Dieselpunk: An Anthology (26 page)

She stopped on the street and surveyed her surroundings. A stone’s throw away, a ship floated down the Neva River and made its way out to the Baltic. The Neva wasn’t as big as the Mississippi, that was true, but it was still an impressive sight. Carriages, both horsed and horseless, passed either way on the road, and pedestrians cluttered the sidewalk. She almost hailed one of the carriages as it rode past, but decided in the end to walk the three miles to Rasputin’s apartment. She wanted the fresh air and the feel of the lively city under her feet. Besides, if she couldn’t ride a horse, she’d rather walk.

What Tabitha saw, instead, dismayed her: food-lines and hungry children. Angry young men clumped together smoking cigarettes, hunched in their fur coats and with caps pulled down tightly to their ears. Their furrowed brows reminding her of thunderheads on the Great Plains. She shook her head silently as she walked past the little clumps of disgruntled men. Gurdjieff had been right. A storm was brewing, and it was likely to be a doozy.

The Templar was about a mile from the monastery when she felt something strange. She couldn’t quite nail it to the wall, but she somehow knew she was being followed. Sometimes, out on the plains or out in the deserts of the Southwest, she could feel the same thing. Tabitha was hard-pressed to remember a time she’d been wrong on this kind of hunch. She turned into an alley between two stores.

She walked twenty paces and turned. A group of young men, five in all, walked into the alleyway. Blank looks were on their faces, not the brooding anger of the other men she’d seen. Just blank and vacant.

They stopped ten paces away from her, their wide eyes staring through her. They spoke in English and in unison: “We have been looking for you, Templar.”

“Reckon you found me,” Tabitha said, making sure her coat was out of the way of her pistol. They didn’t look armed, but she couldn’t be sure.

“
Yes. Our master wishes to speak with you,” said the group.

“
Your master?”

“
Yes. Our master. He wishes to speak with you.”

“
Mind telling me who he is?” asked the Templar.

“
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin,” replied the group.

“
Figured as much. Was just headed his way,” said Tabitha.

“
We will take you to him. You will follow,” they said and turned in lockstep. They left the alley and turned left, towards the apartment of Rasputin.

The Templar followed.

Tabitha felt a little like Daniel as she followed the group down the crowded street. They crossed the Anichkov Bridge with its four horse-tamers. She was hard pressed to keep her eyes on the young men ahead of her as she passed the statues. Finding them in the crowd again would probably be easy, of course, because very few others on the street were walking completely synchronous with each other.

Tabitha fixed her gaze again on the men and continued onward, taking a left onto the next major thoroughfare, and a right on the next. A few blocks after the last turn, the men took a sharp left, continued onto the next alley and turned right. It looked like more than just the average Petrograd alley. It was wide enough to fit two automobiles and was clean of refuse and debris, and had several stairs on either side that led up to a rear entrance on the second story of each apartment building. The group stopped in front of the third on the right. They stared up at the entrance, their eyes still as unfeeling and vacant as ever.

The Templar followed their gaze to the apartment building door on the second floor as she walked up. The last evil den she’d entered hadn’t looked half as ordinary; there were more skulls and carvings and spiderwebs. There was none of that here.

She stopped in front of the men and waved a hand in front of their faces. They just continued staring, but nothing more disturbing than the occasional syncronized blink happened.

“That where Rasputin lives?” she asked.

Silence.

“The master? Is that where he lives?”

More silence.

Tabitha sighed and turned around. She looked up at the door, idly scratching her neck with her right hand. She sighed again, gritted her teeth, and began her ascent to the lion’s den.

The Templar made it three steps before the sounds of feet slapping the pavement made her look over her shoulder. The men rushed Tabitha, crushing into and grabbing her.

One arm went around her waist, another her chest, another between her legs and around her right thigh. She hollered and tried to draw her pistol, but, lightning fast, one calloused hand clamped down on her mouth and another grabbed her wrist and yanked it around up and behind her back.

