David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

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Rasputin's Bastards: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and under the power of their own expansive minds.
They slipped into the minds of Russia’s enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human puppets to murder, and worse.
They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they might have remade the world.
But like the mad holy man Rasputin, who destroyed Russia through his own powerful influence… in the end, the psychic spies for the Motherland were only in it for themselves.
It is the 1990s.
The Cold War is long finished.
In a remote Labrador fishing village, an old woman known only as Babushka foresees her ending through the harbour ice, in the giant eye of a dying kraken—and vows to have none of it.
Beaten insensible and cast adrift in a life raft, ex-KGB agent Alexei Kilodovich is dragged to the deck of a ship full of criminals, and with them he will embark on a journey that will change everything he knows about himself.
And from a suite in an unseen hotel in the heart of Manhattan, an old warrior named Kolyokov sets out with an open heart, to gather together the youngest members of his immense, and immensely talented, family.
They are more beautiful, and more terrible, than any who came before them.
They are Rasputin’s bastards.
And they will remake the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U46mr1iPFS4 * * *

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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:

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