Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [140]
“You know what?” Enkidu said. “You speak real good. I don’t got no doubt you’re smarter than we are. Maybe you got better reflexes, too. Who knows, you might even be stronger. Stranger things have happened. But we still got one big advantage over you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
Enkidu cracked his knuckles. “We got you outnumbered three to one. In my experience, that means we win.”
With a roar, the two groups surged into each other, fists flying.
“Men!” Aetheria said. “Honestly.”
“Oh, I know,” Euphrosyne said. “They look nice enough—but they’re always fighting and starting wars and the like. I think they’re just trying to impress one another.”
“Well, they’re certainly not impressing me,” Eulogia said.
“Meanwhile,” Russalka pointed out, “the way to the Terem Palace is open. Let’s just go.”
“Oh!” gasped Nymphodora. “Can we?”
“Fortune favors the bold,” Russalka said, and strode straight for the door. The other Pearls hurried in her wake.
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