The Golden Horde (44 page)

“When? Now? They’re asleep!”

Volk Volkovich glanced at the shuttered window and the windy, rainy night beyond it, and perhaps at something beyond the night that he alone could see. “The sooner the better,” he said. “I was there. I felt what was building in that place. Tomorrow may be too late.”

*

Nikolai and Anastasya shared a room at the end of the corridor, each with a little truckle bed tucked into opposite corners. There was an oil lamp high up on the wall, clumsily glazed in thick amber glass but throwing dark golden light that kept the worst of the shadows at bay, and each child had the usual two or three toy animals for company at night.

Ivan could see the toys from the doorway where he stood. A bear of stuffed rabbit-fur, loved to shapelessness and premature mange; a woolly lamb so distorted by years of affection that it looked nightmarish; a bird with embroidered plumage so gaudy that it could only represent flames; and two small grey wolves, fuzzy and friendly, with little resemblance that he could see to the sinister reality.

Even though all the toys were scattered on the beds and close to hand, these wolves were the only ones being cuddled. Ivan gazed down at his sleeping children and through the surge of warmth and love for them, he still felt a tiny pang of jealousy, something like what Mar’ya Morevna must have felt the first time she looked in on her children and saw what gave them comfort in the dark.

Though he touched their sleeping faces, it was a long time before he dared to wake them. Heavy-eyed and drowsy, neither child was quite sure what was going on, and the first thing that registered on either of them was the tall, lean, grey-haired and grey-cloaked figure standing just outside the door. As Kolya and Tasha scrambled out of bed in a flurry of blankets and long night-shirts, more awake at sight of the Grey Wolf than their own father, Ivan felt that jealousy return to drive its spike up into his gullet. For just a second his eyes stung and his choked throat refused to swallow. But its hurt died an instant later when they came back, scampering on bare feet across the chilly floor to swarm all over him and babble thanks for bringing back their Uncle Wolf, as if Volk Volkovich was another reward for being good. Ivan looked at them, and at the Grey Wolf, and at the wall, and found that if he closed his own eyes really tightly shut the tears couldn’t escape.

“I’m a friend,” said the deep voice behind him. “A bringer of gifts, a guide to the strange beauties of the worlds beyond the world.” That big hand came down with a reassuring pressure on his shoulder. “But you’re their father, and the noble Lady Mar’ya Morevna is their mother, and they know where the difference lies.”

*

Sitting up after midnight, fully dressed as if it was daylight outside and drinking their hot milk from real adult wine-cups, Kolya and Tasha were enjoying themselves immensely. They’d even seen their father the Tsar rebuild a fire in the stove with his own hands and swear, without much originality and no new words, at the servants who wanted to do the work for him. “This is a family matter,” he’d said, among other things. It was all very thrilling and grown-up.

Ivan sneezed twice, dusted ash and bark-chips off his fingers and squatted back from the stove, then decided it would do and closed the iron door with a clank. He eyed the twins sidelong, watching them grin and giggle and nudge one another with their elbows to provoke still more giggles.
Tell
them
the
problem
and
ask
for
their
help
. That was easy to say, easier still when you weren’t the person having to shape the question into something a seven-year-old mind could understand. Who could say that the prospect of things crawling into the world from Outside wasn’t as exciting as being awake after bedtime?

But then, why shape it at all? These two precocious infants already knew more about the sorcerous Gates than Ivan had been able to force into his brain during all of his years of study. They probably knew more than their mother, and had she not said as much? Tsar Ivan of Khorlov stood up, wiped the stove-soot from his hands, considered a drink to give himself some courage –
for
talking
to
your
own
son
and
daughter
? – then threw the idea aside. Tonight of all nights, his mind had to stay sharp.

“Nikolai Ivanovich, Anastasya Ivanovna, pay heed to what I tell you.” He watched them compose themselves as best they could, but these were the same children he’d once said had all the attention span of a mayfly or some such insect. Asking them to listen closely was as optimistic as putting a fish on horseback and expecting it to ride. “In this city of Sarai is a strong place, a treasure-house where the Ilkhan Batu —”

“Old Stinkyfeet,” said Nikolai helpfully.

“Er, yes, him. Anyway, that’s where he keeps the crowns of twelve kingdoms, and —”

“You found them?” Anastasya burst out, her eyes shining with delight. “Oh Papa, how clever you are! Mama told us they were here, and we knew anyway because they made our heads hurt, but not even she knew where they were hidden!”

The dismissive little flick of one hand the Grey Wolf made was perhaps the most generous thing he’d ever done for the Tsar of Khorlov. But their lack of surprise about the discovery proved, as he suspected, that his children knew as much about matters in hand as he did. And probably more.

“Then do you know what I was going to ask you?”

There was a silence; then a pause and some muttering and nudging of the ‘
you
do
it
’ – ‘
no
,
you
’ variety, before Nikolai sat up very straight, folded his hands in his lap and recited carefully, “‘
Let
one
who
can
bear
it
take
away
a
thing
of
great
power
to
lessen
the
weight
of
that
power
,
so
what
has
been
laid
on
the
fabric
of
the
world
may
be
lightened
and
the
render
– no,
rending
–
thereof
be
spared
.’” The boy relaxed a little. “That’s what it says in the book.”

“What book?” Ivan guessed the answer, but there was always the chance he might be wrong.

He was right.

O
Prizvanyi
Besov
. That was
Enciervanul
Doamnisoar
, in its old title.
On
the
Summoning
of
Demons
.

