The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  A switchback staircase joined the courtyard to an upper floor. Winter and Alessandra began to climb it, their shoes echoing on the naked stone. Just enough light fell through the high windows to guide the way. There were tattered, sagging silks on the walls, looking as though they might tear from their hooks at any moment. The fabric was singed at the edges and Winter began to suspect a fire had gutted this place.

  They made their way up, stepping around the black weed that had already claimed the stairs. It had a wet, glassy texture and stole its way from step to step, its branches splitting like fingers, knotting through cracks and rising again. It seemed to sense their approach, tensing with each footstep.

  Winter noted the way Alessandra moved through the infestation. There was too much confidence in her, not enough caution. He had seen it in certain field agents. The absolute assurance of their knowledge, their skills. Too often it was a flaw, and a treacherous one.

  ‘Don’t take it so fast,’ he hissed.

  She sighed and slowed her steps, allowing him to catch up.

  The staircase took them to a small landing and then twisted again, leading to a narrow hallway and a choice of rooms. The black weed had reached this level, too. It clasped the walls of the corridor and slid around half-opened doors, threading its way into the shadows. Winter saw that it was moving, fractionally, each dankly sweating strand probing a little deeper into the house.

  ‘What the hell is this stuff?’ he asked, eyeing it with a mix of disgust and wariness. ‘It’s all over the place.’

  ‘It’s hexweed. I haven’t seen it in centuries. Somebody’s conjured it. Somebody very talented.’

  ‘What’s it doing here?’

  ‘I imagine it’s guarding the house. You really don’t remember anything, do you?’

  ‘Just keep re-educating me.’

  Winter followed the thickest of the strands as it curled around a door. They found themselves in the piano nobile, the grand floor, a vast, high-ceilinged space that had once been used to entertain visitors. Now it was empty, bare and dark, its furthest corners hidden, untouched by the finger of light from the doorway. Shattered Moroccan lamps stood in the gloom, their jewelled remains tarnished and grimy. There was the taste of dust in the air, bitter on their tongues.

  The body of a man lay on the floor.

  Winter approached the pile of awkwardly angled limbs. The man must have been in his early thirties, his features hard and Slavic. There was no obvious indication of violence but the skin had a bruised, bluish tint, like spoiled ham, and the flesh had already begun to sink against the contours of the bones.

  It was a recent death, perhaps a day at most.

  Winter eased the arm from where it had locked against the chest. It thumped to the floor, still tethered by spirals of black weed that had looped themselves around the man’s wrist, tight enough to choke the flow of blood. The weed also encircled his ankles.

  There was a passport in the jacket. Winter slid it from the inner pocket. It bore the letters CCCP, the iconography of hammer and sickle embossed in chipped gold leaf. He skimmed through the ink-stamped pages to the ID.

  Ladislas Stefanovich Volyntsev. Born 3rd December 1931, Novosibirsk.

  Winter strained his gaze against the Cyrillic script, summoning his functional knowledge of Russian, untouched for the past two years. Volyntsev, it appeared, was a manager of statistics at the Ministry of Fish Industry, Moscow.

  Winter tossed the passport to one side. He pulled a slim wallet from the same pocket and quickly fingered through its contents, finding bundles of roubles and lira. Then he paused, tracing the outline of a small, flat object secreted within the wallet’s lining. He broke the stitching, extracting a laminated rectangle of card that declared its owner to be Yevgeni Ilyich Chaika, employee of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.

  ‘KGB,’ said Winter. ‘They’re ahead of us.’

  ‘Really?’ said Alessandra. ‘We’re the ones who are still alive.’

  Remembering a detail of Soviet tradecraft, Winter unbuckled the man’s watch, recoiling as he made contact with the stiff, cold flesh. He took a Festival of Britain pen-knife from his pocket, extracted the miniature blade and slit the strap. Inside the sweat-stained length of leather was the tip of a strip of paper, tissue-thin and tightly pleated. Winter pinched the end and prised it free.

