Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [47]
Chortenko looked at her steadily, eyes glittering, obviously waiting for something.
She knelt within her cage, quivering before him like an abused and half-starved dog. She could not formulate a response
“Ahhh, my little Annushka. You’ve been with me for a month, and I trust it’s satisfied your curiosity. Now you know what happened to your school-chum, don’t you?”
She nodded, afraid to speak.
“What was her name again?”
“Vera.”
“Ah, yes, Vera. Ordinarily, I would simply have done to you what was done to her and that would have been that. But if you were an ordinary girl, you would not be here now. You managed to follow a trail that very few could even have found. You wheedled, extorted, or coerced information from some of my best subordinates, and before you did this, I would have said that was impossible. You’re smart and you’re cunning. That’s a rare combination. So I’m going to give you one chance to walk out of here alive. But you’ll have to work out the path to freedom yourself. Nobody’s going to give it to you.”
Pepsicolova’s mind was racing. In a sudden, blinding leap of intuition, she understood what Chortenko was holding up before her. And he was right. She feared it even more than she did the hideous tortures she had, night after night, been witness to. Nevertheless, gathering up all her courage, she said, “You want me to do something new.”
“Go on.”
“You want me to…work for you. Not grudgingly but with all the ingenuity and initiative I’ve got. Following not just your orders, but your interests. Without mercy or remorse, doing whatever it is that I know you would want done. Anything less than that, and I wouldn’t be worth your bothering with.”
“Good girl.” Chortenko got up and, slapping his pockets, came up with a key. He unlocked her cage with it. “Turn around, and I’ll untie your hands. Then I’ll have some clothes brought in and a bath drawn for you. You must be feeling positively filthy.”
And she was.
By the time, hours later, Darger finally hauled himself up from the chair and out of the little room, Pepsicolova’s brain burned with dark memories. She stood as straight as she could and stared at him as if he were a bug. But, oblivious as ever, Darger appeared not to notice. He sighed in a heavy, self-pitying way, and said,“Well, that’s enough for now, I suppose. Lead me back to the Bucket of Nails, and then you can take the rest of the day off.”
Among Pepsicolova’s minor talents was an almost absolute sense of time. “Our arrangement was that I’d make myself available as your guide from sunup to sundown. Right now, it’s less than an hour to sundown.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s right. You can have the excess time for your own.”
“It’s going to take me at least an hour to lead you out of here.”
“Then we’d best get going, hadn’t we?”
They had re-crossed Dregs territory without incident and were coming up on the Neglinnaya canal again when Darger said, “What is that on the wall?” He pointed to six lines of ones and zeros which had been painted there with meticulous neatness:
“That? It’s just graffiti that machine-worshipers and such scrawl on the wall to offend people. It means nothing,” Pepsicolova lied.
Which was not easy to do, when the binary code was intended for Anya Pepsicolova herself and ordered her to report as soon as possible to the lords of the City Below.
She lit another cigarette and sucked on it with all her soul.
...7...
The carriage that the Baronessa Avdotya had sent for Arkady drove out of the city through an endless grid of low, regular hills which had been high-rises before being torn down at the fall of Utopia—or, since some disputed whether that happy state had ever been achieved in Russia, what had passed for Utopia in Old Moscow. But at last the land opened up into country estates bounded by thorn-hedges that were smaller, lower cousins of the one that had protected the hometown Arkady had left behind.
The driver reined in the horses in the shadow of an arched hedge-gate and a monkey dressed in green