by Sarah Ash
How could there be people singing out here, so far from shelter? She shook her head, trying to clear the persistent sound.
Suddenly a memory flung her way back into the warm kitchen at the kastel. She could only have been four, five years old. She had knelt, nose pressed to the cold pane, smearing the glass with her hot breath. Outside the snow twirled and swirled, wind-spun eddies of chill white down.
“The old snow woman’s plucking her geese again,” Sosia had said, busily stirring vegetables into soup at the cooking range.
As Kiukiu stared out, she saw figures amid the snow, vague and insubstantial, wreathing in a swirling dance. Their wild hair spun about their slender bodies like spirals of frost-hazed mist. And then it seemed as if they saw her at the window, for the dance ceased and they clustered together, stretching out fingers as thin as icicles, their eyes huge and dark as the moonless sky.
“Auntie,” Kiukiu had called. “Who are they? Those people outside?”
“No one is outside in this blizzard,” Sosia replied distractedly, concentrating on the soup.
And then she had heard the voices. Wisps of sound at first, cold and brittle as hoarfrost, then the singing grew stronger, wilder. The music was so beautiful that it made her heart ache. She had never heard anything so beautiful in her life.
And before she knew what she was doing, she was getting down, walking toward the door, wanting to go out into the snow. . . .
She ran smack into the legs of a tall man who stopped and caught hold of her.
“Where are you off to, little one?”
It was one of the druzhina, Yuri, Auntie Sosia’s elder brother.
“Outside. To join the singing.”
“There’s no singing outside. Only blizzard.”
He picked her up and carried her back into the kitchen, dumping her on the table.
“But the dancers—”
“Haven’t you ever heard of the Snow Spirits?” He crouched down so that his head was on a level with hers. “The spirits of people who died out on the moors in the snows? They come back with the blizzard every winter and they sing to lure the living to their deaths in the snow.”
“What nonsense are you filling her head with now?” Sosia cried, turning around from the bubbling pot. “There’s no such thing as Snow Spirits. It’s just a silly tale.”
Just a silly tale . . . Kiukiu repeated to herself now, trudging doggedly on. No one there. Only the wind.
Pale faces, white as mist, loomed out of the swirling snowflakes. Spindle-thin fingers, translucent as icicles, plucked at her hair, her clothes.
Voices breathed in her ear, whispering of the cold caress of the snow.
“You’re not there!” shouted Kiukiu. “I don’t believe in you. You don’t exist!”
A thin, high voice began to sing in the mist. It sang of snow-filled wastes, the white vastness of the icebound sea. The song was pure as clear ice and bitter as eternal winter.
Kiukiu was desperately tired now. She stumbled, nearly fell. She tried to block the song from her mind.
Many voices joined the one. “Rest,” they sang. “Let us wrap you in soft snow, let us sing you to sleep.”
“I can’t hear you,” Kiukiu cried. How did they know all she wanted was to stop and lie down? She could no longer feel her feet. Her throat and lungs burned with the cold, dry snow air. But if she stopped it was as good as giving up. . . .
Her foot caught in a knotted clump of heather. She pitched forward, putting out her numbed hands to try and save herself. Too late. Snow Spirits wreathed around her, hands linked in a swirling, spinning dance. She was trapped.
“Help me!” she called vainly into the darkness. She tried to push herself back up but the snow clung to her clothes, weighing her down as still the spirits circled, closer, closer . . .
Faces glanced down at her, white as death, cruel and bleakly beautiful as mountain snow. Chill fingers caressed her, each drifting caress numbing her blood until she cowered, shivering uncontrollably in the wet snowdrifts.
“Help me!” she called again, even though she knew there was no one to help her.
“Sleep,” sang the sweet, cold voices, stroking their chill fingers through her hair.
Kiukiu saw a dark doorway slowly opening before her. With growing dread she recognized the yawning blackness beyond. It was the portal to the Ways Beyond, the portal she had last crossed with Lord Volkh’s spirit-wraith clinging to her. Now it yawned open for her alone.
