Prince Ivan (21 page)

He flung Ivan aside as a man might hurl an apple, straight at the wall.

Ivan was upside-down when he hit it, and he was still upside-down when the floor came up to meet him very fast. There was a great roaring in his ears as Koshchey the Undying vanished from sight on a storm of his own making, but the roaring went on for a long time after that, until it faded into darkness as the torches in the passage all went out at once.

*

When Ivan recovered his senses there was no way to tell how long he had been without them. The stones of the floor where his face was pressed against them were as cold as he remembered, and the torches were still burning – but they had been burning when he came from the ramparts of the kremlin to this passageway, so that was no help in telling how much time had passed. For a few seconds he closed his eyes again, hoping against hope that when he opened them again he would be in his own bed after no more than a foul and vivid dream.

It was no dream. The charred door with its twisted, melted metalwork was still on the floor beside him and, when he made the painful effort of raising his head, he could see links of broken chains littering the cell beyond. Ivan squeezed his eyes tight shut to block out the evidence of his own stupidity, and to quell the spasm of nausea that the movement of his head had caused. Both attempts were unsuccessful.

He knew of old, after many falls from horses, that the old lie of ‘
bring
it
up
,
you’ll
feel
better
afterwards
’, was just that, a lie. He was sick twice before he risked standing, and the attempt to do so had simply made him sick again. With the water-bucket broken he was reduced to cupping handfuls from the cistern and splashing them into his face. Despite what was said about the effectiveness of cold water on a sore head, it was another lie. The only difference was to leave him feeling wretched and wet instead of just wretched.

After an eternity of minutes Tsarevich Ivan felt strong enough to start the long walk back, towards the kremlin and the way out that had been his way into this mess. He was afraid to stay in this gloomy corridor, in some underground of the palace that seemed to have no existence on the surface, but he was even more afraid to find out what had happened in the world outside.

The worst had happened.

Two couriers from Mar’ya Morevna’s army were awaiting his return in the Lesser Hall of Audience, and though Ivan knew he would look as out of place there as anywhere else, he went to meet them straight away, or as straight as his still-wobbly legs allowed. Palace servants had been searching for him since the riders arrived, a matter of a quarter hour or so, which told him he hadn’t been senseless very long. Their fussing concern over the state of his clothing and the state of his health followed him the whole way to the audience room, where in less than two minutes it was overtaken by concern for the state of the realm.

The couriers’ report, though confused by not knowing what they had seen, told Ivan far more than they knew. Mar’ya Morevna’s host had been victorious again, trapping the remaining Tatars in yet another ambush of her devising. Very few of the brigands were left to return to their home khanate, and none of the survivors would have anything to brag about except their luck and the speed of their horses. Her successful army turned for home, and had been a mere two hours’ march away when something descended out of a clear sky.

One man described it as a great gust of wind somehow dark enough to see, the other likened it to a black storm-cloud. Regardless of their conflicting descriptions, both agreed on what it did, which was to snatch Mar’ya Morevna from the saddle of her horse and bear her away though she rode in the midst of all her captains and her personal guards. It was one of those captains who had sent them at a gallop to the kremlin, though what he expected would come of it, Ivan didn’t know.

The only thing he
did
know was that all this was his own fault, and he could shift the blame to no one else. He thanked each soldier in turn for his information, dismissed them, then sat staring at the wall for more than an hour. Servants and officials came walking in, saw his expression and tiptoed out again, but Prince Ivan saw none of them. He didn’t even see the wall, only the image again and again of his hands turning keys, of his hands pouring water, of his hands loosing Koshchey the Undying on the world again.

And finally he saw nothing but the blur beyond his tears.

*

Ivan stood on the battlements of the kremlin as he had stood earlier that day. Then he had been waiting for Mar’ya Morevna but now he waited for his first sight of the moon. It was cold, despite the illusory warmth of a glowing sunset, and Ivan was wrapped in a great grey coat made of the pelts of Siberian wolves. That coat, and the deadly look in his eyes, had been enough to send the more superstitious of his guards to the farthest end of the rampart. Any man who looked so and dressed so and awaited the moon with such intensity wasn’t a man they wanted close to them, Prince or not. Only those who knew the moon was nowhere yet full remained near him. Ivan would have found it amusing, had his mind been able to grasp such a concept as humour with his wife newly stolen away.

He waiting, staring at the horizon, and tried to remember what phase the moon had shown last night. Last night, he hadn’t noticed. Last night, it hadn’t mattered.

If it had already reached moondark, did that mean he had already lost? Or was it Koshchey’s sport to give his victims a month of useless hope? Ivan closed his eyes as a shudder of despair racked through his body, but opened them again as one of the guards on the uppermost tower shouted something whose sense was lost on the cold wind. His words were irrelevant; it was what prompted them that mattered. The moon was visible at last.

A pale crescent like the curve of a scimitar unsheathed itself from a bank of cloud, gleaming briefly before it was lost to sight again. Ivan felt his heart lift, because that crescent told him he had three weeks and perhaps a little more in which to find Mar’ya Morevna. Less than he hoped, but more than he feared. Ivan squared his shoulders and hurried down to the kremlin library.

Within an hour he had virtually torn it apart in his search for maps and charts. Besides not knowing his way around the kremlin, Ivan discovered to his chagrin that he barely knew his way around its library either, for in all his rummaging and learning of small spells he had barely skimmed its surface. Mar’ya Morevna and her father before her had acquired enough reading matter, whether books, rolled parchments, cased scrolls or any other form of preserving the written word, to fill every shelf three volumes deep. It made finding any single thing a near-impossible task and at last, almost knee-deep in paper, Ivan lost his temper. Throwing down an armful of bundled manuscripts so hard that the ribbon round them broke and their leaves scattered across the floor like some literary autumn, he hunted out one of the few volumes whose location he knew well.

