Firebird (Tales of Old Russia Book 2) Read online

  He was right.

  The spirit ignited with a startling whoof and a yellow-cored blue flash that sprayed liquid flame all over the Firebird. It took no hurt either from the explosion or the billow of flame, hardly surprising since its own plumage was already far hotter than the burning alcohol. The only heed it took of the incident was to dip its hatchet beak and drink what few dregs of the Kornshcnaps remained, then crunch up the cup itself for good measure.

  The wooden platter had long since passed its flashpoint, and both it and the pile of wood chippings, pine by the smell, were blazing merrily. The coin, whether gold or bronze, was no more than a blob of molten metal that ate its way into the surface of the platter for a few seconds until the Firebird leaned over to peck up first it and then the pine chips.

  Hermann von Salza saw no evidence that it enjoyed the taste of either. What he saw and sensed instead was evidence that Baba Yaga was wise to have the cage door shut and bolted, because the Firebird radiated rage and rumpled dignity along with the heat that shimmered off it like the sun on desert sand. The witch was making foolish economies in her spell: if he was right in what he’d just seen, the Firebird had been given inadequate payment, cheap food and cheap drink.

  As a man who had employed mercenaries in his time the Grand Master knew the risk she ran, and had he liked her better or found her of more use, he might have given her a warning. Instead he kept quiet, remembering yet another of Dieter Balke’s wise little maxims: ‘Let the one who makes the bed sleep in it”. If Baba Yaga’s own carelessness gave him a way to be rid of her, he would take the gift and be glad of it.

  “What have you brought this time?” demanded Baba Yaga.

  “A book,” said the Firebird. Its voice had lowered in pitch until it was no longer painful to hear, but the wildness and the rage were still there, thrumming below every word like a deadly undertow beneath the placid surface of a river.

  “Good,” said Baba Yaga. The harshness had drained from her voice, replaced by a soft greedy purr that was very close to lust. It was a foul sound. “Give it to me.”

  “I took it,” said the Firebird. “It is mine to keep.”

  As Hermann von Salza listened, still barely believing his own ears and with one hand tight on the cross around his neck, he felt certain that Baba Yaga was making a deadly mistake. A Summoning wasn’t a polite request for audience but an order to appear before the summoner, and the Firebird had an air of such furious pride that even one so ignorant in the Art Magic as himself could see her demands weren’t kindly received. The witch had gravely compounded her error by trying to cheat it of its proper due, and he suspected she had also forced it to steal the things it brought.

  Von Salza began sweating more than was justified even by the heat. There was a glitter in the Firebird’s eyes he’d seen before, in the mad, murderous eyes of that hawk of his, just before it took the top joint off a clumsy falconer’s thumb. But this time the glitter was magnified a thousand times.

  “You took it only at my bidding!” snarled the witch. “You keep what I permit you to keep, and I do not permit you to keep this! Give it to me!”

  The Firebird opened its beak and hissed at her, a sound like the pouring of molten iron, and the library grew so hot that the candles guttered and died, melting into pools of wax. But it spread its brilliant wings as far as the cage would permit, and the confines of its iron prison became still more cramped as the glowing hooks of its talons slowly filled with the bulk of a metal-covered book as torn and gouged and blackened as the others.

  “Here, Baba Yaga. Come and take it.”

  Von Salza glanced towards the library door to make sure the way was clear, certain that demand, refusal, submission and this last and deadliest step, temptation, had all been played out before. The fact that Baba Yaga was still alive rather than a smear of fat and charcoal indicated she hadn’t yet fallen for the trap. But there was always a first – and in this case, last – time for anything.

  The witch laughed, a wild cackling sound as frightening in its way as the long howl of a wolf heard on a lonely road far from home and safety. “Soon, soon,” she said. “But not yet. What news among the Rus? Are they still at enmity with each other? Do they threaten war?”

  “Yes,” said the Firebird.

  “When will there be war?”

  “Soon.”

