INTERLUDE

The site was four hundred kilometres from the nearest town with a name on a map.

It had been something Soviet once. Concrete sunk into permafrost. A lift shaft that went down further than the plans admitted, and a generator hall the size of a church.

The woman in the scorpion mask came down in the lift with her hands folded.

The old woman was waiting at the bottom of it. She had a stick she didn’t need, a coat that had been good forty years ago, and a paper twist of something she was eating out of.

“Ah,” said the old woman. “The guest.”

“I am late,” said the scorpion.

“The guest is late. The guest is sorry. The guest will not do it again.” The old woman folded the paper twist into a pocket. “Yaga has heard this song. Yaga knows all the words.”

“How is England, then? Still raining on everybody the same?”

“Cold,” said the scorpion. “Badly run.”

“That is what they said about my country, and look. Here we are, standing in it.” The old woman turned and started walking. “Come, little scorpion. Come and see what your gold has grown.”

The corridor went further than the lift shaft had any business reaching.

There were doors on both sides. The old woman didn’t open any of them.

“Forty-one in the house at present,” she said. “Nine will hold. The rest will be something else by spring, one way and another.”

“That is a better rate than the rooms in England.”

“Better, better.” The old woman rapped the stick twice on the concrete. “Your people in England are cooks who never taste. They open a child, they look inside, they close it up, they write a number on a form and go home to their dinner. Yaga sits with them. Yaga asks what frightens them. Yaga listens to the whole answer, and only then does Yaga begin.”

“Does that help?”

“It helps Yaga,” the old woman said. “Whether it helps them is a different pot.”

They walked on. Somewhere behind one of the doors a pipe knocked twice and went quiet.

“You have not asked me why it is here,” the scorpion said.

“I assumed you liked my company.”

“I stopped looking for her eleven months ago.”

The stick paused for the first time. The old woman turned the word over like a stone found in food.

“Stopped. Three years you chased. Three years Yaga heard about it, every letter, every winter. And now, stopped.”

“I spent three years watching a girl move every eleven days on money nobody can follow,” said the scorpion. “She is careful. She is frightened. She is better at both than anyone has a right to be at her age.”

“And your seer?” The old woman clicked her tongue. “Your poor clever girl that nobody believes. Does she not sit down, close her eyes, and tell you the street?”

“She sees everybody.” The scorpion said it without any heat in it at all. “Presidents. Constellations. Men who have not been born yet. She sat down for this one and found a hole where the girl should have been, and she has sat down for her four hundred times since, and every time it is the same hole in the same place.”

“A hole,” said the old woman.

“It is not darkness and it is not distance. It is a spot the future declines to have any opinion about.”

“And what does Yaga’s clever friend think is standing in it?”

“The Alpha is with her.” The scorpion started walking again. “I do not have a better answer and I have stopped enjoying the search for one. Whatever that boy is, he does not appear in anybody’s sight. While she is holding on to him, neither does she.”

“So the boy is the blanket.”

“The boy is the blanket.”

“Mm.” The old woman was pleased about something. “So you cannot find her with eyes, and so you build a place she must walk into. Yes. Yaga likes this better than the letters.”

“So the hunter builds a kitchen and sits down in it.”

“I built the only place on this earth that has what she needs. She will hear about it. Not soon. She will not believe it at first. She will spend a season proving it to herself, and then she will come, because there will be nowhere else left to try.”

“And she brings the boy.”

“She brings the boy.”

The old woman made a small pleased sound, the sound a lid makes settling onto a pot.

“And how does the little bird hear?”

“Badly. Slowly. From three directions that do not agree with each other.” The scorpion stopped walking. “It has already started. A shipping clerk in Vladivostok. A surveyor who drinks. A guild in Britain with a Russian office and more courage than sense.”

“That brings hunters. Hunters bring guns, guns bring paperwork, and paperwork is the only thing in this world Yaga is frightened of.”

“It will bring everyone. That is what bait is for.”

“Mm.” The old woman looked at her for a while. “And who cleans the house afterwards?”

“You do. At your usual price.”

“My usual price has gone up. The world got expensive while you were in England.”

“Send me the number.”

“Yaga always sends the number,” the old woman said. “Yaga has never once had to send it twice. That is why we are still friends, you and I.”

They’d come to the last door in the corridor. The old woman stopped in front of it, and for the first time she didn’t look like she was enjoying herself.

“And this one,” the old woman said.

“That one stays shut.”

“That one has been shut a long time.”

“It stays shut a while longer,” said the scorpion.

“You are a guest in my house,” the old woman said, “and you are telling me which of my own doors I may open.”

“I am telling you which door is not part of our arrangement.” The scorpion had already turned back toward the lift. “Everything on this level is yours. Everything behind that one is mine. If a day comes when somebody makes you open it, you will find I have been very specific about what happens afterwards.”

The old woman smiled with her mouth only.

“Such a polite little scorpion. Go home. Yaga will feed your guests when they come.”

“Feed them slowly.”

“Yaga does everything slowly,” the old woman said. “That is the whole recipe.”

The lift went up.

The old woman stood in the corridor and listened to it go. Then she took the paper twist out of her pocket, and turned, and walked back the way she’d come, past forty-one doors, humming something with no tune in it.