There was another price as well, and the Firebird wanted to collect that one in person. “Are you proficient in the sorceries of Gate and circle?” it said.
“No,” said Mar’ya Morevna, and the flat reply told Ivan she wasn’t just being honest in the way of the Summer Country. A lack of skill in anything irked her, and most noticeably if it involved a branch of the Art Magic when she was adept at so many others. The Firebird, however, merely stared at her from its hot, dark eyes, until finally she said, “But the spells for constructing a Gate are with me.”
“Then prepare one. I will show you the proper symbols for source and destination.” The great beak snapped twice, angrily. “They are a part of my mind, this past while.”
With the manuscript of copied spells in her hand, Mar’ya Morevna hesitated again. “Noble Firebird, I’ve seen you come into this room without a Gate to guide you,” she said. “The Gate-spells are dangerous—”
“Not to such as I. Proceed.”
“Then why resort to one at all?”
The Firebird raised its crest and ruffled all its feathers, then preened them back into place with vicious jerks of claws and beak. “A matter of honour must be concluded,” it said after a few moments.
“Baba Yaga?”
“Who kept me enslaved!” The harsh voice grew shrill as the Firebird’s temper began to slip. “Who forced me to come and go at her command from the confines of a cage! Who disgraced me by skimping on the very substance of the Summoning!”
It bated, hawklike, smiting the air with its spread wings until they left tendrils of flame and sparks in their wake. Everyone in the Council Chamber, whether man or woman, horse or wolf, flinched from the fiery rush of wind and protected their faces until the Firebird settled back onto the perch.
“You will open me a Gate to the castle of the Teutonic Knights,” said the Firebird as calmly as if its spasm of rage had never happened, “and the reason for it is this. Were I to go to that castle now, by my own will, I would still be subject to the wishes of the witch. But if you send me to do a certain deed, and to return, then your wish – though it be my wish – has precedence over hers.”
“Now I understand,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “But would you willingly put yourself under my command?”
“There is a thing called trust,” said the Firebird simply. Mar’ya Morevna and Prince Ivan both bowed at the compliment. “And I have been unwillingly controlled for long enough.”
“In that case, my wish is easily fulfilled. You took away a book of mine. I want you to bring it back.”
When the circle was drawn at last, it reminded Ivan of the convoluted pattern that had been constructed in the snowy courtyard of Mar’ya Morevna’s kremlin to bring them East of the Sun and West of the Moon. But there were differences he wasn’t schooled enough to spot, yet he knew that they were there as a man might know the direction of the sun with his eyes closed. Ivan stalked around the Gating circle, eyeing it like a viper in the grass, and he took good care to stay well clear of its perimeter.
“These symbols go here,” said the Firebird, peering first at Mar’ya Morevna’s spells and then at the circle on the floor, directing her brush with gestures of beak and claw. “And these, over there.”
As the symbols were painted in, the aspect of the circle changed in a way that Ivan needed no training in the Art Magic to understand: it was the difference between a sheathed sword and the naked blade.
“If you want my opinion,” the Grey Wolf was at his elbow, bristling, “I wouldn’t share the entire kremlin with that thing.”
“Yet here we are, in the same room.”
“If I was certain this was your idea, dear Prince Ivan,” said the Grey Wolf, showing his teeth, “I would probably bite you.”
“I suppose the correct response is to say I’d let you,” said Ivan, “but I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t—”
The crash as the door of the Council Chamber flew open cut his words off short. One of the guards that Tsar Vyslav Andronovich had stationed outside it came in, but nobody took the man to task for his rude entrance, because he came in backwards and already dead.
With the heavy door wide open, all the sounds that it had muffled could be clearly heard: the shuffle of feet shifting position, the quick rasp of breathing, and every once in a while the sharp clang of steel on steel. Then there was a single dreadful crunch and the second guard followed the first through the doorway. His body slid across the floor with the force of whatever had struck it, and a horrible foreshortening effect gave the illusion that his head had been driven partway down into his own chest.
Then a third man stepped inside, slammed the door and bolted it, and when they saw the mace cradled like a child in the crook of his left arm, no one thought the guard’s manner of death was an illusion any more.
“Dieter Balke, Landmeister of Livonia,” said the man, giving a little jerky bow. Except for Balke’s claimed title, the language he spoke was Russian, but his accent was German. This Dieter Balke could be nothing but a Teutonic Knight, and from the sound of it a high-ranked and therefore dangerously skilful one. He surveyed the chamber, betraying no surprise at anything he saw, then turned to face Ivan. “You,” Balke said, pointing with the spiked head of the mace, “are Prince Ivan Khorlovskiy. Yes?”
Ivan’s shashka sabre came out of its scabbard and up to a guard position, but even that razory curve of steel looked insignificant by comparison with the ponderous mace Balke carried as easily as if it had been a riding-whip. If ever there was a time when he might have wanted to deny his real name, this was it. How and why Balke had come to search for them in the Summer country, Ivan didn’t know; but he was certain the Gate spells came into it somewhere.
