across the walls.
“I believe you, grandfather,” whispered the torturer. “But if I relent, then
Uchitel will flay the skin from my living body. I have seen him do it.”
Ivan Ivanovich slipped painfully into madness. The agony deepened until he lost
touch with it. Pechal pressed hard against Ivan’s eyes with the balls of his
thumbs, making the old man scream.
“Your eyes pain you. I can stop them hurting. Here.”
From a shelf on the far side of the stove, he took a carved box of black powder
that Ivanovich used for his ancient musket. Holding the lids open, he piled a
neat little heap on each eye. The powder felt gritty, like having specks of sand
in his eyes.
“Now?”
“Mercy,” sobbed Ivan Ivanovich. He might as well have begged the north wind or
the layers of ice that were forming over the corpses of his friends.
He heard, actually heard the sizzle of his own eyes burning when the guerrilla
touched the candle flame to the black powder. His nostrils were filled with the
stench.
When Pechal burst his eardrums, Ivan felt only the stabbing pain. The lack of
sound was somehow a relief, as though it was the start of a complete sensory
withdrawal from the pain. Cutting the tendons in his jaw, burning his nipples,
slicing his genitals from his body, leaving only the weeping, raw wound—none of
that registered with the poor creature that had been Ivan Ivanovich. Day and
night, hot and cold were gone. After that, it was over.
He still breathed. His heart still pounded desperately. But his mind was dead.
His head rocked from side to side and a toneless, faint whimpering sound was all
that came from his peeled lips. Uchitel returned and stood alongside Pechal,
looking down emotionlessly at the old man’s naked, ravaged body. His cold yellow
eyes registered the blood, the raised blisters, the scorched eye sockets, the
dreadful mute evidence of the castration.
“You have taken him too far, too fast, Pechal,” he said, quietly. “Now he will
tell us nothing.”
“Da, I fear that’s true.”
Uchitel shook his head. “The meat is nearly cooked, and all the animals are
butchered and jointed. We can sleep here tonight and move on in the morning.”
“Why not stay here for a week or so? The snows are passing. Every time we move,
it is farther north, farther east. Soon we shall be at the sea.”
“Yes, Pechal. Soon we shall be at the sea. If your whining continues, then I
shall pin you out on the ice for the white bears to feed on.”
“But…”
The tall, lean man shook his head. “You should learn to hold your tongue, my
brother Sorrow, or I will rip it from its roots. You know why we move on.”
“What the merchant told you?”
“Yes. Now, take this offal out and slit its throat. I am tired, Pechal.”
“Did…?”
“What? You are making me weary, brother.”
Despite the chilling note of warning, the other man continued. “Did he say where
they were? Or how far behind us?”
For a moment, Uchitel stared at him in silence, oblivious of the dying man on
the bed behind him.
“Pechal… the merchant said he had heard that there was a band of militia hunting
us down.”
“But did he say where?”
“They were bastard whores’ sons, spawned in middens, from the port of Magadan,
where, they say, there are houses and many stores and mongrel codsuckers who sit
with their thumbs buried in their own asses while they send their puppies on
horseback to hunt down men such as you and I, my brother. He said that they had
heard we robbed and plundered and raped and burned and slaughtered. His very
words, from what I recall of his blubbering. This so-called government that
believes in some party…”
He spat out the two words as if they soiled his lips. Pechal nodded. “And they
will chase us down. Then we shall kill them.” He clenched his hand, soft as a
woman’s, yet with long, curved nails of horn. “Fool.”
“What?”
“You are a fool. These will not be puking peasants like this old shit here on