Truth and Fear

55

At four in the afternoon Antoninu Florian’s stolen ZorKi Zavod limousine nosed down the hill and out of the raion through the Purfas Gate. Lom held the Blok 15 in his lap, hidden under the flap of his coat. Safety catch off. Florian showed a warrant card. The VKBD corporal leaned over to look into the back of the car. Lom faced front, eyes down, and tried to look bored.

‘Stand aside, soldier,’ said Florian. ‘No questions. Nothing to see.’

The corporal waved them through.

Florian drove the ZorKi with practised smoothness through residential streets and garden squares. Railings and snow. Money houses, finial-ridged with gables and balconies and porches and garaging for cars, set back behind lawns and laurel hedges. The kind of places where bankers and high Vlast officials made their homes. It was a part of the city Lom hadn’t seen before. Apart from a few horse-drawn droshkis and private karetas they had the roads to themselves. A gendarme in a kiosk on a street corner saluted them as they passed. Saluted the pennant. Florian nodded in acknowledgement, expressionless.

‘I have to find Maroussia,’ said Lom.

‘I know,’ said Florian. ‘You said.’

‘You know what happened to her? You know where she is?’

‘Chazia sent an upyr last night,’ said Florian. ‘Its name was Bez. Bez Nichevoi. Bez found Maroussia and took her to the Lodka.’

‘I should have been with her.’

‘It’s fortunate you were not.’

‘I could have stopped it,’ said Lom. ‘I could have protected her.’

‘No. You would be dead.’

Lom shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

‘Not possibly. Certainly.’

‘You said its name was Bez.’

‘Yes.’

‘You said was.’

‘It was a bad thing. It carried many deaths. I burned it.’

The car rolled past tall stuccoed houses. Cherry trees in gardens, leafless now. The snow had been swept from the pavements and piled along the kerb. Twisting on the polished leather bench, Lom could see behind them on the skyline a column of distant smoke drifting up and disappearing into low misty cloud.

‘This isn’t the way to the Lodka,’ he said.

‘No.’

Lom leaned forward. Jabbed the muzzle of the Blok 15 into Florian’s neck.

‘Then turn the fucking car around.’

Florian sighed and pulled in, ploughing the ZorKi’s passenger-side fender deep into a heaped-up ridge of snow on the side of the road.

‘Don’t look back,’ said Lom. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them. On the wheel.’

Florian did as he was told.

‘Where are we going?’ said Lom. ‘Where are you taking me? We have to get to the Lodka. That’s where Maroussia is.’

‘No,’ said Florian quietly. ‘Maroussia was in the Lodka, but now she is not. The Vlast is abandoning Mirgorod to the Archipelago. The government is relocating eastwards to Kholvatogorsk, but Chazia is going further, to Novaya Zima with the Pollandore, and she is taking Maroussia with her. Their train will have left by now. The journey will not be straightforward: it will take them many days, perhaps a week, perhaps more. We also, as you may have observed, are travelling east and we will be quicker. Much quicker. We will reach Novaya Zima before Chazia’s train and we will have time to prepare before they arrive. So unless you have a better plan, please be so good as to stop waving your dick around in the back of my car.’

‘How do you know all this?’ said Lom.

‘I was in the Lodka last night.’

‘You were in the Lodka?’

‘She is alive,’ said Florian. ‘Beyond that, I cannot say, but she is alive, depend on it. Chazia will preserve her. The upyr took her. It did not kill her.’

‘Then we have to find that train.’

Florian shook his head.

‘The train they are travelling on is also carrying an extraordinary cargo. It will go by a special route prepared in advance under conditions of extreme secrecy. We have no chance of catching up with it before it reaches its destination. But even if we could… It is a military train. An armoured train. Soldiers. A mudjhik. A well guarded mobile prison. No. My plan is better. Come with me.’

‘Come with you?’ said Lom. ‘Who the fuck are you? Why would I trust a single thing you’ve said?’

Florian twisted in his seat and pushed Lom’s gun aside.

