Wolfhound Century

41


Maroussia’s legs were shaking so much it was hard to walk. Her spine was trickling hot ice, waiting for the impact of the militia man’s bullet.

Keep going, she told herself. Don’t look back. Get out of sight. Think!

Her world was compressed into the next few seconds. She imagined the bullets smashing into her spine. Her legs. Breaking.

Think! Do something! Now!

There were no limits. No rules. Just do something.

An alleyway opened up to her left, narrow between tall buildings. No one had been down it since the snow started. She knew where the alley went. Nowhere. A dead end. She cut into it. At least for a few moments she was out of their sight.

One side of the alley was a blank brick face, the other a wall of rough stone blocks stained with grime. Dark windows looked out over it, but high overhead, out of reach. No doors. The building was, she thought, an old warehouse. If she could get inside it… inside was better… she could run… weave… find a way out again… into the crowded streets… lose herself in the crowd…

She took a few steps into the middle of the alley, turned, ran at the wall, jumped… Her fingers stretched for the window ledge…

Her weight crashed hard against the wall. Her knee, her elbow, smashed against it. Her fingers scrabbled at the rough face of the stone, well below the window, and she fell.

She pulled off her shoes and forced the bare toes of one foot hard into the crevice between two blocks of stone, drove her fingers into the gap at shoulder level, and pulled herself up. It worked. She was off the ground, barely, her body flattened, her cheek pressed against the cold wall, her fingers trembling. She tried to dig them further into the stone, tried to gouge out holds by sheer effort of will. She raised her good leg, gasping as her weight pressed on her injured knee, lifted one hand, pulled herself a little higher. It worked. And again. She was almost half her own height above the snow and crawling slowly up the vertical face of the wall. She stretched upwards and got the fingertips of one hand onto the stone ledge of the window. With a desperate lunge she got the other hand next to it. Her feet slipped but she scrabbled with her toes and got purchase again, half pulling and half walking upwards until her backside was sticking out, her knees tucked under. There was a groove in the window ledge she could hook her fingers into. If she could just get one knee up there—

‘Are you going to come down, or do I shoot you up the arse?’





42


Lom turned his back on Safran and walked over to the old woman’s broken body. She had been so fragile. He could have picked her up and tucked her under his arm. It was taking all his effort not to look behind him, back up the alley, to see if Teslev was coming back.

‘Who gave you the photographs, Safran? The pictures of the Shaumian women? Who turned you loose on them?’

Safran stared at him. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

‘I mean,’ Lom continued. ‘You’d hardly come after them on your own initiative, would you? You probably don’t even know who they are. I mean, who they really are.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I hope for your sake the order came directly from Chazia herself.’

‘And who are you working for, Lom?’

Lom shrugged. He kicked at a stone. Keep him off balance. Don’t let him have time to think.

‘So did you find the object Chazia wanted?’

This time Safran looked genuinely puzzled.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Never mind. Don’t worry about it.’

The crack of a pistol shot echoed off the high walls. It sounded a few streets away.

Safran smiled. ‘Teslev found her.’

Another shot. And then another.

‘Ah,’ said Safran. ‘The coup de grâce.’





43


Maroussia, clinging to the window ledge, looked down under her arm and stared into the face of the militia man. He was standing below her, his pistol in his hand. He’d obviously been there a while, watching her trying to climb. He thought it was funny. It was in his face. She pushed herself away from the wall and crashed down onto him. He collapsed under her weight. The pistol fired. Something slapped, hard and burning, against her calf and her whole leg went numb.

‘You. Stupid. Bitch.’

She was lying on her back on top of him. His breath was hot against her ear, his voice close, almost a whisper. She whipped her head forward and sharply back, smashing it into his face, and felt his nose burst. The militia man swore viciously and smashed his gun against the side of her head. And did it again. And again. She felt something jagged open a rip in her cheek. Then his other hand was scrabbling around in front of her, trying to pull at her, trying to roll her off him.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ he whispered. ‘Bitch.’

He was strong. She couldn’t fight him. In another second he would be able to get his gun against her back or her ribs and fire without risk of hitting himself. She dug her hand back and under herself, pushing it down between their struggling bodies, scrabbling for his testicles, and when she found them she squeezed and twisted as viciously as she could. The militia man yelled and arched his back, trying to throw her off, trying to club at her hand with the pistol. She jerked her head backwards again and again, smashing it recklessly into his face. She felt it strike a sweet spot on his chin, smashing his skull back against the pavement. She felt him go slack.

Maroussia rolled away from him and raised herself up on her hands and knees. The militia man was lying on his back, trying to raise his head, his eyes struggling to focus.

‘Bitch,’ he mumbled. ‘Bitch.’ He raised his pistol towards her. It seemed heavy in his hand.

She grabbed at the pistol with both hands, twisting and wrenching it. It fired a shot but she barely noticed. She felt the man’s finger snap and the gun came away in her grasp. ‘Oh no,’ he said quietly. ‘No.’

She pressed the muzzle against his thigh and pulled the trigger.





44


In the mid-morning quiet of his apartment Raku Vishnik cleared his desk and spread across it a large new street plan of Mirgorod. The city – crisp black lines on fresh white paper – looked geometrical and rectilinear, a network of canals and prospects laid out like electrical cabling, connecting islands to squares and squares to islands; a civic circuit diagram for the orderly channelling of work and movement. It was nothing, or almost nothing, but wishful aspiration. A flimsy overlay of civilisation, the merest stencil grid over marsh and mist and dreams.

Next to the map Vishnik set out his neat pile of filled notebooks, a box file of newspaper cuttings, a sheaf of other maps and plans. The maps all showed the city or parts of it, and all of them were creased, much re-folded, and covered with faint pencil marks: lines and symbols and Vishnik’s own cramped and scarcely legible annotations, from single words to entire paragraphs. The hatbox of photographs was on the floor beside his chair. On the other side of the window the city breathed and rumbled. Snow flurries smudged the distance, yellow and grey and brown.

