From the moment he encountered the Knyaz at Geyenna, Sergei knew that the scale, scope, and resources of their project had increased dramatically. The masters of Russia did not engage in military operations; Sergei could not recall hearing of their becoming directly involved in any campaign. Even in the recapture of Constantinople, upon which they had come to stake the reputation of the Russian Empire, they had not deigned to intervene. It therefore followed first that the capture of the Marshalls was a matter of prodigious import, and second that Sergei and Marko would from that point onward be relegated to a secondary and subservient role.
Sergei was of course perfectly content to no longer bear the full burden of responsibility. Marko’s reaction was as ever more emotive and less rational. But this no longer troubled Sergei; even Marko would not be so intemperate as to voice discontent in the presence, or even the vague proximity, of a Knyaz. In the event that he did, the master himself would witness firsthand Sergei’s own loyalty. All that remained to concern him was that Marko’s temper, being thus forcibly constrained at length, might erupt into the dangerous and irrevocable folly of rebellion. Against that danger they were shielded by Marko’s sure knowledge that any misbehavior on his part would be swiftly revisited upon his wife and friends, some three thousand kilometers away.
So much for internal considerations. Externally, the situation was favorable, even extremely so; the abrupt arrival of the Graham woman had certain implications concerning their internal security, but none too troubling. A certain amount of leak was inevitable, and the Marshalls’ impetuous campaign could scarcely be concealed. However she had discovered their current location, her appearance here was highly likely to facilitate the children’s capture.
As for the damage inflicted upon the city in the process, Atyrau was a minor port of no significance, in an underpopulated region. It had already been reconstructed once. If a second renewal proved impractical, all its functions could be absorbed by its neighbors without undue trouble.
When the trap was sprung on the morning of the Seventh, they were prepared. The four of them were positioned equidistant around the city’s perimeter; by fortuity the Knyaz happened to be closest to the point where the children elected, against all reason, to reveal themselves. His first command was to attack the Graham woman, his second for Ardent, Snowdrop, and Zenith to assist him in flanking and containing the children. All possible logistical necessities had been arranged some time in advance, and Sergei (as the most trustworthy of the three servants) was able to obstruct the road out of the city within fifteen minutes of their first appearance.
The radio silence imposed by emissants necessarily impaired communications and operational awareness from that point onward. Sergei was not surprised, nor displeased, to find that the Graham woman had not been killed; they had intended only to delay and confuse her. Given her obvious and exploitable attachment to the children, it would be the height of strategic myopia to needlessly risk her destruction. Sergei was not convinced that she could be compelled to assail Western targets for Nadezhda’s sake—in the full knowledge that she would be discrediting familiars in American eyes in the process—but the possibility was promising. Failing that, she could be used to render the Marshalls more compliant.
Soon enough all targets were united in a single trap. This was Sergei’s first attempt at an ambivalent enclosure maneuver—a tactic commonly described in training, but seldom carried out in practice for want of suitable manpower and circumstances. No ordinary emissant could hope to escape this manner of cordon, even with a substantial ectoplasmic reserve; it was in theory the task of the encircling emissors to wait out their prey’s struggles until exhaustion set in, then tighten the circle until ambivalence simply crushed their will to continue. Theory, however, had not accounted for Ruslan, whose paired and metastable valences could simply perpetuate each other through cycles of collapse and resurgence for as long as emissor and substrate remained alive and conscious. His exact response to this scenario would be a matter of some interest in itself.
They were brought to bay at a desolate point, where the highway out of Atyrau passed through a great deal of the empty and infertile grassland in which Kazakhstan specialized. The Blackbird had nothing to draw upon save Ruslan’s own companions in the ruined car, and perchance the odd traveler at a refueling station. In targets, too, it was lacking; it struck at the road itself, vaporizing large patches of asphalt in its fury, and downed several power lines, before tearing sizable trenches into the arid steppe, then converting a negligible portion of the Caspian into steam.
When it was exhausted, and found it could not escape the trap with its own resources, it gave in, and Saray emerged, forcing back their barricade with renewed energy. Sergei saw no reason to confront her, and held his position, noting with some pleasure that they would likely recover all of the Marshalls and their companions, Ruslan excepted, in a state of perfect health.
The conclusion was foregone, the eventual destination assured; the actual process of achieving it was immensely tedious. Yefimov observed the entire process through a pair of binoculars, with Snowdrop blockading a low point in the road before him, and his faithful Amelin and Lyudmila to witness. The former was plainly bored, in spite of the vitalizing aspects of the halo—one hand followed whichever familiar was currently out in lethargic circles on their map, the other held position on the immobile Ruslan, perhaps marking a slight shift in the epicenter of the Tetzloff field with a desultory tap from time to time.
