Rasputin's Bastards

THERE ARE NO GUILTY PEOPLE

Stephen looked up from his metaphorical notepad. The darkness around him was becoming brighter. For a moment, he saw himself on a great plain. A huge rolling cloud boiled overhead — a deep yellow cloud the colour of an old bruise. Stephen stood and stretched, his toes splaying across the dry, stony soil. He felt a hot wind on his face — and heard a humming, like a thousand voices — and then he saw things fly past him: a great axe and a ballpoint pen and a flurry of paper and clocks and at some point he realized that the cloud had dropped a vortex on top of him and around him, as the noise grew louder and the dust whipped around him and he felt his life strip away for a moment and a great bubble well up inside him and he felt as though he could reach out and make the world of wind and artifice dissolve with but a touch and then —

And then the metaphor of the battleground congealed once more. It was no longer a dry plain — now, it was a sea bed. And it was crowded with combatants.

Some were small — he saw Zhanna, a great bolt of silver that arched up from the ocean floor; other children whose names he couldn’t tell, the same silvery energy. And in their midst, he saw what could only have been Alexei — a huge, black-robed creature with an enormous phallus sticking out of its middle. Except it wasn’t a phallus at all — it was too high, and it was prehensile. It lashed up to the cloud, tearing long, rippling gashes in it. The cloud, meanwhile, twitched in other spots and sent tendrils down like the tips of whirlwinds.

Those tendrils snatched at the various children, infecting their silvery perfection with a kind of ink. The infection didn’t stay — Stephen could see some of them slaking it off, stepping out of it like a casing, leaving it to dissolve over the ocean — but it slowed them.

Only the thing in robes — a twisted, Freudian death figure — seemed immune. It lashed up and up, cutting gash after gash as the metaphorical sea rumbled and shook with a great screaming. A great many rents appeared in the cloud — more than could be accounted for by the single creature’s lashing. But the thing had its own defences, and sent tendrils up to lay hold of those others. They writhed and screamed in its grip.

The thing that was Kilodovich turned back then, to the smaller sparks that were the children. He waved them back. He fixed on Stephen.

RETREAT! He shrieked. AWAKEN!