He was looking for shape and pattern.

Methodically he sifted through his notes, looking for anomalous events. Times and places when the city slipped and shifted. Like it had in the Bakery Galina Tropina. Like it had in his photographs. Like it had when he went back to a familiar place and found it different. Others had seen such things in the city. He picked them up in newspapers usually, but also in conversations overheard on trams and buses, in shops, in the street. He’d kept a record of every one. They were in his notebooks. Date, place, time.

Ever since Maroussia Shaumian had come to him the other night a new idea had been taking shape in his mind. A new possibility. Maroussia had pushed him across a threshold. Until then it had never occurred to him that he could do more than accumulate notes and records. He had been an archivist of glimpses only. The thought had never struck him that what he was seeing had a cause. A source. That he could act.

But now, slowly, carefully, thoroughly, he went through the notebooks, one by one, and for each event he made a pencil mark on the map. All morning he worked, attuning his breathing to the slow pulse of the rain and the city.

The pattern began to emerge. It started to resolve itself under his gaze like a photograph in a developing dish, a sketchy outline first, then the richer finer details. But he resisted it. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions. He didn’t want to mislead himself. He kept calm. He stuck to his method.

I should have done this long ago. This has always been here for the finding and I never thought to look.

By mid-afternoon he’d finished. He pinned the map to the wall and stood back. There was no doubting it. There could be no mistake. The spattering of pencil marks looked like a black sunburst, a carbon flower blooming, a splash – as if a ball of black flakes had been thrown at the city and splattered on impact. The rays of the sun-splash pattern thinned out in all directions towards the edges of the city, but at the centre they were clustered, overlapping, intense. They were concentrated around one place. It looked like an impact point, a moon crater, the focal point of an explosive scattering. It was the source. There was something there. Causing the surface life of the city to shift and tremble. And the effect was growing stronger. He had found it.

Vishnik went to the bookshelf by the stove and took out the old book with the sun-faded, water-stained cover. The spine was detaching itself, the gilt lettering rubbing away, the thin translucent pages grubby and bruised. It was a forbidden work now, under the interdiction of the Vlast for more than a century, ever since its existence had been noticed. He’d found this copy tucked behind a heating pipe in the library of the Institute of Truth at Podchornok more than twenty years ago. He’d shown it to no one, and he’d never found another copy since. No reference to it in any library. So far as he knew, his was the only one in existence. A Child’s Book of Wonders, Legends and Tales of Long Ago.

Once more he opened it at the familiar page. Once more, sitting on the floor by his bookshelf in the dimming light of late afternoon, he began to read.

‘How They Made The Pollandore.’





45


Lom left Safran and the body of the executed woman, and walked. Anywhere. Nowhere. He hated the city. He hated the way you could just walk out of an alley and into the flow of crowds and traffic. Faces in the street. Faces behind windows. Faces that knew nothing about the dead body of an old woman a few yards away. That was in another city, not theirs. He needed to breathe. Needed to think.

He bought a ticket and got on a tram at random. The circle line, orbiting the city centre. The car was almost empty. Two thin men with clean-shaven angular faces were talking about horses. Round-brimmed hats, heeled ankle boots, woollen suits with trouser cuffs. Signs shouted at him: CITIZENS! BEWARE BOMBS! REPORT SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES! LEAVE NO LUGGAGE UNATTENDED!

A young man in the rear corner seat was staring at him. Frowning. A long thin nose. High cheekbones. Greasy hair in thick strands across his forehead. He had a book open but he wasn’t reading. When his gaze met Lom’s he de-focused his eyes and pretended he was looking past him, out of the window. Lom shrugged inwardly. Just a student. He wondered what book he was carrying. It was heavy and thick and looked old. Not mathematics or engineering, not with hair like that. He considered going across to find out what it was. Shake the tree. See what fell out. Once, not long ago, he would have. But not now. Leave him be. Leave him to his thoughts. Lom realised he was staring, and the young man was suffering under it: he’d buried himself in his book, pretending to be absorbed in it, but his neck and the edges of his cheekbones were flushed. When the tram stopped he would get up and leave, carefully, avoiding eye contact.

The snow had stopped falling. Nothing but wet grey slush on the pavements already. Mirgorod unfolded on the other side of the window but Lom hardly saw it. It was too close, pressed right up against his face. It was too big and too dirty. It made no sense. What you saw from a tram window were the small things. Random, fragmentary things: a narrow alleyway disappearing between shopfronts; the sign of a drawing master’s school; fresh perch on ice outside a fishmonger’s; the hobbles on a dray horse; a bricked-up window. The city was vast beyond understanding. It replenished itself infinitely, teeming beyond count. People lived their lives in Mirgorod by choosing a few places, a few faces, a few events, to be the landmarks of their own imagined, private city. Interior cities of the mind, a million cities, all interleaved one with another in the same place and time, semi-transparent. Onion-layer cities, stacked cities, soft and intricate, all of them tied together by the burrowing, twining, imperceptible threads of the information machine. Flimsy cities, every one. All it took was a militia bullet, the hack of a dragoon sabre. But the tissue cities carried on.

And underneath them all, two futures, struggling against each other to be born.

Lom slipped his hand into his pocket and met something sticky and rough: Feiga-Ita Shaumian’s bag, tacky with her clotting blood. He untied the cord and looked inside. It was like the hedge-nest of some bird, just the kind of thing a crazy old woman might carry around, but it wasn’t a nest. The sticks were tied together with thread. He eased it out of the bag for a closer look. Some of her blood had soaked through and clotted on it, dark and viscous, and there were globs of some other stuff, some kind of yellow wax, and dry, maroon-coloured berries. He held it up to the light. There were fine bones inside, parts of the skeleton of some tiny animal. A mouse? A mole? A small bird? There was a strong scent too, some sweet warmth stronger than the iron of blood. He remembered the whiteless brown eyes of the soldier in the street in Podchornok, out in the rain.