  Again von Salza found it hard to trust the evidence of his own ears, but this time it wasn’t because he was in awe of the sorcery before him. Baba Yaga was questioning the Firebird as she’d promised to do, and it evidently had no choice except to answer. But whether through stupidity or active malice, the questions were so clumsily phrased that it was able to reply in no more than a single word, and had no intention of volunteering more without being asked. The Grand Master felt his own temper rising, and despite his own apprehension took a step forward, closer to her and closer to the Firebird.

  “Until I summon you again, go!” said Baba Yaga, snapping her fingers. The Firebird vanished, abruptly and without ceremony, leaving only the echoes of an angry screech hanging in its wake. Pulling on a pair of heavy blacksmith’s gloves she scuttled to the slowly cooling cage, unlatched it, and pulled out the new grimoire. It was still too hot for her to open and von Salza was glad of it; the unpleasant aura about this book was more intense than any of the others. She set it down, then turned to glower at him. “If you’re unsatisfied with any aspect of my sorcery, von Salza, then feel free to perform the summoning yourself.”

  Von Salza drew in a long breath, intending to tell this filthy peasant hag just how unsatisfactory he found everything about her. The breath came out again in a long hiss through his teeth, clenched tight and bared in what not even the charitable could have called a smile.

  “I might do just that,” he said. “But with courtesy. And without the cage.”

  Besides confirming everything he needed to know, the look of terror on her face was a reward in itself. Father-Inquisitor Arnald walked through the eerie warm stillness in the library, watching Baba Yaga as she huddled over her latest trophy, then glanced at the Grand Master.

  “It hates her,” he said. “Even more than you hate me.”

  Von Salza swung around to give the inquisitor his full consideration. The words weren’t exactly an overture of friendship, but there was more fellow-feeling in Father Arnald’s voice than he’d heard since the Papal envoys first arrived in Burg Thorn. It changed nothing about now or the future, but it was an interesting development.

  “Not hate,” he said. “I thought it at first, but I was wrong. We’re opposites, you and I. In what we think, in what we do; in our willingness or otherwise to question what we might be told to do by others. Opposites can’t truly hate each other, any more than the reflection in a mirror can be other than reversed. As for the Firebird, if that was hatred then I’ve never realized how strong the word could be.”

  Arnald wasn’t outraged by what he’d witnessed, nor by what von Salza had said. The inquisitor had probably long ago seen and heard enough to thicken his skin somewhat. Instead there was an air of astonishment about him, and more than a little fear.

  “Get value from your servant while you can, Grand Master,” he said quietly. “If that thing ever gets free of its cage, her usefulness is at an end. And may I give you something in the nature of a friendly warning?” Von Salza raised his eyebrows at the word ‘friendly’, but nodded all the same. “When it eventually happens, be somewhere else.”

  *

  The Summer Country

  He came drifting as silently as smoke from between the trees, a wolf with eyes as green as cold and hard as jade. His fur was grey, like iron or a Russian winter sky, and while he wasn’t as big as Sivka – few creatures were – he was certainly bigger than any more common horse that either Ivan or Mar’ya Morevna had ever seen.

  “My mother may be wrong about you,” said the Grey Wolf. “because I couldn’t have been more clever myself.”

  There was something unsettli
ng about the way something so large could move so quietly, and Ivan was grateful they had sent Chyornyy back to his stable. The poor beast would have panicked at the advance of this grey apparition, and if he hadn’t been warned in advance by the wolf’s own mother Ivan would have been terrified himself. He still felt a distinct qualm, because with a wolf this big the canine fangs revealed by its tongue-lolling pink and white grin were half as big again as his own fingers, and the massive carnassial teeth behind them were ivory shears a palm’s width across.

  “You won’t be needing that, Prince Ivan,” said the Grey Wolf, mild amusement in his voice.

  Ivan looked down at his sabre, halfway from its scabbard. He hadn’t meant to draw it, but the fine curve of steel gleamed up at him for all that, an example of the triumph of trained instinct over intention and common sense. He slapped the silver-mounted blade back into its silver-mounted scabbard loudly enough for the click of hilt on locket to echo back from the woods around the clearing, and laughed softly, for sharp as it was the light shashka sabre would have been no more use against such a mass of bone and muscle than a broken toothpick. Not even all that silver would have been of any use had matters come to blows, because the Grey Wolf was no oborotyen werewolf.

