The Fallen (The Sublime Electricity Book #3)

by Pavel Kornev

  I wouldn't even be surprised. Truly, this was the holy water of our enlightened era.

  I took a roundabout way to Leonardo-da-Vinci-Platz where Alexander Dyak's shop Mechanisms and Rarities was located. I also did a good deal of milling about in the area near the Imperial Academy in an unsuccessful attempt to detect potential pursuit. Thankfully, my appearance didn't arouse particular surprise among the locals. Those studying technical fields were prim and proper, but there were also plenty of disheveled humanitarians on the forking streets of the old city. Students of the upper school of arts and attendees of theater courses often looked worse than I did.

  While I staggered about the area, my eye was met by a little drinking-water fountain in the wall of an old building issuing a thin stream. I washed up and took a drink, then stuck my left hand into the basin and held it there until my fingers started going numb and the cold overtook the pain.

  Quite the odd pain reliever, but I didn't have anything more effective at hand.

  When I crossed the shop threshold, Alexander Dyak's eyes went wide in astonishment and he exhaled hoarsely:

  "Leopold Borisovich?!" and immediately coughed, shaking with his whole body. He continued booming out sonorously for some time, leaning heavily with both hands on the counter, then straightened up and waved a hand:

  "This calls for closing up shop!"

  I turned, flipped a sign hanging on the door to read "Closed" and shut the lock. The inventor, meanwhile, wiped his mouth with a kerchief and left the counter.

  "Weren't you about to go to the New World?" he inquired. "And what is with your appearance? Has something happened?"

  "A hereditary disease. I'm having a flare-up."

  "Well, come in!"

  The shop owner nearly shoved me into the back room. There, I laid the jacket down on the table with a metallic clang and fell down powerless on a lounge seat. But I immediately got to my feet, picked up the phone and called Ramon's office.

  "How serious was the attack, and what is the matter with your hand?" the inventor asked, rolling a cart with electric equipment from the far corner.

  I turned my back to the old man and sent my warning:

  "Don't go see the Indians alone. They tried to jump me in an alley."

  "Was it serious?"

  "That isn't a conversation for the telephone. Just be cautious. And find Roshan!" No longer listening to my former partner, I hung up the phone and tried to move the fingers of my left hand. I could, but the pain was simply hellish.

  "Leopold Borisovich!" Dyak objected. "What is the matter?!"

  "Partial transformation," I told the shop owner, leaving my swollen hand in peace. My health didn't worry me beyond that. The injuries no longer hurt. The abrasion left by the slipknot on my neck had disappeared without a trace. It was as if nothing had happened.

  "When did it happen?"

  "An hour ago."

  Alexander Dyak started coughing, spit phlegm into a kerchief and cursed:

  "This damned heat will be the end of me!" Afterward, he clarified: "When was the last time you used the drip bottle?"

  "A week ago. Maybe a bit longer."

  "Didn't I tell you how important it is to take the medicine on schedule?" the inventor reproached me, unwinding the cable and attaching the device to the electric system. After that, he filled a glass vessel from a tub in the corner, lowered an anode and cathode into it and turned it on, setting a timer for two minutes.

  "I'd like to eat something," I said.

  "You're forgetting to even think!" the shop owner called out abruptly. "Excessive consumption of food immediately after an attack can act as a kind of conditioning. Do you want to turn into a cannibal?"

  I did not want to become a cannibal. I just wanted to eat.

  "Patience!" the old man demanded, turning the apparatus on. The transformer hummed into action. A haze started emanating from the cathode.

  "What happened to your electrolysis device?" Dyak then asked.

  "It’s gone," I admitted. "A bit of force-majeure, I’m afraid."

  "Oh, youth," the inventor said, only shaking his head. "Do you not understand how serious your position is? Water saturated with silver ions will fully cure you in the long term! How can you have such a devil-may-care attitude toward your own health?!"

