War and Craft by Tom Doyle

Author:Tom Doyle [Doyle, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2017-09-21T14:00:00+00:00

PART IV

FROM ARMAGEDDON’S SIDE

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

—2 Peter 3:8 (KJV)

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

—William Blake

CHAPTER TWELVE

When the call came, the young woman known as Meg was in Amsterdam. She was not in the red light district, De Wallen, that relative Disneyland of domesticated and regulated sex trade (though she still could have done plenty of her work there). Instead, she stood in the dark corner of a moldy room in an abandoned warehouse overlooking the IJ lake north of city center. Blond, blue-eyed, petite, a living doll, she appeared to belong there. No one saw her as a threat.

A small film crew prepared to capture some very unpleasant things for a discerning audience that found such acts sexually exciting. The unpleasantness was going to be done to a man brought here from Nigeria. It would be available only on a film of extremely limited distribution—uploading it would cause a great deal of trouble.

The man, though terrified (that was part of the thrill for this audience), was not resisting or trying to escape. He merely shook now and then with bed-rattling violence. One might compare him to an animal strapped on a vet’s cold metal table, but this was a human being, with a human’s full awareness of what was going to happen next. To the extent mundane Europeans were cognizant of this form of compulsion, they called it voodoo, though it was no such thing. This was craft suasion and an abuse of the power of command.

Two men armed with FAMAS assault rifles kept the area secure, while a woman with straight bangs and dark short hair worked the suasion craft. The Dutch were sloppy about keeping their craftspeople busy. Idle hands were the Left Hand’s workshop, and a workshop was literally what this little movie was funding: an alchemical lab dedicated to the Left-Hand secrets. The film’s purpose gave Meg another claim of jurisdiction, should the locals squawk.

Having mentally sketched her judgment upon all present, Meg was just about to go on to the next part of her work when she heard the call: Come and see. Did she have time to finish here? Yes, the necessary few seconds would not be the hinge of fate.

Afterwards, a forensic profiler would call the work Meg did “disorganized.” Meg called it “Starry Night” in tribute to her favorite Dutch painter. The profiler would note that the rifles remained unfired, and that the wounds were all from knives.

Meg left the scene of the filmmakers’ crime with the Nigerian man, the only survivor, who was now shaking so hard that she had to support his weight. He was still suggestible, so she suggested he forget the whole thing (like she would when she had time) and go to the

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