R1 - Rusalka (56 page)

Till Uulamets shoved him back hard and said, "And
then
who'll be the power, boy, have you gotten that far in your thinking?"

"I—don't want anything but—"

My friends safe, he thought, trying to figure what else that hid; and felt Uulamets ' hand relax, and close again on his shirt and pull him upright. The raven fluttered and settled on Uulamets ' shoulder as Uulamets pulled him into the circle of his arm.

"Believing stops," Uulamets said, holding him so tightly for a moment his joints cracked, before he roughed his hair and let him go. "Then there's nothing. You understand: there are very few
old
wizards. And thank the god, most of the young ones lose it fast.—Make a fire, boy, do what I tell you, do absolutely what I tell you."

Sasha opened his mouth to plead their need for haste, then smothered that objection and said, bowing his head, "I'm trying not to wish, sir, but—"

Uulamets ' hand came up under his chin and held him eye to eye in a little patch of starlight. "But."

"j__"

"Want
nothing
but what I want. There's another place to get magic. Do you imagine what it is? It's very dangerous."

"From another magician," Sasha said, with a little flutter of dread: he did not know whose thought that was.

Uulamets said, still holding him, "You have to stop fighting me, boy. You've got the power, I've got the experience, and it has to flow my direction: you don't want to see the harm you can do. Will you do what I want? Will you absolutely do what I want? I'm going to work a real magic in a moment. It won't be pleasant for you."

"Pyetr—"

"No promises.
No
promises. We don't even know he's alive. But that blackguard student of mine is going to kill both of us—or worse. There is worse—if we don't do something. Hear how quiet things are? He's thinking. We haven't much time."

"He's making the ghosts—?"

"He's feeding them. He's doing all of this. The vodyanoi is helping him; and he doesn't want us dead, that isn't half what he wants."

Sasha thought he understood. He was afraid of what he understood, and afraid of mistakes.

And helpless, by that fact.

"Go ahead," he said to Uulamets , trying not to let his terror show. "Whatever you have to do."

They went in a hail of twigs and leaves, a passing dark flurry of branches, so rapidly that Pyetr ducked his head, held on to Misighi and when some crashing impact or downward drop made him sure he was going to die—he held the tighter, Eveshka clinging as a weightless chill about his neck, told himself that leshys would never fall, and never drop him, and kept his mouth tightly shut no matter what—until of a sudden they plummeted into empty air: "God!" he cried—

But they stopped abruptly and bounced up again, continuing to bounce slightly—like his heart, he thought, swallowing the outcry he had made: Misighi had evidently caught a resilient branch to stop them. Misighi immediately stretched out the arm holding him, opened all the myriad twiggy fingers and slipped others from his grip until he dangled only from his hands, and lowered him and Eveshka rapidly down and down through empty air.

"Fare well," Misighi said, the mere creaking of branches, as its face retreated into the dark above him and shadowy limbs rushed up past them. "This is the boundary. Further than this is impossible for us."

Pyetr's feet touched ground, and it let them go, uncurling its fingers from his grip.

Then he did well to keep his shaking legs under him—instinctively tried to steady Eveshka, but his hands only met cold; and he looked up into the dark: "Thank you," he said foolishly—difficult to bow to something far above his head; and only had a shower of leaves for his trouble, the creatures passing above them like a storm through the woods.

Eveshka had his hand, always able to touch him, surer of his edges, he supposed, than he was of hers. He looked about him at a woods no worse than where they had been—and beyond, at a starlit forest of dead limbs, dead as Eveshka's own.

Closer than that, at a black ball sitting on the leaves, panting.

"Good dog," he said to it. Babi licked his lips and got up, expectantly, little hands clasping, then one finding the ground, pawlike.

"You shouldn't go," Eveshka said, and turned and put her arms about his neck, looking up into his face. "Pyetr, please, no, I'm—not—strong enough—"

Babi growled and of a sudden jumped up and grabbed his sleeve—pulled him sharply aside, for which a man could be quite resentful, except he saw Eveshka flit and stop a little removed from him, hands clasped together, pain on her face.

"I—can't," she said, "I can't not want you, and you know what that does to us.—Babi,
keep
him, watch him—"

Pyetr tugged to get his sleeve free. "Babi, stop it!" He knew what she was up to, where she was going as she started away. " 'Veshka, no!"

She paused, looked back over her shoulder, paler, much paler once she had crossed that boundary of living woods and dead. And it was not his gentle Eveshka looking back at him with that cold, resolute anger, or speaking to him in a voice so icelike still:

"I can't kill him the way I can you: there's no limit to him. But you're right: a sword might. A knife. I don't know if I can get to him, I may weaken too much. But I'll try, Pyetr—"

Something moved among the trees behind her, something walking through the starlight, among the pale, barkiess trunks. " 'Veshka," he said, shaking his wrist, trying silently to urge Babi to turn loose, not wanting to make overmuch commotion and precipitate something unwanted. "'Veshka, don't look, but there's somebody behind you—quietly, walk back here.—Babi, Babi, dammit, turn loose—"

She did turn and look, and the gray figure came walking steadily as she began to tear into threads again, streaming away into thin air.

