Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove’s title of King of the Alternate History novel, fast-rising science fiction star S. M. Stirling is the bestselling author of the Nantucket series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, On the Ocean of Eternity), in which Nantucket comes unstuck in time and is cast back to the year 1250 BC, and the Draka series (including Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and Drakon, plus an anthology of Draka stories by other hands edited by Stirling, Drakas!), in which Tories fleeing the American Revolution set up a militant society in South Africa and eventually end up conquering most of the earth. He’s also produced the Emberverse series (Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis), plus the five-volume Fifth Milennium series and the seven-volume General series (with David Drake), as well as stand-alone novels such as Conquistador, The Peshawar Lancers, and The Sky People. Stirling has also written novels in collaboration with Raymond F. Feist, Jerry Pournelle, Holly Lisle, Shirley Meier, Karen Wehrstein, and Star Trek actor James Doohan, as well as contributing to the Babylon 5, T2, Brainship, War World, and Man-Kzin War series. His short fiction has been collected in Ice, Iron and Gold. Stirling’s newest series is an Emberverse tetralogy of the Change, so far in three volumes, The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, and The Sword of the Lady. His most recent book is In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, sequel to The Sky People. Born in France and raised in Europe, Africa, and Canada, he now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In the action-packed story that follows, he shows us how an unlikely alliance is forged between two very different kinds of warriors, and then sends them on an even more unlikely mission together, a hair-raisingly dangerous mission that will test their resolve, their ingenuity, and their courage—and the bounds of friendship.
* * * *
It was a hot day in July, the two thousandth and fifty-fifth year of Our Lord; or fifty-seven years since the Change, plus a few months. The feather-grass of the middle Volga steppe rustled around him, rolling to the edge of sight in knee-high blond waves. Sergey Ivanovitch’s jaws moved steadily on the stick of tasteless dried mutton as he lay on his belly and watched through his binoculars as the strange rider approached, ant-small at first under the immense blue dome of the sky. Now and then, he sipped from a leather flask, water cut with corn brandy to make it safe to drink.
“Who is this one, sorry nag?” he said idly, either to himself or the horse lying behind him, mentally checking on the locations of his weapons. “Balls of brass, to ride here alone. Or in a hurry, Christ witness.”
He chewed cautiously on the stick of jerky, since it was like gnawing on a board, and occasionally used his dagger to slice off shavings. His teeth were a young man’s intact set, which he wanted to keep as long as possible. At forty-eight, his father Ivan Mikhailovitch had exactly five discolored stubs left in his jaws and had to live on boiled cabbage and soup, when he wasn’t drunk and living on liquor, which admittedly was most of the time.
Whoever he was, the stranger was coming on fairly fast—canter-trot-canter, with two remounts behind him on a leading rein. Three horses would be very welcome when the traders from Belgorod came.
“So, does he run away or toward?”
Sergey was here on the chance of running across some saiga antelope or wild horses. And to get away from the stanitsa—Cossack village—and his family’s crowded rammed-earth cabin and the squalling of his younger brothers and sisters and the endless chores for a while before harvest pinned everyone down.
And because his grandfather Mikhail had died, and it was unseemly to grieve too openly before others for a man of eighty—it was the will of God and the way of nature, and it became a Cossack to be scornful of death. Mikhail had been a great man, one of the few left who’d been a grown man before the Change; and one of the leaders who’d seen the Don Host reborn.
I am the last of them, the old man had said just before he stopped breathing. The last, and a world dies again with me.
Sergey hadn’t known what Grandfather Mikhail had meant by that, but it made his eyes prickle nonetheless; he shoved the thought roughly away and concentrated on what was at hand.
“And he could throw an axe like an angel,” he muttered. “Christ welcome you, Grandfather.”
A clump of trees and the remnants of old orchards to the north surrounding the snags of some ruined buildings were the only signs that this had once been tilled ground, in the days before the machines stopped. The great river’s bend was only eighty kilometers eastward hereabouts, but folk from his stanitsa didn’t go that way, not if they valued their heads. Too many of the infidel flat-faces ranged there. The feud between Russki and Tartar went back long before the time of the Red Czars and the age of wizards, to the dim days of legend.
“And sometimes you see some of those Kuban bastards this far north,” he mused. “And Daghestanis...Quiet, limb of Satan,” he added as his mount stirred.
The big rawboned gray beast was well-trained and stayed lying prone behind him, both of them sweating under the hot noon sun. Tiny white grasshoppers spurted out of the grass-stems when he shifted his weight on his elbows, and the air smelled of ozone and hay—as well as horse and man’s-sweat, leather and metal.
“Glory be to God forever and ever,” he muttered to himself as the man’s features and dress began to show details in the twin lenses. “I don’t think he’s a Tartar at all; not a Nogai, at least.”
That was what the flat-face tribes around the Volga called themselves these days, and Sergey’s people knew them well from war and trade and the odd marriage-by-abduction. The stranger’s helmet was a blunt cone with a spike on top and a belt of fur around the rim, not wound with a turban; he wore his hair in a black pigtail, too. And his stirrup-leathers were adjusted fairly long, not in the short knees-up goblin Tartar style.
“Maybe I shouldn’t kill him, then. Not right away. Father Cherepanin will scold me if I kill a Christian just for his horses.”
And it would be a shame to miss asking him some questions; Sergey could feel his curiosity itching like a mosquito bite. Grandfather Mikhail had always scorned the younger generation because they were pinned to one place, and boasted of how he’d roamed from Germany to China in the service of Great Russ, in the old days before the Change. Most of Sergey’s generation had little time for stories of the days of the Red Czars, but they’d made him wistful sometimes. And life in the stanitsa could get dull.
Or if Olga finds out about Svetlana, then it could get far too interesting for comfort!
The oncoming rider was jogging along on a horse not quite like anything the Cossack had seen before; short-legged, shaggy, with a head like a barrel and a round tubby body. It didn’t look like much, but it was getting its rider along well. The two remounts on a string behind him were Tartar horses, taller and slimmer and more handsome, but although they carried only light loads, twin sacks, they looked more worn-down.
“So he’s either expecting a fight or just come from one. Most likely running. Who goes on a raid alone? He rides well, too,” Sergey said to himself. “As well as a Cossack. A bit of a runt, but not a moujik, not a peasant.”
All Cossacks considered themselves noblemen, of course, even though they did their own work.
The man was well-armed too, with an inward-curved yataghan sword at his waist, an odd-looking flat quiver of arrows over his back and a bow in his fist; a round shield of leather-covered cane and a braided lariat were hung at his saddlebow. Apart from that, he wore boots and leather trousers and a shirt of mail over a leather jacket, warm gear for midsummer unless he expected a fight. As he watched, the stranger halted and looked backwards carefully, standing in his stirrups and raising a hand to shade his eyes.
Sergey nodded to himself, cased the binoculars, picked up his lance, and whistled to his horse, swinging effortlessly into the saddle as the beast unfolded itself and rose. The stranger reacted instantly, reaching over his shoulder for an arrow; he was about three hundred meters away now, extreme bowshot for a strong man and a heavy stave. That motion halted as Sergey held his lance up horizontally over his head, and then reversed it and drove it point-down in the earth in sign of his peaceful intentions, leaving his own bow cased at his left knee. Then he waited quietly as the stranger jog-trotted forward and halted within talking distance.