Saray soon had no wounds to heal, no fresh pains to absorb. It was curious to see her waver, with no justification for the victimhood she clung to, but after a moment’s hesitation and looking about she resumed her weeping all the same. The sight was mildly ridiculous, but to be expected; a familiar would not abandon its narrative valence simply because it ceased to make sense.
Saray to Blackbird, Blackbird to Saray, back and forth. Even Lyudmila, who was ever-conscious of appearances, shifted restlessly beside him. Yet their orders were firm: they would not close the circle to force ambivalence unless and until the Knyaz signaled a change in policy by moving himself. Direct antagonism might prompt fresh defiance from the Blackbird, or endanger the integrity of the cordon. Within their limits, Ruslan could do nothing but exhaust himself and his friends with continuous changes of valence. It was hoped that this would render them more pliant upon capture.
By Sergei’s watch, forty-two minutes passed between the Blackbird’s first defiant emergence and the final collapse, when Saray sank convulsively to the ground and disappeared, and no new challenger appeared. He could feel the change, as the irritating zone of impingement finally collapsed, to be replaced by a milder and more distant sense of annoyance where all four halos met in the space around the car. Through the binoculars, he saw the car’s occupants contort in fresh discomfort. Frankly, Sergei was amazed they retained consciousness.
That soon changed; in another minute and twenty-six seconds, the last motion in the car ceased. A full minute was allowed for any last mustering of resistance. Then Kist the Golden, as planned, stepped forward to take the four of them into custody. Obediently Sergei withdrew Snowdrop, that Kist’s halo might assert mastery. A black speck on the horizon vanished as Ardent followed suit, and Zenith likewise abandoned his meandering patrol of the skies above the Caspian. Kist advanced gracefully with lance extended and the car sank down, very slightly. A Knyaz took few chances.
“This is an incredible day,” Mila remarked at his shoulder. She had her own binoculars, and watched with tremulous anticipation.
“Indeed,” Sergei replied. She might feel differently were she not within the outermost limits of Kist’s halo, but her statement was true nonetheless. Under the golden god’s protection a black car advanced on the beleaguered wreck, flanked by a pair of military trucks. The car stopped at a prudent distance, while the two trucks continued, circumventing fresh rifts in the land where necessary, and took up position, one on either side of the car. Eight soldiers emerged, covering the Marshalls’ vehicle from every angle. Kist lifted his lance by a fraction, to allow them to approach without crawling.
One of them lifted his hand, signaling that all occupants were unconscious, and at last the door of the black car opened. Out stepped the Knyaz in his patterned hood, the majesty of his triumph only slightly lessened by a pronounced limp, and his left arm clutched to his side in a peculiar fashion. Evidently the Graham woman had done him significant injury en passant. Mila and Amelin sighed in unison, stirred by the sight of a wounded hero.
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The Knyaz approached within five meters of the car before issuing fresh orders, accentuated by gestures from Kist. One man opened each of the four doors, extracting an occupant while covered by his fellow. Through the binoculars Sergei saw Nadezha emerge first, then Fatima, and Ruslan, and a corpulent man he assumed to be a collaborator.
He did not see them remove the Graham woman.
Some confusion ensued at this point, half of the men depositing their captives on the ground while the remainder answered sudden and very peremptory questions from the Knyaz. Sergei felt that he could infer the details, and did not trouble himself over them. He could have no effect upon the situation at the present distance, with a halo preventing communications. “Lyudmila.”
“Sir.”
“I now perceive a certain limitation within our defined operational responsbilities. It is perhaps understandable, but a weakness nonetheless. I feel I should mention this to you now, for further consideration when time allows.”
“Sir?”
“For the past forty-five minutes, our attention has been wholly occupied by the paraphysical activity surrounding the vehicle. No one person was assigned, as they should have been, to visually monitor the vehicle itself.”
The Knyaz, in his wrath, moved to the precisely wrong place to berate a soldier, and Sergei heard the long-expected report of a firearm, followed by a piercing scream as the imposing figure in the patterned hood fell over onto his injured arm. Several more shots followed in rapid succession. The soldiers, after the fashion of all military men everywhere when a very senior officer is abruptly and violently incapacitated, did nothing helpful, but stared uselessly at the car—specifically its undercarriage, he supposed, though this detail was difficult to discern from a distance.
“We would further have done well to specify to our subordinates the precise number and description of persons we expected to see within said conveyance, security considerations notwithstanding.” He had not noticed when Kist disappeared; he could not help noticing when the crone Adesina appeared on the hood of the Knyaz’s car, and began striking down their men with brilliant emanations of white light. Their morale bore this well under the halo, but they were not given sufficient time to think of turning their weapons on the space under the vehicle.
