Dancing with Bears (25 page)

There were no empty chairs in the room, so Arkady crouched on the floor by Koschei’s feet, like a dog. He joined the others in staring into the conjoined candle flame. He was not sure whether or not it was still supposed to represent God, nor what thoughts it was supposed to engender in him. He waited, but apparently the stranniks had said all they felt was necessary and were contemplating the ramifications of their wisdom. Finally, as in a trance, he heard his own voice break the silence, asking the question that had been much bothering him of late:

“Holy pilgrim, exactly what is the Eschaton? You have explained it to me, but not in terms I can understand.”

“You ask a difficult question, my young acolyte, and thus a worthy one.” Koschei rubbed Arkady’s head familiarly. “How best to put it? Ah! There is an ancient theory of ontology called ‘relativity.’ This wisdom I learned from the mad souls and spirits of rage who dwell within the tangled metal webs and nets of the underworld.”

“You took spiritual lessons from
demons?
”

“Demons cannot create—only God has that power. Similarly, they cannot lie.”

“They cannot even lie to themselves,” Chernobog added. “In this way, they show how inhuman they are. But they can put an evil interpretation on the truth. An apple is always an apple. But to Satan, it was created not for nourishment but as a temptation to draw Eve to sin. They cannot deny that sex is pleasurable. So they say that pleasure is evil. And so on.”

Koschei nodded. “Knowing this, a wise man can find wisdom even in the mouths of demons. One must only subtract their interpretation. So: According to the ancients, God is omnipresent and eternal. His omnipresence we call space and his endurance time, and this space-time we call the universe. Now, the universe is made up entirely of energy and matter. Seemingly, these are two separate things, but in truth each is an aspect of the other. If you were to speed up matter so that it went as fast as the speed of light, it would turn into energy.”

“You mean like an explosion?”

“Oh yes, there would be an explosion, greater than anything known to the current age. But that would be the least of it. Matter, being fallen, aspires to the higher state of energy. It wants to shed its gross state and become pure spirit.”

“The stars are all in the process of becoming spirit,” Chernobog amplified. “Some are so far distant that nothing of them remains but their light, spreading forever throughout the universe, and these we call angels.”

Svaroži
č
mimed applause.

“As matter accelerates, however, time slows down for it, and its mass increases. The more mass it has, the more energy required to accelerate it. Thus, as matter approaches the speed of light, the energy required to bring it to that happy point where physicality is left behind and a soul may enter Heaven is infinite. And where is the only possible source of infinite energy?”

All three stranniks looked at Arkady expectantly. In the tiniest of voices, he said, “God?”

“Exactly. Tomorrow, the least fraction of the Divine will touch the city and all within its light will be transformed into pure spirit. Like…” Koschei looked around. “I need a sheet of paper.”

Svaroži
č
drew a pocket missal from his robes and, opening it at random, tore out a page.

Koschei accepted the page and held it horizontally before him. “Imagine this sheet of paper is Moscow. Imagine that the candle-flame represents God. It does not, of course, but pretend. Tomorrow, the two will touch. Like so.” Delicately, he lowered the paper over the candle. A brown spot appeared in its center. Then it went up in flame. “You see?”

Arkady blinked. “You cannot mean this literally.”

“Yes, quite literally. Oh, to the sinful, there will be a worldly, rational explanation. Because God is forever lying to us, in order to test our faith. He creates fossils, for example, to tempt us to fall into the heresy of evolution. He creates injustice, so that we will doubt that everything turns out for the best. He kills off loved ones, so that we might fall into the error of mourning their loss. So to the secularists, it will look like a great fire is consuming the city. There will be a rational explanation—perhaps a cow will kick over a lantern, or a reformer will attempt to force the government to build new housing for the poor by torching the slums. There is an army forming up beneath the city which will emerge sometime tonight, and perhaps
that
will be the ostensible cause. But those who know will recognize it as the work of God.”

“An army?” Arkady asked, mystified.

“An army or the beginnings of one. There are powers which hate humanity, and they are resolved to destroy Moscow tonight.”

“Nor will it end there,” Chernobog said.