  I sat up on an elbow and looked at the elderly man with a certain degree of skepticism. He was wearing an old-fashioned frock. His beard was gray, his hair was thinning and he had deep bald patches.

  "To be honest, I didn’t feel particularly different after using the drip."

  "Well naturally!" Dyak threw up his hands. "Naturally you didn't notice! After all, until today, the syndrome hasn't entered the active stage, right?"

  "No."

  "That's the whole point! Leopold Borisovich, this method of curing lycanthropy has its foundations in the work of the great Russian scientist Pavlov!"

  "If you say so."

  The water-silvering device turned off with a loud clink and I started rolling back my right sleeve.

  "Left arm," the inventor corrected me.

  "What difference does it make?" I asked in surprise.

  Yes, I had been intentionally giving myself silver injections. Or, to be more accurate, a drip from a bottle, given that the concentration of the mixture was so high that it could burn my veins or even cause my heart to stop completely if injected with a normal syringe. A few milliliters of silvered water cut with a half-liter of saline solution, but even like that, the injections sites on my arms took a very long time to heal over and periodically grew inflamed.

  I am a bad werebeast – it is what it is.

  "Drip?!" Alexander Dyak threw up his hands started coughing again. "No drip!" he declared, after which he calmed his breathing. "In this state, you’re extremely sensitive to silver. It would simply kill you."

  "So, what now?"

  The inventor carefully mixed the water in a glass flask, poured some into a measuring cup, and poured out the rest into a bucket, then added a few scoops to it from a vat.

  "Lower your right hand into the bucket," he demanded. "And hold it there as long as you can."

  "As long as I can?" I grimaced. "Sounds ominous."

  But contrary to my apprehensions, the silver-ion saturated water didn't burn my arm, quite the opposite. It gave me a pleasant cooling sensation.

  "Is it okay?" Dyak asked.

  "Completely. And this theory of yours..."

  "It isn't my theory!" the old man cut me off, hacked up some phlegm and wiped the sweat from his face. "It's the Arndt-Schulz rule! Insignificant doses of an irritant, often small doses of poisons, stimulate the body's defensive functions."

  "Just don't tell me you're a believer in homeopathy!" I smirked. The searing pain slightly left my swollen fingers, but the water was no longer cold. It burned the skin as if the bucket had been placed on a gas heater.

  "Isn't it generally accepted as fact that the body can grow insensitive to a poison from repeated insignificant doses?" Dyak parried.

  "Well, arsenic and talc accumulate in the body."

  "Silver isn't the same as arsenic and talc!"

  "Let's hope so," I sighed, swallowing my spit and griping: "It burns!"

  "Hold it as long as you can!"

  But I didn't last much longer. Just a few minutes later, I jerked my arm out of the bucket, shook it in the air and started blowing on my reddened skin. The swelling passed without a trace, and my fingers regained their former sensitivity. But the inky black bruises under my nails remained.

  "Please!" Dyak changed glasses and looked attentively at my hand. "All fine!" he announced, then poured the contents of a measuring cup into a mug of water and extended it to me. "How are you feeling?"

  "I want to eat."

  "Drink this!"

  "Are you serious?"

  "Do you want a relapse?"

  I exhaled indecisively and accepted the mug.

  "Down the hatch!"

  And so I did. And a
gain, the water didn't burn. Instead, everything inside me went numb, like how one feels after eating too many choke cherries. I lost control over my tongue. A bizarre gruff sound tore itself from my throat.

  "The feeling of numbness will pass soon," the inventor assured me, leaving to a storage room and returning with a traveling suitcase. "This here is my personal kit," he warned. "And make sure to perform the treatment according to my regimen, if you don't want to turn into a beast one day. Is that clear to you, Leopold Borisovich?"

  I nodded. In my time, I had long doubted whether it was worth opening up to the inventor but, in the end, I agreed to risk it and had no regret about that whatsoever. Alexander Dyak read up on all the studies performed on werebeasts and developed a whole method for curing me of the ailment once and for all. And after the long-ago outburst in Zurich, I didn't have even the slightest serious attack until today.

