Dimmuborgir
Chapter 4: Russia, part 1
They arrive after nightfall.
That throws her off. Throws her body off. Perhaps because she now can better withstand his abrupt transitions from continent to continent, she is becoming more aware that their jumps don't follow any established time differences. They left Egypt before dawn, and appeared in England around midday. They left England just after dawn; here it is dark, even though there should only be a handful of hours difference.
She had perhaps, without quite thinking about it, assumed that his teleportation aligned with time. Now when she is faced with proof that so is not the case, she can feel the first stirrings of a fresh new panic. What day is it? How much time has passed since he first stole her away in London? She has no idea. She had seen nothing to indicate the date while in Glastonbury, she had just assumed that they arrived there in the morning following the night in Egypt. But perhaps they did not. Perhaps she is losing days, weeks, to the way he moves himself and her across the world.
Never before has she so appreciated a grasp on time than now, when she no longer has it.
She turns in a circle, trying to anchor herself in a location, something tangible, now when she is unable to trust the way time moves.
She gets a sense of place only in the false warmth of sodium streetlights, but it's enough for her to see buildings. Here neoclassical, there baroque. Grand, lavish. They stand on a wide, tree lined street, seemingly pedestrian, though she can see no people around; indicating that it is true night, not evening.
She doesn't get the time to take a lot in; Tom ushers her impatiently towards a building he seems to have chosen at random.
It's palatial, the building they walk towards. In fact, she decides when she looks again, it is a palace. But when he casually clicks open the large double front doors and they step inside a hallway of marble and an enormous staircase, she realises it's a palace that has been converted into apartments.
"Up," he says, and she follows him up the stairs, her cloak held tight about her, a pillowcase stuffed full with her spare clothes under her arm.
There aren't many doors, so she assumes the apartments behind are large. He stops by each one, face intent, focused, like he's listening, but continues ever upwards. She files this with the rest of the fragments of knowledge she's gleaned about him: he likes to be up high, he wants open views.
Finally, just as she had anticipated, he stops outside the door at the very top of the building. Again he appears to somehow listen, before he gently places his hand on the lock and makes it click open.
He grabs her arm, and quietly pulls her inside. It's very dark, clearly a windowless room in the heart of the building, but she gets the sense of a large space around her, high ceilings.
"What is..." she starts, but he whips around and puts his hand over her mouth. She starts, tries to wrench herself loose, but he easily holds her still against him. Her head spins with the sensation of his cold hand against her face, and that cimmerian feeling inside her rib cage flares with the touch of his skin on hers.
And the smell of him, it's so close...
Fire, she thinks, he smells of fire.
Burning trees. A forest in flames. Cedars and pines. Ash and embers. She involuntarily draws him deep inside herself and thinks that she will never ever forget it, the scent of him.
"Stay quiet," he whispers in her ear, and she jerks her head once, eager to acquiesce so that he'll let go. He does, releases her and takes a small step back.
"Wait here."
And he walks away, light of foot, making barely any sound despite the heavy boots she knows him to wear. It's disconcerting, to be in darkness with him somewhere within it, to have no real notion of her own place in that space.
Then she sees the vague outline of him as he opens a door. The darkness within the room that he is entering is of a lighter shade of black than the one in which she stands; she guesses there's a window. Even so, she sees him only for a fraction of a second, quite a way away, down what looks like a large hallway, then he steps out of view and the door shuts quietly behind him.
The darkness is once again overwhelming, but her eyes are starting to adapt. She can make out shapes, get a vague sense of where the walls might be. The front door is behind her, the hallway down which Tom went is in front.
She hears a voice, a muffled shout, a woman screaming, bumps and bangs, and then...then there is a change in the atmosphere. A renting of air, a violent maelström that she can feel, before all goes still. And she recognises it, even though she's never consciously considered it: it is that of Tom teleporting.
And she can't feel him anymore. She hadn't even realised that she could feel him until he's no longer there. But she's sure he's gone. His presence is...absent.
She is alone.
"Well, bugger this for a game of soldiers," she whispers and spins around. This is the first time she has been left alone since he took her. She'll be damned if she's going to waste it. With her hand out in front of her she's walking back towards the front door. She's got no plan, no idea how to get back home, but first things first: get away from him.
She walks straight into him. She can't help it, she yelps as he grabs her arms.
"Where do you think you are going?"
There is icy delight in his voice. She tries to slow her breathing, but it's impossible. He doesn't seem to care for an answer anyway.
"Did I not tell you what would happen if you tried to leave me?"
"It's so dark," she nonsensically says in response. "- and I've never seen that thing you do, how you appear and disappear. I've always been with you, so I haven't seen it. I wish it would have been light so I could have seen it properly."
He laughs, and she's not heard him laugh like that before and it's such a strangely human sound and it doesn't work in her head, him laughing and sounding so genuinely amused.
"And yes, I remember what you said would happen if I tried to leave. You would kill people. But didn't you kill someone just now? So what did I have to lose?"
