Nine Layers of Sky Read online

  “So,” she prompted him.

  “So. In the early nineteen twenties—” he glanced up, unsure whether she would understand the date, but she nodded.

  “I know,” she said. “Go on.”

  “I was involved with the secret police just after the Russian Revolution—the Cheka, under a man named Dzerzhinsky. They sent me to kill someone, a scientist named Tsilibayev. They told me he had invented a time machine, which probably sounds less ridiculous to you and me than to most of the Russian population, and he was going to turn it over to the Germans. I did not manage to kill him, but I destroyed his equipment and his laboratory. As far as I understand, the thing that fell into Elena’s hands is an original piece of technology, a device that Tsilibayev copied. I understand also that it is a kind of key, to open a gate between worlds.” But he did not want to tell her that he seemed able to activate it, that it spoke to him and that he believed it had sought him out.

  The woman was looking at him, her expression unreadable. “Tell me something. If you had known what the equipment was, that it opens a way through into this world of Byelovodye, and if you had seen a little of this world, would you still have destroyed the laboratory?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “An honest answer, if a weak one.”

  “I don’t believe in simple solutions. I’ve seen where they lead.”

  “What happened after you destroyed the lab?”

  “I was sent to Siberia, to one of the camps. Later, in Stalin’s day, twenty thousand died in that region, in Kolyma and other Gulags. The Trans-Siberian Railway is built on their bones. That is why I no longer believe in simple solutions.”

  “We have nothing like that here,” the woman said. She stubbed out the cigarette, as if for emphasis.

  “That’s what I would have said about Russia, once.”

  “But this is a better world. Byelovodye is the sum of Russia’s lessons.” She leaned forward and he could see the belief in her eyes. It was, he realized, a long time since he had been witness to that particular brand of faith, perhaps not since the advent of Perestroika. But unless he was greatly mistaken, there was still a trace of doubt behind her eyes, like a pike in a pool.

  “That’s what I would have said about Russia,” he echoed.

  “Byelovodye—the Secret Republic—is Russia’s heart. How can I make you understand?”

  He understood well enough, he thought, but he could not yet believe, however much he wanted to.

  “You can help me find my lover,” Ilya told her. “That’s the only convincing I’ll need.”

  “I will see what can be done,” she said very grudgingly. Ilya recognized her reluctance. Their goals might coincide, but she did not want to appear to be giving him any quarter. As she reached the door, she turned and said, “Anikova. Colonel, to you.”

  “Ilya Vladimirievitch,” Ilya said in the old manner. He was not admitting to heroic status, not just yet. He saw a twitch of annoyance in her face, then she went through the door.

  Three

  BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

  They had carried her up into the hills above the apricot groves. The land was stony and cold, still fringed with snow. Elena’s head was ringing with the ride and with the discomfort and indignity of being held upside down.

  A collection of yurts rose like growths out of the hard ground, from which children ran to meet the horde. The horsemen greeted their fellows with triumphant cries, shrill as wolf pups. There were many women as well as men; all wore pointed caps and carried bows. The Golden Warrior slid down from the saddle as soon as they arrived, and stalked into a yurt. Elena was hauled from the white mare’s back like a sack of potatoes and dumped unceremoniously before a narrow strip of fire dug deep into the earth. The horsemen left her there, and went to tend to their mounts. She stank of horses and sweat. She held close the knowledge that Ilya was not badly hurt; she had seen him rise.

  Something roared overhead. She saw a slender craft like an arrow, starred with lights. Then it was gone, down over the horizon. The horsemen gave derisory laughs; someone spat into the coals with a hiss. Elena stayed where she was. If she tried to make a run for it, she would be caught and dragged back. If by some chance she managed to escape, she would freeze. She longed for Ilya, with an ache that alarmed her, and longed also for his sword. She should, she thought, have followed her instincts and bought a gun on the black market. But superior weapons had not prevented her abduction.

  An old woman thrust a plate in front of her. Elena looked down at something frosted and bloody, cut into strips.