They looked each other over. Sergey was a young man, just turned twenty, a thumb’s width under six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with lean muscles like ropes and a longish straight-nosed face. And an impressive collection of scars, many of which showed because he was wearing only baggy wool pantaloons and high hide boots and the broad leather belt that supported his shashka-saber and dagger and a light axe with a meter-long handle. His head was shaved save for a long yellow scalplock bound with thongs that hung down past his shoulder from over his right ear. Mustaches of the same corn-color were still distressingly fuzzy on his upper lip; his slightly tilted eyes were pale green, bright in his tanned face.
The other man looked a little like a Tartar, but darker than most— umber-brown skin, braided black hair, with a flat almost scalloped-in face, high cheekbones, and a snub nose. The narrow slanted eyes were blue, but raiding for women back and forth had gone on long enough that you couldn’t judge who was who by looks alone. The stranger was shorter than Sergey, strong-looking, but slim and apparently a youth just barely old enough to take the war-trail; even for a black-arse, his face was very hairless. Sweat gleamed on that smooth impassive countenance.
The stranger spoke first. “Russki?” he said, in a voice that sounded even younger than his face, pointing at Sergey.
The Cossack nodded and slapped a fist against his bare chest, making the silver crucifix slung there bounce.
“Da, Russki, Khristianin,” he said. “Yes, Russian, Christian.”
“I am name Dorzha Abakov,” the stranger replied.
“Sergey Ivanovitch Khorkina, me. I am a Cossack, stanitsa of Polovo in the Don Host, under Ataman Oleg Andreivitch Arkhipov. And you, flat-face boy?”
“Tanghch people; Kalmyk, you Russki say. My ruler is Erdne Khan of Elst.”
From the far reaches, Sergey thought, his brows rising in surprise.
He’d never heard of the khan, and only vaguely of the Kalmyks, who grazed their herds and pitched their yurts in the dry steppe south of Astrakhan on the Caspian shore. Dorzha’s eastern-flavored Russian was rough but understandable; a guttural undertone suggested something else that was probably his native language.
“Musul’manin?” Sergey asked suspiciously
Dorzha spat with scorn; shook his head, and pointed upward. “Worship Tengri Etseg—Eternal Blue Father Sky—and the Merciful Buddha, not stupid gods from books.”
That could have been an insult to the holy Orthodox faith, but the Kalmyk’s next words concentrated Sergey’s mind wonderfully, along with the eastward jerk of his thumb:
“Nogai men follow me to kill. Five and two.”
“Seven Tartars?” Sergey yelped.
Dorzha nodded. “Seven, da, is that word.” Helpfully, he held up one hand and two fingers of the other.
“They were nine when they start after me,” he added, with a smile that exposed teeth that were very even and white, and patted the hilt of his yataghan. Then he indicated his remounts: “These their horses. Now my horses.”
Sergey cursed fluently and at length, regretting his decision not to kill the wanderer from ambush. Probably the Tartars would have turned back if they’d just found the body; they were getting too close to the stanitsa to be safe. Now...even without a blood-debt, any Nogai who found a Russian alone here would fill him full of arrows as a matter of course, unless they went to the effort of trying to capture him for torture or the slave markets. There wasn’t a truce on at present, and this wasn’t anywhere near the recognized trade-trail along the Belgorod-Volga railway in any case.
He suppressed an impulse to gallop away. If he just rode off, how could he keep this Dorzha from following him out of bowshot?
The black-arse devils would track us both! No wonder the little Kalmyk bastard is smiling!
The odds against him had just been cut in half.
But I’ve got a fight at three-to-one on my hands. The devil’s grandmother fly away with him!
Then he laughed and leaned forward in the saddle, extending his hand.
“It’s been a while since I let any blood, anyway,” Sergey said.
Dorzha took the hand, and a long swig from the flask Sergey offered next, along with a little bread and salt from his saddlebags. The Cossack drank from the Kalmyk’s offered canteen in return; it held kumiss, fermented mare’s milk. Kumis was better than water, and that was all you could say for it.
“We run more or fight here?” Dorzha asked. “This is ground of yours...no, this is your ground, you would say.”
Sergey looked around, then cocked an eye at the Kalmyk’s horses. They looked thirsty as well as tired, slobbering and showing their tongues. And if the pursued hadn’t been able to stop for water, then the pursuers probably hadn’t either....
“Hey, dog-brother, there’s an old well in that ruined kolkhoz over there,” he said thoughtfully. “The Tartar swine know it and they’ll probably water their horses at it.”
Dorzha grinned and nodded, making a motion to the west and then a curving gesture to indicate turning north and coming back parallel to their own tracks.
“Way to cut back and hide in wrecked of houses without being seen? They come soon, maybe—”
He pointed to the sun, and then to where it would be in about an hour.
“Catch us in twice that long if we run.”
Sergey laughed; the Kalmyk had grasped the essentials quickly.
“Da. There is a deep ravine four kilometers west that runs to the northeast; we can use that, then come in on the ruins from the north, if we’re quick. I like the way you think, Kalmyk! Let’s go!”
* * * *
There were seven of the Tartars, men with straggly mustaches and sparse beards, dingy green turbans, long filthy sheepskin coats...and unpleasantly clean and well-cared-for weapons.
Sergey looked through a dirty scrap of ancient glass as the enemy dismounted in the thin grass at the center of the old settlement, near a crumbling mound of rust that had been one of the devil’s magic oxen before the machines stopped.
A tractor, they’d called it, according to the old stories, first conjured out of Hell by the evil wizards of the Red Steel Czar to oppress the peasants. According to his great-grandmother, at least. Grandfather Mikhail had always said they were just machines, like a clock or a reaper, and a lot less work in plowing time than a team of oxen. Sergey had his doubts about that—if they weren’t moved by evil spirits, why should they all stop working at the same time?
But Grandfather could certainly tell a story, true or not. To plow sitting down, as if you were taking your ease in a tavern!
None of the Nogai were more than twenty meters away, their boots clumping in the dust and raising little puffs through the sparse grass. That was close enough for the Cossack to smell the hard rancid sweat-and-butter stink of them, as strong as the dry earth and the ancient brick and wood of the ruin.
The well had a built-up earthen coping around it, and a good solid cover of wood; the buildings had been stripped long ago of anything useful, down to wagonloads of bricks, and the frame ones on the outskirts had burned in the yearly grass-fires, but no steppe-dweller would destroy a well, whether Cossack or Tartar or even vagabond bandits. The Tartars looked tired, and their horses worse, despite having three remounts each. The animals were thirsty, too; the slant-eyed men had to hold them back as soon as they smelled water, wrestling with bridles, flicking their quirts at noses and cursing as the eager animals jostled and tossed their heads.
Tartars ride fast, and those are good horses, the Cossack thought. Dorzha must have led them a merry chase.
He mentally added a few notches to the lively respect he’d formed for the easterner.
This is not a little lost boy who’s come to our steppe, for all he has no beard.
