Wolfhound Century

64

The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen lay on his back on the soft estuarial river-mud of the White Marshes. It was almost like floating. It was more like being a water-spider, resting on the meniscus of a pool, feeling the tremor of breezes brushing across the surface. He kept his eyes closed and his hands spread flat and palm-downward on the drum-tight, quivering skin of the mud. He was listening with his hands to the mood of the waters, feeling the way they were flowing and what they meant. He drew in long slow lungfuls of river air, tasting it with his tongue and nose and the back of his throat. There was ice and fog and rain on the air, and the exhalations of trees. He knew the savour of every tree — he could tell birch from alder, blackthorn from willow, aspen from spruce — and he could taste the distinctive breath of each of the great rivers as they mingled in the delta’s throat: the Smaller Chel, the Mecklen, the Vod, and above all the rich complexity of the Mir, with traces of the city caught like burrs in her hair. Everything that he could taste and hear and feel spoke to him. It was the voice of the world.

He was floating on the cusp — the infinitesimal point of balance — between past and future. The past was one, but futures were many, an endlessly bifurcating flowering abundance of possibilities all trying to become, all struggling to grow out of the precarious restless racing-forwards of now.

Aino-Suvantamoinen sat up in the near-darkness — his heart pounding, his head spinning — and scooped up handfuls of cold mud. Cupping his palms together, he buried his face in the slather for coolness and rest. There was something on the Mir that morning such as he had never known before. The river was excited, it was strung out and buzzing with promise. In three centuries of listening, no other morning like this one. A boat was coming, the river told him: a boat freighted with significance, freighted with change. New futures were adrift on the Mir, and also — astonishingly — he’d never felt, never even conceived of anything like this — a new past.

The giant picked himself up from the mud. He had to hurry. He had to reach the great locks and set his shoulder to the enormous ancient beams. He had to open the sluices and close the weir gates before the rushing of the flood carried everything past. Before it was too late.

65

Maroussia lay in the bottom of the skiff, wet and cold, holding the unconscious Lom in her arms. The boat rocked and turned in the current, colliding from time to time with other objects drifting on the flood: the bodies of drowned dogs and the planks of Big Side shanties. Maroussia kept her face turned towards the wooden inside freeboard, staying low and out of sight, risking only occasional glances over the gunwale. If anyone saw the skiff, it would look like one more empty boat adrift from its moorings. Lom was breathing loudly, raggedly, the terrible wound in the front of his head circled with a fine crust of dried blood and weeping some cloudy liquid.

The river had breached its banks in many places. The current was taking them west, towards the seaward dwindling of the city. They passed through flooded squares. Lamp posts and statues sticking up from the mud-heavy, surging water. Pale faces looking from upper windows. Later, at the city’s edge, they drifted above submerged fields, half-sunken trees, drowned pigs. The swollen waters carried them onwards, out of Mirgorod, into strange territories. As the morning wore on, the waters widened and slowed, taking them among low, wooded islands and spits of grass and mud. By now they should have been following one of the channels of the Mir delta, but the channels were all lost under the slack waters of the flood. Maroussia couldn’t tell where the river ended and the silvery mud and the wide white skies began.

Maroussia had been as far as the edge of the White Marshes once or twice, years ago. She remembered walking there, just at the edge of it, lost, exhilarated, alone. That’s where the water would take them. There was no other choice.

It was a strange, extraordinary place. Inside the long bar of Cold Amber Strand, the huge expanse of Mirgorod Bay had silted up with the sediment and detritus of millennia, deposited there by slow rivers. The commingling waters of the four rivers and many lesser streams, stirred by the ebb and flow of the brackish water entering through the Halsesond, had created behind the protecting arm of the Strand a complex and shifting mixture of every kind of wetland, a misty tract of salt marsh, bog and fen. It was a place of eel grass and cotton grass, withies, reed beds and carr. Pools of peat-brown water and small shallow lakes. Winding creeks shining like tin. Silent flocks of wading birds swept against the sky, glinting like herring shoals on the turn.

The sun was hidden behind cloud and mist. Maroussia had no way of measuring the passing of time, except by growing hunger and thirst. Lom was breathing more easily, but she had no food or water. She needed to find a landing place soon. Eventually — it might have been early in the afternoon — she unshipped the oars and began to row. The little skiff was the only vessel to be seen, conspicuously alone in the emptiness. Cat’s-paw ripples and veils of fine mist trailed across the flatness, ringed by the wide horizon only. Waterfowl flew overhead or bobbed in small rafts. A mist was gathering and thickening around them, and Maroussia was glad of it. Mirgorod was a fading stain on the horizon behind them. It began to seem to her that they were nowhere at all.

She rowed clumsily, learning as she went. At least the work warmed her and loosened her stiffened muscles. Lom lay at her feet in the bottom of the boat, heavy and still. Shorelines loomed at them out of the mist. The skiff seemed to be passing between islands, or perhaps they were following channels between mudflats. It was impossible to say. After a time — it might have been only an hour, it might have been much more — she began to feel that the shores were closing in around them. They were approaching slopes of mud and stands of tangled tree growth coming down to the water’s edge. An otter slipped off a mudslope and slid away through the slow waters. A heron, motionless, regarded them with its unblinking yellow eye. At last she saw that, without realising it, she had been following the narrowing throat of a backwater, and now they had reached the end of the passage. They came up to a broken-down jetty of weathered, greyish wood. She managed to bring the skiff up against it with a gentle jolt, clambered up onto the planks with the bow line in her hand, and stood there, looking down at the inert shape of Lom, wondering how she was going to get him out of the boat. At a loss, she glanced back the way they had come.

A giant was wading towards them, waist deep in the dark waters.

In the city, in their labouring clothes, the giants were diminished and made familiar by the human context. This one was different. It was as if the river itself and the mud and silt of the estuary had gathered into human-like form — but twice as large — and risen up and started walking towards them.

The slope of the giant’s belly broached the waters like a ship as he came. His chest was as deep and broad as a barrel, but far larger. Unlike the city giants, who wore their hair tied back in queues, his hair was long and thick and spread across his shoulders in dark, damp curls. The giant waded right up to them and gripped the gunwale of the skiff with both hands, steadying it. The hands were enormous. Fingers thick as stubs of rope, joined with pale webs of skin up to the first knuckle. Wrists strong and round as tree branches. His huge face was weathered dark and his eyes were large and purple like plums, with something of the same rounded protuberance.

‘Your boat is named Sib,’ he said. ‘She’s a good boat.’

His voice was deep and slow, with the cool softness of estuarial mud, but ropes of strength wound through it. His clothes were the silvered colour of mud, with a faint shimmer of grainy slickness. Brown or grey, it was difficult to tell the difference. He was neither wholly of the land nor wholly of the water, but in between, estuarial, intertidal, partaking of both.

‘She’s not our boat,’ said Maroussia. ‘I stole her. She was floating loose, so I took her. We needed her. Badly. My friend is hurt.’

‘You make fast here,’ said the giant. ‘You climb out, and I will bring him.’

The giant scooped Lom up in his arms, settled him into a comfortable position against his chest and waded across to a place where he could climb out. The water sluiced off him. His legs up to his the knee were sleek with mud. Maroussia hesitated. The giant walked a few paces, then stopped and turned. Maroussia hadn’t moved.

‘Well?’ said the giant.

‘What?’ said Maroussia.

‘Follow me.’

‘Where?’

But the giant had already gone ahead.

66

Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom — that part of him which is not made of tissues and plasma, proteins and mineral salts — is floating out in the sea, buoyant, awash in the waves. And Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom — this is not his true name, he knows that now, but he has no other — is puzzled by his situation.

He is alive.

Apparently.

Evidently.

Yet he has no recollection of how he got here, how he came to be in this…

Predicament?

Situation.

And he is… changed.

This is not his body.

His body is elsewhere.

He is aware of it, distant, separate, yet not entirely detached.

And this sea that he is in, it is the real sea, but also…

…not.

The sky is too clear. Too close above his head. There appears to be no sun in the sky. Everywhere he looks, it is…

…just the sky.

Time is nothing here.

The sea shines like wet slate. Numbing slabs of sea-swell hammock and baulk him. He rides among the bruising hollows and feels the touch of salt water pouring over his face, and when he runs his fingers through it, it is like stroking cool hair. Fulmars scout the wave valleys and terns squall overhead. He sees the faint distant smudge of a cliff shoulder to the north, and the low beach-line curving away southwards into mist and indeterminacy. He sees the shore of Cold Amber Strand. He can see it, but he can’t reach it. He lacks the strength to swim so far. It doesn’t matter.

Time is nothing here.

His head is wide open — there is a hole in it — the sea is pouring in — and the fluid from inside him is seeping out, pluming away into the wider water. Part of him is part of the sea. Part of the sea is taking its place. And then…

Time is nothing here.

The sea is slow and always. Days graze its surface and the sea’s skin rises and falls with the barely perceptible pulse of the tide. He can feel the unseen pull of the moons: a gentle lunar gravity tugging at his hair and palpating with infinite slowness the ventricular walls of his heart. But days and nights touch only the thinnest surface of the sea, and all the while, below the surface, beneath the intricate, flashy caul, there is darkness: coiling and shouldering layers inhabited by immense, deathless, barrelling movers.

Time is nothing here.

He imagines he is already sinking. The abyssal deeps open below him like a throat. He dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him.

As he descends the light fails. Layer by layer the spectrum is sucked dry of colour: first the reds fade and the world turns green, then the yellows give up the ghost and the world turns blue, and then… nothing, only the fuliginous darker than dark, the total absence of sight.

The waters are deep. It takes only seconds to leave the light behind, but the descent will be many hours. Every ten yards of depth adds the weight of another atmosphere to the column of water pressing on his body. He imagines going down. Fifty atmospheres. A hundred. A thousand. More. More. The parts of his strange new body which contain air begin to rupture under the weight. Long before he reaches the bottom, his face, his chest, his abdomen, implode. Fat compresses and hardens. The finer bones collapse. Broken rib ends burst out through the skin.

He imagines he hears himself speaking to the hard cold darkness.

‘You are the reply to my desire.’

67

Maroussia slept late the next morning, and woke in the giant’s isba. It smelled of woodsmoke, lamp-oil and the smoked fish that hung in rows from the rafters. Rafters which, now that she looked at them up there in the shadow, weren’t the branches of trees as she had thought, but salt-bleached and smoke-browned whale bones.

The isba was twice as tall as a human would make it, but it felt warm and intimate, lit with fish-oil lamps and firelight from the open stove. Although it was morning outside, inside was all shadow and quiet. The whale-skeleton frame was covered with skins and bark, the gaps caulked with moss and pitch. Iron boiling-pots and wooden chests stood along the sides. From the middle of the floor rose a thick pillar of ancient-looking wood, its base buried in the compacted earth. Every inch of it was carved with the eyes and claws and heads of animals — elk, horses, wolves, seals — their teeth bared in anger or defiance — and inscribed with what looked like words in a strange angular alphabet. The pillar seemed meant to ward off some threat, some doom that was waiting its chance. What kind of thing was it, out here in the marsh, that a giant would be afraid of?

The stove was made of iron, large and elaborate, with panels of white and blue tiles. It was the kind that had a place for a bed on the top of it. Lom lay on it now, breathing quietly. Inert.

Maroussia remembered the night before only in snatches and fragments. She had been too cold. Too tired. Too hungry. The giant had given her food, a broth from his simmering-pot. Fish, samphire, berries. Food that tasted of the river and the sea and wide open spaces. And then he’d left her and gone out into the night and she had slept. When she woke, the morning was half gone, and she was alone with Lom.

She stood up stiffly and crossed the floor to look at him. The stove was taller than her but his face, roughened with a growth of reddish stubble, was near the edge and turned towards her. He wasn’t sleeping, he was… gone. But his body breathed and seemed to be repairing itself. The giant had tended to the wound in the front of his head and left it bound in a cloth soaked with an infusion of bark and dried leaves. Now that she was close to him, the clean, bitter scent cut through the fish-and-smoky fug in the hut.

She had lain alongside him in the cold of the boat, the warmth of their bodies nurturing each other, keeping each other alive. That meant something. That changed something. She knew the smell of his body close up, the smell of his hair and skin, the feel of his warmth. She touched his face. Despite the stove and the furs he felt cool and damp, like a pebble picked up from a stream.

Wake up. Please wake up. We can’t stay here.

She needed to go. She had something to do. It was a weight. A momentum. A push. What she needed to find was somewhere in the city. Vishnik had found the Pollandore. She was certain now, that’s what he’d meant to tell her. He had died and hadn’t told her where. Yet surely it would be in Mirgorod, if he had found it. She needed to get back there.

The giant came in, pushing his way between the skins across the entrance gap. His bulk filled the space naturally and made her feel that humans were small.

‘Has the sleeper woken?’ he said.

‘No. No, he hasn’t.’

The giant walked with a surprisingly soft and quiet tread across to where Lom lay, and looked down on him in silence. He placed a huge hand on the small head and put his huge face near Lom’s small mouth, as if he were inhaling his breath, which — she realised — he was.

‘He has been like this all morning?’

‘Yes. He hasn’t changed.’

The giant went to a wooden chest and took out something wrapped in dark cloth, which, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the stove, he unwrapped and began to eat. It looked like a piece of meat, except that it was dark grey, soft and satiny, with a strange oily sheen. He tore off a large chunk with his teeth and chewed it, his head on one side, his massive jaws working like a dog’s, up and down.

