Wolfhound Century

24


In a train travelling west towards Mirgorod there is a first-class compartment with its window blinds drawn, which the guards think is empty and locked. The guards know – though they couldn’t say how they know – that there’s something wrong with it, something ill-defined which needs a mechanic, which makes it unsuitable for occupation, and which they themselves should keep clear of. That’s fine. No inconvenience for them. It’s the end compartment of the furthest carriage, and first class is barely a quarter full. When they arrive in Mirgorod there’ll be the fuss of detraining, and by the time that’s done the episode of the closed compartment will be forgotten. When the train’s ready to leave again, the compartment will be fine, except – should anyone notice, which isn’t likely – for a lingering trace of ozone and leaf- mould in the air.

Just at the moment there are two figures sitting opposite each other in the darkness of the closed and blinded compartment. They are making a long journey. Should anyone happen to see them – which nobody does – they would appear to be human: two women, not young, riding in composed, restful, silent patience, swaying slightly with the movement of the train. Both appear to be dressed in layers of thin cloth in muted woodland colours of bark and moss. Their heads are covered, their faces lost in shadow. Or they would be, if they had faces, which – strictly speaking – neither does.

One of them – the one facing the direction of travel, as if eager to reach her destination, for her purpose is to arrive – is a paluba. The word is complex: its possible meanings include old woman, witch, hag, female tramp, manikin, tailor’s dummy, waxwork, puppet and doll, none of which is exactly accurate here, though all have some bearing on the true nature of the figure, which is an artefact carefully constructed of birch branches and earth and the bones of small birds and mammals. The paluba is a kind of vehicle, a conveyance, currently travelling inside another conveyance, artfully made to carry the awareness of its creator and act as a proxy body for her, while she herself remains in the endless forest, in the safety of the trees which she can never leave.

The paluba’s maker has placed a little gobbet of herself, a ball of bees’ wax nestled inside the paluba’s chest cavity, approximately where the heart would be. The wax has been mixed with many intimate traces of its maker – her saliva, her blood, her hair, a paring of fingernail, smears of sweat and other fluids, a condensation of breath – and many intimate words have been whispered over it, as the maker kneaded it between her warm palms for many hours over many days, making it well, making it strong, so that she would remain connected with it as the paluba travelled ever further westward. The maker doesn’t stay with the paluba all the time. That would be exhausting and unnecessary. She can find it when she needs to. She can guide its steps, perceive with its senses and speak with its tongue, which is the tongue of a hind deer. When she needs to. For now, the paluba is empty. It’s waiting, endlessly patient, facing its direction of travel. Facing westwards. Facing Mirgorod.

The paluba’s companion faces opposite, eastwards, back towards the border of the endless forest. And whereas the paluba has a hand-made body, a material caricature of the living human form, the companion is the opposite of this also. For while she is not an artifice but a living creature, she has no body at all. Inside her shrouds of cloth there is nothing but air, only air – collected, coherent, densely-tangible forest air. She is the breath of the forest, walking.

As the train edges slowly closer to Mirgorod, the paluba’s companion feels the widening distance between herself and the forest as an ever-increasing pain. She wants to go home. She needs to go home. Nothing would be easier for her than to leave, but she cannot. It is only her presence close to the paluba that enables it to continue to hold together and function so far from the forest. If she were to abandon the paluba it would fall apart. It would become inert, nothing more than the heap of rags and stuff of which it is made. Without her, the paluba’s mission would fail, and with it would fail the hope of the forest, the only hope of the world.





25


The next morning, Lom took the tram back to the Lodka. He had a lead from Safran – the name of the painter, Petrov, who was one of Kantor’s gang and had betrayed the Levrovskaya raid – not much of a lead, but something. A link to Kantor. Lom tried to keep his focus on Kantor, but his thoughts kept sliding sideways. Chazia was a presence in the background, unsettling him. A dark, angel-stained presence. She had showed herself to him deliberately. Playing a game with him. He was sure of that, though he didn’t understand why. Yet it wasn’t her face he kept seeing in the street on the other side of the tram window, but Maroussia Shaumian’s. She had got under his skin. He hadn’t liked the way she looked at him as she left last night: the mixture of fear and scorn in her face had cut him raw. For the first time, it didn’t feel so good, being a policeman.