The Nogai warriors had followed the tracks of Sergey and Dorzha just long enough to make sure that they hadn’t visited the well, then come directly back here; the two chance-met comrades had galloped west three kilometers, then looped north through the ravine and come back well away from their outward trace.
The Tartars thought their prey was still in headlong flight to the west. They’d plan to water their horses before they took up the chase again, pushing hard to make those they pursued founder their beasts; a thirsty horse died faster. But even if they thought themselves safe, the riders of the Nogai Ordu were experienced fighters. Two of them remained mounted, keeping a careful eye out and their bows ready while the others heaved the massive timbers of the lid out of the way and uncoiled their lariats to lower hide buckets and haul them back up hand-over-hand.
Sergey had pulled on his kosovorotka shirt-tunic while he rode and over it a sleeveless leather vest sewn with old-time washers of stainless steel, an heirloom from his grandfather, like the round Red Army helmet that now covered his shaven head. He looked over at Dorzha and tapped his bow, then held up two fingers and flipped his hand back and forth to indicate the Tartar sentries:
I the one on the north; you the one on the south. Then as many more as we can.
The Kalmyk nodded grimly, keeping his head well below the four-foot top of the ruined wall. Sergey eased three arrows out of his quiver, selecting hunting shafts with broad triangular heads, since none of the Tartars looked as if they were wearing armor. He set one on his string and the other two carefully point-down in the dirt. Dorzha did likewise. His arrows were black-fletched in nomad fashion; the Cossack preferred to use expensive imported peacock feathers from the Crimea, even if some of his friends teased him about being a dandy.
As if they’d practiced the motion together for years, they sprang to their feet, drawing and loosing in the same motion.
“Hourra!” Sergey shouted.
Dorzha simply shrieked with exultation, a sound like a file on metal. The snap of the strings on the bracers sounded in almost the same instant as the wet thunk of impact; at ten meters, an arrow from a powerful sinew-and-horn horseman’s bow struck quicker than thought. Sergey’s target went backwards over the crupper of his saddle in a double splash of red as the arrow punched through his chest and out the back of his body without slowing. The other sentry took Dorzha’s shaft under one armpit, and it sank to the fletching; he collapsed thrashing and screaming.
Sergey reached for another arrow. Dorzha shot before he could draw, and a Tartar on foot staggered backwards, staring down incredulously at the shaft in his stomach, then toppled backwards still clutching the bucket he’d been drawing. The long leather rope whipped down the shaft after him, and a scream floated up to be followed by a splash as the man struck headfirst.
“Four left!” Sergey shouted.
Then the Nogai were shooting back and leaping into the saddle; Sergey ducked as a whistle of shafts went by overhead. A savage yelping war-shout rose as they reined around toward the wall:
“Gur! Gur! Gur!”
And a thunder of hooves. Sergey yelled laughter as the two men turned and ran, vaulting over the lower back wall of the ruined building and turning sharply left between a higher stretch of rubble and a big oak tree.
“The infidel swine won’t get off their horses even to piss if they can help it!”
He’d counted on that. With superb horsemanship, the leading Tartar took the wall Sergey and Dorzha had just leapt, and shot from the saddle in midjump. Sergey swerved with a yell as the arrow went vwwwpt! past his left ear and dived for the ground. Dorzha landed beside him and scrabbled in the dirt; the Tartar in the laneway reined back slightly to let his comrades catch up, then came on again with his lance poised.
“Pull!” Sergey shouted.
“I pulling am, stupid Cossack ox!” Dorzha wheezed.
Their joined lariats sprang up out of the dust, secured to the oak tree and with a half-hitch around the jut of eroded brick wall. They both braced their feet and flung themselves backwards, but even with the friction of the hitch, the rope jerked savagely through his callused palms as the first two horses struck it. One went over in a complete somersault and landed on its rider like a woman’s wooden tenderizing hammer coming down on a pork cutlet; the other collapsed and slid, throwing its rider ahead of it. The two behind reared and crow-hopped on their hind legs, screaming louder than their riders as they tried to dodge the tangle of human and equine flesh before them.
Sergey plucked the hatchet out of his belt, tossed it into a better grip, and threw with a whipping overarm motion. The ashwood of the handle left his hand with that sweet fluid feeling you got when something was thrown properly, and an instant later the steel helve went smack into a Tartar’s face; the man fell and beat at the earth with his hands, screaming in a gobbling, choking grunt.
Dorzha had his yataghan out. He dodged in cat-quick under the last rider’s hasty slash, turned it with his round leather-covered cane shield and drove the point of the inward-curved sword into the horse’s haunch. It bucked uncontrollably, and the Nogai had no time to spare for swordwork for an instant. That was enough.
Quick as a cat indeed! Sergey thought, as the sharp Damascus-patterned steel slashed across the man’s thigh, swinging in a beautifully economical curve. It opened the muscle nearly to the bone; Dorzha bounced away again to let him bleed out.
The Tartar who’d been thrown from his horse had landed with a weasel’s agility, rolling over and over, then bouncing up. His bow was gone, but he had his curved shamshir out almost instantly.
“Allahu Akbar!” he shouted as he charged, sword whirling over his head. “Gur!”
“Yob tvoyu mat’,” Sergey replied, grinning and coming up on the balls of his feet; the Tartar probably even understood it—everyone picked up swearwords. “Hourra! Christ is risen!”
His shapska was longer than the nomad’s weapon, a guardless shallow curve with an eagle’s-head pommel, and while the Tartars were fearsome fighters on horseback, most of them were as awkward on foot as a pig on ice. He flicked the Nogai’s cut aside—Sergey grunted slightly at the impact; the man was strong—with a ting and a shower of sparks. The Tartar smashed at him like a man threshing grain, but Sergey drifted backwards until he saw Dorzha circling in the corner of his eye. Then he pressed the attack, lunging forward—only a fool fought fair with a Tartar when he didn’t have to.
Seconds later, the Nogai collapsed with a yell of agony as the yataghan cut his hamstring and the Cossack saber slashed his sword-arm. Sergey grunted again in surprise as Dorzha beat up his killing stroke, leaving him staggering for a second.
“The devil carry you off in a sack!” he said resentfully, examining his sword’s edge—no nick, thank the saints. “Why did you do that?”
Dorzha ignored him. Instead he planted a foot on the wounded Tartar’s chest and put the point of his yataghan under the man’s chin. The Tartar spat at him, then hissed as the point dimpled the flesh.
“Where is the princess?” Dorzha asked ... in Tartar, of which Sergey had a fair command.
“On her way to Astrakhan, where you will never follow, you depraved kufur bi—”
The point drove home and the curse ended in a gurgle, and the Tartar’s heels drummed briefly on the ground. Dorzha wiped his sword and the edge of his boot free of blood on the nomad’s sheepskin jacket.
“Princess?” Sergey asked casually as he helped his chance-met comrade make sure of the others.
“That was a good trick with the axe,” Dorzha said.
Sergey wrenched it free of the wounded man’s face and slammed the blunt hammer on the back of the blade into the Nogai’s temple with a heavy crunching sound. The man jerked once and stopped twitching.
“Off to hell, black-arse,” he said cheerfully, then flipped the weapon into the air and caught the handle.
