David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“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?”

As Alexei spoke, the towers around them began to fade and crumble. The golden light that pervaded this place began to fade, and was replaced by a relentless grey — and then darkness. Alexei could see nothing.

He let the tentacle extend. “You see,” he said, “how ridiculous your fantasy is.”

Somewhere behind him, he heard a deep chuckling then. “Oh,” said Babushka — her voice now an old woman’s, “Kilodovich. How you have miscalculated. The metaphor,” she continued, “has not been for my own benefit for many years. It is for my children. You don’t need to convince me that it’s a stupid lie.”

And with that, the darkness turned into a night sky. A night sky of perfectly paired stars — a million eyes, maybe more, looking out on vistas that were not fantastical at all: highways and offices and houses, and television screens. “See,” said Babushka. “These are just the beginning. Now that you are here.”

And to his peril, Alexei looked — and fell into the soft discourse that Babushka had crafted.

Leo Montassini was always pretty fast, and it was a good thing, because if he was any slower the baby could have taken a serious tumble down the stairs of the lighthouse when Alexei’s arms went limp and he fell to the floor.

He dropped the rifle, which by a miracle did not go off, and managed to catch the baby under his arms before he’d even touched the floor. The baby didn’t cry, which was good because Montassini was no good with crying babies, as his cousin Tina was fast to point out — but the kid sure looked worried.

“I don’t blame you,” said Leo, jostling him up and down. “Should never have gone to that fuckin’ hotel — ’scuse my language.”

The baby looked at him, frowning. Leo could feel a faint ache at the back of his jaw. He went over to check on Alexei. The guy had a pulse — Leo could feel it at his neck. But he wouldn’t move or respond.

“It is too late,” said the Koldun from his chair. “She has him. And now — now she can convert the rest of the world.”

“Convert,” said Montassini. “To what?”

“To one mind,” said the Koldun.

And at that, Leo Montassini felt a tickling at the back of his skull — and a scent in his nostrils that made him think of New York, and the strange concoction inside Fyodor Kolyokov’s tank.

“Whoa,” he said, as much to himself as anyone else, “the sea.”

The Empire of New Pokrovskoye reassembled itself as quickly as it had collapsed. It spread like a stain across thin fabric — remaking the lands of Labrador into a great rich agricultural land, the breadbasket — turning New York and Washington into the Dark Provinces; redrawing the maps, stronger than ever. For now the Babushka flew with Alexei Kilodovich. And every set of eyes he peered through now saw others, and turned them instantly. The Empire spread like an oil slick through the world from its birthplace in the north.

Stephen looked at the girl, as the sky swirled and bent overhead. Zhanna hung behind him, eyeing her with suspicion. Mrs. Kontos-Wu didn’t lower her gun, but she seemed slightly less suspicious.

The girl had greeted them at the main pier when the Zodiac came up to it. She wore her hair in faux-Rasta beads and looked only a little older than Stephen. She shouted “Hello” in Russian, and called Stephen by name. Stephen thought about that — thought about the squid that now hung still and waiting beneath the water of the harbour — and ventured a guess.

“Fyodor Kolyokov?” he said.

“That is correct,” she said in a voice that aside from its pitch sounded remarkably like Kolyokov’s. She squinted, regarding the assortment of Romanian thugs still in the Zodiac. “It is good to see you, Stephen. I take it that you did not manage to find Kilodovich.”

“A lot has changed,” said Stephen. “for one thing—”

“I died,” said Kolyokov. “I know this now. You are no doubt surprised to be talking with me here.”

Stephen shrugged.

“Not really,” he said. “You’re just like the Mystics.”

“The Mystics?” The girl’s eyebrows raised up. “You know about the Mystics. Things have changed.”

“I also know,” said Stephen, “what you did to me.”

“And what was that?”

“You — you cut me off,” said Stephen. “You buried what talent I had.”

“That is what you think I did?”

“Yes.”

“Are you looking for an apology?”

Stephen thought about that. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

“All right,” said Kolyokov. “I apologize. But not for that.”

“For what then?”

“For this,” he said, and then he said: “Manka. Vasilissa. Baba Yaga. One three four seven.”

Beside him, Zhanna’s eyes widened.

“The code,” she said.

The blonde girl smiled. “Why else,” said Kolyokov through her, “do you think you had such a difficult time reading him? I would not leave such a device in the open.”

Stephen felt his eyes widen as a sliver of memory opened to him, and his sense of his life unspooled before him.

“You bastard,” he said. “I’m a bomb!”

Stephen Haber, a bomb. He knew as he said it, that wasn’t precisely correct. He was not, precisely, a bomb.

In addition to not precisely being a bomb, Stephen was not precisely a great many other things he thought he might be. He was not the natural child of Mr. And Mrs. Haber the sleeper agents. He had lived with them as their child, but he had another origin — another lineage. They were sleepers, true. But he slept more deeply than any of them.