The Serpent's Curse (32 page)

They had landed, but the jet wouldn't be going anywhere soon. That might have been its last landing. The engines softened, then died altogether.

“Get ready to move,” Wade whispered.

“No, really? I was thinking of staying.”

“Funny,” he said with a fake smile. “Too bad I can't even laugh.”

“Oh, you better laugh—”

Terence popped open the cabin door. Frigid air slammed inside. Mustering her strength, Lily crawled down the ladder to the ground. Wade's legs were rubber. He slid and landed like a fish next to her. Terence last. Cold hit them like a wall. It wasn't snowing. It was too cold to snow.

“‘You do not know cold like this,'” Lily grumbled. “Boris warned us.”

There was a shallow trench running along one side of the airstrip. They took off toward it, hoping no one saw them. No one seemed to. The land around them was more or less flat, an immense plain of rough frozen ground. Wade said stuff like
tundra
and
permafrost
.

“No lessons,” she hissed.

In the distance, great concrete buildings clustered like ghosts lost somewhere between life and death. They were gray and massive, but also insubstantial, like shadows in the thick frozen air. Scattered here and there on either side of the airstrip were the remains of tall wire fences—barbed wire, she guessed—some standing, most dented, split open, falling over. Towers made of crisscrossed wooden beams stood like observation towers at national parks. There were the ruins of long, low buildings that Wade couldn't stop himself from saying were “barracks, for the prisoners.”

“Lagpunkt,”
she said.

“The coal mine,” said Terence. “That's where Galina is.” He pointed to a series of towers and the chutes angling down from them. There were giant many-spoked wheels, barely standing under their own weight, lonely and abandoned. “This is where prisoners were forced to labor, spending their years below the frozen earth.”

“And probably where Boris was born,” said Wade.

Now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, the mines themselves were in ruins, a mass of cracked smokestacks, frozen cones of black coal, and those things that her tablet had told her must be slag heaps.

When Vorkuta was a labor camp, from the 1930s to the 1970s, tens of thousands of men and women had died there under unspeakable conditions. They had been arrested out of their old lives, sent to Lubyanka, then exiled to Siberia to work and then to die. Like Boris's father.

Galina and Ebner were already across a broad white field, the man with sunglasses following at a distance, the black case hanging from his shoulder like before. They were met by a large troop of armed men—Brotherhood, no doubt—who positioned themselves at several entrances to one of the ruined mines.

Terence blinked ice tears from his eyes. “I don't know mines, but is there an entrance they're not watching?”

“There,” said Lily, pointing. “I think we have to run before they see it.”

A pack of uniformed men was marching quickly across the airstrip from the jet toward them. “Airport officials,” Terence hissed. “Or maybe more Brotherhood. You run. I'll cover for you. Wait for me outside the mine. Do not go inside.”

“Yes, Dad,” said Lily.

She climbed to her knees, looked around one last time, and scrambled across the airstrip with Wade. The area between the trench and the entrance to the mine was long, wide, and open, but no one was looking at them. Or at what appeared to be a half-collapsed doorway near the rear of the mine.

“Sorry, Terence,” she said. “We need to get inside. Wade, come on.”

Keeping low, they hurried across the field to the opening. They slipped slowly into the mine entrance. It was as dark as night inside, but warmer. The ceiling beams were in place, and although debris of crushed rock and abandoned tools covered the floor, the tunnel looked passable.

“Use your flashlight app,” Wade said, and they both flicked them on. The darkness was so thick, even two lights barely penetrated. Fifteen or twenty paces in, they stopped.

“I hear them,” Lily whispered, turning off her light.

Not the Brotherhood, but Galina. Her voice.

Wade pocketed his phone, cupped his ear, and listened. “I think she's on another level. A lower level than where we are. We should search for stairs or—”

“Watch out!” Lily threw her arm in front of him and wrenched him back. Wade's feet were perched inches from the edge of a pit. Moving her light over the pit revealed a sort of cage of metal around a large, perfectly square hole set fifteen feet into the ground.

“An elevator,” Wade said. “Stuck between floors.”

Lily reasoned that the elevator car had fallen past the level below and lodged there, leaving at its top a gap to the floor beneath them.

“We can crawl through to the lower level,” she said.

“What about never entering a dark room if there's another way?”

She shone the light in his face. There was a smile on it. “That was fine in New York. We're in Siberia now.” She slid down to one of the iron struts on the perimeter of the shaft. Then to another, and then finally they both lowered themselves onto the elevator roof. It creaked suddenly under their weight. They shared an anxious moment, until they heard the voices murmuring again.

Relying on her years of gymnastics, Lily slipped through the shaft, which opened out into a lower passage of the mine. It wasn't a big drop, but she braced herself firmly to keep from falling, cleared a space for Wade, and helped him down. Glimmers of light and the echo of voices told her they were now on the same level as Galina.

“You know this is absolutely crazy, right?” she said.

“Oh, believe me, I know,” Wade said.

“Okay, then. Just so we're on the same page.”

“And the same level of a coal mine in Siberia.”

Before they were ten feet down the next passage, a thing jerked out of the darkness behind Wade. It clamped itself over his mouth and pulled him roughly back into the shadows. A voice hissed,
“Silence!”

T
he thing over Wade's mouth was cold, powerful, reptilian.

Gollum?

The dry flesh smelled of stone dust and coal and motor oil and something sharp, medicinal. Trying to turn, he imagined he saw a face—but it couldn't have been a face, because not all its features were there. Lily said nothing, her hands over her mouth, her eyes aghast at what was dragging him backward into a long room lit by a single candle.

