It seemed ill-advised to the Czech magician known as Kristýna to leave the seedy fourth-floor apartment she shared with Mack to collect her spy. Especially as she’d just returned from a solitary mission that had been perilous enough.
But she began to consider it when, for consecutive evenings, nothing had drifted in through the open window, which overlooked the River Seine. Her spy was now late by more than forty-eight hours. Had the Seine proven an insurmountable barrier to her spy, or had her spy drifted down below on the dark streets, become lost amid the huge mounds of garbage while silently pulsing out her name?
“Time for push-ups,” Mack the Maori said from across the room. “Been a while.”
Four hours at least. To Kristýna, Mack was as predictable as the pretentious clock in the Prague town square that drew all the tourists. Still, she must lodge the usual protests, even as she had her own reasons to stay put a little longer. Hoping her spy would come to her.
“We have tasks ahead of us, Mack, and little time.”
“Must. Keep. Up. My. Strength.”
“Push-ups and paperbacks.”
“Yes. That. Is. The. Sum. Of. Me.”
Through his shirt, she could see the taut muscles in his back flexing as he went through his routine. Sometimes she thought of his muscles as individual nations, with their own sovereignty. Sometimes they moved, she was certain, without his intent.
The paperbacks he received from a succession of dormice and potato folk, no doubt obtained on the black market and not even from Aurora. She had rarely heard of the authors. She liked watching Mack receive them, for he displayed a delicate touch and a kindness toward the creatures that showed how aware he was of his strength.
“Tell me more about the sphere. The Golden Sphere.” As if there were any other. “Forty … forty-one, forty-two …”
Mack was a hard man to read. He did not talk with ease about himself, for one thing. That could appear brusque, but was really shyness.
“What can I say? It can be marble-small or house-big. Visible in plain sight or becomes invisible, as it wishes. A good sense of humor on that sphere, too, of course.”
Such meaningless pride, as if she had something to do with it. Yet everything that animated the sphere had come in some way from Czech magic, despite John Dee’s claims.
“Sounds. Impossible. Fifty-five … fifty-six.”
“It exists. You begin to sweat. It is unpleasant.”
“No. I mean. Impossible to find. Sixty. Haven’t complained before.”
“True … The sphere will stay small most of the time. Helpful?”
“Less than you think.”
“Soon, we will have to leave. I can feel it. Can you hide, Mack? Can you be small?”
“Sixty-five. Sixty-six. I can disguise myself. As a landslide.”
“Mild-mannered reader of paperback novels, is my thought. Glasses. A cane. Stooped a bit. Have some respect for the physiques of normal men.”
He stopped then, arms bent, turned his head as best as he was able to look back at her. The quizzical look on his face made her laugh, so hard it took her last remaining energy.
She was so weary, wanted badly to sleep. Even to sleep badly. “Oh, my friend, my love, what can I say? You are nothing if not unique. I treasure you. You are my treasure.”
This declaration only made him look more puzzled, as she had said it in the old tongue, which he couldn’t understand. Mack always said it sounded to him like hundreds of bean sprouts growing fast from the soil or the soft chitter of flying squirrels speaking out the sides of tiny mouths, and even that made her laugh.
Beyond the window, the streetlights that should have given a sophisticated cheer to the night had been snuffed out by Crowley. The Seine looked like a thick, stinky, syrupy strip of blackness, and the breeze did nothing to freshen up their stuffy digs. Some of the garbage, yes, was refuse and rotten food, but more of it represented the entire contents of apartments, left by the curb. People who had fled Paris or tried to flee. Citizens conscripted into the war effort or liquidated or imprisoned.
It was a city under siege by its own ruler, and she remembered it from better, grander days, but for Mack this sad shadow of Paris was all he had known. Should they be proud or ashamed that they had hatched the plot that Rimbaud and others had taken up? That this torrent of garbage was, in part, their fault?
“I’m done,” Mack said, standing up. He stepped into the bathroom to change.
“Then I suppose we should take a walk, while we can.”