Tabitha, eyes wide, grunted in muffled pain as her other wrist was yanked behind her back. She bit the hand covering her mouth, but only received unyielding resistance and a mouthful of coppery blood for her trouble. She tried to kick at the men behind her, aiming for anything vital like knees or groins, but they quickly grabbed hold of her boots as they continued the steady climb upwards. The door came closer.

Tabitha tried once more to break free, but the man holding her wrist behind her back yanked up hard and fast, dislocating her shoulder. White flooded her vision as the nerves screamed at her brain that something was definitely not right. She hollered again and was surprised at the shrillness of her cry. Her next thought was of how easily she’d been taken.

This sure wasn’t good.

The group, still entwined around Tabitha, finished climbing to the top of the stairs and stopped. Adrenaline tunneled her vision and dulled her hearing, but she recognized a hand come out and knock politely on the door. The Templar continued to struggle despite the pain, again making her vision cloudy. Tabitha kicked with her legs, testing the strength of the men holding her, but she might as well have been fighting steel manacles.

The door opened. There, framed by the door, stood Rasputin. He had a long, poorly trimmed beard that, to Tabitha’s trained eye, looked thick enough to grab a handful of and yank his head from his tall, thin body. His hair was parted in the middle, longish and greasy, and his brows looked like giant brown caterpillars crawling above his eyes. But his eyes were the worst part. Bloodshot and wild, like a rabid creature full of malice, the irises coal black.

“Good afternoon, Dame Piotrowski,” Rasputin said in English, his thick, Russian accent marring the words and making them menacing. Tabitha screamed and thrashed in her captor’s grasp. “Stop that or I will have them wrench your other arm out of place,” said Rasputin. Tabitha flared her nostrils and narrowed her eyes up at Rasputin. “Bring her inside,” he said.

They carried her, screaming into the muffling hand the whole way, across the threshold and through the hardwood floored hallway, and into the first room on the left. It was a spacious bedroom with furs covering the floors and occultist paintings adorning the walls. The curtains were drawn, keeping the room in a permanent twilight. They, the men and the immobilized Templar, stopped in the middle of the room, and spun in time to see Rasputin shutting the door behind them.

The men held her as Rasputin walked around the room lighting candles and lamps. “The tsarina had this building outfitted with electricity,” Rasputin explained as he did so, “but I prefer the lamplight of my childhood. It is softer on the features and easier on my eyes.”

After lighting the lamps, Rasputin walked to where Tabitha hung in the grips of the five men. “Stand her upright,” he said, “but keep her bound and her mouth covered.”

They did so, uncoiling their limbs from her body and shuffling her upright, jarring her arm. She bit her lip to try and keep down the pain, but it didn’t help. Each man kept their arms on her wrists and her boots, holding her off the ground. She screamed again, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. Rasputin approached and looked down at her with those awful eyes. Tabitha looked away, struggling against the hand clamped over her mouth.

“
So, Templar, you have come all the way across the sea to take what is Rasputin’s?” he asked, smiling horribly. “You know,” Rasputin mused, “when I heard that a Yankee Templar had come to take what was mine,
rightfully mine
, I thought they would send a man. A bigger man. But, you, you are so slight and so lovely with your blonde hair and freckles. You are certainly not what I imagined.” He grabbed her chin and forced her face upwards. If it was possible, Rasputin was even stronger than the men holding her. “Look into my eyes, my dear,” he said, as two hands came from behind and pulled her eyelids open. Rasputin brought his face close enough for Tabitha to smell him and stared into her eyes.

Tabitha felt something deep inside of her. It was like Rasputin was in her mind, probing and rooting around like a wild hog. All the anger she’d felt over the years, the pity for herself after the murder of her husband and his lover, the guilt, and her need for forgiveness. The Templar felt her mind let go of her body, as if it didn’t need it anymore. Her legs felt weightless, her hands somewhere else. Tabitha tried to struggle, to force her arms and legs to break the vise-grip of the men holding her, to strangle Rasputin, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Her mind was awake, though, that was something.

