by James Bennet
“You don’t know that.”
“I can make an educated guess.” He offered Ben a wan smile. “Perhaps this change in regime is inevitable. Perhaps it is our turn again.”
“You might as well side with the CROWS!”
Von Hart tsked. “Don’t be naïve. You’ve seen the Lurkers, haven’t you? Encountered magic even you can’t resist. To walk out under that darkened sun, flinging spells and imprecations…What chance do you think we’ll have?”
Ben balled his hands into fists, his jaw a bristling line.
“We have to do something!”
“It’s your choice, Liebling. Go. Fly off and save your damsel. But know that you fly to your destruction.”
The choice was no choice at all. A burning canopy over his head. A waitress from Vinegar Hill who knew they could never live a normal life, but who had loved him anyway. Loved him and paid the price.
“We’re wasting time. Consider this goodbye.”
The envoy smiled, and some of it even reached his eyes. “I know,” he said, and clapped his hands. “But first, come. One more thing I will do for you. A small parting gift, so at least you can face your death with dignity.”
Von Hart led Ben to a small door beside the catwalk and down a narrow corridor into the dressing rooms. Old make-up and acrid perfume spiced the cloistered space.
The suit hung on a rail in an alcove, surrounded by feather boas, fishnet stockings and sequinned skirts. Thinking of shed skins, Ben took in the sight and laughed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
If his scorn wounded the envoy, Von Hart didn’t show it.
“You weren’t the only thing I retrieved from the car park.” In fact, he was obviously pleased with himself. “I took the liberty of taking your scales as well. Fulk won’t need them now. Why let them go to waste? Besides, you’ll catch your death one of these days.”
Ben recalled the scrubbed feeling when he had woken up in the room upstairs, the sensation of sandpaper-scoured flesh. He raised an eyebrow at the envoy, colouring despite himself.
“It took some effort to synthesise the scales into a fabric, weave their substance into this. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find it as tough as your flesh. I mean, it is your flesh. A second skin. Extra armour, of sorts.”
“You…synthesised my scales?”
“No mean feat. Your genes are somewhat resistant to meddling. Still, once I realised I only had to work with the magic that was already present, the rest came easy enough. I hope you don’t think me intrusive.”
Bit late for that.
“It’s…it’s a nice gesture. But surely the moment I spread my wings this will all be rags.”
A grin answered him. “That’s the beauty of it. The suit will change when you change, melding into your true form. When you take on human guise, the suit will heed and follow.” The grin grew wider. “If nothing else, it will protect your modesty and spare you a few shocked looks.”
Ben moved in for a closer inspection. The suit hung before him like a reflection, a charred black sheen of tiny heart-shaped interlocking scales, reminiscent of neoprene, a wetsuit padded for war.
An emblem adorned the chest, emblazoned in red and circled by yellow.
“That’s wyrm tongue for Sola—”
“Yeah. I know what it means.”
“All those years,” Von Hart said. “Living under the radar, working for crooks. You know, things could have been so different.”
Ben reached out and touched the material, rubbing it between his hands.
“Fairy,” he growled, but all the same, he was grinning.
Interlude: A Shadow in the Sun
Khan el-Khalili, Cairo
Rose McBriar stood, neck straight, arms held rigid at her sides, in the hustle and bustle of Cairo’s most famous bazaar. She could move her eyes a little – the force that held her, uttered from the witch’s lips and enveloping her like a steel cocoon, allowed an inch or two of free movement, no more. The rest of the time she was subject to another’s will, an invisible yoke around her neck, controlling her motor functions. But like a moth struggling in a chrysalis, her own will appeared to be making some elbow room, bound wings of intention pushing against the unseen walls of her cell. Such things, of course, should be impossible. Witches, magic – impossible. By all the laws of the world she knew, her captors should not exist. Rose kept trying to swallow her shock in her bid to survive them.
