***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Copyright © 2018 W. L. Goodwater
Chapter 1
At a dimly lit street corner on Sebastianstraße, a few miles south of Checkpoint Charlie and uncomfortably close to the East German border, two men in government-issue overcoats warded off the autumn cold and tried their best not to look like Americans. Or spies.
“You know, I have a lighter,” the shorter man said. His breath steamed.
“I don’t need a lighter,” the taller man said through lips clenched around a bobbing cigarette.
It was quiet, as expected. There would be more signs of life farther westward, where routine had mostly replaced rubble, but stillness usually prevailed along the border. For this evening’s business, that was for the best. Overhead, a skeletal moon proved to be a disinterested accomplice, leaving the night dark even by West Berlin standards. The only other light came from the heavily curtained windows reluctantly overlooking the empty road. And, of course, from the otherworldly silver-white flicker of the Wall. Its magical threads pulsed softly and steadily, like breath.
The shorter man tilted back the brim of his hat. Dark curls popped out over a pale forehead. “From where I’m standing, Jimbo, it looks like you need a lighter.”
Jim frowned. “How about you worry less about me and more about watching for our guests, pal?”
“But watching your little show is far more interesting.”
Ignoring his companion, Jim took in a slow breath through his nose. He concentrated, murmured the words he’d been taught as best as he could remember them, and snapped his fingers.
The sound echoed hollowly down the quiet street. The cigarette remained unlit.
“The ladies must love this.”
“What would you know about ladies, Dennis?” What was the problem? This usually worked, though he had to admit it had been a long time since he’d failed out of St. Cyprian’s University of the Arcane.
Dennis laughed. “I may not have your chiseled jawline, but I do have something you clearly lack.”
“And what’s that, pal?”
“Self-awareness.”
In the gloom behind them, the “construction site” they had hastily thrown together looked more like a spent battlefield. Heavy green trucks (labeled us army in a previous life) were parked at odd angles next to aged German civilian machinery. Mounds of torn-up asphalt had been piled nearby. It had been costly (and a little sad) to dig up a perfectly good road, especially when plenty of streets in Berlin were still pocked with the cratered reminders of the war, but everything had to look authentic. Thick canvas tarps had been erected around the most sensitive areas of the site, blocking whole sections of the glittering Wall from view, to dissuade their more curious neighbors. Some things might be hard to come by in West Berlin, but it never lacked for prying eyes.
Snap. And again, nothing.
“See,” Dennis said, “this is why I, like most hardworking Americans, don’t bother with magic.”
“I thought that was because the examiners tested you and found you had no magical ability. Or charisma.”
“I don’t remember them testing for charisma.”
“In your case, they didn’t have to.”
Dennis shrugged. “Well, we can’t all be as magical as you, Jimbo, can we? Do that one again, where you snap your fingers and nothing happens. I love that one.”
The magic spell he was trying to cast wasn’t hard. Maybe he was mispronouncing the first word; Latin had never been Jim’s strongest subject. He’d always thought magic would be a lot simpler if he could just say the incantations in plain English. His disappointed professors hadn’t been very sympathetic to this point of view.
Was the accent on the first syllable or the last . . . ? He snapped his fingers again and this time was rewarded by a prickle across the back of his neck, and a tiny orange ember of flame hovering in the foggy air above his hand like a benevolent spirit.
“Huh,” Dennis said. “Would you look at that?”
“What did I tell you?” Jim said. “Magic.” He held up the tip of his cigarette to the floating fire and puffed his cigarette to life. He sucked in a long draw, the smooth, hot air filling his lungs. For a moment, he savored the acrid taste of the smoke and sweet flavor of victory. Then ducked as the flame suddenly exploded in an angry sunburst, like a journalist’s flashbulb, if it had been designed in hell.
Dennis’s eyes were wide. “Does that usually happen?”
A little singed and with the ruins of his cigarette crumbling through his fingers, Jim swore foully, first in English, then in German for good measure. “This damned city,” he said, mostly to himself. “Nothing works right here, not even magic.”
A surly voice surprised them out of the dark. “There’s this concept in intelligence work you two knuckleheads might want to look up,” it said. “It’s called subtlety.”
“Sorry, Chief,” they said in unison as Arthur joined them. He looked annoyed, but then again, he always did. The head of Berlin Operating Base wore a scowl effortlessly, as though his face had been molded that way by a disgruntled sculptor. His brown suit, the one that seemed expertly tailored to fit poorly, was scarred with the usual unintentional creases. His tie, a stained, threadbare mistake, hung on for dear life.