“Grandfather Mikhail was spetsnaz, he taught us the trick,” Sergey said, and pointed to the axe—not particularly threatening, but not not so either. “The Princess?”
Dorzha sighed and sat on a stump of wall. “The daughter of my Khan. I was her bodyguard;” he said. “Not in the troops with us, just...personal guard.”
Well-born nom’klaturnik stripling dancing attendance on this princess, Sergey thought.
He’d noted the quality of Dorzha’s boots, and the silver inlay on his yataghan and kinjal-dagger, and the tooling on his belt, whose buckle was a blue-enameled wolf’s-head. And his mail-shirt was of fine riveted links, a master-smith’s work.
Then, grudgingly: Young, and a nobleman, but he can fight.
“We taking her up the Volga—a wedding with Duke Pyotr of Nikolayevsk. Then these Tartars, river pirates working for the Khan of Chistopol attack.”
Sergey nodded thoughtfully. “The misbelieving infidel dog wouldn’t want Nikolayevsk strengthened by an alliance.”
Dorzha pounded a fist against the brick beside his hip. “They supposed to kill her, I think, but instead take to sell. That why I run. They no hurt her—”
“You could get a good sum for the virgin daughter of a khan,” Sergey said thoughtfully. “In Astrakhan.”
He turned and freed his lariat, uncoiling it and rigging a casting loop. “Let’s get going,” he said. “There are eighteen of their horses. Can you sleep in the saddle, boy?”
Dorzha grinned. “Can you, farmer?”
* * * *
“Oi, Pri Luzhke!” Sergey sang in a loud, melodious baritone seven days later, reeling in the saddle with his feet kicked free of the stirrups.
“Carry the water; Gala!
Come, maiden, and water my horse—”
“Silence, Cossack pig!” the streltsy officer at the north gate of Astrakhan said in his rough southeastern dialect of Russian.
He twitched the long black mustaches that hung past his blue-stubbled chin; behind him his men hefted their crossbows and half-pikes. The two young men had twenty good horses with them, counting the ones they rode, and their gear was of fine quality. They could probably afford a bribe, and they were strangers without friends here. The scalplock of the Don Cossack was unmistakable, and so were the features of the Kalmyk; Erdne Khan wasn’t at war with Astrakhan, but the realms weren’t particularly friendly either.
“What is your business in the city?”
“I come to drink all the vodka and screw all the women, of course, fool,” Sergey said, and held his canteen up over his open mouth to shake out the last drops, breathing out with satisfaction and tossing the empty vessel aside. “Ahhhh! Got a drink on you, dog-face? Or will I have to settle for fucking your sister, after I put a bag on her ugly head?”
The man flushed, and there was a ripple of laughter from the crowd jammed in the gate, ragged peasants from the drained marshes outside the city with little two-wheeled ox-carts of vegetables, peddlers with pack-donkeys, a hook-nosed Armenian merchant in a skullcap and long kaftan with a curved knife stuck through his sash. A camel in the Armenian’s caravan-string threw its head up and made an unearthly burbling sound, as if joining in the mirth. Two Kuban Cossacks in their round black lambskin caps and long wool cherkessa coats laughed loudest of all. Though there wasn’t much love lost between what its members called the All-Great Kuban Host and their northerly cousins from the Don, they still enjoyed seeing one of the Sir Brothers mock a city man.
The streltsy looked around, obviously trying to see who’d laughed so he could beat someone safer than a Cossack.
“We come to sell our horses,” Dorzha broke in, scowling himself and fingering the silver-inlaid hilt of his yataghan.
He hefted the leading-rope; they had all the Nogai horses, minus those who’d broken legs or sprained something in the brief fight. The tall slim-legged animals were snorting and rolling their eyes at the unfamiliar noises and scents of the great city of the Volga delta.
The militia officer snorted himself. “Where did you get those?” he said. “They’re good horses.”
“They were a gift,” Sergey said.
“A gift?”
“Da. From some dead Tartars,” Sergey said. “Or you could call it an inheritance.”
That produced more hooted laughter; one of the Kuban men nearly fell off his horse as he wheezed helplessly with mirth. A couple of Tartars shot Sergey looks from under hooded eyes, and there were loud calls from the back of the crowd for the streltsy to stop being officious and clear the way.
“Now, are you going to let us past so we can go ease our thirst like Christian men, or will you keep us talking all night?” Sergei asked.
It was only half an hour until the late summer sundown, and nobody wanted to be stuck outside when the gates closed. The officer hefted his long two-handed axe, idly running a thumb down the great curved cutting-edge. He was wearing a steel breastplate and helmet despite the damp heat, and sweat poured off his lean dark face. He spoke to Dorzha next:
“And what’s a Kalmyk boy doing with this scalplock devil?”
“I keep him with me to hold me back when I lose my temper!” Dorzha said, flipping a coin toward the city militiaman. “Here!”
The militiaman snatched it out of the air, bit the silver dihrem and looked at it with respect—it bore the stamp of the Chistopol mint. They both had a fair number of those, courtesy of the dead Nogai. Someone had been paying them well.
“Pass, then,” he said; his men stirred, expecting their cut. “But remember that the great Czar Boris Bozhenov keeps good order here in his city—thieves are sent to the chain-gangs, and armed robbers are impaled or knouted to death. Drunken rowdies cool their heads in the butuks.”
He jerked a thumb at a brace of bleary-looking rascals not far away, sitting with their feet and hands locked in the stocks. A few children were amusing themselves by throwing horse-dung and the occasional rock at them.
“Czar!” Dorzha said with contempt, after they’d passed through the thick rubble-and-concrete wall into the noise and crowds of the street. “Grandfather of Boris called himself Chairman.”
Sergey shrugged. “All the Princes and Grand Dukes and Khans and Czars used to be called that, back in the old days,” he said. “Or Party Secretaries, my grandfather told us children.”
Of course, he also told us that he could fly like a bird back then and jump from the sky into battle, Sergey thought. Sober, he was the best liar I’ve ever met. Of course, there are such things as gliders and balloons, but...And he could throw an axe like an angel.
“Did you have to be so loudness at the gate, like bull that bellows?” Dorzha went on; his Russian had improved, but he still slipped now and then.
Sergey shrugged again. “Who ever heard of a humble Cossack?” he said. “That would be suspicious. Besides, your idea was good: we want those Tartars to hear of us and come for vengeance. How else can we find them before they sell your Princess to Big-Head Boris, or to some Kazakh slave-trader for the harem of the Emir of Bokhara? There must be thirty or even forty thousand people in this city.”
“Seventy-five thousands,” Dorzha said absently.
“Bozehmoi!” Sergey said with awe. “It must be the biggest city in the world, bigger than Moskva the Great in the old days!”
Dorzha shook his head. “They say Winchester is as big, and richer,” he said; at Sergey’s blank look, he went on: “In Britain, far to the west. And there are much more big...bigger...cities in Hinduraj, and China.”
Sergey grunted; those places were the edge of the world, where men might have their heads set on backwards or hop around on a single leg. Astrakhan was certainly at least twice as big as Belgorod, which was the largest city in his part of the world.