The tram had come to a stop. The engine cut out. A murmuring broke out among the dulled morning passengers.

‘We’re going nowhere,’ the driver called. ‘They’ve cut the power. Traffic’s all snarled up. I guess there’s another march somewhere up ahead.’

Lom sighed and got out to walk. It wasn’t far.

A few hesitant snowflakes twisted slowly down out of the grey sky and littered the streets. People kept their heads down. As he got nearer the Lodka, Lom noticed the crowds getting slower and thicker. There was a sound of distant music. Hymns. He turned a corner and was brought up short by a mass of people passing slowly down the street.

They were singing as they came, not marching but walking. There were old men in sheepskin hats and women in quilted coats. Students in threadbare cloaks. Workers from the Telephone and Telegraph Office and the tramcar depot. Schoolchildren and wounded soldiers, bandaged and hobbling. There were giants, shuffling forward, struggling to match the slow pace. Faces in uncountable passing thousands, following a hundred banners, shouting the slogans of a dozen causes. STOP THE WAR! PAY THE SOLDIERS! FREE TRADE UNIONS! LIBERATE THE PEOPLE OF LEZARYE! The finest banners belonged to the unions and free councils. They were made of silk, embroidered in beautiful reds and golds and blacks and hung with tassels. Each took three men to hold the poles and three more to go in front, pulling the tassels down to keep the banner taut and straight against the wind. The banner men wore long coats and bowler hats.

They were going his way, so Lom stepped into the road and walked along beside them. These people weren’t terrorists or even dissidents. They were ordinary people, most of them, ordinary faces filled now with energy and purpose and an unfamiliar sort of joy. Lom felt the warmth of their fellowship. It was a kind of bravery. He almost wished he was part of it. A few people in the crowd looked at him oddly because of his uniform, but they said nothing. The traffic halted to let them pass. People on the pavement watched, curious or indifferent. Some jeered, but others offered words of encouragement and a few stepped off the kerb to join them. Gendarmes in their plywood street-corner kiosks fingered their batons uncertainly and avoided eye contact. They had no instructions.

Lom scanned the faces in the crowd automatically, the way he always did. Looking for nothing in particular, waiting for something to grab his attention. There was a man striding with the crowd, not keeping his place but weaving through them, working his way slowly forward towards the front, handing out leaflets as he went. He was wearing a striking grey fedora. His overcoat flapped open and his pink silk shirt was a splash of colour in the crowd. He came within a few feet of Lom, singing the chorus from Nina in a fine tenor voice.

Lom felt a lurch of recognition. The man’s face meant something to him, though at first he couldn’t make a connection. Then it came to him. Long and narrow and pockmarked, with those wide brown eyes, it could have been Josef Kantor. This man was older – of course he would be – and his face was filled out compared to the lean features in Krogh’s old photograph. But it could have been Kantor. Lom was almost certain it was.

Lom’s heart was pounding. He could hardly go up and seize him. Apart from any doubts about the man’s identity, if he – in his uniform, with few other police around – tried to seize someone by force out of this crowd, things would get nasty. He’d be lucky to get out of it with his life. Certainly, he wouldn’t get out of it with Kantor. Lom walked on, watching the man who might have been Kantor make his way expertly through the crowd.

For a while Lom tried to keep up with him. The man was tall, and in his fedora he was hard to lose sight of. But he was working his way steadily deeper into the crowd. As Lom went after him, his uniform began to attract attention. People jostled him and swore. Twice he was almost tripped. If he fell, he would have been kicked and trampled. He was sure of it.

A strong hand gripped his arm and squeezed, dragging him roughly round. A fat, creased face was shoved close to his.

‘Idiot. Get the f*ck out of here. What are you trying to do? Start a f*cking riot?’

The man shoved him towards the edge of the crowd. Lom bumped hard against someone’s back. Something sharp hit him on the back of the head, momentarily dizzying him.

‘Hey,’ said another voice behind him. A quiet voice, almost a whisper. ‘Hey. Look at me. Arsehole.’

Lom turned in time to see the glint of a short blade held low, at waist level, in someone’s hand. He lurched sideways, trying to get out of range. He couldn’t even tell, in the crowd, who had the knife. Most of the walkers were still ignoring him, still walking on, ordinary faces wanting to do a good thing. Kantor, if it had been Kantor, had disappeared from view.

