Complicating Factors

by Max Gladstone

  Reading between the lines, Josh bet Frank would have been happy with any excuse to get him out of the office. That twisted in his gut. Putting Josh on the assignment meant that he didn’t have anything better to do—that for Frank, protecting Josh from his own agency mattered more than getting any serious work done. Which meant, in a roundabout way, that he was compromised, that the fact he liked looking at one kind of person more than any other really was fucking with his job. Dammit.

  He caught a crosstown bus, and squeezed himself between globular commuters wearing thick wool coats despite the weather. This whole situation could go hang, as far as he was concerned. Dead-end assignment? Stay out of sight for a few weeks? To hell with that. If he’d been given a dead-end assignment, he’d drag some big wriggling thing back to the embassy, up the stairs, drop it on Frank’s desk, and wait for someone to pin a medal on him.

  Which they wouldn’t, of course. This was no business for medals and parades.

  Josh started his search at the pier, flipping the collar up on his long black coat to cut the wind. Sun slanted across the Vltava. Far away, the clock tower chimed. He kept his breath shallow. Spring had broken the winter’s deepest cold, but the air still hurt his throat.

  Dockworkers unloaded boxes from a flat, weathered barge. They wore coveralls and gloves, but none of the coveralls were stenciled “Mafia Guy,” which nixed his first plan.

  Second plan: frontal assault.

  A small lofted office oversaw the pier. He climbed the damp wooden steps. One was loose, and the pavement was a long way down.

  Josh had seen some big men in his time, so he wasn’t quite prepared to call the man behind the desk the biggest. Hard to put him out of the running, though, from breadth alone, and if an ounce of fat lingered on that body, Josh couldn’t spot it beneath the ill-tailored suit. Not that you could tailor a suit to a guy who looked like that. Easier to tailor a tent.

  The fellow looked up when the door opened. Had to look hard to see out from underneath those heavy brows.

  “Hello,” Josh said, quickly, in Czech. “I’m—the people I work with have some items to ship, and we have never shipped through Prague before. I’m asking around for advice.” Stupid, stupid, he should have at least gotten the cover story straight before coming in here and—

  Monument Man didn’t move the corners of his mouth down so much as the center of his mouth up. He grunted, and gestured with his skull toward a door—well, more of a gap in the partition, but it had delusions of grandeur.

  Josh hung his coat on the stand and entered the back office, where a balding, thickset man in an even worse suit slumped in a desk chair, scribbling limply on a pad of paper. He’d lined half the paper with jagged back-and-forth patterns, like shark’s teeth, before shifting into whorls. He looked up, and produced a smile he must have kept folded in a drawer when not in use.

  Josh believed in the power of positive thinking. He could tell this would be a useless conversation from the moment the slumped man applied his smile, but he did not let himself think it. You could stop yourself from thinking, if you tried hard enough.

  “I’m afraid,” the man said, after they’d introduced themselves and Josh settled into an uncomfortable chair, “we can do little for you without the proper forms, and those are quite difficult to find. Many, many layers of review. What would you like to ship?”

  “Cigarettes,” Josh lied.

  “Ah, well, in that case you must speak with the under-over-secretary of gum rot, and the archimandrite of the second-order carbon copy,” and so on. Josh knew the local bureaucracy enough to know that, at this point, he was getting the runaround, and once he realized that, he stopped listening until the man behind the desk reached: “So, as you can see, it will be a lengthy process. I hope, for your sake, you are not attempting to make arrangements quickly.”

  “Of course not,” Josh said. “But I did hope I could find someone who might help me with those, ah, arrangements.”

  The pen continued its slow progress along the paper, but the whorls turned jagged again. “Unfortunately, I merely run this office, and oversee these men. I am a small creature, as you can tell. Some have highly placed friends, but I am not among them, alas. We are condemned to a life of difficulty.”

  “The people I represent,” Josh said, “would be very excited to find an easy path to ship through the city. If there is anything I can do…” He left the sentence hanging.

  “There is not,” the slumped man said. He put down the pen and looked, for the first time in their conversation, straight at Josh. His eyes were watery and black. “I apologize. But if you do not have the proper authorization, there is nothing I can do for you. Kazimir?”

  Josh turned. Monument Man stood in the door—well, stood just outside the door. Kazimir could not stand in the door, exactly. He was too tall.

  “Fine,” Josh said. “I’m leaving. Thank you for the advice.”

  The slumped man smiled again.

  Kazimir turned aside to let Josh squeeze past. Josh shouldered into his coat, pulled the door open, popped his collar, and descended the slick wet steps, one gloved hand always on the rail.

  When he reached the bottom of the steps, Kazimir, behind him, said a single word. “American.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your coat is local. Your shirt is—” He dropped into accented English. “Brooks Brothers.”

  Josh turned. The extra height of the step made Kazimir tower, not that Kazimir needed much help. “Yes.”

  “You need help moving cigarettes?”

  “I need a lot of help,” Josh said.

  “Small cafe down the street,” Kazimir said. “Look for me tonight after dark. Maybe we can talk. But come alone.”

