telegrams and transcripts from the Allied intelligence services. “It’s all dead ends, the fucking lot of it!” He hurled the crumpled pages aside.

  Cade looked across the table at Anja, to see if she was as ready as he was for an end to the master’s nightly tirades. She gave him a subtle nod to proceed.

  He cleared his throat to draw Adair’s attention.

  Looking up, the master cocked an eyebrow. “Aye?”

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  “This isn’t the army, you prat. Speak your mind.”

  Another glance at Anja steeled Cade’s courage. “We’ve been talking…” The master’s mood soured with every word Cade spoke. “… and we think we’re going about this all wrong.”

  “Do you?” Adair leaned away from the table. Lit a cigarette. “Well, don’t keep me in suspense, lad.” He added with a theatrical flourish, “Elaborate.”

  A nervous swallow, then Cade gestured at the avalanche of paperwork they had been scouring for weeks in search of clues. “We knew most of this would be useless. But the problem isn’t the intel. It’s that we’re up against someone who’s just as good at hiding as we are.”

  When he paused, Anja carried the argument forward. “Kein could never have breached the wards on Eilean Donan had he not tortured Stefan. By the same logic, Kein will not be able to find this villa—or us, so long as we remain inside it.”

  “The problem,” Cade interjected, “is that Kein can set up the same kinds of defenses. We’ve been looking for his new stronghold ever since you forced him to abandon Wewelsburg. But wherever he is, he’s invisible.”

  Adair rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Christ, wake me up when we get to what I don’t know.”

  His jest sharpened Anja’s tone. “Unless we draw him out, we will never find him. He knows the same is true of us. It is why he took Niko’s sister. We cannot wait for him to force our hand again. We must be the ones to set the trap this time.”

  That refreshed Adair’s interest in the conversation. “What kind of trap?”

  “Something that lets him think he has the element of surprise,” Cade said. “We haven’t worked out all the details yet, but the idea is to dig in somewhere, then compel him to attack us.”

  Adair waved off the proposal. “Are you mad? Give him the initiative?”

  “In combat,” Cade said, “the attacker is the one most likely to be exposed and off-balance. If six months with the Rangers taught me nothing else, it was that defending a fortified position is almost always easier than attacking one.”

  Anja nodded. “My experience with the Red Army was the same. Better to defend.”

  The master wore a frown of doubt. “I still don’t like it. Setting traps means putting ourselves at risk. If he sees us coming, strikes before we’re ready—”

  “We can mitigate the risk of detection,” Cade said. “Personal wards, minimal use of magick before the ambush. But doing it right means taking it slow—and choosing the right place and time for the ambush. Somewhere Kein would expect to have the advantage, on a night when he’d think the stars favor him.”

  A disbelieving shake of Adair’s head. “Fucking hell, lad. You’re talking about going into Germany! Facing him on his own ground. Tell me I’m wrong!”

  “You’re not wrong. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Adair’s hand trembled as he lifted his cigarette to his lips and took a clumsy drag. He sat down, then heaved a smoke-filled sigh. “Fuck me.”

  Anja moved to stand beside the master’s chair. She set her hand on his forearm. “I know it seems we have a death wish, but we are sure this is the best plan.”

  Cade moved to the other side of Adair. “We pick the battleground. We set the terms. We lure him to us when we’re ready. Then we destroy him—once and for all.”

  He met their proposal with a chuckle.

  “God help me. I’ve created a fucking monster.”

  56

  NOVEMBER

  To walk the streets of Dresden was to step backward in time. With its rococo architecture and quaint side streets, the city was steeped in quasi-medieval ambience. Intricate stonework covered entire blocks of façades and dozens of lofty cathedral spires. If not for the fact that it was blacked out after dark and teeming with Allied prisoners of war during the day, Cade might almost have been fooled into thinking it had been spared the horrors of war.

  Adair had chosen Dresden as the place where they would lay their great trap for Kein. Whenever pressed by Cade or Anja to explain why, the master had resorted to arcane mumbo jumbo about the alignments of stars and planets. Cade hadn’t pretended to understand. Like Anja, he had faith in Adair, and that sufficed.

  There were enough German troops in the city to make it dangerous for him, Anja, and Adair to move about, even after dark. One of them was always on watch, listening for signs of approaching patrols. In the dead of night, the enemy was more often heard than seen.

  The trio had stuck to the city’s outskirts since their arrival. Encounters were less frequent the farther one was from the city’s center, making their halting German and foreign accents less likely to be detected. Under Adair’s direction, they had worked counterclockwise around Dresden, starting from Räcknitz in the south. After more than a week of nightly forays into the city, they had made their way to Blasewitz, near the southern bank of the Elbe. If all went to plan, they soon would be in Neustadt, on the other side of the river.

  The trio scurried across a deserted street into a warren of alleyways. Adair checked his compass, then the folded map in his other hand. “This way,” he said, leading them deeper into the shadows.

