Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [91]
“My dearest Sasha,” the letter opened, rather dramatically, “I hope this finds you well. I must beg your forgiveness for not telling you earlier, but I fear that our pursuers (and I am ashamed to recognize them as my countrymen) may have too easy a time following us. Yet, I worry that if one of us were to be captured, the fate of the other would be as good as sealed. So I have made a decision to travel separately—and I hope you will forgive me for not betraying my means, for to tell you would be to put you in a greater danger.” I stopped there and thought peevishly that he knew the way I was traveling and therefore was in a position to betray me while not extending me the same courtesy. Or was he so certain that he liked me more than I liked him? I continued reading.
“I will wait for you in Krasnoyarsk, and only hope you will do the same for me if you get there first. If we do not meet in one week’s time, proceed without me. If it is at all in my powers, I will make sure the documents you need to achieve your purpose will be available to you.”
Strange—how could he make sure of something like that, unless he had a trusted courier? Moreover, there was no place of meeting indicated anywhere. I turned the page over, and found a faint, spidery scrawl that I would have missed if I had not searched so intently any sign at all.
“Follow your heart,” it read. “Believe your heroes.”
This advice seemed both too general and too hackneyed for Jack, so I decided it was a secret way of telling me where to meet him. The trouble was, I had no idea what was in Krasnoyarsk, and who I could possibly follow there, let alone which ones of my heroes he was talking about.
I folded the letter and stuffed it carefully into the inner pocket of my uniform, as Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi watched. I wondered if they had read the letter.
“Are you going to Krasnoyarsk?” I asked them.
“Eventually,” Liu Zhi answered and twisted his mustache thoughtfully. “Who knows when the next train comes? In winter, there’s snow, there’s cold and breakage. Trains unreliable. Unless the hussars let us join them.”
“This could be arranged, I’m sure,” I said, and rose. “Come along, it is high time the two of you met some of my colleagues.”
Liu Zhi and Kuan Yu nodded to Woo Pei and followed me; their docility and easy manner kept surprising me. After all, I had barely made their acquaintance before witnessing them kick in several English heads. I puzzled whether traveling with me would be of some benefit to them—if it were, it would be easier for me to accept their willingness to come along.
We found the party in the tavern had grown subdued, as most of the participants had either left for the train and its warmth and benches, or fell asleep where they sat. The rotmistr and still sober Volzhenko were the only two who seemed in possession of their faculties. A few hussars were leaving, and Volzhenko barked orders at them, telling them to all stay together, to take a head count when they left and when they arrived, and to report the irregularities to Cornet Petrovsky who was already on the train. When Volzhenko saw me, he grinned. “Has to be done,” he shouted by the way of explanation. “These sorry bastards get drunk, wander through the snow, fall over and pass out, and then we find them dead, like logs frozen solid. We make sure that if anyone falls behind, there’s someone there to go back and dig him out of a snowdrift. Necessary, that.”
“I see,” I said, and smiled.
The rotmistr winked and laughed, and gave an exaggerated head tilt in the direction of Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi. Woo Pei remained invisible in the kitchen, but his presence was still palpable in the sweaty, musty din of the room. “Your friends?”
“Fur traders from China,” I said. And added in a burst of inspiration, “I am paying them to escort me around Beijing. May they travel with me?”
The rotmistr scratched the back of his head, and then opened in his arms in a gesture of wide wonderment. “Oh, young Poruchik Menshov. How I envy your gift of making friends, of finding what