The ride to Bielski Manor was a study in obedience. For three days, Sineus rode east, away from the spreading stain on the world’s memory, his face a mask of cold duty. He followed the order given by Grigori Levin. He retired to his family estate. He did not deviate from the route by a single meter. He was a tool returning to its sheath, and the desolation of the landscape matched the hollow space inside his chest. The villages grew sparser, the fields more fallow, until finally the road became a private track, choked with weeds.
The manor rose from the overgrown grounds like a monument to sorrow. It had been sealed for a generation, its windows dark eyes staring out at a world that had moved on. The air was heavy, still, carrying the damp smell of leaf rot and wet stone. He dismounted, his boots sinking into the soft earth. The great oak door was bound by a heavy iron lock, cold and slick with moisture. He pressed the Bielski Cipher-Key, the small clockwork cylinder of brass and silver from his pocket, against the keyhole. He hummed the lullaby, the one his mother had sung to him, its complex mnemonic vibrations a secret language only the lock understood. There was a deep, grinding click, and the door swung inward on protesting hinges.
He stepped from the grey afternoon into a deeper gloom. The air inside was thick, stale, a mix of dust and the faint, papery scent of decay. He was confined. He was alone. This was his punishment for seeing what the Memory Duma refused to. He walked through the silent halls, his footsteps echoing in the oppressive quiet, past furniture shrouded in white cloths like rows of patient ghosts. He did not stop until he reached the library.
The library was the heart of the house, a two-story octagon of dark wood and leather-bound spines. A thick coat of dust lay over everything, turning the rich mahogany of the shelves to a uniform, lifeless grey. A single spider’s thread, impossibly fine, stretched from a globe to a bookshelf, shimmering in the weak light from the tall, grimy windows. A draft from the open door made it tremble, then snap. The severed thread drifted down into the shadows, gone. Sineus felt a kinship with it.
He lit a single oil lamp, the small flame pushing back the gloom in a weak, flickering circle. He needed guidance, and the living had failed him. So he would turn to the dead. He ran his fingers along the spines of the ancestral records, the leather dry and cracked beneath his touch. These were the memory-annals of the Bielski line, three hundred years of service and sacrifice, bound and chronicled. He pulled down the first heavy volume, the cover embossed with a faded eagle. He laid it on the great central table, the sound a dull thud in the silence. He opened it. The pages smelled of time itself.
For hours, he searched. He moved from one volume to the next, a silent, methodical progression through the centuries. He was not looking for tales of loyalty. The Lodge had taught him enough of that. He was looking for the opposite. He was looking for precedent. For a justification for the treason that was taking root in his soul. He found it, not once, but four times. Four moments when a Bielski had stood against the established order, had broken their oath for the sake of a higher truth.
There was Kaelan Bielski, who in 1648 refused a direct order to burn a series of Cossack villages, choosing instead to forge a secret truce that saved hundreds of lives at the cost of his military career. He was declared a coward and stripped of his rank, but the records showed the border remained peaceful for fifty years. There was another, Anya Bielski, a woman who in 1721 used the family’s wealth to buy and free a shipment of serfs bound for a Siberian mine, an act that saw her exiled from court.
He found another, a captain of the guard who leaked a conspiracy to the foreign court it targeted, preventing a war but dying in a duel he was meant to lose. Each story was a variation on the same theme: a choice made under pressure, a price paid in status or life, and a result that proved the rebellion right. They were footnotes in the grand history of the Empire, but here in this library, they were pillars.
He felt as if the portraits on the walls were watching him, their painted eyes following his every move. He could almost hear their voices, a chorus of silent judgment and encouragement.
— Did you feel this? — he whispered to the empty room, his voice rough from disuse. He looked up at the portrait of the man who had defied the Tsar. — This cold certainty that you are right, and the entire world is wrong?
The fourth record held him the longest. It was the story of his great-grandfather, Dmitri Bielski, from the year 1775. A series of early thaws threatened to burst the banks of the Volga and drown a dozen villages downstream. The local governor, fearing the cost of evacuation and the disruption to tax collection, forbade any action. He declared the threat exaggerated. Dmitri, a military engineer, saw the truth in the rising water levels. He saw the inevitable.
He did not argue. He did not petition. He gathered his men, seized the governor’s supply barges, and in defiance of a direct command from the Tsar’s own representative, evacuated all twelve villages. He used his family fortune to pay for the relocation. The flood came three days later, a devastating wave that wiped the empty villages from the map. Dmitri was arrested, charged with treason. He was saved from execution only by the personal testimony of a thousand peasants. He lost his commission, his standing at court, his wealth. He saved three thousand lives. The conflict was so clear, the price so high. His conscience demanded a cost, and Dmitri had paid it without hesitation.
Sineus closed the book, the leather sighing as it shut. He stood and walked to one of the tall, arched windows, wiping a clean patch through the grime with the sleeve of his coat. He looked out at the forest that bordered the estate. It was supposed to be a vibrant green, even in the fading light. Instead, the trees on the farthest ridge, some 20 kilometers away, were a sickly, washed-out grey. The edge of the Ashen Tract. The physical proof of the threat he had seen, the cancer that was eating the world, was visible from his own home. It was not a report. It was not an anomaly on a map. It was a stain on his land.
He pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The oath he had sworn to the Lodge felt like a chain, each link forged from tradition and protocol. Grigori Levin’s calm, reasonable voice echoed in his mind. We will not risk schism. We will begin the fortification rituals. It was the voice of the governor from 1775, the voice of prudence in the face of catastrophe. To obey was to be a good soldier and watch the world burn. To disobey was to become a traitor and try to save it. The price of his silence was oblivion for thousands. The price of action was his own honor, his safety, his entire life.
He thought of the severed thread of the agent’s memory, dissolving into nothing in the antechamber of the Winter Palace. It had been so clean, so sterile. His career, his place in the Lodge, was a thread just like it. By acting, he would be the one to sever it. But the alternative was to watch the entire tapestry of the world be unmade, not by clean cuts, but by a shrieking, hungry void.
He looked back at the books on the table, at the silent testimony of his ancestors. They had not chosen the easy path. They had not chosen obedience when it meant disaster. They had chosen fire. They had chosen honor, the kind Pyotr had spoken of. The kind forged in defiance.
His decision settled into place, not with a crash, but with a quiet, cold finality. The knot of conflict in his gut dissolved, replaced by a solid core of purpose. His shoulders, which had been hunched with the weight of his indecision, straightened. He was no longer a man trapped by orders, but a man guided by sight. His duty was not to the blind council, but to the people who would be consumed by their blindness.
The last light of day faded from the sky. The library was steeped in shadow, the single lamp a small island of gold in a sea of darkness.
The choice was no longer if he should act. It was how he would begin.
