Altar of Bones (6 page)

She found it and lit it with the tinderbox she’d stuffed deep inside the knapsack. The pitch burst into flame, lighting up the round, underground cavern.

And there it was, where it had always been, set into the wall: an ancient altar made out of human bones.

The altar of bones
.

She’d started toward it, her aching muscles seeming to move on their own, when Nikolai let out a terrible groan and sagged slowly onto the floor. For a moment longer, she stared at the altar as if mesmerized, then she looked down at the man lying at her feet, and what she saw nearly stopped her heart.

“Nikki! Oh, God, Nikki …”

She fell to her knees beside him. How had he even managed to get himself this far? His lips were swollen and blue, his eyelashes frozen to his cheeks. His breathing was ragged, dangerously shallow.

Quickly, she built a fire using pieces of decaying coffins. Once she got the flames hot enough, she used an offering bowl from the altar to make a thin gruel out of melted snow and bread and fat from her knapsack.

“You’re not going to die on me, Nikki. I promise. You’re not going to die,” she chanted, like a prayer, but he was out of his head with fever.

The bowl of gruel trembled in her hands as she looked from Nikolai’s face, white as death, to the altar made of human bones. Skulls, femurs, fibulas, the hundreds of bones fitted intricately together to form an elaborate and macabre table of worship. On top of it, among the stubs of hundreds of melted candles, and battered bronze bowls that had once held offerings, sat the Lady—a wooden icon of the Virgin Mary.

The Lady’s jewels sparkled in the firelight. Her crown shone and the bright folds of her robes—orange, sea green, and a bloodred—glowed as lush as the day they were painted, nearly four hundred years ago in the court of Ivan the Terrible. And it seemed to Lena that the Lady’s eyes glimmered wet with tears over what she was about to do.

“I love him,” Lena said. “I couldn’t bear it if he dies.”

But the Lady was silent.

“I promised him,” she said. And still the Lady did not answer.

Lena made sure Nikolai still slept as if already dead, then she brought the bowl of gruel over to the altar and the icon. Because only with the Lady’s help could she be sure that her promise would be kept.

W
HEN SHE CAME
back, she saw the fire had warmed Nikolai enough that she could rouse him some. She slid her arm under his shoulders and raised his head so he could drink. He took a sip. Then another.

His feverish eyes cleared a little and he looked around the cavern. She could see the wonder grow on his face as he took it all in, for this place, macabre and mysterious, had been a burial chamber for her people since the beginning of time. She watched him take in the deep, oily, black pool fed by water dripping from the ceiling, the stalagmites that covered the floor like rows of tombstones, the crude drawings of wolves etched deep in the stone walls.

Finally, he focused on the hot geyser bubbling and bellowing steam beneath the altar made of human bones, and she heard him suck in a sharp breath.

“My God.”

Lena set down the bowl of gruel and leaned over him. “Sssh, love. Never mind.” She brushed the wet hair off his forehead. “They’re just the bones of people from long ago who died during the winter and were put here to be buried in the summer, only some ended up forgotten. And then other people came along and put their remains to another use.”

“It’s real.” His voice was little more than a whisper, his eyes wild. “It’s the sketch come to life, I tell you—from the Fontanka dossier. I never believed it, not in my heart. A wild tale told in a tavern by a drunken madman? But it’s real … the altar of bones.”

His gaze came back to her, and on his face she saw not only wonder now, but fear, and a raw, naked hunger. “Give it to me, Lena. Let me drink of the altar. If you love me, you will—”

But then his eyelids fluttered, and he passed out again.

Lena sat back on her heels. She could feel the Lady’s eyes on her, but she couldn’t bear to meet them. She looked instead at Nikolai’s pale, fever-ravaged face.

His lying face.

I
T’S ALL BEEN
a lie
. Every kiss, every touch, every word out of his mouth—it had all just been a way for him to find the altar of bones.

Don’t trust anyone, her mother had warned her, the day she had brought Lena to the cave and shown her its frightening secret. “You will be the Keeper of the altar of bones, my daughter, after I am gone, and your sacred duty will be to keep it hidden forever from the world. You must tell no one, show no one. Trust no one, not even the ones you love. Especially not the ones who say they love you.”

The ones you love …

Lena reached out to touch him, then pulled her hand back, balling it into a fist in her lap.

She wondered if Nikolai Popov was even his real name, wondered
now if he’d ever been a real prisoner. Most of the men at Norilsk were sent to slave in the nickel mines, but they’d made him the camp “artist” instead, putting him to work painting slogans and red stars outside on the infirmary walls. The infirmary where she conveniently worked, and he had the kind of ravishing good looks to catch any woman’s eye.

But it was his defiant courage that had had won her heart. He told her he’d been sent to the gulag for drawing cartoons critical of Stalin and the Communist Party. “They are parasites. They feed off the fruits of our labor, all the while telling us how we should think, how we should be. I refuse to be a happy slave, Lena. There’s another world beyond this place, for you and me. For us. A world of infinite possibilities.”