Mar’ya Morevna’s father Koldun had found that sorcery in Prussia, and the Teutonic Knights owned the entire province by now. What method the Landmeister had used to track them to Vyslav Andronovich’s kremlin was another matter. Ivan had a feeling he’d seen Balke before, because the big knight looked horribly familiar. His mind’s eye could see that distant figure on the hill, walking purposefully down towards Vasilisa Kurbit’yevna’s hunting lodge.
“How did you know where we were, Teuton?” he asked, lowering the point of his sabre a little and taking care to sound almost casual about the question.
“You ask that, who left a trail a blind man could follow?” said Balke, and laughed. “The Order has friends in unexpected places.”
“Even here?” asked Ivan. Balke grinned at him and closed those big white teeth of his on any other information about such sources of friendship. “Who knows you and yours here in the Summer Country?”
“Is that what you call it? With all the work to get my other questions answered, that was one I never thought to ask.”
Before Ivan could draw breath to say anything else, Balke had poised his mace easily in both hands and was walking forward with the quick stride of someone with a job to do and no more time to waste about it. “Enough talk.”
Ivan changed guard with the sabre. Trying to block such a mass of metal was asking for a snapped blade, and glissading the mace-strokes wouldn’t work either because the spikes would surely snag somewhere and that would mean a broken sword again. The only safe thing to do until he sized up his opponent was to dodge—
“Vanya! Vanya! The Gate! For God’s sake, the Gate!”
—And the area for dodging in had suddenly shrunk by half. The presence of the Gating circle forced him sideways instead of back, nothing like as far from Balke’s mace or from the circle as he wanted. But that curtailed space worked both ways. If he had little room to move then so had Balke, and there was a good deal more of the knight, height and weight and balance, all of it affected by the momentum of that ponderous iron club he carried.
When the mace-head screeched across the floor in a shower of sparks and splintered tiles less than a finger’s thickness from his ankles, Ivan realized with a jolt that Balke had long since come to terms with his size. T
he man moved as lightly as a dancer. Only a frantic jump straight up and as much backwards as he dared had saved one or maybe both of his feet from being mashed. Ivan ripped out his long Circassian dagger and crouched low behind the blades of sword and dirk, trying to remember what Guard-Captain Akimov had taught him to do.
Tire him out. That was what Akimov would recommend. Let him move around, let him drag his great lump of ironwork after you, let him—
Don’t let him get so close!
Ivan ducked and dodged in a frantic wrench that couldn’t be dignified by calling it a sidestep, and the chair beside him exploded into matchwood so hard and fast that he felt the sting of splinters in his cheek and jaw. The spiked mace whirred as it swung through the air again in a great wide swashing blow, invitation to come in under its arc and use a dagger. Ivan didn’t attempt it, not yet. Balke was probably hoping he might try such a tactic since the end of the mace-haft, metal like the rest of it, was an ugly conical point for use against someone who came too close.
Ivan moved sideways instead, risking a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t going to be trapped by wall or corner. Nobody would help him, because nobody could: there was barely enough fighting space for the two of them as it was, and they were carrying the only weapons in the room. However much Mar’ya Morevna and the Tsar might want to interfere, they were wise enough to know that, unarmed, it would be a literally fatal error.
Restricted as he was by walls and furniture and the whispering threat of the open Gate, Ivan couldn’t change position enough to force Balke to follow him. Instead of moving about and tiring himself, the German knight planted the ball of one foot squarely into the gouge he’d driven through the tiles. Well-braced by that rough footing, he merely swivelled almost on the spot to keep Ivan always in front, where the mace poised low in both big hands could reach him.
Ivan glowered, wishing that the Landmeister had chosen anywhere else to stand. Mar’ya Morevna had primed the Gate to Castle Thorn just an instant before Balke came bursting in and now, with the German knight and his lethal mace in the way, there was no chance for her to get close enough to disable the spell. Ivan could actually hear it, a sinister hissing sound like sand poured across parchment. One step too far, and he would be wrenched from where he faced just one adversary and flung into a fortress filled with them.
“Stand still, damn you,” snarled Dieter Balke, sounding less cool and collected than before. Ivan narrowed his eyes a little. If the man was getting impatient because he’d been expecting to finish his fight quickly, then maybe, just maybe, it was because he knew he couldn’t wield so monstrous a weapon as that mace for very long.
He risked a tentative jab with the sabre’s point to test Balke’s speed again, and as he felt the tingling thump of impact in his wrist, tried to convince himself that the Landmeister’s swing wasn’t as fast as last time.
Balke laughed, and poised his mace again. “You’re slow, Prince Ivan,” he said. “Slow in your movement and slow in your mind. Still wondering how I found you?” He jerked his head towards where the Firebird sat on its perch like a heraldic eagle. “You asked one little bird for information. I asked another. It took time but your little sparrow Countess sang a sweet song of who you were and where you went.” The man grinned again, a thinner, wider stretching of lips. “Eventually.”
Ivan went white, and all the blood that drained from his face seemed to boil up behind his eyes so that Balke’s outline wavered beneath a hot red fog. He’d suspected something of the kind, but being told by that sneering voice was far, far worse. Past caring that the German was trying to provoke him into doing something stupid, he lunged at the Landmeister so hard and fast that even though the mace came up to meet him, it was too slow.
