She twisted into me—
I ducked and raised my elbow—
Her crossguard caught my left arm.
She froze.
And I thrust the tomahawk at her forehead.
“Got you again,” I said.
She nodded, and lowered her sword.
“Is this all you got?” I asked. “Weren’t you a three-time fencing champion?”
Eve frowned. “I took your arm.”
“And I took your head. C’mon, Eve, get serious here.”
Her eyebrows furrowed with frustration. “All right.”
She readied her sword in a conventional grip. The length of her blade was a hassle. I had to get inside her reach. The moment she nodded at me, I lunged and swung for her neck.
She hewed into the attack, stopping it cold, then rotated the sword to aim at my throat. I hooked the blade, stepped in and yanked down. She resisted, trying to snap her sword back up, but I was far stronger. As I stepped in, she wound the sword around, lifting the handle high to her right ear and pointing the tip down, shedding the tomahawk.
Too late. I slapped down the crook of her exposed left arm, creating an opening, and cut at her neck.
“Zero for three, Eve. Try harder.”
She glowered at me, her eyes burning bright. She was getting mad. But maybe this time I’d see what she was capable of.
When the fourth bout began she came in swinging. I circled and shuffled around her, voiding her blows, studying her timing. A half-minute later, she paused, resting her sword at her shoulder. And I swung.
She stepped back, swinging her sword above her head, her edge sweeping for my face. My blade stopped hers a half-inch from my eyes.
I began to shear down. She pivoted, cutting at the other side of my throat.
Or tried. The sword caught itself on the beard of my tomahawk, buying me a fraction of a second. Enough time to disentangle the axe, step in and spike her head.
“I’m still waiting for you to get serious,” I said.
She glared at me. “I am serious.”
“Prove it.”
Her face abruptly smoothened over, becoming an icy mask. She said nothing, simply returning to her original position. She took her guard. I raised my weapon.
And she attacked.
I stepped away. She chased me with a slash. And another, and another, and another, targeting my face and neck. She was a wildcat, lashing out at every opportunity, and I was just barely able to keep up. Every time I tried to circle out, she followed me and closed the line with a thrust, forcing me to back up. She was pushing me to the corner of the room, trying to limit my mobility.
Panting hard, she raised the sword high overhead, as though for a finishing blow—
—she’s not an idiot; she can’t be—
Then swooped down and low.
I stepped out, barely avoiding her leg thrust. As reared up I retaliated with an overhead swing. Seizing her blade, she met my haft with her edge. Snaked the point around the haft and aimed at my throat—
And I transformed the tomahawk blade into an edge of pure blazing light.
She gasped, recoiling from the blinding glare and covering her face.
And dropped her guard.
I shot my left arm in between her right arm and her torso. Snaked up and grabbed her shoulder. Twisted around and drove her into the corner—pulling back at the last second to avoid hitting her head. Raised the tomahawk. Placed it at the back of her neck.
“Got you again.”
“That’s not fair!” she sputtered.
I let her go and stepped out of range.
“What isn’t fair?” I asked.
She pointed at my axe, still as radiant as a star.
“You didn’t say you could do that!”
“Never said I couldn’t.”
She crossed her arms and glared daggers at me. “I thought we were sparring.”
I turned off the glow.
“We were. But we’re training for the battlefield. Not for a competition. You’re still thinking like a tournament fighter.”
“I’m not!” she insisted. “I used these techniques in combat before!”
“What about that last trick I pulled?”
She clenched her fists and said nothing.
“Eve,” I said more gently, “if this were a sporting match, the results might be a lot different. But we’re not fighting daimons who’ll burn up when they touch aetherium, or bad guys who don’t see us coming. We’re fighting almost-immortal giants and who knows what else. They’re not going to play by our rules. There are no rules. If you want in on this job, you have to show us that you’re ready for the big leagues.”
She looked down. Breathed in. Breathed out. Took another breath. Looked back up.
“How can I get better?”