He’d made it seem as if the escape were her idea, but she could see now how easily he’d manipulated things, telling her about the gap in the fence, about the forty-five seconds of no searchlights while the sentries changed shifts. And the cave …
But is there some place, Lena love, where we can hide until the soldiers give up looking for us?
How eagerly, how stupidly, she’d told him about the cave, how it was so cleverly hidden behind a waterfall on the lake where she’d been born.

What a truly gullible little fool you were, Lena Orlova
.

He’d already known about the cave, obviously—not where it was, perhaps, but he’d known of its existence, and that she alone, of all the stupid females in the world, could lead him right to it. She’d been so very stupid. Stupid with love.

And Nikolai? Had he ever loved her, even a little?

Probably not. And, no, he’d never been a real prisoner. He was in the GUGB, surely. The secret police. One of Stalin’s spies. He’d been half-delirious with fever, probably said more than he ever should have, but he’d let slip something about a dossier. The Fontanka dossier, he’d called it. Before the revolution, Fontanka 16 had been the infamous address of the headquarters for the tsar’s own secret police. So how far back did this dossier go, and what was in it?
Who
was in it? A sketch of the altar, Nikki had said. A wild tale told in a tavern by a drunken madman. But what else? How much did he know?

Somehow he’d found out about the altar of bones. He would never
rest now, the men he worked for would never rest, until they got their hands on its terrible power.

“I did love you, Nikki. So very much,” she said, but he slept on.

Again she reached out to touch him, and again she stopped herself. One of the times they’d made love had been in the shed where they stored the paints. Afterward he had said, “Do you believe this can last forever, Lena?”

She hadn’t wanted to give him too much of herself too soon, so she’d turned the question back at him. “Do you?”

“Yes. And I’m not talking about this,” he said, touching her between her thighs. “But this …” His hand had moved up to press into the soft flesh just below her breast. “The blood I can feel right now pumping through your heart. And this.” Then he’d taken her own hand and put it on his chest. “My own heart’s lifeblood. Can you make my heart beat forever for you, Lena?

“Can you make our hearts beat as one until the end of time?”

L
ENA
O
RLOVA
sat before the dying embers of the fire and watched the man who called himself Nikolai Popov open his eyes. His fever had broken; he would live. His black, treacherous heart would go on beating, if not forever, at least for now.

He smiled at her, and then she knew the instant full awareness came, for his gaze left her face and went right to the altar made of bones, and she saw the greed and the hunger flare in his eyes before he looked away.

He yawned elaborately and stretched. “God, I’m feeling better. Like I might live after all. I’m never dosing myself with cooking salts again, though. I promise you that.”

The way he was behaving, still acting the part of the escaped prisoner and her lover, she thought he must not remember what he’d said in his delirium, how he’d given himself away. Good. He would go on with his charade, and she would let him. If he thought she was onto him, he might kill her sooner rather than later.

And he would kill her, she understood that now.
I should have taken out my knife, Nikki, my love, and stabbed you through the heart while you slept
. But then she looked at his face, his beautiful face, and knew she could not have done it. Not while he slept.

He stood up slowly, testing his legs. Lena stood up as well. She slid her knife out of its sheath and held it down at her side, hidden within the folds of her padded coat.

He looked around the cave, careful not to dwell too long on the altar, then his dark, mesmerizing eyes met hers.

“Last night,” he said, “I’d never have made it through the
purga
without you.”

“I love you, Nikki.” It was the simple truth. Still. Even though he was going to kill her.

He smiled. “And I wish I could say I could live on your love, Lena, my sweet, but the truth is I’m starving.”

He clapped his hands, rubbed them together. He started to bend over the bowl to see if anything was left of the gruel she’d made, then he straightened, cocking his head, and a wary look came over his face.

“Something’s different,” he said.

Lena edged a step sideways, away from him. “It’s the sudden silence after all those hours of howling wind. The storm’s passed.”

A new day had dawned, for she could see sunlight filtering through the narrow slit in the stone face above their heads that was the entrance to the cave. It flashed in the Lady’s golden crown, shimmered in the black, oily pool of water.

“We should still hide out here for a while longer, though,” she said, “until the soldiers give up looking for us. But we’re going to need more snow to melt for drinking water.”

She tried to make her movements casual as she walked past him and began to climb the steep steps, carved so many centuries ago into the rock. When she reached the narrow passageway at the top, she squeezed through it without looking back, and she felt a small flare of hope for escape because he hadn’t tried to stop her.

She came out from behind the frozen waterfall so that she could look out over the snow-blanketed lake. On the distant shore, she saw a streamer of powdery snow. The streamer swelled, became a white cloud, and out of the cloud came an iron sleigh pulled by dogs.