Nine Layers of Sky Read online

  Masha came back into the room, carrying a tray.

  “Here. Tea, and some cake.”

  “Thank you,” Elena said, genuinely grateful. Anything was better than raw liver. Masha disappeared once more. Elena sipped her tea, ate some of the cake, and tried not to worry about Ilya. She leaned back against the couch. There was a prickling at the back of her neck. She reached up to find that her hair was coming loose. It was, moreover, full of twigs and moss. No wonder Masha had glanced at her so strangely. She must look as though she had been dragged through a hedge. She rose and went in search of a bathroom.

  She met Masha in the hallway.

  “The washroom? It’s through the door at the end, out the back. There’s a basin and a dipper. We used the banya this morning, so the water should still be warm. If you hear a noise, it’s only the bannik. Rattle the wash-pan—it scares him off.”

  Elena thanked her and went in the direction that the girl had indicated. A washroom had not been quite what she had had in mind, and what was the bannik? She remembered it vaguely from the old tales: a thing that haunted the washroom, all bony legs and a wrinkled face. It was said to rake your back with its claws if you had a troubled future. Elena shivered. The less time spent in the banya, the better.

  She opened the door at the end of the hallway. It was a bedroom: the walls paneled in pale, glossy birchwood, and wide windows leading out onto a veranda. Slowly, walking as if through a dream, Elena went to the window and looked out. There were lilies, folded up now in the cold shadow of the izba. What kind of lily, she wondered, bloomed when there was still snow on the ground? To one side of the room, she could see the open door of the banya.

  She stepped into the banya, keeping an eye open for the bannik. The banya seemed empty and she washed quickly in the basin, keeping a close eye on her bag. There was no mirror. She picked leaves from her hair and pinned it up as best she could. A small sound came from beneath the stand with the basin.

  Elena stepped swiftly back. She had no intention of bending to see what might be crouching underneath the basin. She could see something in the shadows. She moved to the door and opened it. Sunlight fell through. There was a scuttle of movement from beneath the basin; the bannik, it seemed, preferred darkness. She caught sight of a hand, long-fingered with tapering ivory nails, covered in coarse dark hair. It made no move toward her, but Elena went backward through the door and pushed it swiftly shut.

  “He won’t hurt you,” someone said.

  Elena jumped, and turned to see a woman standing before her.

  This must be Masha’s grandmother, but the head-scarfed babushka of Elena’s imagination was entirely absent. This woman was no more than fifty and straight as a birch tree. White hair fell to her waist; her eyes were as icy blue as Ilya’s. She wore a long woolen skirt and a blouse. Both were the color of her eyes. She made Elena think of water and winter sun. She looked almost Nordic, and Elena briefly considered Masha’s parentage. There must have been a Siberian marriage at some point.

  “My granddaughter told me you were here,” the woman said. “My name is Mati.”

  “I’m Elena.” Mati. It meant nothing more than “mother” in old Russian. Perhaps it was a family nickname of some kind.

  “She also told me that you were lost,” Mati said.

  “Yes. That’s right. To be honest, I’ve very little idea how I got here. And your granddaughter didn’t seem to have a map.”

  “No, we have none. There is no need,” Mati said serenely. Maybe they simply didn’t go anywhere. There were plenty of people, even in Elena’s day, who barely set foot beyond their own villages. Her anxiety for Ilya was now wire-sharp.

  “I have to find out where I am,” she said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  Mati nodded. “We’ll do our best to help you.”

  Elena followed her back into the main room.

  “A moment,” Mati said. “My granddaughter is a good girl, but like all young people, she needs to be reminded what to do. I sent her out to feed the kikis, and half an hour later I find her daydreaming on the step.” With a fleeting smile, she disappeared.

  Elena opened her bag and searched for her cigarettes. Only two left. She wondered whether Mati was a smoker. She would save them for later. Instead, she fished the hand mirror from her bag and took a quick look at her hair. Not too bad, though a long lock of it had come free from its pins and now snaked down her cheek. Elena tucked it back again, dimly aware of footsteps behind her. A corner of the room was visible in the mirror and she glanced at it, expecting to see Mati.

