Nine Layers of Sky (9 page)

Seven

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

Ilya waited behind the door of the market, his eyes closed, until he heard the woman’s footsteps resound on concrete. She was walking west, her heels tapping with a swift, decisive rhythm. Ilya paused for a moment, then slipped outside. Sounds rushed upon him: a blackbird high in the trees might have been singing inside his own head. Ilya ignored these noises, concentrating instead upon Elena’s heels on the pavement.

She thought he was mad, of course, and he couldn’t blame her. He wondered if she would even remember the
rusalka
’s attack the next day. The
rusalki
had their own methods of remaining undetected: confusion, illusion, a pressure in the head. And they were aided by the precepts of this modern age, which, even in Russia, sought to reject the supernatural, and to embrace sweet reason. He had seen the war going on in Elena’s mind. He had almost been able to hear her sorting and organizing, convincing herself that what she had seen had been explicable after all.
Rusalka
to runaway; from sword to fishing rod.

But the world was not so easy as these rationalists would have it. Perhaps the
volkh
was right, and maybe the
rusalki
were creatures from another world, but Ilya Muromyets intended to treat them the same way that he always had: as enemies, and deadly in their treachery and stealth. His job now would be to keep Elena safe until the morning. Thus he looked up as he passed beneath the trees along the street, to see if a white face might be peering down through the branches, and he listened to the sounds around Elena’s receding footsteps, to make as certain as he could that she would not be set upon before he could reach her.

He could see her now: her tall, neat figure nearing the end of the market stalls. Ilya moved beneath the scanty protection afforded by the trees; if she looked back, he did not want to be seen. He followed her past the mural of a smiling woman bearing a basket of fruit. That was what this town was named after, he remembered now: Alma-ata, in the Kazakhs’ barbarous tongue.
Father of apples
. Elena was vanishing behind a passing tram. Ilya hung back, in case she should chance to glance around, and then he saw it.

The thing was sitting underneath one of the stalls, gnawing on a bone. Ilya’s first wary thought was that it was one of the
rusalki
themselves, without the glamorous disguise, but then he saw that this creature was different. It was sinuous and small, its muscles gleaming beneath a translucent layer of skin. It had an unfinished, embryonic appearance. It reminded Ilya of the horse’s head in the market, flayed and glistening. But the tissue beneath the skin was mottled, purple and grey like a bruise.

He reached for the fishing-rod case. The thing turned its head and looked at Ilya out of great black eyes. It sucked the bone straight into its mouth. Ilya saw the bone go down its throat with a great painful gulp. Then it was gone, swarming up the wall and into a crack in the concrete. Ilya glanced at the stallholder and his customers. Clearly, they had noticed nothing.

He caught sight of Elena again, walking toward the bus station. Ilya was immediately worried. What if he’d spooked her so much that she was heading out of town? She disappeared behind a plume of exhaust fumes. Ilya pursued, hastening past the line of Tajik refugees in their floral
shalwars,
reading the cards for passersby or selling the last of their pitiful possessions. One of the women looked up sharply as Ilya passed, gave a knowing, gold-toothed grin. Did she see him for what he was, Ilya wondered, or did he merely look like a potential customer? The latter seemed even more unlikely than the former.

Elena was almost at the end of the street, turning left. Ilya followed her down an unremarkable avenue of apartment blocks until she vanished into a dark doorway. He closed his eyes and listened, counting the number of steps that she took. The slam of the steel door was deafeningly final. He could not follow her into her home, but he could still listen. Keeping one ear open, Ilya went back out onto the street to find a public telephone.

It took him two attempts before he found one that was working. Looking up, he saw the broken-tooth vent of the unfinished metro, rising above him. He glanced across at the apartments, wondering whether Elena might glimpse him if she looked out of the window, but the place was half-hidden behind a tracery of branches. Fumbling in his pocket, Ilya extracted a few coins and pushed them into the machine. It took several minutes to accomplish this. A good thing these old machines still took rubles. The brief battle with the
rusalka
and the pursuit through the market had left him breathless. His palm throbbed with the cut of his vow, and his hands were trembling. The cut across his palm burned and stung.
Withdrawal.
It would not be long till it really started to get its claws into him, the sweats and shakes and fever, but he had no choice now. He had made his promise and there was no going back on it. For the first time in centuries, God was watching him.

The phone at the other end was ringing. At least Kovalin hadn’t palmed him off with a forged number. But it was a long time before anyone answered.

“Who’s that?” said a voice. It sounded very old and querulous, as if woken from sleep. Ilya wondered whether he might not have a wrong number after all.

“You don’t know me,” he said quickly. “My name is Ilya Muromyets. Kovalin gave me this number to call, if I had anything.”