Some instinct made Lom hold the thing up close to his face and sniff at it. And the world changed. It was as if the skin of his senses had been unpeeled. The hard line between him and not-him, the edge that marked the separateness of himself from the world, was no longer there. Until that moment he had been tied up tight inside himself, held in by a skin as taut and tense as the head of a drum, and now it was all let go. It was as if he had fallen into green water and gone down deep, turning and tumbling until he had no idea which way was up. At first he panicked, lashing out on all sides, struggling to get control, but after a moment he seemed to remember that you shouldn’t do it like that. He stopped struggling and allowed himself to drift, letting his own natural buoyancy carry him back to the surface.

He was a woman in the woods in winter. He wasn’t seeing her, he was her, crunching her way among silent widely-spaced trees, going home, tired and alive in the aftermath of love, her mouth rubbed sore, the man’s semen pursed up warm inside her. She sniffed at her fingers. The scent of the man clung to them, as strong as memory. She remembered the weight of his belly on her, the warmth of his bed by the stove. Her collar, her sleeve, the fur of her hood, everything had soaked up the smell of his isba, rich and strong, smoke and resin, furs and sweat. Oh hell! He would notice when she got home! Even He couldn’t miss the smell of him on her skin. Did she care? No! This was a new kind of madness and she liked it.

The vision faded. Lom closed his eyes and watched the patterns of muted light drift across the inside of his eyelids. Thinking was tiring. His thoughts were too heavy to lift. He stared out of the window, trying to think as little as possible. In the reflection he saw Maroussia Shaumian’s wide dark eyes. Her long straight back as she walked away.

Three shots. There were three shots.

I’ve achieved nothing. Every thread I follow leads nowhere, or to a corpse.

No, not nowhere. To Chazia.

Kantor was Chazia’s agent. All the killing, the bombs, the robberies, inspired not by nationalist fervour or revolutionary nihilism, but by the Chief of the Vlast Secret Police. Safran was Chazia’s too. Chazia had sent him to kill Maroussia and her mother.

And I am Chazia’s too.

Except that wasn’t true. Not any more.

Chazia would kill him now for what he knew, and take the file back. She had sent the vyrdalak. It must have been her.

The file.

He saw it tucked away in the bathroom of Vishnik’s apartment. He saw Vishnik beaten by militia night sticks. He saw Vishnik, dead in his room, bleeding from Safran’s bullets.

The file. Shit. The file.





46


Josef Kantor followed Chazia along empty passageways seemingly cut through blocks of solid stone. They clattered down steep iron flights of steps lit by dirty yellow bulbs. The treads were damp and treacherous. She was leading him deep into the oldest, lowest parts of the Lodka, where he had never been before, down into ancient, subterranean levels.

‘No one comes here,’ she said. ‘Only me. You’re privileged, Josef. Remember that.’

When had she become so pompous? She was weaker than he had thought. Failing. Not to be trusted. She had agreed, reluctantly, to show him the Pollandore, but she had made him wait. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ she’d said. ‘Let me prepare.’

Kantor felt suddenly annoyed with this terrible old fox-bitch who pushed him around. He wanted to bring her down a bit.

‘Is Krogh dealt with, Lavrentina?’

She was walking ahead of him and didn’t look round.

‘You were right about him,’ she said. ‘He’s an annoyance. It is in hand.’

‘But not done yet, then. And what about the other matter?’

‘The other matter?’

‘The women,’ said Kantor impatiently. Chazia had not forgotten – she never forgot anything – she was prevaricating. ‘The Shaumian women. You were going to deal with them too. Is it done?’

‘Oh that,’ she said. ‘Yes. Your wife is dead.’ He caught a slight hesitation in Chazia’s reply.

‘And the daughter?’

Chazia said nothing.

‘The daughter, Lavrentina?’ said Kantor again.

‘She is not dead. She escaped. We’ve lost her. Just for the moment. We’ll find her again.’

‘What happened?’

‘She had help, Josef. Krogh’s investigator was there.’

‘Lom?’

‘He interfered,’ said Chazia. ‘Safran let him get in the way. Your daughter shot one of Krogh’s men and disappeared.’

‘Did she, then?’ Despite himself, he was impressed. But it would not do.

‘You must kill them both,’ he said. ‘Krogh’s man and the daughter. Do it now. Do it quickly, Lavrentina. And Krogh too. No more delays. Kill them all.’

Chazia turned to face him.

‘Don’t try to bully me, Josef. I won’t accept that. Remember our respective positions. I have other things to do apart from clearing away your domestic mess. Today we are going into the Lezarye quarters. That will raise the temperature. And you have your part to play too. Remember that. The Novozhd—’

‘You can leave that to me,’ said Kantor. ‘You don’t need the details. Better you don’t…’ He felt that Chazia was going to argue the point, but just then they reached a narrow unmarked door in the passageway, and she stopped.

‘Here,’ she said, reaching in her pocket for a bunch of keys.

The door looked newer than the rest. Shabby institutional paint, but solid and heavy with several good locks. Chazia opened it and Kantor followed her inside.

The first impression was of spacious airy dimness. Grey light filtered down from high – very high – overhead: muted daylight, spilling through a row of square grilles set into the roof. But they must have been far below ground level. The grilles were the floors of light wells, he realised: shafts cut up through the Lodka to draw down some sky. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that they were in a high narrow chamber that stretched away on both sides. He could not see the end of it in either direction. It might have been a tunnel. Parallel rails were set into the floor, for a tram or train.

