by James Beach
She cornered him again and began to strike. He dodged as well he could, and swung back as fast and hard as he could find. Every time her hand even touched him it stung and his whole body convulsed with pain. He fell, and began to lose consciousness as the blows rained down. He reached forward to pull himself away, as he racked his stunned mind for some way out of this, some chance to make his way clear, just live a moment longer.
“Yes, this way!” he cried. “Police! She’s a murderer!”
She turned to see where he was looking. With the last remaining energy he could muster he rushed to the corner of the alley and began to climb.
She realized his plan, and screeched in rage as she ran at him. He pulled the ankle of his still-stinging leg just out of her reach.
Ten feet, he told himself. If he could get just ten feet up. Just the rim of lower retaining wall, then hand on that drain pipe, just enough to swing over to the bottom of the Hermitage’s thankfully ornate window ledge with enough room to plant both feet, and then…
He made it.
His back to her, gripping the top of the window’s edge a scant few feet above her, he looked down over his shoulder and into her blazing eyes.
“Coward!” she demanded. “Come down here and face your fate!”
“Thanks so much for the kind offer, but I’m good here.”
She screeched and tried to climb after him, but could only get a grip on the top of the lower retaining wall before she slipped back to the ground. “You can’t stay there all night!”
He spat some blood. “Neither can you, I think.”
“What kind of a man runs from a fight?”
Woozy from his beating, he laughed. He lost his grip and dropped back to the lower ledge. He jumped back up just in time, and scrambled to keep his legs out of her reach again.
He laughed again, his knuckles whitening with his grip on the wall. “A survivor.”
A beeping noise echoed lightly off the walls. Unsure what to do, she stepped back.
“Please, don’t be late for your appointment on my account.”
She sneered. “This is not over! There won’t be a wall big enough for you to climb once this night is done!”
She adjusted her dress with a huff, and stormed off.
In his stunned daze, he realized that she actually felt he had wronged her. He shook his head. What was wrong with people?
He focused back on this moment. What to do now?
There was only one answer. He sighed.
He leaned over to the drain pipe. Since he was on the side that was exposed to the street, he climbed up the pipe as quickly as he could. When he reached the third floor landing, he walked above the connecting bridge.
It appeared he had not been seen yet. So good so far.
His heart was also beating much faster than it should have been, and his upper back was moving on from discomfort and into searing pain. It would have been easer if he weren’t still recovering with his wound, let alone taken a beating. How much he could trust that bribed veterinarian’s stitches to hold his wound together?
Gritting his teeth, he edged along the ledge until he reached the window.
Lyita followed other persons through the building’s main entrance. She examined everything around her as closely as she could while still looking like she knew exactly where she was going. It was easy to seem cool on the outside, but this place made her deeply nervous. This was high society, and nothing she’d ever been a part of in her life. She knew how to look good in a dress. But who knew what sort of elite social cue she could miss, that would reveal her poor origins?
She found the stairwell that Aurelian said would lead to the bathroom with the window. She was about to head up. A large man in an impeccable suit stepped before her, with the unmistakable manner of a sentry.
“My apologies, but you cannot enter the other parts of the museum.”
“Oh,” said Lyita. She put on her best little girl impression. Most macho guys fell for it immediately. “But I just want to powder my nose.”
The guard smiled apologetically. “If it were up to me, you could do that and then come to the gathering. But the Arbiter does not want others sniffing around his sanctuary. You understand.”
Lyita froze her face to hide her confusion. “Yes, of course. Silly of me.” She walked towards the same area all of the other entrants were congregating in. As she did, she pulled out her cellphone to warn Aurelian she couldn’t reach the window.
As she took a step past the threshold, her cellphone screen went blank as if it was turned off. She tapped the screen a few more times, then tried to reboot it. It was simply not working at all.
Her anxiety increased to feverish levels. How was she going to get Aurelian in here? Was she going to have to manage this all on her own?
She spun around to go back outside, just as the door was closed behind her. She swallowed and faced the room.
There were about 30 other people in there with her, about evenly males and females. All were well dressed, but some seemed quite out of place. She noticed strange tattoos on some of the men and women, occasionally extending to their faces. She was familiar with prison tattoos, and also some of the more stylish tattoos that were popular with club goers for years now. These were none of them. They seemed to be a lot of complex patterns that were hard to look at. Some of them were hard to even see, and appeared to emerge only if their owners’ skin was in shadow. None of the tattoos looked exactly like what they had seen on the luck thief’s body. None looked entirely different either.
Other denizens of the space might have looked completely comfortable behind a lunch counter. One man was even wearing the uniform of a city bus driver, and had brought a cat. The man stared ahead bored, as the cat eyed her with curiosity.
The room itself had three entrances, evenly spaced around its edge. There was just enough floor area for the amount of people gathered to be comfortable. It was a half dome, rising from the floor to about 50 feet in height. The walls were solid black marble all the way around and to a height of roughly ten meters, where the wall blended seamlessly into a curving sheet of glass. This glass continued the shape of the hemisphere all the way to a center at the top. There, in the last few feet before the dome’s apex was a circular metal grid in a peculiar pattern.
