The Golden Horde (47 page)

She and the two horses looked down at Ivan, then at the sword, with an expression of such deliberately ordinary disapproval that Ivan could have hugged all of them on the spot. It didn’t bring things back into any sort of perspective, because with the Lord of the Dark Places loose in the world, perspective didn’t matter worth a damn. But there was something comforting about it all the same. Mar’ya Morevna swung down from Sivka’s high saddle and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, all the time staring past him at the writhing column smeared across the sky.

“You’re like the children, Vanya,” she said in his ear. “You can’t be left alone at all.”

“Fewer jokes, noble Lady,” said Volk Volkovich. “The situation here is hardly funny.”

“But then you never understood my sense of humour, did you?” said Mar’ya Morevna.

Ivan looked from his wife to his friend and back again, his lips pulled back in a tight, crooked grin. It sounded like the old sniping, but the ugly edge had gone. If they survived the next few minutes everything was going to be all right, because nothing else would ever seem as bad again. “Later for that,” he said. “We should do something. If we
can
do something.”

“Where are the twins?”

Ivan gestured down the street, now almost empty of people. “In the house where I left them this morning. We were heading that way. After what happened, they’ll have more sense than to go outside.”

“This—” Mar’ya Morevna waved up at the coiled serpentine darkness, and it seemed to shift torpidly at her attention, “—is too recent. What
did
happen?”

Ivan told her, in as few words as he could spare: about the
boyaryy
and their wild scheme for sorcerous intervention; about the crowns and how three of them were no longer where the Tatars thought; and about how he’d thought right up to the last minute that the rending between the worlds had been averted.

“If it hadn’t been for those three fools, you’d have succeeded.” Mar’ya Morevna’s voice managed to blend warm approval and cold rage together in the same few words, and Ivan shivered. “They made their sacrifice, and that attracted attention. They didn’t get out of their house in time, and that provided nourishment …” She caught a question taking shape and shook her head. “Blood, souls, life, death… I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.”

“Mar’yushka, if Chernobog’s power lies in the dark and the night, why did he – it – that
thing
wait until morning?” Mar’ya Morevna had started rummaging in her saddlebags, and it was the Grey Wolf who answered.

“Because you don’t gain strength from a good meal until you digest it.”

Ivan curled his lip in silent disgust. “Thank you for that,” he said with massive dignity. “Would you go to the children, make sure they’re all right, and bring them here? Now we’ve got the horses,” he slapped Sivka and Chyornyy, “we can at least be sure they’re out of this mess.”

“And bring the other crowns while you’re at it,” said Mar’ya Morevna briskly, still rummaging. “You know where they’re hidden?”

Volk Volkovich put fist to forehead and bowed low. “Yes, noble Lady. At once, noble Lady.” His shape collapsed in on itself, and the Grey Wolf in his true form looked at her with wicked yellow eyes. Mar’ya Morevna looked him up and down and raised one eyebrow.

“There. You do have a real sense of humour after all. Not that anyone in Sarai is going to notice. But stay in man’s shape if you can.”

“When I come back is time enough for that,” said the Grey Wolf, and raced off.

“You’re all remarkably calm,” said Ivan, aware his own voice and his hands were trembling. “Is there any significance about that?”

“Panicking wouldn’t help.” Mar’ya Morevna patted him on the shoulder. “You told me so last time, when I saw Tsar Morskoy in his true form and screamed.”

Ivan chuckled weakly, feeling very much put in his place. “I still can’t believe you did that.”

“Believe it. We all have our terrors. He happened to be one of mine. But why panic? Erlik Khan seems content enough to just be here.”

“They thought they were summoning Chernobog. Something Russian. Volk Volkovich says not.”

“He’s right. But the Great Crown of Khorlov is here, and that’s Russian enough.” She lifted it out of the leather bag and brushed ice-crystals from its sheepskin wrapping. “So are the books I thought I might need.”

“Grimoires?”

“No, account ledgers. Vanya, what do you
think
?”

“I think you could be moving faster.”

“No need. We’re safe until nightfall.”

“Then what —?” Ivan shut up and took a small step backwards as Mar’ya Morevna took the books from her saddlebags, because
Enciervanul
Doamnisoar
was the least of them. “You were expecting trouble,” he said weakly, not offering to help.

“I don’t know what I was expecting. But there’s enough trouble between these covers to match most things I might find in Sarai.”

“Even that?” Chernobog was curling heavily in on itself, a movement less like smoke than ink poured into water, all coils and convolutions of infinite complexity. It looked a mile high, and terrifying.

“Even that. The existence, attraction and antagonism of opposites. Where there’s one, there can always be another. Black and white, light and darkness, heat and cold. Good and Evil.”

“Belobog and Chernobog,” echoed Ivan. “Tengri and Erlik Khan. Life and death …” They weren’t just pairs of words, because he understood their significance only too well.

The energies contained within Khorlov’s Great Crown had played no part in aiding Chernobog’s entry to the world of men. Brought here voluntarily rather than under escort, its presence gave Mar’ya Morevna access to a voluntary imbalance of power, and the ability to restore that balance by the Rule of Opposites. The summoning of some entity, some manifestation, some
Thing
whose characteristics opposed those of Erlik Khan.

It was completely logical, but as Ivan stared up at the throbbing congeries of shadows that was Chernobog and Erlik Khan, he began to wonder if the cure might not be as lethal as the ailment.

“Vanya?” Mar’ya Morevna’s voice broke into his ugly imaginings and made him realize how little he’d been paying attention. The spell-books were open, their pages marked with many little strips of parchment, and the muddy ground was covered with a complex series of patterns where if one line curved right, another curved left. Those mirror patterns matched each another sweep for sweep until Ivan’s eyes couldn’t make sense of their convolutions any more. “Vanya, you’re the Tsar of Khorlov and its crown is yours by right. Take it in your hands and hold it high.”

