Kyril 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.
That pleasant thought helped to calm Chortenko and focus his thoughts. He drew in a deep breath, further stabilizing himself. Emotion was the enemy of effective action. He must restore his usual icy self-control.
Something, however, niggled and naggled at the back of his brain.
“Max, Igorek,” he said. “What have I forgotten?”
“You have forgotten most of the mathematics you learned in school,” Maxim said, “the combined and ideal gas laws, the names of the eighteen brightest stars in descending order of apparent magnitude as well as those of all the minor prophets in the Old Testament and most of the major prophets as well, the bulk of Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘The Sail,’ and the entirety of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem.’”
“Also,” Igor added, “the twenty-two major biochemical pathways of the human body, the proportions of the golden ratio, the formulae for green pigments, the names of most of your childhood friends, the location of your second-favorite fountain pen, and a vast effluvium of minutia and inconsequential personal history.”
“As well as-” Max continued.
With a touch of asperity, Chortenko said, “What have I forgotten that is not the common lot of others, I mean. Something I was supposed to do or look into.” This was, of course, too vague a set of parameters for the dwarf savants to work with, so they said nothing.
Vilperivich, who was one of his boldest and most trusted subordinates, chose this inopportune time to clear his throat. “We have not had the usual report from Pepsicolova today.” By the stiffness of the man’s delivery, Chortenko could tell that he was keenly aware of the danger he was in. That was good. He spoke anyway. That was even better. Taken together, the two facts would keep him alive long after his confederates were dead. “Perhaps that is significant?”
“No. I expected that,” Chortenko said. Then, thinking aloud: “I have ordered bleachers and a speaking platform erected on the street before the Trinity Tower entrance to the Kremlin. I have combed through my own forces and had everyone with a particular weakness for the pleasures of the flesh transferred to other departments. The rest I have put on full alert. I have dispatched my best assassin to take care of Lukoil-Gazprom. I have sent my regrets, which doubtless were received with enormous relief, to those politically ambitious enough to have invited me to their drug-fueled soirees tonight. I have compiled lists of those to be killed immediately after seizing full control of the government and those to be killed six, twelve, and eighteen months later, after their usefulness has been depleted. I have consulted with the Duke of Muscovy about…” Chortenko stopped.
“Oh, my.” This was as close to foul language as Chortenko ever came, but it was enough to terrify those who understood him well. “I forgot to order all artillery units away from the city.” Thinking furiously, he said, “Perhaps we can work around that, though. We could-”
A servile messenger chose that moment to scurry into the room and hand a sheet of paper to Vilperivich. He glanced down at it, and his face turned pale.
“Sir,” he said. “Wettig is dead.” “And Baron Lukoil-Gazprom?”
With barely a tremble in his voice, the man said, “Alive.”
The corridor dead-ended into a vast, extended darkness held up by regular iron pillars on which weakly bioluminescent lichen grew. This ghostly background flickered with motion. Kyril stepped into it cautiously, tugging the idiotically giggling Darger after him. Ordinarily, Kyril avoided the motorway as being too open and having too few ready exits. Today, however, haste was all, so he went by the most direct route.
“So you think me a noodle, do you, young man?” Darger gestured broadly toward the flickering distance. “As you can see, I am not the only one who is feeling uncommonly merry.”
The lichen-light was so feeble that Kyril had to stare hard to make out what Darger was talking about. With concentration, however, it became obvious: Shadowy throngs of ragged people were hopping, skipping, limping, twirling, and (some few) dancing past, all in the same direction. They were all mad with joy.
From around a bend in the motorway, light flared. An uneven line of bird-masked Pale Folk appeared, walking steadily, thrusting torches forward like prods to herd yet more of the tunnel-dwellers before them.
Their captives did not seem to mind this treatment. The torchlight threw up shadows on the walls above them that leaped and cavorted madly, as if in some unholy Neolithic Walpurgisnacht. It was an eerie glimpse into the murky hindbrain of Russian prehistory that made the little hairs on the back of Kyril’s neck stand on end.
There was a metal pillar almost touching the wall. Shoving Darger behind it, Kyril said, “Wait here. Don’t move. I’m going to get you a mask of your own. That’ll make things simpler for both of us.” Then he flung himself down on the filthy ground, and lay motionless. Corpses were not entirely uncommon down here. He did his best to look like one.
Above, to his intense annoyance, he heard Darger snicker.
