Tracking a monster in Prague, Kristýna’s adopted hometown, she could not help but be distracted at times. Prague: the place where fairy-tale rot crawled up into visitors’ brains, gave them mind-gangrene from undiluted infections of whimsy.
What a dump. What a treasure. Her second true love. This one more than most, for she knew a famous writer from Earth would live a long life in the wall surrounding Prague, hate the place, be poor and desperate there for decades, and yet be forever linked to it. One day, too, everything she loved about Prague would be destroyed. But not here. One day, tanks would grind down these very streets. But not here. This was a stronghold of the Order of the Third Door.
Here might have another problem entirely, and part of that problem was in not knowing the exact nature of the problem. Yet.
That would be the tall, bulky figure they followed past the houses like postage stamps of light in the dark. The one who knew about woodpecker tongues. The one she couldn’t place no matter how hard she tried.
Spies, spies, spies. Always spies in cities on the brink. She had seen it so many times. Wondered if perhaps this was one time too many. A maze to interrogate, even as they walked through a maze. Granted, many other odd folk had appeared in Prague. Not all of them villains. Mali, Republic, even animal spies, which she hadn’t seen for ages. All worse, more complicated, the closer Crowley’s army came. The closer they came to siege.
And what sort of siege? Porous or tight? She’d seen all kinds, knew each siege was different, and each siege terrible in its own way.
Too much to sort through to find one Golden Sphere. Among all the vines that needed to be trellised or lopped off. Alfred Kubin’s somewhat hysterical missive delivered by a bat through the window of her Prague home had made it clear the Golden Sphere would wreak chaos here if It could. Or, at least, It had wreaked havoc on Kubin. And of this she was wary—wary not of Kubin’s information, but of how it had come to be. He had been on the wrong side of the War of Order and even reconciled, apparently, had been known to nudge a conspirator toward a plot. Which is to say, Kubin’s hysteria felt a little like play-acting.
Yet … she doubted the figure they followed was the Golden Sphere. No, this was something else.
By now, they were quite high. Kristýna always liked to be high—way up above the sullen castle with its crude gargoyles and half-crazed king, up and away from the algae-throttled river of legend, a path that had taken her and her companion through landscapes of eccentric gardens as likely to sticker as to soothe, created by gardeners who had considered their manicured absurdities normal … cobblestone streets bordered by fairy-tale houses in pastel shades, roofs dusted with snow, whose walls curved with a delicate grace poor stupid doomed John Ruskin had misdiagnosed as “twee.”
Down below, the city roiled, anticipating the siege. Republic soldiers manned the walls alongside local forces employed by the merchant clans. Too many tourists, many of them rich, had risked the journey for annual magic festivals and were now trapped, gumming up the works. Soon to be enlisted in a “volunteer” army if it did not go well.
“Anyway, about the houses, I should explain about the houses,” she had been telling Mack, to appear to be casual, because he’d just come to Prague for the first time, after all these years they’d known each other.
Anyway, because no one understood that the point of those curved walls, those slanted roofs, was excellent design for the weather and a wicked comment on fairy tales, not a wish to live in fairyland. Even the most whimsical of homes they passed came with mighty doors made of such a stubborn alliance of wood and metal they were unlikely to admit even an intruder armed with an ax. Prague was treacle on the surface … and then, underneath … became something more wondrous and strange and … resistant.
Mack beside her, grunting a reply to her information: I heard you, I have nothing to say.
Mack, and his shadow.
What did Mack see, staring back at her? After all this Time?
And what did the shadow see? Although there was a more important question still.
She left off the banter, asked the question she’d hinted at, only for Mack to deflect, ignore, pretend he didn’t understand. But now she was on her home turf, for a little while. Safe enough to ask, given the shadow had seen it all unfold on the wooded footpath she’d chosen to bring them through the forests, through Prussia, and then mere miles to Prague. Or, would’ve been.
“Did you mean to let him escape? Did you think it would serve some other purpose?”
Five days since Napoleon’s disappearance, and nary a hint of where he had gone or how he’d accomplished it. Nothing a tuft could tell her, anyway. Which, perhaps, left the Speck.
Two girls wearing bear masks skipped past.
Mack, trudging alongside, but not breathing heavy like her. “I didn’t mean for him to escape.”
Two old men holding flowers and hands made it safely past the figure they followed. Not all did.
“Quite a surprise in the moonlight, then,” Kristýna said. “For both of us. To see a headless body. Again.”