No more sparring. Instead I showed her the dirty tricks I’d learned from half a lifetime at war. How to slide your feet forward and gain extra distance without being spotted, how to use distraction and deception instead of brute force, how to employ light and sound and motion to occupy the enemy’s attention, how to adapt everything to her catalog of longsword techniques. When I checked the room clock again, it was a quarter past five.
“Let’s wrap things up,” I said. “The others will be waking up shortly. We should shower and get ready for the day.”
She nodded. “Let’s go.”
We put our soulblades away and concealed the charagma. I walked her to the door and glanced out the peephole.
Alex, Keith and Pete were in the corridor, arguing loudly about how much weight they could lift. I held up a finger to my lips. Eve nodded.
When they passed, I checked the world outside with voidsight. Clear. I opened the door and let her out.
“Thanks for training me,” she said.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “We should do this more often.”
“Anytime. I’m always up for a rematch.”
She headed for her room, her hips swaying. I looked away. Closed the door. Hit the shower.
It was going to be a long morning.
9. Disclosure
Right after breakfast, we threw ourselves back to work. As the Nemesis operators plotted their infiltration, Eve and I studied the layout of the Hagia Aletheia.
The official website had a floor plan. Most of the massive cathedral was open to the public. There was a restricted area on the upper floor that housed the offices of the Oecumenical Patriarch and his staff. As primus inter pares, the Oecumenical Patriarch was the most senior of the Church bishops and served as the public face of the faith and the mediator of inter-church disputes. Today, though, His Most Divine All-Holiness was present and scheduled to lead services in his other position as the Archbishop of Amarantopolis.
“Security is going to be ultra-tight,” I said.
Eve nodded slowly. “Metal detectors, armed guards, patrols, dogs, who knows what else. At least we’ll be certain the enemy won’t try anything.”
“They could just tip off the cops, you know,” Pete interjected.
“If it fit into their plans, they would have done it already,” I said. “They wouldn’t have bothered sending hit teams after us.”
“Yes, that’s why Mike wants to meet us there,” Eve said. “He said it’s the last place the enemy will attack.”
“Even so,” I said, “we need to be careful.”
“Seriously, brother, you’re asking us to sneak AKs into the backyard of the most fortified church in the world. If something goes wrong, they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.”
I nodded. “If anyone can do it, it’s us.”
“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” Alex called out.
“You’re welcome!” I replied.
“Is there a point?” Pete asked. “If we have to pull our guns, it’ll become a three-way gunfight.”
“Better safe than sorry,” I said. “We don’t know what the enemy is capable of. We gotta err on the side of caution. If
things go to hell, just breach the church and extract us. The Hellenes can take care of everything else.”
Normally, we would conceal short weapons like an AKS-74U under a coat or a burka. But it was summer in Pantopia. Shirtsleeves weather. And burkas were uncommon in Amarantopolis. We settled for second-best: custom-designed backpacks and sling bags, printed overnight.
To the casual observer they looked like bags you could pick up in a sporting goods shop. But the bags were festooned with cleverly concealed pouches to hold ammunition, first-aid kits and other gear. If something went wrong, an operator could unzip the bags, grab the guns and get to work within thirty seconds. As we entered Hellenic airspace, the men retreated to the gym and rehearsed actions on target, including donning and doffing their gear.
“Dedicated, aren’t they,” Eve said.
“It separates the best from the rest,” I replied.
We shoved the weapons, ambrosia and ammo inside a crate plastered with diplomatic markings. The fiction allowed us to breeze us through airport security without a hitch.
We split up at the arrivals hall. I caught a taxi to the Nisantasi shopping district. Its name betrayed its Turkish origins: when the Hellenes took back the city, they simply retranscribed the name into Hellenic. The Turks had used the area as an archery range; today Nisantasi was the most exclusive district of the city, where the one percent lived and shopped and played.
