Moscow was a city of hidden passages and surprising depths. There were pedestrian walkways under all the larger streets, lined with small shops and lit by bioluminescent lichens growing on the undersides of their roofs. Basements opened into underground arcades where illegal businesses were run out of undocumented storage vaults carved from the bedrock when the city was young. Military installations from bygone eras and bunkers built to protect ancient tyrants from their enemies both abroad and at home were embedded deep within a three-dimensional tangle of transit and utility tunnels, some still functional and others containing the ruins of the electrical infrastructure that had been hastily ripped asunder after the revolt of mankind’s electronic slaves. Long corridors connected buildings that no longer existed.
“Vodka, miss?”
“Why the hell else would I be in this shit-hole?”
No man knew all of the underground city’s ways. But Anya Pepsicolova knew as many of them as anybody. To its denizens she was the single best guide to its mysteries that money could hire, a young woman of aristocratic birth who had taken to slumming in the criminal underworld and who, because she had no known protector, they could routinely cheat and shortchange. To the secret police, she was a ruthless and useful undercover agent, though one they felt absolutely no loyalty to. To Sergei Chortenko, she was a naive and ingenious girl who had snooped into matters that did not concern her and who had subsequently been broken to his will. To the monsters who fancied themselves the real rulers of the City Below, she was a convenient means of keeping an eye on the City Above while their plans ripened and fermented and the glorious day grew nearer and nearer when everyone in Moscow-herself most emphatically included-died.
It was hard sometimes for her to keep all of her ostensible masters straight-much less decide which of them she hated the most. The only real pleasure she got out of life anymore was when she was hired by somebody powerless enough that she dared to feed him, alive and screaming, to one of her oppressors.
Pepsicolova sat hunched over a plate of bread she’d chopped into small pieces, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking slowly but steadily, maintaining a small, warm buzz in the back of her skull. After each shot, she splayed a hand over the bread. Then she closed her eyes, flicked Saint Cyrila out of her wrist sheath, and stabbed between her fingers for a bit of bread to clear her palate. It was her way of judging whether she was still sober. She wanted to have a clear head when the foreign adventurer named Aubrey Darger finally put in an appearance.
For the past two days she had observed him. Today they would speak.
At last there came a clatter of feet down the stairs from the street and her prey threw open the door. For the merest instant cool autumn air blew into the Bucket of Nails. Then the door slammed shut, once again restoring the stench of cigarettes and stale beer.
“English!” cried one of the negligible young men-of no interest even to Chortenko’s people-who came here regularly to argue political theory and leave behind small piles of pamphlets. “It’s the Englishman!” shouted another. A young woman who was still half a student but already more than half a whore twisted in her stool and blew him a kiss.
The foreigner could be charming when he wanted to be-that had been the first thing Pepsicolova had written in her report.
“Vodka!” Darger cried, seizing a chair and throwing his cap onto a table. “If you can call it that.” A bottle, a glass, and a plate of bread were provided. He downed a shot and pinched up some bread. Then he leaned over to fill the glasses at the nearest table. “What subversive nonsense are we discussing today, eh?”
The dilettantes laughed and raised their glasses in salute.
Darger gave the impression of great generosity, but if one kept careful track of what he actually spent, it came to very little, perhaps half a bottle of vodka over the course of a long evening. That was the second thing Pepsicolova had written in her report.
Pepsicolova studied Darger through narrowed eyes. He was unlike anyone she had ever met. He was a well-made fellow, if one considered only his body. But his face…well, if you looked away for an instant and he happened to shift position, you would be hard-put to find him again. It was not that he was homely, not exactly, but rather that his features were so perfectly average that they refused to stay in your memory. When he was talking, his face lit up with animation. But as soon as his mouth stopped moving, he faded back into the wallpaper.
Nondescript. That was the word for him. She stood and went to his table.
“You are looking for something,” she told him.
“As are we all.” Darger’s smile was as good as a wink, an implicit invitation to join him in a private conspiracy of two. “In my youth, I worked for a time as a fortune teller. ‘You seek to better yourself,’ I would say. ‘You have unsuspected depths…You’ve suffered great loss and known terrible pain… Those around you fail to appreciate your sensitive nature.’ I said the same words to everyone, and they all ate it up with a spoon. Indeed, my patter was so convincing that the rumor went out that I was consorting with demons and I had to flee from a lynch mob under cover of night.”
He kicked out the chair across from him. “Sit down and tell me about yourself. I can see that you are a remarkable person who deserves far better than the shoddy treatment you have received so far in your life.”
The man was laughing at her! Pepsicolova silently promised herself that he would pay for that. “A guide,” she said. “I was told you were looking for someone wise in the ways of the dark.”
He studied her thoughtfully.
Pepsicolova could easily imagine what he saw. A woman of marriageable age, rather on the slender side, with her dark hair chopped short, dressed in workingman’s clothing: slouch hat, a loose jacket over a plain vest and shirt, and baggy trousers. Her boots were solid enough to snap a rat’s spine with a single stomp. She knew this from experience. Darger would not see Saint Cyrila and Saint Methodia-one slim blade for infighting and the other for throwing-which she kept up her sleeves. But the girls had a brother, Big Ivan, on her belt, which like most males was not so much functional as it was showy and intimidating.
“Your price?” Darger asked.
She told him.
“You’re hired,” he said. “For half your stated fee, of course-I’m not a fool. You may begin by familiarizing me with the general area where I wish to concentrate my search.”
“And that is?” He gestured vaguely. “Oh, east, I think. Beneath the Old City.” “At the foot of the Kremlin, you mean. I know what you’re after.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t think you’re the first who’s ever hired me to help him find the tomb of the lost tsar.”
“Refresh my memory.”
Not bothering to keep the annoyance out of her voice, Pepsicolova said, “During the fall of Utopia, a great many things were dismantled or hidden away to protect them from…certain entities. Among them was the tomb of Tsar Lenin, which once stood in Red Square but now lies buried no one knows where. Like Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, his memory is still a potent one for many Russians. Were his body to be found, it would doubtless be put to use by your political dissident friends. Also, there are the usual rumors about associated treasure which are complete nonsense but I am sure you believe in anyway. So don’t think you’re fooling anybody.”
“Yes! Absolutely! You’ve seen right through me.” Darger smiled brightly. “You are an extraordinarily insightful woman, and I see I can hide nothing from you. Can we start right away?”
“If you wish. We’ll go out through the back.”