  Unfortunately, as recent events had shown, killing a werebeast was something science could do, but curing one was quite beyond most modern thinkers.

  But I didn't share those doubts with the inventor. I simply couldn't – my mouth was frozen and my tongue wouldn't move. And also, I felt it would be wrong to be so open and frank: Dyak looked awfully ill, and I didn't want to upset him.

  Alexander put the water-silvering setup in the suitcase, along with the saline solution attachment with rubber tubes and a green-glass bottle.

  "Silvered water has already been mixed with the saline solution at the appropriate concentration," he warned. "Give yourself an injection today, but no earlier than eight hours after the attack. Can you do that?"

  I nodded again.

  Alexander Dyak coughed, winced in pain and wiped off his sweaty face.

  "This damned heat," he sighed, massaging his chest on his heart side. "That'll be what puts me in the grave, mark my words."

  I scolded him with a finger, walked over to the vat in the corner and scooped water from it with a mug. I drank my fill and suggested:

  "Well, Alexander, why don't you go to the hot springs of Montecalida?! The clean mountain air would do you good. You can find someone to look after the shop. It won't be hard."

  "You really think so?"

  "I'm certain." I took out my wallet and counted out three hundred francs. "Here you go."

  "Come now!" The old man snorted. "I can easily afford this on my own!"

  "No one is placing that into doubt."

  "Well, I'm not going anywhere."

  The chance of convincing the stubborn man onto my side was nil, so I had to fall back on tricks.

  "I'm planning to spend the summer in Montecalida myself, you know. You could watch over me there. I don't plan on returning to the capital again."

  "Well, if that's so..." Dyak considered. "But I'll need time! To pack my things, hire a shopkeeper..."

  "A day or two is no matter."

  "Where can I find you?"

  "I'll find you."

  Alexander Dyak looked at me with unhidden doubt, but nodded all the same:

  "Agreed!"

  I smiled approvingly. I was a bit ashamed to deceive him. After all, I had no real plans of returning to the resort town, but it was a noble lie. The constant smog of New Babylon really could send the old man to an early grave.

  "And also..." I drew out thoughtfully. "Send a courier to bring my suits from the atelier. I'll be by this evening to pick them up together with the suitcase."

  "Alright. Which atelier?"

  I told him the address and wrote out a short message to the tailor, then took my jacket from the table, but the fabric was colored by spots of dried blood. I could not go outside in such clothing.

  "What happened out there?" the inventor asked.

  "A little scuffle."

  "I’m surprised no patrolmen picked you up."

  I nodded. I really had gotten lucky. And relying on more such strokes of luck in the future would be very ill-advised on my part.

  "Alexander, you wouldn't happen to have anything for me to wear?"

  "You don't want to go get one of your suits?"

  "I have business elsewhere."

  "Well, in that case..." Dyak dug through his dressers and soon found a bleach-caked duster. "If that's all there is..."

  "Why not try it on?!" I moved my wallet into my pants pocket, put on the duster and went out into the main part of the shop to look myself in the mirror. There, I rolled up the overly short sleeves and nodded. "This will do."

  I looked like a menial laborer, on a quick break to wet my whistle. People like that generally avoided police attention unless they started pissing on the street or bellowing out songs in public places. I wasn't planning on either.

  "Where are you off to, then?" the inventor asked in alarm when I clipped the pistol holster on the back of my belt, hoping to make the weapon less conspicuous.

  "I'm going out to meet someone," I answered evasively, and pulled out the Steyr's bolt, thumbing rounds into the breech one after the other.

  Fully loaded, I returned the pistol to the holster and headed to the exit, reminding him just in case:

  "Alexander, you won't forget to get my suits?"

  "I'll send someone out post-haste."

  "You have my eternal gratitude," I smiled and left the shop.

  Dyak's silver solution dulled the hunger, but the piercing sensation in my belly hadn't gone anywhere, so I bought a roll stuffed with meat and fried vegetables from the first street vendor I came across, scarfing it down in one bite and washing it back with plain carbonated water.