The gem-beaded surface of its metal was still white with the frost encrusting it when Mar’ya Morevna peeled away the sheepskins, but though the frost-crystals crushed and melted under the pressure of his fingers, Ivan felt no sensation of cold. There was just faint coolness, as pleasant as a breeze on a summer day, and that more than any deeper chill made Ivan shudder.

He could hear Mar’ya Morevna murmuring the complicated cadences of a charm of summoning, but didn’t look down to watch her. Without needing to be told, he stared up at Chernobog, full into the heart of the dark, and tried to visualize it suffused with a warm glow. What happened was far harsher.

The dull sky split asunder and something came searing into existence alongside the black column, casting such light that the snakelike spirals of Chernobog’s structure might have been carved from jet. It made a sound like the singing of flame, and cast a flare of warmth like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

And when its coils of light entwined with the coils of darkness, that silent darkness shrieked.

*

Ivan picked himself up off the street and spat out mud. Being knocked down was becoming something of a habit and he might have wished that Mar’ya Morevna had warned him; he might have wished to be somewhere else entirely. But he was here, and alive, and he was watching things no man had ever seen before.

There was a vast stillness in the city of the Golden Horde. Petty differences were set aside, petty human needs were discarded – even flight, for when gods duel for the souls of men, where is there to run? The structure of the Bright being was like that of the Dark, flickering, dazzling, constantly changing, and as the darkness was most often a great snake made of lesser snakes, so the brightness was sometimes almost human-shaped, though at other times very far from it. But once at least it took on the form of a warrior clad in blue and gold, the colours of the sun and the sky, armed with a spear made of a bolt of lightning that stabbed through the Darkness like a needle in cloth.

To the Tatars it was Tengri of the Eternal Blue Sky fighting Erlik Khan with his thunderbolt, though Ivan knew there was at least one old servant who had come with him down from Khorlov who would see Othinn or Thorr wielding spear or hammer against Jormungandr the Midgarth-serpent. To some of the Russians it would be Belobog struggling with Chernobog, but the rest would see the Archangel Mikhail, come to do battle against the Darkness and the Old Serpent, not for them alone but for all the wide white world.

And it wasn’t enough.

“What’s wrong?” yelled Ivan through the din. “Nothing’s happening! They’re just —”

And then he knew. The Rule of Opposites was too exactly balanced, for while everyone watching wanted the Light to defeat the Dark, there was still enough darkness in their own souls – hidden hatreds, jealousies, a secret desire by either side to turn that power of Light against their enemies whether Rus or Tatar – that the two forces hung in perfect opposition. They could neither win, nor lose, nor even break off the combat once it had been joined.

Instead they remained where they were, a screeching, twisting column of ravening energies, black light shot through with lightnings that was planted all too solidly in the heart of Sarai and the heart of the Khanate and for all Ivan knew, in the heart of the world itself.

It should have been impossible to hear so small a noise above the high, tearing roar thrown off by that swirling vortex, but Ivan heard something behind him. Nikolai and Anastasya were standing there, and what he’d heard was a gasp of fear, or astonishment, or even delight for all he knew. His twin children were removed enough from the normal concerns of childhood that what he found terrible, they might find magnificent. Volk Volkovich was behind them, restored to human form, and he at least looked appalled at what he saw.

“Mama,” said Nikolai. Just that one word, no greeting, no running into a long-missed embrace. No more than a simple recognition of her presence. It was as if all emotion had been shocked out of the boy, and out of his sister too, for Natasha didn’t even speak. They were carrying the other three crowns between them in a sling of cloth, sagging a little with the strain of the power they contained, and the look in their eyes was ancient.

“We stole these,” said Natasha. “Stealing is wrong.”

“It’s wrong even when you steal from an enemy,” said Kolya. “That’s why
They
won’t go away. The ekwi…—” he fought with the word, “equilibrium is upset.”

Natasha looked at her parents with old, wise eyes in her child’s face. It chilled Ivan to the marrow of his bones. “We were trying to do good by doing a bad thing.”

“Then give me the crowns,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “I’ll —”

“No, Mama. That wouldn’t work. You didn’t take them. You can’t put them back.”

“Neither can Papa.”

“But we can.”

Ivan stared, and heard, and that chill turned to stark terror. “Put them back? What do you mean?”

The children didn’t reply. Instead they looked at each other then ran past their father and out towards the flaring, spitting pillar of fire and darkness.

“
STOP
!”

Ivan flung himself after them as he might have done if they were running towards a street busy with horses and wagons, but his clawing fingers rebounded before they could close around collars or hems, before he could reach his own children, because a barrier like a vast sheet of glass or an invisible, unbridgeable gulf opened between them.

He could hear Mar’ya Morevna’s heartrending scream as Volk Volkovich the Grey Wolf sprang past him and slammed against the barrier, hard enough to have dented a kremlin’s stone wall but not hard enough to break through this, and he knew he would hear that scream in his ears for the rest of his life.

And still the two small figures ran on, now no more than silhouettes against the black brightness while the heat and the cold swirled out to meet them.

“
DON’T
…!”

And they were gone.

Through his own helpless sobbing, Ivan could hear even Tatar voices shouting in horror. Those hardened warriors had killed men, women and children in their time, but they’d been strangers. There were people in Sarai who had come to know Ivan’s twins well over the past weeks. They hadn’t expected to see them die. The man who had been their father, and who had once been Tsar of Khorlov, collapsed on his face in the mud where his fingers clawed up great useless handfuls of the cold black earth.

As if that would help. As if it would hurt those who dwelt in the darkness. As if it could do anything at all.