“One day we were working through the ruins near The Citadel and we caught rumor of a vucari hunting in that area, stealing little gypsy children and eating them whole. We went in and found her. But it was clear that the rumors were false. This wolf creature was just living in the area, you see, trying to survive like the rest of us. When the truth of it came to light, I tried getting them to stand down, to retreat. A vucari is nothing to trifle with, as you have seen. But they had their blood up, and nothing I could say would stay their sport. We tracked her until she was cornered. She managed to slit the throat of one of the Muscovites, but in the end, she lost her strength.
“By that time, my blood was up as well. Someone thrust a silver dagger into my hand, and I plunged it into her belly, three times. It was over, and she lay there dead. It was only afterward that we realized that she was pregnant, with two pups. We left her there on the cold marble floor and never entered the city again. But shortly thereafter, the vucari’s mate, his name being Vasile Lupu, tracked us down, one by one, and took out his vengeance. I was the sole survivor, and that is when that bastard Boyko found me. I was more than happy to be in his service, even if that meant being a slave. I wanted nothing more than to be rid of that vile creature.
“So you see, Lux. I cannot travel with you, for my curse will affix itself upon you. Wherever I go, that beast will surely follow. He waited years for me to reemerge. He will not stop this time until I am dead.”
Lux listened to it all, nodding appropriately at various places. Afterward, he was silent. Then he stood, cleared his threat, and said, “I understand. But we all have our secrets, and there is no shortage of dangers lurking in these ruins. My request still stands. But if you are intent on carrying this burden on your own – a respectful decision – then I will see you to the Kiev Gate and have you on your way.”
Just like that? Fymurip stared at the Teutonic Knight, not certain what to do. The man hadn’t even asked for his coins back. Is he playing me? Fymurip wondered. When they reached the gate, what then? Would this cleric fall upon his knees and beg him to stay?
Fymurip looked deeply into Lux’s eyes, trying to divine the truth. There was no malice, no deceit, no deception there. He would see Fymurip to the gate, and then happily bid him farewell.
“This cross of Saint Boniface. . . how important is it to you?”
“I have sworn an oath to the Grand Master that I will return with it or not return at all.”
“And you honestly believe that it resides somewhere within these ruins?”
Lux nodded.
Allah, forgive me for what I am about to do.
“Very well,” Fymurip said, standing and turning toward Igor Square. “Follow me.”
“Where to?”
“Lux von Junker,” Fymurip said, not bothering to turn, “you may have Royal coin, but I am not without resources of my own. Come. We will do this my way.”
IV
Just outside the little town of Draguloki, they watched the withered old man fish for carp. He had neither bait, nor pole, nor net, but he thrashed around happily in the knee-high water of the small stream that flowed a few feet from the entrance of his hovel. He would grunt and jab his hands under the water, flail around aggressively, but would always come up empty-handed. The failure didn’t seem to shake his resolve. “I’m gonna get you, fishy. I’m gonna get you.”
Lux shook his head. “This man is going to help us?”
“Looks are deceiving,” Fymurip whispered, hoping that he was correct. It had been a long time since he had seen the hermit. He was crazy back then. Hopefully, he wasn’t absolutely senile now.
Fymurip picked up a small rock and tossed it into the water near the man’s legs. The splash startled the carp, and the old man fell to his knees, cursing. “Damn the gods! I nearly had it!”
“You haven’t caught one since I’ve known you!” Fymurip said from brush cover. “Nor will you ever.”
The hermit scrambled backward toward his hut. “Who is it? I warn you. . . I have strong magic.”
Fymurip emerged from hiding. He smiled and put up his hand in peace. “Would you harm an old friend, Kurkiss Frieze?”
The hermit pushed strands of greasy grey hair out of his face. He squinted. “Who are you? And who is that with you?”
Lux emerged then, his hand on the pommel of his sword. Fymurip motioned toward Lux with caution. “Careful, he’s not kidding about the magic.”
Fymurip took a step into the water. “It is I, Fymurip Azat. Your old Muslim friend.”