“They’re late,” Arthur said.
“Not late, Chief,” Jim said. “Just running on European time.”
Arthur snorted, which could have been a laugh or a rebuke. “Just keep your eyes open and let me know when they get here,” he said. “Oh, and Jim? Leave the magic to the professionals and the Commies.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Our wayward guests are causing enough stress on my ulcer without you—”
“A shod m’hot nisht geredt fun moshiach,” Dennis said.
“In English, Dennis, or I’ll—” Arthur began.
Dennis nodded toward the intersection ahead. Two cars, glossy with accumulated mist, were coming toward them. “You goyim would say: Speak of the Devil and he shall appear.”
The British got out first and dutifully greeted Arthur with firm, terse handshakes. Their leader, a burly Scotsman named Alec with a dark wild forest of a beard, had to stoop when he made his greetings.
Shortly behind came the French, a smaller, more somber contingent. They spoke in low whispers with Arthur for a long minute before he led them within the tent.
They gathered behind the tarps and trucks, a knot of foreigners ruling over the land they had rightly and thoroughly conquered, silent in expectation. Silent, that is, until Alec spoke.
“Would you look at this lot? One well-tossed grenade over the Wall and half the brains in Western intelligence go up in smoke,” said the big Scot, who nearly filled the cramped space by himself. He shoved an elbow into Jim’s ribs. “And that’s just if they get me.”
Alec had been a guerrilla fighter in the Highlands during the German occupation and had the scars to prove it. Jim had always wanted to ask him about what it had been like, but Arthur had been quick to wave him off. Some things are better left where they lay, had been his advice. Some wounds don’t heal right.
“Forgive me,” said a thin, dark-haired man. His English was excellent though his French accent unmistakable. “You said ‘brains’ but I believe you meant ‘fat.’”
Alec’s laugh nearly knocked down one of the tarps. “Emile, you didn’t tell me they’d started issuing you frogs a sense of humor.”
Emile was something more of a mystery. Jim had read his file, if you could call it that: a single sheet of paper, barely half-filled, with the only interesting bit of intel being his preferred brand of cigarettes. His age was hard to guess, but everyone in France was a veteran of some kind or another.
“Alec, ask Jim to light a cigarette for you,” Dennis added from a corner.
“Enough,” Arthur said. He eyed the assembled men with the red-rimmed glare of the unwillingly sober. “It’s late, I’m tired, and none of you are very fun to look at, so kindly shut up.”
With all mouths closed and eyes turned toward him, Arthur grunted. “Let’s get this over with so you can get back to your bosses and tell them we’re not crazy.” He motioned impatiently to one of his men standing by one of the trucks. “Just very unlucky.” The agent untied a cord and pulled back the canvas sheet that had been drawn over this section of the Wall. The others pressed in.
It wasn’t easy to see it, even when pointed out. Just a shadow, no more than an inch square, nestled in the shimmering weave that made up the Wall. But on closer inspection, it was more: a flaw, a withering of the magic.
A breach.
Alec spoke first. “That’s it? That’s what we’re all getting so ruffled about? I could barely stick my wee finger in there. I don’t see many East Germans or Soviet spies sneaking through, no matter how little they feed them.”
“Are we certain this has not always been here?” Emile said quietly, his eyes never leaving it. With care, he touched the area around the breach, the soft crackle of the magic filling the silence.
“We are,” Arthur said. “And there’s more.”
This was news to Jim. “More?”
Arthur nodded. “It’s growing.”
Alec lurched back, nearly knocking a few of the others down in the process. “Growing? You never said anything about growing.”
Jim felt a little sick. Dennis wasn’t looking much better. Suddenly their joking didn’t seem as funny. They’d been briefed on the breach shortly after it had been found, but at that point there was still hope it wasn’t as bad as they feared. But if it were growing . . .
“We couldn’t confirm until a few minutes ago,” Arthur said. “We took another measurement and . . .” He pulled a folded slip of paper from his pocket and scanned it. “Five percent growth since discovery.”
“Five percent? That’s . . .” Alec said.
“This is a more serious problem than we thought,” Emile said. “I will need to send this information to Paris.”
“With the utmost security,” Arthur added.
“You do not think the Soviets already know?” Emile asked.
“It is their Wall, their magic,” Arthur said. “But even if the hole went all the way through, there’s not a lot of opportunity for them to examine it from their side, not unless they’re using a spotlight at a hundred yards or a rifle scope.” He rubbed his eyes. “And besides, even if they know, we don’t want them to know we know.”
“This is why we Americans build our walls out of bricks and concrete,” Dennis said. “Not fairy dust.”
