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The night was black and splashed with alizarin crimson.
Lacking other illumination----nothing in this dark, wild place existed for a lampwand to give glowing to, even had one been stowed away by providence aboard the lodka, which it had been not---young Eugene had discovered he might pick a path along the crumbling edge of the roadcut by squeezing, from time to time, the safety-bar at the yoke's edge of his borrowed and unfamiliar quickblade.
"This way, I think." The young man pushed between two thick and thistled bushes, his tonen somewhat unsure, for although he had been born and bred to issue orders, he'd never before commanded something which was not quite human. Zaytseva's grim, nameless Cossack servant plodded wordless behind him, never acknowledging his orders (although obeying them without fail), contributing nothing to the task they shared in theory except the noise of ragged breathing and the thump and gravel-clatter of occasional stumbling.
To be fair to the unfortunate creature (Eugene was in no position to appreciate how only a son raised by his father might have thought such a thing), it was a steep way they followed, never intended for the passage of human, or semi-human, feet. The soil had been turned by whatever energies had brought the roadcut down upon them and was still loose in places, threatening to slide at a footstep, even, he thought, as a sneeze. Rocks and boulders which long ago had found a kind of neutral buoyancy within the earthy medium they floated in now lay upon the surface, ready to trip the night-blind and unwary passerby. Not for the first time did Eugene wish for something other than the ankle-length dress boots which might have seen their proper milieu at some play-party of Maria's, but by no means here, upon a broken trail thousands of verts from the light and warmth of home.
Somehow, Eugene wondering how to manage even as they managed it, he and his companion made it to the top, stood at the edge and looked down. He might have been looking into an ink well. He knew his younger brother and the Malinovsyn-Korochuvak bodyguards were down there, as he knew his father was upon the other side, but he could neither see nor hear them. What should he do now? His father had been unspecific instructing him, saying it was an unspecific task they had before them. They were to look for traces of whomever had conceived this deed. Their greatest fortune (and much the most unlikely, considering the amount of time since the attack suffered by the droilodka) would be to find one of the culprits and bring him back alive for questioning.
Another designator flash said nothing to him. He had hoped, in truth expected, to discover footprints in the damp soil or other indication of recent human presence. In this he was disappointed. Save for the grooves left at the summit by whatever tool had drilled the rock for explosives, he'd found nothing to indicate any thinking being had been here since the planet had first coalesced from interstellar gases. Even without conversation over it, he knew his father, having himself hammered out the Bargain which had given Genrich four decades of tranquility, lent small credit to the notion that woodsjacks, with no reason anyone could offer in support, had risen again to harry their conquerors. But who else would have done such a thing?
Of a sudden he sensed motion in the low trees a few measures to his left, away from the roadcut. Unaccustomed to carrying a weapon or thinking about using one, he shone the designator towards the spot---and cussed himself for betraying his position. In answer, the bizarre, dizzying sensation of a near-miss passed around and through him as he flung himself upon the ground.
The Cossack behind him was less lucky. Eugene heard a grunt, accompanied by an uglier implosion as the beam struck the creature full in the torso. A child of his culture, Eugene knew it was like being upon the receiving end of a big timber sluicing downstream in the white water from the Sorokin logging fields. A revolting gurgling noise---the sound of death, he somehow knew---was followed by a silence even more horrible. The metallic scent of blood freshly spilled came sharp to the younger Eugene Sorokin. He found that his stomach was in revolt and, with some difficulty, quelled it.
With only sound to guide him, a sense he'd never before used this way, Eugene pointed his forearm in what he assumed was the right direction and tensed both thumb and fingers simultaneously, not waiting for the glow of his designator to give him away. He heard a crash, as if the trees had taken the brunt of his blade. He rolled, in order not to be where his enemy now knew he was and let go the energies of his weapon once again. A hoarse scream echoed across the mountaintop, twisting something deep and vulnerable within him. Was this what it felt like to do injury to another being? A form, no more than silhouetted in the mist-lit darkness, crashed from the foliage, staggering as if unable to see or think. Before Eugene could catch the fellow's trouser leg (this close did he pass by Eugene's face) he felt the fabric slip through weapon-burdened fingers and hear, more than saw, his wounded assailant pitch over the precipice and, with another scream, throw himself into the roadcut's depths. Maybe he just imagined the dull thud of the impact far below.
