The Pearls’ grand procession was a grave disappointment. The streets were at first empty, and then they were filled with unhappy-looking people, all hurrying away from the heart of the city. None looked festive. Some carried torches, true, but they didn’t look like the sort who could be trusted with them. Nobody cheered or threw flowers. After a few tentative waves were ignored, the Pearls withdrew from their windows and sulked.
When at last they pulled up before the Great Kremlin Palace, there were no musicians playing and no ceremonial troops to greet them. The plaza was eerily dark and still.
“Where is everyone?” Nymphodora said, when the Neanderthals had helped them down from their coaches. Neat lines of streetlamps burned quietly over desolately empty spaces.
“I dunno,” Enkidu said. “But if it was up to me, we’d turn around right here and now and go home.” He held up his hands to fend off the Pearls’ glares. “I know, I know! I was just saying.”
Olympias sniffed the air. “I smell smoke. Is there a building on fire? Is that why there’s nobody here?” “That is none of our concern,” Russalka said. “Let us go to our royal husband.”
With Neanderthals to their front, back, and either side, the Pearls entered the palace and swept up the great staircase to the Georgievsky Hall. There were no guards at the door and the hall was empty. Lanterns burned unattended. The silence was so absolute it seemed to reverberate.
“Maybe we shoulda sent word we was coming,” Enkidu said uneasily. “Hush,” Russalka snapped. “We go through those mirrored doors over there.” They pushed into the octagonal Vladimirsky Hall and came to a halt. For this room was not empty. Shaggy members of the Royal Guard slouched in delicately carved chairs that were surely worth more than they were, smoked cigars and spat on the floor, leaned against pristine white walls which would doubtless require cleaning as a result. Two were on their knees, shooting dice.
“Cease this scandalous behavior!” Russalka commanded. “A palace is no place for such slovenliness. Our royal husband will be outraged when we tell him about it.”
The guards stared. Those who were seated or kneeling rose to their feet.
“Excuse me for pointing this out, Gospozha,” said their leader. “But you’re not supposed to be here at all. Much less ordering anybody around.”
A Neanderthal stepped forward. “My name’s Enkidu. These are my boys.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Somehow, I seem not to have caught your name.”
The bear-man’s lips curled back in a snarl. “Captain Pipaluk, of the Royal Guard.”
“Well, Captain Pipaluk, I think you oughta treat these ladies with respect. They come all the way from Byzantium to marry your boss-man. They can cause you a lot of trouble.”
All the bear-guards laughed coarsely. “Marry the duke?” their leader said. “Impossible!”
“He’s in the Terem, right? Through that door there?
Deadly serious again, Captain Pipaluk said, “He was the last time we saw him. But we’re not going through that door until we’re sent for-and neither are you.”
Enkidu smiled brutishly. “In that case, we’re just gonna have to go through you guys.” As he spoke, the Neanderthals and the bear-guards all casually arrayed themselves for a fight.
“Well, well, well,” Captain Pipaluk said. “This is a clash for the records. The gene vats of Byzantium against those of Russia. The old culture versus the new. Decadence against youth. Come to think of it, you’re even dressed for the part, with those pansy outfits and those silly little hats. I believe what we have here is a genuine passing-of-the-torch moment.”
“You know what?” Enkidu said. “You speak real good. I don’t got no doubt you’re smarter than we are. Maybe you got better reflexes, too. Who knows, you might even be stronger. Stranger things have happened. But we still got one big advantage over you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
Enkidu cracked his knuckles. “We got you outnumbered three to one. In my experience, that means we win.”
With a roar, the two groups surged into each other, fists flying.
“Men!” Aetheria said. “Honestly.”
“Oh, I know,” Euphrosyne said. “They look nice enough-but they’re always fighting and starting wars and the like. I think they’re just trying to impress one another.”
“Well, they’re certainly not impressing me,” Eulogia said.
“Meanwhile,” Russalka pointed out, “the way to the Terem Palace is open. Let’s just go.”
“Oh!” gasped Nymphodora. “Can we?”
“Fortune favors the bold,” Russalka said, and strode straight for the door. The other Pearls hurried in her wake.
Anya Pepsicolova had had a home once. To return there was unthinkable, for it would bring the full weight of Chortenko and the underlords down upon her parents. In her new and nightmarish life, she had made many enemies but no friends. She had slept in a constantly changing series of cheap flats where she had kept only the most utilitarian of possessions. Fleeing, there was, in all of Moscow, only one possible destination.