Grandfather Mikhail called us snails, because we hadn’t seen Moskva the Great or Vladivostock, Sergey thought. But now I’ve begun to travel like him!
They walked their horses through a crush of carts and wagons and rickshaws and the occasional bicycle or pedicab, and past horse-drawn tram-cars traveling on steel rails set into the roadway—another mark of urban sophistication. Most of the folk were the locals, Russians of a sort, but there were Georgians and Armenians, Greeks and Circassians, Tartars of a dozen different tribes, Kurds, men from the oasis-cities far to the east, a swaggering Lah in the gold-laced crimson coat and plumed hat the Poles affected, sailors from the Caspian fleets, porters staggering under high-piled packs . . .
“Here, it stinks,” Dorzha said, in a resigned tone. Which it did; most of the city was low-lying, and the land around it natural swamp, and there was a thick wet smell of sewage and rot. “Best not to drink the water.”
“I don’t drink water. It’s all right for baths, of course,” Sergey said; unlike some, he washed every couple of weeks whether he needed it or not, and took sweat-baths even in winter.
He forced himself not to gape like a moujik as they passed a building that must have been fourteen stories high, a survival from before the Change not yet torn down for its metal. Most of the city was post-Change two or three stories and built of brick often covered with colorful plaster; on a rise to the north were the walls of the city’s Kremlin, and behind it, the gilded onion-domes of cathedral and palace. Shopkeepers and artisans called out the wares that spilled into the street, windmilling their arms and screaming of their low prices in a dozen languages, selling everything from Chinese silk to blocks of tea carried here from Georgia to piles of Azeri oranges from the southern shore to a tempting display of swords laid out on dark cloths.
Sergey would have turned aside to look at the fascinating glitter of honed metal if Dorzha hadn’t scowled and jerked his head. The caravanserai he chose was the usual type, a square of cubicles within a high rammed-earth wall with a section fenced off as a corral for livestock, and a warehouse where goods could be left under guard for an additional fee. Sergey’s nose twitched at the smell of cooking food; it had been a long day.
A sullen-looking man in ragged clothes and an iron collar came to take their animals.
“Here, rab,” the Cossack said, and tossed him a silver coin. “See that our horses are well-watered and fed—alfalfa and cracked barley, not just hay.”
That brightened the slave’s face; it also made him more likely to do his job properly...and anyway, a Cossack brother was supposed to be open-handed, especially with found money and booty. Sergey didn’t like trusting his horse to a rab, but slaves were common in places like this.
Many of the residents were squatting at the entrances to their little mud-brick rooms, cooking their evening meals on little braziers. Those not concerned about religious pollution sat at long trestle tables around a firepit, where the serai-keeper and his helpers carved meat from a whole sheep and a couple of yearling pigs that turned on a spit, and handed out rounds of bread and raw onions and melons.
“Room for us, if you please, brothers,” Sergey said.
One of those customers looked over his shoulder at Sergey, grunted, and returned to his meal.
“Hey, dog-face, thanks for the seat,” Sergey said.
Then he grabbed him by the back of his coat, heaved him aside to thump squawking on the ground, and tossed the man’s plate and loaf after him.
“Here’s your dinner, and fuck your mother, pal.”
Yob tvoyu mat’ wasn’t necessarily a deadly insult in Russki—between friends it could be just a way of saying “take this seriously”—but Sergey hadn’t used the friendly intonation. The ex-diner was burly, and he had a long knife through his sash. Sergey stood and grinned at him with his thumbs in his belt. The man put a hand to his knife for a moment before thinking better of it and slinking away; the two who’d been on either side of him crowded aside to make room for the newcomers.
“He can’t complain if I serve him some of his own manners,” the Cossack said as he sat down on the bench and slapped the rough, stained poplar planks. “Food and wine! Christ’s blood, does a Sir Brother, a knight of the Don Host, have to go hungry and thirsty here with gold and silver at his belt?”
A serving wench bustled over with wooden platters and clay mugs; she gave Sergey a long considering look. He preened and smoothed down his mustaches with a thumb before she turned back to her work, but he caught the glance she gave his companion, too.
“Nice round arse,” he said to Dorzha as the youth sat beside him. “And haunches like a plow-horse. Hey, dog-brother, I think she fancies you, though. Or your fine boots and coat. Give it a try!”
The Kalmyk flushed under his dark olive skin and tore off a lump from the loaf of bread. Sergey laughed. The youth was as fastidious and dainty as a young priest fresh from a monastery school, even waiting until a rock or a bush came up to drop his trousers. He’d noticed that on the trip here, though they’d had little time for anything but riding and sleeping and chewing jerky in the saddle. With ten horses each, you could push hard, two hundred kilometers a day or better.
And we needed to, after we spent hours fishing that dead Tartar out of the well....
“It gets moldy if you don’t use it, youngster,” he said. “Anyway, it’s the little skinny ones like you who can fuck like rabbits.”
Dorzha flushed still more, then scowled as Sergey guffawed and took a long gulp of the rough red wine.
I blushed like that the first time Uncle Igor said that to me, he thought. Of course, I was thirteen, and the Kalmyk has to be older than that.
“Best not get drunk,” Dorzha said coldly. “We may have work to do this tonight, if lucky.”
“To drink is the joy of the Russ,” Sergey said reasonably. Then he shrugged: “Besides, this is just wine. No Cossack can get drunk on wine. We are born with a grape in our mouths.”
He didn’t take more than one mug, though; the boy had a point. When he’d gnawed the last gristly meat off the rack of pork ribs and picked his teeth with his dagger-point, he tossed the bones to a dog that looked even hungrier than the rab, and walked to their cubicle with an exaggerated care; if anyone was watching, they might be encouraged to think he was drunk and would sleep soundly.
* * * *
You can’t keep a dog from rolling in shit or a Tartar from seeking revenge, he thought later that night. They’re not peaceable and forgiving and full of loving-kindness to all, like us Christian men.
They’d left the door open—many of the residents of the caravanserai did, to get what little breeze they could in the sultry summer heat of the delta. Sergey opened one eye a slit; he was lying in his drawers, sprawled back with his head on his saddlebags. Long curved knives glinted a little in the moonlight, as three dark-clad figures slipped in, with the tails of their turbans drawn across their faces to leave only the eyes exposed. A man stooped, knife poised to thrust into Sergey’s belly.
Thump.
His foot lashed up into the man’s crotch, toes rolled up to present the callused ball of the foot as the striking surface. That slammed his victim’s testicles up against the pubic bone as if they were iron on an anvil. A thin squeal like a dying rabbit sounded, and then a maul-on-oak sound as the Cossack’s knee punched into the descending face. The Tartar pitched to the side, unconscious or dead; Sergey used the motion to raise both feet in the air and then flip himself up into a standing crouch.
Dorzha had moved in the same instant. He had his belt in his hand, with a brick snugged into a loop at the end by the buckle. It arched out and smacked into the side of the second knifeman’s head; the long dagger fell from nerveless fingers, and the man reeled back and collapsed against the wall.
