Once the initial giddiness faded, Alina began to wish the news of their imminent departure had waited until the morning. It kept her staring fixedly at the darkened ceiling above, the trepidations that had accompanied her down snowy roads swarming back to clot at the front of her thoughts. Outside, what had been faint skittering sounds on the roof on prior nights was worse than ever, more like a dog scrabbling around with ragged claws than tree branches bobbing in the moonlight.
She drifted off at some point, mouth shaped in a vague frown of irritation.
Alina registered the sounds before she registered her own reawakened state, the low murmur of voices blurred by the door, the timber that of men with an occasional interlude at a higher pitch. The entrance to her room was very near to that of the Darkling. The first night in the manor, she had lain awake wondering if she would hear a knock upon the door and unsure of how to respond if she did. But no knock had come, she had fallen asleep, and so had passed each night since. The proximity meant she did hear occasional comings and goings and the faint edges of speech. But at the moment, it sounded more like a symposium was being conducted practically on her threshold.
Uneasy, she sat up, casting back the covers and stuffing her feet into her boots. From the foot of the bed she fetched up a dressing gown Sveta had found for her and shrugged into it.
"You're traveling with all of those men!" the girl had exclaimed - clearly she was not acquainted with army life - and nothing would do but that she locate a suitable garment, as if Alina was to be strutting before the others in her night attire. (Of course, now that had unexpectedly proven to be just the case.) The archaic style suggested it was a castoff of the Countess, but at this point in their stay, Alina had sufficient background to wager the old woman would not have noticed the appropriation had she slid down the balustrade while wearing it.
She eased her door open a narrow span to find nearly every single member of their party clustered nearby. The Darkling was there, speaking to Ivan, other Grisha, and numerous oprichniki. Even those not involved in the core discussion were muttering quietly to one another and their expressions put a turn to her stomach. Closing the door behind her, Alina slid up to one of the Squallers, standing on the periphery, and softly asked her what was going on.
The other woman had an eye on the Darkling and Ivan, but answered back just as quietly: Pavel, one of the Inferni, had been found dead by an oprichnik on patrol. Killed, as those animals on the hill had been killed. Swallowing, Alina asked in what way that was. The response made her stomach flop upside down.
They were drained of blood.
The others were rippling their way into two groups, Ivan heading a mixture of Grisha and oprichniki and the remainder clustered around the Darkling. The Squaller joined the former group, leaving Alina to wait in silence as preparations resolved around her. David had not been in his room and Leonid, an oprichnik who had been on watch, was missing from his station. Ivan's party was to search the outbuildings and exterior of the manor house; the others would take the inside. The residents of the estate, of which neither hide nor hair had been spotted since Pavel's body was discovered, were to be accounted for. Alina privately thought that hide and hair were not necessarily to be expected at this late hour. But there was a grimness to the Darkling's expression reminiscent of that he had worn in the troika on the night of their arrival, and she said nothing.
Ivan lead his collection of soldiers toward the nearest staircase, the thump of their boots the only sound for a moment. Alina stood quietly through all of this, not wanting to draw attention to herself. But now, the Darkling turned to regard her. He was going to tell her to go back to her room, she was sure of it. To lock her door and leave the real Grisha to handle this. The Little Palace had ill-prepared her for the reality that most of the Second Army faced. She steeled herself for protest, when:
"You'll come with me."
Startled, but trying hard to hide it, Alina moved to fall in with the others.
"Alina." She stopped, looking at him. "Get your kefta." Turning so quickly for her room, there was some chance he did not see the blush dawning over her cheeks, Alina could have groaned at herself. Embarrassing enough that she had been standing in front of everyone - in front of the Darkling - in her nightclothes. To have forgotten the importance of corecloth when entering potential danger on top of that was icing on an unpalatable cake. Thrusting her arms into Sofya Volkova's kefta, she was still hastily buttoning buttons upon reentry to the corridor.
They made their way down the hall and to the other wing, the light cast forth from a lantern in the hands of one oprichnik jolting along the wooden panels of the walls as they went. As such things fall out in such moments, the creaks of the old house seemed magnified around them as they went, but not in the ways played out in the ghost stories told in Keramzin's dormitories. The sighs and groans of the structure seemed to move only with the soldiers, and all else more distant from them was as still and quiet as a corpse they were disturbing.
