Chapter Text
The medieval village of Schlachen hovered on the north-eastern rim of the Harz mountains, overlooking the spruce-covered slopes once declared imperial forest by Charlemagne, which now marked the inner border between East and West Germany.
In the town, the Sankt Walpurgisnacht festivities had gotten off to an early start. Sprigs of greenery festooned the slate rooftops and hung from doorways of the whitewashed buildings. Firewood and straw men were piled up at the north end of the village square in readiness for the night’s bonfires. Colourful tents ranged across the square, stallholders readying their wares: food and drink and traditional crafts celebrating Spring.
Into this idyllic scene strolled two spies, hatless under the afternoon sky.
The pair crossed the ancient cobblestones of the square, passing the gathering crowds: shopgirls and housewives, schoolchildren pushing their bicycles, old men ambling with the occasional horse and cart in tow.
In the way of their profession, the spies observed the festive goings-on with a sharply jaundiced eye.
“Pure superstition,” said Illya Kuryakin, in a neutral tone. “These small villages still remember the excesses of the Hexenbrunnen, particularly those towns close to Mount Brocken. And it would not surprise me if some of the villagers still celebrate the witches’ sabbath on the mountain in this day and age... Which, of course, is a superstition that you might not find entirely unwelcome.”
These nuggets hadn’t been in the mission file. The stock of obscure information knocking around Kuryakin’s immense brain never ceased to amaze. Nor, it had to be said, how Illya used said information to goad his partner, as now.
As Illya shot him a sideways and transparently baiting look, Napoleon Solo withheld a remark about young women prancing naked across the mountainside, and said, instead, “Perish the thought, partner, I’m only pagan on Sundays.”
Which, as it happened, was untrue. Solo had set aside the saints and catechisms of his boyhood a long time ago, but he did believe that his famous luck owed something to divine intervention.
To forestall further partnerial needling, Napoleon added, sotto voce, “What about the Laurience device? Does Section Eight also think that’s pure superstition?”
Kuryakin’s brows tightened slightly, the way they did when he was deeply perturbed.
This mission’s files contained very little about the device itself. Peterson from U.N.C.L.E’s Washington office had only managed to convey a few background details before he was silenced by their feathered friends. Dr. Laurience was an Austrian brain surgeon who’d seemingly achieved a breakthrough in mind transference between chimpanzees. Laurience had vanished from the academic scene a year ago amid a cloud of disapprobation. Section Eight could only speculate as to whether, and if so, the science behind how, the good doctor had managed to perfect his mind transference device on humans, and for THRUSH.
What hadn’t been speculation was the device’s intended target. Peterson had given his life to learn that THRUSH was planning to ship the device stateside, to be used at the United Nations General Assembly Congress in September.
Matching Napoleon’s low tone, Illya said, “Brain transplants are physically impossible. Even if you could get the craniums off without both patients bleeding to death, you would need to reconnect a hundred billion neurotransmitters to the other body’s nerve receptors, not to mention its spinal column.”
He shook his head, adding, “According to Peterson, Laurience’s device doesn’t work by brain transplants. Instead, it supposedly rewires the mind in situ, swapping one set of memories and personalities with another. This is an even more impossible method than the first. It’s more likely Laurience fried the brain of his human subject rather than replaced it with the chimpanzee’s.”
Napoleon remarked, innocently, “And I thought Cartesian dualism was gaining ground amongst the intelligentsia!”
As expected, Illya’s blue eyes narrowed minutely, in what, for him, indicated categorical outrage. “Descartes was debunked by science! Mind and body cannot be separated - - the self is indistinguishable from the brain. Any act of a nonphysical consciousness on the cerebellum would be a violation of basic physics. Such as the conservation of energy!”
“Ah, but science can’t turn man away from centuries of philosophical thought,” mused Napoleon Solo, who would not deny his own propensity for needling his partner. “After all, as our friend John Locke said, it makes sense that our identity is founded on our conscious self and not our bodies. From Greek times, men believed souls survive the body’s death; Plato advocated the reincarnation of soul into subsequent physical forms. How’s that for conservation of energy?” he added, teasingly, and Illya shuddered.
Grimly, his partner bit out: “Thanks to philosophers, men also thought the world was flat, and that the Divine was responsible for earthquakes and thunderstorms. And superstitious villagers believed that on this very night, millennia ago, the Devil wed his beloved on the Brocken and delivered the world over to evil.”
Kuryakin fell silent as he drew to a halt alongside the low wall that bordered the edge of the square. Napoleon followed his gaze across the mountainside to the craggy, distant peak of Mount Brocken, where, according to Illya, witches still allegedly gathered.