The floor of the chamber was heaped with boxes and sacks and pallets. Large shapeless lumps of stuff shrouded under sacking and tarpaulins. And there were machines, on benches or on the floor. Some he recognised: lathes and belt saws, pulleys and lifting chains and other such contraptions. Others, the majority, meant nothing to him: complex armatures of metal and rubber and wood and polished stone. The impression was of a workshop, or a warehouse, but its purpose escaped him. There was an oppressive mixture of smells: iron filings, wet stone and machine oil. The atmosphere unsettled him. He felt on edge and slightly disoriented, as if there was a low vibration in the air and the floor, a rhythm and resonance too deep to hear.

‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where’s the Pollandore?’ He didn’t know what he was expecting the Pollandore to look like, but nothing he could see seemed likely to be it.

‘It’s not far,’ said Chazia. ‘I need another key.’ She switched on a lamp at a work table and began to search through drawers. ‘I haven’t needed this for a while.’ The table she was searching was spread with small implements, scraps of paper and chips of stone. Its centrepiece was a large brazen ball with tiny angled spouts protruding from its dented, fish-scaled skin. It floated in a dish of some heavy silver liquid that might have been mercury. Its surface shimmered and rippled faintly in the lamplight.

‘So what is this place?’ said Kantor.

Chazia glanced up. Light from the lamp glinted in her foxy eyes and slid off the dark marks on her face and hands. Did they cover her whole body, Kantor found himself wondering. He was beginning to feel uneasy. He felt for the revolver in his pocket.

‘This is my private workplace,’ said Chazia.

The lamp threw light into some of the nearer shadows. Kantor started. He thought he had seen someone else in the room, standing watchful and motionless against the wall. It was a shape, draped in oilcloth, almost seven feet tall. Curious, Kantor went across to it and pulled the sheet away.

At first the thought he was looking at a suit of armour, but it was much cruder, larger and heavier than any human could have worn and moved in. There was some kind of goggle-eyed helmet and clumsy-fingered gauntlets with canvas palms that made the effect more like a deep sea diver’s suit. The whole thing was a dull purplish red. He realised it was constructed from pieces of angel flesh. The woman had made herself a mudjhik! But one you could climb inside. One you could wear. He had underestimated her. Badly. His mind began to work rapidly. What you could do with such a thing, if it worked. If it worked.

‘Come away from that,’ said Chazia sharply.

She didn’t want me to see this. So this is what she does. This is her dabbling.

‘You wear this?’ he said. ‘You put yourself inside this thing?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Chazia. ‘Come away from it. Do you want to see the Pollandore or not? We haven’t much time. I need to get back. Come, it’s this way.’

She led him to an iron door in the side wall, unlocked it and went through. Kantor followed her and found himself standing on a narrow iron platform suspended over space.

Whatever he had expected, it was not this. They were looking across a wide circular pit, a cavern, and in the middle of it was a wrought iron structure. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet high. In the depths of the Lodka. An iron staircase climbed up round the outside. There were viewing platforms of ornate decorative ironwork, pinnacles and spiracles, and within this outer casing an iron helix spiralling upwards. It reminded Kantor of a long thin strip of apple peel. And inside it, held in suspension, touching nowhere, the Pollandore.

The air of the cavern crackled as if it was filled with static electricity. It made Kantor’s head spin. The Pollandore hung in blankness, a pale greenish luminescent globe the size of a small house, a cloudy sphere containing vaporous muted light that emitted none. Illuminated nothing. A smell of ozone and forest leaf. It revolved slowly, a world in space: not part of the planet at all, though it was following the same orbit, describing the same circumsolar trajectory, passing through the same coordinates in space and time, tucked in its inflated sibling’s pocket but belonging only to itself. There was no sound in the room. Not even silence. The Pollandore looked small for a world, but Kantor knew it wasn’t small, not by its own metrication.

He turned to say something to Chazia, who was standing beside him staring across at the uncanny, terrible thing. Kantor opened his mouth to say something to her, but nothing came out. The space in the cavern swallowed his words before they were spoken. He grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly back off the platform and pushed the door shut.

‘We must destroy it,’ he said. ‘Get rid of that repellent thing.’

‘Don’t you think,’ said Chazia, ‘don’t you think we have tried?’





47


Maroussia Shaumian sat on the slush-soaked ground under the trees at the end of her street, leaning her back against one of the trunks. Watching for uniforms. Watching for watchers. Her whole body was trembling violently. She had almost not made it. The militia man’s first bullet had gouged a furrow of flesh in the calf of her left leg. It was a pulpy mess of blood, but it held her weight. Her knee, which had crashed against the wall in her first wild jump, stabbed bright needles of pain with every step, and the hair at the back of her head was sticky with blood – hers, and his. She could feel pits and flaps of skin where his teeth had cut her scalp. There was a ragged stinging tear in her cheek, wet with blood. Her neck was stiff. It hurt when she tried to turn her head. The pistol lay black and heavy in her lap.

She knew it was stupid to return home. The policeman. Lom. He had warned her not to. But then that was reason enough to do the opposite. Distrust of the Vlast and all its agents went deep. And yet… this one had helped her. He had let her get away. Without him she would already have been taken.

She could not think about that now. She needed to go home. Where else could she go? She needed to be clean of all this blood. She needed fresh clothes. She needed the little money that was there. She needed to rest. And she needed to think through her plan. She waited until the street was quiet, stood up stiffly and limped up the road to the entrance to her building.


