sheathed, he pressed the cup on his breast, as he had no bag anymore. “Won’t he get free? That would be bad…”
“Even the Secret Seven have no power to free him! He’s spread inside the stone, merged with it.”
“You are cruel as only a Pagan can be!” Thomas cried hoarsely. “He’d prefer death.”
“Death,” Oleg replied heavily, without looking back at him, “is for a long time, very long… And a live man has hope.” There was a thunder behind them again, sand and pebbles came down in torrents on their heads and shoulders.
“If he’s imprisoned for life… How long do magicians live?” Thomas cried on the go.
“Differently,” the wonderer snapped. “Fagim perished in over hundred thousand, and Trtsik died of old age in forty… You hold the cup firm! Don’t be distracted. We need to ruin all this bug-ridden place. No mercy to those who gorge on our blood. Do as you would be done by!”
They climbed downstairs, then the corridor turned twice, Thomas clasped the cup with care to his breast.
The corridor ended with a small ordinary door. Tar torches blazed on both sides of it, scattering sparkles. No guards, no bars. Thomas shrugged his shoulders with chill.
The wonderer pushed the door, it opened with no squeak. There was a middle-sized room with ascetic furniture.
Chapter 41
The man did not turn but continued to write. “What detained you, the Wise?” he asked slowly.
“Trifles,” Oleg replied. He winced, fingers of his right hand were feeling a huge swollen bruise on his left elbow. “Have I kept you waiting too long, Slymak?”
“Never mind,” the man replied. “I had some things to finish before, anyway.” He put the quill aside, turned slowly. A deathly cold struck through Thomas, a breath out of grave. Slymak had white hair and tiny grey beard but radiated the power Thomas had sensed neither in himself nor in any other man before. The look of his sunken eyes was piercing. Thomas felt the evil wise man had known all of him at once, assessed his thoughts and desires, weighed his honor and knightly pride, looked through memories of the banks of Don and the beautiful Krizhina. Slymak did not look a strong man but Thomas had no doubt that a move of his eyebrow would shatter a stone wall.
“The idea of stealing the cup,” Oleg spoke slowly, “was yours?”
He spoke with strain, watching every move of the Head of Secret Seven, while Slymak settled back in his armchair easily, crossed his legs, smiled in a relaxed, free and easy way.
“I have,” Oleg replied honestly.
“Now I can say it,” Slymak said uncaringly. Thomas caught himself at an anxious thought of himself and the wonderer as mice in a box together with a big cat. “Surely, the cup is nothing to us, people of reason. It means little even to Britain… though it could be some help to her.”
“Who is it important for?”
Slymak smiled condescendingly, fiddled with his beard. “For the new country, new nation… that could rise hundreds of years later!”
“Your calculations go that far?” Oleg said in a dull voice.
“That’s your school, the Wise. You were the one to lay the foundations of knowing, of exact science. Our calculations say the cup will be carried across the ocean where a huge continent lies… In a word, there will be a new nation that may grow too independent… er… owing to some circumstances of its birth. That nation could acquire unprecedented power! You know we need no foes. We need workers.”
“Is the cup bound to get to that new continent?” Oleg asked.
Slymak nodded at the stiffened Thomas who stood still, pressing the cup against his chest with both hands. “His descendants!.. Like father, like son. Adventurers, brigands, poets, hirelings, dreamers, prophets… All of them shall rush to the new lands and create the state of new… er… sort. All the states we know today are just hen coops and farmyards as against that one. You know we can’t allow it. No nation or kingdom can disobey us.”
“Have you heard of how Fagim died?” Oleg said softly. “He was the Head of Secret Seven.”
Slymak’s pale cheeks flashed with red. He leaned on the back of his armchair, chuckled. “Yes, you succeeded in uniting Slavs. Though only eastern tribes. But we made this victory of yours turn out to be a defeat! The son of Rurik, whom you’d led to Novgorod, tried to accept the Judaism of Khazars. His wife was baptized in the Orthodox Christian rite. Furious Svyatoslav, a grandson to Rurik, adhered to the true Russian faith only because he was indifferent to any gods. And his son, great-grandson to Rurik… ha ha… left his Russian name of Vladimir for the Greek one of Basil. With his help, we threw a net of steel on the savage beast called Rus’!”
Oleg went black, as though burnt by invisible fire. His teeth made a fierce grind in the cruel silence, he looked down.
“And Vladimir himself,” Slymak went on with malicious laughter, “the one baptized your Rus’, was but half a Rusich, which you fear to recall! Who was… ha ha… his mother? Malusha, a daughter of Gulcha who’s now one of Secret Seven! And you know well who was Malusha’s father. You
Oleg was bending, as though under an avalanche of falling rocks. He turned ghastly pale, with black pits of eyes, his breath rattling. He looked aged at once, dead tired.
“The very name of your nation is all but extinct,” Slymak snapped fiercely. “In the most remote villages, where our power has not reached still, there are Ruses but all the rest are Russian slaves, Russian serfs, Russian servants… Later they shall be just Russians. You, as a sorcerer, must know well the difference between noun and adjective!.. Once I met Sardan, just after he had penetrated to Kievins. ‘What nation are you now?’ I asked. ‘Russian,’ he answered. I laughed and said, ‘And I am Greek…’ Ha ha! The top class of humor, you see?”
Every his word bent Oleg down like a heavy stone dropped on shoulders. Suffering for his friend, Thomas grasped with fear that the evil mage spoke truth: the wonderer was the last Rusich. The others in his fatherland were just Russians.
“Where are your Ratmirs, Vsegnevs, Vedeneys, Vysheslavs?” Slymak added. He leaned forward in his chair, peering greedily into the sorcerer’s face contorted with pain. “Princess Olga took the name of Helen — that must be a particular insult to you… ha ha!.. Half of man’s names we replaced by Jewish ones, like Ivan, and the rest by mixture of Greek, Chaldean and other scum. A better trick than Obres did harnessing your women into their carts! The present-day Ruses… no, Ruses would not have submitted… Russians carry us on their backs and sing praise to us!”
Oleg shook his head, as if he struggled not to faint, asked in a lifeless voice, “Why gathered here?”
Slymak’s face twisted, his eyes glittered with malice. Red spots on his cheeks flashed brighter. “Do you think we mean to meet you? Try to capture you? Too much honor! I won’t repeat Fagim’s mistake. I know all about you! I’m stronger. You know that.”
“Slymak,” Oleg whispered as if he were clutched between heavy boulders, “you are no kind of beast like Sardan or Isfahan. They were brutal fanatics. I can guess why you did not interfere… I know you are genius, Slymak. But why don’t you see it’s not the way it should be?”
“Wise, I can’t believe my ears! Weren’t that you to found the Society of Magi in ancient times and put the Counsel of the strongest Seven at the head of it? To guide all the nations in the world, to direct, to correct, to lead the way to good and suppress evil? You were at lead for several thousand years! Then you supposedly have found another way, so you demanded to prohibit magic, to destroy it. It is written in records you came out alone against