  If not for the Sight, Cade was sure he’d long since have lost track of Adair in the dark. Anja, however, lagged a few paces behind on purpose, to make it easier for her to hear if they were being followed.

  They stopped at an intersection of several alleyways. Adair nodded. “This is it. Here.”

  Cade dropped to one knee, shrugged off his ruck, and dug into it for supplies. An ivory horn brimming with black powder. A vial of holy oil. Blessed chalk. And a leather pouch of ashes taken from the brazier in which they had cremated crow feathers with the finger bones of a dead child and a crucifix carved from a single oak branch.

  He looked up at Adair. “Whose sigil?”

  Adair consulted his map. “LILITH.”

  Cade sketched the demon’s seal in chalk on the pavement. It was one of many Adair had planned. According to the master, the pattern of seals, placed in the correct positions throughout the city, would create a massive lens to focus their powers against Kein, while simultaneously stripping the dark master of his own yoked spirits, leaving him defenseless. It was a complex scheme, one that would take months to execute—and, in a stroke of irony, it had been inspired by the devil’s trap Kein himself had created to unleash mayhem in Normandy.

  When LILITH’s seal was done, Cade traced the design with holy oil. Twice he paused at the touch of Anja’s fingertips on his shoulder, a warning they might have company; both times the threat passed withou
t incident and he continued. When the seal was traced, he put away the oil, pulled the stopper from the horn, and poured black powder into the center of the seal.

  Adair grew impatient. “Is it done yet?”

  “Almost.” Cade put away the horn. He dug a match from his coat pocket, struck it on the ground, and dropped it onto the black powder. A pop of combustion echoed off the brick walls, and sparks shot into the air. Flames consumed the gunpowder and ignited the oil on LILITH’s seal, burning it into the asphalt and activating it as a permanent glyph.

  The black powder ceased sparking, but the oil still burned.

  “Kill it,” Adair said.

  Cade upended the pouch of ashes onto the burning sigil, dousing the flames. Somewhere nearby, large dogs filled the night with furious barks.

  Adair hustled Cade and Anja down another alley, away from the approaching canines. “We’re done here. Let’s go.”

  Their retreat was quick and calm, aided by their individual powers of magickal silence, intangibility, or flight. Soon their pursuers were far behind them, and the trio regrouped in the darkness of a side street in the Striesen district.

  The master pressed his large hands onto Cade’s and Anja’s shoulders. “Smartly done, both of you. Now back to the cellar.”

  Anja deflated. “Already?”

  Her protest didn’t sway Adair. “We’re walking a tightrope here. No way we’ll make it to Neustadt before morning.” He resumed walking. “Onward. Miles to go before we sleep.”

  There was no more discussion on the walk to their hideout. They had set up camp in a steam-choked cellar beneath an administrative building on the campus of the Technische Universität Dresden. Wards, illusions, and demonic guardians served to keep them safe there from Kein’s scrying and other magicks of clairvoyance, as well as to fend off unwelcome visitors who might happen into the building’s basement.

  Anja had converted a janitor’s neglected quarters into their new dormitory and base of operations. She had draped wool blankets—borrowed by Cade from the campus laundry—from pipes that ran along the ceiling, to create corners of privacy for each of them. They shared the table and chairs in the middle of the room, but Adair had taken over one entire wall with his annotated maps, photographs, calculations, and notes.

  While Cade and Anja shed their coats and gear, Adair moved to the wall, found the red dot he’d inked for that night’s step in the building of the trap, and put a check mark through it. “Making progress,” he said. “A few more weeks, the outer ring will be complete.”

  Cade took a bottle of vodka from their provisions. He poured a few fingers into a dirty glass, then sipped from it as he eyed the map. “At this rate, we’ll be working through the winter. Can’t we pick up the pace?”

  “Not unless you feel like giving away our position to Kein. And this won’t take as long as you think. The inner circles get smaller as we go.”

  Cade studied the snare’s design. “How many circles do we need?”

  “Four, I think.” Adair dug out a pack of cigarettes, took one, then offered it to Cade, who snagged a smoke. The master lit his, then Cade’s, as he continued. “Not sure yet where they’ll go. We need to pick a killing field before we can drive Kein into it.”

  Anja emerged from her corner-tent in stocking feet, shaking loose her black hair. “This is taking too long. I came here to kill Kein, not spend my nights playing lookout.”

  “Patience, my dear.” Adair puffed smoke rings against the map, as if they might direct him where to set the next nodes of his trap. “I know this is slow, but it’s for our protection. It’s also the only way to build the trap that keeps the whole thing passive until we trigger it—which means Kein won’t be able to sense it until it’s too late.”

  She plucked the cigarette from Adair’s hand and the vodka from Cade’s. She downed the booze in one tilt, then took a long drag off the Lucky. As she exhaled, an illusion disguising the left side of her face vanished, revealing her Y-shaped scar. “Fuck careful. I want his head.”

  “We all do,” Cade said, “but none of us is strong enough to take him alone. Hell, I doubt we’d have much of a chance even if we ganged up on him. Gotta neuter him first.”

