Kolovrat — the strilet of winged combat
The Kolovrat is a double-action, one-handed firearm of the revolving-cylinder type, chambered for a 0.6-calibre cartridge. Lightweight model of 899. Manufactured by Murany Armouries. As things have turned out, all revolving strilets are called kolovrats, although many arms factories have long surpassed the Murany Kolovrat in the number of units produced, in certain respects exceeded its quality, and equalled the prestige of its name.
The Pelazgian armouries, for instance, are renowned for their six-shot Apostle, the principal weapon of the pantsar’s guard for the past three hundred years. Goodwin’s twelve-shot, long-barrelled Cobra revolver is not only the chief strilet of Great Prostor’s wheeled fleet, but also the favourite weapon of the imperturbable screen idol, the marksman Karakurt.
The first Kolovrats were made a thousand years ago, in the final years of the Times of Gnashing. In the Murany arms workshops, the Krechetov brothers produced a dozen of the first seven-shot revolving strilets for the last winged rykars of Volga, Ilay, and Porat, fitting them to the enormous hands of the celestial champions.
Two ‘celestial’ kolovrats survive to this day. One, a spare that never saw battle against the reptiles, spent its entire thousand years lying in whale oil in Vasilissa’s armoury beneath the temple of Volga the Stronghold-Builder. The other, which had served Elivsin’s left hand, was found on the bed of the Shepotov Channel, in the petrified remains of Vladyar the worm-serpent, together with the shattered finger and metacarpal bones of the winged godkin.
In 910, just before the war, both kolovrats were exhibited at Vasilissa’s Millennium Museum, with a parade and salutes, in honour of the newly revived legend of the bitter struggle between Parat and Vladyar. For the occasion, the elderly Pantsar Iluyanka XXVII appeared not with his usual Apostle-260-lk, but with his grandfather’s Kolovrat-Rhinoceros, model 700.
