Wolfhound Century

50


Maroussia must have fallen. She was lying hunched on the floor of her room. Aching, exhausted, she pulled herself carefully, with steady deliberation, up onto the chair. The feel of the trees, the buried sleeping god, swam in her head. The paluba was watching her.

‘That’s real,’ she said. ‘It’s there. Isn’t it? I didn’t know.’

The paluba said nothing.

Maroussia saw it and the companion now for what they really were: a weaving of light and will and contained, living air. The moulded breath of forest trees. Trees rooted in the body of the buried god.

But her mother was still dead. The militia would come. They were already coming. That was real too.

‘How long was I…? I mean, when did you come? How long have I been lying here?’

The paluba shrugged jerkily. The question meant little to her.

‘I’ve done what I can for your wounds. They will heal quickly now.’

Maroussia pulled up her skirt and looked at her leg. The raw gash had crusted over. The pain was dulled.

‘Who was he?’ she asked. ‘The man I saw?’

‘Your father?’

‘Yes. My father. He must have a name.’

‘Oh, he’s Hasha.’

‘Hasha?’

‘Hasha. He can’t come to you here. He can’t leave the forest.’

‘Will I… Could I go there, to him?’

‘Eventually. Perhaps. It is possible. But… I’m sorry, there’s something more.’

Maroussia stared into the paluba’s wild, fathomless eyes.

‘Show me.’





51


Rain was tumbling out of the sky. A heavy black downpour. Lakoba Petrov the painter had walked a long way, out to the northern edge of the city, no longer Mirgorod proper but the Moyka Strel, in the wider Lezarye Quarter, out beyond the Raion Lezaryet itself, an ageing halfway place where the houses were made of wood. Although they had been there for centuries, they were skewed, temporary-looking buildings of weathered planking, with shuttered windows and shingled roofs. Their eaves and porches and windows were mounted with strips of intricately carved wood, pierced with repeating patterns and interlaced knotwork. It was like embroidered edging. Like pastry. Like repeating texts printed in a strange alphabet. The woodwork was salt-bleached, and broken in places, but even so the houses looked more like musical cabinets or confectionery than dwellings. They were made from trees that had grown on the delta islands long before the Founder came.

Petrov had been born in this place, but he hardly knew that now. New thoughts filled him so full of wild energy that he could not keep body or mind still, he couldn’t even walk straight. Uncontainable and superabundant, he tacked back and forth across the road, advancing only slowly and zig by zag in stuttering steps, muttering as he went, hissing random syllables under his breath in a new language of his own.

Lost in his fizzing new world, he walked smack into the line of soldiers that blocked his path.

In the face of one a mouth was moving, but Petrov heard no words, only the soft swaying of the sea and the hissing of the rain, until the soldier struck him in the shoulder with the butt of his rifle, hard, and he fell.

‘Go down there. Get in line with the others.’

Petrov struggled to his feet, his shoulder hurting. The soldier who had hit him was young, not more than a boy, his face white as paper. He seemed to have no eyes.

‘Get in line.’

‘No,’ said Petrov. ‘No. I can’t.’

The soldier jabbed the muzzle of the rifle hard into his stomach.

‘Do it. Or we shoot you now.’

Some of the soldiers had circled round behind him. A hand shoved Petrov sharply in the back, so that he stumbled forward, almost falling again. The soldiers in front of him moved aside to let him through.

‘Down there. Walk.’

Petrov realised then that he knew this place. It was a piece of waste ground, cut across by a shallow gully. Boys used to play there when he was one of them. They had called it Red Cliff, having never seen cliffs. There was a small crowd of people there now, lined up on the lip of the slope, in silence, in the rain. Soldiers to one side, waiting. Three army trucks drawn up in a line. Soldiers unloading stuff from the tarpaulined backs. An officer, fair-haired, neat and pale, was giving orders. Petrov knew he smelled of soap.

Some of the people were naked, and others were in their underclothes. Some were undressing under the soldiers’ gaze. Women crossed their arms over their breasts and shivered. The rain soaked them. There was a pile of rain-sodden clothes. Alone, at some distance, an earth-coloured mudjhik stood, sightlessly swaying, attendant. The soldiers were arranging their mitrailleuses in a row on a raised mound.

Petrov realised that one of the soldiers from the street had followed behind him, and was standing at his shoulder.

‘Go over there and join the others, citizen,’ the soldier said in his ear. His young voice was drab with shock. ‘Leave your clothes on the pile. If we can, we will be quick.’

The people smelled wet and sour. They were as silent as trees. Petrov was aware of bare feet, his own among them, cold and muddy in the rain-soaked, puddled red earth.

Time widened.

Somewhere – distant – it seemed that someone, a woman, was berating the soldiers with loud, precise indignation. Three echoless shots repaired the silence and the rain.

Then the mitrailleuses began to fire.





52


Maroussia was in a terrible place. The paluba’s kiss had taken her there. A dreadful nightmare place in the shadow of a steep hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, it was alive. It was an angel, fallen.

There were trees here too, but here the trees were stone, bearing needles of stone. Maroussia was walking on snow among outcrops of raw rock. In parts the earth itself, bare of snow, smouldered with cool, lapping fire under a crust of dry brittleness. Dust and cinders, dry scraping lava over cold firepools. Walking over it, Maroussia’s feet broke through the crust into the soft flame beneath. Flame that was cold and didn’t burn.

Stone grew and spread like vegetation. There were strange shimmering pools of stuff that wasn’t water.