The third Tartar acted with commendable prudence and great speed; he threw his knife at Dorzha and fled. The Kalmyk boy gave a startled yelp of pain. Sergey ignored him—time enough to bind wounds later—and threw himself forward in a tackle that caught the man around the knees and brought him crashing down. The air went out of him in a whuff! as he flopped on belly and face; most of the Cossack’s went out, too, but he scrabbled forward over the heaving body and hammered a knobby fist into the small of his enemy’s back—much better than breaking your knuckles on a skull, grandfather had always said. And again and again, until the enemy went limp.
“Shut up, you fornicating buffoons! We’re trying to sleep like Christians!” someone called from the cubicle next door.
“Sorry, brother,” Sergey said contritely. “The saints guard your dreams.”
Then he dragged the man back into the cubicle by his ankle and turned to look at Dorzha. The Kalmyk was in his drawers and shirt, with a long red stain spreading on the linen beneath his left arm. He clamped that to his side and shook his head.
“Just a scratch,” he said, with a tight brace in his voice that gave him the lie. “Let’s get what know we must—what we must know, I mean.”
Sergey grunted thoughtfully and looked through the dimness at their three assailants. The man he’d kicked and knee-butted was breathing in swift shallow jerks, his eyes wide and fixed; no use there. The one he’d punched was unconscious—and probably bleeding out internally from his ruptured kidneys. If he woke, it would only be to scream.
“Well, Christ be witness, you hit this one just right!” he said, as the one stunned by the Kalmyk started to stir. “That was good work—it shows a delicate hand. I finished my two off or nearly, and they’re useless.”
“Delicate is not Cossack way, eh?” Dorzha said with a painful smile.
Sergey laughed as he grabbed the man, pulled his belt loose, trussed his arms behind his back with it, and stuffed a gag into his mouth.
“So, dog-face,” he said, tipping water from his skin over the man, who glared defiance as he came fully aware. “You nod when you feel like a good chat, eh? No noise and fuss, now; people are trying to sleep.”
“Let me this do,” Dorzha said.
Sergey looked around; the Kalmyk had bound a spare shirt around his ribs beneath his garment, and was moving with careful precision. Sergey shrugged and stepped aside. Dorzha picked up one of the Tartar daggers, held it up until the captive’s eyes followed the flicker of moonlight on the honed edge, and then struck like a cat. The Tartar’s eyes bulged as his hide trousers fell away. It was only a few seconds later that he began to nod frantically, trying to bellow at the same time and choking as the wet cloth slipped farther into his wide-stretched mouth.
Dorzha flicked the gag free with the point of the knife, and held it so that blood dripped on the man’s face. Sergey winced slightly and suppressed an impulse to cup his hands protectively over his crotch. Instead, he pulled on his clothes as the Kalmyk asked questions in quick, confident Tartar—he spoke the turka dialect better than he did Russian, though with an unfamiliar accent and choice of words that showed he’d learned it somewhere else besides the middle Volga. The interrogation was thorough and expert; where, when, how many guards, what the passwords were, a staccato sequence timed to leave no time for the captive’s pain-fuddled mind to invent lies.
“Kill me,” the Tartar rasped at last, face gray and sweating.
Dorzha nodded and thrust; the dagger’s watered steel slid home with only a slight crunching sound, and he left it with the hilt jutting out of the man’s chest to keep the first spurt of blood corked. Then he rose...and staggered, his eyes turning up until only the whites showed, and collapsed backwards himself with limp finality.
“Bozehmoi! I didn’t think he was that badly hurt!” Sergey said, and sprang to drag the Kalmyk into the scanty clear space.
He pulled up the shirt to get at the wound; it was leaking red through the loose, hasty bandage. Then he stared for a long moment, blinking and shaking his head.
“Bozehmoi!” he said, then thumped the heel of his hand against his forehead as bits and pieces of the past week went click within. “Aaaaaah! I am a stupid Cossack ox!”
* * * *
Dorzha opened her eyes and raised a hand to feel at her ribs, now expertly and tightly bandaged. Then her hand flashed toward the hilt of her yataghan where it lay next to her.
Sergey laughed. Her eyes flashed toward him, and the blade glowed blue-white in the darkness, catching a stray gleam of moonlight from outside.
“Hey, sister, how many men have I watched you kill?” Her blue eyes narrowed, and he went on: “Four. And I’ve only known you eight days! So if I had designs on your skinny arse, I wouldn’t have left that sword within your reach, would I?”
“I listen,” Dorzha said, sitting up against the mud-brick wall of the cubicle and propping the blade across her knees.
“Also, as a boy you were more girlish than was good to see, and as a girl, you’re too much like a boy for my taste. And we’ve shared bread and salt, and fought for each other. Now, let’s get on with rescuing this ‘princess’...a friend of yours, or your sister?”
Dorzha smiled unwillingly. “Half sister. My mother was a concubine, and half-Russki. I was raised with Bortë...the Princess...and it amused the Khan to let me train as a warrior to protect her.”
The smile flashed wider: “How she me envied! We are friends, too...more or less. She is...wise. A scholar.”
Sergey grunted and tossed over the leather water-bottle. Dorzha drank deep and then stood, moving experimentally.
“How is it?” Sergey asked.
“Not too bad,” Dorzha said. “I wouldn’t want to use my bow, but I can fight; you strapped it up well. Where are the bodies?”
“Over the wall,” Sergey said. “The street-pigs will eat well tonight; or maybe the beggars.”
He rose himself, swinging his long arms and grinning. “Let’s go!”
* * * *
Now, how to kill this one?
The Tartars were holding the Princess—Sergey thought of her as looking like an icon, with stiff gold-embroidered robes—in the house of a rich Kurdish merchant who traded in silk, cotton, and slaves; from here you could look down a long narrow roadway at its side, but it was black-dark, too far from the main streets to rate gas-lamps. The building presented a thick blank wall to this street and it had a tower at the back, four stories high with narrow slit windows; one of them showed lantern-light, but everything else was dark.
“Let me have the lantern,” Dorzha whispered.
Sergey handed it over. It was hers, and a good one, made of metal and running on distilled rock-oil. What he hadn’t realized until now was that the cover would flip up and back if you squeezed the handle. That the Kalmyk woman proceeded to do; long-short-short-long-long-long. It was no code he knew, but. . .
The second time through, the window darkened...then went light again, in the same pattern, as if someone were waving a cloth in front of the light. Dorzha seemed to slump slightly, and gave a soundless sigh of relief.
“She is there,” the Kalmyk said. “And well, and says come to me. We used that signal when we wanted to steal out of the Khan’s house in Elst.”
“You two must have done wonders for your father’s peace of mind,” Sergey said, grinning in the dark.
“Tcha!” Dorzha replied. “Now, how best to go in?”
“They have patrols along the walls,” Sergey said. “Best through the entrance—if we can do it quietly.”
“I think I can. Come.”
They circled, meeting nothing more alarming than a pi-dog that growled and slunk away from sniffing at a motionless drunk, or corpse, lying in the gutter. This was a respectable neighborhood, and that meant few went out late at night. At last, they ghosted down the avenue that approached the Kurd’s mansion from the front, keeping to the deep shadows the moon cast on the right side of the street. The same moon shone full on the sentry leaning on his spear before the entrance—it glinted on the whetted metal, and on the rippling black-laquered scales of his sleeveless hauberk.
