The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume One Read online

  The Witch Who Came in From the Cold Season One: Volume One Copyright © 2016 text by Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

  All Rights Reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part, in any audio, electronic, mechanical, physical, or recording format. Originally published in the United States of America: 2015.

  For additional information and permission requests, write to the publisher at 175 Varick St. 4th Fl. New York, NY 10014

  Serial Box™, Serial Box Publishing™, and Join the Plot™ are trademarks of Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

  ISBN: 978-1-68210-066-0

  This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Written by: Max Gladstone, Lindsay Smith, Michael Swanwick, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Ian Tregillis

  Cover Illustration by: Mark Weaver

  Art Director: Charles Orr

  Lead Writer: Lindsay Smith

  Editor: Juliet Ulman

  Producer: Julian Yap

  The Witch Who Came in From the Cold original concept by Max Gladstone and Lindsay Smith

  Episode 1: A Long, Cold Winter

  by Max Gladstone and Lindsay Smith

  Prague, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic

  January 1970

  1.

  Tatiana Mikhailovna Morozova lay on her belly on the slate roof tiles, trying not to let the cold harden her muscles. She needed to stay limber for whatever came next—if it ever came next. The past few nights had proven fruitless, but she couldn’t let down her guard. She listened to Prague’s nightlife settle around her, from the distant mutter of drunks to the crunch of thin boot soles against snow to the heavy chill crackling in her numb ears, and tried to sift through them for any signs of her target.

  But none of the street sounds were out of the ordinary; not a single person was out of place. Her entire operation, so carefully crafted, had been for nothing.

  Tanya grabbed the binoculars from the rooftop ledge—KOMZ, dense metal and enviable optics, standard KGB issue—and surveyed Staré Město Square once more. A lone man crossed the square, kicking up a swirl of fog in his wake, but his frowning face was not that of their target. She swiveled her gaze across the night-stained square toward the streetlamp at the northwestern entrance, where a woman leaned against the post. Tanya couldn’t hear the repetitive click of the lighter flicking open and snapping shut, but she could imagine it; she knew the sound too well. Nadezhda was just as bored as she was—knowing Nadia, probably more. If their target didn’t show soon, it’d be another empty night. Another battle lost.

  With a growing sense of desperation, Tanya checked each exit of the square once more. Their sources had hinted that their adversaries were working on a new, advanced scouting method, and this was just the sort of night for them to turn it loose. All their analysis indicated tonight was ideal—weather conditions, star alignment, magnetic pull, all those fiddly little calibration elements that operators like her rarely had to take into consideration. That’s what the bureaucrats were for. But if Tanya let another target slip past, too many people would pay the price.

  Several of their assets had already vanished, and they couldn’t afford to lose even one more. She had a better chance out here, on the edge of the Iron Curtain, but then, so did the other side. It was difficult to get information when she was back in Moscow, spending her days in the dank basement of the Lubyanka headquarters, pretending she couldn’t hear the screams from the interrogation cells. And her family was better connected than most, better skilled at greasing the ancient gossip machinery that far predated the East-West divide.

  The messages they did manage to pass on were always brief, vague, smuggled in via coded newspaper advertisements or a short radio broadcast on a signal strong enough to pierce the censors’ static. We have located one in Burma, the message might read, or One lost to them in Marrakesh. Tanya didn’t know which side was ahead, but suspected it was a little too even for anyone’s comfort.

  Something rattled on the roof ledge beside her.

  Tanya dropped the binoculars and glanced toward the array of devices lined up on the ledge. They weren’t so much devices, really—the largest of them was scarcely wider than a ruble—as charms. Talismans. One was twitching like an electric wire starting to fray; another hummed with a barely visible glow. Some kind of detector slowly coming to life.

  Tanya held her breath like a fist squeezing shut. There it was, just on the edge of her hearing: a shuffle and scrape, dry and rhythmic. So rhythmic it sounded mechanical. Close enough, anyway. Tanya raised the binoculars again, and sure enough, Nadia had flicked the lighter to life. Their target had arrived.