  • • •

  Gabe had half an hour and Edith would notice if he was late. Walking—jogging, really, to judge from his lungs—to the small park near the embassy took six. He took a pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket, tapped one out, lit the cigarette, sat on a bench facing the street, and waited.

  A woman sat next to him. Not Morozova. She read a newspaper. He glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes. The woman stood. He glanced down. Her purse lay on the ground by his feet. He jumped up, grabbed it, looked around the park, playing nervous. A door opened across the way and a dress—it might have been the woman’s—disappeared within. The door drifted shut, slowly. He crushed his cigarette, ran past an old woman walking a dog and a young woman walking with her daughters, danced across the street between slow-moving cars, and shoved his way through the door into a dark, dusty concrete stairwell. He reminded himself to speak Czech: “Ma’am! I think you dropped this.”

  A door to his left opened. “Good. You found it.” He recognized Tanya’s voice. He felt a lot of things at once, and didn’t have good words for any of them.

  Because he—Christ—trusted her, he only felt a moment’s stab of fear as he stepped through the door, and she clicked the latch shut behind him and secured the chain. They stood in a living room unfurnished save for thick curtains that let in little light. Morozova drew back from the door. She looked strained. She looked alive, which he worried about these days. When she’d left for Moscow, he’d assumed everything one assumed. She wouldn’t come back; she’d been called home for good; she was in the Lubyanka basement, with a hole in her head if she was lucky, or dead or dying in some place without a name, some place from which they’d peeled all names. They were both good players, but good was not enough to survive this game. “I missed you,” he said. The truth slipped out. It made the room feel uncomfortably tight.

  Surprise whispered across her face, and something followed, like a smile without form. Maybe she had missed him, too. She must have been at least as worried. But whatever armor she’d donned against Moscow, she had not removed it yet. “You shouldn’t have thrown the cigarette away. That is an American cigarette. If they search the square—”

  “You think it would have looked more natural
if I kept the thing as I ran?”

  “You would have been harder to trace.”

  “What do you need?” Gabe leaned back against the door. “You have five minutes. And two people know my face now.”

  “Ice people. And only one of them has seen you.”

  “The other one just knows you were trying to signal someone at the US embassy. That’s much better.” Gabe breathed in the heat of his frustration, and tried to breathe it out. “Rough times at the office, sorry. What can I do for you?”

  She glared at him, then looked away, though there was nothing to look at save the cobwebs in the unloved corners of the room. “I need your help.” His watch ticked seconds. The words came in a rush. “The Flame is moving. A new player is in town. Someone connected with the Acolytes, someone big. We do not know who. I hoped you could enlighten us.”

  “You’re coming to me,” Gabe said, “for information about who’s entering and leaving Prague. Can’t you get that information on your own? Don’t your people basically own the local secret police?”

  Her face flickered—now that had been a smile. Hadn’t it? “We could,” she said, “but my boss at the KGB happens to be an evil Flame wizard, as you know. I do not have access to my usual official channels. Hence, I come to you.”

  “We used to be able to meet in public. Or, at least, without the runaround.” He was wasting time, and he shouldn’t. Why had that felt important to say? Keep it business. She has her problems, you have yours, don’t complicate things.

  “We made a move,” she said. “It was the right move, but we now face the consequences. Can you help me?”

  “What happened?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it, but kept her lips open. Breath hissed over and through her teeth. “The barge,” she said. “It was attacked.”

  Gabe reeled. He didn’t need to ask what barge she meant. There was only one barge, as far as the sorcerers of the Ice were concerned: the barge where they kept their Hosts in stasis, suspended against the need for great magic, to keep them out of trouble, and coincidentally under the Ice’s thumb. He’d found it, but he was almost a Host himself. How could the Flame have done it? With their own Hosts? Were they that reckless? He thought all this. He said: “What?”

  “South of the city. By Flame. Some Hosts were taken.”

  His voice rose on its own. “We just about killed ourselves trying to keep the Flame from getting their hands on a single Host, and now—”

  “I know,” she cut back. “And that is why I need your help. Some new figure, some authority, has sent the Flame spinning. I need to know who this person is. Knowing, we can track their activities, and find the missing Hosts. I hope.”

  Gabe glanced at his watch. Five minutes. He could still make it. “Things are bad, aren’t they?”

  “The world,” she said, “is always one step from disaster. But some days the step is smaller than usual.”

  • • •

  Every goddamn thing was going wrong for Jordan Rhemes.

  Except, of course, for business.

  Business was great. Business was booming. That was part of the problem. Much as she’d tried to keep herself out of the affairs of Their High and Most Puissant Whatevers, the Sorcerers of Ice and the Cultists of Flame, keep her nose to the grindstone, tend her bar and perform her rituals and sell her charms and make sure nobody got hurt, she’d let Gabe drag her into a grand ritual to stop the Flame from getting their hands on a Host. Dumb idea? Certainly. Would she encourage a repeat performance? No. But she’d rocked the boat, and whatever had happened on the Vltava a couple days ago—she made it her business not to know—was the boat rocking back, and when the boat started rocking, people wanted life preservers.