Shit. He needed to get out of there. Warily, watchfully, trying not to be jostled again, he edged himself sideways until he could step out of the slow tide of people, back onto the pavement. Lom realised he was sweating. He paused for a moment to catch his breath and tried to find his bearings, looking for a side street or alley that would let him get to the Lodka without getting caught up in the march again.





26


Unaware of Lom’s abortive pursuit of him, Josef Kantor continued to weave his way through the moving crowd. Kantor wasn’t the leader of the march. Nobody was. A dozen separate organisations had called for the demonstration and claimed it as theirs. There was a vague plan of sorts: to march up Founder’s Prospect to the Lodka and hold a vigil there, with speeches from the steps, then on to the Novozhd’s official residence in the Yekaterinsky Park to present a petition at the gates.

The chiefs of each marching organisation walked apart from the others, following their own colours, suspicious of spies and provocateurs. Kantor moved from coterie to coterie with a word of encouragement and support. He was everyone’s friend. Some of them wondered who he was. Some thought they knew him, though each one knew him by a different name – Pato, or Lura, or David, or Per, or simply the Singer. Some knew him as the go-between and negotiator who had drafted their petition, a masterpiece of inspiring words and lofty demands that meant different things to different people.

The size of the crowd grew as it went, exceeding all expectation, even of Kantor himself. Runners moved through it, passing back instructions and bringing forward news of the swelling numbers, until those at the front began to wonder what they had unleashed, and felt nervous. They were beginning to sense that something more momentous than they had intended was preparing to happen.

The song changed from Nina to the Lemke Hymn. Their breath flickered on the air, but their hearts were warm. They were no longer a hundred thousand separate, accidental people but one large animal moving forward with a strength and purpose of its own. A newly-formed being whose moment had come.

And then a hesitation began somewhere in the crowd, no one knew where, and spread, a gathering wave of silence and concern. The singing died away but the crowd kept on walking.

Kantor shoved his way to the front.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Dragoons are gathering at the Lodka. They have mudjhiks, and orders to fire.’

‘Rumours. There are always rumours.’

‘Maybe.’

Kantor moved on to another group. The Union of Dockers and Tracklayers was always up for a fight. He grabbed their Steward, Lopukhin, by his sleeve.

‘It’s only a rumour,’ said Kantor. ‘Keep them going. Get them singing again.’

‘Who cares if the dragoons are waiting for us?’ said Lopukhin. ‘They won’t attack us. We are fellow citizens. What a moment for us! Imagine. The dragoons refusing a direct order!’

But Lopukhin’s was only one voice among the leaders. Others were for turning aside and making straight for the Park. The argument continued all the way up Founder’s Prospect, and they were still arguing when they found themselves at the edge of the Square of the Piteous Angel.

The square was empty. On the far side, the huge prow of the Lodka rose against the sky. And between the marchers and the Lodka were two lines of mounted dragoons. A mudjhik stood at each end and another in the middle.

Those at the head of the march tried to halt and turn back, but the great mass of the crowd had a momentum of its own, and those behind, unaware of what was happening, kept on coming. The shoving and jostling started. Kantor found Lopukhin again and seized him by the shoulder.

‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘This is your moment! Lead them, Lopukhin! Face the soldiers down!’

‘Damn, yes!’ cried Lopukhin. His face was flushed, his eyes bright and unfocused. ‘I will!’

Lopukhin shoved his lieutenants in the back, making them stumble forward into the empty square. He grabbed the colours of the Union and jogged forward, yelling and waving it over his head.

‘Come on, lads! Come on! They won’t shoot us!’

Some of the men followed Lopukhin willingly and others were pushed forward by pressure from behind. Kantor slipped away to the edge of the crowd and took up a position in the doorway of a boot shop. At first nothing happened. The dragoons didn’t respond, and the demonstrators grew confident. More and more spilled into the square. Then Kantor heard what he had been waiting for. From the back of the crowd a swelling noise rolled forward. At first it sounded like they were cheering. Then the screams grew clearer, and the crack of shots.

All was as it should be. The troops that had been waiting out of sight in the side streets, letting the crowd pass by, were attacking the flank and rear. The killing had begun.





