It was someone sobbing…
The hackles went up on the back of Ivan’s neck, and a flurry of conflicting images went flooding through his mind as he wondered about Mar’ya Morevna’s father, who had trained his daughter as a skilled and deadly commander of armies. He thought about that daughter, now his wife, a lady so gentle, so loving, and yet so ruthless with her enemies. He thought of thousands of Tatar corpses strewn like mown grass across the steppe, and the firm, decisive sound of Mar’ya Morevna’s own voice asking him a question he couldn’t answer:
How else does one deal with such people…?
And he thought of someone weeping behind a locked door.
Tsarevich Ivan stared at the chains and padlocks for a long minute while honour and conscience, sympathy, horror and morbid curiosity all fought for precedence. He hadn’t promised not to open locked doors and, even if he had, some promises were more honourably breached than observed. But Mar’ya Morevna might not see it that way. The alternative was to disregard a sound he would never have ignored at any other time or place. Ivan closed his eyes and muttered viciously for several seconds, using all the filthy language he knew in the hope it would make him feel better. It didn’t, and at last he looked for the keys.
They were easily found, almost as if his fingers moved more nimbly once his mind was made up, and just as easily turned. Ivan discovered that the rusty iron padlocks opened far more readily than he had expected, flinging back their hasps at the merest touch. Very soon only the lock of the door itself remained. That was when he hesitated. The other locks, the bars and the chains now strewn across the paving could be replaced and no one the wiser, but opening this lock and then the door was a last step he couldn’t deny having taken.
Despite the thickness of the oaken timbers Ivan heard a tiny, feeble moan, and there were no more second thoughts. He turned the key – its wards lifted the lock’s tumblers with slick, oily ease – and when he pulled the handle there was only an instant’s resistance before the door groaned open. A breath of chill air rolled out of the room beyond. Ivan grabbed one of the torches from the wall and looked inside. At first there was only darkness, the long black sweep of his own shadow, and the dance of light and shade cast by the guttering torch-flame. Then something turned over in the pit of his stomach, and there was a buzzing like a swarm of bees inside his head that drove out every other thought but shock and pity.
Because a prisoner was chained to the wall.
*
He was little, and shrivelled by privation. His nose was like a blade, his eyes were sunk in his head, there wasn’t flesh enough on his bones to feed a louse, and he was very, very old. His hair was white, and hung down past his shoulders; his moustache was white, and hung down past his chin; his beard was white, and hung down past his knees almost to the floor, for he was fettered upright, shackled to a beam and the wall of his cell with twelve iron chains. Two were at each wrist, and two were at each ankle; two were at his waist and two were at his neck; and they all ran to a hook in the beam and through a padlock bigger than his head.
Ivan stared while the buzzing in his head grew louder, not wanting to believe the evidence of his own eyes. That Mar’ya Morevna was more than she seemed was something he accepted willingly, and that she was a Tsarevna who ruled her own realm and fought her own wars was something he’d grown used to. But learning she had a secret like this, whether it was hers or her sorcerer father’s, was more than Ivan could bear. Any claim that she knew nothing, that her father had locked doors before he died and she had just kept them that way, was no more than a weak excuse easily disproved. If this door had remained shut since her father’s time, the prisoner inside would have died from thirst or starvation long ago. Someone knew he was here, and that someone had kept him alive.
It wasn’t a discovery to encourage any husband, and especially the husband of such a wife.
Then the old man raised his drooping head and opened his eyes, blinking as they began to water in the torch-light. He looked towards the doorway, even though Ivan felt sure that just now he could see no more than a great brightness invading his dark cell. “Pity me,” said the old man into his bright darkness, in a voice weak and quavering. “Give me a drink, for I have been given none these ten years and I am parched!”
