A Cauldron of Secrets (The Dashkova Memoirs Book 2)

by Thomas K. Carpenter

I hated to agree, but the need was great and her request seemed simple, like the lock of hair that hadn't done me any harm for giving up. It occurred to me that she might be insane, and that agreeing was meaningless, but my mind had been opened to the possibilities. Plus, I couldn't explain how she made me lose track of time, leading me to believe she was something more than she appeared.

  In the end I agreed, with a worried heart that my payment might have devilish implications, but only because the need was dire. Then again, maybe Pavel would come to thank me for this.

  "I accept."

  It had seemed that Chloris had been across the pool, but then she was on me all at once. She grabbed my hand, and I thought I would fall into the pool.

  Her mouth went around my first finger, wet lips up past the knuckle, and she sucked on it, producing a delirious joy in me that arched my back and made me knock-kneed. I don't know how long I stayed like that, but at the end, she bit hard enough to draw blood before releasing my hand.

  I went cold with the thought of what had happened and what I'd agreed to. Somehow, in the aftermath, the price seemed more real than it had when she'd voiced her request.

  I shook off my unease, knowing that my son would never even make the overland journey across the European continent, let alone board a ship onto the Atlantic.

  11:52.

  I pulled out a handkerchief and wrapped up my blooded finger.

  "The man you seek is named Koschei," said Chloris, wiping her mouth as if she'd just finished a delicious meal.

  "The duck egg!" I exclaimed, his name sparking my recognition. "In the children's stories, Koschei the Deathless carried his soul in a duck egg."

  "That's the one," said Chloris, the corners of her lips teasing upward, while her eyelids wavered dozily.

  I hadn't caught the connection at first, since I'd grown up in St. Petersburg, where I'd heard the myths from the West, rather than from Russia. Only when I was married and moved to Moscow did I hear about Koschei the Deathless.

  "That's only a story," I said. "A tale to scare children."

  "You asked a question. I provided an answer," she said, with a throwaway shrug.

  My voice rose in froth. "You haven't answered my questions, only baited me with a story. I wonder if last time was merely a lucky chance, and that you feed on my expectations."

  "I don't care what you believe," said Chloris with a thin smile. "We made a deal. The second thing you wanted to know was how to find him. Do you still wish to learn that?"

  "Yes," I said. "And if he's not there, then I'll be coming back to see you."

  "Koschei has made his home on an island in the Schuylkill River, west of the city. Fishermen call it Muskrat Isle, though no trappers go there anymore," she said, ignoring my threat. "Nothing but dead things there now."

  "Does he keep the duck egg there?" I asked.

  "That's not what you asked," said Chloris, the words coming out flat and hard. "You wanted to know where to find the man who holds the duck egg, not the egg itself. Be more careful with your questions next time."

  A flurry of words poised on my lips and I lifted my head to unleash a volley when the door opened. Madam Maria's son was there, calling to me that my hour was up.

  12:03.

  I was standing outside before I realized it. The boy was looking at me strangely, and it was only when I noticed that my dress was soaking wet, well past my knees and dripping onto the carpet, that I understood what had happened.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The fishing skiff made a splash when I pushed away from the dock and into the Schuylkill River. The current pulled against the boat, tugging it in lazy circles as I fit the oars and sat on the middle seat, tucking my rapier behind me so not to bend the blade. I had a long moment of doubt as I drifted into the current, hands outstretched on the oars like a condemned woman on the rack.

  Dipping the oars into the water and giving them a long stroke did nothing to reduce my doubts. Chloris had said I was a fool, and I agreed with her.

  If I had another option, I'd take it, but getting the duck egg back was my only way out, and I'd never been a woman to back down from a challenge.

  Before long, my arms ached and I'd torn the bandages on my shoulder blade, from when Koschei had thrown me across the room. The ivory-handled pistol poked my gut as I leaned forward to stroke the oars. It fit better on my back, tucked into my belt.