Chortenko’s mansion.
Chortenko lived right off of the Garden Ring. From his front step, five separate fires were visible. But his mansion, unlike so many others, was not ablaze.
Well…that could be remedied.
Now that her head was beginning to clear, Pepsicolova was all but certain that she was not Baba Yaga anymore. Which meant either that the massive overdose of drugs she had taken was wearing off or that she’d fallen into a lower spiritual state, shedding her supernatural aspect and becoming merely human once again. She was not at all sure which interpretation she would have preferred, given the choice.
If she was only human, however, that meant she would have to use cunning and guile, things her discarded witch-self would never have bothered with. Pepsicolova entered the mansion through the front door and walked calmly and unhurriedly to the records room. There Chortenko’s two dwarf savants were poring over a mountainous heap of files. Igorek picked up a report, flipped through it committing its contents to memory, and then handed it to Maxim, who did the same. After which, the report was carefully placed atop a roaring fire in the fireplace.
The dwarfs looked up incuriously as she entered.
“I am going to set fire to this building,” Pepsicolova said. “Your master will want to know this information. Go immediately and tell him.”
Igorek and Maxim rose and left the room.
Pepsicolova scooped up an armful of documents and one of the reading lanterns. Then she went to the top floor and set fire to all the curtains. That would start the house ablaze well enough, and by the time the fire burned down to the basement, she expected to have completed her business here.
When enough time had elapsed for those on the ground floor to smell smoke, a servant came running up the stairs with a carafe of water in his hand. “Tell your master that Anya Alexandreyovna has come home,” Pepsicolova said. “Also, the building is on fire. It contains much that he values, so I’m certain that he’ll want to know.” To her own ear, her words sounded mild and reasonable. But something in her tone or expression made the servant turn tail and run, water spraying with each long stride. Not long later, she heard somebody outdoors banging a hammer on an iron fire triangle.
Back down to the first floor she went.
Throwing the mansion’s front doors wide open, Pepsicolova dropped a single folder on the mat. A few paces inward, she dropped a second folder. Leaving a line of reports behind her like a trail of breadcrumbs, she made her way down to Chortenko’s basement study, where he had once kept her in a cage.
For her, this was where it had all begun.
Here, it would end.
Pushing open the door, she found herself in a room she knew only too well. At her entrance, the dogs leaped and barked and bayed in their cages, throwing themselves desperately against the bars. Already, they could smell smoke from the upper floor. It imbued the air with a tinge of madness.
Closing the door behind her so that the final file was wedged under it, half on the landing and half in the study, Pepsicolova studied the dogs dispassionately. Had they been human beings, she would have left them in their cages without a second thought. She did not much like people. In her experience, they deserved pretty much whatever happened to them. But these were dogs and hence as innocent as she had been when the secret police had first brought her, naked and weeping, to this room. She could not let them die here.
Pepsicolova drew Big Ivan, the least favored of her knives, from her belt, and, using his hilt as a hammer, systematically smashed all the locks one by one.
The dogs leaped and danced as she released them, hysterical with freedom and fear. Some of them bit her, but they didn’t really mean it and so she didn’t mind.
She had just broken open the last of the cages when she heard footsteps on the stairs. “Don’t do this, please,” a woman’s voice pleaded. “Please, Sergei Nemovich. Let me go.” If there was a reply, Pepsicolova could not hear it.
Then Chortenko kicked open the basement door. He had the files she’d strewn about in the crook of one arm, and pulled an elegantly dressed society lady after him with the other. Her he threw into the room. Whipping off his glasses, he turned his bug-eyed gaze on Pepsicolova. His face was flushed with anger. But as always his tone was mild and controlled. “You have crossed a line, little Annushka,” he said. “So I-”
The dogs attacked.
Chortenko fell backward as he was swarmed and overwhelmed by the newly freed animals. The society lady darted into a corner, shrieking with fear. But the dogs did not attack her. They were all rabid to tear the flesh from their tormentor’s living body. Snarling and snapping and foaming at the jaw, they fought each other to get at Chortenko. But if the male dogs were savage, the bitches were even worse, ripping and tearing at the spymaster with unholy glee.
Foremost among them was Pepsicolova herself.
Her knives were forgotten. She used only her jaws and nails. The sound that Chortenko made as her teeth sank into his throat-a high-pitched sort of scream, more of a squeal, actually-was almost as good as the taste of the flesh she ripped from his struggling body.
