“I’m a friend,” said the deep voice behind him. “A bringer of gifts, a guide to the strange beauties of the worlds beyond the world.” That big hand came down with a reassuring pressure on his shoulder. “But you’re their father, and the noble Lady Mar’ya Morevna is their mother, and they know where the difference lies.”
*
Sitting up after midnight, fully dressed as if it was daylight outside and drinking their hot milk from real adult wine-cups, Kolya and Tasha were enjoying themselves immensely. They’d even seen their father the Tsar rebuild a fire in the stove with his own hands and swear, without much originality and no new words, at the servants who wanted to do the work for him. “This is a family matter,” he’d said, among other things. It was all very thrilling and grown-up.
Ivan sneezed twice, dusted ash and bark-chips off his fingers and squatted back from the stove, then decided it would do and closed the iron door with a clank. He eyed the twins sidelong, watching them grin and giggle and nudge one another with their elbows to provoke still more giggles. Tell them the problem and ask for their help. That was easy to say, easier still when you weren’t the person having to shape the question into something a seven-year-old mind could understand. Who could say that the prospect of things crawling into the world from Outside wasn’t as exciting as being awake after bedtime?
But then, why shape it at all? These two precocious infants already knew more about the sorcerous Gates than Ivan had been able to force into his brain during all of his years of study. They probably knew more than their mother, and had she not said as much? Tsar Ivan of Khorlov stood up, wiped the stove-soot from his hands, considered a drink to give himself some courage – for talking to your own son and daughter? – then threw the idea aside. Tonight of all nights, his mind had to stay sharp.
“Nikolai Ivanovich, Anastasya Ivanovna, pay heed to what I tell you.” He watched them compose themselves as best they could, but these were the same children he’d once said had all the attention span of a mayfly or some such insect. Asking them to listen closely was as optimistic as putting a fish on horseback and expecting it to ride. “In this city of Sarai is a strong place, a treasure-house where the Ilkhan Batu —”
“Old Stinkyfeet,” said Nikolai helpfully.
“Er, yes, him. Anyway, that’s where he keeps the crowns of twelve kingdoms, and —”
“You found them?” Anastasya burst out, her eyes shining with delight. “Oh Papa, how clever you are! Mama told us they were here, and we knew anyway because they made our heads hurt, but not even she knew where they were hidden!”
The dismissive little flick of one hand the Grey Wolf made was perhaps the most generous thing he’d ever done for the Tsar of Khorlov. But their lack of surprise about the discovery proved, as he suspected, that his children knew as much about matters in hand as he did. And probably more.
“Then do you know what I was going to ask you?”
There was a silence; then a pause and some muttering and nudging of the ‘you do it’ – ‘no, you’ variety, before Nikolai sat up very straight, folded his hands in his lap and recited carefully, “‘Let one who can bear it take away a thing of great power to lessen the weight of that power, so what has been laid on the fabric of the world may be lightened and the render – no, rending – thereof be spared.’” The boy relaxed a little. “That’s what it says in the book.”
“What book?” Ivan guessed the answer, but there was always the chance he might be wrong.
He was right.
O Prizvanyi Besov. That was Enciervanul Doamnisoar, in its old title. On the Summoning of Demons.
“You were reading that?” said Ivan, doing his best not to sound as appalled as he felt, and there was momentary relief when both of the children shook their heads. It lasted no more than the drawing of a breath.
“We couldn’t read it,” said Natasha. “But Mama read it to us.”
“Not the best bits,” Nikolai added, sounding a little resentful.
Ivan accepted the twins knowing more about the crowns than he did, but hearing where they’d learned about the problem was another matter. Maybe it was true what philosophers said, that children’s minds were more resilient when it came to horrors than they were given credit for. All he knew was that his children weren’t among those the philosophers were thinking about and he, fully grown and adult in most things, had lain awake and sweating after skimming through that particular book for the first time.
And even then he’d taken pains to avoid ‘the best bits.’
“I can take them to the treasure-house, Vanya,” said the Grey Wolf. “No need for you to come with us.”
Ivan blinked once, twice, then turned an empty stare on Volk Volkovich, wondering if his sudden spasm of horror been so obvious. He shook his head. “They’re my son and my daughter. I may be nothing more than dead weight, an ignorant, uneducated lump of meat, but where they go, I go.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“My friend,” Ivan punched the Grey Wolf amiably in the ribs, hard enough to hurt, “what you meant or didn’t mean doesn’t matter. It’s the way I feel right now. Mar’ya Morevna would have been the saviour of this undertaking and her children are a good second-best. While I …”
If he’d drunk enough to completely blunt his sense of pride, Ivan might have said exactly where he stood amid these cold equations. Instead he walked to the wall and unhooked the shashka sabre hanging there, attached its scabbard to his belt and turned around with the blade half drawn. The metallic sound as he slapped it home again was as sharp as the clapping of hands.
“I can use this, if it’s needed. Let’s go.”
*
Ivan shook the clangour of abrupt passage between the worlds out of his head, and tried not to be sick as what had once passed for equilibrium reeled through his inner ear backwards and upside down. He sniffed through a nose trying to bleed from the impossible pressures and decided in a detached sort of way that as a form of travel, there was little to recommend this process.
