Nine Layers of Sky (25 page)

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 tarnished, 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.

“Where exactly are we heading?”

“Out onto the steppe. They’ll have taken her there, if they wanted her alive.”

The Mechvor twisted to look at him. “I’m sure they won’t have harmed her,” she said anxiously. “Please try not to worry.”

“I’ll try,” Ilya said. He could see that she meant to be kind.

They crossed a river, and downstream he glimpsed the spines and curves of military gunships, as well as a wallowing hulk that looked like the remains of a sailing vessel.

“Those are the naval yards,” the Mechvor said.

“He can see that,” Anikova said, shortly.

“But we want to make him feel at home,” the Mechvor said. Once more, her voice was filled with reproach. “After all, he is a guest, and guests are sent from God.”

“I know, I know.” Anikova gave her companion an uneasy glance that Ilya was unable to interpret. He wondered what the relationship really was between these two, where the power truly lay.

The road took them past a series of buildings that the Mechvor described as the state university. The complex was vast: three central polygons surrounded by low halls. The roofs were festooned with a tracery of satellite communication; he could see the dishes from the road. He tried that sideways glance again and found that there was simply nothing there, only a wasteland of grass. It was more comforting to look at it directly. The place was set in a parkland of manicured lawns and groves. The sight of the birches gave Ilya an unexpected pang of homesickness. Yet he was not sure whether it was for the world he had left behind, or for the one through which he was now traveling. He may not always have known what his role was, but he had known where he belonged, and now even that was slipping away from him. He leaned back in his seat for a moment and closed his eyes.
Elena,
he thought.
I belong to Elena.
But he did not even know if she was still alive. That thought returned him to the practicalities of the situation.

“So it’s just you, me, and her?” he said to Anikova. “Against a horde?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re meeting my team at Bhalukishoy. I’m not going in there without armed personnel.”

“That’s a relief.”

“You should know,” the Mechvor said gently, “it’s most unusual for the tribes to venture this far north. Usually they keep to the southern territories. So there is a great need to drive them back.”

“This is just one clan,” Anikova said. “A raiding party. And they can’t be acting alone.”

“Why not?”

“Why would a bunch of barbarians take it into their heads to get hold of a distorter coil? No, they’re working for someone. Somebody operating against the State has hired them—or more likely, persuaded them, since the tribes don’t use money—to get hold of this thing. So that leaves major questions. Who, and why?”

“How resistant are the tribes to interrogation?” Ilya asked, surprising himself. He thought he had left KGB mode behind him long ago.

Anikova gave a thin smile.

“Good question, Muromyets. They can’t be interrogated without a great deal of trouble. They would simply rather die. Hunger strike, suicide . . . We’ve seen it all.”

As he had surmised, the apparent perfection of this State, too, possessed darkness at its heart.

“And they won’t talk? At all?”

“No. But the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ has a local answer. Even here, we’re troubled by dissidents. They’re crazy, of course.”

Again, Ilya thought he detected a faint unease in her face. It made him question the strength of Anikova’s convictions. It was disappointing to see that the old Soviet approach still had its hold: anyone who disagrees is simply mad; the truth is so self-evident, that to deny it is tantamount to a denial of reality itself. But what did that really mean in a world in which reality was so malleable and fluid?

“What do they believe, these dissidents?” Anikova frowned and said nothing, so Ilya changed the subject.

“The tribespeople, then. Where do they come from?”