Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [117]
The baron threw himself heavily into an overstuffed easy chair and lit up a cigar. “That was not badly done,” he said. “Not badly done at all.”
It was then that messengers arrived from four other sectors of the city to report further invasions.
The four messengers arrived almost simultaneously, one on the spurs of another, carrying tidings of uprisings in Smolenskaya, Taganskaya, Krasniye Vorota, and Pushkinskaya. Tens of thousands of Muscovites had taken to the streets, and there were not the forces to contain a fraction of them. One artillery unit had set up its gun on the Astakhovsky bridge, just above where the Yauza flowed into the Moscow, determined to hold back and break up the Taganskaya mob, should it try to cross the river, as seemed inevitable.
Even as General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka stared at the last messenger in dumbfounded silence, the distant rumble of cannons sounded. The action at Astakhovsky bridge had begun. The baron clutched his head in both hands as if, lacking a convenient enemy to manually decapitate, he would do it to himself.
“Dear God,” Zoësophia said. “What are we to do? Obviously, when one visualizes a map of the city, all four forces—five, counting the one you just defeated—are roughly equidistant from the Kremlin and so must be converging upon it. But why? For what purpose?”
Prompted by the naiveté of her question, Baron Lukoil-Gazprom exclaimed, “They mean to overthrow the government! As they march through the city, they will multiply their numbers by drawing in drugged perverts and hedonists. What started out as an easily scattered force will quickly become a universal uprising of the populace.”
“Yes.” The general stared at Zoësophia. “I am surprised you couldn’t have thought that through yourself, dear. You seem like such a levelheaded young lady.”
“This is the first time I’ve seen military action of any kind, and I fear I let it rattle me. I’m not experienced the way the baron and you are.” Zoësophia squeezed the general’s forearm lightly for emphasis—to no result. Even unconsciously, it seemed, Magdalena Zvyozdny-Gorodoka was not interested in women. To some degree, Zoësophia regretted this, for the general provided better material to work with than did the baron. But she would also have been more difficult to control. So it all came to the same thing in the end.
Zoësophia took a deep breath, as if to remaster her runaway emotions. “However, all seven of the duke’s brides were given specialized educations, so that we might serve as advisors to him, and mine included military theory.” On a side table was a potpourri of dried rose petals. She seized a fistful, crushed them to powder, and dribbled the powder onto the map, letting every speck represent a human soul. Four thin lines, starting at the four squares where the newly reported invasions began, flowed inward to smash up against the Kremlin walls. Then the powder mounded up on Red Square, the area behind St. Basil’s, and the open spaces of the Alexander Garden before the Trinity Tower, creating an impenetrable crescent two-thirds of the way around the ancient stronghold.
“Here is what we face,” she said. “The government cannot hold out against such numbers. The Kremlin will inevitably fall. Now, as you see, it will soon be surrounded by enemies on all sides save one. To the south, the quay between the river and the Kremlin will be empty because there is not room enough to gather there and we have disrupted the one force that would have come up it. Now, there is an underground passage that leads to the Terem Palace from the basement of a pump house below the Beklemshev Tower—”
“How did you know that?” the general asked sharply.
“To maximize my utility to the duke, the Byzantine Secret Service told me everything they knew about the Kremlin and its defenses. How they obtained this information I do not know. But I see that it is reliable.”
There was the briefest of silences. “Go on,” the baron said.
“Theoretically, it would be possible