Disclaimer:everything that looks familiar belongs to those guys who own Vertical Limit or Highlander, or to the muse of clichés. Everything and everyone else is mine.

Author’s note:

ostrov Domanskii is a small island between Russia and China, and a place where a military conflict that is still remembered bitterly happened (Soviet era)

Mikhail Domanskii was a follower (friend? lover? both?) of one pretty imposter knyazhna Tarakhanova declared herself a daughter of Russian empress Elizabeth, and was imprisoned by Catherine II for that, and is believed to have betrayed the girl when another Russian empress Catherine II promised him money and royal pardon

the princess – knyazhna Tarakhanova (that’s what she was supposedly called by her followers and what insisted on being called by everybody else)

Chapter 1:

Cory Raines checked the guide-book again and felt tempted to swear in a number of languages, alive or dead, who the hell cared. The most exquisite mountain-climbing spot on Earth – unique, unforgettable experience of your life! A nearly impossible to reach place, temperature below the freezing point he deemed adequate… Plus, the Pakistanis picked this particular moment to – as he was told before by the kid – wake up the Indians. With help of artillery fire.

Very exquisite indeed!

Blast the tour operator, the weather, and this never-ending war thing. Cory felt his face scowl almost instantly as he heard another long-distance shot echo. He hated wars. Even if those watcherboys’n’girls Rina had warned him about didn’t bother to check, Cory knew what it was like to be a civilian under fire, and a soldier as well – from first-hand experience. Wars… First in England, many others later, then some in Germany, and then – this particular one, very brief, not even a war, but something that was labeled a military conflict by those politically-correct assholes. These gunshots reminded him of that little conflict… or more like a miniature hell on a tiny piece of land, so small it was, too small… and seated right between two fairly big and impossibly ambitious countries of this world.

Ostrov Domanskii.

Somehow, the very name had an uneasy side, brimming with betrayal... Probably because of the Mikhail Domanskii, Cory mused every now and then as he was killing what little time they had left, with other boys there, industriously waiting for the hell to finally break loose, or the end of the world to come upon them via nuclear war, or both. Strange person he was, this Domanskii… A shadowy man that some believed to be nothing but a legend, a phantom constructed from scratch by crazy historians, and some thought he was very much real. A man in between ever-fighting, torn kingdom of Poland and the mighty Russian Empire. The man who followed a charming imposter from debts to tempting coup ideas to prison… And a, frankly, shallow enigma Cory brought up just to talk about something beside the Chinese. Thinking about him and the princess, tossing around their own scenarios of the drama ages old made everybody’s nerves relax a tad while they were trying to survive right in the drama of here and now… After it was all over, some of those who lived to tell the tale wrote to him, years later. Thanks for your stories, they helped to keep whatever sanity we still had staying where it belonged, the letters read. If Mikhail Domanskii never existed, we should have made up the guy so the story’s complete and whole. Right, Poland and Mikhail Domanskii… After all the years gone since that day when they were finally coming to mainland, coming home, it felt oddly nice to get those letters at the post office.

And after all the years past, somehow he still woke up with a start and in proverbial icy-cold sweat on the event’s anniversary. And somehow, these particular military parts of robber extraordinaire’s biography never found their way into his chronicle that gave Cory immense pleasure to study anyway.

The journals were a marginally hard read – talk about spelling mistakes… Aren’t those watchers supposed to be literate? – but an exciting one nonetheless. Good ol’ Rina and her unassuming position in their archives… Swoosh! A serge of mountain wind made him somewhat dizzy, and the man almost slipped. Grrr, the kid owns him big! Just you wait, Tom, when I lay my hands on your sorry self, it won’t be pretty! At least, he could take pleasure in the fact that someone beside him was too dragged out of lands with much more temperate climate to freeze and curse under his or her breath, watching one Cory Raines’ whereabouts. Wait, wasn’t his watcher these days some reformed pick-pocket, a chick from the south of France? Serves her right! Rule number one: don’t get caught. If violated, see rule number two: deal with it.

…Somebody was walking his way from the mountaineer base the kid talked about. In a moment, this somebody was going to tell him the news that would shatter Cory Raines to pieces, but Cory did not know that. Blessed are the innocent… He never thought much of the Bible anyway.