The Underground Goddess #2
Once on the property, we split into six and seven; I went left with Malina, Roksana, Martyna, Ewelina, and Dominika, while the others went right.
We spied no cables, but once we met up with the other group in the rear of the building, they confirmed that they had found some and sliced them.
That would most likely rouse the scammers into investigating, which was not ideal for us, but it did have the benefit of immediately ending the progress of any scam they had going at the time.
The back entrance was not only boarded up but had chains twined around the doors with a padlock.
Roksana, Berta, and Ewelina joined forces on that to cast a spell called Passage, which unlocked the padlock and the dead bolt on the doors as well. Some clanking and rattling ensued as Martyna unwrapped the chains, and Malina told us all to cast kinetic wards on ourselves before entering.
“We don’t know if they’re armed or what might be down there. It might not be an entirely human threat.”
That was the first time I’d heard that interpretation, but I’m glad she said something. I cast the protective ward and was bathed in a cone of violet light that filtered the world in shades of indigo.
Martyna hauled open the doors in a scrape of dust, and we filed in, daggers out, and immediately heard a chorus of cursing coming from downstairs.
It was utterly black inside because the cutting of the cables not only disabled phones but robbed them of electricity.
We had to pause to cast Night Vision, which showed us the dim contours of walls and staircases, but very little else.
We were in a foyer or lobby with staircases heading up and down.
We headed down, with Klaudia taking point, and I was in the middle of the pack; the violet light from our wards aided us somewhat as our eyes adjusted.
The muffled shouting increased abruptly in volume as Klaudia opened a door at the bottom of the staircase that gave egress to the basement area. We rushed in to shouts of “What is that?” and “Who is that?” because our wards were visible to the humans down there.
Had it only been humans, we would have had little trouble.
But there was something else hiding underground, and once we presented ourselves as targets, they attacked, horned and hooved.
I did not understand the fullness of that at first—I got rammed and it staggered me, but the ward did redirect much of the force at the attacker, and he pinged off me like a pinball on a purple bumper.
They kept coming, however, but on their second attack, we were ready and bloodied some of them, got a better look at what lunged out of the darkness, and heard their bleats of pain when we stabbed them: They were fauns.
Or satyrs, as I first thought, because that was the word I most commonly associated with chimeras made of man and goat.
I was not the only one to mutter a “What the fuck?” under my breath, because while this manifestation or infestation certainly explained the deep weirdness we’d sensed about the place in our divination, no one could fathom why such creatures would be lurking in a Warsaw basement.
Upon their third advance, the fauns demonstrated that they could learn: They came up close and reached out with their hands to grapple with us—specifically attempting to disarm us.
One simply approached me with slow steps and watched my knife hand the whole time, no eye contact, just waiting for me to strike.
I straight kicked him in the face with my left booted foot to make him understand the knife wasn’t all he needed to worry about, and he blinked, snorted blood, and grinned as he kept coming.
I feinted with the knife overhead, and his hands shot out to intercept but annoyingly tracked as I spun and tried to stab from the other side. He caught my forearm in an iron grip, bent down, and sank his teeth into my flesh, all of these movements too slow to trigger the kinetic ward.
I screamed, dropped the knife, and wasn’t the only witch screaming. My sisters were also suffering similar attentions.
But I heard Malina say, “Fuck this,” before a searing flash of light assailed our eyes in the gloom.
She had summoned her hellwhip—an arcane weapon that could dispatch most anything unprotected by god-level wards.
It was the equivalent of igniting a lightsaber in a room full of foam rubber swords, and normally she wouldn’t summon it where humans could be tagged with it, but so far we’d seen no humans, only fauns.
She swept it in a counterclockwise scything motion, and the white-hot blade of it juicily separated human torsos from goatish nethers, ropy intestines and bean-shaped kidneys spilling across the floor and bleats of agony and dismay filling the space as the fauns splashed into pools of their own blood.
The whip licked harmlessly off our wards, and Malina swept the whip back once more before flicking her wrist and allowing it to loll in electric menace.
“Someone cast Starlight, please,” she said, and I think it was Patrycja who obliged, calling down the brilliance of the Zorze to shine from her hands and penetrate the dark, revealing a crowd of humans farther back in the basement, all cringing away from the sudden glare.
They had on useless headsets and stood near little cubbies arranged on a couple of long tables.
We also saw shelves and a furnace and several water heaters—it was fortunate that Malina’s hellwhip hadn’t burst any of those.
“Charm them into submission,” she said. “We’ll take our time interrogating them. ”
Stepping over and through the viscera of goat-footed men, I hoped at least one of the humans could explain the fauns’ presence, because it made no sense for them to be there.
They were creatures out of Greco-Roman myth.
They should be pursuing naiads and dryads on the slopes of Mount Olympus, not slumming in a Polish basement, guarding a criminal call center.
Each of the sisters had a feature that she used to charm others; it was primarily a defensive measure, because no one lashed out at someone they liked, but it could also get people to talk because they wanted to please us.
Malina had long, straight golden hair that was nearly irresistible, Klaudia used her lips, and Ewelina actually used her right ear, which I thought a bizarre move, but there was no denying its mesmerizing effectiveness.
Like many of the other young witches, I used my eyes.
But I didn’t go straight to the cluster of frightened men and women, because I was curious about the shelves—why were they even there? What was being stored on them?
