David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“You destroyed my love, Ming Lei.”

“I will apologize to her for that too.”

“You locked what was good in me,” said Shadak, “away in this place.”

“I know,” said the Devil. “Although it is not that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

“‘What is good.’ That is not what I did.”

“Oh.”

“When we put a sleeper into metaphor, we lock away not the good — but their will.”

“That makes no sense—”

“—because,” said Kilodovich, “you have lived your life wilfully — or so you think.”

Shadak stepped forward. “I will kill you and everyone you love!” he shouted. “Restore me!”

“You are,” said Kilodovich, “restored already. That is why I am sorry. When I put you here, I was — inept.”

“Wh—”

“I would say that I was but a tool, and it was the ineptitude of my masters. But that is not true either. No, I fouled it for you.”

“Then fix it!”

“The problem,” said the Devil, “was that I did not properly fix you in this place. You straddled the worlds. Your will was in one place, your anima in another, each infecting the other with only cruel and incomplete hints. It meant that you could not be controlled as others were — but that you could never be wholly yourself. You exercised part of your instruction — you made a great arsenal for us, in the caves in northern Turkey. But past that — the only way anyone could control you was the old-fashioned way: through seduction and coercion. Past that, you became a true psychopath and made your way in the world thus. This is something that would not, I think, have been possible had we not intervened.”

“I am,” said Shadak, “almost upon you. You cannot save yourself with talk. You cannot survive. I will have my revenge — and at the moment of your death, you shall so beg for release that you will restore me.”

“I am sorry,” said Kilodovich. “No.”

“What — why?”

“You will not leave this place,” he said.

Shadak thought back — to the tentacle spreading across the window. To the machinegun fire. The boat pitching.

“You are correct,” said the Devil. “You will not arrive at New Pokrovskoye. That is why I must apologize now. I hope that bringing you here will at least spare you the suffering.”

“Suffering?”

“Of death.”

“I am dying?”

“Most likely,” said the Devil. “I am as I said, sorry. It is a war. We must make way for the main invasion force. And you, Amar Shadak, are in the way of that. We have all agreed.”

“You — you fucking—” Shadak felt his cheeks redden. He felt tears well in his eyes — as his pitiful, sundered life spread before him. The Devil tried to comfort him with a tentacle on his shoulder, but he swatted it away.

“Hey! Alexei!”

The Devil looked up at the sound of the voice — and Shadak did too.

They were not alone in the courtyard. At some point, three other figures — also in robes, although not as dark as the Devil Kilodovich’s — had arrived. They were rocking back and forth on invisible feet — impatient, like they had to pee.

“Enough of this,” said one. “Leave him.”

“I feel responsible.”

“You are responsible — but that’s not the point,” said another.

“We are getting our tuchases whipped,” said the third.

“They got guns! And they’re shooting at us!”

“What did you expect?” said Kilodovich. “You have spent too much time in the sea, Comrades. You have forgotten what a real fight is.”

He turned back to Shadak then. “You should not concern yourself with these things,” he said. “Listen — I can restore you. But not in your body.”

“Wha—”

And with that, Alexei’s tentacle came out and pierced through Amar Shadak’s chest. The world flowed back into him, and he grew, and became a man.

“My gift,” said Alexei. “And again — my apologies.” Shadak stood alone in the Black Villa.

Or not precisely alone, perhaps. He stared at the place where the creature had been — felt his heart beating in his chest, felt the air in his lungs. He went over to the well, took a wooden bucket that was beside it and lowered it on a thin, hemp-like rope. After lowering it just a dozen feet, there was a hollow-sounding splash. He pulled up the bucket — credibly heavier now. He lifted it to his face, and sniffed at the dark liquid inside, sloshed it around.

In the distance, he could hear another sound water makes — splashing, flowing. Deep in his bones, he felt a twisting. Was he dying? Shadak looked around himself. Was this the gift that Alexei Kilodovich had offered him — to insulate him entirely from death? To remove him, therefore, from play?

“Fuck this,” said Shadak. He tossed the bucket back into the well. It bounced credibly against the well’s stone walls. “Fuck you, Kilodovich,” he said to the scudding grey sky. “I choose death!”

And as he spoke it, the sky seemed to draw apart, like a badly woven cloth, and something like rain fell from it, hitting Shadak’s upturned face like ice.

“Fuck you!” he shouted. And the water became a torrent — coming from above and beside him, as the hull of the Filipino cabin cruiser ruptured against a sharp rock. Shadak spun in the water, and kicked against someone, and for a perverse moment laughed as the water filled the cabin. He kicked and he dove and a moment later he came up again, under the dark sky of the Atlantic. Something slipped past his ankle, but missed as a wave lifted him, and carried him on its silvery crest, toward the jagged rocks of the Labrador shore.

Miles Shute fought as best he could — and that was better than most of his less-experienced comrades — but in the end, he too wound up in the water, gripped in the tentacles of a giant squid. He’d emptied his MP5 into the side of one of them, then managed to lay hold of a boat-hook and whack away at another one that had managed to get one of its whiplashing tentacles up top of the wheelhouse. He probably could have held out there indefinitely, if one of his shipmates hadn’t tried to climb up to join him. Miles didn’t have anything against the kid — far from it, he was one of the few who Miles had gotten to know by name since joining the Imperial Navy: Arkady something-or-other. The kid was a grad student from Boston — not one of Richard’s MIT students for once, but a microbiologist from Boston University. Arkady was a bright, fit young man with a thick beard and as far as Miles was concerned a good attitude. He was pissed as anyone to find out he’d been duped into spying for the old Soviet Union, but he said he was going to use this whole thing as an opportunity to expand his horizons.

So when three rungs up, a tentacle whipped around the kid’s ankle and started tugging him back, Miles felt obliged to help out. He got on his belly, took hold of Arkady’s arms, told him to calm down, and tugged. Over Arkady’s struggling shoulders, he could see the huge beast half out of the water itself, wrapping its shorter arms around the still-extended net poles, giving off the wafting stink of bleach. If Arkady weren’t screaming, he probably could have explained what that smell was all about. Miles figured he’d ask him when he got him up.

Which is why he was so pissed when Arkady’s hands slipped from his, and he tumbled down the ladder and landed with a wet smack on the deck. Before he had thought it through, Miles was down after him.

Which was, Miles realized an instant later as he fell into the water with two tentacles wrapped tight around his middle, a big mistake. He flailed and kicked and tried to pull the thing off from around him — and if it had just been a big rubber thing, he might have been able to. But another question he might have asked little Arkady was about the suckers, which actually seemed to have teeth. He screamed as they cut through his shirt and his trousers and began to bore into his flesh. He skidded across the wet decking — caught up briefly at the gunwale — and fell into the briny ocean along with Arkady, and the rest of his comrades.