  I'd had enough sense to change into my printer clothes before heading out to Muskrat Isle, though I wished I'd also put on my riding coat. The river air was much cooler than in the city, and dew formed on the gunwale, glistening like tiny jewels.

  I'd brought a lantern with me, which I'd lashed to the front seat, and its golden light blasted across the water. I assumed the owner of the boat went on nighttime frog hunting expeditions by the gigging pole tucked under the seats. The frogs serenaded me in their alien tongues on my way up the river, content that I was not hunting them.

  Working against the current sapped my strength. Even if I'd been a younger woman, it wouldn't have been easy. The further upriver I went, the more I consoled myself that the name “Koschei the Deathless” was a moniker taken to scare folks. But I couldn't figure out what role he played in Anne's schemes. She seemed too aristocratic to bother herself with men like Koschei.

  Part of me didn't believe the nonsense with the duck egg, though if that was the game he played, I'd at least go through with the ritual. I'd heard of assassins with odd habits. They either designed them to unnerve potential clients and foes, or they were an affliction of those that killed people for money.

  If he was adhering to the myth of Koschei the Deathless, I had to have control of the duck egg to control him in turn. Which explained why Anne Bingham wanted it back.

  But if he was real, then I was placing myself in grave danger trying to secure the egg without help. However, I had little choice if I wanted to stay in Philadelphia. Action, at least, provided an answer to my troubles, even if it created new problems.

  I searched my memory for other hints that might help me with this lunatic who called himself Koschei. The myths that used this name were many and varied. If I recalled correctly, the egg was typically hidden within a duck, which was in a hare, in an iron chest, under an oak tree, and out in the ocean on some damned island.

  In the stories, Koschei usually abducted the hero's wife. But it seemed in this version, he was acting as a henchman. Either way, I did not doubt the danger I was putting myself in by approaching his island.

  Further up the river, a cold mist enveloped the rowboat, hindering my progress. With sight reduced, every errant splash wheeled my head around. At times, I thought I heard a clicking sound, like two brass pegs tapped together, but when I turned my head to find the source, the noise was gone.

  Without warning, the boat sliced through a field of cattails, grinding to a halt in a patch of bright fog. Leaning my elbows against my knees, I heaved with breath, every limb trembling.

  At least on the way back I could move with the current, I told myself. If I made it back.

  I stood for a long time at the bow, considering my options. I could wield the lantern and one weapon, or take both rapier and pistol and go sightless. I couldn't convince myself to search the island without light, so I kept the rapier at my side.

  The water was deeper than I expected. I waded to shore with the anchor rope in my teeth and tied it to an old tree washed onto the island during a flood.

  My boots oozed water as I stepped gingerly across the rocks, moving slowly so I could examine my surroundings. The soaking left me vulnerable to the chill that passed across the island like winter's breath.

  The further west I went onto the island, the less the pistol felt comfortable in my grip. Before long, I was holding both the rapier and the lantern awkwardly in my left hand, the light bobbing and lurching across the moist earth as I struggled to maintain my grip, while the pistol was in the right hand.

  The fog faded to tendrils near the center
of the island. The earth was littered with rocks the size of bricks, but misshapen and jagged, rather than rectangular and smooth. I had to watch where I stepped to keep from twisting my ankle.

  I saw the first dead animal about ten minutes after I'd left the boat. It was a hare. Or at least that's what I thought it was based on the single leg attached to the pulped body. The rest of the animal looked like someone had placed it in a printing press and slammed the lever down.

  As I moved away from it, keeping my pistol level, I tried to imagine why it had been killed in that manner. Rabbits were a good source of food for a man living on his own, but it hadn't looked like there'd been any attempt to harvest meat from the creature. It was almost as if the rabbit had been smashed between two heavy stones and then left to rot.

  The second dead animal I found might have been a rabbit as well, but the body had been mashed and tufts of fur stuck out from the bloody pulp. Then I found a turtle, shell broken like a shattered mirror. A little later, there was a dead coyote, its legs like snapped toothpicks.