‘There is no time for this,’ he said, locking eyes with Lom. His irises were green, flecked with amber. ‘Come with me to Novaya Zima, Vissarion. Together we will do what needs to be done. Or get out of the car now, if you think you can do better alone.’

Lom stared into Florian’s face. He wished he could read something more in those deep, wise, dangerous eyes, but he could not. He had to make a choice, but it was no choice, not really. He sank back into the wide leather bench and slipped the Blok 15 into the pocket of his coat.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK. Drive.’

56

Florian picked up the main route east. The outskirts of Mirgorod diminished to a tideline of subsistence enterprise–one-shed factories, workshops and junkyards, semi-collapsed smallholdings–but the road was getting more crowded, not less, and all the traffic was going in one direction. Away from the city. There were a few trucks and one or two private saloons, but mostly it was horse-drawn wagons and carts and nameless antiquated things hauled by donkeys and bullocks. There were whole families just walking, pushing prams and handcarts, lugging duffel bags, dragging suitcases along the ground, wearing layers upon layers of clothing to keep warm and leave room in the bags for more. The polished black staff car with its Vlast pennant drew hostile glares. From time to time somebody thumped the coachwork or spat on a window. Florian drove in silence, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

It took them hours to get clear. At last the traffic thinned out and Florian gunned the throttle. They were on the open road east of Mirgorod, skirting the southern shore of Lake Dorogha. It was just after six but twilight was already closing in.

‘Tell me about Novaya Zima,’ said Lom.

Florian tossed the road atlas onto the back seat.

‘Follow the Zelenny mountains north,’ he said. ‘You’ll find it.’

Lom found Mirgorod and started turning pages. Page after page eastward from where they were, the country was a flat expanse of pale green, spattered with small blue lakes and the hairline threads of rivers. The atlas was a Solon and Dutke Standard & Comprehensive: the best you could buy, which wasn’t saying much. Only the largest towns and cities were shown, their names in florid black-letter script. There were a few highways picked out in pink, but citizens of the Vlast didn’t make long journeys by road. They used the slow looping sweeps of the waterways or, if they could afford it, the transcontinental trains. Most roads weren’t even shown, and those that were mapped weren’t necessarily there, or still maintained, or even passable. The same went for the railways.

Even the map-green of the empty landscape was optimistic. It belied featureless horizons of sandy soil and scrubby grassland, or the silent monotony of birch and moss. If green on a map meant anything, it meant flat. For thousands of miles east from Mirgorod nothing rose more than a few hundred feet above sea level. Not until you reached the Zelenny Mountains, a third of the way between the city and the edge of the endless forest. On the map the Zelenny range was a north–south spine of taupe-shaded contours, but in reality they were scarcely mountains at all, just a spine of uplands slightly too elevated, distinctive and topographically important to be called merely hills. The spine of the Zelenny ran north all the way to the coast and continued out across the water, becoming two long thin islands hooked into the belly of the Yarmskoye Sea like a crooked skeletal finger. The south island was contoured taupe, the north island was the blank and featureless white of year-round ice, and adrift in the sea near the islands was a name in the smallest and faintest typeface that Solon and Dutke ran to: NOVAYA ZIMA.

‘That’s it?’ said Lom. ‘That’s where Chazia is going?’

‘Yes,’ said Florian.

‘It’s nowhere. Why the hell would Chazia go to a place like that?’

‘That’s what I want to know,’ said Florian. ‘A couple of years ago the Armaments Minister, Dukhonin, started spending money on his own initiative. He was Vlast Commissar for Industry then, but this was a private venture: secretive appropriations, diverted funds, nothing accounted for. He requisitioned building materials, heavy machinery, oil, coal. And it was all for Novaya Zima. He flooded the place with tens of thousands of conscript workers.