  “Eat, eat,” the woman said, in fractured Russian. Elena picked up a sliver and tasted it gingerly. It was horse liver. It might be all she was going to get and besides, this stuff was a delicacy back in Kazakhstan. The realization that she was being treated well warmed her more than the fire. She smiled up at the woman, intending to try out her paltry Kazakh vocabulary and see how that went down.

  “Rakhmat.” The old woman gave a beaming smile, which vanished almost as soon as it appeared.

  “Eat,” she said again, and went back into one of the yurts. She was wearing stout Russian boots beneath her woolen skirts. So much for ethnic purity, Elena thought, even here. She could do with a pair of those boots herself. She forced down the rest of the liver, then accepted a flat round of lepeshka bread and a cup, a fragile thing made of birch-bark, containing herb tea sweetened with honey. At least she would not go hungry.

  When she had finished, she rose to her feet and looked around her. It was now quite dark. A sheaf of stars was scattered across the sky, and Elena looked eagerly upward, but to her dismay, there were no constellations that she recognized. She stared and stared, willing the heavens to take on their familiar configuration, but the stars burned distant and unknown. A great rim of moonlight was spreading just above the ledge of the mountains. The moon looked closer, somehow, and brighter.

  The horsemen were milling around, seeing to tack and food. No one looked at her directly, but she had the feeling that all eyes were upon her. Slowly, making it plain that she had no plans for escape, she made her way toward the yurt into which the old woman had disappeared.

  As soon as she reached the flap of skin that formed its door, a warrior stepped in front of her: a girl, no more than sixteen or seventeen, with a fierce dark face.

  “Joq, joq. Marhamet—oturunguz.” Then she paused, adding carefully, “Nyet.” But Elena’s Kazakh, though basic, was good enough. “No, no. Please. Sit down.”

  “I want to speak to the old lady,” Elena said in Russian, racking her brain for the correct words. The last thing she wanted to do was cause inadvertent offense. “Quaise jerde apam?” Was that the word for mother or father? She couldn’t remember. The girl frowned. “Apam?” She pointed across the fire pit, to where a tall woman in her thirties was standing.

  “Joq. Keshiringiz, echtem et.” Never mind.

  “Apam? Mama? Ili babushka?” But the girl was catching on.

  “Yes, the grandmother.” Elena gestured to the yurt. The girl put her head around the flap and spoke. “Minute.”

  “Rakhmat,” Elena said. “Rakhmat.” Perhaps if she repeated her scattering of words often enough, she would start making sense. But at that point, two of the horsemen strode across. They clasped Elena’s arms, repeating, “Joq, joq,” and laughing as they did so, as if she were a naughty child. Elena tried to pull away, but their strength was intimidating. Their hands encircled her wrists like steel bands; they smelled strongly of horses and earth and meat.

  “All right, all right,” she said, sagging in their grip, and let them lead her to a nearby yurt. They pushed her through the door, not roughly, but with implacable firmness, and she heard the straps of the door being knotted behind her.

  The yurt contained only a carpet patterned with birds and beasts, some cushions, and a stove. Elena made a thorough investigation, but there was no gap between the edges of the yurt and the ground; it was like being imprisoned in a drum. The
dim red light from the stove flickered across the walls of the yurt. Outside, the shadows of the horsemen were reduced to striding ghosts. Elena curled up on the cushions next to the stove, grateful for its warmth. She could think about nothing but Ilya.

  Four

  BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

  Ilya slept fitfully, having made sure that there was no way out of the room in which he was being kept. The place was spartan: bare green walls with wooden skirting, very Soviet-institutional. A pallet lay across a bench. It was hard, but he had slept on worse and the room was at least clean. There was, however, no doubt in his mind that it was a cell. The door was double-locked and unyielding; the green paint hinted of the Lubyanka. He wondered whether the room was bugged, but a cursory search revealed nothing. Lying back on the pallet, he listened, but the sounds in the building were muffled. He could hear voices, but there was an underwater quality to them: a resonant echo that made it impossible for him to discern what anyone was saying. It occurred to him that the room might be sealed in some way. Perhaps they were used to people with his kind of abilities. But he was too worried about Elena to speculate.