There was a small bathroom up a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. It had a basin and a bathtub and cold running water. A tarnished mirror. The walls were painted a pale lemon-yellow. Maroussia locked herself in, took her clothes off and washed herself, all over, slowly and without thinking. She let trickles of icy water take the blood and dirt from her skin. Out of her hair. She caught some water in cupped hands and drank from it: it tasted faintly of blood, but it was cold and sweet. She left her dirtied, bloodied clothes in a heap on the floor, wrapped herself in a thin rough towel and went barefoot back to her room as quickly as her stiffening injuries would let her, not wanting to encounter Avrilova on the stair. She found the door broken down, and assumed the militia had done it.

She dressed carefully, taking her time, not only because of her vicious and stiffening wounds, but also because she felt there was something ceremonious about it. Here begins the new life. She found clean underwear. A cotton slip. A plain grey dress. A black scarf for her hair. Shoes were a problem: her left shoe was sticky with the blood that had run down her leg. Her mother had saved a pair of boots from better times. They would do. And there was a clumsy woollen coat, also grey, which her mother had left behind that morning. She must have frozen.

When she’d dressed, she wandered around the room stuffing things into a bag. A few spare clothes. Soap. Their bit of money, about thirty roubles. That wouldn’t last long. After some thought she put in the book of Anna Yourdania’s poems. Someone at the Marmot's had given it to her. The Selo Elegies. She loved the quiet, allusive, suffering voice.


The sun is dropping out of the sky, the orchard

breathes the taste of pears and cherries,

and in a moment the transparent night

will bear new constellations –

like salt berries – glittering – harsh.


Why are our years always worse?


Yourdania’s son, who was nineteen, had died in the camp at Vig. Her husband was shot on the basement steps of the Lodka.

As she dressed and packed her few things, Maroussia went over her plan. Like so many people in Mirgorod, she had lived for years with the thought that one day such a time would come. The militia would come for her, and it would be necessary to run. She had decided long ago that when this day came she would make for Koromants, the Fransa Free Exclave on the Cetic shore, three hundred miles to the south of Mirgorod.

The whole world to the west of the forest was divided between Vlast and Archipelago, locked in their endless war. But wherever there was war, there must be bankers, financiers, traders in weapons – wars were fought on credit – and so the Fransa free cities, which belonged neither to the Archipelago nor to the Vlast, existed. Sealed off from the dominions by guarded perimeters. Everyone was stateless there, everyone was free, money and information the only power. Spies and criminals and refugees of every kind gravitated to such places – if they could get in, through the wire or over the walls. Exiled intellectuals gathered there to plot and feud, and she had heard of other, stranger figures, not human, forced out of the ghettos, margins and northern wildernesses of the Vlast, who found places to live in the older, darker corners of the Fransa exclaves. Ones who might understand about the Pollandore and help her.

The nearest Fransa port to Mirgorod was Koromants. Maroussia had seen a photograph once of the seafront there: a wide boulevard of coffee shops and konditorei looking out over clear dark waters, and behind it, rising against the sky, the sheer jagged mountains of the Koromants Massif. There, she had decided, that was where she would go, when the time came. Though how she would get there she didn’t know.

Maroussia decided not to take her identity card. It would be no help where she was going. She placed it carefully on the table in clear view, for the police to find when they came. It was time. She had delayed too long.

She turned towards the doorway and saw the figure of madness and death standing there, regarding her with shadowed fathomless eyes.

‘Maroussia?’ it said. ‘Maroussia. Are you ready?’


The paluba’s voice was thin and quiet in the room, a breeze among distant trees. The air was filled with the scent of pine resin and damp earth. Flimsy brown garments shifted about the creature, stirring on a gentle wind. There was a mouth-shape in the hooded shadows that moved as it spoke.

The creature stepped forward across the threshold. Only it wasn’t a step. The thing seemed to fall slowly forward and jerk itself backwards and upright at the tipping point. It appeared flimsy, held together by fragile joints. Its limbs were articulated strangely. Behind the creature another one came, its follower, its companion double, more shadowy, more shapeless, more airy, more… nothing. Just a shadow, waiting.

‘What are you?’ said Maroussia, at the ragged edge of panic. And hope.

‘I can smell wounds here,’ the paluba said. ‘You’re bleeding. You’ve been hurt.’

‘Who are you?’ said Maroussia again. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘You don’t have to be frightened,’ the voice said. ‘I am your friend. Your mother’s friend. But your mother wouldn’t listen to me. Did she tell you nothing?’

‘She’s gone now. She’s dead. The police killed her.’

‘Oh.’ There was a moment’s stillness in the shadow where the paluba’s face was suggested. Maroussia thought she could hear grieving in its voice. ‘She took what we left for her. Did she give it to you?’

‘No. She gave me nothing.’

‘It was an invitation. A key. Your father sent it.’

‘I never had a father.’

‘Of course you did. Everyone does.’

‘My father was a lie. I come from nothing.’

‘Did she tell you that? Poor darling, it wasn’t so. Do you want to know?’

‘Know what?

‘Everything.’

‘Yes.’

The paluba reached up and pushed back her thin hood, showing her beautiful, terrible face. Her waiting mouth

‘Kiss me, Maroussia.’

‘What?’

‘Kiss me.’ In the shadow the companion stirred. ‘Kiss me.’

Maroussia stepped forward and rested her hand on the paluba’s slender shoulders. Sweet air was drifting out of its upturned mouth. It tasted of autumn. Maroussia put her own dry mouth against it, slightly open, and drank.

In the paluba’s kiss there were trees, beautiful complex trees, higher and older than any trees grew, and everything was connected.

Maroussia was walking among them. She placed her hand on the silent living bark and felt her skin, her very flesh, become transparent. She became aware of the articulation of her bones, sheathed in their muscle and tendon. Eyes, heart and lungs, liver and brain, nested like birds in a walking tree of bone. A weave of veins and arteries and streaming nerves that flickered with gentle electricity.

She heard the leaves and branches of the trees moving. Whispers filling the air with rich smells. The trees reached their roots down into the earth like arms, and she reached down with them, extending filament fingers, pushing, sliding insistently, down through crevices in the rock itself.

