Altar of Bones (25 page)

The lion laughed, the unicorn smiled, but the Lady only had eyes for her jewels.

Z
OE WALKED OUT
of the museum and into a whirl of lights and noise and people. It was dark, a cold drizzle misted the air, wetting the pavement and haloing the streetlamps. She turned up her face, let the rain wash over her. It didn’t help.

She wanted to weep and curse, both at the same time. Here she was, wearing the same clothes she’d put on in San Francisco more hours ago than she cared to count, so tired her feet kept moving only because they knew they should. She needed a hotel room, and maybe some food, except she was too tired to eat.

She wasn’t even sure where she was in relation to anything else. She’d told the cabdriver at the airport to drop her off at the Musée de Cluny, and after that it was a blur. She looked for a street sign and found one finally, embedded in the wall of a cream-stone apartment building with a gray dormer roof—Boulevard St.-Michel.

Which would be a useful bit of knowledge if she had a map, and if she knew where she wanted to go from here in the first place.

She turned around and nearly bumped into an in-line skater with purple spikes in his hair who didn’t even notice her as he whizzed by. The street was jammed with traffic—motorbikes, every one of them with a hole in its muffler, and all those small European cars that honked for no reason and looked ridiculous, and so many voices, all of them
speaking French. She didn’t understand a single word and she didn’t care.

The tapestry. She’d focused every brain cell in her head on it and gotten nothing. She really wasn’t all that stupid, so that meant there’d been nothing to get.

Let it go for now. Let it go
.

So many French voices, most of them happy, most of them young, and if she’d had a gun, she would’ve shot the lot of them. Her head ached so badly that if she didn’t get some aspirin soon, it would explode. She looked for a drugstore and saw only bistros and restaurants and cafés.

Zoe searched through her limited high school French for the word for drugstore, but it hurt to think. She had a vague memory, though, that their pharmacies—yes, that’s what it was,
une pharmacie
. And you were supposed to easily spot
une pharmacie
because of the universal symbol of a bright green neon cross they all had over their doors.

She looked up and down the street for a green neon cross. No luck.

No, wait … The rain had thickened and it was hard to see, but was that a wedge of green light across from the museum and down a side street?

Zoe dashed through the stalled traffic to make it across before the stoplight changed, weaving through Peugeots and Vespas, barely beating out a taxi driver with manic eyes who tried to run her down.

A huge McDonald’s loomed in front of her, bursting with people. But down the narrow cobblestoned side street, it was deserted. The wedge of green light was still there, a pale luminous green, though, not the cross of a
pharmacie
.

No, it was something else entirely.

Zoe’s breath hitched. She had to be seeing things. She walked slowly toward it, wondering if her brain had finally shorted out on her.

The wedge of green light sliced through a small shop window and lit a wooden signboard swinging in the night wind. It seemed to be an antiques store. Or rather, more like a junk shop, or maybe a pawnbroker. That sign, though, that gently swinging wooden sign … It was carved in the shape of a griffin.

And not just any griffin.

It was an exact replica of the one on her grandmother’s key.

Z
OE RAISED HER
hand, almost afraid to push at the narrow door with the sign in it that said
OUVERT
. She could see no one inside, only a tall, green-shaded belle epoque streetlamp that had been placed directly in the bay window. As if the shop’s owner had known all along she would leave the museum with a headache and go looking for the green neon cross of a pharmacy.

Zoe thought of all the stories she’d heard growing up about Russian sorcerers who could divine the future, and she shuddered.

But, no, she was being silly. If she’d been paying more attention when she first got here, not so out of it from jet lag, and if it hadn’t been raining, she would have spotted the griffin signboard right off, as soon as she’d stepped out of the cab in front of the museum. This green light in the window was a coincidence, nothing more.

But however she’d come to be here, this was the place her grandmother had meant for her to find, Zoe was sure of it.

She pushed open the door.

A bell above the lintel jangled loudly and she paused, but the shop was deserted and no one came out of any back room to help her.

She looked around. The place was like something out of a Dickens novel. Floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with what could only be described as “stuff.” Clocks—lots and lots of clocks—but also paintings, busts, flowerpots, lamps, candlesticks … In one corner was a ship’s figurehead, a bare-breasted floozy with a trident in her hand and a lascivious grin on her face.

“Bonjour,”
Zoe called out. But the shop remained quiet, except for the tick of the clocks.

She looked for something that might take her key, but the trouble was there were too many somethings: chests and jewelry boxes by the dozens, several bureaus, and even a couple of armoires.

Just then a blue velvet curtain half-hidden behind an ornate floor
mirror flared open so dramatically Zoe expected nothing less than a vampire to step out from behind it.

Instead, an old man came into the shop. Only a few wisps of white hair dusted his pink scalp, and the teeth behind his smile probably spent the night in a glass on his bedside table. He’d been whittled down by time, yet he had quite the dapper air about him with his argyle sweater vest, polka-dot bow tie, and rimless bifocal glasses.

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
Zoe said.

“Bonsoir, madame,”
he said, neither rude nor friendly, but he couldn’t help correcting her French.

Faced now with having to explain what she wanted in that language, Zoe’s head had emptied of almost every word she knew, and there hadn’t been all that many in there to begin with.
“Parlez-vous anglais?”

The man blew out a “No” between his lips, lifted his shoulders, spread his hands.