  He had seen what the horse clans were capable of firsthand on the Kazakh steppes, all those years ago: terrible refinements of cruelty as barbarous as anything that the Russians had come up with. Men buried to their necks in sand, their heads encased in the stomach sack of a camel so that when the sun fried down, the sack tightened, to drive them mad before suffocation. He had stood at the edge of the steppe, himself a prisoner, watching men die as the buzzards circled. He had been unable to save them. The clans would treat him differently, they said, because he was a Russian. He never discovered what they had in store for him. He had taken pains to escape before that. Siberia had been a picnic in comparison.

  Ilya rolled onto his back and rubbed his eyes. Women were more equal among the Kazakh tribes than elsewhere: unveiled, performing the same work as the men. But he could not help thinking of what they might do to a female prisoner. The thought filled him with a terror that he had rarely felt for himself. He dozed a little, but his dreams swooped on him like kites, sharp and clawing.

  He woke with a start, to find someone sitting by the side of the bed. At first, in confusion, he thought it was the volkh, but then the figure leaned over him and said, “You’ve been having nightmares, you poor man. We could hear you shouting. I’ve brought you something to help you sleep.”

  The voice was gentle, female. Ilya sat up and saw a young woman’s narrow face, the delicate sloping lines of Chinese ancestry beneath a coil of black hair. But her eyes were not human; they had no whites. They were like the eyes of a deer. Like the eyes of the volkh, he realized with a shudder of shock.

  “What are you?” Ilya whispered.

  “Hush.” She put a warm hand on his shoulder, filling him with a sudden, half-sensual comfort. It reminded him of heroin. He wanted only to bury his head in her lap, but forced himself to pull away.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’m here to help you. My name is Kitai. I am a Mechvor, a dream-decider. I’ve brought you this.”

  She was holding a slip of paper, which she opened to reveal a pale powder.

  “What is it?”

  The woman tipped the powder into the water glass on the floor. “Drink it. It’ll make you sleep. There’s no point in worrying about what-might-be. We’ll go in search of your friend in the morning; Colonel Anikova is already working on it. You’ll need your strength.”

  Her voice was soothing, verging on the hypnotic. He had not heard a voice like it since his childhood. But it reminded him so much of the drug: the half-sexual, half-maternal whisper heard inside the head in the depths of morphine dreams.

  “No,” he said, his voice sharp, and knocked her hand away.

  “You don’t understand.” Still soothing, tinged with reproach. “You must drink it.”

  And suddenly he already had. His mouth was fresh with water and a chemical aftertaste, and he was lying down on the pallet without a murmur of protest. Her hand brushed his brow and he realized with dim surprise that she was singing beneath her breath, the same ancient lullaby that his mother had sung all those years ago: Bayushki-Bayu; I spell you into sleep …

  “Sleep now,” she said, and he did.

  When he next awoke, Colonel Anikova was standing over him. She was neither gentle nor smiling. It came as a relief.

  “Drink this. Get your boots on. We leave in half an hour.” She thrust a glass of tea into his hand.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where do you think? To find your friend, assuming there’s anything left of her.” She did not wait to hear his reply, but was already striding through the door. He wondered whether a guilty conscience accounted for her manner, after her failure to save Elena and the distorter coil from the Warrior, or whether she was simply always this brusque. Whatever the case, it was better than the insidious kindness of the Mechvor.

  He frowned as he sipped his tea, remembering the incident in the night. Why had that strange woman been so insistent? And “Mechvor” did not mean “dream-decider” in modern Russian; the closest translation he could come to was “dream-thief.” Even if he had been shouting out, convulsed by nightmares, one man couldn’t have been making all that noise, especially in a room that he was certain was soundproofed. But at least there was now the prospect of getting out of here, of actually doing something. His worst fear had been that they would simply leave him in here, while Elena … Best not to think about that.

