Pulev lumbered out through the back door of the Quiet Pool, slammed it, pressed his mighty back against it in his sumptuous, shimmering fur coat, and listened. A cheerful wariness had frozen on his good-natured, cunning hippo face. He was breathing hard with his whole vast, fat body. Seemed quiet… Pulev shook out his hand. Yees… landed a proper one… He hit like a horse kicking, and this time he’d given that impudent fellow card-player a particularly juicy right. The man had opened his maw, jumped across his path: not letting you past, he said. So Pulev—crack, no backswing… sent him spraying. Yees. What he could do, he could do.
His head hummed: he’d been at the baize since the previous evening. Gone bust three times. How many hookahs of silence, how many carafes of tobacco vodka he’d put away, there was no counting. Still, he’d won a wad of seven thousand and jumped ship. No wonder they’d got cross… so he’d cracked him with his right… and legged it. Couldn’t catch his breath. His heart was hammering like a sparrow’s, barely keeping up. But the wad warmed his chest; he could hear the bonds creaking. Oof… if only he could get his breath.
Snow swirled in the yard. Getting light already. Empty. Quiet. No… some skinny oddball was brushing snow off a cadaver. What a wretched beast: why did respectable establishments let people in on things like that? Pulev sat on the steps and turned up his fur collar—beaver, soft, steeped in expensive cigar smoke. He’d won that too, from a drunken caravan man. And it was just his size: no pinching at the shoulders or belly, a fit for a tsar. Fancy that. Its last owner had been as fine a figure of a man as Pulev, yet managed to drink himself into losing everything.
Having caught a little of his breath, Pulev began filling his pipe. The door behind him opened a crack. A ratty little face poked out, its moustache red with bloody snot. It blinked and stared, scarcely able to stretch its eyelids over the little eyes bulging with hatred. Pulev smirked. ‘Still alive, are you? Go to bed.’
‘There he is! There he’s sitting!’ the injured card-player yelled, choking and spraying from his mangled nose. The gaming manager appeared beside him and looked sternly at Pulev.
Pulev broke into a broad smile. ‘What? Everyone knows the rules. Once you’ve left, you’ve left. What happens at the table stays at the table!’
‘You won’t be playing here again,’ said the manager, and shut the door. The victim’s bubbling protests came through it—‘What do you mean? That’s all?’—then fell silent. ‘Big deal.’ Pulev drew on his pipe and puffed. ‘I’ll play somewhere else. Or give it up altogether. When’ll I be that lucky again?’ He smiled to himself, turning the pleasant events of his fortunate night over in his murky, darkened head.
Suddenly Pulev froze, biting down on his pipe. ‘Take me apart in six…’ The lad brushing the horse had begun changing its batteries and glanced his way. ‘And may my mother unlove me… That’s Lefty. My old pal. The star of the acid Fieldlands. Traitor.’ Pulev would have known that little bell of a boy from four posts away: the chicken shoulders, the porcelain neck, the switchblade of a nose you could open letters with. Lefty, though, had not recognised his old companion beneath the shaggy beard and fur coat. Clockmakers’ memories were full of holes after they came back from the Field, especially at first.
Some six months ago, word had gone round that Lefty had perished in the Cursed Field. Two of his guides had been found dead and twisted at the boundary: a sure sign that the Clockmaker himself was long gone. Before that, the whole bickering pack of capital and local bounty hunters—Pulev among them, naturally—had raced each other around the Fieldlands looking for him. There had been a hundred thousand on his head. A hundred thousand! As much as a dozen raiders, or a pair of forest tsars. And no wonder… The pup had crippled Kholos Scylla, the richest magnate in Ionica. In spring, for some damned reason, he had gone off to Vasilissa, where they revered him as a great master of dew-gathering. Well, at some ball or reception or whatever they had in high society, he had come face to face with Kholos Scylla and, for no reason at all, roared straight into him at point-blank range. Roared so hard the poor fellow’s face split and his eye ran out. A second later Lefty stuck him with an ice pick and bolted. And all this in respectable company: generals, ladies, little dogs, and that sort of crowd.
