Dancing with Bears (39 page)

“Should I kill her, then?”

“You are a zealot and your delusional beliefs would make her death mean nothing to you. The pleasure of this woman’s death is mine.”

Even as they spoke, however, Baba Yaga was pulling the cork from her bottle and cramming the bandanna deep down its neck. “I am terror and Old Night,” she said. A box of matches appeared magically in the palm of one hand. “I am the fear you cannot name. I am she who cannot be placated. If you think you can kill me, you are welcome to try.”

“All things are possible with God’s help.” The first speaker held a klashny, but he did not raise it to his shoulder. Not yet. Baba Yaga recognized him by his clothing. He was a strannik, a worshipper of the White Christ, and doubtless the one she sought. The White Christ did not frighten Baba Yaga any more than did the Red Odin or even the Black Baal. She was old, old beyond human reckoning, older than language and older than fire. She had coalesced in the darkness that came before the gods. When the first sacrifice had been laid upon the first altar she had been there to snatch it away from its intended recipient. When first ape-man had been killed by an envious brother, it was she who had guided the murderer’s hand.

The strannik stood watching, doing nothing. The real danger came from the machine-creature crouched at his feet. It launched itself at her in a silver blur.

Baba Yaga set fire to the rag stuck in the bottle. She had time to do so, she reckoned. It would take a good three-quarters of a second for the demon to reach her.

When it did, she side-stepped the creature and smashed the bottle on its back.

The underlord went up in flames.

Burning, it spun about and tried to seize her in its arms and metal jaws. But Baba Yaga knew a trick worth two of that. She reached into the flames and, grabbing the man-wolf by its ankles, flipped it over.

The underlord would have fallen on its back had the fight not occurred at the very lip of the rampart. Instead, it fell with a long electronic wail down the side of the Kremlin, burning all the way to the ground. When it hit the stones of Red Square, its screech stopped abruptly. Though it continued to burn, it did not move.

Baba Yaga turned to the man in black. “You are a strannik,” she said. “There were three of you.”

“There still are.”

“You think so?” From one pocket, Baba Yaga drew a gobbet of flesh. She threw it at Koschei’s feet. “I tore that from the one called Chernobog.” She dipped her hand into another pocket. “Him I ran into by chance and oh but he was hard to kill! So hard that I simply had to have more. Before he died, he told me where I could find Svaroži
č
.” A second hunk of meat joined the first with a wet thud. “He also was great fun. And he, in turn, told me where I could find you.”

“Lying bitch!” Koschei said. “Svaroži
č
cut into his own brain to ensure that he would never break his vow of silence.”

Baba Yaga laughed and laughed. “You’d be surprised how much information can be conveyed by gestures, given the proper motivation.”

Koschei got off one shot before Baba Yaga tore the klashny from his hands and threw it over the side, after the underlord. He tried to punch her in the stomach, but she ducked his blow and yanked his feet out from under him. He fell flat upon his back.

“Show some spunk, pilgrim! Get up and fight.” BabaYaga stamped down three times, hard, where Koschei’s face had been, while he threw himself from side to side to avoid her heavy shoes. Then he was on his feet again, hunched like a wild animal and breathing heavily. His eyes were two hot coals framed by raven-black hair.

“The patriarch Jacob wrestled with an angel,” Koschei said. “Clearly it is my destiny to contend with you—and defeat you as well.”

“Count your fingers, strannik.” Baba Yaga opened one hand to reveal a fresh-severed pinkie.

Koschei looked down in astonishment at his bleeding hand. Then, with a roar, he charged.

But Baba Yaga deftly feinted to one side and then side-stepped him on the other. “You’re down to eight!” she crowed.

Head down, Koschei waded into Baba Yaga, showering her with blows. Several landed solidly before, somehow, she dove between his feet and then slammed both her elbows into his back.

He fell forward on his face.

“Six!”

More slowly this time, Koschei stood. With a stunned expression, he held up his three-fingered hands before his face. Blood fountained from four finger-stumps.

“First your fingers, then each ear,” Baba Yaga said in a singsong voice, almost as if it were an incantation. “Your nose, your toes, your what-you-fear.”

Something inside Koschei broke.

