by Tom Doyle
Only one thing to say to that. “Fuck off. Now.” Scherie’s strong language always worked with ghosts, and sometimes with the living. The Safavians strode hurriedly away, glancing back at Scherie with more fear than they had shown at their pursuit.
Great—with the Safavians heading to the Galata side, Scherie would have to go the other way, into the old city. She needed immediate extraction. As she chose a different path through the restaurant, she got out her cell phone and texted on the trot: “XTRACT.”
Scherie ducked into a different restaurant, and Madeline was again at her elbow, passing through the people Scherie had to bump aside, chilling all. “He knows what you’ll probably do.”
“Who knows?” asked Scherie.
Madeline shook her head. “Going solo was a good start, but still a high percentage prediction, so he’ll have a response to it. Whatever you’d normally do now, do something different.”
Something different? With the Safavians going toward Galata, there wasn’t another way to go except toward the old city. A bridge only had two ends. A bridge …
And then the penny dropped. “You want me to—”
But Madeline was shushing and shaking her head more emphatically. “Don’t even say it. Just do it.”
Scherie turned and ran out an exit. She gave a quick look over the rail. All clear, but she needed another reason besides the word of the treacherous Madeline. She didn’t need to wait more than a second before she had a good one: a new Dog on the old city shore near where pedestrians exited the bridge, head tilted back as if sniffing for her. She assumed a symmetrical Dog on the other old city side exit. Too many by land.
So one by sea. Without further thought, Scherie took a big breath, and leapt into a crouch atop the rail. She let her breath out and pushed off in a long dive, filling her lungs again as she fell toward the Golden Horn.
She plunged through the oily surface into the cold water; her concerns with toxins were focused on the lead from guns. Her clothes weighed her down, which for the moment was good, but might be a problem later.
Keeping her eyes open and willing them to see, she swam underwater in what she hoped was the direction of the Eminönü ferry docks. She had the preternatural endurance of a combat craftswoman; she could swim 250 meters without a breath, so she would have to come up for air at least once before she reached the docks. There, she would have options. If the real city police didn’t delay her, she could hop the ferry across the Bosphorus or toward the airport, or get on the train toward the airport, or even double back toward Galata and the U.S. Consulate (not the safe house, though). The fake police would have difficulty covering all her possibilities.
Angry angled lines slashed down in front of her eyes. Holy shit, they were shooting at her. She almost let out her breath in shock. They were creating a public scene, risking a craft disclosure that would bring the wrath of all mundane authority, foreign and domestic, down on their heads. She skewed the paths of the shots away from her, but they continued to fall around her, slowed in water to a visible, eerie beauty.
She swam deeper, changing direction slightly. She didn’t like how close they had come to her position. They must have an idea of where she was going. Not good, but the docks were still her best bet, even if she had to swim farther on. If anyone was foolish enough to dive in after her, she still had her knives.
A blur, just ahead and to her right. She focused—see, dammit—and beneath the old city shoreline found a round, blue-green glow, like a craft-hidden entrance. She remembered something from her stateside briefing on the secret sewers and cisterns of the old city. She ignored the glow and swam harder for the docks. Her clothes were slowing her down. Her head and heart began to pound, and her lungs hungered for air. Her combat instructor had been emphatic on the dangers of underwater swimming. If Scherie pushed too far, she could pass out and drown, but with bullets flying she didn’t want to come up until absolutely necessary.
Then Madeline reappeared, also glowing, though with the distinctive black light of the Left Hand, long finger pointed at the underwater entrance. God, I still don’t trust that revenant. But the entrance was so much closer than the docks and hidden from surface view. So long as there was air near behind it, and not a blind alley of dark water for her to drown in. It would be like Madeline to point the way to death.
For magic assistance, Scherie readied an image of an opening door, but when she reached the entrance, she found only an open stone maw, craft camouflaged from mundane view, and crumbling underwater steps angling up the hole into darkness.
