hungry. Mikhail turned and ran on, his heart hammering; he heard a crash, looked back, and saw the house flying into fragments before the wind. And then the clouds were coming after him, about to engulf him. He ran, but he couldn’t run fast enough. Faster. Faster. The storm roaring on his heels. Faster. His heart, pounding. A banshee scream in his ears. Faster…
And a change exploded out of him. Dark hairs burst from his hands and arms. He felt his spine contort, bowing his shoulders. His hands-no longer hands-touched the earth. He ran faster, his body whipsawing, and he began to rip from his clothes. The storm clouds took them, and spewed them to heaven. Mikhail kicked his shoes away, his toes spiraling earth and flowers behind him. The storm reached for him, but he was running on all fours now, racing from the past into the future. Rain swept over him: cold, cleansing rain, and he lifted his face toward the sky and-awakened.
Dark upon dark. His eyelids, sealed by tears. He worked them open, and a faint glimmer of crimson sneaked in. The little fire was still burning, and the chamber smelled strongly of pine ashes. Mikhail got to his haunches, every movement an exercise in pain. His muscles still throbbed, as if they’d been stretched taut and re-formed. His brain, his back, his tailbone all ached. He tried to stand, but his spine shrieked. He craved fresh air, the scent of the wind through the forest; it was a physical hunger in him, and it drove him on. He crawled, naked, across the rough stones, away from the fire.
Several times he tried to stand up, but his bones weren’t ready for it. He crawled on hands and knees to the stairway and ascended them like an animal. At the top he crawled along a moss-draped corridor, and gave a pile of deer skeletons only a passing glance. Soon he saw light ahead: a ruddy light, the light of either dawn or dusk. It came through the glassless windows and painted the walls and ceiling, and where it touched, the moss had not leeched. Mikhail smelled fresh air, but the scent made something in his brain click and whir like the wheels of a pocket watch. It was no longer the pungent, flowery aroma of late spring. It carried a different smell, a dry aroma with a chill center: fire at war with frost. It was the smell of dying summer.
Time had passed. That much was clear to him. He sat, stunned by his senses, and his hand drifted to his left shoulder. The fingers found ridges of pink flesh, and a few flakes of scabs drifted from the skin and settled to the floor. His knees were hurting him now, and it seemed important to him that he stand up before he went any farther. He tried. If bones had nerves, they were aflame. He could almost hear his muscles bending, like the squeaking hinges of old doors long unopened. Sweat was on his face, chest, and shoulders, but he didn’t give up, nor did he cry out. His skeleton felt unfamiliar. Whose bones were these, lodged like broken splinters in his flesh? Stand up, he told himself. Stand up and walk… like a man.
He stood.
The first step was like a baby’s: halting, uncertain. The second wasn’t much better. But the third and fourth told him he still knew how to walk, and he went through the corridor into a high-ceilinged room where sunlight turned the rafters orange and pigeons softly cooed overhead.
Something moved, over in the shadows on the floor to Mikhail’s right. He heard the noise of leaves crunching. Two bodies lay there, entwined and slowly heaving. Where one began and the other stopped was difficult to tell. Mikhail blinked the last of sleep’s mist from his eyes. One of the figures on the floor moaned-a female’s moan-and Mikhail saw human skin banded with animal hair that rose and rippled, then disappeared again into the damp flesh.
A pair of ice-blue eyes stared fixedly at him from the gloom. Alekza grasped a shoulder on which pale brown hairs rose and fell like river tides. Franco’s head turned, and he saw the boy standing there at the crossing of sun and shadow.
“My God!” Franco whispered, in a shocked voice. “He’s made it through!” Franco pulled away from Alekza, with a moist parting sound, and sprang to his feet. “Wiktor!” he shouted. “Renati!” His shouts echoed through the corridors and chambers of the white palace.”Someone! Come quick!”
Mikhail stared at Alekza’s nude body. She made no movement to cover herself. A light sheen of moisture glowed on her flesh. “Wiktor! Renati!” Franco kept shouting. “He’s alive! He’s alive!”