Ivan cringed to think the old man’s jailers were so cruel that he needed such desperate exaggeration to arouse pity. More and more he was determined there would be words between Mar’ya Morevna and himself when she came home, and the bee-buzzing in his head took on the sharper sound of rage. He looked around, and his eye fell on the brimming bucket. Wine would be better to restore the old man’s spirits, but the water was closer and at least it was cold and clean, the better to quench thirst. There was only one problem: there no drinking-vessel other than the bucket either in the cell or out of it. Need prevailed over nicety and after tipping some out so it wouldn’t spill too much, he hefted the bucket and held it to the prisoner’s mouth—
Who drank its contents down in a single draught.
Ivan stared for a moment, his head so filled with buzzing that he felt no more than a brief, dull surprise that the old man should have been so thirsty. Then he set the bucket aside, but the ancient prisoner looked at it as he might on the life-giving cross and said, “One is not enough to quench a thirst like mine. Good sir, of your charity, give me another.”
There was no harm in it. Ivan took the bucket, filled it full, and brought it back to where the old man hung helpless in his chains. Again it was drunk to the dregs, this time not in one gulp, but more slowly as the first fierce edge of that cruel thirst abated.
“One more, and one only,” the old man said, “and I will be restored.”
Ivan could see that although there was water in his beard he looked better already, and was pleased that so small an act of kindness could do so much good. Bringing the bucket for a third time, he took care to hold it with more care, and watched contentedly as the old prisoner savoured every drop.
“Ah,” he said, sighing deeply, “Now I am myself again. Many thanks to you, Prince Ivan.”
The bucket dropped with a crash from Ivan’s hand at the sound of his name, and his mouth shaped questions that were never voiced, for at that self-same same instant the buzzing vanished from his mind, his memory gave him the answers – and he realized just what he had done.
“‘Who am I when I am myself, and how do I know your name?’” said the old man, uttering Ivan’s own unspoken questions in a voice no longer frail and tremulous, but harsh and bleak as winter. “I know because of who I am – and who I am is Koshchey the Undying!”
He stood up straight, as though the twelve chains no longer weighed him down, and a moment later he drew a deep breath and burst the forged and welded links of his fetters so they fell away like rotten rope. While the harsh clangour of iron chains falling to the stone floor died away he combed his fingers through his beard and smiled a smile that never reached his old, cold eyes.
Ivan met that smile with a stare of horror – then plunged out through the door, slammed it shut and shot every lock and bolt he could reach then leaned back against the wall, panting as if he had just run a race. His breath caught in his chest when the passage filled with the smoke and smell of burning timber, and with the blacksmith stench of heated metal. The bars and bolts glowed red, then pink, then white, then ran like wax; the lock’s inner workings oozed in searing streams out of the keyhole, leaving tracks of scorch all down its wood; then the hinges melted from their sockets and the useless door fell down.
Koshchey walked out as if the fallen door was a bridge between his cell and the wide white world outside, and beneath his tread the heavy oak turned black then crumbled into dust and ashes.
“Again I give you thanks, Prince Ivan,” said Koshchey Bessmertny, though he glowered beneath his brows, “and your kindness brings you safety. Three times you gave me water when I was a prisoner, so three times I will forgive a wrong. You tried to lock me in my cell ag
ain, and that was one. Guard the second and the third, for they guard your life. If you are wise, you will not see me again.” Koshchey laughed like the grinding of ice on a frozen river. “Nor will you see Mar’ya Morevna. She owes me thrice three years of liberty for each one her father stole from me, and you will not live so long. Farewell.”
The old man turned from Ivan and began to walk away along the corridor that led to Mar’ya Morevna’s kremlin palace. Despite the threats Ivan knew he couldn’t stand helpless while such a necromancer escaped into the world, to steal away his wife and do the good God knew what other harm. If he had only thought to wear a sword…
But there were other things.
Ignored by Koshchey as beneath his notice, Ivan stepped lightly, back into the cell and when he came out again the wooden bucket hung from his right hand. He swung it once, twice, and three times as he ran towards Koshchey the Undying, and on the third he brought it down with all his strength across the necromancer’s skull. The bucket flew to shards and staves, and Koshchey was hurled to the floor, slack-limbed and sprawling like a dead man.