From the vantage point of this bustling golden afternoon, the mountain seemed serene and unruffled. However, Napoleon wasn’t fooled. If he had a dime for every time he encountered a thing of evil whose looks were deceiving, he would be a very rich man. And that was even without counting the THRUSH sirens of his acquaintance.
Napoleon took in a breath of bracing Saxony air. This rustic hamlet was an unlikely venue for a struggle between the powers of good and evil.
Although if the superstitions were to be believed, on this May Day's Eve, the deck would be stacked in favor of the dark forces. It was, after all, why they had come here on this particular day.
On Sankt Walpurgisnacht, in similar small villages and towns and hamlets across the Harz Mountains in central Germany, ancestral castles would throw open their doors and welcome the celebrating citizenry. For this reason, it was on this night that teams from U.N.C.L.E. offices in Munich and Berlin had gone to three other villages which boasted a castle matching Petersen’s description.
The New York office’s top team had been sent to the fourth candidate, Castle Schlachenschloss, about which, and about whose mistress - - the reclusive Baroness Ottila von Schlachenstein - - very little was known.
Tonight, while Schlachen and its Baroness were celebrating, an American spy and a Russian one would break into Castle Schlachenschloss. They would determine if the twelfth-century ramparts and Gothic spires were hiding a bodyswitching device that THRUSH planned to turn against the President of the United Nations General Assembly. If the evil thing was there, they were under orders to destroy it, and the scientist who invented it.
As if responding to Napoleon’s dark thoughts, the clouds shifted across the sky. Late afternoon sunlight spilled, slanting and golden, over the castle’s towering stone walls and down the wide green rolls of its approach. Schlachenschloss’s drawbridge was still raised, but already stallholders had staked their claim around the prime spot in the castle’s shadow, where the sunlight did not reach.
The gilded light found the cobblestones of the square, where it haloed Illya Kuryakin’s golden head.
Illya leaned unconsciously into the light, a cat sunning itself, and Napoleon had to catch his breath.
Solo might have left his church-going days behind, but he and his partner and the organization they served battled dark forces every day. And here, in what might be a THRUSH stronghold, facing a night on the edge of light and darkness, he took comfort in the fact that Illya was undoubtedly on the side of the angels. Even the sun thought so.
It had to be said: Illya Kuryakin, former GRU operative and Russian Navy lieutenant and graduate from U.N.C.L.E.’s Survival School with more marks than anyone save for Napoleon himself, Solo’s irritating, intriguing partner, was completely unaware of how damnably angelic he looked.
Kuryakin didn't use those striking looks nearly enough. He was a successful seducer when the mission called for it, but off the clock, Illya was an enigma wrapped in an Arctic iceberg: remote, chilly and circumspect. Although the girls in the typing pool and young Felix from Section Six sighed over his frosty blue eyes, as far as Solo knew, Illya hadn’t dated seriously since Marion Raven got engaged.
There was a time when Solo would have been tempted to make a pass at his partner himself, if he’d thought he might live to tell the tale. Come to think of it, he’d almost done so last year, calling Illya’s bluff after his partner had batted his eyelashes mock-flirtatiously at him at the end of the Kiryū affair. It would have been a mistake, and Napoleon had fortunately managed to stop himself in time.
Alexander Waverly's usual method of breaking in new partners involved weeks of working intensively in close quarters. Pairs either sank or swam. Solo and Kuryakin had had their moments - - especially at the start, when no one thought U.N.C.L.E New York’s hometown boy made good and its prickly, stoic little Russian envoy would last three days - - but they'd made it to three years, and were still going strong.
Napoleon knew things about Illya Kuryakin that maybe no one in the world knew. They’d spent weeks living in each other’s pockets and sleeping in the same room, watching each other’s backs in the field and saving each other’s lives time and again. They shared an office and godawful paperwork and lunches in the commissary. When off duty, they had a standing Thursday dinner date, and spent Sunday afternoons catching up on the New York Times crossword. They were closer than the brothers they didn’t have, certainly closer than Napoleon was to any of the women he’d dated during their partnership.
That partnership, that friendship, had over the last three years grown to become the center of his life. Only a fool would risk such an indubitably good thing for a little action. Though Napoleon’s track record in the a little action department wasn’t an unblemished one, at least the Chief Enforcement Agent of U.N.C.L.E. New York could say he was no fool.