  Nadia lit the cigarette, but held it aloft, uncertain. Come on, Nadia. Give me a direction. Give me something to work with. The bright cherry bobbed as Nadia scanned the square.

  Finally, she jabbed it in the direction of a frothily ornate building tiered like a wedding cake of stone.

  Tanya swiveled toward the old town hall. There it was, a dark figure, a blur behind the veils of fog. Crunch. Crunch. Each step in slushy snow a labored act. Was the target injured? Weak? Undercharged? They could only be so lucky.

  She set the binoculars aside and bounded for the fire escape.

  • • •

  Drahomir was drunk. That was, after all, the plan.

  He leaned over the table, clutching his beer with both hands. “And then I could see your friend Joshua to be holding the two pairs—I knew he had them, from his eyes, which are soft as pools. I am an excellent judge of character.”

  “You sure are, Drahomir.” Gabe Pritchard raised his glass. “Here’s to your success.”

  Smoke and jukebox jazz owned Bar Vodnář after dark. Candles flickered on tabletops. The lamps burned low, and conversation rumbled behind the music, Czech cut with jags of German and French. When the door opened, it drew eyes like filings to a magnet, but never held them long.

  “I stayed in, to show him I was not afraid. I could turn the jack or the six, and his pairs would be as nothing against my straight. Through the, what is it—”

  “The turn.”

  Drahomir grinned like a horse about to bite an apple. “The turn! But you turned no jack, and no six.” He slapped the table once to emphasize each loss. “And he, what is it, re-raised. So all of my money, I push it into the center of the table. I will scare him away. And then, to find on the final card the jack, my friend!” He laughed, and slapped Gabe hard on his bad shoulder. Gabe kept his own smile beaming, and laughed along, though less harshly. “Gabriel! Poker is full of such strange words. Is there a word for this miracle?”

  “It’s called being a river rat, Drahomir.”

  “Rats,” Drahomir observed, “are fantastic animals. They are hardy, and they live well in the most inhospitable corners of our earth. Wherever you find man, look beneath him and you will find a rat.”

  Gabe himself was neither a rat nor drunk, but he faked the latter well. Throughout the game at Josh’s place, he’d steadily poured himself shots of iced tea from a whiskey bottle; after dragging the victorious Drahomir to drinks at the Vodnář, he’d switched to “gin and tonic.” Jordan, who ran the bar, owed Gabe, and he owed her. She knew that when he ordered a gin and tonic with a twist, he meant hold the gin.

  Plain tonic was the perfect dr
ink for this kind of work: Gabe had never acquired the taste for quinine, and damn if the stuff didn’t make him squirm just as well as if it were fully leaded.

  But that wasn’t the only reason he wanted to squirm, now.

  This talk of rats and reading men might mean Drahomir had jumped a step or two ahead of Gabe’s agenda. Gabe liked agendas: He liked conversations to move where and when he wanted under conditions he controlled. The plan had been to get Drahomir drunk and excitable—which Josh’s sacrifice back at the poker table, and his sleight of hand, achieved neatly—but, flush with triumph, the man might be too drunk, too excitable, for the gentle work to come.

  Gabe felt a sharp pain in the middle of his forehead, and hoped it was only nerves. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’m glad you enjoyed the game, Drahomir.”

  Drahomir mimicked him. “Enjoyed? I found it wonderful. Such talking, it feels like playing against men. I have, you know, played mostly chess—there we keep silent, we watch, we are like machines. I never liked much gambling, but this!”

  “It’s a game about friendship, really,” Gabe offered. “It teaches you to know people. When you can trust them. When you can’t.”

  “Will we play again?”

  “Soon,” Gabe said. The pain intensified. He grimaced.

  “Are you well?”

  “I’m fine, Drahomir. A headache.”

  “Ha. A few too many drinks, my friend?”

