Rasputin's Bastards (72 page)

And then, bit by bit, more things became visible: smoke coming from some buildings — great stone ramparts going down to the sea. The masts of tall ships. Flickering oil-flames further out, on top of buoys. A glorious hot-air balloon, tethered to the topmost tower of a fantastical palace that looked like it was out of a fairy story.

And a voice, a deep basso, calling out for someone called Natascha.

Stephen shook his head.

Fuck it, he thought. What the hell did a bunch of fortune tellers in New Jersey know about dream-walking anyway?

“Hey!”

Stephen looked over his shoulder. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was maybe a dozen feet behind him. She had changed into the same getup as had Uzimeri: a black sweater, black jeans and high laced boots. Stephen nodded at her.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” she said. “Easiest thing in the world, to slip off the side and fall into the ocean.”

“Okay.” Stephen spun on his ass so he was facing her. “Now I’m not alone.”

“We got another set of messages,” she said, “from the Mystics.”

“Which is?”

“We’re not as done as we thought we were,” she said. “Babushka’s still a threat. Soon, Alexei will confront her. Hopefully, he is strong enough. And there is something else . . .”

Alexei Kilodovich and Vladimir climbed to the top of the aerie and faced the Koldun, Vasili Borovich. He was tied to a chair, and in rough shape. He regarded Alexei levelly.

“Name the smells,” said Alexei.

“What?”

“That is what you said to me, just days past,” said Alexei. “‘Name the smells.’ As if by doing so I would be welcomed to this magnificent community that you have built here in Canada. It made me very sentimental and trusting to you. And then you fucking set me up for a killing.”

“I had no idea,” said Borovich, “who you were.”

“That,” said Alexei, “is bullshit. You knew me well enough to kill me.” Borovich struggled in his bonds. “Only enough to know that Lena — the

Babushka — wanted you alive. That she had a special purpose for you.”

“Bullshit,” said Alexei.

It is true
, said Vladimir.
Babushka asked and asked about you. We did not tell her anything.

“Borovich tried to kill you too,” said Alexei.

“The Children?” Borovich looked back and forth between the two of them — and to Montassini, who was standing behind Kilodovich like a mob enforcer. “Yes — again, only because the Babushka wanted them so.”

“This does not cause me to feel better,” said Alexei.

“You don’t know what the Babushka can do when she has everything she wants.”

Alexei shook his head. “Take the world over — live in the backs of the brains of everyone on this planet. Change the names of things to suit her tastes, and live forever.”

Borovich glared at him.

“And you,” said Alexei, “would have stood for it — if she had loved you properly. Yes?”

“Oh God,” said the Koldun.

Alexei felt himself grow before him. His head was scraping the ceiling of this aerie. Robes flowed from him like liquid. And the thing in his belly stirred and reached across the space to Borovich. Vladimir started to snuffle and tear up at the sight of the thing.

“I think,” said Alexei, “you shall be unravelled.”

“What the fuck is goin’ on here?” said Montassini. “You okay, Alex?”

“Oh God,” said Borovich.

And Alexei said, “No. The lie.”

In 1976, Borovich awoke in Toronto. He had connived an assignment here — and it was a poor one. He worked the University of Toronto — pulling students here and there into a suite of rooms he kept in an old house in Parkdale, near the lake, seeing if he could manage the slow technique of remaking them for City 512. He could not, of course, on his own — the techniques were too difficult in those days for one to do alone. But it was rumoured that Lena, who had been there two decades earlier, had perfected a technique. She was gone, but Borovich had convinced certain others that he might continue the work. So he occupied his flat and whiled away the days.

“You did nothing here, did you?” said Alexei.

Borovich squinted at him. Alexei was sitting on a rattan chair at the back of Borovich’s house. Behind him, the skeletal phallus of the half-finished CN Tower rose up. Borovich looked at his hands — still smooth, long fingers with nails bitten to the quick.

“You were desperate,” said Alexei, “to find Babushka.”

“That was not her name,” said Borovich, “then.”

“Yes,” said Alexei. “You are so disgusted with her — with your choice of her. Because you are such an honourable man.”

