Dancing with Bears (16 page)

“I am strangely unmoved.” Zoësophia strode quickly around the interior of the octagonal cupola. Its walls were lined with cushioned benches, whose width invited lounging rather than sitting. She suddenly rounded on Surplus. “This is as good a time and place as any to have it out with you. You are going to see the Duke of Muscovy tomorrow. I am coming with you.” Then, as Surplus began to shake his head, “I warned you once that my sisters and I could make trouble for you. Yet you did not take me seriously then, and you do not take me seriously now.”

“Do you know?” Surplus said wryly, “I honestly believe I do.”

“Oh, no. You do not.” Zoësophia’s smile was cruelty itself.“ All of us have our admirers—and it would be the easiest matter imaginable to convince one that Muscovy would be a better place without you in it. Russians are a direct folk, so it would take some persuasion to convince one of them that your death should be lingering and painful. But we can be very persuasive. You exist on our tolerance, and we have tolerated you so far only because a figurehead was needed to arrange our collective marriage. In this, you have proved yourself incompetent, complacent, self-satisfied, and may I say officious. Indeed, I am come to the conclusion that you and your absent friend are both complete and utter frauds!”

“I know from what depths your passion arises,” Surplus said solemnly. “For I feel it myself.” He took her gloved hand and kissed its knuckles. Zoësophia snatched it away from him.

“Are you mad?!”

“Sweet lady, I am precisely the opposite of mad, for I have thought this out long and carefully. Attend: A compulsion was placed upon you in Byzantium, rendering the least touch by a man toxic to you and his intimate caresses fatal. Yet I have seen you and the others walking arm in arm and bestowing chaste kisses upon each other’s cheeks. I have seen you playing with kittens and brightly colored birds with your bare hands, without injury. Why should this be?”

“Obviously, because neither women nor kittens nor birds are men.”

“Nor am I, O Avatar of Delight, nor am I. Have you forgotten that I am no man but rather a reconfigured dog? My genes were tweaked to give me full human intellect and the upright stature of a human. Still, I remain not
Homo sapiens sapiens
but
Canis lupus familiaris
. You may do with me as you wish, and the suicidal impulse implanted by the Caliph’s psychogeneticists will not kick in.” Gently, he touched her face just below and to the side of her eye. “You see? No welt.”

For a still, shocked instant, Zoësophia did not move.

One hand floated up to touch her unblemished face.

Then, slowly, she peeled off her gloves and let them fall. One by one, her silks rained down to the floor with a grace that was almost as entrancing as the tawny body that their absence revealed. When she was, save for her jewelry, entirely naked, she passed her hands over Surplus, undressing him. Then she sank back onto the cushions, leaving him standing over her. “I shall teach you all I know,” Zoësophia said. Her expression was cryptic. “Though it may take some time.”

She held out the most desirable arms Surplus had ever seen or even imagined and drew him down atop her. “The first position is called the Way of the Missionary.”

The fastness that the underlords had made their own was in its era impregnable. But during a subsequent age, one corner of it had been sheared away for a tunnel whose purposes were no longer evident. So it was easy enough to enter the complex unnoticed. In a shabby corridor that went nowhere anybody cared to go, Anya Pepsicolova unscrewed a metal plate bolted low on a wall and then ducked through the opening thus revealed. She straightened up inside a nondescript and windowless office whose lone door had long ago merged with its frame in one great mass of rust.

Guided by the light of her cigarette alone, Pepsicolova fetched a coil of rope she had stashed in one corner and rolled up a moldering carpet to reveal a manhole cover hidden underneath. Only the topmost rung of several hundred had survived long neglect, but to this she tied the rope and so rappelled down to the bottom of the shaft. She ground the cigarette underfoot. From here it was only a leisurely walk along a narrow, lichen-streaked passage, to what she thought of as the Whisper Gallery.

The underlords did not know of the gallery. Of that Pepsicolova was certain. She had discovered it by logic alone. First she had reasoned that the Preutopians who had built this facility had trusted nobody, not even their own associates. Then that they would therefore have had means of spying on one another. At which point, Pepsicolova had simply snooped and pried, examining with particular closeness anything that seemed ostentatiously uninteresting. Until finally she found the secret passages and undocumented access-ways by which the Preutopians had bypassed their own security.