  “No, nothing like that.” He focused on Drahomir’s dark eyes, willing the pain away. “Look, Drahomir, we’ve known each other for a while now. I’m glad my job at the embassy lets me work so closely with you at the Ministry of Economics. It’s been a good partnership.” Another wash of pain split his head in half between good and partnership, but he kept his voice level. Drahomir looked concerned, but was it concern for Gabe, or concern at the subject of their talk? Jordan, at the bar, stared at him—at them. Had he made a sound without noticing?

  Don’t overthink it. Make the touch, make the call. You’ve strung this guy along, now show him the bait, and the hook. Gabe and Josh had figured Drahomir for an idealist and a patriot—a smart one, he’d have to be, the man had survived more purges than a cholera victim, but an idealist and a patriot still. Gabe had gone thirteen rounds with Headquarters over the proper pitch. Don’t offer money, that would make us seem venal and corrupt. Play into Russian narratives. Let him know money’s around if he needs it, but don’t think you can buy him. Don’t offer asylum. If he wanted to run he’d have run already.

  Give Drahomir Milovic, assistant undersecretary of the Czech Ministry of Economics, a chance to be a hero. And let him take it.

  Headquarters was doubtful.

  “I especially value your friendship given everything your country’s been through in the last few years,” Gabe continued. Meaning, though he wouldn’t say it out loud: the Prague Spring, Soviet tanks in the Staré Město, the end of their government’s short-lived normalization. This was when Gabe needed the soft eyes, the earnest stare, the Marlboro Man jaw and the aw-shucks John Wayne calm: You can trust me, sir, I’m Amurican, ah just want whut’s right. And he could have done it, had done it in a hundred gin joints all over the world, except for this damn pounding in his head like some furious dwarf burrowing inside his brain, mining for gold. It was all he could do to keep from wincing. Pull it together, dammit. Make the pitch. “We agree on a lot of things. You like freedom. You like being able to trust the people you sit next to. You like making your own choices, for your own reasons.”

  The dwarf hit a fresh vein of ore. Gabe raised a hand to his temple and tried not to scream.

  “My friend,” Drahomir said, not listening, worried—worried about Gabe because of this beautiful connection they shared that Gabe had spent the last six months building, block by painstaking block, “you seem unwell. We should find you perhaps a doctor.”

  I know people, Gabe could not say, because the words could not escape the ring of the dwarf’s hammer, who would give their lives to know what you know. To sit at the Minister’s ear and hear the poison the Soviets whisper there. To watch the little traces that matter: sudden shifts in spending patterns, interest in new industries in third-world nations, transfers of raw capital backed by Red guarantees. And when Drahomir said, Ah, but I have this knowledge, and I can do nothing to help my country, to help my people, he, Gabe, would reply, You can. Knowledge, Drahomir, is power. Like at the table, when you knew my buddy held two pair. And if you help us—and I’m not talking anything major here, just little details, schedules, the answer to a question or two once in a while, so long as you feel safe—you can sleep at night, and know you’ve done your part to slide a knife between the ribs of those smiling bastards who step so tenderly onto your country’s throat and bear down.

  That’s what he would have said, but with kinder and more measured words, with the soft Iowa assurance he’d deployed so readily with assets in Cairo and Madrid and Bangkok and Milan, so that Drahomir, like all the men and women before, would listen, and look into his heart, and find that in that secret place he had forged, unwilling, unsuspecting, a tool to Gabe’s own specs: a hammer, maybe, or wrench, or screwdriver, or pry bar, or knife. A tool with a handle, waiting to be used.

  That’s what he would have said, but the dwarf hit cerebellum paydirt and what he said, instead, was sharp and four-lettered and of no use to anyone at all.

  • • •

  Tanya and Nadia crossed paths one block west of the square, ahead of their target. The street was a patchwork of shadow and light, everything reduced to hazy blobs that either melted into the darkness or blotted the lamplight. Having to rely on their own imperfect eyesight, the women were at a disadvantage.

