The Poison Master Read online

  There was a thunderous bang. The van shook and rattled, and Atyrom was flung sideways across Elena's lap. Gulnara screamed. Atyrom shouted with fury. Scrambling up, he wrestled with the door, punching and kicking until the damaged lock gave way and the door shot open.

  Atyrom fell out of the van, still shouting. Elena hastily levered herself across into the driver's seat and followed. The ambulance was trundling slowly down the road, the azure lights wobbling on top. Atyrom stumbled after it, bawling insults and curses.

  “Are you drunk, asshole? Look what you've done to my van!”

  As quickly as she could, Elena caught up with him. Atyrom was panting with rage. He shook off Elena's restraining hand and bounded through the snow, taking long, floundering leaps like a hunting dog. Elena struggled after him. Catching up with the ambulance, Atyrom pulled open the door and dragged the driver out. Both men fell heavily into the snow.

  “Hey!” Elena shouted. “Atyrom, stop! It was an accident. Leave him alone!”

  Atyrom was not listening. He hauled the ambulance driver to his feet and shoved him against the side of the nearest vehicle. All down the line, men were coming out of their cars to join in the argument, and to her dismay Elena saw the dark-coated figure of the militzia man heading purposefully towards them from the direction of the customs post.

  “Atyrom, for God's sake!” she called. “You'll get us arrested.” Atyrom was shaking the driver, pushing him against the tarpaulin side of the truck.

  “What about my van, you fucking bastard?”

  Something fell out of the driver's pocket: something long and bright that Elena could not see clearly. Atyrom stared down at it for a startled moment, then gave a roar of rage and head-butted the driver. A thin spray of blood spattered out across the snow. The driver gave a wail of pain.

  “Grave robber!” Atyrom shouted.

  Elena reached the irate Uzbek and hauled him back by the arms. The ambulance driver slumped back against the side of the truck as the policeman panted up. Elena caught a glimpse of a young, bony face beneath the militzia hat: one of those Ukrainian countenances with cold eyes set too far apart. She pulled Atyrom aside as the policeman swung the butt of an ancient Kalashnikov at the Uzbek's head.

  “Don't touch me!” Atyrom shouted, ducking. “Don't you fucking touch me! Look! Look!” Wrestling out of Elena's restraining grip, he pounced into the snow and thrust out a handful of dirty, glittering slush. The policeman stared. “Look what this bastard's stolen! Watches! Money! Teeth!”

  Appalled, Elena saw that Atyrom was right. A single golden tooth rested on the snow in his gloved palm, its root still stained pink.

  “Stealing out of the mouths of the dead!” Atyrom roared.

  The ambulance driver, wiping blood from his face with his sleeve, began to protest but the policeman snarled, “Shut up!” He swung the gun again. Elena reflexively ducked out of the way, but there was a hard, dull crack as the butt of the gun connected with the side of the driver's head.

  The ambulance driver dropped as if pole-axed and lay still. The policeman crouched in the snow, the pale eyes glaring up at Atyrom. “Well, what do you say, then?” he remarked, quite calmly. “Half for you, half for me?”

  Atyrom, evidently mollified, shrugged. “Ladna. Why not?”

  Elena watched in horrified silence as the policeman began to pick through the driver's pockets and placed a motley collection into the Uzbek's waiting hands.

  “What about him?” she said angrily, pointing to the driver, but no one seemed to hear. Elena knelt down in the snow and examined the man's head. The blood was already congealing, glazing like red frost across the driver's skin. Was he dead? Elena groped inside the man's sleeve. The skin felt cold and clammy. She could not feel a pulse.

  There was a shout from somewhere up near the front of the line.

  “Hey! We're moving!”

  Atyrom hauled himself to his feet and began to hurry back in the direction of the Sherpa.

  “Well, are you coming or what?” he said over his shoulder.

  Elena pointed down at the ambulance driver. “What about him?”

  “Leave him,” the policeman said. He spat into the snow. “Filth.”

  “No! We can't just leave him.” Elena said. “I think he's dead. And if he isn't, he soon will be in this temperature. And what about the ambulance?”

  Atyrom looked momentarily puzzled. “So? If he's dead, there's nothing we can do about it. Are you coming or not? If not, I'll leave you behind.”