  “The child hasn’t done a thing I told her to do,” Mati’s voice said behind her, but the figure that Elena could see in the mirror was not Masha’s white-haired grandmother.

  It was a rusalka.

  Eight

  UZBEKISTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  Ilya and the Mechvor sat in the dim confines of a roadside yurt, listening to the rain beat down onto the canvas.

  “You see,” the Mechvor was saying, almost apologetically, “I have no way of returning to Byelovodye. And there are people here who wish me harm.”

  “What sort of people?” Was she talking about the akyn’s bunch, or the volkh? Or Manas?

  “Those who work to hold our worlds in an incorrect relationship to each other.” The Mechvor’s dark gaze shifted, sliding away like oil. Ilya considered this oblique statement. The Mechvor wanted him to know that she was in danger, and the touch of her hand against his suggested that she was not above using a few subtleties to obtain his protection, but clearly she did not want to tell him where her sympathies lay. That, in turn, suggested that she did not know what he was seeking to do. If he was in the Mechvor’s place, Ilya thought, he would play his cards close to his chest and find out as much as he could without giving his own game away. He would also be reluctant to let the other person out of his sight. He smiled at the Mechvor, as if weakening.

  “Don’t worry,” he said as reassuringly as he could. “I won’t let any harm come to you.”

  “Thank you,” the Mechvor whispered. Her eyes widened until they looked like wells in her face, and he was instantly drawn.

  “I can’t keep calling you by that outlandish title,” he said, to cover his momentary confusion. “Your name’s Kitai—is that a Siberian name, by any chance? It sounds familiar.”

  Kitai nodded. “I am from the region that corresponds to Siberia. The heartland.”

  “I was born in Siberia,” Ilya said. She looked up and smiled.

  “I know.” Again, the soft touch against his hand. He thought of Elena, steeled himself against dreams. “I knew that we understood each other,” she went on, hesitantly.

  “I’m sure we do,” Ilya said. If his past experiences with her were anything to go by, she could make him do whatever she wished. It was a frightening thought. But perhaps her powers were different on this side of the border.

  The Mechvor rubbed her palms over her eyes. “I have to find a way back.”

  “So do I.” His voice sounded colder than he had intended. “I left Elena there.” It was hard not to sound accusing.

  “There are gates here, in this world. Ones that were created in the last century, but there are also said to be more ancient openings.” Her voice held the trace of a question.

  “I don’t know of any.” It was also difficult to know how much to tell her and how much to conceal. But he had to find Elena.

  “So you don’t know where the nearest one might lie?” Kitai asked.

  Samarkand. Ilya stifled the thought as soon as it occurred. He said, “No. I do not.”

  The Mechvor was staring at him. He thought he saw a trace of satisfaction in her face, and he wondered whether she had plundered information from his mind, or simply confirmed her suspicions.

  Nine

  BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

  Elena sat very still. She could hear Mati moving about behind her, chatting amiably enough about her granddaughter. The woman sounded entirely human. She did not
dare turn around.

  “Is there a village nearby?” Elena asked as casually as she could. “I was wondering where Masha goes to school.”

  “We educate her here,” Mati murmured. We?

  “Do you live with your family, then?”

  Mati laughed. “Oh, yes. There are lots of us.”

  Elena, seeking escape, looked around at the amateur oils and the threadbare rugs. It made an unlikely supernatural stronghold. She thought of the bannik underneath the basin, of hairy, clawed hands. Mati’s own hand came to rest on the back of the couch. As she leaned to adjust a spray of thorned flowers in a nearby vase, Elena looked sideways at the long, human fingers, the short unpainted nails. She wondered what she might see if she looked through the mirror. Mati’s hand flexed, convulsively, as she straightened up. Was it Elena’s imagination, or did the nails seem just a little longer?

