The Armies of Heaven (7 page)

“Mama!” I heard her from behind a door in front of me, her voice as plain as day, and I yanked on the handle, but it was locked tight. I pounded on the door in anguish and nearly fell forward when it opened suddenly. A young boy stood blinking up at me at the top of a set of stone stairs, and Ola’s voice came once again from below.

“Mama!”

I rushed past the boy and nearly tumbled down the stairs in my haste. Next to a small chair, a thick board lay on the floor covering a kind of well. I dragged it away and tried to see into the darkness beneath it.

“Mama?”

The walls of the little well began to glow as if bathed in flame, and at the bottom, in the center of the illumination, stood my baby. Her cheeks were grimed with soot and tears, her golden-red curls tangled and dull, and she was dressed in rags, but it was my sweet baby. Flooded with relief, I stretched out on the floor and reached for her, and she held her arms up to me, but the well was far too deep. My heart was anguished as Ola began to cry once more, and with her tears, the familiar column of flame sprang up around her.

“Ola!”

Someone tugged at me, trying to pull me away.

“Let me go!
Ola!
”

And then the dream crumbled away like a castle of sand in the tide, and I was thrashing and beating my fists against Vasily as he knelt beside me inside my tent.

“No! I have to save her!” I tried to leap up, but he pulled me into his arms and held me tightly as the dream drifted away. “I found her,” I moaned against his chest. “I nearly had her.”

“It was a dream.” Belphagor spoke behind me, crouched in the entrance of the tent. He put his hand on my back and rubbed it gently as if I were a child waking from a nightmare. But Ola was the child caught in a nightmare. What had Helga done to her? “We all dream of her,” he said sadly.

I’d forgotten that of the three of us, Belphagor had been separated from her the longest. Vasily and I had been reunited with Ola for a few short months at Gehenna, but Belphagor had been a prisoner of Kae’s and had only seen her from a distance before Helga’s Cherub once more stole her away. Though he wasn’t her biological father, Ola was as much his daughter as she was ours, and it was his arms she’d been taken from when the Nephilim abducted her, leaving him tormented by guilt.

I reached out and pulled him close to let him know he wasn’t on the outside of this. “But it was more than just a dream. I can’t explain to you how I know, but I connected to her on the dreaming plane, and I saw where Helga’s keeping her. I saw Ola.”

“Where did you see her?” Vasily, at least, seemed willing to believe me.

“I didn’t recognize the palace, but it must be somewhere in the south, perhaps at Erebus on the Gulf of the Firmament, or even Aden. Whatever palace it is, I think it’s abandoned. It seemed so empty. But it’s in a very warm climate, and I thought I heard the ocean.”

Belphagor sat on his hip. “Aden has been abandoned since the capital moved to Arcadia,” he said thoughtfully.

“And Azel Kaeyevich was there.” I realized who the little boy must have been. I’d run right past, concerned only with Ola, and hadn’t even taken a good look at him. “She has him guarding Ola somehow, and Ola… ” I leaned against Vasily in despair. “She’s put her into some kind of a pit.”

Vasily’s grip tightened, and a low growl came from his chest. “She what?”

“The boy is in a room at the bottom of a set of stairs, like a storage cellar of some kind, and there’s a…a pit…in the center of the room. And she’s inside.”

His voice rumbled like embers falling against a grate. “I want Helga dead.”

At this point, I couldn’t argue with him.

By midafternoon, we’d reached the Shamayim Basin and the shore of Lake Superna. The old highway to Aravoth had once hugged the shoreline on the eastern side of the lake, and it wasn’t difficult to find the remnants of the crumbled stones that once paved it. We would be traveling the length of Superna until we were halfway to Iriy.

When we stopped for the night, everyone took advantage of the opportunity to bathe in the clear blue water under the rising moon. In the secluded cove where Love and I had gone with Margarita and Lively for privacy, I thought I sensed the presence of the syla once more, but there was only a persistent breeze that seemed to rise up from nowhere and then die down again as I bathed near the shore. No voices spoke. No spirits appeared.

I pulled on my uniform over my wet skin with reluctance and climbed the hill to our camp. It had been a long day’s ride and I was ready to fall into bed before I finished eating the meal our cook had prepared. I told the troops we’d make plans for replenishing our supplies early in the morning. I simply couldn’t stay awake another minute.