  Like his mother, if he chose to change his shape at all he would become more something like a wereman.

  There was a flicker in the sunlight as if a cloud had passed swiftly across the sun, and a young man stood on the grass. He was tall and brown and splendidly muscled, his eyes were still the eyes of a wolf and, except for the cloak of grey fur that hung from his shoulders to his heels, he was as naked as a new-drawn blade. That lack of clothing seemed not to concern him in the slightest, for he made the same deep, arm-extended bow of respect to Ivan and Mar’ya Morevna that Ivan had made to the standing stone, and did it just as well.

  “Volk Volkovich, at your service,” he said. The sunlight wavered again and the wolf came back. “That service will be true, in whichever form I take.”

  Barely distracted by the bow and the brief moment of humanity that engendered it, Ivan looked at the Grey Wolf for a long while, very thoughtfully, trying to see beyond the changes of form, beyond the formal words – or more simply, still trying to take in the sheer size of the beast.

  “So you’re the Grey Wolf, Wolf’s son,” he said. “Your mother made your introductions to us, in a manner of speaking. She said we’d meet somewhere or other, and that you wanted to go into my service.”

  “In exchange for my life, when I was a cub. All true.”

  “Of course,” said Ivan. “But I wish when your Mother told me that, she’d also mentioned how you’d—”

  “Grown?” suggested the Grey Wolf helpfully.

  “Your mother told us,” said Mar’ya Morevna, “you were no longer a cub. She could have been a little more specific.”

  “She could. But it’s more entertaining to let people learn things by themselves.”

  “So this was a joke? None of us are laughing. Not even you.”

  “Not a joke, noble Lady. More a diversion. And I’m glad to meet you here rather than further on the road.”

  “Why so?” Ivan already had a sneaking suspicion what the Grey Wolf’s answer would be, and he was right. The wolf looked from Ivan to Sivka, and then at the carving on the standing stone.

  “From that careful oath-taking performance I witnessed from the woods,” he said, “you know that any man who rides his horse to the right will lose it. Did you ever give thought to what happens to that horse?” He showed his teeth in a wicked grin, and they seemed if anything larger and more numerous than before. “I happen to it.”

  Sivka took a couple of paces backwards, pawing at the ground with one ponderous fore-hoof, and even though a horse has no eyebrows to reinforce the expression he managed a very creditable glower of warning at the Grey Wolf. “You could try,” he rumbled ominously. “But you would have to try very hard and very fast. Or I might happen to you.”

  “You can’t be waiting all the time,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “Not every time someone goes down the right-hand path, surely?”

  “Often enough. Or something like me: a bear, or one of the great cats.”

  “What cats?”

  “Come now, Prince Ivan; you know about the lynxes in the Russian forests. Why should there not be lynxes in the woods of the Summer Country?”

  “Lynxes as large as you?”

  “Not quite as large, but large enough.”

  “Surely even if you hadn’t overheard my oath,,” said Ivan, “ you’d have known when we met that Sivka wasn’t my horse.”

  “How would I know, not being a part of this land and its magics? A beast of the Summer Country would know it, but I’m a Russian wolf and,” again there was that wicked, toothy, tongue-lolling grin, “I’m a stranger just as much as you.”

  “Hardly as much,” said Prince Ivan. “Why would a Russian wolf be here? Killing things for entertainment’s sake, or at the instruction of a warning carved into an old stone?”

  “Both, and neither,” said the Grey Wolf. “As for what other reason I might have for being here, I could make some impudent remark like, ‘you should know what the weather’s like in Russia at this time of year.’ But instead I’ll say, ‘the doings of wolves aren’t the doings of men,’ and by the time you’re wise enough in the Art Magic to understand the many layers of the real answer to your question, you’ll be wise enough not to need to ask it.”

  Ivan grinned wryly. “Could you be a little more obscure?” he said.

