Wolfhound Century

10


Josef Kantor was reading at his desk. The window of his room stood open. He liked how night sharpened the sounds and perfumes of the wharf. He liked to let it into his room. There was no need for the lamp: arc lights and glare and spark-showers flickered across the pages of his book. There was no better light to read by. The light of men working. The light of the future.

He heard the quiet footfall on wet paving, the footsteps climbing the iron staircase. One person alone. A woman, probably. He was waiting in the shadow just outside his door when she reached the top, his hand in his jacket pocket nursing his revolver. He made sure she was in the light and he was not.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I meant never to come here, but I had no choice.’

A group of men just off their shift were coming up the alleyway, talking loudly. Curious glances at the woman on the staircase. She wasn’t the kind you saw in the yard at night. They would remember. Kantor didn’t need that sort of attention.

‘Go in,’ said Kantor.

He followed her into the room and lit the lamp. He saw that she was young – early twenties, maybe – and thin. Her hands were rough and red from manual work, her wrists bony against the dark fabric of her sleeves, but her face was filled with life and intelligence. Thick black hair, cut short around her neck, fell across her brow, curled and wet. It had been raining earlier, though now it was not. Her coat was made of thin, poor stuff, little use against the weather, but, fresh and flushed from the cold, she brought an outside air into the room, not the industry and commerce of the shipyards but fresh earth and wet leaves. She met his gaze without hesitation: her eyes looking into his were bright and dark.

There was something about her. It unsettled at him. She was not familiar, exactly, but there was a quality in her that he almost recognised, though he couldn’t place it.

‘You’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Wrong person. Wrong place.’

‘No. You’re Josef Kantor.’

Kantor didn’t like his name spoken by strangers.

‘I’ve told you. You’re mistaken,’ he said. ‘You’re confusing me with someone else.’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘This is important. I’m not going until we’ve talked. You owe me that.’

She took off her coat, draped it over the back of a chair and sat down. Underneath the coat she was wearing a knitted cardigan of dark green wool. Severe simplicity. Her throat was bare and her breasts were small inside the cardigan. Kantor was curious.

‘Since you refuse to leave,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell me who you are.’

‘I’m your daughter.’

Kantor looked at her blankly. He was, for once, surprised. Genuinely surprised.

‘I have no daughter,’ he said.

‘Yes, you do. It’s me. I am Maroussia Shaumian.’

It took Kantor a moment to adjust. He had not expected this, but he should have: of course he should. He had known there was a child, the Shaumian woman’s child, the child of the frightened woman he’d married all those years ago, before Vig, before everything. That affair had been a young man’s mistake: but, he realised now, it had been a far worse mistake to let them live. He studied the young woman more carefully.

‘So,’ he said at last. ‘You are that girl. How did you find me?’

‘Lakoba Petrov told me where you were.’

‘Petrov? The painter? You should choose better friends than Petrov.’

‘I haven’t come here to talk about my friends.’

‘No?’ said Kantor. ‘So what is this? A family talk? I am not interested in families.’

Maroussia put her hand in the pocket of her cardigan and brought out a small object cupped in her hand. She held it out to him. It was a thing like a nest, a rough ball made of twigs and leaves, fine bones and dried berries held together with blobs of yellowish wax and knotted grass. ‘I want you to tell me what this is,’ she said.

Kantor took it from her. As soon as he held it, everything in the room was the wrong size, too big and too small at the same time, the angles dizzy, the floor dropping away precipitously at his feet. The smell of resinous trees and damp earth was strong in the air. The forest presence. Kantor hadn’t felt it for more than twenty years. He had forgotten how much he hated it. He swallowed back the feeling of sickness that rose in his throat and moved to throw the disgusting thing onto the fire.

‘Don’t!’ Maroussia snatched it back from him. ‘Do you know what it is?’ she said. ‘Do you know what it means?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Where did you get it?’

‘Mother has them. I stole this one from her. I don’t know where she gets them from, but I think they come from the forest, or have something to do with it.’

‘Nothing useful ever came from that muddy rainy chaos world under the trees. That’s all just shit. So much shit.’

‘I think these things are important.’

‘Then ask your mother what they are.’

‘She can’t tell me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Do you really not know? Don’t you know anything about us at all? You could have found out, if you wanted to.’

It was true. He could have taken steps. He had considered it while he was at Vig, after the Shaumian woman had left him, and later. But it would have meant asking questions. He had told himself it was better to share with no one the knowledge of their existence. That had been stupid. He could see that, now. Now, it was obvious.

