"Metro 2033" - читать интересную книгу автора (Glukhovsky Dmitry A)

CHAPTER 7. The Khanate of Darkness

The tunnel was absolutely empty and clean. The ground was dry, there was a pleasant breeze blowing into their faces, there wasn’t even one rat, and there were no suspicious looking side passages and gaping patches of blackness to the sides, only a few locked doors, and it seemed that one could live in this tunnel just as well as at any of the stations. But more than that, this totally unnatural calm and cleanliness not only meant they weren’t on their guard but it instantly dissipated any fear of death and disappearance. Here the legends about disappeared people started to seem like silly fabrications and Artyom already started to wonder if the wild scene with the unfortunate man who they thought had the plague had actually happened. Maybe it was just a little nightmare that had visited him while he snoozed on the tarpaulin by the wandering philosopher’s fire.

He and Khan were bringing up the rear since Khan was concerned that the men might break away from the group one by one – and then, according to him, no one would reach Kitai Gorod. Now he was quietly walking next to Artyom, calmly, as though nothing had happened, and the deep wrinkles which had cut through his face during the skirmish at Sukharevskaya, were now smooth. The storm had passed, and walking next to Artyom there was now a wise and restrained Khan and not a furious, full-grown wolf. But Artyom was sure the transformation would take only a minute.

Understanding that the next opportunity to draw aside the curtain from the metro’s mysteries had arisen, he couldn’t hold himself back.

‘Do you understand what’s happening in this tunnel?’

‘No one knows that, including me,’ Khan answered reluctantly. ‘Yes, there are some things that even I know exactly nothing about. The only thing I can tell you is that it’s an abyss. I call this place the black hole… You probably have never seen a star? Or did you say you once saw one? And do you know anything about the cosmos? Well, a dying star can look like a hole if, when it goes out, it is affected by its own incredibly powerful energy and it starts to consume itself, taking matter from the outside to the inside, to its centre, which is becoming smaller all the time, but more dense and heavier. And the denser it becomes, the more its force of gravity grows. This process is irreversible and it’s like an avalanche: with the ever-increasing gravity, the growing quantity of matter is drawn faster and faster to the heart of the monster. At a certain stage, its power achieves such magnitudes that it sucks in its neighbours, and all the matter that is located within the bounds of its influence, and finally, even light waves. The gigantic force allows it to devour the rays of other suns, and the space around it is dead and black – nothing that falls into its possession has the strength to pull itself away. This is a star of darkness, a black sun, and around it is only cold and darkness.’ He went quiet, listening to the conversation of the people ahead of them.

‘But what does that have to do with the tunnel?’ Artyom couldn’t resist asking after a five-minute silence.

‘You know, I have the gift of foresight. I sometimes succeed in seeing into the future, into the past, or sometimes I can transport my mind to other places. Sometimes it’s unclear, it’s hidden from me, like, for example, I don’t know how your journey will end – your future is generally a mystery to me. It’s kind of like looking through dirty water and you can’t make out anything. But when I try to look into what happened here or to understand the nature of this place – there’s only blackness in front of me, and the rays of my thoughts don’t return from the absolute darkness of this tunnel. That’s why I call it the black hole. That’s all I can tell you about it.’ And he went silent, but after a few moments, he added, ‘And that’s why I’m here.’

‘So you don’t know why sometimes this tunnel is completely safe and other times it swallows people? And why it only takes people travelling alone?’

‘I know nothing more about it that you do, even though I’ve been trying for three years to figure out this mystery. So far, in vain.’

Their steps resounded with a distant echo. The air here was transparent, and breathing was surprisingly easy, and the darkness didn’t seem frightening. Khan’s words didn’t put him on his guard or worry him; Artyom thought that his companion was so gloomy not because of the secrets and hazards of the tunnel but because of the futility of his investigations. His preoccupation was self-conscious and even ridiculous in Artyom’s opinion. Here was the passage and there were no threats here, it was straight and empty… A boisterous melody even started to play in his head, and apparently it then became external without his noticing, because Khan suddenly looked at him mockingly and asked:

‘So then, isn’t this fun? It’s nice here, right? So quiet, so clean, yes?’

‘Aha!’ Artyom agreed joyfully.

And he felt so light and free in his soul because Khan had understood his mood and was also affected by it… He is also walking and smiling and not burdened with heavy thoughts, he also believes that this tunnel is…

‘So now, cover your eyes, and I’ll take you by the hand so you won’t stumble… Do you see anything?’ Khan asked with interest, softly squeezing Artyom’s wrist.

‘No, I don’t see anything, only a little light from the flashlights through my eyelids,’ Artyom said a little disappointedly, squeezing his eyes closed obediently – and suddenly he quietly yelped.

‘There – you made it!’ Khan noted with satisfaction. ‘It’s beautiful, yes?’

‘Amazing… It’s like when… There’s no ceiling, and everything is so blue… My God, what beauty! And how easy to breathe!’

‘That, my friend, is the sky. It’s curious, no? If you relax and close your eyes in the right mood here, then lots of people see it. It’s strange, of course… Even those who have never been to the surface see it. And the feeling is as though you’ve landed at the surface… before it all happened.’

‘And you, do you see it?’ Artyom asked blissfully, not wanting to open his eyes.

‘No,’ Khan said darkly. ‘Almost everyone sees it but I don’t. I only see thick, bright darkness around the tunnel, if you know what I mean. Blackness above, below, and on all sides, and only a small thread of light extends into the tunnel, and we follow it when we’re in the labyrinth. Maybe I’m blind. Or maybe everyone else is blind. OK, open your eyes, I’m not a guide dog and I don’t intend to take you by the hand to Kitai Gorod.’ He let go of Artyom’s wrist.

Artyom tried to walk on with his eyes squeezed shut but he stumbled on a cross-tie and almost fell to the ground along with his whole load. After that, he reluctantly lifted his eyelids and stayed silent for a long while afterwards, smiling stupidly.

‘What was it?’ he asked finally.

‘Fantasies. Dreams. A mood. Everything together,’ Khan replied. ‘But it’s very changeable. It’s not your mood or your dreams. There are a lot of us here and so far nothing has happened, but the mood can change totally, and you will feel it. Look there, we are already coming out at Turgenevskaya! We got here fast. But we can’t stop here at any cost, not even for a break. People will probably ask to take a break but not everyone feels the tunnel. The majority of them don’t even feel what is accessible to you. We need to go on, even though now it will be harder.’