“Kovalin? Ah, yes, the boy,” the voice said. Ilya’s eyebrows rose. If the dead-eyed, corpse-faced Kovalin was a boy, how old was this person? “So, do you?” the voice went on.

“Do I what?” Ilya said, stupidly.

“Have anything.” The voice was patient, as though reasoning with an idiot.
Not far wrong,
Ilya thought.

“Yes. I think so. I think I’ve found what you’re looking for.”

“Do you? How long have you been in Kazakhstan?”

“I got off the train this morning.”

“And already you have found the thing for which we have been searching? Kovalin told me that you are a desperate man, Ilya Muromyets.”

“Nevertheless,” Ilya said, as firmly as he could, “I may have what you’re looking for.” He did not want to say:
I think I drew it to me.
The wordless voice still echoed in his head:
I am here. I have found you.
What the hell was this thing?

“Then come to us now. Show us. I will send a car.”

“I don’t have the object myself,” Ilya was forced to admit. “Someone else has it. She wants to meet someone from your organization, to sell it. Tomorrow, at eleven. In the lobby of the Hotel Kazakhstan.”

There was a long pause. Then the voice said, “Very well. I will give you a chance. We will be there. But do not be late.”

“I won’t—” Ilya started to say, but the voice had hung up. There was only the humming of the phone in his ear. Slowly, he replaced the receiver and focused once more on Elena’s apartment. He could hear snatches of conversation, tuning in and out as though molded by static.

“—nothing very much. I went to the market. I thought we’d have the rest of that plov tonight, how does that sound?”

He thought that was Elena. An older, female voice answered briskly. Still listening in on this desultory conversation, Ilya sat down at a nearby table and ordered a shashlik and tea. Bottles of beer stood in the freezer and Ilya was tempted, but thought better of it. It was foreign, imported, and it would cost too much. Perhaps it was unfortunate that Kazakhstan, though Islamic, was not a dry country.

“How long does this place stay open?” he asked the waitress.

“All night.”

“Any chance of a cheap place to stay round here?”

“You could sleep out back with the refugees.” Ilya, studying her, saw blue eyes in a dark Persian face. It was likely that she was one of those refugees. She looked no more than sixteen.

“Two hundred
tenge
will get you a bed. And there’s a toilet—we built it ourselves.” She sounded proud. He’d slept in worse conditions in Siberia, and he could keep an ear out for Elena, at least.

“All right.”

“Do you want to see it?” the girl asked, in the manner of a receptionist showing a guest the best bedroom. Ilya stifled a smile and followed her through to the back of the cafe, to a collection of rusty old vehicles and corrugated iron huts.

“We sleep here.” She pointed to an ancient bus.

“It’ll do.”

A boy was cooking plov in a wok over an open fire. He had no face, only a mass of blackened scar tissue. Blue eyes like the girl’s were scowling in concentration as he stirred the rice and mutton.

“My brother,” the girl said, following Ilya’s stare.

“Dear God. What happened?”

“A shell. It fell on the house. We lived near Par-char, in Tajikistan. Everything in the village was destroyed.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know. Rebels, maybe, or mujahideen, or the Americans.”

“Why would Americans destroy your village?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. Why not?”

Ilya’s heart reached out to her, but she did not seem unduly concerned. Perhaps she had been too young to remember properly, or perhaps such events were like bad weather, striking without reason. The girl leaned over her brother, teasing, threatening to snatch the spoon, and the boy gave a happy, lipless grin.

Watching them, the craving for heroin receded until it was no more than a distant tide. Ilya knew that it would come back, but faced with these two, who had so little, he could not bring himself to care about his own troubles. He went into the bus and sat down on one of the stained mattresses, listening as the rain once more began.

Interlude

BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

Early that morning, Anikova drove the staff car back from the dacha to Central Command. It was not long past dawn and she was still half-asleep, so when she reached the curve of the road that led past the lake, she stopped the car and got out. The lake was dim with mist in the early morning light; if Anikova narrowed her eyes, the landscape seemed to blur and swim, as though she was looking through a water-filled glass. Nothing moved in the pines, or among the white-striped birch branches. If she looked at the coils of mist in a certain way, she might imagine that the lost city of Baikal was rising from the water: the oldest place in Russia.

But this was no longer Russia. This was her home of Pergama Province, not far from First City. Strange, Anikova thought, to be homesick for a place one had never known, but Russia must still run in her blood.
This is Byelovodye,
she reminded herself,
the heart of all
the Russias, the place where they meet, the hidden Republic. This is the best place of all.
She looked down at her smart dark uniform, its buttons in the shape of snarling bear heads, at the red stars at her cuffs. Yet when she thought of what she and the Mechvor had to do that day, of what they had already done, she felt hollow and unconvinced, as though the uniform was the only thing holding her together.