Plus, Illya might either drop-kick him into next Sunday, or roll his eyes skyward at his partner’s depraved American ways. No one’s ego was so robust that it could survive either rebuff, even Solo’s.
Sex wasn’t difficult to come by if you were Napoleon Solo. Partnership was quite another thing. There was, after all, only one Illya Nikolaievitch Kuryakin.
That said, Napoleon would only give up on flirting when one of them was dead, and possibly not even then.
He reached out and traced the line of sunlight across Kuryakin’s shoulder, where the leather holster rode under the concealing gray jacket. “Physics can’t explain the whole world, Illya. Don’t you believe in the immortal soul?”
Illya snorted and arched impatiently away from Solo’s hand. Noli me tangere - - touch me not. Or in its original Greek, Μή μου ἅπτου: leave off your clinging to me - - unless I first touch you. His unpredictable, undeniably alluring partner was a bristling alleycat; you’d never know, on any given day, whether it’d purr or claw your face off.
"I am a faithful , dedicated Communist atheist,” Illya announced. “Officially, we don’t believe in souls, the Divine, the Church, or Devil-worshipping witches. And we definitely don’t believe in bodyswitching: either the brain-swapping or the brainwave-swapping kind. I’m a scientist. This talk about souls, and the ability to transfer them via machinery, is superstition to me, and ought to be to you as well.”
“You’re overthinking this,” Napoleon said, snaring his partner’s wrist in proprietary fashion. God knew why this was the time Illya suffered to be touched. “Bodyswaps aren’t meant to be scientific. They’re comic relief, like that Carole Landis movie? Or they’re part of a hex that teaches the swappers something, say in that opera Gilbert wrote before he and Sullivan made it to the big leagues.”
Illya frowned. Popular culture was decidedly not one of the things rattling around in that beautiful brain.
“The genre that comes to mind is horror. A short story from Poe, a Boris Karloff film, the science fiction novel The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Works of pure fiction, obviously, with no scientific basis, and which result in identity fraud and sex by misrepresentation and, eventually, violent death. Not comic relief in the slightest.”
Napoleon let go of Illya. He gathered himself up to issue forth a dignified riposte, which was when a shadow fell between them.
As one, the two spies looked up at the interloper.
“Guten Tag, gentlemen.”
A young woman stood before them, small and very slender, almost boyish. She was dressed in a red velvet coat, with fair curls to her shoulders. Her voice was high and sweet like a countertenor ’s, her accent thick. In her hands, she held a red scarf, and a pouch too small to contain a gun.
“Allow me to me cast the stones for you and tell you your fortunes,” she said. “It will be worth your while, I assure you.”
Illya had gone very still. His eyes were wide. If Napoleon didn’t know better, he would’ve said his partner looked like someone had walked over his grave.
Kuryakin didn’t signal no, though. And there was something in the woman’s steady blue gaze that spoke to Solo: a touch of something beyond the here-and-now. Although whether that something stood on the side of light or of darkness, Napoleon had no idea. Still, agreeing to this distraction couldn’t do any harm, and it would definitely needle his dour man of science.
“With such a charming proclamation, how could we refuse?”
Solo knew his German marked him as a foreigner, but these days foreign tourists got to all parts, including to the Harz mountains. Besides, the way the woman eyed the cut of his suit, he had the feeling she’d known he wasn’t German even before he opened his mouth.
“A wise choice, and one which you will not regret.”
She hastened over to the wall and spread the red scarf atop its broad surface. From the pouch, she extracted a handful of small, carved stones. She scattered the handful atop the scarf - - nine stones in total - - and then spread narrow fingers over them where they had fallen.
The partners peered over her shoulder at the curious symbols carved into the surfaces of the stones.
”Runen,” Illya said, in his perfect German accent. Runes, one of the oldest methods of fortune telling. At least Kuryakin wasn’t announcing that fortune telling was pure superstition, though he was frowning slightly.
“Yes, the Elder Runes,” the woman said. She pointed to the three stones that had fallen in the middle of the scarf. “This one is the Kennaz, the Torch rune. It represents creative fire, inspiration, hot-blooded impulse. This, the Ice rune, Ika, symbolises introspection, clarity. And you will see this reversed stone, which has crossed the two, is Gebo, the gift. It is the rune of exchange, of balance, of partnership, and its reverse speaks of a balance which will be put out of joint.”
She looked up from her reading. “The stones say your souls are connected. One is the mirror of the other, one fire, the other ice.”
She reached over and picked up Solo’s left hand, running her thumb over the star sapphire of his pinky ring. “You each wear a ring that belongs to a woman. But you aren’t linked to these women. Instead, you are linked to each other, body and spirit. And very soon, I see, this link will undergo the ultimate test.”