Everything was alive and watched her. No, not alive, but the opposite of life. Anti-life. Hard, functional, noticing continuation without existence, like an echo, a shadow, a reflection of what once was. But everything was aware of her. Everything.

The hill that was an angel had spilled its awareness. It was bleeding consciousness into the surrounding rock for miles. Like blood.

She wasn’t alone. Sad creatures wandered aimlessly among the trees. Creatures of stone. Creatures that had become stone. They were broken, cracked, abraded, but they couldn’t die. From the shelter of stunted stone birches, a great stone elk with snapped antlers and no hind legs watched her pass. There was no respite for it. It could only wait for the slow weathering of ice and wind and time that would, eventually, wear it away and blow its residuum of dust across the earth. But it would be watching, noticing dust. Cursed with the endlessness of continuation.

Stone giants were digging their way up out of the earth and walking across the top of it, breaking waist-high through stone trees. If they fell they cracked and split. Headless giants walking. Fingerless club-stump hands. Giants fallen and floundering in pools of slowed time.

The corruption was spreading, seeping outwards through the edgeless forest in all directions like an insidious stain, like lichen across rock, like blood in snow. It would never stop. It would creep outwards for ever. The forest was dying.

The angel had been shot into the forest’s belly like a bullet, bursting it open, engendering a slow, inevitable, glacial, cancerous, stone killing.

The angel was watching her. The whole of the lenticular stone waste was an eye, focused on her. She felt the gross intrusion of its attention like a fat finger, tracing the thread from her to the paluba to the great trees of the forest.

It knew. And without effort it burst the paluba open.


The explosion of the paluba drove sticks and rags and meat across the apartment, smashing furniture and shattering glass. The air companion was sucked apart like a breeze in the hurricane’s mouth.

Maroussia felt a scream in her head as the paluba tried to tuck her away in a pocket of safety. There were fragments of voice in the scream – the paluba’s voice – desperately stuffing words into the small space of her head.

The Pollandore! Open it! Open it, Maroussia! You have the key! The key is in your pocket!

And in the moment of ripping and destruction she also sensed the angel’s fear. Fear of what was in Mirgorod waiting, and fear of what she, Maroussia, could do.


Maroussia walked out of her apartment and down the stairs. Out into the street and the rain. In her pocket was a frail ball of twigs and berries, bones and wax. She wasn’t going to Koromants. Not yet.





53


Lakoba Petrov lay among the bodies of the dead. A dead face pressed against his cheek. The smell and the weight and the feel of killed people were piled up on his chest – he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe – the trench was filling up with the bodies of the dead – one by one in rows they jerked as the bullets struck them and they died – they fell – they died. Water, percolating through the stack of the dead, brimmed in his open mouth. He coughed and puked. His mouth tasted bitter and full of salt.

The soldiers clambered among the bodies, finishing off the ones who were not yet dead, the ones who moaned, or hiccupped, or moved, or wept. Petrov, who had fallen when the firing began, untouched by any bullet, lay as still as the dead under the rain and the dead.

The soldiers began to cover the bodies over with wet earth. Petrov felt the weight of it and smelled its dampness. It was as heavy as all the world. He could not draw breath. He waited.

When the time came he pulled himself out from among the bodies and the red earth and turned back towards the city. But there was no escape: the dead climbed out after him in countless number; sightless, speechless, lumbering. Dripping putrefaction and broken as they died, they climbed out from the pit and followed him, walking slowly.

What he needed now could be got only from Josef Kantor.





54


By the time Raku Vishnik got home from the House on the Purfas he was soaked, but he hardly noticed the rain. He was certain that he had found the Pollandore. What Teslom had said confirmed it. It was real, it existed, he knew where it was. He wanted to tell someone – he would tell Vissarion – he would tell Maroussia Shaumian –they would share his triumph. They would understand. And together they would make a plan. His head was turning over scenes and plots and plans as he opened the door to his apartment and walked into nightmare.

The room was destroyed. Ransacked. His furniture broken. Drawers pulled out and overturned. Papers and photographs spilled across the floor. A man in the pale brick colour uniform of the VKBD looked up from the mess they were sifting when he arrived. Two other men were sitting side by side on the sofa. Rubber overalls and galoshes over civilian clothes. Neat coils of rope put ready beside them. Two large clean knives.

‘My room,’ he said. ‘My room.’

It was the room he thought of first, though he knew, some part of him knew, that this was madness. When he’d arrived in Mirgorod twenty years before, to begin his career, he’d been able to obtain this small apartment, just for himself. The first time he closed the door behind him he had almost wept for simple joy. One afternoon soon afterwards he’d found on a stall in the Apraksin a single length of hand-blocked wallpaper – pale flowers on a dark russet ground – and put it up in the corner behind the stove. It was there now. And he’d accumulated other treasures over the years: the plain gilded mirror, only a little tarnished; the red lacquer caddy; the tinted lithograph of dancers. He looked at it now, all spilled across the floor.

‘F*ck,’ said Vishnik quietly, almost to himself. ‘F*ck.’ A tired resignation settled over him. None of it mattered now. He had known this time would come. He picked up the holdall, waiting packed by the doorway. ‘OK,’ he said to the VKBD man. ‘OK. Let’s go.’

The VKBD man took the bag from Vishnik’s hand and shut the door.

‘You won’t be needing that,’ he said. ‘We’re not going anywhere. All we need is here.’

‘What?’ said Vishnik.

