Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [40]
So, really, it turned out to be quite an amusing little gathering after all.
Chortenko climbed the stairs from his basement with a calm and easy heart. Waiting for him on the ground floor was a servile with a hot towel, which he used to clean any spatters of blood that might be on his face and hands. Then he went into the library and sat down to discover Pepsicolova’s latest report waiting for him on a side table. He read it through with care. It fit in interestingly with his observations of the ambassador’s behavior.
When he was done, he touched a nearby bell.
His butler materialized at a respectful distance. “Brandy, sir?”
“Just a small glass.”
“Very good, sir.”
Chortenko swirled the brandy in the glass, staring down at its fluid motion, enjoying its aroma. Sir de Plus Precieux was assuredly intent upon deceiving him. Which probably meant that ultimately the ambassador would have to be rigorously interrogated. But before Chortenko took such an irreversible step, he would need the duke’s assurance that it was the right thing to do.
The Duke of Muscovy, after all, was the ultimate arbiter in such matters. It would not do to act contrary to his judgment.
He thought back to his last conversation with the ambassador.“I would wield the whip myself,” he had said. Chortenko could not help being amused. The fellow had so little idea of what modern torture—applied by knowledgeable professionals—entailed. But he would learn. He would learn.
Chortenko took the merest sip of brandy and rang his butler again. When the man appeared in the doorway, he said, “Two of the dogs have died. Please have their corpses removed and buried somewhere immediately.”
“As you will, sir.”
Chortenko leaned back in his chair with a satisfied little smile. He was a methodical man, and despised untidiness.
...6...
It had been years since Anya Pepsicolova last saw daylight. The basement bar where she daily met Darger was as close as she ever came to the surface anymore. Unless one counted Chortenko’s mansion, as she did not; to her that bleak house felt as though it were sunk deeper into the earth than even the most stygian of her other haunts. Nor did she think she would ever know the surface world again. She was trapped in this labyrinth of tunnels and darkness, tied to a slim and unbreakable thread of fate that was somewhere being rewound, drawing her inexorably inward, toward the underworld’s dark center, where only madness and death awaited her.
But today she was still alive, and that, she reminded herself, was good. And she was still the third most dangerous entity—after Chortenko and the underlords—in all the City Below. Which was, if not actually good, at least a consolation.
As she poled down the Neglinnaya canal, the lantern at the bow of her skiff feebly lighting the walls ahead, Pepsicolova said, “We’ve been doing this for a week. You draw your maps. Sometimes you hire men to break through a bricked-over doorway. What exactly are you looking for?”
“I told you. The tomb of Tsar Ivan.”
“Lenin.”
“Yes, precisely.”
Pepsicolova tied up the skiff at the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. Here, dim streaks of lichen provided some feeble light. As she always did, she paused at the bronze statue of a young man and his dog to touch a snout already rubbed shiny. “For luck,” she explained and, to her surprise, Darger did the same. “Why did you do that? This is my superstition, not yours.”
“A man in my profession by necessity courts Lady Luck. Nor do I sneer at any superstition, lest there be some practical reason behind it, as in the well-observed fact that a man walking under a ladder is far more likely to have a hammer dropped upon his head than one walking cautiously around it, or that breaking a mirror necessarily entails the bad luck of enraging its owner.”
“Exactly what is your profession?”
“Right now, I am searching for Tsar Ivan.”
“Lenin.”
“Of course.