Episode 1 #2
Sevastyan and Ellisandre stood in silence before the lamassu.
Sevastyan’s blood burned through his body.
There were a dozen things he wanted to do, and none were appropriate for a clandestine meeting amidst ancient artifacts in a public space.
He turned to the right, walking through more stone reliefs depicting ancient attendants of ancient kings.
Ellisandre shadowed him. He stepped around a massive black pedestal that was once the base of a column from Tell Tayinat, a neo-Hittite city.
Once there would have been a wooden column set upon its strong, wide surface, but the beauty and safety it had once supported had long since moldered.
Nothing was safe. Everything ended, in time.
Except stone. He should have been born a stone.
He moved past the black column base, coming to the end of the hall, and turned right, finding himself face to face with a colossal statue of King Tutankhamun. The ancient pharaoh rose up above all the other artifacts, his colors dulled by time, like Sevastyan himself.
He stopped and waved at the cases surrounding himself and Ellisandre.
“Someday, someone will look at me through glass, like this. There’ll be a little plaque.
” He made a gesture in front of himself as if he were framing a piece of writing with his fingers.
“Recovered in Prague, considered to have been burned on the funeral pyre of a neo-European deity of war. Site abandoned early twenty-first century.”
Ellisandre’s breath stopped. Sevastyan stared straight ahead. He couldn’t—wouldn’t look.
“Which god?” Ellisandre’s voice was tight.
“Does it matter if they have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Name withheld. This one took offerings in lebkuchen and Amaretto.”
Ellisandre absorbed his words without flinching or looking. Then, when he said nothing else, they walked toward the colossal pharaoh. Sevastyan stayed where he was, feet pinned to the floor in anger.
Ellisandre’s gloved hand flexed just beyond the hem of their brown sleeve. A slow curl of long fingers, a familiar order. Come.
He closed his eyes, his chest already leaning forward, his feet still stuck to the floor. He’d known this would truly hurt. It was worse than he’d hoped.
Wide brown eyes brimming with tears, hands curled in his shirt. Burn marks on a beautiful cheek.
There was a reason he’d broken the silence and called out to the deity of war who had chosen death and rebirth over his service.
He followed Ellisandre past the pharaoh toward the bodies and caskets of the dead, the mummies encased beyond, frozen in time.
Except they had not been left in peace, in quiet.
Their graves had been ripped open, their wrapped bodies laid out on display, each layer of their burials set out for all to see. “Who gave you the damned right?”
Ellisandre turned their head ever so slightly toward him under the brim of their wide maroon hat. “You.”
He looked away. Ten years had not taken away Ellisandre’s bluntness. Perhaps they had magnified it.
Ellisandre studied a dark statue of a falcon, from the temple of the god Horus. “You didn’t come to worship at the feet of something dead. Speak.”
“And if I had?”
“You wouldn’t be angry.” Ellisandre met his gaze. “You’d be lost.”
Sevastyan let Ellisandre see his nostrils flare, for just a moment.
They tilted their head beneath the wide-brimmed hat. “No, I misspoke. You, Bal, are lost. But not the rest of you.”
Sevastyan’s chest clenched. This was not how he wanted to hear that name again. It was precious. Sacred. Short for Baldhr, for everything that he had ceased to be when his god and goddess in one had gone down to Hel in a battle fit for the greatest of Valhalla.
“You and me, Vast, the two of us betrayed Bal. But you . . .” Ellisandre turned away as if to study an explanation on the wall. “You and I both know I owned only part of you. For the rest, there was prior claim.”
“I would have been there.”
“Prior claim, Vast.” Ellisandre swept their chin back and forth in stately denial. “You had your oaths. And I made mine.”
Speaking wasn’t bringing balm to the wounds that had been seeping for a decade.
Ellisandre gazed at him, those gray eyes deep pools of calm above a battlefield of endings, an incarnation of the Morrigan. “You’re not free, Vast.”
This was not land on which he could stand. He had to find some semblance of the road he’d planned to tread. He stared back at Ellisandre. “Nor you. Your friends shield something the Merchari mean to have.”
