The Hidden Goddess (35 page)

“Stay where you are,” he muttered.

Emily felt her muscles cramping painfully, her hands balling into fists, even the bottoms of her feet tensing and curling inward. She felt as if she were being crushed under a terrible weight. Then Heusler turned away from her, lifting his hands like a preacher giving an invocation. He spoke words that rang off the tall buildings around them. From the puddles that had formed from the burning black rain, a huge snakelike thing grew, raising an eyeless black head. The thing struck out at whatever Russians were still standing, heedless of their bullets. Opening a huge mouth, it swallowed one of
them whole. The man shrieked, dissolving in a conflagration of red and gold.

Over the sounds of the shrieking was another sound—a sudden cry, high and furious. Heusler staggered forward as a man threw himself onto the High Priest’s back. Even though he was wearing a heavy overcoat and gloves, she recognized him.

Dmitri
.

Dmitri wrapped a hand around Heusler’s forehead and pulled the fat man’s head back. Then he brought his hand up, slashing abruptly. Emily did not see the knife in Dmitri’s hand, but she did see the blood fountaining from Heusler’s throat. Heusler fell, his hands reaching up with futile magic streaming from them. Dmitri rode Heusler’s body to the ground, then leapt up, pulling his shotgun from a holster on his back. Emily felt the spell cramping her muscles slacken, fall away. The writhing snake collapsed inward on itself, becoming a spreading thick puddle of black. Smoke rose from it, acrid and foul.

New waves of men were storming into the fray now, and they were all wearing heavy overcoats and dark smoked goggles. They fell upon Heusler’s men, grappling wildly. With Heusler bleeding on the ground, it seemed that more rifle shots were finding their mark; Emily saw another sangrimancer fall, a cavernous hole blown in his chest. Everything churned—swirling freshets of black rain and humming waves of glowing red magic hissing up like mist and vapor, the close sound of firearms and breaking glass, the screams of the wounded and dying. Dmitri looked up the street. Emily followed his gaze.

At the end of the street a man stood alone, carefully working some kind of device. He was ice-white, neatly tailored, calm.

Perun
.

He stood within some kind of egg-shaped shield that glowed yellow and green; the black rain sizzled and smoked against it. Like the other Russians, he was wearing dark goggles. A cigarette dangled forgotten between his lips. He glanced up at Dmitri and gave a small nod. Dmitri quickly
lifted a similar pair of goggles hanging around his neck and fixed them over his eyes.

Then, to her horror, Emily realized that Heusler was not dead. He was inching his bulk toward her, his fingers clutching at the black, slimy cobblestones. The wound on his throat closed even as she watched, creeping magic seaming the lips of the wound, stanching the gouting spurts of blood. The black knife was in his hand.

At that moment, Perun punched a button on the device in his hand, then tossed it away from himself. She watched it roll out onto the cobblestones with a small
tink tink tink
.

It was the last thing Emily saw.

The device exploded with a rumbling boom and a flash of light that made everything go stark white, like the light of a hundred midday suns.

She felt Heusler’s hand on her arm, then on her throat. He pulled her out from under the cart and pulled himself up over her body, panting like a dog. She felt him raise his arm.

There was a lone rifle crack. Warm sharp chunks splattered across her face. Something dropped beside her head, shattering. Shards of it sliced into the flesh of her neck. Burning pain flamed through her.

Heusler’s bulk fell over her, a smothering weight.

“Cursed Warlock,” Emily heard Dmitri’s voice say. “Let him heal himself of
that
.” She heard him grunt as he rolled Heusler’s body off of her. Then he was helping her sit up. She felt warmth spill down the side of her throat, down into the well of her collarbone. His hand brushed something from her face, sharp bits scratching her skin.

“You see, Miss Edwards?” he said. “I told you I had been sent to protect you.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Pelmeni with Smetana

The next hour was a blur of shadows and pain.