  Elena glanced up and met Mati’s eyes. They had become colorless, pale as water when a cloud passes overhead, leaching the blue from the sky. And Elena saw that Mati knew, saw the horror reflected in Elena’s own face. Mati began to change: the face sharpening, nails lengthening, the glitter of razor teeth. Elena bolted from the couch to the opposite wall, but the rusalka was between her and the door. Then Mati was standing in front of her, no more than a foot away. Elena had not even seen her move. Before Elena could react, the rusalka reached out and tore the bag from her hand. Elena snatched at it, but the rusalka was already across the room.

  Mati sat down on the arm of the couch with a sidling motion that turned Elena’s stomach. In a raw voice the rusalka said, “Try not to be afraid. Fear will change me, make a monster of me. I don’t want that.”

  It was the first indication she’d had that she might possess a power over the creature, but if so, it was a chancy kind of power, at best.

  “One of you attacked me in the market in Almaty. I thought I was going to die.”

  “No one attacked you. She was one of my kind, a wild cousin. She was trying to take the coil, it’s true, but she was also seeking to save you.”

  “From what?” Elena asked, then thought with absolute dismay of Ilya.

  “From something that wished you ill.”

  “Ilya?” Elena whispered.

  “Ilya Muromyets, slayer of devils. A good man who does not understand what he is dealing with. Not one who wishes you harm. No, my cousin sought to save you from a ghoul, a dark creature, the avatar of something in this world, which was pursuing you,” Mati said, and Elena noticed that, now that she had become more absorbed in what the rusalka was saying, the nails had once again receded, the eyes were once more blue. “My wild sisters have great understanding, but little speech. We are not human. We do not think in the same way, act in the same way.”

  Elena, looking pointedly about the room, said, “It all seems human enough. Or is this just illusion, too?”

  “No. This is real.”

  “Why have you been hounding Ilya all these years?”

  “We have not been hounding him,” the rusalka hissed. “He draws us to him. We are at his mercy, not the other way round.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every time he is injured, dying, even simply in danger, he summons us. He has the power to open gaps between the worlds.”

  “But you’ve been appearing to him for years, long before he had the coil.”

  “He is like the Warrior. He does not need the coil to open up a small gap. With the coil, his abilities are amplified.” Mati’s long fingers closed protectively around the bag.

  Don’t let her know that you can use the coil, too. Elena tried to keep her face carefully blank. Or did the rusalka already suspect? Elena prayed that Mati would think that it was Ilya who had opened the world and helped her escape.

  “We had no choice but to help him,” Mati said. “He called us to him in Almaty. He summoned my sisters to the place where Kovalin’s men were waiting to slay you both.”

  “But he said—”

  “He does not understand his own power; he does not know. I’m sure he told you what he believes to be the truth.”

  “Where does his power come from, though? What is he?”

  “He is Russia, Elena. He and all the bogatyri. The spirits of a country, the embodiment of its dreams. They are at the heart of the great mystery, the relationship between land and mankind. But they’re the ones with the real power, not us. That is why everyone has been trying to keep Ilya in the dark. Because everyone is afraid of that power.”

  “So what are you? What are the rusalki?” And if I can activate the coil, too, what am I?

  “Indigenous inhabitants. Aborigines. Natives— like the Kazakh, the Entsy, the Evenk—all the tribes who make up Russia in your world. But there are legends that we were once nomads who crossed from dimension into dimension, changing as we went, taking on different customs, different forms. We built gates across the worlds. We must have come here thousands of years ago, by your reckoning, building two gates between here and Earth: one in Siberia, and one in Samarkand, and there may have been others that are now forgotten and lost. And then we settled, as nomads do, became both more and less civilized, rejected the technology that had enabled our progress. But it is still important to us to keep those routes open. When a human, Tsilibayev, finally found a way to duplicate our ancient technology, it gave the humans of Byelovodye the means to build gates of their own and control them. Since then, everyone has been battling for power. What happens in your world affects this one. And besides, we have nowhere else to go. We need an escape route, if anything should happen to Byelovodye.”

