Rasputin's Bastards

THE GRAND INQUISITOR

As dawn came to the caravansary, Amar Shadak found himself puzzled. He’d expected to see at least one guard at the edge of the pit he’d reserved for Kontos-Wu and that little bastard Stephen. But here he was, standing outside the wide chamber beneath the caravansary’s mosque, and the lights weren’t even on. Someone would be fucking dead in an hour, he thought. Shadak found the switch, rolled his shoulders, and stepped through the archway and down the steps to the oubliette.

“Good morning, my dears,” he said in a pleasant tone, and waited for the satisfying cries from below. He took a breath. Licked his lips. Took another breath.

“Good morning,” he repeated. “Wake up. Amar has come to chat with you.” Shadak’s pleasant smile faltered. He strode over to the edge of the pit and leaned over. He licked his lips, and his mouth went slack. There was no one there.

He thought back to the twisting sands on the floor of a cave, and to the dance in the dust, when the world had betrayed him, his comrades had risen up as with one mind, and he’d fallen into the Black Villa for good.

He turned away.

Rapture, he thought, fucking Rapture all over again.

He turned and stepped out through the crumbled arches of the mosque. The world was dangerous now — ghosts walked here. No, he reminded himself. Not ghosts — the Children.

Across the room, Mrs. Kontos-Wu stirred.

“It’s time,” she said, in a thick Russian accent. “Zhanna?” said Uzimeri.

“What?” said Stephen.

There was no time for an answer. The door crashed open then, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu was on the move.

“Take no chances,” Shadak had said, a moment before, to the three fidgeting guards outside the tower room. “The Rapture has begun again, and it won’t be long before it comes upon us.”

The Rapture. That was what Uzimeri had kept calling it. Shadak knew it by a different name — he’d been fucked by it before. He didn’t know if he could beat it this time. But he took what steps he could.

He gathered his men together in the courtyard, and in the morning glow looked each one in the eye. Sure enough, one in four was not himself. As Shadak spotted one such man, he separated him out — and again and again, until he had determined which one was which.

Then, the en-Raptured ones placed in the midst of a circle, he set the others upon them to first beat them senseless and chain them together behind the main house. It would likely take a short time for the devil children to regain their senses and take possession of someone else.

Or so Shadak hoped. He had not attempted this before.

Once the en-Raptured were safely chained up, Shadak set about interrogating the remainder of his men. What had happened when Ming Lei’s jet had landed on the strip? They had debarked, yes — and the men who were now tied and beaten senseless had taken the prisoners to the mosque. Shadak did not care for that answer, however; his men gave it too quickly and confidently — as though they had not had to think about the question for a second. Shadak swore to himself. The bastard children hadn’t just ensorcelled the men he’d taken care of; they’d buggered with the memories of the rest of them too. They might have even fiddled with Shadak’s mind. Who knew?

Swearing aloud, Shadak then marched his men up to the security room, where a bank of a dozen television monitors gave a view of all parts of the courtyard and many of the rooms. The man on duty there through the night claimed that nothing had happened. But Shadak made him rewind the tapes anyway, to the time of the plane’s arrival.

Ah, he’d said when the time came, here we are.

And the seven of them watched, slack-jawed, as the prisoners moved through the front barbican, first towards the oubliette, and then to the tower — the place where Shadak was keeping Uzimeri. The submarine guy.

Shadak would have liked to head there straight away. But he had dallied a moment too long in the security room, and the little demons had the time to refocus their energies. It pissed Shadak off; he was so absorbed in the video footage that one of them had nearly managed to slip a knife between his ribs before he knew what was happening. Shooting first that one and then the other two was a reaction more in anger than self-defence. And that pissed Shadak off more.

“Okay,” he said, outside the tower room, “now.”

And with that, one of his men swung the great iron bar from the door, while another slammed his boot against the door.

It was amazing, thought Stephen, as Mrs. Kontos-Wu snapped the knee of the first one through the door, the difference between watching the woman at work and being on the receiving end of her peculiar skill-set.

She really was good.

