Spring's Arcana, page 14
The mirrors shivered in their seatings, tinkling prettily. She carefully avoided touching them, edging towards the one which brightened most.
There was her mother, lying on her back in a green sunny field. Nat could almost smell the crushed grass. Mama’s belly was high and proud, probably with baby Nat, and Maria Drozdova stroked the curve lovingly as her lips moved. Daisies nodded in ankle-high grass, turning their faces towards the plaid blanket Mama reclined on.
Next to her, a dark-haired man with his face turned away was propped on his elbow, reaching for a dandelion. The stem broke silently, and Mama’s expression soured between one moment and the next. There was no sound, but Nat could very well imagine the cutting remark slipping between her mother’s pink-glossed lips.
The screen darkened and Nat was off again, walking towards the next brightening. Her skirt brushed the glass to her left and a thin fragment of green cloth whispered free, but she didn’t notice.
Mama, creeping down a dark hall Nat recognized because she’d been there yesterday; it led to Baba de Winter’s office. Her mother was pregnant, but not nearly as heavily—just rounded a bit, like Leo’s midlife potbelly. On her it looked natural, beautiful, and right. The baby bump pulled up the skirt of her yellow flowered dress, and her bare feet had pink-polished toenails.
Nat watched, spellbound, as her mother crept into de Winter’s office. The only light was from the huge windows, bathing the room in the dusky, dusty orange of a moonless summer night in the city. Mom obviously knew where she was going; she headed to the left instead of the huge bar on the right Dmitri had revealed just yesterday.
It felt like a million years ago.
Soft and stealthy, Nat’s mother pressed on the gleaming black wall, her fingers moving in a tortuous pattern. A slice of the wall pulled back; Mom stiffened, glancing over her shoulder.
The picture faded just as Mom was reaching into the wall cabinet. Nat’s heart pounded so hard her head felt hollow and swollen. It was work to turn away, looking for the next screen.
A baby-blue, 60s-adjacent Mustang zoomed down a two-lane highway, rolling grass on every side. Mountains were a purple smudge on the horizon, and the only other landscape feature was a giant, twisted tree in the middle distance, roots diving into a pile of bright yellow sand, tangled branches loaded with pink blossom.
Wait a minute. I know that car. Mom talked about it all the time, but the Mustang was lost and only the ancient black Léon-Bollée remained. Nat reached for the mirror, yanked her hand back just in time. Her fingers stung anyway, and she gasped. Hey, no fair! I didn’t even touch it!
Now both her hands were bleeding and the injustice filled her throat, hot and acid as bile. She once more considered kicking the goddamn glass, swallowed her rage with habitual speed but without the usual ease, and looked for the next glowing picture.
Nothing. Three avenues branched away, and all three were dark.
“That’s all I’ll give for free.” The sorcerer’s voice filled the passageway, tugged at her hair and skirt with a dry hot breeze. “Now you must ask, Drozdova. Choose wisely, choose well—and hurry.”
Ask? Ask what?
The popping noises were getting louder. Mirrors creaked, like skyscraper windows on windy days. The vibration met her shoes and ran up through her bones, settling in her teeth.
Whatever Mom had stolen was in parts. Was this the man who believed in the future, who was supposed to give her directions to the first piece? If not, why had he scooped her up from the party?
Except he wasn’t really living up to his end of the deal, if that even was the deal. A good daughter would figure out how to negotiate, how to hold him to his bargain. But he was a fucking sorcerer, he had her trapped in a mirrored labyrinth, and had anyone thought to warn her? Of course not.
Nat’s hands were fists. Hot blood slipped between her fingers. She tried to glare down each hall at once. “This is bullshit,” she muttered. Then, because she couldn’t help herself, she inhaled hard and screamed. “This is fucking BULLSHIT!”
Cracks spiderwebbed along the darkened glass on either side. The floor rumbled, groaning, and Nat swayed, terror igniting behind her breastbone.
The scary thing wasn’t the thought that she had somehow caused it. No, the absolutely terrifying thing was that she knew she had.
And it felt good.
More popping, cracking sounds. She realized what they were just as a mirror exploded behind her, glass smashing across the hallway to pepper its opposite twin. Nat flinched, and the screen to her left flickered.