They passed through the kitchen, and Darger held the door for her. As Pepsicolova passed through, he placed his hand on her backside in an infuriatingly condescending manner. A thrill of dark pleasure ran up her spine.
She was going to enjoy making this one suffer.
The first time that the Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma spent the night with Arkady, she came alone. The second time, she brought along her best friend Irina to help blunt his appetites. Nevertheless, when the pearly light of dawn suffused itself across the city and seeped through the windows of his apartment, the two ladies sprawled loose-limbed and exhausted upon the raft of his great bed, while Arkady was entirely certain that he could continue for hours to come.
Seeing their exhaustion, however, Arkady gently kissed both the dear women on their foreheads and, throwing on his embroidered silk dressing gown, went to the window to watch the birth of a new day. The smokes and fogs of Moscow had been transformed by the alchemy of dawn into a diffuse and holy haze that briefly made this thronged and wicked place appear to be a sinless city upon the hill, a second Jerusalem, a fit dwell-ing-place for the living Spirit.
He stood motionless, reveling in the presence of God.
After a time, Baronessa Avdotya stirred faintly and said, “That was… even better than the first time. I would not have thought it possible.”
Beside her Irina murmured, “I am never going to let a man touch me again. It would spoil the memory of this night.”
There were no words Arkady could have more greatly relished hearing. They stroked his vanity so emphatically that he had to fight down the urge to fling himself back onto the bed and show both ladies how much more he had yet to give.
“Why have you left us?” the baronessa mock-complained. He could hear her loving smile in her voice. “What are you looking at so intently?”
“I am watching the sun come up,” he said simply. “It struggles to rise above the horizon, and in doing so it makes the horizon seem to shift and move, like a sleeper’s eyelid when he strives to awaken. Yet though the enterprise looks difficult, it is inevitable; not all the armies in the world could delay it for the slightest fraction of a second.”
“You make it sound so profound.”
“It is! It is!” Arkady cried with all the certainty of a recent convert. “It seems to me that this is exactly like the merciful God trying to force His way into our night-bound, sinful lives-it seems so difficult, impossible even, and yet His will is indomitable and cannot be stopped. Darkness flees from Him. His light arises from within like the sun, and the soul is filled with purity, certainty, and serenity.”
“Oh, Arkady,” Irina sighed. “You are so very, very spiritual. But God does not enter into the lives of ordinary people in such a manner. Only for saints and people in books does He behave that way.”
Now Arkady flung away the robe and returned to the bed. He swept both women into his arms and addressed them by their pet names. “Ah, my beautiful Dunyasha! Sweet Irinushka! Do not despair, for God has found a way to break through the membrane separating Him from the mundane world.”
“Away, insatiable beast!” The baronessa pushed herself out of Arkady’s arms and then, when he did not move to grab her back, snuggled into them again. Irina rolled over weakly and touched her lips in a little pouting kiss to Arkady’s chest, though without any strength.
Now came the most delicate and important part of Arkady’s mission. “I was not always so vigorous, you know, nor so sure of God’s abiding love. Not long ago I was weak and riddled with doubt.” He paused, as if debating within himself whether to share with them a great secret. “My darlings! Do you wish to be as strong as I? To have my sexual stamina? That is nothing. That is the simplest thing imaginable. I can show you how it is done. But more importantly, you will feel the presence of the indwelling God as intimately as you have felt my caresses.”
“It sounds delightful,” Baronessa Avdotya murmured,“though improbable.”
“Invite me to your estate next weekend, when the baron is away, and I will bring what is requisite. We shall all three of us be made closer than lovers and stronger than gods.”
“I will come,” Irina promised. “But I must bring another friend with me-perhaps two-so that I can get some rest between your storms of lovemaking.”
“We’d best make it five,” the baronessa said.
It was that fleeting moment of golden perfection that comes in late September, which the Russians called “grandmother’s summer.” The parks and boulevards of Moscow drew lovers and idlers out from their houses and businesses. There were people boating on the river’s silvery waters. The view from the wooded heights of the Secret Garden was as picturesque as a hand-colored woodcut.
Simply being in the Kremlin, Surplus felt lifted above the day-to-day concerns of the groundlings in the city beneath him. It explained everything about those who governed from this high place: He felt himself not only physically but morally superior, occupying a higher, more spiritually elevated space, ethereal where the Muscovites were flesh-bound and sweaty, pure where they reeked of sausage and kvass. He shook his head in amusement at the whimsicality of these thoughts, but found he could not dismiss them. “Those poor fellows!” he thought pityingly, meaning everybody who had the misfortune to be ruled from this extraordinary spot.
It was also, he had to admit, good to get away from the Pearls for a change. Beauteous and charming as they might be, the Pearls were also- there was no denying it-intense. Indeed, they were growing more intense with each passing day on which they were not taken, with enormous pomp and ceremony, to the Terem Palace to stand at last, blushing and shy, before their new bridegroom. After which, he presumed, these seven virgins with their excess of book learning and lack of any prior outlets for their physical desires, would teach the duke precisely how terrifying such young ladies could be.
So it was with a bit of an edge in his voice that Surplus turned to the rotund and pompous bureaucrat-the eighteenth most powerful man in Moscow, the gentleman had boasted-with whom he slowly strolled among the ash trees of the Secret Garden and said, “We have been in Moscow over a month and still you cannot make this simplest of things happen?”
“I have given it my honest best. But what is there to be done? A meeting with the Duke of Muscovy is not something that happens every day.”
“All I wish to do,” Surplus said, “is to give the man a present of seven uniquely beautiful concubines, all of them graceful, intelligent, and desperately eager to please. Nor are they merely decorative and companionable. They can also cook, tat lace, arrange flowers, cheat at cards, and play the pianoforte. Not only are they pleasant to the eye and ear and-presumably-nose and hand and tongue, but they have been thoroughly educated in literature, psychology, and political philosophy. As advisors, they will be unfailingly frank yet subtle as only a Byzantine can be. Further, they are trained in all the social graces and the erotic arts as well. Never was such a gift more churlishly refused!”
“The duke is a great man, with many demands on his time.”
“I warn you that when he finally experiences the thousand delights of the Pearls of Byzantium, he will not reward you for having kept them from him so long.”
“You have your duty and I have mine. Good-bye.” Wrapping his dignity about himself like a greatcoat, the bureaucrat, whom Surplus now thought of as the single most useless man in Moscow, departed.