"'Veshka!" Pyetr said—jerked violently to tear his sleeve free: cloth ripped, but Babi held like a lump of iron, seized his wrist with his hands, strong as chain, as Eveshka dimmed and dimmed. Babi began to pull him away, but of a sudden he wanted to go toward that ominous figure, and of a sudden Babi's grip slipped, releasing him.

He caught his balance, walked across the boundary, stopped beside Eveshka all the while knowing he had made a grave mistake in his plans against Chernevog—knowing that Chernevog had wished him here all along, ahead of his companions, and a sword could do very little, when Chernevog wished not.

"'Veshka," he said, feeling her attraction, too; and felt her attention—felt the touch of the threads that flowed from her and felt the delirious little jolts as his strength flowed out of him—to her, who was a wizard no less than Chernevog: "Take it all," he said, with what breath he could spare, hoping she would go all the way to substance then: "Quickly. Take the sword…"

But she might not have heard. The theft continued the same as the flow of threads from her to Chernevog, who walked up to them, a fair-haired man younger than himself, a handsome youth with a gentle face and a smile and outstretched hand.

The hold on him broke, Eveshka's touch stopped, sudden freedom, sudden loss: he reached, reeling in a struggle for balance, after the sword—got it from its sheath as his right leg went out from under him, and went down to his knee with the point, trembling, aimed at Chernevog's heart.

Then his arm simply would not move further, while Chernevog brushed the blade aside to close about the hand that held the blade, Chernevog a faceless shadow against the stars, holding his hand, making him look up. "You don't want to hurt me," Chernevog said, the way Sasha would wish at him, just as gently, just as subtly: nothing wicked could be that gentle, or that reassuring, and he could not move.

Then it seemed for a heart-stopping moment the touch of a snake, and he recoiled, finding his sword in his hand and Chernevog close enough; he grabbed at Chernevog's arm—

But he found himself quite, quite incapable of moving then, Chernevog laying an arm along his shoulder, taking the sword ever so gently from his fingers, saying to Eveshka, "Don't do that, 'Veshka, he's the one will suffer for it. Do you want that?"

"No," she said.

"I know what you've come for. Shall I give it back to you? I can do that. I've kept it very well. I knew you'd come, soon or late."

"No!" she cried, and Pyetr wanted with all his heart to get his hands on Chernevog's throat, but he could not, could not even though Chernevog wished him slowly to stand up and look at Eveshka.

Her face was buried in her hands, her body heaving with quiet sobs.

"She knows everything she's done," Chernevog said, beside him, and put an arm around him. "A heart is nothing I'd want. But I can make her happy. And you—what do you want? Your young friend safe?"

"All of us," he muttered, knowing it was useless.

"I'll throw in Uulamets , if he'll be reasonable, ease poor 'Veshka's mind—yours, too. There's nothing so terrible about what I want. No tsar you could find so kind as I am—"

"Go to hell!" he said, and suddenly Eveshka went pale, spinning off threads of herself, faster and faster, until the starlight shone through her, until the threads wrapped themselves about him, the shocks multiplied and he heard her sobbing, "Kavi, Kavi, no!"

"On the other hand," Chernevog said, when the sparks cleared out of his vision and he was lying numb on the ground, "you can go to hell yourself, peasant lout, much, much more easily than I."

«
^
»

U
ulamets chanted softly,
while the smoke went up, and ghosts swirled through their midst—but not within the smoke. Uulamets mixed ash and herbs into one of his small pots, then took a small flint blade and cut his wrist with it, bleeding into the bowl. "You," he said to Sasha.

Sasha, head spinning from the smoke, set the knife to his arm and brought it sharply down. Blood made a steady drip into the pot—not so painful: but his hands shook as he gave the items back.

"Vodka couldn't hurt," Uulamets said, then, and unstopped the jug and took a drink and added that, too, which gave Sasha a queasy feeling as much as the bloodletting. "Don't you know?" he asked, indignant, and Uulamets :

"No." Uulamets stopped the jug, stirred the mix with a carved bit of bone, added moss and another powder. "It can vary." He took a twig from the fire and poked the burning end into the pot.

It went up with a puff of fire, and Uulamets hastily danced it from one hand to the other, tamped in more herbs, then put the hollow bone into it and covered the bowl with his hand while he breathed the smoke through the bone.

He passed pot and bone to Sasha. "Breathe deep," he said, and as Sasha did that, "deeper.—Good lad."

His chest burned; his eyes blurred from tears as Uulamets took it back, sucked in several more puffs, then suddenly leaned forward, grasped him by the shoulder and blew smoke into his face, saying, again, "Breathe."

He did that. He did it twice and three times, and Uulamets wished him—he felt it start—let go, breathe the smoke he breathed, deeper and deeper, back and forth—

Breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, hold nothing back—