She knew what she was going to ask—the one question she could never, ever voice, the one her mother would never forgive. It slipped between her teeth, bolting like a runaway horse. “My father,” she said, desperately. “Where’s my father?”
Between the popping, the groaning, the creaking, and the shattering, the sorcerer’s laugh tiptoed. Are you sure you want to know? that chuckle said, and Nat’s right fist jumped up, pistoned out.
The mirror to her right shattered. It hurt, but the pain was a sweet clean jolt. Her other fist leapt free too, and left a bloody print in the center of a star of breakage. “You’ll show me everything,” she said, and it was Mama’s you do not know who you are fucking with, sir voice, filling her throat and streaming free like a spring storm tearing through tossing branches weighted with new growth. “Or so help me, I will end you.”
The mirror down the leftmost passageway lit, blazing with pitiless white. Nat looked, her eyes growing rounder, and she recognized that table, the chairs, the thick white china mug of hot chocolate with the chipped rim—
A terrific crack speared the picture, shivering it from top to bottom. Glass fell, crashing musically, and Nat let out a miserable little cry. Her bloody fists leapt up as she ducked, bare arms over her head a pathetic shield against flying shards. Little razors kissed her bare skin, almost painless as the sting waited to creep up catfoot, and she had wasted her one question asking something she did, after all, know the answer to deep down, in the most secret places of her aching, pounding heart.
MISBORN THINGS
Each of the creatures in the garage turned into hideous, bubbling scrap by the hatred wedded to Dima’s bullets was a stab to Koschei’s prestige; energy the Deathless poured into his dolls could not be renewed, only laboriously gathered afresh. Dmitri worked his way up, floor by floor—the stairwells were hidden and more often than not turned into greased slides, but his boots gripped well and he found each camouflaged door.
Nothing better than a thief for that particular task. Everything hidden, everything of value gloated over by a miser late at night, everything treasured, was all within his purview. Or, at least, the finding was, and what did you do once you had found it?
Only what was natural. Only what you were meant to, what you had been made for.
He ascended from parking garage to anonymous building-layers masquerading as offices, glass doors shattering and cubicles exploding with particleboard, paper, shards from tiny crouching mimic-goblins, sparks from electrical snakes hidden in the walls. The straight razor flickered, the gun roared, and Dima sang, hopping over a trap disguised as a secretary’s desk and shooting a skittering gremlin chirping about rates of return. A large rectangular taupe plastic thing masquerading as a printer waddled towards him, rumbling a deep chthonic curse he stepped mincingly aside to avoid; he kicked it and his silvered boot-toes did as much damage as the countercurse he spat in a language from the banks of a dying river under a smoke-choked sky, a former incarnation’s knowledge rising from the buried past.
The only really troubling parts were the pseudo-bathrooms. It just wasn’t right for urinals to make that noise.
Past the office floors the terrain changed. Now it was apartments, blank doors on either side of indifferently lit halls with cheap nylon carpeting that turned to mush dragging at his soles, the smell of fatty food burned on hot plates rising choke-thick, the doors taffy-stretching until the straight razor slashed and they screeched, flapping open and cringing. Behind each one was a different stage set, some with the deadly quiet of carnivorous traps and others with howling violence lurking behind lumpen furniture.
This was mere foreplay. Above, it would become much more interesting. Koschei’s mightier clockworks were kept closer to the nest, and now the poking, prying little bastard knew he had a guest. He would be hurrying to do whatever he could to the Drozdova, but she was a tough little nut, resistant to cracking.
Dima could admit as much, even as it irritated him enough that he missed a single strike at a lumbering beast built to look like an ancient Frigidaire. Which meant he had to shoot it twice; as he did so a lamp-shaped thing with a conical cream plastic shade wrapped its cord around his ankle and bit, burning his calf through Italian wool.
He liked this suit. Dmitri roared a curse and kicked the thing, sending it skittering into a corner with a shower of venomous green sparks. Bad enough that Koschei aped his betters, but the man had no creativity.