  Or so she’d been told. She didn’t like boats. Don’t trust anything with a foundation you can’t see.

  So she’d run through her backlog stock of charms in two days: good, fine, whatever. The extra cash in her safe and favors in her ledger and barter stock on her shelves felt nice. But people kept coming. Which drew attention of the mundane sort—she’d already laid out more than she would have liked for a second, preemptive round of protection money, always stay one step ahead of demand—and that meant that she had to spend time she’d usually spend behind the bar at work in her small lab. And her bartenders could not swap shifts easily, and hiring was difficult, and servers kept getting sick, and so on and so goddamn forth.

  She settled an argument about shift changes with one of her bartenders, then pushed into her back room to find the broken chairs she stashed there full of local hedgewitches and magic-mongers, rising to their feet, hands out, and of course each one of those was here first, and each had the greatest need.

  “Jordan, s’il vous plaît—”

  “Jordan, all we need is—”

  “Jordan, just one favor—”

  Mostly women, mostly European, a few men. She shoved past them, wandered down her long stockroom—shelves of critical reagents all but bare, sage supply depleted—to her office, where she collapsed against the door and breathed, until seeds of patience sprouted in the barren garden of her soul.

  Just take them one at a time. If they ask too much, if they need more than you’re willing to give, or offer—say no.

  She opened the door, squared her shoulders, arched her neck like a prince, and strode back up the winding hall to the room where the hedgewitches waited.

  They were gone.

  All save one: A short-haired young woman of, Jordan guessed, Vietnamese descent, waited against one wall. She wore a gray collared shirt and dark gray slacks and boots. No sign remained of Jordan’s other badgerers.

  “Bon soir,” the woman said, sounding bored.

  “You scared them off,” Jordan replied, also in French.

  “Nah.” The woman uncrossed her arms, and as the fabric moved Jordan judged the size of the muscles it hid. “Sometimes people find it uncomfortable to be around me. It looked like you could use a moment’s peace.”

  Jordan crossed to the door that led out into the bar, and set her hand on the knob. The other woman didn’t seem to take the hint. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I’m new in town,” she said. “You’re Jordan?”

  Jordan did not answer.

  “You can call me Van. I’ve heard of you, but I don’t know the lay of the land in Prague.”

  “Looking to settle down?”

  “Just passing through. But I don’t know how long I’ll be here.” She met Jordan’s eyes, and dropped the disaffected act. She had a good smile when she wanted to, and it made her look younger. Jordan didn’t know many people who could still look that young. “I don’t like being in the dark. I run into things.”

  “It’s an easy town,” Jordan offered. “Plenty of hedge stuff out in the countryside, but I’m it where big work’s concerned, unless you want to cozy up with one of the factions.”

  “Good thing for me you’re friendly.”

  “Good thing.” What else? “Flame and Ice are all over the local government and embassies, so stay clear of both.”

  “What else is new?”

  That might have been an invitation—the traveler eager to share her story, cozying up to the local innkeeper, preface to a sob story with a hook in it. Or it might have been a tip of the hat, from one player to another. “Have you been in the game long?” A neutral enough question.

  Van glanced down at her knuckles, and made a fist. “All my life.”

  Jordan liked this girl. Which was a problem. She had plenty of castaways to worry about; Gabe, for starters. “First drink at the bar’s on the house, the next one you pay for.” She opened the door. Bar Vodnář’s murmured conversation and jazz intruded on the stockroom silence. “Welcome to Prague. Any other questions?”

  “Just one,” Van said. “Is there anywhere around here I can box?”

  • • •

  Either Josh was about t
o die, or the night was going much better than expected.

  He’d met Kazimir in the cafe, sat down, shared a pot of bad tea and a plate of blini, during which neither they, nor anyone in the café, for that matter, spoke. After they finished the blini, the young man who’d tailed Josh from the bus station entered the cafe and sat in the corner without ordering anything or looking at anyone, especially Kazimir.

  Kazimir nodded at nothing, paid for the tea and blini, and walked out into the night. Josh huddled deeper in his coat and followed him. They walked down to the river and into warehouse country: big buildings, empty if they weren’t packed with shipping crates. Kazimir opened a side door in one particularly decrepit building with a key from the ring at his belt, and led Josh down a hallway lit only by the streetlights outside, to a stairway leading down.

  Oh yeah. Definitely about to die.

  Kazimir went first. Josh figured his chances if he ran. With all that bulk, Kazimir shouldn’t be very fast on his feet. But, Josh’d been paying attention: The big guy didn’t seem to have any weapons, and he hadn’t been acting strange, or any stranger than he had at the docks. Frank knew where he was, and—what had he done, anyway? Nothing to tip them off. He hoped. Hadn’t even gone back to the embassy. Just wandered the waterfront, idle, as inconspicuous as he could manage.

  He followed.

  The stairs led to a door, behind which Josh heard people talking, and a trace of music.

  Kazimir moved.

  Josh had been through basic, and he’d had his share of street fights before, but nothing he knew prepared him to be caught up in a bear hug by an enormous man who, while Josh was still processing, said, “Amerikanski, I like you.”