‘Does anyone else live out here?’ Maroussia asked. ‘In the marshes, I mean. I didn’t see any sign… when we were coming here. It all seemed so empty. Are there villages?’

‘Why?’

‘I was wondering where the clothes came from.’ He had found dry clothes for her, not city clothes but leggings and a woven shirt. Soft leather boots.

‘There are no humans here now. There used to be a village on the smaller lake.’ He waved his arm vaguely in no particular direction.

‘You’ve been kind to us,’ she said.

‘The rivers brought you. Why would I not be kind?’

‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘My name is Aino-Suvantamoinen, and yours is Maroussia Shaumian, and you are important.’

‘What do you mean? How do you know my name.’

‘You are someone who makes things happen. Different futures are trying to become. You have something to do, and what you choose will matter.’

She stared at him. ‘You know?’ she said. ‘About the Pollandore?’

The giant made a movement of his hand. ‘I know,’ he said,‘some things.’

‘You know where it is?’

‘It was taken. Long ago.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘That I do not know.’

‘I have to find it,’ said Maroussia. ‘I can’t stay here. Time is running out.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to do when I find it. I don’t understand.’

‘Understanding is not the most important thing. Understanding never is. Doing is what matters.’

The giant turned away and sat down in a corner to concentrate on his meat, as if he had said all he would say. It was like talking to a thinking tree, or a hill, or the grass, or the rain.

‘What exactly is that stuff you’re eating?’ said Maroussia.

‘Old meat,’ the giant said. ‘The marsh preserves. Trees come up whole after a thousand years. This meat… I put it in, I leave it, I find it again. It tastes good.’

‘What kind of meat?’

He held the chunk at arm’s length, turned it round, inspected it.

‘No idea.’ He took another bite. Then he laid it aside and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Let us walk.’

Maroussia looked at Lom, sleeping on the stove.

‘What about him?’ she said. ‘Will he be all right on his own?’

‘No harm will come today.’

Maroussia walked in silence beside the giant. The floods had receded during the night, revealing a wide alluvial land, a cross-hatch of creeks and channels punctuated by rocky outcrops, islands and narrow spits of ground. Reed beds. Salt marsh. Sea lavender and samphire. Withy, carr and fen. There were stretches of water, bright and dark as rippled steel. Long strips of pale brown sand, crested with lurid, too-green, moss-coloured grass. Reaches of soft, satiny mud. Wildfowl were picking and probing their way out on the mud. Maroussia knew their names: she had watched them rummaging on the muddy riverbanks near her home. Curlew, plover, godwit, redshank, phalarope. The quiet progress of geese at the eelgrass. A kestrel sidled across the sky: a slide, a pause, a flicker of wings; slide, pause, flicker of wings.

This was a threshold country, neither solid ground nor water but something liminal and in between. The air was filled with a beautiful misty brightness under a lid of low cloud. There was no sun: it was as if the wet land and the shallow stretches of water were themselves luminous. The air smelled of damp earth and sea, salt and wood-ash and fallen leaves.

‘This is a beautiful place,’ Maroussia said. ‘It feels like we are in the middle of nowhere, but we’re so near to the city. I didn’t know. I never came this far.’

‘It will be winter soon,’ the giant said. ‘Winters are cold here. The birds are preparing to leave. In winter the snow will lie here as deep as you are tall. The water freezes. Only the creatures that know how to freeze along with it and the ones who make tunnels beneath the snow can live here then.’

‘But it’s not so cold in Mirgorod,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s only a few versts away.’

‘No. It is colder here.’

‘What do you do when the winter comes?’ said Maroussia.

‘When the ditches freeze and the marshes go under the snow I will sleep. It will be soon.’

‘You sleep through the winter like a bear? The giants in Mirgorod don’t do that.’

‘Their employers do not permit it. They are required to work through the year, though it shortens their lives.’

The giant fell silent and walked on. Maroussia began to notice signs of labour. The management of the land and water. Heaps of rotting vegetation piled alongside recently cleared dikes. Saltings, drained ground, coppiced trees. Much of it looked ancient, abandoned and crumbling: blackened stumps of rotting post and plank, relics of broken staithes and groynes, abandoned fish traps. The giant paused from time to time to study the water levels and look about him, his great head cocked to one side, sniffing the salt air. Sometimes he would adjust the setting of some heavy mechanism of wood and iron, a winch or a lock or a sluice gate.

They stopped on the brink of a deep, fast-flowing ditch. The giant stared into the brown frothing surge that forced its way across a weir.

‘The flood is going down,’ the giant said. ‘Every time the floods come now, the city builds its stone banks higher. But that is not the way. The water has to go somewhere. If you set yourself against it, the water will find a way, every time.’ He stooped for a moment to work a windlass that Maroussia hadn’t noticed among the tall grass. ‘I tried to tell them,’ the giant continued when he had done his work. ‘When they were building the city, I tried to tell them they were using too much stone. They made everything too hard and too tight. You have to leave places for the water to go. But I couldn’t make them listen. Even their heads were made of stone.’

‘You remember Mirgorod being built?’

‘I was younger then. I thought I could explain to them, and if I did, then they would listen. They tried to drive me out, and every so often even now they try again.’ He grinned, showing big square teeth. Incisors like slabs of pebble. Sharp bearish canines. ‘I let them lose themselves.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The marshes are bigger than you think, and different every day. Every tide brings shift and change. All possible marshes are here.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes,’ said the giant. ‘You do.’

Maroussia hesitated. ‘If you remember the city when it was being built—’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘—then you would remember the time before? You remember the Pollandore?’

‘You don’t need to remember what is still here.’

Maroussia hesitated.

‘I need to go back,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to leave Vissarion. He helped me.’

‘You should not leave him,’ said the giant. ‘He is important too.’

‘What do you mean?’

The giant stopped and looked down at her.

‘I don’t know, and neither does he. But it is on the river, and the rain likes him. That’s enough.’

‘But what if he never wakes up?’ said Maroussia. ‘Or he wakes up but he isn’t… right. He almost drowned, and there’s that hole, that terrible hole, in his head.’

‘He is not hurt,’ said the giant. ‘At least, his body is not. But he doesn’t know how to come back.’

‘I don’t understand that either.’

‘I can fetch him back, if you want me to. Tonight. After dark. When the day is over. Your choice.’

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

68

Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom lies face down, floating on the glass roof of the sea. He presses his face against the water as if it were a pane of glass. Looking down into clarity. A landscape unrolls beneath him.

Time is nothing here.

This is the drowned, memorious land. Mammoths’ teeth, the bones of bear and aurochs and the antlers of great elk litter the sea’s bed. The salt-dark leaf mould of drowned forests. It is a woodland place. Lom sees the sparrowhawk on the oak’s shoulder and he sees the bivalves browsing the soft stump’s pickled meat. Sea beasts move across the floor of it. Their unhurried footfalls detonate quiet puffballs of silt as they go, slow without heaviness, shoving aside fallen branches, truffling for egg-purse, flatworm and urchin, their eyes blackened like sea beans and gleaming in the half-light.

Time is nothing here.

Except… something touches him. The merest graze of an eye in passing. An alien gaze, cold and empty, vaster far than the sea, star-speckled. It passes away from him.

And pauses.

And flicks back.

And takes him in its grip.

Lom closes himself up like a fist, like a stone in the sea, like an anemone clenching close its crop of arms, like a hermit crab hunching into its shell. He wants to be small. Negligible. He wants to pull himself tight inside and withdraw or sink out of sight. But it is hopeless. He knows the touch of the angel’s eye for what it is.

Archangel begins to prise him open for a closer look.

No! Lom dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him. He is strong. Very strong. Stronger than he had ever known. Lom slips with a writhing kick out of the angel’s grasp. He hears, very faint and far away, the yell of its anger. And feels its fear.

In his room on the Ring Wharf, Josef Kantor felt Archangel rip a hole in his mind and step inside. Archangel’s voice filled his head. The cold immensity separating stars. He fell.

THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY LIVE!

KILL THE TRAVELLERS! DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!

As soon as he was able to stand and wipe the spittle from his face and stem the blood that was spilling from his nose, Kantor went to find a telephone. He needed to speak to Chazia.

69

Night came, a thick and starless black. Inside the isba the smoke from the burning bog-oak in the stove and the fumes from the boiling-pot made Maroussia’s head swim. Afraid she would be sick, she tried to retreat into the shadows at the edge of the room and would have squatted there, watching, but the noises from outside drove her back. There were voices outside in the dark, voices that barked and growled and called like birds and argued in unintelligible words. The skin covering of the isba shook as if something was pounding on it and tugging at the door covering. She crawled back towards the centre of the room and crouched as near to the iron stove as she could get. Blue fire was burning hot and hard as a steam-engine’s firebox, roaring heat into the air.

‘Do not be alarmed by anything you see or hear,’ Aino-Suvantamoinen had said. ‘But do not touch me. And do not go outside.’

Yet now he lay on the floor, immense, like a felled bull. His arms and legs trembled as if he was having a fit: their shaking rattled and clattered the antlers, vertebrae, pieces of amber and holed stones tied to his coat. The hood of the coat hid his face, but she could still see his eyes. They were open, but showing white only, as sightless and chalky as seashells. He’d put a piece of leather between his teeth, and now his mouth dripped spittle as he chewed and ground on it with an unconscious concentration that seemed like blank rage.

Lom lay on his back in the centre of the floor.

‘No matter how bad it gets,’ the giant had said, ‘you can do nothing. Understand? Nothing. Whatever happens, do nothing. and do not touch me.’ Yet he had been like this — collapsed, growling, fitting — for… how long now? Half an hour? An hour?

The wall of the isba bulged inward, as if some heavy creature outside had thrown itself against it. There was a screech of anger. Surely whatever was outside would break in soon. The carvings on the central pillar flickered in the fierce firelight as if they were alive and moving.

Five minutes. Five more minutes, and if nothing has changed…

Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom is lying on his back in the sea, looking up into the night sky. He feels the gentle pull of the moons in his belly. All around him the sea glows with a gentle phosphorescence. A fringe of luminousness borders his body. Light trickles down his arms when he holds them in front of his face.

The hole in the front of his head is open to the starlight. A little cup of phosphorescence has gathered there. So much has flowed in, and so much flowed out, washing across the folds of his cerebral cortex. He is merging with the sea. His pulse is the endless passing of waves. His inward darkness is the darkness of the deep ocean.

Time is nothing here.

He hears the sound of splashing. Rhythmical. Sweep, sweep, through the waves. It is a sound he remembers, but he cannot place it now. The drift of water through the kelp forests below him is more interesting.

Idly, with the last remains of merely human curiosity, he turns to look. Something very large and human-shaped, an outline darker than the sky, a starless mass against the stars, is wading towards him. That is what the sound is. Legs. Wading through water. Did he not once do such a thing himself?

The wading person is growing larger and larger as he comes closer. He is watching. He has a purpose. His purpose is to bring Lom back.

But Lom doesn’t want to go back.

He gathers the weight of the sea and throws it against the giant in immense curling waves that crash against him. Lom fills the waves with the teeth and jaws of eels and the stings of rays. He tangles the giant’s feet in ropes of weed. The giant stumbles and the undertow of the waves pulls at him, dragging him towards the edge of the deep trench that opens and swallows him.

The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen feels the viciousness of the sea’s antagonism. Ropes of water form within the water and wrap themselves around his arms and legs, tugging him down towards the pit that is opening beneath him. Bands of iron water squeeze his ribcage, forcing the breath from his lungs. Ice-cold water-fingers grip his face, hooking claws into his nostrils, stabbing into his ears with water-needles, gouging his eyes, tearing at the lids. This isn’t how it is meant to be. The man he is trying to bring home is fighting him. He’s too strong. All the futures in which he will rescue this man and return home safe are fading and dying one by one. Something is putting them out like lamps.

I will drown here, and with me the marsh will fail.

With one last push of effort he begins to swim for the surface.

Pulling the water-fingers from his face he peers up and sees the dim light above him, the greenish star in the shape of a man, glowing dimly. It is not far. The giant kicks and hauls himself towards it. The seawater clamps itself about him, heavy and chill as liquid iron, squeezing like a fist. He fights it, dragging himself upwards out of the ocean pit. But it is too far. He is tiring. He cannot reach it. The thread of river-water that links him to his body in the isba is failing, and when it breaks he will be lost.

Desperately he lets go of a part of himself and sends it back up the river-thread, squirming and writhing for home like a salmon against the stream. The silver thought-salmon flickers its tail and disappears into the dimming green.

Maroussia was kneeling over the still body of the giant, her ear against his mouth. He was trying to say something.

‘Wake him… wake the man… call him back… do it… now’

The hoarse whisper faded. The giant’s face collapsed.

Maroussia lurched across to where Lom was lying and took his face in her hands, turning it towards her.

‘Vissarion!’ She was shouting to be heard. The voices outside in the night were screeching and yammering, hurling themselves against the walls of the isba. ‘Vissarion! It’s Maroussia! Listen to me! You have to wake up now! Oh, you have to. Please.’

Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom hears a voice calling, faint above the noise of the sea and very far away. He opens his eyes and sees against the shadows of the sky a face he knows, a familiar face, a face with a name he half-remembers, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him, like the moon made whole. He lifts his arm towards it, and as he does so he feels a tremendous blow against his back, lifting him up out of the water, and a huge fist seizes him by the neck and begins to pull him back towards the shore.

