“Visitor! Visitor!”
Nadia looked up from her book and sighed. It was a chilly day in Thessaloniki—four days before Christmas—but the sun was high, the light was good, and she’d just come out here and sat down on her favorite bench against the chapel wall. Her reward for finishing lessons early. But there was that stupid Ruslan in his usual panic, clattering down the steps from the walltops where he’d been looking out over the town.
“Visitor on the way! Hide!” He flailed his arms as he hit the bottom, nearly tripping on the final step. Did he even see her, or was he screaming for the whole base to hear him? But that was Ruslan for you, she thought as she snapped her book shut and got up from the bench.
There was no hurry; he had to have seen the visitor coming a mile away from up there. Visitor protocol meant going to the nearest restricted area on base and hiding there until an adult came with the all-clear. In her case, that was the chapel right behind her. She looked back with her hand on the door and saw Ruslan scuttling off to hide himself.
The chapel was even better than restricted, these days; Nadia was pretty sure she was the only person to set foot inside it since they set up base here, seven months ago. Yuri had no interest and Papa Titus would never allow a priest inside this place. Not because he didn’t believe (though he didn’t). Because it was a security risk. Nadia tried to dust the place off every now and then, but it still looked grubby and forlorn. It was a pity; it must have been a lovely little church once.
She might have kept reading The Dark is Rising, but you were supposed to stay away from windows under visitor protocol, and light was bad in here. It wasn’t a game, either; last August Ruslan had tried to snoop on a visitor, and got spotted himself. That earned him three whole minutes with Yunks for a punishment, and for the next three days he couldn’t do anything but cry and babble in Uzbek. Now he took it too seriously—but he’d always been timid. He was fifteen now, three years older than Nadia, and she knew she already had more spine than he ever would.
Well, if she couldn’t read … she tiptoed forward, careful not to stir up too much dust, until she stood before the image of Christ on the iconostasis screen before the altar. She had no candle to light. The only question was who or what to pray for. For Papa Titus, she guessed, though she didn’t really want to. For Yuri, Hamza, Fatima, Ruslan, the staff ladies, the little Metic kids—
The Metics. She grimaced. She was still a Metic herself, really. Not properly part of the family. They let her call herself a Marshall because she was Yuri’s sister—his real, blood sister—and he was in, and they’d joined before Papa Titus changed the rules. But she wasn’t really a Marshall until she got her familiar, and she’d already failed once, and if she didn’t get one soon she would be too old and that was what she really wanted to pray for but was it right to pray for that?
She didn’t know, and there was nobody to ask.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t pray. Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhiy, pomiluy mya greshnuyu. Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhiy, pomiluy mya greshnuyu. Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhiy, pomiluy mya greshnuyu … she felt herself rocking back and forth on her feet as she repeated the words in her mind, keeping her eyes shut. Nadia knew there was a special way you should breathe, too, when you said the words, but nobody had ever taught her.
She startled at the sound of a knock on the chapel door behind her. Was the visitor gone already? It couldn’t have been ten minutes. “Yes?”
“Nadezhda Titovna,” boomed the harsh voice of Varvara, the oldest of Papa’s three serving-women. “Your father is calling for you.”
For a moment, her heart stopped beating and her mind went blank. But her body knew what to do without either: “Yes, ma’am. Coming.” Nobody kept Papa Titus waiting. She was already on her way to the door as she said the words.
Varvara frowned at her as she came out, but Nadia didn’t care. Varvara frowned at everything. “Is it time, then?” Nadia asked her. “My time?”
“Do you think he tells me?” Varvara snapped back. “Don’t dawdle.” And she limped off toward the north end of the yard, leaning heavily on her cane. Varvara had been with the family longer than anyone but Hamza, and Papa Titus trusted her to run everything he didn’t feel like dealing with himself. He called her his Grand Domestic. Nadia thought it was a joke, but she didn’t get it. She didn’t believe Varvara got any jokes at all. Old cow.