  Minutes later, Anikova returned, with the sword slung over her shoulder. It was like seeing an old friend.

  “I’m not returning this to you just yet,” she said in response to his glance.

  “When, then?”

  “If it comes to a fight.” She patted the gun at her hip. He could not tell what kind it might be. It had a smooth, molded grip. “But I want to make sure you understand something. My priority is not Elena. I might wish it was so, but it isn’t.” She spoke with stilted correctness; he wondered what emotions she might be concealing, if any. “My priority is the distorter coil. If I have to retrieve it from her corpse, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  “I understand,” Ilya said. He did not like it, but he could appreciate her position.

  “Good.” She held open the door. “After you, Citizen Muromyets.” There was a trace of a smile on her face. “Yes, I know who you are. And what.”

  “More than I do,” Ilya told her, and was bitterly gratified to see her look of surprise. It strengthened his suspicions about her possible connection with the volkh, but he still knew too little to be certain.

  She led him through a maze of corridors. He had not seen a great deal of the place on the previous night, when they had brought him in, but it reminded him powerfully of the Lubyanka. Anikova whisked him through a series of swinging doors until finally they came to an atrium. Statues supported the ceiling in an explosion of Soviet brutalism: massive shoulders, faces composed of slabs of stone. The light was dim and filtered, coming from far above, as though he stood in the home of giants.

  “Through here,” Anikova said, and led him toward two great bronze doors. They stepped out onto a square. He looked back to see a rose-marble façade, fronted with columns. It reminded him of Lenin’s tomb. He wondered whether a waxy body might lie encased at the heart of this edifice, then thrust the thought away. Such notions seemed to have unsettling repercussions in Byelovodye.

  “Where are we?” Ilya asked. This place could have been anywhere in the former Soviet Union, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, but the marble blocks beneath his feet were free of dust and weeds and the gilt facing on the surrounding buildings glittered in the sunlight. Church domes gleamed between the leaves of oak and lime. This was a green city, as tree-lined as Almaty, reflecting the old Russian love of the woods. Then, from the corner of his eye, he found that he was witnessing a different scene. The buildings were tumbled, half-finished, with rough plaster walls. The gilt was t
arnished, the marble cracked. It was like the old stories of enchantment, where gold turns to nothing more than a handful of leaves. But which was real? Perhaps both, or neither. Ilya took a breath and kept silent.

  “It’s the city center,” Anikova told him, unhelpfully.

  A vehicle was standing at the bottom of the steps: something streamlined, riding low on the ground and as smooth in its contours as the gun at Anikova’s hip. It did not look like a car. There were no wheels, for a start. As they approached, the door hissed open and the Mechvor jumped out, her night-dark gaze filled with concern.

  “Citizen Muromyets! Did you sleep well? How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Get in the back,” Anikova said. Ilya did so, followed by Kitai. Anikova swung into the driver’s seat and the car glided soundlessly away. Ilya watched the passing scene with interest, having been unable to glean much from his journey of the previous night. It looked like a typical Soviet city. Traffic slid noiselessly along the wide roads, and the air was fresh. Whatever else these people had accomplished, a solution to environmental pollution appeared to be one of their achievements.

  Ilya craned to look at the crowds: uniform suits reminiscent of Mao’s China, for the men, but many of the women were wearing dresses, longer than those of their Russian contemporaries. Ilya, for whom the miniskirts of the more relaxed Brezhnev era had come as something of a revelation, disapproved of this return to concealment. But the people seemed clean and well-dressed. They all wore shoes, and they did not look hungry. He wondered what he might glimpse from the corner of his eye, but the vehicle was moving too fast for him to see what lay beneath the surface of the city.

  “That’s the cathedral,” the Mechvor supplied as they drove past. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  It looked exactly like St. Basil’s, down to the bulging crimson domes. A flock of doves wheeled up, hiding it behind a scatter of wings. Ilya looked back, but it was gone. The vehicle swung out onto a smooth black highway. He leaned forward and tapped Anikova on the shoulder.