They stepped into the station. The light marble that coated the walls was barely distinguishable from that which covered the walls at Prospect Mir and Sukharevskaya, but there the walls and ceilings were so smoke-stained and greasy that the stone was almost invisible. Here it was untainted and it was hard not to admire it. People had left this place so long ago that there was no trace of their presence. The station was in surprisingly good condition, as though it had never been flooded, never seen a fire, and if it weren’t for the pitch darkness and the layer of dust on the floor, benches and walls, you could have thought that in a minute a stream of passengers would start flowing into it or, after emitting its melodious signal, a train would arrive. It had hardly changed after all these years. His stepfather had described all this with bewilderment and awe.

There weren’t any columns in Turgenevskaya. Low arches were cut in thick marble at wide intervals. The flashlights of the caravan didn’t have enough power to disperse the dusk of the hall and to light the opposite wall so it looked as though there was absolutely nothing beyond the arches, as though there was the end of the universe.

They passed through the station rather quickly and, contrary to Khan’s fears, no one expressed the desire to stop for a break. People looked perturbed and they started talking more and more about the fact that they needed to go as fast as they could, and get to an inhabited place.

‘Do you feel it, the mood is changing…’ Khan observed quietly, raising a finger as though trying to feel the direction of the wind. ‘We do indeed have to go faster, they’ll feel this on their skin no less than I will with my mysticism. But there’s something preventing me from continuing on our route. Wait here for a little while…’

He took the map that he called the Guide out of his pocket carefully and, having told everyone to stay still, he extinguished his flashlight and took a few long and soft steps and disappeared into the dark.

When he stepped away, one guy came out from among the group and slowly, as though with effort, made his way over to Artyom. He spoke so timidly that at first Artyom didn’t recognize the thickset bearded man who had threatened him at Sukharevskaya.

‘Listen… it isn’t good that we’ve stopped here. Tell him, we’re afraid. There are a lot of us but anything can happen… Damn this tunnel, and damn this station. Tell him we have to go. You hear? Tell him… please.’ And he looked away and hurried back into the crowd.

This last ‘please’ made Artyom shudder. He was unpleasantly surprised by it. Taking a few steps forward so that he would be closer to the group and could hear the general conversation, he immediately realized that there was nothing left of his previous good mood.

In his head where a small orchestra had just been playing a bravura march, it was now empty and quiet and he could only hear windy echoes despondently sounding in the tunnels that lay before them. Artyom went quiet. His whole being had frozen, tensely waiting for something, sensing an inevitable change in plans. And he was right. After a fraction of an instant it was as if an invisible shadow swooped in above them and it became cold and very uncomfortable, wiping away all the feelings of peace and confidence which had settled upon them when they were walking through the tunnel. Now Artyom remembered Khan’s words about the fact that this wasn’t his mood, not his joy, and that a change in circumstances did not depend on him. He nervously turned his flashlight in a circle around him: an oppressive sensation of premonition had piled on top of him. The dusty white marble flared before him dimly, and the dense black curtain under the arches wouldn’t be pushed backwards in spite of the panicky flashings of his light. This strengthened the illusion that the world ended beyond the arches. Unable to control himself, Artyom almost ran back to the others.

‘Come to us, come, brother,’ someone whose face he’d never seen before said to him. They, apparently, were also trying to save the batteries of their flashlights. ‘Don’t be afraid. You’re a person and we’re people too. When things like this go on, people have to stick together. Don’t you think?’

Artyom willingly acknowledged that there was something in the air. Because he was scared he was unusually chatty, and he started to discuss with the people of the caravan his worries, but his thoughts kept returning to Khan’s whereabouts. The man had disappeared over ten minutes before and there was no sign of him. Indeed he knew himself that you shouldn’t go into this tunnel alone, you should only go together. How could he have gone off like that, how could he have dared to defy the unwritten law of this place? He couldn’t have simply forgotten it, or just decided to trust his wolf’s sense of smell. Artyom couldn’t believe that. After all Khan had spent three years of his life studying this tunnel. And it didn’t take that long to learn the basic rule: never go into the tunnel alone…

But Artyom didn’t have time to consider what might have happened to his protector up ahead before the man himself appeared noiselessly at his side, and the people were reanimated.

‘They don’t want to stop here any longer. They’re scared. Let’s go on, quickly,’ Artyom proposed. ‘I also feel something’s not right here…’

‘They’re not scared yet,’ Khan assured him, looking behind him, and Artyom suddenly realized that his hard, husky voice was quivering. Khan continued, ‘And you also don’t know fear yet so let’s not waste breath. I am scared. And remember I don’t use words lightly. I am scared because I dipped into the station’s gloom. The Guide wouldn’t let me take another step, otherwise I would have undoubtedly disappeared. We can’t go any further. Something lies ahead… But it’s dark there and my vision doesn’t penetrate and I don’t know what exactly is awaiting us there. Look!’ He lifted the map up to their eyes with a quick motion. ‘Do you see? Shine your flashlight on it! Look at the passage from here to Kitai Gorod! Don’t tell me you don’t notice anything?’

Artyom scrutinized the tiny section of the diagram with such urgency that his eyes hurt. He couldn’t make out anything unusual, but he didn’t have the courage to admit it to Khan.

‘Are you blind? You really don’t see anything? It’s all black! It’s death!’ Khan whispered and jerked back the map.

Artyom stared at him cautiously. Khan again seemed like a madman to him. He was remembering the stuff Zhenya had told him about going into the tunnel alone, about the fact that whoever survived the tunnel would go crazy from fright. Could this have happened to Khan?

‘And we can’t turn back either!’ Khan whispered. ‘We managed to get through while there was a benevolent mood in there. But now the darkness is unfurling and a storm is brewing. The only thing we can do now is to go forward but not through this tunnel, but through the parallel one. Maybe it’s clear right now. Hey!’ he shouted at the others. ‘You’re right! We need to move on. But we can’t go along this route. There’s destruction and death that way.’

‘So how are we going to move on?’ asked one of them in puzzlement.

‘We’ll cross the station and go through the parallel tunnel – that’s what we have to do. And as soon as possible!’

‘Oh no!’ someone in the group burst out. ‘Everyone knows that you don’t take the reverse direction tunnel if the one you’re facing is clear – it’s a bad sign, certain death! We won’t go in the left-hand tunnel.’

Several voices agreed. The group shuffled their feet.

‘What’s he talking about?’ Artyom asked Khan.

