Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [53]
She held out the most desirable arms Surplus had ever seen or even imagined and drew him down atop her. “The first position is called the Way of the Missionary.”
The fastness that the underlords had made their own was in its era impregnable. But during a subsequent age, one corner of it had been sheared away for a tunnel whose purposes were no longer evident. So it was easy enough to enter the complex unnoticed. In a shabby corridor that went nowhere anybody cared to go, Anya Pepsicolova unscrewed a metal plate bolted low on a wall and then ducked through the opening thus revealed. She straightened up inside a nondescript and windowless office whose lone door had long ago merged with its frame in one great mass of rust.
Guided by the light of her cigarette alone, Pepsicolova fetched a coil of rope she had stashed in one corner and rolled up a moldering carpet to reveal a manhole cover hidden underneath. Only the topmost rung of several hundred had survived long neglect, but to this she tied the rope and so rappelled down to the bottom of the shaft. She ground the cigarette underfoot. From here it was only a leisurely walk along a narrow, lichen-streaked passage, to what she thought of as the Whisper Gallery.
The underlords did not know of the gallery. Of that Pepsicolova was certain. She had discovered it by logic alone. First she had reasoned that the Preutopians who had built this facility had trusted nobody, not even their own associates. Then that they would therefore have had means of spying on one another. At which point, Pepsicolova had simply snooped and pried, examining with particular closeness anything that seemed ostentatiously uninteresting. Until finally she found the secret passages and undocumented access-ways by which the Preutopians had bypassed their own security.
The Whisper Gallery completely circled the domed ceiling of what had once been a splendid conference room, all oaken panels and crimson draperies and brass sconces and leather armchairs and polished marble tabletops. It was so high up that nobody below could tell that what looked to be decorative molding was actually a series of slit windows from which the room could be observed. The floor of the gallery was of a soft material that absorbed all footsteps, and the room’s architecture was such that the slightest of sounds could be heard clearly from above.
As she approached the gallery, she heard the murmur of voices.
Pepsicolova quietly took her station. Below her was an underlord. It was in no way human, though it inhabited a human body. The body hunched forward, hands held loosely by the chest, as if it were a praying mantis. Yet though it moved as if it were a living thing, the stench of rotting meat that rose from it was, even from far above, all but unbearable.
Standing across a table from it were the last things in the world Pepsicolova would have expected to find in such a place:
Three stranniks.
Pimps, whores, prostitutes, gangsters, and other unwholesome businessmen were of course frequent visitors to the underlords, as were politicians, black marketeers, drug runners, petty thieves, and salesmen of all sorts. But stranniks?
She held her breath.
“We shall leave this with you,” the largest of the three stranniks said. “You will know what to do with it.”
With a twinge of disappointment, Pepsicolova realized that she had come at the end of the conversation for the underlord responded by saying, “Soon—very soon indeed—when we have recovered the weapon that has lain lost beneath Moscow since Utopia fell—we will kill you. We will kill you slowly and painfully, and along with you every human being who lives in this city. In this way, we shall have a partial revenge for what you and your kind have done to us.”
In Pepsicolova’s experience, such dark words meant that the underlord had run out of useful things to say.
“Yes, that is what you believe,” the chief strannik said. “But you are merely tools