Mack nodded, and soon they slipped quietly out the apartment door and down the stairs. As ever, she marveled at how agile Mack could be despite his bulk. Catlike did not cover it.
He had on the subdued suit that he preferred at night, a kind of a second skin, rain or shine, hot or cold. A tattered paperback book dangling from one meaty hand. Always there, always a different one. Always in English. With all the little scraps of paper to mark pages.
“Mack, no knife and no truck.” His new joke. But also a lie, as he was both, on some level. No one appreciated that joke more than a Czech, because it was so clearly a joke and, on some level, a lie, and yet no one knew what it meant. After all, the beer in Prague that was black was light and the beer that was clear was heavy.
They had an hour until Crowley’s current midnight curfew. Although the curfew often changed without warning. Her friend John Ruskin, trapped in Paris due to an ill-advised visit three years before, had been one victim. Crowley had broadcast the Englishman’s capture through the tinny maws of every one of his mecha-crocodiles, beating his chest like a triumphant ape.
As fiery a polemicist as he was, Ruskin had not been made for such times. Kristýna wondered, with some sadness, if he had been shrieking as Crowley had him put to the sword. Like a dazed bird mortally wounded by a cat. The glittering sword assembling from shards of gravel from all over Paris, held by an invisible hand. “That the populace,” Crowley had decreed, “shall participate in the people’s justice.”
The body of Ruskin thus wrenched high in the air, that all might observe the spectacle better and derive the satisfaction of seeing a disembodied head, post-sword, tumble slowly—thus spake Crowley’s dark magicks, with arrogance toward gravity—to the hard marble of Notre Dame.
Just one of the luminaries whose heads had rolled recently across the floor of Notre Dame and then down into the darkness to join past generations.
But at least Ruskin rippled across worlds, as some did, and so he was not lost to everyone, everywhere. Just here.
The streets were deserted due to the impending curfew. The lights that should have shone out with merriment from shop windows were muted, dull, mournful where present. Everywhere, the shambolic mounds of garbage added unwanted texture and weight to the shadows. To combat the smell, she must continually ask the tiny white flowers on the vine that formed her necklace to discharge a vanilla fragrance. Mack might not mind the stench, but it gave Kristýna a headache, reminded her how Paris at the moment had too few trees, too few parks clean of piles of refuse.
Almost at once, she became preoccupied with another problem, however, and all thoughts of her rendezvous left her. For they had picked up stalkers again, and from their appearance and the glance she shared with Mack, Kristýna understood they would never be returning to their apartment, and that she had been right: They were not long for Paris, either.
To be almost always traveling, to have almost nothing left of family, as much of a rump-pain as they could be, was wearying. Spycraft was wearying, too. And she knew, wary of the feeling, that this was the reason Mack’s bulk beside her, so dapper and indestructible, made her happy … even as they picked their way through ankle-deep garbage followed by two crooked shadows.
She had spotted the two who shadowed her and Mack a day before—one lurching beneath a bulky overcoat and the other gliding smooth, neither motion to be trusted. Now it was clear that Lurch and Glide were not random watchers, but assigned to the Case of Kristýna and Mack. A hard case to crack.
Their path took them to the threshold of a pub with no name that lay in the darkness at the end of a shadowy street full of battered, abandoned apartments. Next to the pub lay a little public park, glutted with trash and some pathetic trees. Still, it had enough grass and vines and bushes for her purposes.
A careful observer might have been wary, but Lurch and Glide hadn’t been made that way.
Beyond the rickety wooden door lay a central bar island with a low ceiling; glasses hanging down from slats looked like transparent tulips. The bar top was old, pitted wood, gnarled and knolled, a surface rough and familiar to her. A bar in Prague very much resembled this one.
Kristýna wore practical tweed trousers and a white cotton shirt with a black jacket she now took off and placed on the back of a chair. The jacket was lined with a thick green moss that might have resembled wool in a certain light. But there was no certain light in that place. It had sprung up, without a license or other preamble. It hadn’t even been there a few minutes before.