Straining to look, she could see the jumble of exotic goods stacked all around her. A wall of lamps rose on either side of a yellow Moorish arch, a rainbow of scarves hanging on a stall beyond. Just above her head, a thousand ceramic pharaohs glared down at her from an endless row of shelves. Rugs poured from the shadowed eaves, cascading into pools formed of urns and chests, each one loaded with trinkets to catch the eyes of passing tourists: golden plates, stuffed model camels, vintage cameras, all glimmering cheaply in the shade. Incense and hookah smoke coiled everywhere. The noise and the heat were only rivalled by the smell. Having worn the same shirt and jeans since her unplanned flight from New York, she guessed that some of the smell was hers.
Unable to wipe her face, Rose blinked away a tear. How had she come to be here, in this far-flung dusty place? It all remained a blur, a staccato of memory from when she’d arrived at her sister’s in Vermont, pulling into the darkened driveway in the rented car and already hearing Poppy’s soft remonstrations in her ears. You should never have accepted that cheque and Why did you let him buy the apartment? and What the hell do you see in him anyway? He sounds like a crook! All of which she’d been prepared to take in the appropriate silence, knowing what she knew and knowing that she could not explain the paradox, even if she’d wanted to. How Ben Bastard Garston made her feel, so safe, and at the same time more aware than ever of her own strength and independence. She couldn’t even tell him that. She’d taken his advice to lie low against her better judgement, but damn him, he’d scared her badly with his crazy talk of killers on the New York streets who’d apparently mentioned her by name (thanks for that, Ben). Postponing her exams, she had driven up north with her fingers nervously tapping the steering wheel and her guts aflutter. How he expected her to explain all of this to Poppy without her calling the police was beyond her.
As it was, she never got the chance. The minute she’d slammed the car door, the shrunken woman in the purple perm and the tuxedo had stepped out from the bushes and into the driveway, waving some kind of stick. Hello, Princess. Then the sensation of drunkenness and flying. Time fleeting past in slurred protests and muffled profanity. Get yo…fucking pawsh off me…bish… Later, someone shouting her name. Ben? The shreds of a dream clung to her, an image of her very-ex-boyfriend shouting her name across some paved and gated space. Then darkness again, followed by light. Bright, bright light. The Saharan sun…Had she been half awake when she’d stepped off the plane? Had the witch let her rise to the surface, let her taste her arid surroundings? And that was the point when Rose had started thinking of her captor as a witch – beyond all logic, a witch – though that impression hadn’t even seemed that far-fetched, considering the leggy vixen in the bad make-up, torn stockings and pointy hat who sat opposite her during the flight. A fucking witch! Rose had moaned and slumped in her seat, wishing for the life of her that the woman was just in fancy dress, but deep in her guts knowing different. The witch may have even spoken to her, but if she had, it would hardly have been reassuring. The words Sahara and Move it swam through her mental fog. She remembered craning her neck on the runway to look back at the little white craft, what she’d guessed was a private charter jet, even as her terror at her situation came thudding back to her.
Terror swiftly followed by born-Brooklynite spunk. Christ, she was pissed! What the hell kind of shit had Ben landed her in? What the fuck was going on? Witches were real? Was she having some kind of mental breakdown? But she could not deny the force that gripped her, and it was only sheer adrenalin, sheer determination to live, that pr
evented a scream from flying from her throat, a scream that she feared would never end…
Anger was easier, a mast to cling to. Anger and blame. None of this – Rose could only think of it as craziness – would be happening if Ben had just stayed away, lived up to his lie and left her in peace. Left you up in your ivory tower. Or if she’d somehow found a way to make him stay away, to blow out her old flame once and for all. But you waited for him, didn’t you? In a tower of your own making… The reason to free herself, though it pained her, was obvious. Self-preservation. That was what her sister would’ve said. Even now, spellbound and dazed in an unfamiliar foreign city in the company of what she could only think of as monsters, Rose experienced the all-too-familiar dilemma, her heart dangling and shifting like the flag in a game of tug-of-war. She’d told herself – taught herself – that it hurt less to have Ben out of her life than to have him in it.