The Whisper Gallery completely circled the domed ceiling of what had once been a splendid conference room, all oaken panels and crimson draperies and brass sconces and leather armchairs and polished marble tabletops. It was so high up that nobody below could tell that what looked to be decorative molding was actually a series of slit windows from which the room could be observed. The floor of the gallery was of a soft material that absorbed all footsteps, and the room’s architecture was such that the slightest of sounds could be heard clearly from above.

As she approached the gallery, she heard the murmur of voices.

Pepsicolova quietly took her station. Below her was an underlord. It was in no way human, though it inhabited a human body. The body hunched forward, hands held loosely by the chest, as if it were a praying mantis. Yet though it moved as if it were a living thing, the stench of rotting meat that rose from it was, even from far above, all but unbearable.

Standing across a table from it were the last things in the world Pepsicolova would have expected to find in such a place:

Three stranniks.

Pimps, whores, prostitutes, gangsters, and other unwholesome businessmen were of course frequent visitors to the underlords, as were politicians, black marketeers, drug runners, petty thieves, and salesmen of all sorts. But stranniks?

She held her breath.

“We shall leave this with you,” the largest of the three stranniks said. “You will know what to do with it.”

With a twinge of disappointment, Pepsicolova realized that she had come at the end of the conversation for the underlord responded by saying, “Soon—very soon indeed—when we have recovered the weapon that has lain lost beneath Moscow since Utopia fell—we will kill you. We will kill you slowly and painfully, and along with you every human being who lives in this city. In this way, we shall have a partial revenge for what you and your kind have done to us.”

In Pepsicolova’s experience, such dark words meant that the underlord had run out of useful things to say.

“Yes, that is what you believe,” the chief strannik said. “But you are merely tools in the employ of a higher Power. What you anticipate as destruction will be in actual fact transformation. The Eschaton shall be achieved, the glory of God’s physical being will touch and cauterize the Earth, and on that very day, you will return to Hell.”

“Fool! This
is
Hell! All existence is Hell for our kind, for no matter where we are, we know your kind still exists unpunished.”

The strannik nodded. “We understand each other completely.”

“For the moment,” the underlord said with obvious regret, “I must refrain from destroying you.”

“I in turn will pray to the living God to forgive and punish you through all eternity.”

The stranniks departed, leaving behind them a leather satchel, whose contents the underlord began to unpack with extreme care.

Darger had lifted a crate as the factor hurried away, as if to carry it into the bar. Now he set it back down and sat atop it, thinking. He had intended to spend another week or so underground before bringing the great scheme to a head. But as a humble worshiper of Fortuna, he believed that there was a time and tide in the affairs of men which was often triggered by sudden, unexpected good luck. Luck that one ignored at one’s peril.

Surely this windfall of tobacco was a sign that he should advance his timetable. He could immediately see how it could be used to publicize his fictitious discovery. Surplus might experience a moment’s surprise to see events moving ahead of schedule. But Darger was certain his friend would be quick to adapt to the changing winds of circumstance.

A door opened onto a steaming kitchen and a worker in a stained apron scurried out on an errand. A delivery man staggered by, bent under a side of raw beef. Them he ignored. But then a clutch of five ragged boys ran past.

“Young people!” Darger called after them. “Are you interested in earning some pocket money?”

The boys skittered to a stop, and stared at him with glittering, unblinking eyes, wary as rats. The biggest of the lot squinted skeptically, spat, and said, “What’s the pitch?”

Darger removed the factor’s money from his pocket and slowly peeled off several bills. He understood these slum-children perfectly, for he had been much the same as they in his boyhood. Thus, when one of the smaller ones surreptitiously eased closer, he tightened his grip on the money and favored him with a sudden sharp look. The imp hurriedly backed away.

“What’s your name?” he asked the ringleader.

The boy’s mouth moved silently, as if he were chewing over the implications of giving out this information. Then, grudgingly, he answered, “Kyril.”

“Well, Master Kyril, I have something to celebrate, and I wish to celebrate it by giving away all these crates of cigarettes.”

Kyril looked the pile up and down. There were twenty crates. “Okay. We’ll take this shit off yer hands.”