At least – looking sourly from side to side – not unless the traveller was an oborotyen wolfling or a child quickened halfway between Moist-Mother-Earth and the Summer Country. The ordinary route of Gate and circle might have been more dangerous, but it was at least more comfortable. This way was like being a sheet of parchment folded in upon itself a thousand times to fit through the spaces that separated one world from the next, then brutally snapped open again at the final destination. Small wonder he had a bloody nose and his ears rang. If the Firebird felt like this when it was snatched through the worldwarp created by the stolen crowns, then no wonder its temper was fraying at the edges. Ivan would have been grateful had it been just his temper. Instead it felt as if his mind, his body and the very sinews that held his muscles together were all unravelling at once.
And in a light that someone had conjured up to see by, the floor was winking at him with a million yellow eyes. He blinked, and blinked again, and all those eyes slid into focus with a snap.
The golden hoard of the Golden Horde was everything that Volk Volkovich had said, and more. His disinterest had taken colour from his words, and castrated the lust that such a mountain of gold might have for men of normal appetites.
To be Tsar of Khorlov was one thing, but Khorlov had never been a wealthy realm and the gold and jewels scattered here could make it a domain second to none in the wide white world. Ivan went down on one knee and scooped up gemstones in his two cupped hands; rubies like blood, sapphires like a summer sky at evening, emeralds green as grass and pearls like quicksilver tears, all of them shot through with the cold white fire of diamonds.
He poured them like sand back down through his fingers so that they clattered blazing in their myriad colours across the hard stone floor, then lifted another handful. This time it was of gold, minted coins with the heads of dead or conquered kings, and tiny, perfect ingots each half the length of a man’s fingers that a high-born lady might wear strung on wires to ad
orn herself, all cold against his skin but their weight extraordinary, and each possessed of its own yellow-metal sheen.
Ilkhan Batu was no Dragon, to know the place and the provenance and the value of every last jewel here, and the fill of just one belt-pouch, a quantity so small among all this as to be dust beneath the feet, would secure Khorlov and all the people of Khorlov for generations yet to come.
Then a coin, just one coin, fell to the floor and rolled chiming like a gong to join the snowdrift heaping of its mates.
“No, Papa,” said Natasha. Her pale brows were drawn together as the grinding pressure of the place crushed down on her brain, but there was no disapproval of his action in her voice, just surprise that he touched this treasure in the first place. “Leave them be. They’re dirty.”
Nikolai came over and crouched down by Ivan’s side. He too had the look of a child whose head was aching, and as he put out his own hands to hold his father’s, Ivan could see how they shook. “This is a horrible place, Papa,” he said softly. “Can’t you see the blood?”
Ivan looked; at his son, at his daughter, and at the riches held within his two cupped hands. Riches taken from a hundred conquered cities, riches paid for with a hundred thousand lives. And he saw.
The gold wept congealing drools of sticky crimson down between his fingers and the smell that clogged his nostrils was no longer gold but sheared copper, the stench of blood. Stealing it to use for Khorlov’s benefit would be like building a palace on a foundation of skulls, and Ivan had seen piled-up skulls enough since he left home. He opened his hands and the gold cascaded to the ground. Far away he could hear the high, metallic echoes of metal against stone but in the privacy of his own head the only sound was a repetitive damp thud like dropped gobbets of raw meat.
“Here,” said Volk Volkovich.
The Grey Wolf had thrown back the lids of all the wooden boxes, and to Ivan’s eyes the royal crowns within them glowed with a cleaner radiance than the soiled gold and jewels on the floor. He stood up, wiping stains from his hands that only he could see, and examined the carving and the decoration on each box in an attempt to learn the origin of the crown it held. “This, this and this,” he said at last, lifting each one from its padded case as he spoke. “One each. That should serve to do something at least.”
Volk Volkovich gazed at them, and then at him. “Why one and not another?” he said. Ivan closed the wooden boxes one after another, a chorus of small, sharp snapping sounds, then touched each of the chosen crowns in turn.
“Because I recognize these three. They didn’t come willingly into Batu’s hands, so maybe stealing them back might ease the warping more than taking any other. This is the Great Crown of the Great Princes of Kiev. The city fell by storm, and its people were slaughtered. There’s the Crown of Vladimir, a lord so highly regarded that his domain adopted his name for ever after. And that – you saw the siege that took it – is from Ryazan, last worn by Roman Ingvarevich before the Tatars impaled him outside his own city gates. Old crowns with much power and taken, not given. We should take them back.”
Nikolai Ivanovich was staring wide-eyed at the three crowns. “I thought the gold was bloody, father,” he said, sounding sick. “But these are awful. I know we have to carry one, but can we do it now, and go?”
Ivan saw nothing, and knew that meant nothing. He wondered whether the blood Kolya saw was all to do with the Tatars and if not, what the boy would see the first time he looked long and hard at the Great Crown of Khorlov. Much blood had been spilled down the years to secure the realm or the succession, and Aleksey Romanov’s death might still drip warm from the jewelled gold that Ivan had killed him to defend.