Base’s real name was Eptapyrgio, “seven towers,” even though it had ten. The Greek Emperors built the castle at the highest part of Thessaloniki, centuries ago, and then the Ottomans used it as a jail, and when the Greeks won their freedom again they’d turned it into a museum.
Then Papa Titus came along and took it for his base, saving the oldest northern towers for his private quarters and offices. Staff and Metics got to stay in the more recent jail facilities scattered around the courtyard. It was not a pretty place; the stones of the castle walls were mostly grey with an ugly freckling of browns and whites, the trees in the courtyard had bare branches, and the whole thing looked like the dungeon it basically still was.
Nadia looked behind her, and saw Zeinab chivying Ruslan out of his own hidey-hole. She trembled; Ruslan was the second part of the plan. Was this the day? Was it finally going to happen?
They passed Yuri on the stairs, and that sealed it. Yes, it was finally time. Yuri smirked and clapped her on the shoulder as they passed; he was on his way to do his part, and he would enjoy it. Normally that worried her, how much Yuri loved his work, but now Nadia was too frightened and anxious to feel more than a twinge of annoyance.
A pair of Papa Titus’s gun-toting Lictor bodyguards flanked the door to his office. Varvara didn’t bother to acknowledge either, but knocked on the door, waited for an “Enter,” then shoved Nadia inside and shut the door behind her—the same way she would throw meat into a lion’s cage.
Papa Titus was standing perfectly still in the at-ease position. He didn’t look worried or impatient, but he never let himself look any way at all without meaning to. He was in good shape for a man pushing sixty, even if he was bald and wrinkled, and his beard all grey. His mask was laid on the table in front of him, between his beat-up copy of Bellum Gallicum and a map of Istanbul with notes scribbled all over it. His quick black eyes followed her as she marched in, threw her arm out in salute, and stood silently at attention.
“You know why you’re here?” he demanded.
“Yes, sir.”
“The emissor died sometime this morning. French. Confirmed 0900 around Tarabya. Where is that?” Nadia’s hand whipped out at once, pointing at a spot midway up the European coast of the Bosporus. She’d been studying a similar map every morning since they moved here. “Good. Ruslan will drop you off along the north coast while he holds the sky over the airport. Yuri will move in ahead of you to strafe the main front. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” And she did. Familiars liked to be near people and away from other familiars. The Russians had the Fatih district—old Constantinople—heavily fortified, with at least three masters backing up their regular forces. It wouldn’t flee south towards them, or cross the Bosporus.
To the west was a big forested park, low population. The familiar would naturally drift north, then west along the coastline when it hit the Black Sea. Ruslan’s familiar at the airport would keep it from going too far west, and whatever Yuri did would get the Russians’ attention and possibly scare the familiar into moving a little faster towards Nadia. Like a dog flushing game out for a hunter.
Only one thing worried her. “Sir. How many kilometers do I have to cover?”
“Could be twenty or more. It won’t move quickly by daylight. Yuri has orders to drive northeast if he can.”
“Yes, sir.” She stared at the map, hard. She’d been jogging around the courtyard every day, but that was a long hike. “Do the Russians—“
“It was some kind of hidden mine that killed him. The Russians, or the Turks, have no reason to hunt for lost puppies in the area, unless their spies in the French army are better than mine. Even if they were ready to do it, which they aren’t.” He looked her over. She’d just dyed her hair black again last week, and she’d been applying tanning lotion. Nadia would look Turkish enough from a distance. “Can you do this? I need to know now.”
She looked right into his hard black eyes. “Yes, sir. I can.”
“You won’t like what happens if you don’t.”
She thought she saw something flicker in the air over Papa Titus’s shoulder, something that might have been the faintest outline of his Yunks. It was an old trick of his, to remind you who was in charge, and Nadia refused to flinch or even look. “Yes, sir. I can do this.”
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“Good. Any more questions?”
“Do we know what it looks like, sir?”
“Not very well. Mostly human, probably female. Are you seriously worried you won’t recognize it? No? Then go change, you leave in five.”