Dispirited, Surplus sank down on a park bench.
The Secret Garden’s portentous name was more suggestive than it perhaps merited, for it lay above and was named for the Secret Tower, one of the Kremlin’s two dozen towers, most of which antedated the Utopian era. As for why the tower was so named, there were many explanations. One was that it was the terminus of a secret tunnel into the city. Another said that it contained a secret well. The most plausible was that it was named after a long-demolished Cathedral of the Secret that once stood nearby. But which was the truth no man could say for there were no facts in Russia-only conflicting conspiracy theories.
Surplus came out of his reverie to discover, sitting on the bench beside him, a stocky and unprepossessing man in blue glass goggles.
“You seem unhappy, Ambassador,” Chortenko said. “May I ask why?”
His mood being foul, and seeing no reason to pretend otherwise, Surplus said, “Surely you, who are reputed to know everything else that goes on in this city, must be aware of what I have made no effort whatsoever to hide.”
“Yes, yes, these ‘Pearls’ of yours, of course. I was only making small talk. But you, I see, are far too direct for that. So I shall be blunt as well. It is impossible for you to see the Duke of Muscovy. No foreigner has ever been allowed into his presence. But if you will answer a few questions openly and honestly for me, I will arrange the impossible for you. And then…well, you will have as much of the great man’s attention as he deigns to give you.”
There was something about the quiet amusement with which the man spoke that made the small hairs on the back of Surplus’s neck bristle with sudden fear. But he said only, “What do you wish to know?”
“This book that was stolen from you-for there was a book and it was stolen-exactly what is it?”
“I cannot tell you specifically, for that is information which the Caliph’s political surgeons have locked my brain against divulging.” Surplus froze every muscle in his face and stared blankly into the distance. Then, with a sudden, spasmodic toss of his head, he said, “However, I am at liberty to say that it was intended as a present for the duke.”
“Then we are allies in this matter. Tell me, is this book very valuable?”
“Far more so than the Pearls of Byzantium. Indeed, it was the chief gift, and they only an afterthought.”
Chortenko pursed his lips and then tapped them thoughtfully with one stubby forefinger. “Perhaps my people can aid in its recovery by finding the man who stole it from you. He is a foreigner, after all, and hence extremely noticeable.”
“His name is Aubrey Darger, and he was my secretary. But I must tell you that the book itself is useless without…” Surplus’s face twitched and contorted as if he were struggling to find a phrasing allowed by the thought-surgery. “Without certain information that he alone possesses.”
“Curious. But I imagine that information would come out easily enough under torture.”
“If only that were so! I would wield the whip myself, after what that dastard has done. But for much the same reason that I cannot be more open with you about…certain aspects of the matter…it would be a pointless endeavor.” Surplus sighed. “I wish I could be of more help. I don’t imagine the little I’ve told you suffices to warrant a meeting with the duke.”
“Not at all, not at all.” Chortenko consulted a small datebook and then made a notation. “Come to my house a week from Tuesday, and I’ll take you to him.”
Darger followed his guide into the undercity.
Anya Pepsicolova was, of course, an agent of the secret police. But Darger did not hold that against her. Indeed, that was the entire point of this charade-to get the attention of the powers who actually ran Muscovy and, ultimately, convince them that he had something they desired.
Something they would be willing to pay dearly for.
Rulers were notoriously stingy with those who did them favors, of course. So in order to receive an appropriate reward, a silent partner would be required. Somebody highly placed in the administration. It was Surplus’s job to find that individual, just as it was his to ostentatiously display the bait.
The Bucket of Nails’ kitchen opened on a long corridor. Through some of the doors lining that corridor could be glimpsed butchers, dishwashers, mushroom cultivators, gene splicers, and the like. These were the lowest levels of the working class, people who were grimly holding on to the very edge of subsistence, terrified lest they lose their grips and fall into the abyss of joblessness and penury.
They rattled down a metal staircase which seemed ready to collapse from age into a lower level where the lichens and bioluminescent fungi dwindled almost to nothing. Where two corridors intersected, a legless army veteran with a patch of tentacles growing out of one cheek sold oil lanterns from a blanket. Pepsicolova threw down a few rubles, and the man lit two lanterns with a sputtering sulfur match. Their flames leapt high and then sank down as he trimmed the wicks. Pepsicolova handed one to Darger.
The metal parts of the lantern seemed flimsy and its thin panes of glass ready to break at the tap of a fingernail. “Aren’t these a fire hazard?” Darger asked.
“If Moscow burns, it burns,” Pepsicolova said with a fatalistic shrug.
She led him down a second steep and endlessly long metal stairway to a vast and shadowy marble-walled station room. There, long concrete piers lined an underground river whose waters were as black as the Styx. “This is the Neglinnaya River,” Pepsicolova said with a touch of melancholy. “The poor thing has been trapped underground since forever.” A handful of gondoliers ditched their cigarettes into the water at their approach and waved lanterns urging the newcomers toward their crafts. But Pepsicolova ignored them. To one end of the pier was a small skiff. She climbed in, and Darger after her.
An odd incident happened as they were preparing to cast off. A wraith-thin and albino-white individual emerged from the gloom and held out three packs of cigarettes, which Pepsicolova accepted wordlessly. The creature’s face was expressionless, his movements listless. He turned away and faded again into darkness.
“Who was that?” Darger asked.
With an irritated gesture, Pepsicolova lit up a cigarette. “Somebody. A messenger. Nobody anybody cares about.”
“You’d be healthier if you didn’t smoke so much.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Pepsicolova stood and poled. Darger lounged back, watching her by the light of his lantern. When she leaned into the pole, he could not help noticing that she had quite a nice little bottom. All those months in the company of exquisite and untouchable women had made him acutely appreciative of the charms of their imperfect but (potentially) touchable sisters.
He had patted her on the fanny earlier chiefly in order to establish himself as the shallow and insignificant sort of man he was pretending to be. And she had arched her back! She had all but purred! Darger flattered himself that women rather liked him, but this Anya Pepsicolova had responded in such an extraordinary manner as to suggest deeper feelings on her part toward him.
Darger looked forward to getting to know the dear thing much better. For the moment, however, it was best to keep things simmering away on the back burner. There would be time for romance soon enough.
He just hoped that it did not break her heart when he inevitably had to move on and leave her in the lurch.
Dark waters lapped against the boat. Pepsicolova poled them deeper into mystery.