The barkeep fit the bar: a tiny wizened man in an ancient brown vest and old-fashioned dark tights, whose green slippers curled upward at the end. His eyes gleamed like whorls of polished bloodwood in the dim light and there was about his physique a twisted, rootlike quality. Just like her father, so very long ago.
Mack took up a position opposite her at the bar island. They both ordered honey mead, warmed, and received giant mugs frothing with an elixir that tasted like the sting of bees as well as honeycomb. In Mack’s hand, the mug looked like it must contain a bee’s portion.
It was all rather comfortable, and Mack smiled across at her as if they had no cares in the world. He took a book from his pocket.
But, after a time, the two rather curious individuals crept into the pub and sat to the immediate left and right of Kristýna. She turned toward neither of them, instead taking her cue from Mack’s reaction.
There was no Mack reaction. No knife. No truck. Although she kept telling him “lorry” made more non-sense, even in Czech.
The barkeep served both pursuers honey mead. That was all he had on offer. She wondered what was creeping up to the roof to outflank them while they entertained these two guests.
“Cold night,” said the one on her left, after pretending to drink. It came out like “Cauld gnat,” with too many tongues getting in the way.
“Yes, a bit chilly,” said the one to her right, who dared not pretend to drink given his constitution. This came out like “SSSSsss, eh BITE silly.” Not enough tongues. Which is to say, not even one tongue.
For these two were more dead than alive, in a sense, more there than here.
The one on her right was already beginning to drift into her space. The one on the left was eager to topple into her space. The looming shadows of either did not predict a good time, for anyone. But still she kept her gaze on Mack.
“One too particulate, one too many legs,” Mack said, taking a delicate sip of his mead, wiping stray liquid from his mouth with a white pocket square.
“Rude,” No Tongues said. “Rsssuuuud.”
“Where are you from?” Too Many Tongues asked Mack. “WAR-AR-U-FRAM?”
“Mack,” said Mack.
“Mack isn’t a place.”
“Cultural observer.”
“Not from these parts, then.”
“Far-distant land.”
“No verbs there?”
“No wasted ones.”
“And where are you from?” Too Many Tongues asked.
“Nowhere,” she replied.
“You must be from somewhere,” No Tongues asked. “Usssss mussssssbeeeee friiiimssswear.”
“Where are you from?” she asked. “Far from here, yes?”
Mack had his gaze locked on hers. If ever there was a mountain about to erupt into a volcano, that was Mack. The empty mug of mead had disappeared, perhaps crushed to dust.
More than once. More than once she had looked across a table or a bar or a room at someone she cared for and wondered if this was the last time. It got old. She was getting old in the service of the Order. But she could not see her way clear to another life, given her purpose and her responsibilities.
All she wanted in the moment was for the moment to last, the honey mead a comfortable blaze in her stomach, the threat as yet to either side and not in front of her.
“Oh, I think you know where we’re from,” Too Many Tongues said. “I think you know who I represent.”
The barkeep looked less like her father and even more like a wizened shriveled root, no matter her best efforts. Kristýna felt thick smoke like velvet lingering on her right arm and what seemed like a sack of wet meat leaning heavy on her left arm.
“We’ve come to … we’ve come to …,” No Tongues started to say, but by then the dark smoke of him had begun to turn into the lines of delicate green vines like luminescent fractures in the very air, questing and growing until No Tongues was very much rooted in place on the stool, unable to say anything at all. His vine-self sprouted tiny white starlike flowers—and then she had had enough and the vines withered, blackened, became crisp, brittle, exploded into flakes.
“This cannot last,” Too Many Tongues said, although with difficulty, as from top to bottom he was becoming a huge sack of fruit, his disgusting raw meat quality tumbling away in a cascade of apples, plums, grapes, and an assortment of melons, great and small. “This is so unfair.”
Too Many Tongues became an avalanche until his great coat held nothing at all, and rolling across the floor beneath his bar stool was a great quantity of bruised fruit.