Lyudmila, burdened by the confusion inherent to shifts of valence, no longer appeared to be listening. This was somewhat bothersome, and he was further frustrated with himself for failing to harmonize with Adesina as she appeared—though the distance between them could well have made this problematic. “Amelin. I shall require your services.” The clairvoyant assented with a bow of his head, though clearly worse for the experience himself. It was said that his kind felt individual valences less than typical humans, due to the innate passivity inculcated by their training. He might well require that resilience today.
“The situation is entirely amenable to reparation,” he continued, surveying the scene with binoculars. “Further assistance from His Imperial Majesty seems improbable at this juncture; however, this scenario is at worst merely infortuitous from a strategic perspective.” And a personal one, though he did not care to remark as much aloud; securing the family following this failure would likely earn him considerable goodwill from the administration, and there was now, it seemed, one less Knyaz. He was not so vulgar as to seek rank for its own sake, but there was much room for improvement in Holy Rus’.
Yet such was not his present concern. The Graham woman remained under the car until all opposition was routed, and all three vehicles inspected by her emissant for malingerers (the car’s driver quit the field with abrupt but dignified haste, and was not pursued). In the process, the halo shrank considerably for lack of substrate. Only when the field was clear did the American re-emerge, and begin shaking the slumbering figures on the grass while Adesina kept watch. She met with no notable success, and after some consideration lifted Nadezhda to convey her to the Knyaz’s car.
“What can I do to help, sir?” asked Lyudmila, rubbing at her forehead. The repeated changes in valence had plainly imposed some strain on her.
“For now, we shall remain in place,” he told her. “The three Marshalls are now incapacitated, and her emissant has no utility for transport or defense. The loss of our leadership notwithstanding, a skilled player of chess might regard this as an advantageous trade. She may now elect to return to the city and face Marko, or escape it, and encounter us. Progress in either direction will be slow, thanks to the late antics of the Blackbird.”
Before she could choose either way, Ardent reappeared above Atyrau. Marko had doubtless seen the Knyaz’s fall, and Sergei did not trust his colleague to hold his ground, but the Graham woman had no cause to know as much. Accordingly she turned the car in something near Sergei’s direction. It was difficult to judge her course as she maneuvered around the ravaged portions of the ground, but most likely she had elected to rejoin the road at some point after Snowdrop’s barrier. Thus, he supposed, forcing him to deploy his emissant to obstruct her passage anew. A meager plan, but likely the best she could contrive under the circumstances.
Ardent did not move from the city, and to Sergei’s relief Zenith did not reappear in the skies. The boy would be most useful marooned on a ship at some distance, blockading the port and otherwise staying out of the way. Sergei was confident in his ability to manage the Graham woman alone, burdened as she was with three near-comatose children, and one of them incapable of walking.
All the same, he had no intention of starting a direct confrontation with her. Should she escape them now, reacquisition could prove highly problematic as both a tactical and a political matter. Long before she drew close, Sergei, Amelin, and Lyudmila were ensconced in their prepared rallying point, a small concealed crevasse within sight of the highway, slightly less than a kilometer away. Sergei had long since mastered the art of rapid construction with glass, and an artfully textured ramp would allow them to rejoin the road on a few seconds’ notice.
Lyudmila sat in readiness behind the wheel. Amelin charted the enemy’s approach on the map. They were still some distance out when he blinked, and lifted his hands; she had relinquished her familiar for the sake of stealth. Again, a reasonable response, and perhaps the best available, but not adequate. It was, however, vexatious, as Sergei had entertained a mild hope of bringing the conflict to a quicker and more elegant end.
As Snowdrop germinated once more from the ground over their heads, Sergei felt the familiar sensation of harmonic synchrony; evidently the Graham woman had elected against a crude duel of ectoplasmic reserves. This was wise, as he suspected she no longer had any. And yet there was something peculiar in the familiar sensation—a feeling of unaccustomed vigor, an acceleration, and then a wrenching, as though the second party to the partnership had quite simply wrested control of the entire process away from Sergei. The comforting ritual of his keystone sequence faltered into a dark silence. Without meaning it—from pure and reflexive alarm—he released Snowdrop, but the halo did not collapse.
At the same moment, Amelin arched his back, and clapped both hands to the side of his head, and shouted. Lyudmila put out a hand to steady him, only to let go as he began to convulse with great violence. He threw himself back in the seat, all four limbs dancing to the mad commands of an insensible puppeteer, tearing his precious map in half. Lyudmila screamed, and withdrew her hands. Sergei himself felt as though he could scarcely move. From the blue skies above he heard the sound of countless voices, singing a single note.