It was a Tuesday, so of course there was yet another tea party. Up and down the room, twin table-halves were set against either side of the dividing screen. Knots of men (never women, who understandably found the implicit comparison with the Pearls painful) clustered about the tables, vying for the attention of the beauties across from them, while serviles with madly glittering eyes watched for the least sign that a teacup needed filling. Occasionally, a gentleman succeeded in drawing a Pearl away from his competition, and the two stood apart, talking quietly through the screen.
Because they were indoors and because it was the custom here in Russia, the women did not wear veils. This made the Pearls feel daring, which lent a certain sauciness to even their least consequential remarks.
Zoesophia wafted from table to table, now drawing Russalka away from a young swain’s flattery that she was beginning to take too seriously, now subtly switching a retired general’s attention from Eulogia to Euphrosyne, so that each could later upbraid him for his inconstancy. Where the conversation was too heated, she damped it down, before a Neanderthal could descend upon the offender. Where it was listless, she enlivened it with an easily misinterpreted sisterly kiss upon Nymphodora’s dewy lips. By the time her circuit was done and Olympias rose to take over, the energy in the room had significantly intensified.
“Your baron glowers away anybody who tries to sit at your table,” Olympias said behind her hand.
“I know. It is terribly boorish of him.”
“But also very indicative of the depth of his feelings. As is the way your young artist-the one with the unfortunate mustache-refuses to be glowered away.”
“They are both overwrought. I fear that inevitably one of them will kill the other.”
Olympias assumed an expression of bored indifference. “There will always be more artists; they are interchangeable. Conversely, by all accounts, if the Butcher of Smolensk were the one to fall, it would be universally regarded as a act of high-minded civic spiritedness on your part.”
“You are a wicked, sinful girl,” Zoesophia said before drifting back to her table, “and when someday the vagaries of politics free us from the duke’s harem, you’re going to make some unfortunate man extremely happy.”
“Men,” Olympias called loftily after her. “Many, many, many men.”
If truth be told, Zoesophia found these events tedious. Nevertheless, the Pearls were all in ardent competition to be the next after Aetheria to kill a man-not by suicide, it was agreed, for that had been done, but this time by provoking a duel-and it would be uncongenial of her not to give it her best effort. So she returned to the table where Baron Lukoil-Gazprom and the artist who, quite frankly, she found so boring she couldn’t bring herself to remember his name, impatiently awaited her return.“Nikodim, my sweet,” she said to the baron, and to the poet: “My little rabbit.”
“At last, dear angel, you return!” The artist was lean as a whippet and twice as high-strung. “A thousand times have I died in your absence.”
“It was worse for me,” the baron said dryly. “He at least wasn’t sharing a table with a twit.” He was a handsome man and rich as well, though in such company that went without saying. Also politically powerful, which for Zoesophia was always a plus. But the best thing about him was that he thought himself clever, and such fellows were invariably the most delightfully easy to manipulate. He leaned closer to the screen and in a low, flirtatious voice said, “Tell me, ma petite minette… what is the shortest path to your bedroom?”
“Through the wedding chapel,” snapped the artist, who was himself unwed.
Zoesophia allowed herself a hastily stifled snort of laughter.
The baron suppressed a wince. “Sweet lady, it is a dreary journey this… stripling urges upon you. I have made it myself and can recommend neither the experience nor the prospect at the end.”
“It is at least an honorable estate,” the artist said.
“You forget that these ladies are all promised to the Duke of Muscovy.”
“So what you are saying is that in order for you to betray your wife, you require that Zoesophia cuckold the duke?”
It happened as fast as that-too fast for Zoesophia to prevent, even if the rules of the Pearls’ little game had allowed that. The baron sucked in his breath. Then he stood, jarring the table as he did, so that the spoons and teacups rattled.
“That is an insult I will not endure,” he exclaimed loudly. “Sir, I give you your choice of weapons.”
Somehow the artist was on his feet as well. He was such a negligible fellow that Zoesophia had not seen him rise. “Then I choose paint and canvas,” he said. “We shall each paint a satirical portrait of the other in oils.” In his anger, he looked like a terrier defying a bull. Of course, that mustache did not help. “The winner to be selected by vote of all those present-”
“Bah! Paint is no weapon. A duel is not a duel unless there is the chance of grievous injury.”
“Please. Allow me to finish. The winning portrait will be placed on public display for a month at the expense of the loser.”
The baron turned white. Then he sat down. “That is no fit challenge for a gentleman,” he grumbled, “and I refuse to accept it.”
During the exchange, all the room had fallen silent. Now a light smattering of applause arose from those present. The artist colored with pleasure.
“That was wittily done, my little carrot,” Zoesophia said, “and so you must have a reward. You there!” She snapped her fingers at the servile waiting on the table across from her. “Observe me carefully. Then assume my stance.”
The servile stared at her with hard, reptilian eyes. Then, with an ease possible only to one who had no true sense of self, she took on Zoesophia’s mien and posture.
“Now do precisely as I do.”
Zoesophia delicately raised a hand, and the servile moved as if her shadow. Her fingers brushed the artist’s cheek. She stepped forward, into his arms. Her chin tilted upward and her lips met his. Zoesophia’s tongue briefly, lightly probed the air.
Separated by several feet of space, she and the artist kissed.
A long moment later, Zoesophia stepped back, gracefully extricating her proxy from the artist’s embrace. A gesture of dismissal, and the servile resumed her former stance.
The baron watched it all with mingled wonder, lust, anger, and humiliation. Then he turned his back on them all and stormed out of the embassy’s ballroom. Zoesophia did not doubt for a second that at next Tuesday’s tea party she would be short one suitor or the other.
So, really, it turned out to be quite an amusing little gathering after all.
Chortenko climbed the stairs from his basement with a calm and easy heart. Waiting for him on the ground floor was a servile with a hot towel, which he used to clean any spatters of blood that might be on his face and hands. Then he went into the library and sat down to discover Pepsicolova’s latest report waiting for him on a side table. He read it through with care. It fit in interestingly with his observations of the ambassador’s behavior.
When he was done, he touched a nearby bell. His butler materialized at a respectful distance. “Brandy, sir?” “Just a small glass.”
“Very good, sir.”
Chortenko swirled the brandy in the glass, staring down at its fluid motion, enjoying its aroma. Sir de Plus Precieux was assuredly intent upon deceiving him. Which probably meant that ultimately the ambassador would have to be rigorously interrogated. But before Chortenko took such an irreversible step, he would need the duke’s assurance that it was the right thing to do.