70

Lom woke in the giant Aino-Suvantamoinen’s isba, aware of the warmth and the fire and the quiet shadows and the giant sitting near him, waiting, patient, large and solid. Lom knew where he was. Completely. He felt the moving water nearby, and grass, and trees, and the sifting satiny mud. The sea, some distance off, was still the sea, and the river that surged towards it was a great speaking mouth. The air around him was a tangible flowing thing, freighted with a thousand scents and drifting pheromone clouds, just as the space between the stars was filled with light and forces passing though. Everything was spilling myth, everything was soaked in truth-dream.

‘You are awake,’ said Aino-Suvantamoinen gently. His voice was slow and strong and estuarial.

‘This will fade,’ said Lom. ‘Won’t it? This will not last. Will it? Will it?’

He tried to raised his head from the leather pillow.

‘No,’ said the giant, ‘this feeling that you have now will not last. But it will not altogether fade. There is no going back to the way you were before.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You need to rest.’

‘I hurt you, didn’t I? I didn’t want to come back, and I hurt you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I almost killed you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your fault. You were stronger than I thought. You did not know.’

‘No.’

‘I bear you no grudge. ‘

‘But you are hurt.’

‘Only tired now. I will recover. But I need to sleep. it will be winter soon.’

Lom tried to push the covers back and sit up.

‘You can’t sleep yet,’ he said. ‘You know that. There is something wrong. There’s something coming. It’s very close.’

‘Ah. You felt that?’

When the giant left him, Lom went outside to sit by himself some distance from the isba, on a stump of wood. The stiffness of his bruises was scarcely noticeable. He touched his forehead tentatively. In the centre of it, just above the eyebrows, he found a small and roughly round hole in the bone of his skull, like a third eye socket. It had a fine, smooth covering of new skin, slightly puckered at the edge. With his fingertip he felt the fluttering of a pulse.

The world he had seen in all its oceanic myth-ridden fullness was already diminishing, but still he smelled the dampness in the air, the woodsmoke, and heard the flow of water in the creek, and he knew what they meant. It was all traces and memories now, a faint trembling of presences: possibilities almost out of reach. But still real. Still there. The plug in his head was gone, and he was alive.

The world and everything in it, everything that is and was and will be, was the unfolding story of itself, and every separate thing in the world — every particle of rock and air and light, every life, every thought and every event — was also a story, its own story, the story of everything becoming more like itself and less like anything else. The might-be becoming the is. The winter moths on their pheromone trails, intent on love and flight, were heroes. Himself, Maroussia, Vishnik, Aino-Suvantamoinen, they were all like that, or could be: living out the bright significant stories of their own lives, mythic, important.

But Vishnik was dead. Vishnik, what was left of him, mutilated and killed, his ruined body laid out naked on the couch; Chazia had done that.

Lom remembered Chazia and Kantor bending over him in the interrogation room — Chazia’s knife, Kantor’s indifferent finger poking at his opened brain. It was all coming back, riding a hot rushing tide of anger. He could not stay here, in this timeless watery place. He had to do something. He had to go back.

And then — only then — the question occurred to him. The last thing he remembered, vaguely, a blur, was throwing himself from the bridge into the flooding Mir. What had happened to him after he fell? How had he come to be here? He didn’t know.

71

Elsewhere — far away, but not so far — in an empty side room in the Lodka, Lakoba Petrov was preparing himself for his one great moment. He had obtained all he needed — all the materials for his new, wonderful art — from Josef Kantor, impresario of destruction. And now the time was almost come for the performance.

From a canvas holdall Petrov extracted three belts of dynamite and nails, enwrapped his person with them, buckled the straps. Also from the canvas holdall he drew forth a capacious overcoat of dark wool, threaded the detonator cords through the sleeves so he could grip their terminations in his palms, and put on the coat to drape and obscure his death-belted torso.

Petrov did what he did with care. Fully. With absolute clarity and certainty of purpose. Every movement a sacrament. Every breath numbered. Rendered aesthetic. Invested with ritual luminance.

When he tugged the detonators, nails would fly outwards from him explosively. Omnidirectional. Flying in the expulsive, expanding, centrifugal cloud of his own torn and vaporised flesh. He would be the heart of the iron sunburst. Going nova.

And so I am become the unimaginable zero of form. The artist becomes the art. Total creation. Without compromise. Without hesitation. Without meaning, being only and completely what it is. The gap between artist and work obliterated.

His own unneeded coat he closed up in precise folds and set in the middle of the empty floor. Adjacent to this he placed the now-empty canvas holdall.

They would be found so. The only extant work of the Petrovist Destructive School: members, one.

A thought struck him. Awkwardly, on account of the bulk of the explosive girdles, he bent to withdraw items from his former coat. A tube of paint. A piece of polished reflective tin to use as a mirror. One final time, with the facility that came with practice, he inscribed his forehead. And then, with an unexpected flourish, one last tweak of originality, he unbuttoned his shirt and wrote on his bare, white, fleshless, hairless (because shaven) upper chest, the same two splendid words.

I, Petrov.

He was calm. He was prepared. All was ready.

At the other end of the same long corridor as the room in which Petrov prepared himself, in a much larger chamber, there was a large gathering of persons of importance. The Annual Council of the Vlast Committee on Peoples. Josef Kantor was there, thanks to the arrangements of Lavrentina Chazia. He stood anonymously at the back of the room, one more nondescript functionary among many, watching. Waiting for what would come. For what he knew would happen. His toothache, which had not troubled him for weeks, was back, and he welcomed it, prodding at the hurt again with his tongue as he examined the scene.

The large room was dominated by one long narrow heavy table of inlaid wood. A line of electric chandeliers hung low above it like frosted glittering clusters on a vine, and creamy fluted columns made an arcade along one side, where secretaries sat at individual desks with typewriters. For all its spaciousness the room was warm, and filled with muted purposeful talk. The places at the table were occupied by men in suits and full-dress uniforms, absorbed in their work, assured of their importance and the significance of what they did.

On the far wall from where Kantor stood hung a huge painting of the Novozhd, life size and standing alone in an extensive rolling late-summer landscape. Sunlight splashed across his face, picking out his plush moustache and the smile-lines creasing his cheeks, while behind him the country of the dominions unrolled: harvest-ready fields crossed by the sleek length of express trains, tall factory chimneys blooming rosy streamers of smoke against the horizon, the distant glittering sea — the happy land at its purposeful labours.

And beneath the portrait, halfway down one side of the table, sat the Novozhd himself, in his familiar collarless white tunic, drinking coffee from a small cup.

There was a shout from across the room.

‘Hey! You! Who are you?’

Kantor looked across to see what was going on. It was Petrov. He was pushing past flustered functionaries, his shaven head moving among them like a white stone. He was wearing an oddly bulky greatcoat and there were fresh scarlet markings on his face. He was right on time. Kantor stepped back towards the wall. He needed to be as far away from the Novozhd as possible.

Petrov paused and surveyed the room for a moment.

The militia who lined the walls, watchful, were not approaching him. Those nearest him were retreating. Giving him room. They were Chazia’s Iron Guard, every one: they would not interfere.

A diplomat near Kantor took a step forward. ‘What is that man doing—?’ he began.

‘Stay where you are!’ hissed Kantor. The diplomat looked at him, surprised, and seemed about to say something else. Kantor ignored him.

Petrov had seen the Novozhd, who had risen from his seat, cup in hand.

High functionaries were murmuring in growing alarm. A stenographer was shouting. There was rising panic in her voice. ‘Someone stop him!’

Petrov moved towards the Novozhd, blank-faced and purposeful.

The ambassador from the Archipelago was on her feet, trying to push through a group of Vlast diplomatists who did not know what was happening and would not make way. She was shouting at the guards: ‘Why won’t you do something!’ But the guards were moving away, as Kantor knew they would.

Petrov made inexorable progress through the crowd. When he got near the Novozhd, his arms stretched out as if to embrace him.

And the explosion came. A muted, ordinary detonation. A flash. A matter-of-fact thump of destruction. A stench. The crash of a chandelier on the table. Silence. More silence. Ringing in Kantor’s ears.

Then the voices began: not screams — not shouts of anger — just a low inarticulate collective moan, a sighing of dismay. Only later did the keening begin, as the injured began to realise the awful permanent ruination of their ruptured bodies.

Pushing through the crowd, stepping over the dead and dying, Kantor found himself looking down at the raw, meaty remnants of the Novozhd, and Lakoba Petrov fallen across him like a protective friend. Petrov’s head and arms were gone, and some great reptilian predator had taken a large bite of flesh from his side. The Novozhd, dead, was staring open-mouthed at the ceiling that was spattered with his own blood and chunks of his own flesh. His moustache, Kantor noticed, was gone.

Someone touched his arm, and Kantor spun round. He knew the guards would not bother him, but there was always the possibility. But it was only Chazia.

She leaned forward intimately, speaking quietly under the din and panic of the room. Her blotched fox-face too close to his.

‘Good, Josef,’ she said. ‘Very good.’

Kantor took a step back from her in distaste. There was too much of angels about her. It was like a stink. She was rank with it.

‘I do my part, Lavrentina. You do yours. What about the girl, and Krogh’s man? Lom?’

‘That’s in hand,’ said Chazia. ‘It is in hand. Though I don’t understand why you set so much store—’

Kantor glared at her.

‘I mean,’ Chazia continued, ‘after today—’

‘The angel needs them dead, Lavrentina,’ Kantor heard himself say, and struggled to keep the self-disgust out of his voice. It uses me like a puppet. A doll. A servant. He was getting tired of the angel. More than tired. He feared and hated it. The situation was becoming intolerable.

I am bigger than this angel. I will make it fear me and I will kill it. I will find a way. I have killed the Novozhd and I will kill the angel. Kill Chazia too.

But now was not the time. He needed to prepare. He needed to focus on the future. Only the future mattered.

‘Just get rid of them,’ he said. ‘Lom and the girl. Don’t foul it up again.’

‘I told you,’ said Chazia. ‘It’s already in hand.’

72

It was night outside the isba, under clear stars. Aino-Suvantamoinen was a massive dark bulk crouching over the flickering wood-fire. It was crisply, bitterly cold, and the light of the moons was bright enough to see the shreds of mist in the trees at the edge of the clearing. A hunter’s night. Lom sat wrapped in sealskin, drinking fish stew from a wooden bowl. He’d slept all day — a proper, resting, dreamless sleep.

‘I can’t stay here,’ Maroussia was saying. ‘I have to go back. To the city. There was a paluba. And someone else. She… showed me…’

The giant shifted his weight. ‘You saw a paluba?’

‘Yes.’

Lom watched her as she talked. She held herself so straight and upright, her face shadowed in the firelight. Lom saw her now as she was, a point of certainty, uncompromised, spilling the flickering light of possibilities that surrounded her. She was clear, and defined, and alive. She rang like a bell in the misty, nightfall world. She was worth fighting for.

‘I have to do this thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a choice.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not right. I do have a choice. And I’m choosing. ‘

She lapsed into silence, watching the fire.

‘Maroussia?’ said Lom.

‘Yes?’

‘I wanted to thank you.’

‘What for?’ she said.

‘You came back for me, didn’t you? You didn’t have to.’

She didn’t look round. ‘You didn’t need to help me either. But you did. Twice.’

‘I’ll come back with you to Mirgorod,’ said Lom. ‘If you want me to.’

She turned to look at him then.

‘Would you do that?’ she said quietly.

‘Yes.’

73

Major Artyom Safran stood at the edge of the trees by the giant’s isba, watching it from the moonshadow. Muted light spilled from a gap in the skins draped across its entrance. His quarry was inside. The mudjhik was motionless at his side, a shadow-pillar of silent stone.

Safran held the fragment of angel stuff that Commander Chazia had cut from Lom’s head tight and warm in his hand. Using the mudjhik’s alien senses he felt his way along the thread that still joined it to Lom until he touched the other man’s mind with his own. He felt the faint, startled flinch of an answering awareness and hastily withdrew. Lom was unlikely to have known what the contact meant, if he had even registered it, but it was better to be cautious.

There were three of them, then. Lom, a woman — the woman, it must be — and something else: a strange, complex, powerful, non-human presence. He put himself more fully into the mudjhik, inhabiting its wild harsh world. The mudjhik needed no light to see by. It had other senses through which Safran felt the hard sharpness of thorns, the small movements of leaves on branches, the evaporation of moisture. Bacteria thrived everywhere, and the mudjhik was studying them with simple, purposeless curiosity. Something had died and was decomposing near their feet, under a covering of fallen leaves.

Safran felt the watchfulness of small animal presences pressing against him. One in particular was close by, drilling at him with a hot, bitter attention. A fox? No, something smaller and crueller. A weasel? Its mind was like strong, gamey meat. Every mind had its own unique taste, that was one thing he had learned. And here, in the wetlands, it was not only animals: ever since he and the mudjhik had entered the marsh territories, Safran had been aware of the semi-sentience of the trees themselves, and the rivers, even the rain. There was a constant, vaguely uncomfortable feeling that everything around him knew he was there and did not welcome his presence. He ignored it, as did the mudjhik, which disdained trees and water as beneath its notice. Safran, through the mudjhik’s senses, probed the interior of the isba. The third presence was a giant, then. That too was unexpected.

For all its physical stillness, Safran sensed the mudjhik’s eagerness to rush forward and attack. It enjoyed human fear and death. It fed on it. Some of the mudjhik’s bloodlust leaked into Safran’s mind. It made him hungry to charge and stomp and crush. He fought to keep the urge in check. He hadn’t anticipated the presence of the giant. It could be done, of course, but the position was not without risk. It needed thought.