Arkady, meanwhile, was staggering through the ruins of the Terem Palace, half-blinded by his mask. He was not precisely clear how he had found his way here. But the fragmentary decoration was familiar to him from his schoolboy history texts. The Duke of Muscovy must surely be here somewhere! Yet nowhere in this shambles could he find any trace of that great man.
Icons crunched beneath his shoes. He tripped over an enamel stove and fell flat on his face. When he regained his feet, a staircase opened up before him and all in a rush he found himself down at its bottom.
At last, Arkady stumbled into the Golden Porch, an antechamber of sorts into which a passage from the Great Kremlin Palace debouched. This room, unlike all the others he had seen, was at least intact. But it too was deserted.
Disheartened and exhausted, Arkady sank down at the top of a short flight of stairs overlooking the antechamber. In daylight, assuredly, it would have looked splendid. Now, however, lit by only two guttering candle-lanterns, one to either side of the stairs, it was cavernous and dark, a palace of shadows at the end of time. Was everybody else dead and only he alive? Had he somehow outlived humanity, dooming himself to eternal desolation and despair? Or was he himself dead and inexplicably condemned to search through the ruins of his life, forever seeking and never finding?
Such were his confused and incoherent thoughts when the Pearls Beyond Price flowed through the doorway into the Golden Porch, chattering and laughing. Only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight of him.
The Pearls’ sudden unease was perfectly understandable. In a mirror across the room, he could dimly make out an eerie sight: a man in a lavishly brocaded surcoat, wearing a helmet with a smooth silver facemask, topped by a crown covered over with diamonds, sat brooding heavily and in perfect solitude. It was himself. In the unsteady lantern-light, surrounded by the reds and golds of the highly decorated walls, he might have been a hand-colored illustration in a children’s romance. King Saladin resting after his victory over the Zengids, perhaps, or Ivan the Terrible wracked with guilt after murdering his son.
The Pearls clustered together. Then Nymphodora stepped forward and timidly said, “Sir?”
Arkady looked up. Several of the Pearls gasped. Apparently they had not all been absolutely sure he was alive.
“Sir, I must ask. Who are you?”
“I…?” There was an answer to that question, he was sure of it. Arkady sought for it in the reeling corridors of his mind. It was all terribly confusing. But then he remembered his quest, his duty, the sacred errand that had sent him out into the terrible streets of Moscow on this most horrific of all nights. He must find the Duke of Muscovy. He had a message for the Duke of Muscovy. He must warn…
“The Duke of Muscovy.”
With screams of delight, the Pearls converged upon him.
Chortenko’s body was not recognizable by the time Anya Pepsicolova and her new friends were through with it. She stood, shaking her head, trying to will herself to think clearly and rationally. The basement door was open and the society lady gone-fled, doubtless, in horror of what she had seen. Already, some of the dogs were bounding up the stairs toward the open front door and liberty. Others, however, cowered, afraid to pass through the smoke-filled air that choked the rooms above.
“Hush now, don’t be afraid,” Pepsicolova said soothingly.“You don’t have to go upstairs if you don’t want to. There’s another exit right over here.”
She unlatched, unbolted, and threw open the door into Chortenko’s secret tunnel system. Several dogs streaked past her as she stepped through it.
Pepsicolova had no good memories connected to these tunnels. But they opened into not just the Kremlin but several buildings, public and private, along the way. She was considering which exit to take when she saw something in the tunnel ahead. It was, strangely enough, a piece of furniture. A kind of surgical table or cot which was used in hospitals, what was it called? A gurney. As she drew closer, Pepsicolova was astonished to see none other than the Englishman, Aubrey Darger, strapped down helpless upon it.
“Well!” she said, inexplicably amused. “Somebody expended a great deal of effort strapping you down.”
With a twitch of her wrist, Saint Cyrila appeared in her hand.
A relieved smile appeared on Darger’s face. “Good girl!” he cried. “Well done! Cut me free and we’ll-”
Then, as the knife moved not toward the straps but toward his groin, Darger said, “Um…excuse me, but… If I may ask… Exactly what are you doing?”
Which was, Pepsicolova felt, an extremely astute question. She considered its answer carefully, all the while staring down at Darger, hard and unwavering. “Something I’ve been wanting to do,” she said at last, “for a long, long time.”
Saint Cyrila cut through Darger’s belt as if it were made of paper.
Diving and soaring with a life of her own, the blade moved up and down and up again. Humming to herself, Pepsicolova proceeded to cut away first Darger’s trousers and then his shirt. Darger had a great deal to say during the process, but she didn’t bother listening to any of it. When he was completely naked, she kicked off her shoes, shucked her trousers, and climbed atop his prone body.