‘Where is Lom? Where is the girl? Where is the file?’

‘What the f*ck is this?’ Vishnik was angry. Livid. ‘Who the f*ck are you, with your f*cking questions? Look at my room. Look what you have done. You can go f*ck yourself.’

‘Where is Lom? Where is the girl? Where is the file? Please answer.’

‘Number one,’ said Vishnik. ‘I don’t know. Number two. What girl? Number three. What f*cking file?’

The two men in rubber overalls were standing now. They picked up the couch and moved it to the middle of the room. The VKBD man repeated the questions. And then the fear came. Vishnik stumbled and almost fell. But he would not fall. He would not.

‘You,’ said Vishnik, ‘can piss for it.’

The VKBD man indicated the couch in front of him.

‘Sit down, Prince Vishnik. No, lie down. Close your eyes and think. We have plenty of time. Shout all you like. No one will come. The dvornik will have told them we are here and they’ll keep quiet until we are gone. You know this is true. No one will come to help you. Now…’ He put a hand on Vishnik’s shoulder and propelled him gently forward. ‘Please don’t feel you must attempt to endure. Prolongation of your pain is needless and inconvenient.’

‘F*ck you,’ said Vishnik. ‘F*ck you.’





55


Lom’s tram forced its way against the rising storm. The other passengers sat tightly silent, staring out through the rain-streaming windows. The air grew bruises, purple and electric. Wind burst upon the streets in panicky, erratic bellows. Ragged whorls and twisters of wind-lashed rain threw hard gobbets against roofs and windows. Within moments floodwater was gushing up through the gratings of the sewers.

The tramway was raised above it, running on embankments and viaducts. Lom watched the mounting flood through blurred glass. People caught in the streets wrapped their arms over their heads and waded for shelter. The embankments of the city overbrimmed. Canal barges and ferries were tipped out of their channels into the streets and surged about helplessly before the wind, thumping hollowly against the walls of buildings, smashing through the windows of shops and theatres and restaurants. Pale faces looked out from upper windows. Droshki drivers struggled in the teeth of the storm to cut their horses loose from their traces and let them swim. It was impossible to tell street from canal. Some people had taken to boats and sculled their way slowly between tenements and shopfronts. A few souls swam, making little progress against the currents and churn.

The tram trundled on, deeper into the city, until at last the inevitable confronted it and it lurched to a halt in a shower of sparks from the power cable overhead, up to its wheel-tops in mud-thickened surging water. In the aftermath of the engine’s surrender, wind and rain filled Lom’s ears. His first instinct was to wait where he was, but the driver was shouting at them that they had to get out.

‘The water is rising! The car will tip!’

They could already feel her shifting uneasily under the pressure of the flood. One by one they climbed down. The water was almost up to his waist, brown and icy cold.

The passengers from the tram stood in a huddle in the water, ineffectually wiping at the rain streaming down their faces, at a loss. There was a small bakery nearby, its door open, the flood lapping dully at the counter lip. Baskets and sodden loaves and pastries floated low in the water. From an upstairs casement a man in a pink shirt was beckoning, mouthing, his words lost in the rain. The others moved towards the shop, but Lom ignored him. He had to get to Pelican Quay.





56


When Lakoba Petrov came to his room, Josef Kantor’s first instinct was to shoot him out of hand. Petrov stank like shit in a ditch. He had shaved his head, and his body, always thin, was a bundle of sticks. He was sodden, weighted down with water, a drowned rat. There were smears of what looked like paint or ink on his face, as if he had been writing on himself. His pupils were dilated, wide and dark.

‘You told the girl where to find me,’ said Kantor. ‘You are an idiot, a useless fool. What are you doing here now?’

But Petrov only looked puzzled.

‘Girl?’

‘The Shaumian girl.’

Petrov waved the issue aside.

‘I have come,’ he said. ‘I am prepared. What we spoke of earlier. The great inflagration, when all things will burn. I have decided. Let it come.’

Kantor withdrew his hand from his pocket. He had been fingering his revolver, but he let it lie. Instead he sat back in his chair and regarded Petrov with an interested benevolence. He had given up on this plan, and intended to use Lidia or Stefania, but he had not been able to overcome his doubts about their reliability. Their commitment to the sacrifice that was required. If Petrov had come back to him, that was better. That would be much more satisfactory.

He smiled at Petrov.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good. I’m glad you came to me, my friend. Let us discuss what you need.’





57


Walking against the flood was a perilous business. The water was slicked with oil and foulness. A dead rat nudged against his chest and caught there. Lom slapped it away with a shudder. The cold numbed his feet; hidden kerbs and obstructions underfoot threatened to trip and duck him at every step; his cloak spread sluggishly about him on the water. There were fewer and fewer people about. The streets were being abandoned to the rising waters. Lom rounded a corner and saw a flat-bottomed boat making slow headway away from him. Lom surged ahead, shouting. The boat, already low in the water with the weight of hunched bodies, was being poled effortfully forward by a man standing in the stern. Someone saw Lom and tugged at the boatman’s sleeve. He paused to rest and let Lom catch up. Lom grabbed the gunwale with both hands and hauled himself over the side, falling heavily into the bottom among feet and sodden belongings.

‘Thank you,’ he breathed. ‘Thanks.’

‘Fifty roubles,’ said the boatman.