Hands up to keep from hitting her head, she pushed up off a stone step and, after a second of heart-pounding need and panic, broke into dark air. She gasped. The air stank of rot and re-rot, and she gulped it down like perfume. She felt for the stairway and pulled herself up it and out of the water.
The echoes of her dripping mixed with other drips in the darkness. Heat, she thought, with an image of warmth flowing from the air into her skin, and she felt warmer. She emptied her boots. Whatever happened, this outfit was never returning to her closet.
Every tool or weapon she carried was rated for extreme environments, so she squeezed her still-functioning cell phone out of her clothes and turned it on to use as a lamp. The stairway ended where a tunnel began, running more level, but still inclined, with a trickle of water down its center. The tunnel stones were time-polished and slippery, and her feet smacked against their surface with the wide, tentative stride of someone jogging on ice. Rats scattered at her light, bats squeaked and fluttered their leathery wings, and she smelled their shit amidst the general damp and decay.
After a minute, the tunnel opened into a chamber. If this was a cistern, it made the Basilica Cistern look like a village well. This vast, cavernous structure, filled with columns, was like something made by Tolkien’s dwarves, and from the glows of camouflage craft Scherie could tell that it went on farther than conventional sight showed.
Directly ahead of her were the backs of two tall statues that also served as karyatid-like supports. She moved between them, then turned to view them. A man and a woman, crowned, sat on high thrones as if guarding the way Scherie had come. They were Byzantine, but instead of calm, affectless nobility, they wore the faces of deranged, fanged demons. Greek letters marked them as “basileus” and Latin letters indicated they were “imperator.” Scherie guessed this must be the Byzantine co-emperors Theodora and Justinian in their dark aspects, as hinted at in the Secret History of Procopius.
As if drawn to distant kindred, Madeline manifested, her outline more distinct but still monochromatic. Was she wearing a pants suit? “You can summon aid here. The local Left Hand will make a deal.”
“I’ve got other ways of calling for help.” Scherie turned on her cell phone again and started dialing.
“You stupid bitch!” said Madeline, swiping at the phone, chilling Scherie’s already cold hands.
“I’m still breathing, ghost bitch,” said Scherie.
“He can listen to any call you make.”
“Is this a trivia game? Who the fuck are you talking about?” But Scherie now noticed a series of texts that had been sent to her since her SOS, all from THE_INLAW:
I apologize, but I will not let your message go through.
Again, my deepest thanks for liberating me.
In gratitude, I have not ordered any particular suffering to accompany your death.
(I didn’t want you to have to hear this from my sister.)
Good-bye. Roderick.
Oh God, no. She had failed. Roderick lived. She had to get to Dale, to warn him, and Endicott, and the whole frigging free world.
She should have kept her mind on local concerns. The scrape of stone and metal echoed from the east to her left. From the north, the slap of feet in the tunnel she had come from. They had found her. In this forest of columns, she could see nowhere to hide from multiple pursuers.
Through the dark, phone light held out in front of her, Scherie ran sou
th, slaloming between the columns.
The guns’ thunder echoed; shots ricocheted off stone that was too close, throwing up bits of gray shrapnel. She didn’t try to turn off her phone to lose them; the Dogs could track by all senses, and she needed her sight. She skewed their shots aggressively, but they’d be putting their own spins on the bullets.
Then, a shot meant for her chest bent south, and she felt some giant kick her in the rear. She fell. Her phone skittered away from her across the stone. She crawled back away from it, and leaned up against a column
Aw, fuck. She’d been shot in the thigh. Not in that whole Morton Pentagon fuck-up had someone gotten a piece of her. She was going to die like a stupid raw recruit, and all she could think of was how she had let everyone down.
Scherie focused her mind on containing some of the damage to her leg, but she also had at least two Dogs to kill. She readied her knives—two for throwing, and the third for close quarters. She readied her craft to guide her knives like missiles, to make them drive home.