By now Darger was clearly convinced she was crazy. Which, Pepsicolova had to admit, was entirely possible. Eyes wide with fear, he babbled, “My dear young lady! This is certainly neither the time nor the place for such actions. You mustn’t… mustn’t…”
But Pepsicolova bent low over Darger and, tapped the flat of Saint Cyrila’s blade warningly against his lips. “Shhhhhh,” she whispered. Then she spat out a tooth and grinned.
“Giddy up.” She dug her heels into his sides. Savoring Darger’s protests, Pepsicolova rode him like a stallion. This day just kept getting better and better.
Yevgeny and his crew were engaged in blasting down burning houses in order to create a fire break to limit the spread of the conflagration.
“Awaiting your order, sir,” the sergeant said. “Fire,” Yevgeny said miserably. “Fire!” the sergeant barked.
The gun fired.
Thus did his men (and, temporarily, his women) show their displeasure with his indecision earlier. Everything was being done strictly by the book. There was no slack, no swagger, no camaraderie, none of the easy give-and-take natural to a well-run crew. Only a stiff adherence to the minutest detail of military protocol.
“Shall we load and fire again, sir?” The sergeant stood as straight as a ramrod, eyes unblinking and unforgiving.
“What is your advice, Sergeant?”
“Sir! No advice, sir!”
“Then we shall move the piece down the street to demolish the next house.”
There was the slightest pause. Enough to let Yevgeny know that he had guessed wrong-that he should have put another round into the smoking rubble or else moved the gun in the other direction-before the sergeant said, “Sir! Yes, sir!”
It was all Yevgeny could do to keep from weeping with humiliation.
Then, breaking with the script, one of the men shouted and pointed up into the sky. Turning, Yevgeny saw the most amazing sight of his entire life: a naked giant looming over the buildings before him. The unsteady light from the flames below reflected off its skin, making it shimmer. For the briefest instant he wondered if he were experiencing a mystic vision of one of the demons from the Pit.
The giant shifted against the stars. Moving slowly, it turned onto Teatralny proezd. It was coming straight toward Yevgeny’s gun crew.
A horse reared in terror. Several of the soldiers looked like they were ready to run. One of them had actually thrown down the swab he was holding and was about to bolt.
“Stay at your posts, damn you!” Yevgeny shouted, grabbing the panicky soldier and flinging him back toward the cannon. He drew his sword. “I’ll kill the first mother-violating one of you who breaks and runs. Sergeant, are you in control of your men or not? Get that gun swung around. Give me an elevation. Are you all hares and hyenas? Stand and fight like the Russians you pretend to be!”
“Sir,” the sergeant said, “there’s not the time for a precise-” “Do it by eye, then.” The gun was aimed and its elevation adjusted. “On your command, sir.”
“Let it get closer. We’ve only the time for the one shot.” “Now, sir?” “Not yet.” “We’ve got a good shot, sir.” “Just a little…” Yevgeny murmured.
“He’s getting pretty fucking close, sir.”
“Not until my command,”Yevgeny said. He waited until the last possible instant and then forced himself to count silently to three. “Fire!”
They fired.
The Duke of Muscovy’s great heart was hammering so hard it was about to burst. He had no illusions on that front. His body had been designed for a prone and sedentary existence. He could not long survive standing up and walking about like one of his own minuscule subjects. Already his mighty bones had sustained hundreds of small fractures from the stresses of his stroll through the city. His internal organs, crushed by forces they were never meant to withstand, were failing. In just a few seconds his heart would stop.
He had realized that all this would happen even as he had struggled to awaken, for the duke’s tremendous brain was capable of miracles of extrapolation. Further, having lived only a shadowy half-existence erenow, the dreads and fears natural to a man knowing he was about to die did not rise up within him. Quite the opposite. For the first time, he found himself capable of feeling full human emotion, and he had given himself over to the experience.
It had been, as he had known it would be, a brief life but a joyous one.
Down on the street below, the duke saw an artillery crew swarming about their piece. They were as cunningly detailed as the very best of toy soldiers and he loved them as fully and uncritically as a little boy would have. There were tiny plumes on their shakos and all-but-invisible brass buttons on their jackets. They were tamping down powder and ball while their commander gestured with a sword that was the merest glint of reflected moonlight.
Then his heart failed. In the instant before the world went dark, the Duke of Muscovy saw a puff of white smoke at the mouth of the cannon.
