David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“Hello?” Stephen leaned over her, and cupped her chin in his hand. He raised her face to look at him.

“Nice work,” he repeated.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu blinked and smiled at him.

“I’m gratified you think so,” she said. “Now prove you’re pleased, and get me a drink.”

Uzimeri stared at the mountains longingly. Amar Shadak’s caravansary was perched on the face of one of the smaller mountains of the Toros. The mountain’s larger cousins were spread within the scope of Uzimeri’s view. Uzimeri picked the nearest one, and as a kind of game he set out to figure a way to the top of it, on foot and with only minimal climbing gear. He imagined what kind of gun it would take to shoot a man who’d made it to the snowy peak, from this spot here in the caravansary. He imagined himself as that hypothetical man, standing there, looking back at the caravansary with its great stone walls and its broad timber deck, the helicopter sitting idle on its steel-reinforced roof, Amar Shadak firing off round after round from his hunting rifle in a vain attempt to kill him. Tears streamed down Uzimeri’s cheek as he struggled to hold onto the image. A few weeks ago, had he imagined such a thing he would have been able to make it as real with little effort; he would have, in the barest second, found himself on that peak, his ankles deep in the snow, the thin air clutching at the hairs in his nostrils. He would have been free of this chair in the blink of an eye. The plastic bonds that were cutting off circulation to his hands would be gone, the deep cut across his cheek where the belt buckle had struck him would be healed and he would be free — free in a place where men like Amar Shadak could never find him.

He could have done that a few weeks ago — indeed, he had done so many times in the company of the Blessed children. But since they had boarded the submarine in the pen at Istanbul, and taken his men there, Uzimeri had lost the ability. In truth, he now realized, it had never been his ability — it was the workings of Zhanna, and her siblings the Children; their powers. And when they had left him, they had taken those powers with them.

Uzimeri had been a moderately religious man before the children came and went. Since they left him, in one of the Foxtrot submarines he kept and maintained on behalf of Amar Shadak and accompanied by his finest crew, he had become positively fanatical. Every day, he prayed for the return of the Blessed Children — so that they might again return him to the glimpse of paradise he’d been afforded in their brief acquaintance.

He began to pray now.

“Oh Blessed Children,” he begged, “hear me now, and deliver me from this evil place again, as you had from the sadness and despair of my life before You. I will serve you with all the fire of my soul, though it be the tiniest spark as compared to Your Greatness—”

Uzimeri’s prayers were interrupted by the sharp smack of leather across his face. Trembling, he turned to face his torturer again.

“Thank you for waiting,” said Amar Shadak. Thick hair tumbled in curls across his broad shoulders. His features were hard enough that he could get away with it without looking effeminate. Indeed, many in his organization found him simply awe-inspiring.

There was a time when Shadak inspired that kind of awe in Uzimeri. But now

…Now, Uzimeri was sworn to another master. He looked Amar Shadak in the eye, and although his voice trembled in anticipation of the tortures to come, his words were clear.

“I have nothing to say to you,” said Uzimeri, “that I have not already said.”

“I’ll see about that, you traitorous little bastard.”

Shadak said it in that pleasant, lilting voice of his, as he pulled the belt tight so the buckle gleamed silver against his fist. There was only a little blood on it, a faint pinkish smear across its edge.

“Babushka deliver me,” begged Uzimeri one last time, before the beating resumed.

Alexei Kilodovich set out on his quest to unravel the lie of his life with enthusiasm. It didn’t last. Adults who wish they could return to the pleasures and vitality of their youth, he decided, would do well to amend those wishes, lest someone like Vladimir be within earshot.

Because facts were facts: even in the most generous interpretation, Alexei’s youth was nothing more than a kind of prison. He had not seen his mother since he was tiny, and he lived and learned in a boy’s school in a frozen wasteland. At night, he slept in the upper bunk in a drafty wooden barracks heated by a coal stove. In the day, he attended classes and performed exercises and studied texts in a low complex of grey classrooms and gymnasiums. Life would undoubtedly have been more brutal in an actual Soviet prison — but that was cold comfort for Alexei. Life was a drudge, an institutional routine — and what was more depressing, as the days progressed he slipped into it as easily as a tractor wheel falls into a well-worn rut.

He thought it would be so different on that first day, when he returned to the buildings from the exercise yard where he and Chenko had been playing cards, his mission from Vladimir fresh in his mind: You must spend the rest of your life tearing this lie to pieces and putting it back together. Only then will you find the truth .

“Let’s get tearing, then,” Alexei said optimistically.

He pushed open the doors to the main hall and looked around for some clue as to where to begin. So far, it was the same as he remembered it: a long hallway with lockers on either side, a poured-cement floor with a worn green rug running up the centre of it. On the right, there were doors to classrooms: on the left, washrooms and a little down-sloping hallway that led to the machinery rooms, where lay the generators and heating system.

Where to begin?

First, Alexei kicked hard at one of the lockers — willing it to vanish in an orange puff of rusty sheet metal. It made a loud clanging noise that echoed from the cement floors and steel-clad walls and when Alexei looked at it all he could see was a foot-shaped dent near the bottom. It did not vanish.

So Alexei moved on to the nearest classroom door. He threw himself against it, as though trying to break it down. It didn’t vanish either — but it did swing open, sending Alexei sprawling across the classroom floor. A dozen boys looked back at him from their desks, while at the front of the class, a teacher who Alexei recognized as the sadistic Czernochov speared him with a look of shock and anger.

Czernochov strode across the room to Alexei and demanded to know what the meaning of this intrusion. Alexei bit him on the ankle — all the while thinking, Vanish, Czernochov, like the pestilent lie that you are . Czernochov didn’t vanish any better than the door or the locker. He kicked Alexei hard in the stomach, grabbed his hair and used it to pull him, still doubled around the pain, to his feet.

Czernochov sneered and pushed Alexei away, so that he stumbled against one of the desks. Several of the boys snickered. Alexei couldn’t get at any of them for the purposes of hitting, and when he willed them gone they only laughed harder.

“You are on drugs,” said Czernochov quietly to Alexei, then turned to the classroom and said more loudly: “Young Kilodovich here is addled by drugs. See, it makes him crazy enough to think that he can best me here in my own classroom. But can he? No — he bites at my ankle and crumples at the first touch of my boot. Let this be a lesson to you all: drugs make you too confident even as they weaken you against your enemies. A terrible combination, as Kilodovich here is about to learn firsthand.”

Later, in the infirmary, Alexei found cause to reassess many things. He wondered if perhaps Czernochov had been right, and he was simply coming down from a crazy LSD trip. Perhaps it had all been an elaborate hallucination — his career with the KGB, his time in Belarus, his job with Wolfe-Jordan, the two yachts, the submarine; Heather, Holden Gibson… The talking baby Vladimir. All those things certainly seemed less real than the two broken ribs in his chest and the bandage over his left eye.