Emile whispered to his companion, then said, “The timing of this concerns us.”
“How so?” Jim asked.
“This breach is a potential crisis between East and West,” he said, “and it comes only weeks after our governments began to rearm West Germany.”
“Over Moscow’s strenuous objections,” Arthur said.
Alec regained his composure enough to speak. “Am I the only one thinking about what happens if that wee hole doesn’t stop growing?”
“If the Reds keep their pants on, we can handle a limited breach,” Arthur said. “Just another gate to watch.”
“But what if it is more than that? What if the whole bloody thing comes down?”
It was Emile who answered. “We would have thousands of refugees attempting to cross the border within hours. The East Germans would be forced to stop them. The Soviets would assist, of course, and we would be required to match any show of force with our own.”
“And suddenly we’re all pointing guns at each other again,” Arthur said.
“Not just guns,” Jim added.
“A lot more than just guns,” Arthur said. “With fifty thousand civilians right in the middle. Civilians, I might add, who will be stupid and brave enough to force the issue.”
“It’ll be another war,” Alec said, the first quiet words out of his mouth.
“It’ll be the last war,” Arthur said. “We’re getting too good at killing each other not to do it right this time.”
“What is the United States going to do?” Alec asked.
“Ask Eisenhower. Ask the commandant in Zehlendorf,” Arthur said. “I just gather intel.”
“Arthur . . .”
“What do you want me to say? We’re going to prepare,” Arthur said. “Boys will start shining their combat boots, politicians will be polishing their sabers. The same dance with an updated tune.”
“And what are you going to do?” Emile asked.
Arthur sighed. “What else?” he said. “Figure out a way to keep the whole damn roof from falling in. Any of you all know anything about magic?”
Jim tried not to laugh at the question. There weren’t many people out there who could help with magic on this scale. After the German invasion, British magicians were an all but extinct species. The French were hardly in a better position. No, this one would fall to the US of A, no matter how little Mom and Pop America would like it.
“What about you, Jim?” Arthur said. “You went to school for this stuff. Can you offer any magical insight here?”
Jim stood by the breach. It didn’t look much bigger than when he’d first seen it a day or two ago, but he didn’t doubt the measurements. “Sorry, Chief,” he said. “They kicked me out long before we covered magic like this.”
He thought about St. Cyprian’s, and about the fireball blowing up in his face. He was pretty sure his eyebrows were a little burned. Carefully, Jim put a finger into the breach and felt only the cold. “I think we’re going to need to call in the experts for this one.”
Chapter 2
“Whatever you do,” Karen said, “don’t move.”
“Why can’t I move?”
“You’re moving.”
“I’m not moving.”
“Your lips are moving.”
“Why can’t my lips move?”
“Because you’re scaring Bing.”
“I think that might be the scalpel.”
“No, not Bing,” Karen said. She stroked the rat’s white fur and he looked up at her expectantly, tiny nose twitching. “He’s proud to do his part for magical research. Now hold him steady.”
Gerald held Bing in place while Karen made a shallow half-inch cut along the rat’s right leg. The blood was bright and quick, as if dropped on snow.
“See? He didn’t even feel it.” Karen set the scalpel aside and reached for the first element of the spell: powdered goat’s horn.
“Think this one will work?” Gerald asked.
“No idea,” Karen said as she sprinkled the grayish powder.
“But we’re trying it anyway?”
“That’s why they call it research,” Karen said. She handed him the transcription Allison had typed up. “Here,” she said, “read this. Your pronunciation is better than mine.”
“Come now,” Gerald said, taking the paper reluctantly. “Your magic runs circles around most of the people in this building.”
Karen smiled at that, though she didn’t believe a word of it. “Go ahead,” she said. “I want you to do it.”
With Gerald’s Midwestern accent droning two-thousand-year-old words in her ear, Karen set out the other prescribed magical reagents, making sure the dried hemlock didn’t touch the salt of an inland sea. She wanted to roll her eyes; these complicated spells never worked. The extra details always struck her as someone trying too hard. Good magic didn’t have to be so arcane.
“Ready?” Gerald asked.
“Let’s make history,” Karen replied.
His voice rose as he began the last stanza, an uncharacteristic dramatic flair for the owl-eyed magician from Topeka. But when you might be on the verge of the greatest magical breakthrough in human history, Karen figured a little showmanship wasn’t a bad thing.
There was some magic in the spell; Karen felt its familiar whisper starting in the back of her mind. Something was happening, she just wasn’t sure what. Neither, it seemed, was Bing, his round pink eyes darting about the room as unseen energy began to gather. Karen watched the cut, the blood already clotting, and willed it to close.