“You were reading that?” said Ivan, doing his best not to sound as appalled as he felt, and there was momentary relief when both of the children shook their heads. It lasted no more than the drawing of a breath.

“We couldn’t read it,” said Natasha. “But Mama read it to us.”

“Not the best bits,” Nikolai added, sounding a little resentful.

Ivan accepted the twins knowing more about the crowns than he did, but hearing where they’d learned about the problem was another matter. Maybe it was true what philosophers said, that children’s minds were more resilient when it came to horrors than they were given credit for. All he knew was that
his
children weren’t among those the philosophers were thinking about and he, fully grown and adult in most things, had lain awake and sweating after skimming through that particular book for the first time.

And even then he’d taken pains to avoid ‘
the
best
bits
.’

“I can take them to the treasure-house, Vanya,” said the Grey Wolf. “No need for you to come with us.”

Ivan blinked once, twice, then turned an empty stare on Volk Volkovich, wondering if his sudden spasm of horror been so obvious. He shook his head. “They’re my son and my daughter. I may be nothing more than dead weight, an ignorant, uneducated lump of meat, but where they go, I go.”

“I didn’t mean …”

“My friend,” Ivan punched the Grey Wolf amiably in the ribs, hard enough to hurt, “what you meant or didn’t mean doesn’t matter. It’s the way I feel right now. Mar’ya Morevna would have been the saviour of this undertaking and her children are a good second-best. While I …”

If he’d drunk enough to completely blunt his sense of pride, Ivan might have said exactly where he stood amid these cold equations. Instead he walked to the wall and unhooked the
shashka
sabre hanging there, attached its scabbard to his belt and turned around with the blade half drawn. The metallic sound as he slapped it home again was as sharp as the clapping of hands.

“I can use this, if it’s needed. Let’s go.”

*

Ivan shook the clangour of abrupt passage between the worlds out of his head, and tried not to be sick as what had once passed for equilibrium reeled through his inner ear backwards and upside down. He sniffed through a nose trying to bleed from the impossible pressures and decided in a detached sort of way that as a form of travel, there was little to recommend this process.

At least – looking sourly from side to side – not unless the traveller was an
oborotyen
wolfling or a child quickened halfway between Moist-Mother-Earth and the Summer Country. The ordinary route of Gate and circle might have been more dangerous, but it was at least more comfortable. This way was like being a sheet of parchment folded in upon itself a thousand times to fit through the spaces that separated one world from the next, then brutally snapped open again at the final destination. Small wonder he had a bloody nose and his ears rang. If the Firebird felt like this when it was snatched through the worldwarp created by the stolen crowns, then no wonder its temper was fraying at the edges. Ivan would have been grateful had it been just his temper. Instead it felt as if his mind, his body and the very sinews that held his muscles together were all unravelling at once.

And in a light that someone had conjured up to see by, the floor was winking at him with a million yellow eyes. He blinked, and blinked again, and all those eyes slid into focus with a snap.

The golden hoard of the Golden Horde was everything that Volk Volkovich had said, and more. His disinterest had taken colour from his words, and castrated the lust that such a mountain of gold might have for men of normal appetites.

To be Tsar of Khorlov was one thing, but Khorlov had never been a wealthy realm and the gold and jewels scattered here could make it a domain second to none in the wide white world. Ivan went down on one knee and scooped up gemstones in his two cupped hands; rubies like blood, sapphires like a summer sky at evening, emeralds green as grass and pearls like quicksilver tears, all of them shot through with the cold white fire of diamonds.

He poured them like sand back down through his fingers so that they clattered blazing in their myriad colours across the hard stone floor, then lifted another handful. This time it was of gold, minted coins with the heads of dead or conquered kings, and tiny, perfect ingots each half the length of a man’s fingers that a high-born lady might wear strung on wires to adorn herself, all cold against his skin but their weight extraordinary, and each possessed of its own yellow-metal sheen.

Ilkhan Batu was no Dragon, to know the place and the provenance and the value of every last jewel here, and the fill of just one belt-pouch, a quantity so small among all this as to be dust beneath the feet, would secure Khorlov and all the people of Khorlov for generations yet to come.

Then a coin, just one coin, fell to the floor and rolled chiming like a gong to join the snowdrift heaping of its mates.

“No, Papa,” said Natasha. Her pale brows were drawn together as the grinding pressure of the place crushed down on her brain, but there was no disapproval of his action in her voice, just surprise that he touched this treasure in the first place. “Leave them be. They’re dirty.”

Nikolai came over and crouched down by Ivan’s side. He too had the look of a child whose head was aching, and as he put out his own hands to hold his father’s, Ivan could see how they shook. “This is a horrible place, Papa,” he said softly. “Can’t you see the blood?”

Ivan looked; at his son, at his daughter, and at the riches held within his two cupped hands. Riches taken from a hundred conquered cities, riches paid for with a hundred thousand lives. And he saw.

The gold wept congealing drools of sticky crimson down between his fingers and the smell that clogged his nostrils was no longer gold but sheared copper, the stench of blood. Stealing it to use for Khorlov’s benefit would be like building a palace on a foundation of skulls, and Ivan had seen piled-up skulls enough since he left home. He opened his hands and the gold cascaded to the ground. Far away he could hear the high, metallic echoes of metal against stone but in the privacy of his own head the only sound was a repetitive damp thud like dropped gobbets of raw meat.