‘My mother isn’t well,’ the girl was saying. ‘She hasn’t been well for years. In her mind, I mean. She’s always frightened. She thinks bad things are happening and she is being watched. Followed. She never goes out, and she’s always muttering about the trees. For months now these things have been appearing in our room. I’ve seen three or four, but I think there have been more. She pulls them apart and throws them away. She won’t say anything about them, but she keeps talking about something that happened in Vig. Something that happened when she went into the trees.’

‘You should forget about all that,’ said Kantor. ‘Forget the past. Detach yourself. Forget this nostalgia for the old muddy places. Trolls and witches in the woods. These stories aren’t meant to be believed. Their time is finished.’

‘They’re not stories. They’re real. And they’re here. They’re in the city. The city was built on top of it, but the old world is still here.’ She held up the little ball of twigs and stuff. ‘These are real. These are important. They’re from the forest, and my mother is meant to understand something, but she doesn’t. Something happened to her in the forest long ago. And…‘ She hesitated. ‘She keeps talking about the Pollandore. I need you to tell me what happened then. I need you to tell me about the Pollandore.’

For the second time, Kantor was genuinely startled. Whatever he had expected her to say, it was not that.

‘The Pollandore?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t exist.’

‘I don’t believe that. I need you to tell me about it. And tell me about my mother. What happened to her in the forest? It’s all connected. I need to understand it. I have a right to know. You’re my father. You have to tell me.’

Kantor was tired of playing games. It was time to end this. End the pretence. Open her eyes. Peel back the lids. Make the child stare at some truth.

‘I’m not your father,’ he said.

She stared at him.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What do you mean? Yes you are.’

‘That’s what your mother told you, apparently, but she lied. Of course she lied. She always lied. How could I be your father? She would not… your mother would not… She refused me… For months. Before she became pregnant. She went into the trees. She kept going there. And then she abandoned me and ran back home to Mirgorod. You’re not my child. I’m not your father. I couldn’t be.’

There was raw shock in her face.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You’re lying.’

But he saw that she did believe him.

‘What does it matter, anyway?’ he said. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘It matters,’ she said. ‘It matters to me.’

‘Hoping for a cuddle from Daddy? Then ask your mother who he is. If you can get any sense out of the old bitch.’

The girl was staring at him. Her face was white and set hard. Blank like a mask. So be it. She would not look to him for help again.

‘You bastard,’ she said quietly. ‘You bastard.’

‘Technically, that’s you. The forest whore’s bastard daughter.’

‘F*ck you.’


After she had gone Kantor extinguished the lamp again and sat for a long time, considering carefully. The girl’s visit had stirred old memories. Vig. The forest edge. The Pollandore. He’d thought he had eradicated such things. Killed and forgotten them. But they were only repressed. And the repressed always returns. The girl had said that.

He should have done something about the Shaumian women long ago: that he had not done so revealed a weakness he hadn’t known was in him, and such weakness was dangerous. More than that, the girl was a threat in her own right. She was rank with the forest, and surprisingly strong. She had caused him to show his weakness to her. He would have to do something: the necessity of that was clear at last. He must end it now. He was glad she had come. Laying bare weakness was the first step to becoming stronger. In the familiar dialectic of fear and killing, only the future mattered. Only the future was at stake.





11


Maroussia Shaumian walked out through the night din and confusion of the dockyard and on into nondescript streets of tenements and small warehouses. She was trembling. She needed to think, but she could not. There was too much. She walked. Wanting to be tired. Not wanting to go home. Scarcely noticing where she went.

There was rain in the air and more rain coming, a mass of dark low cloud building towards the east, but overhead there were gaps of clear blackness and stars. She didn’t know what time it was. Late.

She came at last to the Stolypin Embankment: a row of globe lamps along the parapet, held up by bronze porpoises. Glistening cobbles under lamplight. Beyond the parapet, she felt more than saw the slow-moving Mir, sliding out into the Reach, barges and late water taxis still pushing against the black river. The long, punctuated reflections of their navigation lights trickled towards her, and the talk of the boatmen carried across the water, intimate and quiet. She couldn’t make out the words: it felt like language from another country. A gendarme was observing her from his kiosk, but she ignored him and went to sit on a bench, watching the wide dark river, its flow, its weight, its stillness in movement. She took the knotted nest of forest stuff out of her pocket and held it to her face, breathing in its strange earthy perfume. Filling her lungs.

And then it happened, as it sometimes did.

A tremble of movement crossed the black underside of the clouds, like wind across a pool, and the buildings of the night city prickled; the nap of the city rising, uneasy, anxious. Maroussia waited, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The rain-freighted clouds settled into a new shape. And then, suddenly, the solidity of Mirgorod stone and iron broke open and slid away, vertiginously. The blackness and ripple of the water detached itself from the river and slipped upwards, filling the air, and everything changed. The night was thick with leaking possibilities. Soft evaporations. Fragments and intimations of other possible lives, drifting off the river and across the dirty pavements. Hopes, like moon-ghosts, leaking out of the streets.