You’re a survivor, Rose. Remember that. She kept repeating her mantra, an internal chant, in the face of his secrets. And all of his secrets were bullshit! Did he think she was a child? She had known all along that there was something wrong with him. OK, something more to him. Normal people couldn’t withstand blazing frying pans or smell perfume from five floors down. And then there was the Central Park thing…But when he kissed her, she had a nasty habit of forgetting all that, or at least pretending to forget. In a New York subway, she’d walked away and left him to it, surrendering to her inner resolve that she didn’t need him in her life. Despite all this, despite standing here like a storefront dummy in the bazaar of her nightmares, Rose was privately enraged by the fact that for all her forgetting, she hadn’t managed to convince herself of this decision either.
Men!
Or…whatever the fuck he was…
Her hands, the palms of which were sweaty yet cold, curled slowly into fists. She blinked, surprised by the pressure of nails biting into her skin. The sensation wrenched her out of resentment and doubt, and back to the scene before her. She stood by a small table set under an awning in a corner of the souk. A man in a tuxedo sat in a chair with his back to her. His collar, bleached white, looked as starched into rigidity as she was. He was talking with a fat, greasy mystic-cum-merchant.
“Please, Abbas,” the man in the tux said. “All these things are very fine, but I didn’t come here to haggle over mummified cats, cracked jewellery or any other plunder from broken tombs. As one Old Believer to another, I already have the spell I require. And I know the hour of its speaking. Why not save us both some time and give me what I seek?”
He spoke like this, the man in the tux, polite and measured to a fault, as though his words performed topiary on the air, each breath between them laden with pitfalls, hidden dangers. He’d spoken like this from the moment the witch – who, as far as Rose could recall, had somehow been shorter and smaller than the leggy vixen who’d just shared the flight with her – had greeted him as they stepped off the plane. He had leant on the hood of an elegant car, black and soundless on the runway, straightening with a smile as they approached. Sabah el kheir, he’d said, the perfect gent. Please, call me… He’d coughed, perhaps thinking better of giving her his real name. The shadow. Then, pleasantries over, the inexplicably shrunken witch had handed Rose over into his care (with another soft utterance, the relinquishing of an invisible yoke), and the man, the shadow, had taken her hand and kissed it as if she was some visiting dignitary, rather than a gagged and bound victim of kidnap. Welcome to Egypt. I trust Khepri, the scarab, with his bright ball of dung, doesn’t trouble you overmuch.
If he hadn’t extended one finger, enclosed in a pristine white glove, directly upward at the sky, Rose wouldn’t have realised that he meant the sun.
Those fingers were under his chin now, steepled in a way to suggest great patience, as he bartered with the merchant.
“I have many shabtis,” Abbas was saying, holding out a small carved figurine. “All working, all sound. Should you need anyone, ah, replaced…”
Apparently despite himself, the shadow took the figurine from the merchant. He rolled it between finger and thumb, watching the light filtering through the awning play across the worn inscriptions.
“Another relic from the New Kingdom, Abbas? What would the government say?” The shadow let this sink in, watching the man squirm in his kaftan. Then he sighed. “These shabtis are hardly rare. They litter the tombs of the ancient dead. Of course our ancestors used to rely on them, believing that the figures served as substitutes for the deceased, in case something happened to the mummy, leaving the soul, the ba, lost and wandering. As such, I admit it holds a passing interest…”
The merchant started rubbing his palms, but the shadow merely tutted.
“Passing, I said. You’re too late for this to be of any use. We made our little switch months ago and we did not use stone.” With that, he tossed the figurine back to the merchant, who, after a fumble, managed to catch it, made it vanish back into his robes. “The knife, Abbas.” The shadow folded his arms, the gesture looking anything but casual. “I’d hate you to think me rude, but if you weren’t protected by so many glyphs, I would have simply strangled you and taken it by now.”
The merchant laughed and fanned himself with his palm leaf, visibly amused, clearly terrified. Rose fancied she could see herself, standing pale, stiff, her hair a mess, in the beads of sweat dripping from under his turban. The shift in atmosphere as Abbas brought out the object in question was not imagined, however. A sense of loosening shivered over her skin. Her shoes shuffled a little on the sandy floor.
“Ra sails across the sky in his Boat of a Million Years,” the merchant said, “and even he never thought to see this day. The knife has been in my family for three thousand years and more, passed down from father to son. The gods will spit on me for such a trade.”
