Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

Darger had not gone more than three or four strides, however, when his feet were snatched out from under him and he crashed painfully to the ground. For an instant, all went black. Then, when he tried to stand, he could not. A pair of bony knees dug into his back and Kyril spoke urgently into one ear: “Get ahold of yourself. Those books are gone and tough shit about that.”

But they-” Darger felt tears of frustration well up in his eyes. “You have no idea what has just been lost. No idea at all.”

“No, I’m pretty sure I don’t. But you ain’t gonna rescue one fucking page of them by running into a goddamned fire, okay? Those books are dead and gone. There’s not enough left of ’em by now to wipe your ass with.”

Darger felt something die within him. “You’re…you’re right, of course.” With an act of sheer will, he pulled himself together and said,“Pax. Uncle. ’Nuff. You can get off me now.”

Kyril helped him up.

“So what do we do now?” the young bandit asked.

A furry paw clamped down on Darger’s shoulder. “Caught up t’you at lasht!”

“Oh, dear.” Darger had not thought this evening could possibly get any worse. Yet now it had. “Sergeant Wojtek.”

“You don’ know musch about the Royal Guard,” the bear-man said, “if you think a mere dozen drinks or sho can put one of ush out for the night.” His speech was slurred, but he looked to be as strong as ever.

“Indeed, you are a most remarkable fellow, Sergeant,” Darger said. “I will confess that if I absolutely had to be recaptured, there’s less shame in it for me to be recaptured by you than by some ordinary soldier.”

“You can shtop with the flattery. Nobodysh buying a word of it.” Sergeant Wojtek carried the folded gurney under one arm. Without releasing Darger, he shook it open. “Now I’m going to shtrap you in again. If you coop’rate and don’t try to get away, I promish I won’t bite off your face. But if you mishbehave all bets are off. You won’t get any fairer deal than that, now will you?”

Darger sat down on the gurney, swung up his legs, and then lay flat. “How on earth did you…? No, don’t tell me. You managed to pull yourself partially out of your drowse before I left the bar. Though you were unable to summon the sobriety needed to stop me, you heard me talking with Kyril and so knew where we were headed.”

“Right in one.” Sergeant Wojtek tightened the straps, one by one. “Hey! Shpeaking of your young partner in crime-where ish he?”

“While I was distracting you with conversation, he quite wisely fled.” Darger felt a little sad to reflect that in all likelihood he would never see the young lad again. But at least he could take some consolation in the fact that he had put the boy’s feet on the path to a respectable career.

“Well, no big deal. You, however, have to be kept shomewhere shecure.” Sergeant Wojtek thought for a moment and then grinned toothily. “And I know jusht the playzsch.”

Across the Kremlin grounds he pushed the gurney and through a field of rubble that led to the most extraordinary breach in the side of the Terem Palace. (Fleetingly, Darger regretted that from his prone position, he could not get more than a glimpse of it, and so the nature of the catastrophe that had created it remained to him a mystery.) Then, hoisting the gurney onto his back, Sergeant Wojtek made his way across uneven floors, down into the basement, and through a doorway, where he was finally able to set the gurney down again.

“If you don’t mind telling me…where are we going?”

“This tunnel leads to Chortenko’s manshion. Ish probably the best protected playzsch in the city, now that the Kremlin’s in sush bad shape. I’m going to bring you there and then shtand guard over you until Chortenko pershonally accepts you into hish cusht’dy.”

Darger had been thinking furiously. Now he said, “Is that wise?”

Sergeant Wojtek eyed him suspiciously. “Waddaya shaying?”

“You noticed that the crowds had dispersed? That means the revolution has failed.”

“Well…maybe.”

“Not maybe, but certainly. There is, as the Bard put it, a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. That tide has turned and left you stranded in the shallows, an easy prey for the warships of the regime you opposed.”

Sergeant Wojtek pushed on in stolid silence for a time. At last he said, “You’re right. I’m in a terrible fiksh.”

“I can tell you how to get out of it.”

The sergeant stopped. “You can?”

“Absolutely. However, in exchange for my advice, you must promise to free me.”

“How about I shimply promish not to kill you?”

“No good. Leaving me for Chortenko to find accomplishes the same thing and in a more painful fashion.”

It took Sergeant Wojtek several minutes to think through his options. Then, placing a paw over his heart, he said, “I shwear on my honor ash a member of the Royal Guard. Are you happy now?”

“I am. Now, what you must do is to quickly obtain a great deal of easily negotiated wealth-gold, jewels, and the like. Then, straightaway go to a hostler-roust him from bed, if you have to-and buy a sturdy coach and six of the best horses he has. He will overcharge you, but what of that? Your life is at stake. Flee immediately, without waiting for morning, for St. Petersburg. There you can easily book passage to Europe, where the remainder of your loot will allow you to live in comfortable anonymity.”

Sergeant Wojtek snorted. “Yeah, but wheresh a guy like me going to come up with that kind of money?”

“I believe you will discover,” Darger said, “that the Diamond Fund is, briefly, unguarded.”

A wondering light dawned in the sergeant’s eyes. “Yesh,” he said. “It would work.”

“Then you may release me, and we shall part as friends.”

“Hah! Let a shlippery bastard like you free? Not a chansh.” Sergeant Wojtek turned away and started back up the tunnel, leaving Darger strapped motionless to the gurney.

“You gave me your word as a member of the Royal Guard!” Darger called after him.

“Chump!” the sergeant said over his shoulder.“I shtopped being a Guard the inshtant I made up my mind to deshert.”

To be chosen for one of the Kremlin troops was a great honor for a Muscovite soldier and one that only the best received. However, when the naked giant came crashing through the government buildings, supernatural dread had gone before him in a great wash of terror. Warriors who would have stood their ground in the face of superior forces and fought to the death, broke and ran. Those charged with defending their nation’s very center of power scattered in a panic.

In their wake, Surplus drove Chortenko’s blue-and-white carriage up the Trinity Tower causeway and parked it before the Armory.

Surplus knocked hard on the door with the heavy silver knob of his cane. Then, when there was no response, he pushed the door open. “This way,” he said, and entered the unguarded building.

Arkady followed a step or three behind him, carrying the carpetbag of makeshift burglar tools and from time to time murmuring, “the Duke of Muscovy,” in the manner of a man trying to keep in mind some desperately important fact or duty.

The Armory had from Preutopian times been kept as a museum of Muscovy’s and before that Russia’s greatest treasures. There was much to see here. But Surplus moved swiftly past the larger luxuries and won-ders-the gilded coaches and carved ivory thrones and the like-straight toward the Diamond Fund. “Come briskly, young man. We might as well get some use out of you…as a mule, if nothing else.”

“The Duke of Muscovy,” Arkady mumbled. He shivered convulsively