Three Stories About Ghosts

  “It’s an underground railroad, one of Europe’s first electrically powered ones. Made in the 1890s.”

  She scoffed and shot a glare at another man who had tried to hold the same handrail as her.

  “Have they upgraded it since then?”

  John smiled and nodded. “It’s one of the nicer ones.”

  Agatha shook her head, “And what in Nafarin’s tits are we doing here?”

  “Budapest’s skies are tightly controlled, the flight paths are watched, appartures are shut. We have to get to the old city unseen.”

  She scoffed again and gestured all around them. “In broad light, surrounded by people?” she asked, her voice near exasperation.

  John nodded. “If you’d dressed a touch more—normal—we’d be near invisible in the crowd, but, even as we are, no one watches these unattuned transit lines. They’re full of pain and misery.”

  John took another swig of the water bottle they’d bought from a machine to wash out the acrid taste of unattuned commutes, and shuddered as he swallowed, the water sitting uneasily in his gut. Few places in the world caused more pain to a servant of the Sky Mother than mass transit systems. Even during quiet hours, they dripped with the agony of tens of thousands.

  They stood in silence for another three stops, rode the electrical stairway up, and paused at the exit from the station to see if they could gather enough power from anywhere to throw up a basic ward: but they were completely depleted. John tried to act natural as he scanned the skies above them, then stepped out into the glow of a street light and led the way towards Bohdan’s Emporium.

  Agatha kept pace, though he could see she was uncomfortable. After leaving the main road, they walked ever deeper into Budapest’s hidden underbelly, streets scattered with pools of urine, garbage, dog waste, and—here and there—brief flashes of alchemical lights heavily warded and hidden from unattuned eyes shining above doorways.

  John tried to remember exactly which door marked Bohdan’s shop, but stopped short as he caught sight of a Hungarian uniform standing guard outside of it. He instinctively dropped his hand to his wand, but even as he remembered that he was completely powerless, three violet sparks flashed from the shop’s windows, and the guard at the door dropped to the ground, followed by two other similar thuds from the inside.

  John approached slowly to find Bohdan and his son, Pavlo, dragging two more uniformed bodies out from inside the shop.

  “John,” Bohdan called, his voice cracked and raspy from decades of tobacco abuse. John had offered to pay for the corrective surgery many times, but Bohdan liked it, claiming it gave him an air of danger. Like the Cossack needed it: the man’s bald head, scarred right eye socket, glowing blue eyes, and gold-toothed grin dripped lethality from his every movement. His muscles were gnarled and knotted, and his ears cauliflowered from decades of boxing.

  “Bohdan,” he answered as he approached, but Bohdan was looking past him.

  “You bring a Warden here?” he asked, shooting him a questioning look.

  John nodded. “Needs must, my friend. I need your help.”

  Bohdan finished chewing on something, turned away for a moment, nodded, swallowed, and turned back.

  “These new guys, John, they want to make me an offer.”

  John gestured down to the three bodies outside his door. “And that’s your answer?”

  Bohdan rolled something with his tongue, turned away, and spat it out onto the road. “Da.” He turned back and stared directly at Agatha. “I don’t like her here.”

  “I don’t like being here,” she answered, unperturbed.

  Pavlo stood leaning up against the door, holding a minor oak branch in his hand, humming with the violet hues of pure Khanate mana.

  “The Khan?” John asked.

  “At the front line, where you can always find him,” Bohdan answered, and John could taste the pride in his words. Whatever else this man was, he was loyal to his Khan.

  “You know why I came to you?” John asked.

  “The apparture network is shut. I can guess what you want.”

  John nodded.

  “Alright, one trip, where do you want to go?”

  John drew in a deep breath and released it in a long, drawn-out sigh. “I need to speak to the Khan and Anton.”

  Bohdan paused for a moment and looked him up and down with a deep frown. He rested his hands on his hips, and Pavlo stopped leaning on the doorframe to stand up straight.

