David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

New Pokrovskoye was a beginning of a new empire that would erase the rest more thoroughly than before. The sky was a great pink canvas, bejewelled by strange constellations now visible through Babushka’s stretching mantle. It stretched as she expanded — over the sea, across the lands, and south along the jagged coastline. Easy to imagine her overtaking the world in this way. She had everything she needed to do so, surely.

Almost everything she needed. There was still rage in her belly — for while she inhabited ten thousand minds, and was prodigious at that — there were six billion others in the world that she could not touch. Six billion whose dreams were their own and whose minds were closed.

It must be driving her mad, thought Fyodor Kolyokov as he let the blinds close and turned back to Heather; mad to be denied the key to those minds, while its vessel lay so near.

“Now?” said the girl, and Kolyokov smiled. “Now,” he said.

Leo Montassini hurt all over. His stomach hurt — his ribs hurt — his balls ached. He hurt enough that it caused him to wonder just what he was doing alive. The last he’d remembered, he was on the receiving end of a beating from that little fucking fisherman — and he wasn’t doing too well. He’d blacked out. He should have been dead.

He blinked and sat up. He was lying some distance from the entrance to the greenhouse where all this had happened — but not that far. He could see the flickering greenish light behind the girl who was leaning over him.

The girl who was leaning over him. Leo blinked.

“Who the fuck are you?” The girl was kind of a looker, Leo had to admit. She was blonde, which was how Leo liked them, and tight. She probably worked out. Leo liked that too. He smiled at her.

The girl smiled back and extended a hand.

“I am Fyodor Kolyokov,” she said in a thick Russian accent, and brushed aside a lock of rasta hair from her eye to look more closely at him. “I recognize you. Are you not one of Gepetto Bucci’s capo s? Not the funny one, surely?”

“I am quartermaster of the Imperial New Pokrovskoye Tea Company,” explained the little man one more time. “Now let me go or there will be trouble.”

Amar Shadak looked over to Gepetto Bucci, who shrugged and twiddled his forefinger around his ear. He looked back at their prisoner. Shadak didn’t even bother making a nice face for this one.

“Where,” said Bucci, leaning forward, “is New Pokrovskoye?”

“Everywhere,” said the prisoner. “It will come upon you soon. Then you will be in trouble. Trust me. Better to let me go. I will put in a good word for you with the Imperial Guard.”

Bucci nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it to life. “I got this from my old man. He used to run an empire up this way too.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. That’s so. Not fuckin’ tea, though.”

The Quartermaster looked up at the bluish flame. “Vodka,” he said and nodded.

Bucci shook his head no. “Screech,” he said. “Used to run it down through St. John’s. Newfoundland. Big empire. Roman empire, you could say.” He looked at the quartermaster. “Don’t fuckin’ threaten me,” he said. “Answer questions.”

Their prisoner rattled the handcuffs they’d used to affix him to the chair at the Cloridorme Marina office. Outside, the harbour stood empty, but for the motor launch that Bucci had arranged to meet them there. It was nearly dawn. The prisoner was the only living soul they had seen since pulling into town.

Shadak rolled his shoulders and stepped back from the interrogation. He had suddenly lost his stomach for it, and as he stepped back leaned against the flimsy screen door that led outside. Just like that, he was standing on a cracked cement pad in the pale illumination of a Coke machine, listening to the surf crash rhythmically against the pier. Another sea — of car and truck hoods — gleamed nearer in the pre-dawn light.

He scraped his foot along the cement. It was sandy. The way the sand rasped between the toe of his shoe and the cement made him think about the way the sand flowed like a river through the caves where he had lost himself in the Black Villa which made him think about the townspeople who even if they were in their beds might be in a place far off now. Rapture had come to this place; there was no mistaking it.

Rapture had taken the men in the caves. It had taken his caravansary — and it had assuredly taken everyone in the Emissary Hotel, prior to the arrival of Gepetto Bucci and his crew.

“Everything okay in there?”

Shadak shuddered and turned. Jack Devisi stepped into the pool of light outside the Cloridorme marina. Devisi dropped his spent cigarette and mashed it under his toe.

“Mind your business,” Shadak said.

“Right.” Devisi shrugged, moved his toe off the squashed butt. Smoke curled across the top of his shoe then vanished in the maritime breeze. Devisi reached into his jacket, pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered Shadak one. Shadak made a swatting motion. Devisi shrugged, pulled one out between his lips and lit it.

“I been at the diner here in town,” said Devisi finally. “Supposed to open at six a.m. It’s five-twenty now. You think someone’d be in there — getting’ ready. Fuck, with all the cars in town…” he gestured to the cars — they were double-parked along the road to the edge of town. Volkswagens and Chryslers, Hondas and Toyotas…

There was a muffled cry inside the marina. Devisi looked back over his shoulder. “Workin’ him over, huh?”

Shadak looked out at the ocean. Dawn was creeping up in the east, painting a thin pink line at horizon’s edge. The moon and a couple of stars perched a little higher in the part that was still night.

Devisi laughed nervously. “Surprised you ain’t in there,” he said.

Shadak took his hands from his jacket pocket. He looked at Devisi. “Why would you say that?”

“I only mean, it seems you like that kind of thing.”

Shadak raised his eyebrows. Devisi stepped a little closer.

“You know,” he said. His voice was like gravel in Shadak’s ear. Stale cigarette smoke enveloped Shadak. “Rough shit.”

Shadak turned to look at Devisi, calculating as he did so. He thought about killing him. For no reason better than the exercise, and he was in reach. It would be misplaced, such an act. But , thought Shadak , it would be satisfying.

“Hey!”

Devisi and Shadak both looked back. Bucci was standing in the door, his sleeves rolled up, his cheeks pink with the exertion. He looked at Devisi and jerked his thumb back. “Get inside. We gotta talk.”

Devisi nodded and stepped away. Shadak’s thoughts moved elsewhere.

Bucci ambled up beside Shadak.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Shadak, and Bucci shook his head.

“That fuckin’ guy in there,” he said. “Don’t blame you for getting air. He’s whacked.”

“Does he know?”

Bucci looked out at the sea. “He knows. Fat lot of good it’ll do us. I ask him where New Pokrovskoye is. He won’t say at first. Then he tells me it’s on the — get this — the Iliana Peninsula. Through the Petroska Straits. He gave us directions, but he may as well have told us to follow the fuckin’ Yellow Brick Road.”

“The sea,” said Shadak. “How fast can we get your boat here? You said later this morning.”

“My guy says about eleven, depending.”

Shadak nodded. The crew of them had flown in overnight and driven here in a rental, to get a fast lay of things in Cloridorme. But it didn’t sound like you could fly to New Pokrovskoye that easily — and anyway, Shadak wanted to go in with some firepower. Bucci had a boat he kept in Newfoundland — a big fast boat that Shadak was familiar with. There were guns there too — cached underneath the new Trekkers Outfitting Co-op that was slated to open there in the fall. That was the plan: load up the boat, send it to Cloridorme, and then the crew of them could follow the trail across the water to New Pokrovskoye.