The Witch Who Came In From the Cold by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, thriller
ISBN: 9781682100653
Publisher: Serial Box
Published: 2016-03-29T20:57:01+00:00

3.

Sasha abandoned the voltmeter. It was the wrong line of inquiry. The exact purpose of the mineral circuit inscribed inside the case still eluded him. But, like a broken pawn chain, it was the watershed. Now he understood the true nature of the problem. Tanya’s radio wasn’t an electrical puzzle. It required a very different approach. An approach he didn’t dare attempt in his office. One that nobody could witness.

He lived alone in his two-bedroom khrushchyovka, but the second bedroom was not for sleeping. It had no bed—just shelves, cabinets, a workbench, and several very old books. And a series of wards he’d installed by himself.

He set the radio on the bench. Then, from one of the cabinets, he produced an eclectic collection of crystals, flower blossoms, and tarnished silverware. These he arranged in the corners of the room. Some he laid inside special chalk marks on the floor; others he placed in iron baskets suspended from the ceiling. Then he placed a thumbnail-size piece of patinaed copper mesh on his tongue and spoke the appropriate incantation.

The room instantly went from merely quiet to utterly still. It was as though the outside world had disappeared.

He removed the copper mesh from his mouth and set it on a towel. Only now, with the magical Faraday cage hermetically sealed, did Sasha turn his full attention to the radio. First, he removed the case again. He studied everything not with a technician’s eyes but with a sorcerer’s inner sense.

He plugged it into the outlet. As in his office, it functioned like a perfectly normal radio. When he twisted the dial, the speaker hissed nothing but static. Remembering how the circuitry had taken so long to de-energize, he unplugged it again . . . and now, with his inner eye wide open, he felt a tingle.

Such magical craftsmanship! So orderly. So precise. Almost crystalline. This was the work of an Ice sorcerer.

But to what end? He’d find out sooner or later. What one sorcerer could do, another could undo. What one spell could weave, another could unravel.

Sasha’s magic could melt this Ice. That’s what Flame did.

He touched the tuning dial; the static hiss grew stronger. The static took on a strange warble, as though the radio were pulling down a signal from very far away. He kept turning the dial. Slowly. Slowly . . .

The tingle became a spiritual jolt that almost knocked him from his chair. The static disappeared. And then the unplugged radio spoke in an old man’s voice. “Tanushka? Are you there, little bird? What matters must we discuss?”

Tsk-tsk, Tatiana Mikhailovna.

The construct prattled, “Why won’t you speak to your lonely grandfather, little Tanushka?”

Sasha smiled. “I’ll speak with you, dear Dyedushka.”

A staticky pause. For a moment Sasha thought the spell was broken. Then the construct said, “You’re not Tatiana.”

“No,” Sasha said, “I am not. But tell me something, Grandfather. Do you play chess?”

She’d come to hate this time of night.

The darkest, quietest hours were when visions of Andula Zlata infiltrated Tanya’s dreams. The student she’d worked so hard to save, she and Nadia.

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