Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

Anya Pepsicolova had had a home once. To return there was unthinkable, for it would bring the full weight of Chortenko and the underlords down upon her parents. In her new and nightmarish life, she had made many enemies but no friends. She had slept in a constantly changing series of cheap flats where she had kept only the most utilitarian of possessions. Fleeing, there was, in all of Moscow, only one possible destination.

Chortenko’s mansion.

Chortenko lived right off of the Garden Ring. From his front step, five separate fires were visible. But his mansion, unlike so many others, was not ablaze.

Well…that could be remedied.

Now that her head was beginning to clear, Pepsicolova was all but certain that she was not Baba Yaga anymore. Which meant either that the massive overdose of drugs she had taken was wearing off or that she’d fallen into a lower spiritual state, shedding her supernatural aspect and becoming merely human once again. She was not at all sure which interpretation she would have preferred, given the choice.

If she was only human, however, that meant she would have to use cunning and guile, things her discarded witch-self would never have bothered with. Pepsicolova entered the mansion through the front door and walked calmly and unhurriedly to the records room. There Chortenko’s two dwarf savants were poring over a mountainous heap of files. Igorek picked up a report, flipped through it committing its contents to memory, and then handed it to Maxim, who did the same. After which, the report was carefully placed atop a roaring fire in the fireplace.

The dwarfs looked up incuriously as she entered.

“I am going to set fire to this building,” Pepsicolova said. “Your master will want to know this information. Go immediately and tell him.”

Igorek and Maxim rose and left the room.

Pepsicolova scooped up an armful of documents and one of the reading lanterns. Then she went to the top floor and set fire to all the curtains. That would start the house ablaze well enough, and by the time the fire burned down to the basement, she expected to have completed her business here.

When enough time had elapsed for those on the ground floor to smell smoke, a servant came running up the stairs with a carafe of water in his hand. “Tell your master that Anya Alexandreyovna has come home,” Pepsicolova said. “Also, the building is on fire. It contains much that he values, so I’m certain that he’ll want to know.” To her own ear, her words sounded mild and reasonable. But something in her tone or expression made the servant turn tail and run, water spraying with each long stride. Not long later, she heard somebody outdoors banging a hammer on an iron fire triangle.

Back down to the first floor she went.

Throwing the mansion’s front doors wide open, Pepsicolova dropped a single folder on the mat. A few paces inward, she dropped a second folder. Leaving a line of reports behind her like a trail of breadcrumbs, she made her way down to Chortenko’s basement study, where he had once kept her in a cage.

For her, this was where it had all begun.

Here, it would end.

Pushing open the door, she found herself in a room she knew only too well. At her entrance, the dogs leaped and barked and bayed in their cages, throwing themselves desperately against the bars. Already, they could smell smoke from the upper floor. It imbued the air with a tinge of madness.

Closing the door behind her so that the final file was wedged under it, half on the landing and half in the study, Pepsicolova studied the dogs dispassionately. Had they been human beings, she would have left them in their cages without a second thought. She did not much like people. In her experience, they deserved pretty much whatever happened to them. But these were dogs and hence as innocent as she had been when the secret police had first brought her, naked and weeping, to this room. She could not let them die here.

Pepsicolova drew Big Ivan, the least favored of her knives, from her belt, and, using his hilt as a hammer, systematically smashed all the locks one by one.

The dogs leaped and danced as she released them, hysterical with freedom and fear. Some of them bit her, but they didn’t really mean it and so she didn’t mind.

She had just broken open the last of the cages when she heard footsteps on the stairs. “Don’t do this, please,” a woman’s voice pleaded. “Please, Sergei Nemovich. Let me go.” If there was a reply, Pepsicolova could not hear it.

Then Chortenko kicked open the basement door. He had the files she’d strewn about in the crook of one arm, and pulled an elegantly dressed society lady after him with the other. Her he threw into the room. Whipping off his glasses, he turned his bug-eyed gaze on Pepsicolova. His face was flushed with anger. But as always his tone was mild and controlled. “You have crossed a line, little Annushka,” he said. “So I-”

The dogs attacked.

Chortenko fell backward as he was swarmed and overwhelmed by the newly freed animals. The society lady darted into a corner, shrieking with fear. But the dogs did not attack her. They were all rabid to tear the flesh from their tormentor’s living body. Snarling and snapping and foaming at the jaw, they fought each other to get at Chortenko. But if the male dogs were savage, the bitches were even worse, ripping and tearing at the spymaster with unholy glee.

Foremost among them was Pepsicolova herself.

Her knives were forgotten. She used only her jaws and nails. The sound that Chortenko made as her teeth sank into his throat-a high-pitched sort of scream, more of a squeal, actually-was almost as good as the taste of the flesh she ripped from his struggling body.

Arkady, meanwhile, was staggering through the ruins of the Terem Palace, half-blinded by his mask. He was not precisely clear how he had found his way here. But the fragmentary decoration was familiar to him from his schoolboy history texts. The Duke of Muscovy must surely be here somewhere! Yet nowhere in this shambles could he find any trace of that great man.

Icons crunched beneath his shoes. He tripped over an enamel stove and fell flat on his face. When he regained his feet, a staircase opened up before him and all in a rush he found himself down at its bottom.

At last, Arkady stumbled into the Golden Porch, an antechamber of sorts into which a passage from the Great Kremlin Palace debouched. This room, unlike all the others he had seen, was at least intact. But it too was deserted.

Disheartened and exhausted, Arkady sank down at the top of a short flight of stairs overlooking the antechamber. In daylight, assuredly, it would have looked splendid. Now, however, lit by only two guttering candle-lanterns, one to either side of the stairs, it was cavernous and dark, a palace of shadows at the end of time. Was everybody else dead and only he alive? Had he somehow outlived humanity, dooming himself to eternal desolation and despair? Or was he himself dead and inexplicably condemned to search through the ruins of his life, forever seeking and never finding?

Such were his confused and incoherent thoughts when the Pearls Beyond Price flowed through the doorway into the Golden Porch, chattering and laughing. Only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight of him.

The Pearls’ sudden unease was perfectly understandable. In a mirror across the room, he could dimly make out an eerie sight: a man in a lavishly brocaded surcoat, wearing a helmet with a smooth silver facemask, topped by a crown covered over with diamonds, sat brooding heavily and in perfect solitude. It was himself. In the unsteady lantern-light, surrounded by the reds and golds of the highly decorated walls, he might have been a hand-colored illustration in a children’s romance. King Saladin resting after his victory over the Zengids, perhaps, or Ivan the Terrible wracked with guilt after murdering his son.