Katabasis

Katabasis By Joseph Brassey

CHAPTER 1:


GHOSTS IN KIEV





Illarion stood upon the edge of a broken battlement beneath the star-speckled night sky. There was no moon, which meant the desolate ruins of Kiev were lost in the darkness beyond the citadel’s walls. Here and there, tiny sparks winked at him from the sea of darkness—fires dutifully tended by the scattered remnants of the population that had once filled the city. The only sound he heard was the voice of the cold wind, moaning as it slithered through gaps in the ruined walls. On nights like this one, it was very easy for him to think that he was the only one left, the only survivor of the rapacious Mongol hordes that had swept out of the East.

Once, Kiev had been the most beautiful city in all of Rus, but the horde—hundreds of thousands of men and horses—had thundered across Rus, trampling and destroying everything in its path. Some cities, like his own Volodymyr-Volynskyi, had thought they could withstand a Mongolian siege, and the price of their hubris had been the horrific death of every man, woman, and child of noble birth. The rest were allowed to flee so that they would spread the word of what happened to those who dared to fight back. These pitiful survivors fled to Kiev, bringing their fear with them, and by the time the horde arrived, the city was hideously swollen with refugees.

Illarion had not seen the destruction of Kiev; he had only witnessed the aftermath a year later when, in the company of a band of Shield-Brethren, members of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, he had passed through the ruined South Gate in search of a mystic artifact.

In the labyrinthine caverns beneath the cathedral, they had found nothing—no artifact, no guidance from ghosts of fallen Ruthenians, no cryptic message to be deciphered. They had found only flesh and blood enemies, members of the Fratres Militiae Christi Livoniae—the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. With the aid of a company of Skjalddis—Shield-Maidens—who still held the citadel in the center of Kiev, Illarion and the Shield-Brethren had driven the Livonians out of the caves.

When the Shield-Brethren continued east, chasing their mad quest to save Christendom by striking at the heart of the Mongol empire, Illarion had realized his place was not with them, but with Kiev. Some nights, when he prowled the battlements alone, Illarion wondered if he stayed behind simply because he was afraid—afraid that Saint Ilya would never respond to his entreaties. That the saint was gone. That all of the old ghosts were gone. That Rus was dead, and that this winter would never end. The stories told about Saint Ilya’s grave were that it was the hiding place of the egg that held the soul of Koschei the Deathless. Had the mysterious egg been destroyed as well, thereby ending the life of Rus’s last immortal hero?

The night offered no answers to Illarion’s endless questions, and when the sky was void of the moon, it was even easier to let go of the endless questions. He could walk along the crumbling walls with no purpose, no destination, and—looking behind him—no past. What use was to it be afraid of what might come if he didn’t exist?

The wind stirred, toying with his white-streaked hair as if it were trying to remind him of what he was missing. His right ear was gone, cut from his head by the Mongol gleaners who prowled the fields of dead after the horde was done with an enemy city. He, unlike his wife and children and so many others, had not been entirely dead.

Some nights when he was lost in the depths of a sweat-stained sleep, he would remember rising from the piled corpses, animated with the urge to fight back, but when he woke in the morning, the dream seemed to be only a mere figment of a tale he had overheard around a camping fire.

Power had rested upon his shoulders once, and luxury. He had commanded a household of servants, had possessed retainers, and paid men who fought in his service. But it had never fit him well. As a boy, he’d been drawn to the training yard, had benefitted from a position where men were expected to fight, and his father had hired the finest swords in the land to teach him. When he had grown to manhood, he had spent several years in the service of another boyar as a retainer, and a brief time as a sword for hire when his family believed him to be on a pilgrimage. It was on those journeys, in the years before he returned home to marry the bride picked for him, that he had first met the Shield-Brethren—and eventually Feronantus, the cold master of the northern citadel. His life had changed, then, and but for the rift between the church of the east and the church of the west, he might not have come home. How different might life have been, had that been his fate?

He heard gravel crunch behind him, and he stirred slightly, shaking off the layer of morbid thoughts that were accreting to him like layers of ice. He knew his visitor had stepped poorly solely to warn him of his approach, and he turned his head to indicate that he had heard the signal. He had been outside long enough that his eyes had grown accustomed to the tiny gleam of the distant lights, and he could make out enough of the silhouette of the person approaching to realize it was one of the Skjalddis.

“Moping in the dark?” she asked, and by her voice, he knew it was Nika. Green-eyed Nika, who appeared oblivious to both the weather and the endless despair of life in Kiev.

“Aye,” he said with a short laugh. “’Tis better to do it up here where the wind carries my sobs away from the citadel.”

She stood next to him, less than a head shorter than he, and she seemed to be both listening and looking intently. “It is both the best and worst night for a raid,” she said after a moment or two of introspection.

“There are no Mongols left,” Illarion said. “They’ve taken everything of value.”