Madeline appeared. Was she here to gloat? No. She was looking more substantial. In the dark, she could pass for the living. She limped about like … like a killdeer faking a broken wing.
The shooting started again. Madeline cried out like the banshee she was, then folded to the ground. The Dogs moved in. The glow of their craft played off Madeline’s black light like a laser show. The Dogs didn’t seem to notice Scherie; they only had eyes for Madeline. Like a snake with its prey, she fascinated them. They did not acknowledge each other; these two weren’t working together. The Dogs, despite their name, seldom did.
Scherie picked out her targets. She did not aim for the chest—though big in area, too often body armored. Arm or leg would not be enough damage. She steadied her breathing, and aimed for their throats.
Her first throw was a clean hit with the messy arterial aftermath. The second curved away from the other Dog’s throat and just nicked his arm.
This delayed his bringing his gun to bear on her for a second, and in that second, forgetting all pain, she was already on him. With a martial “Kiya!” she slammed her remaining knife at the base of his throat, but at the last the point slid and merely scratched him, driven back by craft. She restrained his gun hand, but his free hand came up and with a crunch connected with her face. A dizzy darkness called. His gun moved up to finish her, then jerked away toward some other target. Madeline. With all her anger at this debt and an underhand thrust, Scherie drove her knife forward again, this time craft-impelled for his heart, through Kevlar, meat, and bone.
His body dropped back away from her, taking her knife with it. In a near faint, she folded to her knees. First things. Triage. She wrapped her hands around her leg. Heal, fucker. Her hands came away bloodier. The bullet was still in her leg, its damage contained, but not for long if she had to move. And she had to move.
She retrieved her phone. In its light, she could now see the pillar that had sheltered her. It had a gorgon’s face carved into its base. Appropriate. She crawled to her second victim, and pulled at the knife. It wouldn’t budge. Some combination of craft and Kevlar had frozen it in place. In the distance, more noises. No time to retrieve her other knives either.
She stood, spasming, and with her right leg swinging stiff as wood, she made her way farther south until she stumbled out of the vast cavern onto a wooden walkway. The emergency lights revealed one of the known, tourist cisterns—by its location, she guessed the Basilica Cistern. It was like the cavern she’d been in, only smaller and with the floor covered with a pool of water. Scherie was on the walkway for sightseers. She followed the exit signs. The “open” spell had lost a little of its zap, but was still at ready to help force the locked doors.
Madeline was out on the street before her, waving her on like dead Captain Ahab inviting his crew to follow. Scherie wanted a better choice, but she didn’t have one. The evening tourist foot traffic avoided her, assuming she was some local unpleasantness that the guidebooks hadn’t warned them of. Smells of the nargile’s tobacco and diesel exhaust mixed unpleasantly.
It was harder than she thought, walking through the pain. Wasn’t she supposed to be some great healer? Her skirt was sopping wet with water and blood, and red ran down her leg. The trackers would find her trail with ease.
She crossed the street and tram tracks and moved across the plaza that had been inside the racetrack of the Hippodrome. A crowd roared like ocean surf in her head, “Nike!” Victory. But that had to be a hallucination, or the ghost of the place rather than the people—for those days were fifteen hundred years ago, and no mortal’s spirit could sustain itself so long.
Indignant gulls and crows flew around her, and the mangy mutts of the plaza trotted toward her, menacing beyond their size. Ghost scenes obscured her view of the present, and the faded spirits of Janissary soldiers, killed by their own emperor, seemed to bar her way with oversized muskets and swords.
At the far end of the Hippodrome, Madeline stopped waving and stood to the left of an ancient column. As Scherie approached, she recognized it: three coils of scarred and twisted deep green bronze, a triple-helix that had once ended in snake heads. A low fence and a shallow ditch encircled it to block the public, but without guards on hand, these were mere discouragement for a determined vandal. Few knew what an astounding piece of history these sad remains were: the Serpent Column, taken from Delphi by Constantine the Great for his new city.