The Duke of Muscovy, after all, was the ultimate arbiter in such matters. It would not do to act contrary to his judgment.
He thought back to his last conversation with the ambassador.“I would wield the whip myself,” he had said. Chortenko could not help being amused. The fellow had so little idea of what modern torture-applied by knowledgeable professionals-entailed. But he would learn. He would learn.
Chortenko took the merest sip of brandy and rang his butler again. When the man appeared in the doorway, he said, “Two of the dogs have died. Please have their corpses removed and buried somewhere immediately.”
“As you will, sir.”
Chortenko leaned back in his chair with a satisfied little smile. He was a methodical man, and despised untidiness.
…6…
It had been years since Anya Pepsicolova last saw daylight. The basement bar where she daily met Darger was as close as she ever came to the surface anymore. Unless one counted Chortenko’s mansion, as she did not; to her that bleak house felt as though it were sunk deeper into the earth than even the most stygian of her other haunts. Nor did she think she would ever know the surface world again. She was trapped in this labyrinth of tunnels and darkness, tied to a slim and unbreakable thread of fate that was somewhere being rewound, drawing her inexorably inward, toward the underworld’s dark center, where only madness and death awaited her.
But today she was still alive, and that, she reminded herself, was good. And she was still the third most dangerous entity-after Chortenko and the underlords-in all the City Below. Which was, if not actually good, at least a consolation.
As she poled down the Neglinnaya canal, the lantern at the bow of her skiff feebly lighting the walls ahead, Pepsicolova said, “We’ve been doing this for a week. You draw your maps. Sometimes you hire men to break through a bricked-over doorway. What exactly are you looking for?” “I told you. The tomb of Tsar Ivan.” “Lenin.” “Yes, precisely.”
Pepsicolova tied up the skiff at the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. Here, dim streaks of lichen provided some feeble light. As she always did, she paused at the bronze statue of a young man and his dog to touch a snout already rubbed shiny. “For luck,” she explained and, to her surprise, Darger did the same. “Why did you do that? This is my superstition, not yours.”
“A man in my profession by necessity courts Lady Luck. Nor do I sneer at any superstition, lest there be some practical reason behind it, as in the well-observed fact that a man walking under a ladder is far more likely to have a hammer dropped upon his head than one walking cautiously around it, or that breaking a mirror necessarily entails the bad luck of enraging its owner.”
“Exactly what is your profession?”
“Right now, I am searching for Tsar Ivan.”
“Lenin.”
“Of course.” Darger unfolded a map of Moscow. “We are now directly below-here? A brief walk from the Resurrection Gates?”
“That is correct.”
Darger got out his book, flipped to a page midway through it, and nodded with satisfaction. Then, repocketing the tome, he said, “We shall extend our search into the underground passages below the south wall of the Kremlin and above the river.”
“The south wall? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You should be aware that most people think that the tomb is buried somewhere under Red Square.”
“Which is precisely why nobody has found it yet,” Darger said with an infuriatingly superior smile. “Shall we go on?”
They were coming into Dregs territory. Pepsicolova closed her lantern so that only the merest slit of light shone out. More than that would have identified them as rank outsiders, and thus enemies. Moving in total darkness, as the Dregs themselves did, would have identified them as strangers who knew their way around, and thus both enemies and spies. The territory between the two identities was extremely narrow, and there were times when she suspected it existed only in her mind.
She pushed through a rusty metal door which squealed as it opened and slammed shut noisily behind them. They boomed down a short flight of iron stairs. The air here felt stale and yet she could sense a great openness before her. The light from her lantern did not reach to the far wall.
They walked forward, dead cockroaches crunching underfoot.
“This is the largest space we’ve been in so far.” Darger’s voice echoed hollowly. “What is it?”
“Before it was built over, it was something called a motorway-a road the ancients built for their slave machines to carry them along. Now hush. We’ve made more than enough noise already.”
There were whole tribes of people living in the darkness under Moscow. These were the broken and the homeless, the mentally ill and those suffering from the gross reshapings of viruses left over from long-forgotten wars. The more competent among them went aboveground periodically to scrounge through garbage bins, shoplift, or beg on the streets. Others sold drugs or their bodies to people who would, as likely as not, soon end up living down here themselves. As for the rest, no one knew how they managed to stay alive, save that often enough they didn’t.
The Dregs were reputed to be the oldest and maddest of the tribes in the City Below. They lived in abject fear, and this made them dangerous.
From the darkness ahead came the sound of one metal pipe being steadily and rhythmically struck by another.
“Shit,” Pepsicolova said. “The Dregs have spotted us.”
“They have? What does that mean?”
She put down her lantern on the ground and closed its shutters completely. The darkness wrapped itself around them like a thick black blanket. “It means that we wait. Then we negotiate.”
They waited. After a time, there was the scruff of feet on pavement and then a wavering quality to the darkness before them. Out of nowhere someone said, “Who are you, and what are you doing where you don’t belong?”
“My name is Anya Pepsicolova. Either you know me or you’ve heard of me.”
There was a quiet murmur of voices. Then silence again.
“My companion and I are searching for something that was lost long ago, before any of us was born. We have no reason to disturb you, and we promise to stay away from your squat.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice said in a tone utterly without regret. “But we’ve made a treaty with the Pale Folk. They leave us alone and we defend their southern border. I’ve heard you are a dangerous woman. But nobody goes back on a promise to the Pale Folk. So you must either turn back or be killed.”
“If it’s any help-” Darger began.
“Shut up.” Anya Pepsicolova stuck a cigarette in her mouth. Then, narrowing her eyes almost shut, she struck a match. Briefly revealed before her were eight scrawny figures, wincing away from the sudden flare of light. They were armed with sharpened sticks and lengths of pipe, but only three of them looked like they could fight. She noted their positions well. Then, waving the match out, she raised her voice: “I’ve eaten with the Dregs and slept in your squat. I know your laws. I have the right to challenge one of your number to individual combat. Who among you is willing to fight me? No rules, no limits, one survivor.”
A new voice, male and husky and amused in the way that only somebody sure of his own strength could be, said, “That would be me.” By its location, the voice belonged to the biggest one of the lot. He was standing just right of center before her.
“Good.” A flick of the wrist brought Saint Methodia to her hand. Swiftly, before her opponent could move from where she’d seen him standing, Pepsicolova sent her flying straight and hard into his gut.