The space was striking. Why had she never heard of such a room in the Hermitage before?
The moon shone bright tonight, and was just beginning to rise over the bottom wall of the hemisphere. A few more people trailed into the room from other doors. The people began organizing themselves according to the lines upon the floor. She then noticed the lines set into the marble floor that matched the pattern in the highest part of the domed ceiling.
She found what appeared to be an open spot in that same pattern and stood there, determined to bluff her way through as long as she could.
Across the room, a woman in a fine fur overcoat stared at her. She appeared neither young nor old, neither fat nor thin, neither lovely nor plain.
She smiled at Lyita, in way that was utterly carnivorous.
Aurelian stared in frustration as the window stayed closed. He checked his cellphone for the third time, and still Lyita had sent him no response. It was cold and getting colder. The physical exertion kept him warm inside, but his exposed fingers were starting to get stiff.
He cursed. Breaking the window was a risk. The only other way to get in without detection was, in his current state, almost unthinkable. He’d have to clamber onto the slanted copper roof, slick with light snow, and try the maintenance entrance. And hope that he still remembered the codes to the door, and that they hadn’t been changed since the failed theft he’d been a part of just over a week ago.
At that exact moment, a piece of the ledge he stood on crumbled under his feet. He twisted for a grip as he fell, and barely caught himself on the now broken edge. His shoulder hurt so hard he actually let out a noise.
Keeping his mind focused to try and overwhelm any possi
bility of luck being needed, he pulled himself back up, thinking through every finger and toe hold on the wall. Inch by inch, he hauled himself back over the ledge. There were a couple of further crumblings of brick which could have killed him if he were paying any less than absolute attention. He lay flat on the edge, to reduce the amount of his weight per square centimeter, and stopped for breath.
What was he going to do?
He had no tools and still had bad luck. While Lyita was still inside there, stuck with whatever magical nutcases he had pulled her into. While she was trying to help save him.
Magda’s taunts still stung. He was damned if was going to let Lyita die trying to save him from a woman he had run from.
He inched ahead on the ledge, to see where the ledge had crumbled and parted from the wall. That had actually been weird. Taking utmost care, he leaned over the place where the ledge was missing to see what else might be gone.
Sure enough, some parts of the exterior wall itself had fallen with the ledge. What could have killed him might also be his opportunity.
Very carefully he reached over the edge, and removed further crumbling pieces from the wall. He placed them on the ledge behind him rather than letting them drop and make a single sound. Soon there was enough removed to make a hole. It would have to do.
With the first prayer he’d said in years, Aurelian began the tricky work of contorting his body while upside down, so he could go from the ledge he rested on into the space he’d just made.
If anyone else was waiting on the other side of that hole, he would just have to figure that out when he got there.
Lyita found a space in the room that no one else had claimed yet, about halfway towards the center of the room. She looked at the main door to her left, as fewer people straggled in and stood in different places on various spots of the floor’s design. An elderly gentleman walked towards Lyita, and coughed. She realized that she must be standing in his spot. She moved and found another one.
The middle-aged woman who’d been staring at her nodded and sneered, as if having had a suspicion confirmed.
The door closed. “And so!” a man’s voice called out. Lyita saw a tall, thin and aristocratic man with short mixed-gray hair take a spot in the center of the room, directly beneath the structure in the top of the dome. “Now let us begin-”
The door opened. Lyita tried not to collapse from relief, as Aurelian stepped in. He closed the door behind him. She noticed bleeding knuckles on his fist.
“Any other latecomers?” the aristocratic man in the front of the room asked in annoyance.
“Apologies,” said Aurelian. Lyita watched as woman who smirked at her stared at Aurelian. This time she did not smile. Instead her expression descended into purest malevolence. He returned the woman’s gaze with sheer defiance.
“Just take a spot so we can move on,” the man declared. Aurelian stood next to Lyita. “Now then, while there still is moonlight let us begin. For those I have not met before,” he smiled with light amusement at both Aurelian and Lyita, “call me Roths. In brief, you are present at the renewal of an old truce that keeps all of us and the interests we serve from each other’s throats. When it has been broken we all have suffered. Therefore, to help perpetuate our beneficial peace, a spell was made. Every one hundred and thirteen months, we shall select an arbiter. When inevitable conflicts of interest arise, or something affects us all, this arbiter shall speak and their word shall be enforced by all the other groups.” He indicated himself. “For the past period, I have been honored to serve this role. Whoever the spell selects tonight will take my place, for the next one hundred and thirteen times the full moon shines upon St. Petersburg.” He spread his hands. “Are we all ready for the ceremony to begin?”
Most of the group nodded.
“We are not!” the middle-aged woman declared.
“Yes Magda?” asked Roths. “It seems you have something to say.”
She snarled and pointed at Aurelian and Lyita. “They were not invited here. They should not be a part of this.”
“Nevertheless, they are here. That simple fact proves their right to attend. No one who learns of this can be forbidden, you know that. You also found your way here yourself, years ago. This is the heart of the truce that serves us all.”
