Away from the Duma the Kremlin grounds were more open. In the last light, huge rooks wearing gray patches on their wings like shawls flew from one bare tree to another, cawing their complaints about the human invasion. Stef wandered into a small church like a glittering lacquered box. Gold-haloed saints ascended every wall and hung suspended in the red depths of the ceiling; ghostly notes of song showered down, although he could see nobody singing.
People knelt, prayed or simply stood and looked on. An old woman rose, crossed herself, and jostled Stef on her way out. Another and younger woman wearing a fur hat and a long coat rose and turned to go. Either Dyeva or her twin sister passed so close to Stef that he could have touched her.
After a stunned instant of surprise he followed, out into the dry fresh-falling snow, the lights and shadows of dusk. The rooks had settled into their nests. She didn’t walk, she strode, eyes straight ahead. He followed her along a winding path, keeping one or two people between them. He was looking for a place to kill her, a dark corner, a moment of privacy.
Then he realized that he didn’t need privacy. Left hand on the red button of the transponder, he gripped his weapon with his right, raising the barrel a little in his coat pocket. He would kill her in the open and escape where nobody could follow. He only had to make absolutely sure that this was his quarry. He stepped off the path, the dry snow crunched under his boots, he hastened, he was directly behind her.
She had stopped to watch a wedding party ending a day’s celebration here in the Kremlin at dusk.
Holding wine glasses were a pretty girl in voluminous white, her new husband in an uncomfortable-looking suit of black, and half a dozen friends. One of the friends stepped forward with a bottle of bubbling wine and filled their glasses. Everyone was laughing. They had picked up a street musician someplace, an old man with a primitive instrument of some sort that he crushed and stretched between his hands. He played wheezy music and the young people toasted the couple while onlookers clapped, laughed and wept.
“Dyeva,” said Stef and she turned her head and looked at him.
Unquestionably it was the Tartar face he knew so well, with the high cheekbones and the angled eyes.
Her face didn’t change, yet she knew instantly why he had come. Instead of pleading for her life, she said in Alspeke, in a low, urgent voice: “Look at them! Look at them! Look at this world. Can you really let it destroy itself to save what we have-tyrants, fools, Darksiders, the White Chamber? These people are alive, they’re free, they deserve to have a future. Whoever you are, take just one second before you kill me. Think about it!”
And for a lengthening instant Stef did. In fact, he had been thinking about it secretly for hours. To be here, now, seeing these people, this world-it wasn’t theory anymore. Uncounted millions lived and breathed and wanted to keep on doing so. His own world seemed remote and for the moment unbelievable-the broken drains and babaku smells of Golden Horde Street, his dirty apartment and the kif pipe, Yama and his stinking guardian, his long day in the White Chamber, Lake Bai and the singsongers on the boat, the synthesizer and thesisi warbling the melody “This Dewdrop World.”
For that instant he could have joined Crux himself. Then he thought of Dzhun and he was paralyzed by indecision. As he hesitated, Dyeva turned to face him squarely and he heard the soft soundPhut! as she shot him through her coat.
He felt-not pain, but an incredible, crushing pressure in his midsection. His upper body flew backward, almost separated from the rest of him and the back of his head struck the cold hard snowy ground. A last mechanical contraction of his right hand fired his pistol, sent the bullet up, up into the darkening overcast like a tiny missile. His left squeezed the red button, meaning: my job is finished, I have succeeded. Bring me home.
Dyeva turned and hastened away, boots squeaking in the fresh snow. People were gawking at the wedding party and almost a minute passed before she heard, by now far behind her, a single scream. She would never know that the reason was not only the sight of a dead man lying horribly mutilated in the snow, but the fact that, even as someone spotted him, he disappeared, evaporated into the gathering darkness. Yama had kept his word.
She plunged into the crowd before the Duma building, her mind running now on the scheduled arrival of the President and his cabinet for a debate on the Mongolian situation. Running also on the fact that such schedules were almost never kept. Running on the fact that she still had fifteen bullets, and that any one would be enough. Running on the importance of stopping this Minister Destruction that she had been hearing people on Ganesh curse since her childhood-the man who had given the order that ended their world.
