The Lights of Prague

by Nicole Jarvis

  Bazil hummed. “Still feeling confident in your ability to judge people’s character?”

  “Are you going to help me, or not?”

  “Why? From what I heard, you made some mistakes and trusted the wrong people. It happens. I don’t want to piss off the man with an entire organization of lamplighters hanging on his every word.”

  “You said they’re going to kill me,” Domek said.

  “I did. It happens,” Bazil said. “You don’t respect me. You just need me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Domek said.

  “I’ll bet you are.”

  “Will you help me now?”

  “Is that why you apologized?” Bazil rearranged himself to sit on the street outside, his back pressed against Domek’s small window. “Your friend lives in a nice area,” he mused. “Someone like me poking around the entrances is going to set off alarms. I’ll end up in St. Wenceslas myself before I can blink. I didn’t live this long by sacrificing myself for strangers.”

  “Listen,” Domek said, “they’re doing something dangerous, and they’re not the only ones. There’s another group, a nest, that’s experimenting with wisps. There are threats on every side, and I’m the only one who knows it.”

  “Don’t let the information die with you. Tell me what’s happening.”

  Domek couldn’t trust him. He catered to pijavice in his club, and seemed to have no plans to stage a jailbreak. But he was right—if Domek died in the morning, no one would know the dangers to Prague. And, after all, there was little chance Bazil could make the situation worse. Quickly, Domek summarized his discoveries of the night, from the Zizkovs’ experiments to Paluska’s plan to drain Kája’s power. Out loud, the situation seemed insurmountable. Only Domek cared about Kája’s survival, and the nest unchecked could devastate the city. “And there’s nothing I can do from in here. I need you to let me out.”

  Bazil swore quietly. “I never should have left this to the lamplighters.” His boots scuffed on the cobblestones overhead as he stood up.

  “Did you just come here to taunt me?” Domek waited for a beat, and then asked, “Bazil?”

  There was no answer. He had left.

  Domek kicked the wall and swore. Why had he thought Bazil would save him? He worked with pijavice, and Domek had shunned his help. He would probably sleep well with the image of Domek in a cell to keep him company. He could use the information he’d learned to keep his people safe, and leave Prague to suffer. And what else had Domek expected? He had done nothing but trust the wrong people.

  It felt fitting, in hindsight, for Domek to end up imprisoned.

  For days now, he had been toting Kája around in a small clay jar, only letting him out when he needed his help. From the way he had reacted to being forced back inside the container, Domek wondered if he experienced some level of the same mind-numbing discomfort when trapped. Kája used to be a man, and Domek had contained him like a slave.

  Domek deserved this.

  Metal rasped against metal, and then the cell door creaked open. Bazil smirked at him, dangling a set of keys on his fingers. “Somebody’s looking out for you. These were right in the open. You might have even been able to reach them if you’d realized. Lucky.”

  “I suppose I was due some,” Domek said. Or maybe the person who had locked him in had wanted to leave him a way out. The question was—why? Was it possible Kája had faith in him, despite everything? “Thank you, Bazil. I won’t forget this.”

  Bazil just shrugged and threw the keys back onto the hook, making them swing around wildly. “Where to next?”

  Domek shook his head. “You’re not coming with me.”

  “You don’t seem to be able to handle it on your own. If you want something done right…”

  “What about your people? You said you have contacts across the city. What could you do alone to help?”

  “Break you out of a cell, for one. My spies are children, mostly,” he said. “I wouldn’t bring them into this. They observe only. The others aren’t the type you trust with powerful spirits—a lesson you could have learned earlier.”

  “I don’t trust you with powerful spirits.” He jogged toward the stairs, Bazil on his heels. “I’ve already been fooled too many times this night. Thank you for saving me, but I have to finish this on my own. It was my mistake. I’m going to end it.”

  “You’re just one man, and you’ve already been imprisoned by your own people. I’m the only person in this town who isn’t working toward your death, buddy,” Bazil said. “Do you know how much I’ve done to help you? I could have sold your secrets and made a pretty coin for it. I have a contact who would kill to know what you’ve been doing.”