  “Bohdan,” John continued, “time is not on our side, and the opportunity is passing farther by the moment. I had to take the Metro lines to get here unseen, and we’re now out of time. Will you trust me?”

  Bohdan didn’t answer for an age, and John found that he was holding his breath: but the Cossack shook his head, stepped back for a moment and growled, staring at the floor.

  “You know what we’ll do to you if you are with them?”

  “I’m not,” John answered, never losing sight of Bohdan’s wand arm—not that he could do anything if attacked.

  Bohdan coughed, nodded, and stood up straight. “Da,” he walked over and placed his hand on John’s shoulder and gestured for young Pavlo to make way at the door. He led them inside and walked over to a drinks cabinet to pour vodka.

  The inside of the shop was as squalid as it was breathtaking. It looked unchanged from Soviet days, the outdated utilitarian decor standing at odds with the ridiculous array of weapons systems hanging along its walls, branches of all shapes and sizes, from a dozen different varieties of trees, shining with the hum and glow of power from all corners of the world. Above an old, cracked mirror behind the wooden counter, Bohdan’s pride hung on two chains from the ceiling: a whole limb of a Persian Ironwood tree, still charged with power from the now sealed world engine at Damavand.

  Agatha had paused at the door; John had never seen her so visibly uncomfortable. Pavlo, a tall sixteen-year-old with jet black hair, bright brown eyes and a thin frame invited her inside, covered the three bodies with a ward to conceal them, and closed the door. Then he raised a wand and asked her permission to cut her link to the Warden tower.

  John started as he realised Bohdan had allowed her inside, thinking she was still linked. To help him, he was willing to give up his entire shop.

  “She’s already cut her link,” John said, placing a hand on Bohdan’s solid shoulder. “But thank you for the show of trust.”

  Bohdan visibly relaxed, blew out his cheeks, and nodded.

  “Pohzahlstah,” he said, stooping to pull a threadbare Persian rug from the floor, uncovering a hidden trapdoor. He coughed as he opened the trapdoor, releasing a plume of dust, and pulled a lever on the underside of the floor to lower a staircase into the space below.

  He tapped the wall with his wand as he stepped down, lighting a number of alchemical globes that bobbed along the cellar’s ceiling. They all joined him downstairs and Bohdan called to Pavlo to uncover the hidden apparture. The ‘dark network’, as it was called, a series of secret appartures used by smugglers and thieves, was something the Wardens had been trying to infiltrate for decades. It would take a lot for Agatha to forget what she had seen here today.

  Bohdan drew a power canister, glowing a rich emerald green and bearing the state stamps of the ley mines of Sindhustan, and fed it into the apparture to awaken it.

  “Address?” he called as he hunched down by the apparture controls above the floor.

  “Air, alum, cinnabar, amalgam, and copper,” John answered.

  Bohdan typed in the symbols and waited as nothing happened.

  “Hello?” called an ephemeral voice from beyond the apparture’s portal. “Who’s that? We can’t see where you’re calling from. Who is this?”

  “This is John,” he answered, stepping closer to the apparture.

  “What the—” The voice paused. “John what—what are you doing on this line, where in Nafarin’s accursed breast even are you?”

  “A cellar under Bohdan’s Emporium. Anton, list
en, when we skipped class in year seven, and my dad caught us on our adventures, where were we?”

  The voice laughed, and though he couldn’t recognise the voice through the distortion of the apparture, the laugh was unmistakable. “Lady Ethel’s Dance Parlour.”

  John smiled for a moment despite himself, drinking in the memory before it slipped his mind.

  “Oh, really?” Trish asked in his mind, and John smiled wider. “Even in year seven, huh?”

  “Anton,” John said, “Agatha and I blew the main conduit on the west edge of the tower. Whoever commands it had drained every last bit of energy from the tower itself. Half an hour ago, the interior turrets were still empty, and they were recharging the main Arkannons first.”

  There was silence for a moment, but before John could start wondering what was happening, Anton’s form materialised through the apparture, followed by three guards.