The barges, swollen and heavy-perfumed, dipped their sterns and raised their bows, opening their mouths as if to speak, exhaling shining yellow. The porpoises threw their mist-swollen, corn-gold lamp-globes against the sky. The cobbles of the wharf opened their petals like peals of blue thunder. The stars were large and luminous night-blue fruit. And the gendarme in his kiosk was ten feet tall, spilling streams of perfume and darkshine from his face and skin and hair.

Everything dark shone with its own quiet radiance and nothing was anything except what it was. Maroussia felt the living profusion of it all, woven into bright constellations of awareness, spreading out across the city. She looked at her own hands. They were made of dark wet leaves. And then the clouds closed over the stars and it started to rain in big slow single drops, and Mirgorod settled in about her again, as it always did.





12


It was late when Lom got out of Krogh’s office. The streets about the Lodka were deserted. Shuttered and lightless offices. The wind threw pellets of rain in his face. Water spurted from downpipes and spouts and overflowing gutters, splashing on the pavements. Occasionally a private kareta passed him, windows up, blinds drawn.

In his valise he had a folder of newspaper clippings – accounts of attacks and atrocities attributed to Kantor and his people, Krogh had said – and one photograph, old and poorly developed, of Kantor himself, taken almost twenty years ago, at the time of his transfer to Vig. And he had a mission. A real job to do. At last. Mirgorod spread out around him, rumbling quietly in the dark of rain and night. A million people, and somewhere among them Josef Kantor. And behind him, shadow people. Poison in the system. The ache in his head had gone, but it had left him hungry. He needed something to eat. He needed a place to stay. He needed a way in. A starting point. He wished he’d asked Krogh about money.

In his pocket he had Raku Vishnik’s address: an apartment somewhere on Big Side. He had a vague idea of where it was, somewhere to the north, beyond the curve of the River Mir. Not more than a couple of miles. He had no money for a hotel, and he didn’t want to pay for a droshki ride, even if he could find one. He would go to Raku. Assuming he was still there. Lom buttoned his cloak to the neck and started to walk. A fresh deluge dashed against his face and trickled down his neck. A long black ZorKi Zavod armoured sedan purred past him, chauffeur-driven, darkened black windows, the rain glittering in its headlamp beams. White-walled tyres splashing through pools in the road. Lom hunched his shoulders and kept moving.

The hypnotic rhythm of walking. The sound of water against stone. As he walked, Lom thought about the city. Mirgorod. He’d never seen it before, but all his life he had lived with the idea of it. The great capital, the Founder’s city, the heart of the Vlast. Even as a child, long before the idea of joining the police had taken shape, the dream of Mirgorod had taken root in his imagination. He remembered the moment. Memories rose out of the wet streets. He was back in Podchornok, at the Institute of Truth. Seven years old. Eight. It was another day of rain, but he was in the library, looking out. He liked the library: there were deep, tall windows, their sills wide enough to climb up onto and crouch there. Although it was grey daylight, he pulled the curtain shut and he was alone: on one side the heavy curtain, and on the other the windowpane, rain splattering against it and running in little floods down the outside of the glass. Beyond the window, the edge of the wood – not the forest, just an ordinary wood, rain-darkened, leafless under a low grey sky. And him, reading by rainlight.

He even remembered the book he had been reading. The Life of our Founder: A Version for Children. The chapter on the founding of Mirgorod. There was an illustration of the Founder on horseback, accompanied by his retinue on lesser horses. They had drawn to a halt on a low hummock surrounded by flat empty marshland, and the Founder had thrust his great sword upright into the bog.

‘Here!’ he said. ‘Here shall our city stand.’

It was a famously preposterous location for a city. The ground was soft and marshy, scattered with low outcrops of rock like islands among the rough grass and reedy pools and soft, silken mud. No human settlement within two hundred versts. No road. No safe harbour. Nothing. Yet here the Founder had said, because he could see what all his counsellors and diplomats and soldiers could not. He could see the great River Mir reaching the ocean. He could see that the river was linked by deep inland lakes and other rivers and easy portages to the whole continent to the east. He could see that to the west lay great oceans. Only the Founder could see that this lonely place was not the back end of nowhere but a window on the world.

‘We can’t build a city in this awful place!’ the Founder’s retinue cried, splashing knee-deep in the mud, their horses struggling and stumbling.