“Nice try, but no. I’ll be giving them away a pack at a time. What I want you and your comrades to do is to spread the word through the underground—to the Diggers, to the Outcasts, to pretty much everybody except the Pale Folk—that I’ll be handing this stuff out free. Come back in half an hour, and if you’ve raised a large enough crowd, you can help distribute it. For which, I’ll pay you this much”—he extended the bills, and young Kyril snatched them away—“up front, and an equal amount when the job is done. Are you up for it?”

Kyril’s face grew still as he mentally searched for a way to sweeten the deal. “Do we get some of the cigarettes, too?”

“If you must.” Darger sighed. “Though you really shouldn’t, you know. They
are
bad for you.”

The guttersnipe rolled his eyes in scorn.“I don’t fucking care.”Then he addressed his gang: “Dmitri—Diggers! Oleg—Psychos! Lev—Outcasts! Stephan—Bottom Dwellers!”

They scattered.

In less than the prescribed half an hour, a crowd had gathered, as uncertain and murmurous as the sea. Darger climbed to the top of the stack of crates to address them. “Good friends, congratulate me!” he cried. “For today I have made a discovery that will leave my mark in history. I have found that which everybody said could not be found…the books for which I have searched for so long…the lost library of Ivan the Great!”

He paused, and a puzzled, halfhearted cheer went up.

“In honor of which discovery, I will now give away three packs of cigarettes to everybody who steps forward to congratulate me.”

A much heartier cheer arose.

“Form a line!” Darger cried. Then, dragooning the slum-boys as his helpers, he pried open the first crate and gave a handful of cigarette packs to a drab woman at the head of the line. “They are yours if you say: Congratulations for finding the library.”

“Congratulations for finding the library.”

“Excellent. Next. You must say…”

“Congratulations for finding the library.”

“Good.”

Beside him, Kyril was handing out cigarettes and receiving perfunctory congratulations, as were his four comrades. Darger noted that their pockets already bulged with packs.

“Congratulations for the library.”

“Congratulations.”

“Good luck. Glad for ya.”

“Um…books?”

“Close enough,” Darger said. “Keep the line moving.”

It took less time to give away the cigarettes than Darger had expected, and yet the experience left him wearier than he would have thought. Finally, though, all the crates had been opened, their contents distributed, and the troglodytes (and a certain number of habitués from the bar and nearby service workers who had come out to see what the noise was about) had gone.

Darger scrupulously paid out the promised money to his half-sized allies. He would have done so even if he hadn’t known how such young men repaid broken promises.

When they had been paid, four of the young men instantly scattered. Kyril, however, remained, looking unaccountably abashed. “Uh, sir,” he said. “What you said about finding the library…does that mean I have to move out of it now?”

Zoësophia was pleasantly surprised by Surplus’s performance. He had, as it turned out, extraordinary stamina for one not born of the breeding vats of Byzantium. It was not until the Way of the Wounded Crane that he gasped, “Enough! Pax! I am but mortal—I must… I have no breath! I can do no more!” And then, when she ignored his pleas and continued onward, he made it all the way through the Way of the Supple Monkey before turning pale and passing out.

“Well!” Zoësophia said, pleased.

Having gotten more of a gallop than she’d expected, Zoësophia found herself feeling decidedly fond of the ambassador. She scratched him behind the ears, and noted with amusement how his feet scrabbled briefly against the cushions. Then she gathered up all the scattered items of clothing and carefully smoothed and laid them out for the morning. She always carried a small mirror with her and this she used to make sure she had no scratches or bruises that would show when dressed. Her hair was a dreadful mess. So she commanded it to go limp and then flicked her head so that it flew out, undoing any snarls or tangles. Six passes of her hands and a command for it to resume its usual body, and she looked as if she had just spent an hour with a beautician.

As she always did before sleeping, Zoësophia took a mental walk into her memory palace and carefully sorted her day’s thoughts into three cabinets—one sculpted from fire, one of ice, and the third merely rattan. She was all but certain that the ambassador was nothing more than a confidence trickster, doubtless planning to run some elaborate scheme on the Duke of Muscovy. But that was tangential at best to her real mission, so she placed that thought in the rattan cabinet, which she reserved for whims, fancies, and idle speculations.