Rasputin's Bastards (60 page)

For now he saw not just the brightest points, but dimmer ones too. The hand drew him along the wall, and he caught more glimpses through these: a forest, with high coniferous trees, and a large bearded man muttering something about a “mantra” to a group of attentive children while armed guards hovered conspicuously near the tree line; a woman, legs crossed, bouncing up and down on a mat (the unseen sleeper was bouncing too, making the whole thing as nauseating as a roller coaster); another bouncing view, this time looking at a man — heavyset, with a drooping handlebar moustache and receding hairline, that Alexei thought he recognized before he sped past. Then views of Moscow and the sky and a city that looked like London and other places that were but blurs of colour. What were these, wondered Alexei? Were they sleepers less accessible to these huge dreamers? Sleepers belonging to Americans, perhaps? Who was the bouncing man that he thought he’d recognized?

And what, he wondered, was that dimmest light?

It flickered in the distance — barely visible at all, like the last dying ember of a candlewick.

“There,” said a dreamer.

Alexei found himself propelled toward the two eyes. They held a view that blurred and faded in the dark cave . Of a gun barrel. Of a figure that through this filter Alexei took a moment to recognize.

It was himself — young Alexei Kilodovich — woven of strands of understanding and perception that were alien to him. The eyes, Alexei realized now, belonged to Amar Shadak.

“Inside,” said another dreamer.

“Alexei,” whispered a dreamer’s voice that was this time unmistakable: Kolyokov. “Do that which we have made you to do. Disassemble Amar Shadak. Make him ready for us.”

And then, the light faded altogether, and the grip around his middle loosened, and Alexei found himself on the ground — held only in the grip of gravity, outside a low house before mountaintops. The sky over its red clay shingles was dark, the trees growing around its cut stone foundations were bare. The house itself was made like a Roman villa. There was a stone archway at one end that led into a weed-choked plaza. Alexei stood up and headed for the villa, a purpose in his stride. He didn’t know what that purpose specifically would be: but if he could trust Fyodor Kolyokov’s words this one time, it would be the thing that they had made him for.

It was a strange and tricky villa. When Alexei stepped into the courtyard, the stones were white with snow and the pond in its centre was covered in a thin veneer of ice. The sky overhead had turned a terrible white and where the light from it struck it made a flickering, washed-out glare. Alexei retreated for the shade of the overhanging roof. In spite of the ice and the snow, Alexei found himself sweating. He heard the sound of sloshing water through another archway, and he followed it through the arch, into a narrow corridor that seemed to run the circumference of the courtyard, and then to what must have been a kitchen. Embers burned at the bottom of a great hearth at one end; the middle was dominated by a long wooden table covered in a brown canvas cloth. The cloth was stained a deep purple here and there — maybe wine, from the tipped-over jug that rocked through a twenty-degree arc in a divot at the far end of the table. Or maybe blood; at the far end, the skinned carcass of an animal — a sheep, or perhaps a goat — hung from an iron hook over an open wooden barrel. The sloshing came from inside the barrel.

Alexei crept over and looked inside. The barrel was dry. The sloshing sound continued.

Alexei rubbed his chin, and looked up at the animal. He took a finger and touched the bare muscle at its shoulder. It was cool, and although it glistened in the dim light, it was dry. It felt a bit like plastic. Maybe, thought Alexei, that was how flayed muscle feels after it’s been draining for a day.
Maybe
.

Alexei went over to the embers in the fire. He licked a finger and touched it to one. There was a convincing hissing sound, as the spittle boiled against his skin. There was the barest hint of pain. He nodded, scrunched his mouth.
Not bad.

Alexei pushed himself up off his haunches, and next regarded the rocking jug. He touched it lightly. It stopped rocking, and settled into the divot in the old table. He took his hand away — and the jug rolled to its left. By the time he stepped away, shoved his hands into his pockets, the jug was rocking back and forth again like nothing had happened.

He was tempted to go back outside — test the ice on the pond — test the snow on the flagstones — maybe go outside altogether, run to the nearest of the mountain-peaks, reach into the rock and see if it weren’t just as soft as wet clay, as insubstantial as gauze, and see if he could just step out of this place.

