behind a crate of silk that decades ago had been stashed in a smuggler’s vault deep in the City Below and left to rot when its owner met with a now-unknowable fate. The feeling of well-being grew stronger, and he was suddenly struck by the urge to sing. He lurched to his feet in alarm. “This ain’t right,” he said, and slapped himself as hard as he could, twice.
A grin as warm as sunshine blossomed on his face, accompanied by an overwhelming sense that all was right with the world. This was terrifying. “There’s some kind of weird shit in the air,” he said in mingled fear and wonder. “Bugger me up the fucking ass like a goddamn man-whore if there ain’t.”
Kyril had slept in the new suit-green velvet, with yellow piping-that he’d bought with some of the proceeds of his first confidence game, so all he needed to do was to lace up his shoes and run.
He grabbed the shoes and, not bothering to put them on, ran like hell.
As Kyril ran, he found himself growing happier and happier until, against all his better judgment, he slowed to a trot and then a walk and finally a dawdle. “Definitely something in the air,” he chuckled. “Pretty funny stuff, whatever it is.”
One of the Pale Folk plodded lifelessly by. But this one had a bird-head! Kyril couldn’t help laughing. On an impulse, he raced after the sad parody of a human being and positioned himself directly in front of it. It stopped and stared at him until, still laughing, he stepped out of its way with a little bow. Then, when it tried to walk by, he stuck out his foot and tripped it.
Down it went, in the drollest possible manner.
Kneeling on the sad being’s back, Kyril merrily undid the leather mask. The beak was filled with herbs and had two meshed slots or nostrils. Laughing dementedly, he strapped it on.
When Kyril had the mask secured on his own face, he leaped back to see how his pallid victim would respond. The creature stood slowly. An odd, puzzled look entered its eyes. Its face relaxed into the faintest shadow of a smile. Then it leaned back against the marble wall. Its eyes slowly crossed. After a bit, its jaw went slack and it began to drool.
That was pretty funny. But what was even funnier was that by slow degrees Kyril’s mood was darkening. Experimentally, he tried punching the wall. “Fuck! Piss! Cunt! Shit! Prick!” he said. It hurt like a motherfucker.
He dared not take off the mask to suck on the skinned knuckles. But he felt a lot better for being able to feel a lot worse.
Now that he could think clearly again, Kyril was sure that he’d been breathing in spores from the funguses that the Pale Folk grew. You didn’t have to be much of a geneticist to grow happy dust-though giving it away free was a new wrinkle. And if the mushrooms were just beginning to broadcast that shit, that meant that the City Below would be a madhouse for at least a day. During which time, the Pale Folk would be free to do who-knew- what.
However, all he had to do was get to the surface, where the spores would be harmlessly dispersed by the winds, and he’d be fine.
Only…
Only, nobody drugged strangers out of the goodness of their heart. Happy dust was valuable. Whoever was pumping it out would want a return on their investment. Which, for the moneyless tribes living underneath the streets of Moscow meant enslavement, death, or-presuming that such a thing were possible-worse. Well, fuck them. Kyril didn’t owe anybody anything. Especially his so-called friends. The sonsabitches had stabbed him in the goddamned back, pissing themselves with laughter as the cocksucking goats hauled him off screaming to jail, just to keep their fucking mitts on a few shitty rubles that he’d earned for them in the first place. The cunts.
There was, however, one man who had played it straight with him. Who could have simply ripped him off, but had not. Who had taught him useful skills and shown him a possible path out of squalor. Who, devious and unreliable though he might well be, had very carefully shown Kyril the line up to which he could be trusted, and beyond which all bets were off.
Who right now doubtless was sitting like a lump in Ivan the Terrible’s library with his nose buried in a book, oblivious to the world around him and all its strange and gathering dangers.
Well, Kyril didn’t owe him anything either. He had told Darger so to his face. To his goddamned face!
Still…
Feeling like an absolute turnip, Kyril turned away from the long stairway that led up to the surface and headed back toward the lost library.
The orange glow of the reading lantern showed Darger chortling, snorting, and snickering like a fool. He had a scroll unrolled across his lap and was shaking his head in merriment over what was written thereon. Occasionally, he paused to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes.
“You simply must read this,” he said when Kyril crawled into the library. “What Aristotle had to say about comedy, I mean. One does not commonly conflate philosophical greatness with ribald knee-slappers and yet-”
“I can’t read Greek,” Kyril said. “Hell, I can barely read Russian.” He snatched the scroll from Darger’s hand and threw it roughly on the library table, where it buried the lantern under parchment, dimming the light considerably. “We gotta get outta here. Some kind of shit-ass bad stuff is coming down real soon.”
Darger assumed an expression of judicious wisdom. Then, carefully, he said, “A Phoenician wine merchant, a freedman, and an aristocrat all went to a brothel together. When they got there, they discovered that all the doxies were already taken, save for one ancient, crippled eunuch. So the Phoenician said-”
“This ain’t no time for jokes! We gotta leave right now, seriously. I’m not shitting you.”
“Oh, very well, very well.” Chuckling witlessly, Darger groped about on the table. “Just let me bring along something to read.”
“Here!” Kyril snatched up the nearest book and, flipping open Darger’s jacket, shoved it into an inside pocket. “Now move your fucking ass!”
Chortenko was in a towering rage. In all his years of service to Muscovy, no prisoner had ever escaped his custody. And now, today, in the course of an hour, he had lost two. Worse, they now knew things nobody outside his own service should know. And worst of all, though he had sent every agent he could spare out to look for them, both fugitives had managed to vanish completely off the face of the earth. A woman of such staggering beauty as to stop a man dead in his tracks and a dog who walked like a human being should not be able to do that!
Three of Chortenko’s subordinates stood at attention before him. They displayed no emotion, though they must have been keenly aware of the danger they were in. They were hard men all, who understood that were any one of them to show the least sign of fear, Chortenko would kill him on the spot for a weakling.
That pleasant thought helped to calm Chortenko and focus his thoughts. He drew in a deep breath, further stabilizing himself. Emotion was the enemy of effective action. He must restore his usual icy self-control.
Something, however, niggled and naggled at the back of his brain.
“Max, Igorek,” he said. “What have I forgotten?”
“You have forgotten most of the mathematics you learned in school,” Maxim said, “the combined and ideal gas laws, the names of the eighteen brightest stars in descending order of apparent magnitude as well as those of all the minor prophets in the Old Testament and most of the major prophets as well, the bulk of Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘The Sail,’ and the entirety of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem.’”
“Also,” Igor added, “the twenty-two major biochemical pathways of the human body, the proportions of the golden ratio, the formulae for green pigments, the names of most of your childhood friends, the location of your second-favorite fountain pen, and a vast effluvium of minutia and inconsequential personal history.”
“As well as-” Max continued.
With a touch of asperity, Chortenko said, “What have I forgotten that is not the common lot of others, I mean. Something I was supposed to do or look into.” This was, of course, too vague a set of parameters for the dwarf savants to work with, so they said nothing.
Vilperivich, who was one of his boldest and most trusted subordinates, chose this inopportune time to clear his throat. “We have not had the usual report from Pepsicolova today.” By the stiffness of the man’s delivery, Chortenko could tell that he was keenly aware of the danger he was in. That was good. He spoke anyway. That was even better. Taken together, the two facts would keep him alive long after his confederates were dead. “Perhaps that is significant?”
“No. I expected that,” Chortenko said. Then, thinking aloud: “I have ordered bleachers and a speaking platform erected on the street before the Trinity Tower entrance to the Kremlin. I have combed through my own forces and had everyone with a particular weakness for the pleasures of the flesh transferred to other departments.
