He squeezed her shoulder lightly. “Talleyrand can give you letters of introduction, should you reach French territory,” he added. “Hell, some of the noblemen here can give you letters for other Russian officers. You can get the word out.”
“And leave you all to die,” Gwen said.
There was a Talker at the embassy in St Petersburg, she knew, one with the reach to contact London. But getting there would be difficult, even for her. She’d need to find a great deal of food along the way or die in the Russian countryside, but where could she find the food? It was unlikely that the peasants would be interested in helping her. They’d be more likely, if some of the horror stories she’d heard were true, to chop her up for the stew pot.
But even if she did make it to St Petersburg, there was no way anyone from Britain – or France – could reach Moscow in time to help. And God alone knew what the Russian nobility would do. They might side with the Tsar, despite his madness, or start a civil war, while the undead advanced in all directions. It seemed unlikely that they would join the outsiders in stopping the undead while there was still time.
If there is still time, she thought, morbidly. The Tsar’s undead empire was already snowballing rapidly. Who knew where it would end?
Her own words came back to haunt her. If one undead bit a living person, there would be two undead; if both undead bit a living person, there would be four undead; if all four undead found a new victim each, there would be eight undead ... then sixteen, then thirty-two, then ... it would just keep going until they ran out of victims. But Russia was a heavily populated country. By the time they ran out, there would be an unstoppable army heading towards the German states or the Ottoman Empire.
Sir Sidney coughed. Gwen looked up at him, apologetically. She hadn’t realised her thoughts had slipped away from him.
“I wish there was another way,” he said, softly. “But if the end is nigh anyway, use your magic and escape. Get out and warn the rest of the world about the Tsar.”
“Understood,” Gwen said, bitterly. Cold logic told her he was right. But cold logic was no consolation. How could she abandon Olivia, knowing that she would be killed ... or forced to serve the Tsar again? But if she tried to carry someone with her, there was no way she could get as far as she could on her own. “If that’s what I will have to do, that is what I will have to do.”
Sir Sidney tugged on her arm. “Council of war,” he said. “Come on.”
Gwen followed him back across the roof, down the stairwell and into a large room that had been hastily converted into a command centre. She had her doubts about the value of any coordination; the sheer mass of undead would ensure that they would break through the defences in multiple locations, but there was no choice. A handful of men drilled with swords, serving as a reserve to be rushed to any threatened breakthrough. But there weren’t enough of them to hold the line.
A nasty thought occurred to her and she frowned. “We need to check for tunnels,” she said, remembering the catacombs under the cathedral. “Can they bypass our defences by sneaking in underground?”
“We looked,” Sir Sidney said. “But we found nothing.”
Gwen resisted the temptation to roll her eyes as the Council of War slowly gathered. There were procedures for the Royal Sorcerer – and then the Royal Sorceress – to call Councils of War, but as far as she could tell Master Thomas had never bothered. But then, few had doubted his competence and none had doubted that he knew where a great many bodies were buried. If the Royal Sorcerers Corps did wind up going to war, Gwen knew, she would be expected to work with her senior magicians, rather than issuing orders.
Talleyrand gave her a sidelong look, then a wink, as he entered the room. He carried a sword by his side, although Gwen had no idea if he knew how to use it. Talleyrand’s great skills lay in diplomatic manipulation, according to Lord Mycroft, rather than swordplay or military operations. But life at the French Court was sometimes touchy. It was quite possible that Talleyrand knew how to use the blade.
Behind him, Lord Standish stepped into the room. He looked tired, tired enough merely to nod to Gwen rather than say a word. Gwen suspected the older man was looking at the end of his career, even if they did manage to make it out of Moscow successfully. His reputation would not survive losing command of the mission to Sir Sidney, no matter what their sealed orders said. Gwen felt a moment of pity, which she ruthlessly suppressed. Lord Standish had done absolutely nothing to control his wife.