And Borovich’s eyes fluttered shut — as a great black thing pierced his middle — and he remembered finding her; finding, in addition to all those university students, the names on a list of sleepers that Lena had made, and hunting them. Getting angrier and angrier as one after another turned out to have quit their jobs and left their families and abandoned their lives, to disappear from the world. He dreamed and scoured the world looking for their signatures — seeking them out.

Finally, one night in the midst of a July heat wave, he found one. His name was Jack King. He was staying in the Royal York Hotel, just having arrived by train, with nothing but a suitcase containing a change of clothing, a small automatic pistol and a little packet of subway tokens. He was on his way to Parkdale — to murder an upstart who was getting too close.

Borovich had smiled to himself — made a note of his room number, and gotten one of the few sleepers he managed to control: Alice, her name was, an undergraduate political science student at U of T. She was small-boned and slender but for a tiny potbelly and thick, dark brows that accentuated her eyes. He sent her over to the hotel; made her knock on his room door; and when he answered, step inside and say: “Do not be hasty, Lena. I bring this gift.”

Lena accepted it graciously — he had not been with her long, but he’d been with her long enough to know her tastes. At the end of the night, her sleeper had said: “All right, Vasili. You may join us. But you must bring gifts.”

It was two and a half years before Vasili could assemble gifts rich enough for Lena’s tastes. He raided the Hermitage, the treasure vaults of the Kremlin, riding sleepers at the highest level of the party. Where necessary —

“You murdered,” said Alexei. “You murdered people who had nothing to do with this. It is fascinating.”

“How can — how can you be here?” said Borovich, manipulating a KGB Colonel named Vlochma to wrap his lips around a gun barrel.

Alexei sat beside him, crouched in the younger man’s mind.

“Was it worth it?”

Vasili looked at him, tears in his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “What are you doing? How can you be here?”

Alexei was about to answer when another voice came up around them in a great, angry cloud.

“It is obvious, my love,” said Babushka. “He is the Destroyer.”

Heather stopped at the top of the wooden stairway that led down the cliff, to the main town of New Pokrovskoye. “
Mi mi mi mi mi,
” she said aloud. “
Mi!
”

“All right!” said Kolyokov. “Enough with your mantra! You can stop now.”

“Is it safe?”

“Maybe,” said Kolyokov. “Who knows? But I need to think and that Goddamn mantra is making it impossible.”

“Sorry.” Heather sat down on the edge of the stairs and looked out over the village. There were some lights on — and she could see shadows moving in front of those lights — but the town had an eerie quiet to it.

She took a deep breath, and felt an odd squirming in her middle. Was that Fyodor Kolyokov? Like some twisted foetus, making itself at home in her uterus? It felt creepy, but also kind of good. She was getting used to sharing her body with the old zombie. At least with Kolyokov, you knew where you stood. Holden Gibson had done the same thing with her, with the rest of them, on a whim.

Fyodor Kolyokov had enough respect for her to pay for his time.

And really, Heather had to admit that there was something oddly liberating being dream-walked by an old creature like Fyodor Kolyokov. As she sat there thinking, her hands worked in her lap — fingers counting. She heard muttered Russian coming from her lips. It faltered here and there — like a grandparent. Kolyokov was getting on — she didn’t know how long he’d be with her.

Her hands fell into her lap then, and she felt her head turning toward the lighthouse.

She blinked at the sight of it: the top surrounded by sparking blue electricity — its very tip connecting with a whirling, silent funnel cloud that drew down from the otherwise clear night sky. Then he turned her head to the port — where now could be heard the high-pitched hum of an outboard motor. A boat was coming in to the harbour.

“Start singing your mantra again,” said Kolyokov. “We must go meet that boat.”

Alexei Kilodovich and Vasili Borovich stood on the remains of a cracked riverbed. Mountains rimmed the horizon, but the land that led to them was flat and dry and monotonous. The sky was more interesting. It was filled with a great bruise of a cloud; a cloud that bled and pulsated and burned with a terrible fever. It had a kind of face to it — an alien face, that expressed unguessable emotions. Vasili tried to shrink away from it, but Alexei would have none of that. He stared up into it, unapologetically.

“You,” said the face, “have been ill-used.”

“Do not blame yourself,” said Alexei.