Lom fumbled for the money with chilled, clumsy fingers and leaned across to pay him – not fifty roubles, but all he had – rocking the boat and elbowing his neighbour. She glared at him in mute protest. The boat punted forward in silence, past the Laughing Cockerel Theatre and the sagging balconies of the Apraksin. The wind was getting up, whipping the rain into their faces, raising low, choppy waves and flecks of spray. Lom found himself shivering. At least the floods gave him time. Chazia’s people couldn’t move in this.

An argument broke out among the passengers. A group of conscripts wanted to be taken to the Armoury and were attempting to commandeer the vessel. The boatman had had enough and wanted to go home. He poled stubbornly onwards, ignoring the soldiers’ attempts to issue orders and impress upon him the urgency of his duty. The rest of the passengers looked on disconsolately, having given themselves up to events, indifferent to where they were carried as long as they stayed out of the icy, dirty water. Lom kept out of it. Neither direction suited him.

The boat was crossing a wide inundated square when the arguing soldiers fell quiet. Lom followed the direction of their gaze. There was something in the water. A smooth coil of movement. It came again, and then again: a slicker, surer movement than the wavelets chopping and jostling in the wind. Lom glimpsed a solid, steely-grey, oil-sleeked gun barrel of flesh. He thought it was an eel, but larger. Blackish flukes broke the surface without a splash and a face was watching him. A human face.

Almost human. It was the almost-humanness of the face that made it so shocking, because it wasn’t human at all. It was a soft chalky white, the white of human flesh too long in the water, with hollow eye-sockets and deep dark eyes, the nose set higher and sharper than a human nose, the mouth a straight, lipless gash. The creature raised its torso higher and higher out of the water, showing an underbelly of the same subaqueous white as the face, and heavy white breasts, with nipples like a woman’s but larger and bruise-coloured, bluish black. Below the almost-human torso, the dark tube of fluke-tailed muscle was working away. The creature’s face was watching him continuously. It knew he was there. It knew it was being watched. There was no expression on its face at all. None whatsoever.

The creature swam swiftly towards the crowded boat, its white face upturned, watching Lom intently. He saw its hollow dark eyes, its expressionless mouth slightly open. He heard a faint hiss, like an expulsion of breath. It came right up to the boat and put its hands up on the sides, and began to tug and rock it, trying to pull itself in. It had a smooth, square, white upper back, like a man’s, with a faint raised ridge the length of its spine.

‘Rusalka! Rusalka!’

The boatman was yelling, panicked, and striking at the creature with his long heavy pole. One of the conscripts shouted in protest and lunged across the thwarts to grab at his arm, but it was too late. The boatman caught the rusalka a heavy blow full on its head, and it withdrew under the water.

The soldier jumped in after it.

‘Come back!’ he was shouting. ‘Please! Come back!’

He splashed about until he was exhausted and sobbing and gulping for air. At last he let his companions pull him back into the boat. While the passengers’ attention was distracted Lom slipped over the side and waded away towards the edge of the square.





58


Krogh barely looked up when his private secretary came into the office carrying another stack of files. As always, the files would be placed in the in-tray and the completed work from the other tray would be cleared. It would be done without speaking. That was the routine. Minimal disturbance. Krogh was slightly surprised when the private secretary lingered, and walked around behind the desk to stand in the bay and look out of the windows. The rain was pouring in sheets out of the ruinous, bruised sky.

‘The floods are rising,’ the private secretary said.

Krogh grunted. The interruption irritated him. He was already unsettled following the call from Lom.

‘I won’t go home tonight,’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep in the flat. I may need to speak to the Novozhd later. There’s no need for you to stay, Pavel. Go home now before the bridges are closed.’

‘It’s too late for that.’

There was something in the private secretary’s tone that surprised him.

‘Well,’ said Krogh, ‘get them to find a launch to take you. Tell them I said so. I don’t want you any more, not till tomorrow.’

‘There was a message from Commander Chazia.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That you were a stupid old f*cker.’

Krogh realised too late how close behind him the private secretary had come. The loop of wire was round his neck before he could react. It tightened, cutting into the folds of his flesh. He felt it slicing. Felt the warm blood spill down his neck inside his collar. It splashed the papers on his desk. He tried to get his fingers inside the wire, but could not. His fingers slipped on the blood. He felt the wire cut them. He tried to stand up, he tried to fight, he tried to call out, but the private secretary was leaning away from him, pulling at his neck with the wire loop, tipping him backwards, unbalancing him. He tried to throw himself sideways but the private secretary hauled him upright. No sound could escape from his constricted throat. He could get no air in. He felt the back of his chair digging into his head. It hurt. Then he died.





59


When Maroussia Shaumian reached the building where Raku Vishnik lived, she found the street door shut against the rising waters. She pushed it open and waded into the dim, flooded hall. Her splashing echoed oddly. She felt the weight of her sodden clothes dragging at her as she climbed the stairs to Apartment 4. The door was ajar.

‘Raku?’ she called softly. ‘Raku? It’s Maroussia.’

There was no answer. She pushed the door open and went in.

What was left of Vishnik lay on the couch, adrift on a sea of littered paper and broken household stuff. He was naked, on his back, his arms and legs lashed by neat bindings to the legs of the couch. There was blood. A lot of blood. Three fingers of his right hand were gone.

She must have made some sound – she didn’t know what – because he turned his pulped and swollen face in her direction. He was watching her with his one open eye. She had thought he was dead.

She went across the room to him. He was moving his mouth. He might have been speaking but she couldn’t hear him over the sound of the rain against the windows. She knelt down beside him. The water from her dress soaked the drift of notebooks and scattered photographs.