‘Apparently it’s native folklore,’ he said and frowned. ‘The devil! There is absolutely no time to convince them and I don’t have the strength to either… Listen!’ he addressed them. ‘I’m going into the parallel tunnel. Whoever trusts me can come with me. The rest of you, goodbye. Forever… Let’s go!’ He nodded at Artyom and picked up his rucksack, which was heavy in his hands, and climbed up onto the edge of the platform.

Artyom was frozen with indecision. On the one hand, Khan knew things about these tunnels and the metro in general that far exceeded human understanding, and you could rely on that. On the other, there was the immutable law of these accursed tunnels that you could only go through them with a certain number of people because that was your only hope for success…

‘What’s up there? Too heavy? Give me your hand!’ Khan extended his palm down to him and got onto his knees.

Artyom really didn’t want to meet his gaze at that moment. He was afraid to see that spark of madness he had been so frightened to see flashing in the man’s eyes a few times before. Did Khan understand that he was rejecting the warning calls of not just the people here but of the tunnel itself? Was it enough just to feel the nature of the tunnel? The place on the map, the Guide, at which he’d pointed wasn’t black. Artyom was ready to swear that it was a faded orange colour, like all the other lines. So here was the question: which of them was actually blind?

‘So? What’re you waiting for? You what, don’t understand that a delay will kill us? Your hand! For the devil’s sake give me your hand!’ Khan was yelling but Artyom slowly, with small strides, stepped away from Khan, still staring at the floor, and moved closer to the grumbling group.

‘Come on, brother, come with us, no need to hobnob with that jerk, you’ll be safer here!’ he heard from the crowd.

‘Fool! You’ll perish with them all! If you don’t give a shit about your life then at least think of your mission!’

Artyom summoned the courage to finally lift his head and set his gaze on Khan’s dilated pupils, but there wasn’t the fire of madness in them, only desperation and fatigue.

He started to doubt himself and he paused – and at that moment someone’s hand came lightly down onto his shoulder and it softly pulled him.

‘Let’s go! Let him die alone, he only wants to drag you along into the grave!’ Artyom heard the person say. The meaning of the words made their way to him heavily, he slowly grasped them, and in a moment of resistance he let the man lead him off after the others.

The group set off and moved forward into the darkness of the southern tunnel. They were moving surprisingly slowly, as though affected by the friction of some kind of dense medium – like they were walking in water.

And then Khan, with unexpected lightness, sprang off the platform and onto the path, and in two swift bounds he was at their side. And in one fell swoop he brought down the man who was leading Artyom along, and gripped Artyom and jerked his body backwards. It all seemed to go in slow motion for Artyom. He watched Khan’s leap from over his shoulder with mute surprise, Khan’s flight seemed to have lasted several seconds. And with the same dull reasoning, he saw how the moustached man in the tarpaulin jacket who was softly gripping him his shoulder, fell hard to the ground.

But from the moment when Khan intercepted him, time started to speed up and the reactions of the others upon hearing the sound of impact, seemed to him to be lightning quick. They were making their first steps toward Khan with their guns fixed on him, and Khan retreated softly to the side, squeezing Artyom to himself with one arm, holding him up, shielding his own body. His other hand was stretched forward and in it he held Artyom’s dimly shining new machine gun.

‘Go on,’ Khan pronounced hoarsely. ‘I don’t see the point in killing you, you’ll die anyway in an hour’s time. Leave us. Go on,’ he was saying, moving towards the centre of the station, step by step while the frozen figures of the undecided people were starting to turn into vague silhouettes and merged with the darkness.

Some sort of fuss was heard, they were probably helping the moustached man who’d been knocked down by Khan, and the group started to move toward the entrance to the southern tunnel. They’d decided not to join Khan. Only then did Khan lower the gun and sharply ordered Artyom to get up onto the platform.

‘Any more of this and I’ll get sick of rescuing you, my young friend,’ he said with unconcealed irritation.

Artyom obediently climbed up and Khan followed him. Picking up his stuff, he walked into the black aperture, with Artyom trailing behind.

The hall in Turgenevskaya was quite short. On the left, there was a blind alley, a marble wall, and on the other side, there was a piece of corrugated iron over a break in the wall, and that was as far as you could see by the light of a flashlight. Marble, slightly yellowed with age, covered the whole station, which had only three arches. These led to the stairway which connected this station to Chistyie Prudi whose name had been changed to Kirovskaya by the Reds and which was now walled up with rough grey concrete blocks. The station was completely empty, there wasn’t an object on the floor, there were no traces of human activity, not a rat, not a cockroach. While Artyom looked around, he remembered his conversation with Bourbon, which confirmed that rats were afraid of nothing and if there were no rats in a place then there was something wrong there.

Grabbing him by the shoulder, Khan crossed the hall with a quick step, and Artyom could feel, even through his jacket, that Khan was trembling, as though he’d caught a chill. When they put down their bags at the edge of the platform, getting ready to jump onto the path, a weak light suddenly hit them from behind, and Artyom was again surprised by the speed with which his companion reacted to the danger. Within a short moment, Khan was on the ground, spread out and looking at the source of the light.

The light wasn’t very strong but it was shining straight into their eyes and it was hard to make out who was in pursuit of them. A moment’s delay and Artyom too dropped to the floor. He crawled to his rucksacks and got out the old weapon he was carrying. It was bulky and inconvenient but it made flawless holes of 7.62 calibre and whoever was on the receiving end of it would have a hard time functioning with holes like that in them.

‘What’s your business?’ Khan’s voice growled, and Artyom managed to figure out that if the person had wanted to kill them then they would have done so already.

He could see how it probably looked from the outside: helplessly crouched on the floor, in the light of a flashlight and in his crosshairs too. Yes, if he’d wanted to kill them, they would be lying in a pool of blood already.

‘Don’t shoot!’ a voice called out. ‘No need…’

‘Turn off your flashlight!’ Khan said, and he moved over to the column to get his own flashlight.

Artyom finally got hold of his weapon and, holding it fast, he rolled over to the side, out of the line of fire and hid in one of the arches. Now he was ready to emerge on the other side and cut off whoever it was, if the person chose to shoot.

But the stranger followed Khan’s orders as soon as they were given.

‘Good! Now put your weapon on the ground!’ Khan said in a less tense voice.

Metal clinked on the granite floor, and Artyom, aiming his weapon forward, crawled sideways and appeared in the hall. He had calculated correctly – fifteen paces in front of him, lit up by the reflections of the flashlight on the arches, with hands up, was that same bearded man who had initiated the skirmish at Sukharevskaya.

