Zoesophia turned away. Feeling simultaneously chastised and yet rather better than he had a minute before, Surplus returned to his party.
In the morning, the Pearls would have a new set of complaints to accompany their unceasing demands to be immediately presented to the duke. But he would deal with that in the morning. For the moment, all was well.
Chortenko did not take a carriage after the reception. He found that walking focused his thoughts. His dwarf savants strode along to either side of him in unthinking lockstep. Pedestrians, seeing him coming, hastily stepped into the street to be out of his path.
At last he said to the marginally taller of the two,“Is it not odd, Max, that the Byzantine Empire should send an American as its ambassador…and an American who is, not to put too fine a point on it, a dog?”
“Byzantium was founded by Megarians and Argives under Byzas in 657 B.C.E. The Caliph is the fourteenth in the clone-line of Abdullah the Politically Infallible. The straight-line distance between Moscow and Byzantium is 1,098.901 miles, which converts to 1,644.192 versts. The ambassador’s accent is that of the Demesne of Western Vermont, one of the smaller republics in Sub-Canadian North America. America was discovered by Damascene sailors during the rein of Abdul-Rahman III. Sailors are sexually promiscuous. Genetic anomalies are ambiguously discouraged by the political elite of Byzantium, though the civil code contains no provisions against it. No individual with a genome less than 97% human has ever achieved full citizenship in the Caliphate.”
“Hum. Interesting. What on earth could the ambassador be hiding?”
With absolute and unquestioning seriousness, the second savant said, “Anything.”
“Yes, Igorek, and yet it seemed to me that he also wanted us to know that he was doing so. The Honorable Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux is playing rather a deep game with us.” He clasped his hands behind his back and scowled down at the ground passing under his feet. His savants were serenely silent. Eventually he said, “We know what men fear. But what about dogs?”
The savants opened their mouths but were gestured to silence.
“Tell me, Max. What breed do you believe our good friend the ambassador is derived from?”
“Two characteristics distinguish the dog from other canids: its worldwide distribution in close association with humans, and the enormous amount of subspecies variability. Dogs do not have wisdom teeth. Wisdom is a cultural artifact. Breed is a cultural artifact. The ambassador is either a mongrel or a genetic chimera. Baboons have been observed to steal puppies from wild dogs and raise them to guard the pack. The chimera is a fabulous beast, described by Homer as ‘a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle.’ The ambassador’s source genome appears to be derived chiefly from the American foxhound.”
“Is it indeed?”
It was not a long walk to Chortenko’s house. When he got there he rang for the aide on duty. “Have Igor and Maxim fed and cleaned, then set them to reading today’s reports. I also require that you have the kennels in the basement expanded, and buy dogs for them-eight should suffice. American foxhounds, if possible, though anything reasonably close will do. Let us discover what gives them pain, and what they fear. Just in case we find we have to put the ambassador to the question.”
…5…
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