His target was Lom. Chazia had been clear on that. And the Shaumian woman, if he found her there. There had been no mention of others, human or giant, but the strategic purpose of his mission was to draw a line. No loose ends. No continuation of the story. What that meant was without doubt. Leave none alive.

Mentally he checked through his equipment: a heavy hunting knife; two incendiary grenades; the revolver that Chazia had given him (a brand new model, the first production batch, a double-action Sepora loaded with .44 magnum high-velocity hunting rounds, power that would stop a bear mid-charge). The Sepora should be enough to handle the giant. And then there was the Exter-Vulikh, a stocky and wide-muzzled sub-machine gun with a yew stock, modified to take hundred-round drum magazines, of which he carried four.

The Vlast employed killers who prided themselves on the precision and refinement of their technique: they affected the exactitude of assassins, with high-velocity long-range hunting rifles and probing needle blades. But Safran was not one of those. He preferred brutally decisive weapons, muscular weapons that did serious, dramatic damage. Handling the Exter-Vulikh gave him powerful gut feelings of pleasure. He liked the weight and heft of it, the fear it provoked, and the noise and mess it made. Just thinking about using it stirred a feeling in his belly like hunger. Desire. And with the mudjhik, it was even better: the strength of the mudjhik was his strength, its power his power. The fear it caused was fear of him. Safran loved the mudjhik, with its barrel head and reddish brown stone-hard flesh. It was the colour of rust and dried blood, but it could glow like warm terracotta in the evening sun.

Years of training and long experience had built the connection between Safran and his mudjhik, until their minds were so closely intermixed there was no longer a clear distinction between them. Most mudjhiks passed from handler to handler and brought traces — stains — of their previous relationships with them, including the memories of deaths, fears, failures, human aging; but Safran’s had been a virgin, the last of them. Another reason to love it. But he feared it, too. Sometimes he dreamed it was pursuing him. In his dreams he tried to run and hide. In empty streets it followed him. Crashing through walls. Pulling down houses. Wherever he went it found him. In one dream he took refuge inside the Lodka itself, and the mudjhik was beating on the ten-foot-thick walls of stone, trying to break through. The boom-boom-boom of its heavy blows made the ground he stood on shake and tremble. He knew the mudjhik would never stop. Each blow chipped a fragment of the wall away. Hairline fractures opened and spread through the immense walls.

A mudjhik was tireless. If the man ran, the mudjhik would follow. Relentless and for ever. It was only a matter of time. There was no escape.

‘You’ll go alone,’ Chazia had said. ‘Travel light. Move fast. It’ll be better.’

The march had taken longer than expected. The mudjhik kept sinking into the soft ground and floundering in streams and shallow pools. Safran had become confused about direction, distance, time. The territory seemed larger than was possible. A day’s travel seemed to bring them no nearer the target. As time passed, Safran had felt his mind merging more and more completely with the mudjhik. He had thought they were close before, but this was overwhelming, as if the mudjhik were using him, not the other way round. It was a good feeling. He embraced it. He felt the Vlast itself, and all its authority and power and inevitability, flowing through him. He was not a single person any more. He was history happening. He was the face of the hammerhead, but it was the entire force of the arm-swing of the hammerblow that drove him forward. He didn’t have questions, he had answers. And, at last, after uncountable days of arduous marching, the onward flow of angel-sanctified history and the piece of angel stuff he held in his hand like a thread brought him to the isba.

The mudjhik was restless, knowing its quarry was close. It wanted to wade in and crush his skull and stamp his ribs in. Now. Even in the dark it would not miss. But Safran was tired after the long days of marching. His hands trembled with cold and fatigue. He would not fail, he could not, yet he knew the dangers of overconfidence. Once again he surveyed the lie of the operational zone.

The isba stood, stark in the moonshine, on a slightly raised shoulder of ground in a clearing about a hundred yards across. On the far side of the clearing from where Safran stood some kind of canal or nondescript river was running. With the mudjhik’s senses, he could smell its dark, cold and slow-moving current. On every other side of the isba there were thickets of thorn and bramble and low trees, cut through with narrow wandering pathways. Safran was satisfied that the targets could not escape. They could not cross the open ground without him knowing. In daylight, if they tried, he could cut them down with the Exter-Vulikh before they reached the cover of the trees. But in this light? The cloud cover was thickening, the last moonlight fading.

Working only by feel, Safran stripped down the Exter-Vulikh and reloaded the drum magazines one more time.

Wait. Let them sleep.

74

Lom was dreaming, dark, ugly, disturbing dreams of gathering hopelessness and death, and when the giant woke him he found them hard to shake off. Slowly he focused on the giant’s heavy hand on his shoulder, the huge figure leaning over him, the dim face close to his, the deep soft voice whispering in the stove-light.

‘The enemy is come. Wake up.’

‘What?’

‘You must go quickly. Both of you.’

‘What? I don’t…’ He struggled to separate reality and dream.

‘There is a hunter outside in the trees. A killer. An enjoyer of death.’

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I know.’

And he realised that he did know. He’d felt the presence of them in his dream, and he could still feel it now.

‘There are two of them,’ he said.

‘He has a follower with him. A thing like stone.’

A mudjhik? Could that be?

Lom, fully awake now, climbed down from the bed on top of the stove.

‘You must make no noise,’ said the giant. ‘They listen hard.’

It was viciously cold. Lom stood as close to the stove as he could. He had the slightly sickened feeling of being awake too early. Maroussia was preparing with pale and silent efficiency.

‘My cloak?’ whispered Lom. ‘Where is it?’

Aino-Suvantamoinen had it ready and handed it to him. Lom wished he could have felt the weight of the Zorn in its pocket, but that was still somewhere in the Lodka, presumably, where Safran and the militia would have left it when they brought him down. He’d lost his cosh too.

And then they were ready. But for what? He found he could sense the hunters outside in the darkness. They were out there watching. Waiting for dawn, presumably, a better killing light, and that would come soon. Lom considered their options for defending the isba, or getting to their boat, or escaping into the woods; but without weapons there were none. They were caught. Helpless.

Aino-Suvantamoinen stepped across to the great iron stove, pressed his belly against it and, stooping slightly, embraced it. The isba filled with the smell of damp wool singeing as the giant grunted, lifted the entire stove off the ground, spilling red embers against his legs, and carried it, staggering, a few paces sideways. The stove had been standing on a threadbare rug with an intricate geometrical pattern, much worn away and scarred by spills of ash and charcoal. The giant kicked the rug aside to reveal an area of rough planks. He knelt and fumbled at it, trying to get a grip with his huge fingers, then leaned back and pulled. The area of floor came up in his hands, releasing a chill draught of air that smelled of damp earth and stone. A patch of darkness opened like the cool mouth of a well.

‘Go down,’ he said. ‘Quickly!’

‘You want us to hide down a pit?’ said Lom.

‘Not a pit. A tunnel. The old lake people built souterrains. Follow the passageway until you find a side opening to the right. That will bring you out in the woods behind the enemy. When you are past them, then you run.’

‘What about you?’ said Maroussia.

‘I don’t fit down there.’

‘So…?’

‘So I will destroy our enemies if I can.’

‘You can’t fight a mudjhik,’ said Lom. ‘Not even you.’

‘There are ways,’ said the giant.

‘You can run too,’ said Maroussia. ‘You don’t have to fight. Not for us.’

The giant didn’t reply. He lit a lamp from the stove embers and handed it to Lom. His face in the flickering light looked mobile, distorted and strange.

‘You must be quiet,’ he said, ‘or you will alert the enemy. And you must go now.’ He knelt and scraped a heap of compacted earth from the isba floor and scooped it into the stove, dousing the flames and burying the embers. In the near-darkness they heard the swish of the entrance covers and knew that he was gone.

The souterrain passageway was narrow and low. Lom, stooping, the lamp flickering in his hand, went first. The walls and roof of the passage were lined with rough wet blocks of stone. The floor was of damp compacted earth. The feeling of immense weight above their heads, pressing down and pressing in sideways against the passage walls, was oppressive. Unignorable. It seemed impossible that there should be underground constructions at all in such a place of soft and shifting, saturated ground, but the tunnel they were following was evidently old. Perhaps even ancient. It had survived. Lom led the way forward as quickly as he could.

They felt the rush of scorching air almost before they heard the explosions. The surge extinguished the lamp in Lom’s hand. The concussions themselves, when they came, were muted, abbreviated, like heavy slabs being dropped from a height, and it took them a moment to realise what they had heard.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Lom. ‘Grenades. He’s got grenades.’

There was a longer, liquid-sounding, sliding slump, another rush of hot air, then silence and profound darkness. The tunnel had collapsed behind them.

‘Keep going,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m right behind you. Don’t stop.’

Lom edged forward, his right hand on the rough stone wall to feel his way along, his left hand stretched out ahead of him. The darkness was total. More than the simple absence of light, it was a tangible presence. It closed in around them and pushed against them, touching their faces with soft insistent fingers, pressing itself against their eyes, feeling its way into their nostrils, the whorls of their ears, slipping down their throats when they opened their mouths to breathe, thick with the rich and oppressive smell of being underground.

Lom kept moving. He had to push his way through the insistent jostling darkness, filled with the presence of the long-departed souterrain builders, alert, curious and resentful. He felt the hairs rising along the back of his neck.

There was nothing to measure their progress by, nor the passage of time, except the sound of their own bodies moving and breathing. Raw root-filled earth and rock were all around them now, just the other side of this thin skin of stone. This flimsy, permeable wall. The wall was nothing. Negligible. With one push he could put his hand through it and make an entrance for the slow ocean of mud. Why not? Mud was only a different air. They could breathe it, if they wanted to, like the earthworms did. They could swim through it, slowly, working their limbs through the viscous, slow-yielding, supportive stuff. They could do that. If they wanted to.

‘Vissarion?’ Maroussia’s voice reached him from somewhere far away. ‘Why have we stopped?’

He had lost the wall. He had taken his hand off it. When? Sometime. He waved his arms to left and right, over his head, and encountered nothing.

‘Can you feel the wall?’ he said.

‘What wall?’ she hissed.

‘Either side. Any wall. Can you?’

‘No.’

‘Shit.’

Think. Figure it out.

They must have come into some larger chamber that the giant hadn’t mentioned. He would have assumed they’d have the lamp.

He was standing on the very edge of a bottomless pit. A narrow tapering well. One more step… any step…

No. It was a tunnel not a cave. They were not lost, only disoriented. Taking a deep breath he turned to his right and began to walk steadily forward. Four or five paces, and he barked his knuckles against the cold damp stone. Its roughness was familiar now, and comforting.

There was another concussion. It made the ground sound hollow, and it seemed to have come from just above their heads. Then the ground shook again. And again. A rhythmical pounding that was obviously not grenades, not this time. Trickles of cold stuff fell across their faces and shoulders in the darkness. It might have been earth or water or a mixture of both. The pounding stopped, and a regular scraping took its place.

‘It’s the mudjhik,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s found us. It’s trying to dig us out.’

Lom felt the mudjhik’s presence. Felt the pleasure it was feeling. The anticipation. It would haul them out of the earth like rabbits. Burst their heads between its thumbs, one by one.

‘Keep moving!’ hissed Maroussia. ‘Come on! There’s no point waiting here till it gets through.’

Yes, thought Lom, but which way? He felt sour panic welling up at the back of his throat.

Which way?

His eyes were stretched wide, straining to see in the absolute dark that pressed in against them. When he realised what he was doing, he closed them.

We are too rational, he thought. We overvalue sight.

‘Get low!’ he hissed. ‘Lie down and get out of the airflow. And keep still.’

‘Lie down?’ said Maroussia.

‘Just do it.’

Lom breathed deeply, concentrating on the air around them, ancient and cold and thickened and still. Almost, but not entirely, still. The hole in his head was open, and he was open with it. He could feel the air circulating slowly in a hollow space, and he let himself ride with it, feeling its moves and turns. There was a current eddying slowly towards a gap in the wall. Another passageway. Sloping gently upwards towards an opening into the world outside. In the darkness he crossed directly to Maroussia and took her hand.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

He was hurrying, almost running through the dark, pulling Maroussia behind him. She swore as she smashed her elbow against an outcrop of stone and almost stumbled, but he kept hold of her and pulled her on. Behind them the sound of the mudjhik’s digging had stopped. It knew they were moving. Lom felt its uncertainty. Frustration. For the moment it was at a loss. But it would find them. And it would keep coming. It always would.

The walls of the passageway were closing in. The roof was getting lower. But Lom led them on at a desperate shambling run. Then there was light ahead of them. The grey light of dawn. Slabs of stone fallen sideways. A gap half-blocked with brambles and small trees. They pushed and scrabbled their way through, ignoring the scratching of thorns and the gouging of branches. And then they were out. Standing among fallen leaves in pathless undergrowth.

Lom looked for cover, any cover, any place to hide or make a stand against the mudjhik. Nowhere. Only a tangle of low trees and undergrowth and moss in every direction.

But what sort of stand could they have made You needed a trench mortar to stop a mudjhik in its tracks. If it came, it came.

There was an acrid smell in the air. A big fire, burning. The isba!

Maroussia went crashing off towards the scent of burning. Lom was leaning against a tree, doubled over, gasping and trying desperately to get enough breath in to refill his spasming lungs.