Hellas might still be in the throes of the longest recession in its history, but Nisantasi hadn’t gotten the news. High-end cafes lined the roads, emphasizing their exotic menus and decor, each trying to one-up the other. Luxury fashion shops displayed bespoke suits and dresses in the windows, either promising personalized attention from in-house tailors or a marriage of body scanners and 3D printers with premium materials and exquisite service. Multistory shopping malls flung their doors wide open to accommodate wealthy foreign tourists and even wealthier locals.
I ducked inside a shopping mall and retreated into the restroom. Even the washrooms here offered luxury: the floors and sinks were marble, and the cubicle walls were made of polished wood. Entering a cubicle, I locked the door, pulled my flask of ambrosia, and took a gulp.
Fire sloshed through me, soaking into my flesh, my bones, my soul. Blood roared through my veins. My heart struggled to catch up. I was burning up. I swallowed a cough and concentrated.
The art of shapeshifting required a great deal of delicacy. The greater the change, the higher the chances of something going wrong. If you tried to turn blue eyes brown, for instance, you might burst the eye instead. And you must work with what mass you have: you could not make yourself bulkier or slimmer, taller or shorter. If you tried to make yourself taller by lengthening your bones and stretching your tissue fibers, you’d get severe osteoporosis and flaccid muscles. That’s assuming you didn’t tear your nerves and blood vessels apart in the process. Biology and physics always demand their dues. If you didn’t have a huge amount of ambrosia and doctors on standby—or at least the power of a god—shapeshifting into someone else was almost impossible.
But what you could do was make yourself unrecognizable to biometric-equipped security cameras.
In my mind’s eye I painted a stark image of the person I wanted to be. The person I now am. Heat rushed to my face. My bones melted, shifted, expanding in places and contracting in others. My skin liquefied and folded, cooling in some areas and warming elsewhere. My jawline shifted under my skin. Breathing deep, I held my focus, letting my body obey my will.
Eventually, the fire cooled. I checked myself in a hand mirror.
I was a different man now. The space between my eyes were noticeably wider, my nose rounder, my cheekbones sunken. My chin and jaw protruded like bone shelves, and my lips had migrated south just a tad. My dark hair was now riddled with silver streaks. Artificial laugh lines and eyebags appeared on my face.
Minor changes, but when compiled, I had a new biometric signature.
I worked my jaw. The muscles were stiff, unused to the new range of motion, and at the halfway point my mouth wouldn’t open any wider. As I closed my mouth, a faint pop echoed in my ears.
The temporomandibular joints were the most complex joints in the body. With such a major transformation, TMJ dysfunction was almost inevitable. At least I still had all my toes and fingers. Taking a small sip, I focused on more delicate changes, adjusting the joints until I could fully open my mouth. It didn’t eliminate the popping, but I could live with it.
I expended the rest of the ingested ambrosia on cementing the changes, careful to burn every last drop. The disguise would be good for the rest of the day. I poured the remaining ambrosia down the toilet bowl and flushed. It was a waste, but where I was going, there would be security measures to detect ambrosia. I didn’t need the inconvenience later.
I strolled outside with my new face and a modified gait. No one noticed the change. I strolled into the House Hotel and wandered about the lobby and the bar, examining the collection of books and spirits on display. After a few minutes, I discreetly turned off my holophone.
All communications devices periodically broadcast their locations and, thus, their users’ locations. Every modern nation would keep fastidious records of cell phone activity everywhere within their borders. If something went wrong, I didn’t want my phone to betray me.
The narrative I built with my route was simple: Jens Anderson arrived in the airport early in the morning for a working vacation in the holiest city in the continent. He decided to splurge on a stay at a five-star hotel and took the opportunity to get in some shopping before checking into his room. Modern cell towers, after all, could only determine location, not intention.
I caught another taxi to the city’s central bus terminus, where I deposited my passport and holophone in a coin locker. From the terminus I could board a train to the airport or a bus out of the city, depending on how well the meeting went.
I grabbed another cab to the Old Imperial District. Here was the original Amarantopolis, the city Emperor Amarant took for his capital when he united Hellas after the fall of the Macedonian Empire and stood fast against invasions from the east and west.
