Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [62]
“She will not like what she sees.”
“It will cause her great mental distress.”
“It will fill her waking hours with despair and her sleep with nightmares.”
“Follow us, Anya Alexandreyovna.”
The underlords led Pepsicolova down a series of corridors and through the great room where cigarettes were deconstructed, doctored, and repackaged. But the crates of cigarettes had been cleared away, along with everything else connected with that enterprise. Instead, the Pale Folk were lashing tight bundles of straw to sticks, creating something like a cross between a besom and a broom. These were dunked repeatedly into cauldrons of liquid paraffin, kept warm by small fires underneath, and then carefully set aside. Others were cutting and sewing leather into narrow curving cones as long as a human forearm, with straps and buckles at the open end. These they stuffed with dried herbs held in place by wads of cheesecloth.
A dozen or so figures already wore the leather cones strapped to their lower faces like masks. With the appearance of the underlords, the Pale Folk put aside their work and did likewise. Then they joined their masters, some before and some behind. One in ten of these bird-beaked homunculi picked up a torch and lit it from the warming fires. In solemn silence, they filed out of the great room, looking for all the world like some cultic religious procession out of the fevered hindbrain of ancient Rus.
“You’re making torches and masks now, instead of cigarettes.” Pepsicolova found this alarming on more than one level. “Why?”
No answer.
“Do I need a mask?”
No answer.
They passed out of the installation. As they did, more and more Pale Folk joined the procession. They were a near-silent, shuffling mass, torchlit in outline, dark and unknowable at the core.
For over an hour, they passed through what, for lack of a better word, might be called farmlands. Here, passages and rooms had been filled with trays of human manure, on which grew pale blue mushrooms, tended by bird-beaked Pale Folk. The smell made Pepsicolova’s head swim, but she lit up a cigarette and the sensation went away. Occasionally, the underlords paused to hand something to a mushroom farmer. Maybe it was a vial. The torchlight was never steady enough for Anya to tell.
At last the subterranean farms were left behind. Down stairways and slanting passages the silent flow of bodies went, like an underground river seeking the center of the earth. Until, at a level far deeper than Pepsicolova had ever gone before, they came to a metal wall. In its was a crudely cut hole. Metal shavings littered the floor.
One at a time, the underlords ducked within. Pepsicolova followed. The Pale Folk stayed behind.
The space within was perfectly lightless.
Pepsicolova waited for her eyes to adjust, but they could not. She could sense the underlords to either side of her, but she could not see a thing.
“If you want to show me something,” she said at last, “you’re going to have to get one of your flunkies in here with a torch.”
“Ah, but first we must prolong your mental agony, Anya Alexandreyovna.”
“It must surely be excruciating already.”
“But it can still get worse.”
“Much worse.’
“Trust us.”
Silence stretched as taut as a violin string about to snap. Pepsicolova could feel the hatred crackling soundlessly in the air about her. It was almost a physical force. As was the conviction that she was about to be shown something unspeakable. The moment went on and on until, just as she was about to burst into hysterical laughter, one of the Pale Folk stepped into the room, bearing a torch.
“Behold, Anya Alexandreyovna, the weapon with which we shall destroy Moscow, Muscovy, and all Russia as well.”
Pepsicolova stared in disbelief.
Back in the Hotel New Metropol, Arkady found that he was still unable to purge the images from his mind. The things he had done! His stomach churned at the thought of them. Yet, at the time, his traitorous body had gloried in those filthy actions. “I don’t understand, holy one,” he said to Koschei.