‘Don’t shoot,’ he said again with a trembling voice. ‘I wasn’t planning on attacking you. I decided to come with you. You did say that anyone who wanted could come. I… I trust you,’ he said to Khan. ‘I also feel that there’s something going on over there, in the right-hand tunnel. They’ve already left, they all went. But I stayed behind, I want to go with you.’

‘Good sense,’ Khan said, studiously examining the guy. ‘But my friend, you don’t inspire trust in me. Who knows why that is,’ he added mockingly. ‘Basically, we’ll examine your proposal. On condition that you hand over your entire arsenal to me. You’ll walk in front of us in the tunnel. If you want to play the fool then it won’t end well for you.’

The bearded guy pushed his pistol across the floor to Khan with his foot, and carefully put several spare cartridges next to it. Artyom picked them up from the floor and approached him, not lowering his gun.

‘I’ve got him!’ he shouted.

‘Keep your hands up!’ Khan thundered. ‘And jump onto the path, quickly. Stand there with your back to us!’

After about two minutes into the tunnel, as they walked in a tight triangle – the bearded guy called Ace, walked five paces ahead of Khan and Artyom – they heard a muted howl. It stopped almost as soon as it had started…

Ace looked back at them frightened, forgetting even to shine his flashlight to the side of them. The flashlight was shaking in his hands, and his face, lit from underneath, was forced into a grimace of horror, and that had a greater effect on Artyom than the howl had.

‘Yes,’ Khan nodded, silently answering the question. ‘They made a mistake. But I guess time will still tell whether we have too.’

They hurried on. Casting looks over to his protector from time to time, Artyom noted in him more and more signs of fatigue. His hands were lightly trembling, his stride was uneven, and sweat had gathered in huge droplets on his face. But they hadn’t been walking for long at all… This path was obviously considerably more tiring for him that it was for Artyom. Thinking about what was draining the strength from his companion, the young man couldn’t stop returning to the thought that Khan had seemed to be right in this situation, that he’d saved Artyom again. Had Artyom followed the caravan into the right-hand tunnel, then he would undoubtedly already be dead, he’d have disappeared without a trace.

But there were a lot of them – at least six of them. Had the iron rule not held? Khan had known – he’d known! Whether it really was premonition or if indeed it was thanks to the magic of the Guide… It was almost funny that a bit of paper with ink on it could do that. Could that piece of rubbish really help them? Well, the passage between Turgenevskaya and Kitai Gorod had been orange, definitely orange. Or had it really been black?

‘What’s this?’ Ace asked, suddenly stopping and uneasily looking at Khan.

‘Do you feel that? From behind…’

Artyom stared in puzzlement at him and wanted to let out a sarcastic comment about jangled nerves because he didn’t feel anything in the slightest. The claws of the heavy sensation of depression and danger had even seemed to unclench since they’d left Turgenevskaya. But Khan, to his surprise, froze in place, gestured to him to keep quiet, and turned to face the direction from which they’d just come.

‘What a keen sense!’ he said after a half minute. ‘We’re in admiration. The queen of admiration,’ he added for some reason. ‘We must definitely discuss this in more detail if we get out of here. You don’t hear anything?’ he inquired of Artyom.

‘No, everything seems quiet,’ Artyom listened and responded. At that moment he was filled with something… jealousy? Offence? Vexation, that his protector had said such things about the rough bearded scumbag who had only two hours ago threatened their lives? Please…

‘That’s strange. I think you have the rudiments of the skill to hear tunnels… Maybe it hasn’t developed itself totally in you yet. Later, later. That will all come later.’ Khan shook his head. ‘You’re right,’ he addressed Ace, confirming the man’s suspicions. ‘Something’s coming this way. We have to move and fast.’ He listened again and sniffed the air in a very wolf-like manner. ‘It’s coming from behind like a wave. We have to run! If it covers us, then the game is over,’ he concluded, tearing off.

Artyom had to rush after him and break into a run so he wasn’t left behind. The bearded guy was now keeping pace with them quickly, moving his short legs and breathing heavily.

They went along like that for ten minutes, and all that time Artyom couldn’t understand why they were rushing so much, getting so out of breath, stumbling on the cross-ties if the tunnel behind them was empty and quiet, and there was no evidence that they were being chased. Ten minutes passed before they felt IT. It was definitely rushing after them, hard at their heels, chasing them step after step – something black. It wasn’t a wave, but more like a whirlwind, a black whirlwind, cutting through the emptiness… And if it overtook them, then the same fate awaited them as had met the other six and all the other daredevils and fools who entered the tunnel alone or at a fatal time, when fiendish hurricanes raged, sweeping up any living thing. Such suppositions and a vague understanding of what was going on, were rushing through Artyom’s mind, and he looked at Khan with anxiety. Khan returned his look and everything was clear.

‘What, have you got it now?’ He exhaled. ‘It’s a bad business! That means, it’s already very close.’

‘We have to go faster!’ Artyom wheezed as he ran. ‘Before it’s too late!’

Khan picked up his pace and now he was trotting along with wide paces, saying nothing, not answering Artyom’s questions anymore. Even the traces of exhaustion that Artyom had seen in the man seemed to have disappeared and something beast-like had emerged in him again. Artyom had to run to keep up but, when it seemed that they had broken away from the thing that was pursuing them inexorably, Ace tripped on a cross-tie and fell head over heels onto the ground. His face and hands were covered in blood.

Out of inertia, they ran another dozen paces before they took in that Ace had fallen and Artyom thought quickly that he didn’t really feel like stopping and going back for the guy – he wanted to leave him to the dogs, the short-arse bootlicker with his amazing intuition. He wanted to keep going before the thing got to them.

It was a disgusting thought but Artyom was seized by such a compulsion to flee and leave the fallen man that his conscience had gone silent. Therefore he felt a certain disappointment when Khan rushed back and, with a powerful jerk, lifted the bearded man to his feet. Artyom had secretly hoped that Khan with his more than disdainful attitude towards others’ lives, and indeed their deaths, wouldn’t hesitate to forget the guy and leave him in the tunnel like the burden he was, and rush on.

Having ordered Artyom to take one of the injured Ace’s arms, he took the other and pulled them along. This made running considerably more difficult. Ace was moaning and grinding his teeth from pain with each step, but Artyom didn’t feel anything for him, apart from growing irritation. The long, heavy machine gun was painfully knocking against his legs, and he didn’t have a free hand to hold onto it.

But death was very near. If they stopped and waited for half a minute, the ominous vortex would overtake then, whip and tear them into the smallest particles. In the course of a second they would no longer be of this universe and death cries would burst from them with unnatural speed… These thoughts didn’t paralyse Artyom but, mixed with malice and irritation, they gave him strength and he gained more and more with each step.