The wave of people passed Kyril by unnoticing. One of them stepped even on his hand, but he managed not to cry out. Then, when the line of Pale Folk had gone beyond him as well, he rose to his feet. Stealthily, he ran after the hindmost of them and, wrapping arms about the creature’s chest, wrestled him to the ground. The torch fell to the side, atop a pile of rubbish, but the fire it caused seemed unlikely to spread, so he didn’t bother stamping it out.
Seconds later, he returned to Darger with the mask.
But when he tried to strap it on his mentor, the bastard pushed it away.
A murmur of voices rose up behind them, growing steadily stronger. A second wave of happy idiots was being driven their way. “Look, sir. What fun!” Kyril cried desperately, thrusting forward the filter-mask. “Why don’t you try this on?”
Laughing helplessly, Darger shook his head.
“Oh, don’t be such a prick, sir. It’s full of dried herbs and flowers-see? Take a whiff. Smells pleasant, dunnit?”
“Oh, no, you fail to understand,” Darger said in the jolliest possible manner. “What you propose is the stuff of bad melodrama. Disguise ourselves in anonymous headgear and then pass ourselves off as minions? Absurd! Such stratagems work on the stage, young sir, only because the author has sided with the hero and by fiat declared that they will. If we must play this little game of yours, let us at least play it well.”
“It’s not actually a game, you fucking idiot. Sir.”
“Viewed properly, all of life is a game. Look at yourself! Do you walk with the plodding mindlessness of the Pale Folk? Oh, dear me, no. You stride along purposefully, and as to your motions…well, they are far too quick and alert. Even the Pale Folk, incurious dotards though they are, would be able to see through your subterfuge, were they not distracted by their chore. Now suppose I were to don this jolly old mask, what then? The two of us would be doubly obvious. Whoops go our chances of evasion and escape! You see?”
Reluctantly, Kyril had to admit that Darger’s words made a kind of sense. He flung down the mask in disgust. “Then what can we do?”
Joyous voices and the scuffing of feet announced that the next wave of captives was almost upon them. Soon they would be dimly visible. Darger laid a finger alongside his nose and winked. “Walk behind me, as if you were driving me toward this oh-so-very mysterious destination of theirs. Try to plod. I in my turn shall hide you behind gales of laughter and avalanches of girlish giggles! You must move in the same direction as the others, mind you. Oh, my, yes. If we go against the flow the Pale Folk will notice we are but imperfectly of their sort. When we see a line of escape divergent from our destination, why, then we shall take it and so sail off into a phosphorescent sea of free will wherein to find a destiny of our own.”
“Yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense.”
Darger waggled a finger at Kyril. “It is far better than your own foolish plan. Minion helmets indeed! Were I to follow your lead, it would inevitably end up with us breaking into some super-criminal’s lair to steal secret information, seduce a convenient voluptuary, kill the villain, and leave the entire place ablaze behind us!”
There was a glimmer of torchlight in the distance. “When we get to the surface,” Kyril said solemnly, “I’m going to kick your butt so hard you’ll never sit down again.”
Darger laughed and laughed.
The hunt wasn’t going well. Pepsicolova was down to her last two cigarettes, and the craving was almost unbearably strong. And getting stronger. She pulled the nearly depleted pack from her jacket pocket and gently teased out one tobacco-filled cylinder. It was soft from repeated fondling already, but she ran her fingers down its length, not so much straightening it as deriving what satisfaction she could from the feel of the paper. Slowly, she ran it under her nose, savoring the ghost of comfort the aroma provided. At last she was unable to put off the deed any longer and convulsively lit up.
Leaving her with a cushion of exactly one smoke.
She’d been hunting for a fresh pack for hours, with no success. Several times she’d run across a fellow addict also desperately looking to score. After determining for certain that they were entirely out, she’d released them. The first, a woman, she had then stealthily trailed after. But when she’d witnessed what became of the poor bitch when she finally found the Pale Folk, Pepsicolova had concluded there was nothing to be gained by following her example.
Now she was crouched in a concrete air vent high above the motorway, staring down at the throngs being driven toward the underlords’ redoubt. The flood of people looked more impressive than it actually was. There were hundreds of captives, she reckoned, but not many hundreds. Life was hard in the City Below and correspondingly short. Also, they were scattered over an area equal to that of the City Above, which meant that, inevitably, a goodly fraction of them would evade capture simply through blind luck. By Pepsicolova’s best estimate, the underlords wouldn’t be able to assemble an army of more than two or three thousand. Tops. Hardly enough to accomplish anything serious. So whatever they were up to, this was only for starters.