On impulse, Zoe asked him if he spoke Russian.

The man beamed, said in beautiful Russian, “How ever did you know? I’ve lived here so many years I might as well be French…. Well, Parisian—there is a distinction. But I was born ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution.” He turned his head aside and spat. “In a reindeer herder’s hut on the frozen tundra near what they now call Norilsk. You will not have heard of the place, and for that you should count your blessings.”

Zoe kept her voice light, but her gaze didn’t leave the old man’s face. He had the darkest eyes she’d ever seen. More than black, they were opaque.

“Actually, I have heard of it,
monsieur
. My great-grandmother was … well, maybe she wasn’t born there like yourself. I really know so little about her. Just that she escaped from a Siberian prison camp called Norilsk, back in the 1930s. Her name was Lena Orlova and she had a daughter called Katya. Maybe you know the family?”

The old man’s smile stayed in place, but Zoe thought the tiniest spark of a light had come on deep in those dark eyes. “Truly what a small and intimate planet it is we dwell on. I have a nephew who works in a bank in Chicago.”

Zoe laughed. “I’m from San Francisco, but I get your point.” She waved at a particularly cluttered stack of shelves that seemed to have a Russian theme going on. “I was wondering, though…. Ever since I first heard my great-grandmother’s story I’ve wanted to go to Norilsk. To trace my roots, as we Americans like to say. Do you have some artifacts, antiques, or whatever, native to the region I could look at? Maybe buy.”

“You do not want to go to Norilsk, trust me on this. She is the frozen armpit of the universe, never mind the season. Or, if you want to save that epithet for Mother Russia herself, then Norilsk is a puss-filled pimple on the frozen armpit of the universe.

“So,” he went on before Zoe could get another word in. “Sadly, I’ve nothing from Siberia at the moment. Not even a necklace made of wolf’s teeth, which is more common than you might think. Can I show you other things? A clock, perhaps? I have many clocks. Cuckoo, grandfather, turret, water, repeater, pendulum, marine—and every one keeps perfect time.” He pulled out a pocket watch, flipped open the lid. “If you care to wait for twenty-one minutes and sixteen seconds, you will hear them all strike the hour simultaneously. It is a symphony, trust me. Stay, listen, your ears will thank you.”

“Your clocks are beautiful.” Zoe pulled the silver chain out from underneath her turtleneck and over her head. “But I was wondering if you have something in your shop that might be opened with this key.”

The old man went very still. He started to reach up to touch the key, then let his hand fall back down at his side. He said, his voice barely above a whisper, “If you have that, then Katya Orlova is dead.”

“So you did know my grandmother.”

“I knew them both, Lena Orlova and her daughter, Katya. Her death, was it a kind one?”

Zoe’s throat got tight, so that she ended up blurting it out more harshly than she’d meant to. “She was murdered.”

“Ah.” He bowed his head, shut his eyes. “It never ends.”

“Were you very close friends?”

“Katya and I? No, not in that way. But I have been waiting many years for her to walk through my door again. Or for the one who comes after her.”

Zoe had so many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. “I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. I’m Zoe. Zoe Dmitroff.”

She held out her hand, and the old man bent over it in an old-fashioned bow. “And I am Boris. A good Russian name, no?”

He kept her hand while he stepped closer, to peer up into her face. “Yes, it is still as it should be. One Keeper passes, but another is there to take her place. I saw it was so the minute you walked through the door. I only thought I should wait for you to produce the key. But I saw it.”

He stared at her, but with faraway eyes, as if he were lost in another time. “But then I am of the
toapotror
. The magic people.”

“The magic people?”

He sighed, letting go of her hand. “Do you not know? Well, the years pass by, and with them goes the knowledge of the old ways. We
toapotror
are a tribe of native Siberian families whose duty it is to help the Keeper preserve the altar of bones from the corruption of the world. Sadly, we are mostly all gone now, either dead or strewn to the four corners of the world.”

His flat black eyes glimmered with his sudden smile. “But then the real magic has always resided within the altar, not in us.”

“Yet it was the green light you put in your window that brought me here. I would never have found you otherwise. That was magic of sort, wasn’t it?”

“Yes…. Yes, perhaps it was.” He smiled again. “And I suppose it was magic of another sort at work that day I spotted Lena Orlova in a Hong Kong noodle shop. That two war-weary exiles from so far a place as Norilsk should both happen to take hungry at the same time, to walk into the same noodle shop in a city full of noodle shops—coincidence or magic, who indeed is to say? And I knew her the moment I laid eyes on her. How could I not? For although we were both only children when last I saw her, she had grown up to be the very image of the Lady. As you are.”

Zoe’s blood quickened.
Look to the Lady …
“What do you mean I’m her image?”

He held up a finger. “You will see in a moment, but first …”

He went to the front door, poked his head out, and looked up and
down the street. He shut the door, hung out a
FERME
sign, and turned the lock bolt.

He turned back to her, his voice barely above a whisper. “Were you followed?”

“I don’t know,” Zoe said, feeling stupid now that the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her.

The old man turned off the green-shaded lamp, peered out the window, then pulled down the shade. “We
toapotror
have served the Keeper for generations, since ever there was a Keeper, and we do so with loyal hearts. But sometimes it is dangerous. We learn to take precautions, even when we look like old fools for doing so.”