3
“Follow me,” Wiktor said, on a morning in late September, and Mikhail walked in his shadow. They left the chambers of sunlight behind, and went down into a place in the white palace where the air was chill. Mikhail wore the deerskin robe that Renati had made for him, and he drew it tighter around his shoulders as he and Wiktor continued into the depths. Mikhail had realized over the past few weeks that his eyes quickly grew accustomed to darkness, and in the daylight he seemed to be able to see with razor clarity, even able to count the red leaves in an oak tree at a distance of a hundred yards. Still, Wiktor had something he wanted the boy to see, down here in the dark, and he paused to light a torch of boar fat and rags in the embers of a small fire he’d previously arranged. The torch flickered, and the smell of the burning fat made Mikhail’s mouth water.
They descended into an area where the murals of robed and hooded monks on the walls still held their colors. A narrow passageway led through an arch, past open iron gates and into a huge chamber. Mikhail looked up, but couldn’t see the ceiling. Wiktor said, “This is it. Stand where you are.” Mikhail did, and Wiktor began to walk around the room. The torchlight revealed stone shelves packed with thick, leatherbound books: hundreds of them. No, more than hundreds, Mikhail thought. The books filled every available space and were piled up in stacks on the floor.
“This,” Wiktor said quietly, “is what the monks who lived here a hundred years ago labored on: copying and storing manuscripts. There are three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine volumes in here.” He said it with pride, as if discussing favored children. “Theology, history, architecture, engineering, mathematics, languages, philosophy… all here.” He made a sweeping gesture with his torch. He smiled slightly. “The monks, as you can see, didn’t have much of a social life. Show me your hands.”
“My… hands?”
“Yes. You know. Those two things on the ends of your arms. Show them to me.”
Mikhail lifted his hands toward the torchlight.
Wiktor studied them. He grunted and nodded. “You have the hands of a scholar,” he said. “You’ve lived a privileged life, haven’t you?”
Mikhail shrugged, not understanding.
“You’ve been well taken care of,” Wiktor went on. “Born into an aristocratic family.” He’d already seen the clothes Mikhail’s mother, father, and sister had worn; they were of high quality. Good torch rags, now. He held up one of his own slender-fingered hands and turned it in the light. “I was a professor at the University of Kiev, a long time ago,” he said. There was no wistfulness in his voice, only memory. “I taught languages: German, English, and French.” A hard glint passed over his eyes. “I learned in three different tongues how to beg for money to feed my wife and son. Russia does not put a premium on the human mind.”
Wiktor walked on, shining the torch at the books. “Unless, of course, you can devise a more economical method of killing,” he added. “But I imagine all governments are more or less the same: all greedy, all shortsighted. It’s the curse of man to have a mind and not have the sense to use it.” He paused to gently remove a volume from a shelf. The back cover was gone, and the sheepskin pages hung from the spine. “Plato’s Republic,” Wiktor said. “In Russian, thank God. I don’t know Greek.” He sniffed at the binding as if inhaling a luxuriant perfume, then returned the book to its place. The chronicles of Julius Caesar, the theories of Copernicus, Dante’s Inferno, the travels of Marco Polo… all around us, the doors to three thousand worlds.” He moved the torch in a delicate circle and lifted a finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Be very quiet, and you can hear the sounds of keys turning, down here in the dark.”
Mikhail listened. He heard a tentative scratching noise-not a key in a lock, but a rat somewhere in the huge chamber.
“Ah, well.” Wiktor shrugged and continued his inspection of the books. “They belong to me now.” Again, that hint of a smile. “I can honestly say I have the largest library of any lycanthrope in the world.”
“Your wife and son,” Mikhail said. “Where are they?”
“Dead. And dead.” Wiktor stopped to break cobwebs away from a few volumes. “Both of them starved to death, after I lost my position. It was a political situation, you see. My ideas made someone angry. We were wanderers for a while. Beggars, too.” He stared at the torchlight, and Mikhail saw his amber eyes glint with fire. “I was not a very good beggar,” he said quietly. “After they died, I struck out on my own. I decided to get out of
