Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [85]
“An army?” Arkady asked, mystified.
“An army or the beginnings of one. There are powers which hate humanity, and they are resolved to destroy Moscow tonight.”
“Nor will it end there,” Chernobog said.
“Nor will it end there. The survivors will carry the sacred flame with them, out into Muscovy, into Russia, into the world!”
“Everybody will die?”
“Yes. But thanks to your hard work, most of Moscow will be filled with the divine spark of rasputin. Briefly, its citizens will be in a state of perfect grace. Now, man being a sinful brute, almost all will rapidly fall from that grace once the rasputin leaves their bloodstreams. But, to their great good fortune, the flames will reach them first and they’ll die in a state of grace. Which is all that God really cares about.”
“No,” Arkady said.
“Yes.” Koschei sounded genuinely amused. “The details He leaves to underlings.”
“You talk about armies and death and setting fire to Moscow, and then you claim it’s what God wants?” Arkady said with growing anger. “How do you know what God wants?”
“You don’t believe I know?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, if you don’t believe me, you can always ask Him yourself.” Smiling benignly, Koschei held out his hand. In it was a vial of rasputin.
“Madness and buggery!” Arkady swore in an agony of enlightenment. He saw it all now, and the sight made him want to tear out his eyes with his own hands. “You are not the holy man I believed you to be! You are an agent of the Devil himself, and your drug leads not to Paradise but to the slippery slopes of Hell. Well, I shall stop you. I swear I will. Mark my words.”
“Stop me?” Koschei’s eyes shone with benevolent love, even as his tone turned stern and scornful. “You think I would have given a young mooncalf like you the means to thwart the will of God? I have told you as much as I have only because it is already too late to stop anything.”
“Far, far, far too late,” Chernobog amplified.
Svarožič leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet in soundless laughter.
With a cry of despair, Arkady fled from the room, from Koschei, from his past, from all he had ever been or was or aspired to be.
Down the canted hotel hallways and out onto the reeling streets he ran. Blindly he fled through dark buildings that crested and fell with each staggering step he took. What to do? He had betrayed his new city and government. He was a traitor to all humanity! He was a new Judas, a villain beyond all possible redemption!
There was only one possible solution.
He must warn the Duke of Muscovy.
...12...
Kyril woke up feeling optimistic and scowled. He had never in his life had anything to feel optimistic about, so naturally he distrusted this feeling. Kicking off the gunnysack he’d been using for a blanket, he crawled out from behind a crate of silk that decades ago had been stashed in a smuggler’s vault deep in the City Below and left to rot when its owner met with a now-unknowable fate. The feeling of well-being grew stronger, and he was suddenly struck by the urge to sing. He lurched to his feet in alarm. “This ain’t right,” he said, and slapped himself as hard as he could, twice.
A grin as warm as sunshine blossomed on his face, accompanied by an overwhelming sense that all was right with the world. This was terrifying. “There’s some kind of weird shit in the air,” he said in mingled fear and wonder. “Bugger me up the fucking ass like a goddamn man-whore if there ain’t.”
Kyril had slept in the new suit—green velvet, with yellow piping—that he’d bought with some of the proceeds of his first confidence