  Elena, rehearsing a dozen arguments, got to her feet, but as she rose she noticed something embedded in the snow, not far from the fallen driver. She bent to look more closely, and saw a small black sphere. Reaching down, she plucked it out of its icy bed.

  The sphere was around the size of a golf ball and looked as frail as a sugar shell, yet it was unaccountably heavy. Its matte surface seemed to swallow light. Bewildered, Elena put it in her pocket and it weighed down her coat; she could feel it dragging the material as she hurried back to the Sherpa, but by the time she reached the vehicle she had forgotten all about it. With the light of battle in her eye, she climbed back into the damaged van and began to tell Atyrom precisely what she thought of him.

  The argument—with Gulnara echoing Elena's every pronouncement—lasted all the way down the long road to Tashkent.

  ST. PETERSBURG 21ST CENTURY

  Beyond the open door of the apartment block, the snow breathed a winter cold and lessened the ammoniac reek of the stairwell, so that Ilya Muryomets could smell his own blood. The hot, meaty odor filled the air, as though the whole world was bleeding rather than just one man.

  Ilya's hand fumbled to his side; his shirt was sticky and stiff. He remembered, distantly, that the dealer had knifed him; the situation, so carefully engineered, had gone disastrously wrong.

  Think, he whispered to himself. You were a bogatyr, a hero, a son of the sun… think. Then the soft clutch of heroin took him, shutting him off from both understanding and pain.

  Ilya could no longer see clearly, but he could still hear. A confused blur of sound rushed around him: snatches of conversation across the city; the gulls crying over Sakhalin, thousands of miles away; a door shutting in icy Riga with a sudden decisive thud. All of these sounds became distilled as Ilya listened, resolving into the steady seep of his blood onto the concrete floor.

  Ilya Muryomets' mouth curled in a rictus grin. The glittering winter light glared through the door of the hallway, sharpening the shadows within. He had to get outside, escape into winter before the rusalki came for him, but his feet moved down the stairs with a slowness that suddenly struck him as comical. He leaned back against the wall and shook with mirth, the breath whistling through his punctured lung like a ghost's laugh.

  He realized then that someone was watching him. He turned with a start, but it was only Ludmila Murmanova from the upstairs apartment, clutching a bag of withered apples and gaping at him in undisguised horror. He wondered what she saw: a gaunt man with pale hair and paler eyes, like a wounded wolf.

  Ilya's laughter wheezed dry. He wiped the blood from his mouth and murmured, “Oh…good day, Mrs. Murmanova. Been shopping?”

  Ludmila Murmanova edged past him and fled up the stairs. The slam of her steel door echoed through the stairwell.

  The noise stirred Ilya into motion and he staggered down the stairs and out into the winter afternoon. He wondered why he was even considering flight. He didn't have a chance, Ilya thought, as the sweet haze of the drug started to wear thin and reality—as cold as the day—began to intrude. He had never been able to escape the rusalki. His side was beginning to hurt now. His lungs burned and he could see his own fractured breath spilling out into the air.

  Clutching his side, Ilya tried to run, but he managed only a few paces before the pain brought him to his knees in the snow. The world grew dark, then bright again. Ilya began to pant in panic, looking around.

  Across the street, sheltered by the wall, stood a man.
His gloved hands were folded in front of him; his face was broad and pale beneath a furred hat. His eyes were black, without visible whites, and they glistened like oil in the pasty folds of his face.

  “Help me,” Ilya Muryomets tried to say, but the words were a whisper. The snow was searing his hands. He struggled to rise, but out on the Neva the ice splintered like breaking glass. Ilya looked up and saw that it was already too late.

  A rusalka was rising from the river. Numbly, Ilya watched as she slid over the bank of the Neva and started to comb the ice from her hair with bone-thin fingers. He thought for a moment that she might not have seen him. But his heartbeat was slowing in the impossible cold, echoing through the winter world like a bell, and when he raised his hand to touch his injured side the blood crackled beneath his fingers. It made almost no sound at all, but the rusalka heard it and her head went up like a hunting dog's. Beneath the glistening frost of her hair, her eyes were the color of water, but then, suddenly, he was seeing through the illusion.