‘Shit,’ he gasped. ‘Shit. Wait!’

Maroussia stopped and turned.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Just keep up.’

75

Minutes later they were crouched side by side among the trees at the edge of the clearing. The isba was in flames. Its skin covering was gone. The whalebone frame still stood, blackened and skeletal in the middle of a wind-tugged roaring fire of wood and furs and wool. White and grey smoke and clouds of sparks poured into the sky, swithering and whipping in the wind. The smoke was blowing away from them but they could smell it.

The mudjhik was a dark shape slowly circling the fire. From time to time it paused, its massive neckless head tilted to one side, as if it were listening to something. Sniffing the air.

There was no sign of Aino-Suvantamoinen. There was no sign of their human hunter either. They watched the mudjhik in silence.

Lom felt something dark touch his mind. It was the same intrusive triumphant contact he had felt in the souterrain. His hands prickled as if the flow of blood were returning to numbed extremities. His mouth was dry. He felt himself sinking into a pit of blank hopelessness. Despair.

The position is hopeless. We’re going to die.

No. That’s not my voice.

The mudjhik’s blank face whipped around towards where they were hiding, driving its eyeless gaze into the tangle of branches.

‘Fuck!’ hissed Lom. ‘It’s seen us. Run!’ He caught a glimpse of the mudjhik beginning to move towards them. A kind of lurching fall that was the beginning of its accelerating charge. They turned and fled.

They ran thoughtlessly, stumbling and crashing through the undergrowth. Lom’s chest was tight, his stomach sickened. Already he was feeling the thud of the stone fist against the back of his head that would be the last thing he ever felt.

After twenty or thirty yards they broke out of the thorny scrub onto a path, a narrow avenue filled with pale dawn light like water in a canal. It led gently downhill between taller trees towards the mudflats. Picking up speed they ran along it. Lom had no plan, no hope, except the wild thought that if they could reach the soft expanses of mud the mudjhik would be unable to follow them. It would flounder and sink. How they themselves would cross the treacherous flats he didn’t know.

He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He could hear the mudjhik following. The rhythm of its heavy footfalls shook the earth beneath them. And he could feel the taunting, the almost casual mockery of its leisurely pace. It would not lose them now.

Then Lom was almost knocked sideways off his feet by a slap of wind against his body. Flying leaves and small pieces of twig and thorn stung his face, half-blinding him. He half-felt and half-saw in the corner of his eye a small and indistinct figure flow out of the woods and back up the path behind them. It was almost like a woman except that she was made of twigs and leaves and twisting wind. Behind him he heard Maroussia cry out and stumble. He stopped and turned to grab her and pull her upright.

‘Don’t stop!’ he shouted into the rising noise. ‘Don’t look back!’

The wind rose, dissonant and maddening: it was almost impossible to walk against it, let alone run. A heavy bough fell at their feet with a dull thud. It didn’t bounce. Big enough to have killed them all.

‘Just keep going!’ Lom yelled.

A series of tremendous crashes came behind them, one after another. Four. Five. Six. Accompanied by the squeal and groan of tearing wood. The wind died.

‘Vissarion!’

It was Maroussia. He stopped and looked back.

There was an indistinct shape on the path, at once a woman and a vortex of air and tree fragments, standing on the air a foot above the earth. It seemed as if her arms were spread wide to embrace the wood. Beyond her, huge trees had toppled across the track. Half a dozen of the largest beech and oak lay as if hurricane-flattened. Swirls of wind still stirred among their fallen, near-leafless crowns. The mudjhik had almost managed to evade them, but the last of them had come down with the immense weight of its trunk across its great stone back. The mudjhik was trapped under it, its face pressed deep into the scrubby grass and dark earth. It was not moving.

The wind-woman let her arms drop to her sides in a gesture filled with tiredness and relief. Aino-Suvantamoinen stepped out of the woods. He was walking towards the mudjhik where it lay.

‘No!’ yelled Lom. ‘Wait! Don’t!’

The giant didn’t hear him, or else he took no notice. He walked across to look down on the mudjhik’s motionless head. Its face was pressed inches deep into the mud. It could not have seen or heard or breathed. But it did not need to. As soon as the giant came within reach the mudjhik’s free arm whipped forward in a direction no human or giant could have moved. But it was not human or giant: it had no ligaments and skeletal joints to define the limits of its moves. Its fist of rust-red stone smashed into the front of the giant’s knee and broke it with a sickening crack. The giant shrieked in shock and anger and pain as he fell. The wind-woman seemed to cry out also, and shiver like a cat’s-paw across still water. A storm of twig-fragments and whipped-up earth clattered ineffectually about the mudjhik’s half-buried head.

The mudjhik’s arm struck out again, almost too fast to be seen, punching towards the fallen giant’s body, but he was just out of reach. Groggily, Aino-Suvantamoinen began to crawl away to safety, shaking his great head and dragging his snapped and twisted leg. Lom could hear his laboured breathing, deep and hollow and harsh. He sounded like a huge beast panting, a dray horse or a great elk. The mudjhik was moving purposefully under the weight of the fallen tree. Unable to raise itself with the trunk on it back, it was rocking its body from side to side and scooping at the earth under its belly with its hands. Gouging a deepening groove in the ground. Digging its way out. Soon it would be free.

He turned to Maroussia, but she wasn’t there. He looked around wildly. Where the hell had she gone?

Then Lom saw her. Up the path, at the edge of the trees. She was heading for the stricken giant. Aino-Suvantamoinen was waving her away, but she was taking no notice.

‘Maroussia!’ Lom yelled. ‘Get down! Get out of sight!’

There was a sharp ugly rattle of gunfire. An obscene clattering sound, flat and echoless. A sub-machine gun. Lom saw the muzzle flashes among the trees up and to the left, on the side of the path away from Maroussia. Bullet-strikes kicked up the mud, moving in a line towards the crawling, injured bulk of Aino-Suvantamoinen. A row of small explosions punched into the side of the giant’s chest from hip to shoulder, each one bursting open, sudden rose-red blooms in little bursts of crimson mist. The huge body shuddered at the impacts. Then the top of his head came off.

Lom heard Maroussia’s sigh of despair. Then the gun turned on her. A spray of bullets ripped into the trees around her, splattering the branches like heavy rain. He saw a splash of blood across her cheek, red against pale, as she fell.

‘Maroussia!’

She wasn’t moving.

No, thought Lom. Not her. No.

He began to move. He needed to get to her. He needed to draw the fire. Give her time to get into cover. If she could.

The gunfire turned towards him. He yelled and threw himself sideways into the trees, falling heavily.

Silence. The firing had stopped.

Keeping low, expecting the hail of bullets to fall again at any moment, Lom began to slither along the ground, hauling himself along on his elbows, driving forward with his knees. He felt the low mat of brambles and the roots of trees scraping his lower belly raw. He winced as a sharp branch dug into him under his belt: it felt as if it had pierced his skin and gouged a chunk from his flesh. He ignored it. He was trying to work his way up the hill to where she had fallen. Keeping his head low, he could see nothing. Where was the gunman? Waiting for him to show himself. Moving to a new position? Coming up behind him? No point in thinking any of that. Move! The only thing in his mind was reaching Maroussia. He reached the shelter of a moss-covered stump. Pushing aside a thicket of small branches, he risked a look.

Twenty yards ahead of him, Maroussia, looking dazed and lost, was trying to stand. He saw her stumble into the cover of the trees.

And then the mudjhik was free of the fallen tree and on its feet, and coming straight towards him.

Lom ran, ducking low, ignoring the thorns and brambles that slashed his face and hands until they ran wet with blood, heading for where the trees grew densest, squeezing between close-growing trunks, wading brooks. Anything that would slow the mudjhik. Anything that would give him the advantage.

The mudjhik was relentless. It would not give up. It would keep on coming. But it could not move as fast as a man through a wood. Lom could hear it behind him, crashing its way through the trees, but he was getting further ahead. Widening the gap.

Lom ran. There was nothing before this moment, nothing after it; there was only now and the next half-second after now, where he had to get to, by running as fast as he could make his body run and by not falling. The world narrowed down to one single point of clarity, the hole through which he had to pass to reach the moment on the other side of now. Behind him was the hunter. Ahead of him… calling him, wanting him as much as he wanted it… the safe hiding. The dark place. The mothering belly. The hole in the ground.

Lom hunched in the souterrain. He was sweating and shaking with cold. Thick darkness pressed against his eyes and seeped into his skin. He could smell his own blood, smeared on his hands and face; he could smell the damp earth and stone; and he could smell his own fear. Fear, and despair. Where was Maroussia? For the third time he did not know. For the third time he had left her to face her enemies alone. Vissarion Lom, protector of women. His own death would surely come and find him here. The mudjhik would sniff him out and dig. Drag him out and snap his neck. He had a little time to wait. But no hope. The souterrain was not a refuge but a trap. A dark hand reached inside his skull with stone fingers and squeezed his brain in its palm. Cruel and stupid and certain. I am coming. I will be with you soon. Again Lom felt the prickling clumsy numbness in his fingers and the gut-loosening dread. It will not be long.

He repelled the touch with all his force and slammed his mind shut against it. He had more strength than he had expected. This was something new. He felt a moment of surprise, his adversary’s mental stumble as he lost his footing, and then… silence. He was free of it.

Only when it was gone did Lom realise how long it had been there: the fear, the lack of confidence, the constant unsettling feeling of alarm and threat moving at the barest edge of his awareness. It had been with him ever since he’d woken in the giant’s isba, but it was gone at last. He’d driven it out. He was stronger than he thought. Stronger than his enemies knew.

Lom waited a moment, collecting his strength. He took stock. The hunters knew where he was, and he couldn’t keep the mind-wall in place for ever. But it was a chance. And Maroussia might be alive. She was alive. He was sure of it, though he couldn’t have said how he knew. Somehow he could feel her presence out there somewhere in the woods.

It was time to fight back.

When he was ready, Lom called back all the feelings of defencelessness and despair. He let himself be defeated, hopeless, hurt. Bleeding and weeping and broken in the dark.

It is finished. Over.

He let the one thought fill his mind.

I am finished. No more fighting. No more running. Everything hurts.

And deliberately he lowered his defences and let the mudjhik in. He felt its touch flow into his mind, and let it feel his defeat.

And then — when he had it, when he felt its triumph — Lom began to edge away within his mind.

Carefully, slowly, reluctantly, so it would feel to the mudjhik like energy and will draining away, he slipped beneath the surface of his own consciousness, retreating behind a second, inner, hidden wall he had built there. Barely thinking at all, moving by instinct only, he began to crawl away down the souterrain passage, further and deeper into the earth.

76

Maroussia watched the militia man step past Aino-Suvantamoinen’s body with relaxed, fastidious indifference. He was another uniform, another gun. After the mudjhik had lumbered off under the trees in pursuit of Lom, he had stepped out of cover. Coming for her.

He was casually confident now, the squat ugly weapon slung from his shoulder and held across his body, pointing to the ground. He stopped for a moment to look at the dead giant. A defeated humiliated hill of flesh. The carcase of an immense slaughtered cow. She could tell by the way the man held himself that he was pleased. Gratified by the demonstration of his own power. He was walking across to where she lay. Not hurrying. She was no threat to him. Simply a matter of tidiness. A job to finish neatly. An injured woman to kill, while the mudjhik hunted down the fleeing man. He was a man who had succeeded.

She saw him close up. He was bare-headed. She could see his pale, insipid face. Fine fair hair, close-cropped, boyish. A piece of angel stone in the centre of his head. Then it came to her. Like a blow to the head. Anger knotted its fingers in her stomach and pulled, tight, making her retch. It was the same man. The one who had shot down her mother was the same one who was sauntering across to her now to finish the job.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No.’

She began to crawl away towards the trees. She was not badly hurt. Splinters of wood, smashed from the trees by the machine-gun fire, had sprayed her face, leaving her stung and bleeding from small cuts, and something heavy had struck her on the back of the head, leaving her momentarily dizzy, but that was gone now. She could have stood up and tried to run, but the militia man would simply have cut her down. She wanted to draw him closer. Get him into the woods, where she could spring at him from behind a tree. Knock the gun aside. Claw at his eyes with her fingernails. She needed him close for that. Careful to make no sudden movement that might cause him to raise his gun and rake her down from where he was, she crawled with desperate slowness towards the thickets.

The image of her mother dead came vividly into her head. Another slack and ragged body lying in the pool of its own leaking mess. That was three of them. Aino-Suvantamoinen. Vishnik. Mother. Just three among many of course: the Vlast was heaping up the corpses of the dead in great hills all across the dominions, tipping them into pits with steam shovels and bulldozers, and no one was counting. Soon she would be another.

She was not going to make it to cover. Her chance was no chance at all. In less than a minute — in seconds — he would do it. It was his job. His function. He was an efficient man, and even here in the woods the day belonged to efficient men. She was about to get up and run, knowing it would only hasten the end, when she heard him cry out in anger behind her. The noise of his gunfire shattered the silence that had settled on the morning. But no bullets struck her.

She looked back. For a second she thought he had been surrounded by bees. Little black insects were swarming all over him and he was firing wildly, the gun held one-handed while he tried to protect his face with the other and beat the bees away. Only it wasn’t bees. It was leaves and pieces of twig and thorn. He was at the centre of a wildly spinning vortex of wind. The woman-shaped column of air that she had glimpsed earlier was upon him. Embracing him with her arms of wind. The hunter was panicking, blinded, shouting in anger and fear, lurching from side to side, trying to punch the wind away, firing his gun at the air that was assaulting him.