“Ah, your quest for redemption,” Rasputin said, eyes widening inches from Tabitha’s own. “You Templars. Do you not know that sin and redemption go walking hand-in-hand through the forest of life? That we must experience one to truly know the other?

“
Put her down. She is mine now,” said Rasputin, taking a step back.

The men released her and she just stood there. She couldn’t feel the stomach churning pain in her shoulder, though she knew it was still dislocated. The Templar willed her hands to draw her pistol, but couldn’t make them move a fraction of an inch. Not even a finger.
Oh God
, she thought,
what has he done to me?

“
Hand me your sword, my dear,” Rasputin said, hand outstretched.

Tabitha drew her blade and handed it hilt first to Rasputin. He took it and admired the blade, turning it in his hands and running a thumb along a sharpened edge. “Ah,” he said, “a European broadsword. So unlike the curved blades of the Tatars.” He test swung it clumsily.

“Arseny,” Rasputin said, “come stand beside me.” One of the men behind Tabitha walked around and stood at attention beside Rasputin. “You are mine now, Templar. For now, your mind is not mine, only your body. Soon, though, your eyes will empty as they have with these men. Then, you will no longer think or feel anything other than love for me. Here, Arseny, take this blade.”

Rasputin held the sword to his left and Arseny, with eyes staring straight ahead, took it from him.

“Slit your throat,” Rasputin said.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Arseny struck the base of the blade into his own throat and drew the edge, slicing open his jugular. Blood poured down his shirt and began to well from his mouth. Arseny was soundless except for the gurgling of his own dying breath. He remained standing.

“Hand me the blade, Arseny,” said Rasputin. Arseny handed him the blade, blood trickling down to his pants and pooling on the floor. His eyes stayed fixed ahead as Rasputin stepped forward and grabbed hold of Tabitha’s buffalo coat and wiped the blade clean. Arseny dropped with a thud to the ground, his legs buckling beneath him. He was dead. Rasputin offered Tabitha the hilt of the blade and said, “Take it and sheath it.” Tabitha took the sword and sheathed it.

“
Now,” Rasputin said, “you others take the body from here and dispose of it. I would like to be alone with the Templar.”

The four men wrapped him in the rug he had died on and picked him up. They carried him out of the room. They were gone quickly and efficiently, in the way only a mindless servant can be. Rasputin turned and watched them go. He turned back to Tabitha as they politely shut the door.

“Ah, alone at last,” he said, walking to a wash basin that was set in a corner. He said over his shoulder, “Disarm yourself. Just put your weapons on the chair by the door.” Tabitha’s mind screamed as her body did what it was told, removing the bag the monks had given her and putting it in the seat, unbuckling her gunbelt and draping it over one side of the backrest, and putting her sword’s belt over the other.

“
Come,” Rasputin said from the basin, a wet washcloth in his hand. The Templar walked over and stood in front of him. “Look up,” he said. She did, and he began to wash the blood caked on her face. “I do not care for my newest apostle to be so unkempt,” Rasputin said as he scrubbed her face and rinsed the blood-covered rag in the basin. Finished, he tossed the rag to the side. “Lovely,” he said, turning her face up to his. Tabitha’s mind screamed as he began to lean his face down to hers.

Someone knocked on the door, just loud enough to be heard above the gypsy music. Behind the door, a voice said something in Russian. From the sound of it, the voice belonged to a young girl.

Rasputin straightened and replied, also in Russian. Tabitha could barely make out the words of the young girl, but understood enough Russian to know Rasputin had said, “Yes, my dear. Daddy will be there in a minute.”

He looked back down at Tabitha and said, “I apologize, but I must be going. They are wondering why I am not dancing with them. Sit on the bed and wait for me. I will have you tonight, after Felix and his wife have finished entertaining me.”