Reaching a door that looked much like any downwind of it to Alina, but apparently held more significance to the others, their procession ground to a halt. Yegor stepped close, his ear all but touching the wood for a long moment. Shaking his head, he sent a look to the Darkling, who nodded. The oprichnik pressed briefly on the door handle, then backed up and forcefully planted the sole of his boot beside it.
The sound of splintering wood chased a wave of half-astonishment, half-horror through Alina, as she peered past various shoulders to the interior of the room revealed. The suite was fronted by a sitting room, so there was no view of an appalled - or befuddled - Countess before them. For she had no doubt these were the Countess's rooms; Alina wondered just how much of the discussion she had missed before being woken by the voices of the others. The Darkling had clearly prioritized "accounting" over any adherence to propriety.
Two guards swept quietly into the room, the Darkling and others following after. Including Alina. Even if she did not expect to be herded by the Heartrender close behind her if she didn't, she still had no inclination to stand in the too silent hallway alone.
There was a peculiar scent to the rooms. Not the stereotype one might expect of an older person, nothing powdery or medicinal or dying. But it was distinct, though difficult to put her finger on why. Alina shifted to put her back against the wall as the others searched rather than stand in the open door. Gazing at lace draped settees and patina-ed wood, she clutched her kefta and robe more tightly about her.
Yegor soon presented himself before the Darkling, gesturing deeper into the suite. "There is no one here, Soverenyi. The bed does not appear to have been slept in tonight." He hesitated. "Overall, things look-"
"Staged." Everyone turned to stare at Alina.
"I don't know. It looks too much like I'd expect it look. But it doesn't…feel…right." She flushed under their skeptical regard, but the Darkling gave her an appraising look.
"She's right. Something is amiss here. We proceed to the lower floor and sweep each level going up. Weapons held ready."
For most of the Grisha, that was a moot point. But Stasya unpocketed her flint and the oprichniki set off down the hall with rifles out. Matvey, holding the lantern, pulled a pistol from his belt. Alina slid up alongside the Darkling. Deploying her own powers would shatter the ruse of Sofya Volkova immediately, were there any not their own to see.
Quietly, she asked, "What should I—"
"If it comes to it, do you what you must to defend yourself."
Down the back stair they went, a search commencing with the first of the doors they were met with. No one and nothing of interest behind it, desultory puffs of dust besmirching charcoal grey uniforms. Rather than setting anyone at ease, Alina suspected each empty room wound many of the others tighter, as they did her. Thumbs hooked together, the fingers of one hand quietly strangled those of the other.
Then: a quiet trill on piano keys. The opening notes of the tune she had heard the other day. Alina stopped so abruptly that the Heartrender close on her heels swore as he nearly plowed into her. The Darkling turned at the minor commotion, but she had seen his chin rise slightly before that, seen the others swivel their heads towards the sound. They had heard it too.
"There's a piano in there," she whispered, jabbing a finger in the direction of the ballroom. She could just make out its double doors through the gloom further down. The Darkling studied it, then nodded in its direction. "Carefully. It could be a trap."
Silently, they converged upon it, his guards thrusting the doors open and emerging into the room bristling with firearms. The Grishas' hands were poised to work each of their particular brands of the Small Science. But there was nothing for them to face, but a piano and a sea of dust. Thick and undisturbed as ever. Dust motes danced in the beams of lantern light. The Heartrender, who had looked most dubious of Alina's remarks upon Countess Timurova's suite, shook his head. "Look at this place. No one has been in here in an age."
"I thought that too. But - I don't know how, but that sheet was half on the floor last time. Someone's folded it since. I—" Looking to the Darkling, Alina heard something else familiar then. Scrabbling on the exterior wall, like the sound of dog talons. Like the sound she had heard outside of her window. Her blood ran cold.
With a tremendous crash, the glass running the far wall in broad panes avalanched inward, born ahead of the body that broke it. Leonid, the missing oprichnik, or so she guessed from the uniform. The man's features were a gory mess.
Behind them, just inside of the door, Matvey's cry choked off in a spray of arterial blood, as a dark shape climbed up the wall above him toward the high ceiling. The lantern he carried smashed upon the floor beside the oprichnik's jerking body, a flaming pool of oil starting to form. Stasya swooped a hand toward it, her quick action keeping the old wood from catching fire. But a second figure bounded through the door and striking out at her with an impossibly fast limb. She yelled, lashing out with her power and darting away.
They were surrounded.