  “You said you have pijavice in your clubs. Are you working with the Zizkovs?”

  “No,” Bazil snapped. “I’ve told you before that I was watching them too. I’m on retainer for a rich pijavica out in the country. I give him the information I want him to have, and keep him in the dark when it suits me. He would have been very interested in you, but I protected you and your little wisp.”

  “You’re a spy for the pijavice and you expect that to make me trust you? I believe that you’ve helped me, but you’ve helped yourself more. When you play both sides, you hurt everyone.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “I’m tired of hidden motives.”

  Bazil threw up his hands. “Fine. I had no desire to die tonight anyway. God forbid I beg you to let me throw myself on a blade for your mistakes.”

  “If you want to do something useful, get those child spies of yours out of the city before dawn,” Domek said. He opened the front door for Bazil.

  “I hope you finish this before you get yourself killed,” Bazil said, standing at the threshold. “I’d hate for my work to have gone to waste. You’re putting the fate of Prague on your shoulders. Broad as they are, I doubt they can bear it.”

  * * *

  The night was approaching its end. Clocks across the city had just struck four in the morning. At this hour, Prague’s streets were nearly empty. There were the bakers, up early to start kneading their bread for their morning customers. The worst drunks were stumbling home after seeking oblivion despite the risk of falling into the Vltava or being dragged into an alley by a hungry pijavica or dark-eyed robber. The hoofbeats of the few horse-drawn carriages echoed against the tall buildings. Other than those few sparks of motion, the streets were deserted. Life had paused in the riverside city, taking this lull to breathe and resettle before it started again.

  With Hackett and her carriage long gone, Ora and Sokol found the last hack for hire still on the road so late. The driver stared down at them with a leer—her, in her finery, and him, out of uniform—but let them in when Ora waved a handful of zlatý banknotes at him. “To Kampa Island,” she said.

  The heavy clouds that had been swirling overhead for hours finally broke open, sending a rush of rain sweeping across the streets. Within moments, the water escalated from a mist into a downpour, cold with the lingering bite of winter.

  “In, in,” the driver said, and Sokol slammed the door behind them.

  Inside, Ora rubbed absently at her neck, staring out of the carriage window at the downpour. This truly would be a suicide mission. Crane was dead, but the other four members of the family were still alive—along with the dozen they had just recruited. Ora had nearly died just fighting Crane, and they were likely all now empowered by the cure.

  At her side, Sokol was methodically examining the daggers and stakes that bristled from holsters on his torso and thighs. Ora could feel from the bite in the air that every weapon in his collection was tipped with hawthorn or silver. He was prepared no matter whether the pijavice had been cured or not. Hopefully Ora had correctly interpreted Crane’s reaction to Hackett’s silver-embossed gun.

  “Where did your team get all those?” she asked finally, breaking the silence. The collection was not even the extent she had spied in the ministry’s armory, though the aura o
f hawthorn had forced her to stand outside the door while Sokol had armed himself. As Sokol had said, if his team wasn’t allowed to help him tonight, their weapons would do no one any good sitting behind a locked door in a government office. “From what I heard in there, your budget does not cover nearly that amount of silver.”

  “Every piece of silver that’s been confiscated by the local government in the last three decades has been filtered over into our department,” Sokol said.

  “I’m sure all the political prisoners would be glad to know their silver teapots were put to good use,” Ora said dryly.

  “Run me through what to expect in the house,” Sokol said. “We’ll be in their territory. We need to take them by surprise, not give them an opportunity to plan. Mayer is a slippery bastard. Hopefully they won’t be expecting you to come back tonight.”

  “They have around a dozen new pijavica recruits. If luck is on our side, they’ll be too busy giving them the cure to notice our arrival,” Ora said. “It takes days for the pijavica poison to convert a human. Hopefully the reversal process takes some time as well.”

  “We should hope so,” Sokol said darkly. “We’re not enough to take on that many.”

  “Love the optimism,” Ora said.