Kurkiss didn’t seem to believe at first. He squinted again, moved forward cautiously, looked Fymurip up and down. “Impossible. He was torn to shreds by a wolf.”
“Not yet,” Fymurip said, lowering his hand and taking another step forward. “And I won’t be until you can catch a fish with your bare hands.”
Kurkiss giggled. “It’s good to see you again, old friend. I had written you off.” He motioned to Lux. “Who’s the giant?”
Lux seemed insulted by the comment, moved his hand again to his sword. “An impatient fellow, for certain,” Fymurip sighed, “and not one who can take a joke, apparently.”
“No time for jokes, my friend,” Lux said. “Daylight is wasting, and people are dying.”
“Welcome to Starybogow!” Kurkiss cackled and did a little dance. “Where death is cheap and life. . . well, that’s more complicated.”
“Agh! We’ll get nothing from this bloviating fool. Let’s be off!”
Lux turned to leave, but Fymurip grabbed his arm. “Patience, cleric. Kurkiss will give us what we need.”
“And what is that?” Kurkiss asked, straightening his back, though it seemed as if the weight of the world pushed down on his shoulders. The past few years had been hard on the old man, Fymurip could tell. He seemed more broken, more unsettled. Fymurip could see a tremor in the man’s hand as he spoke, and he appeared to always be on the verge of collapsing. “I don’t treat with Teutonic Knights.”
“How did you—”
Fymurip was just as surprised as Lux at Kurkiss’s statement. Nothing in the German’s outward appearance gave away the truth, though the sword might have been a clue, or his height, or his arrogant impatience.
“He is a knight indeed,” Fymurip said, deciding there was no reason to lie about it, “and he is on a very important mission. We need to find a man, a Teutonic cleric in fact, who has been seen in Starybogow.”
Kurkiss waved off the request. “I don’t travel in those ruins anymore. Bad for my arthritis.”
“No, but you still know everything and everyone. Surely that hasn’t changed.”
Kurkiss paused, stared at them cautiously and rubbed his chin as if he were deciding their fate. Perhaps he was. “Very well. We can talk. But he won’t fit in my house.”
They followed Kurkiss across the stream and into a small clearing on the left side of his hut. There, a pot of water boiled over a small fire, and dried ash stumps had been set up to use as chairs. Atop the stumps were what looked like black, shrunken heads, but on further scrutiny, were simple macramé balls affixed with button eyes and dried corn husks for hair. “Meet the family,” Kurkiss said, motioning to each as he lifted them gently and set them on the ground. “Batushka and Matushka. . . oh, and of course, my wife, Helena. They like the cool breeze of a morning and the warm flames of the fire as they await breakfast. But sit, sit. . . they are happy to give you their chairs.”
Fymurip and Kurkiss sat quickly, but Lux could not find a comfortable stump. He settled on the damp ground next to Matushka.
“The gods have cursed you with so much girth,” Kurkiss said, giggling at Lux’s misfortune.
“There is only one God, old man, and my girth, as you call it, has served me well.”
“Perhaps. But what do you do, I wonder, when hiding from mice, or from roaches, or from—”
“Kurkiss!” Fymurip snapped. “Focus, please.”
The hermit shook his head as if to clear away the fo
g, then nodded. “Of course, of course. So, tell me whom you seek in the old city.”
Fymurip laid out the mission as best he could. Lux chimed in on occasion to fill in any missing pieces. When they were finished, Kirkiss reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt, dried leaves, and sticks, and tossed them into the boiling pot.
“An old Bosnian woman taught me this little trick. Then I found out that she was Baba Yaga and had to kill her.” He chirped like a bird. “I do miss her cooking.”
He swirled the dirt mixture with a wooden spoon, then let the inertia of the stir die down. Fymurip stood and gazed into the pot, watching as the boiling water sizzled and popped around the dirty pebbles. To him, the mixture had no distinctive shape, nor did it suggest anything resembling a location or a direction in which they might go. It looked like nothing more than wet dirt and leaves.