  He saw a small, pinched face beneath a fluttering flap of skin. Her hands were curled and clawed, with fingers spreading up from both sides of the wrist. She looked nothing like a human woman, but Ilya had learned long ago that the rusalki maintained a glamour to hide their true appearance.

  The rusalka glanced from side to side with exaggerated slowness: she was playing with him. They hear everything, Ilya thought in despair. If a single feather drifted down to the snow, she would hear it. She is like me.

  Slowly, the rusalka smiled with a mouth full of needles.

  “No, no,” Ilya heard himself whisper, over and over again, but the rusalka rose like a disjointed puppet and stalked towards him. Blood filled his mouth with a rush, and he spat into the snow. The rusalka, murmuring, crouched beside him on backward-bent knees and lifted up his chin so that he could look into her face.

  It was the last thing he wanted to do. He could see through the rusalka's eyes; all the way to the back of the north wind, all the way to the end of the world. The rusalka bent her head so that the cold curtain of skin fell across his face and kissed him, freezing the blood on his lips and breathing arctic air into his mouth. He could feel the thin spine of her split tongue traveling down his throat, scouring it clean of blood and sealing the vent in the wall of his chest.

  His lungs gave a convulsive heave. He knelt, gasping. The rusalka scooped up a handful of bloody snow and tasted it as though it were ice cream. A curious expression, of mingled greed and regret, crossed her face and then she sidled away, her image drawing the sunlight into itself until she was no more than a vivid shadow against the snow, and then was gone.

  And Ilya raised his head and cried aloud, because she had healed him and he would live, and this was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Some time after the rusalka had healed him, Ilya rose and brushed the snow from his frozen hands. When he looked across to the apartments, he saw that the stranger had gone. Uneasily, Ilya drew his coat closer about him and began to wander along the Neva, beside the eroded concrete fortresses of the tower blocks.

  The rusalki were whistling a storm out of the north. Ilya could hear them as they hid deep in the forests around the Beloye Mor, beyond the Arctic Circle, singing up the wind. Patiently, he walked on, waiting for the storm to break. He felt as light and empty as air. The last time he had been so close to death had been ten years ago, up in the Altai, and that had been the last time, too, that he had seen a rusalki. He had been shot, during a deliberately clumsy and obvious escape from an internment camp, and he really thought, then, he had been successful in trying to die. His enemies, however, were eternally vigilant. He had watched with his dying sight as the rusalka slipped down out of the trees to whisper healing into his mouth, her fingers water-soft against his skin and a new moon rising through the bones of the birches. He had pleaded with her to have pity, but she had only smiled a cold drowned smile and made him live.

  Since then the world had changed, and Ilya had lost his way within it. He did not understand these new times: a day when there were no more heroes but only the will of ordinary people. He had made and lost a fortune. If he wanted money these days, he had to work for it on the building sites or scaffolds of the city. It seemed to him that all heroes came to dust or blood or this half-life of his—enduring, like radiation. Yet he still took advantage of the advances of this scientific age: medicine to ease sickness, drugs to ease the soul. He would have to seek out a dealer soon—one of the runners who hung around Centralniye Station—and perhaps for a while he could pretend that he was nothing more than another casualty of the late twentieth century and not the last of the bogatyri.

  There were no heroes any more, and men born in the twelfth century were not supposed to see the dawn of the twenty-first. There were not supposed to be supernatural creatures that fed off love and blood, though sometimes Ilya watched the fanciful programs on the television and wondered whether such ideas might be gaining in strength; whether there might be a clue in this now long-standing rationalism to his own plight. Genetic modification or black magic? Behind their glamour, it sometimes seemed the rusalki did not look so very unlike the small grey aliens that had become so popular nowadays. If one was to believe the TV, everyone in America seemed to be seeing them, and the thought made Ilya shudder.

  He walked on through St. Petersburg, up the wide channel of Nogorny Prospekt. He could hear the storm now, sweeping down from the north, veering out over the Gulf of Finland. He stood still, listening with unnatural acuteness as the first wave of the storm drenched the city in a veil of ice. Thunder rolled overhead, cracking the frozen Neva with a sound like gunfire. Ilya stood quite still and let the storm break around him. Its passing left him deafened and cold through to the bone, but still unmercifully alive. It had been a warning, no more, from the forest's drowned witch- children, and when it was over Ilya sighed, then began trudging up towards the station.