And suddenly it disappeared, vanished entirely. The feeling of danger was released so suddenly that one’s consciousness was left unusually empty, like the gap after a pulled tooth, and it was as though Artyom was now feeling around with the tip of his tongue for the pit. There was nothing behind them. Just tunnel – clean, dry, clear and completely safe. All that running from fear and paranoid fantasies, the unnecessary belief in some sort of special feelings and intuition, seemed so funny to Artyom now, so silly and absurd, that he burst out laughing. Ace, who had stopped next to him, looked at him with surprise at first and then also started to laugh. Khan looked at them, annoyed and finally spat at them:

‘Well, what’s so funny? It’s nice here right? So quiet, so clean, right?’ And he walked on alone. Then Artyom realized that they were altogether only about fifty paces from the station, and that light was clearly visible at the end of the tunnel.

Khan waited at the entrance, standing on the iron stairs. He had had time to smoke some kind of home-made cigarette, while they, laughing away, completely relaxed, made the fifty paces.

Artyom was penetrated by a feeling of sympathy and compassion for the limping Ace who was moaning through his laughter. He was ashamed at the thoughts that had flashed through his mind back there when Ace had fallen. His mood was dramatically improved, and therefore the sight of Khan, tired, emaciated, scrutinizing them with a strange look of suspicion, seemed a little unpleasant to Artyom.

‘Thanks!’ Boots rumbled on the stairs and Ace climbed up onto the platform saying to Khan, ‘If it weren’t for you… You… Well, it would have all been over. But you… didn’t leave me there. Thank you! I don’t forget things like that.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Khan responded without any enthusiasm.

‘Why did you come back for me?’

‘You’re interesting to me as someone to talk to.’ Khan flung his cigarette butt on the ground and shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s all.’

After climbing a little higher, Artyom understood why Khan had gone up the stairs to the platform and not continued along the path. In front of the actual entrance to Kitai Gorod, the path was heaped with sandbags as high as a man. Behind the sandbags was a group of people sitting on wooden stools with a very serious look about them. Buzz cuts and wide shoulders under beaten-up leather jackets, shabby sports trousers – all this looked rather amusing but, for some reason, it hadn’t produced any merriment. Three of them sat there and on a fourth stool there was a deck of cards, which the thugs had strewn carelessly about. There was such abusive language being used that listening to it, Artyom couldn’t make out even one normal word in the conversation.

To get through the station you could only pass along a narrow path and up the little stairway, which ended with a gate. But diagonally across from the path, there was an even more imposing pack of four guards. Artyom threw them a look: shaved heads, watery-grey eyes, slightly bent noses, cauliflower ears, wearing training pants with a heavy ‘TT’ imprinted on the stripe. And there was an unbearable smell of fumes, which was making it hard to think.

‘So what do we have here?’ the fourth guard said hoarsely, examining Khan and Artyom behind him from head to foot. ‘Are you tourists or what? Or traders?’

‘No, we’re not traders, we’re travellers and we have no goods with us,’ Khan explained.

‘Travellers – grovellers!’ the thug rhymed and guffawed loudly. ‘Hear that Kolya? Travellers – grovellers!’ he repeated, turning to the card players.

They responded enthusiastically. Khan smiled patiently.

The bull of a man leant one hand against the wall blocking their way.

‘We have here, a kind of a… customs operation, you know what I mean?’ he explained. ‘Cash is the currency. You want to go through – you pay. You don’t want to then you can get lost…!’

‘Whose prerogative?’ Artyom protested indignantly.

That was a mistake.

The bull didn’t probably quite get what he’d meant but he’d understood the intonation and he didn’t like it. Pushing Khan to the side, he took a heavy step and got right up into Artyom’s face. He lowered his chin and gave the young man a severe look. His eyes were completely empty and seemed almost transparent, and they lacked any sign of a reasonable mind. Stupidity and malice, that’s what they emitted, and though it was hard to hold his gaze and Artyom was blinking from the tension, he felt how fear and hatred was growing in those eyes as they sat there at the tunnel entrance watching people come past.

‘What the fuck?’ the guard said threateningly.

He was taller than Artyom by more than a head and three times as wide. Artyom remembered the legend someone had told him about David and the Goliath. Though he was confused which was which, he knew that it ended well for the smaller and weaker of the two, and this gave him a certain optimism.

‘Whatever,’ he unexpectedly plucked up the courage to say.

This answer upset the man for some reason, and he spread out his short and fat fingers and, with a confident motion, he put all five of them on Artyom’s forehead. The skin on his palms was yellow, calloused and it stank of tobacco and car grease, and Artyom didn’t have time make out all the many aromas to it because the thug pushed him backwards.

He probably didn’t have to apply much force but Artyom flew a metre backwards and knocked Ace, who was standing behind him, over too. They both fell onto the little bridge while the thug returned to his place. But a surprise awaited him there. Khan, who’d thrown his bag on the ground, was standing there gripping Artyom’s machine gun in his hands. He demonstratively clicked open the safety catch and with a quiet voice that indicated that nothing good could come of all this – so much so that even Artyom’s hair was standing on end upon hearing it – he pronounced:

‘Now why so rude?’

He hadn’t said anything much but, to Artyom, who was floundering on the floor, trying to get to his feet, burning with shame, these words seemed like a dull precautionary growl which would likely be followed by a quick and hard attack. He stood up, finally, and tore his old machine gun off his shoulder and trained it on the offender, with the safety catch undone. Now he was ready to pull the trigger at any moment. His heart was beating hard and hatred definitely outweighed fear on the scales of his feelings and he said to Khan:

‘Let me take care of him.’ And he was surprised himself at how unhesitatingly ready he was to kill the man for pushing him over. The sweaty shaved head was clearly visible in the cross-hairs of his scope, and the temptation to pull the trigger was strong. After that, what would be, would be, but most important was to get rid of this piece of filth right now, to wash him in his own blood.

‘Alert!’ the bull bawled.

Khan pulled the pistol out of his belt with lightning speed, and slid to the side and he took aim at the ‘customs officers’ who had leapt from their places.

‘Don’t shoot!’ he managed to yell to Artyom, and the animated scene was frozen again: the bull standing there with his hands up on the little bridge and a motionless Khan, aiming at the three thugs who hadn’t managed to grab hold of their machine guns from the pile they made nearby.

‘There’s no need for blood,’ Khan said quietly and imposingly, not asking but more like giving an order. ‘There’s a rule here, Artyom,’ he continued, not taking his eyes off the three card-players, who were frozen in absurd poses.