She saluted and went down the stairs at a run. She kept her waif outfit in her room, crumpled up in a bag so she’d look extra-pathetic, and all her tools and supplies with it. Right down to a tattered scarf for hijab, and a bandanna over her nose and mouth. In less than two minutes she was out at the front gate, where Yuri and Ruslan were waiting in the back of a decrepit sedan.
The car went roaring down the road as soon as she shut the door, and she hurried to buckle herself. There was a shaded glass between their compartment and the front; after a couple of minutes, it popped open and a hand passed back a sheathed knife and a nine-millimeter. Nadia made sure the gun was empty, then stuffed both weapons down her shirt in the special places sewn to hold them.
Then there was nothing left to do, for the rest of the ride, but sit back and concentrate on breathing slowly while she repeated her silent prayer to herself. She shouldn’t discuss anything important where the Praetorians in the front might hear, her voice would shake, and besides, she had nothing to say. Yuri would only tease her and she didn’t want Ruslan’s fumbling reassurances.
It wasn’t a long trip; the airport was fifteen minutes away and the sedan had a siren. Their two planes were already getting ready for takeoff when they got there, and nobody in Thessaloniki was stupid enough to get in the way of Marshall Family business with nosy questions or pre-flight security. All five of them were in the air—Yuri and one Praetorian in one plane, Nadia and Ruslan in the other plane with the driver—less than an hour after Ruslan had come screaming down the stairs with his warning.
All planned ahead for months, executed without a hitch so far. Nadia simply couldn’t believe it was happening now. They’d be approaching Istanbul in less than two hours. Six hundred klicks, as close to the front as Papa Titus dared to linger.
There were only twelve seats inside the little plane, ten of them empty now. Ruslan, sitting across the aisle from her, put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. We’re lucky so far, right?” His voice cracked, very slightly. Nadia bobbed her head, feeling queasy in a way that had nothing to do with the motion of the plane.
“We’ll get there in the late afternoon. You’ll have time to get in position before night falls and it starts moving around. And it’ll have cover to hide in, and people around to keep it stable. A way better chance than … you know.”
Yes. She knew. A better chance than last time, when she’d been ten, and the emissor died at twenty-hundred and they didn’t get the news for more than ten hours. Nadia was on the ground at ten the following morning, found the familiar five hours later—and it was already too degraded to salvage. She’d tried anyway, begging and crying while it disintegrated before her eyes in the bright summer sunlight. It was all she could have done, and Papa Titus had still been angry with her.
This time would be better. It had to be.
She switched to the window seat to watch the Greek coast flit by beneath them. The plane was one of Papa Titus’s custom couriers, coated in some kind of radar-blocking paint or material, Nadia didn’t know what, and flying low and fast. Yuri’s plane would be taking a parallel course to their south; it was stealth-coated too, but it would not be Yuri’s job to be inconspicuous.
He would probably kill a number of people with his diversion. Ruslan, too. And they wouldn’t all be soldiers who died. Nadia knew she ought to feel bad about that, and she did, but she also knew that Papa Titus would be waiting for her to come back successful.
She had heard all the stories, growing up, of the men and women who faced down the Soviets and earned a bullet for it, dying for Christ or their country or the simple right to tell the truth. Nadia hoped she might have been brave enough to take a bullet, but she would never be brave enough to handle Yunks. Nadezhda Titovna Marshall, dutiful daughter and coward. But wasn’t everybody? Nobody else was trying to stop Papa Titus either. They were all cowards together.
And it was no good to think of escape. She had seen everyone’s faces, knew too many things people outside would be happy to learn. Those people could not protect her from Papa Titus, and she did not trust them any further than she trusted him. They would all be the same kind of person. And of course a twelve-year-old girl had no chance on her own.
But she would not be on her own for much longer, if this went well. After today, she would never be helpless again. There was no way any familiar she brought back would be a match for Yunks, but anything would be better than the situation now, wouldn’t it?
Ruslan tried to push food on her, packaged meal bars from the plane’s locker. She didn’t feel hungry, but ate what she could, knowing she would need the energy. All too soon the plane was veering north to circle around from the Black Sea. The area northwest of the city was still Coalition-held. All Papa Titus’s allies, or people who thought they were, because they were stupid. He would have let them know he had two planes on the way, to do his part for the war effort.