“Nor will it end there. The survivors will carry the sacred flame with them, out into Muscovy, into Russia, into the world!”

“Everybody will die?”

“Yes. But thanks to your hard work, most of Moscow will be filled with the divine spark of rasputin. Briefly, its citizens will be in a state of perfect grace. Now, man being a sinful brute, almost all will rapidly fall from that grace once the rasputin leaves their bloodstreams. But, to their great good fortune, the flames will reach them first and they’ll die in a state of grace. Which is all that God really cares about.”

“No,” Arkady said.

“Yes.” Koschei sounded genuinely amused. “The details He leaves to underlings.”

“You talk about armies and death and setting fire to Moscow, and then you claim it’s what God wants?” Arkady said with growing anger. “How do you know what God wants?”

“You don’t believe I know?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, if you don’t believe me, you can always ask Him yourself.” Smiling benignly, Koschei held out his hand. In it was a vial of rasputin.

“Madness and buggery!” Arkady swore in an agony of enlightenment. He saw it all now, and the sight made him want to tear out his eyes with his own hands. “You are not the holy man I believed you to be! You are an agent of the Devil himself, and your drug leads not to Paradise but to the slippery slopes of Hell. Well, I shall stop you. I swear I will. Mark my words.”

“Stop me?” Koschei’s eyes shone with benevolent love, even as his tone turned stern and scornful. “You think I would have given a young mooncalf like you the means to thwart the will of God? I have told you as much as I have only because it is already too late to stop anything.”

“Far, far, far too late,” Chernobog amplified.

Svaroži
č
leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet in soundless laughter.

With a cry of despair, Arkady fled from the room, from Koschei, from his past, from all he had ever been or was or aspired to be.

Down the canted hotel hallways and out onto the reeling streets he ran. Blindly he fled through dark buildings that crested and fell with each staggering step he took. What to do? He had betrayed his new city and government. He was a traitor to all humanity! He was a new Judas, a villain beyond all possible redemption!

There was only one possible solution.

He must warn the Duke of Muscovy.

...12...

K
yril woke up feeling optimistic and scowled. He had never in his life had anything to feel optimistic about, so naturally he distrusted this feeling. Kicking off the gunnysack he’d been using for a blanket, he crawled out from behind a crate of silk that decades ago had been stashed in a smuggler’s vault deep in the City Below and left to rot when its owner met with a now-unknowable fate. The feeling of well-being grew stronger, and he was suddenly struck by the urge to sing. He lurched to his feet in alarm. “This ain’t right,” he said, and slapped himself as hard as he could, twice.

A grin as warm as sunshine blossomed on his face, accompanied by an overwhelming sense that all was right with the world. This was terrifying. “There’s some kind of weird shit in the air,” he said in mingled fear and wonder. “Bugger me up the fucking ass like a goddamn man-whore if there ain’t.”

Kyril had slept in the new suit—green velvet, with yellow piping—that he’d bought with some of the proceeds of his first confidence game, so all he needed to do was to lace up his shoes and run.

He grabbed the shoes and, not bothering to put them on, ran like hell.

As Kyril ran, he found himself growing happier and happier until, against all his better judgment, he slowed to a trot and then a walk and finally a dawdle. “Definitely something in the air,” he chuckled. “Pretty funny stuff, whatever it is.”

One of the Pale Folk plodded lifelessly by. But this one had a bird-head! Kyril couldn’t help laughing. On an impulse, he raced after the sad parody of a human being and positioned himself directly in front of it. It stopped and stared at him until, still laughing, he stepped out of its way with a little bow. Then, when it tried to walk by, he stuck out his foot and tripped it.

Down it went, in the drollest possible manner.

Kneeling on the sad being’s back, Kyril merrily undid the leather mask. The beak was filled with herbs and had two meshed slots or nostrils. Laughing dementedly, he strapped it on.

When Kyril had the mask secured on his own face, he leaped back to see how his pallid victim would respond. The creature stood slowly. An odd, puzzled look entered its eyes. Its face relaxed into the faintest shadow of a smile. Then it leaned back against the marble wall. Its eyes slowly crossed. After a bit, its jaw went slack and it began to drool.