A dancing cat with a singing dog. A dove hitching a ride on a hawk’s back. The figure in the dusk paused at these marvels, common for Prague, where magicians had a sense of humor. But they did not of a sudden vanish and the figure continued on.
“Yes,” Mack said. “A surprise.”
“By now, he could be anywhere. Up to anything.”
She’d found a horse for Napoleon. She’d garden-spelled a body for him out of thicket and copse, a stout body of thorned vines shot through with moss and lichen and rotting bark. Something loamy to soothe. A body that wouldn’t wilt. That smelled of mint and lavender. To counterbalance the not-so-sweet smell of preservatives and magic augers. With a nice thick carved-out slice of tree trunk, fit to house the head of a military genius.
“And yet it was your watch.”
“I saw nothing. I don’t know why,” Mack said.
Perhaps the shadow knew.
All she’d asked in return from Napoleon was to accompany them to Prague and serve the Order against Crowley. The very Crowley he said he hated. Yet at midnight five days after they’d arranged to pick him up, there loomed the headless body, a thicket without a point, atop a horse they no longer needed. Symbolic of something. Perhaps the state of things within the Order.
“Calm as could be. The horse,” Kristýna said. “Not spooked. Not startled. Imagine that.”
“Let us concentrate on what we’re doing now,” Mack said. “And save this for later.”
“Right. Mack, no knife and no truck. No truck with questions, rather.”
But she laid off him for the moment, their quarry turning a corner, and them both having to quicken the pace without seeming to. She was reminded of ages-old ballet classes, of sidles and sneaks and intrigues so ancient now it made her tired to think of them.
The bulky, tall figure had proved adroit at avoiding all sorts of obstacles—sudden cats, dogs, children, old men. Would of a sudden pirouette and be past, almost seeming to invert its shape or to draw in its gut in a spectacular and preternatural fashion. Always sticking to darkness so as to mute the effect. But Kristýna saw it. How the top of the figure’s head at times quivered and divided into four pieces, came back together again. Which might have startled a younger soul.
How, too, in the aftermath of this … quiver … a passerby hugging a stone wall or leaning in an alleyway might have disappeared, never to be seen again. Was it their quarry’s fault? Or a trick of the light? Or both?
“Did you know, Mack, that a woodpecker’s tongue wraps around its brain?”
Mack said nothing.
“Although this is to say nothing of the local cuckoos,” she continued on grimly, “which lay their eggs in the nests of the red-faced imperial nuthatch, laying with them plots against those species’ ambitions, and the imperial birds none the wiser as they sit atop eggs that will hatch into babies that do not have the ambition of their own species but of another entirely—”
“Interesting,” Mack said, interrupting, because he must feel compelled to say something in the face of so much detail. If only to stanch the flow. Especially as these ridiculous words had also been delivered by the one they stalked, if not as coherent, the past couple of days. And had been known to come from Napoleon’s mouth, or something similar, the short time he’d been atop a horse and beside them.
“Tell me, Mack, how do you think this … person … we’re following knew the sign code?”
“Ask Napoleon.”
“I can’t ask Napoleon.”
Mack shrugged. “It is a common-enough saying.”
Kristýna opened her mouth, bit her tongue. The “person” had a poor command of Czech, kept talking, when greeted, in specific phrases, including the woodpecker one. Which is how the “person” had been brought to their attention, having talked about woodpecker tongues to the wrong Czech magician.
The figure ahead of them, the one that weirdly resembled a schoolmarm, stopped in front of a wall of posters, backlit by a huge public fountain full of flaming mead. The fountain was surrounded by the balloonicles and floats for a prewar carnival: The next morning there would be a parade of giant red bunnies, porcupines, and bears, precursor to drunken reveries. One last hurrah before getting serious. Children jumped into the honey mead, came out with their cups full, which were given over to their parents. The place was flush with the thick smell of the honey and abuzz with night bees sneaking a sip from derelict cups.
“You Czechs are strange,” Mack said, his face on fire from the glow.
“No. We are just very human.” She decided not to remind him she wasn’t Czech. Not really. Because she was proud of the Czechs, often wished she was one.
“No one is sober around here.”
She laughed, but her eyes had never left their quarry. Mack had never understood the Czech tolerance for alcohol. “Later, you will dive for honey mead for me.”
The schoolmarm figure had been facing a wall plastered with posters for upcoming cultural events, most of which had been canceled. Now it appeared to disappear into the fabric of the low wall to their left. But they could not quicken their pace, had to walk past as if common citizens of the city.