Tom flicks on the light. She suspects it's for her sake rather than for his; she's pretty certain he can see in the dark. When her eyes have adapted she sees him wearing a grin showing too many teeth. His hands are hard and cold on her upper arms.
"I didn't actually kill them," he says.
"You didn't….what did you do to them then?"
He shrugs, managing to make it look boyish.
"I just brought them elsewhere."
"Where," she asks even though she knows she will regret it, "- did you bring them?"
He smiles again, and God, she thinks, how perfectly beautiful he is up close, with those terrifying noctilucent eyes and the way shadows fall just right across his face. So beautiful and so despicable.
"Siberia."
She can feel herself shivering at how casually and delightedly he commits atrocities.
"They were asleep," she says slowly. "You took them from their bed, didn't you, wearing only nightclothes, and you dropped them in Siberia. In November."
"Correct."
"So they are as good as dead. In fact, it would have been more merciful to kill them outright."
"Perhaps," says Tom with another shrug, "- but I did not want a mess to clean up here."
"You are...you…" She can't continue, because she doesn't know what he is, and she's got no words anyway.
He wipes at her cheek with his thumb, cold, slow, like he's wiping away smudges of stubborn dirt. This protracted contact of his skin against hers intensifies that feeling inside of her tenfold. Now she becomes aware that it is really a sound, or rather the memory of a sound; a melody existing between breaths, just out of hearing range.
"Stop this," he says. "By now, this should be nothing new. Your humanity is like a stain on you. Like mud on your face. It makes you weak, and stupid. I needed somewhere for us to stay, and I arranged it. Now this place is mine. We may have to remain here for a while and I have no wish to be cooped up in just a small room with you for the entirety of it."
He's still holding on to her, one hand on her arm, another on her cheek, and he's close, far too close, she can't think. Everything is going too fast. Too many fast jumps, too many of her convictions and notions shattered. She's still reeling from how he brought King Arthur out of stasis just for fun.
Still reeling from finding out that King Arthur, and Avalon, had even existed.
But she knows one thing: if she is to have any chance of surviving, she needs to stop resisting at every turn and start playing along. And also, whispers a small but clear voice inside of her, if she does play along she will get to experience extraordinary things. Has she not spent her adult life passionately entrenched in history? As his captive she has already walked the blurred line between history and myth, and there would appear to be a lot more to come before he is satisfied. Why should she not grab it, experience it, while she is also looking for a way out?
Smile on the outside. Scream on the inside. Grasp knowledge with both hands. And survive.
"Well. It's rather...much." The jerk of her chin manages to take in the entire hallway in which they stand. Marble floors. Frescoes and intricately sculpted moldings. Faux rococo furniture and an abundance of gilded details. It can only be described as garishly opulent. "Perhaps a tad ostentatious?"
The amusement on his face at her abrupt change in demeanour tells her that he knows precisely what she is thinking and what she is trying to do, but is content to indulge her. She'd rather not speculate as to why.
"I will agree that the previous inhabitants had somewhat...loud tastes, but nevertheless, this will be a perfectly serviceable base while we are here."
He finally lets go of her, and with it the melody inside her recedes, wraps itself snugly around her ribs in repose.
"Where do I sleep?"
He gestures her down the hallway, then into the bedroom from which he abducted the apartment's unfortunate inhabitant.
"In here, I guess," he says while making a show out of putting a broken Tiffany lamp back on the bedside table, righting an upended chair.
She looks around. Same interior decoration themes as the hallway, only….more. The bed is a monstrosity, she notes with a glance, and the ceiling frescoes on the risqué side. But her attention is on the floor to ceiling window facing out over a large green space, a park, and beyond it...
A large church lit up by many many lights, lending it an otherworldly appearance. Built in the spirit of that medieval romanticism so inherent of many landmarks in Russia, with enameled onion-domes and bright colours. She recognises the church, of course.
"We're in St Petersburg," she breathes.
"Well done," he says dryly from behind her. "No doubt you will proceed to tell me the name of the church."
"The Church of Spilled Blood," she says immediately, ignoring his sarcasm. "Built on site of the assassination of Alexander II."
"Bravo," he says drolly. "And now, alas, it is but a museum for mosaics. Not much belief left to permeate those ugly domes."
"I actually think they're very pretty,'' she says. "Like something out of a fairytale." Then she realises she can no longer see his reflection in the glass. He's left the room, apparently uninterested in her architectural musings.
She finds him in one of the living rooms, sprawled across a brocade chaise lounge that looks almost as uncomfortable as it is ugly. It is positioned, she's not surprised to note, right by a large, arched window, similar to the one in the bedroom. He's got the vellum sheafs out again, holds them up towards the large crystal chandelier above him so that he may better see the faint text underneath the current writing.
"So what now?" she asks when he ignores her presence. "What kind of diadem are you looking for?"
He doesn't put down the sheaf, doesn't look at her. But at least he answers
"It was one among the crown jewels of the Romanov dynasty."