The man screamed and fell to the ground, blubbering and cursing. There was a ripple in the darkness as the others converged upon him.
“I’ll need my knife back, thank you.”
After a slight hesitation, somebody threw Saint Methodia to the ground at her feet. Pepsicolova picked her up, wiped her on the front of one trouser leg, and returned her to her sheath.
“Tell the Pale Folk that Anya Pepsicolova comes and goes as she pleases. If they want me dead, they can do the work themselves without involving the Dregs. But I don’t think they will.” She held up a pack of cigarettes. “Where do you think I got these?” Then she laid it down on the ground, and a second atop it. “This is my payment for our passage. Every time we pass through your territory in the future, I’ll leave another two packs.”
Pepsicolova picked up the lantern and opened its shutters, revealing a clutch of ragged figures desperately trying to patch up their fallen comrade. “He’s not going to survive a wound like that,” she said. “The best you can do for him now is to roll him over and stomp down hard on his neck.” Then, to Darger: “Let’s go.”
They walked down the center of the motorway away from the Dregs. With every step, she expected an iron pipe or a brick to come flying out of the darkness toward the back of her head. It was what she would have done in their circumstances. But nothing happened, and at last the sounds made by the dying man faded to inaudibility behind them. Pepsicolova released a breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding in, and said, “We’re safe now.”
She waited for Darger to thank her for saving his life. But he only said, “Don’t think I’m paying for those cigarettes. All expenses are covered by your salary.”
The three stranniks walked through the Moscow underworld as they would have the true Underworld-with their shoulders back and their heads high, secure in the strength of their own virtue and the unwavering support of a loyal and doting Deity. Because Koschei was the first among equals, he led. Chernobog and Svarozic followed a half-step behind, listening respectfully as he talked.
“When I was a boy, there was a metal girder sticking up out of the ground in the woods outside my village. If you pressed an ear to it, you could hear voices, many voices, sounding very small and far away. And if you closed your eyes and held your breath and concentrated as hard as you could, you could make out what they were saying. These were the demons and mad gods that the Utopians had in their folly created and released into their world-straddling web, of course, but the village brats did not understand that. They understood only that if you took a younger child there and forced him to listen, he would hear things that would terrify him. Often he would cry. Sometimes he would piss himself.
“Then, of course, they would laugh.
“I was a saintly child, obedient to my parents, uncomplaining at my chores, happy to go to church, devout at prayer. So it was with sadistic glee that these snot-nosed, plague-pocked, half-naked sons of Satan led me to the girder and shoved my face against it.”
“Children should be beaten regularly,” Chernobog said, “to control their unnatural impulses.”
Svarozic nodded in agreement.
“I did not want to do as my cruel and faithless sometime-playmates commanded, and so they hit me and kicked me with feet that had never known shoes and so were hard as horn, until finally, reeling, I felt my ear strike the metal. There were voices, tiny as those of insects and almost impossible to hear. But when I closed my senses to the outer world, I could just barely make them out. Abruptly, they all ceased. Then a single small voice said: We know you are listening.
“I jerked away with a cry. But the others slammed me back against the girder so hard that my skull rang and blood trickled down my cheek.‘Tell us what it says!’ one of the boys commanded.
“Fearfully I obeyed. ‘It says it knows there are seven of us. It says when it gets out of Hell and into the real world, it will kill us all.’ Then it told me how we would die, in slow and careful detail. I repeated every word to the others. They stopped laughing. Then they turned pale. One burst into tears. Another ran away. Before long, I was all alone in the woods. I clutched the girder tightly to keep from falling down from the shock and horror of the blasphemies I heard. But I kept listening.
“I was as terrified as any of the other children had been. But I knew that what I was hearing was not merely the babble of demons. It was the true voice of the World. I realized then that existence was inherently evil. From that moment onward, I hated it with all of my heart. And I went back regularly to listen to the demons so that I might learn to hate it better. That was the beginning of my religious education.”
“Hatred is the beginning of wisdom,” Chernobog agreed.
Svarozic seized Koschei’s hands in his and kissed them fervently.
They came to one of the stations on the underground canal and paid a boatman to take them to the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. There, an ash-pale wraith emerged from a side-passage, lantern in hand. It bowed.
This was Koschei’s first encounter with one of the Pale Folk. He studied the scrawny figure with disapproval, but said nothing.
“Are you here to lead us to the underlords?” Chernobog asked.
The pallid thing nodded.
“Then do so.”
Deep, deep into the darkness they went, through service tunnels strewn with garbage and down rough-hewn passages carved into the bedrock and smelling of shit and piss. (Koschei, who knew that all of the sinful world was odious to the nostrils of the Divine, felt a twinge of satisfaction at this momentary revelation of its true nature.) After a time, whispery shadows of footfalls sounded behind them. “We are being followed,” Koschei observed.
Svarozic smiled.
“Yes,” said Chernobog. “Doubtless the border-guards of one of the outcast settlements. They will have sent somebody ahead to alert their executive committee of our coming.”
They proceeded onward until they came to a narrow and railingless set of stairs that followed the curving interior of an ancient brick cistern. This they descended, the lantern casting a crescent of light on the wall before them. The cistern had been breached ages before but was damp to the touch from the mingled and condensed exhalations of the undercity. At its bottom was a miniature slum city where the squatters had made their camp. From crude shelters built of discarded shards of timber, old blankets, and packing crates, the last few stragglers emerged and joined those already waiting. These ragged folk lifted up their hands in joyful obeisance.
“This is a settlement so small it has no name,” Chernobog said. “I have been here before. Its inhabitants are all drug users or mentally afflicted, and, living so near to Pale Folk territory, their numbers have been dwindling in recent months.”
A toothless crone whom, despite her decrepitude, Koschei shrewdly estimated to be but in her thirties, clutched him about the waist and cried, “Have you come to bless us, holy one? Have you come to relieve our suffering?”
Gently, he raised the hag up and enfolded her in a hug. Then he peeled her off of him. “Do not fear. The day of your liberation is almost at hand.” He gestured, and the squatters gathered before him in a semicircle. “Today I have come to feed you not with food which passes down the gullet and through the digestive organs and then squeezes out the anus and is gone forever, nor with wine which is drunk in an hour and then pissed away in a minute, but with wisdom which, once taken in, stays with you forever.”
Koschei bowed his head, thinking, for a minute.