Deciding confrontation in the gardens was preferable to the confines of the corridor or the ballroom, the Darkling shouted, "Outside!" Glancing back to see Alina right behind him, he sprinted for the fretted doors beside the piano.
Together they plunged out into the moonlight, into a garden of dead things robed in ice and snow. Massive planters squatted alongside benches, all rendered of dark stone, that ran along the perimeter half-walls and punctuated the interior space into nooks for sitting and viewing plantlife that must once have looked far more majestic. The flagstones settled awkwardly into the earth, having shifted so long ago that the edges jutting up were themselves worn smooth.
Alina could only see such things later, in her mind's eye, thinking back upon it. In the moment itself, her world narrowed to a featureless corridor down which she ran at the Darkling's heels. He did not stop until they reached a clear space a good distance from the manor, for who or what had hurled Leonid's corpse was out here somewhere. Stasya stumbled out behind them, face twisted with pain and clutching her arm with a bloodied hand. The Corporalnik and remaining oprichniki likewise fled into the garden, eyes wild from the sight of what charged in their wake.
One came after them by way of the door, while the other vaulted clear through the broken glass, landing in a crouch atop one of the huge planters. Even with nothing but moonlight to see by, Alina recognized them. One of the Countess's guards and the other, from amongst the servants. Yet there was something terribly wrong. Their eyes burned with a feverish, inhuman light and they moved like no man she had ever seen moved, animalistic and swift as striking snakes.
The Cut sheared the planter and the man-creature perched atop it - though he had nearly avoided it with his speed - a high pitched shriek bursting forth from him. It reverberated painfully through several layers of her skull. Even as that black gash of unlight faded from view, a shadow on the face of the house skittered down and jumped to the flagstones to reveal itself as another of the guards. Figures bounded down from the slope running above the garden. A hoarse screeching rose from their throats in unison, as they rushed the oprichniki and Grisha.
Blood drumming in her ears so hard everything else seemed very distant, Alina raised her arms. Without her mirrored gloves, there was little enough she could do save set the gardens aglow so that her own side could see. Bands of shadow snaked out from the Darkling's hands, reaching for the creatures' eyes. But blinding them did not cause panic as it had with the Fjerdans. It did not seem they could see, but they moved with confidence nevertheless, as if their other senses were more than sufficient. Gunshots pounded the air, but she had yet to see another creature drop, even if some were bleeding. That blood was sluggish and dark.
She saw the Heartrender fling out a hand, before a look of confusion flitted across his features, only to be replaced with dawning horror. The guard he had targeted never broke stride, fingernails as sharp as a scalpel of Grisha steel tearing the Corporalnik's throat out. With one arm limp by her side, shredded muscle showing through the gash in her sleeve, Stasya sent gouts of flame into the night, her face white-lipped and sagging. Yegor grappled desperately with a creature to the left.
Alina watched as an unsettling pattern emerged. They were like a dog pack, sniping and darting away, but always careful in how they placed themselves around the others. It kept the Darkling from using the Cut as effectively, kept the others from holding ground in the face of those terrible claws and that speed. She stared around uneasily, just as the creatures dashed in with suddenly increased furor.
There. A flash of white, on the wall above, caught just out of the corner of her eye.
That white, frizzy hair was sleek as water now. Her face was nearly as pale, free of an old woman's lines, but inhuman in its cut-glass beauty. The Countess Timurova scuttled down from near the eaves, headfirst like a spider, and sprang free to balance on a stone rail that ran along the garden's edge. Her eyes were savage, gleeful, and they were fixed upon the Darkling.
"Look out!"
He whirled before the words were completely out of Alina's mouth. But the Countess was as swift as any of her minions. She opened her mouth and something shot out of it like a whip, catching him at the soft flesh of his throat, just under his chin. It looked all but inconsequential, save for how his body jolted and his eyes went wide, his hands coming up only to curl ineffectually in the air before him.
Nearby, the last standing of the oprichniki slumped to the ground. As she screamed like a thing gone mad, the remainder of Stasya's energy flung the Inferni at his assailant and then they were both howling, flames wreathing their struggling figures. There was no one else left.
Alina's arm rose and in the darkness, she sketched an arc of light, bright and burning. The Countess fell - one half of her body tipping left, the other right.
There was quiet in the courtyard then, except for the breath that shuddered like sobs in her chest. There was blood all around her. Yet there was also movement: heaving and white and wet. Maggots writhed free of the creatures' bodies, more and more of them, until Alina felt a scream rising with the gorge in her throat. It clogged there; it was in dreadful silence that her hands came up from her sides.