‘Yes,’ the Founder had said. ‘We can. We will.’


‘Hey, you!’

Lom was passing a small shop of some kind, still open. A man came lurching out.

‘Hey, come on. Drink with us.’

Lom ignored him.

‘Wait. That’s my cloak. Give it me, you bastard. You stole my cloak.’

Lom fingered his cosh. The length of hard rubber, sheathed with silk, rested in a specially tailored pocket in the sleeve of his shirt, near the wrist. He undid the small button that let it slip into his hand and turned.

‘You’d better go back inside,’ he said.

The man saw the weapon in his hand. Stared at him, swaying slightly.

‘Ah, f*ck you,’ he said, and turned away.

Lom walked on, deeper into the city. Kantor’s city. But his city too: he would make it so. He was the hunter, the good policeman, the unafraid. He passed a bar, but it was closed and dark. Its name written on the window in flaking gold paint. The Ouspensky Angel. When, in the last years of the Founder’s reign, the first dying angel had fallen from the sky and crashed into the Ouspenskaya Marsh, it had been taken as a sign of acknowledgement and consecration. Over the centuries the stone of the angel’s limbs had been used to furnish protection for the Lodka and other great buildings, and to make mudjhiks to garrison the city, but its torso had been left to lie where it still was, visible to all newcomers as they arrived in the city. The Life of our Founder had a picture of the falling angel and a simple sketch map of ‘Mirgorod Today’ showing the cobweb of streets and canals, the city like a dark spreading net. Lom remembered how he had stared at that map, and the picture of the falling angel, that time in the library. The strange, nameless longing the pictures had stirred in him. The sense of possibilities. Purposes. The adventures that life could hold.

And then Lom remembered…

… now, for the first time…

He had forgotten… for a quarter of a century…

… when he was reading that book, looking at that picture, imagination stirring

… he remembered…

… the hand ripping aside the curtain from the library window and the hate-filled face stuck into his, the sour breath, the cruel hand snatching the book from his hand, the voice screeching at him.

‘Here you are, you vicious little bastard! Now you’re caught, you evil piece of shit!’

The claw-hand grabbed him by the neck, fingernails gouging his skin, and hauled him out of the window seat. He fell hard, down onto the library floor.


Lom stopped in the middle of the street, pausing for breath, letting the rain run down his face. The memory of that moment had shocked him. He had put it away so deep. Forgotten it. A hurt from a different world, it meant nothing to the policeman he had become. Put it aside again, he told himself, think about it later. Maybe. Now, immediately, he needed to get out of this rain and night. He wondered if he was lost. There were no signs. No sense of direction in the empty streets. He had been stupid not to take a ride.

Rain skittered down alleyways, riding curls of wind. Rain slid across roof-slates and tumbled down sluices and drainpipes and slipped through grills into storm drains. Rain assembled itself in ropes in gutters and drains, and collected itself in watchful, waiting puddles and cisterns. Rain saturated old wood and porous stone and bare earth. Rain-mirrors on the ground looked up into the face of the falling rain. The wind-twisted air was crowded with flocks of rain: rain-sparrows and rain-pigeons, crows of rain. Rain-rats ran across the pavement and rain-dogs lurked in the shadows. Every column and droplet, every pool and puddle and sluice and splash, every slick, every windblown spillage of water and air, was alive. The rain was watching him.

Ever since the builders first came, the rain had been trickling through the cracks and gaps in the carapace of the chitinous city, sliding under the tiles and lead of the roofs, slipping through the cracks between paving slabs and cobbles, pooling on the floors of cellars, insinuating itself into the foundations, soaking through to the earth beneath the streets. Every rainfall dissolved away an infinitesimal layer of Mirgorod stone, leached a trace of mineral salts from the mortar, wore the sharp edges imperceptibly smoother, rounded off the hard corners a little bit more, abraded fine grooves down the walls and buttresses. Fine jemmies and levers of rain slid between ashlar and coping. Little by little, century by century, the rain was washing the city away.

The rain trickled down Lom’s face, tasting him. The rain traced the folds of his skin and huddled in the whorls of his ears. The rain splashed against the angel-stone tablet in his skull. The rain tasted angel, the rain smelled policeman, the rain trickled over the hard certainties of the Vlast and the law, stoppered up with angel meat. While Lom walked on, oblivious, absorbed in memories, the rain was nudging him ever further away from the peopled streets, towards the older, softer, rainier places.


Memory hit him like a fist in the belly.

How was it he’d forgotten her? Buried her so deep? Never thought of her? Never. Never. Not till now.

She had dragged him down corridors and up stairways to the Provost’s room.

