The rest I have put on full alert. I have dispatched my best assassin to take care of Lukoil-Gazprom. I have sent my regrets, which doubtless were received with enormous relief, to those politically ambitious enough to have invited me to their drug-fueled soirees tonight. I have compiled lists of those to be killed immediately after seizing full control of the government and those to be killed six, twelve, and eighteen months later, after their usefulness has been depleted. I have consulted with the Duke of Muscovy about…” Chortenko stopped.
“Oh, my.” This was as close to foul language as Chortenko ever came, but it was enough to terrify those who understood him well. “I forgot to order all artillery units away from the city.” Thinking furiously, he said, “Perhaps we can work around that, though. We could-”
A servile messenger chose that moment to scurry into the room and hand a sheet of paper to Vilperivich. He glanced down at it, and his face turned pale.
“Sir,” he said. “Wettig is dead.” “And Baron Lukoil-Gazprom?”
With barely a tremble in his voice, the man said, “Alive.”
The corridor dead-ended into a vast, extended darkness held up by regular iron pillars on which weakly bioluminescent lichen grew. This ghostly background flickered with motion. Kyril stepped into it cautiously, tugging the idiotically giggling Darger after him. Ordinarily, Kyril avoided the motorway as being too open and having too few ready exits. Today, however, haste was all, so he went by the most direct route.
“So you think me a noodle, do you, young man?” Darger gestured broadly toward the flickering distance. “As you can see, I am not the only one who is feeling uncommonly merry.”
The lichen-light was so feeble that Kyril had to stare hard to make out what Darger was talking about. With concentration, however, it became obvious: Shadowy throngs of ragged people were hopping, skipping, limping, twirling, and (some few) dancing past, all in the same direction. They were all mad with joy.
From around a bend in the motorway, light flared. An uneven line of bird-masked Pale Folk appeared, walking steadily, thrusting torches forward like prods to herd yet more of the tunnel-dwellers before them.
Their captives did not seem to mind this treatment. The torchlight threw up shadows on the walls above them that leaped and cavorted madly, as if in some unholy Neolithic Walpurgisnacht. It was an eerie glimpse into the murky hindbrain of Russian prehistory that made the little hairs on the back of Kyril’s neck stand on end.
There was a metal pillar almost touching the wall. Shoving Darger behind it, Kyril said, “Wait here. Don’t move. I’m going to get you a mask of your own. That’ll make things simpler for both of us.” Then he flung himself down on the filthy ground, and lay motionless. Corpses were not entirely uncommon down here. He did his best to look like one.
Above, to his intense annoyance, he heard Darger snicker.
The wave of people passed Kyril by unnoticing. One of them stepped even on his hand, but he managed not to cry out. Then, when the line of Pale Folk had gone beyond him as well, he rose to his feet. Stealthily, he ran after the hindmost of them and, wrapping arms about the creature’s chest, wrestled him to the ground. The torch fell to the side, atop a pile of rubbish, but the fire it caused seemed unlikely to spread, so he didn’t bother stamping it out.
Seconds later, he returned to Darger with the mask.
But when he tried to strap it on his mentor, the bastard pushed it away.
A murmur of voices rose up behind them, growing steadily stronger. A second wave of happy idiots was being driven their way. “Look, sir. What fun!” Kyril cried desperately, thrusting forward the filter-mask. “Why don’t you try this on?”
Laughing helplessly, Darger shook his head.
“Oh, don’t be such a prick, sir. It’s full of dried herbs and flowers-see? Take a whiff. Smells pleasant, dunnit?”
“Oh, no, you fail to understand,” Darger said in the jolliest possible manner. “What you propose is the stuff of bad melodrama. Disguise ourselves in anonymous headgear and then pass ourselves off as minions? Absurd! Such stratagems work on the stage, young sir, only because the author has sided with the hero and by fiat declared that they will. If we must play this little game of yours, let us at least play it well.”
“It’s not actually a game, you fucking idiot. Sir.”