“I do not apologize,” said the cloud. “It is a statement of fact. I had wondered, when we first met, just what it was you are. And you know — with the potential that you carried, you might have lived a much better time on this earth.”

“Like your Vasili?”

The cloud rumbled. “Vasili? Is he here?”

Alexei gestured to his feet, where Vasili Borovich lay huddled.

“Ah,” said the cloud. “The traitor. He is of no consequence. He is barely here — thanks to you.”

Sure enough, Borovich seemed to be fading from this place. Alexei could see the ground through his insubstantial flesh.

“Of course,” said the cloud, “if you wanted to, you could return him here.”

“I see no need.”

“That is your ability, yes? To make — and break — sleepers. At will. What a thing you are, Kilodovich.”

“You are Babushka,” said Alexei.

“Had you any doubt?”

“Not truly,” he said. “I wished to confirm it. For we had defeated you.”

The cloud rumbled. “You tricked me. You drove me out of sleepers by placing them all in such peril. Now we are not in sleepers.”

“It does not matter,” said Alexei. “For I am — ”

Alexei took a breath. He reminded himself: he was not a KGB agent who worked for Wolfe-Jordan and had failed to protect Mrs. Kontos-Wu from gangsters. He was not a low-level sleeper who had failed to perform even rudimentary remote viewing exercises.

“I am the Destroyer.”

So without more thought, he set his attention to the world that Babushka had created: the sick, indulgent conception of the Empire of New Pokrovskoye.

“Is that the best that you can do?” demanded Babushka. She had taken on the personification of a beautiful young woman — pale, alabaster skin underneath a dark crimson hood. “It is, I take it, designed to inspire fear of rape, yes? Or perhaps to erase your own sense of inadequacy. Did you play Dungeons and Dragons in college?”

Alexei looked down at his robes — at the twitching tentacle that came out of his middle. He could see what she meant.

“I suppose,” he said. “In truth I have not given it much thought.”

“Well,” said Babushka, “how effective you must think it to be then. It must strike fear into all the metaphorical children that you undo.”

“Just as I suppose that little whore you dress yourself up as inspires lust in all the metaphorical boys and girls you seduce, hmm?”

Babushka’s metaphor pulled her cloak around her chest. They were standing in a town square underneath golden onion-domed churches. Her lips turned up in a slight smile.

“Perhaps you invoke death, you think — with that cliché of a robe, with those little glowing eyes and the hint of a pecked-clean skull.”

“I don’t think I made this up myself,” said Alexei. “I was trained by wicked men after all. But tell me — was there ever a time you looked like — ” he gestured with a bony hand up and down Babushka’s slim body “ — that?”

Babushka laughed. “I like my metaphor,” she said. “It pleases me to no end.”

Alexei looked around. “Yes,” he said. “You do a great deal to please yourself.

This whole place — very nice. The Empire of New Pokrovskoye?”

“It is,” she said, “an ancient empire. Ruled by a benevolent Tsarina.”

“Ah.” Alexei gestured to her. “Yourself.” Babushka nodded. “It is very — magical. Tell me — how long has the Tsarina ruled?”

“Ten thousand years,” said Babushka with obvious pride.

“And still — she is as beautiful as the day she took the throne. How does she do this?”

Babushka waggled her fingers. “Magic,” she said.

“Oh,” said Alexei, in a condescending tone. “Magic. Wonderful. Does she have a little wand?”

“No,” said Babushka. “It is innate.”

“I see.” Alexei looked around. “ It sounds like a fantasy novel. Or a fairy tale.”

“It is,” said Babushka, “very real as you can see.”

“No,” said Alexei and he squinted. “It’s not. It is a little girl’s fantasy. The sort of fantasy concocted by a little girl born into poverty under Stalin’s rule — a girl who had watched her family die and who had rarely known the taste of proper food — who was snatched from her village one day by wicked men and raised in a cave underneath the mountains to dream. Such things are not real for they exclude the grit and dirt of reality. It is all fine pastries and great halls. The poor, if they are seen at all, are rustic and grateful — all craftsmen who make fine leather or lovely dresses. Criminals are mainly dashing young rogues who only steal for the love of their Tsarina. The ones who are wicked — well. They are easily defeated. It is a great lie of a life. Is it not?”