Wild:. Noelle MackЧитать онлайн книгу.

      In another hour the first passengers paused at the head of the gangplank, a little unsteady on their legs at the end of their long voyage. Kyril and Lukian ran downstairs to another window where they would have a better view. There were scores of people jostling each other on the deck.

      The English left the ship first. Lukian checked and counted them silently against the manifest. Traders in fur, lumber, jewels, coal, and minerals. Red-faced, boisterous, and glad to be home.

      Then came the Russians, at least the richer ones.

      Merchants led the procession—there was no mistaking their pompous air or their plump bellies. Their wives waddled after them.

      Several other men of various nationalities followed. One wore pince-nez and carried a valise. Kyril cast an inquiring look at his cousin.

      Lukian hazarded a guess. “The ship’s doctor. He carries the most valuable cargo of all.”

      “Which is?”

      “Morphine.” His cousin’s tone was curt. “Cheap to buy but worth more than gold when a man needs it.”

      Then a bearded boyar wearing ankle-length robes and a fur hat strode down the gangplank, swinging his arms inside his long sleeves. His wife followed him.

      Kyril straightened. “Who is he?”

      His cousin looked at the scribbled copy of the ship’s manifest in his hand. “Not anyone who is looking for us. There are only two Old Believers listed. As you know, they have some understanding of our kind—”

      “Lukian, what is his name?” Kyril wanted to know before the fellow and his wife were engulfed by the others like them on the dock, waving handkerchiefs and smiling through their tears.

      “He must be…Vladimir Kromy of Moscow. And that is his wife Lizaveta.”

      “Ah! I have heard of him. Deeply religious and a thorn in the side of our dissolute nobility. But what are they doing here?”

      Lukian only shrugged. “Meeting that horde of relatives, I suppose.”

      “Their faith is strict,” Kyril said. “They will find London a perfect Sodom and Gomorrah.”

      “They are not wrong about that,” Lukian said shortly.

      The next passengers to disembark were a mixed lot. Kyril guessed at the nationality of each, then looked at the manifest to see if he was right. A massive Dutchman. Rawboned Germans, tall and strong. Ukrainians and Swedes, blond as angels. Several strapping African men, laughing together, their kit bags over their shoulders. Their bearing was proud, not like the hangdog look of ordinary swabbies. Kyril glanced again at the manifest in Lukian’s hand. There they were. Three harpooners, two ship’s carpenters, and one cook.

      On and on. More came, clutched the ropes of the gangplank, made their way down. No one stood out. If there were agents of the Tsar on board, they ought to have appeared by now. Perhaps Kyril had not recognized them.

      Then a horde of peasants, the men in caps and the women in shawls, stormed up from steerage, disheveled and exhausted, children clinging to their mothers’ skirts as they were swished along in them to the bewildering strangeness of a new land.

      “Hmm. Is that all?”

      Lukian looked down at the manifest. “Wait. There are more to come. I have been counting.”

      The officers and crewmen of the Catherine were still onboard, running about yelling orders to the dockworkers they would supervise. They ignored the five tall fellows dressed like English laborers who came to the top of the gangplank and paused.

      “There they are,” Kyril said. He had never been surer of anything.

      “Yes. The officers are pretending not to see them. I expect they were told to make them look like Englishmen. They did not succeed.”

      “They look like what they are—Cossacks. Bloody-minded Cossacks.”

      Kyril nodded as he memorized their faces. Their upper lips were pale, he noticed. The long mustaches, the mark of their tribe, had been shaved off. “It would not be more obvious if it was stamped upon their foreheads.”

      Their height, their swagger, their ferocious cockiness—they would be easy to avoid. Or to hunt down, if it came to that. They would not be killed by any member of the Pack unless they killed first.

      The five men still waited, as if someone was about to join them. A man who was even taller than they came up behind them, his coat collar turned up and his hat brim turned down. He spoke to one of the others, who nodded respectfully.

      “Wait—I think my count is off by one,” Lukian said. He stared at the manifest as if he could mentally add up all the people who had flowed down the gangplank once more.

      The very tall man looked up. His gaze swept the pool of the dock and the quay teeming with laborers. He looked at the immense warehouses, built in ranks, strongholds that bore a distinct resemblance to prisons.

      There was something about him that suggested he had once worked in one. His watchfulness, for one. For a few seconds, he seemed to be looking at the very window behind which Lukian and Kyril stood.

      Even from here Kyril could see the livid scar that ran from his temple to the corner of his mouth—and that his eyes were the color of ice. Bleak and freezing cold. He kept still, aware that he and his cousin could not be seen, given the direction of the light. The man’s gaze returned to the Cossacks.

      Kyril realized that they were only his bodyguards. The imperial secret service had not needed to send a team of agents. The man with the icy eyes was capable of slaughtering the entire Pack by himself, given time and the right weapons.

      “No, Lukian. Your count is correct. I suspect that man, the last one, was exempted from appearing on the manifest. By special order. An order that had to be obeyed.”

      “What the devil are you talking about?”

      Kyril pointed and made sure that Lukian’s gaze followed. “That devil. His identity is a closely guarded secret.”

      “Then how do you know it?”

      “I had an affair with the wife of the head of the Tsar’s secret service. In St. Petersburg. A talkative woman. She described him well.”

      “Were you trying to get us all killed?”

      Kyril clasped his hands behind his back and shook his head. “At the time, and that was two years ago, it was the only way to find out anything about the man. And she was very pretty.”

      “Who is he, Kyril?”

      Kyril stared fixedly out the window. “That is Volkodav. It must be. Have you not heard of him?”

      “No.”

      “Otherwise known as the Wolf Killer?”

      Lukian nodded, his expression suddenly grim. “That name is one I know.”

      Several hours later…

      He had left Lukian stationed where he was to observe the complete unloading of the ship. Phineas Briggs was a powerful man and it would not do to accept his fee and not find out more about the smuggled goods aboard the Catherine.

      The matter of the khodzhite was intriguing.