  “I’ve looked death in the eyes before,” Sokol said. “So have you.”

  Ora sighed and moved on to brief him on the family members she’d met.

  Despite the chaos Ora had encountered earlier that night, the square in front of the Zizkovs’ house was as quiet and empty as the rest of the city. The windows were all covered by heavy drapes. Any glass that had shattered with her leap had fallen into the stream, swept away by the water.

  “Do you think we’ll be too obvious if we bring an umbrella?” Ora asked as the carriage driver pulled to a stop. She patted the navy skirt of her replacement dress, lamenting her sodden and shredded red gown from the beginning of the night. It had been better suited to grand missions.

  Sokol chuckled. “I can always trust you to think of the creature comforts.” He glanced out the window again, where the rain crashed against the street, and then said, “If they’re going to notice us, they’ll notice us. Might as well be as dry as we can.”

  Ora gave the hack driver an extra stack of banknotes to wait out of sight, in case they needed a quick escape. If they did not make it out of the family’s clutches, the driver would certainly grow bored and leave. Sokol and Ora crept across the cobblestones to the house, pressing close to one another beneath Ora’s steel-ribbed umbrella. Skirting the front door, they found a side entrance. After Ora listened at the door to make sure that no one was lurking inside, Sokol methodically picked the lock with practiced ease.

  Once they were inside the dark, empty kitchen, umbrella carefully set aside, Ora took a deep breath, keeping her lips parted so the scents from the house could hit her tongue. “The humans are all gone,” she murmured to Sokol. From the heavy scent of blood, thick and cloying, they hadn’t left alive. “I can’t smell the family, but…” She paused, listened. “There are voices downstairs. Underground.”

  “Of course,” Sokol muttered.

  “That might mean they’re still in the middle of administering the cure. We could still have time.”

  The garishly luxurious decorations of the house seemed more ominous in the dark. No candles were lit—without guests to impress, the pijavice in residence didn’t need light. Ora led the way, with Sokol close behind. He kept one hand on her shoulder, trusting her to get him through the darkness.

  The door to the cellar was open, and Ora could hear voices from downstairs.

  “How did this happen?” demanded Mayer, his lowborn accent thick with rage. “This is the version of the serum we used on ourselves—it should have worked. We planned for weeks to get these new recruits, and half of them have been wiped out in one night!”

  Half of the pijavice were dead? What had happened here after she had left?

  Carefully, Ora and Sokol took the stairs into the cellar. Behind her, Sokol took his hand from her shoulder to ready his weapons.

  The remaining four members of the family were clustered around a table in the center of a small chamber. As Mayer had said, there were several clumps of abandoned clothing scattered around the room where other pijavice had fallen. What could have killed so many?

  There were still five pijavice hanging from chains on the walls around the room, most looking too shell-shocked to protest. The outlier, Lady R, was snarling ferally and rocking against her chains. “This is what you wanted us to volunteer for, Byre?” she hissed, barely coherent. “You tried to kill us all!”

  The family ignored her.

  “This isn’t the serum I made,” said Weintraub, the scientist Ora had recognized earlier, carefully sniffing a glass vial streaked with the remains of something iridescent. “This is pure poison—I can smell hawthorn and silver in here. How did this get here? Who injected the subjects without noticing it had been tampered with? This could kill any one of us.”

  The brunette woman, Ajka, who had changed from her frilly dress from that evening into a more serious long skirt and soot-stained work shirt, sneered. “Of course. My apologies. I should have made sure the serum in our personal laboratory hadn’t been replaced with poison!”

  “This is wisp magic,” Mayer said, taking the vial. “A transformation spell like this is something only the most powerful witch could do.”

  “How?” Weintraub asked. “All our wisps are dead.”

  “Apart from the one that was taken from Baj,” the woman said. “You think it could have been here?”

  Ora didn’t know what they were talking about, but their impassioned debate was a perfect distraction. She glanced back to nod at Sokol, who was on the stair above her, and then she burst into the room.