“Not everything,” she countered.

“There are easier cities to plunder,” he said. “I wouldn’t wait around either.”

“Still…” She cocked her head, listening intently again.

Illarion caught himself before he spoke, and did the same. He was at a deficit, having only one ear, and after listening for a few seconds, he had to admit he heard nothing but the wind as it sighed across the crumbling crenellations of the wall.

“Do you hear it?” Nika asked.

Illarion shook his head.

She glanced at him; he gestured at the hair obscuring his missing ear, and she nodded. “It’s only on nights like this, when the moon is hiding and the wind is from the north. It is…”

“What?” Illarion asked, his curiosity aroused. He briefly wondered if Nika was playing with him, spinning a nursemaid’s tale as if he were a wide-eyed boy.

“After our sisters failed to return…” She paused, and Illarion bowed his head in respectful memory of the party of Skjalddis who had left Kiev with the Shield-Brethren months ago. “I kept vigil on many nights,” she continued. “I was waiting for some sign that they would be coming back, and it was during the near darkness of a new moon that I started to hear the sounds of…of their ghosts.”

“Their ghosts?”

Nika made a noise with her mouth that was not unlike the low moan of the wind through the stones of the wall. Illarion shivered briefly at the sound; it made the skin along his back crawl, but he covered his apprehension with a snort of laughter. The sound was harsher than he intended, but it felt surprisingly good nonetheless to have something to laugh about. “Ooooo,” he said, aping the same noise that Nika had made.

She nudged him with her shoulder. “Ah, you have heard them,” she said.


“Aye, I guess I have,” Illarion admitted. He struggled to think of what to say next, but his tongue was still and his mind was empty; the tiny spark of humor that had fluttered to life between them guttered and went out, swallowed by the night. Carried away by the wind.

“When I was a young girl, I was in love with the wind,” Nika said. “As a child, when it howled and shook the timbers of our tiny house, I was never afraid. I would lie awake, listening to its cries. My father worried, of course, but my mother pointed out that I was silent during the storms. What better nursemaid could new parents hope for? When I was older, I would let my hair down when the winds came and run in the meadows. It was my mother’s turn to worry. ‘What man would want such a wild woman?’ she would lament to my father. ‘The wind cannot give us grandchildren. It will abandon her; the storm will steal her heart one day, and leave nothing behind but a hollow shell.’”

“Did it?” Illarion asked, wondering how often this story was repeated across all of Rus.

“My heart?” Nika shook her head. “The wind blew my father’s fishing boat into the rocks one day. He got caught beneath the sail, was battered against the rocks. By the time we managed to pull the canvas from the water, there was nothing left of him but a bloody stain. It was my mother’s heart that the wind stole.”

Illarion thought of the planks that had been laid down across the families of Volodymyr-Volynskyi. Hearing the screams of those underneath as the horses stamped across the field of wood. “Who suffers more,” he wondered, “those who are slain or those who are left behind?”

“There is no answer to that question, Plank,” Nika said. Illarion had not told the story of his survival of the destruction at Volodymyr-Volynskyi, but it had circulated among the Shield-Maidens nonetheless, almost as if it had been whispered to a few of them by the wind itself. At first, Illarion had bristled at the nickname, but he had gradually realized that the time in his life when he might have objected to it was long gone.

“Aye,” he sighed, knowing she was right. He exhaled, letting out a breath he had not realized he was holding in, and stared out across the empty expanse of Kiev.

To the east, the darkness was becoming less absolute. Tiny dots were swirling around, starlight snared in a mist rising from the Dnieper River. As he watched, the mist thickened and started to creep into the broken ruins like a river breaching its bank and slowly engulfing the surrounding fields. The wind shifted, dancing around the citadel so that it blew into their faces now. Blowing the mist toward them.

Nika put her hand on his arm. “Do you hear it?” she whispered, her grip tighter than necessary.

He did. The sound was distant at first, far enough away that it might have been trees falling in the forest, or the thump of rocks rolling in the river, but it was too persistent—too rhythmic—to be natural.

“Mongol riders?” he whispered to Nika.

She shook her head. “That is not the sound of hooves,” she said enigmatically.

Illarion stared at her, trying to ascertain what she wasn’t telling him. He half-turned, unsure whether he should merely stand idly on the battlement when an unknown host approached the city—a host, judging by the sound, of a size that would find their meager defense of the citadel to be little more than the sting of a gnat.

“Wait,” she said, grabbing his arm.

“We have to warn the others,” he said, pulling free of her grip. Nika did not move, and Illarion could not fathom why she wasn’t concerned. With an exasperated exhalation, he stayed as well.