“No!” she cried, furious that she should have to die like this. “I’m not going to go through! It’s not my time yet! I have to protect Lord Gavril. I gave my word—”
“Why go on suffering?” whispered a single voice close to her ear. “Give in. Let go. Is life so sweet?”
Kiukiu sank back into the snow, exhausted. The black portal towered above her. She was too weak to resist it. Already she could feel the dark leaking into her mind, filling it with death-cold shadows. As she sank back into the snow, her will begin to waver. The darkness was surrounding her, numbing all her senses. All she could hear was the whispering chant of the Snow Spirits. She was fading . . .
Dying.
CHAPTER 17
The warship Sirin rocked at anchor on the broad river Nieva, her sails furled. A cold, gusting wind whipped the river water into choppy waves.
The White Guard lined the quay as the ducal party, well-wrapped against the wind in furs and cloaks, left the Winter Palace by the Water Gate. There were few onlookers; only a vast flock of gray and white seagulls floated on the water.
“Gulls in the city,” Eupraxia said as she and Elysia watched from an upper window. “It must be stormy out in the estuary.”
Andrei Orlov, dashingly arrayed in his naval uniform of royal blue, gold buttons gleaming in the cold sunlight, drew apart from the ducal party and saluted his father and mother.
“Oh,” sobbed Eupraxia into her handkerchief, “my little Andrei. Look how handsome he is.”
Suddenly the Grand Duchess hastened forward and flung her arms around her son.
Perhaps she has a heart after all, Elysia thought.
“Why must he go?” Eupraxia whispered. “He’s only a boy. Suppose Prince Eugene’s fleet attacks them? Suppose the Sirin sinks? Suppose . . .”
Astasia was hugging her brother now. Elysia saw him gently disengage her arms from about his neck and kiss her on both cheeks. Then, with a final wave of the hand, he climbed down into the rowboat that was bobbing ready beneath the quay, and the sailors began to pull across the choppy water toward the Sirin.
Elysia heard a few ragged cheers from the onlookers, and a military band played—rather badly—the national anthem as Andrei scrambled up the ladder and reached the deck. An answering salvo from the Sirin’s cannon sent a cloud of seagulls screeching up into the gray sky. The anchor chain began to grate as the sailors labored at the capstan to wind up the heavy anchor.
“So few of the city people to see him,” mused Elysia.
“People are afraid to show their support,” said Eupraxia with a sigh. “It’s those wretched intellectuals at the university. Intellectuals! Insurgents, I call them, filling people’s heads with their scurrilous nonsense. Free speech, indeed!”
Sails were unfurled and slowly the great ship began to slip away.
“Madame Andar?” A liveried servant appeared, presenting her with a letter on a silver salver.
She tore it open and saw only the laconic message:
I have traced our friend K. This man will bring you to me. Come incognito.
F.V.
An unmarked carriage waited at a side entrance of the Winter Palace. Count Velemir helped Elysia in and climbed in after her.
“Where are we going?” Elysia asked as the carriage pulled away over the cobbles.
“Our friend Kazimir has lodgings down by the docks. Not a very salubrious area for a respectable woman to explore alone.”
“The docks? Why is he not at the university?”
&n
bsp; “As I warned you, Elysia, Altan Kazimir is a changed man. Suspicious of his own shadow, edgy, unpredictable. He seems to believe that there is a price on his head.”
Elysia nodded. No one escapes Azhkendir unchanged, she thought—but did not say so aloud.
“In order not to alarm the good doctor unduly, you will have to enter the street unaccompanied. Help will be close at hand, should you need it. I have placed a man or two in the vicinity.” He leaned across and took her hands in his. “I would not put you at risk, Elysia, for all the world—but there is no other way.”
The little carriage had turned off the wide avenue and was proceeding down a steeply winding street, overhung with dilapidated buildings that blocked out much of the daylight. Raucous street cries could be heard now, and pungent smells began to penetrate the carriage: frying onions; smoking fish; rotting refuse.