The Russian aristocrat she’d rescued followed Lord Standish in, escorted by one of the other diplomatic representatives. Gwen gave him a surprised look, only to see him bow deeply to her. At least he recognised he owed her a debt of gratitude. She’d met noblemen and women in England who would happily have complained if Gwen had carried out the rescue, as if she’d saved their lives just to spite them. Some people were never satisfied.
“We are all here,” Sir Sidney said. “We shall begin.”
He looked over at Gwen. “I think it is time to discuss everything,” he added. “Tell us how this crisis began.”
Gwen kept her face expressionless with an effort. He could have warned her what he was planning to ask. But that would have given her time to think of a reason not to tell them anything.
Gritting her teeth, she started to explain.
Chapter Thirty
Your daughter is a Necromancer?” Lord Standish said, when Gwen had finished. “Why is she still alive?”
Gwen kept her voice as firmly under control as possible. “It was decided, in the wake of the Swing, that it would be better to have a Necromancer under our control,” she said. There were other considerations, but she kept them to herself. “Olivia’s life was spared and she was allowed to study at Cavendish Hall.”
Talleyrand cleared his throat. “This is a breach of the Treaty of 1810, barring the use of necromancy,” he said. There was a faintly mocking tone to his voice. “I will have to inform my government.”
“Go inform the Tsar,” Gwen snapped, tartly. “I’m sure he’d be very impressed.”
“That would not have happened,” Talleyrand pointed out, “if you’d killed Olivia when you discovered what she was.”
“You used Necromancy in London,” Lord Standish snapped. “How dare you blame us for keeping a pet Necromancer when you did the same?”
Gwen shifted, uncomfortably. The French might have been blamed for the necromantic outbreak in London, but Gwen knew better ... and she suspected Sir Sidney knew better too, if Lord Mycroft had briefed him thoroughly. It had been Master Thomas who had unleashed the undead, allowing them to roam freely and hopefully put an end to the Swing; it had taken Gwen, Jack and Olivia to stop him and bring the undead back under control. The French had been blamed for the crisis afterwards, just to conceal the truth. If it ever got out, Gwen knew, there would be outrage, perhaps even civil war. The secret had to remain buried.
Sir Sidney cleared his throat. “That is beside the point,” he said. “If we don’t get out of Moscow soon, we won’t be reporting anything to anyone.”
He looked from face to face. “We have around four days worth of food, assuming we don’t take in any extra mouths,” he said. “Some of us” – he carefully did not look at Gwen – “require extra food to be effective. However, we can expect to be attacked before we run out of food to eat. Once the Tsar has secured Moscow, he will turn his attention to us and we will be overrun. Our defences are insufficient to stop him.”
His face twitched into a ghoulish smile. “So ... what do we do?”
“We could speak to him,” Lord Standish said. “Remind him that we have diplomatic immunity ...”
Gwen snorted, rudely. “The Tsar is mad,” she said. She had to smile at his shocked reaction. Being contradicted publicly by a slip of a girl had to be a blow to his pride. “He is unlikely to care about diplomatic niceties. Besides, he has good reason to want us all dead. We know too much.”
“Aye, about what he did to himself,” Sir
Sidney said. “Lady Gwen – do you think we could fight our way out of the city?”
“I doubt it,” Gwen said. “He can pour undead on us like raindrops. We wouldn’t even have the protection of these walls. He’d kill us, easily.”
Sir Sidney looked down at the table. “Stay; we die. Go; we die. We need to consider desperate measures.”
“There is a possibility,” the Russian nobleman said. “The Tsar might not yet have claimed control of the garrisons outside the city – or the airship landing strip.”
Lord Standish stared at him. “We could have flown here on an airship?”
“The Tsar dislikes flying,” the Russian explained. “But yes, there are airships near the city.”
“That’s an interesting possibility,” Sir Sidney said. “Alexander, would the crews work for us?”
“You’d have me with you,” the Russian said. “They’d do as they were told.”
