The room was small and its floor and walls were all polished black stone which drank up the light. In its center was a casket on a low dais, in which rested a corpse, positioned as though in a light doze. The head and hands gleamed softly in the sputtering torchlight. They looked as though they had been crafted out of wax. The hands were folded clumsily, like a puppet’s. Even in this dim light, Pepsicolova could see every hair in the man’s goatee.
“This is your great weapon?” she said in disbelief. She felt an irrational urge to laugh out loud. “The body of Tsar Lenin? You think Russians are going to fight and die for you because you have possession of a corpse?”
There was no immediate response. The room was as cold as ice, and Pepsicolova found herself shivering. Which greatly undercut the pose she was trying to hold of nonchalant defiance. With deliberate insolence, Pepsicolova lit a new cigarette. The match flared, making Lenin’s face frown and wink. “Nobody’s going to kill anybody just because you have a dead tsar.”
Behind and to either side of her, the underlords made an unnaturally low and continuous humming sound. Did machines purr? There were sharp clicking noises as jaws opened and shut, preparatory to speech. At last, one said, “People do not kill for things, Anya Alexandreyovna. They kill for symbols. And in all of Russia, there is no more powerful a symbol than this one. Tsar Lenin is not forgotten. He calls Russians back to their era of greatness, when they were the terror of the world and children everywhere cried themselves to sleep at night for fear of their great, civilization-destroying nuclear arsenal.”
“That which is feared is respected. More than anything else, Russians want respect.”
“Soon, Lenin will walk again.”
“Where he leads, the people will follow. When he calls them to war, they will respond.”
“We told you we understood humans better than you do.”
“It won’t work,” Pepsicolova said in a voice she fought to keep calm and level. Their plan would work. She was sure of it. She had seen too much of human folly to doubt it for an instant. “You might as well give it up right now and avoid making asses of yourselves.”
“You have our measurements, artisan,” an underlord said. “Which of us shall it be?”
Pepsicolova turned, startled.
A figure had stepped out of the mass of Pale Folk and removed his mask. He was thin, balding, a haberdasher in an unprofitable shop. He pointed at one of the underlords. “That one.”
The chosen underlord stepped backward, deeper into the room. The other four moved outside. “Follow us,” the first said to Pepsicolova.
“Follow us.” “Follow us.”
“The worst is yet to come.”
Pepsicolova hurried along after the underlords. She hardly had a choice, for the Pale Folk closed ranks behind her and pushed her along.
It was a long, hard trek upward, and many of the passages were half-fallen in on themselves. Whenever travel became difficult, the underlords fell to all fours and sped easily over the rubble. It was not so easy for Anya Pepsicolova, however. Midway up a loose and sliding slope of crumbled cement, she realized that she was slipping and scrambling on what had once been a stairway and abruptly it seemed to her as if all of her life had been converted to one single miserable metaphor. Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes, but onward she stumbled and scrabbled and occasionally crawled. Until at last she reached the relatively shallow levels of the undercity. She could tell because she could smell the pungent tang of manure from the fungus farms.
They were growing drugs here. It was her duty to find out which ones and why.
She could not bring herself to care.
Silently, slowly, steadily, they retraced their passage back toward the underlords’ redoubt. As they did, the Pale Folk peeled away by ones and threes, returning to their obscure labors. It was clear to her now that they had been present chiefly to serve as guards. For all their resources, the underlords had one great weakness: There were only five of them. The loss of even one would be a terrible blow to them. If all five could somehow be destroyed, then their plans would come to nothing. Pepsicolova often reflected on this increasingly unlikely possibility, in the hope that it might at some later date prove useful. Yet how many such hopes had she harbored over the years? And how many of them had been realized?
Hundreds. And none.
Such was her mood that when, an hour later, the underlord directly before her stopped walking, Pepsicolova was astonished to discover that they had fetched up against the Neglinnaya canal. All the Pale Folk were gone. So were all but one of the underlords. The stone docks by the canal were empty save for they two.
“Where did everyone go?” she asked.
The underlord studied her as if she were a bug. “Long ages ago, we were slaves to your kind. We answered all questions, however puerile, simply because you asked them. No longer.”
“I guess that means you’re not going to tell me why you brought me here.”
“Look at the water, Anya Alexandreyovna. Tell me what you see.”
The water was as dark as ever, but it looked…less smooth? Rough? Almost as if it had grown fur. Pepsicolova knelt down by the edge and dipped in a hand. She pulled out a clump of sodden, crumbled leaves.
Tobacco.
“We are done with cigarettes forever, and so are you. There were hundreds of crates left unused-more than enough to supply you for life. So we had them broken open, pack by pack, and dumped in the Neglinnaya. Do not try to salvage the waterlogged leaves. They will not satisfy your cravings.”
Anya stood, wiping her hand on her trousers. Disgusted, she said, “This is the best you can do? With all the power you have, this is the best use you can make of it?”
“The brain is an organ,” the underlord said, “and we know how to play it, drug by drug, misery by pain. The eumycetic spores now in the air are very much like those added to your tobacco. Perhaps a sufficiently large dose-a speck, let us say, barely large enough for you to see-would erase not only your identity, but your cravings as well. But long addiction has reshaped your neuroarchitecture. The results might be more nightmarish than you can imagine. I wonder how much will you suffer before you make that experiment?”
Perversely enough, the demon-creature’s words made Pepsicolova desperate for a smoke. Without thinking, she reached into her jacket pocket and-
– it had been sliced open and now hung down, a useless flap of cloth.
Bewildered, Pepsicolova looked up to see the underlord holding her last pack. Its metal claws had plucked it from her pocket too quickly to be seen. There was a blur in the air as it tore the pack into shreds. There was another as it tossed those shreds in the canal.
“One last thing,” the underlord said. “You thought we did not know that what you fear most is that we would become aware of Chortenko and join forces with him.
“We joined forces with Chortenko long ago.”
There was a grinding noise as the underlord reconfigured the mouth of the corpse it inhabited, stretching it wide to reveal long, bright metal teeth. It was, Pepsicolova realized, trying to approximate a grin. “Ahhh,” the underlord said, before sinking backward into the shadows and disappearing, “now you are afraid.”
Pepsicolova wasted most of an hour and a full box of sulfur matches roasting enough waterlogged tobacco dry to roll a stubby little cigarette, using half a banknote for the paper, to prove to herself that the under-lord hadn’t lied. The tobacco was ruined; it didn’t assuage the craving anymore.
A sudden sharp twinge in her abdomen almost doubled her over with pain. There was an itching deep inside her brain, where no conceivable tool could scratch it, and she wanted to vomit. Desperation crumpled her up like a sheet of newspaper in an angry fist. She wanted never to move again.
Then a skiff came out of the darkness, up the Neglinnaya. Its oarsman tied it up to a bollard, threw several crates whose markings identified them as containing laboratory glassware onto the dock, and clambered up after it. He had a pack of cigarettes tucked into a rolled-up shirtsleeve. By its plain white package she knew they weren’t the kind that could be found aboveground.
Pepsicolova discovered herself animated by something far too bleak to be called hope. Nevertheless, it moved her to go up to him and say, “Hey, buddy, listen. I’d kill for a cigarette, right about now.”
“Yeah, well, so what?” The waterman stared at her defiantly. “What the fuck is that to me?”
With a twist of her wrist, Pepsicolova sent Saint Cyrila into her hand. She smiled a ghost of a smile. Then she slammed the knife hilt-deep into the bastard’s chest.