And breaking through.

The buried chamber of the wild sleeping god was furled up tight but immense beyond measuring. The restless sleeping god, burdened with tumultuous dreams, had extended himself outwards and inwards and downwards, carving out an endless warren, an intricate dark hollowing. Its whorls and chambers ramified in all directions, turning and twisting and burrowing, spiral shadow tunnellings of limitless extent, unlit by the absent sun but warmed by the heart of the earth. It was all rootwork: the roots of the rock and the roots of the trees. It was matrix and web. Fibrous roots of air, filaments of energy and space, knitted everything to everything else in the chamber of the sleeping god’s dream.

He was lying on his back and great taproots drove down through his ribs. A tree limb speared up out of his groin. Water trickled over him. Rootlets slipped down, fingering his pinioned body, brushing and touching gently. The roots of the great trees drank from the buried god as their leaves drank the sun.

Up in the light the trees mingled their crowns in one great leafhead and exhaled the good, living air of the world. The air she drank on the paluba’s breath.

And there was a man walking there among the trees. She knew that he was her father and he knew that she was there, and he greeted her, and she understood why her mother had loved him and why she had to leave and how the leaving had been her death.





48


Lom sat bolt upright in his seat on the tram. The file! Chazia would come for it, and she would find Vishnik. Maroussia.

He had to do something. Now.

The tram had stopped. An anonymous place somewhere away from the centre of the city. Across the street was a hotel, a telephone cable running to it from a pole in the centre of the square. Lom ran across. THE GRAND PENSION CHESMA. Wet zinc tables under a dripping wrought iron veranda. Steep marble steps up to a chipped, discoloured portico. A handwritten card propped in a small side window: Closed For Winter. Lom hammered on the door.

‘Open up! Police!’

The paint on the door was peeling, revealing sinewy bleached grey wood. There was an ivory button in a verdigrised surround. BELL, it said. PORTER. He pressed it, more in hope than expectation, and kicked at the door.

‘Police! Open or I break it down.’

There was a noise of bolts being pulled back. The door opened. A porter in sabots and a brown overall eyed him warily.

‘You don’t look like police.’ We wouldn’t take you as a guest.

Lom shoved the door open and shouldered his way past the porter into the dim hall. A suggestion of wing-backed chairs and ottomans draped with grey sheets. A smell of old cooking and older carpets. Dampness, dust and the sea. Lom unbuttoned his cloak.

‘This is a uniform,’ he said. ‘And this is a gun. I need to telephone. Now.’

The porter led him into a back room. There was a phone on the desk. The porter lingered uneasily.

‘Don’t stand there gawking. I’m hungry. Get me some sausage. And a mug of tea.’

It took Lom for ever to negotiate his way past a series of operators, getting through first to the Lodka and then to Krogh’s office. The private secretary’s voice came on the line.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Lom. I need to speak to him. Now.’

‘Ah. Investigator Lom. The Under Secretary was beginning to wonder whether you might not have taken a train back to Podchornok. You haven’t, have you? Where exactly is it you are calling from?’

‘Just put me through to him.’

‘I’m afraid he’s not available at the moment. His diary is very full. If you’ll tell me where you are, or give me the number, I’ll arrange for him to return your call some time this afternoon. Unless you’d like me to make you an appointment to see him. I’m sure he would be most—’

‘Stop pissing me about and put me through.’

There was a hiss of indrawn breath and the line went dead. F*ck.

He was about to hang up when he heard the tired dry voice of Krogh.

‘Yes, Investigator. Something to report?’

‘Can I speak?’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean, this call is private? Bag carrier not listening?’

‘Just give me your report, Lom. I was playing this game when you were at school.’

‘Perhaps you’re getting complacent. Are you sure you’re secure?’

‘Of course I am, man. There are systems. Arrangements.’

‘That’s what Chazia thought, but she was stupid. She relied on the systems because she’d made them, but getting in wasn’t even hard.’

There was a pause.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Maybe she’s listening now.’

‘That’s ridiculous. You’re hysterical. Perhaps I made a mistake about you.’

‘If she is, it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying anything she doesn’t already know I know.’

‘What exactly are you saying?’

‘Kantor isn’t the story. Kantor’s an agent. Chazia’s agent. Chazia’s the one moving all the pieces.’

‘Can you prove it? Are you sure?’ Lom listened for indignation. Disbelief. But there was only guarded interest in Krogh’s voice. ‘Is there proof, Lom? Certain proof I can take to the Novozhd?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Lom. ‘I’ve got a bag full of proof. Her own files. Her own handwriting all over them. But she knows I’ve got them.’

‘I see.’

‘And if she is listening to your calls – and if I were you I wouldn’t bet my life she’s not – she knows I’ve told you. Of course, even if she doesn’t listen to your calls, she’ll assume I’ve told you anyway.’

‘Ah. I see. Yes.’ Pause. ‘And how did you come by these sensitive papers?’

‘I broke into her private archive and took them.’

‘Did you, indeed? You’ve exceeded my expectations, Investigator.’

‘And now you know, and she knows you know. So you have to do something about it. Action this day, Under Secretary. Action this hour.’

‘What exactly did you have in mind?’

‘You’re her boss. Roll her up. Reel her in. Have her killed. I don’t know – it doesn’t matter – just get her, and do it now. Get her and you get Kantor too.’

‘I’ll need the proof. I’ll need the papers.’

‘There’s no time for that. You need to move now. And I’d take care of your private secretary as well, if I were you.’

‘That’s wild talk, Lom.’

‘Chazia had my personal file, Krogh. She had it from your office less than an hour after we met. Referred to her by your private secretary. He even signed the f*cking thing out to her. They’re running rings round you. They’re so confident they don’t even try to hide their tracks.’