  His friend seemed to have aged a decade in the months since they’d last met. His chestnut hair had greyed a touch, but even worse was the half-grey stubble that now adorned his normally clean-shaven face. His blue eyes were haggard, and an arc burn forked along his left cheek. His deep blue uniform, bearing the Arch Magus’ gold chevrons on the brown leather lapels, was speckled with blood, burnt in places, and torn at the right knee. His friend had been through hell.

  The three guards—two men and a woman—seemed even worse off. Before he could step forward to embrace him, a brutish hulk of a man with a dyed black moustache stepped through behind them. His face was calm, but authority came off him in waves. He wore a thick circular hat in black fur and a red coat with gold buttons bound by a white sash at his waist, with a curved birch branch hanging from it. The signet ring of the Khanate glinted on his right index finger. Bohdan and Pavlo immediately dropped to their knees.

  John paused, halfway over to Anton, locked eyes with the Khan, and bowed his head.

  “Great Khan,” he said, trying to think of anything appropriate to say. Even a family as powerful as his had never been invited to the courts of the Khanate. He’d never met the man in person. “I wish our first meeting had been in better circumstances.”

  The Khan snorted, walked over, and placed a hefty hand on John’s shoulder.

  “The interior Arkannons,” he said with a grin, “are drained?”

  John nodded.

  The Khan turned back and raised an eyebrow at another Cossack, dressed similarly to his Khan, who had walked through the apparture with three giant canisters of pure violet Khanate mana. The man nodded.

  “We wondered,” the man said in a young, assured voice, “at how they could sustain their attack so long. At the least, father, it’s worth a try now.”

  John bowed to the young man, who turned to feed the apparture with enough power to portal through half an army. The Khan and Anton eyed each other.

  “Your men hold here,” the Khan said, but Anton immediately stiffened and shook his head.

  “It’s our tower; we have to be there.”

  “Your men are spent, man; you can’t ask them for more if—”

  “They will fight for their tower.” Anton’s face had taken on a desperation that John had never seen before. He didn’t like it. The Khan nodded and started issuing orders to the men arriving, one at a time, through the apparture.

  “How long before this criminal’s wards fail and we are spotted?”

  “Great Khan,” Bohdan said as he bowed even lower, still on his knees, “seven minutes.”

  “Khan,” John said. He locked eyes with the man as he turned towards him. “Bohdan and his son Pavlo—not to mention his wife, Natalia—whatever else they are, I know them to have always been fiercely loyal to their Khan.”

  The Khan paused for a moment, studied him, then nodded and turned back to study Bohdan. He walked over, placed a hand on his shoulder, which sent Bohdan to prostrate himself on the floor beneath his feet, and nodded.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” the Khan said, “but whatever else happens, know you will not suffer as a result of siding with me in this crusade.” He looked back over to John. “Is he an honourable thief?”

  John nodded. “Wouldn’t have come here if he wasn’t. I trust him with the bulk of my trade from this region.”

  The Khan, seeming to have made up his mind, ordered mana canisters to reinforce Bohdan’s wards, and slowly started to assemble a strike force in the shop.

  John took Anton aside in the commotion, despite his protests that he had to organise the remaining Hungarian forces, and pulled him up the stairs to Bohdan’s computer behind the shop counter. He handed Anton the invoice slip that Margaret Goodland had given him and breathed a prayer to the Sky Mother than Anton would be able to help him.

  “Please tell me you still have a burner login or two on you,” John said.

  Anton looked confused for a moment, but nodded.

  “What’s this, John?” he asked.

  “Everything started with these trackers. I went to the tower to try and find the transponder codes attached to the invoice, but you weren’t there, obviously. Can you find them from here?”

  Anton stared at him with uneasy eyes for a moment, glanced back to where his men were assembling, and sighed.

  “It’s important to you?” he asked.

  “Critical,” John answered as Agatha climbed the stairs and walked over to them.

  Anton nodded, logged into the Hungarian militia’s intranet, gestured to the computer, and stood up.

  “Log out when you’re done,” he said as he turned and walked back down to the cellar to see to his men.