Then he spoke: “Blessed are the diseased, for theirs is the kingdom of the flesh. Blessed are those who seek death, for they shall not be disappointed. Blessed are those who have nothing, for they shall inherit the void. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for vengeance, for their day is fast in the coming. Blessed are those who have received no mercy, for no mercy shall they show. Blessed are they who stir up strife, for all the world shall be their enemies. Blessed are those who have been abused without reason, for theirs is the kingdom of madness. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and speak all kinds of evil against you, for your hearts shall burn with passion. Blessed above all are the lustful, for they shall know God. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is not only in the spirit and the future, but in the body, and we have come to give it to you now.”
Koschei stretched out his hands in blessing then, and Chernobog said, “Rejoice, for we have brought God to dwell within you for a space.”
Then Koschei, Svarozic, and Chernobog passed through the crowd, moving their thumbs repeatedly from vials to tongues, until all present were ablaze with the sacred fire of the rasputin. After which they resumed their pilgrimage, leaving these most wretched creatures in all of Russia ecstatically coupling with each other in their wake. Briefly, one of their number rose up from the tangle of bodies to call after them, “We are forever in your debt, oh holy ones!”
Without looking back, Koschei raised a hand in dismissal. To his brothers-for their wan guide did not count as an audience-he observed, “All debts will one day be called in, and then they shall be repaid in full.”
Some time later two of the Pale Folk emerged from a side passage and fell in step with the stranniks. Over their shoulders they carried a metal pole. From it hung a woman, tied head and foot, like game being brought back from the hunt. She struggled furiously and finally managed to dislodge her gag.
“Holy pilgrims! Thank God!” she gasped. “You must free me from these monsters.”
“What wickedness did you do, my daughter, to find yourself in so dire a situation?” Koschei asked.
“I? Nothing! Those ass-fucking Diggers betrayed me. They-”
Svarozic restored and tightened the gag and then kissed the woman on the forehead. “If you have done no evil,” Koschei said, “then be comforted, for I am sure that you will die in a state of grace.”
At last the narrow ways opened up into a cavernous space, at the far end of which was an enormous doorway, three times the height of a man and made of smooth and unstained metal, such as could not be replicated today in any forge in the world. The door appeared at first to be shut. Only as they neared it could they see that it gaped slightly ajar, just wide enough for one person to pass through it at a time. The gap was guarded by another pale-skinned individual who favored them with neither word nor nod but merely stood aside to let the two Pale Folk, their captive, the three pilgrims, and the guide pass within.
Thus did the strannik Koschei complete his long journey from Baikonur.
Darger was driving Pepsicolova mad with his little book. He referred to it often, though not as one would a reference work, nor again as (quite) a map, nor yet as one would an inspirational tome such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Machiavelli’s The Prince. He treated it almost as if it were Generation P or the I Ching or some other traditional book of divination. Yet, despite his humoring her small superstitions, Darger was clearly a rationalist. Pepsicolova could not imagine him believing in such mystic claptrap.
“If you would only be a little more open about the methodology of your search,” she said, “perhaps I could be of more help.”
“Oh, no need. We’re doing quite splendidly as it is.” Darger removed the book from his inner pocket, flipped quickly to a place in its center, and snapped it shut again. “In fact, I dare say we’re ahead of schedule.”
“What schedule are you talking about? And what’s in that book you’re always looking at?”
“Book? Oh, you mean this thing? Nothing of any importance. Sermons and homilies and the like.” He put a hand flat on a section of brick wall. “Does this seem particularly weak to you?”
“No, it does not.”
“The bricks are soft and crumbly, though. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to give them a try.”
“As you command.” So common had Darger’s demands for demolition become that Pepsicolova had taken to carrying a pry-bar with her, almost like a walking stick. She hoisted it level with the wall and thrust forward hard.
The bar punched straight through the brick. When she drew it back, there was a hole through to a space on the other side. “Enlarge it! Quickly!” Darger urged her. Then, when the hole was big enough, he began tugging and pulling at the bricks himself, yanking them free, until the opening was sufficient for them to clamber through and into the room beyond. Lanterns first, they entered.
“Look there-books, by God!”
Darger darted forward, excitedly holding up his lantern so he could examine the shelves with their warped and faded contents. Pepsicolova, however, hung back. With horror, she regarded an overstuffed chair, its upholstery half-rotted, and the small, grit-covered reading table at its side. They were not… and she knew they were not… Yet still, they paralyzed her.
Forcing an equanimity she did not feel into her voice, Pepsicolova said, “We’ve broken through into somebody’s basement. One that hasn’t been used for quite some time.” She gestured with her lantern. “See there. The doorway’s been bricked over.”
She did not add, Thank heavens.
“A basement room? Just a basement room?” Darger looked around him bewilderedly. Then he collapsed into the chair. He bowed his head into his hands and was very still.
Pepsicolova waited for him to say something, but he did not. Finally, impatiently, she said, “What is wrong with you?”
Darger sighed. “Pay me no mind. ’Tis but my black dog.”
“Black dog? What on earth are you talking about?
“I am of a melancholic turn of mind, and even a small setback such as this one can strike me with a peculiar force. Do not put yourself out about me, dear heart. I shall simply sit here in the dark, pondering, until I feel better.”
Wondering mightily, Pepsicolova stepped back from the hole in the wall. Darger was a darkness at the center of his lantern’s pool of light, a slumped caricature of despondency. It was clear that he would not move for some time yet to come.
So, with reluctance, Pepsicolova squatted down on her heels just outside the breached room, smoking and remembering. Spycraft and its attendant dangers were her solace, for their perils drove away introspection. Alas, inaction always returned, and with it her thoughts, and among them the memories. Central to which was a basement room with an overstuffed chair and a small reading table.
Afterward, Chortenko was always so serene.
His people had stripped Anya Pepsicolova bare, shaved off all her hair, save only her eyelashes, and then flung her, hands tied behind her back, into a cage in the basement of Chortenko’s mansion. The cage was one of three which Chortenko called his kennels, and it was too low for her to stand up and too short for her to stretch out at full length. There was a bucket that served her as a toilet. Once a day, a dish of water and another of food were slid into the cage. Because her hands were bound, she had to drink and eat like an animal.
If Chortenko’s purpose was to make her feel miserable and helpless, then he succeeded triumphantly. But the conditions were not what made the month she spent in his kennels a living hell.
It was the things she saw him do in that basement room.