The skinheads probably knew the price of the Kalashnikov and its lethal force at such a distance, and therefore they didn’t want to cause any unnecessary suspicion in the man who held them in his sights.

‘Their rules force us to pay duty to enter. How much do you take?’ Khan asked.

‘Three cartridges each,’ the guy on the bridge responded.

‘Shall we haggle?’ Artyom suggested mockingly, pointing the barrel of his machine gun at the guy’s belt area.

‘Two.’ The man offered some flexibility, giving Artyom the evil eye. But he didn’t seem sure of what Artyom was going to do.

‘Give it to him!’ Khan ordered Ace. ‘Pay for me too and consider it payback.’

Ace readily pushed his hand into the depths of his travelling bag and approaching the guard, he counted out six shining and sharp cartridges. The man quickly squeezed his fist around them and poured them into the protruding pockets of his jacket, and then raised his hands again and looked at Khan, waiting.

‘So the duty is paid?’ Khan raised his eyebrows questioningly.

The bull nodded sullenly, without taking his eyes off Khan’s weapon.

‘The incident is settled?’ Khan asked.

The thug kept silent. Khan reached into his auxiliary bag and took out another five cartridges and put them in the guard’s pocket. They tinkled into the pocket and disappeared together with the tense grimace on the bull’s face, which had resumed its usual lazy and suspicious expression.

‘Compensation for moral damage,’ Khan explained but the words didn’t have any effect.

It was likely that the bull hadn’t understood them, as he hadn’t understood the previous question. He was guessing at the meaning of Khan’s wise statements by Khan’s preparedness to use money and force. This was the language he understood perfectly, and probably the only one he spoke too.

‘You can put your hands down,’ Khan said and carefully lifted his gun upwards, taking his aim away from the three gamblers.

Artyom did the same but his hands were shaking – he had been ready to take out the shaved skull of the thug at any moment. He didn’t trust these people. However, his agitation was unfounded. The thug, having relaxed and lowered his hands, growled to the rest of his buddies that everything was fine and, leaning with his back to the wall, he assumed an indifferent attitude, letting the travellers go by him into the station. As he passed, Artyom gave him an obnoxious look but the bull didn’t take the bait and was looking off to the side.

However, Artyom heard a disgusted ‘P-puppydog…’ and heard spittle hit the floor. He had wanted to turn around but Khan, walking a pace ahead of him, grabbed him by the hand and dragged him along so that Artyom was torn between satisfying his urge to turn back and show the sorry guy a thing or two, and the other cowardly part of him that just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

When they had all stepped onto the dark granite floor of the station, they suddenly heard a bellow of stretched vowels behind them: ‘He-ey, gimme my piece!’

Khan stopped, took the cartridge clip labelled ‘TT’ with its rounded bullets and flung it over to the bull. The man rather deftly caught the pistol and put it in his belt, watching annoyed at how Khan had let some extra cartridges fall on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ Khan opened his palms, ‘a prophylactic. Isn’t that what it’s called?’ He winked at Ace.

Kitai Gorod differed from other stations that Artyom had seen: it didn’t have three arches like VDNKh but was one large hall with a wide platform, with tracks on either side of it, and it gave the alarming impression of an unusual space. The accommodations were lit in the most disorganized way, weak pear-shaped lamps dangling here and there. There weren’t any fires here at all, apparently they weren’t allowed. In the centre of the hall, generously pouring light around itself, there was a white mercury-vapour lamp – a real miracle for Artyom. But there was bedlam surrounding it so one’s attention was distracted and you couldn’t keep your eyes on the marvel for more than a second.

‘What a big station!’ He exhaled in surprise.

‘You’re only really seeing half of it,’ Khan reported. ‘Kitai Gorod is about twice as big as this. Oh, this is one of the strangest places in the world. You have heard, I guess, that all the lines meet here. Look at those rails, to the right of us – that’s the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya branch. It’s hard to describe the craziness and disorder that goes on there, and here at Kitai Gorod it meets your orange Kaluzhasko-Rizhskaya, and no one from the other lines believes what goes on there. Apart from that, this station doesn’t belong to any of the federations, and its inhabitants represent themselves completely. It’s a very very curious place. I call it Babylon. With affection,’ Khan added, looking around the platform at all the people who were scurrying to and fro.

Life at the station was bubbling. It was vaguely like Prospect Mir but the latter was more modest and more organized. Artyom remembered Bourbon’s words about the fact that there were better places in the metro than that wretched market which they walked through at Prospect.

There were rows of trays along the endless rails and the whole platform was filled with tents. Several of them were made into commercial stalls, others were used as shelter for people. The letters SDAYu were painted on some of them, and that’s where travellers could spend the night. They made their way through the crowds and, looking sideways, Artyom noticed on the left-hand track that there was an enormous grey-blue figure of a train. It wasn’t complete; there were altogether only three wagons.

There was an indescribable roar at the station. It seemed that the inhabitants never fell silent for a moment and they just constantly talked, screamed, sang, argued desperately, laughed or cried. In several places, overlapping the din, there was a rush of music and this created an unusual holiday mood in underground life there.

At VDNKh there were also people who sang enthusiastically, but it was different there. There were only a couple of guitars there, and sometimes people would gather at someone’s tent to relax after work. Yes and and there was music sometimes at the three-hundredth metre border where you didn’t have to listen hard to hear it coming from the northern tunnel. At the little patrol fire they sang with guitars, but mostly about things that Artyom didn’t really understand: about wars that he hadn’t taken part in, and which were conducted according to different, strange rules; about life there, above, before.

He especially remembered songs about some Afghanistan place which Andrei really loved to sing – although there wasn’t much not to understand in these songs, they were all about sadness for fallen friends and hatred for the enemy. But Andrei could sing so well that everyone who listened was touched so much that their voices quivered and they had goosebumps.

Andrei explained to the younger ones that Afghanistan was quite a country and he described its mountains, the passes, the bubbling brooks, the villages, the helicopters and coffins. Artyom knew what a country was pretty well, since Sukhoi had spent worthwhile time explaining things to him. But while Artyom knew something about governments and their histories, mountains, rivers, and valleys remained as abstract notions to him, and they were mere words which were defined for him by the discoloured pictures his stepfather had shown him in a geography textbook.

Even Andrei hadn’t been to any Afghanistan, he was too young for that, but he had just heard the songs from his older army friends.