Maroussia could see, as he could not yet, that the wind-woman was losing her strength. Dissipating. The man was keeping his feet. The wind-woman who had brought down huge trees on the mudjhik could not even floor him now. She was exhausted. But she had done enough. She had made time. Maroussia ran.

She pushed her way through the undergrowth, following a path she hoped was taking her back to the isba. It wound between trees and turned aside round boulders. Sometimes it failed altogether, and she had to squeeze between close-growing trees until she found it again. Or found a different path. There was no way of telling. She might have been doing no more than following random trails made by wild animals. She had a vague notion of where the isba lay, but no way of knowing whether she could trust her sense of direction in this world of moss and leafless branches and strange hummocks in the ground.

The wind-woman had given her time. She should use it. She stopped running. Stood. Listened. Heard the sound of her own ragged breathing, the beating of her heart, the air moving through the trees — a sound as ancient and constant as the sea. She rested her hand on the smooth grey skin of a young beech tree. Trying to feel the life in it. She could feel nothing, but she imagined the tree welcomed the effort. She felt that maybe the warm touch of her palm had quickened it somehow. Imagination. But it was a good thought anyway, her first good thought in a long time. Progress. The territory would help her if she let it. Her pursuer would not think like that.

Once more she followed the smell of burnt wood and bone and wool to the remains of the isba. Much of the whalebone framework had fallen, but a few blackened lengths stuck upwards out of the mess. Heaps of rug and fur still smouldered, clotted and blackened and ruinous. The smell of it caught at the back of her throat. The iron stove was canted sideways, heat-seared and filthy with ash and soot. Some of its tiles had fallen away. It looked diminished and pathetic. Everything looked smaller now. There had been so much room inside the isba when she was in it, but the burnt scar it had left on the ground seemed too small to have contained so much space. Maroussia had seen plots like this in Mirgorod, sites where condemned houses had been cleared away and new ones not yet built. The gaps they left always seemed too small. All interior spaces were bigger than their exterior. Living inside them made it so.

The Sib was still tied to the little jetty on the creek at the edge of the clearing where Aino-Suvantamoinen had brought it the day after they arrived, while Lom had lain lost in his fever and she had sat with him. She considered untying the skiff, climbing in and drifting away. But Lom was out there somewhere in the woods. Perhaps not dead. Perhaps the mudjhik had not found him.

What would the hunter do? Come here of course. Check the isba. Check the Sib. Maybe he was watching her now from the trees. Maybe the mudjhik was there. No. Not that. They would not wait. They would attack immediately. They were not here yet. But they would come.

Think.

The territory will help you, if you let it.

The hunter would come here. He would walk where she had walked. Cross the ground that she had crossed. Stand on the jetty where she had stood, to look down into the boat. Sooner or later, he must do that. How much time did she have? Perhaps hours. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps none.

Near the isba was a neat stack of Aino-Suvantamoinen’s fishing gear, untouched by the fire. A hauled-out salmon trap. A mud-sled. Leather buckets for cockles. And, leaning neatly against a stack of firewood, a shaft of wood thicker than her arm and as long as she was tall, with a flat metal blade like a long, narrow spade, lashed firmly to one end. She tested the blade edge. It was sharp on both sides and at the end. She had seen implements like this before, in the whalers’ harbour. Flensing tools, used to slice long ribbons of flesh from porpoises and small whales as they hung from hooks. This was the same, but bigger, of a thickness and weight for the giant to heft. Unwieldy for her. But it was all she had.

The territory will help you, if you let it.

There was a little inlet by the jetty, where a stream flowed into the creek. The ground all around it was flat, grassy, empty but for a few saplings all the way back to the isba and the wood’s edge. But the bank of the inlet was undercut by the stream, creating an overhanging ledge a couple of feet above a small expanse of soft, grey, semi-liquid mud. Maroussia threw a stone out onto the mud and watched it slowly settle for half its depth into the slobs.

She threw the heavy flensing blade after the stone, marking its position by a large bluish tussock of rough grass. Then she took off her clothes. All of them. They would be useless for what she intended; they would only hamper her movements. Slow her down.

She shivered. The touch of the wintry morning raised tiny bumps on her skin. She would be colder soon, much colder, but that was nothing. She could ignore it. Rolling her clothes into a bundle she dropped them into the bottom of the boat and threw a tarpaulin over them. Then she went back to the overhanging bank and slipped carefully down onto the mud within reach of where the blade had sunk almost out of sight. She pressed it down with her foot until the mud closed over it.

Maroussia knelt on the mud. Her knees sank immediately into the chilly ooze. Its touch was soft and slightly gritty against her skin. She began to scoop out a narrow channel the length of her body, plastering the mud over herself. Water began to puddle in the bottom of the shallow trench. But she couldn’t cover herself entirely with the mud. She couldn’t reach her back. There was no time. She lay down in the hollow she had made and rolled, covering every inch of her pale skin with the cold grey mud. Rubbing it into her hair and over her face. She lay flat, trying to wriggle her body down into it as much as she could, until she was firmly bedded in. Lying still, she could feel herself sinking slowly deeper as the mud opened to take her down. Gradually she felt the cold softness rising higher. She had chosen a place where a notch in the bank gave her a view of the jetty ten feet away. It would have to do. She waited. The hunter would come.

Time passed. Maroussia felt her body stiffening in the cold. She felt the tiny movements of the soft mud oozing against her. Water puddling underneath. The mud on her back began to dry and itch. She closed her mind against it. Do not move. Slowly the terrain closed in about her, absorbing her presence until she was part of it. Scarcely there. A heron flapped along the creek on loose flaggy wings and alighted close by. She watched it stand motionless, a slender sentry, probing the water with its intent yellow gaze, oblivious of her only a few feet away. She could not let it stay. If she startled it later, when the time came, it would alert him.

‘Go!’ she hissed. ‘Move it! Shift!’

The heron didn’t react. She risked moving a hand. Flexing her fingers out of the mud. The heron’s yellow eye swivelled towards the movement instantly, alert for the chance of a vole or a frog. Their gazes met. For a moment they stared at each other. Then the heron lifted itself slowly away to find a more private post.

Some time later — how long, she had no idea — an otter came browsing along the creek and passed near her face. It had no idea she was there.

And then the hunter came.

She didn’t hear him until he was almost on her. He was good. He was taking care. She heard his boots in the grass when he was ten steps away. He was standing where she had known he would stand. Checking out the Sib as she had known he would. Holding the gun cradled and ready, as she had pictured him doing. With his back towards her.

The territory will help you, if you let it.

She took a firm grip on the heavy shaft of the flensing blade that lay alongside her in the mud. Now was the time.

She was certain that the sounds of the river masked the sound of her rising out of the mud — a thing of mud herself — and the tread of her bare muddy feet on the grass, but some peripheral sense must have alerted him He was turning towards her and raising the muzzle of the gun when she swung the blunt end of the flensing tool at his head. It caught him across the side of his face. The momentum of the blow knocked him sideways and his booted feet slid from under him on the wet planking of the jetty. He went down heavily, losing his grip on the gun, and ended up on his back, looking up at her, blankly surprised.

Afterwards she wondered whether it had been her startling appearance, naked and plastered with mud, her face distorted with effort and hate, that slowed his reaction, as much as the mis-hit blow and the awkward fall. But whatever the cause, he was too slow, and she had played this scene through in her imagination a thousand times while she waited, anticipating every variation, every way it might go. Without stopping to think, she reversed the tool in her grip, set the vicious leading edge of the blade against his neck between sternum and chin, and shoved it downwards with all her weight, as if she were digging a spade into heavy ground. It sliced into his neck with a gristly crunch. She felt it parting the flesh and lodging against his vertebrae. He tried to scream but could manage only a wheezing, frothing gargle. She pulled back an inch or two and thrust again. The shaft was at an angle now, and she leaned the whole of her weight onto it. She felt the blade find its way between two vertebrae. It was sharp. She pushed again. His head came clean off and rolled a few feet across the planking, leaving a mess of flesh and tubes and gleaming white glimpses of bone between the man’s shoulders. A widening pool of purple blood.

77

Lom walked fast through the souterrain tunnels. There was no light, but he didn’t need it: the fear had gone and he was strong. He was going back to where they had first come down, under the giant’s isba. He knew the way. He knew how to avoid the earth fall caused by Safran’s grenades. The tunnels weren’t dark and cramped; they were bright, airy, perfumed, luminous, beautiful. He knew his way by the smell of the earth, the trickle of dislodged earth, the stir and spill of air across the dampness of stone. He felt it all — he felt the roots of trees in the earth and the sway of their leafheads in the wind — as he felt the rub of his cuff against his wrist, the sock rucked under his foot, the sting of the grazes on his belly. There were other things too, things he could not quite focus on, not yet, but he felt their presence: they were like flitting shadows, hunches, hints. He was a world in motion — a borderless, lucid, breathing world. The seal in his head was cut away. The waters of the river and the sea had washed him clear.

This would not last. He knew that. Aino-Suvantamoinen had said that. It would fade, but it would not altogether go, and it would come again.

As he passed through the dark tunnel without stumbling, he tried to reach out with his mind into the woods above him. He didn’t know yet what he could do. What the limits were. Further and further he pushed himself.

He found Safran. Safran was nearby. Moving with careful confidence almost directly above him.

He found the mudjhik, pushing its way through thorns. It was hunting but it had no trail. It was lost.

Lom reached out for Maroussia, but he couldn’t find her. He felt her presence, but she was… withdrawn. Barely breathing. Waiting. Still. She was hiding. But not from him.

And then he felt Safran’s death…

Lom needed to get out of the souterrain. Now. He need to get to Maroussia.

He came to the place where the giant had let them down, but when he pushed up against the wooden hatch it would not shift. It was high above his head: he could just about touch it with his hands but he couldn’t get his full strength into the shove. It seemed as if there was something heavy on top of it — the stove had fallen across it, perhaps.

He needed to get out.

There was another way. Perhaps.

Lom gathered all his strength into himself. Breathing slowly, focusing all his attention on what he was doing, he reached out around him into the perfumed earthy darkness, pulling together the air of the tunnel, making it as tight and hard as he could. He waited a moment, gathering balance. The earth above his head was cool and dark and filled with roots and life. It was another kind of air. Thicker, darker, richer air, and that was all it was. And then he pushed upwards.

78

Maroussia sat on the edge of the jetty and considered her situation. She had killed a man. She thought about that. When she had shot the militia man near Vanko’s, although she had not meant to kill him and didn’t think she had, afterwards she had been filled with empty sickness and self-disgust. But this time, though she had killed, she hadn’t felt that. There was only a pure and visceral gladness. Satisfaction burst inside her like a berry. She had wanted to do it. Now it was done. That was good.

She slipped off the jetty edge into the deep icy water of the creek. It came up to her chest and the coldness of it made her gasp. She wished she knew how to swim but she had never learned. She waded out into the middle of the stream, feeling the slippery mud and buried stones and the tangle of weeds beneath her feet. The strong current pushed at her legs. She ducked her head under the water, eyes open, letting it wash the clotted mud from her hair. Cleaning everything away, the mud and the fear and the blood that had splashed her legs. Surrendering herself, she let her body drift downstream, turning slowly, until she came to a place where the branches of a fallen tree reached out across the creek. There she climbed out.

When she got back to the jetty she kicked the severed head over the side. It fell in the water with a plop and disappeared. Then she put her clothes back on and prepared the skiff to leave: laid the oars ready in the rowlocks; made sure the lines were loosely tied so one tug would release them. She would give Lom till dusk to find her, and if he had not come, she would go alone. She drank a little water and wished there was something she could eat. She had not felt so hungry for days. But that was tomorrow’s problem. For the moment it was enough to sit with her back against a jetty post and wait.

She tried to keep her eye on the edge of trees that enclosed the wide clearing, watching for any sign of movement that would signal the coming of Lom. Or the mudjhik. But her gaze kept being drawn back to the burned-out remains of the isba. The outward sign of her desolation and grief. Killing the militia man had not healed that. Not at all. Desultory snowflakes appeared, skittering in the grey air.

And then the wreckage of the isba erupted. It was as if a shell had fallen, or a mine exploded. A column of dark earth and roots and stone and the remains of the isba spouted ten — twenty — feet up and slumped back down in a crump of dust. She saw the giant’s stove bounce and break open. A wave of dust-heavy air rolled over her, smelling of the raw, damp underground.

As the air cleared she saw something, a man-shaped figure, climbing up out of the earth. Its face was a mess of dirt and blood. A heavy cloak hanging from its shoulders. It stood for a moment as if dazed, looking around slowly, then it began to walk slowly towards her.

‘Vissarion?’ she said. ‘Vissarion? Is that you.’

The figure stopped to wipe its face with its sleeve. It was Lom. He looked lost, disoriented, stunned. She saw that the wound in his forehead had opened. It was seeping blood into his eyes and down across his mouth. He kept wiping at his face, vaguely, again and again.

‘Maroussia?’ said Lom. ‘There’s dirt in my eyes. I can’t see properly.’

‘What… what happened? Was that another grenade?’

Lom wiped his face again and looked at her, blinking.

‘That?’ he said. ‘That was me.’ He paused, and she saw that he was grinning at her. Grinning like a child. ‘This is going to be fun.’ Then his legs crumpled and he sat down heavily beside her with his hand to his forehead. ‘Ow,’ he said, looking at her balefully. ‘My head hurts. You haven’t got any water I could drink, have you?’