‘Maroussia—’ he said. ‘I didn’t…’

What should I do? she thought. What should I do?

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll help you.’ What should I do? She tried to undo one of the knots, but it was tight and slippery with blood. Her fingers tugged at it uselessly. ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Who did this? What can I do, Raku?’

‘I found it,’ said Vishnik. He was staring at her with his one remaining eye. They had taken the other one. ‘It’s here and I found it. I didn’t tell them what I know.’

‘It’s OK, Raku,’ she said. ‘It’s OK.’

‘No. I want to tell you. I wanted to. I was going to.’ He tried to raise his head from the couch. There was blood in his mouth. ‘I found it. I found it. And they were here… But they didn’t get it. Even they… even they are human. And stupid.’

‘Raku?’

He laid his head back against the couch. His mouth fell partly open. His face was empty. He was gone.

Maroussia stood up. She was trembling.

I need to get out of here. I need to get out of here now.

The horror of the thing on the couch – what they had done to him… She could not stay. It was impossible. But the storm was raging outside, and the floods… She had almost not made it here. Where could she go? How?

She went to the window, parted the curtains and looked out into storming darkness. The casement was rattling in its frame; the reflection of the room behind her flexed as the panes bowed under the force of the wind. She pressed her face against the glass, trying to see.

The street lamps were out. The only faint light came from the windows of neighbouring houses, but she could see by their glimmering reflection on the waves down below that the flood had risen further. There must have been ten to fifteen feet of surging water in the street, whipped into choppy, spray-spilling peaks.

And there was a boat.

A diesel launch was nosing its way up the flooded street, half a dozen uniformed men in the open stern, hunching their shoulders against the rain, MILITIA OF MIRGOROD in white lettering on the roof of the cabin.


She heard a movement in the room behind her, and spun round, thinking wildly that it was Vishnik, raising himself somehow from the couch.

But it was Lom.

‘We have to get out,’ said Maroussia ‘We have to go. They’re outside now. They have a boat.’

‘I know,’ said Lom. ‘I saw them.’ He was looking at Vishnik. ‘I came for him.’

‘Raku’s dead,’ said Maroussia. ‘He was… He spoke to me when I got here, he said… he said he told them nothing.’

‘He had nothing to tell. They didn’t need to do this.’

From down below there came the sound of hollow thumping, wood striking against wood, heavily. Glass breaking.

‘There’s no time,’ said Maroussia. ‘We have to go now.’

Lom stood looking at Vishnik for a moment.

‘Take the stairs,’ he said. ‘Not the lift. Go up. In houses like this the roof space is usually open from house to house. All the way to the end of the row if you’re lucky. Keep going up. You’ll find a way.’

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I’ll keep them occupied. You can find a boat on the quay.’

‘They’ll kill you,’ said Maroussia.

‘They won’t,’ said Lom. ‘Not straight away. They need to know what I’ve done. They need to be sure.’

Maroussia shook her head. ‘Come with me,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Lom.

Maroussia hesitated. There was another crash from downstairs. A shout.

‘Shit,’ said Lom. ‘Just go. You need to go. Please.’

There was nothing else to say. She turned away from him and went out of the door.





60


When Maroussia had gone, Lom went to the lift cage and pressed the button to summon the car. The mechanism juddered loudly into life. The lift was on one of the upper floors, and it took agonising moments to descend. When it reached him, he pulled open the cage and stepped inside, pressed the button for the basement and stepped back out again. There was a splash when it hit the water below. It wouldn’t be coming back, not with the weight of water inside it. That left only the stairwell.

He went to the top of the stairs. He would see down one flight and the landing below. He checked the gun. Checked it again.

A quiet voice. The sound of boots. A face peering up from the landing below.

Lom fired high. The shot struck the wall above the man’s head, and he ducked out of sight.

‘Lom?’ It was Safran’s voice. ‘Lom? Is that you? What are you hoping to achieve?’

Lom fired another shot down the stairwell.

‘Don’t try to come up,’ he called. ‘I’ll shoot anyone I see. I won’t fire high again.’

‘There are six of us, Lom. You haven’t got a chance.’

‘I’ve got boxfuls of shells. I’m very patient.’

‘You’re mad.’

Lom said nothing. The longer he could hold them here, the more time he would give Maroussia.

‘We can rush you, Lom. Any time we want. You can’t shoot us all.’

‘Who’s first then?’

‘How’s your friend, Lom? How’s Prince Vishnik?’ Lom felt the anger rising inside him. ‘He liked you, Lom. Did you know that? He called your name a lot. When he wasn’t squealing like a pig.’

‘You bastard—’ Lom stopped. Safran was goading him. He mustn’t let it distract him. He waited. ‘Safran?’ he called. But there was no answer. The silence stretched. Nothing happened. Lom waited.

Someone appeared on the landing below. A face. An arm. Throwing something. Lom fired too late.

The grenade bounced off the wall and skittered towards him. Instinctively he kicked out at it, a panicky jab of his foot that almost missed completely, but the outside edge of his shoe connected. The clumsy kick sliced the grenade against the skirting board. It bounced off and rolled back down the stairs, two or three steps at a time. Lom lurched back, protecting his face with his arm.

The explosion sucked the air down the stairwell and then burst it back up. The noise was too loud to be heard as sound; it was just a slamming pain inside his head. Lom stumbled dizzily.