Around them was a tortured mangle of metal furniture and the broken remains of the equipment of coal mining—drills, saws, picks, and axes—reminding him of a nineteenth-century machine factory.

“Silence!” the voice hissed wetly in his ears. “I release you. Silence, yes?”

Wade nodded. So did Lily, her eyes welling up now. The scaly fingers lifted off his mouth. Wiping his lips on his sleeve, Wade turned slowly.

By the wavering flame he saw a shriveled wire of a man whose nose was mostly gone. It had rotted or burned away. An open hole gaped between his cheeks, giving him the look of a skeleton. The flesh on his forehead was mottled—red, black—and crosshatched with deep scars. His lower lip had been burned almost completely away. The gums that remained were gray. He had no teeth. His lidless, protruding, red-veined eyes appeared to be on fire.

“Every time someone comes,” he slurred in a whisper that suggested he couldn't speak any louder, “by plane, by truck, by any way, I come see who. I watch.”

“Who are you?” Lily asked tentatively.

“Four long years I watch and wait, knowing it is only matter of time before she come. Four years, I wait for Galina Krause. Finally, she has tracked me to my lair. The circle of horror is completed.”

“You know Galina Krause? You know she's here?” Wade asked. “Who are you?”

“Me? I am no one. You are Enklish? Enklish are good people.”

“American,” Lily said, looking at Wade for an answer he didn't know the question to.

The man turned his face away. “Ah, I thought Enklish. My brother he live London. Maybe you know. Boris his name. Big man. Scholar. They love him in London. But how could you know Boris? You are children; he is famous man. I wished Boris, not Galina. Brother Boris. I sent message for him to come. He has not come.”

Lily's knees gave out, and she fell into Wade to keep from collapsing on the filthy floor. After all that had happened since the Promenade room in London, after the countless miles they'd crossed to get here, they
knew
this burned wreck of a man?

Russia felt suddenly as small as the inside of a box.

“You are Aleksandr?” she said softly.

Not that it was even remotely possible for his flesh to move or the muscles that had been destroyed by fire to alter his features, but something softened in his expression.

“You . . . you . . . know Boris Rubashov? My brother, Boris?”

“We met him in London,” Wade said, still holding her up. “He helped us to come to Russia. But he . . . he thought
you
were dead. He was convinced that Galina . . .” His hand moved to his pocket, then stopped.

“He thought Galina had killed you,” Lily said.

The man, whose brother had called him
A
, stared silently at them with bloodred eyes, eager for every syllable. “Tell me more,” he said. “More!” So they related the sad facts of his brother's poisoning. How he had “told” them by video about the Teutonic Order's theft of Serpens from Copernicus. How they had followed his opera ticket to Venice to retrieve what had turned out to be Aleksandr's very own message to his brother.

“Worokuta,”
Wade said finally. “That was from you.”

“I sent it to a colleague in Prague,” the man said. “I hoped it would get to Boris. So that I could see him one more time. To pass on to him my knowledge of Serpens.”

“Without Boris we wouldn't be here,” Lily said softly. “I didn't realize until now how much he helped us. He hated the Order. He was coming back before they got to him. He loved you. He would have come here, if he had seen your message.”

Aleksandr shuddered for minutes without cease. Lily guessed that his eyes were dry only because his tear ducts had been destroyed by fire. He was sobbing without tears.

“Oh, Boris,” he said finally. “Boris—” He stiffened suddenly. He pushed a curled finger to his lips, then picked his way through the ruined machinery. He leaned against the door they had come through. He dragged a dented cabinet against it. “Galina Krause does not know the way to my little home,” he whispered, “but she will find it. She circles and circles the passages, looking for me.”

“The mine entrances are guarded except the one we came through,” said Wade.

“Galina must find me,” Aleksandr said, selecting something from the junk on the floor. It was a scalpel. “I will not leave before she does.”

“You treated Galina four years ago?” Lily said. “She wouldn't have been much older than we are now. What was wrong with her?”

Aleksandr shook his head. “You have heard of Greywolf? Greywolf harbored a secret experimental clinic for KGB. I was forced. Then, after KGB, the Order. Hideous place. The machine—”

Wade shot Lily a look. “The machine? You know about it? My stepmother is trapped at Greywolf,
inside
the machine. What is it?”

“Kronos is the Order's experimental time-traveling device!” he said. “They were building it even as I performed the surgery. I know little of physics, but Galina Krause is mad! Time travel simply cannot be done without the relics of Copernicus. Ptolemy knew what he was doing. He lacked only the final brilliance of the Magister. This is the greatness of Copernicus. His wondrous astrolabe!”

Lily tugged Wade to her. “That's what the midnight deadline is. Galina's going to use Kronos on Sara. But my Lord, to do what—”

There were noises echoing into the room from the passages outside.

“Galina's getting closer,” Wade said. “We should get out of here.”

“She believes I will tell her where the relic is!” he said.

Lily shivered. “Then it's true. You're a Guardian like Boris.”

His eyes fixed on her, then on Wade, then on her again. “As our father was before us. As all good people must be. All people who fight the Order . . .”

With that, Aleksandr went into a kind of trance, speaking much as his brother had in the London breakfast room, drawing them far from the mine and down the long passages of history.

“Behold,” he said, “behold the snowbound streets of Kraków, Poland, on the night of February thirteen, in the year 1568 . . .”