Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [122]
“What?”
She straightened into a crouch, still straddling the man’s body. A knife appeared in her hand. She did not know where it had come from, but it felt right. Perhaps she would use it on this pot-bellied fellow. If she dug deeply enough, she might find his soul. Then she could feast.
“That was what you were going to ask me—wasn’t it? But I don’t know the answer. So I’m asking you.” Abruptly, she sat down on the terrified little man’s chest. “I have a sting,” she said, caressing his cheek with the flat of the blade, then turning it sideways to draw the narrowest imaginable line of blood. “But I have no name. I’ve killed many a man, but I feel no shame. I take and I take but I never give.” She lifted the knife away from his face. By the way that his eyes trembled, she knew that he was not in the least reassured. “Answer my riddle and I’ll let you live.”
“I…I don’t…”
“I’ll give you one more chance.” Her lips moved away from her teeth, and all the darkness in the universe grinned with her. “What am I doing here?”
“S-scaring me?” he stammered fearfully. She considered his words. They sounded true. The knife disappeared from her hand and went back to wherever it had come from.
“And who am I?”
She could see the little man reaching far, far back into his past, looking for the answer. Saw his thoughts pass back through the years, before adulthood, before adolescence, into the dark ocean of childhood, where all the most extreme terrors are born and then stored away, never to be forgotten. In a child’s voice, he said, “B-b-baba Yaga?”
“Baba Yaga.” She spoke the name slowly, savoring each syllable as if they were strokes of a bell. Ba. Ba. Ya. Ga. She stood and walked to the window. Over her shoulder she said, “That’s good. Baba Yaga. Yes, good. You get to live.”
Baba Yaga kicked out the window and left through its absence.
Something terrible was happening. The Duke of Muscovy knew this for a fact. It could not be seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted, but it could be felt, like a vibration in the air, a silent and unending shriek of agony rising from the stones and bones of Moscow, by anyone with the sensitivity to detect it. Over and over, the duke strove to awaken. Again and again, he failed.
There were faint scuttling noises in the darkness to every side of the duke as his bear-guards hurried to get out of reach of his thrashing arms. Something (a support beam, perhaps?) splintered. Something else (a chair?) smashed.
Moscow was burning! The city was in rebellion, its defenders were absent from their posts, and the State was about to fall. Every cell and neuron in the duke’s tremendous brain screamed with the need for him to cast aside sleep.
Again, the Duke of Muscovy groaned. He knew what to do—he knew! Were he to awaken, stand, and assume his rightful control over the State, he would be dead in half an hour, his mighty heart crushed by stresses no human organ could withstand. But half an hour was more than he would need. He could save his city and nation in half that time.
But he could not awaken.
He could not act.
...17...
There were fires on the horizon to the west and north and a geyser of flames had just erupted from the roof of a house not three blocks away from Yevgeny’s crew, sending sparks and ashes showering into the night. Yet no fire bells rang and no firefighters appeared to check the fire’s spread. Which was madness. It made no sense at all.
Yevgeny was in an agony of indecision. Was this what he was supposed to be looking for? But if so, why would General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka and Baron Lukoil-Gazprom have been so coy about the nature of the threat? Was he expected to put out the fire or was he supposed to stay at his post and let it burn? If there were three unrelated fires within eyeshot at the same time, surely that meant there were more elsewhere in the city. That wasn’t natural. But neither did it look like any kind of deliberate enemy action he had ever heard of. Nothing in his military training had