Emily could see nothing, but she could feel herself being quickly lifted into a large covered drayage wagon, carried away swiftly from the sounds of screaming and scattered rifle pops. There was the sound of horses’ feet, and the smell of blood and black acid rain, and the feeling of men’s bodies all around her—wounded men, groaning.

The cut place on her throat burned, and the whole side of her neck was tight and sticky with clotted blood. But that pain paled in comparison to the pain searing her eyes. They ached as if they’d been put out with red hot pokers, and her head was splitting. She tried to blink away the blindness, but there was nothing, not even the faintest shadow of motion.

Dmitri sat beside her. He had a cool damp cloth, and he laid it over her aching eyes. It smelled of chamomile and mint and other smells she could not identify—chemical smells.

“The compress will help the blindness pass,” he said, his body rocking against hers as the wagon moved. “The Solar Flash is hard on the eyes, but will do no permanent damage if treated quickly.”

And after a while, Emily’s vision did begin to return. First she could distinguish vague forms around her, the men sitting hunched forward, nursing injuries. Then, everything became very red, and she began to see details. Loose tunics stained with blood. Thick fingers fumbling with heavy wooden crosses on beaded strings, heads bowed, lips moved in prayer. A bottle of vodka, a bulwark against pain, being passed from
dirty hand to dirty hand. Emily reached for it as it passed, taking a long swallow. Shuddering, she looked out the flapping canvas at the back of the wagon, trying to see where they were going.

Dmitri lifted the compress to her face again.

“Keep it over your eyes,” he said curtly, and the way he said it made Emily wonder if it was really because he was worried about her vision.

But silently, she did as she was told.

The wagon stopped after a little while, and Emily, the compress still over her eyes, was led into a place that smelled good. There was the sharp tangy smell of tea, the rich earthy odor of beets and potatoes, the savory whiff of chicken broth. When Emily removed the compress, she found that her vision was mostly restored, and that she was in a big kitchen. A squat woman in a colorful headscarf was stirring a pot of soup and muttering to herself in Russian. Dmitri, in the far corner, was rummaging in a box, pulling out pieces of clean white linen. Laying these over his arm, he took up a steaming bowl and a small vial of iodine and came to sit next to Emily.

“Let’s have a look.” He seized her chin, looking at the place on her throat where she’d been cut. “It’s not deep, and those heathen blades of glass cut cleanly, at least.”

He dipped one of the pieces of linen in the warm water, and began to wipe the blood from Emily’s throat without particular gentleness.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“Safe,” he said. “A restaurant, actually. The
pelmeni
with
smetana
are particularly good, if you are hungry.”

Emily winced as the cloth touched the wound. She thought about all the death she’d seen that day. “I’m not,” she said.

“Certainly a healthy young Witch isn’t going to let the death of a few dozen strangers ruin her appetite?” Dmitri said. He did not sneer, or speak with anger, but the bitterness of the words made Emily press her lips together. Dmitri dipped the cloth into the bowl again. The water turned abruptly red. He wrung the cloth and began wiping her face, removing scratchy chunks of bone and, Emily knew now,
Heusler’s brain. Over by the stove, the woman was cutting potatoes into the soup unconcernedly, as if brain-spattered girls came to sit in her kitchen every day.

A door opened, and the smell of a brown cigarette preceded the opener into the kitchen.

As she watched Perun enter, Emily tensed. Even though the Sini Mira had saved her life, and even though her father had been a member of that group, they continued to make it very clear how they felt about her and her kind, and she continued to distrust them.

Perun came to Dmitri’s side and cast his husky-dog gaze down on Emily.

“Miss Edwards, it is good to see you again,” he said. His accent was even thicker than Dmitri’s. “You remember, we have met before?”

“Yes, we’ve met once or twice,” Emily said, pushing away Dmitri’s hands. “Once when you tried to kidnap me. The second time before you kidnapped Emeritus Zeno.” She paused. “Where is he?”