27


Threading through back streets and alleys, Lom made his way round to a side entrance of the Lodka and back into the great Archive. He called up the file on Lakoba Petrov without difficulty – unlike the Kantor file, it was there, and there was no sign that it had been tampered with. He sat reading it at one of the long tables under the dome while the Gaukh Engine rumbled and turned quietly behind him. He’d switched on the desk lamp. It pooled buttery yellow light on the blue leather desktop. But he found it hard to concentrate on the file. His head was hurting, as it had done in Krogh’s office. Patches of faint flickering colour disturbed his vision.

Lom rubbed at his forehead, feeling the seal of angel skin smooth and cool under his fingers, tracing the slight puckering of the skin around it. He was keyed up and unsettled after his dangerous encounter with the marching crowd. The glimpse of Kantor – it was him, he was sure of it – haunted him: the sureness with which he had moved through the jostling people, the easy confidence on his face. He hadn’t looked like a hunted man.

But there was something else that troubled Lom, something deeper: watching the crowd marching, he had been drawn towards them. He had launched himself unthinkingly among them to follow Kantor. He had, he now realised, wanted to be one of them. He was, at some instinctive level, on their side. And yet… the hostility, the contempt, even the hatred they had turned on him when they noticed him. Not him, the uniform. For the second time, it didn’t feel so good, being a policeman.

Lom turned his attention to the papers on Petrov. It was a thin file. Petrov was a painter, one of the modern type, not approved by the Vlast. Petrov wasn’t popular, it appeared, not even among his fellow artists. He was a marginal figure: there was only a file on him at all because he came into contact with bigger figures. Artists. Composers. Writers. Intelligentsia. They gathered at a place called the Crimson Marmot Club, where Petrov seemed to be a fixture. He had a temper: the file contained accounts of arguments at the Crimson Marmot, scuffles he was involved in. And there had been a dispute with a picture framer. Petrov claimed he’d left a dozen of his works to be framed, the man denied all knowledge of them, and Petrov accused him of having stolen and sold them. He’d made a formal complaint. The framer said Petrov owed him for previous work, and there were no documents on either side. The investigating officer could resolve nothing. He’d filed a report, though. Must have been a quiet day.

Petrov appeared to have few friends of any kind, the report noted, apart from one woman, a life model who worked in a uniform factory near the Wieland Station. Her name was noted for thoroughness, though there was no address and no file reference. The name was Shaumian. Maroussia Shaumian.

Lom sat back in his chair and drew a deep breath. Circles of Contact.

He tried to imagine Petrov. The registry file gave only a vague outline, a man seen only through the lens of surveillance. He wondered what Petrov’s pictures were like. There was one scrap of newsprint pinned inside the cover, clipped, said a manuscript note, from The Mirgorod Honey Bee, dated early that spring: a review of an exhibition at the Crimson Marmot Club. He’d ignored it before, but he looked at it now.

‘It would be remiss,’ the reviewer said,


to overlook the work of Lakoba Petrov, though most do. This young painter is developing a fine individualism. His prickly personality, which is perhaps better known than his canvases in the city’s advanced artistic circles, manifests itself in the three likenesses shown here as a reckless energy. He is impatient with the niceties of style – surely a trait to be admired – and he is not a tactful portraitist, but his use of colour is original and his brush strokes have a fierce movement. He captures through his sitters something of the essence of the modern Mirgorod man. A troubled anxiety lurks in the eyes of his subjects, and their surroundings seem jagged, uncertain, about to fall away. A young man’s work, certainly, but there is bravery and promise here. The Honey Bee hopes for good things from Lakoba Petrov in the future.


The review was by-lined Raku Vishnik.

Circles of Contact.


There was a high-pitched frightened shout from somewhere above him.

‘Soldiers! There are soldiers in the square!’ All across the immense reading room, readers looked up from their work. Lom searched for the cause of the commotion.

‘They’re charging!’ the voice called again. And then Lom saw where it was coming from: somebody was leaning over the balustrade of the upper gallery, where the high arched windows were. He was waving frantically. ‘The dragoons are charging!’ he was shouting. ‘They’re going to kill them all!’

Lom ran up the gallery stairs. The upper windows of the Archive, under the dome, were crowded with people watching the demonstration. He squeezed in among them and looked out across the rooftops, through grey air filled with scrappy lumps of snow.