  It unfolded into a sheet of notes, a seemingly disconnected scrawl of letters and numbers that Winter instinctively recognised as the lingua franca of field work. Place names and timings and tiny, inscrutable symbols that spoke in private code. One word stood out from the others, circled for emphasis. Winter attempted to make sense of the hasty, slanting strokes.

  Zerbinati. He stared at the word as if the sheer intensity of his scrutiny might unlock it. But it meant nothing to him. Zerbinati. It was every damn possibility in the world.

  ‘Do you know what this means? Zerbinati?’

  Alessandra shook her head. ‘I can’t place it.’

  Winter slipped the sheet into his own wallet then stepped from the Soviet agent’s corpse and headed deeper into the shadows. Seconds later the tip of his shoe connected with something weighty and metallic. The object skittered across the floor. He knelt to retrieve it. It was a gun, and a familiar one. Webley & Scott. Standard British Intelligence issue. He had been given one himself.

  He checked the clip. Empty. Whoever had owned the gun had used every last bullet before the weapon was abandoned.

  Winter put the revolver back on the floor and straightened up. His eyes had begun to calibrate to the gloom. The darkness in the far corner was more than just the shadows. It was a mass of black weed. He could see its tendrils extending across the hardwood floor. They had a stealthy, predatory quiver.

  Something else caught his eye, perhaps ten feet from where he had kicked the gun. At first he could make no sense of the shape in the half-light. Then, as he stepped closer, he recognised it. He reached down to retrieve the fallen object.

  It was a cap. A peaked, checkerboard-patterned cap. Winter turned it in his hand, seeing the Mary Quant label on the rim inside. There was no blood on it, at least.

  He tossed it back to the ground then walked towards the clump of weed.

  ‘Winter!’ warned Alessandra, hanging back.

  The tendrils reared and slapped the floor as Winter approached, like an animal making a defensive display, carving out territory. He ignored them, even as other, lower strands slithered around his feet.

  There was a woman entangled in the weed, right in the heart of it. He could see her face through the black cradle. Her eyes were closed and in the near-dark he couldn’t tell if she was dead or simply unconscious. The weed had raised her from the ground, suspending her from the wall, and she hung like a trophy in the shadows.

  It was Libby Cracknell.

  ‘There’s somebody in here,’ he called to Alessandra. ‘I’m getting her out.’

  Winter reached into the thick snarl of weed. The black strands were unnaturally cold to the touch and left a slick, clammy residue on his hands. It was an effort to crack them apart but he managed to prise an opening, freeing some space around Libby’s body, enough for him to slip his arms around her. Her wrists and ankles were bound, lashed by the vines.

  The weed clung to the girl as Winter attempted to wrench her free. The tendrils coiling at his feet mounted his shoes. He booted them away, leaving them to flex in indignation on the floor. Eventually the black weed loosened its lockhold. Winter ripped Libby’s body from the thicket and laid her gently on the floor. Alessandra was already there, kneeling beside her. She put her fingers to the girl’s throat, searching for life.

  ‘There’s a pulse. She’s breathing.’

  ‘I know her,’ said Winter. ‘She’s one of mine.’

  ‘SIS?’

  Winter nodded. ‘God knows what she’s doing here…’

  He felt a sudden, scoring pain. A tendril had seized his wrist, claiming blood as it tightened like wire around th
e bone. The gun was squeezed from his hand. A second vine clasped his left wrist. Another thin black whip closed around his legs. There was strength in the weed, enough to twist his limbs around, turning him to face the throng of vegetation.

  The weed was seething now. The spidery heap of vines thrashed against the air. Winter struggled against its grip but he found himself hauled forward. The strands that had curled around his ankles now lifted him from the floor, raising him until he was level with the densest part of the growth.

  ‘Don’t fight it!’ urged Alessandra. ‘Don’t let it think you’re a threat!’

  Winter faced the hexweed, forcing his muscles to relax. He peered into the cracks between the strands and saw something stir at the core. A single stem, capped with a black flower head. It moved with a questing, inquisitive motion, worming its way through the shadows.

  The stem emerged from the vines. It was segmented and it glistened dewily. Silky black petals encircled a stigma that looked uncannily like a cluster of flies’ eyes.

