Carrie Vaughn - Discord's Apple

She didn’t have much cover here—a few tufts of scrub, a snowdrift. But they never looked for her.

In a way, writing prose was like relearning how to walk. She had to think about complete sentences. Describe instead of label. She didn’t have Bruce to draw the pictures for her. Like Tracker, she was alone.

She had a dilemma: Did she continue with the mission, or did she go after Jeeves and Matchlock? Her instincts told her it wasn’t really a dilemma. They could hold out for now. If the soldiers wanted them dead, they would have killed them immediately. She had no idea where the mercenaries were taking them. The helicopter had flown west, and Russia was a very big place.

The bunker at the edge of the defunct gulag, where the prisoner was being held, was ten miles away. She could reach it before nightfall if she managed a good pace. Never mind that she had only her gun and a short-range radio with her. The bunker would have food and water, and the equipment to contact Talon.

She could do this without Talon. If she ignored the pang in her belly the thought of him gave her. He’d tell her she was crazy, trying this on her own.

No, he wouldn’t, a voice inside her argued. He has faith in you.

She checked the body of the mercenary she’d shot, verified he was dead, and looted a pack of food rations and a canteen off him. The canteen held vodka. No good for survival—maybe she could use it to inure herself to a lingering death, if she became hopelessly lost or injured. She shook her head, chastising herself for such defeatist thinking. Maybe she could use the vodka as a bribe.

Then, loosening the collar of her coat and hardening her will, she set off at a jog across the wasteland.

Robin Goodfellow was matchless as a spy. But soon, Hera would need an army. She gathered the start of one in a bar outside town.

The bartender, his eyes a bit glazed, his movements meticulous, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or someone else was guiding his motions, stood at the bar and finished pouring a glass of wine. He set the bottle aside, his face slack. The next day, he’d remember nothing, he’d be convinced that his bar stood empty all night, and know nothing about the four people gathered here. The place was frequented by bikers and truckers. Transients. She couldn’t have her people trooping in and out of her hotel room, so she gathered them here. They might have been holding an informal meeting of some innocent town club.

Smiling indulgently at the entranced bartender, she picked up the glass, took a sip, and went to the round table in the center of the room where the others waited for her, pretending to nurse their own drinks.

They were frustratingly young to her eyes. The oldest among them had only two thousand years behind him. The youngest, forty. One learned so little within the span of a natural life. Despite their youth, their inexperience, they were used to wielding power, and the world was not so rich in magic as it once was. These people would have to do.

She had drawn them here with a promise of more power than they could find or make in their individual spheres of influence. She had explained that through her, and only through her, they could combine their strength and reach for the divine. Because they were who they were, could do what they did, and knew something of power, however limited their understanding of it was, they believed her, and they answered her call.

Now she had to prove that their faith in her was not misplaced.

“I want to own this town,” she said.

“What will that gain us?” The Curandera was older than she looked, a mother and healer, a bringer of rain and storms, a speaker of the languages of the earth and sky. Still in her first lifetime, she was the youngest of them, but because her knowledge of magic had been passed down to her, from mother to daughter, for a thousand years, she was powerful.

“Here lies a power that can dictate the fate of nations,” said the Marquis. He was in his third or fourth lifetime, a British nobleman from the last century steeped in the culture of empire and one of the few successful practitioners in the revival of what he called ceremonial magic. He could bind, curse, break, mold, and summon. If only Hera could teach him how to do all this without his props, tools, symbols, and erroneous scholarship. He looked uncomfortable in a suit and tie, his brown hair tied in a short tail at his neck, as if the modern clothing were a costume. He ought to be wearing a frock coat and powdered wig.

“What power?” said the Curandera.

“How much do you know about chemistry?” Hera asked. “What happens to an unstable compound, where the molecular bonds are weak, or require too much energy to maintain? It breaks down. A reaction occurs until the molecules form more stable compounds. Do you see what is happening in the world? The political situation is unstable. The artificial borders, the nations constructed out of blood and misguided diplomacy are falling apart. The world is an unstable compound, and it must break down if it is to form a more stable unit. I plan to guide that reaction. I have access to the catalyst that will ignite the final decomposition.”

“That’s ambitious. Thinking you can mold the world, and that it will be better because you’re involved?” said the Curandera. Her eyes shone, and Hera knew the thought that inspired the brightness: the idea of a female divinity remaking the world, of a matriarchy restored.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It certainly couldn’t be much worse.”

The Curandera smiled.

The fourth of their party sat a little ways off from the table, out of the light coming through the room’s only window. He was young looking, handsome in a tie and dark jacket, his short hair combed back. The Wanderer was the oldest of them, apart from Hera herself. Through sheer experience, he had gained insight. He could see patterns of the past and how they would play into the future. He could look at a man sitting perfectly still with a blank expression, and predict what that man was thinking or might do next. He had become, by the stubborn nature of his existence, a seer.

“It isn’t worse,” he said. He spoke slowly, with a quiet certainty that the others would wait to listen to him. “No worse than it’s ever been. Perhaps better in some ways. Always, there has been chaos. The world has broken and re-formed many times—I have seen it many, many times. It does so against the will of people, and without our guidance.”

Hera said, “How many times have you wanted to take control—you can see what must be done, your wisdom tells you when you see madness, when the world is run by fools. Even you, Wanderer, don’t remember. There was a time when the world was not ruled by shortsighted mortal whim. I remember.”

“Can you bring that time again?” he said flatly, like he didn’t believe her.

If she had been able to act even a few hundred years ago, she would have gathered a very different looking army: witches, mediums, saints, prophets. People who knew magic for what it was, people who feared the dark it could do, but worshipped its strength, whether they called it God or nature or alchemy. These people before her—they felt the power, they touched it, they identified some destiny in their skills, the strength of their knowledge of what lay underneath the surface of emotions like love and hate. But they didn’t call it magic. Even the Marquis preferred to think of the power as a science that could be codified.

“I can,” she said.

“Then I will follow you, for it has been two thousand years since I have seen one with such a power.”

She nodded respectfully, though the Wanderer might have caught the flicker in her expression, the surge of anticipation at once again having followers and servants. He tasted his martini and watched her over the rim of his glass.