Not something. Someone. A commodity to the Merchari. He didn’t have to close his eyes to smell the room and see Gang Junseo kneeling in all his madness amidst the ruin of an alcohol and blood drenched fate.
At least Gang Junseo hadn’t been kneeling in fire. Not like Rei.
Sevastyan
A week ago: December 27th, South Korea
Sevastyan slammed the brakes on the four-wheeler.
Snow was falling hard and the roads would be shut soon, if they hadn’t already closed behind him.
Most people conjured neon metropolises in their minds when they summoned an image of South Korea, but there was a realm beyond the gleaming subways and towering Lotte shopping centers.
Mountains. Ski slopes. Trees. Tracts of almost nothing.
Places where the wealthy evildoer might go to be alone with their spoils.
Sevastyan jumped out of his vehicle, adjusting his gloves.
Depending on what he found, he wasn’t going to leave evidence of his passing.
Not a print on a glass or a knob. This client had gone off script, and they were going to pay the fines for this stop.
Sevastyan wasn’t a foot soldier who made casual emergency visits.
He should have been halfway back to Russia by now, only hours away from Rei and their temporary headquarters on the island of Sakhalin off the eastern coast.
Instead, he was here, doing something he wouldn’t want Rei to know about.
Sevastyan’s lip pulled back in a snarl. He raked his eyes over the mountain lodge.
Built in traditional hanok style, its half-circle roof tiles were laid down in orderly rows with circular end caps on the upturned edges.
The walls were treated wood, no paint. To the right was a long wing surrounded by a wrap-around covered porch.
There were lights on in that room but the rest of the visible windows were dark.
An air of stillness hung over it all. Unnatural quiet.
He knew this resort. The client would be in that wing and a handful of attendants would be waiting to be summoned from the basement at the other end of the building, where the service rooms were.
All the better to not witness what might be taking place.
If all the lights were off except for the entertainment wing, then preparations were finished.
Pizdec. Damn. He’d come too late.
Tire marks in the falling snow, partially filled in, revealed that several people had recently left. The few vehicles remaining looked like they were close attendants and security. Too bad the greatest security breach was the client himself.
Sevastyan walked through the strip of ornamental garden and circled the wing. There were shadows inside, but no sound. It was too cold to smell anything. He was too late. By how much remained to be seen.
He eased open the side door.
A familiar man in his twenties knelt in a puddle of alcohol spreading across the wooden floor.
In his hand was the broken neck of a green bottle.
Half torn from his shoulders was a black hanbok, the cut modern, the fabric expensive.
The front two panels, meant to be wrapped one over the other and tied closed, were torn apart, leaving his shoulders and chest on display.
Chinese characters in black ink had been written down his ribs and smeared across his skin with bruising force.
Blood from the young man’s nose and lip dripped down to stain the pool of spirits beneath his knees.
Halfway across the room, the client in question, a prominent member of regional law enforcement, was sprawled out on his back, half of a wooden table resting on his chest. It looked like the corner had hit the center of his chest with force and the table had shattered.
Closer to the kneeling young man, a larger man lay half on his face.
What could be seen of his visage was a mass of broken glass and cuts. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving.
Sevastyan was late–for a tableau vivant that should never have been set. He took it in, letting his heartbeat slow. His mission was to defuse, not to have to kill the merchandise.
“It’s always the quiet ones,” he said.
The young man spun on his knees, dropping the remnants of the bottle and grasping chopsticks from the mess of a dinner that had been strewn across the floor.
They were Korean style: long, made of heavy metal, and deadly in the right hands.
Like the hands of someone who had just used a glass bottle and a table to fell two men.
Even bloodied and injured, Gang Junseo moved as beautifully in person as he did on screen. Like Rei. After all, they had gone through the same training.
Sevastyan left his hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed. His heartbeat stayed slow. He breathed through his nose. “The ones raised by dogs. Timid to the hand that broke them, demon to any new master. Bak made one mistake with you.”
“What was that?” The young man’s voice was hardly recognizable compared to his famous smooth tones. It was harsh now, guttural. Like he’d been choked.
He was speaking, though. Not all would be capable. Most in his position were catatonic.