The mighty wings of Kizil Khan stretched out across the sky, and the waters and the sand swept away beneath them like a thing already forgotten. Fear, too, was forgotten now, left behind on the plane. Nadia was in the Red King’s own talons, and he would not allow any other story but his to be told here. Life and death came as they would in his kingdom, and she would feel nothing but sorrow and wonder.
The hills rose up, lightly forested, and then passed away as they turned east. There were roads below as well, but Nadia saw only one or two cars, the odd house tucked away in a corner. The outskirts of Istanbul, too scattered to call suburbs. To their right was a forest at least ten klicks across, divided into any number of parks. It was a perfectly safe area—the biggest Russian guns couldn’t shoot so far, even if they wanted to blow up someone’s country cottage.
But this was no familiar’s country; such an empty space couldn’t hope to feed anything the size of the blood-drenched god of a monster holding her up. Dogs barked and howled as they passed, hearing the King’s call in their own way. Their owners would have fallen to their knees to cry, suddenly remembering loved ones they had buried years ago. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy his hunger.
The sun at their back was half-hidden behind clouds, and still too bright. She could see Kizil Khan’s feathers blurring at the edges where the natural light burned the ectoplasm away. Lower and lower he sank, straining to reach the more settled places ahead, where food would be plentiful—where Nadia knew he must not go.
The French familiar was somewhere in a broad arc in front of her, south and east. With its emissor dead it would be weak and vulnerable. It would flee from Kizil Khan, and if it could not flee Kizil Khan would just absorb it once he got close enough. Which was why Ruslan’s plane hadn’t kept up with them; the familiar could tug at the cable if he liked, but a fifteen-year-old boy was still his anchor on reality, and that anchor would be circling the airport by now, kilometers away.
Down, down he sank, feebler and feebler, toward the narrow streets of a small town, and the horses and cattle in the farms around it moaned and screamed as they felt the very outermost edge of his halo pass over them. Nadia thought she might have heard a few babies cry as well. The town would be lucky, if that was all he did; Kizil Khan was never happy unless he was free to play his little game of give-and-take. If there was a very ill child in town, it might get better, but its grandfather would die for it.
At last the talons let go, and Nadia tumbled down a grassy slope at the edge of a small wood to the town’s north. The great eagle was already hurrying back to its master by the time Nadia got to her feet to look. She watched her sleeve carefully, until all the blood soaked in had evaporated, then waited a few seconds more before she pulled out her dowser. She couldn’t see any locals, and anybody nearby would be too busy recovering from the presence of the King to bother over one little girl in rags.
The dowser said it was 15:49, less than two hours till sunset, and its GPS claimed the town was “Gümüşdere,” a name she thought she remembered from the map. The names were tricky. She didn’t speak much Turkish, and the bit of Kazakh she remembered wasn’t exactly the same. All the more important for her to keep out of sight.
She hurried into the woods before setting the dowser proper to search; it was a little confused by Kizil Khan’s presence, but after a moment reported something to the southeast, just as expected. It didn’t mean the familiar was still alive—it might be past recovery at this very moment, and disintegrate before she got anywhere near it—but there was still enough of it for the dowser to spot, and that was encouraging.
Less encouraging: it really was twenty klicks to Tarabya, where the emissor was reported dead. If his familiar hadn’t moved north much since he died … she shook her head, tucked the dowser away where nobody would see it, and made for the nearest road at a jog. She might be spending the next three hours on the move, and she didn’t know if the thing she was hunting could last that long.
It was much harder than she expected just to get up and walk to the road. She might tell herself, logically, that she looked like nothing more than some lost Turkish schoolgirl. Not all the locals had fled the war zone, and many of them would still be living and working as well as they could, even in the areas under siege. It had been much the same back in Guryev—but then, she had really belonged in Guryev! And look how that had turned out …
There was nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other. Face down, quick walk or slow jog but not too quick. Running flat-out would attract attention, people trying to help a girl in danger. Walking too slow would waste time and maybe make her look lost.