No sooner had the first one fallen down than Mrs. Kontos-Wu rolled over and kicked the door closed against the second and third. As fast as that happened, Stephen rolled over to the fallen rent-a-cop, who was clutching his thigh and whimpering. He had a small Ingram submachine gun on a strap, and Stephen yanked it away from him. He rolled to the side and levelled it at the entryway. The door pushed open again, and as it did, Stephen fired. The sound was deafening — the light from the muzzle flash blinding — and two rent-a-cops fell backwards down the stairs.

Sometimes he had to remind himself: Mrs. Kontos-Wu wasn’t the only one who knew what they were doing. Stephen was no slouch himself.

“Shit!” Uzimeri scrambled back, and pointed at the feet of the now-screaming rent-a-cop who’d been left behind. Stephen looked, and instinctively held his breath.

One of the rent-a-cops had managed to drop something before they’d left: a small cylindrical canister, that was spewing what Stephen hoped was only tear gas.

Stephen lunged for it. Smoke was pouring out of the thing like a burst steam pipe, and as he put his hands around it, Stephen felt his eyes begin to tear and sting.

“The window!” said Uzimeri. “Ah! It hurts!”

It did hurt. Stephen could barely see, but he could still make out the glowing rectangle of the open window here in the tower. He flung the canister toward it.

And swore, as he heard the tink! tink! thunk!, of the metal impacting too low, and landing on the wooden floor of the tower room.

Uzimeri screamed and coughed as the gas welled up around him. Stephen found himself doubled over. His lungs demanded that he inhale, but he knew better than to give in. They’d be completely at Shadak’s mercy if he did.

If they weren’t already. The rent-a-cop who’d survived was making strangled bubbling noises now; who knew what had happened to Mrs. Kontos-Wu; and he and Uzimeri were blind and choking in this room. The next round of rent-a-cops, on the other hand, would have gas masks. And he didn’t think they’d be gentle.

“I’m going to fucking skin that bitch,” said Shadak, standing outside at the tower’s base and watching the tear gas drift northward in the morning light. He was standing alongside just three of his men now.

Three were in the tower. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were en-Raptured. Either way, it was a problem. The three men beside him were scared shitless; he could hear them muttering among themselves, about sieges and traps and ghosts that walked here among the living. Superstitious cowards, he thought. Even given the comforting plume of tear gas coming out of the arrow-slit, the likelihood that Kontos-Wu and the boy were clutching their throats like a pair of G-8 protesters — storming the room would be out of the question with these cowards at his side.

There was only one thing to do.

“Watch here,” said Shadak, and pointed at the tower. The three men nodded gratefully. After having seen what they’d seen inside the tower, watching from a safe distance was about their speed. “I’ll be back with reinforcements.”

And with that, keys jingling in his pocket, Shadak circled around the house to where he’d chained up the en-Raptured guards. They were still there, of course; Shadak’s chains were well-made and his locks first rate. He knelt down, and looked into one man’s eye after another. Finally, he stood, and addressed them all:

“Does anyone know why they are here?” he bellowed. They stared back like beaten dogs. “No? Good. I will unchain you now. We have work to do in the north tower.”

“The north tower?” said one. “What’s there?”

“What have we done to anger you?” said another. “We thought you had been invaded,” said a third.

“I am sorry!” shouted a fourth, thumping his chest as a chain came loose. “Whatever it is we have done, I for one am sorry for it and shall not do it again!” Shadak smiled as he worked the locks. They had no idea, of course. Their puppet-masters had fled, and these men were fresh to the day. Reborn.

And that was what Shadak needed now — fresh troops, with no idea what they were getting themselves into.

Stephen coughed as the poison air finally made its way into his lungs. He felt like he wanted to throw up, or to die, or to throw up and then die. He let the Ingram down into his lap. He didn’t want his finger anywhere near the trigger with the way the gas was working on him.

Stupid, stupid. He should have thrown the canister out the door and down the stairs. It was a bigger target and it was closer. If he’d been thinking — not letting this Uzimeri character make his decisions for him — that’s what he would have done.

Why the hell had Kolyokov trusted anything to him? Stephen was mystified. The only thing Stephen had managed to do was set them all up for a slow and painful death at the hands of a psychotic Turkish gangster.