Light poured forth in waves, washing over the bodies. Where it touched them, the nests of maggots began to burn and an awful stench rose through the air. She pushed harder than she ever had, harder than if one hundred of Baghra stood there, smacking her with canes, harder than she had ever imagined doing anything in her life.
"Alina."
Maggots crisped and blackened, piles of clothing alight like bonfires. Almost as hot were the tears that dripped down her face, as she looked at her comrades strewn around her like broken toys, and the arms she held out before her trembled like dead leaves on a tree's limbs. Nothing moved now, but she could not see that, and the light continued to pulse.
"Alina!"
She spun so fast she nearly tripped on the flagstones. The Darkling stared back at her. A rivulet of blood ran down his throat and his face was paler than its norm. But he was standing. He was alive.
"Are, are you okay?"
His mouth quirked. "I am. Are you?"
He started to raise an arm toward her, to what purpose, she was not sure. But movement propelled movement and Alina lurched toward him, griping at the front of his kefta with shaking hands. She wanted to close her eyes, but she could not force them shut. Instead, she dropped her forehead to his chest and let the black fabric there become her only view of the world.
The Darkling went still at first. Then she felt his hand slip beneath her hair to cup the back of her neck, much as he had on that horseback ride that seemed so long ago. She felt a little calmer, but blurted out, "I don't want to sleep right now, I'll have nightmares."
He made a sound that she more felt than heard; it might have been a laugh. His other arm came around her waist. She did not fall asleep and he did not move: they stood like that for a long moment, their heartbeats twinning in her ears.
When Alina finally pulled back, the Darkling let the arm at her waist fall away. But his other hand came to her face, just for a moment. "Thank you, Alina."
From beyond the corner of one wing of the house, the thunder of several pairs of boots running pulled them about with alacrity and they each raised a hand into the air without a word said. But there was no mistaking the deep red of the kefta that burst into view. They were fewer in number than they had been, Ivan's party, and there was more than one wound in evidence. The Heartrender himself turned several shades paler to see the carnage littering the gardens, not to mention the sight of the Darkling bleeding.
Alina did not have it in her to smirk just then.
They found only two others alive in the manor. David - who had drowsed off in the library rather than his room - and Sveta had barricaded themselves in the scullery and were unharmed. Though Alina privately ascribed that to their being of neither threat nor other interest, remembering with a shiver the Countess's inhuman face staring at the Darkling. David looked as present in the moment as she had ever seen him - fear could do that - and Sveta was praying hysterically over the icon she clutched in her hands.
Of the stablemaster, there was no sign. One of the two surviving oprichniki reported that a horse was missing and tracks were to be seen churning away through the snow. But whether the man had merely fled in terror or was one of the creatures, escaped, no one could say.
She was unsure if anyone did more than pretend to sleep the rest of that night, gathered into one of the more defensible rooms. For her part, Alina curled beneath a blanket at the end of a couch, her kefta still on and buttoned to the neck. Whenever her eyes opened, they found their way to the Darkling, seated nearby in a chair.
"What were they?" she whispered, once dawn had finally come to limn the horizon.
"Precisely? I don't know." He leaned his dark head against the back of the chair, but more than anyone else, Alina was sure he had not closed his eyes the night through. "But there are older things in the world than people like to remember. Time has not ended all of them."
The thought of leaving Sveta here or even in the nearby village, was not something Alina could stomach. Who knew what superstitious peasants would make of what had occurred at the Timurova estate: the truth, likely. She asked the Darkling if the girl could be brought to Chernast - without begging or merely suggesting - and he did not refuse her.
As the sight of the manor receded into the distance, Alina let out a small laugh, surprising herself. She peered at her hands. "I suppose I don't need to worry about how to deal with the stag now."
The Darkling looked at her for a long moment.
"Indeed."
Notes: I can scarcely believe it's done! I started on this well over a year ago and am thrilled to have gotten it wrapped up. I hope everyone enjoyed reading the story and I would love to hear what you thought!
The creatures in this tale were based upon a variety of vampire from Russian lore: the Upierczi. They were said to have stingers under their tongues, instead of having fangs. When burned, their bodies give rise to hordes of small, gross creatures like maggots. There are some other hints to Slavic vampires and bad omens sprinkled throughout the work.