“Yes,” he said, lifting the crown of Kiev and tucking it beneath one arm. The thought of wearing it had been unmannerly before, and now was revolting. “Volk Volkovich, do what you need to do to get us out of here. Now. At once.”
*
The light oozing through the shuttered windows was as dull and grey as any other day that Ivan Aleksandrovich could remember since he first arrived in Sarai. But it was still far too bright, bright enough to hurt even though his still half-asleep mind was sure he hadn’t drunk enough last night to justify the way he felt this morning. One bleary eye not shrouded by the covers of the too-big, too-empty bed glanced around the room, looking for empty bottles, upturned furniture, even the boots of a guest sleeping off his skinful underneath the table. None of those. Just three lumps on the floor, two wrapped in old cloaks and the third in what could have passed for his best outdoor coat. But as for—
Three lumps on the floor?
“God guard us all!”
Even though Ivan’s head was still pounding as though someone was using it for a drum with a war-mace as a drumstick, he shot out of bed in a swirl of furs and oaths and blankets. The oaths had to do with what it felt like when the cold air of the room hit his naked skin, and he realized he’d locked the door to keep any servant from coming in and seeing the three stolen crowns. That meant no one had been able to get in and light the stove, but it didn’t matter, because his unpleasant dream had been real. Ivan squatted down and gingerly unwrapped the first of those anonymous lumps. This was Sarai, the city of the Golden Horde, and they might have been severed human heads.
They were nothing of the sort. The crown of the city-state of Kiev gleamed out at him, three hundred and twenty-seven years of history all wrapped up in a single piece of gold dressed with fur and jewels. Though he didn’t have his son or daughter’s talent at sensing such things, Ivan could feel the abstract energy called Power to Rule come off it like heat off a coal fresh from the fire. Except that this felt cold. He shivered violently, then bundled his trophy up again and started looking about for somewhere to stow it. There was a loose floorboard somewhere, because he could remember an irritating squeak underfoot somewhere near the window, but whether there would be enough space beneath it was another matter.
He would rather get the damned and damning things right out of the city, but that was out of the question either by magical or ordinary means. If Mar’ya Morevna was here, she could open a storage space in some alternate reality which the Tatars didn’t know existed, never mind find and search. But if Mar’ya Morevna had been in Sarai, they wouldn’t have needed to bring the crowns back here in the first place.
They’d almost failed to do even that.
In fact they’d barely made it back to the house, because Volk Volkovich had underestimated how much strength a seven-year-old child would need to carry any sorcerous artefact through a Gate, no matter how short the distance or how talented the child. The third crown, the one Ivan had carried himself, had only confirmed the burden.
Well, never mind.
He lowered the third bundle down into the space beneath the bedroom floor, dropped the floorboard back in place and secured the whole thing by dragging a clothes-chest on top of it. The unsettling business was all past and done with, no one had come to any harm and both wolf and children had told him they already sensed an easing of the pressure hanging over the city. They had staggered off to bed, the twins to their room and Volk Volkovich to the servants’ quarters since nobody ever noticed an extra servant more or less, while Ivan had fallen over almost where he stood.
Now the autumn equinox could come and go as it pleased. It fell tonight, so they had acted just in time. From that view of the disregarded plunder locked away and forgotten in the shadows of the treasure-house, Ilkhan Batu might never notice anything was missing. No one would know a threatened catastrophe had been averted, and the Tsar of Khorlov could never claim the credit, either. Ivan grinned at nothing in particular, and crawled back into bed.
Half an hour later he was awake again, listening to the thunderous pounding of fists on the street door and wondering what the hell was going on. Then he looked at the handsome, flower-patterned wall, trying to remember the last time he’d checked to see if the spy-holes were in use, and felt his stomach turn to a cold lump of lead inside him.<
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He was half-dressed, shirt and breeches and one boot, when other boots came thudding along the corridor outside and more fists drummed against his bedroom door. “Open up, Khorlovskiy!” Now there was a voice he knew and hated. “Open up or we break the door down!”
Ivan didn’t bother with the other boot. He knew the threat wasn’t an idle one, and if Amragan tarkhan was going to enter the room he would do it whether the door was locked or not. At least he could deny the Turk any satisfaction of smashing his way in. Ivan pulled back the bolts at top and bottom and stepped neatly aside as a burly Tatar about to ram his shoulder against the timbers came lurching past.
“Well, well,” he said, as casually as he could. “To what do I owe this pleasure so early in the morning?”
“Whether it’s a pleasure remains to be seen, Russian,” said Amragan tarkhan as he strode inside. The Turk wasn’t wearing his usual coat but half-armour, pulled on in haste if the misaligned laces meant anything. “Were you expecting other visitors?”
For an instant Ivan didn’t know what Amragan meant, then realized that though he hadn’t wasted time putting on his second boot, he’d pulled his sabre from its hooks by the door and the sheathed weapon was still in his hand. “I, er, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Even you’re usually more polite when you come calling.”
The Golden Horde Page 32