As he leaned against the wall, trying to clear his head, trying not to vomit, it dawned on him that the sawing, hiccupping sounds he was hearing were someone else’s pain.

He looked up in time to see a uniform looming up the stairs. He fired towards it wildly and the uniform retreated.

Something – a sound, a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye – made him turn. Safran was behind him, only a few yards away, his revolver raised.

Shit. The lift shaft. He climbed it.

As Lom swung round, he saw the satisfaction in Safran’s pale eyes. There was no time to react. Safran clubbed him viciously on the side of his head. On the temple. And again.

Lom’s world swam sickeningly, his balance went and he fell.


Two militia men were holding his arms behind his back. Safran’s pale eyes were looking into his. Lom tried to tense the muscles in his midriff, but when the blow came, hard, he folded and tried to drop to his knees. The men held him up.

Lom hauled at the air with his mouth but no breath would go in. Safran pulled his head up by the hair to see his face and hit him again. And again. When the men dropped his arms, he went down and curled up on the floor, knees tucked in against his chin, trying to protect himself. At last he was able to suck in some air, noisily. A sticky line of spit trailed from his mouth to the floor.

‘You,’ said Safran, ‘are nothing. You are made of shit.’





61


The room they left him in was stiflingly hot. It must have been somewhere deep inside the Lodka: there were no windows, just shadowless electric light from a reinforced glass recess in the ceiling. Some sort of interview room. A wooden table in the centre of floor, two chairs facing each other across it, another two along the wall. Green walls, a peeling linoleum floor and, around the edges of the room, solid, heavy iron pipes, bolted strongly to the wall and scalding hot to the touch. Leather straps were wrapped loosely around them, and there were stains and dried stuff stuck on the pipes. There were stains on the floor too. Dark brown. Through the door came the sound of a distant bell, footsteps, muffled yelling and shouting. It was impossible to tell what time it was. Whether it was night or day.

Every part of him hurt. His left eye was closed. It felt swollen and tender to the touch. His fingers came away sticky with drying blood. His head was throbbing. There was a dull pain and an empty sickness in his midriff. A sharp jabbing in his ribs when he moved. No serious damage had been done. Not yet. He had been lucky or, more likely, Safran had been careful.

He tried the door. It was locked. He sat at the table, facing the door, and waited, trying to keep the image of Vishnik on the couch – what they had done to him – out of his mind. He would settle with Safran for that.

He found himself thinking about Maroussia Shaumian. Her face. The darkness under her eyes. She had been holding herself together but the effort was perceptible. There had been a ragged wound across her cheek. He hoped she was far away. He hoped he would see her again.


When he heard the key turn in the lock, he thought about standing up to face them, but didn’t trust his body to straighten, so he stayed where he was. The man in the doorway was wearing a dark fedora and a heavy grey coat, unbuttoned, over a red silk shirt. His face was thin and pockmarked under a few days’ growth of beard.

Lom had seen him before. In the old photograph on Krogh’s file. In the marching crowd. As a statue half a mile in the sky, looking out across another Mirgorod, a city that didn’t exist, not yet. The whisperers’ Mirgorod. His Mirgorod. This was him.

The half-mile-high man laid his hat on the table, hung his coat on the back of the other chair and sat down facing Lom. His hair was straight and cut long, thickly piled, a dark of no particular colour, unusually abundant and lustrous, brushed back from his face without a parting. The red silk of his shirt was crumpled and needed washing. Close up, his eyes were dark and brown, with a surprising, direct intensity. It was like looking into street-fires burning. The man let his hands rest, relaxed and palm-down on the table, but all the time he was watching Lom’s face with those deep, dark brown eyes in which the earth was burning.

‘Kantor,’ said Lom. ‘Josef Kantor.’

‘You’re an interesting fellow, Investigator,’ said Kantor. ‘Stubborn. Clever. Courageous. A policeman who steps outside the rules.’ He paused, but Lom said nothing. Every word was to be wrung from him. Nothing offered for free. He regretted he’d spoken at all. He’d given too much away already. In interrogations, there was as much to learn for the subject as for the interrogator. What did they know? What did they not? What did they need? The silence in the room continued. It became a kind of battle. Eventually, Kantor smiled. ‘You react as I would,’ he said. ‘Observe, learn, give nothing away. That’s good.’

Lom said nothing. Kantor leaned back in his chair.

‘So. Here we are. I wanted some time alone with you before Lavrentina comes. She’ll be here soon, I’m afraid, and after that it won’t be possible for us to speak like this any more. Which for me is genuinely regrettable.’ Kantor looked at his watch. ‘You’ve impressed me. Do you want to know what time it is? Ask me, and I’ll tell you.’

Lom said nothing.

‘Would you like to smoke?’ He laid a packet of cigarettes on the table. ‘Oh please, say something. We both know the game. I’ve been beaten myself, in rooms like this one. You ask yourself, will I be brave? But it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference. Lavrentina will come soon, and that won’t be the kind of roughhouse you and I are used to.’

The strangest thing about Kantor, thought Lom, was that, despite all he knew about him, he was attractive. He turned interrogation into a teasing game. He made himself charming, fun to be with. You sensed his strength and power and his capacity for cruelty, but somehow that made you want him to look after you. He might kill you, but he might also love you.

‘Perhaps you’re still hoping you’ll be able to deliver Lavrentina’s stupid file to Krogh. Perhaps you’re thinking, Krogh is arresting Chazia even as we speak. He will come through the door any moment now and rescue me. But that isn’t going to happen.’ Kantor paused, and looked into Lom’s eyes with warm sympathy. ‘We found the files in the bathroom. And Krogh is dead. She had to do that, didn’t she, after that telephone call?’

