"So let me get this straight. " Chole said looking over the forged documents. One had been recently printed in London, and looked new, but Cytheria had gone back two centuries to London to have it forged with the Royal Society's official script. The other was much older or looked much older. She had it written in the 10th Century. It was basically an additional letter to be added to something called the " Loachim Chronicle " which itself was various accounts gathered by the first Bishop of Novgorod the Great in the 10th century that a Vasily Tatishchev managed to recover in the 17th century and had put together and submitted to the Royal Society for their peer review.

"I present these documents and the map to this Vasily Tatishchev in Perm…" Chole said to be sure.

"No! Vasily is who the Royal Society addressed it to for his investigation. But he died in Moscow before they sent it. You give it to his nephew Peter who is in Perm who likes to think himself as scholarly and adventurous as his great Uncle was. So you've traveled from Moscow to Perm to find him because he is the most trusted heir to his legacy." Cytheria said correcting her.

"Right then. To Peter, in Perm. And he's going to gather some brigands, go chase after a bunch of woman hiding out in the wilds of Siberia, kill all the woman and get the nails and return home!" Chole chided, then asked, "Who thought of this crazy plan!"?

"Jan in general but, the details are all mine, and it’s not brigands its Cossacks, and there not nails, there the Crucifixion Nails, and they aren’t just killing the woman, they have to cut off all the heads and bring them back to Langepas in sacks so Jan's cohort there can identify Tori. It's brilliant!". Cytheria said not at all worried about the complexities of the plan.

"Brilliant? Send forty or sixty men on a six hundred and sixty-mile journey to attack some girls in the middle of the woods is brilliant?" Chole asked skeptically. "Why not just send an assassin in and take Tori out or do it yourself if your so worried about Grum's standing with Xsanthriana?".

"First, I'm not getting next to that girl if I can help it. She was in my damn house. Not once but maybe three times if I can believe Tamerlane. And she stabbed him in the back with a pair of knives while we were on a plane flying to Scotland. She came out of a freaking mirror while he was having himself a stewardess in the bathroom for god's sake, and she did that when she was pregnant, sickly and lying comatose thousands of miles away and two hundred years in the past. If you think for one minute that I'm going up against that, personally you can forget it!" Cytheria said emphatically to her old friend.

Chole took a deep breath. Whoa to her if she stood in the way of her plans to have her adult son, Grum, marry an Etruscan demi- goddess's four-year-old daughter. Chole exhaled, letting her friend, an Etruscan demigoddess in her own right, continue.

"Secondly, Jan's worried about an early warning. This Norn camp was put there specifically because no one goes there. That whole area is big fat blank nothing in the footnotes of history. The only one who's going to see this document is Peter and he's going to salivate at the thought of carrying on in his uncle's footsteps. " Cytheria explained.

"Also, Jan thinks she gains a big blood deed by betraying the camp and advancing herself to demi hood. Especially after the priest her cohort is with, consecrates the heads," Cytheria told her.

"Yeah but what happens to history after this Peter guy gets back and proclaims himself the owner of the Crucifixion Nails or worse yet this other girl Jan employs, a witch right? What if she tries to keep the nails for herself?" Chole asked her, surprised that Cytheria hadn't thought of that.

"Chole, there are no nails! That story is all made up! But I'm sure if they search about long enough after raising the Norn camp to the ground maybe they'll find some big nails in the charred rubble and proclaim those the Crucifixion Nails. Geesh! Chole you're as gullible as Peter. Speaking of Peter, he died later that year, so him getting anything written down and circulated about this, isn't very likely." Cytheria told her boastingly.

"Really?" Chole asked, thinking there was more. "And just how do you know that?"

"Simple really, Tamerlane and I were both exiled to Perm by Peter the Great. We spent some several years there. We even met Vasily once before he died, when he dropped by to see his nephew, also named Peter, who didn't live far from us. Then one day Peter came to our home and walked off with some old relic from our house saying he'd return it and then later, after having to ask for it back, he claimed to have lost it and offered Tamerlane a paltry sum as damage. You do know how I get when people steal from me don't you?" Cytheria was saying with a smirk.

"Yes, indeed I do," Chole smiled thinking of that poor harem girl Cannias whom she was hired by Cytheria to turn into a book cover because the harem girl dared to borrow a necklace from her without asking. "So then what happened?".

"I had his house burned down with everyone in it; his wife, children, a few close relatives, even his mistress, plus the servants. Everyone! Peter, the pets, and the livestock too." Cytheria bragged. "The man was a simpleton, always having these romantic notions of making himself rich and powerful and being noted as a man of Letters like his uncle. This letter from the Royal Society that I forged congratulates Vasily on his Histories and asks him if he could verify the veracity of the additional account in the other forged document you give him and then asks him to assist in the retrieval of the Crucifixion Nails. It's the exact type of thing that Peter will respond to. That and the gold you're going to give him, freshly minted from the Tower of London at that time, and sent in advance for his trouble by the Royal Society. It's more than enough to set him off on this noble task rather quickly I'd think." Cytheria said happily as she continued.