Dying, he regretted that he would never know what came next.
The first thing Arkady heard upon regaining consciousness was one of the Pearls saying, “Well, that was pleasant. What shall we do next?”
He was, Arkady realized, lying on his back, with his trousers around his ankles. One of his shoes was gone, as were his shirt and jacket, but the helmet was still upon his head. Every muscle in his body ached as if he had been beaten with a cudgel. Further, he was utterly and completely exhausted. He could not so much as lift a finger. He had not the energy even to speak. Nor could he bring himself to open his eyes. Worst of all, he had no memory of whatever it was these six perfect Daughters of Ishtar had just done to him.
“I want to see the face of our bridegroom,” Aetheria said. (He recognized that dulcet voice which he had once worshipped, and which still tugged at his heart.) His head shook from side to side as she tugged and tugged, before finally undoing the chin-strap.
There was a brief, astonished silence.
“It’s Arkady!” somebody exclaimed. There was a scuffling noise as the Pearls gathered around his prone body, looking down.
Strangely enough, none of them died. Evidently the mental commands implanted in them by the Caliph’s technicians were not going to kick in. They had enjoyed sex (or so they had thought) with the Duke of Muscovy, and that act had freed them of their psychic shackles. Leaving them free to do whatever they wanted with whomever they wished, as was the birthright of women everywhere.
“But why was he wearing a crown?”
“And carrying a scepter?”
“Look. Here in the pockets of his jacket: precious stones, jewelry, gold nuggets.”
“He has become a thief!” Aetheria cried. “That is sort of romantic,” another Pearl said doubtfully. “Not romantic enough.”
“Anything less than suicide is an insult, in my opinion.”
“At any rate, these treasures belong to the Russian people and the State of Muscovy, so he cannot keep them,” Aetheria said. “Look at this cunning jeweled egg! We can’t simply leave him here to walk away with them.”
“There’s a chest over there; place all these things in it. When the Neanderthals return, we can have some of them stand guard over it for the duke.”
Somebody coughed. “Um…we’re back,” said a male voice and, almost simultaneously, another said, “We won the fight.”
The Pearls shrieked. “Cover your eyes, we’re all disheveled!” “Don’t look.” “Where are my clothes?”
Upon which, cursing his eyes for so steadfastly refusing to open, Arkady felt himself falling back into oblivion.
Unhurriedly, Anya Pepsicolova dressed. When she had finished tying her shoes, she straightened and looked down on Darger’s naked body for a long, still moment. Darger stared warily back at her, clearly alarmed by the expression on her blood-caked face, but equally clearly still thinking, still scheming. Perhaps she should shave off all his hair, from head to foot, as well? That would bring a neat symmetry to her long, difficult journey through the underworld. She considered the possibility seriously, but then decided against it. Because, really, she’d done enough.
Aloud, she said, “There. That’s taken care of.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” Darger said with unctuous insincerity. But then, under the circumstances-post-coital and still bound hand and foot to the gurney-he was not exactly under oath. “So. Where, if I may ask, have you been all this time?”
“Oh, out and about.” Pepsicolova tugged at her lapels to straighten her jacket. She shrugged. “You know.”
“What did you do?”
“This and that.” She slipped her cap onto her head and adjusted the angle. “Nothing of any particular note.”
“Good, good, I’m glad to hear it.” A note of cunning entered Darger’s voice. “So, my darling Anya, now that we’ve experienced mutual ecstasy-I presume it was good for you, too?-we must discuss our future together.”
“Future?” Anya was pretty sure that Darger hadn’t experienced anything at all like ecstasy. She would have noticed. But that was a matter of perfect indifference to her, one way or the other. What did matter was that her skin felt stiff and itchy. “Well, the first thing I’m going to do is to wash my hands and face. Then…I don’t know. Go for a walk, maybe.”
She turned her back on Darger, on her career as a spy, on the City Below, on everything that had happened to her since she first encountered Chortenko, and started to walk away. Up ahead in the distance, she saw something waiting patiently for her. She could not help but smile.
Darger laughed ingratiatingly. “You foolish, loveable thing,” he said. “The future of our relationship, I meant. Our feelings toward each other. Oh, I’ve been a blind fool! Wasting my time searching for tombs and books and libraries and tsars, when all the while there you were, right before me. But I shall make it up to you, my precious one, I swear.”
His voice grew fainter behind her.