And then Gerald was finished. The silence that invaded the room held them all captive for the longest a single moment could be stretched.
And then the moment passed and the wound remained unchanged.
Bing sniffed the air and stared at them, as if to say, What did you expect, a miracle?
Gerald did not seemed surprised. “You know the old saying,” he said with a shrug. “‘You want to heal someone, call a doctor.’”
“‘You want to kill someone, call a magician,’” she finished. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in and found her research notebook. She had a dozen of these, each full of similar failures. She read the title off the cover. “Sorry, Quintilianus the Great,” she said, “but your spell ‘Quicken the Mending of Mortal Flesh’ would be better named ‘Wasten the Time of Overworked Magicians.’”
“That’s why they call it research, right?” Gerald asked as he wrapped medical tape around Bing’s leg.
“Right,” Karen said, forcing herself not to sigh. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, instead of just two of us.” She scooped up the bandaged Bing and held him nose to quivering nose. “Your country thanks you, Bing the Rat, for your service.” She carried him across the room to his cage, where his fellow rats were waiting. “Marlon, Bob, Jimmy, you leave Bing alone. He’s had a rough day.”
The door to the cramped lab opened slightly and a blond-bobbed head peered in. “Is it over?” Allison asked.
“The magic or the rat torture?” Gerald asked.
“Yuck,” Allison said. “Both.”
“It is safe to enter,” Gerald said as Karen watched the rats plow through fresh sawdust. It was, she thought, a painfully apt metaphor for magicians: a simple, caged life-form digging ignorantly through the leavings of some complex, unknowable mind, hoping to find a treat.
“Miss O’Neil?” Allison said.
“Karen,” she said, seemingly for the hundredth time. “Call me Karen.” Allison was only a couple years younger than her, after all; such formality made Karen feel old. But Allison was a hard worker and fiercely loyal, which was always welcome in a world haunted by government bureaucrats. Karen suspected family connections had gotten her the job in the OMRD to keep her out of trouble until she found a good husband, which, as Karen guessed from the lengthy gossip Allison often subjected her to, wouldn’t take long.
“Karen, right,” Allison said, as if trying to commit the name to memory. “Karen, you’re late for your staff meeting.”
Oh, hell. Speaking of bureaucrats.
“Times like these,” Gerald said, not looking up from his notes, “I sure am glad you run this department, not me.”
Karen thrust her notebooks into a drawer. “I keep showing up late to staff meetings and there might soon be an opening.”
“No, thanks,” Gerald said. “Uncle Sam couldn’t pay me enough to sit in a conference room with the director.”
“Dr. Haupt?” Karen said. “He’s a great magician.”
Gerald snorted. “He’s terrifying.”
“Not if you get to know him.”
Gerald shook his head. “I think the more I knew, the more terrified I’d be.”
“It isn’t the director I’m worried about,” Karen said. “It’s the rest of those blowhards.”
Gerald adjusted his glasses. “I won’t argue, but to be safe, I think I’ll stay here and let you deal with the lot of them.”
“And they say that chivalry is dead,” Karen said. On her way out the door, she knelt down and put her face up against the wire bars of the rat cage. “Wish me luck, boys,” she said. “Time for me to get experimented on.”
Though she was only a few minutes late, they hadn’t waited for her. She tried to slip into the wood-paneled conference room as quietly as possible, even wondering if they’d notice if she used a few discreet spells to hide her arrival. But as soon as she stepped inside, all eyes turned her way.
“Nice of you to join us,” said Harold Wilkerson, the balding head of the Military Application Department. Harold seemed to barely tolerate her existence, but since he offered similar disdain to just about everyone at the OMRD she didn’t take it too personally.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said quietly as she hurried to her place at the long table.
“Actually,” said Marvin Barth, an ample-girthed magician who ran the Environmental Magic Department, whatever that was, “since you’re up, you know what would be swell? If you could get us some coffee.”
Karen paused in front of her chair. “I don’t drink coffee.”
Barth hefted his jowls into a smile. “But the rest of us do. And it would be swell.”
The rest of the room stared at her through the cigarette haze, a wall of unblinking masculine eyes, waiting for her to capitulate. Demanding her to.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, “but don’t go too far without me.” She hurried out into the hall. Before she closed the door, she heard someone say, “So where were we?”
The break room wasn’t far. The disorganized cupboards stared back at her in silent mockery of her situation. You’ll get no help from us, they seemed to say to her. We’re on their side. Simple, immovable, and usually full of worthless junk: the cupboards did remind her of most of the men of the OMRD.