The woman known as Magda clenched her fists. “Fine then. They shall be dealt with soon enough.”
Roths nodded. “All are in, the doors are closed. Let us begin.” He spread his arms forward, and his hands began to glow. “The doors to heaven rise.” Above him, the light began to shift. The patterned metal lattices in the highest part of the dome separated into two sections, and began to rotate in opposite directions. Slowly at first and then with increasing speed, they spun.
The moonlight came in brighter from above, and was broken into shifting patterns of light and shadow by grid at the dome’s top. A circle of light formed in the air above them, with wisps trailing from the edge. Roths’ hands shined with almost painful brightness, and then the light drifted from them in fist-sized spheres to merge into the circle.
Seeming of it’s own will, the circle drifted downwards. Aurelian saw that it was headed towards the woman called Magda
“You must be joking,” Aurelian blurted out.
Roths frowned. Even the mist seemed to pause and wait, as all of the attendees turned towards Aurelian.
“Why do stare at me like a bunch of goats?” Aurelian protested. “Tell the truth and shame the devil. She had to steal luck just to get in here. That bitch couldn’t run a coffee shop.”
“That common peasant has no business here,” said the woman. “He doesn’t even know magic!”
“Yet I got in here in anyway,” said Aurelian, brandishing his bloody knuckles. “And I didn’t even have to steal anyone’s luck. How do you like that?”
She turned to the crowd. “This cheap peasant thug killed my dear friend and servant Oleg! Along with his whore, who has the nerve to stand in Oleg’s place. Are we going to let these street rats do this to one of us?”
“Watch us do it again to you,” said Lyita. “She tried to run at Magda, and found she could not move her feet. They were bound to their space on the marble floor.
“None of us can move,” Roths explained. Not until the nest arbiter has been selected.”
The older man in the bus uniform faced Lyita, petting his cat as he raised an eyebrow. “That ‘bitch’, as you call her, is Magda. Purloined luck is only one of her ventures. She runs one of St. Petersburg’s strongest occult concerns.”
“So?” Aurelian challenged. “This assistant of hers tried to kill us, and did kill a poor kid just trying to go to college. You want to give her more power? You think you can trust someone like that?”
“This troubles me personally,” Roths admitted. “I don’t like murder or theft, if it is avoidable. But both are within our law, as long as only the non-magical are harmed.”
Magda nodded, satisfied. “Thank you for remembering our law. I expect no less, and as arbiter I will do no less.”
“You haven’t been selected yet,” Roths reminded her.
“Then let us move forward!”
“Now I object,” said the man with the cat. “If these two are truly non-magical peasants, then their attendance is traceable to your failures. I do not know if you should be a candidate for arbiter.”
Magda snarled and made a dismissive motion with her hand. “Sometimes vermin show up, and need extermination.”
To Aurelian’s dismay, several in the group nodded their agreement. He jabbed his finger at Magda. “If you’re so fancy and great, why’d you need to take my luck then?”
“I don’t!” said Magda. “That was all my assistant.”
“Then you should be able to defeat this mere peasant,” said a rather elegant younger Asian woman to Magda’s right. “Having found out who you are, it is within his rights to challenge you.”
“You’re damn right I do!” said Aurelian. He had no idea where this goi
ng, except that it probably wasn’t good. The only path that seemed worse at this point was backing down.
“And I challenge you too!” said Lyita.
The Asian smiled lightly and shook her head, as if admonishing a child. “Women peasants cannot challenge. I am sorry.”
Lyita’s eyes flashed fire. “Free my legs and this peasant will claw your eyes out.”
Roths moved his hand and Lyita could not speak. “We don’t have much time. The moon moves through its positions, and we must select a new arbiter before the time has passed.” He turned to Magda. “This young man has challenged you. Do you accept?”
“Of course I do,” she snapped.
“Then let’s go forward.”
Magda breathed in, and held up her hands. The same patterns appeared that Aurelian had seen in the alley. She looked into his eyes, nodded and smiled with gleeful malice. A glowing yellow mist came grew from her hands, and solidified into a tendril, edged in black. Seconds after it left, it was followed by another. One after the other they snaked their way through the immobile crowd towards him. He watched, unable to move, as he saw they were headed straight for his heart.
The first tendril slithered through the air, aiming for his heart. He tried to knock it away with his hand, and his nerves screamed with pain and then went cold. It was just enough to nudge the band away. It continued past him in the air, and began arcing back. He could no longer move that arm.
She laughed. “This will be over soon.” The tendril snaked around the room, to slowly make its way back to him.
“You can’t trust her with whatever this role is!” Aurelian implored the group. “When her time comes, she won’t surrender something like that once she has it. That’s not the kind of person she is!”
“If she is not worthy, you can prevent her,” said the man called Roths. “You and your friend you clearly care for each other very much.”
Magda smiled with calm certainty as the next tendril edged ever closer. It was joined with the first tendril that had hurt and numbed his arm, now edging back again his way.