But Kurkiss gasped, stepped back from the pot, made the sign of divinity over his chest, and fell back onto an ash stump.
“What is it? What do you see?” Lux asked, rising from the ground.
“Your deaths,” Kurkiss said. “Both of you. Abandon this mission. Now.”
“Did you see the cleric?” Fymurip asked.
The hermit nodded. “Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He was in motion, near The Citadel, I think. The vision was not clear. Romani surrounded him. He is being protected by them. They will kill you if you try to find him. So I say again, abandon this mission. It is not safe.”
“Why do they protect him?” Lux asked. “We will do him no harm.”
Kurkiss shook his head. “It isn’t you that they fear. They are afraid of who else wants the cross.”
“Who?” Fymurip reached out and put his hand on the hermit’s frail shoulder. “Who wants it?”
Kurkiss shivered as if cold, but he stood, opened his mouth, and tried to answer. “The Han—”
Before he could finish, a shaft came out of the thicket behind his hut and struck the hermit in the neck.
Kurkiss Frieze fell dead at Fymurip’s feet.
*****
Before the hermit’s body hit the ground, Lux was up and setting a bolt in his crossbow. Fymurip had already reached the woods’ edge in pursuit of the assassin. Lux followed closely behind, finding it difficult to negotiate the thick underbrush, the branches and nettles ripping at his clothing and skin. The Tartar moved with ease, but the assassin was fast, agile, and it was clear from Lux’s position that a confrontation had not occurred. Lux burst his way through the wood, crashing and plowing the brambles like a mad boar.
Finally, the bolt was ready. He raised the crossbow to his shoulder, aimed as carefully as he could as he stepped out into a small clearing. He pulled the trigger. The bolt found flesh in the assassin’s hip. Lux smiled at his accuracy, until he realized that he had shot a dead man.
“He’s already dead,” Fymurip said. “He cut his own wrists with a poison blade.”
Lux clipped the crossbow to his belt and knelt down beside the assassin’s body. The poison had worked fast. Already the corpse’s eyes bulged purple. His throat was puffy and red. His veins ran dark green, giving his face a striped marble appearance. His lips were bloodless.
“Nasty poison,” Lux said, picking around the body, looking for clues, anything, to indicate who he was, who he worked for.
“He must have been tracking us from the city,” Fymurip said. “Maybe that is why it was so easy to leave.”
Lux nodded. “I would say so. And clearly, he didn’t want the old man to tell us why we shouldn’t find Gunter Sankt.”
“But why?”
Lux rolled up the corpse’s sleeve, and pointed at a blood-smeared tattoo. “That’s why.”
Fymurip leaned in and gasped when he saw it. It was a tattoo of two black birds, back to back. Both had red beaks and talons, and in the center of their bodies, lay a plain red-and- white shield. In the corner of the white part of the shield lay the capital letter H.
“The Hanseatic League.”
Fymurip whispered the term as if doing so aloud was a curse itself. Lux had to admit some apprehension at uttering the name as well, for the Hanseatic League was nothing if not diabolical. Headquartered in the city of Lübeck, in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, the League served primarily as a collection of merchant guilds. Though its mission seemed sincere – on the surface, at least – it dominated European trade by any means necessary. But its influence had fallen on tough times in the east, primarily in Poland and Russia. Why had they employed an assassin to work in a ruined city? And why did they care at all for an old cleric with a silver cross? Surely they had no clue as to its power, and even if they did, how would it benefit them?
Fymurip put words to Lux’s thoughts. “Why is the Hanseatic League here?”
Lux shook his head. He laid the corpse’s arm across the man’s chest, said a silent prayer for the lost soul despite his anger, and stood. He looked into the woods. Are there others? He wondered. Are they watching us now?
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I suspect the reason they didn’t want Kurkiss to discourage us from finding Sankt is because they too are looking for him. They haven’t been able to find him, and they must think I can do a better job than they for I am Teutonic.”