A hundred thousand. And there it stood, twenty paces away, plain as day. Pulev felt a clammy slime of sweat creep down his sides. No, not greed. Worse: the gambler’s fever. Easy. This was serious business. It had to go smoothly, no scaring him off. Trying to look casual, Pulev reached into his shoulder holster and transferred his five-shot Deed to his coat pocket. Handier that way. He checked the pistol by feel. Seemed all right. The main thing was to stay calm… Reliable pistol, full magazine. He squeezed the grip in the hot pocket. Someone else’s pocket, unfamiliar: sand, sticky small change, bits of sweet wrapper. Disgusting. Ugh… and his palm was sweating.
Lefty had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. A dead end. No weapon in sight. Maybe in the coat, in a pocket? No, hardly: nothing dragging, nothing bulging. Empty pockets. Even if he had something tucked in his belt, he wouldn’t get it out in time. Lefty’s roar wasn’t much; he could scarcely stop even one bullet. Why wasn’t the fool taking better care of himself? You almost felt sorry for him. Poor, poor little Lefty. Poor he might be, but the bounty was rich. When luck came your way, you had to take it. And if it was wrong, well, he’d repent and give a bit of alms. Still, everything inside him fluttered. It was as though a burning train were running through his guts. Whichever way you looked at it, the boy was a rykar. A little dangerous. To hell with it… Five seconds’ work. He could go quietly closer, make certain, shoot from ten paces. Done. Well then, Father Viy, keep me safe. Pulev stood up.
Lefty had lifted the second battery from the ground and was about to fit it into the socket on the cadaver’s flank when footsteps sounded behind him, stumbling and hurried as death’s. A pistol was cocked with a musical click. Lefty turned as though in a dream. A human thundercloud in a splendid fur coat was advancing on him, aiming straight at his face and shouting, ‘Good morning, brother Lefty!’ Lefty shrank back, bared his teeth, and felt the loathsomeness of the Void beneath his heart. His body became a stranger’s; a desperate roar tore itself from his chest. A shot… Something struck his forehead like the blunt back of an axe. The roar choked. Pain. Darkness snapped shut its iron jaws and swallowed Lefty into the cramped snake-pit a person enters in the instant before death. One more shot and he was finished. Instead, as though through broken glass, Lefty heard Pulev’s strained puffing and stifled curses.
Pulev’s back turned to ice. Jammed. The slide had jammed! Hissing and clacking his teeth, he battered the pistol and stared, spellbound, at what the boy was becoming before his eyes. Five paces in front of him stood an ugly, evil dream, a foul shadow of the Cursed Field in a grey coat. Lefty was still dazed by his own roar, but already his malevolent spider-eyes were searching for Pulev. And Pulev could only puff and scrape his palm against the slide, no longer remembering how to fire the useless pistol. Into his own mouth, perhaps?
The next second his hundred thousand lunged at him. At the last moment Pulev howled and swung a heavy arm. Lefty flew aside like an empty box, but before he could fall he hurled himself at the fur coat again like a mad dog. Pulev never even understood how he had come to be running away. He had not run since childhood, considering it undignified for a man of his proportions, which made him all the more astonished at how well he could do it. His whole self had become a running machine. Every joint seemed greased; his heavy belly rang with a menthol lightness; the skirts of the weightless coat lifted in flight like a devil ray’s wings. Snow in his face, walls, walls, a turning, black windows, not a soul. Ahead, the tunnel of an archway with dim light at its end; behind, the echoing scrape of footsteps. Oh, oh… So this was how ingloriously he would die. If only he could reach the street. Not in a piss-soaked archway…
A miracle… He burst out beneath the green morning sky. Turned, expecting to meet the monster’s leap with his face. When the big man fled, Lefty had thrown himself after him. His light body, seething with emptiness, had been ready to catch the victim’s bulk in three bounds. But at once he discovered that his slippers were flying in opposite directions on the ice. He skittered on the spot like a wild cat on wet parquet, fell, sprang up, and try as he might could not catch Pulev’s iron-shod boots.
They ran from the archway onto the bridge. Pulev looked back. Lefty was following, his slippers sliding; he was even falling behind. The Field shadow had dropped away from him. He was no longer as frighteningly twisted as he had been after the roar. Now Pulev was merely running away from an unarmed boy. Panic gave way to an almost cheerful lightness; only his heart laboured, pumping reluctant blood. Right… steady. All was well. On the run, Pulev tried to sort out the slide. Now, nearly, nearly… Then he would stop and shoot the vermin.
