One of the underlords leaned forward over the ancient mahogany conference table, placing its hands flat on the smooth surface. The velvet hangings on the wall behind it had been ripped and shredded by time, and the clothes it wore were only slightly less tattered. Candles flickered in brass sconces which had once held electric lights, casting a meager and gloomy light over the scene.
Slowly the second underlord leaned forward, beside the first. Then the third, the fourth, the fifth. The first creature’s mouth clacked open and shut twice in its lifeless white face. At last it said, “Do you fear us?”
“You obey us.” “But obedience is not the same as fear.” “You must fear us.”
“Tell us that you fear us, Anya Alexandreyovna.”
“More than you can imagine,” Pepsicolova said insincerely. In fact, she did fear them-some. Only not as much as they required from her. Nobody who answered directly to Sergei Nemovich Chortenko could entirely fear demon machines that had stitched themselves into human corpses. They might be sadistic, homicidal, and driven by unreasoning and unquenchable hatred, but since it was their nature rather than their choice, they still fell short of absolute evil. That was only Pepsicolova’s opinion of course-but by now, she was something of an expert on such matters.
“If you truly feared us, you would be filled with dread and terror to learn that we no longer require your services.”
“But you find us faintly comic, do you not?”
“Terrifying but also laughable, in a bleak, nihilistic way. Do not try to deny it.”
“We understand human beings better than humans do themselves.”
“Nevertheless, you are indeed filled with dread and terror at the prospect of what we might do now that you are no longer useful to us.”
Pepsicolova drew deeply on her cigarette, buying time to think. She was sure she could kill one and with luck maybe two of the underlords, before the others could take her down. But never all five. Despite their grotesquely misshapen bodies, those things could be blindingly fast when need arose. She was as good as dead, if they wished her so. “This has something to do with the stranniks, doesn’t it? Something to do with the satchel of vials they brought you.”
The underlords grew very still. “You are bluffing.”
“Somehow you discovered that stranniks brought us a satchel of vials.”
“This would not be impossible to learn.” “Stranniks talk too freely.”
“What do you know about the stranniks?”
“Enough.” Pepsicolova blew a smoke ring at her interrogators. It floated almost to their faces before dissolving in the air. Making up lies at random, she said, “I’ve known two of them for years. The third I met only recently, but after I confessed my sins to him, he called me his ghostly daughter and swore he would be my guardian angel and protector in all things from that day onward.”
“This is consistent with the known behavior of stranniks.”
“Religion is superstition and stranniks are superstitious.”
“The feelings of superiority an older man would have, hearing in detail the socially unsanctioned behavior of a younger woman, would be conducive to his emotionally bonding with her.”
“Possibly they would then fornicate.”
“You will immediately tell us everything you know.”
“What’s my incentive?” Pepsicolova said defiantly. “Are you promising to kill me quickly and painlessly if I do?”
The first underlord pulled back, dragging its hands across the conference table. Steel claws left ten deep gouges in the wood. The others followed suit. “No, Anya Alexandreyovna, we will not. We hate you too deeply for that.”
“Then you will simply have to live without the knowledge.”
The five underlords were very still for the length of a very long breath. They were communing, Pepsicolova suspected, by means of that ancient necromancy bearing the unlikely name of radio. At last the first underlord lowered its arms so that she would have an unobstructed view of the ruins of its face and said, “Shall we show her?”
“She will not like what she sees.”
“It will cause her great mental distress.”
“It will fill her waking hours with despair and her sleep with nightmares.”
“Follow us, Anya Alexandreyovna.”
The underlords led Pepsicolova down a series of corridors and through the great room where cigarettes were deconstructed, doctored, and repackaged. But the crates of cigarettes had been cleared away, along with everything else connected with that enterprise. Instead, the Pale Folk were lashing tight bundles of straw to sticks, creating something like a cross between a besom and a broom. These were dunked repeatedly into cauldrons of liquid paraffin, kept warm by small fires underneath, and then carefully set aside. Others were cutting and sewing leather into narrow curving cones as long as a human forearm, with straps and buckles at the open end. These they stuffed with dried herbs held in place by wads of cheesecloth.
A dozen or so figures already wore the leather cones strapped to their lower faces like masks. With the appearance of the underlords, the Pale Folk put aside their work and did likewise. Then they joined their masters, some before and some behind. One in ten of these bird-beaked homunculi picked up a torch and lit it from the warming fires. In solemn silence, they filed out of the great room, looking for all the world like some cultic religious procession out of the fevered hindbrain of ancient Rus.
“You’re making torches and masks now, instead of cigarettes.” Pepsicolova found this alarming on more than one level. “Why?”
No answer. “Do I need a mask?”
No answer.
They passed out of the installation. As they did, more and more Pale Folk joined the procession. They were a near-silent, shuffling mass, torchlit in outline, dark and unknowable at the core.
For over an hour, they passed through what, for lack of a better word, might be called farmlands. Here, passages and rooms had been filled with trays of human manure, on which grew pale blue mushrooms, tended by bird-beaked Pale Folk. The smell made Pepsicolova’s head swim, but she lit up a cigarette and the sensation went away. Occasionally, the underlords paused to hand something to a mushroom farmer. Maybe it was a vial. The torchlight was never steady enough for Anya to tell.
At last the subterranean farms were left behind. Down stairways and slanting passages the silent flow of bodies went, like an underground river seeking the center of the earth. Until, at a level far deeper than Pepsicolova had ever gone before, they came to a metal wall. In its was a crudely cut hole. Metal shavings littered the floor.
One at a time, the underlords ducked within. Pepsicolova followed. The Pale Folk stayed behind.
The space within was perfectly lightless.
Pepsicolova waited for her eyes to adjust, but they could not. She could sense the underlords to either side of her, but she could not see a thing.
“If you want to show me something,” she said at last, “you’re going to have to get one of your flunkies in here with a torch.”
“Ah, but first we must prolong your mental agony, Anya Alexandreyovna.”
“It must surely be excruciating already.” “But it can still get worse.” “Much worse.’
“Trust us.”
Silence stretched as taut as a violin string about to snap. Pepsicolova could feel the hatred crackling soundlessly in the air about her. It was almost a physical force. As was the conviction that she was about to be shown something unspeakable. The moment went on and on until, just as she was about to burst into hysterical laughter, one of the Pale Folk stepped into the room, bearing a torch.
“Behold, Anya Alexandreyovna, the weapon with which we shall destroy Moscow, Muscovy, and all Russia as well.”
Pepsicolova stared in disbelief.
Back in the Hotel New Metropol, Arkady found that he was still unable to purge the images from his mind. The things he had done! His stomach churned at the thought of them. Yet, at the time, his traitorous body had
