Altar of Bones (5 page)

W
HEN THEY GOT
beyond the reach of the searchlights, they stopped just long enough to strap on their snowshoes. Lena listened for the bay of the dogs, for the rasp of the runners on the soldiers’ iron sleighs, but there was only the wind.

They’d gone barely a mile farther when the wind began to blow harder, driving pellets of snow into their faces, lashing the loose snow on the ground into ice clouds. Lena stopped to scrub her eyes with her sleeve, knocking the icicles off her eyebrows.

Nikolai staggered up next to her. He leaned over, bracing his palms on his thighs, gasping for air.

“The
purga
will be on us soon.” Lena had to shout a little to be heard above the wind. “It’ll be hard going after that.”

Nikolai tilted back his head to grin up at her. “Hard going, hunh? And what do you call this so far? A nice, warm day at the beach?”

Lena shook her head at him. It would take too much breath to explain, and there was no explaining anyway. A
purga
was something you had to experience to believe, and by then all you could do was pray the experience didn’t kill you. Soon there would be no tracks behind them, no horizon in front of them, no ground, no sky. Only snow and wind beyond imagining.

Nikolai’s whole body suddenly heaved as a fit of coughing tore through him. When he was finally able to draw a breath again, he said, “It’s the damn cold. It shreds your lungs into confetti paper…. How far away are we from this secret cave of yours?”

“Not far.”

He straightened slowly and looked around them, although she knew he couldn’t make out much this deep into the polar night.

“‘Not far,’ she says. Lena, love, please tell me we’re not lost.”

She’d heard the teasing smile in his voice, but that cough, the sudden wetness in his breathing, was scaring her. Had the exertion of their escape driven the fever into his lungs?

She pulled off her glove and reached out to touch his face. It was coated with a thin sheet of ice from his sweat freezing instantly in the frigid air.

Still, she felt him smile. “I’ll make it, love,” he said. “I’m one tough bastard underneath all my surface charm. But how can you be sure you know where we are? It’s black as pitch out here, and everything’s the same. Nothing but snow and more snow.”

“This land is bred into my bones. I can find my way over it blindfolded.”

Before they set off again, though, she used the rope from off the sheepskin coat to tie them together, for once the
purga
struck they’d be as good as blind, unable to see beyond the end of their noses. They could lose sight of each other in seconds, and if that happened, Nikolai would be a dead man come morning.

T
HE PURGA HIT
two hours later.

The shrieking wind drove the snow into her eyes and mouth, the cold burned her lungs with every breath. She wondered how Nikolai was managing. She couldn’t see him behind her; only a steady pressure on the rope told her he was keeping up. A couple of times she knew he’d fallen, because the rope had suddenly jerked taut, but he’d somehow managed to get right back up again.

They had to have covered at least three miles since they’d entered the box canyon. The canyon was shaped like a boot and at its toe was the lake, the one place she thought of as home. It wasn’t the Ozero P’asino—she’d lied about that to the sergeant. The small Siberian lake she’d been born on wasn’t on any map. No roads led there, and in winter even the caribou trails were buried deep beneath the snow.

She’d told him other lies, as well. Her mother hadn’t been a Yakut. She’d been one of the
toapotror
—the magic people.

I need some of that magic now. Real magic to drive away the
purga,
to get us safely to the cave before Nikki—

The rope jerked taut.

Lena waited, but this time he didn’t get back up.

S
HE USED THE
rope as a guide, feeling her way back to him. Only seconds had passed since he’d fallen and already he was nearly buried in snow.

She grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and hauled him half-upright. His head lolled. He breathed and sounded as if he were drowning. “Nikki, get up. You’ve got to keep moving.”

A raw cough ripped through him. “Can’t. Chest hurts.”

She shook him, hard. “Nikki! Don’t you dare quit on me.”

“No. Don’t want to die….” He grabbed her arms and suddenly his face, crusted with ice, was only inches from hers. “If you love me, you won’t let me die.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise … Nikki, please. You’ve got to get up. It’s not much farther now, but I can’t carry you.”

“
Da, da
. Getting up … getting up …”

She thrust her shoulder up under his armpit and leveraged him onto his feet. He swayed, but didn’t fall back down.

She’d told him it wasn’t far, but she wasn’t sure anymore. They should’ve reached the lake by now, but the lake was nowhere, and they were nowhere, lost in a world of snow and wind and cold.

S
HE LOST ALL
sense of time as they slogged on, her arm around Nikolai’s waist, holding him up against the blasts of wind.

She needed to get Nikolai to the cave soon, or he would die. She was tired, so tired.

Nikolai’s legs gave out beneath him and he lurched into her. She reeled, fighting desperately to keep from falling, screaming as his dead weight wrenched her arm nearly out of its socket. But somehow he got his feet back under him, and they staggered on.

Not much farther now. Just one more step, Nikki. That’s it. Don’t fall on me. Don’t fall—

He fell, and this time he took her with him.

They plunged through black space, hitting deep, pillowy snow and rolling to a stop. They landed in a snowdrift, and it was so warm and soft. She wanted to lie there and rest just a little while.

She knew that to stop was to die.

She thrashed her legs, fighting free of the sucking snow, and realized she wasn’t on the snow-shrouded tundra anymore. She was on ice.

They’d found the lake.

N
IKOLAI STILL LAY
in the snowdrift, unmoving. She fell back onto her knees beside him. She shook him, hard. She had no breath left to shout at him, he couldn’t have heard her anyway.

She shook him again, felt him move.
Get up, get up, get up
, she willed him, a chant in her mind. And somehow, with her half-lifting him, he got back onto his feet.

Just one more step, Nikki. That’s it, one more step
.

Her own steps were happening on sheer instinct now. She was as good as blind, moving through a black nightmare of wind and snow.
Just one more step, one more …

They hit a wall of ice.

The waterfall.

I
N SUMMER, THE
runoff from melting snow and swollen streams sent a cascade of water shooting off a tall, steep bluff and into the lake below. In winter the waterfall froze solid.

But no matter what time of year, the waterfall always hid the entrance to the cave. First, you had to know that it was possible to walk onto the narrow ledge between the waterfall and the bluff, but even then all you would see was a flat face of solid rock. Unless you were a daughter of the
toapotror
, the magic people.

A daughter of the magic people knew that what looked like a sheer
wall of rock was really two walls, overlapping each other to form a slit barely a foot wide. And if you dared to squeeze yourself into that slit, to inch your way along it, with the space growing narrower and narrower until it seemed that you’d taken one step too many, that you were stuck, trapped forever … then suddenly the slit would widen again, opening up into the entrance of a secret cavern.

L
ENA DIDN’T KNOW
how she got Nikolai through the slit to the entrance of the cave, and she would never have managed it if he hadn’t battled back through the fever and found the strength to hold himself upright mostly on his own.
I’m one tough bastard
, he’d said, and she loved him for that.

To get inside the cave, you had to climb down steep, shallow steps the magic people had carved long ago into the rock. By the time they hit bottom, Lena’s arms and legs were trembling with the effort and she didn’t know how Nikolai had done it, even with her trying to bear as much of his weight as possible. The blackness was absolute, and she had to feel around for the pitch torch she hoped would still be in its bracket on the wall.