‘Here you are!’ she shrieked at the Provost. ‘I told you! He is corrupted. He is foul. He should never have been admitted. I said so.’

There was a fire of logs burning in the room. She had taken something of his, something important, and gone across to the fire and put it carefully in.

‘No!’ he’d cried. ‘No!’

He’d thrown himself across the room and scrabbled at the burning logs. He remembered her, screeching like an animal, punching him across the back of the head, and… Something had happened. What? He couldn’t remember There was a door he couldn’t open, and something terrible was behind it. What had he done? He felt the shame and guilt, the permanent stain it had left, but he didn’t… he couldn’t… he had no recollection of what it was.

But he did know that the next day they had cut into the front of his head and placed the sliver of angel stone there, and that had made him good.


Lom rested his valise and wiped the rain from his face. He was passing through narrow defiles between once-grand buildings that were tenements now, propped up with flimsy accretions and lean-tos. Gulfs of night and rain opened between the few street lamps. Mirgorod had withdrawn indoors for the night, and his sodden clothes had tightened around him, becoming a warm mould, wrapping him in his own body heat. The sound of the rain seemed to seal him in. Dark alley-mouths gaped. Broken wooden fences barricaded gaps of waste ground. Small doorways cut into high brick walls.

He might have seen something, some shape slipping back out of the lamplight. He felt again for the smooth weight of the cosh in his sleeve.


He came to the margin of an endless cobbled square, the far side all but invisible behind the night rain. There was a lamp in the middle of the square, and some kind of kiosk beneath it. Two horses standing against the rain, their heads turned to watch him. And a covered droshki waiting. He walked fast towards it, but he hadn’t crossed half the wide open space when the driver appeared from the kiosk and climbed up into the seat

‘Hey!’ shouted Lom. ‘Hey! Wait!’

Lom started to run, awkwardly, hampered by a horizontal gust of sleet in his face, and his rain-heavy cloak, and his luggage. It was hopeless. The droshki drove away into the dark on the farther side.

‘Shit.’

The rain fell harder and colder. It stung his face and pressed down on him like a heavy weight. Wind-spun rain gathered itself in front of him and resolved itself into a thing of rain, a man of rain – no – a woman of rain – taller than human, a hardened column of rain and air.

And then the rain attacked him.

Lom spun around and tried to hide from it, but when he turned it was in front of him still. It lashed out and struck him. A fist of rain. A hard smash of wind off the sea, filled with rain. A stinging punch of rain in his face. He fell to the ground, tasting rain and blood in his mouth. The rain became a great foot and stamped on him, driving him face-down into the stone, driving the breath from him.

He was going to die.

He hauled himself to his feet and tried to run, slipping and stumbling across the cobbles. But he was running towards his enemy, not away. The rain surrounded him, and met him wherever he turned, dashing pebbles and nails of rain into his face. He held up his hand to protect his eyes. The droshki kiosk was in front of him. He stumbled towards it and pulled at the door. It wouldn’t open. He tried to barge into it with his shoulder, but the rain kicked his legs out from under him and he fell on his back, cracking his head. When the world came back into focus he was looking up into the face of the rain. His nose and mouth began to fill. He gasped for air and his throat filled with rain and blood. Rain kneeled on his ribs, driving the breath out of him. He was drowning in rain.

Something broke open inside him then. He felt it burst, as if a chain-link had snapped apart. A lock broken open. Some containment that had been placed inside him long ago had come undone.

He remembered.

He remembered what he had done that afternoon in the Provost’s room.

He remembered how he had gathered up all the air in the room and thrown it at her, and she had screamed and fallen. He remembered the pop that had followed when the air recoiled, refilling the temporary vacuum. He remembered the Provost’s papers flying about the room, the air filled with a cloud of hot embers and ash and smoke from the fire, the chair falling sideways, the picture crashing down from the wall. He remembered what he had done, and he remembered what it had felt like, and he remembered how he hadn’t known, not then and not later, how he had done it.

He tried to do it again. Now!

He reached out into the squalling, churning air and gathered up a ball of wind and rain. He tried to compact it as hard as he could. And he flung it at the figure of rain.

It was a feeble effort. It made no difference. Nothing could. He was going to die.


The thing of rain was standing over him, suddenly gentler now. Lom felt the attention of its regard, appraising him, wondering. A hand of rain reached down and touched his forehead gently. Fingertips of rain stroked the shard of angel stone cut into his head. He seemed to feel a brush of kindness. Pity.

Poor boy, it seemed to say. Poor boy.

The thing of rain dissolved into rain, and he was alone.

He picked himself up off the ground, bruised, exhausted, soaked. He needed to get inside. Out of the rain. And quickly.