Now I knew why there had been a swastika on my wall. And why I’d thought I saw it run away. I pointed my gun at it, trying to keep my hand steady. It had been a very, very long day.
“No,” said the woman. “Not that—no loud.”
Then, in almost a single movement, she pulled a gleaming combat knife out of her sleeve, one of those nasty little ones that look like plastic-handled toys but will cut through a lead pipe, and shoved it right into the place where the four legs came together in a knot of muscle. The blade made a wet, cracking noise going in, like someone disjointing a roast chicken. The thing hissed and the arms thrashed, but she had pinned it against the wall.
As if all this wasn’t surprising enough, the writhing monstrosity began to smoke. The young woman pulled her knife out and let it fall to the floor. Within moments nothing was left of my four-legged visitor but a greasy smear on the old linoleum and a stink in the air like extremely rotten fish.
“Silver work good,” she said, wiping the blade of her knife on the side of the recycling bin. “And for neighbors, better too. More quiet. Oxana I am. You come to our apartment, drink tea and talk, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. I mean, it was 4:30 in the morning, and we had just killed a hairy swastika in my apartment lobby. What else could I say?
eleven:
tea and shurikens
HALYNA, OXANA’S redheaded roommate with the muscles, was already up and heating the kettle in their studio apartment. She had pulled her hair back into a tight braid, but was still apparently wearing what she slept in, a man’s long t-shirt with the arms cut off so high that I had to keep looking away when she bent over, because the bottom of the armholes reached down to the base of her rib cage. Just in the interest of fair reportage, Halyna had very neighborly-looking breasts and an athlete’s extremely muscular stomach.
Oxana went off to do something in the bathroom, so I sat on a rolled-up karate mat on the floor. The place didn’t really have much other furniture, just a low table and a pair of military-style bunk beds standing against the wall. If these women were a couple, they were a slightly odd one, but it was easier to examine furnishings than to keep looking away from Halyna’s armholes, so I went on with my observations. Only the walls of the apartment showed any sign of personality but, other than several pictures of young women with weapons, most of the things my neighbors had taped to their walls were posters and newspaper headlines in what looked like Russian, so I didn’t learn a lot. There were, however, lots of weapons around—a fuckload of weapons, to be more precise—and not just in the pictures. Some leaned against the wall like farm tools in a barn; some, as with the throwing stars, had been hung on stick-up hooks from the hardware store. A few more rolled mats and many more sharp things lay strewn around the room. I saw long throwing axes and machete-length knives and even baling hooks, as if these nice young women sometimes liked to load and unload hay. More mats stood rolled up along the walls, and I realized that they probably kept the floor clear for sparring.
Halyna came out with three glasses of milky tea and set them down on the table along with a plate that contained what I swear was a McDonald’s apple pie cut into three pieces. They were rolling out the red carpet for me.
Oxana came back. She was at least as attractive as Halyna, but I thanked the Highest that she was still in the baggy tracksuit she’d worn to my door. A guy can only take so much before his mind starts wandering into non-helpful avenues.
“Okay,” said Oxana as Halyna set out the tea glasses. “You are probably with questions.”
“Yes, I am probably with questions. What was that thing, how did you know silver would kill it, and who the hell are you two?”
Oxana took a piece of the apple pie and ate it quickly enough to suggest she was actually hungry, which—after finally meeting the thing that had apparently been crawling around my apartment lately, was not so true of me. She licked her fingers carefully before answering. “It called Nightmare Children. Silver not kill it, but does back-sending it.”
“Back sending?”
“Send it back,” explained Halyna. “To the place it is coming from.” She had better English than her roommate. “To the dark place.”
“Keep going,” I said. “Who are you?” I swept my hand around the room, indicating the mini-armory they had assembled. “What’s all this for?”
“Protect,” said Oxana. “We protect.”
“Who? From what?”
“From enemies. Protect what they would destruct.”
“We are Scythians, you see,” said Halyna, more than a little proudly, as if that explained everything. I didn’t even recognize the word at first—she pronounced it Skeet-ee-ahns. “Also some are calling us Amazons. They were our ancestors.”
Click! Finally, something made sense.
“Amazons—Scythians.” I nodded. Foxy Foxy had said something about that, I remembered. “You were at the auction for the feather, weren’t you? At Islanders Hall?”
Halyna shook her head and blew on her tea. “No. Those were sisters of ours, but they have gone back to Ukraine. Now our turn to be watchers. To be protectors.”
I tried my own tea. It was a little sweeter than I liked, but after the night and morning I’d had it was quite acceptable, thank you. “Begin from the beginning,” I said. “Why are you Amazons, exactly?”
It took a while to get the story, because Oxana’s English was a bit confusing and both women were prone to introducing bits of Scythian philosophy whenever possible. The upshot was that a group of Ukrainian women, including these two, traced their history back to the Amazons of the Greek myths, who—they told me—had been one of the Scythian tribes of Asia Minor back before Christ became Flavor of the Millennium. The ancient Amazons, Halyna and Oxana assured me, had been women warriors who rode beside the men into battle, and were buried with their weapons when they fell. Halyna and Oxana’s Amazons, however, were a modern day cult of sorts (my word, not theirs) who had developed an entire code of life, were obsessive about self-defense and martial arts, and whose Amazon-ism was all wrapped up with Ukrainian nationalism and religion and a complicated dislike of Russia—and to my surprise, an even more profound dislike of Persia. Not Iran, the present-day version—it’s pretty damn easy to find people who don’t like Iran—but Persia, like the Persian Empire. Like, way more than two thousand years ago.
“But it doesn’t exist anymore,” I pointed out.
“Not true,” said Halyna. “Some bad parts is . . . are very much alive.”
They told me about the Scythian way of life—compounds in the forests of the Carpathian Mountains south of Lviv that were half summer camp, half bunker, with no men to distract from the intensive schooling and training.
“Training for what?” I asked. “And how did you know about the whatever-it-was, that swasti-kid?” My nickname for the hairy horror with children’s hands puzzled them. “Sorry, what did you call it? Nightmare . . . ?”
“Nightmare Children,” said Halyna. “We know because we have fought with them before. They are favorite tool for work of the Black Sun.”
Click! Click! Second thing that made sense. “And how do you know the Black Sun? They’re not Ukrainian, are they? I thought they were American.”
“They are from many places,” said Halyna. “And they are wanting Anahita’s treasure. We want to take it for us instead. They will use it for bad things. We will not.”
Anaita. Click, click, click. The whole thing now actually began to come together, at least in a welcome-to-my-world sort of way. Unfortunately, since Anaita’s treasure was Eligor’s horn, these Amazons and I wanted to get hold of the same thing. And apparently so did the Black Sun Faction and their thugs and their unpleasant, faceless hand-spiders. But I needed that horn to get Caz back. I couldn’t let anyone get in the way of that. “Really? Anahita’s treasure, huh?” So these Amazons knew about it, too. Had I been the last to figure it out, or had my initial guess somehow tipped off everyone else? “And what will you use it for?”