"Something's burning,” Galina said.

Timur-Bey shook his head. “It's not burning; it had burnt, many years ago, but it still smolders. Like they do.” He pointed with a nod.

There were five men there, standing and sitting under the shadow of the fence, dressed in rags; their feet were wrapped in remnants of rough sailcloth, and muskets rested on their shoulders. But Yakov looked into their faces-red as if boiled, their beards and eyebrows singed or burned off, their eyes the blind white of a cooked egg. Their nails, trimmed with mourning black, bubbled as if melting off their fingertips. Their rags were covered in soot, but Yakov guessed them for military uniforms, even though it was impossible to see the insignia; he guessed that they were from the early nineteenth century, but could not determine their allegiance. At least, until they spoke.

"Hey, Petro,” one of them called. “What time is it?"

"Who cares what time it is?” Petro replied and spat philosophically. “Does time even have meaning anymore?"

One of the others nodded and sat down, resting the musket across his knees. “And for what sins are we being punished so?” he said. “What sins have I committed, dear Lord in heaven, to guard the fence of a burned building for all eternity? What sins, what sins are so great to merit such a punishment? Dear Lord, forgive me my trespasses, lowly sinner that I am, and deliver me from this torment."

"Shut up about your sins, Corporal,” the one named Petro said with a stifled laugh. “Who's to say sins have anything to do with this fence? And who's to say whose sins are greater?"

A general murmur of agreement emitted from the rest of the soldiers.

"I suffer so,” the Corporal said.

Collective groans of annoyance were his answer, and Yakov decided that for the past hundred and eighty years the Corporal's suffering had been getting on his comrades’ nerves.

Yakov and the rest had all agreed that a direct approach would be the most foolish one; instead, they decided to rely on an old-fashioned deception-rather, Zemun and Koschey decided on it, while Galina and Yakov rolled their eyes at each other and shook their heads in disbelief. Timur-Bey and Sergey remained neutral on the matter.

"Seriously,” Yakov said to Zemun. “Trojan horses have been done before."

"It's not the same,” Zemun said. “There's no one inside me.” She sounded hurt, and Yakov didn't argue further.

They watched Zemun as she approached the gates, her jaws moving rhythmically, and her eyes as empty as those of a regular cow. The soldiers at the gate turned to watch her with their blind white eyes.

"What's that?” the Corporal asked.

"Looks like a cow, Corporal,” Petro said, and stroked his bare face thoughtfully, as if he expected to find a beard. “A beauty of a cow, too."

The rest muttered that it was a nice enough cow, yes sir, sure was.

"I haven't had have any milk in ages,” Petro said. “Or cheese, for that matter."

The corporal stopped lamenting the cruelty of his fate, and smiled. Zemun let herself be led inside, and Yakov heaved a sigh. He only hoped that the plan wouldn't backfire too badly.

When night fell, the gate in the tall fence swung open, lit from the inside by the ghostly blue light of the celestial cow, and Zemun herself motioned for them to come in. Inside the gate there was a yard of tightly tamped dirt; every pockmark and trough stood out in stark relief, like craters on the moon's surface, illuminated by pools of light. There were stars strewn about, and their blue and white rays pierced the darkness like spotlights.

"What happened here?” Yakov asked, pointing at the globes of pure light littering the bare yard.

"They tried to milk me,” Zemun answered, and looked sullen. “But I don't think they suspect anything."

Galina exhaled an unconvincing laugh. “Of course not. Why would they?"

Yakov looked past the scattered stars and forgot about the danger and everything else, gaping at the wooden palace that towered over them. The facets cut into its smooth light walls reminded him of the palaces in the Kremlin, and the gilded onion domes topping seven slender towers appeared more beautiful than any buildings he had ever seen. “What is this?” he whispered.

"That,” Timur-Bey said, “used to be one of the oldest buildings of the Kremlin."

"It's all stone now,” Galina said.

"It used to be all wood,” Timur-Bey said, his almond-shaped eyes dark and stark in the grounded starlight. “I remember it; the Tatars burned a few of those palaces… and they kept burning throughout history. Your people rebuilt them in stone, but some of the old buildings made it here. This one… I hear that Napoleon burned it… Moscow burned for many days then."

Moscow burned for many days then. Historians argue about who started the fires. Some said it was the Russians, intent on depriving the invaders of food and shelter. They burned the houses and the food stores, the shops and the warehouses; they did not care that the privation would affect them too. Others said that the Napoleonic troops burned the Kremlin on purpose and everything else by accident, due to the windy weather and too many unattended cooking fires in their encampments. Yakov didn't know who it was, and it didn't seem important to him, but he did wonder how the soldiers they had seen-Petro and the corporal and the rest-ended up here. He could imagine it now-burned and injured, suffocating from smoke, their mouths tasting of ash, they stumbled through fire and sparks, wincing at the crashing of the great beams of the palace burning around them. They must've seen the doorway, distorted by heat and smoke, and rushed through. He thought they were soldiers, probably used to fighting and routing and shooting and stabbing, but not this, not being caught in a burning building, gilded with molten flames. He imagined a despair great enough, a fear powerful enough to pick up the ghost of the stately building that roared and collapsed in a tornado of fire and howling smoke, and to bring it with them underground… even though Yakov suspected that they were not as much underground as on the other side, in some unseen lining of the known world.

Zemun had done a bit of reconnaissance-she knew the sheds and the piles of firewood in the yard, the small barracks where the soldiers with burned hair and boiled white eyes sat in dreamless sleep all night long. She still did not know who was inside, since the palace's gates were locked tight. They decided to wait until morning, hiding in one of the sheds filled with half-rotten logs and rusted axes.

Galina kept looking up, searching for something in the molded ceiling beams.

Yakov guessed that she was looking for birds. “They're not there,” he whispered.

She nodded, still looking up, as if expecting them to materialize out of the surrounding stale air. Yakov looked too, squinting up into the cupped ceiling, where shadows grew dense in the corners, reaching for the thickly hewn supports and twining around them in an elaborate chiaroscuro. If he squinted and tilted his head, the shadows shifted and something glinted between his eyelashes, impossible to see directly but shifting to the corners of his vision and dancing and taunting, they twinkled like the stars that fell out of Zemun's udders, like large slow drops of magical milk.

Galina watched them too; she asked, “Did you have a kaleidoscope when you were a kid?"

"Of course,” Yakov said. “Show me a kid who didn't."

Sergey the rook squawked in the affirmative on Yakov's shoulder, and Yakov felt sudden and acute pity for this man, a criminal imprisoned in a bird's body, at yet another similarity, another reminder that he used to be a child too, and that he and Yakov shared many experiences, few things being unique in the mass-manufactured Soviet childhood.