Lefty came to his senses. Where was he running, and why? Damn… At first the big man had bolted like a terrified pig; now he was keeping up a steady hippopotamus trot and looked as though, at any moment, he might recover his wits, stop, and shoot his hapless pursuer. They crossed the bridge. Iced granite rang beneath their heels along the embankment. Too late to turn back, nowhere to turn aside. Cursed slippers: he could neither catch him nor escape. God… so stupid he could cry. Empty Joker bottles stood on a post of the railing. One seemed to jump into his hand of its own accord.
Pulev felt the pistol become a weapon in his hand again. His fat finger crept vindictively onto the trigger. He was on the point of stopping and emptying the magazine into his pursuer when he heard Lefty’s ragged voice behind him: ‘Stop! I’ll shoot!’
‘He’s armed.’ The thought scratched like some loathsome reptile through Pulev’s suddenly weakened belly. Oh, he had done a bad thing. He should never have done it. All that damned greed. The shame… Something struck him, not very hard, beneath the shoulder blade. ‘This is death,’ thought his hunted sparrow’s heart. Something fine drew taut to breaking point, snapped inside his chest, and everything vanished.
The bottle bounced off the broad back like a ball. The big man suddenly began to topple and fell like a straw scarecrow slipping off its pole. Living people do not fall that way. Lefty flew up to the body sprawled on the grey ice, kicked the enormous pistol-clenching fist as hard as he could, slipped, and fell beside it. Choking on the icy air, he struggled to catch his breath. A haze rose above the dead man’s trousers. A sharp stink. Lefty doubled up with bilious retching and crawled a little way off. The dead face gazed dimly at him through small, unmalicious, narrowed eyes. Only now did he recognise Pulev. Goodness, how he had lost weight. He used to weigh as much as a cadaver’s hindquarters, go clean-shaven, know everything about everyone, and run his own gang of bounty hunters. He had been a decent fellow, really, but rather dim: he could never keep more than two thoughts in his head without getting them tangled.
Lefty felt his face, examined his hands, and found no distortions. Apparently it was only with that roar that he had expelled the last remnants of the Void. In the old days, on returning from the Field, he would have been handed over to the doctors and technicians of the Exodus House. Kazimirov and Lisovskaya would examine him; together they would perform the rite of transfiguration, after which he was prescribed at least three days’ rest in the Crematorium baths, fine coverings steeped in morphine and balsamin, and the tender ministrations of gentle sisters. Little by little, Lefty got his breath back.
The transfiguration had played a cruel trick on him. Treacherous euphoria. On waking, he had imagined everything was as it had been in the golden days, when he could walk about Vasilkov barefaced and unarmed and everyone would simply smile at him… But things were different now, you idiot! If strangers recognised him, they would report him—or, like Pulev, try to shoot him. Not a step outside his room without a mask and two pistols! And perhaps, if he were very careful from now on, he might manage to get out of here alive, in one piece, and with all his treasures.
Silence. He could hear the snow falling. A year ago, over the New Year holidays, Vasilkov and the Crematorium had glittered with thousands of lights, and the music had thundered so loudly that the Cursed Field drew back and seemed to weaken. Crowds of merry pilgrims filled the streets; singers, acrobats, jesters, dwarfs, and prostitutes entertained the carnival guests as best they could. Little restaurants and wake-houses packed to bursting; masks, fireworks, the sour smell of salutes; trains of sledges drawn by troikas; stalls heaped with street food, and drink running from every tap. And now? A few strings of lights in the windows, sickly tinsel and fir branches underfoot, and a dead fat man in the middle of the street. Time to get up and clear out of here, quickly.
Suddenly Lefty felt the touch of the Cursed Field, as though a cold hand had slipped into his chest and tugged at his heart. An ugly tinny clatter sounded, and a tall, barefoot woman in a light summer suit came out of Stable Street onto the embankment. She stopped beneath a blind streetlamp and stared into the Cursed Field. A gusty, damp wind came off the sea and began savagely worrying her bright blue hair.