“How do we get past him?” Sergey whispered.
“Leave this to me,” Dorzha said.
“I’ll be noisy, if you’re going to cut off his—”
The Kalmyk woman gave him a scowl. Then she leaned shield and sword, bow and quiver against the wall and walked quietly toward the sentry. The man was dozing standing up, but he straightened and leveled his spear as she approached,
“Who comes to the house of Ibrahim al-Vani by night?” he growled in Tartar.
Dorzha spoke. Sergey blinked in astonishment. Apart from her accent, the Kalmyk had always spoken to him in a light pure tone much like a lad’s—it had been close enough to fool him, after all. Now . . .
“One seeking a valiant warrior,” Dorzha said, in voice that nobody would have mistaken for a male’s of any age, full of honey and musk and promise. “But I see I’ve found one.”
Sergey blinked again as the Tartar leaned his spear against the wall and the two figures merged. An instant later, the Tartar slumped down, with only a thin brief whining sound. When he came up, Dorzha was scrubbing the back of her left hand across her lips.
“That’s a trick I don’t think I can copy,” he said, handing her the weapons she’d shed.
“Ptha!” she said—either something in Kalmyk or simple disgust. Then she put an arrow to the string. “Take his keys. I cover you.”
“Bad security,” Sergey noted, as he did, and propped the corpse artistically against the wall in the sort of slump a sleeping man would use. “They should have locked him out and kept a relief inside.”
Though the merchant probably guarded merely against theft; against stealth, not an assault—it was hard to change your habits quickly. The doors were thick oak, strapped with a web of salvaged steel fastened with thick bolts at each crosspiece, and the lock was well-oiled.
More bad security. A nice loud rusty screech would warn the house.
The door swung outward, just enough to pass them through into the courtyard. It was a narrow cobbled rectangle, with stables and barracks and storage along one side, a row of horse-troughs, and the merchant’s own dwelling on other; that probably had an inner court of its own, for his womenfolk. The tower was against the far wall, freestanding, probably a refuge against riot and a treasure-house for the most valued goods.
“Wait,” Sergey said.
He took another inheritance from his grandfather from his belt. It was a length of flexible metal with wooden handles on either end; he looped it about the bolt of the lock and pulled it back and forth. A nearly soundless rasp followed, and metal filings drifted down to the pavement. He was careful to go slowly—Grandfather had warned him that it might lose its temper and snap if it was overheated, and no modern smith could duplicate its magical properties.
“Bortë will be interested in that; she loves things from before the Change,” Dorzha said softly.
She covered the courtyard as she spoke, recurve bow half-drawn and ready to flick out a shaft. After half a minute, the bolt dropped free, and Sergey caught it before it could drop to the stones. Then he eased the door shut again and locked it, leaving the key in the plate. That might not make a difference, or it might fool someone into thinking the door was secure when it wasn’t. You never knew, Grandfather had said....
They walked over to the tower; Sergey scooped a handful of water out of one of the troughs as they passed, to wet a mouth gone a little dry. The darkened buildings seemed to loom around him like banks of angry, watchful eyes, and his shoulders crawled with anticipation of a sudden arrow or crossbow-bolt. On the steppe, or even in a forest, he felt at home. This was like a fight in a coffin.
A narrow eyehole opened, and a voice spoke in some musical, liquid-sounding language, much muffled by the thick iron-strapped door.
“The password is Azazrael’s Sword,” Dorzha replied in Tartar, naming the Death Angel.
A surly grunt, and more of the strange tongue. Dorzha spoke again:
“Speak something beside that sheep-bleating, you peacock-worshipping Kurdish apostate. Our chief wants us to check on the Kalmyk woman.”
“She is as well-guarded as the wives of my master Ibrahim al-Vani themselves!” the man said, in bad Tartar—worse than Dorzha’s Russki had been when she and Sergey met.
“His wives are guarded by the fifty fathers of their children,” Dorzha sneered. “Or Kurdish eunuchs—as if there were any Kurds with balls. We caught her—now we want to see her.”
“It is my head if anything happens to her,” the guard said, grumbling. “Curse the evil witch anyway, with her alchemy from Satan!”
Sergey gave a soundless sigh of relief; the man was going to open the door.
“And it’s my head if I don’t do what the Chief says,” Dorzha replied. “And my head is worth more than yours. I gave the password—open! Or I go and we come back with a battering ram, and a flaying knife to peel the skin from your worthless arse!”
“You Tartars don’t rule the universe, you just think you do,” the man grumbled. “Wait, then, wait.”
They could hear clicking and shunking sounds. The door opened, only a narrow crack, and a thick chain spanned the gap. A blue eye looked through it, going wide for an instant before the point of Dorzha’s yataghan punched through it with a crunch of steel in the thin bone that separated eyesocket from brain. The man toppled backwards like a cut-through tree. Sergey shouldered Dorzha aside, flicked the cutting wire around the chain, and went to work.
“Hurry!” Dorzha said.
“We may need this again. I’m not going to break it,” Sergey said stubbornly. “Besides, it was my grandfather’s.”
Dorzha said something explosive in her native language—but quietly— and soon the forged-iron link parted, falling to the stone floor with a musical tinkle. Sergey blew his lips out in mute relief when the door opened after that.
Because I have no idea what we would have done if there had been another lock!
The hallway within the tower was empty; on either side were chambers that the Tartar had said were used to store goods—and there was a square concrete shaft in the middle, from the looks of it a relic of the old world. Stairs started to the left; they took them in a swift quiet rush, Sergey leading and the Kalmyk woman following behind. There was an odd, acrid odor in the air, growing stronger as they ascended. Behind him, Dorzha chuckled.
“That is Bortë,” she said.
She smells like rock oil and sulfur? he thought, puzzled.
The door was unbarred from the outside; a sliver of lamplight showed under the bottom of the thick planks. Sergey pushed at it, sword poised— probably there would be a guard within, as well as the Princess. The door gave a little, and then halted with a yielding heaviness. Sergey grunted and set his boot to it, pushing hard. Behind him, Dorzha spoke in her own language.
The door slid open. Sergey leapt through, cat-agile but trying to stare in three directions at once...and then relaxing a little as he saw a woman in a long hooded caftan standing with a lamp in her hand. The smell of acid and strange metals came from the room behind her; he could see that it held benches and odd-looking bits of glass.
The body at his feet attracted his attention first; it was a big man, very big, with a good deal of fat over solid muscle. He wore a turban but was beardless, and his great smooth torso was bare above sash, baggy pantaloons of crimson, and curl-toed boots. A broad curved sword lay beside one set of sausage-thick fingers; a look of fixed horror was on his face, and his eyes bulged as if they were about to pop out of his smooth, doughlike features.
Interesting, Sergey thought, looking around the room, noting a spilled chess set by the dead man; the furnishings were cushions and rugs rather than chairs, as you might expect from a Kurd. Something killed him....
Dorzha pushed past him, sheathing her yataghan. “Bortë!” she cried.
“Dorzha!” the other replied, setting her lantern on the floor.
They embraced, a fierce hug, and then Dorzha held her half sister at arm’s length.
