Nine Layers of Sky Read Free Page A

him off from both understanding and pain. Ilya could no longer see clearly, but he could still hear. A confused blur of sound rushed around him: snatches of conversation across the city; the gulls crying over Sakhalin, thousands of miles away; a door shutting in icy Riga with a sudden decisive
thud.
All of these sounds became distilled as Ilya listened, resolving into the steady seep of his blood onto the concrete floor.
    Ilya Muromyets’ mouth curled in a rictus grin. The glittering winter light glared through the door of the hallway, sharpening the shadows within. He had to get outside, bolt for what passed as home before the
rusalki
found him, but his feet moved down the stairs with a slowness that suddenly struck him as comical. He leaned back against the wall and shook with mirth, the breath whistling through his punctured lung like a ghost’s laugh. He realized then that someone was watching him. He turned with a start, but it was only an old woman, clutching a bag of withered apples and gaping at him in undisguised horror. He wondered what she saw: a gaunt man with pale hair and paler eyes, like a wounded wolf.
    Ilya’s laughter wheezed dry. He wiped the blood from his mouth and murmured, “Oh . . . Good day,
gaspodhara
. Been shopping?”
    The old woman edged past him and fled up the stairs. The slam of her steel door echoed through the stairwell. The noise stirred Ilya into motion and he staggered down the stairs and out into the winter afternoon.
    He wondered why he was even considering flight.
I don’t have a chance,
Ilya thought, as the sweet haze of the drug started to wear thin and reality, as cold as the day, began to intrude. He had never been able to escape the
rusalki.
His side was beginning to hurt now. His lungs burned and he could see his own fractured breath spilling out into the air.
    Clutching his side, Ilya tried to run, but he managed only a few paces before the pain brought him onto his knees in the snow. The world grew dark, then bright again. Ilya began to pant in panic. He looked around. Across the street, sheltered by the wall, stood a man. His gloved hands were folded in front of him; his face was broad and pale beneath a furred hat. His eyes were black, without visible whites, and they glistened like frost in the pasty folds of his face.
    “Help me,” Ilya Muromyets tried to say, but the words were a whisper. The snow was searing his hands. He struggled to rise, but out on the Neva the ice splintered like breaking glass. Ilya looked up and saw that it was already too late.
    A
rusalka
was rising from the river. Numbly, Ilya watched as she slid over the bank of the Neva and started to comb the ice from her hair with bone-thin fingers. He thought for a moment that she might not have seen him. But his heartbeat was slowing in the impossible cold, echoing through the winter world like a bell, and when he raised his hand to touch his injured side, the blood crackled beneath his fingers. It made almost no sound at all, but the
rusalka
heard it and her head went up like a hound’s. Beneath the glistening frost of her hair, her eyes were the color of water, but then, suddenly, he was seeing through the illusion. He saw a small, pinched face beneath a fluttering flap of skin. Her hands were curled and clawed. She looked nothing like a human woman, but Ilya had learned long ago that the
rusalki
maintained a glamour to hide their true appearance.
    The
rusalka
glanced from side to side with exaggerated slowness; she was playing with him.
They hear
everything
, Ilya thought in despair.
If a single feather
drifted down to the snow, she would hear it. She is like me.
Slowly, the
rusalka
smiled with a mouth full of needles.
    “No, no,” Ilya heard himself whisper, over and over again, but the
rusalka
rose like a disjointed puppet and stalked toward him. Blood filled his mouth with a rush, and he spat into the snow. The
rusalka,
murmuring, crouched beside him on backwards-bent knees and lifted up his