Cardboard boxes of indeterminate contents. A dusty sleeve for carpenters’ tools—hammer, screwdrivers, pipe wrench. And a human head.
Wait—
Yes, a head. A woman’s head situated on a small marble base.
She herself looked to be of marble, so pale and bloodless was her skin, but she had eyes and real nostrils, not the dead white of statues, and there was a shy blush to her lips, at least. Her dark hair might be a wig, but it looked real. And she blinked.
I froze and locked my gaze on her, trying to determine whether I was really seeing this or if my brain was playing a cruel joke born of hormones and stress chemicals.
But no, her eyes were tracking the movements of my sisters, and when she noticed me staring at her, she returned my gaze coolly.
I stepped closer, pouring some energy into my eyes, attempting to charm her.
“And who might you be?” I asked.
The disembodied head blinked a couple of times, gave me the tiniest smirk on one side of her face, but made no reply.
“Come on, tell me your name,” I said with all the persuasion I could muster.
The smirking intensified.
And so did the din of voices from the scammers: They should have been quietly falling under our coven’s sway as our charms hijacked their minds, but instead they were resisting—not physically, because they were unarmed and we still very much were, but rather with spirited suggestions that we perform anatomical impossibilities.
“I don’t understand,” Roksana said. “They should be charmed. How are they not?”
“I think it might have something to do with her,” I said, pointing a finger at the woman’s head on the shelf, “though I don’t know who she is.”
“Watch them,” Malina said to the coven. “Roksana, with me.”
The two of them left the cluster and came back to where I was. Roksana turned on her phone’s flashlight and shone it at the head of the woman, who eyed them with the same contemptuous amusement she’d given me.
“Is that…?” Roksana began, but almost immediately trailed off, her eyes shifting uncertainly to Malina. Our coven leader stepped forward and cupped the left jaw of the woman, her thumb brushing softly across her cheekbone.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s her.”
“Why is she here?”
“We won’t get an answer until she’s gone,” Malina said. “They won’t respond to our charms until she’s taken care of.”
“Pardon me, but who is that?” I asked.
“She has several names, but is most often called Laverna,” Malina said. “Roman goddess of thieves and grifters. The fauns were protecting her. And she is protecting those phone scammers from our charms.”
The smirk of the goddess widened into a full smile of brilliant teeth. “Always a pleasure to know my work is appreciated,” she said, dry menace hidden behind a tone of wry amusement.
“Knowing your work and appreciating it are two very different things,” Malina said.
“How did you find me?”
“Divination.”
“I am shielded from divination.”
“That is no doubt true in most cases. But the goddesses who protect Poland are nearly impossible to deny when it comes to identifying threats in our lands, and we are blessed by them. Why are you here?”
“Why am I anywhere? For the money.”
“Money you cannot spend and which will never make you whole.”
“I simply don’t have enough yet.”
“There will never be enough. The world’s billionaires are obviously broken people incapable of recognizing their own immorality. And you are no different.” Malina turned to me. “Laverna is the reason this group was so effective. Remove her, and justice can proceed. Would you like to do the honors?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“She’s an Olympian. Unkillable except in the very short term.
Destroy this current vessel, and she will respawn like monsters in a video game, because the Olympians are truly immortal.
But she’ll respawn in Olympus, effectively ending her influence in our lands.
That will allow us to make some progress with the scammers.
If you want vengeance for your babcia, it should—no, it needs to—begin with her. ”
“Good.” I wanted that very much. Stealing from an innocent woman, putting that strain on her heart for personal gain?
Unforgivable. I held up my knife so that Laverna would be sure to see it.
“One of your minions here preyed upon my babcia, the sweetest lady in Poland. I am not half so sweet—not even a little bit when it comes to her—so I will do what she could never contemplate. Your immortal moment in Poland is at an end. Do not ever come back. It is under our protection.”
The contemptuous smile disappeared. “Wait, who are—”
I did not wait. I shoved my knife into her eye and punched it through the socket to penetrate the brain, then I twisted the blade around to scramble everything well. Golden ichor spilled out of the wound, and the jaw went slack. If she was foolish enough to return, we would dispatch her again.
“Try the charms now,” Malina called over her shoulder, and soon the protests of the scammers died down and they said nicer things in softer tones, entirely agreeable and willing to confess their crimes. Which we would absolutely have them do in front of police.
Under questioning, the scammers told us that one of them had taken a road trip to Italy and come back with Laverna’s head resting in the passenger seat.
The scam had been conceived and set up on the drive, and the fauns had been summoned over the course of some weeks to provide extra protection.
More important, though, was the crypto wallet the leader handed over along with its password.
We would be draining all of that for sure; my babcia’s funds would be restored, and we’d try to return as much as we could to all the other victims we could find. Or rather, I would.
I volunteered for the project, as I felt that healing the wounds caused by such malevolent greed would be my grateful service to the Zorze in return for their aid to us.
The goddesses above gave us the strength to defeat the goddess below.
They were the keys that unlocked our dreams—a phrasing that I borrowed from another Szymborska verse in translation:
Dreams have keys.
The real world opens on its own
and can’t be shut.
We certainly could not shut out the real world. But we could, for a small while, put on a scarf and make tiny corners of it cozy and safe. Especially when you had a sisterhood at your back. Babcia and I would have many happy teatimes ahead of us.