“Are you all right?” she said—in Russki, which must be for his benefit.
“Fine. Bored. They let me keep my gear, the fools, so I had plenty of time to prepare,” Bortë replied. “What took you so long?”
“There were...problems.”
Bortë threw back the hood of her caftan. Sergey blinked; the family resemblance was unmistakable, though the khan’s other daughter was shorter and not quite so slim, and the night-black hair that fell loose down the young woman’s back was glossier than Dorzha’s. The face beneath was snub-nosed, with a rosy, ruddy-pink complexion, full lips, and narrow slanted black eyes.
Perhaps it was the lantern-light streaming up from below, but he felt a slight prickle of alarm in belly and back at that face. She reminded him of something like a cat, or better still, a ferret—small, quick, comely, and quite evil. The black eyes glanced up and down his long form.
“Where did you get this great Cossack ox?” she said—also in Russki, with a pellucidly clear but old-fashioned, bookish accent. “I’m not surprised you’re late, with him to drag around.”
Dorzha shrugged. “He’s useful for the heavy-lifting chores,” she said. “Now let’s go!”
“How did you kill him?” Sergey asked, intrigued, while she snatched up a bundle and slung it over her back like a knapsack.
He nudged the dead man with his toe. Bortë was smaller than her sister, and while she held herself well he couldn’t see her killing a man this size with a blade unless she took him utterly unawares. Also there was no blood—even a small stiletto left in the wound leaked a little when stabbed deep into the body.
Bortë smiled, revealing small, very white teeth; the first two were slightly buck-shaped. Instead of replying, she held up her hand; there was a piece of leather across her palm, and a steel needle concealed within it. There was blood on the tip of the little sliver of metal, with some purplish discoloration beneath that.
“But I let him win the last game,” she said. “He wasn’t a bad man. For a eunuch.”
Sergey swallowed. “Your sister said you were a scholar,” he said.
“I am,” she replied, and smiled more broadly. “Of chemistry.”
The Cossack crossed himself.
* * * *
“Yob tvoyu mat’,” Sergey said; it struck him as more manly than screaming We’re fucked! and slapping himself on the top of the head.
The lights and voices at the bottom of the stairs were both indistinct, but they were getting louder. And there was no other way out of this tower. Screams of rage cut through the brabble; someone must have discovered the body and the cut chain.
“We’re fucked,” Dorzha said, then cursed in Kalmyk and kicked the wall viciously.
Not fair, Sergey said. She doesn’t have to be manly.
Dying heroically was always more pleasant when you were drunk and listening to some balalaika-twanging gypsy guslars lying song than in a situation like this. His mind hunted back and forth like a wolf he’d seen trapped in a pit once. Suddenly, he felt a new sympathy for its snarling desperation.
“We killed plenty of those Tartars before,” Dorzha said, but with a note of doubt in her voice.
“Da,” Sergey said. “When we ambushed them or surprised them. A stand-up fight...”
He shrugged. Dorzha did too, and whipped her yataghan through a circle to loosen her wrist.
“We knew this was risky,” she said.
“Da, “ the man said again. “Well, Cossacks don’t usually die old anyway.”
The sound of hands clapping came from behind him. He turned and glared at Bortë, who had dragged a sack out of the inner room. Now she applauded again.
“Hear the baatar,” she said, jeering. “Hear the hero! Listen to him meet death unafraid—because it’s so much easier than thinking.”
Dorzha scowled at her sister. So did Sergey. I could really come to dislike this woman, if I had the time, he thought.
Then he ducked with a yelp as she pulled a stoppered clay jug out of her sack and lofted it over his head. It dropped neatly down to the next landing, a story below, and shattered. He couldn’t see anything come out of it, not in the darkness of the stairwell...but a sudden scent sharp enough to slice your lungs made him cough and backpedal, rubbing at his streaming eyes.
“It is heavier than air,” Bortë said.
“Poison?” he asked, as the shrieks of rage below turned to choked howls of panic.
“Chlorine. Quite deadly. It will flow downward. Come!”
She turned and began dragging the sack with her into the inner sanctum. Sergey ignored the shadowed forms of retorts and glass coils on tables; the square inner shaft ran through this room, and there was an open door in it that showed modern ropes, not rusted ancient cable. That looked much better than fighting his way down the stairs, even if the air there was breathable, which just now it wasn’t. Mikhail had told stories about war gases in the old days, and how he’d used them against the moujids in some place far to the east. The Princess took half a dozen of the jars from her sack and dropped them through the opening.
“That will take care of anyone waiting below,” she said. “There’s a tunnel out under the walls. The eunuch told me about it. The joke is on him, eh?”
“Ha. Ha,” Sergey said as his testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. “If that stuff burns out your lungs, going down there will kill us! Or at least me, you witch!”
“Not with these,” she said, and pulled improvised masks out of the sack. “I have been thinking all the time I was here, baatar. Luck favors the prepared.”
“She never stops,” Dorzha said, taking one of the masks and examining the ties that would hold it on her face. “It’s no wonder Father tried to marry her off to someone two months’ journey away.”
“These will protect us?” Sergey said.
Bortë smiled again. “The chemicals need to be activated with uric acid,” she said.
“That’s what?” he said, baffled; the words were Russki but he’d never heard them before.
She told him.
* * * *
Sergey ripped the mask from his face half an hour later, spitting. “You enjoyed that!” he snarled.
To his surprise, Dorzha laughed with her sister. “Only the sight of your face, Cossack,” she said.
He looked around the darkened streets; they were near the docks, and the masts of the ships showed over the roofs, some of them with the flickering stars of riding-lanterns burning at their tops.
“Well, I suppose we should try and get you to your father,” he said. Odd. I will miss Dorzha. And her sister is interesting. Terrifying, but interesting.
Bortë looked southward for a moment. “Why?” she said. “He’ll only marry me off to some other fat imbecile.”
Sergey rocked back on his heels. “Why, why—” His mind churned. “What else is there to do with you?”
Dorzha spoke. “You wouldn’t believe there were larger cities than Astrakhan,” she said. Then, wistfully: “I’ve never seen any bigger. But they say in China . . .”
In the shadows, Bortë’s head turned toward her. “They say that in China, Toghrul Khan rules now,” she said thoughtfully. “A Yek, but a Mongol like us; our ancestors came west from there, very long ago—the tongues are still close kin. At least, he rules the portions near the Gobi, and they also say he wars against the Han farther south. I wonder ... I wonder if he could use a scholar of the ancient arts? His court in Xian is the richest in the world, the stories say.”
“Gold,” Dorzha said thoughtfully. “Silk. Rank.”
Bortë shook her head. “Books!” she said, and her eyes glowed. “Scholars! Laboratories!”
Suddenly, Sergey’s irritation lifted, and he began to laugh. “A real bogatyr—hero—I was, escaping with a woman’s piss-soaked scarf over my nose!”
“You might do better with instruction,” Bortë said.
“He is useful for the heavy work,” Dorzha said.
Sergey laughed again, a booming sound that rattled off the warehouses around them. And if he went home, Olga and Svetlana would be waiting. Probably with their threshing-flails in hand.
“Which way is China?” he said.