  Better to focus on what they could turn in their favor; better to minimize their shortcomings and leverage their strengths. Just as their forebears had stolen the secrets of the atom bomb rather than wasting money uncovering it for themselves. She and Nadia had three advantages over their target: One, they could be certain their target would take the most direct path available to its destination. Two, that it would move at a steady pace. Three, and perhaps the most crucial: It had no idea they were looking for it.

  In truth, Tanya much preferred stalking this kind of prey over the usual drunken, paranoid diplomats the rezidentura chief frequently sent her to follow. Those men were always ready to throw a punch, looking for spies everywhere, a confusing mix of alcohol and counterintelligence training sending them looping halfway around Staré Město trying to shake tails real and imagined. But that’s where the advantage ended. Diplomats, agriculture secretaries, cultural attachés, and the like—they rarely showed a fraction of the raw determination that tonight’s prey surely would.

  “Couldn’t get a good look,” Nadia said, voice pitched low so it wouldn’t echo off the stone around them. “Still not sure who they’re after.”

  “We’re close to Bar Vodnář.” Tanya pointed along the narrow, curving street ahead, through the hazy shapes of balconies and cherub statues jutting from the dark. “Everyone likes to make trouble there.”

  “Well, let’s try to stop it before it gets too close. Last thing we need is to pick a fight with some supercharged construct.” Nadia pitched her cigarette into a snow bank. “You have enough dampeners?”

  Tanya’s jaw stiffened. Between her grandfather’s constant second-guessing and Nadia’s chiding, it was hard not to feel like a child, fumbling along. Hadn’t she proven herself enough? But she nodded, huffing out a white cloud of breath before her. “I’m ready.”

  “Great.” Nadia rolled her shoulders and her neck—the fighter in her limbering up for a brawl. “Since we don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, let’s keep it standard. You take the lead, find out who our target’s after. See if you can’t get that person to safety in a hurry. Use the Vodnář safe room if you have to, though try not to get that nosy bartender involved if you can avoid it. I’ll circle back and try to delay or disable our target.” />
  Tanya refrained from pointing out that this was exactly how she’d set up their operation last time, only with their roles reversed. That operation belonged to another world—a whole other set of problems. Their mundane daytime world of geopolitical struggle, scrabbling for scraps of information that could change the fate of governments, entire continents. How tiny it all seemed, comparatively.

  No, Tanya thought, as she glimpsed their target up ahead. Its limbs—definitely something stony, bound with metal and a host of other elements—shimmered in the dim streetlights a block away. A construct, a being assembled by powerful sorcerers and breathed to life with elemental energy. A creature fueled by a single purpose: to hunt down an elemental Host.

  This world was something else entirely.

  • • •

  Gabe’s dwarf wormed spineward. He grimaced, and clutched the table’s edge.

  “My friend,” Drahomir said. “You are not well. A doctor must be found.”

  “It’s fine, Drahomir.” Gabe ground the words between his teeth. “I have to ask you something.” Hammers struck his temples. Meet Drahomir’s eyes. Be John Wayne. “You probably know I don’t.” He tightened his jaw through a spasm. Jordan set down her towel, watching him openly. He was attracting too much attention, dammit. “You won’t be surprised to learn I don’t work—” But he cut off for a rapidly indrawn breath as wires of pain shot up and down his spine.

  Fine officers stroked out on assignment. People had heart attacks. But this didn’t feel like a heart attack. Poison? He’d not left his drink unattended—that was a rookie mistake. Could Drahomir have—no. They’d watched the man. They knew him. He wasn’t a killer.

  Drahomir took his wrist. “Gabriel, let me take you to the hospital. Or at least your embassy. You are in pain. They will surely want to care for you.”

  And let Drahomir go down with him in public documents, let him be seen entering the American Embassy—how much use would the man be then? Gabe tried to shake his head.