Then he rolled over, rose, and seized Ivan by the shirt.
“That was two,” he said, and lifted Ivan until the prince’s boots were inches off the ground. “Understand my name, young fool. It took many years and many lives for me to become what I have become. I cannot be slain, not by such as you, nor by any man. Remember that, but forget Mar’ya Morevna. I need but hold her in my kremlin until the dark of the moon, and she will be mine until I decide to let her go. By then, Prince Ivan, you will be long dead. Find yourself another wife, make yourself another life, because you will sooner see your ears without a mirror than set eyes on Mar’ya Morevna again!”
He flung Ivan aside as a man might hurl an apple, straight at the wall.
Ivan was upside-down when he hit it, and he was still upside-down when the floor came up to meet him very fast. There was a great roaring in his ears as Koshchey the Undying vanished from sight on a storm of his own making, but the roaring went on for a long time after that, until it faded into darkness as the torches in the passage all went out at once.
*
When Ivan recovered his senses there was no way to tell how long he had been without them. The stones of the floor where his face was pressed against them were as cold as he remembered, and the torches were still burning – but they had been burning when he came from the ramparts of the kremlin to this passageway, so that was no help in telling how much time had passed. For a few seconds he closed his eyes again, hoping against hope that when he opened them again he would be in his own bed after no more than a foul and vivid dream.
It was no dream. The charred door with its twisted, melted metalwork was still on the floor beside him and, when he made the painful effort of raising his head, he could see links of broken chains littering the cell beyond. Ivan squeezed his eyes tight shut to block out the evidence of his own stupidity, and to quell the spasm of nausea that the movement of his head had caused. Both attempts were unsuccessful.
He knew of old, after many falls from horses, that the old lie of ‘bring it up, you’ll feel better afterwards’, was just that, a lie. He was sick twice before he risked standing, and the attempt to do so had simply made him sick again. With the water-bucket broken he was reduced to cupping handfuls from the cistern and splashing them into his face. Despite what was said about the effectiveness of cold water on a sore head, it was another lie. The only difference was to leave him feeling wretched and wet instead of just wretched.
After an eternity of minutes Tsarevich Ivan felt strong enough to start the long walk back, towards the kremlin and the way out that had been his way into this mess. He was afraid to stay in this gloomy corridor, in some underground of the palace that seemed to have no existence on the surface, but he was even more afraid to find out what had happened in the world outside.
The worst had happened.
Two couriers from Mar’ya Morevna’s army were awaiting his return in the Lesser Hall of Audience, and though Ivan knew he would look as out of place there as anywhere else, he went to meet them straight away, or as straight as his still-wobbly legs allowed. Palace servants had been searching for him since the riders arrived, a matter of a quarter hour or so, which told him he hadn’t been senseless very long. Their fussing concern over the state of his clothing and the state of his health followed him the whole way to the audience room, where in less than two minutes it was overtaken by concern for the state of the realm.
The couriers’ report, though confused by not knowing what they had seen, told Ivan far more than they knew. Mar’ya Morevna’s host had been victorious again, trapping the remaining Tatars in yet another ambush of her devising. Very few of the brigands were left to return to their home khanate, and none of the survivors would have anything to brag about except their luck and the speed of their horses. Her successful army turned for home, and had been a mere two hours’ march away when something descended out of a clear sky.
One man described it as a great gust of wind somehow dark enough to see, the other likened it to a black storm-cloud. Regardless of their conflicting descriptions, both agreed on what it did, which was to snatch Mar’ya Morevna from the saddle of her horse and bear her away though she rode in the midst of all her captains and her personal guards. It was one of those captains who had sent them at a gallop to the kremlin, though what he expected would come of it, Ivan didn’t know.