Not that it was any concern of hers.
She smoked the penultimate cigarette down to almost nothing. Then she pierced the butt with the point of Saint Cyrila’s blade and toasted it with a match, breathing in every last bit of its magical smoke. After which, no longer cramped and aching, she scuttled back up the vent. At the top, she squirmed through a narrow slit between concrete slabs, and regained her feet in an unused utility tunnel. It was surpassingly strange how the people below her pranced and gamboled like buffoons and snickering idiots, even as they were being driven toward an end she knew to be singularly unsavory. But that was no concern of hers either.
Her only concern was finding more smokes.
It was the most grotesque journey Kyril had ever made. The Pale Folk drove the underpeople before them like cattle, thrusting forward their fiery torches whenever their captives lagged. The scrawny denizens of the underworld, in their turn, capered and joked as they were prodded along. Somebody stumbled and fell and didn’t get up even when poked with a torch, so one of the Pale Folk stamped down hard on the fallen body, snapping the spine, and walked unhurriedly on.
Great gusts of laughter swept through the throng like wind.
Sickened, Kyril looked away. He was rapidly losing faith in Darger’s plan. Despite the man’s assurances, no chance to slip away had presented itself. Nor did it look like it was going to. They came to the collapsed end of the motorway and were herded through a side-entrance into a smaller tunnel, one lined with smooth ceramic tiles half as old as time. Here they were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder. Twice, they passed dark doorways. In each one stood one of the Pale Folk, torch in hand, preventing egress.
Darger glanced over his shoulder and, taking in Kyril’s dispirited posture, grinned. Then the sonofabitch began to sing!
“Do your hopes hang low? Have you no place to go? Then just keep your eyes open, and watch out for the foe. The race goes to the bolder so behave just like a soldier.
For escape will never beckon, if your hopes hang low!”
Kyril placed the beak of his mask up over Darger’s shoulder so he could be heard: “Stop singing like that, you madman!”
Carelessly, Darger pushed him away. Then, changing his tune to a hornpipe, he sang:
“Listen to me, if you want to be free, Says your only friend the madman. Your mouth you must shut or they’ll rip open your gut,
Says Darger the musical madman.”
Just then, the tunnel opened out into a foyer. Hallways led out from it, and there were faded signs reading SURGERY and X-RAY and OUTPATIENT REGISTRATION and LABORATORY and RADIOLOGY, with arrows pointing in different directions. Not all of the words or symbols made sense to Kyril, but enough of them did for him to recognize this place.
It was a hospital. One that had not been used in a very long time.
Clearly this was a revenant of some ancient defense installation, built underground to render it safe from the wars of the Preutopian era, with their explosions and great machines. Kyril had run across stranger things under Moscow and was not greatly surprised. Though he did feel a twinge of regret that he had not chanced upon this place earlier, when he could have scavenged it for things to sell on the gray market.
The great river of incoming bodies here split into several streams. Kyril found himself carried along, like a cork in the current, down a hallway, up a set of stairs, and into yet another dim hallway. There the pressure eased somewhat as Pale Folk grabbed and pushed individuals into short lines before the open doors of what must have originally been rooms for the hospital’s patients. In each room were rotting gurneys. In some the Pale Folk were strapping their blissful captives onto them. In others, they were performing surgery. Without anesthesia, Kyril judged from the sounds he heard.
“Go to the last room in the hall,” Darger sang, gesturing theatrically at the furthest doorway. Through it could be glimpsed, by the light of a single candle, a single figure bent low over a body that struggled and giggled and choked all at once.
“The one that’s got no line at all. Do as I say, and we’ll be okay,
We won’t ask her, we’ll unmask her and she’ll fall.”
Lacking any plans of his own, Kyril shoved Darger before him, toward the final doorway. Luckily, there was a great deal of jostling and confusion in the throng. Some of the captives doubled over with merriment, overtopped, collapsed to the ground, and had to be goaded back to their feet. Others clung to each other to keep from falling. So he drew no particular notice. When they were in the near-lightless room, Darger slapped his knee, apparently overcome by some joke known only to himself and bumped the door half-closed with his bum. Straightening, he staggered backward, and the door slammed shut.