As I turned toward my tent, Belphagor asked for a word.

“What is it?” I was irritable as he took me aside. I felt as if I might fall asleep on my feet.

“Vasily and I discussed it while we walked today.” He colored a bit in the silvery light of the moon. “And we think you ought to bunk with us.”

I stared at him. “You what?”

“I know it’s unorthodox. But Vasily can’t bear to have you wake alone from those awful dreams, and selfish demon that I am, I can’t bear to be away from him for more than a night. We could trade off, of course, but it seems silly. We’re family. And I assure you, we’re quite capable of behaving ourselves while you’re with us.” Now he definitely blushed.

I nearly laughed. “I appreciate the offer.” I did; odd as it was, I was deeply moved. “But I don’t want to intrude. I’m all right on my own.”

“If you’ll pardon my saying so, Nazkia, you’re not. Your mind needs to be sharp, and it won’t be if you’re continually waking. You cry out in your sleep, often long before you wake, and you thrash and scream when you do.” His gave me a reproachful look. “You’re alarming your men. And your cries are bound to bring unwanted attention now that we’ll be nearing farmsteads.”

I couldn’t argue with this. If I endangered the troops because of my pride and modesty, it was a useless pride and modesty. “I see your point.”

Belphagor laughed. “Well, don’t look as if I’ve just condemned you to the gallows. I promise you, we’ll be chaste as angels.”

“I’m not worried about that.” I glowered in irritation, though in truth, the two of them had never been able to be discreet. “It’s just— What will the Virtues think?”

“They’ll think it’s none of their business and they’ll keep their mouths shut. They are well-trained soldiers, amazed as I am to say it, and they have great respect for you. If you think one of them will even raise an eyebrow, you’re mistaken.”

“All right,” I said impatiently. “Just tell me where your tent is. I’m exhausted and I don’t want to talk anymore.”

He held out his arm with exaggerated chivalry and I sighed and took it as he led me across the grounds of our camp to where Vasily already waited.

“This is awkward,” I admitted as I climbed inside. “Is there even room for three?”

Vasily silenced me with a kiss.

Belphagor cleared his throat behind me. “When I promised her we’d be chaste as angels, I meant all of us, Vasily.”

“Quiet,” Vasily grumbled and curled around me snugly as I lay down. “Just go to sleep, Bel.” Normally, Vasily showed him an almost deferential respect. It was when he was most aroused by Belphagor that Vasily was sullen and rude. It seemed to be an odd part of their cycle of “courtship” and a prelude to the rough treatment Vasily so desperately desired.

I wondered what I’d gotten myself into, but I had little time to worry about it; I fell asleep the moment I closed my eyes.

I
dreamt I was down at the lakeshore still, bathing in the moonlight. As the breeze rose and died around me, light shimmered in it.

At first, I thought the glint of moonlight on the water reflected up at me, but as I watched, the shimmering light moved of its own accord like swarms of tiny fireflies forming shapes in the air. If I didn’t look at them straight on, they were easier to see, and at last I realized they were all around me, beings that looked like women made of liquid and light. They were very much like the wings of my element in the terrestrial manifestation of my radiance—translucent, sparkling columns of water.

Long tresses made of little glints of light flowed about them as if they were under the surface of the lake and not above it with me. What had seemed to be a breeze was the touch of their flowing hair and swirling garments as they circled me.

When I’d begun to perceive them visually, I also began to hear their voices, like songs or musical calls distorted by the medium of liquid instead of air, but at last, I made out the words: “
Padshaya Koroleva
.”

I tried to focus on them as they wavered and fluxed as if the water they were made of rippled with waves that variously reflected the moonlight. “Are you syla?”

“We are rusalki.
Nechysta
syla
.” If I understood the term correctly, it meant “unclean force,” a term for a demon, in earthly vernacular. “We bring dreams of what was and is in the grove above the lake.”

So my intuition had been correct. What I’d seen in the Winter Palace, Kae had actually experienced. And Ola… She was really in a pit somewhere in the south of Heaven.

“We are the ones who see the past. The syla see what is and will be. We come because the syla cannot see.” The voice I thought I’d heard at Pyr Amaravati had whispered the same.