  It took John a few minutes to find the transponder numbers attached to the order on the invoice, write them down, and borrow a tracker from Bohdan’s near endless supply of military hardware. He programmed the unit and looked at the weapons around him. Despite John’s best efforts, Bodhan wouldn’t take a single credit note, but much to his Khan’s delight was beggaring himself by outfitting every soldier around. He refilled John’s supply of scholin weed without asking any uncomfortable questions, and pointed him to a small back room where he kept what he called “the good shit.”

  John and Agatha stooped their heads to walk through the low black door, and entered the armoury. They each took a fresh wand, packed two yew branches filled with the emerald green power of Sindhustan on their backs, picked out seven canisters of condensed mana from a crate marked with his own Boston factory’s emblem, and picked out a main battle branch of pure North American mana, produced in Mississippi by the Choctaw Circle of Shaman. The good shit indeed, John thought as he turned on the GPS tracker.

  As the Cossacks and the remaining Hungarians started to form ranks outside in the alley and prepare for their assault, all John wanted to do was join them, but Trish insisted that the answer lay with the GPS trackers. He returned to the computer terminal and pulled up the notes on the order.

  Order 672B202AK

  25th of May 2019

  Request received for a non-lethal response to goblin infestation at Danube mine in Budapest. Prf. Goodland to lead the effort in the coercion of goblin nest to disperse. Per request for study, goblins to be shot by GPS transponders supplied by Hungarian Interior Militia. Approved 25/05/2019 Maurius Duma.

  “Trish?” John asked in his mind. Something had been gnawing at the back of his mind for days.

  “Yes?”

  “Professor Goodland specialized in Egyptian power down through the dynasties. What would he want with goblins?” But the answer came to mind even as he finished the question.

  “Damavand,” he whispered. He looked over to Agatha. “There are goblins in Damavand.”

  Agatha nodded, and Trish started to struggle to remember something in his mind. Her efforts seemed to drain his energy as well, and he downed a fresh bottle of scholin extract.

  “He wanted to track where they’d go.”

  “Goblin colonies exist nearly everywhere in the world,” Agatha answered, furrowing her brows.

 
“Managed colonies,” John said, scoffing. “Camps, prisons. I remember Trish telling me about the goblins at Damavand.”

  To his surprise, Trish didn’t chide him or even joke about his paying attention to her work for once, but urged him to go on, seeming unable to access her own memories.

  “Goblins who choose to live in freedom go to Damavand.”

  “They’ll die.”

  “Most do,” he said as he nodded. “The reverberations of the spells cast there will echo on for countless millennia, killing any of us in a matter of days. But for those goblins able to survive, somehow, they find the one place in all of this Earth where they can live free. The only place where we—humans—cannot.”

  Agatha raised her eyebrows and nodded. “They live there in numbers?”

  “Several thousand,” Trish said in his mind.

  “Several thousand, according to Trish. I think the”—he leaned in closer and hushed his voice—“I think the world engine the professor and Trish sought is another place goblins run to when driven from our ley mines.”

  He turned to the computer and typed in the transponder codes into the tracker, then clicked on the world map view. As expected, almost all of the goblins tracked were within Mount Damavand itself, but two, soft little specks on the map, seemed to be in Oregon. John’s heart froze, and he swallowed hard. This must have been what the professor found.

  Trish screamed in his mind, forcing him to hold the counter for balance as she nearly knocked him off his feet.

  “Yes!” she cried again. “There was an apparture there.”

  “What?” John said out loud. He looked to the floor in confusion, then headed down to the apparture—the soldiers now outside ready to depart on their assault—and punched in the approximate coordinates in Oregon where the goblins had run to.

  He tried to keep his mind calm as an apparture portal chimed back at him, opened, and signalled that it was ready to receive. He dashed up the stairs, logged out of the computer, found Anton outside, and—with his heart racing as he realised this might well be the last time he saw his friend alive—embraced him. As Anton led the Cossacks and Hungarians up in force towards the tower, John and Agatha rushed to the apparture.