  She pushed Cade’s empty glass to his chest. “Then I need another drink.”

  “If this trap works,” Cade said, “we can banish most of Kein’s yoked demons before we throw the first punch. I know it feels like we’re wasting time, but this is the smart play.” He refilled the glass and handed it to her. “Trust me.”

  “Trust is for children and fools. But you are right. I have waited this long for revenge. I can wait a few months more.” She downed her second shot, then trained her stare on Adair. “It would be a shame to squander such an opportunity, no?”

  Adair lit another cigarette and enveloped himself in a gray shroud as he exhaled. “It’d be a fuck of a lot worse than that. If Kein finds out we’re here before we finish the trap?… We’re all as good as dead.”

  1945

  57

  JANUARY

  Mornings, Adair had found, were the best times for working complex math based on the various ephemerides he relied on to track and predict celestial events. Though his labors in the streets of Dresden were committed at night, as were the majority of his recent experiments, the hours when Cade and Anja slept were the only times he could count on peace and quiet in the lair.

  He didn’t blame them for it. They had to eat sometime, and plans for the trap needed to be coordinated with everyone alert, but their waking presences made concentration difficult. And these numbers had to be precise.

  Popular astrology was hokum. At least, the common variety peddled to the masses in newspapers and gaudy shopfronts was. Adair had seen enough bastardized astrology to know it from a distance. All it took for charlatans to make a living as “astrologers” was a knack for reading the unconscious physical and verbal cues of the gullible, and a bit of practice at asking leading questions. It was so simple, Adair was sure he could teach a monkey to do it.

  Real astrology, on the other hand … that was a tricky business. It was more art than science, but some of its elements were the mechanisms of the universe. Unlike its watered-down popular form, it never promised truth or predicted anything with certainty. Its chief purpose was to expose propensities and potentials. To show the trained eye what might be, or what was possible, in the right place at a specific moment in time.

  The language of astrology was one of geometry and trigonometry. It spoke of a sky divided into twelve houses. It defined stellar and planetary influences by their relative angles: the beneficial trine, the baneful square, the gentle sextile, the vexing quincunx, or the energizing clash of opposition. Every detail mattered; not only did Adair need to know in what zodiacal sign each planet and major celestial object resided, he had to know where it would be in relation to all the others. Then he had to account for the specific latitude and longitude of Dresden, for times of day, and for precession—periodic variations in the earth’s axial tilt.

  Every time he thought he had found an optimal night to spring the trap upon Kein, he began the tedious process of checking the ephemerides and ferreting out any sign of a possibly dangerous or disastrous planetary configuration that could backfire upon them. He had learned to pay close attention to two vital harbingers of peril: Mars and Pluto.

  Lastly, as if his task weren’t complicated enough, he had to weigh any proposed date against what he knew of Kein’s horoscope, based on information he had cobbled together over the past two centuries. The sheer volume of the calculations was enough to drive a man to madness, or at the very least to drink. Fortunately, vodka had proved abundant in Dresden.

  With painstaking care he scribed planetary symbols and their degrees and minutes of arc within their respective signs onto a wheel-shaped chart. When they all were in place, he used a red pencil to note planets aligned in opposition; green lines to expose the trines; blue for the squares; and black for the ever-irritating qu
incunx. Then he laid Kein’s chart atop it, and held both sheets of paper together as he lifted them in front of the room’s bare, dangling bulb.

  Planet by planet, angle by angle, he compared the two charts.

  When he set them on the table, he was sweating. His heart hammered inside his chest as he bellowed, “Up! Both of you.”

  The young magicians groaned and cursed before they rose to answer his summons. Cade reached the table first, yawning and knuckling sleep from his bloodshot eyes. He squinted at Adair. “Fucking hell. What time is it?”

  “Half nine.”

  “In the morning? Shit, this better be good.”

  Bleary and groggy, Anja bumped into the table before she stopped next to Cade. “If this is not vital, I will kill you both.”

  Adair hunched over the chaos of grids, graphs, calculations, and horoscope charts. “I’ve got it. The perfect date and time for the attack.” He slammed his latest chart onto the table in front of Cade and Anja. “The night of February thirteen, at ten o’clock.”

  The young karcists blinked and eyed the chart.

  Cade looked dubious. “The night before Ash Wednesday?”

  “Exactly,” Adair said. “Ash Wednesday is a terrible date for magick, but we’d strike just before it begins.” He pulled forward more pages of calculations and excerpts from ephemerides. “On its face, the night itself looks common. Even if Kein reviews the charts before taking our bait, nothing here should give him reason for concern.” He pointed at Kein’s estimated natal horoscope chart. “It would take a detailed cross-reference to see the threats this chart poses to him. It’s the night when most of his strongest planetary influences will be in opposition to themselves, thanks to their upcoming transits over Europe.” He stabbed at the papers with his index finger. “This is it. The night and the hour. Now we need the place.”

  “We have it,” Cade said. “We were waiting for you to pick a date before we told you.”