Free Nine Layers of Sky by Liz Williams Page A

traveling, and the compartment was almost empty. Ilya had only one companion: a middle-aged woman with a disappointed face. Her gaze passed over Ilya’s shabby appearance with distaste, and for the rest of the day she devoted herself to a pile of true-crime magazines. A hardened soul, Ilya thought dreamily. Russia was full of them, had always been. But a hard soul was almost always the shell for a wounded heart, or so they said. Ilya felt that his head was stuffed full of aphorisms, like a pudding with raisins, the trite detritus of a too-long life.
    He felt sorry for the woman and blearily offered her a handful of the sunflower seeds. She declined, which did not greatly surprise him. His face, reflected in the dirty window of the train, was stripped down to its Slavic bones. His eyes were hectic, the pupils pin-pricks.
    The journey passed in a haze of drugged speculation. It would not have astonished him to learn that he had simply imagined Kovalin’s visit. Perhaps he was wholly mad, nothing more than a casualty of a broken Russia, part of the flotsam washed up on time’s shores. Maybe he was indeed no more than forty-five, a demented soul pretending to be an eight-hundred-year-old hero. And what had happened to the others over the years: the Nightingale Bandit, Manas of the Kyrgyz Mountains, Mikula, Svyatogor? He had not seen any of these men for years, and it had not been for want of looking.
    Perhaps, as he suspected with distant envy, they were dead at last, or had retreated into the wilderness, just as he himself had done for a time before once more seeking life in the grimy, teeming cities of the Ukraine and western Russia.
    But Ilya could not imagine what reality he could be fleeing from, what worse thing could possibly have befallen him than that which had happened already. Surely the truth was more terrible than madness. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and took out the paper that Kovalin had given him. There was a telephone number on the piece of paper, a contact within Kovalin’s organization.
    We have ended the century as scientists,
Kovalin had said, but Ilya wondered if this was really true. The man seemed to reek of sorcery, yet he was the only meaningful thing that Ilya had left. And he had promised death. For that tenuous hope, Ilya was prepared to believe almost anything.
    But try as he might, Ilya could not reach a satisfactory explanation as to why Kovalin had chosen him for this task. Surely Kovalin had his own people on which to call? The only answer must be that tracking the object was dangerous—perhaps so dangerous that only an indestructible person could do the job. But the situation reminded Ilya too strongly of a day over eighty years before, when another mysterious official had sent him on a similar quest. And that adventure, not long after the Revolution, had ended in Siberia where, surrounded by death in the bitter winter, he had, as usual, survived.
    Memory took him back as though the intervening years had never been. The railway line ran arrow-straight from Moscow to Petrograd, aside from the bend known as the Tsar’s Elbow, but the closer they drew to the Gulf of Finland, the edgier Ilya became. When the train drew past Kalinin, crossing the frozen artery of the Volga, the signs of revolution became even more apparent: the artillery forces outside the town, soldiers stumbling through the snow. The train thundered through, leaving the troops behind.
    Ilya leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The operative, one of Dzerzhinsky’s men in the new police force they called the Cheka, had been oblique. The target was engaged in counterrevolutionary activities; he had set up a secret laboratory in the forests and had collaborated with Germans. His eradication was essential to the security of Lenin’s new state. Ilya, weary of war, did not care to question too greatly what he had been told.
    He felt like a bowstring, nerves tightly wound along the Petrograd line. They passed