Dancing with Bears (44 page)

A carriage rattled over the cobblestones and came to a stop not far away. A veiled woman leaned out the window. “You there!” she called to Kyril. “You in the green suit! Come over here.”

Kyril stepped closer, smiling. Opportunity, it seemed, was everywhere. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

“Yes, you can.” The woman opened the carriage door. “Get in.”

Kyril climbed into the coach and the woman slid over to make room for him. On the other side of her sat two dwarf savants looking alert and placid.

At a word from the woman, the carriage started forward again. But instead of saying what she wanted, she instead studied him shrewdly for a very long time. At last Kyril could not keep silent any longer. “You said I could help you, Gospozha?”

“Yes, you can. If, that is, you’re the young lady I think you are.”

“Waddaya talkin’ about? I ain’t no girl.” Kyril reached for the latch, intending to kick the door open and leap out. But the veiled woman had already seized his collar. Her grip was implacable.

“Nice try, Missie. You may be able to fool everyone else, but you’re not fooling
me
. I’ve read your file and I know more about you than you do yourself. How long have you been passing yourself off as a boy?”

Long years of scrabbling to stay alive had taught Kyril how to read people. This woman’s face and stance conveyed amusement, scorn, perception—and no doubt whatsoever. She wasn’t bluffing. She knew. Looking down at her feet, Kyril said, “Since my parents died and I ran away from the workhouse three years ago.”

The carriage rumbled down the smoky streets. After a while, the woman said, “What’s your name?”

“Kir—I mean, Klara.” She stared wistfully out of the carriage window, at all the dazed and well-heeled marks stumbling about in a mental fog, and abruptly blurted, “I was making awful good money out there.”

“I have better and ultimately more profitable work for you. I’m the new head of Muscovy Intelligence, and I need some bright eyes in low places.”

“What? You want me to be a
spy?
An informer? A fink?”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

Klara thought. “Naw,” she said at last. “It just caught me by surprise.”

“Must this happen to
every
city we visit?” Surplus said with just a touch of pique.

“At least we can take comfort in the fact that none of this was our doing,” Darger reassured him. Then, because he was an honest man, he added, “So far as we know.”

They stood atop Sparrow Hills, which, long months ago, they had agreed upon as their meeting-place, watching Moscow burn. Black smoke bent low over the city. At least three of the Kremlin’s buildings were burning and the Secret Tower, beneath which lay the former library of Tsar Ivan, was a pillar of flame. Surplus had, in an effort to raise his friend’s spirits, shown him the pocketful of gems he had rescued from the Diamond Fund. To no avail. “All those books,” Darger mourned. “Gone.”

“Surely not all,” Surplus said. “Some must have survived.”

“Only one. The young man who showed me where the library was snatched it up and stuffed it into my jacket when he hauled me away.”

“Which book was it?”

Darger drew out the book and opened it. Then he began to laugh. “It is an economic treatise on the nature of capital. The very book, in fact, which we chose to use as the bait in our plan to defraud the duke.”

He handed it to Surplus who gave it a cursory glance. The book was a German first edition. The text looked to be as dry as dust.

“Well,” Surplus said, “this is of no possible interest to anyone.” He cocked his arm to throw it away.

But Darger stopped him. “Wait! Let us not waste a useful prop. Perhaps we can use it in our next operation, when we reach Japan.”

“Japan? Are we going to Japan?”

“Why not? It’s said to be a beautiful place. And full of fabulous riches as well. Indeed, its rulers are reckoned as being wealthy beyond avarice. If such a thing is even imaginable.”

“Nevertheless,” said Surplus, crouching to place the book down upon the grass and then straightening and turning his back on it, “we shall come up with something new for our Japanese friends. There are far too many old ideas in the world as it is.”

He turned his back on the conflagration.

They mounted two horses they had rented at exorbitant cost. Which cost, however, came to less than outright purchase would have and thus, given that they had no intention of ever returning the horses to their former owner, was, looked at properly, something of a bargain. The saddlebags, moreover, were packed with a judicious assortment of items taken from the Diamond Fund.

As they put Moscow behind them, Surplus narrated his recent adventures. When the tale reached its climax, Darger, astonished, remarked, “I did not know that your walking stick was actually a sword cane.”

“There is a great deal that you do not know about me,” Surplus said complacently.

S
OMETIME LATER…

I
t was a remarkable sight: A band of hard men numbering in the hundreds—far too many to be called a raiding party, though perhaps not quite enough to be considered a true army—were readying their weapons on a hillside above Baikonur. Most were mounted on short, sturdy horses, but a sizeable fraction rode camels, which lived wild in the region and could be captured and broken to the saddle by those who knew how. Small bright flags here and there identified the leaders from each of the hidden towns of the steppes that had contributed warriors to the cause. Below them sprawled a dark, Satanic city of smokes and machines. Enigmatic engines reached for the sky. Cracking towers and gantries loomed from the yellowish smog. There were silvery glints of movement here and there, but for as far as the eye could see not one sign of life—not an animal, not a tree, not so much as a blade of grass.

A bold young man on a roan mare cantered up to the band’s leader. “Are you ready, Father?”

“Arkady Ivanovich, I was ready when your mother was still a virgin. As well she learned.” Gulagsky reared up his horse, roaring with sudden laughter. He gestured the young man to his side. “Come ride with me. We will each protect and defend the other.” Then, raising his klashny overhead, he shouted, “Are you ready to ride? Are you willing to fight? Are you prepared to die? Are you men enough to crush and destroy every living machine in the city below?”

Up and down the line of mounts, the men grinned savage and merciless grins. They had grown up in an unforgiving land and stayed when lesser folk had fled. Among them they felt not the slightest flicker of fear. Their eyes, to a man, glittered with the indwelling God.

“Baikonur is ours!” Gulagsky bellowed. He swept forward an arm. “The demon machines stole it from us—now we take it back!”

The men
roared
.

They galloped down on the city like wolves upon the fold.