“Kazimir lodges above the Sign of the Orrery. It is a tavern on the corner of the quay; you cannot miss it. We will set you down before the quay and we will wait for you there. But if Kazimir turns violent, just open a window, any window, and cry out, ‘Azhgorod!’”
“Now you’re really beginning to alarm me,” Elysia said, essaying a smile. The smell of herring from the smokehouses was beginning to make her feel a little queasy.
She climbed down from the coach and gazed uneasily around her. She had taken the precaution, as he advised her, of wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a veil. A new smell assaulted her nostrils: the stink of boiling pitch. Out in the middle of the river she could see a little island where many fine ships were moored for repairs. The boisterous wind was blowing tar-fumed smoke directly toward the quay.
Wrapping her veil more tightly about her face, she ventured out along the quay, head down. She had to pick her way across mud-slimed cobbles where gulls fought over fish guts discarded by the herring-wives who clustered together to do their messy work, chatting and laughing raucously. This, at any rate, was no different from the harbor in Vermeille.
When she passed two sailors staggering along, propping each other up, yelling a shanty, she knew she must be near her goal. Gazing upward, she saw the Orrery sign flapping wildly overhead in the gusts of wind.
She pushed open the door. The dark taproom was filled with a haze of pipe smoke that made her eyes water. Men turned toward her, staring.
“What do you want?” A thin-faced woman appeared, carrying mugs of ale. She glared at Elysia.
“Doctor Kazimir.”
The woman gave her a quizzical look. “Out the back,” she said. “To the left just before the yard.”
Elysia hurried through the taproom and almost ran headfirst into a burly sailor hitching up his trousers, coming in from what the woman had euphemistically called “the yard.”
Elysia shrank back to let him pass. When he had lumbered by, she saw, with relief, a blue-painted door to her left. Lifting the latch, she went through and found herself at the foot of a narrow wooden stair.
“Doctor Kazimir?” she called, wishing her voice sounded less hesitant.
There was no reply.
At the top of the stairs was a little door. The landing ceiling was so low she had to stoop to knock.
“Go away!” came a man’s voice from within.
“Doctor Kazimir, I’ve come a very long way to see you.”
“Go away!” repeated the voice irritably.
Elysia tried the door latch but it was locked. She would have to try a different tack.
“My name is Elysia Nagarian. Bogatyr Kostya Torzianin has kidnapped my son Gavril and taken him to Azhkendir.” What was she doing, shouting her most intimate secrets through a wooden door to some eccentric scientist who had barricaded himself in?
“What’s that to me?”
“I—” She stopped a moment, almost speechless with frustration. “I hoped you could help me. There’s no one else in all Mirom who knows anything about Azhkendir.”
There was a silence on the other side of the door.
“You’re alone?”
“Yes,” she said, trusting there was nothing sinister implied in his question.
There came another silence—and then she heard the sound of furniture being dragged across bare boards. Chains clinked, bolts were shot, and at last the door opened a little way, and a bespectacled man peered out at her from the gloom.
“You’d better come in.”
Elysia squeezed inside—and could not help noticing how Doctor Kazimir put his head outside, checking the stair before closing the door, standing with his back to it, as if to prevent anyone else getting in.
Elysia raised her veil and looked at him quizzically. She hoped that she had not just walked into a madman’s trap.
“I—I’ve got little in the way of refreshment to offer you, madame.” He edged away from the door, his movements nervous and uncoordinated. “Not even tea. Only vodka.”
Elysia shook her head. “Nothing, thank you.”
He reached for a half-empty bottle of vodka and poured himself a glass, swallowing it down in one gulp.
“You—you must excuse me. This is not how I usually entertain visitors. P-please sit down.”
The dingy room was meagerly furnished; the table was covered with a clutter of glasses and empty bottles. The clean smell of spirits did not quite obscure the stronger smell of unwashed flesh.
As Elysia sat down on a rickety chair, she noticed a battered traveling trunk in one corner, half-open, spilling out dirty linen and books. Doctor Kazimir had either recently arrived, or not bothered to unpack.