She did not think much of Gümüşdere, which from the ground was nothing more than a collection of quiet streets and country lanes, with houses appearing just often enough between the trees and fields for the place to call itself a town with a straight face. The two-lane highway she was currently on was nearly deserted, perhaps one car passing for every minute of walking, and so bare of cover that she had to walk twenty meters out of her way to find a stand of bushes each time she wanted to pull out the dowser. Some ragbag girl carrying such expensive-looking gear would be suspicious—and actual thieves would lust for the thing.
Nadia got into the “dense” part of the town—where she could have thrown a rock from a window in one house and hit any of its neighbors—by 16:11. She was making wretched time, and she knew it—but what could she do? She had no idea when the familiar might become mobile again, and she didn’t really know her way around. The dowser kept pointing her south by southeast, but couldn’t give her anything more definite.
She could feel eyes staring suspiciously at her out of every window. The trouble with these small towns was that everybody knew everybody else in them, and she was not a regular sight on these streets, was she? There was a teenage boy walking her direction from some distance away—about sixteen, t-shirt and faded jeans. She took the next right turn, trying hard to make it look like what she wanted to do anyway.
What was a local boy that age doing out of uniform? Nadia thought the Turks had lowered the local draft all the way down to her age by now, seven or eight months after the invasion. They’d lost a lot of men in stupid attacks on Fatih, had the Russian bear gnaw them to bloody bits—and here she was, a lone girl with a Russian accent who knew a few stock phrases of Turkish! What would that boy do, if he decided to come after her, and caught her, and heard her voice?
Without meaning to, she broke into a run, and dashed the next hundred meters, making random turns and checking over her shoulder as seldom as she dared. But the boy did not follow, and two other people she saw looked at her curiously, and the heavy bag banged against her hips as she ran, so after a minute she made herself stop and duck into an alley to see it was 16:25.
Half an hour since landfall, and she hadn’t made much over a single kilometer in a straight line towards Tarabya! That had to change. She risked a furtive glance around, and spotted what looked like a market down the street. Yes. A brisk walk—the kind a girl would use when going to pick up yogurt and floor cleaner from the store before it closed—and she was around the back of it, in a bare side street where some stock-boy or clerk had attached his bike to a pole with one of those silly cable locks.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Nadia whipped out her bolt-cutters, and her second-largest stack of lira bills. She hoped that would cover it, but she had no idea how much a bike cost here. Papa Titus had meant those stacks for last-resort bribes, so she was probably fine.
By 16:40, the little town was behind her, and her biggest worry was keeping her ratty hijab from blowing off her head as she pedaled down the road. The familiar was still there, and she was making much better time. With a bike, she could cover ten klicks in an hour with no trouble, leaving her plenty of time to stop and check the dowser.
There was a roll of thunder in the distance—or was it thunder? Off ahead and to the right. She caught a flash like lightning, too. It might be a storm; more likely it was Yuri at work, setting his Shum-Shum loose to devour another chunk of the suburbs to make a deadly distraction for his sister. Hopefully it would not need to go on much longer, at the rate she was going—
Nadia looked down the road, and some of Yuri’s favorite Kazakh swears slipped out of her mouth as she slammed on the bike’s brakes. Soldiers. Two soldiers in a jeep, inspecting a car before it went under the North Marmara Highway. The road was not very busy, but there were three cars backed up behind the one being checked, and not much traffic the other direction. There would be another checkpoint on the other side of the underpass, she was sure.
Nadia permitted herself a single minute, no more, to cry with her face on the handlebars. Then she left the bike by the side of the road and set off across country, trying to look casual. A girl wandering aimlessly around the countryside near sunset might simply be crazy or stupid. A girl struggling to get a bicycle over railings and rough country and up a steep highway embankment, on the other hand, was obviously trying to get around the checkpoint. She would be much too interesting and memorable to look at.