Sometimes it was a political prisoner whom he questioned far beyond the point where the man had given up everything he knew and more, forcing the wretched captive into ever greater and more grotesque fantasies of conspiracy and treason, until finally, mercifully, he died. Sometimes it was a prostitute whom Chortenko did not question at all, but who did not leave the room alive, either.
Anya Pepsicolova saw it all.
When the deeds were done and the bodies cleared away, underlings would bring in an overstuffed green leather chair, and light a reading lamp beside it. Then Chortenko would sit puffing on his pipe and unhurriedly reading War and Peace or something by Dostoyevsky, a glass of brandy on a little stand by his elbow.
One day, a man was thrown into the kennel next to her. They hadn’t bothered to strip and shave him, which meant that he was one of the lucky ones who would be dealt with in a single night. When the guards were gone, he said, “How long have you been here?”
Pepsicolova was huddled in the center of her cage, chin on her knees. “Long enough.” She didn’t make friends with the meat anymore.
“What was your crime?” “It doesn’t matter.” “I wrote a treatise on economics.”
She said nothing.
“It dealt with the limits of political expansion. I proved that under our economic system, and given the speed with which information travels, the Russian Empire cannot be resurrected. I thought that the Duke of Muscovy would find it a useful addition to current political thought. Needless to say, his people did not agree.” He made a little laugh that turned into something very much like a sob. Then, suddenly breaking, as the weaker ones would, he pleaded with her: “Please don’t be like that. Please. We are both prisoners together-if you can’t do anything else, at least help me keep my spirits up.”
She stared at him long and hard. Finally she said, “If I tell you about myself, will you do me a favor?”
“Anything! Provided it is in my power.”
“Oh, this will be in your power. If you are man enough to do it,” Pepsicolova said. “Here is my story: I have been here for exactly one month. Before that I was in college. I had a friend. She disappeared. I went looking for her.
“I came very close to finding her.
“The trail I followed was twisty and obscure. But I was determined. I slept with many men and two women to get information from them. Three times I was captured. Twice I used my knives to free myself. One of those I used them on may have bled to death, I don’t know and I don’t care. The third time, I was brought before Chortenko.”
She lapsed into silence. The economist said, “And?”
“And nothing. Here I am. Now. I have kept my part of the bargain, now keep yours.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She squeezed one of her legs between the bars, reaching it as far into his cage as she could force it to go. Her near-starvation diet helped. “I want you to bite through my femoral artery.”
“What!”
“I can’t do it myself. The animal instincts are too strong. But you can. Listen to me! I have enough self-discipline that I can keep from yanking back my leg. But you’ll have to bite strong and hard, right through the flesh of my thigh. Give it your all. Do this small thing for me and I’ll die blessing your name, I swear it on my mother’s grave.”
“You’re crazy.” The man scrambled to the corner of his cage farthest from her. His eyes were wide. “You’ve lost your wits.”
“Yes, I’m sure it’s comforting to think that.” Pepsicolova drew her leg back into her own cage. She had dwelt with despair for so long that she felt only mild disappointment. “You’ll learn better soon enough.”
That night, she didn’t look away when the questioning began.
Later that night, Chortenko sat reading, as was his routine. “Listen to this,” he said after a time. “‘All is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.’ Isn’t that so very true?” Chortenko pushed his glasses up on his head and stared at her with those inhuman faceted eyes. “Even you, my dear, who have seen what happens to those who cross me-even you fear something more than joining their number. Even you fear most of all the simple act of taking a new step, of uttering a new word.”
Chortenko looked at her steadily, eyes glittering, obviously waiting for something.
She knelt within her cage, quivering before him like an abused and half-starved dog. She could not formulate a response
“Ahhh, my little Annushka. You’ve been with me for a month, and I trust it’s satisfied your curiosity. Now you know what happened to your school-chum, don’t you?”
She nodded, afraid to speak. “What was her name again?”
“Vera.”
“Ah, yes, Vera. Ordinarily, I would simply have done to you what was done to her and that would have been that. But if you were an ordinary girl, you would not be here now. You managed to follow a trail that very few could even have found. You wheedled, extorted, or coerced information from some of my best subordinates, and before you did this, I would have said that was impossible. You’re smart and you’re cunning. That’s a rare combination. So I’m going to give you one chance to walk out of here alive. But you’ll have to work out the path to freedom yourself. Nobody’s going to give it to you.”
Pepsicolova’s mind was racing. In a sudden, blinding leap of intuition, she understood what Chortenko was holding up before her. And he was right. She feared it even more than she did the hideous tortures she had, night after night, been witness to. Nevertheless, gathering up all her courage, she said, “You want me to do something new.”
“Go on.”
“You want me to…work for you. Not grudgingly but with all the ingenuity and initiative I’ve got. Following not just your orders, but your interests. Without mercy or remorse, doing whatever it is that I know you would want done. Anything less than that, and I wouldn’t be worth your bothering with.”
“Good girl.” Chortenko got up and, slapping his pockets, came up with a key. He unlocked her cage with it. “Turn around, and I’ll untie your hands. Then I’ll have some clothes brought in and a bath drawn for you. You must be feeling positively filthy.”
And she was.
By the time, hours later, Darger finally hauled himself up from the chair and out of the little room, Pepsicolova’s brain burned with dark memories. She stood as straight as she could and stared at him as if he were a bug. But, oblivious as ever, Darger appeared not to notice. He sighed in a heavy, self-pitying way, and said,“Well, that’s enough for now, I suppose. Lead me back to the Bucket of Nails, and then you can take the rest of the day off.”
Among Pepsicolova’s minor talents was an almost absolute sense of time. “Our arrangement was that I’d make myself available as your guide from sunup to sundown. Right now, it’s less than an hour to sundown.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s right. You can have the excess time for your own.”
“It’s going to take me at least an hour to lead you out of here.”
“Then we’d best get going, hadn’t we?”
They had re-crossed Dregs territory without incident and were coming up on the Neglinnaya canal again when Darger said, “What is that on the wall?” He pointed to six lines of ones and zeros which had been painted there with meticulous neatness:
“That? It’s just graffiti that machine-worshipers and such scrawl on the wall to offend people. It means nothing,” Pepsicolova lied.
Which was not easy to do, when the binary code was intended for Anya Pepsicolova herself and ordered her to report as soon as possible to the lords of the City Below.
She lit another cigarette and sucked on it with all her soul.