He fled.

Baba Yaga chased the strannik down from the wall and between the churches and palaces and across the plazas and open spaces of the Kremlin, regularly issuing little shrieks and screams so that he would know she was mere steps behind him. They ran all the way to the south wall. Koschei was in a blind panic, and so had as good as trapped himself. She drove him down the wooded slopes of the Secret Garden until he came up against the wall and there was nowhere to go but forward, into the Secret Tower.

Koschei did not notice the faint tendrils of smoke oozing out from under the door.

Seizing the knob in his mutilated hand, Koschei threw open the door and plunged within.

But opening the door provided fresh oxygen for the fire smoldering deep below, and a path upward for its flames. They rose up with a mighty roar, engulfing the strannik and all in an instant turning the tower’s roof to smoke and gases.

Baba Yaga did not stay to admire her work. Moving like a swirl of darkness, she disappeared into the night.

All of which was a fine piece of theater. Indeed, it was almost operatic.

But there was a coda:

Down in the city, coming around a corner, Baba Yaga collided with somebody directly under a street lantern. Who of course shrieked in fear at the sight of her. But then, strangely enough, the woman seized Baba Yaga’s arms and stared hard into her face. She began to shake her head apologetically, but then stopped and studied her features even more minutely. Finally, she said, “Anya? Is that you? Everyone at the university thought you were dead.”

A shock ran up Baba Yaga’s spine. “What…?” she said. “What did you just call me?”

“Anya.” The young woman looked unaccountably familiar. Her expression was one of extreme concern. “Anya Alexandreyovna Pepsicolova. Don’t you even remember who you are?”

Terrible confusion rose up within her, then. She balled a fist and punched this disturbing young person in the stomach. Then, with a high-pitched sound that might have been a scream, she fled, looking for someplace to hide.

After her first moment of shock, Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma realized that Chortenko’s advances were an opportunity in disguise. In the new government, he was sure to be a center of power second only to Lenin himself. So he was an ally to be cultivated. And the baronessa knew how to cultivate a man.

There were unsavory rumors about his sexual practices, of course… But gossip always painted a darker picture than did simple fact. Anyway, before he had lost interest, the baronessa had indulged her husband’s brutal appetites from time to time and had survived those experiences well enough. She did not anticipate any serious problems there.

Reaching up and behind her, she took Chortenko’s hand in her own, and brushed her cheek with it. Too fleetingly for the act to be noticed by the crowd, she kissed his knuckles.

She could sense his astonishment.

Good.

“As of this moment,the Duke of Muscovy no longer rules.”Lenin’s words, simultaneously shocking and thrilling, threw the crowd into prolonged applause. He waited it out with stoic patience.“History has done with him. The people are in command and have chosen me to… They have chosen me to…” His words trailed off. Tsar Lenin peered quizzically at the crowd. Which was, the baronessa suddenly realized, behaving oddly. What had been a still lake of rapt faces was now in swirling motion. People were screaming. They were running, as if in fear. It took her a second to realize that they were not running away from the platform and its legendary speaker but from something behind and above them both.

She turned.

It had been hours since Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma had first taken the rasputin and, though it still made her hypersensitive to all matters spiritual or emotional, its embers were burning low. So she felt not raptured but horrified astonishment at seeing, looming up over the rally, the gigantic face and figure of an archaic giant. The body was perfectly formed in every way. But the light from an uncountable number of torches was reflected back from its tremendous face in a ruddy glow that made it seem to shift and glower. This was not the visage of an omniscient, all-powerful, and loving deity.

It was the face of an idiot.

The baronessa felt as if a curtain had been lifted, revealing a higher reality far vaster and more terrifying than the island of sanity on which she had unknowingly lived all her life. Then the monstrosity was upon her, its gigantic foot descending to crush the platform and everyone upon it. The baronessa had risen from her chair. She was frozen with fear and unable to move.

Tsar Lenin inexplicably dropped to all fours. Then he leaped.

The foot came down right atop him, crushing the tsar and smashing the platform to flinders.

Then it was gone.