  The red-tailed hawk surprised me most. Its wings had been sheared from its body. The beak of the dead bird yawned open in surprise.

  It was no wonder the fishermen stayed away. Even without accounting for superstitions, a person who could catch and kill rabbits, coyotes, and hawks with their bare hands was dangerous.

  At the center of the island, a shape caught my eye that turned my guts around and put a half-dozen beads of sweat on my forehead. The shape wasn't plain to see, by any means. I didn't even realize I walked among it for the first ten or twenty steps.

  But then the spacing between the rocks began to seem uniform, placed. Not everywhere, but at least in some locations. The rocks were not strewn about in this place as if they'd pushed up through the earth or tumbled here during a springtime flood, but with purposeful execution.

  I couldn't begin to guess at the reasons, nor in the dark, with my hands trembling softly with the anticipation of an attack, could I see enough of the pattern to get a glimpse of the intelligence behind it, but that there was a pattern, that I was sure.

  At the center of the rocks the ground was smooth, glass smooth. A circle had been cleared and the black mud of the island smeared until it could have been a dinner table. Using my lantern, I traced the outline, seeing nothing else inside the circle.

  The hairs on my arms and neck stood at attention, as if pulled towards some hidden magnetic field. My gaze wandered upward, until my back bent like a hook. The sky was vast and stygian, and alien, as if it wasn't my sky, but the sky of some other universe. I could have stayed for hours examining the swath of foreign stars, but the weight of the island pressed me forward.

  Past the rocks, the land rose into a mound. A massive oak tree with a trunk as wide as I was tall had dug itself into the earth, and the mud from flooding had built up on the upriver side, spilling around the sides and creating the mound. Mud had strained through the roots, making them look like tentacles from some unearthly beast.

  At the base of the mound was a pile of bones from various woodland creatures, snapped and broken like twigs for a fire. A long limb at the bottom suggested human remains. One look and I knew the legend was real. Fear wormed its way into my gut. The savage display of the bones suggested a wanton killer. I was mesmerized by the pyre of death.

  Swallowing grew unnaturally difficult. Though the air was wet and fog teased at the edges of my vision. My tongue felt stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  Only the clicking saved my life. I turned, recognizing the sound from my boat ride to the island, and Koschei came out of the gloom.

  The pistol blast caught him straight in the chest. He kept coming, two long, loping steps, though it seemed impossible he could reach me so quickly.

  His arm knocked me through the air and into the pile of bones. I lay stunned, the white flash from my pistol affecting my vision, the air in my lungs having fled from the impact.

  The pistol, now useless, remained in my right hand, while the rapier and lantern were far to my left, thrown there when he'd hit me.

  Koschei the Deathless advanced with the arrogance of a predator, stalking me with long curled fingers. In the light of my lantern, it appeared his black hussar jacket had once been another color entirely.

  I found myself staring at the links in his armor, that pale, translucent mail beneath his open coat. Rather than steel, bent into a curl and intertwined with its brethren, the links were made of teeth, and the hole where I'd shot him appeared to be a grotesque mouth on his chest.

  Chloris had been right. I was a fool for coming to the island. I thought I was hunting an eccentric assassin who'd grown too attached to the myths of his youth. Now I realized, too late, that whether or not this had once been a man, he was now a beast, and that I would soon be dead.

  Chapter Twenty

  Time was a Gordian knot. A torturous path of thoughts and experiences that wound around the yoke of our lives, too difficult to follow, but sometimes surfacing with clarity before sinking back beneath the gnarled mass of hemp.

  Despite the danger, leaving for the island had felt that way: sure and right, and I'd felt a clarify that had left me arrogant in my task. That I would succeed even through the curtain of danger.

  Truth had never cut so keenly, even when my handsome Mikhail had died, or when my sovereign passed through the gates of the afterlife. I'd been a fool, a choice that'd been mine and mine alone. This creature—not man, but creature—would cleave me with the sharp nails on its elongated fingers, stomp me like the hare on the rocks, and scatter my bones amid the dead reeds, leaving my flesh to be picked apart by ravens.