“Viewed properly, all of life is a game. Look at yourself! Do you walk with the plodding mindlessness of the Pale Folk? Oh, dear me, no. You stride along purposefully, and as to your motions…well, they are far too quick and alert. Even the Pale Folk, incurious dotards though they are, would be able to see through your subterfuge, were they not distracted by their chore. Now suppose I were to don this jolly old mask, what then? The two of us would be doubly obvious. Whoops go our chances of evasion and escape! You see?”
Reluctantly, Kyril had to admit that Darger’s words made a kind of sense. He flung down the mask in disgust. “Then what can we do?”
Joyous voices and the scuffing of feet announced that the next wave of captives was almost upon them. Soon they would be dimly visible. Darger laid a finger alongside his nose and winked. “Walk behind me, as if you were driving me toward this oh-so-very mysterious destination of theirs. Try to plod. I in my turn shall hide you behind gales of laughter and avalanches of girlish giggles! You must move in the same direction as the others, mind you. Oh, my, yes. If we go against the flow the Pale Folk will notice we are but imperfectly of their sort. When we see a line of escape divergent from our destination, why, then we shall take it and so sail off into a phosphorescent sea of free will wherein to find a destiny of our own.”
“Yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense.”
Darger waggled a finger at Kyril. “It is far better than your own foolish plan. Minion helmets indeed! Were I to follow your lead, it would inevitably end up with us breaking into some super-criminal’s lair to steal secret information, seduce a convenient voluptuary, kill the villain, and leave the entire place ablaze behind us!”
There was a glimmer of torchlight in the distance. “When we get to the surface,” Kyril said solemnly, “I’m going to kick your butt so hard you’ll never sit down again.”
Darger laughed and laughed.
The hunt wasn’t going well. Pepsicolova was down to her last two cigarettes, and the craving was almost unbearably strong. And getting stronger. She pulled the nearly depleted pack from her jacket pocket and gently teased out one tobacco-filled cylinder. It was soft from repeated fondling already, but she ran her fingers down its length, not so much straightening it as deriving what satisfaction she could from the feel of the paper. Slowly, she ran it under her nose, savoring the ghost of comfort the aroma provided. At last she was unable to put off the deed any longer and convulsively lit up.
Leaving her with a cushion of exactly one smoke.
She’d been hunting for a fresh pack for hours, with no success. Several times she’d run across a fellow addict also desperately looking to score. After determining for certain that they were entirely out, she’d released them. The first, a woman, she had then stealthily trailed after. But when she’d witnessed what became of the poor bitch when she finally found the Pale Folk, Pepsicolova had concluded there was nothing to be gained by following her example.
Now she was crouched in a concrete air vent high above the motorway, staring down at the throngs being driven toward the underlords’ redoubt. The flood of people looked more impressive than it actually was. There were hundreds of captives, she reckoned, but not many hundreds. Life was hard in the City Below and correspondingly short. Also, they were scattered over an area equal to that of the City Above, which meant that, inevitably, a goodly fraction of them would evade capture simply through blind luck. By Pepsicolova’s best estimate, the underlords wouldn’t be able to assemble an army of more than two or three thousand. Tops. Hardly enough to accomplish anything serious. So whatever they were up to, this was only for starters.
Not that it was any concern of hers.
She smoked the penultimate cigarette down to almost nothing. Then she pierced the butt with the point of Saint Cyrila’s blade and toasted it with a match, breathing in every last bit of its magical smoke. After which, no longer cramped and aching, she scuttled back up the vent. At the top, she squirmed through a narrow slit between concrete slabs, and regained her feet in an unused utility tunnel. It was surpassingly strange how the people below her pranced and gamboled like buffoons and snickering idiots, even as they were being driven toward an end she knew to be singularly unsavory. But that was no concern of hers either.
Her only concern was finding more smokes.
It was the most grotesque journey Kyril had ever made. The Pale Folk drove the underpeople before them like cattle, thrusting forward their fiery torches whenever their captives lagged. The scrawny denizens of the