It was Sevastyana Lisovskaya, queen of the Fieldlands. The snow and cold did not trouble her in the least. Nor did the several arrows sticking out of her back and neck. Lengths of string, threaded with fishing bells and empty tins, were tied to the shafts. Her outline wavered, like a blurred photograph. Some bastards had shot her with crossbows so that she would rattle with tins like a dog caught by cruel children; so that everyone would know in advance that the queen was coming.
Once, Yana Lisovskaya had been like a beloved elder sister to Lefty—only closer. She had been his mentor, and not merely in the acid arts. When they hid from the others in the warm shallows of the Cursed Field and were alone together, she taught her young friend not only useful acid lore but many pleasurable things as well. Among them, how to break the company’s sacred oath without consequences. Oh yes… without consequences. After what had happened to her in the Cursed Field, after she had become what she had become, all his memories of her seemed to have been sealed in thick plastic bags: frozen solid, beyond any hope of thawing. His mind shouted at his heart: ‘Look at her—that’s your dearest friend. She loved you. And didn’t you love her? Can you really feel nothing?’ ‘Nothing,’ his heart replied. ‘Forgive me, and leave me alone.’
Lisovskaya looked at Lefty with empty eyes. An arrow protruded from her throat, its steel tip gleaming dully, and did not prevent her from not breathing. She was standing too close: the Void bore down on Lefty like an icy press; a metallic taste soaked everything around them; the fur of Pulev’s coat stood on end, and patterned cracks spread through the grey embankment ice, which began melting at the edges. ‘Well, what do you want?’ Lefty asked, crawling farther away. ‘Nobody can help you. You simply aren’t there. Go away.’ He waved her off.
Yana turned and walked away along the embankment. Clattering and jangling, the tins bounced after her; behind their ringing the emptiness shifted and stretched. A block farther on, Yana turned into Linden Square and disappeared. The saddest tinny clatter in the world faded with her. The Void receded. After it, the cold air tasted sweet to Lefty. Bitter memory and pity tickled his eyes and throat; he was ready to give a small, quiet sob, and damned Pulev, it seemed, was waiting for at least one tear, his dead eyes fixed on Lefty. But Lefty only sniffed and gave a short sigh.
It was fully light now. The sky had run out of snow, and against its brightening azure the black, nocturnal body of the Cursed Field emerged. Now it lay above the sea in all its alien beauty, stirring, twitching its nervous tentacles, whispering like a late visitor on the other side of a wall, and flickering with small, thunderless bolts of lightning. An armoured car rattled down the street, its turret pierced, its gun fallen inwards, and the Stavrian coat of arms(*) on its side. Behind it came the clatter of tall rykar horses. Swarm rykars dozed in the saddles, wrapped in black felt cloaks. Farther up the street there were more hoofbeats and roaring engines. Lefty did not know whose gang this was—perhaps that of yet another pretender claiming to be Tsarevich Stavr XXVIII. In any case, anything might be expected of them: they could start on him, or simply shoot him out of boredom. Lefty went down the embankment steps towards the water. He had to wait for them to pass.
He sat on the cold steps, turned up the collar of his cold greatcoat, and pushed his hands into its cold sleeves. Far away, on the opposite shore of the Children’s Sea—so called for its shallowness—the outlines of Guernica could be seen through the nocturnal depths of the Cursed Field. His dear native town seemed close enough to touch: six makhs as the crow flew. Above it rose the twin summit, the jagged silhouette of Castle Bezdez, and the one-eyed tower. Farther east stood the cliff of Yavros; on its very brink the Yavorov family home was just discernible. In that old stone house with its mysterious tower, little Lefty had often spent whole days, sometimes entire weekends and holidays. His cousins Lyutovik and Yagr had lived there, and his beautiful cousin Poleya. Lefty had been the youngest of that happy little band, a cherished pet among the older children. All three had long been dead… What was wrong with him? Tears had come to his eyes after all. In truth they were never far away, and now, once again, he began rubbing his eyes irritably with his sleeve. When would he finally develop a man’s character? Damn it. But the tears kept coming, and Lefty stopped trying to hold them back. Evidently these were for Yana, and for Pulev, and for almost dying for nothing; for the agonising transfiguration, and for everything that had happened to him since the last time he had cried.
When he had cried himself out, Lefty grew still and stared into the Cursed Field. Memory drew him into the past, to the last peaceful day of childhood.
Next episode https://bezdezna.com/en/book/chapter-2-1/