"The Romanovs? Wait. Are you going to tell me Anastasia really did survive?" Her voice is snide, but a part of her is prepared for him to say yes. A short while ago she had stood over King Arthur's body. Anastasia Romanova having survived the Russian revolution seems positively pedestrian in comparison. "And now she's a little old lady and you are going to rob her of her trinkets?"
"Don't be silly," he mocks, still not looking at her, attention wholly focused on the sheaf in his hand. "She was 17 in 1918. Even if she did survive the execution she would be rather dead by now. Rhetorical, of course. I can assure you, Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova of Russia died in that dank little basement, as did the rest of them."
Well. Fine.
"How do you expect to find this diadem? Almost all of the Romanov jewels were sold for parts by the Bolsheviks."
"True, but the diadem we seek was stolen away by that crazy, reeking monk before the revolution. He was insane, but likely he saw the centre stone for what it really was."
She ignores the "we", ploughs on with trying to understand.
"Crazy mo... Rasputin? You mean Rasputin? How do you actually know all this? Those notes," she nods at the sheafs "- were clearly written more than a millennia ago, they are a lot older than the Russian revolution. So unless they are some kind of Nostrodamus prophecies for monsters I don't see how they can tell you that Rasputin thieved a tiara some 120 years ago."
His voice is frigid when he answers. Though he ignores the slur his tone is making clear that he is reaching the very end of his limited patience.
"These priceless texts obviously do not mention the diadem, or Rasputin. But they do mention the ancient stone that I seek, a stone that I know for sure sat in a wheatsheaf diadem owned by the Romanovs."
"But..but all of this is just wild conjecture and crazy guesses, you have no way of really knowing, it's not like you were there and I…"
He stops reading the sheaf then. He puts it down and looks at her, gives her his undivided attention, and his slow, wide smile stops her in her tracks.
She feels like she's falling.
"What do you...? But you are…"
She had been about to say "too young" but she stops herself. Ageless, she had thought, and ageless she still thinks.
"It was fun," he says quietly, "-but not as fun as Bloody Sunday."
"I don't believe you," she whispers. "I can't."
She feels ill, unmoored. Goosebumps and tunnel vision. Her hands shaking, her teeth clacking together uncontrollably. Every time she makes an uneasy truce with her impossible situation he changes everything, pushes the parameters of what she is willing to accept further and further away from her.
"I need to sit down," she says, and more or less falls into a chair standing perpendicular to the chaise lounge.
He sighs. He sounds terribly put out.
"Come now, Hermione. When will you rid yourself of this tedious attitude? We entered Avalon, we found the Holy Grail. What more do you need to accept that there are powers and beings at force in this world that are wildly beyond your ken? Stop questioning everything. It is boring, and only makes you out to be a thickheaded materialist."
He snaps his fingers and from a Mazarin desk over in the corner flies a wad of thick writing paper across the room, straight past her nose and into his waiting hand. With another snap comes a fountain pen in gold from the same desk.
She barely reacts. Summoning writing utensils like that seems the very least of it.
He sits up straight, and with a noisy screech pulls up a little pedestal table so that he may use it as a makeshift writing desk.
"Now, Grigorij Rasputin was as crazy as they come, but shrewd enough, and he obviously knew a priceless object when he saw it. The sapphire in the diadem is of immense significance. It dates back to that cretin Moses and his silly little tablets. I cannot even hazard a guess as to how it came into the possession of the tzars and ended up in a piece of jewellery."
He starts writing, the pen flowing easily across the paper. He appears to be taking notes from the sheafs.
"At the time, I had too much fun to care about the stone, or what the monk did with it." The pen keeps moving as he speaks. "I had no idea that I would one day come to need it. Now I am stuck trying to work out where a fevered mind might have hidden a small object. So if you will excuse me…"
She doesn't take the hint. She remains where she is, watching him.
His handwriting curls like smoke as he takes notes from the sheafs, his hair falling down over his forehead and she can only see the sharp ridge of his cheekbone, the shadows of his eyelashes across it. She doesn't recognise the language in which he writes.
She's in deep thought, but she's moved on from Rasputin, and Tom's insinuation that the stone he's looking for had been chipped off one the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. She's considering something else instead, something brought on by his touch.
"Tom?"
He doesn't look up from his notes.
"Yes?"
"When...when we entered Avalon, made the mist open for us...I helped, didn't I? I could feel it, inside. Something went from me to you. What was it?"
"Hermione?"
"Yes?"
"Go to bed."
The look on his face as he stops writing and looks up at her brokers absolutely no objections, it is dark and wild and she has learnt to read him quite well already, hasn't she?
She turns on her heel and starts to leave, then stops, looks back over her shoulder at him.
"The texts…the palimpsests.."
"Yessssss?" he snaps, his voice is a hiss and she knows she will be in trouble soon.
"In what language are they written?"
"Enochian," he says shortly, and her heart does something funny, she can feel in her chest; how it flutters, then trashes, before it starts beating normally again. She doesn't tell him that he's ridiculous, that it's a made up language.
She says nothing at all as she realises that she's not surprised, not really.
She walks to the bedroom, shuts the door quietly behind herself. Locks it.
Not that it can ever keep him out.