The Golden Horde (45 page)

“Here,” said Volk Volkovich.

The Grey Wolf had thrown back the lids of all the wooden boxes, and to Ivan’s eyes the royal crowns within them glowed with a cleaner radiance than the soiled gold and jewels on the floor. He stood up, wiping stains from his hands that only he could see, and examined the carving and the decoration on each box in an attempt to learn the origin of the crown it held. “This, this and this,” he said at last, lifting each one from its padded case as he spoke. “One each. That should serve to do something at least.”

Volk Volkovich gazed at them, and then at him. “Why one and not another?” he said. Ivan closed the wooden boxes one after another, a chorus of small, sharp snapping sounds, then touched each of the chosen crowns in turn.

“Because I recognize these three. They didn’t come willingly into Batu’s hands, so maybe stealing them back might ease the warping more than taking any other. This is the Great Crown of the Great Princes of Kiev. The city fell by storm, and its people were slaughtered. There’s the Crown of Vladimir, a lord so highly regarded that his domain adopted his name for ever after. And that – you saw the siege that took it – is from Ryazan, last worn by Roman Ingvarevich before the Tatars impaled him outside his own city gates. Old crowns with much power and taken, not given. We should take them back.”

Nikolai Ivanovich was staring wide-eyed at the three crowns. “I thought the gold was bloody, father,” he said, sounding sick. “But these are awful. I know we have to carry one, but can we do it now, and go?”

Ivan saw nothing, and knew that meant nothing. He wondered whether the blood Kolya saw was all to do with the Tatars and if not, what the boy would see the first time he looked long and hard at the Great Crown of Khorlov. Much blood had been spilled down the years to secure the realm or the succession, and Aleksey Romanov’s death might still drip warm from the jewelled gold that Ivan had killed him to defend.

“Yes,” he said, lifting the crown of Kiev and tucking it beneath one arm. The thought of wearing it had been unmannerly before, and now was revolting. “Volk Volkovich, do what you need to do to get us out of here. Now. At once.”

*

The light oozing through the shuttered windows was as dull and grey as any other day that Ivan Aleksandrovich could remember since he first arrived in Sarai. But it was still far too bright, bright enough to hurt even though his still half-asleep mind was sure he hadn’t drunk enough last night to justify the way he felt this morning. One bleary eye not shrouded by the covers of the too-big, too-empty bed glanced around the room, looking for empty bottles, upturned furniture, even the boots of a guest sleeping off his skinful underneath the table. None of those. Just three lumps on the floor, two wrapped in old cloaks and the third in what could have passed for his best outdoor coat. But as for—

Three lumps on the floor?

“
God
guard
us
all
!”

Even though Ivan’s head was still pounding as though someone was using it for a drum with a war-mace as a drumstick, he shot out of bed in a swirl of furs and oaths and blankets. The oaths had to do with what it felt like when the cold air of the room hit his naked skin, and he realized he’d locked the door to keep any servant from coming in and seeing the three stolen crowns. That meant no one had been able to get in and light the stove, but it didn’t matter, because his unpleasant dream had been real. Ivan squatted down and gingerly unwrapped the first of those anonymous lumps. This was Sarai, the city of the Golden Horde, and they might have been severed human heads.

They were nothing of the sort. The crown of the city-state of Kiev gleamed out at him, three hundred and twenty-seven years of history all wrapped up in a single piece of gold dressed with fur and jewels. Though he didn’t have his son or daughter’s talent at sensing such things, Ivan could feel the abstract energy called Power to Rule come off it like heat off a coal fresh from the fire. Except that this felt cold. He shivered violently, then bundled his trophy up again and started looking about for somewhere to stow it. There was a loose floorboard somewhere, because he could remember an irritating squeak underfoot somewhere near the window, but whether there would be enough space beneath it was another matter.

He would rather get the damned and damning things right out of the city, but that was out of the question either by magical or ordinary means. If Mar’ya Morevna was here, she could open a storage space in some alternate reality which the Tatars didn’t know existed, never mind find and search. But if Mar’ya Morevna had been in Sarai, they wouldn’t have needed to bring the crowns back here in the first place.

They’d almost failed to do even that.

In fact they’d barely made it back to the house, because Volk Volkovich had underestimated how much strength a seven-year-old child would need to carry any sorcerous artefact through a Gate, no matter how short the distance or how talented the child. The third crown, the one Ivan had carried himself, had only confirmed the burden.

Well, never mind.

He lowered the third bundle down into the space beneath the bedroom floor, dropped the floorboard back in place and secured the whole thing by dragging a clothes-chest on top of it. The unsettling business was all past and done with, no one had come to any harm and both wolf and children had told him they already sensed an easing of the pressure hanging over the city. They had staggered off to bed, the twins to their room and Volk Volkovich to the servants’ quarters since nobody ever noticed an extra servant more or less, while Ivan had fallen over almost where he stood.

Now the autumn equinox could come and go as it pleased. It fell tonight, so they had acted just in time. From that view of the disregarded plunder locked away and forgotten in the shadows of the treasure-house, Ilkhan Batu might never notice anything was missing. No one would know a threatened catastrophe had been averted, and the Tsar of Khorlov could never claim the credit, either. Ivan grinned at nothing in particular, and crawled back into bed.

Half an hour later he was awake again, listening to the thunderous pounding of fists on the street door and wondering what the hell was going on. Then he looked at the handsome, flower-patterned wall, trying to remember the last time he’d checked to see if the spy-holes were in use, and felt his stomach turn to a cold lump of lead inside him.

He was half-dressed, shirt and breeches and one boot, when other boots came thudding along the corridor outside and more fists drummed against his bedroom door. “Open up, Khorlovskiy!” Now there was a voice he knew and hated. “Open up or we break the door down!”