A final check, hands shaking. Water bottle, not as big as she’d want but water was heavy. Four more meal bars. Dowser, fully charged and working. Bolt cutters, flashlight, and multitool. Three magazines for the pistol, which she hoped she’d never need. A good amount of money in lira and euro bills, divided into several wads and hidden all about her body. It was little enough, but still a lot of weight to lug around. Most of it went in an artfully shabby satchel she slung diagonally across her body, to make it harder for any actual vagabond scavengers to steal from her.
When she was done, she dimmed the lights. Ruslan was still in his seat, eyes closed, breathing deeply. It would be hard enough to do this normally, when he was not stuck in a plane several hundred feet up with only two other people around to feed his Red King. And Ruslan would not want to take too much from the pilot, or from her. He was already starting to cry as the plane faded out around them.
She knew what he was seeing, because she saw it too, as she saw it every time the King appeared: the bandaged child, half her age, looking tiny on a camp cot cluttered with used syringes and soiled instruments and dark matted red-brown gauze, bare sand and dust underfoot. The imam in the corner, praying unheard, as her hands—the hands of a grown man, dirty and bloody—shook and clutched at the air, at her clothes, her hair, each other, not knowing where to go. The tent was flimsy and hot, and flies buzzed in through the open flap, through the torn netting. She tore it further running out, but there were only more tents outside, tents and tents stretching on to the horizon, and unwashed people trying to hide from the sun.
The camp vanished, the butcher’s hand was sure, and the curved blade went through the bull’s throat quickly. The life poured out of it in one sudden flood, the beast sank to its knees. The drumbeat within it slowed to silence. Its death seeped into the soil, and filled it with power. The seeds took it and sprouted and life did not end, it only changed, as regular as the tides, in and out, up and down, back and forth. Black buzzards landing on the rich black soil.
Guryev was burning again, the lights flashing in the sky. Thunder cracked and towers fell. Men and women screamed and died, her parents among them, and even as she wept for them she knew their death was good and true. Fire clears out the underbrush, ash settles to the forest floor and feeds the new growth. On the high desert the eagle strips flesh and cracks bones, and not a drop that falls is wasted on the thirsty ground. When the eagle dies his children will eat him in turn.
Slowly the vision released her. Nadia opened her eyes again—she had not known she closed them—and saw Kizil Khan standing there, their beautiful dark benefactor, somber and majestic, his half-opened wings touching either side of the plane. The great eagle stretched out his neck and gave a mournful cry that rattled in his throat. Then he slumped, the wings fell, and the long brown-black feathers drooped to brush against the deck.
There was a strong smell of blood in the air; Nadia put out a hand to touch his neck, and it came back damp and sticky with the gore that came spurting eternally out of his body to dribble down his plumage. Kizil Khan shuddered and groaned at her touch, and he turned his face toward her. The enormous beak opened wide until she could see his other face, the eyes and nose and mouth of a man carved out of hard black stone, meeting her gaze from halfway down the eagle’s throat. Nadia always had the feeling that he was just about to smile, but he never did. A wisp of white ectoplasm floated out of her mouth and into his.
Then the beak snapped shut, and the ramp at the back of the plane opened up so the howling wind sent the red blood flying all over the walls. Nadia ignored it, even the splashes that landed on her face and soaked into her clothes. They would vanish as soon as she was clear of his halo.
She looked to Ruslan, but he was still bent over in his seat, and she knew not to distract him; she didn’t need her ride down to disappear now. So she cinched her satchel a little tighter, and stepped close to the great bleeding beast so she could wrap her arms around his neck. It wasn’t clear to her how they would make it out the back ramp together, but it wasn’t like that kind of detail mattered to a creature like Kizil Khan.
One moment she was inside the plane, feeling his hot blood wash over her. The next they were free, and she bit back a gasp as the two of them plunged toward the Black Sea.