‘Vissarion?’ said Maroussia. ‘Where’s the mudjhik?’

79

Artyom Safran wondered where he was. Dead, certainly. But also… not. As the terrible flat blade had begun to slice into his neck and he knew that he would certainly die there, he made one last reckless throw of the dice. He grabbed at the mental cord connecting him to the mudjhik and hurled himself along it, all of himself, wholeheartedly, holding nothing in reserve. It was easy and instant, like jumping from a window to escape a fire. The mudjhik had been pulling at him insidiously for years, and the pull had been growing stronger all the time they were in the wetlands. More than once in the last few days he had felt himself slipping away, and it had required an effort of will to hold himself separate. Now he stopped trying, and threw himself instead at the door, and it was open, and he stumbled through. The mudjhik, reacting instantly, pulled him inside. Greedily. It felt like a great hunger being fed at last. In the last moment of his separateness, Safran had felt a surge of crude, ugly, inhuman satisfaction enfolding him.

What have I done?

It was his last purely human thought.

He was not alone. Dog-in-mudjhik came at him hard, scratching and tearing and spitting, before he had a chance to find his balance. Dogin-mudjhik would tolerate no rival. It was a territory thing. Only the death of the interloper would do.

Safran tried to put up some sort of defence, but he had no time to work out how. He tried curling himself into a tight ball with his back against Dog-in-mudjhik’s ripping jaw. Hugging himself to protect his vital organs. But it was the merest persiflage. Dog-in-mudjhik cut through all that. Dog-in-mudjhik was shredding him, tearing him off in chunks, snarling. Dog-in-mudjhik made himself as big as a house and started to dig. Safran was going to die a second time.

But the mudjhik’s angel stuff knew what it needed, and it was not dog thoughts any more. In the gap between two instants the space inside the mudjhik that Dog-in-mudjhik occupied ceased to exist. It closed up completely, solid where space had been. Dog-in-mudjhik went out like a snuffed candle. Dog-in-mudjhik was extinguished, leaving only a faint and diminishing smell of dog mind in the air.

What had once been Safran lay still, curled up tight, quivering like hurt flesh. Trying to close himself off. Trying too late to renege on the deal. Far too late. The angel-stuff encompassed him, fitting itself around him until there was no space between them. Then it moved in.

Safran-in-mudjhik felt sick and dizzy with horror. He was in a cold red-grey world. Seeing without eyes, hearing without ears, overwhelmed and confused by the mudjhik’s alien angel-senses, he couldn’t grasp where he was. Or who. Or what. But even then, in the moment of his profoundest and most appalling collapse, he began to feel something else. A new kind of triumph. He sensed the first glimmerings of an immense new power. The angel stuff was feeling it, but so was he. He was going to be a new thing in the universe. A first. A best. Immortal. Safran-in-mudjhik was strong.

Experimentally he swept an arm sideways. It cracked against a tree and broke it. The tree toppled towards him and he fended it off effortlessly. A long-eared owl, half-stunned and dislodged from its roost, struggled to get purchase on the air with its wings. Safran-in-mudjhik caught it in flight and smashed it against his own stone chest. Felt it break. Felt it die. So good. This would be fun. There were so many things to do. Sweet freedom things.

First and sweetest, revenge.

Safran-in-mudjhik began to explore his new self. There were angel-senses here, and angel memories that Dog-in-mudjhik could perceive nothing of. The bright immensity between the stars. Existence without time. He could remember. He belonged there. And now he was on his way back.

Somewhere in the rust-and-blood-red corridors of his new mind he could feel the connection with Lom. Faint but still there. He fumbled towards it, but he was still too clumsy to hold on to it. He couldn’t get it clear enough to know where Lom was. Not yet. But soon. Finesse would come. In the meantime, he certainly knew where she was. The Shaumian woman. The Safran-slicer. Creator of Safran-in-mudjhik. Kill her first. He turned towards the isba clearing and the creek. It was going to be a good first day.

80

The swollen river surged ahead, thick and brown and heavy. It carried the skiff onwards and widened as it went. Lom, cradling Safran’s sub-machine gun, stared mesmerised at the surface. It was scummed with ragged drifts of foam, littered with dead leaves and matted rafts of grass and broken branches. He felt drained. His head hurt. The new skin across the hole in his skull had split, and though a crust of dried blood had formed, it throbbed in time with his pulse and wept a clear sticky liquid. It was sore, and all the muscles of his body ached. The effort of pushing his way out of the souterrain had exhausted him, and the world around him felt diminished, distant and separate. He wondered if such easy power would ever come back to him again.

Maroussia handled the oars. She had little to do but steer the skiff with occasional touches, avoiding the larger obstacles floating along with them and keeping them clear of eddies and backwaters.

‘The waters are rising,’ said Lom. ‘It must have been raining in the hills.’

Maroussia shook her head.

‘The giant is gone,’ she said. ‘Without him to work the sluices, the waters are running wild. All this wetland will go. There’ll be nothing left but the city and the sea.’

A dark mossy floating lump of tree nudged heavily against the bow and rested there, travelling alongside them in the current. Lom stared at it. It was a mass of little juts and elbows of branch-stump and bark canker. Every crook and hole was edged with a dewy fringe of spider’s web. Lom shifted the weight of the gun, which was pressing into his leg. The death of Aino-Suvantamoinen, and the weight of all the other deaths before him, had left him feeling numbed and stupid. The boat was taking them into a darker, emptier future.

Maroussia pulled hard at the oars, skewing the Sib sideways. She rowed in silence, looking at nothing. Lom watched her hands on the oars. Large, strong, capable. She’d pushed back her sleeves. Her hands were reddened but her forearms were pale and smooth. He could see the tendons and muscles working as she rowed. Her black hair was slicked with river mist: it clung to her face and neck in tight shining curls.

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Lom.

‘What?’

‘The giant. It was Safran that killed him. Not you.’

‘He tried to help,’ said Maroussia.

‘He thought it was important. So did Raku.’

‘Yes.’

‘So it is important.’

For a long time Maroussia didn’t say anything. She just kept rowing. Then she looked up at him.

‘I’m going to find the Pollandore,’ she said. ‘The angel is destroying the world. The Pollandore can stop that.’

Lom noticed how thin she was, though her arms were strong. As she rowed, he watched the shadow play on the vulnerable, scoop-shaped dip at the base of her throat. The suprasternal notch. She was human and raw and beautiful. She rowed in silence for a long time. Lom watched the empty mudbanks pass by. He wiped his weeping forehead.

‘Vissarion?’

‘Yes?’

‘That thing in your head…’

‘It’s gone now.’

‘What was it? How did it get there?’

‘I was young. I don’t know how old. Eight maybe. Eight or nine. A child.’

‘That man I killed…’

‘Safran.’

‘He had one the same.’

‘Savinkov’s Children. They call us that. Ever heard of Savinkov?’

‘No.’

‘You should have. Everyone should know about Savinkov.’

‘I don’t.’

‘He was provost of the Institute at Podchornok when I was there. Vishnik went there too. He was my friend.’

‘But he didn’t… he didn’t have anything like that.’

‘No. Only a few of us. Before he came to the Institute, Savinkov was an technician of angel-flesh. His specialism was the effect of it on the human mind. Putting a piece of it in direct contact with the human brain.’

‘They put that stuff in people’s heads?’

‘And the other way round.’

‘You don’t mean…’

‘It’s common practice with mudjhiks to put in an animal brain: naturally they tried with human brains too, but it doesn’t work that way. The mudjhiks become uncontrollable. Insane. But there are less dramatic methods than full transplant. Angel flesh has a sort of life. Awareness. It affects you. And it encourages loyalty. The sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the whole. It’s a way of binding you to the Vlast.’

‘But… you… They did it to you when you were a child.’

‘That was Savinkov’s subject. His research. Were children more or less susceptible? Did the effect grow or diminish with time? How could you measure and predict it? The skull insertion technique was Savinkov’s invention. It used to go wrong a lot. The children died, or… well, Savinkov put them to work. In the gardens. The stables.’

‘But… the parents?’

‘We didn’t have parents. None of us did. Savinkov used to take waifs and strays into the Institute for the experiments. I never knew who my parents were.’

‘Oh…’

‘Savinkov saw nothing wrong with it,’ said Lom. ‘He had some successes too. Some of them became excellent mudjhik handlers and technicians with the Worm. Servants of the Vlast of great distinction.’

‘But not you.’

‘No. I was one of Savinkov’s disappointments in that respect.’

Walls rose on either side of the river. The channel narrowed. A roar of rushing water. The skiff rolled and yawed, rushing ahead out of control.

‘Hold on!’ yelled Lom.

Maroussia almost lost the oars as the Sib pitched over a low weir and spun out into wide grey water. The Mir Ship Canal. The skiff settled, drifting slowly with the current.

It was a bleak, blank place after the edgeless mist and mud of the wetlands: a broad channel cut dead straight between high embankments of stone blocks and concrete slopes, wide enough for great ships and ocean-going barges to pass four or six abreast. Featureless. There was nothing natural to be seen, not even a gull in the sky. The trees were out of sight behind the great ramparts and bulwarks built by armies of giants and serfs. Built by the Founder on their bones. The water was deep: Lom felt it fathoming away beneath them, dark and cold. A bitter wind, freighted with flurries of sharp sleety snow, was pushing upstream off the sea, smelling of salt and ice, slowing their progress. It had been autumn when they entered the wetlands. It felt like winter coming now.

‘It’ll be easy from here on,’ said Lom. ‘Downstream to the sea lock. We can leave the boat there and walk back along the Strand to the tram terminus. Let me take the oars for a while.’

Maroussia wasn’t listening. She was staring over his shoulder up towards the embankment. He followed her gaze. The mudjhik was standing on the crest, a smudge of dried blood and rust against the grey sky. Grey snow. Grey stone. It was watching them. As the current took them downstream, the mudjhik began to lope along the top of the high canal wall, keeping pace. Lom looked for an escape. On either side of the canal the embankments rose sheer and high. No quays. No steps cut into the stone. Nowhere to go. The mudjhik had only to follow them.

‘Maybe we’ll find a place on the far side where we can get out,’ he said. ‘It can’t cross the canal before the sea lock. We can be miles away by then.’

As if in answer, he felt the dark touch of the mudjhik’s mind in his. It felt stronger than before, much stronger, and different now. There was an intelligence there that had been absent before, with a sickening almost-human edge to it. It was almost a voice. No words, but a cruel demonstration of existence and power. It was a voice he recognised. Safran. But it wasn’t quite Safran: it was something more and something less than he had been. Lom felt he was being touched intimately by something… disgusting. Something strong but inhuman, broken and foul and… wrong. A mind that stank.

He slammed his mind-walls closed against it. The effort hurt. His head began to ache immediately. He felt the pulse in the socket in his forehead flutter and pound.

‘We have to destroy that thing,’ he said. ‘Somehow. We have to end it. Here.’

Safran-in-mudjhik considered the pathetic little rowing boat sitting there helplessly, a flimsy toy on the deep flowing blackness. The two frail lives it carried, cupped in its brittle palm, flickered like match-lights. He had shown himself deliberately so he could taste their fear. Their deaths would be… delicious. Especially hers. The one that had taken his head when part of him was in the man.

That part of him wanted to be back in the man. It wasn’t happy any more. But it would learn, or he would find a way to silence what he did not need. The angel-stuff was coming awake. Learning to remember. Learning to think. Now it had learned it could soak up human minds, absorb them, grow, it wanted to do it again. The first one had come willingly. More than that, it had come by choice, pushed its way in. Regretted it already, though. Would have preferred extinction. Too late! Too late, impetuous companion! Stuck with it now. But willingness was not essential. There were many minds here. Take them. Harvest them. Fed with such nutriment, what could angel-stuff not become? It remembered swimming among the stars. Why not again? But better. Stronger. More dangerous.

Start with the two in the boat. There was history there. Bad blood.

81

Lom pulled hard on the oars, racing the skiff seaward, scanning the far embankment for a scaleable escape. There was none. His head was hurting worse: tiny detonations of bright light flickered in his peripheral vision; waves of giddiness distracted him. He couldn’t maintain his defences indefinitely. He hadn’t the strength.

Maroussia went through Safran’s equipment. There was the pistol, useless against the mudjhik, but not negligible.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You’d better have this. I don’t know how to use it.’

Lom put it in his pocket.

There was also the Exter-Vulikh that had cut down the giant. Its magazine was half full and there were two more besides, but it was nothing that would worry a twelve-foot sentient block of angel flesh, not even for an instant. Maroussia laid it aside with an expression of distaste.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just stopped?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We could wait. I know we can’t make headway upstream, but we could try to hold our position out here. Or maybe we could make the boat fast somehow against the far embankment. Sooner or later a ship will come along.’

Lom considered.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘If there is a ship. We haven’t seen any. Don’t they try to clear port before the freeze? I think the season’s over.’

‘Something must come along, one way or the other.’

Lom turned the skiff and began to row against the stream.

The mudjhik understood what they were doing instantly. It stopped loping forward and began to jog up and down on the spot, stamping heavily. Then it bent forward and began to pummel the ground with its fists. For a moment Lom thought it was raging impotently, but it straightened up with a large chunk of stone in its hands and lobbed it towards them.

The first throw fell short. A boulder as large as a man’s torso whumped into the canal, jetting up a column of white water. Short, but close enough for them to feel the sting of the spray on their faces. The ripples reached the Sib and set her rocking. The next shot was closer. The mudjhik was finding its range.