Alexei resisted the temptation. If he’d learned nothing over his time stewing in his own history, he’d learned to recognize this place for what it was:

A metaphor.

And not a particularly good one.

Alexei stepped back to the hallway. He ran his finger along the stone of the wall, felt for the coolness, the fractal roughness of chipped, ancient stone. It was there, he thought. Or it was coming.

Alexei leaned against that stone, so he had a view of the courtyard and the entryway, and he waited there — for whatever it was coming to complete its arrival.

He didn’t wait long.

Amar Shadak stumbled through the archway, flinching at the lash of a great, devilish whip. He was smaller than he had been for a long time — as small and soft and weak as he had been when he was just fourteen; when his mother still lived; when his father was still in Romania, building the beginnings of his empire. He stumbled through and fell to his knees, felt the lash, and climbed again to his feet. The whip withdrew through the arch like the tail of an immense rat. Shadak stumbled to the edge of the pond, reached into its icy waters and splashed some on the reddening fabric of his shirt.

“Fuck you!” he screamed. His voice was high, but it was tinged with violence.

“Manners, boy.”

“What? Who the fuck — ”

A shadow grew over the stonework of the little plaza.

“You know who the fuck.”

Shadak forced himself to look into the archway — to the figure that drifted from beneath it. It was all greys and blacks — a pale creature wearing a long dark coat, black hair that seemed to drift around its skull as though suspended in water. The eyes reflected glints of fire. It smelled of river mud. It carried its whip like a great phallus or maybe a severed umbilical cord, dangling out its middle while both arms twitched and gestured. Clearly, it scared the crap out of Amar Shadak. But he didn’t look away.

“What is this place? Where the fuck are we? Where is fucking Kilodovich?”

The thing was twice as tall as Amar Shadak. In the pale light of the courtyard it stood like a hangman’s tree, like the Crucifix. It wore a beard on its chin, thin and scraggly and long. When it spoke, it spoke with wind that stank.

“You are home. In your safe place. A place where I shall not trouble you, so long as you remain. It is a place that reminds you what you are.”

“And what is that?”

“A rich man. Who collects. Weapons and vehicles and money. Collects it for us.”

The Shadak boy stood up. He clenched his fists defiantly. “Fuck off,” he said.

“Manners.”
The thing lifted a narrow arm, and bent a finger chidingly as the whip twitched. The kid Shadak flinched at the sight of it. He still didn’t look away, though. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“My safe place?” he said. “What is safe about here?”

Leaning against a pillar, Alexei found himself shaking. A
safe place
. That’s what this metaphor was — just like the spy school that Alexei had believed was a part of his childhood. This place was the equivalent for Amar Shadak: a Roman-esque villa, with food and wine and a view of mountains. In the courtyard, Shadak was working it out too — with considerably less success. He wouldn’t, of course, stand a chance. Alexei had been mired within his own safe place, his own metaphor, for what seemed like months before he’d broken loose — and that had been on its revisitation, with more than a few hints from Vladimir that escape was necessary. For Amar Shadak, this place was real.

Alexei pushed himself away from the pillar and strode out from beneath the overhanging roof. Neither Shadak nor the tall thing noted his presence as they continued to spar with one another, and there was no reason that they should. For although this thing had no doubt happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it had not happened with a middle-aged Alexei Kilodovich bursting in and interrupting the session. Alexei was tempted to do so — but he knew it would be about as effective as shouting a warning at a movie hero from the balcony.

But still — right now, he intuited that watching was not enough. If Vladimir were here, he’d ask him questions — make him explain the goings-on in this strange villa. But Vladimir was gone now. The guided tour was over.

He sat down next to the trembling little metaphorical body that Amar Shadak inhabited. Shadak was listening now, his eyes locked on those of the spectral thing, who was engaged in some kind of recitation. Telephone numbers; addresses; symbols and images; a sequence of colours, each of which might be associated with a different animal, which in turn might be associated with a string of numbers or an address in a strange city, or the face of a stranger. They all combined into a chaotic modem-squawk of imagery and words and numbers. Alexei watched little Amar Shadak’s lips move as he silently repeated back certain things, and drew up new associations. Then he looked around the courtyard. It seemed to be saturating the tiles deepening their reds, the ice on the water gaining depths and imperfections, the sky overhead shifting from a pale white to a deep alpine blue. Alexei nodded to himself. The more that Shadak heard, the firmer his metaphor became.