She was making the right decision, she told herself sadly, as she ambled along the highway to get out of the sight of the waiting motorists before she crossed it. Possibly somebody would report her anyway, but she would be less conspicuous without the bike.
17:12, and the sun was brushing against the horizon. She drank half of her bottle down after crossing the highway, then stumbled down the hill and into the outskirts of the once-wealthy suburb of Uskumruköy. The familiar was not too far now, but her feet and legs were sore. She thought she might have blisters starting.
Soldiers stood guard at crossroads here, their military vehicles parked in random roads. She thought she caught snatches of French, but she did not know much French, or any western language besides English. She walked briskly past them with her face down, and they ignored her. Just another wretched Turk brat roaming the streets. They had larger problems.
The light faded, and on she walked past half-empty strip malls and fast-food joints with military vehicles in their drive-throughs, ducking into alleys to check the dowser, or simply to sit down and rest. How much longer could the familiar hold out? Was it dying already? If she didn’t get to it in time, could she throw away the dowser and disappear?
She didn’t want to leave Yuri behind, or to live with him as a dead weight, his kid sister the overgrown Metic. And she didn’t know what Papa Titus would do with her if she couldn’t get it done this time. There would be no third chance. He might make her staff like Varvara if she was lucky, but he really didn’t need another babysitter. If he didn’t need her, and couldn’t let her go … she shuddered, and got back to her feet.
17:50, and only half the streetlights were working. Saving power, or just in bad repair, she didn’t know which. A lot of the businesses here were boarded up. Nobody could run a restaurant for tourists and vacationers at the edge of a battlefield. Half of the citizens had fled. She noticed men with guns walking the rooftops, clusters of spotlights with backup generators, and European dance music drifting out of apartment buildings.
At a crossroads three white soldiers lounged around a little fort of sandbags, smoking cigarettes and eating kebabs while their belt-fed machine gun pointed straight up at the sky. Zit-faced local conscripts marched down the sidewalks in ranks, patrolling their hometown. One or two leered and whistled at Nadia from a distance, but didn’t follow up when she kept walking.
All the people out of uniform had cleared the streets now; there must be some kind of curfew after dark, or else they were frightened. Still she pressed on south, sprinting between stands of trees a stone’s throw from the highway even though her feet were so very sore and she didn’t know if there was a salvageable familiar at the other end. But the dowser said there was still enough for it to find.
18:05, and she was still limping along, too sore even to dash anymore. Could she have kept the bike after all? Too late now. The familiar might have been orphaned for a full twelve hours. It would already be breaking down into loose ectoplasm, sunlight or not.
18:22, and she hardly had the energy to hide. She had passed on into Zekeriyaköy now; soon she would be within the extreme range of Russian artillery. Still the dowser pointed persistently south and a little east, without a wobble. The familiar, it seemed, had gone to ground. All she had to do was find it in time, and all would be well.
18:37. It was dark, and cold. But the dowser said the familiar was still there … and it was pointing to a building at the end of the street she was on, a small two-story structure surrounded by road on three sides, with whitish siding and a tall, thin tower rising out of its roof.
A mosque? It wouldn’t surprise her. Familiars were often attracted to places of worship. There was no door on this side of the street; peering around the corner, she saw a small crowd gathered around the far side, making a commotion. It was Friday, she suddenly remembered, but long past time for the big Friday prayer. If she listened closely, she thought she could hear an argument, and poking her head just a little further she caught a glimpse of fatigues and a rifle.
The soldiers had sealed off the mosque, and the locals weren’t happy. Nadia couldn’t blame them. But she needed to get in. There was a tiny strip of decorative shrubbery on her side of the mosque, behind a short iron fence and a gate; she slipped inside to examine the ground-floor windows. Both locked, but one had a small tree in the way, good cover.
She spread her jacket across the glass, then waited for the argument on the door side to get a little louder. As soon as she heard a shout, she asked God’s pardon on the off-chance His name was Allah after all, and swung her bolt-cutters into the covered glass as hard as she could.