She slumped, let out a sigh of relief.
Mack stared at the mess, shook his head. He placed his battered paperback on the bar.
As if the encounter had served as a beacon, a light shone out of the dark … and drifting down out of the night floated Kristýna’s spy: a dandelion tuft that landed, secure, in her outstretched hand. Tuft but tough, as she liked to say, for the texture of the words.
I spy with my little vine. I spy with my little spore. Tuft but tough, you are.
She clasped the tuft tight but gentle. Safe. There must have been many others, but only the one to make it through. What might it tell her that would have been splendid to know an hour ago? Well, they’d debrief as soon as they’d reached a safe place. Still some obstacles to that. She placed the tuft-spy in her shirt pocket.
“To the catacombs, then, to pay our respects to Ruskin?” Kristýna asked in a language Mack would understand.
A huge, world-devouring smile.
“Not an ossuary?” Mack knew she loved the sound of that word, but that there was no ossuary here. At least, not nearby. The word “ossuary” had always struck her as a good Czech word, made her think of the sound an owl’s wings made. Whereas “catacombs” was just a banal place with cats shoved into cubbyholes, surely.
“No, not yet. Not just yet.”
“I left a few things behind I should retrieve,” Mack said.
“No time.” She knew Mack would miss the Paris apartment, especially the shelves he’d built for his paperbacks, although perhaps she could grow him some shelves. He’d have to start all over again, and perhaps she hated their vagabond life in part because she felt a loyalty to Mack as well as to the Order.
Yet what would happen when Mack’s aims, his purpose, diverged from hers? And how would she know when they had? Seven years, and she still could not yet see the edges of his ambition, knew only that he was not without his secrets, as she had hers. Mack had never joined the Order, only joined her, and his home was so far away.
Came a creeping outside. A creep-creep-creaking.
“Now, Mack!”
“Then the catacombs it is. Excellent choice. Keep our enemies close,” Mack said, ever staid.
Was that a creak? A crack?
The door smashed open to reveal a giant mechanical jaw full of glittering trash. A feral red eye of flesh, pulsing. A guttural growling roar. A dumb inability to negotiate the narrow entryway, huge metal shoulders stuck. For a moment.
“Don’t look in its eyes!”
Kristýna swept up his paperback and her blazer, waved her arms—and they were away, taken up out of the bar and punching up through the weak ceiling in a torrent of vines and flowers to an adjoining apartment rooftop. The snapping jaws of the mecha-crocodile a hot rush of air on their ankles.
As it scuttled up the side of the building toward them, Kristýna blasted it with enough vines to form a net. She did not much mind the mecha-crocodile: It did only what came natural to its unnatural situation. It could do no more. It could do no less.
“Now I turn it over to you,” she said, leaping into Mack’s arms. She felt as if she were being engulfed, cocooned, and she could not say she hated the feeling. Quite the opposite.
Mack smiled, kissed her on top of her head, which was all he could reach from that vantage. Then, with a controlled recklessness, jumped to the next rooftop, and then the next, under the barren half moon that looked like Crowley’s psychotic cracked smile, the mecha-crocodile in confused pursuit as the probing vines delicately destroyed it from the inside out. Until, looking back over Mack’s shoulder, she saw it two rooftops back, overgrown and caught in midspasm, unable to follow any longer, all its gears confounded and overrun.
All to the good, and yet as she lay there in Mack’s arms, a tiny Czech magician who loved plants and was much older than anyone might think, Kristýna had a nagging doubt that their escape had been too easy. Perhaps because she always took such care and pride in planning possible escapes.
But also, because the two dispatched had not been made by Crowley, just sent by him. She was a veteran of the old ways of magic. Hers was one kind. The two who had been sent represented another. To encounter that kind again after so long felt like a message being conveyed without words. A message like … a growing confidence, a sense of some thing soon to come out into the open.
No matter what the dandelion-tuft spy revealed, Kristýna doubted it would solve this particular mystery.