Yet Kristýna could tell the creature was truly gone.
They walked up to the wall, as if out for a quiet stroll, held hands to complete the illusion, stared at the poster the creature had perused with such intensity.
The Fester Growley Book Club, meeting at the Twisted Spoon Bookshop, midafternoon, in three days’ time. The Czechs did have a talent for satire, it was true.
“Can you feel it?” Mack asked. “The residue?”
“Yes. Of course.”
The poster exuded magic. Not the magic of animals or trees, but of a Celestial Beast. A Beast could disguise almost every part of its essence, but most were too powerful to be truly invisible.
“Were we tracking a Beast?”
“Or did a Beast put up the poster?”
The idea made her snort. A Celestial Beast putting book-club posters up all over the supernal burgh.
Such fairy-tale rot. Then she sobered.
“The Council must be told about this.”
She meant the Council of Czech leaders and their Republic advisers that ruled Prague, given the state of their king. The Prague magicians would spearhead the defense of the city, and they, too, were part of the Council. Kristýna was among the members of the Order who advised the Council … on the matter of peculiar doors.
Mack shook his head. “I say no. I say we pursue it ourselves.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know what it is yet. We don’t know where it comes from.”
“No, because we do know what it is yet, and we must not hide anything from the Council.”
“At least keep it to the Order, not the Council.”
She pondered that, sidestepped for the moment. Mack could keep what he wanted to himself. She was free not to follow his advice. Especially here.
“Shall we attend, then. This book-club meeting?” It wasn’t a question.
“Absolutely,” Mack said.
That settled at least one issue. So it was time for the next thing. What she’d been putting off.
Appropriate to have waited until on the hill above the castle, where many things banished from the city proper came out to play.
Even the common doors there shared an uncommon resilience out of necessity, lined with spells and varieties of ivy not entirely natural. Sometimes, the ivy in such places seemed to laugh at passersby, a peculiar green laugh, dry and yet deep, as if below the ivy lay buried some plant-beast and the vines were merely its searching limbs. Sometimes, the ivy scorned the drunken stumblers spilling out from golden light, bewildered, to the streaking swirl of stars framed by the reaching arms of the trees.
So she meant to use the natural properties of the place for an intervention. But the whole point of intervention was surprise; it allowed for nothing that resembled permission.
Mack in the mead-light stood upon the cobblestone street. But his shadow shone across a thicket of bushes. Such a lush, thick shadow. So intelligent and self-aware and dangerous.
It was a moment’s work, but a wrenching, exhausting thing nonetheless.
In the blink of an eye, the thicket’s thorns became more than just part of a plant. They reached out, clung to and pierced the shadow, which writhed there in surprise and pain. Like a marmot pooling into black liquid.
While Kristýna pushed Mack away, toward the fountain. Ripping the shadow from him. Ripping it right good off him, in such a way he cried out, which she covered up by drawing him close and kissing him on the lips. Hoping maybe the kiss would replace the shadow in his mind, in such a way that nothing would change.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mack’s shadow still writhing in the thorns’ embrace. This would not last long. But it would last long enough if she was quick.
She pulled Mack close, as best she was able, stared up at him, stern, unyielding.
“Trust me, my love? Time to run, Mack no truck. Time to run if you don’t want a marmot’s shadow to find you again.”
Mack, in shock. Mack wild-eyed, wrenched out of himself, as if she’d pulled out his spine, not his shadow. The stare he gave her made her wince. Betrayal. Uncertainty. Laid bare to her. Ah, this game was not for the faint-hearted. Not for the weak.
“Mack! Wake up! Wake up now!”
The betrayal faded, and he nodded, and he let her take his hand. There, above the castle, among so many people whose business required secrecy and who lingered in impromptu pubs and beer gardens hidden within mazes of alleys or behind hedge walls, or on the edges of cemeteries with headstones without names or dates.
They ran, together, his rough hand in hers, which was just as rough. Past the fountain and its cheery crowds. Down the quaint cobblestone streets, up high and higher still, gasping for breath in time, but she driven by a kind of mania and sense of loss, Mack by sheer terror. She could feel it. He hadn’t known about the shadow. Hadn’t understood what his clandestine meetings might mean for him.
Mack shadowless. He shivered uncontrollably as they fled, as if it were cold, which is how people reacted at first when they had no shadow of their own. How they reacted when they learned the “people” they trusted didn’t trust them.
Would that be enough for him to tell her the truth?