  “We wolves taught cunning to the foxes,” said the Grey Wolf. “We have subtlety of mind and cleverness with words. I could be so obscure, Prince Ivan, that you wouldn’t have the slightest notion what I meant.”

  “Like some lords who try their hand at politics,” said Mar’ya Morevna, smiling thinly, “instead of leaving matters to their High Stewards and First Ministers. Not that the stewards and ministers are any clearer, sometimes.”

  “Hardly surprising. Who do you think taught politics to men in the first place?” In the sudden silence, the Grey Wolf licked daintily at his paw then scratched one ear to show how unconcerned he was about their shock.

  “How?” said Mar’ya Morevna.

  “Who?” said Prince Ivan.

  “And when?” said Sivka.

  The Grey Wolf ignored every question for a moment, scratching harder than ever. “A flea in the ear,” he said when he was finished, “can be a damned irritation.”

  “So can creatures who don’t answer what they’re asked,” said Ivan. “Especially when they want to enter service.”

  The wolf thumped his tail against the ground and put his head on one side like a dog trying to make friends. Then he grinned again. “Consider your own brothers-in-law, Prince Ivan. Are they sorcerers who take the shape of birds – or birds who take the shape of men?”

  “They’re all human,” said Ivan, but despite his confident reply he – who had attended all their weddings – had to pause if only for the merest moment. The Grey Wolf saw that hesitation and nodded sagely.

  “Of course they are,” he said.

  “Then why ask, if you already know?”

  “To prove a point. You assumed they were men who took on the shapes of Falcon, Eagle and Raven; but when I put a tiny hint of doubt into your mind, you had to think of proofs to refute that doubt. People assume all the time. For example, your wife the Lady Mar’ya Morevna assumed you and my mother…” He scratched his ear again.

  Ivan glanced sideways at Mar’ya Morevna, whose sudden blush was sufficient proof that Mother Wolf had guessed right. This time the Grey Wolf didn’t grin, a delicacy that Ivan suspected was nothing to do with good manners but a great deal to do with the reputation of his dear wife’s temper. She had her bow in hand and an arrow on the string, and whatever else the wolf had been in their brief acquaintance, stupid wasn’t one of them.

  “So,” said the Grey Wolf, with just a trace of smugness in his deep, growly
voice. “If even an enchanter of wide-famed skill and noted beauty can be deceived by what she expects to see,” his tail thumped again when Ivan laughed at the well-timed flattery, “then ordinary folk are easy. They expect to see what the stories say: men who become wolves when they must, at the full moon. They don’t expect or see wolves who become human when the mood takes them. And then we laugh.”

  At the thought of it the Grey Wolf laughed too, a sound that made Sivka snort and sidle nervously across the grass. Ivan saw Mar’ya Morevna’s face and knew she was feeling just the same fluttering of raised hackles. A day, an hour, five minutes ago, and he would have sworn on any stack of holy relics that though a talking wolf grinned like an ordinary wolf, all teeth and tongue, when it spoke like a man it would laugh that way too. He would have been wrong, and his swearing done for nothing, for the laughter of a wolf was wolf through and through with no suggestion of human in it. The sonorous ululating howl ran a handful of ice along his spine in something of the way an ordinary wolf-call would have done; but this soft sound, laden with the mirth of a knowledge that had nothing to do with men, was somehow far, far worse.

  “I like you, Prince Ivan,” said the Grey Wolf. “And I enjoy your company. Not in the way that wolves usually enjoy the company of men, or horses for that matter. So I still offer you my service. Do you accept?”

  Ivan looked at the Grey Wolf, and at his jade-green eyes. They weren’t cat’s eyes, that reflected light like jewels. These eyes had their own light, a phosphorescence ghostly pale in the sunlight of the Summer Country, but all the warmth of the sun would never take away their chill. He knew the Grey Wolf was lying, or at least stretching the truth until it lost all of its original shape. In any other circumstance or any other time, he and Mar’ya Morevna and Sivka would all have been so much meat for that voracious appetite. Just food; and to a Russian wolf, food was whatever could be eaten. To accept the offered service of such a creature was almost as unsettling as the prospect of refusing it.