Perun gestured obliquely with the cigarette, smoke making patterns in the air. “How are your eyes, Miss Edwards? No permanent damage, I hope?”

“My eyes ache,” Emily said. The words sounded too angular, too foreign. This place, with its smells, reminded her of her father. “I will be fine,” she added, letting the words form themselves in Russian. Perun looked startled.

“Miss Edwards!” he returned, in Russian. “I did not know.”

I didn’t either, until last night
, Emily thought. But now the sonorous tones of Russian were familiar and homey.

“What have you done with Emeritus Zeno?” Emily asked the question again, though it tasted no better in Russian.

“We do not have him,” Perun said. “The Institute is mistaken in thinking that we do.”

“I think the Institute can be forgiven for that,” Emily said, “since he was kidnapped using one of your machines. Something called a Nikifuryevich Ladder.”

Perun shook his head ruefully.

“The Institute does not seem to understand that our technologies can be used against us, as any technology can.” He
fell silent for a moment as he watched Dmitri pick bits of bone from Emily’s hair. Then Dmitri stood silently, moved back to the box from which he’d gotten the supplies, watching his own hands as he replaced them slowly, item by item. Emily lifted her head to look Perun full in the face. The man bore the scrutiny, taking a long drag off of his spicy-smelling cigarette.

“Then if you don’t have Emeritus Zeno … who does?”

“The same people who just tried to kill you, most likely.”

“The Temple of Itztlacoliuhqui,” Emily said softly. She remembered the vision she’d had in the Institute’s conservatory, the vision of a knife-edged goddess of black glass. Then it was she whom Ososolyeh had been warning Emily against.

“The High Priest said that she commanded that I be killed. But if she’s got the hair sticks, why does she want me dead into the bargain?” Emily shook her head. “Just for fun?”

“Hair sticks?” Perun reached for a chair, pulled it close to where Emily was sitting. He sat down and leaned forward. “What are you talking about?”

Emily snapped her lips shut. What did he know? What should she tell him? Her mother had been taking the hair sticks to the Sini Mira … at least, that’s the best sense Emily could make of her jumbled memories. But her mother had also killed her father, to destroy the secret of the poison … so why hadn’t she destroyed the sticks while under Cowdray’s terrible possession?

Unless she’d never known.

Unless, after all, Emily had never told.

“Miss Edwards?” Perun prompted, and Emily realized she’d been silent for a long time.

“You first.” She brought her eyes up to meet his. “I want you to tell me what’s going on. What connection you had with my father, Vladimir Lyakhov. I know he was a member of the Sini Mira. I know you’ve been looking for him. Tell me why.”

Perun let out a long breath. He let the stub end of his cigarette drop to the floor, and quenched it with his foot.

“All right,” he said. “I will tell you what I know. As you said, your father’s name was Vladimir Lyakhov, but within the Sini Mira, he was known as Volos, after the God of Oaths.
It was a title within our organization, a nom de guerre. My own name, Perun, honors the Heavenly Smith.”

Volos’ Anodyne
, Emily thought. That was what Zeno had called the poison.

“The title of Volos was inherited by your father,” Perun continued, his voice breaking through the little firecrackers of connection that were popping in her brain. “From his mentor at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. After he was murdered, your father assumed his work. Thus, your father became Volos.”

“Aleksei Morozovich,” Emily said. “That was his mentor, wasn’t it? The scientist who created the poison called Volos’ Anodyne.”

Perun’s eyes widened. He glanced over at Dmitri, who had taken a position by the door and was watching Emily with arms crossed.

“You know more than you are telling, Miss Edwards!” He reached into his pocket, extracted a silver cigarette case. He took out another one of his brown cigarettes, tapped it on the back of the case.

“Aleksei Morozovich was indeed the creator of Volos’ Anodyne. It was his life’s work.”

“His life’s work was to poison magic, to make it unpracticeable?” Emily stared hard at Perun. “Why? Why tamper with the natural way of things?”