  The black flower head swayed in front of Winter. It trembled against his left cheek, close enough to brush the skin, trailing shivers where it touched him. The weed moved down his body, tracing his jawline, skimming his throat, lingering against his torso. It pulled away for a moment.

  And then it made a rapid, snapping movement, targeting his chest.

  11

  Winter felt his ribcage shudder. The stem had entered him.

  He looked down. There was no blood, no break in the skin, but the stem was inside him nevertheless, spearing through his shirt and embedding itself in his chest cavity. He could sense it threading through tissue, navigating veins. It was searching, hunting.

  He screamed. The petals had closed like a fist. Now they were tearing a part of him out. It felt like his heart at first. But it was something else, something buried in bone and blood, beyond the flesh, somehow deeper than his physical body. The petals had it in their grasp and they were determined to take it. Winter kicked in agony as whatever they had found was plucked from his chest.

  The stem slid out of him. Again there was no visible trace of the violation – his shirt was intact, his skin too. Winter gathered his breath and blinked to clear his vision. The flower head hovered in front of his face, the petals splayed to reveal their prize.

  It was a small, round object, roughly the size of an apple. The orb was as black as the weed and it had a glossy, inky sheen. He had no idea how such a thing could possibly have been inside him but he instinctively knew he had carried it for some time.

  ‘What the hell am I even looking at?’

  Alessandra stepped away from Libby, her eyes on the orb. There was a trace of awe in her voice. ‘It’s your thaumaturgic imprimatur.’

  This wasn’t enlightening. ‘It’s my bloody what?’

  ‘Every magician has one. It’s accumulated from every act of magic you’ve ever done. I’ve never seen one before. It’s fascinating.’

  Winter stared at the dark, wet ball as it nestled in the petals. He wasn’t fascinated. He was repelled. It was part of Tobias Hart.

  ‘How can that thing have been inside me? It doesn’t belong to me. It’s his…’

  ‘It’s dead magic. Just like dead skin. It has no power. But it’s enough to identify you. I think that’s what the hexweed is doing.’

  The petals tremored as they held the orb. So the thing was some kind of signature, thought Winter. Given what Alessandra had just said he imagined the weed was weighing it, testing its authenticity. Finally the petals closed. The stem withdrew into the thicket, taking the shiny black sphere.

  Winter instantly felt the vines loosen, slipping from his wrists and ankles. With no support he fell. As he tumbled to the floor he saw the hexweed retreating. And not just the vines in front of him. Every piece of black vegetation in the room was peeling from the walls, extracting itself from the floorboards, stealing out of woodworm holes. Moving with a collective impulse it snaked to the furthest corner, unravelling into the shadows. Moments later even the shadows had gone.

  Light was filling the piano nobile. Winter stared at the floor as he got to his feet. All around him fragments of jewelled glass were coalescing from swirls of dust. As quickly as they appeared the pieces spat themselves to the corners, locking against each other with a hard, chinking sound. The shattered Moroccan lamps were repairing themselves. In moments they were blazing, alive with colour.

  A different room had been revealed. The dimensions were the same – the height, the width, the essential geography – but everything had changed. The filthy silk brocade on the walls now glimmered with gold thread. Ornamental rugs sprawled across the floorboards. There were cupboards and cabinets and alcoves, mahogany chairs and cedarwood caskets, Etruscan bronzes and framed Phoenician maps. Winter saw tables swimming with papers, clippings, card-covered files, leather-backed journals. Bookshelves scraped the ceiling, stacked with thick, gilt-edged volumes, their spines cracked from centuries of use. An alabaster sarcophagus stood against the wall, riddled with hieroglyphs.

  The room shuddered, phasing in and out of Winter’s vision, light wrestling with shadow. It was as if the ghost of the empty, gloomy space that had been there only moments before was fighting for dominance. And then everything settled, and was still. The new room had won.

  Winter steadied himself. He turned to Alessandra, open-mouthed. ‘What just happened?’

  She smiled as she took in their surroundings. ‘I think you happened.’

  ‘How can…?’

  She trailed a hand over a newly materialised marble bust, feeling its solidity. ‘There was a glamour on this house.’