Alexei looked at the thing’s eyes. He knew, of course, who those eyes truly belonged to. Hadn’t those been Kolyokov’s instructions to him? Disassemble Amar Shadak. Make him ready for us.

Somewhere inside that preposterous masquerade, thought Alexei, lurked young Kilodovich, hell-bent on a mission from Fyodor Kolyokov to break the spirit of Amar Shadak. For himself, Alexei began to feel dizzy. He was inhabiting a metaphor within a metaphor, watching a metaphorical version of himself operating with an assassin’s assurance within the second of those metaphors.

Alexei leaned close to Shadak. “I am sorry,” he said.

At that, Shadak’s eyes flashed — and he looked up at the apparition with new understanding.

“Kilodovich,” said Shadak.

The thing reeled back at that, and looked about in confusion. Shadak grinned at that.

“Alexei Kilodovich,” he said, his adult sneer creeping back into his voice. “You miserable fucker. You fucking steal my woman and usurp my contract. You are KGB aren’t you? Setting us all up for a big bust.”

The apparition grew, and the whip pulled back from its middle, twitching in the air over Shadak like a huge tentacle.

“Oh fuck off. You’ve hypnotized me. This is complete bullshit.”

“Manka. Vasilissa. Baba Yaga.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

The whip cracked in the air like a pistol shot, and Shadak shrieked as it lashed down on him.

“You fucker!” he howled. “You fucker!”

Shadak bent over himself and shut his eyes. He began to weep.

The metaphor, meanwhile, continued to flower. Cracks appeared in stone that had been smooth; Latin scripts appeared on stones; in the pond, the ice began to melt and crack. The wind from the mountains smelled of flowers. The apparition looked into the blue perfect sky — as if for advice — and at that moment, little Amar Shadak rolled across the ground and fled behind the giant. It flipped its whip at Shadak, but the kid was too quick. He vanished through the archway. The apparition began to follow it, but stopped again — listening to the cascade of words and ideas and pictures that inhabited the substance of this place:

RodionovRodionovtoolateabandonthisoneabandonabandontoolatetoolate. . .

Alexei left the rumbling Discourse behind to follow little Shadak. He felt tears in his eyes, in a sudden burst of empathy for Amar Shadak. Hadn’t he, just days ago, undergone the same revelation? Hadn’t he too fled his metaphor — torn a rip in the side of it and crawled out, back into himself? He had an unreasoning desire, then, to see Amar do the same thing: tear his way from the metaphor, return to his body, and begin the process of reassembling himself.

Alexei stumbled out the gate. The stones outside the villa were sharp on his feet, and the wind whipped off a glacier that hadn’t been there before. He turned back to the villa. The building was twisting and reorienting too. A slim tower that Alexei was certain had not been there before had thrust itself up from the rear of the building. A murder of crows competed for perch on its steep, tiny roof, cursing each other as they flapped and scrambled. Clouds now gathered to the east. The air felt electric with the coming storm. The world of this villa — this safe place — was becoming real.

So quickly. When Alexei was in City 512, it had taken months to make him believe his place. It had taken all of Fyodor Kolyokov’s strength and will; all of Alexei’s time; for months, to create a world that was only a skeleton compared to this one. Alexei waded into the grasses and peered down the hill. Where, in this blossoming metaphor, had Shadak lost himself? Unthinking, he put his hands to his mouth and called out: Amar! Show yourself! He smirked as he did so. He was not, of course, really here. He was observing — a ghost. He could no more make himself felt here than he could —

A whistling came across the grasses then, and a sharp pain in the side of Alexei’s head — and thought incomplete, Alexei fell.

The dark was silent and empty this time — a void like death. Alexei spun in it — or maybe he didn’t move at all and simply imagined himself spinning. Or maybe he was dead and this was how death was.