‘I still need to show the Novozhd the proof.’

Krogh sounded old and tired. The fatigue was seeping down the line. Lom remembered the big office. The plain neat desk. The windows. Quiet traffic noise. Long corridors. This wasn’t going to work.

‘I’ll get the files to you, Krogh. But you can’t wait for that. You need to act.’

‘When can you bring me the files?’

‘Soon. Soon. I’m not saying any more on this line.’

‘Investigator Lom. Be calm. You’re asking me to risk a huge amount – everything – on—’

‘A telephone call from a junior policeman from Podchornok. Your rules, Under Secretary. You got me into this.’

‘I did.’

‘Oh, and there’s one other thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s an angel in the forest somewhere beyond Vig. It’s alive.’

‘That’s preposterous.’

‘Chazia and Kantor – mainly Kantor, I think – are in communication with it. I just thought you should know.’

Lom hung up.

The porter brought a tray with a glass of black tea, a plate of rye bread and a length of dark purple sausage.

‘The dining room is closed. You can take it here. Or there is the garden.’

‘Forget it,’ said Lom. ‘You have it.’


There was half an hour yet till the tram to Pelican Quay. Back at the tram halt, Lom sat alone under the canopy, sick and dispirited. His clothes and skin stank of hopelessness and self-disgust and other people’s blood.

Image: Safran killing the old woman in the street.

Image: Maroussia Shaumian walking away alone. Pistol shots. Three.

Image: Chazia overturning Vishnik’s flat and finding the file. Image: Vishnik dead.

All caused by him. His responsibility. His fault. Because every step he’d taken had been wrong. Because he’d been a blundering, halfhearted, self-indulgent, piss-poor idea of a detective, and now he wasn’t even that. He was loose. He was alone.

It would take him hours to retrieve the file and get it to Krogh, even if it was still there. He had no confidence that Krogh would move against Chazia before he had the file in his hands, or even when he did have it. Lom had done what he could, but it hadn’t been good enough. It hadn’t been good at all. It had been shit.

The sky had grown dark and livid. Fat cold drops of rain began to explode on the ground, bursting at first like fallen overripe fruits but then like bullets from a mitrailleuse, rapid and hard and shattering, mixed with shards of ice. Over the sea a storm was coming.


Out in the Sound a high tide had been building. The two broken fragments of moon tugged at the weight of water, dragging its dark bulk shouldering against the land. A twisting black surge of foam-flecked ocean forced its way in through the Seagate towards the city, scouring the foundations of the Halsesond martello forts as it came. The rivers and canals of Mirgorod were already high and swollen, pregnant with weeks of rain and snow. Inside Cold Amber Strand the column of brackish tidal waters confronted and commingled with the rivers in flood. In Mirgorod the waters rose quickly when they came.





49


The rain pounded the city and darkened the sky. Soaked, Vishnik stepped out of the shabby crowded street and closed the louvred door behind him, and the House on the Purfas enfolded him in its familiar melancholy civilised quietness. The entrance hall was faded, airy, spacious. Empty but for dust motes, pools of shadow and the sweetness of wax polish and age. Grey window-light and the sound of rain. Somewhere a clock was ticking slowly. Doorways and corridors opened in all directions, and a wide staircase climbed upwards into indistinctness.

Now, the House on the Purfas was home to the Lezarye Government in Exile Within, but once it had been the Sheremetsny Dom, a low expansive sprawl of wood and brick, skirted with peeling loggias and leaking conservatories. The country estate for which it was built had disappeared long ago under the tenements and courtyards of the expanding city, but for Vishnik the corridors of the House on the Purfas led away into the lost domain of his childhood. If he could go deeper into the house, he felt, he would be back among it all. Back in his own boundless childhood house at Vyra, with its world of passages and stairs. Daylight slanted in through high narrow windows panelled with stained glass, splashing lozenges of colour across dusty floorboards and threadbare rugs. The tall furniture and heavy fabrics of drawing rooms, salons, dining rooms, bedrooms, box rooms and attics. The strange devices and spiced air of kitchens, pantries and sculleries. If he went to a window in the House on the Purfas and looked out, he was sure he would see, not the Moyka Strel, but balustraded pathways, formal parterres, weathered statuary, great heaps and mounds of foliage overgrowing walls of old brick and, in the furthest distance, a slope of wooded hills.

There was a brass hand-bell on a side table. Vishnik picked it up and rang it. A woman in a black dress and a white cape came.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Sir?’

A domestic servant. Another dizzying time-tumble. The whole place was a museum. A case of butterfly specimens, dried out and pinned; their dusty wings spread under glass in a parody of summer flight, but if you opened the glass and picked one up it would crunch and collapse between your fingers.

In the centuries after the coming of the Founder, the people of Lezarye had learned to accept the end of their annual migrations and settle into the static life of the Vlast. The elder families had absorbed the ways of the aristocrats, a choice that was only the latest in the long history of tragic turns and counter-turns that left them with nowhere to go when the Novozhd gripped power and the aristocrats fell.

‘I need to see Teslom,’ said Vishnik to the woman.

‘What name shall I say?’

‘Prince Raku ter-Fallin Mozhno Shirin-Vilichov Vishnik.’

‘Will you wait in the library, please, Excellency.’

Teslom was the Curator of Lezarye. He kept the records of the old families and tended the artefacts, regalia and memories that survived from their proud ancient days of hunting and herding, and the long slow rhythms of their decline: the systole of assimilation, the diastole of segregation and pogrom. Although Vishnik had visited the House on the Purfas to consult Teslom several times before, he had never been admitted to the Curator’s collection. No one who was not born into the long families ever was. The exclusion irked him. Lezarye had few enough friends in Mirgorod.