Why let them boss you around? Why isn’t Fat Marvin in here making the coffee? Because he’s a man, obviously. Such domestic work would be beneath him.
Karen mercilessly flung a few open until she found what she needed. Grabbing a metal pot, she filled it with water and set it on the counter. With a fingertip, she traced a symbol on the surface, and nothing happened.
Of course, she thought. The enchantment had been used up and no one had bothered to reapply it. Why should they, after all, when they had a woman magician in the building? Isn’t that why God let women use magic, so they could power the household appliances? She should serve it to them cold. No, she should make it piping hot and pour it over their heads.
Enchantments had never been her strength, not in school and not after. They could be useful tools, certainly, but there was something macabre about it to her, infusing an object with your own energy. Like leaving behind a lock of hair. Or a fingernail clipping. She sighed. The damn coffee wasn’t going to heat itself, so instead she touched the leather pouch around her neck, gripped the pot with her other hand, and whispered the necessary words. The power moved easily enough, bleeding from her palm into the metal, settling there comfortably. Karen shivered.
The coffee grounds too were aligned with her foes. How much was she supposed to use? Did it matter which kind? If her mother knew she was twenty-six and still couldn’t brew a cup of coffee for her “handsome” coworkers, she’d probably have a heart attack. Who was she kidding? Her mother knew, but, as with everything else unpleasant in her world, just pretended not to.
When finished, Karen eyed her handiwork: it smelled like an ashtray and looked like mud. Perfect.
“ . . . this report comes in from Sparks, Nevada, says they have a bona fide werewolf on the loose,” Karen heard as she reentered the meeting with the coffee on a tray. The speaker was Al Lambert, head of Public Inquiry, the group responsible for handling reports of errant magic anywhere in the US. They were the largest group in the OMRD, with more than two dozen magicians on staff, and always had the best stories.
“So you tell them there’s no such thing as monsters?”
Al leaned back in his chair and adjusted his tie. “Oh, we told them. Ten or fifteen times. But the local police were insistent. You know how people get. Want to blame everything on magic. They hate us until they think they need us. So we had to send out a team.”
One of the others asked, “And what was it?”
“A particularly cranky beagle.” Laughs all around.
As they started to sip at her scalding-hot coffee, Karen did her best to hide a grin at their disgusted looks. Maybe they’d think twice before asking her to do it next time. After all, she didn’t remember seeing table service on her job description.
“Alright,” Wilkerson said, “who’s next? I don’t have all day for this status meeting.”
Just keep your head down, she thought. Don’t remind them you are crashing their good ol’ boys club and maybe you can get back to work faster.
“I for one would be very curious to hear the latest from Theoretical Magic,” said George Cabott, deputy to Harold over in Military.
Ugh, so much for keeping her head down.
“Thank you, George,” Karen said. He smiled. Allison would have swooned; just about every woman who worked at OMRD headquarters would have. But Karen knew George’s dark secret: he was unbearable. She didn’t really blame him, though, as human empathy had been bred out of his Manhattan-dwelling family generations ago. She just wished she had known all that before she slept with him back in college.
“Yes, great idea,” Barth said, straightening up a bit in his groaning chair. “We’ve heard enough about actually useful magic for one day.”
Karen turned to face him. “I’m sorry, Marvin, did you have some compelling breakthrough to share with us instead? Some wonderful achievement from the third floor to justify your bloated”—she paused for just a fraction of a moment before finishing—“budget?”
Barth choked on his coffee. See, this was why she usually kept quiet. She had plenty to say, but it never came out quite as nicely as these old men wanted it.
“As I’ve mentioned before,” she began before Barth could recover, noting then ignoring the rolled eyes from some of the assembled, “we have a number of exciting research projects ongoing. We were running tests this morning on healing magic, and then there is our continuing work on Universal Expression Theory—”
“Is this getting somewhere, honey?” Al Lambert asked. He’d lived in DC for twenty years but still sounded like he’d just walked off the ranch in Plano.
“I need resources,” she said flatly. There were groans all around. “My whole department is two magicians and one secretary. You talk about the public hating magicians. What if we could finally learn how to heal people? And what if we didn’t have to rely on spells, but could control magic directly—”
“And what if I had a unicorn that pissed gold dust?” Lambert said. “There are, what, a few thousand people in the whole country who can do decent magic? We can’t waste them all on chasing fairy tales. Listen here, honey—”
“Yes, sweetheart?” This stopped the old Texan cold. Stopped the whole
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