The only thing he did know was that all this was his own fault, and he could shift the blame to no one else. He thanked each soldier in turn for his information, dismissed them, then sat staring at the wall for more than an hour. Servants and officials came walking in, saw his expression and tiptoed out again, but Prince Ivan saw none of them. He didn’t even see the wall, only the image again and again of his hands turning keys, of his hands pouring water, of his hands loosing Koshchey the Undying on the world again.
And finally he saw nothing but the blur beyond his tears.
*
Ivan stood on the battlements of the kremlin as he had stood earlier that day. Then he had been waiting for Mar’ya Morevna but now he waited for his first sight of the moon. It was cold, despite the illusory warmth of a glowing sunset, and Ivan was wrapped in a great grey coat made of the pelts of Siberian wolves. That coat, and the deadly look in his eyes, had been enough to send the more superstitious of his guards to the farthest end of the rampart. Any man who looked so and dressed so and awaited the moon with such intensity wasn’t a man they wanted close to them, Prince or not. Only those who knew the moon was nowhere yet full remained near him. Ivan would have found it amusing, had his mind been able to grasp such a concept as humour with his wife newly stolen away.
He waiting, staring at the horizon, and tried to remember what phase the moon had shown last night. Last night, he hadn’t noticed. Last night, it hadn’t mattered.
If it had already reached moondark, did that mean he had already lost? Or was it Koshchey’s sport to give his victims a month of useless hope? Ivan closed his eyes as a shudder of despair racked through his body, but opened them again as one of the guards on the uppermost tower shouted something whose sense was lost on the cold wind. His words were irrelevant; it was what prompted them that mattered. The moon was visible at last.
A pale crescent like the curve of a scimitar unsheathed itself from a bank of cloud, gleaming briefly before it was lost to sight again. Ivan felt his heart lift, because that crescent told him he had three weeks and perhaps a little more in which to find Mar’ya Morevna. Less than he hoped, but more than he feared. Ivan squared his shoulders and hurried down to the kremlin library.
Within an hour he had virtually torn it apart in his search for maps and charts. Besides not knowing his way around the kremlin, Ivan discovered to his chagrin that he barely knew his way around its library either, for in all his rummaging and learning of small spells he had barely skimmed its surface. Mar’ya Morevna and her father before her had acquired en
ough reading matter, whether books, rolled parchments, cased scrolls or any other form of preserving the written word, to fill every shelf three volumes deep. It made finding any single thing a near-impossible task and at last, almost knee-deep in paper, Ivan lost his temper. Throwing down an armful of bundled manuscripts so hard that the ribbon round them broke and their leaves scattered across the floor like some literary autumn, he hunted out one of the few volumes whose location he knew well.
It was the first, the simplest, and the easiest to understand of all Mar’ya Morevna’s grimoires, especially for a man unskilled in sorcery who was also in a hurry. Ivan found the spell – ‘To Reveal That Which Would Be Discovered’ – a small spell good for lost keys, misplaced wallets and other relatively unimportant items… Such as books in an overcrowded library. He took less than a minute to arrange the spell’s geometry in his mind’s eye, and then, with only a token concentration on whatever map, chart or note he needed, Ivan read the words aloud. Perhaps that lack of focus was what created a sudden explosion of activity on half-a-dozen shelves at once.
It was certainly what caused the spike of agony that lanced through his skull as if someone had thrust a stylus into each eye, leaving a throbbing headache in its wake.
Magic was never without cost, and careless magic was more costly than most. Occasionally its cost was life. As the tears of pain faded from his eyes and left his vision more or less clear, Ivan realized with a shiver just how close he had come to pulping the inside of his own head with the pressure of the spell. If the magic had been unable to find what he sought in the outside world of the library shelves, its energy would have snapped back into his brain like a breaking bowstave. It was a mistake few sorcerers made more than once.
Ivan snuffled uncomfortably as his nose began to bleed all over the grimoire, and glanced around for something with which to wipe the spattered pages before his bloodstains became a permanent feature of its text. Then he realized there was no need. The blood was gone. Absorbed into the paper. Consumed. Devoured…
Prince Ivan Page 15