  ‘Glamour? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s an older word than you imagine. A witch word, before this century stole it. A glamour is a hex. A spell of illusion. Concealment.’ She waved a hand at the display of objects around them. ‘All this? It’s the life’s work of Eugenio Franzeri. Someone really didn’t want it to be found.’

  ‘You mean it was here all the time? Just hidden from view?’

  ‘Sì,’ she said, patiently. ‘That is how a glamour works.’

  ‘And what does this have to do with me?’

  She stepped close to him, the teasing smile still on her lips. ‘It’s a powerful enchantment. The work of a truly gifted magus. Whoever cast it also conjured the hexweed to protect the house. Again, impressive.’

  Alessandra was relishing this.

  ‘Now,’ she continued, casually, ‘seeing as the hexweed vanished as soon as it knew who you were… and given that the glamour faded, too… well, I’d say it’s obvious who’s responsible, wouldn’t you?’

  Winter stared at her. ‘You mean Tobias Hart did this?’

  ‘You really were very good, you know. A natural. No wonder I liked you.’

  ‘This house was waiting for me to return?’

  She put a hand to his chin, her eyes dancing. ‘Tell me, darling. Am I explaining all this too quickly for you? Should I start with card tricks instead?’

  Winter pushed past her, unamused. He went to kneel by Libby. She was stirring now, her eyelids batting back the sudden brightness in the room. He loosened the collar of her blouse, allowing air to circulate around her throat.

  ‘Cracknell. It’s me. It’s Winter.’

  Her eyes opened at the sound of his voice. They strained to focus on his face, the pupils shying from the light of the lamps.

  ‘Winter,’ she repeated, muzzily.

  ‘Are you injured?’

  Her eyes moved from his face to take in the room. They darted, confused by what they saw.

  ‘Where am I?’

  Winter put an arm behind her shoulder as he helped her to sit up. ‘The house in Venice.’

  ‘This isn’t where I was. Not this room…’

  Winter felt her flinch, as if the memory of the weed had just caught up with her. ‘It’s okay, Cracknell. It’s okay. You’re fine. Don’t expect it to make sense just yet.’

  ‘W
hat are you doing here?’ asked Alessandra, bluntly.

  Winter shot her a cautioning look then returned his attention to Libby. ‘This is Alessandra Moltini. I got her out of Budapest. There were some unexpected developments during the mission. So tell me, did Faulkner send you?’

  Libby took her eyes away.

  ‘I need to know,’ said Winter, more firmly now. ‘Did Faulkner send you to Venice?’

  The girl met his gaze again. ‘I’ve got orders.’

  ‘So I imagine. Were you ordered to follow me?’

  Libby managed to conjure a gap-toothed grin. ‘I got here before you, Mr Winter. Strictly speaking, that’s not following.’

  Alessandra raised an eyebrow. ‘The child is spirited, at least.’

  ‘How did you get in?’ pressed Winter. ‘The door was still locked when we got here.’

  ‘Who uses the bloody door? Window, mate. First floor.’

  Winter shook his head, breath escaping between his teeth. ‘They don’t trust me, do they? That’s why London sent you after me.’

  ‘You left the service,’ said Libby. ‘Once you’ve strayed they’ll never trust you again. Bit like cheating on your wife, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. How did they even know this place existed?’

  Again Libby lapsed into silence.

  ‘Look,’ said Winter. ‘They clearly don’t trust me. But you need to. Because we’re in the field now. And that’s how we stay alive out here. That bond of trust. It’s everything. So I’m asking you again. How did they know about this house?’

  Libby took a moment before replying. ‘I was shown a dossier,’ she said at last. ‘Not all of it, but enough. Something big from back in the forties.’

  ‘Operation Paragon.’

  Libby nodded. ‘I was only allowed to see a few pages, and some of that had been black-lined. But they knew exactly where this house was. There was a report attached. It was in your handwriting.’

  Winter’s expression gave away nothing. ‘What’s so important about this house?’

  ‘There’s intelligence here. Something you went and buried, Mr Winter. A long time ago.’