A line of dragoons was moving out across the square, the mudjhiks loping forward, drawing ahead of the riders. Some of the demonstrators broke away from the crowd and started to run for the side streets but stopped in confusion, seeing more troops emerging from there. The dragoons had them bottled up tight. A strange collective tremor passed through the demonstrators as the horsemen picked up speed and raised their blades and whips. Then the heads of riders and horses were moving among the crowd, arms high and slashing downwards. The mudjhiks, moving with surprising speed, waded into the thick of it, striking with their fists and stamping on the fallen.

The dragoons withdrew, circled around and attacked again. And again. Lom saw a group of men grab hold of one of the riders and pull him down until his horse was forced to stumble. Once they had him on the ground, they kicked him and stamped on him and hacked at him with his own sword.

And something else was happening, though nobody but Lom seemed to see it. There were too many people in the square. Among the demonstrators and the dragoons, Lom could see others walking there: a sifting crowd, soft-edged, translucent, tired and unaware of the killing all around them. They were not old, but their hair was already turning grey. Their shoulders were frail, their faces drawn unnaturally thin and their skin was as dry and lifeless as newsprint. If they spoke at all, they spoke only when necessary; their voices had no strength, and didn’t carry more than a few paces. Whisperers. The dragoons rode through them as if they weren’t there at all. Because they weren’t.

Above the massacre the sky tipped crazily. Out of the low leaden cloud another sky was breaking through, bruised and purple. An orange sun was tumbling across it like a severed head, its radiance burning in the cloud canyons. Behind the muted grey and yellow facades of the familiar buildings in the square there was another city now. High, featureless buildings rising against the livid sky. One immense white column of a building dwarfed all the other blocks and towers. Ten times taller than the tallest of them, fifty times taller than the real skyline of Mirgorod, it climbed upwards, tier upon tier, half a mile high, its lower flanks strengthened by fluted buttresses that were themselves many-windowed buildings. The top quarter of it was not a building at all, but an enormous stone statue of a man five hundred feet tall. He was standing, his left foot forward towards the city, his right arm raised and outstretched to greet and possess. He was bare-headed, and his long coat lifted slightly in the suggestion of wind. Although the statue was at least a mile away across the city, Lom could make out every detail of the man’s lean, pockmarked face. His eyes were fixed on the visionary distance yet saw every detail of the millions of insect-small lives unfolding beneath his feet. He would be visible from every street in Mirgorod. He would rise out of the horizon to lead incoming ships. He was uncle, father, god. The city, the future, was his.

The statue was the man he had seen weaving his way through the demonstration that morning. The man whose more youthful face gazed confidently into the camera in the photograph in Krogh’s file. Josef Kantor.


Tucked in its pocket of no-time and no-space, the Pollandore feels the nearness of the deaths in the Square of the Piteous Angel. Feels the footfall of mudjhiks, the spillage of blood. The panic.

To the Pollandore it is a hardening, a sclerosis… and a loosening of grip. Something slipping away. Its surface growing milky and opaque. The silence that surrounds it darkening into distance.

From its well of silence the Pollandore reaches out.


Lom stood for a long time at the window, staring at the immense white statue of Kantor half a mile above the blocky, featureless city. What he was seeing, he knew, wasn’t there. Not yet. It was a city that wasn’t there, but could be. Would be. He could feel it taking shape and solidifying. He was seeing for himself one of the glimpses that Maroussia and Vishnik had talked about last night. A scene from one of Vishnik’s photographs. But this was different: Vishnik’s was a city of soft possibilities, sudden moments of opening into inwardness and truth; this city was hard and cruel and silent. Closed up. Uniform. A city of triumphal fear. The city of the whisperers and dominion of Kantor, imperial and immense. Mirgorod was a battleground, a contention zone: two future cities both trying to become. The hard city was winning.

And which side was he on?

But that wasn’t question, not yet. The question was, what were the sides? Kantor was an enemy of the Vlast, yet his statue presided over the dragoons at their murderous business in the Square of the Piteous Angel. Vishnik and Maroussia were feeling their way towards the softer city under the iron and stone of Mirgorod, and went in fear of the Vlast’s police. Fear of him. The feel of his uniform against his skin disgusted him. What kind of policeman was he? He pushed the question aside. Of one thing he was sure. Kantor had to be stopped, and that was his job. Lom turned away from the window. He had made a decision. He had something to do.