"And as to the girls at the camp, the additional account from the Chronicle, clearly spells out that they're all witches and that their matron witch was a handmaiden of Helena, mother of Constantine the Great who when in Jerusalem, switched the nails that Constantine's mother Helena thought she was taking back to Constantinople for her son the emperor after which she ran away with them to the North where they used the Nails as the source of power for their secret coven hidden in Siberia. All rather devilish don't you think? " Cytheria said congratulating herself.

"Yes, very devilish given their crime and that they're witches. I can well imagine what will befall them when they're caught by Peter and these Cossacks". Chole said, but then tilted her head. "Okay, but I'm still a bit fuzzy on the witch."

"Which witch?" Cytheria asked not sure which witch she referred to since Chole just called all the Norns at the camp witches, which they all clearly were not. She had been speaking of what was written in the forged document, not the actual camp. Then she realized it was Jan's witch.

"Oh.. That witch. Well, of course, we need her to identify Tori after she's killed, and I wouldn't need you for this at all if she weren't such a wuss about getting her boots dirty. No, she's there because she came straight from Moscow with the priest because the coven was going to try to recruit her as an acolyte, thus verifying that the coven is still active. Instead, she realized it would be sacrilegious to join the coven and so she reported it to the church. You met her and the priest in Moscow after they tell you her tale. Then you have her recreate the map she saw on the back of one of the girls trying to recruit her and find out it looks just like the one you're going to give Peter, that the Royal Society had stuffed in some trunk in an attic and didn't know what to make of it till they got the Loachim Chronicle from Vasily . You asked if she might be willing to identify any of these witches and she agrees to it because she's overcome with angst about being chosen to be a witch and wants to purify herself by doing penance and bringing the coven to justice. But she's traveling straight there with her priest, who she actually recruits in Surgat, where I dropped her off, not Moscow. I did get her to travel fifty miles, by the way, insisting that she had to have a priest. Anyway, she's to meet Peter in Langepas whom you have assured her that he would come. And to add to Peters' numbers, she'll be recruiting additional men." Cytheria told her.

Chole gave Cytheria a long doubtful look.

"Trust me Chole; it's all icing on the cake. A beautiful, pure, and pious woman waiting for him at the end of his journey. A priest there to sanctify the kill, it's perfect. Just the kind of thing Peter's always dreamed of. Just make sure you get him on the road in a week. There'll be plenty of unemployed Cossacks in Perm, and you should figure a rate of march of twenty miles a day considering Peter will be rather anxious to get there. Try for no more or no less, as we need to time this, so it happens after Tori has birthed her child."

"What?... You didn't say I was going along too did you? I thought I was just going to drop off the map and documents and then see Peter out of Perm. You didn't say anything about me walking six hundred and sixty damn miles with a bunch of stinky men!." Chole complained.

"Fine don't walk… just witch yourself in and out secretively every now and then so you can extol the men to keep to the rate of the march, or actually just Peter, he's a bit on the heavy side, and the rest are Cossacks, so it should be easy for them." Cytheria insisted.

"What if the Cossacks can't take the Norn camp?" Chole asked, still not sure about the plan.

"Not to worry, Jan assures me that the camp is mostly filled with novices and rejects. And of the handful of witches that are there, only a few can fly and one of those is supposed to be a drunk!." Cytheria told her. "Any more questions Chole?"

"After all, this is done, then I get Melantha?" Chole asked just to be sure of her payout for doing this.

"Yes, but let's wait till Tamerlane gets over his little infatuation with her first. You really pushed it last time if you remember. If it takes too long, I'll work something out, but I just can't imagine how that little tryst of ours is going to last forever." Cytheria told her.

It certainly seemed like it was lasting forever, but Chole kept silent on that since Cytheria's husband had only recently received Melantha back after nearly some thousand or so years.

"So how do you like the map?" Chole asking Cytheria of her contribution to the plan. It laid on the table between the two.

"Great! You have all those little wedgy things in there that are the mountains and hills, and the little tree's and rivers, and even swamp thingies. It looks really good. Did you get it done right the first time?" Cytheria asked.

"No.. The first attempts kept ripping when I stretched them. It took me, four girls, to get it right." Chole answered with a happy smile.

"Oh, and since you're in Perm, should I drop by for a social?" Chole asked.

"As I don't remember you having dropped by for a social then, I'd rather you'd not. " Cytheria said, not wanting to experience whatever the effects of messing with her own timeline might be like.

~stephen

( Originally written 10 July 2013 -sfe )