Jan’s fourth initiation had been the stuff of nightmares. Too traumatic to recall completely. A few nightmare scenes, half-remembered, made him shudder. Rather than fading with time, the memories had sharpened and became even more painful. Weeks of sleep deprivation, bodily mortification, and degradation had worn him almost to the breaking point. But it had worked as Father Fall advertised, breaking down the barriers between Jan and the source of Romani magic, the mysterious astral Sponsors.
Jan knew he had to go a very different route to make further progress. For several months, he had been corresponding with a succession of successively better connected Linked Chain mages. For the most part, they were enchanters, summoners, or ethernauts, barely willing to acknowledge that what Jan did was up to par with their own powers. But the Linked Chain was always hungry for three things: money, power, and dignity. All he had to do was show them that he could bring the Chain more of the first two without sacrificing the third. Climbing the Chain, he knew, was necessary to reach their top sorceress. Probably the only manaslinger in the world who could speak to him in his own tradition and teach him how to fine-tune and shape the massive, ragged bolts of raw power that his previous mentor had taught him to hack out of the Other Side.
Finally he was allowed an anchorless chat window with Vadoma Shaw. Waiting for the call, Jan fussed at his hair for the fourth time, coughed nervously for the fifth, and looked again out the window at the bleak Pennsylvania coastline. A dusting of snow, blackened by soot, lay heavy on the banks of the canal.
“Snow should be clean”, Jan thought as he always did. In Istanbul, the snow had been the only relief from the rubble and corpses everywhere that there was somehow never time to bury. He jerked his attention back to his ‘link, muttering to himself angrily “Why the hell am I thinking about corpses today. This is what I’ve been working toward for eight years.” He ticked over his selling points in his mind, ready to make his best sales pitch to Shaw. With her fame and status, she would surely need persuading to spend time with him. Surely she would assume he was a cultureless hick; at her level of stardom, she probably never even ordered coffee from someone without an agent and a half-dozen trid credits. Jan knew he could be charismatic when he put his whole aura into it, but he feared that the lack of in-person contact would hold him back. He only hoped that somehow the laws of physics would bend, allowing his Awakened aura to translate over the Matrix and tip the balance.
Her first words blew past all his preparations. “Show me how serious you are”, Shaw snapped. He barely had time to register her latest look: thick, brutal earrings and lip piercings, jagged inverted lightning tattoos, severe bangs, and plucked, arched brows. But the cheekbones and noble brow were the same as ever: she looked exactly like all the publicity stills and vids of her he had ever seen, while also looking radically and angrily different. He gulped. Trembling, he held up his left hand, palm facing Shaw, fingers spread .
“How many?”, he asked, trembling.
“Would you give them all?” He realized that she was not looking at his hand, and maybe not even at his face. The dark, slitted eyes seemed to be driving daggers into his soul.
“J- J- Ja, Meine Dame. Alle, wenn es noetig ist.” He cursed himself for trembling.
Shaw switched to German as well. Oddly, he had not noticed her Scottish accent until she switched from English. Perhaps she was still in character from her last one man show, a mashup of last decade’s smash hit Kadeera with the neglected classic, The Vagina Monologues. Her tone started severe, as she began to grimace. “Ja. Allen. Deine finger-” She began to draw her finger, ending in a wicked inch-long burgundy nail, across the screen at the height where his hand was exposed.
And then she cracked up. “Hahaha, ach mein Gott!” Continuing in English again, “Father Fall must have scared you to death. Oh, god!” She cackled and guffawed for what felt like minutes, though his Transys told him it was mere seconds. Jan mustered his will and attempted a grin. He felt it sliding, sickly and inadequate, off his face as she continued. “Oh, mann, whodja think we are, the bampot Yakuza? Gee on, cetcher bawhead outcher breeks guy!” Jan’s eyes flicked desperately to his CC line and found no translation. “Umm, sorry,” he sputtered, not sure how to continue.
“Ah couldnae help meself, lad, jew unnerstan." She chuckled a bit more, and then leaned forward. In an instant she transformed back from the jocular to the intense.
“All right, man, ye’ve got three weeks wi mae. The money’s good, and I’ve three aethers think they can keep up with me all together tae gee it. We’ll see how many of yae last. For nea, getcher chankin arse aboot pronto, choom. We start in nae tayim.” Bewildered, Jan’s fingers twitched a desperate query to Bloodhound. “Umm, well, I think that sounds, umm…” But before the grizzled hacker could rouse himself to assist, the signal cut out. For a second, Jan sat stunned. Not knowing if he had succeeded, failed, or been told to go wash his face. Until an address appeared on the screen.
With a sigh of relief, he realized the address was in Berlin. He had been accepted into tutelage by Vadoma Shaw! Of all people. He exhaled stress and lowered his shoulders. “OK”, he said out loud, realizing from the stinging of his eyes that he had not even dared to blink for the whole conversation. “The easy part’s over, I guess…”