Solo’s eyebrows had risen to his hairline. With some effort, he smoothed the skepticism from his face. Kuryakin put his own beringed hand behind his back. His dour presence smoldered like a warning.
The woman released Napoleon and turned back to the scarf. “The runes at the bottom show the elements ranged against you. Hagalaz: wrath, the obstacles of nature. Nauthiz: need, restriction, conflict, self-reliance. The others to the left and right of the center show your past, present, and future.” She indicated with her finger. “These three, in particular: the Bull, the Thorn, the Estuary - - symbols of courage, communication, catharsis.”
She paused and held Solo’s gaze. Very seriously, she said, “It will take a step of faith to make the connection, and a selfless act to change it, and a leap of love to set you free.”
Napoleon had to swallow. The woman’s regard was compelling, almost enough to make him suspect some form of hypnosis; he felt strangely unsettled. Beside him, Illya’s grim silence was its own center of gravity.
Solo made sure his tone was light. “You’re speaking in riddles, Fraulein.”
She inclined her head. “Meine Herren, you’ll understand soon enough, and be glad for what I spoke of this afternoon.”
Belatedly, Napoleon brought up the façade of a smile he deployed in the field. “Do the stones tell you how all this will end for us?”
The woman’s own smile told him she could see past his practiced charm. “Our endings are not for man to know, but the stones don’t lie. Here’s the final rune, the Dagaz. This is the symbol of awakening, of illumination, the completion of the full cycle.”
She pressed the stone into Napoleon’s palm. The rune carved into its surface looked like two triangles turned on their sides, joined at the point of both apexes - - separate, and equal, and always connected to each other.
The woman curled her small fingers around his. The stone felt curiously warm to the touch, either from the heat of the afternoon sun or from her smooth palm.
“Keep it. May it bring you and your partner luck,” she said. She gathered up her scarf and headed into the crowd.
The spies watched her red-clad form merge with the other figures in the town square.
Napoleon mused, “Is it the first time someone’s left us without seeking payment for services rendered?”
“Even more unusually, it looks like she’s paid us,” Illya observed, taking the runestone from Napoleon’s hand. His partner’s fingers were even warmer than the woman’s. “We should scan this to make sure it doesn’t have a tracker, or one of those little devices with wings.”
“I doubt she would have bugged us,” Napoleon said, though of course that kind of thing happened to them much more often than not. Still, strange as it sounded, he could almost believe the woman was genuinely trying to warn them, to help them.
Was fortune-telling just superstition, a sop to man’s fears about an unknown future, or was it something more? The star sapphire burned on his little finger. Was it just a lucky instinct, or had the fortune teller somehow had an intuition about Joan - - and if so, was she right about the rest of her predictions?
The woman’s words rang in his ears: It will take a step of faith to make the connection, and a selfless act to change it, and a leap of love to set you free.
Illya said, tartly, “No one can predict the future, Napoleon. Not even a young woman dressed like a kobold from Bavarian myth.”
Belatedly, the light bulb illuminated itself over Solo’s head. “Was that what that red velvet costume was supposed to be? Not a bad schtick, all things considered.” Then Napoleon frowned as a relevant concern crossed his mind: “Say, don’t kobolds put curses on people?”
“Only those who deserve it,” Illya Kuryakin drawled, “and those who need to be taught a lesson… I realize this means one of us might be in grave danger. And it’s not the one of us who believes that curses, like souls, are pure superstition.”
It was Napoleon’s turn to snort. “If I’m going down, I’m taking you with me, partner. Didn’t you hear the lady? Our souls are connected.”
Illya’s mouth quirked. Solo steeled himself for another quip about souls and superstition, but instead, his partner said, thoughtfully, “I heard her speaking about selfless acts, yes. I haven’t eaten since lunch in Berlin, and the weisswurst smells very good.”
Napoleon grinned. His partner’s bottomless stomach was a force of nature, and more: after their unsettling experience, it signified all was right in the world and its struggle between light and darkness.
“It’s always a selfless act to feed my partner. Let’s get back to the inn for an early dinner. We can also make sure to scan this rune for electronics or poison, though I don’t think we have any equipment that checks for Bavarian curses.”
“I will take a deferred dinner as a sign of faith,” Kuryakin said, with dignity.
He dug his hands into his pockets and set off in the direction of the inn. The fading sunlight outlined his lithe figure in gold, as if he really was a holy being in disguise.