“How did you find me?” he asked warily. His voice, though light and a little tremulous, was not unpleasant. If he shaved, Elysia thought, looking at the several days’ growth of fair stubble—if he let the barber attend to his long, straggling hair—he would prove quite well-favored.
“I have connections at court,” Elysia said, equally warily.
Doctor Kazimir sat down at the table opposite her, one hand clutching the vodka bottle, the other his empty glass. He began to speak; yet due to his agitation, the words came out in a rush.
“I—I must tell you, madame, that when I left Azhkendir, Lord Volkh was alive. The news that he had been killed was a shock to me, a total shock. We did not part on the best of terms, you see, and now I regret that. Not only because the druzhina put a bloodprice on my head, but because your husband was in his own way an honorable man, forced to bear an intolerable burden—”
“This is all well and good,” Elysia said patiently, “but it is my son’s plight that brings me here.”
“Your son. I never met your son.” Kazimir raked one hand through his lank, fair hair. “You must understand, Madame Nagarian, that I was on my way to Arkhelskoye when the news of Lord Volkh’s murder broke. Suddenly I was a wanted man! I was forced to disguise myself and seek the first passage out—on a fur trader’s vessel. The smell of the stinking pelts clings to me still. . . .”
“So you can’t help me.” Elysia, who till this moment had been clinging onto this one vain hope, felt herself engulfed in a wave of hopelessness. She rose, pulling the veil down to conceal the tears that had begun to well in her eyes.
“No, wait!” cried Kazimir, leaping up. “I am ashamed, madame, to receive you in this fashion. What must you think of me? It’s just that I have been in constant fear for my life since the news broke, moving from one filthy tavern room to another—”
“So?” Elysia said coldly.
Kazimir lifted the bottle and shakily began to pour another glass. The bottle rattled against the glass and the liquor spilled onto the table.
After another gulp, he began to speak. “Your husband wanted to find a cure. He wanted to become human again. He wanted to stop—or even reverse—the unusual condition he had inherited. He believed from his research that the Drakhaons were in some way related to reptiles or serpents. The old legend . . .”
“The first Volkh Nagarian was called the Son of the Serpent,” murmured Elysia.
“And that
maybe the lethal venom with which he killed his enemies could also be used to produce an antidote.”
“An antidote?”
“You had not seen him for many years?”
“No.” For a moment she saw him again, saw those broodingly dark eyes, burning unnaturally blue in the darkness of their bedchamber. And she heard again his voice shiver through the icy Azhkendir night, the cry of a beast cursed with a human soul.
“He was . . . extraordinary.” The doctor slowly shook his head, as if what he had seen was still beyond his comprehension. “Such a unique condition.”
“How, unique?” Elysia was thinking of Gavril, not Volkh, now. For all these years she had been silently watching him, hoping against hope that the telltale signs of his father’s deformities had not begun to manifest themselves.
“I have spent my life trying to explain and explore the mysteries of the natural sciences, madame. But I had never before encountered a condition such as this—one that defied scientific explanation. I could have spent a lifetime researching it. But Lord Volkh did not have a lifetime. He wanted a cure.”
“Is such a thing possible?” Elysia had wanted to leave. Now, against her better judgment, she found herself compelled to listen to Kazimir’s tale. If there were the slightest hope . . .
“We began to experiment with the . . .” and Kazimir’s voice dropped, as if he were afraid they were being overheard, “the venom. In miniscule doses. A process of desensitization, if you care to call it that.”
“And what effect did it have?” Elysia found that in spite of herself, she had drawn closer to the doctor.
“The desired effect. The physical changes began to be reversed. But as I had suspected, the more human Lord Volkh began to look, the more his powers dwindled. The elixir I developed restored his humanity but left him weak, unable to transform himself.”
Elysia shuddered, remembering the nightmare she had tried to block from her mind all these years. Transformation. That was a rational, prosaic way of describing something so darkly visceral, so profoundly terrifying, that it had deprived her of speech for several days. Volkh had warned her that there was a side of his life that she could never share—and she, foolishly, had thought he referred only to his military campaigning, never imagining . . .