Stephen coughed, and bent closer around the Ingram. When he felt the hand on his shoulder, he shook it off.

“F-F-F—” He coughed. “f-uck off.”

The hand returned. This time it held tight on his upper arm, and pulled. “Up.”

It was Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

Stephen stumbled upright. He held the Ingram by the stock. He was all but blind. Mrs. Kontos-Wu dragged him a few steps toward the window. He could feel her bending down to Uzimeri.

“And you,” she said. “Get up.”

How the hell could she even move in this miasma, let alone speak? Stephen could barely keep his balance. From the sounds of his protests, Uzimeri was in no better shape.

Yet within a few seconds, they were all shuffling across the room to the still-open door. Mrs. Kontos-Wu paused over the corpses of the two rent-a-cops outside to retrieve their weapons, then led the three of them down the stairs.

“Careful,” she said. “The stairs here are old and they are not too regular. Don’t want to fall.”

“N-no,” said Stephen. The air was clearing as they made their way down, and he was starting to feel better. Not better to the point where he could see straight and the rivers of snot running out of his nose had slowed any. Not better to the point where he could breathe without coughing.

But he was feeling well enough to realize that Mrs. Kontos-Wu wasn’t speaking in her normal voice. It was that heavily accented Russian voice.

The one he’d first heard her use at the Emissary, where she’d returned after apparently having been drowned by Amar Shadak’s smelly, diesel-powered Foxtrot submarine. The one that Konstantine Uzimeri had appeared to recognize just now, as belonging to —

“Z-Zhanna?” said Stephen.

“That is right, little one,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “The very Zhanna that poor Konstantine here has been telling you about all night. It was a good telling, Konstantine.”

“Praise—” a cough “—praise to Zhanna,” said Uzimeri.

“Stop it,” said Zhanna/Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “This religion of yours is very foolish, Konstantine.”

“Forgive me,” said Uzimeri.

They reached a landing near the bottom. Stephen was able to stand straight on his own now, and he could even see a little, enough to judge the round chamber at the tower’s base to be empty.

“Where are they?” said Stephen.

“Outside,” replied Zhanna/Mrs. Kontos-Wu, a little contempt sneaking into her voice. “They won’t come in again soon. They’re getting to be like Konstantine here — superstitious.”

“Forgive me,” said Uzimeri.

“But—” Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s grip on Stephen’s arm slackened for an instant “—but they’re not above shooting us as we come out the door. Stay here. I won’t be long.”

“Where are you going?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s hand slipped from his arm. Reflexively, Stephen grabbed at her and it was a good thing he did. Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s knees had buckled, and in another instant she would have tumbled down the stairs. As he held her in his arms, she began to cough.

Outside, Stephen could hear another kind of coughing: of small-arms fire. Taking Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s slack form in his arms, he pressed back against the wall, and waited for it to end.

“I will fucking skin her alive,” Shadak vowed under his breath.

He was pressed against the wall of the caravansary’s main house as he said it. He and four others had pulled back just in time to avoid the hail of bullets that had mowed down the remaining three of his makeshift squad. But it wasn’t too late to see that the ones firing were his other three men, whom he’d left to watch the tower.

Shadak knew what had happened as fast as the firing had begun; those dream-walking little bastards had gotten into his men, and driven the cowardice right out of them.

“Bastards.” There was nothing for it but to shoot them. Shadak raised the little Skorpion machine pistol he kept at his belt and fired a couple of rounds all but blindly around the corner. Then he spared a glance — only to see one man down, and two others with their hands raised.

“Sir!” shouted one. “What have we done wrong?”

“You have wounded Hugo!” shouted a second. “Do not fire please!”

“Ah!” yelled the third, whose name Shadak took to be Hugo. “I am bleeding!” Shadak’s instincts kicked in, and he whirled just in time to see the three men behind him shake their heads, and begin to raise their weapons — training them on him. Shadak was quicker, and emptied the rest of the Skorpion’s clip into their bellies. Their weapons fired off harmlessly in the air as they tumbled backwards with looks of wounded incomprehension on their newly liberated faces.