But did they really play music like this at VDNKh? No, the songs were pensive and sad – that’s what they sang there and, remembering Andrei and his melancholic ballads, and comparing them to the merry and playful melodies which issued from different corners of the hall, Artyom was surprised again and again how varied, how different music can be and how much it can affect one’s mood.

Coming up to the nearest musicians, Artyom stopped without meaning to, and joined the small group of people not just to listen to the words about adventures through the tunnels under the influence of weed but to hear the music itself and to look curiously at the performers. There were two of them: one with long greasy hair, tied down with a leather strap around his forehead, dressed in some kind of strange multi-coloured rags, jingling on the guitar. The other was an elderly man with a significant bald spot from the looks of it, and a pair of glasses that had been repaired many times, in an old faded jacket, and he was charming them with some kind of wind instrument, which Khan called a saxophone.

Artyom hadn’t ever seen anything like it. The only wind instrument he knew was the pipe. There were people who knew how to play it well, cutting insulating tubes of different diameters, but they only made them to sell: people didn’t like pipes at VDNKh. And furthermore the horn looked a little like the saxophone, which sometimes was used to sound the alarm if something was hindering the siren that was usually used.

On the floor next to the musicians lay an open guitar case in which lay a dozen cartridges. When the long-haired one had finished singing his heart out, he said something particularly funny, accompanying it an amusing grimace, the crowd chuckled with joy and applause broke out and another cartridge flew into the case.

The song about the wanderings of the poor devil had ended and the hairy guy leaned on the wall to relax, and the saxophonist in the jacket then took to playing some kind of motif that was unfamiliar to Artyom but evidently popular here because people started applauding and a few cartridges flashed through the air and into the red velvet of the case.

Khan and Ace were discussing something, standing near a tray; they weren’t telling Artyom to hurry up, and he could have stayed there another hour probably, listening to the simple songs, if they hadn’t suddenly stopped. Two powerful figures approached the musicians with an unsteady gait, and they were very reminiscent of and dressed similarly to the thugs whom they’d met at the entrance to the station. One of the approaching figures crouched and started to unceremoniously remove the cartridges from inside the case, pouring them into the pocket of his leather jacket. The long-haired guitarist rushed at him, trying to stop him, but was quickly knocked over by a fierce blow to his shoulder and had his guitar torn away from him, lifted up in order to smack it down, to shatter the instrument on the side of the column. The second thug pushed the elderly saxophonist against the wall with little effort when the man tried to get away to help his friend.

None of the audience standing around the musicians stepped in. The crowd thinned noticeably, and the ones who were left either covered their eyes or pretended to be looking at the goods for sale lying on a tray nearby. Artyom burned with shame for them and for himself, but he decided not to get involved.

‘You’ve already been here today!’ the long-haired musician said, almost weeping, holding his hand to his shoulder.

‘Listen you! If you’re having a good day that means we’re have a good day, got it? And don’t you start with me, right? What, you want to go to the wagon do you, you hairy faggot?’ the thug screamed at him, throwing down the guitar. It was clear that he had been waving it around more as a warning than anything else.

At the word ‘wagon’ the long-haired guy immediately stopped short, shook his head quickly and didn’t say another word.

‘Got it… faggot?!’ the thug finished, stressing the first syllable, contemptuously spitting at the musician’s feet. The musician again said nothing. Convinced that the rebellion was quashed, the two bulls went off slowly, searching for their next victim.

Artyom looked around in dismay and saw Ace nearby who had also been attentively watching the scene.

‘Who was that?’ Artyom asked, puzzled.

‘Well, who did they look like to you?’ Ace inquired. ‘The usual bandits. There’s no governing power at Kitai Gorod so there are two groups that control it. This half is under the Brother Slavs. All the riff-raff from the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya line gather here, all the cutthroats. Mostly they’re called the Kaluzhskys, some of them are called the Rizhskys but you won’t see the likes of them either at Kaluga or at Riga. But there, you see, where the little bridge is,’ he pointed to the stairway that went off to the right and upwards in the middle of the platform. ‘There is another hall, and it’s identical to this one. There isn’t this racket up there, but the Caucasus Muslims are in charge there – basically the Azerbaijanis and the Chechens. It was once a slaughterhouse with each of them trying to take over as much territory as possible. In the end they split the station in half.’

Artyom didn’t bother asking what a ‘Caucasian’ was, having decided that this name, like the incomprehensible and hard to pronounce ‘Chechens’ and ‘Azerbaijanis’ were referring to stations he didn’t know, where the bandits came from.

‘Now both groups behave peacefully,’ continued Ace. ‘They grab those that decide to stop at Kitai Gorod to make some money and charge customs duty. The charge is the same in both halls – three cartridges – so it makes no difference how you enter the station. Of course, there’s no order here at all, and they of course don’t need it, the only thing is you can’t build a fire. If you want to buy some weed? Go for it. Want some spirits? Buy as much as you want. You can load yourself with the kind of weapon that could take down half the metro – no problem. Prostitution flourishes. But I don’t advise it,’ he added and muttered something about personal opinion with embarrassment.

‘And what was that about the wagon?’

‘The wagon? It’s like their headquarters. And if anyone misbehaves in front of them, you refuse to pay, you owe them money or something like that, then they drag you in there. There’s a prison there and a torture chamber – it’s like a pit of debt. Better not to land there. Are you hungry?’ Ace turned the conversation to a different topic.

Artyom nodded. The devil knew how much time passed since that moment when he and Khan were drinking tea at Sukharevskaya. Without clocks he had lost his ability to orientate himself in time. His journeys through the tunnels, full of strange experiences, could have lasted many hours, and also could have flown past in mere minutes. Apart from that, the passage of time inside tunnels was totally different than anywhere else.

In any event, he wanted to eat. He looked around.

‘Kebab! Hot kebabs!’ a swarthy trader was standing nearby with thick black eyebrows underneath his arched nose.

He had pronounced it a little strangely: he hadn’t used a hard ‘K’ and instead of an ‘a’ came the sound of ‘o.’ Artyom had met people before who had spoken with unusual accents but he hadn’t ever paid special attention to it.

The word was familiar to Artyom. They made kebabs at VDNKh and liked them too. It was pork, obviously. But whatever that trader was waving around seemed a far cry from that. Artyom looked at it tensely and for a long time, and finally recognized the charred carcasses of rats with twisted paws. It made him dizzy.