“We have plans to make, my sweetness. Promises to make. An engagement ring to buy. We must… Surely you’ll…you’ll… Wait! Come back! You’ve forgotten to untie me!”
But Anya Pepsicolova was no longer listening.
Several long, bleak minutes later, Darger realized that Pepsicolova had left behind the big knife she carried in her belt. It had slipped from its sheath to the gurney when she doffed her trousers, and then been knocked to the floor in the course of her inexplicable passion. Afterward, she had not bothered picking it up. He could see it, just barely, out of the corner of his eye, tantalizingly near at hand.
Darger eyed the blade yearningly. It might be just possible, he judged, that a desperate and determined man to, by shifting his weight vigorously and repeatedly, overtopple the gurney. Then, by various stratagems, he could draw the knife to himself and so cut through one of his restraints. After which, the rest would be a breeze.
A harrowing, difficult, and suspenseful half hour later, it was done.
Arkady was gone, and with him the bulk of what Surplus had managed to liberate from the museum cases.
Worse, there came the sound of breaking glass as a second vitrine was smashed open. It was louder than the first had been, which meant that Surplus’s competitor was coming closer. It also indicated, Surplus feared, that whoever was at work was an amateur seizing the moment, rather than a professional who would be open to negotiation.
He glanced about, sizing up his situation.
There was only one exit from the Diamond Fund. Its display cases offered no hiding places. Not that Surplus particularly desired one. He was by nature a confronter rather than a slinker.
A third vitrine smashed. It was just outside the entrance to the room.
There was a moment’s silence. Then a shaggy figure, large as an ogre, filled the doorway. Heaped in its arms was a fortune in armor and weapons. It paused to peer about before entering.
“How pleasant to encounter a compeer,” Surplus said, stepping into the light of a column. “I trust your endeavors have been fruitful?”
With a tremendous clatter, the intruder dropped everything he held. Kicking the loot out of his way, he strode into the light and was revealed as a member of the Royal Guard. “All thish ish mine!” the bear-man cried. “If you try to take sho much ash a kopek of it, I’ll kill you.”
The fellow swayed slightly. It was clear he had been drinking.
Surplus brought his cane up to his mouth and delicately tapped its silver knob against his lips. “Split the swag fifty-fifty?”
“Hah!” The guard shambled forward, stumbling and almost falling when he stepped on what appeared to Surplus’s tutored eye to be the ancient and indeed priceless Alexander Nevsky Helmet.“Shergeant Wojtek shares with nobody.”
“I’ll go as low as one-third. In all fairness, there is far more here than the two of us can hope to carry off on our own.”
Sergeant Wojtek rolled his neck, showing his teeth. Then he held up his paws, uncurling the fingers one by one to extend their claws. “Do you imagine for an inshtant that a former member of the Royal Guard can be bought?”
He threw a punch at Surplus’s head.
Surplus danced away from the blow. “Really, sir, there is no reason for us to fight. We are surrounded by an ocean of wealth. It makes no sense to quarrel over who gets to drink from it.”
He barely managed to evade a second blow.
“Nobody takesh whatsh mine!”
“You make an excellent point, sir, I do confess it, a most excellent point,” Surplus said, searching desperately for an appropriate strategy. With each missed punch, the length of corridor behind him grew shorter. At its end, he could break and run, true. But the bear-guard was assuredly not only stronger but also considerably faster than he was. It was only his drunken state that had kept him from simply charging forward and seizing Surplus in a crushing hug. “Yet nighttime is a dwindling resource, and with the dawn we may expect a restoration of order. It would not do for either of us to be found here tomorrow morning.”
“Shtand shtill sho I can kill you, damn it.” Sergeant Wojtek aimed a haymaker at Surplus and almost fell over when it missed. Clearly the alcohol had badly degraded his reflexes. This was a factor which could be used to Surplus’s advantage.
“Is there to be no resolution other than death?” Surplus asked with genuine regret. He held his cane before him, one paw on the knob and the other by its tip, as if he thought it possible to fend off the gigantic animal-man chimera with it.
“None,” the Royal Guardsman said truculently.
“Then I must inform you, sir, that you are a drunken lout, a traitor, a thief, a murderous thug, a disgrace to your uniform-and quite possibly not even a gentleman.”
With a bellow of rage, Sergeant Wojtek charged.
All in one movement, Surplus stepped to the side, like a matador dodging a bull, pulled away the wooden sheath that was half of his sword-cane, and plunged the sword down the space at the side of the guard’s neck that was unprotected by bone.
Deep the sword went, into the heart and through.