It was the first, the simplest, and the easiest to understand of all Mar’ya Morevna’s grimoires, especially for a man unskilled in sorcery who was also in a hurry. Ivan found the spell – ‘
To
Reveal
That
Which
Would
Be
Discovered
’ – a small spell good for lost keys, misplaced wallets and other relatively unimportant items… Such as books in an overcrowded library. He took less than a minute to arrange the spell’s geometry in his mind’s eye, and then, with only a token concentration on whatever map, chart or note he needed, Ivan read the words aloud. Perhaps that lack of focus was what created a sudden explosion of activity on half-a-dozen shelves at once.

It was certainly what caused the spike of agony that lanced through his skull as if someone had thrust a stylus into each eye, leaving a throbbing headache in its wake.

Magic was never without cost, and careless magic was more costly than most. Occasionally its cost was life. As the tears of pain faded from his eyes and left his vision more or less clear, Ivan realized with a shiver just how close he had come to pulping the inside of his own head with the pressure of the spell. If the magic had been unable to find what he sought in the outside world of the library shelves, its energy would have snapped back into his brain like a breaking bowstave. It was a mistake few sorcerers made more than once.

Ivan snuffled uncomfortably as his nose began to bleed all over the grimoire, and glanced around for something with which to wipe the spattered pages before his bloodstains became a permanent feature of its text. Then he realized there was no need. The blood was gone. Absorbed into the paper. Consumed. Devoured…

Prince Ivan looked at the small, simple book with new respect, then closed its covers and set it carefully aside.

The spell had caused a series of extrusions among the still-shelved books, as if someone more expert in what the library contained had pulled each volume slightly outward to make finding them that much easier. Ivan moved hurriedly through the room, gathering books and charts, then took them back to the table and cleared it by the simple expedient of an open-handed sweep. The floor could be tidied later.

That was what servants were for.

It took another hour of leafing through maps before some inner sense told him he had found what he was looking for. It was a tattered sheet of parchment whose clumsy, amateurish outlines lacked the precision of other cartographers’ work – in short, the sort of chart a man might draw for himself if he wished to keep a secret. There were few enough lines and features scribbled in that the bulk of the information must have been stored in that safest of all repositories, the map-maker’s memory – a memory dead and gone these ten years past, for the writing on the map was in the same crabbed handwriting that Ivan had seen on old official documents. It was that of Mar’ya Morevna’s father.

Ivan hadn’t been optimistic enough to expect a dotted line marked ‘
follow
this
to
Koshchey’s
kremlin
’, but when he compared the sketch to better maps, that was exactly what he found. It didn’t say ‘
Koshchey
the
Undying
lives
here
’ in so many words, since for his own reasons Mar’ya’s father had written in the old Norse runes, but the scratchy, angular letters on the sketch-map were in a place where larger charts showed nothing, and that place wasn’t the impossible distance he had expected.

There was no time for niceties like sitting still and begging help from his brothers-in-law. Finding where they were so messengers could deliver wedding invitations had taken almost a week, and hoping that those three kremlins were in the same place was as vain as hoping Koshchey the Undying would have a change of heart and release Mar’ya Morevna himself.

He rolled up the maps and strode from the library towards the stables.

*

Koshchey
Bessmertny
’s kremlin looked exactly as Ivan thought it might, no palace but a grim, jag-crested citadel squatting atop a low hill in the middle of an unpleasant-looking forest, its presence lowering like a shadow over all the lands nearby. Those lands were bleak and desolate, as if tainted by the presence of the necromancer, though it was as likely Koshchey lived in such grim surroundings because he enjoyed them.

Finding this kremlin had proven easier than Ivan dared to hope. The old maps and the new had each guided in their turn, and behind and beyond all else had been the same magic that had brought him unerringly to the kremlins of each sorcerer brother-in-law. Now after many days of travel it had led him to where his wife was being held; fewer days than he expected, but more than he hoped, while every night the moon grew a little rounder.

At least getting this near to Koshchey’s ugly dwelling had been simplicity itself. There was no town beside it, and no outlying villages, only the ugly forest. Despite its dense undergrowth, Ivan still felt horribly exposed, for every window of Koshchey’s kremlin looked like a malevolent eye and it seemed that every one of those eyes was staring straight at him. At the same time he was grateful for the necromancer’s arrogance. Anyone else would have cleared the ground for two bowshots all around the walls to make sure that nobody could do what he was doing now; but Koshchey let the woodland grow unchecked, sure that no one would be so brave or stupid as to approach his home.

Ivan laid a hand on Burka’s nose to keep the horse quiet, and wondered with grim humour which word best described him.

Half an hour dragged by, resin-scented and stifling in the dark shade of the pine-trees. In that half-hour, despite his apparent immobility, Ivan had examined Koshchey’s kremlin with his mind’s eye. The concentration had left him nerve-drawn and tired just as much as if he had been actually creeping around his enemy’s fortress, but he had learned enough. There were no guards or sentries, no livestock or servants, not even the flutter of silk since no banners flew above that grim fortress. The distant kremlin was dark and empty, and though he was glad of it, Ivan wondered why.

He was still wondering as the afternoon turned to dusk, because in all those hours he had seen nothing alive near Koshchey’s kremlin, neither bird nor beast nor insect inside nor out, and the only thing that moved had been the slow sweep of shadows following the sun.

Now that sun was setting, and with the approaching night came an idea that Ivan would never have contemplated during daylight. It was a plan of such elegant simplicity that it deserved to succeed. He would swing into Burka’s saddle, slip into the fortress under cover of darkness, find Mar’ya Morevna—