Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [81]
Anya stood, wiping her hand on her trousers. Disgusted, she said, “This is the best you can do? With all the power you have, this is the best use you can make of it?”
“The brain is an organ,” the underlord said, “and we know how to play it, drug by drug, misery by pain. The eumycetic spores now in the air are very much like those added to your tobacco. Perhaps a sufficiently large dose—a speck, let us say, barely large enough for you to see—would erase not only your identity, but your cravings as well. But long addiction has reshaped your neuroarchitecture. The results might be more nightmarish than you can imagine. I wonder how much will you suffer before you make that experiment?”
Perversely enough, the demon-creature’s words made Pepsicolova desperate for a smoke. Without thinking, she reached into her jacket pocket and—
—it had been sliced open and now hung down, a useless flap of cloth.
Bewildered, Pepsicolova looked up to see the underlord holding her last pack. Its metal claws had plucked it from her pocket too quickly to be seen. There was a blur in the air as it tore the pack into shreds. There was another as it tossed those shreds in the canal.
“One last thing,” the underlord said. “You thought we did not know that what you fear most is that we would become aware of Chortenko and join forces with him.
“We joined forces with Chortenko long ago.”
There was a grinding noise as the underlord reconfigured the mouth of the corpse it inhabited, stretching it wide to reveal long, bright metal teeth. It was, Pepsicolova realized, trying to approximate a grin. “Ahhh,” the underlord said, before sinking backward into the shadows and disappearing, “now you are afraid.”
Pepsicolova wasted most of an hour and a full box of sulfur matches roasting enough waterlogged tobacco dry to roll a stubby little cigarette, using half a banknote for the paper, to prove to herself that the under-lord hadn’t lied. The tobacco was ruined; it didn’t assuage the craving anymore.
A sudden sharp twinge in her abdomen almost doubled her over with pain. There was an itching deep inside her brain, where no conceivable tool could scratch it, and she wanted to vomit. Desperation crumpled her up like a sheet of newspaper in an angry fist. She wanted never to move again.
Then a skiff came out of the darkness, up the Neglinnaya. Its oarsman tied it up to a bollard, threw several crates whose markings identified them as containing laboratory glassware onto the dock, and clambered up after it. He had a pack of cigarettes tucked into a rolled-up shirtsleeve. By its plain white package she knew they weren’t the kind that could be found aboveground.
Pepsicolova discovered herself animated by something far too bleak to be called hope. Nevertheless, it moved her to go up to him and say, “Hey, buddy, listen. I’d kill for a cigarette, right about now.”
“Yeah, well, so what?” The waterman stared at her defiantly. “What the fuck is that to me?”
With a twist of her wrist, Pepsicolova sent Saint Cyrila into her hand. She smiled a ghost of a smile. Then she slammed the knife hilt-deep into the bastard’s chest.
The man’s eyes went round with astonishment, and his mouth as well. Under other circumstances, it would have been a very comic expression. His lips moved slightly, as if he were about to speak. But he said nothing. He only slumped, lifeless, to the ground.
Pepsicolova retrieved Cyrila, wiped her clean on the waterman’s shirt, and restored her to her sheath. She plucked the pack of cigarettes from his sleeve. It was half-empty, but in her desperate state, she welcomed it as if it were half-full.
“Hell,” she said. “It’s not like you need ’em anymore.”
The small triumph did nothing to lift her spirits. But she was used to despair; she had been living with it for years, and knew how to function under its weight. Sitting down by the edge of the canal, Pepsicolova dug out a smoke. She straightened it between two fingers and lit up.
She had to think.
The messenger banged on Yevgeny’s door just as he was about to leave for his cousin Avdotya’s