The fog slithered across the ground, devouring the distance between the river and the citadel walls at an unnatural rate, and the wind blowing against his face was warm. It carried strange scents—the musk of blossoming flowers, a bittersweet crispness that reminded him of orchards in the spring, and the smoky aroma of smoldering cedar and cypress—as well as a distant thrum of sound. At first, Illarion thought the noises were nothing more than the echo of night birds, calling to each other, but as the sound became clearer, it fell into sync with the rhythmic beat of the march. The words were oddly familiar and yet utterly foreign, and he instinctively realized he knew what sort of song it was.

“They’re singing,” he said. “It is like one of the battle songs sung by the Shield-Brethren.”

“Aye,” she answered, somewhat breathlessly. “We sing one like it ourselves, but…”

The voices echoed as if from some deep chasm, far away and out of sight. The fog reached the base of the hill, the mists wreathing around stones and broken houses, through trees and over the bones of the dead, and Illarion thought he saw shapes in the mist, always at the very edge of his vision, melting back into the fog when he tried to focus upon them. The sound of leather-shod feet grew louder and louder as did the singing voices, and Illarion found himself wondering how the noise had not alerted the rest of the citadel.

Nika touched his arm again and pointed, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose as he looked down and saw figures stepping out of the mist. They had broad faces with strong noses and close-cropped hair; they carried heavy shields emblazoned with shadowy sigils. Illarion recalled the shields that hung in the great hall at Petraathen, the mountain citadel of the Shield-Brethren.

I never took the final test…

Each rank remained solid for a brief instant, their stony faces staring up at Nika and Illarion, and then, as the next rank formed and crashed into them, the forward rank fell apart, splashing back into the wave of fog lurching against the wall. The ghosts swirled around the wall, forming and dissolving with a mindless relentlessness that made Illarion want to scream. The shout stuck in his throat and he could feel it swelling in his chest, struggling to get out.

The mist parted suddenly, as if it had been cut by the sword of an invisible giant, and in that instant, all of the faces disappeared. The mist trickled away, running back down the hill like rain water sluicing off the hard rock. All that remained was a solitary figure—more solid than any ghost and yet even more improbable than the phantom host that had just thrown itself against the walls of the citadel.

The figure looked to be an impossibly old woman, stooped and bent, her hair wild and matted and covered in dirt, as were the wretched rags that hung about her gnarled form like sodden cobwebs. When the mist was gone, she lifted her ancient face and fixed Illarion with the most terrible pair of eyes he’d ever beheld, their baleful gaze lancing like a bolt through his heart. As he stood, transfixed by the vision, the crone’s withered right hand slowly rose and, with a deliberate, unerring gesture, pointed towards the frigid north.

The world seemed to fade, and Illarion’s vision narrowed until his eyes could see nothing but the old woman’s dire stare. The scream that had been caught in his throat withered and died, slipping back into his gut with a whimper. His eyes burned as if he had been staring too long into a fire, and he struggled to find the strength to blink.

When he did, the crone was gone.

Beside him, Nika stirred, as if she, too, had been released from the grip of some unspeakable glamour. He shivered, as the wind had shifted again and its breath was fiercely cold once more.

“Did you see…?” he asked, reluctant to put into words the vision he had witnessed.

“Aye,” Nika said, her voice as unsteady as his. “I saw the ghosts of my fallen sisters.”


“No,” Illarion said. “There were men, carrying heavy shields, like the Greek infantry once did. And…and there was an old woman.”

Nika stood close enough to him that he could make out her features in the starlit night. There was still a trace of fear in her face, but mostly Illarion saw a fierce determination in the Shield-Maiden’s eyes. “I only saw the faces of dead Skjalddis,” Nika said. Her throat worked and her eyes widened slightly.

“You have been keeping a vigil,” he whispered, realizing she had been lying to him earlier. “You’ve seen them before.”

“Every month,” she admitted. “When there is no moon.” Her eyes were bright now, tears reflecting starlight. “But I never saw the old woman,” she said. “Not until tonight.”

“Who is she?” Illarion asked.

Nika let loose a short bray of laughter, a cruel sound that was quickly swallowed by the night. “She showed herself because you were here,” Nika said. “You’re the one who summoned her.”

“Me?”

“Aye,” Nika said. “You stayed when the others left. You had family here. You are part of Rus. You have been down into the crypts and seen the grave of Saint Ilya. You know the stories.”

“They’re just stories,” Illarion protested.

Nika stepped closer to Illarion and peered into his eyes as if she were trying to see some flicker of light hidden deep within. “You know who she was,” she said softly. “From the stories. The witch with the leg of stone. The witch who knows what must be done.”

Illarion’s heart was pounding. He looked at Nika, and though he already knew the answer, he could not stop himself from asking, desperate that she should tell him otherwise.

“Nika,” he whispered, “what is it that must be done?”

“You must go north,” she replied. “That is where Baba Yaga has instructed you to go, and wherever you go, my sisters and I will follow.”