Dmitri found the escape from this particular floor and raced up concrete steps lit by angrily buzzing fluorescents, bursting out into a long gallery of glass rectangles arranged in rows. Each case held a wrapped cocoon, varying shapes and sizes swelling or deflating as the things inside accreted towards birth or failure. The former Koschei would probably keep.
The latter were simply released to hunt wherever his domicile happened to be perched, bringing home prey to add to the sorcerer’s numinous force. Dima showed his teeth in a wolf’s grin, though wolves—unlike humanity—did not destroy merely for the joy of it. The gun barked in his hand, his boots flickered, and he leapt from case to case, spreading fractals under his stamping heels. Falling glass shivered, and he heard a high tinkling echo from above.
Now what do you suppose that is?
The linen-husked things screamed as their safe little hutches were broken and the inimical outside flooded in. It was to be expected; only the strong survived in this world.
“Bastard,” a lipless voice thundered through the long wood-floored room. “What the fuck are you doing, Konets?”
It spoke in the language of the old country, and Dima’s hatred turned bright as the straight razor in his left hand, still innocent of any stain. It took practice and skill to carve without smirching yourself.
He shattered the last case, pausing to concentrate. The gun accepted its silencer; from here, the work would be quiet. He used the moment to listen to the painful piping cries of the misborn things; maybe Koschei could salvage a few once Dmitri had what he wanted.
But maybe not.
The entrance to the next level was cut into the popcorn ceiling, and it throbbed with sorcery. Koschei’s voice rose in a chant far above, and that shiver-tinkling sound of breakage kept going though Dima had demolished every case on this floor.
He pursed his lips, whistling a high drilling note, and coiled himself to leap.
SEE SOME THINGS
Broken glass glittered everywhere. White surgical light foamed over Nat in a stinging wave. There was a clattering, a low male grunt of effort, and two short pops.
“Oh, really?” the low, dry, smooth voice of the sorcerer said, and his tone was so prosaically aggrieved she almost opened her eyes again. “Shooting me, Konets? Have you no—”
Next came a swish and a terrible throaty gurgle. Nat let out a small helpless sound, her stinging arms still clasped over her head. A hot droplet touched her cheek.
Like a child awake after a nightmare, she was afraid to look in case it was real.
Soft footsteps, glass grinding finer and finer. The steps circled her, and she drew in huge, shuddering breaths. Knowing who it was didn’t help.
“Oh, zaika,” Dmitri said, and under the fresh scratches on her left arm the older ones from his hurtful grasp throbbed. “What you do to yourself?” There was a click, and Nat peeked between her bare, bleeding arms to see Dmitri, his suit rumpled and covered with strange burns and spatters, scratching at his forehead with the muzzle of a big, dull black gun. The weapon had a strange elongated snout she recognized from movies as a silencer.
His other hand, dangling at his side, held a bright cutthroat razor, its worn black handle almost slipping from his fingertips. Despite the precarity of its position, it still held a bright, evil gleam, and something told her his loose grip wasn’t ornamental or thoughtless.
“Oh,” she said, blankly. “It’s you.” State the fucking obvious, Nat.
“Or was it him?” Dima made a swift movement, gesturing with the gun as if it was welded to his palm, though by some curious circumstance it never pointed at her.
The scarecrow-thin sorcerer lay amid whorls of broken glass, but not nearly enough for the labyrinth Nat had been caught in. The wreckage amounted to only a couple medium-sized windows; the shards spread outwards, an exploding flower with reflective petals. Two smoking holes in the scarecrow’s chest matched a tidy one in the very middle of his forehead, and under his chin his throat gaped in a great smiling slice that showed the raw edge of meat and a chip of white bone, but no blood.
In fact, he wasn’t bleeding at all, though Nat’s arms were covered with oozing, shallow slices. The sorcerer’s fingers twitched, and a horrid dusty wheeze rattled from his collapsing lungs through the clean cut in his throat.
“I hurt him again,” Dmitri announced, turning on his heel. His boot-toes twinkled just as much as ever, but they were suddenly much less funny when the razor answered. And the bright metal on the shoe-caps looked just as sharp as the blade itself.
He stalked to the sorcerer, who kept making that wheezing noise. The scarecrow’s long fingers twitched, and his thin dry lips were moving. Of course there wasn’t any breath to make his vocal folds resonate, but Nat could decipher one or two of the words.