That was pretty funny. But what was even funnier was that by slow degrees Kyril’s mood was darkening. Experimentally, he tried punching the wall. “Fuck! Piss! Cunt! Shit! Prick!” he said. It hurt like a motherfucker.

He dared not take off the mask to suck on the skinned knuckles. But he felt a lot better for being able to feel a lot worse.

Now that he could think clearly again, Kyril was sure that he’d been breathing in spores from the funguses that the Pale Folk grew. You didn’t have to be much of a geneticist to grow happy dust—though giving it away free was a new wrinkle. And if the mushrooms were just beginning to broadcast that shit, that meant that the City Below would be a madhouse for at least a day. During which time, the Pale Folk would be free to do who-knew-what.

However, all he had to do was get to the surface, where the spores would be harmlessly dispersed by the winds, and he’d be fine.

Only…

Only, nobody drugged strangers out of the goodness of their heart. Happy dust was valuable. Whoever was pumping it out would want a return on their investment. Which, for the moneyless tribes living underneath the streets of Moscow meant enslavement, death, or—presuming that such a thing were possible—worse. Well, fuck them. Kyril didn’t owe anybody anything. Especially his so-called friends. The sonsabitches had stabbed him in the goddamned back, pissing themselves with laughter as the cocksucking goats hauled him off screaming to jail, just to keep their fucking mitts on a few shitty rubles that
he’d
earned for them in the first place. The cunts.

There was, however, one man who had played it straight with him. Who could have simply ripped him off, but had not. Who had taught him useful skills and shown him a possible path out of squalor. Who, devious and unreliable though he might well be, had very carefully shown Kyril the line up to which he could be trusted, and beyond which all bets were off.

Who right now doubtless was sitting like a lump in Ivan the Terrible’s library with his nose buried in a book, oblivious to the world around him and all its strange and gathering dangers.

Well, Kyril didn’t owe him anything either. He had told Darger so to his face. To his goddamned face!

Still…

Feeling like an absolute turnip, Kyril turned away from the long stairway that led up to the surface and headed back toward the lost library.

The orange glow of the reading lantern showed Darger chortling, snorting, and snickering like a fool. He had a scroll unrolled across his lap and was shaking his head in merriment over what was written thereon. Occasionally, he paused to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes.

“You simply
must
read this,” he said when Kyril crawled into the library. “What Aristotle had to say about comedy, I mean. One does not commonly conflate philosophical greatness with ribald knee-slappers and yet—”

“I can’t read Greek,” Kyril said. “Hell, I can barely read Russian.” He snatched the scroll from Darger’s hand and threw it roughly on the library table, where it buried the lantern under parchment, dimming the light considerably. “We gotta get outta here. Some kind of shit-ass bad stuff is coming down real soon.”

Darger assumed an expression of judicious wisdom. Then, carefully, he said, “A Phoenician wine merchant, a freedman, and an aristocrat all went to a brothel together. When they got there, they discovered that all the doxies were already taken, save for one ancient, crippled eunuch. So the Phoenician said—”

“This ain’t no time for jokes! We gotta leave right now, seriously. I’m not shitting you.”

“Oh, very well, very well.” Chuckling witlessly, Darger groped about on the table. “Just let me bring along something to read.”

“Here!” Kyril snatched up the nearest book and, flipping open Darger’s jacket, shoved it into an inside pocket. “Now move your fucking ass!”

Chortenko was in a towering rage. In all his years of service to Muscovy, no prisoner had ever escaped his custody. And now, today, in the course of an hour, he had lost two. Worse, they now knew things nobody outside his own service should know. And worst of all, though he had sent every agent he could spare out to look for them, both fugitives had managed to vanish completely off the face of the earth. A woman of such staggering beauty as to stop a man dead in his tracks and a dog who walked like a human being should not be able to do that!

Three of Chortenko’s subordinates stood at attention before him. They displayed no emotion, though they must have been keenly aware of the danger they were in. They were hard men all, who understood that were any one of them to show the least sign of fear, Chortenko would kill him on the spot for a weakling.