Gwen shook her head. “Any Mover or Blazer worthy of the name could bring down an airship,” she said. It would be almost pathetically easy to use magic to cause an airship to explode in midair. “We’d just make ourselves an easy target.”
“If we could get to the airstrip, we could get out, heading away from the Russians,” Sir Sidney mused. “And then make a run for French territory.”
“That would be acceptable,” Talleyrand said. “I’d be happy to hand out safe conduct passes to you and your fellows.”
“We’d still have to get out of the city,” Gwen pointed out. “And we would have no idea what reception awaited us.”
Sir Sidney nodded. “Desperate measures,” he said. He looked up at Gwen, meeting her eyes. “Can your daughter take control of the Tsar’s undead?”
“Apparently not,” Gwen said. “His intellect seems to be directing them – occupying their minds – in a manner no normal Necromancer can match. He’s one of them, to all intents and purposes, as if their shared intelligence resides in one body.”
“Kill the Tsar and the rest of the undead would revert to their normal patterns,” Sir Sidney mused. “But there really are too many of them, aren’t there?”
Gwen nodded. If a few hundred undead could form a hive mind that was terrifyingly intelligent and cunning, a few hundred thousand would be almost unstoppable. Kill the Tsar and the undead would become far more dangerous. But leaving the Tsar alive was almost as risky. His madness would make it impossible to talk sense into his head.
“Then we give them another centre,” Sir Sidney said. “You said an injection of Olivia’s blood was enough to turn the Tsar into an ... undead Necromancer. What if we made a second undead Necromancer of our own.”
Talleyrand jerked. “Are you mad?”
Sir Sidney glowered at the Frenchman. “Do you have another idea?”
“There’s no guarantee that we would be able to repeat their success,” Gwen said, hastily. She really didn’t like the idea, not least because there were just too many unknowns. “And even if we did succeed, whoever we choose to serve as the test subject might collapse into madness too. We’d be swapping one problem for another.”
“We might be able to get enough soldiers from the garrisons to retake the city,” Alexander said, quickly. “There would be no need for extreme measures.”
Gwen and Sir Sidney exchanged glances. The Russians would be unprepared for the undead, no matter how heavily armed they were. It was unlikely the Tsar would have doubted his own success enough to have his men armed with weapons designed for killing undead. And fighting through an urban environment was always difficult. They might be better off advising the Russians to burn Moscow to the ground, keeping the undead penned up until they were consumed by the flames.
“It would be tricky,” Sir Sidney said, diplomatically. “But Lady Gwen can fly you to the garrisons. You can speak to the soldiers and try to convince them to help us.”
Gwen nodded. That, at least, she could do.
There was a sharp tap on the door. Romulus opened it, looking grim. “Sir,” he said, “we have a visitor. He wishes to speak with you.”
Sir Sidney looked puzzled. “A visitor?”
Moments later, a man with a long unkempt beard and a manic look in his eye was shown into the room.
“Greetings in the name of the Father Tsar,” he said. “My name is Gregory.”
***
If there was one advantage to being trapped by a wall of undead, Olivia had decided, it was that most social convention seemed to have gone by the wayside. The Russian girls had thrown themselves into helping to prepare the defences, clutching swords in one hand while rigging up barricades with the other. Olivia had a feeling that they would probably be more dangerous to themselves than the enemy, but at least it would delay the undead, winning the defenders a few more seconds. Or so she hoped.
“There’s someone coming towards us,” Raechel said. She had refused to leave Olivia’s side, even after Olivia had insisted on leaving the bedroom. Now, she spent half of her time staring out of the windows, looking towards the undead. “Just one person.”
Olivia scrambled up beside her and peered through the crack in the boarded-up window. She had warned the defenders that the boards wouldn’t stop the undead for long, but they’d ignored her. Raechel had pointed out that they had to do something, so Olivia had let it slide ... now, she peered through the crack and stared in horror as she saw Gregory walking, as calmly as if he were going to dinner, towards the main doors. It didn’t look as though he was undead, but it hardly mattered. He was a slave of the Tsar.