All at once no time remained for imagining. Another series of crashes, more purposeful, headed toward him. Wishing he could suppress the designator altogether (such a contingency had been provided for in the weapon's design, but Eugene's sketchy lesson had not included this usage), he thrust again and again at the noise coming towards him, rolling, ducking unseen and maybe unreal energies being tossed at him in return.
Another squirm and nothing remained to squirm upon. Having heeded not where his rolling and dodging him, Eugene found with a start that he lay across the soft, broken lip of the roadcut, ankles hanging in dark empty space over a drop of hundreds of measures. Sweat sprang with the odd sensation of a million pinpricks over every line of his skin. If his life had afterward depended on it, he could never have decided whether it was the sweat of fear or of relief. He started crawling forward.
Sudden impact lifted his body from the damp ground where he lay near the perilous edge and dropped it back again. Behind agony-clouded eyes, he had the fleeting thought it'd been like being struck by a boulder traveling several hundred verts per hour. Yet this, too, was a near miss, else he would not have been able to think at all. He heard the sound of running feet. With the greatest effort, against a mass of bone and muscle moving all too slowly for his racing fears, he raised an aching, injured arm and squeezed the yoke.
In the air before him, brightness seared the night as beam met destructive beam in mutual cancellation. Eugene had the presence of mind to make a second blade quickly. Again, destruction flared.
Upon his third squeeze, darkness fell. He heard a muffled groan, a crash, rose to his knees and blade in the same direction again. This time his opponent's answering blow seemed to take him squarely in the chest. He was tossed backwards, over the edge, somehow twisted his body in midair and slammed both arms and elbows against the yielding, near-vertical surface before him. Soil and gravel sleeted by his face as he clawed in the dark for a hold in crumbling earth. Dirt ripped through his fingers as he fell.178Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqYLUv9WuxZ
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Angry and frustrated, Zakh ground his teeth. At that, it was better than crying, which was what, in truth, he wanted to do but dared not. Instead, he slumped behind the steering pedestal, keeping a sullen back to unwelcome others, his father's and stepmother's guests, and stared into the featureless ring-lit night through the damaged and now inert fabric of the droilodka. The guests---in this despairing moment he discovered himself thinking of Zaytseva and the others as "Greasylocks and the Three Bores"---were blabbering among themselves and paying him no mind. After all, he was just a child.
Just a child! Maybe he was the youngest of father's sons, a mere twelve, but had he been assaulted, insulted, blade at, as Eugene and Adam had been, any the less than they in the attack upon the droilodka? Would he have died less dead? Did he not also share a right---a duty---to take part in the defense of his father's position upon this planet?
"Remain you here." His brothers had each taken him aside---the command had not even come from his father! ----adding, as a patronizing overthought, "Watch over our stepmother, the Oligarch, and Lady Malinovsyn-Korochuvak."
Very well, (his demand was quiet, of no one in particular), with what? He had not even though to bring his almost-useless tokarev weapon, although he could blame this oversight on none other but himself. Live and learn, Terrible Yvan always said. He would never make such an idiotic mistake again!
For a long time while Zakh gazed in sightless resentment into the darkness surrounding them. Curious, he thought as he began to calm down, how neither his father nor his brothers had mentioned watching over Zaytseva, paralyzed though the Poohbah was. Somehow he did not seem the kind who required it over anyone. The ugly entity which pushed him about in his chair seemed more an ornament---in bad taste, Zakh thought----than a need.
In similar circumstances, a simple unconscious reflex, Zakh's idle thoughts would have turned his head round to look upon their object. He experienced no such reflex now. And noticed it. What was it that seemed so dire about his new stepmother's father? The fellow was an utter cripple in an age of limb and nerve regeneration which witnessed few such, and upon this account, Zach thought, to be presumed quite harmless. Not wanting to be watched watching, Zakh did observe the man now, but by courtesy of a reflective dial-cover upon the pedestal.
Zaytseva hunched where he had been earlier seated by his inhuman servant, now gone with the younger Eugene, dark eyes agleam as he related some esoteric and theoretically amusing item of Cosmopolitan palace skullduggery to the others. His wheeled chair depended upon so many---what was the word Terrible Yvan used?----electromagnetical devices, it would not function within the droilodka's enveloping purge-field, and had been folded upon itself and set to one side.
Animated as it may have sounded, the adult discussion was conducted, at least by one participant, without the usual gestures and gesticulations enthusiasm might have been expected to engender. Zaytseva's useless arms had been crossed for him at the thin white wrists which lay before him in his lap. Beneath the light blanket upon which his hands rested, his ankles were not crossed, but the feet dangling at their ends lay upon the deck in an angular, uncomfortable-looking position, almost as if they had been.