  The aftermath of the storm had left the city silent and deserted. The skies cleared to a pale haze and Ilya could see the crimson smear of sun far away to the west. Time to get off the streets, he thought. Time to get drunk.

  There was a bar off Nogorny Prospekt which he sometimes frequented. Entering its dark environs, Ilya ordered a double vodka and felt it warm him all the way down to his heart. He put his hand inside his damp clothes, feeling furtively for the wound, but there was nothing. The storm had washed his clothes clean of blood. The rusalki were fastidious; they did not like to see the signs of a life lived hard.

  Ilya drank in silence, for he had learned long ago to seal his tongue against the secrets that might otherwise be spilled. The bar was crowded. He thought, once, that he glimpsed the pasty-faced, black-eyed stranger who had been watching him by the river, but when he looked more closely, no one was there. He stayed in the bar until midnight, drinking hard, until the memory of who and what he had been had become numbed, and he could stumble back to what passed as home to sleep and dream.

  Kazakhstan/Uzbek border 21st century

  Atyrom pawned the teeth as soon as they reached Tashkent, but by this time both Elena and Gulnara were too weary and disgusted to make further protests. They watched as Atyrom carefully counted his bounty out onto the pawnbroker's table. The teeth glittered as they fell, like the mockery of a smile. Atyrom glanced sourly at Elena and his sister, clearly expecting another barrage of criticism, but Elena, at least, had already decided that she had said everything she was going to.

  “It'll pay for the damage to the van,” Atyrom said for the twentieth time, as though reasoning with children. Gulnara muttered something sour and looked away. Elena thrust her hands further into the pockets of her overcoat and tucked her chin into her collar, though the room was stuffy in contrast to the bitterly cold outside.

  The pawnbroker's office smelled of paraffin and despair, making Elena wrinkle her nose. Inside her right hand pocket, her fingers curled around the small, hard sphere. Although the thing had been in her possession for so short a time
, she already found herself clutching it like a talisman. The little sphere felt hot and smooth, and Elena tucked it into her palm until her hand grew comfortingly warm. The thing seemed to beat with a pulse of its own, or perhaps it was only echoing her own agitated heart.

  She had no reason to feel guilty, Elena told herself again. Atyrom had acted before either Elena or his sister had been able to stop him; it was not their fault. Then the pawnbroker gave a voracious grin at the sight of a fake Rolex watch and Elena's guilt flooded back, hot and fresh as blood across the snow.

  Atyrom had emptied his pockets now and begun an earnest conversation with the pawnbroker; they were speaking Uzbek, which Elena was unable to follow. A woman wearing a shalwar kameez came in with a tray and three little glasses of sweet tea, then disappeared. Elena stared around the room, noting the detritus of lives: old shoes gathering dust, the entrails of a radio scattered across a crumpled newspaper. She tilted her head to read the headline. “Uzbekistan regains glory!” it read in Russian, with a pride that was now old, and wholly misplaced.

  Elena's hand stole beneath her coat to the inner pocket where she still kept her Party card. She fingered the square of laminated plastic, thinking—with a familiar distant astonishment—of the events that had brought her here to a pawnbroker's back room. She'd studied philosophy at university along with astrophysics, and a memory of the Rektor flashed briefly before her mind's eye: face flushed with enthusiasm before a blackboard as he explained the differences between the Aristotelian notions of primary and efficient cause.

  Elena allowed herself a brief, wry smile. The efficient cause of her presence here was a simple need for money: the only reason there was to accompany her friend Gulnara and a man she didn't like a thousand kilometers south before the end of winter, with a vanload full of black market clothes from the Emirates and a handful of Western videos. She was hoping for a hundred dollars—enough to pay the rent for another month and put the bulk of it into the box under the mattress. Elena smiled as she thought of the box. Every tenge they could spare went into it: Anna's waitressing wages, Elena's cleaning money, their mother's pension, and the results of occasional forays such as this one. The fund was growing too slowly, but if they were careful and no disasters like illness occurred, they should have enough by spring.