Shadak swore. Those little bastards would have him kill everyone in this caravansary before they were done with him. No one could be trusted — there was no one that Amar Shadak was not better off shooting, given the manner of the attack that he was now certain had been mounted against his stronghold here.

“Well, so be it,” he said, and stooped over the bodies of his men to gather their weapons and ammunition. “I will slay them to a man, if that is how the fight is going to go. If—”

Shadak stopped dead, dropping a green satchel of ammunition, as an all too familiar pain — the infernal scratching at his grey matter — began to blossom in his skull.

“No,” said a girl’s voice. One that, like the pain, was both familiar and well inside his cranium. “No more shooting.”

Shadak felt his fingers slacken, and his waist straighten —

— ah? —

— and then he was there, in the place again: a place of intolerable joy and peace, where fingers clutched and pulled at the substance of his brain like masseurs, and his mind spread across a field of light in a relaxed and delighted puddle. Peace was short-lived, however. Transcendence coalesced into the broad stones of a plaza, in the great courtyard of the Villa. The sky was bright and his hands clenched into small, soft fists.

“I’ll skin her,” he squeaked.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was near the end of the book and she had to say that it was a strange one. Usually, at this point, Becky and her friends would be closing in on the thief, or the kidnappers, or the smugglers. Things might look pretty perilous. But Mrs. Kontos-Wu was sure she’d never read a Becky Barker book where Becky had had to leave her best friend Bunny Miller in an abandoned warehouse bleeding from a gunshot wound, in order to save Jim from the fez-capped terrorists who’d shown they meant business by sending Jim’s severed left hand to Becky in the post. Mrs. Kontos-Wu wondered if the series had found itself a new author.

“Hey.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked up from the book and smiled. Lois was back! She was there, framed in the doorway to her dormitory room. Mrs. Kontos-Wu had to shield her eyes from the light — it was certainly bright out in the hallway! Brighter than daylight. Brighter than the sun, Mrs. Kontos-Wu was willing to bet.

“Hello Lois,” she said.

“Hello,” said Lois. “Are you enjoying the book?”

“Yes. Hey — how come you’re talking like that?” Lois was speaking with a funny accent today. Or a funnier accent than her usual Bostonian drawl, anyway. She sounded like Mrs. Kontos-Wu imagined that foreign secret agent talked in Chapter Nine, before Honey had taken her out with the ice pick.

“You know why I’m talking this way,” said Lois. “You know who I am.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu felt a wiggle in her stomach. She drew her knees up, and tried to focus back on the book. “Chapter Fourteen,” she read aloud. “‘A Necessary Evil.’”

“Snap out of it,” said Lois. “You know that this is all make-believe. It was shattered by that Kolyokov bastard. You shouldn’t come back here anymore.”

“Fuck off.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu said it before she knew what she was doing. Eyes wide, she put a hand to her mouth and drew a shocked breath. She couldn’t believe she’d just said that!

“You fuck off,” said Lois. “I was hoping to be able to count on you as a conscious operative — not have to dream-walk you through your manoeuvres. There are other things for me to be doing.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu closed the book. She could barely make out the words anyway; the light from the hallway was literally blinding her.

“Stop it!” bawled Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “I don’t want to be a conscious operative or whatever it is you say I should be! I’m busy reading! And I happen to like it here!”

Lois stepped into the room, and reached down to take Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s hand. “Of course you like it here,” said Lois sadly. “It was made for you to like it here. But if you stay here, you’ll die.”

As Lois spoke, the light from behind her grew — tearing into the substance of the wallpaper and the rug and the little study desk in the corner, like hot flame across newspapers. Mrs. Kontos-Wu tried to cover her eyes with the book, but it was no good. The light passed through like it was made of glass.

Lois tugged at her arm. “Come on!”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu had no choice. She stood up in a dizzying rush, and stumbled forward. Lois caught her in both arms, and helped her steady herself on a floor that seemed maddeningly insubstantial.