The surgeon didn’t notice. With emotionless intensity, she was drilling a hole in the skull of a man who, for his part, was making a strangled, wheezing noise-though whether of pain or amusement, probably not even he could say. Darger raised his eyebrows and put a finger to his pursed lips. Obediently, Kyril stood and watched. He had seen some rough sights in his short life. Several steps of this operation, however, made him want to throw up.
But at last it was over. The pale surgeon unstrapped her patient. She did not place a mask like her own on him. On a table by the gurney was a bowl of silver-gray marbles. She took one and stuck it in the man’s ear.
The new unit of the Pale Folk stood up. His expression was blandly happy and perfectly without volition. He went to the door, paused briefly as if puzzled at finding it shut, then carefully opened it and left. Kyril kicked it shut again with the back of his heel, before any of the lost souls outside could start forming a new line before it.
The surgeon looked at Darger and then gestured toward the gurney.
Now Darger shuffled forward, smiling as if he wanted nothing more than to have his skull drilled through and his brain operated upon. When he was motioned to lie down, he giggled. Then he wrapped his arms about the surgeoness, holding her motionless. “Quickly! Remove her mask!” he commanded.
Kyril did so. Soon, the surgeon was lost in whatever pallid shadow of joy the Pale Folk were capable of experiencing.
Darger released her. Then, with a whimsical little flip of his wrist, he plucked two of the marbles from the bowl. He held one to his ear, and for an instant all amusement fled from his face. But it very quickly returned, and when it did, he offered the second marble to Kyril.
Warily, Kyril raised the thing to his ear. Exit the room, a tinny voice said. Turn left. Follow the others to the Pushkinskaya docks.
He whipped his hand away and stared down at the metal device. “What the hell?”
“It is an ancient form of scrying or telepathy called radio.” Darger stuck his marble in his ear. “Well? Put it in, boy, put it in! Then we shall know exactly where the mysterious forces behind all this misbehavior wish us to go.” He winked in a comically exaggerated manner. “Knowing which, we can then go in the opposite direction.”
Reluctantly, Kyril followed suit. Exit the room, the voice repeated. Turn left. Follow the others to the… Doing his best to ignore it, he said, “Tell me something.”
“Anything, thou most inquisitive of underage ruffians! Anything at all.”
“How do you know what to do? I mean, how can you? Everybody else, they’re so happy you can cut their throats and they don’t care. Hell, even I was like that after a few minutes. Without this mask, I’d be a giggling idiot. What makes you different from the rest of us?”
“Ahhh, but you see,” Darger said, “I am a depressive. There has been many a morning when my life seemed so hopeless that I lacked the will even to get out of bed. Perforce, I developed the strength of character to confront the savage black dog of despair and get about my business anyway. Compared to that, ignoring happiness is a jolly walk in the park.” As if to demonstrate which, he began to skip in a little circle, clapping his hands rhythmically.
“Stop that!” Kyril said.
It was like following in the trail of a vengeful army. Everywhere Pepsicolova went, she found the remains of squats that had been emptied out by the Pale Folk. The cardboard shanties were all ripped open and their contents scattered and trampled underfoot. If there’d been a campfire, the meager treasures of the squatters had been piled atop it until it was smothered, leaving a smoldering heap of blankets and trash. The pettiness and pointlessness of this vandalism-by any human standard-told her that it had been done by command of the underlords.
Pepsicolova scrabbled through the charred piles of clothing and the crushed cardboard boxes, but in none of them did she find what she was looking for.
She was skulking down a long, narrow passage, sucking on the butt of her final cigarette when a gingerly extended leg touched an invisible strand of barbed wire stretched knee-high from wall to wall. Cautiously, she knelt to touch it. Taut. Such a defensive measure meant that she was coming up on a settlement. So there would be a lookout nearby.
Who would of course be incapacitated by whatever had rendered everybody in the City Below but Anya Pepsicolova and a few fellow tobacco addicts into giggling half-wits.
She stepped over the wire.
Something came slashing toward her out of the darkness. With the barbed wire behind her, she couldn’t move away from it. So she stepped forward, rising to grab the wrist and arm of her attacker just under the weapon and guide the thing down and to one side while she twisted frantically out of its path.
Metal clashed on concrete, sending up sparks. Pepsicolova released her attacker’s wrist and kicked, sending the weapon clattering away.