‘Shit,’ said Lom and turned the boat again.

As soon as the boat started heading downstream, the mudjhik halted its bombardment and went back to pacing them along the embankment.

‘It’s herding us,’ said Lom. ‘It could sink us anytime, but it wants to get in close.’

I will not let you touch her. Weak as he was, he tried to force the thought towards the mudjhik, against the flow of its onslaught. I will bring you down.

They heard the sea gate before they saw it. The light was failing. Twilight brought sharp fresh squalls of sleet off the sea. There were gulls now, wheeling inland to roost. The Ship Canal swung round the shoulder of a small hill and narrowed, channelling the flow of the Mir in flood into a bottleneck of concrete, and ahead of them rose the great barrier. On one side, the left as they approached it, were the lock gates themselves, three ship-breadths wide, and to the right a roar of gushing water hidden in a cloud of spray. The grand new hydroelectric turbine, turning the pressure of water into power to light the streets of Mirgorod.

The immense lock gates were shut against them. They could make out the silhouette of the Gate Master’s hut at the far end, between the lock and the turbine, but no light showed there. Of course not. Night was falling. No shipping traffic would come now. None, probably, till the spring. They were alone except for the mudjhik, standing in plain sight next to the massive stubby gate tower, waiting for them.

Lom fought the surging water with the oars, but there was nowhere to go. The skiff would either be brought up hard against the bottom of the gate or carried into the turbine’s throat.

‘A ladder!’ Maroussia shouted above the noise of the water. ‘Over there.’

Lom could just make out in the gathering gloom a contraption of steel to the right of the turbine, away from the mudjhik, designed to give access to the weir at water level. All he had to do was take the Sib across the current without getting dragged into the churning turbine mouth.

He could see nothing of what happened under the curtain of spray. There would be a grating, probably, to sift detritus from the canal. Maybe that’s what the ladder was for. To clear it. But even if there was a grating, the boat would surely be smashed against it. The whole weight of the river was passing through there: the force would be tremendous; nobody who went into that churning water would come out again.

He let the current carry them forward and tried to use the oars to steer a slanting course across it, aiming for a point on the embankment just upstream from the bottom of the ladder. His arms ached. His head was pounding. There would be no second chance. The mudjhik was attacking his mind hard, not constantly but with randomly timed pulses of pressure, trying to knock him off balance.

The skiff crashed against the wall, caught her bow on a jut of stone and spun stern-first away from the embankment towards the deafening roar and dark, blinding spray. Lom dug in with the left-hand oar, almost vertically down into the water, and turned the skiff again. She crashed against the foot of the ladder and Maroussia grabbed it. The boat kept moving. Lom crouched and leapt for the ladder. The impact jarred his side numb, but he managed to hook one arm awkwardly round a steel strut. He had slung the Exter-Vulikh across his back by its webbing strap and the Sepora was in his pocket. The Sib continued sliding away from under him. She left them both clinging to the metal frame and disappeared into the shouting darkness and mist. Lom scrabbled desperately for a foothold and barked his shin against a sharp-edged metal rung. Then he was climbing, following Maroussia up the sheer embankment side.

There was nowhere to go. They were standing on a railed steel platform overlooking the turbines. A narrow walkway led across plunging water and slowly turning turbines to the lock gate tower, and beyond that was the lock itself, and the mudjhik. There was no other exit.

Lom looked over the seaward side with a wild idea of diving into the sea and swimming for the beach. If there was a beach. But down there, there was no sea, only a cistern to receive the immense outflow from the turbines. It was a deep, seething pit of water. Hundreds of thousands of gallons burst out from the sluice mouth every second and poured into what was basically a huge concrete-walled box. You wouldn’t drown in there, you’d be smashed to a bloody pulp before the air was gone from your lungs.

Across the walkway a door led into the lock gate tower. With a crash of masonry it shattered open and the mudjhik shouldered its way through. It stood there a moment. Its face was blank. No sightless eyes. No lipless, throatless mouth. Just a rough lump of reddish stone sat on its shoulders. But it was watching them.

Lom raised the Exter-Vulikh and fired a stream of shells into the mudjhik’s belly. The clattering detonations echoed off the surrounding concrete, deafening even above the roar of the turbine sluice, but the shells had no discernible effect. Lom had not thought they would. It was a gesture. The magazine exhausted itself in a few seconds and he threw the gun over the rail into the water below.

For a moment nothing happened. Stalemate. The mudjhik watching them from its end of the walkway. Lom and Maroussia staring back. Waiting. Then the mudjhik turned sideways and began to edge its way across the narrow steel bridge, squeezing itself between the flimsy rails. Lom reached for Maroussia’s hand — it was the time for final, futile gestures — but he didn’t find it. Maroussia had darted forward, running straight at the mudjhik. Lom felt its surge of raw delight as it grabbed for her, reaching sideways, swinging its leading arm wildly. He felt it reaching for her with its mind at the same time. Opening itself wide. Drawing at her. It was like a mouth, gaping.

It’s trying to suck her in.

Understanding slammed against Lom’s head like a concussion. And with it another thought. Another piece of insight.

It’s too confident. It fears nothing at all.

And he saw what Maroussia was trying to do.

The mudjhik’s swing at her was too awkward a move for its precarious position on the walkway. She ducked and the arm missed her, sweeping through the air above her head. The impetus of the move overbalanced the mudjhik slightly. It stumbled and leaned against the walkway rail, which sagged under its weight.

Lom pulled Safran’s Sepora out of his pocket and fired, again and again, aiming high to clear Maroussia, aiming for the huge eyeless head. The recoils jarred his hand and shoulder. He flung all his rage and defiance and disgust and hatred at the mudjhik’s undefended, questing, open-mouthed mind. He was still tired and weak — the power of his push was nothing compared to what he had done under the ground — but he felt the jar as it impacted. It was enough. Together, the mental onslaught and the heavy magnum rounds confused the mudjhik and added momentum to its stumble. The narrow guard rail collapsed under its weight and the mudjhik fell into the churning, roaring waters of the cistern below.

82

Maroussia was lying on the narrow iron walkway. She wasn’t moving. Lom ran across. He knelt down beside her and laid his hand on her head. She stirred, raised her head and looked at him.

‘Is it gone?’ she said.

‘Yes. It’s gone. Are you… are you OK?’

‘If that thing is gone then we can go back. I need to go back.’

‘It’s almost dark,’ said Lom. ‘And it’s a long walk back. There won’t be any trams till the morning. We’ll have to stay here.’

She sat up slowly. She looked dizzy and sick.

‘No. I…’ But she had no strength for a night journey. No strength to argue even.

‘Just for tonight,’ said Lom. ‘We can stay in the Gate Master’s cabin.’

The Gate Master’s lodge was an incongruous wooden superstructure on the lip of the sea gates. The lock on the door gave easily at a shove from Lom’s shoulder. Inside was near-darkness. The smell of pitch and lingering tobacco smoke and tea. Maroussia found a lamp and matches. In the yellow lamplight the interior had a vaguely nautical flavour: large-scale charts of the harbour and the inner reaches were pinned to the walls, and more of the same were spread out on a plan table under the seaward window, with instruments, pencils, a pair of binoculars. There was a chair, the kind with a mechanism that allowed the seat to revolve and tip backwards. A long thin telescope on a tripod stood on the floor; heavy oilskins hung from a hook on the back of the door; a pair of large rubber boots leaned against the foot of a neat metal-framed bed. The Gate Master had left everything prepared to make himself comfortable when he returned: firewood stacked in the corner, water in the urn, a packet of tea, a box of biscuits. Lom pulled the heavy curtains across the window while Maroussia lit the stove and the urn. There were even two mugs to drink from. Maroussia sat on the edge of the bed and Lom took the swivelling chair, leaning back and putting his feet up on the table.

‘What if someone sees the light?’ said Maroussia.

‘There’s no one for miles. Anyway…’ Lom shrugged. ‘Shipwrecked mariners. Needs must.’ But he took Safran’s heavy revolver from his pocket and laid it on the table within reach.

‘Any bullets left in that?’

‘No.’

Maroussia was looking at him. Her eyes were dark in the lamp shadow. Uncertain.

‘Before the mudjhik fell…’ she began, and stopped. He waited for her to continue. ‘I felt something. Inside my head.’ She paused again. Lom didn’t say anything. ‘I don’t know… There was a kind of sick feeling, like I was going to faint. Everything seemed very far away. And then… it was like a fist, a big angry punch, but inside my head. It didn’t feel aimed at me, but it almost knocked me over anyway. And then the mudjhik… went.’

‘What you did was crazy. Running at it like that. You were lucky. If it had caught you when it swung—’

‘It was you, wasn’t it? The mind-punch thing. It felt like you. You did it.’

Lom said nothing.

‘And when you blew yourself out of the ground…’ said Maroussia. ‘How do you do that? I mean, what is it?’

‘I don’t know. It’s something I used to be able to do. When I was a child. Then it stopped when Savinkov sealed me up. But since the seal was taken — actually before then, when I came to Mirgorod — It’s been coming back. I just… I just do it.’

There was a long silence. Pulses of sleet battering at the window. Maroussia was examining the woollen rug on the bed. Picking at it. Removing bits of fluff.

‘Who are you?’ she said eventually. ‘I mean, what are you? Where do you come from? I mean, where do you really come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lom. ‘But I’m beginning to think I should try to find out.’ He took a biscuit from the box. It was soft and stale and tasted of dampness and pitch. He swallowed it and took a sip of tea. Cooling now. Bitter. He chucked the box of biscuits across the room onto the bed next to her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Have one.’

‘No.’

‘Sleep then. We need to clear out early tomorrow. You can have the bed.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll take the floor.’

‘We could share the bed,’ she said. ‘There’s room.’

She was sitting in shadow. Lom couldn’t see anything in her face at all. Another scatter of sleet crashed against the window. The door with the broken lock stirred in the wind.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would be better.’

83

Lom lay on his back, pressed between Maroussia and the wall. He was tired but sleep hadn’t come. As soon as he had got into the bed, Maroussia had pulled the blanket over them both, turned on her side, away from him, and apparently gone straight to sleep. He felt her long back now, pressed against his side, the length of her body stretched against his.

The wind and rain had died away. He could hear the slow rhythm of her breathing and the quiet surge of the sea. And it seemed to him that somewhere at the edge of his mind he could hear Safran under the water, crying in his pain. But if he tried to reach for the thread of it, it wasn’t there.

‘Vissarion?’

‘Yes?’

But she said nothing more. Only the gentle ebb and flow of her breath. The rising and falling of her ribs against him. He turned on his side so that his face was against the back of her neck. He could smell her dark hair. The moment of rest at the end of the pendulum’s swing, before it fell back and swung again. They would have time. Later. Or they would not.

The mudjhik lay pinned under a hundred thousand gallons a second. On its back. It pounded the concrete floor beneath it, the floor built to take the brunt of the Mir in flood, pounded it with its fists and heels and head. The mudjhik would never sleep. Never die. No matter how long, no matter what it took. It would pound its way out.

Somewhere, deep inside the angel-stuff, what remained of Safran wanted to scream but had no voice. Wanted to weep but had no tears. No mouth. No eyes.

They overslept. Lom surfaced eventually to the sound of Maroussia making tea. She had drawn back the curtains and filled the cabin with grey dawn light. Lom stumbled out of bed and found the Gate Master’s shaving kit — a chipped bowl for water, soap, a razor and a small square of mirror — all set out neatly ready for use. He washed and shaved for the first time in… how long? He had lost count of the days. The mirror showed him the hole in the centre of his forehead with its crust of blood. He washed it clean and watched it pulsing faintly with the beating of his heart. He touched it with his finger. The new, healing skin felt smooth and young. The pulse inside it was a barely palpable fluttering.

‘Here.’

Maroussia nudged him gently and handed him a mug of strong, sweet tea. She had found sugar. As he sipped it, she kissed him, once, quickly, on his freshly shaven cheek. He caught once more the scent of her hair and felt the cool bright touch of her mouth fading slowly from his skin.

With the Gate Master’s razor he cut a strip of cloth from the bottom of his shirt, knotted it bandanna-fashion round his head to hide the wound of the angel mark, and checked the result in the mirror. The effect was odd but not unpleasing. Gangsterish. Buccaneering. Conspicuous, but not as instantly-identifying as a hole in the head. After a moment’s hesitation, he folded the Gate Master’s razor, slipped it into his pocket and turned to find Maroussia appraising him.

‘You’ll do,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘And you look… fine,’ said Lom. She had washed her hair. It was damp and lustrous. Her cheeks were pink. ‘But you’re going to freeze out there.’

‘I’m too hungry to notice.’

‘We’ll find a café,’ he said. ‘When we get back. We’ll have breakfast.’ Coffee. Eggs. Pastries. That would be normal. That would be simple and good. Then a thought struck him. ‘Have you got any money?’ He had none. Nothing but a razor and an empty gun.

Maroussia dug in her pockets and came up with a few coins. Enough for tram fares to the city, perhaps. Not much more.

‘I wanted to leave something,’ she said. ‘For the Gate Master.’

‘We’ll send it to him,’ said Lom. ‘Afterwards.’

They stood for a moment in the middle of the neat cabin. They had set things as straight as they could, and Lom had made a temporary repair to the lock. It would hold.

‘We’d better go,’ said Maroussia.

‘Yes.’