‘You don’t eat rats?’ Ace asked him sympathetically. ‘Here are some.’ He nodded at the swarthy trader. ‘They won’t give you pork. It’s forbidden by the Koran. But rats are OK,’ he added, hungrily examining the smoking grill. ‘I also used to be disgusted and now I’m used to it. A little cruel, of course, and they’re a little bony and apart from that, they smell a little. But these abreks,’ again he shot a glance over at him, ‘know how to cook a rat and you can’t take that away from them. They pickle it in something, and afterwards it becomes as soft as a suckling pig. And with spices!… And much cheaper!’

Artyom pushed his palm against his mouth, inhaled deeply and tried to think about something else to distract himself, but the blackened carcasses of rats mounted on spits kept swimming before his eyes: the spits were stuck into the bodies from the back and came out at their opened mouths.

‘As you like, but I’m treating! So join us. It’s altogether three cartridges for a skewer!’ Ace issued his final argument and headed for the grill.

Having warned Khan, Artyom needed to go around the station and find something more normal to eat. Artyom looked through the whole station, he was offered home-brew in all manner of flasks, he greedily but cautiously scrutinized the tempting half-naked girls who stood at lifted tent flaps throwing inviting looks at the passers-by; vulgar though they were, they were so relaxed, so free, and not tense, beaten down by the harsh life women like them were at VDNKh. He hung around the booksellers for a bit but there was nothing of interest there. Everything was much cheaper: there were pocket-sized books, that were falling apart, about a great and pure love for women, and books about murder and money for men.

The platform was about two hundred paces long – a little longer than usual. The walls and the amusing columns that were reminiscent of accordions were coated with coloured marble, mostly a grey-yellow, but pinkish in places. The length of the station was decorated with heavy sheets of some kind of yellow metal that had darkened with time, and on them were barely recognizable symbols from a past epoch. The ceilings were darkened from fires, the walls were speckled with a multitude of inscriptions made in paint and soot, and depicting primitive and frequently obscene pictures. On some places there were chunk-sized chips in the marble and the metal sheets were dented and badly scratched.

In the middle of the hall, on the right side, through one of the short flights of stairs, beyond the little bridge, you could see the second hall of the station. Artyom wanted to wander around there too, but he stopped at the iron enclosure, which were made up of two-metre sections like at Prospect Mir.

Several people stood by the narrow passage, leaning on the fence. On Artyom’s side were the familiar bulldozers in training pants. On the other side, they were swarthy and moustached, of average size, but they didn’t look like they could take a joke either. One of them was squeezing a machine gun between his legs, and the other had a pistol poking out of his pocket. The bandits conversed calmly together and you could hardly believe that there had ever been hostility between them. They fairly politely told Artyom that passage to the adjacent station would cost him two cartridges and he’d have to pay the same to get back again. Having learnt his lesson from bitter experience, Artyom didn’t dispute the fairness of the tariffs and just walked off.

Having made a circle, carefully studying the stalls and bazaars, he returned to the end of the platform where they’d arrived. The hall didn’t end there, there was another staircase leading up. He went up and found a small hall there, split in half in exactly the same way with a cordon. Here, apparently, was another boundary between the two areas. On his right, he saw, to his surprise, a real monument – one of those that you see in pictures of the city. But this wasn’t a full figure, just the head of a man.

What a big head! It was no less than two metres high… Though it was dirtied on top by something, and its nose was shiny from frequent rubbings by human hands, all the same it demanded respect and was even a little frightening. Fantasies about giants entered his mind. One of the giants lost the battle in his head and now its head was dipped in bronze, to decorate the marbled hall of this small Sodom, buried deeply in the earth’s crust, hidden from the all seeing eyes of God… The face of the severed head was sad, and Artyom suspected at first that it belonged to John the Baptist of the New Testament, which he had once leafed through. But then he decided that, judging from the scale of it, that it was probably something to do with a big and strong hero who had genuinely been a giant but had lost his head in the end. None of the inhabitants scurrying around could tell him who this severed head belonged to, and he was a bit disappointed.

But near the statue he came across a wonderful place – a real restaurant, set up in a spacious and clean tent of a pleasant, dark-green colour, like at his own station. Inside, plastic vases of flowers with cloth leaves were in the corners, and a pair of tables had oil lamps on them, suffusing the tent with a comfortable, soft light. And the food… It was the food of the Gods: the most tender pork with hot mushrooms which melted in your mouth. Restaurants served that at VDNKh on holidays, but it had never been so delicious…

The people sitting there were solid, respectable types with good and tasteful clothes. Apparently they were important merchants. Carefully cutting pieces of fried crackling, which oozed with hot fat, they unhurriedly placed small pieces of it in their mouths. Meanwhile they sedately conversed with each other, discussing their business, and sometimes threw a politely curious glance over at Artyom.

It was expensive, of course – he had to give over a whole fifteen cartridges from his supply and put them in the wide palm of the fat inn-keeper, and then he regretted that he’d succumbed to temptation, but his stomach was nonetheless happy, calm and warm so the voice of reason was silenced.

And the mug of fermented mixture was sweet, and it pleasantly swirled his head but it wasn’t strong, it wasn’t that poisonous, turbid home-brew in the dirty bottles and jars that would make you weak at the knees with one sniff. Yes, and it was only for three more cartridges, and what’s three cartridges if you exchange them for a phial of a sparkling elixir which helps you to come to terms with the imperfection of this world and restores a certain harmony?

Drinking the fermented mixture in small gulps, sitting alone in silence and peace for the first time in a few days, Artyom tried to resurrect recent events in his memory and to understand where he had got to and where he had yet to go. There was still another section of his designated journey to overcome, and he was again at a crossroads.

He felt like the hero of the almost forgotten fairy tales of his childhood. The memory of them was so distant now that he didn’t remember who had told them to him… Was it Sukhoi or was it Zhenya’s parents, or was it his own mother? More than anything Artyom liked to think that he’d heard them from his mother, and her face even would swim out of the fog for a moment and he could hear her voice reading to him with smooth intonations: ‘Once upon a time…’

And so, like the fairytale hero, he was standing there and in front of him there were three roads: one to Kuznetsky Most, one to Tretyakovskaya, and one to Taganskaya. He savoured the intoxicating drink, his body seized by a blissful languor. He didn’t want to think at all, and all that was circulating in his head was: ‘Go straight – you’ll lose your life. Go left – you’ll lose your horse…’

This probably could have gone on forever: he really needed this rest after his recent experiences. It was worth waiting at Kitai Gorod – to look around, to ask the locals about the tunnels. He had to meet up with Khan again, to find out if he would be going further with him or if their paths would diverge at this strange station.

It hadn’t gone at all according to the lazy plan that Artyom had made. He exhaustedly contemplated the small tongue of flame that was dancing in the lamp on the table.