“Come on,” she said, turning away from the window and picking up one of the throwing knives. “We have to get down there to see him.”
It took nearly five minutes of arguing to get past the guard on the stairwell, who seemed bound and determined to make sure that none of the womenfolk went down to the ground floor. Olivia felt her patience nearly snap before she finally managed to talk their way past him, eventually pointing out that the upper levels were a trap. She was just in time to see the black butler usher Gregory into the room Sir Sidney had turned into a command post. One hand played with the knife as she followed him, knowing that Gwen would understand. And the others simply didn’t matter to her.
“The Father Tsar intends to unite all of Russia under his rule,” Gregory said. “You will not be permitted to interfere.”
Olivia winced at the sound of his voice. It was just as hateful as she remembered, while the smell – if anything – had grown worse. His robes were stained with blood, as if he hadn’t bothered to wash himself since the brief and violent encounter in the catacombs. Perhaps he simply didn’t care, she told herself. It had only been a few short hours – it felt like days – since the Tsar had killed himself, only to rise from the dead.
Gregory swung round to look at one of the Russian noblemen. “The Tsar has the best interests of Russia at heart,” he added. “Why do you oppose him?”
“The Tsar is killing his own people,” the nobleman said. “He’s gone mad.”
“The Tsar is bringing them all into a glorious new union,” Gregory said. “As you too will be brought in, when the time comes.”
“Never,” the nobleman said.
Gregory turned his attention back to Sir Sidney and Talleyrand. “Your nations have engaged in plots against the Father Tsar and his country. You have armed the enemies of the Tsar – and the enemies of God Himself. You have allowed foreign ideas to waft into the Russian Empire and contaminate its people. You have threatened to destroy a stability that has lasted for hundreds of years and replace it with chaos. You cannot be forgiven for your crimes.”
“We cannot be blamed for the spread of liberal ideas into your country,” Sir Sidney said. “If your people saw fit to consider them ...”
“Your claims of innocence are ill-founded,” Gregory said. “Your people exist as servants of your monarchs. Whatever they do is done with the consent of their rulers. We know you saw fit to weaken Russia” – his gaze fell on Talleyrand – �
�even in the guise of allies.”
He was mad, Olivia knew. The Father Tsar had to know that monarchs weren’t absolute rulers, able to dictate the thoughts and actions of their subordinates. His own experience should have taught him the dangers of assuming so, even before Ivan had tried to sneak Olivia out of the complex to safety. Or maybe he was just trying to build up a justification for attacking the palace.
She shook her head. But why would he bother?
Gregory’s gaze swept the room. “But the Father Tsar is merciful,” he continued. His voice became a sneer. “In exchange for one little concession, he will allow you and your families to leave the country, alive and well. You will be escorted back to St Petersburg and put on a ship bound for your homelands. But we will demand the concession first.”
“And what,” Talleyrand said, “do you want in exchange?”
Gregory swung all the way around until he was staring at Olivia. “We want the Necromancer,” he said, his face twisting into a leer. “Give her to us and we will allow the rest of you to leave.”
“No,” Gwen said, flatly.
Talleyrand looked over at her. “Can we hope to escape?”
Gregory took a step towards Olivia. “I will take her from this place,” he said. “And you and yours may leave in peace.”
Cold hatred, rage and fear burned through Olivia’s mind. She clutched the knife in her hand, then threw it with lethal force. Gregory staggered as the knife landed in his throat, his face becoming a shocked mask, then fell to the ground, blood pooling around his body. Olivia watched, fearful that he would rise again, but instead his body merely twitched and went still. Behind her, she heard Raechel being noisily sick.
“That ... that could have cost us our lives, you stupid girl,” one of the older men snapped, angrily. “They could have let us go!”
“They wouldn’t have let us go,” Gwen said. She rose to her feet and hurried over to Olivia, holding out her arms, tossing her look over her shoulder at the older man. “Do you really believe he meant a word of his offer?”
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