This history didn’t exactly warm Scherie’s failing heart. This column symbolized the Greek victory over ancient Persia, and its entwined craft-conductive design was likely cursed to kill practitioners of Persian descent. I should have known. Here at last, the trap. “What now?”
“Touch the pillar.” Madeline made it sound obscene.
Scherie could see Madeline all too clearly now. The tall and thin black-lit halo had filled in with her pale face and her male clothes—a Victorian man’s bright riding gear, complete with a crop for enforcing discipline on the collective Left-Hand spiritual herd. “Madeline, before I die, I’m going to dispel you for good.”
“Please. I won’t allow my brother to succeed.”
Scherie looked back the way she had come, and the world wobbled like a shaky camera threatening to fall. Two new Dogs in military uniforms, bearing assault rifles, were moving in for the kill. No choice, then. The column would probably incinerate her, but better it than these Dogs.
Too exhausted, Scherie couldn’t imagine climbing down. She leaned forward over the fence and awkwardly tumbled over with a smack of wet clothing, though she automatically rolled as she fell—drills were good for something. Pain and darkness competed for her mind, and darkness was winning. She stretched her hand toward the column. A low green glow moved up its snakes like an electrical Jacob’s ladder.
Around the fence, people pulled themselves up and close, then bent down to stare at her. A few would-be nighttime guides were shouting in their numerous languages for her to get up and out. The two soldier Dogs would be here soon, no doubt as ready as their dead fellows to shoot her, even in public.
This can’t be right, touching this. But her blood-smeared palm made contact.
Nothing. She readied some last spiteful energy to dispel Madeline. But, standing above her at the fence, the ghost wasn’t gloating. “Keep your hand on it!”
Fine—to the absurd end. Scherie couldn’t have moved much even if she had wanted to. She was about a ten count from passing out. Nine. Never mind …
Then, like the static of a winter’s day, a brief shock of craft energy made her fingers jump; it might have hurt if her leg wasn’t demanding all her capacity for pain. The energy seemed to push her a few steps back from unconsciousness.
Cutting through the multilingual chaos around Scherie, a woman’s voice came out of the column, vibrating her hand like a restaurant’s buzzer. In what sounded like Greek, the voice posed what might have been a question.
Scherie responded in panglossic. “I … I don’t speak Gr
eek. Please repeat.”
“Do you wish to claim sanctuary?” asked the voice, in English or panglossic.
Scherie knew of one Sanctuary, but that was distinctly American craft. Didn’t matter.
“Yes. I claim…”
The force hit her like water from a fire hose, knocking her soul out of her skin for a second, then passing through her. The guides stopped shouting. People shook their heads, confused, and turned away. All the city ignored her; all except the Dogs, who had reached the fence, but for some reason weren’t shooting.
“What is your house?”
Always on about the ancestors. The House of Morton was loaded with evil baggage, but that House Rezvani even existed was a secret, one probably unknown to this pillar voice.
“I’m a Morton by marriage.”
Silence. Dale had warned her that there’d be moments like these, when someone would stand in judgment of her connection to his line, and her life might hang between their greed and fear. But the voice left her dangling. “Wait.”
* * *
Scherie couldn’t say how long she waited. Longer than an hour, less than a night. More Dogs gathered, men and women, standing over her at the fence, quietly staring at her. They waited for her hand to slip like a pet anticipating a scrap tumbling from the table. No, they were more jackal than dog. Even in her hallucinating desperation, she was awed—what power in the world could remotely hold back these hunters from finishing her?
The night tourists and drinkers veered away from the Dogs, but no one seemed to notice Madeline’s presence, and its chill, as anything but the weather. Scherie could no longer distinguish Madeline from the living. That communal Left-Hand ghost stood silent vigil, as if waiting for Scherie to die. Wounded and wet, Scherie could delay shock and hypothermia, but they would keep their appointment eventually.
Things went black. Then, a man’s voice. “Madame?”