The room he was put in to wait was not part of the Collection, it was only the Secular Library. It was a dim quiet place of heavy bookcases shut away behind glass doors and curtains. Vishnik opened one of the cases and looked at the spines of the books. The ones here were merely miscellanea, marginal outriders of the true library, but still there were some things here that could be found nowhere else in the Vlast.

Lyrics From The Moth Border

Hunting Cold Beasts

Peace Of Mind Among Cold Beasts

Pigments, Tints

Life On The Water Ways

The Geometry Of Clouds, Steams and Vapours

Jurisprudence In The Archipelago

Vishnik took a book from a shelf, carried it across to a table and opened it. Shaw’s Atlas of the Archipelago. It contained page after page of maps in muted colours and a gazetteer of place names: a world, but not his; other countries, other islands, strung out across the face of the blue, with vertebrae and ribs of snow-capped mountains. The poetry of unfamiliar shorelines. A great bridge had been built across the sea to join them, thousands of miles long, but it was broken in several places. The orthography of the place names was familiar, but the names themselves… He didn’t recognise them – they were strange and wonderful. Morthern. Foerd. Mier. Gealm. The Warth. Horrow. Sarshalls. It was an atlas of elsewhere.

Teslom had come in quietly while he was reading. When Vishnik noticed him, the Curator made the formal gestures of acknowledgement and permission.

‘Welcome, Prince Vishnik. The princes of Vyra and Turm were always friends of Lezarye in the former days of the long homelands. There is a place for you in our hearts and at our tables. How can I help you?’

Teslom was a small man, neat, spare, kempt, with dark-shadowed eyes behind rimless circular glasses and glossy brown hair flopped across his forehead. He wore a double-breasted suit of dark blue; a soft white shirt with a soft turned-down collar and faint pattern of squares; a dark tie held in place with a pin.

‘I want you to tell me about the Pollandore, Teslom my friend. Every f*cking thing you can.’

‘The Pollandore? Why?’

‘I found a story about this thing. It was in a book. An old and rare book. I asked myself, is it real? Is it true?’

‘What story is this? Where did you find it? What book?’

Vishnik opened his satchel and handed it to him. A Child’s Book of Wonders, Legends and Tales of Long Ago. Teslom took it carefully and opened it, his dark eyes shining.

‘I had heard of it, but even we don’t have a copy.’ He held it close to his face, examining the stitch binding and inhaling its paper smell.

‘Tell me about the Pollandore, Teslom, and I will give it to you. My gift to the People.’

Teslom handed the book back to him.

‘A good gift. But why the Pollandore? There are other stories here.’

‘Because of these.’

Vishnik opened his satchel again, took out a sheaf of photographs and spread them across the table. Teslom lit a lamp and studied them for a long time in silence.

‘Where did you get these?’ he said at last.

‘They are mine. I took them. These things happen. I’ve seen them. This is the proof. And now I ask myself, what does Teslom know about this?’

‘But what makes you connect these pictures with the story of the Pollandore?’

‘Why? Always f*cking why? Because it is a possibility, Teslom my friend. Because I have a feeling. A hypothesis. Because it would fit the case. So. What do you tell me? What do you say?’

Teslom hesitated.

‘I would say,’ he said at last, ‘that you are not the first to come to this house and speak about the Pollandore. A paluba came here yesterday.’

‘A paluba.’

‘Indeed. From the woods. It talked of the Pollandore and now you come with these questions about the same thing.’

‘The Pollandore is real then. It was actually made.’

‘I don’t know that. There is a record that Lezarye once held such a thing in care, that one of the elder families was appointed warden, but it was seized by the Vlast soon after the Founder came north. Attempts were made to destroy it in the time of the Gruodists, but they failed. That is what is said.’

‘And this paluba spoke of it? That implies it exists.’

‘It implies only that our friends in the woods believe so. Some of the Committee also think it is real. Others do not.’

‘What else did it say, this paluba?’

‘It asked to address the Inner Committee. It spoke of an angel, a living angel that had fallen in the forest and was doing great damage. The woods fear it will poison the world. The paluba wanted us to open the Pollandore. That is the way the legend goes, is it not? The Pollandore, to be opened in the last extremity, when hope is lost.’

‘Exactly. Yes. F*ck yes. Do you see what this means, Teslom? Do you see?’

‘The paluba also said the Pollandore itself was broken, or leaking, or failing, or something. The point was unclear, I think. I was not there myself.’

‘What did the Committee do?’

‘Nothing. They refused to countenance the paluba’s message at all. They wanted nothing to do with it. They sent it away.’

‘So…’

‘I was appalled when I heard what they had done. But they’re too frightened to act. The pogroms have begun again, worse than ever. Did you know that? The Vlast is clearing the ghettos. People are being lined up and shot. Lezarye is being rounded up and put on trains to who knows where. Whole neighbourhoods are being emptied.’

‘I didn’t know. I’ve seen the rhetoric in the papers, but I didn’t… What are you – I mean the Committee…?’

‘The Committee is too frightened to move. There is talk of arming ourselves and fighting back. Getting money and mounting a coup. Young men on the rooftops throwing down bombs on the militia. Others, of course, hope that if we keep quiet the troubles will fade away again, like they have done before. But already people are dying. ‘

‘And you? The Collection?’

‘My duty is to protect it. It has survived such times in the past. I’ve begun to pack it away, but… it is so much work for one man. The Committee offers no help. They will not consider departure.’

‘Where would you go?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps the woods, if I can find a way to transport the collection there. Or one of the exclaves. Koromants. Or maybe I will get it on a ship and go across the sea to the Archipelago. But with the winter coming…’

Vishnik held out the Child’s Book of Wonders.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it.’

‘But you know I can’t… it may not be safe…’

‘Take it, Teslom. Find a way. And if you think I can help you, my friend, ask me. Ask me.’