“What does that mean? What can’t they see?”

“Darkness comes between.” The lilting voices of the rusalki crossed and echoed around me. I couldn’t tell when one stopped speaking and another began. “Like the shadow of the world upon the moon or the moon upon the sun. The Little Queen has closed her eyes.”

My heart twisted. “Little Queen” was the name the syla had given to Ola when they’d first seen her. “What do you mean, she’s ‘closed her eyes’? What’s happened?”

“They cannot tell,” said a rusalka from one side.

“They cannot see,” said one from the other.

“
Polnochnoi Sud
will open for
Padshaya Koroleva
.”

“On the night of the
tsvetok paporotnika
.”

“The flower of the fern?” I spun about, trying to keep up with who was speaking. “You mean on Ivan Kupala?” My first encounter with the syla had been on the eve of the Russian celebration of midsummer. They’d shown me the magical flower I’d later lost to Helga, giving her the power of influence that had made her the leader of the Social Liberation Party.

“When you reach the water’s end, you will enter the Midnight Court.” They were disappearing now, the glinting lights winking out, and their melodic voices dissolving into the sound of the wind.

“Wait,” I pleaded. “I don’t understand. How can I get there?” The water churned up around me and I floundered and went under, gasping and taking it into my lungs. Then someone was hauling me onto the shore, and I hugged the ground, coughing and vomiting lake water.

I resisted the hands tugging at me and the muffled voices calling my name. I only wanted to rest here, but they were insistent. I opened my eyes, confused to find myself soaking wet and cradled in Vasily’s arms on the shore of Lake Superna. Vasily was dripping wet as well, as if he’d fished me out of the water himself, and Belphagor stood over us. Around us hovered a dozen anxious Virtues.

“What’s going on?” I struggled to sit up.

Belphagor helped me to my feet. “You were sleepwalking, it seems.”

Vasily picked himself up and steadied me on the other side. “The dream again?”

I shook my head. “Not that one, anyway.” I nodded to the troops as I regained my bearings. “Please. I’m fine. Everyone go back to sleep. We have a long ride ahead of us tomorrow.”

Belphagor murmured in my ear as we headed back up the hill. “Still think sleeping on your own is a good idea?”

“Exactly how did sleeping with you two do me any good? I nearly drowned.”

“Yes, and you were doing it very quietly. If it weren’t for Vasily wondering what was taking you so long after he thought you’d gotten up to use the ‘facilities,’ no one would have known you were gone.” He held open the flap as we reached the tent.

I sighed in acquiescence and ducked inside. “You might be interested to know what I dreamt about,” I said when they’d climbed in after me. “Though it wasn’t Ola this time, not directly.”

Vasily wrapped his arms around me. “What was the dream?”

“I was visited by the Unseen World—but not the syla. They called themselves rusalki. They claimed the syla sent them to give me a message.”

“Rusalki?” Belphagor’s brow wrinkled with concern. “No wonder you nearly drowned.”

“You’ve heard of them?”

“I’ve never heard of them appearing in Heaven before, but they’re not known for their altruism. I believe their specialty is tempting men to their deaths. I’m surprised your friends would send any kind of message through them.”

“It seems they had no other way of contacting me. But they told me I would visit the Midnight Court on the eve of Ivan Kupala.”

Belphagor frowned. “There’s no way you can do that, Nazkia. The stakes are too high for you to be running off to the world of Man in the middle of all this.”

“I have no intention of running off. But they seemed to know something of Ola. If there’s a chance the syla know where she is, I can’t ignore them. They knew the last time she disappeared, and I didn’t pay attention. She’d be with us now if I’d listened carefully. I’d have found her at Solovetsky.” I ran my hand through my damp hair. “If one of us needs to go below in order to get her back…” I paused. Belphagor was giving me a peculiar look.

Vasily directed a sullen glare at the airspirit. “You might as well tell her.”

I glanced from one to the other. “Tell me what?”

“Bel’s planning to fall. He’s going back with Love.”

Belphagor sighed at my expression of dismay. “I wasn’t going to tell you until we got to Elysium. It’s not like I’m abandoning you—
either
of you—I just need to see someone. Take care of some unfinished business. It should only take me a few days.”