Looked like he was cussing Dmitri out.
Shaking went through Nat in waves, muscles quivering between the urge to run and the absolute knowledge it was impossible, that if she attracted the direct attention of the murderous gangster stalking the undead sorcerer-thing on the floor something even worse might happen.
“Eh, old man.” Dmitri bent over the sorcerer. “You’re a mess. How you gonna fix this one?”
Koschei’s lips twitched with renewed speed. Incredibly, his hands were moving, smoothing his pullover, exploring the twin holes in his chest. He glared at Dmitri, those terrible, vital dark eyes all but shooting invisible hate-rays.
“What’s that?” Dmitri grinned, the wide white smile of an utter lunatic. “I can’t hear you,” he chanted, and the gun spoke again and again, making soft little coughing noises as the scarecrow’s body jerked.
Nat cried out, unable to stop herself, and Dmitri glanced at her. His snarl smoothed so swiftly she might have doubted ever seeing it, and he administered a final kick to Koschei’s midsection. His boot-toe sank in with a sound like an axe biting well-seasoned wood, and Nat’s stomach revolved again.
“You worried about him?” The razor flickered once, twice, before snapping closed and disappearing, whether into sleeve or pocket she couldn’t tell. “It would take more than that, zaika, though I do admit, sometimes I’m tempted to keep going. Just to see.” He strolled toward her, and she couldn’t help staring at the gun. He carried it like a mechanic would a tool when called to answer some kind of customer question, like Leo wandering into the kitchen with a ratchet on a bright summer day wanting lemonade, his fingers black with engine grease and Mama muttering about the marks he’d never dare leave on the yarrow-washed floor.
The thought of Leo made her flinch again. Dmitri’s free hand flashed out; his fingers, warm and hard, circled her right wrist. “Easy,” he said, much more softly. “Let’s see what we got, eh?” His dark head cocked, and he inhaled, shuddering slightly. “All’s well. Dima’s here.”
“M-my mother.” Nat’s lips felt at once too large and too small for the words. “The m-mirrors.”
“See some things, did you? Come, we take care of this.”
Even if she was capable of objecting, she might not have. Because he made another quick movement, the gun disappearing, and bent to pick her up like an overtired toddler at a late party. He was wiry but strong, and his footsteps made no more noise against the scattered, crunching glass than they had before.
“You’re lucky,” he said over his shoulder, a diagonal cord of muscle on his neck standing out. “Next time I see you, Koschei, we find out how long it takes the parts of you to crawl back together when I’m done scattering them.”
There was a deep groaning wheeze. Nat wished she could bury her face in the convenient black-clad shoulder, but the stains there were fresh and smelled truly awful. Besides, Dmitri’s hands were a little too tight, as if he expected her to start struggling and screaming at any moment—and would clamp down without a second thought.
So she just closed her eyes and tried to breathe.
“Drozzzzzzdovaaaaaaa.” A thick, rasping chuckle. The image of Koschei cradling his own head in his bloodless hands, pressing the edges of his sliced throat together, were sick-making, and she almost choked on bile. “You know where the Kniiiiiiife iiiiis.”
Dmitri halted, and his eyelids dropped halfway. He had turned to stone.
“Let’s just go,” she whispered, with no real hope he’d agree.
But he started moving again. Nat finally sagged against him, trying not to look at anything but his dark-stubbled chin. Whispering laughter, brittle as old caramel dried to a crackglaze, filled the shattered room behind them. There were no plants, no fireplace, no glass pyramid. Just a corpse, some broken glass, and the high dusty cavern of a warehouse with its walls running like smoky oil on dark water through veils of visual static.
“Don’t look,” Dmitri said. “Give you a headache, zaika. Close your eyes.”
So, like the good little girl she once was, Nat did.
MAMA’S IN
There were weirder things in the city than some guy carrying a bleeding woman in a green dress down a sidewalk growing increasingly icy as the temperature dropped. Nat had even seen one or two of them tonight, but she still flinched every time a car rolled slowly by, feeling strangers’ gazes burn over them. Dmitri refused to set her down.