No, she didn’t believe in God any longer. But she had had to try once more to recapture her faith in the Cathedral of the Annunciation. Who could have imagined that she’d ever have a chance to pray there, in a building long since vaporized and its atoms embedded deep in the Kremlin Shield?
Well, the experiment had failed; she could not recapture her own faith, but she would insure that other people kept theirs. She would sacrifice herself as Christ had for the sins of the world. There was no heaven at the end of it, but this was how she wanted to die.
She squeezed herself through the crowd, murmuring apologies in her strangely accented Russian, a kind of Russian that wouldn’t be invented, ever, if she could manage it. She wondered if her parents would still be born and meet and have a child and call it Maria. No, too unlikely; if they lived at all, they would meet other people and marry them. Everything would be different. She felt a strange, dark satisfaction in thinking that she would not merely die here in the Kremlin; in some sense, she would never have existed at all.
She had reached the front of the crowd, and stood pressed behind a bulky policeman. Fortunately, when the first gleaming limousine turned in through the Gate of the Savior and slid to a stop before the Duma, the policeman moved a little to get a good view of the notables. On the far side of the car, President Rostoff emerged and turned to wave at the crowd. On this side, a young and apparently nervous security man emerged and glanced briefly at Dyeva’s face. Other security men appeared too, jumping from cars, stepping briskly through the snow.
Rostoff, instead of going inside, crossed behind his own car and came to the crowd, reaching out to shake hands. People were cheering, arms reaching out and waving like limbs at the edge of a forest in a windstorm. From a second limousine, Razumovsky approached, also smiling, but keeping a few steps back to avoid up-staging the President. Dyeva shifted the pistol in the deep pocket of her coat and prepared to fire.
Then a gaggle of odd-looking people ran up, carrying primitive cameras of some sort. A sudden spotlight flashed on the crowd and Dyeva was blinded by the light. The long barrel of the impact pistol slipped through the hole in her coat made by her last shot. Shielding her eyes, she aimed as well as she could at Razumovsky. The little soundPhut! vanished in the roar of the crowd.
But the young security man had spotted the gleam of metal, and without the slightest hesitation he shoved the President the wrong way, into the path of the exploding bullet. Suddenly half of Rostoff’s large body was gone, shredded.
Unaware of the disaster, the security man raised his own right hand, which was holding the newest M91K police automatic, 7.8 mm and loaded with superteflon hollowpoints. The first of six bullets hit Dyeva. They were not impact ammo, but they were sufficient.
She toppled backward, firing a last around that skated upward and blew a meter-wide hole in the marble facing of the new Duma building. The chips were still flying as she hit the snow, feeling nothing but a strange lightness as if she had become a woman of air that would shortly disperse. She looked up into the faces of the security man and Minister Razumovsky as the two bent over her.
But you’re supposed to be dead, she thought. And died.
Razumovsky glared down at her Tartar face.
“The goddamn Chinese did this!” he roared, and turned away.
Half a dozen people in the crowd were down, bleeding and crying for help, because the young security man and the others who had rushed to help him had managed to hit not only Dyeva but everyone near her as well. Razumovsky ignored all that, the screams, the confusion. Roughly he shook off the hands trying to drag him this way or that way to safety. Alone of them all, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
He plunged into the President’s armored limousine and shouted to the driver, “Get me out of here!”
While the driver, weeping and blinded by tears and lights, tried to find the gate, tried to force a way through the crowd without killing anybody else, Razumovsky took a key from around his neck and drove it into a lock in the back of the front seat. A small steel door fell open and he pulled out a red telephone.
“Razumovsky here!” he roared. “Chinese agents have wounded the President! I relay to you his exact words: ‘We are at war! You will launch now!’ Code word: Ivan the Terrible.”
He sank back on the upholstery and passed a shaking hand over his squashed-frog face. At least in dying theglupetz Rostoff had inadvertently chosen the right policy-for a change. Had he lived, who could tell what might