Oddest of all was the man's face, which added much to the mystery of his menace, for Zaytseva possessed altogether the fairest male countenance upon which Zakh had ever looked, in drama or in real life. Pomade-tressed he might have been, the boy thought (with broader generosity of spirit than he had earlier exercised), following fashions presently in vogue within the imperium-conglomerate. Still, the man was no sick-swallow, sunken-eyed, thin-lipped, pinch-nosed creature of indeterminate gender such as disgusted Zakh of late in Mistress Maria's dramafiles, or like this chronic inebriate Malinovsyn-Korochuvak. That he was sire to the beautiful Veronica was no mere guessing matter. After his own sinister matter, he was quite as beautiful as she was.
And beautiful she was, albeit it somehow like an ancient stacking doll. Zakh shifted in his chair to observe her in his makeshift mirror. Hers was a distant and intimidating aspect. He felt unbalanced, awkward in her presence, cold-sweat, tongue-tied, stammering if not altogether speechless. He always sensed that he was being judged. And convicted.
This was a different sensation from the grinning self-consciousness Mistress Maria sometimes evoked in him. That feeling warmed his cheeks, the back of his neck, his ears. While it, too, was embarrassing, although he somehow understood, in his precocious sophistication, that embarrassment in the female presence is a natural state for boys his age, at the same time it was, beyond question, pleasant, even exhilarating. Although he was in essence a farm bumpkin, long since acquainted with the biological facts of life, he wondered now if this warm feeling was what his brother Eugene felt about Maria and why he was going to marry her. Zakh could think of many worse reasons.
Aware that his thoughts had wandered, Zach realized in the same moment that he'd answered the question which he'd earlier asked himself. Whatever it was he felt in Veronical Zaytseva Benes's presence, whatever dampened his hands, made the blood stream cold inside him, it was this which kept him from looking direct upon her father. Of a sudden, Zaytseva stared straight at him---rather, at the dial face where he must've known his own to be reflected---and sent a leering wink at the boy. Zakh looked away, his heart pounding with unnamable terror.178Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNsv67AtJFt
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At about the same instant that Eugene fils and Zaytseva's Cossack achieved the violated crest of the roadcut, Adam and the creatures borrowed from the Malinovsyn-Korochuvak found themselves picking a careful path through rubble in the silent darkness halfway along that portion of the greenway sliced through the mountain ridge. With shocking abruptness, the hazy, ring-lit, star-studded sky was filled with destructive flashes upon both sides, and with the gut-wrenching sound of screaming. Before Adam or his inhuman companions could react, the hiss of falling earth came rushing, growing louder, lower every second, until it was a bass roar with undertones more felt than heard. It was punctuated by a nearby thump. And another. The roar became a hiss again, afterward a trickle, until about them only quiet remained.
One of the Cossacks raised an arm, squeezing upon the yoke of its quickblade, directing the designator beam ahead. Upon a black-brown slant of newly fallen earth, the saw a form rise from beneath a light covering of soil. Shaking, spitting, brushing dirt from its eyes, it seemed not to know it stood over a pair of similar bodies which would never raise themselves again.
"I say, s-stop there, you!" Adam found himself too confused to think of anything more forceful. Both Cossacks had their quickblades aimed at the man who, for all he could tell, might have been his brother or his father. The slow-moving dirty figure turned, glancing at the bodies lying nearby as though seeing them for the first time, and raised an arm in gesture of surrender.
"The other one is broken, I think." It was a gravel voice, an unmistakable peasant accent, although nothing born among the mountains and forests of Genrich. "Don't kill me, son, giving up as I plainly am." Adam felt himself relax a trifled, he and the Cossacks stepping forth a few paces. In the relief washing through his body at not having to subdue the man, it did not occur to him to wonder about the other fallen figures. He opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted. "A Sorokin scion, I presume?"
"Yes," Adam replied. "I am." He had the discomfiting sense of being inspected. The cornered man's gaze went up and down his body, from one Cossack to the other where they stood with weapons ready to strike or deflect.
"I guess that's that, then." Of a sudden the wretch before the nodded, grinned, fisted his weapon hand, and shoved it beneath his chin. The scarlet beam underlit his face in a hideous manner----just before that face vanished in an upblasted cloud of blood and disrupted flesh.
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