When he came back down the stairs from the gallery window, the great reading room was almost empty. Only a few had stayed at their desks, head in hands, or staring into space, or pretending to work, trying to ignore the sounds of killing. Shutting it out. None of them was going to take any notice of him.

Instead of turning left at the bottom of the staircase and going back to his own desk, Lom went right, following the perimeter of the reading room until he reached a door of varnished wood. It was inset at face height with small square windows of rippled glass.

CLOSED ARCHIVE! AUTHORISED ACCESS ONLY!

He pushed through the door and let it close quietly behind him. His hands were sweating.

The corridor beyond was empty. Lit with dim electric bulbs in globes suspended from the high ceiling, it was lined with more doors, each with a small square of card in a brass holder with a hand-written number. Occasionally a name. Lom went slowly down the corridor reading them. It took for ever.

CMDR L Y CHAZIA.

Lom gripped the brass doorknob, turned and pushed. It was locked. He shoved, but it didn’t shift. He thought of trying to kick it down, but the door was solid and heavy. The noise would bring someone. In his pocket he had a bunch of thin metal slivers. His hands were clumsy, slick with sweat. It took him three, four attempts to pick out the right tool. He had to bend down and put his ear close to the door so he could hear what he was doing above the sound of blood in his own ears.

At last the tumblers slipped into place.

He closed the door before he flicked the light switch. Illumination flared dimly. Green-painted walls, an empty desk, rows of steel-framed racks holding files and boxes of papers. Lom forced himself to move slowly down the aisles between the racks, reading the file cards. It wasn’t hard to find what he was looking for. Chazia had been methodical. The lavender folder for Josef Kantor was in its place on the K shelf. It was fat and full. He took it and pushed it inside his tunic.

As he was leaving, something made him turn back and go round to the L shelf. It was there. A much slimmer folder, pale pink. LOM, VISSARION Y, INVESTIGATOR OF POLICE. He stuffed it inside his tunic next to Kantor’s.

He was halfway across the still-deserted floor of the reading room, almost at the exit, before he realised he hadn’t switched off the light inside the room. An archivist was watching him curiously. No way to go back.


Lom stepped out into the square. The snow had stopped falling, leaving the air damp with impending rain. The smell of burned cordite and the dead.

People were moving across the square, alone or in small groups, pausing to look at each body, searching for a familiar face, hoping not to find it. Their feet splashed and slipped across cobbles wet with slush and blood. The dragoons had gone, and the militia, uncertain what to do, were ignoring the searchers. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The grey whisperers were there still. Walking by on their own withdrawn, secretive purposes.

But a couple of blocks away everything was normal. People pursued their business. Trams came and went. Lom boarded one, taking the Vandayanka route, heading for Pelican Quay. When he got there, he stopped at a chandlery to buy a small rubberised canvas sack with a waterproof closure. Then he wandered over to a bench and sat watching the boats at their moorings, idly kicking at the pavement. When he’d managed to loosen a cobble stone, he bent down casually to prise it out of the ground. And slipped it into his pocket.





28


Half the city away, in a room in the House on the Purfas, the paluba sat at the end of the table under the gaze of the Inner Committee of the Secret Government of Lezarye in Exile Within. The windwalker stood behind her, filling the air with woodland scents, ozone and leaf mould and cold forest air.

The five men of the Committee were drinking clear amber tea from glasses in delicate tin holders, waiting for her to begin. They waited patiently, taking the long view, as their fathers had, and their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Their room, their rules. They were the ones who carried the weight of the past. Theirs, the great duty to keep the traditions. One day they would overturn the Vlast and bring back the good ways. The rebellions of Lezarye, the Birzel among them, were theirs. They worked and thought in centuries, but their day would come, and they would be ready.

‘Madam,’ said the man at the far end of the table. Elderly, white hair clipped short and thick, a gold pin in the lapel of his thick dark suit. ‘Please. It’s been many years since we were honoured by an emissary from the forest. We are anxious to hear your news.’

‘Stasis,’ said the paluba. ‘Balance. Archipelago. Continent. Forest.’

Her voice was quiet, leaves stirring in the wind. The men leaned forward slightly to catch her words.