  Though my gut knew there was no escape, providence never found those with a weak heart, so I scrambled to escape the pile of bones as white shards scattered before his advance. Despite my efforts, I found myself caught on a root while Koschei moved within reach. He stood so close I could hear his breath, rattling in his chest.

  When I knocked away a little animal skull on my lap, it bounced up the rise, and my gaze followed it to a hollow at the top containing the duck egg. If only I could reach it, the beast would be at a disadvantage.

  Except Koschei was nearly on top of me and the duck egg was a full length away at the top of the mound, too far to get to even if I wasn't entangled on the roots.

  Koschei raised his hand to smite me, but an angry clicking erupted from the darkness and a golden armored body the size of a dog leapt between us. It was the creature that had rolled to Djata's door. The creature reminded me of a pangolin, one of those creatures that lived on the African plains, except armored in gold rather than bone.

  Koschei outweighed the pangolin by a hundred stone, but the little creature fought with the ferocity of a dozen badgers. I watched, mesmerized for several moments, before remembering the task that could save my life.

  Freeing myself of the detritus, I released my dueling pistol and scrambled up the slope to grasp the warm duck egg, cradling it between my hands. My climb was fortuitous, as Koschei flung away the golden pangolin and advanced on me once again.

  With the duck egg held before me, Koschei froze, a dreadful hissing noise escaping from his withered lips. It was only in this moment, as we stared at each other, bound in a tenuous stalemate, that I understood the nature of this being.

  It was the bloodshot eyes that made the connection. Koschei the Deathless was what Voltaire—and eventually I—would become once we had sloughed off our mortal cares. I couldn't be certain, but dread requires little of certainty, and everything of fear.

  A tugging on my pant leg alerted me to the golden pangolin's insistence that we leave. Before, I'd been unsure of its loyalties, but now I was willing to follow it rather than face Koschei alone.

  Koschei watched as I struggled to my feet, trying to keep both hands around the duck egg for fear of dropping it. He hovered nearby, waiting to pounce should I fumble with my charge.

  The pangolin kept tugging on my pants. I hesitated briefly; my pistol
lay discarded on the earthen mound. The rapier was nearer still.

  I took a step towards the rapier, thinking I might rescue the weapon, but Koschei swung his fist like a cudgel. His knuckles bit into my forearm, spearing muscle and tendon, and I almost released the duck egg.

  The pangolin leapt, but Koschei swatted it away. He surged towards me, murderous intent on his boney brow.

  I lifted my arm, indicating I would smash the egg upon the rocks, and he froze a second time. This time I needed no encouragement from the pangolin. I backed away, glancing over my shoulder for treacherous rocks, keeping my arm high.

  Away from my fallen lamp, the darkness enveloped me. The pangolin's insistent clicking kept me moving in the right direction, back towards the fishing boat.

  Koschei stayed with us, always within striking distance, but right at the edge of sight. My arm grew heavy as the dance wore on, but I dared not relax.

  When the fog returned, stealing what little sight I enjoyed, Koschei disappeared. I thought I'd be relieved when the deathless assassin left us, but not knowing where he lurked was worse than seeing him within reach.

  The fog glowed with faint illumination, as if the starlight diffracted into the mist. We traversed the island in that cocoon of insubstantiality, and part of me feared that when we came out of it, I would find myself in another world entirely.

  Long minutes later, my arm trembling, we reached the eastern side of the island, the line of demarcation announced by the sentinel of dead reeds sticking through the muck.

  When I crouched down to untie the rope from the tree root, the pangolin craned its snout towards me, its black eyes regarding me with indifference.

  "Thank you, Friend," I whispered, my voice struggling to find itself in the fog.

  When the creature spoke, I nearly dropped the duck egg. "Welcome, you are," said the pangolin in English.

  When it spoke, I realized the line on its jaw was not a wrinkle, or a feature of its kind, but the gap of a hinge. The golden pangolin was not a flesh-and-blood creature, but an Automaton that could act on its own behalf.