‘And then, while the heavy labour was still flowing in, Dukhonin started recruiting persons of a different kind: managers, architects, doctors, teachers. He collected specialists. Engineers. Chemists. Mathematicians. Astronomers. Physical scientists of every conceivable discipline. And always the best. Outstanding in their discipline. I say recruiting, but it’s a euphemism of course. Some of the people Dukhonin sent to Novaya Zima were zeks, prisoners he pulled out from other camps. In other cases bespoke arrests were made, and an eminent few were simply invited, though it was always made clear to them that refusal was not an option. And no one he sent north has ever come back. None of them has ever been heard from again. No communication comes out of Novaya Zima. None at all.’

‘So what is he doing up there?’ said Lom. ‘It sounds like he’s building a city. But why build a city up there? It’s thousands of miles from anywhere.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Florian. ‘I’ve been combing the archives for weeks, and I’ve found out some of what’s been sent up there, but as to why… there is no indication, none at all. And Dukhonin is dead now.’

‘I read about that in the paper,’ said Lom. ‘Josef Kantor killed him.’

‘Yes,’ said Florian. ‘Perhaps it was Kantor. Maybe.’

‘What do you mean, maybe?’

‘It is something of a coincidence, don’t you think?’

Lom felt his irritation rising again. He wished Florian wouldn’t play games.

‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s a coincidence?’

‘Dukhonin dies and the very next day Chazia sets off for Novaya Zima with Maroussia Shaumian in tow.’

‘You think Chazia killed him?’ said Lom.

‘It is not unlikely, certainly. And there is something else.’

Florian hesitated again.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Lom. ‘What else?’

‘Perhaps you have heard someone speak already of the Pollandore? Perhaps Maroussia Shaumian has mentioned this to you?’

‘Yes,’ said Lom cautiously. ‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘The extraordinary cargo to which I referred a moment ago,’ said Florian. ‘The cargo on Chazia’s train? It is the Pollandore.’

Lom’s stomach lurched. He felt his skin prickle. A chill in his spine.

‘Shit,’ he breathed. ‘Shit. What the hell is Chazia up to?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Florian. ‘But you see now? You understand why I came for you? Why I think we should join forces?’

An hour later twilight was thickening into night. Florian flicked on the headlamps. They were passing through level country, undrained and undyked, a patchwork of woodland and shallow lakes and reed beds. The beams splashed off scrubby birch trees and alders, vegetable patches and makeshift fences, stands of hogweed. From time to time a weathered wooden cabin rose out of the darkness and disappeared behind them.

Lom had been turning over what Florian had told him. He didn’t doubt it, not really, but it didn’t make sense: the more he thought about it, the less it fitted together, and a big part of the puzzle was Florian himself. Who was he? What was he? What was he keeping back? He glanced at Florian’s shadowy profile.

‘You can’t drive a car all the way to Novaya Zima,’ said Lom, remembering the thousands of miles of empty green on the map. ‘It isn’t possible. You need to tell me where we’re going.’

‘Still you do not trust me, Vissarion?’ said Florian patiently. ‘We are going to Novaya Zima, but not by car. We are making for a small lake called Chudsk, but we will not reach it for some hours yet. Why don’t you get some sleep?’

‘I don’t need to sleep. You could let me drive for while.’

Florian hesitated.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Fine.’

Florian brought the car to a stop, killed the engine and dropped his hands off the wheel with a sigh. When he cut the headlamps and wound down the window, an immense silence rolled in around them, and with it the smell of damp earth and cold night air. Tiny night sounds could be heard above the ticking of the cooling engine: the wind moving across grass and snow, the nearby trickle of water, the shriek of a fox. Lom got out and walked round to get in behind the wheel. Florian slid across into the front passenger seat.

‘Thank you,’ said Florian. ‘I am tired. Just keep straight on. There’s only the one road: you just need to make sure you don’t turn off onto any farm tracks.’ He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Lom started the engine and pulled away.

‘Florian?’ he said.

Florian stirred reluctantly and opened his eyes.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘You need to tell me how you know what you know. You need to tell me who you are.’

‘Who I am? In what sense, exactly? Are we discussing allegiances here? Sides? Motivations?’