When by slow degrees the baronessa came to, she found herself lying on the ground on her back. There were chairs and splintered wood lying atop her, pinning her down, and she seemed to be tangled in the bunting. But she managed to struggle free. Frantically, she began searching, more by touch than by sight, for Lenin’s body. Perhaps he had survived. Perhaps he could still rule. With a strength that might have come from the dwindling effects of the rasputin or might have been simple frenzy, she blindly flung planks and beams out of her way, digging through the rubble in search of her nation’s beloved leader.

Lanterns moved slowly here and there. It seemed she was not the only searcher. The members of the new government had assuredly fled, of course, like the poltroons and weaklings they were. But Chortenko’s people remained, their pale faces floating over the rubble as they worked with quiet efficiency. So too did several members of the Royal Guard, looking like gray round-backed snowbanks whenever they bent low over the wreckage.

“Here!” somebody shouted. There was the sound of an armful of planking being thrown to the side. “We’ve found him!”

The baronessa scrambled over the debris to join the circle crouching about a small, still form.

“Pick up the tsar,” Chortenko told two of his underlings. “Perhaps he can be repaired.” Which seemed to the baronessa an extremely odd choice of words under the circumstances. Then, when a nondescript barouche had been brought around, Chortenko said, “What is this thing? I sent you to fetch my own coach. Why isn’t it here?”

The man he addressed looked startled. “You lent it to the Byzantine ambassador, sir. So we requisitioned a coach from one of your neighbors.”

“Lend my coach? I never did any such thing. Who told you that?”

“The servants back at your mansion. Ambassador de Plus Precieux told them you’d given him its use, and so of course they… Well, who would dare claim such a thing if it weren’t true?”

Chortenko looked grim. “I will deal with this when there is time. Right now, lift Lenin into the coach. Baronessa, you will ride with us. The rest of you, stay here and do what you can to establish order.”

In the barouche, Tsar Lenin was laid across the forward-facing seat with his head in the baronessa’s lap. The noble head was surprisingly heavy. The baronessa took one of his hands in her own and stroked it. The skin was unpleasantly waxy, and as cold as a corpse. “Oh, my beloved tsar,” she said, and began to weep.

“Stop that,”Chortenko snapped. “He’s not dead yet. Paralyzed, yes. But look at his eyes.”

The baronessa did. The eyes were slightly open and there was a faint light to them, though it was dimming. Lenin’s lips moved, almost imperceptibly. “Half a hundred of us started out from Baikonur,” he said in a faint voice. “Now but I remain. And soon there will be none.” His eyes moved slowly to focus on Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma. “You…”

Deeply moved, the baronessa leaned close to hear the tsar’s last words.

“You should…” Lenin whispered.

“Yes?”

“Eat shit and die.”

By the time Darger and Kyril had made a complete circuit of the Kremlin, the Alexander Garden was nearly empty and they were able to simply stroll up the Trinity Gate causeway. Darger led, feeling infinitely self-assured, and Kyril followed, muttering resentfully. “This is as crazy as drinking piss,” Kyril said. “We’re walking into what’s gotta be the most dangerous place in all Russia for people like us, in order to grab some books? I mean, if it were, I dunno, diamonds or some shit like that, I’d understand. But
books?
”

“Don’t hunch your shoulders like that,” Darger said imperturbably. “I know you’re feeling exposed, but it makes you look suspicious. We go this way.”

“I mean, you’re smart and all, I get that. But you’re bugfuck crazy. I gotta wonder if you’ve let your brains go to your head.”

“Kyril, rescuing even one of those books would give my life a meaning I never expected it to have. Plus, the right collector would pay a fortune for it—and I hope to leave with an armful.”

“Listen, there’s still time to turn back.”

“Here’s the Secret Garden. The tower should be visible just around this bend.”

The path twisted under their feet and they turned the corner just in time to see the Secret Tower go up in flames.

“Dear Lord!” Darger cried. “The library!”

He started to run toward the tower.

Darger had not gone more than three or four strides, however, when his feet were snatched out from under him and he crashed painfully to the ground. For an instant, all went black. Then, when he tried to stand, he could not. A pair of bony knees dug into his back and Kyril spoke urgently into one ear: “Get ahold of yourself. Those books are gone and tough shit about that.”