I had hours to kill. The taxi dropped me off near Amarantopolis University. A certain strain of Near Eastern scholars insisted on calling it Istanbul University, its original name when established by Mehmed the Conqueror. Groups of young men and women passed me by, chattering about pop culture and food and homework with nary a care in the world. It hadn’t even been a month since the Chios attack, but normality was already desperately reasserting itself, even in the face of carbine-toting cops patrolling the streets and police drones prowling the skies.
The Grand Bazaar was right across the street. Tourists and locals surged in and out of the gates, eager to get their hands on exotic Turkish trinkets and Hellenic goods, while blue-uniformed security guards watched them and counted down the hours to the end of their shift. I had read somewhere that there had once been a mosque nearby, but it had been destroyed during the War of Independence and never rebuilt. In its place was a large museum, the Amarantopolis Museum of Fine Arts. Holographic advertisements announced that the museum was hosting an exhibit on Near Eastern artwork featuring rare calligraphy from the medieval era.
I wound and weaved my way through a dense network of streets, using the opportunity to check my back. These streets were pedestrian-only, home to an eclectic array of shops and restaurants. I passed a sushi bar, a kebab outlet and a traditional Hellenic taverna within five minutes. Tables and chairs burst out of the eateries and spilled on to the street, leaving maybe six feet for pedestrians. Money changers, electronics stores, convenience shops, fashion houses and others crammed the street; some were browning with age while others were painted in vibrant colors; some had generic glass-and-steel-and-concrete constructions while others followed more classical Pantopian design aesthetics. There was no organizing theme, no coherence to the streets, nothing to unite them save for capitalism and commerc
e.
My path took me to the Hippodrome. Little remained of the racecourse that once stood here. Now it was a spacious park, an oasis of green in the concrete jungle. Asian tourists yammered in their respective tongues and dialects, taking selfies and photos from every direction. Couples, young and old, strolled across the grass and occupied the benches, their looks of disapproval failing to deter the tourists. Nearby, a lone artist stood oblivious, painting a still portrait of the Serpent Column and the Walled Obelisk, sacrificing realism for verisimilitude.
A man’s voice boomed across the world, amplified by a half-dozen loudspeakers, singing the Adhan. The call to prayer.
All Creation flows from Al-Asul. I testify that there is no God but the Source. I testify that Hakem is the right hand of the Source. I testify that Alim is the voice of the Source.
A sense of dislocation fell over me. My feet traversed the concrete of Amarantopolis, but in my mind I was again patrolling the dusty streets of Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul, a hot-blooded freshly-commissioned lieutenant hopped up on caffeine and sugar and God knew what else that went into our Rip Its and Monsters, a vengeful boy desperately eager to prove his worth and telling one and all he would search for and destroy the insurgents while secretly hoping—he had stopped praying years ago—this wouldn’t be the day a rifle bullet or a piece of high-velocity shrapnel would find a gap in his powered armor.
Over in the Near East the people took their religion dead seriously, possessing a conviction few Westerners could match. Every time we heard the Adhan, we would tense up, scan, check our weapons and gear and get ready to rock and roll. As the people departed to the nearest mosque, they avoided us infidels and passed through alleyways and neighboring roads, channeling us by design or accident to deserted streets. If an attack went down, the sheer number of people blocked avenues of advance or egress around us, and our rules of engagement forbade us from unleashing many of our powers or heavy firepower around so many civilians. The insurgents had no qualms attacking us, of course: they would have prayed earlier, fulfilling their daily quota, and were secure in the belief that if they fell in battle they would surely cross the Bridge of the Requiter and be greeted by Hakem and a small army of virgins in the Garden of Paradise. And if the mujahideen killed civilians during their ambush, well, it was Hakem’s will and the civvies’ fault for staying so close to the Hesaders.
Hammer of the Witches (The Covenant Chronicles Book 2) Page 32