  “I can understand the need for a way out,” Elena said, thinking of Canada. “But you said what happens in Russia affects Byelovodye. Why should the rusalki be in favor of that?”

  “Because the Mechvors of Central Command are poisoning this world. In recent years, they have sought to control everyone and everything, they have closed down all the newer gates and locked the technology away. They want to open one great gate, then bleed the dreams of Earth through it. You are a scientist. Think of dreaming as a kind of energy, a force that can be channeled and siphoned. Rather than a balance between the two worlds, Byelovodye will have all the power. I might be in favor of that, but the price is too high. Central Command and the Mechvors want one dream only—their own. The ideals and visions of others, of rusalki, of the horse clans, used to matter. We were equals, and now we count for nothing. Martial law was declared throughout the Republic seven years ago. Since then, things have gotten steadily worse—a repression with which you must be familiar.”

  “I know the kind of thing. Is this why things have been gradually worsening in the former Soviet Union? Is this why so many people seem to have lost their faith in everything?”

  “Humans always seek to control their dreams,” the rusalka said. “They try to nail things down and make them safe, revise history. But the world—all worlds— change too quickly for that to be possible. This is why the distorter coil is of such importance.”

  Elena was silent.

  “You don’t know what to think,” the rusalka said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “No. If Ilya were here—”

  “You need a man to think for you?” Mati said with thin scorn.

  “I need someone whom I know I can trust, to discuss my options,” Elena said with equal coldness. “I am a scientist. I have to look at whatever evidence is at my disposal.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mari said after a moment. “Around here, I am used to being an elder. I forget that others may have knowledge of their own.”

  Elena sighed. “It’s an easy mistake. Wanting a man to think for you is one of Russia’s greatest problems. First the priests, then the tsars, then the Party. It’s a need that encourages the creation of monsters.”

  “It is the same everywhere,” Mati said. “Here as well as your world. But in Byelovodye, if you let someone else do your thinking for you, they can change your reality.”

  �
��My world as well as here,” Elena said, and the rusalka smiled.

  “So, you need to choose which side to belong to, Elena, based on what you have already seen. If you accept what I have to say, you will be choosing rusalki over human, the horse clans over civilization. The Mechvors of Central Command cannot be allowed to remain in power, and we are no longer willing to grant them a voice.”

  “What power do I have?” Elena asked.

  “None. But you are a guest, and guests are sent from God, they say. We are not entirely monsters. We would rather you rode with us.”

  If she listened to the rusalka, Elena thought, there would be a sense in which she would be choosing dreams over reality. But what about Ilya? How far might her choice be a betrayal of him?

  “If you had known nothing of any of us, if the choice had been an abstract one,” the rusalka said, “which would you choose?”

  But Elena did not think of forests and fairy stories, of Golden Warriors and ancient tribesmen. She thought of Valentina Tereshkova’s image on the Tashkent Metro, with the daisies like a necklace of stars around the rim of her helmet. She thought of the rockets blasting up from the steppe, melting the snow at the foot of the tower, to be lost in the blazing dark. She thought of Ilya, not as a hero, but as a man, knowing again what it was like to be in love. And she remembered her dreams of Canada, a different land, yet somehow part of the same ideal.

  Ilya’s dreams were all of the past, she realized, what Russia had been and would never be again, but her dreams were of the future, tomorrow, what Russia might yet prove to be. And she knew that, whatever dreams the rusalka had in mind, Elena had already made her own choice.

  Ten

  UZBEKISTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  On the pretext of visiting the lavatory, Ilya hurried to the back of the yurt and flagged down a passing car, making sure that he could not be seen by the Mechvor. The farther he got from this strange, manipulative creature with her weird eyes, the better. An Islamic rosary of black beads dangled across the windscreen. The driver was a taciturn man who spoke little. It suited Ilya. He sat in the front seat, watching the road unfurl between the sway of the beads as they left the yurt, and Kitai, far behind.