  It had been decades since Ora had seriously battled another pijavica, excluding her fight with Crane earlier that night. When she had lived with Czernin, she had learned how to use her claws and teeth to rend and tear. In between the lazy, indulgent weeks in his estate, there were short, brutal grabs for power among his followers that always ended in dust.

  Since then, Ora had lived a softer life, first of exploration, then briefly of love, and then of a soft haze of grief. Her days in the past decade had been full of masquerades and university lectures, with no room for the harsh blur of violence.

  If she’d had the choice, she would have gone for Mayer first, to cut the head from the snake, but he was at the far end of the table from her. Instead, she attacked the one closest to the stairs, Byre, who was standing back to avoid the confrontation between the other three. It was the work of an instant. She moved across the room with supernatural speed and thrust one of Sokol’s silver daggers into the pijavica’s heart. There was a beat, and then the body turned to dust in her grasp.

  She wanted to crow with triumph. She had been right; their cure, whatever it was, had given them a weakness to silver. Perhaps this fight wasn’t doomed.

  Unfortunately, her element of surprise only lasted so long.

  Weintraub, hearing the soft sound of a body dissipating, turned and lunged toward her without hesitation. He threw her against the closest wall. A sliver of bare skin above her glove brushed against one of the chains hanging there, and she hissed. It was smothered with hawthorn poison. Her fangs grew in response to the pain, clogging her mouth.

  Before the other two could turn on Ora as well, Sokol charged from the stairwell and slashed his dagger at the woman. For a human, he moved quickly, and she had to dodge to avoid the bite of silver.

  Ora scrambled to her feet, and was immediately forced to duck a blow from Weintraub. She slashed his chest with her claws before a knee to her stomach threw her against the wall again.

  “Lady Ora Fischerová,” Weintraub said, finally recognizing her. “In hindsight, I suppose I should have realized you were a pijavica. You always seemed…above the rest of us.”

  “I was above you,” Ora panted, regaining her sta
nce. She was slowed by her injuries, fighting against the pain. “But not because I’m a pijavica.”

  “What are you doing here, fighting against us? Mayer told us that your friend was the one who opened his eyes to this path. You care about knowledge. You should be begging to join us,” Weintraub said.

  “I’m here because you’ve been killing innocent people, and you’re planning on killing more,” Ora snapped. “You’re out of control.”

  He scoffed and stepped back. Behind him, Sokol was fighting both Ajka and Mayer. Ora tried to dart past Weintraub to help him, but Weintraub grabbed her and they fell heavily to the floor. They grappled, neither able to get a grip. Weintraub hadn’t been the most impressive human, so Ora hadn’t expected him to put up much of a fight, but he had clearly been trained by Crane. He used his pijavica speed and strength to their full advantage, and Ora found herself outmatched.

  Finally, he knocked her head hard against the stone floor and, while she lay there dazed, scrabbled for something on the table. Ora, recovering fast, lunged to snap his neck, but had to scramble backward when he spun toward her, aiming a gleaming syringe at her face. It was half-full of a dark substance with a strange, rainbow sheen, and smelled of ash and slick metal.

  “We learned the hard way tonight that one drop of this is enough to kill a pijavica within minutes,” Weintraub said, holding the syringe like a dagger and feinting toward her, forcing her back toward the wall. “It burns you from the inside out until you finally—painfully—turn to ash when it hits your heart. You’re sure you’d not rather hear our proposal?”

  “If you’re as longwinded now as you were when you were a professor, we’d be here all night.”

  Snarling, Weintraub lunged toward her with the needle. She ducked under his arm and elbowed him in the jaw. He stumbled backward, struggling to regain his balance while avoiding jabbing himself.

  “No!” Mayer snarled across the room.

  Ora glanced over—the woman was gone, a dust pile on the floor. Sokol was wielding a dagger in one hand and a stake in the other. His right sleeve was bloody, and there was a scratch beside one eyebrow, but he seemed otherwise unharmed from the fight so far. “Regretting your betrayal yet?” Sokol taunted. His smile was vicious.