Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [43]
“I jerked away with a cry. But the others slammed me back against the girder so hard that my skull rang and blood trickled down my cheek.‘Tell us what it says!’ one of the boys commanded.
“Fearfully I obeyed. ‘It says it knows there are seven of us. It says when it gets out of Hell and into the real world, it will kill us all.’ Then it told me how we would die, in slow and careful detail. I repeated every word to the others. They stopped laughing. Then they turned pale. One burst into tears. Another ran away. Before long, I was all alone in the woods. I clutched the girder tightly to keep from falling down from the shock and horror of the blasphemies I heard. But I kept listening.
“I was as terrified as any of the other children had been. But I knew that what I was hearing was not merely the babble of demons. It was the true voice of the World. I realized then that existence was inherently evil. From that moment onward, I hated it with all of my heart. And I went back regularly to listen to the demons so that I might learn to hate it better. That was the beginning of my religious education.”
“Hatred is the beginning of wisdom,” Chernobog agreed.
Svarožič seized Koschei’s hands in his and kissed them fervently.
They came to one of the stations on the underground canal and paid a boatman to take them to the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. There, an ash-pale wraith emerged from a side-passage, lantern in hand. It bowed.
This was Koschei’s first encounter with one of the Pale Folk. He studied the scrawny figure with disapproval, but said nothing.
“Are you here to lead us to the underlords?” Chernobog asked.
The pallid thing nodded.
“Then do so.”
Deep, deep into the darkness they went, through service tunnels strewn with garbage and down rough-hewn passages carved into the bedrock and smelling of shit and piss. (Koschei, who knew that all of the sinful world was odious to the nostrils of the Divine, felt a twinge of satisfaction at this momentary revelation of its true nature.) After a time, whispery shadows of footfalls sounded behind them. “We are being followed,” Koschei observed.
Svarožič smiled.
“Yes,” said Chernobog. “Doubtless the border-guards of one of the outcast settlements. They will have sent somebody ahead to alert their executive committee of our coming.”
They proceeded onward until they came to a narrow and railingless set of stairs that followed the curving interior of an ancient brick cistern. This they descended, the lantern casting a crescent of light on the wall before them. The cistern had been breached ages before but was damp to the touch from the mingled and condensed exhalations of the undercity. At its bottom was a miniature slum city where the squatters had made their camp. From crude shelters built of discarded shards of timber, old blankets, and packing crates, the last few stragglers emerged and joined those already waiting. These ragged folk lifted up their hands in joyful obeisance.
“This is a settlement so small it has no name,” Chernobog said. “I have been here before. Its inhabitants are all drug users or mentally afflicted, and, living so near to Pale Folk territory, their numbers have been dwindling in recent months.”
A toothless crone whom, despite her decrepitude, Koschei shrewdly estimated to be but in her thirties, clutched him about the waist and cried, “Have you come to bless us, holy one? Have you come to relieve our suffering?”
Gently, he raised the hag up and enfolded her in a hug. Then he peeled her off of him. “Do not fear. The day of your liberation is almost at hand.” He gestured, and the squatters gathered before him in a semicircle. “Today I have come to feed you not with food which passes down the gullet and through the digestive organs and then