‘For centuries,’ she continued, ‘balance has prevailed.’

White hair nodded. ‘This Novozhd is weak,’ he said. ‘His position is attacked from without and from within. He is losing his war with the Archipelago. Our moment is coming.’

She knew he was a liar. Stasis is good, that was what he meant. Balance is satisfactory.

The paluba rested her hand of twigs and earth and wax on the table. It settled like a moth on the pale surface of polished ash and drew their eyes.

Take it away, she felt these men thinking. This is a foul and horrible thing. Get it off our table.

Pay attention to me! That was what she wanted the hand to say. I am the Other, the Unlike You. But I am here. Listen to me. Your world is not what you think.

‘Everything is different now,’ she said aloud, looking around the table and fixing each man in turn with the sockets where her eyes would have been. ‘Your stasis is broken. An angel has fallen in the forest, and lives. It is alive.’

‘Impossible.’

‘It is injured. It cannot move, though it struggles to free itself and may yet succeed. It is the strongest there has ever been. By far.’

‘There hasn’t been an angelfall for eighty years,’ said the man on White Hair’s right. ‘And none has ever survived the impact. The war in heaven is over. Even some in the Vlast’s own council say so.’

‘Wait, Efim,’ said White Hair. ‘Let her speak.’

‘The angel’s power flows from it into the rock that holds it. It is killing the forest. The greater trees are failing.’

‘Even if this is true—’ said Efim.

The paluba ignored him. ‘But the angel is frightened,' she said. 'It feels itself weakening. Failing. It has been looking for a way to defend itself. Or escape.’

‘Peder! Surely we’re not going to listen to this?’

‘And now the angel has found a way,’ said the paluba. ‘It is building an alliance. Here in Mirgorod.’

Another man leaned over to speak in White Hair’s ear. ‘Can’t we get rid of these awful creatures? The smell…’

The paluba could hear the whisper of a moth’s wing.

‘Efim’s right,’ said a small man in a waistcoat. ‘We don’t have time for this. Tomorrow we’ll have thirty million in our hands.’

‘I’ve already said we shouldn’t touch that money,’ said another, a soft, round, moon-faced man in spectacles. ‘Kantor’s Fighting Organisation is too vicious, too wild. Our reputation suffers by association.’

‘Ridiculous!’ said the man in the waistcoat. ‘This is war! We can’t afford to be fastidious. While we do nothing our people are dying. Pogroms are growing worse. Show trials. Executions. Whole streets are being cleansed while we sit here and talk and do nothing.’

They were voices, just voices, so many useless, chattering, indistinguishable, male, redundant, broken voices. The paluba hardly troubled to hear them. She already knew that she had failed here. She had known it when she saw the little glass of amber tea and smelled the fear in the room. Nonetheless, she must not give up. Everything must be attempted.

‘There is no time!’ said the paluba. ‘None at all. We can stop what is coming. But we must move now. Now! The alliance of Lezarye and the forest—’

‘And what are we to do, exactly?’ said Efim. ‘Send in the Fighting Organisation? Could they blow this angel up with their grenades?’

‘The answer lies in the Pollandore.’

Efim stood up. ‘I’ve had enough of these fairy tales. And of these disgusting… things. Call me when this rubbish is over.’

The paluba felt the finality of the room turning against her.

‘The Pollandore is stirring,’ she said. ‘It is beginning to have effects. It is beginning to spill, perhaps even to break apart. Even in the forest we have felt it.’

‘The Pollandore is nothing. More stories. More nonsense.’

‘The time has come.’ The paluba was whisper-roaring at them. ‘Open the Pollandore. This is the message from the forest. The time is now. You have to open it.’

‘What you ask is impossible. Even if we knew how to open it – whatever it is.’

‘Even if it existed, even if this wasn’t all absolute rubbish…’

‘I bring you the key,’ said the paluba. ‘I offer it to you now. This is my message to you, the gift I bring you from the one who sleeps.’

‘The Pollandore is in the keeping of the Vlast,’ said Peder. ‘Unless they have already destroyed it. I’m sorry, madam. We cannot help you in this. Not at all.’

She had failed. She had known it as soon as she came in, and it had proved to be so. But there was another way. The Shaumian women. She had hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. It was not… reliable. That had been shown already, many times. But she would have to try. If there was time.