Then she had both her hands about a throat and was choking hard.
Arms thrashed wildly, clawed at her face, tried to choke her in return. But finally the body went limp in her arms. Pepsicolova lowered it to the ground.
Breathing heavily, more from the shock than the exertion, she searched out the weapon. It was a crowbar as long as her forearm that had been sharpened along one edge for most of its length. Nasty little bugger. She threw it away. Then she went back to the lookout she had throttled and lit a match so she could examine him. He was, she now saw, a weak old man with toothpick arms and a face as wrinkled as an apple in January. Harmless, so long as he didn’t catch you by surprise. Pepsicolova bent low over his foul-smelling, toothless hole of a mouth and could hear him breathing. So he was still alive.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
There was an empty pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. In a nearby puddle formed by the slow drip of a leaky water paper, five cigarette butts floated uselessly. Pepsicolova chose to interpret this as a hopeful sign that she was getting closer to her goal.
All senses alert, she continued down the passage. It dead-ended at the top of a rotting metal ladder that she doubted would hold her weight. Firelight flickered from below. Pepsicolova looked out and down into a large and irregular storage space hacked out of the bedrock and forgotten centuries before she was born.
Some twenty feet below was a incongruously homey scene: A dozen or so men sitting on a circle of crates and rickety wooden chairs around a small campfire. A stretch of rock wall behind them had been covered with floral wallpaper. To one side was a clothesline hung with freshly washed trousers and shirts. To the other was a stack of scrap lumber and busted-up furniture for firewood. A wisp of blue smoke disappeared through a grate in the ceiling.
Pepsicolova recognized the squat. It belonged to the Dregs-one of whose members she’d recently had to kill, just to get through their territory. They were all male (in Pepsicolova’s experience, there was something fundamentally wrong with any group that couldn’t attract a single woman, no matter how degraded), and they had a reputation for being completely mad. But they looked peaceful enough now. They were passing around a jar of what had to be bootleg vodka.
Then the thing she had been praying for happened: Somebody got out a cigarette and lit it. He took a long drag and passed it after the jar.
Pepsicolova’s nostrils flared. She recognized the smell. It was the real stuff!
Even better, she could see a large stack of familiar white packs arranged neatly against the wallpapered bedrock. So they had tobacco to spare. Best of all, she’d dealt with the Dregs before, and instilled in them a healthy fear of her abilities. She could negotiate with them.
Things were going her way at last.
Which made it particularly ironic that the Pale Folk chose that very moment to attack.
There was a sudden clanging of two metal pipes being repeatedly slammed together. It was obviously a lookout raising the alarm, for the men below instantly leaped to their feet and snatched up weapons. Pepsicolova saw one take the cigarette from his lips and ditch it in the fire. She could have wept.
The clanging cut off abruptly. Pale Folk came running into the squat in force. There were at least eight of them for every one of the squatters. The Dregs, no cowards, ran to meet them.
The fight itself didn’t interest Pepsicolova. She had seen enough gang battles to know that the side having the eight-to-one advantage (as the Pale Folk did) would inevitably win. However, she found it encouraging that the Dregs fought at all. The Dregs were mercenaries who had learned early that a captive could be traded for cigarettes, and had been ruthless enough in providing such captives to amass a fortune in smokes. Which in turn had, at least temporarily, bought them freedom.
So much, Pepsicolova thought, for the notion that tobacco was inevitably bad for you.
At first the advantage was to the Dregs. They had homemade blades and metal pipes. Somebody brandished what looked like a handgun. There was a flash of black powder and one of the Pale Folk fell.
But the attackers had not come unprepared. Some of them carried a device that looked something like an atomizer in reverse, with a glass jar at the top and a bellows affixed to its bottom. Inside the jars was a fine black powder. When squeezed, the bellows emitted a puff of dry smoke.
Perhaps it was a new drug. Or a dosage of the happy dust in such quantity as to overwhelm the Dregs’ resistance to it. In any case, those inhaling it instantly lost all desire to fight. In minutes the battle was over. The squatters, smiling happily, were prodded away. Three Pale Folk had been killed. Their bodies were left where they’d fallen.
But before they left, the Pale Folk gathered up all of the Dregs’ possessions and threw them upon the campfire. It blazed up like a bonfire, so hot that its flames licked the blackened ceiling.
Into this inferno, they threw the cigarettes. All that beautiful smoke went roaring up through the vent and away.