“Yes, yes.” The shadow swatted a fly away. “We are all cursed in our own way, Abbas.”
Abbas frowned at this, the insult noticeably lancing his fear. All the same, he unfolded the bundle of silk on the table and the shadow leant in for a closer inspection.
“You mustn’t fear the gods so,” he breathed, taking in the curious hook-tipped object before him. “In the old days, the gods were central to everything, overseeing and joined with the world like shorebirds and Nile crocodiles, a symbiotic – and quite mythical – relationship. The ancients worshipped their gods through nature, and in return, the gods promised not to destroy them. But I’m sure you know how easy it is to anger the gods, hence storms, drought, earthquakes and the like…” The shadow stuck out his chin, his admiration for this archaic arrangement plain. “Ritual and sacrifice kept the gods happy in the old days, Abbas. But, alas, these are not the old days.”
Lightning quick, the knife was in the shadow’s hand, slicing through the shafts of sunlight. Abbas gave a yelp and sat back, his wobbling chin only just avoiding the arc of the blade. Rose, startled by the movement, took a step back as well. And then was startled all over again to realise that she had done so.
The shadow hadn’t noticed, his attention fixed solely on the blade.
“Nevertheless, the old ways are best.” The knife snapped back, the shadow resting one white-gloved finger on its keenly honed edge. “We call this a des. The sem priests used them in the embalming process, slicing the flesh and removing the organs. Shaped from stone, but sharp as you like.” His back remained turned to her, but Rose just knew that smile was back on his face, as thin and cold as the knife. “The ancients held that the crescent moon was also a knife, you know, clutched by a god. Some considered it holy to etch symbols into their skin. Eyes and snakes and flowering reeds. Ankhs and falcons and birds. All rendered in precise wounds. All rendered in blood. Protection matters, I’m sure you’ll agree. This knife is an important tool. Sacred. Necessary.”
“Then you won’t mind paying handsomely for it.”
The shadow barked a laugh. Clearly, no merchant in the Khan el-Khalili would let fear get in the way of a good bargain.
“Name your price,” he said.
Rose fought the urge to take another step back, suspecting that she could if she tried, as the merchant’s eyes strayed over the shadow’s shoulder and drank her in, climbing from her thighs and up over her breasts, the filthy, slender shape of her. He met her eyes for half a second before flicking away, back to his pale customer.
Abbas licked his lips. “This woman. Is she…shalakh? In your possession?”
Rose clenched her jaw. Her nails were biting deep now, tensing at the knowledge that perhaps in the witch’s absence, the spell’s hold on her was slipping. Or perhaps because the shadow was focusing his attention elsewhere. Under this, she had an inkling that her own determination played a part. Her temper flared, stoking her Irish blood. She was a little tired of being treated as an object, some trinket in other people’s hands.
“I’m afraid my companion is not for sale,” the shadow said. “Does the scribe trade the tablet for the stylus? There would be no point. Name another price and I’m sure—”
The man in the tuxedo didn’t get to finish, because that was the moment Rose lurched to one side and wrenched the shelf nearest to her from the wall. A thousand glaring pharaohs rained down, crashing into the table. Clay shattered, brightly painted chips scattering all around. Rose saw the merchant tumble back on his chair, his palm leaf and turban tilting through the dust, his slippers flying over his head. She didn’t take in the shadow’s reaction until she’d reached the end of the row of stalls, her pumps skidding on grit as she pushed people out of her way, the alarmed faces and jabbering voices closing in around her like an incoming tide. Are you hurt? What happened? She could’ve begged for help, yelled Kidnap! in the middle of the marketplace, but in that moment, with her newly freed muscles flinging blood around her brain, all she wanted to do was get away. Instinct screamed at her to run. Breaking through into an open plaza, she could see over the heads of the crowd to the littered table and the shadow beyond. He still sat there, shoulders straight, visibly unharmed. Calmly, he brushed ceramic chips off one shoulder. His hand closed around the handle of the knife. He opened his bag – leather, bulky, the kind that doctors used – and put the relic inside. Then he climbed slowly to his feet.