  But it wasn't all in my head. In a certain degree, I was simply running out the clock, not having made up my mind to go on. And that was no wonder. After all, I had a meeting with the past before me.

  Science is stronger than magic. I had no doubt in that, but I always allowed that not everything could be studied and understood in this life. Some things required faith.

  For example, love. I laughed grimly at my own joke and shook my head. No, I wasn't talking about love. I was talking about something incomparably bigger, something that defies comprehension. About faith as such.

  The adepts of scientific knowledge would say that such convictions placed me on the same level as malefics, but I didn't give a damn about that. My dad had raised me to be a good Christian. And it wasn't at all the religious symbols tattooed into my skin that tamed the beast today, that was faith. Mine and that of my father.

  My dad was a werebeast. He knew that the curse was transferred directly via inheritance, and didn't want the same fate for me. I didn't want to talk about that, so I didn't explain anything. I just drove to the tattoo artist's. By my fifteenth year, my whole back had been covered with an empty cross, my chest had a black eight-pointed star and a traditional fish and, on my neck, there was a Chi-Rho symbol over my spine, while my right bicep had the entire Latin text of the Pater Noster. Only my left arm was free of ink – my dad had died before managing to finish what he had planned. The time had come to correct that error.

  In any large city, there are neighborhoods where outsiders shouldn't go, and New Babylon was no exception. Some of the nastiest quarters were inhabited by immigrants from Eastern Europe, primarily Russian and Polish. But I walked down the narrow streets with no fear. With my nearly two meters of height, characteristic hair-cut, bleach-caked duster and knowledge of the Russian language, I was protected better than any police escort.

  And all the same, before the door with the sun-washed sign and beautiful smoking girl, I unintentionally slowed my pace and stopped. But I immediately picked myself back up, leaned and walked into the semi-dark interior of the bootmaker's workshop.

  The old craftsman tore himself from the piece of leather, which he had split so far open that he winced a few times and issued a drawn out, frigid address:

  "Leeooo..."

  On our last meeting, I had been a bit too harsh on him, and Sergei Kravets, as the craftsman was called, hadn't forgotten that.

  "In the flesh," I smiled, getting
out my wallet.

  "You haven't been here for a long time."

  "There was no reason for me to come. As far as I remember, my dad left a sketch for my left arm and even paid in advance?"

  Kravets appraised my appearance and said grudgingly:

  "That was a long time ago..."

  I threw a fifty-franc bank note onto the table, noting with slight unrest that I didn't have very much cash left in my wallet.

  "Well, does this refresh your memory?"

  The craftsman stashed the money in the breast pocket of his apron and went over to a cupboard filled with albums.

  "It's complicated work," he said, looking for the sketch. "It will take several days."

  "No dice," I responded, removing my duster. "I need it all, right now."

  "Are you sure you can bear it?"

  "Well, I'll try."

  Kravets shrugged his shoulders and set about readying the instrument. I removed my shirt and sat at the table, setting my left arm onto it. The procedure would take some time and be quite unpleasant, but I really wanted to get it over with once and for all.

  "Are you going to look at the drawing?" the craftsman asked me.

  "No. Just do it all exactly as my father ordered."

  "You're the boss."

  A set of needles and jars of ink appeared on the table, then Kravets twisted the wick of a kerosene lamp and looked at my arm.

  "What's wrong with your skin?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Looks like sunburn."

  "Doesn't matter. Just do the tattoos."

  The old craftsman took a heavy sigh, dipped a needle into the ink and started mucking about with a magnifying glass.

  "The actual tattooing is half the work. The other part is making sure the skin doesn't slake off after."

  "It won't," I answered and squinted from the painful prick.

  And then another. And another and another...

  Little by little, the remnants of the pain traveled through my whole body and concentrated in my left shoulder. At the same time, the sound filling my head started to go quiet and my thinking grew sober once again.