Lom felt his defences crumbling. He was tired and scared and weak and sick.

‘You killed him, actually,’ Kantor was saying. ‘Of course you did. You knew you were doing it at the time. At least, you were indifferent whether it happened or not. See why you interest me, Lom? I see something of myself in you, as a matter of fact. And you killed Vishnik too.’

‘No!’

‘What do you want to know, Lom? Go on, ask me something and I will answer, I promise, even if only to repay the pleasure of having finally got you to speak. I have to get something out of you before Chazia does. You have the advantage of me: you’ve seen my file. Tell me about it. What does it say?’

It was as if he had been reading Lom’s thought processes in his face.

‘Chazia thinks she can use you,’ said Lom. ‘But she’s wrong, isn’t she? You’re using her. The question is, what for? What do you want, Kantor?’

‘Ha!’ cried Kantor. ‘You wonderful man! You do see to the heart of things, don’t you? You’re right, that is the biggest question. No one, not even the angel, has asked it until now.’

‘You owe me an answer.’

‘I do.’

‘So answer.’

‘Have you ever wondered where the angels come from?’

Surprised, Lom shook his head. ‘The stars, I guess,’ he said. ‘The planets. Outer space. Galaxies.’

‘Exactly. And what about that? We hardly consider it, do we? They arrive, and we take them for signs and wonders. Messages about us. Who is justified, who not? What clever machines can we make of their dying flesh? It’s all so narrow and trivial, don’t you think? As if this one damp and cooling world with its broken moons was all there is. The Vlast looks inwards and backwards all the time. But we’re seeing angels the wrong way round. What they tell us is, there are other worlds, other suns, countless millions of them; you only have to look up in the night to see them. And we can go there. We can move among them. Humankind spreading out across the sky, advancing from star to star.’

‘Impossible,’ said Lom.

Kantor slammed his hand on the table. ‘Of course it’s possible. It’s not even a matter of doubt. The engineering is straightforward. Like everything else, it is only a matter of paying the price. A few generations of collective sacrifice is all that’s needed. The fruit of the stars is there to be harvested. That’s our future. I know it. I’ve seen it in the voice of the angel. A thousand thousand glittering vessels rising into the sky and unfolding their sails and crossing the emptiness between stars. All it requires is ingenuity. Effort. Organisation. Purpose. Sacrifice. The deferment of pleasure. Imagine a Vlast of a thousand suns. That would be worth something. Can you see that, Lom? Can you imagine it? Can you share that great ambition?’

It seemed to be an honest question. It might have been a genuine offer, a door out of the torture room.

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. I can’t.’

‘Ah,’ said Kantor and shrugged. ‘Pity.’

The door opened and Lavrentina Chazia came in.


Archangel unfurls his mind like a leaf across the continent.

The dead dig trenches to bury themselves.

The dead ride long slow cattle trains eastwards, the streets behind them empty, the walls fallen from their houses, their wallpaper open to the rain, their home-stuff spilled across the streets. The smell of wet, burned buildings enriches the air.

Grey-haired young men with ears turned to bone.

A naked corpse lies at the foot of the slope; a lunar brilliance streams across the dead legs stuck apart.

Conscripts in trenches kiss their bullets in the dark and drink the snow.

Corpses awaiting collection stiffen like thorn trees.

Men and women hang by the neck from balconies on long ropes, like sausages in a delicatessen window.

I becoming We.

The clock and the calendar reset to zero.

Everything starts from here.

Archangel – voice of history, muse of death – reaches out across his world – the is and the will-be-soon – touching its unfolding – tasting its texture with his mind’s tongue – testing it with his mind’s fingers – it is satisfaction – it is joy – it is hope. The stars are coming, and the space between them.

And yet – and still – nearby but out of reach – the tireless egg of time glimmers diminutively in the massy dark – his future tinctured still with the edge of fear.


Chazia had brought a carpet bag with her, which she set on the table and began to unpack. Lom watched as she unrolled a chamois containing an array of small tools: blades, pliers, a steel-headed hammer.

Kantor picked up his hat and cigarettes and withdrew to a chair at the edge of the room. He laid the hat on his lap and folded his arms across it. It seemed like an instinctive act of self-protection. It wasn’t deference. It might have been distaste.

‘There is only one subject of interest to us, Investigator,’ said Chazia. ‘The whereabouts of Maroussia Shaumian, the daughter of Josef’s late wife. That is all. There is nothing else. The sooner we have exhausted that topic, the sooner we can leave this unpleasant room.’

His flimsy constructions of hope and defence crumbled. He said nothing.

‘Major Safran saw you talk to her, and now we can’t find her. I think you know where she has gone.’

‘He won’t speak,’ said Kantor. ‘He’s playing dumb.’

Chazia came round to Lom’s side of the table and knelt beside him. She began to bind him with leather straps like the collars of dogs. She fixed his hands to the legs of the chair, so that his arms hung down at his sides, and then she bound his ankles to the chair legs as well. Her face was close to his lap. Her breasts were pressing against the rough material of her uniform blouson. The patches on her skin didn’t look like stone, they were stone. Angel stone.

She worked with methodical care, her breathing shallow and rapid. The fear was a dry, silent roaring in Lom’s head. He wanted to speak now, to tell her everything, but his mouth had no moisture in it and he could not.