“Can you?”
“No, it doesn’t work that way, Fymurip. I do not share any kind of spiritual connection with a member of my order simply because we worship and serve the same God. Does it work that way with you and other Muslims? I thought not. No. We have to do the leg work. We have to find Gunter Sankt by searching Starybogow. Brick by brick, building by building, if we must. And at least the old man gave us some clue as to where to start looking.”
“If we go back in, Lux, we may lead the Hanseatic League right to the very thing they want most.”
“Yes, and I suspect that’s exactly what they intend. And we should give them what they want. We need to let this play out as it may, if we are to learn who all the principles are in this game. I owe that much to myself, to my order, and most importantly, to Duke Frederick. We need to find Gunter Sankt before the Hanseatic League finds him, or things may escalate beyond our control.”
V
Realizing that they hadn’t eaten in a full day, they chose to stay at Kurkiss’s hut for a few moments longer to find succor and prepare for another foray into the ruins. Lux found the notion a little unsettling: ransacking a dead man’s hovel for food, and over his corpse no less. But it was either that or go back into Starybogow weak of body and spirit. They had already seen what lay waiting for them in those ruins when they were at their best. Lux shuddered to imagine what it might be like if they were fatigued.
Fymurip dug a small grave for his friend and laid him to rest. Lux had no practical idea how Muslims buried the dead, nor did he particularly care. When the Tartar wasn’t looking, Lux said a small prayer of his own for the old man, and then got back to the matter at hand: finding food and clean water.
Fymurip took this time to pray to Allah.
Lux imagined that it was the man’s first chance to do so since his enslavement, and it looked cathartic. Fymurip did not have the traditional Turkish seccade prayer rug, and for a moment, Lux wondered if the Tartar remembered in what direction Mecca lay. Then all fell into place as Fymurip found a dry-rot potato sack and spread it out in compensation, then went to his knees in the center. Lux crawled into the dilapidated hut and gave Fymurip all the time he needed.
He found a loaf of half-moldy bread, tore off the bad portion and ate half of the good part in one massive bite. After prayers, Fymurip did the same. They also found a wineskin of bitter dark grape, but otherwise, it was drinkable. They also found a store of cured squirrel meat, which they finished off quickly. Then Lux cleaned himself in the creek while Fymurip ran his dagger across his face to eliminate the stubble which had grown there over the past few days.
Then they let out. The sun was well past its zenith, and they dared not
wait any longer. Kurkiss’s hut lay close to Starybogow so their trip back was quick and ueventful. They also had little problem getting back in, the guards at the Konig Gate remembering them and put out their hands for coin the minute they were spotted. Still in charge of their finances, Fymurip dipped into the bag and produced a few silver coins. The guards quickly stepped aside.
The Citadel lay in the southeast corner of the city. In its day, it had served as a natural defensive position for the citizenry, a stone-fortified keep, with its tall, Constantinople tower looking out for invaders winward. It sat atop an escarpment, and atop that lay a sturdy curtain wall which had faired relatively well in the earthquakes. The main passage up the escarpment, unfortunately, had been devastated by the quakes, and was nothing more than a long, snake-like pile of stone barely navigable by anyone without grapple hook and maddened determination. If one were bold and foolish enough to try climbing those stones, there were entry points through the wall that lay guardless, but Fymurip had a different idea.
“There’s a staricase that winds up through the eastern battlement, which lies between the tower and the Kiev Gate. Few know of this entrance. The city watch would use it to move quickly from the square to the battlements if the town had ever been breeched.”
“Seems like a weak point in the defense,” Lux said, but then changed his mind when he actually saw its construction.
A third of the way up the staircase, Lux noticed that some of the steps were false: strong enough to support a man-sized body, but easily cracked open. Once open, it offered a clear view to the winding stairs below, and thus burning oil or other flamable substances could be tossed in the approach of any invading force. And with the stairs so narrow, once burning bodies began stacking up, it would be near impossible for armed hostiles to get up the staircase in any orderly fashion.
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