Almost too slow.
The striking-head missed him completely, if that properly described how one of the spikes ripped through his coat and gouged his back, but the iron shaft hit his ribs on the right side hard enough to lift him off his feet and his sabre flew from fingers that refused to hold it any more.
At the same time he felt the jolt all down his left arm as the long straight blade of the Circassian dagger went into Balke up to the hilt.
The knight roared something that might once have had words in it, and tried to shorten his grip on the mace trapped between Ivan’s arm and body so that either the spiked head or the spiked pommel would be of some use.
Ivan clamped the iron haft against his side, squeezing tight then tighter still until his bruised ribs creaked in protest, but letting the mace go would be much, much worse. His left hand punched Balke in the belly again, and again, and again, and the dirk went thudding into meat each time. Then Ivan fell down, and the mace came with him. The spikes of Balke’s mace tore at back again, but there was no force behind them any more. The Landmeister of Livonia had a more urgent need for both hands.
He was trying to stop his insides from falling out.
Dieter Balke staggered sideways with blood and fouler matter spurting down his legs. There was a damp, rending noise, and glistening loops of gut burst past the frantic scrabble of his fingers to slop down around his feet. Balke skidded, stumbled, tripped – then fell sideways into the hissing maw of the open Gate. There was a single horrid scream, the only sound that had come out of him since he first felt Ivan’s dagger, but it cut off as abruptly as the slamming of a door.
“Lord God in Heaven, what a way to die!” Mar’ya Morevna crossed herself, and after a moment so did Tsar Vyslav Andronovich. Prince Ivan got to his feet and stared for a few seconds at the empty Gating circle, both arms hanging limply by his sides while blood dripped and puddled from the dagger-point. Finally, left-handed, not caring one way or the other, he made the sign himself.
“No worse than what he did to the little Countess.” He looked at the Circassian blade, noticing where its fine edge had nicked on bone. “At least steel is clean.”
“Steel?” said Mar’ya Morevna. Her face was still pallid with shock. “Your dagger didn’t kill him. The Gate did.”
Ivan glanced at his wife, and then at the shimmering, hissing circle. “I don’t understand.”
“I prepared it for the Firebird. Most specifically for the Firebird. Nothing else.” For a few minutes Ivan cradled his aching ribs and stared at nothing while thoughts tumbled through his mind without distraction from pain. Then he stared at the Gate and was glad he felt too weary to be sick. “Wrong size,” said Mar’ya Morevna in a soft, remorseless voice. “Wrong shape. Wrong species…”
“Whereas I am correct in all of those respects,” said the Firebird, “and there is unfinished business requiring my attention.” It spread its wings and glided towards the Gate, crossed the perimeter of the circle, vanished, then was back an eyeblink later in what looked like a continuation of that same glide. One wing dipped into a smooth banking turn, and in no more than twenty seconds it was on the iron-and-gold perch again, preening its feathers and looking as if it had never moved at all. The only real difference was the presence of a book – no, an unstable heap of books – which had suddenly appeared in the centre of the floor.
Ivan walked unsteadily to a chair and sat down very carefully, favouring his right side, then watched his wife dispel the Gate and return her file of spells to the safety of a closed saddlebag. Only then did Tsar Vyslav Andronovich walk to the door that Balke had bolted and swing it open, admitting a crowd of concerned kremlin servants, guards, ministers and at least two physicians. Ivan relaxed and let them go to work.
There had been no need to ask the Firebird if its matter of honour had been concluded; a faint, foul smell of scorched fat had returned with it through the Gate, and there was a greasiness on its sickle talons that coiled away in wisps of smoke even as it preened. Ivan winced and gasped as the surgeons probed gently at the purple bruises forming on his side. He had no need to ask at all. And no desire to, either.
*
Castle Thorn of the Teutonic Order;
1235 A.D.
Ignored…
He stopped at once and waited for von Düsberg to come panting along the corridor. The man really is too fat, he thought. If armour grows any heavier, then wearing it will kill him. “Your pardon, Brother Albrecht,” he said aloud, “but I was thinking of other things.” Von Salza smiled to himself. That was true enough. I still am. But I won’t say anything aloud, my good Treasurer, to spare your feelings. “You did very well, Albrecht. I hadn’t expected an inquisitor of all people to give us such a useful confession.”
“Thank you, Grand Master,” said von Düsberg, straightening his clothes and knightly mantle as he regained his breath. “Is it truly useful? I mean, what will happen to him when he reaches Rome?”
“Not enough. Prayers, penances, an admonition from a Bishop – or from the entire College of Cardinals, who knows? No more than that; the man’s a Father-Inquisitor and they can do no wrong. But rest assured, he won’t trouble us again.” Von Salza started to walk again, keeping himself to a more sedate pace for Albrecht’s sake.
“Can you be sure?”
“Better than that; I’ve made sure. There’s a letter in the various reports that accompany Father Arnald back to Rome, and the knights who escort him will carry further copies.”
Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Page 29
