Rasputin's Bastards

THE GAMBLER

Now, his own life slipping away, Kolyokov spun through the vortex and did his best to deafen himself to her increasingly hysterical entreaties.

Fyodor! cried the cloud. You’re dying! If you don’t join me now, you’ll vanish.

Fyodor snorted. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what lies beyond the lay of our lives?”

Nothing! Nothing but dark and quiet.

“You speak as though you know. Are you alive or are you dead, Lena?”

What are you — a Goddamn philosopher? The cloud roared around him, tossing him higher and higher until he breached its top and saw stars spread above him. Look — the only life after death is in the Discourse!

“In the Discourse,” said Kolyokov, spinning around so he faced the vortex once more. “Interesting: you do know. Because you’ve died in body too. And the Discourse — is that where you live now? In the lines of chatter between the sleepers and their masters?”

You’ll die without me.

“Let me tell you something. I’ve been living in the Discourse, quite comfortably, for quite a while now. How do I know I’ll die?”

Trust your senses.

He laughed. “My senses are the one thing I know that I cannot trust here. One minute I’m in a metaphor of an old spy school I made — then I’m in the desert talking to Yahweh — the next I’m here in the sky, tossed about like a rag doll. And now — and now—” he squinted down “—there you are.”

Join with me, Fyodor.

The voice came from beneath him — she had coalesced now into her old metaphor; the beautiful Lena, draped in a hooded cloak. Her face uncovered, she was an ice-queen — as beautiful as the face of a glacier. She rose to meet him.

“If I join with you,” he said, “I’ll have surrendered to you. You’re too powerful in this place. And my Children — my beautiful Children — will finally be lost to me. They’ll become your playthings.”

Ours, said Lena.

“Our playthings, then? See? You admit it. But that is not why I risked so much to bring them to me.”

Fyodor, she said, her eyes ablaze with cold blue fire, you risked too much for a thing you may never have.

A rumbling came over the world then, and he realised with a horrible twist in his gut that here in the clouds, he’d misjudged the scale of things. He’d thought Lena was no more than a dozen metres off as she spoke with him. But no — she was much farther than that. She was a mountain face; a continent.

When one of her perfect hands finally reached him, fingers thick and long as rockets spread about him, and closed around him like a cage. The giant hand brought him closer to her eye, which stared at him through the spaces between those monstrous digits.

“Impressive,” said Kolyokov. “But if what you said is true — that we’re here in the Discourse, and this is just a metaphor you’ve made for me: then I’ve got nothing to fear from you. Everything — my dissolution, this — storm that you are. Just a metaphor. Just a dream. So what am I risking now, truly?”

My displeasure, she said simply.

And with that, the Goddess Lena lifted Fyodor Kolyokov over her head, to an altitude that would be in low orbit were this more than a metaphor, and with a snap of her wrist, flung him down through the clouds… down and down, until he plunged into the very deepest part of this metaphor’s ocean.

“Je-sus.”

The word echoed and boomed through the sky where Kolyokov floated. He peered up into the darkness and shouted: “Hello! Who’s up there?”

“This thing’s got nothing to do with us.”

Kolyokov frowned. The voice sounded, what? Italian? No. Not quite Italian though near to it. Italian-American, maybe.

An accent from an Italian-American twenty storeys high. Kolyokov treaded water and called out again. “Hey! Down here!”

“What about the old man?” Similar accent from a different speaker. Kolyokov shouted again, but he couldn’t compete.

“The old man’s not here. Maybe he’s dead. But we got two out of three and that ain’t too bad. C’mon.”

Kolyokov stopped shouting then — because the next thing he heard was a clang that was unmistakable: the sound of the hatch on his isolation tank, swinging shut for one last time.

“Oh no,” he said to himself, looking around at the dark waves that danced around him. “Oh not this.”

It wasn’t long after that that those waves pulled him under, and the darkness of the ocean became complete.