Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

She waited for Darger to thank her for saving his life. But he only said, “Don’t think I’m paying for those cigarettes. All expenses are covered by your salary.”

The three stranniks walked through the Moscow underworld as they would have the true Underworld-with their shoulders back and their heads high, secure in the strength of their own virtue and the unwavering support of a loyal and doting Deity. Because Koschei was the first among equals, he led. Chernobog and Svarozic followed a half-step behind, listening respectfully as he talked.

“When I was a boy, there was a metal girder sticking up out of the ground in the woods outside my village. If you pressed an ear to it, you could hear voices, many voices, sounding very small and far away. And if you closed your eyes and held your breath and concentrated as hard as you could, you could make out what they were saying. These were the demons and mad gods that the Utopians had in their folly created and released into their world-straddling web, of course, but the village brats did not understand that. They understood only that if you took a younger child there and forced him to listen, he would hear things that would terrify him. Often he would cry. Sometimes he would piss himself.

“Then, of course, they would laugh.

“I was a saintly child, obedient to my parents, uncomplaining at my chores, happy to go to church, devout at prayer. So it was with sadistic glee that these snot-nosed, plague-pocked, half-naked sons of Satan led me to the girder and shoved my face against it.”

“Children should be beaten regularly,” Chernobog said, “to control their unnatural impulses.”

Svarozic nodded in agreement.

“I did not want to do as my cruel and faithless sometime-playmates commanded, and so they hit me and kicked me with feet that had never known shoes and so were hard as horn, until finally, reeling, I felt my ear strike the metal. There were voices, tiny as those of insects and almost impossible to hear. But when I closed my senses to the outer world, I could just barely make them out. Abruptly, they all ceased. Then a single small voice said: We know you are listening.

“I jerked away with a cry. But the others slammed me back against the girder so hard that my skull rang and blood trickled down my cheek.‘Tell us what it says!’ one of the boys commanded.

“Fearfully I obeyed. ‘It says it knows there are seven of us. It says when it gets out of Hell and into the real world, it will kill us all.’ Then it told me how we would die, in slow and careful detail. I repeated every word to the others. They stopped laughing. Then they turned pale. One burst into tears. Another ran away. Before long, I was all alone in the woods. I clutched the girder tightly to keep from falling down from the shock and horror of the blasphemies I heard. But I kept listening.

“I was as terrified as any of the other children had been. But I knew that what I was hearing was not merely the babble of demons. It was the true voice of the World. I realized then that existence was inherently evil. From that moment onward, I hated it with all of my heart. And I went back regularly to listen to the demons so that I might learn to hate it better. That was the beginning of my religious education.”

“Hatred is the beginning of wisdom,” Chernobog agreed.

Svarozic seized Koschei’s hands in his and kissed them fervently.

They came to one of the stations on the underground canal and paid a boatman to take them to the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. There, an ash-pale wraith emerged from a side-passage, lantern in hand. It bowed.

This was Koschei’s first encounter with one of the Pale Folk. He studied the scrawny figure with disapproval, but said nothing.

“Are you here to lead us to the underlords?” Chernobog asked.

The pallid thing nodded.

“Then do so.”

Deep, deep into the darkness they went, through service tunnels strewn with garbage and down rough-hewn passages carved into the bedrock and smelling of shit and piss. (Koschei, who knew that all of the sinful world was odious to the nostrils of the Divine, felt a twinge of satisfaction at this momentary revelation of its true nature.) After a time, whispery shadows of footfalls sounded behind them. “We are being followed,” Koschei observed.

Svarozic smiled.

“Yes,” said Chernobog. “Doubtless the border-guards of one of the outcast settlements. They will have sent somebody ahead to alert their executive committee of our coming.”

They proceeded onward until they came to a narrow and railingless set of stairs that followed the curving interior of an ancient brick cistern. This they descended, the lantern casting a crescent of light on the wall before them. The cistern had been breached ages before but was damp to the touch from the mingled and condensed exhalations of the undercity. At its bottom was a miniature slum city where the squatters had made their camp. From crude shelters built of discarded shards of timber, old blankets, and packing crates, the last few stragglers emerged and joined those already waiting. These ragged folk lifted up their hands in joyful obeisance.

“This is a settlement so small it has no name,” Chernobog said. “I have been here before. Its inhabitants are all drug users or mentally afflicted, and, living so near to Pale Folk territory, their numbers have been dwindling in recent months.”

A toothless crone whom, despite her decrepitude, Koschei shrewdly estimated to be but in her thirties, clutched him about the waist and cried, “Have you come to bless us, holy one? Have you come to relieve our suffering?”

Gently, he raised the hag up and enfolded her in a hug. Then he peeled her off of him. “Do not fear. The day of your liberation is almost at hand.” He gestured, and the squatters gathered before him in a semicircle. “Today I have come to feed you not with food which passes down the gullet and through the digestive organs and then squeezes out the anus and is gone forever, nor with wine which is drunk in an hour and then pissed away in a minute, but with wisdom which, once taken in, stays with you forever.”

Koschei bowed his head, thinking, for a minute.

Then he spoke: “Blessed are the diseased, for theirs is the kingdom of the flesh. Blessed are those who seek death, for they shall not be disappointed. Blessed are those who have nothing, for they shall inherit the void. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for vengeance, for their day is fast in the coming. Blessed are those who have received no mercy, for no mercy shall they show. Blessed are they who stir up strife, for all the world shall be their enemies. Blessed are those who have been abused without reason, for theirs is the kingdom of madness. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and speak all kinds of evil against you, for your hearts shall burn with passion. Blessed above all are the lustful, for they shall know God. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is not only in the spirit and the future, but in the body, and we have come to give it to you now.”

Koschei stretched out his hands in blessing then, and Chernobog said, “Rejoice, for we have brought God to dwell within you for a space.”

Then Koschei, Svarozic, and Chernobog passed through the crowd, moving their thumbs repeatedly from vials to tongues, until all present were ablaze with the sacred fire of the rasputin. After which they resumed their pilgrimage, leaving these most wretched creatures in all of Russia ecstatically coupling with each other in their wake. Briefly, one of their number rose up from the tangle of bodies to call after them, “We are forever in your debt, oh holy ones!”

Without looking back, Koschei raised a hand in dismissal. To his brothers-for their wan guide did not count as an audience-he observed, “All debts will one day be called in, and then they shall be repaid in full.”