“Now,” she said, “pay attention. We’ve been holding Shadak and his men off as best we can, pitting them against one another. But there are more than we can deal with at any one time. So you’ve got to move quickly. You’re at the base of the tower now. When I say, you’ll lead your two friends in a run out the main door. You will run to your left, where you’ll see a large gatehouse. Run through the main gate, and wait. There’s a truck that’s making its way up from Silifke. It should be here in a few minutes. When it shows up at the gate, you’ll have a minute clear where you can get into the back. Do you understand?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu let the programming sink in. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Lois slapped her. “No! Don’t run a program through your head! That’s not how it’s going to be anymore! Do you understand?”

“I understand,” she said.

“Then good. Now listen carefully,” said Lois. “Manka,” she said. “Vasilissa. Baba Yaga.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu blinked. The light was gone. She was in a room at the base of the tower. There were bodies everywhere. Her eyes stung and her mouth and nose were wet.

And apparently she was propped on poor little Stephen Haber’s shoulder. “Zhanna?” said Stephen. “You’re back?”

“Who the hell is Zhanna?” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Come on, kid.” She looked from Stephen to an old man, who was staring up at her with an altogether creepy awe. “You too. We’ve just got a few minutes, if we want to get out of here alive.”

The old man grinned. “Ah,” he said. “Your friend is back in herself. See?” Stephen squinted at her. “Are you?” he asked. “No bullshit this time?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu thought about that — about exactly where she was; whether this was herself really; and whether the bullshit was finished or not — but immediately pushed it down again.

“No bullshit.” She said it uncertainly, but Stephen’s relieved smile showed he hadn’t picked up on it. That kid could be dense some days, no doubt about it.

Together, the three of them climbed down the rest of the stairs and made a break for the arched doorway at the tower’s base.

Shadak awoke with a mouthful of brackish spit and a sharp lump travelling down his throat. The lump was, Shadak knew with doomed certainty, the key to the padlock that held the chains in place around his shoulders and wrists and ankles. He let out a volatile stream of curses. The two men who stood over him looked down at him apologetically.

“We are sorry, Mr. Shadak,” said one.

“We do not know how this came to be,” said the second. “We found you like this. And—”

“You see, we cannot find the key,” said the first.

Shadak swallowed, and felt the key slide another few inches down his gullet. Christ — it was going to cut his insides to ribbons if he didn’t get to a doctor soon.

“That is because,” said Shadak, “I have swallowed the key.”

“One of the devils has made you do that,” said the first. “Just as one made me shoot poor Tomas, and caused Pyotr here try to shoot you although you were not looking.”

The second — Pyotr — gave Tomas a look.

“Where—” Shadak winced, as the key tore past a sphincter. “Where are the prisoners?” he finished.

“Escaped, sir,” said Tomas. “In a truck. Viktor tried to pursue on a motorcycle, but I am afraid that I threw a chain into his spokes before he could get going.”

“He is all right,” said Pyotr.

Shadak couldn’t have cared less whether Viktor was all right or not. But he didn’t want to antagonize his men at this point. It was a small blessing they were still apologizing and not just leaving him to die.

“That is fine,” said Shadak. He forced himself to ignore the pain. He modulated the tone of his voice to the familiar, pleasant lilting. He forced his mouth from a grimace, to pleasant repose. He looked first Victor and then Pyotr in the eye. “We will catch up to them later. For now, I want you to get to work on these chains. And contact our surgeon in Silifke. I believe that I will have need of him presently.”

“Of course, sir,” said Viktor, moving off to the tool shed to fetch metal-cutters. “I will find the phone,” said Pyotr, stepping around the corner of the main house.

And so Amar Shadak sat alone for a space beneath the brightening sky. He leaned back, and stared into it — the still deep blue, marred here and there by a light pasting of sun-painted cloud.

Men could lose themselves in such a vista. Too many men strove to do so. And that, thought Shadak as the key cut sharply into his innards, was the thing.

That was the thing.

“I’ll—” Shadak coughed, and felt the hated key hitch higher in his chest. He tasted salt in a mouthful of phlegm.

“I’ll skin her,” he said, and lowered his head against his shoulder, as the old love for her sunk like a spill of acid through the little cuts the key made down the middle of his chest. Alone beneath the lightening sky, Amar Shadak began to weep.