Anikova rested her forehead on the cool side of the staff car and took a breath of morning air. That kind of thinking was forbidden these days, and had never been entirely wise. She remembered her mother cautioning her against dangerous thoughts.
Be careful what
you dream. Look what happened to your father.
And then her mother’s face would grow pinched and pale as she screwed her hands together in the shelter of her apron. Anikova had taken good heed of the lesson; an easy thing for a child to learn, but harder for an adult, forced into disquieting compromises. She should forget about hidden cities, forbidden dreams: just get in the car and drive. But it was a long time before she could bring herself to leave the lake.

An hour and a half later, Anikova sat with her hands on her knees, watching as the Mechvor went through the procedure. Kitai’s whiteless eyes were closed; her face wore a faint smile. Anikova thought that this was what irritated her most about the Mechvor: The woman never seemed to lose her temper. She remained good-natured, good-humored, even under the most trying circumstances. Anikova could not help feeling, however, that Kitai felt a genuine concern for all her subjects, even when she was so ruthlessly stripping their dreams from their heads.

The old man lay on an operating table, surrounded by equipment. What made it worse was that this was the second case that morning; Kitai had already seen to a girl brought in by Anikova’s people on the previous day. She had been found outside the People’s Palace, distributing samizdat literature, perhaps the very leaflets that had been printed in the old man’s bathroom. Anikova had watched sourly as the Mechvor questioned her, treating it all as a huge secret, as though they were all girls together, gossiping about boys and love. The girl had at first been terrified, but had gradually relaxed, confiding in the Mechvor, forgetting about the silvery bands that crisscrossed her shaved scalp and led downward to feed into the skin of Kitai’s hands. And in due course, Kitai had plucked her thoughts neatly from her skull, leaving the girl a passive, empty shell.

“We’ll give her something new, later today,” Kitai had said that morning. “Something much more appropriate.” She had put a hand on Anikova’s arm and peered anxiously into her face as they made their way up the marble steps of Central Command. “She’ll be a lot happier, really. And it won’t hurt a bit.”

The wind that blew across the central square was cold and tinged with rain. The classical portal of the Command building towered above them, its façade dull in the absence of sunlight. Anikova, dressed only in her uniform darks, shivered.

“Tell me,” Anikova said. “How many people’s memories have you altered like this? How many dream-neurons have you bled dry?”

Kitai looked momentarily blank. “Why, I can’t remember.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I do keep excellent records—I’m sure I could get the numbers for you.”

“Don’t bother,” Anikova said. She wondered how old the Mechvor really was. She had the appearance of a girl in her twenties, but Anikova had first met her when she herself was a raw recruit, and that had been three decades ago. In that time, the Mechvor had barely altered.

“I started my work among the horse clans.” Kitai seemed eager to make up for her inadvertent lapse in knowledge. “It was very different then, naturally. We had not developed the technology; we used drugs and drums. I suppose you might say I was a kind of shaman. But now, with all this new equipment, there’s no need for any of that primitive sort of thing.” She smiled. “I’m a very modern girl, really.”

You are what the State wants you to be,
Anikova thought, but she did not say so aloud. The last thing she wanted was Kitai poking about inside her head. The Mechvor was looking at her sharply, nonetheless.

“You do understand how necessary this is, Colonel?” she said. “That dreams and ideas should be controlled? Because otherwise, reality itself is in danger of collapse. Ever since the coil was stolen, the breaches along our borders have been growing, increasing in number and in size. These are no longer just the little natural rifts, Colonel. If we don’t find a solution, it’s only a matter of time before a major breach occurs. If this coil remains in the wrong hands, and matters reach a point where the tribes and our enemies can freely cross between here and Russia, our national security will be threatened. We have to redouble our efforts if we’re to maintain our wonderful society.”

“Of course I understand,” Anikova said. “I lost my father through a breach. Do you think I’m not aware of the risks?” How many coils did Central Command possess, anyway? She knew that most of the gates on the Byelovodyean side were powered by Tsilibayev’s engineered copies and had now been closed, but she could not help wondering as to the number of ancient originals. That information, however, was strictly classified: The only certainty was that there was now one less. With an effort, she forced her thoughts from her mind.

“Colonel, I’m so sorry,” the Mechvor said, but she must have known about Gregori Anikov’s death. Anikova’s background was a secret to no one; Kitai’s sympathy felt merely superfluous.

“Well, I should get busy,” Kitai went on. “It would be nice to go for lunch later, wouldn’t it?”

Anikova muttered something in reply. The Mechvor, feeding the links back into her hands, connected herself to the machine and started work.