‘You were a promising policeman, Investigator,’ she was saying as she worked. ‘Krogh thought he’d been clever, spotting you, but it was my doing, actually. Didn’t you guess? I keep track of all Savinkov’s experiments. You’d never have been able to get at Laurits if I hadn’t let you. We fed you the evidence, of course. Laurits was lazy, and brazen with it. I thought it would be a good idea to let you take him down, if you could. Keep the others on their toes. I had it in mind to bring you to Mirgorod myself, if you succeeded. A career open to talent, that’s what the Vlast should be. But Krogh got you first, and it has come to this. A pity.’

Lom tried to focus on her, but his vision was blurry. What was she saying? He wasn’t sure. His gaze was drawn back to the line of implements ready on the desk.

‘Oh no,’ said Chazia. ‘It won’t be like that. Excruciation has many uses, but collecting information quickly isn’t one of them. Torture is good for encouraging demoralisation and fear – for every one person put to pain, a thousand fear it – and it binds the torturers closer to us. But none of that is relevant in your case. Such methods were ineffective on your friend Vishnik, and I doubt they would be more so with you. On this occasion I require the truth quickly, and there is a better way. You may find the method professionally interesting.’

She took a piece of some dark stuff from her bag and pulled it onto her right hand. It was a long, loose-fitting glove made of a heavy substance something like rubber, but it wasn’t rubber. She held it out for him to see. It had a slightly reddish lustrous sleekness like wet seal fur.

‘Angel skin,’ she said, though he knew that already. He had read of such things. This was a Worm. Chazia took a flask out of her bag and held it up to Lom’s face. He jerked his head aside.

‘It’s only water,’ she said. ‘Drink a little if you like.’

He nodded, and she unscrewed the cap and held the flask to his dry lips, tipping it up to let him take a sip. He sluiced the water around carefully in his mouth and let it trickle down his throat as slowly as he could. Without warning, she tipped the rest of it over his head. It was ice-cold. Lom shouted at the shock of it.

‘It helps,’ said Chazia. ‘I don’t know why.’

She brought her chair round from the other side of the desk and sat beside him, placing her angel-gloved hand on his face. He flinched. His skin crawled.

‘Ask him, Josef,’ she said quietly, with suppressed excitement. ‘Ask him.’

Kantor came and stood by him. His eyes were hard and dispassionately curious. The smouldering earth flickered deep inside them.

‘Where is my wife’s bastard daughter, Vissarion? Maroussia Shaumian? Where is she now?’

Lom felt something disgusting slithering about on the surface of his mind, and pushed it instinctively away. He closed his thoughts against it and concentrated on Kantor’s face. He imagined himself drawing it, like a draughtsman, meticulously. He examined its lines, contours and shadows.

See it as an object. See the surface only.

Chazia grunted in surprise, and Lom felt her push the Worm harder against the defences he had built. Her hand inside the obscene glove tightened, gripping his face where before she had only touched. He shut his mind more firmly against her. Kantor asked the question again.

Fall back to the second line of defence. Tell them something they already know. Let them believe they are making progress.

He ignored Chazia and looked into Kantor’s eyes.

I can do this.

‘I saw Miss Shaumian this morning, for the first and last time. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I’ve lost track of time. I saw her on the occasion of the summary execution in the street of her mother, Feiga-Ita Shaumian, wife of Josef Kantor, by Major Safran of the Mirgorod Militia. Miss Shaumian also observed this execution, and afterwards she walked away. I do not know where she went. I have not seen her since.’

Kantor returned his gaze impassively. If the words meant anything to him he did not show it. Lom felt Chazia remove her hand from his face.

‘Nothing,’ she said to Kantor. ‘Hold his head please.’

Kantor walked around the desk to stand behind him and put his arm across Lom’s throat, under his chin, pulling him backwards until he was choking, and all he could see was the recessed light in the ceiling. Kantor’s other hand gripped his hair so that his head was held firmly.

Chazia’s face came into his line of view. He saw the fine blade in her hand, but it was only when she placed it against the skin of his forehead that he realised what she was going to do.

Repel! Repel!

He drove his mind against her with all his strength, trying to ball up the air in the room and throw it at her.

Nothing happened.

‘The vyrdalak reported that you could do that,’ said Chazia. ‘No wonder Savinkov sealed you up.’ She touched the stone rind in her face and smiled. ‘Quite useless here, of course.’

He felt her begin to cut.

Chazia didn’t find it easy to get the embedded piece of angel stone out of his forehead. She had to dig and gouge and pry with considerable force. She tried several different implements. The pain went on for ever. Lom choked and fought for breath and closed his eyes against the blood that pooled in their sockets and seeped under the lids. He might have screamed. He wasn’t sure.

At last it stopped. Kantor released his hold on Lom’s head and let it fall forward. Lom was gasping for breath. His eyes were blinded with blood and his nose was filled with it, but his hands were bound at his sides and he could do nothing about that. He hadn’t fainted while it was happening, and he didn’t faint afterwards. Fainting would have been easier, but it didn’t come.

Kantor was leaning over him.

‘Is that the brain in there?’ he said to Chazia.

Kantor’s finger probed the hole in his forehead.

‘It’s firmer than I would have thought.’

He jabbed harder. Lom felt no pain, only a deep, woozy sickness.

‘Don’t, Josef,’ said Chazia. ‘Don’t damage it yet.’

Then Lom fainted.