Ivan didn’t bother with the other boot. He knew the threat wasn’t an idle one, and if Amragan
tarkhan
was going to enter the room he would do it whether the door was locked or not. At least he could deny the Turk any satisfaction of smashing his way in. Ivan pulled back the bolts at top and bottom and stepped neatly aside as a burly Tatar about to ram his shoulder against the timbers came lurching past.

“Well, well,” he said, as casually as he could. “To what do I owe this pleasure so early in the morning?”

“Whether it’s a pleasure remains to be seen, Russian,” said Amragan
tarkhan
as he strode inside. The Turk wasn’t wearing his usual coat but half-armour, pulled on in haste if the misaligned laces meant anything. “Were you expecting other visitors?”

For an instant Ivan didn’t know what Amragan meant, then realized that though he hadn’t wasted time putting on his second boot, he’d pulled his sabre from its hooks by the door and the sheathed weapon was still in his hand. “I, er, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Even you’re usually more polite when you come calling.”

“Times change,” said Amragan. “Circumstances differ.” He sat down on the clothes-chest Ivan had so recently been dragging about, his own weight and that of the armour making chest and floorboards creak ominously. Ivan managed to keep any expression off his face. “Finish dressing. You must come with me. At once.”

Ivan reached for his other boot. Whatever was going on had nothing to do with the theft of crowns from the treasure-house, because if anything had been spotted through the spy-holes, Amragan
tarkhan
wouldn’t have wasted time playing cat and mouse. Most especially he wouldn’t have bothered sitting on the trunk when the thing to do was to fling it aside and have his men tear up the floor.

What made it still more mysterious was that when Ivan hooked the sabre to his belt, Amragan said nothing against it but looked almost approving, as if every sword might help. But help what, and where? There was still no explanation when he and the
tarkhan
hurried back downstairs, nor was there any comment when Volk Volkovich emerged from the servant’s hall beyond the kitchen and fell into step among Amragan’s ten soldiers at Ivan’s heels. Perhaps it was true that one more servant always went unnoticed, even one so striking as the Grey Wolf, but it seemed more like Amragan
tarkhan
simply had too much on his mind, and if he wanted silence rather than idle chatter then that was what he would get.

Within a few minutes Ivan realized where they were going, and his uneasiness returned with a rush. The last time he’d walked along this street and turned at this corner, he’d been following a well-dressed servant who had invited him to take wine with three Russian nobles. That afternoon had spiralled downward into unpleasantness and ended with threats, so Ivan was glad his sabre and Volk Volkovich were with him. When he arrived accompanied by a
tarkhan
and ten Tatar soldiers, the three
boyaryy
wouldn’t like it at all.

They went into the house at the same raking stride which had taken them through the streets of Sarai, past more Tatars obviously standing guard, and into a low-ceilinged room at the back. Then Amragan
tarkhan
turned on Ivan, gestured at the room and demanded, “Do you know them?”

Ivan looked at the mess on floor and walls and ceiling that had been Stepan Mikhailovich, Andrey Vladimirovich and Mstislav Vasil’yevich. Even their own mothers couldn’t have answered ‘yes’ immediately. Had he not been introduced to each man and known there were three of them, it would have been hard to say how many corpses were actually in the room. Or even if they’d been human. Usually squeamish in the presence of massacre, Ivan didn’t feel any more nauseated than when passing a butcher’s stall in the market, because whatever had happened had been so thorough that the aftermath was recognizable only as raw meat.

What did make him feel momentarily queasy was the unmistakable sound of Volk Volkovich’s stomach rumbling.

“If it – they – are, or were, who I think …” Ivan cursed briefly and gave up on trying to make sense from case and tense. Whatever he called them wouldn’t matter to the
boyaryy
now. “We spoke last week. Wine and gossip. They were strangers in Sarai, but they’d heard of me. I hadn’t met them before. Or since.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I told you, just gossip. Why? Do you think I killed them because of something they said?”

Amragan
tarkhan
smiled thinly and looked him up and down, a slow, contemptuous scrutiny that made Ivan bristle. “You? Do this? Hardly.”

“Then why drag me here? Why get me out of bed at all?”

“It was time you were up and about,” said the Turk coolly. “And this is only a part of what I want you to see. Follow.”

He brushed past and headed upstairs to the room where Ivan and the three dead men had exchanged useless opinions of each other. There was another dead man in the middle of the floor, and this one was all too recognizable. He was a Tatar, spreadeagled on the bare wooden floor and secured there by long iron spikes driven through all his major joints. But that hadn’t killed him. It had been done merely to hold him in place as a cook will with a roast to hold it steady for carving. And then he had been carved, probably slowly, certainly carefully, until shock or loss of blood had done what his torturers had taken such pains not to hasten.

Carved as a dark gift for a dark god.

There were no magic circles on the floor, no cryptic patterns drawn in blood or cunning arrangements of sliced-off meat. There was just a particularly vile murder, and Ivan’s memory of a certain conversation held right here, in which certain Russians who should have known better couldn’t be dissuaded from a certain course of action. The comprehensive carnage in the room downstairs suggested that the sacrifice had been rejected.

Or had it been accepted after all? From the little Ivan knew of Chernobog, gratitude from the Lord of the Dark Places was unlikely to manifest itself in warm light and sweet scent. Mar’ya Morevna had a saying culled from years of studying the grimoires in her father’s library, books that had as much to do with avoiding sorcerous entities as calling them up. ‘
Be
careful
what
you
wish
for
,
you
may
get
it
.
And
you
may
not
like
it
,
but
it
may
like
you
.
Raw
,
or
cooked
.’