‘Sure,’ said Lom. ‘Absolutely. For a start.’

‘I am…’ He paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘I am… freelance.’

‘Freelance?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Uh-huh?’ said Lom. ‘You care to expand on that? Because you need to.’

Florian settled lower in the passenger seat and closed his eyes again. Lom thought he wasn’t going to say any more, but after a while he started speaking quietly.

‘You think I am playing games with you, Vissarion? OK. Maybe. But really. You should look at yourself. You are angry, and you ask me what I am? You? You, who have that marvellous, that wonderful, that unique and beautiful opening in your head? You sit there and it’s spilling out… shedding… you don’t know what, you’re not even aware… and you ask me to say what I am?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Lom. ‘What are you trying to say?’

Florian half opened his eyes and glanced sideways.

‘I think you should stop asking yourself what things are and start asking what they can become. I think you should work at yourself. I think you should, to coin a phrase, get a fucking grip.’

57

Colonel-General Rizhin put aside the name of Josef Kantor and the life he’d lived under that name without a backward glance. He killed Kantor without compunction or regret. There is no past, there is only the future. Commissar for Mirgorod city defence.

Rizhin began to work.

He had an appetite and capacity for work that were astonishing. Relentless. Prodigious. Terrifying. The more he worked the more energy he drew from it and the more work he did. No detail was trivial, no obstacle immovable. He had a nose for men and women whose capacity for work matched his, or almost, and he gathered them about him. Put them to work. Those that flagged or showed the slightest inclination to cling to a private life of their own (the very phrase an abomination in Rizhin’s lexicon) were ruthlessly obliterated.

And Rizhin’s work was war, his purpose victory.

Within hours of the departure of Chazia, Fohn and Khazar, the pyre outside the Lodka was extinguished. The number of recruitment booths doubled. That very afternoon, he told the people of Mirgorod what to expect. He broadcast on the radio, on the tannoys and loudspeakers. The film was played in cinemas and converted Kino-trams, over and over again. Incessantly. The text appeared that evening in special editions of all the newspapers. Every paper carried the same photograph of Rizhin’s gaunt, smiling, pockmarked face. By the evening it had appeared on posters in every public building, on every tram, on every city wall. Yesterday the people of the city might have been asking, who is this Rizhin? Today they knew.

He called the city to war, a war against two enemies: outside the city were the forces of the Archipelago, and inside the city were the diversionists, the traitors, the looters, the spies. It wasn’t two wars, it was one war fought on two fronts, and there was nothing that was not part of it. No bystanders. No noncombatants. No civilians.

‘At last,’ he told the people of Mirgorod, ‘we are coming to grips with our most vicious and perfidious enemy The fiends and cannibals of the Archipelago, the slavers, are bearing down on our city. And they have accomplices among us! Whiners. Cowards. Deserters. Panic mongers. Spies. Saboteurs. Traitors!

‘The enemy’s soldiers and their secret allies must be rooted out and destroyed at every step. This is no ordinary war. Not a war of soldiers but a war of all the people. Everyone and everything is at war! Total war! Our homes are not our own, our dreams are not our own. Our lives are not our own. There is only one life, the Vlast, and only one outcome is possible. Overwhelming triumph!

‘Everything must be mobilised, all that we are. Private lives do not exist. Every man, woman and child is a soldier of the Vlast. We will fall upon our enemies as one body, an irresistible mass, roaring defiance, destruction and death with a single voice. With the angels on our side we will certainly prevail. All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to victory!’

In the cinemas and in the squares the people of Mirgorod broke into spontaneous cheering. The death of the Novozhd had left them adrift, afraid and grieving, but here was a leader again, come in their desperate hour.

Rizhin.

His face was everywhere, and his words.

Onward to victory!

58

Elena Cornelius was working in the Apraksin when she heard from a customer about the forced evacuation of the Raion Lezaryet. She closed the counter immediately and went as fast as she could to the school, desperate to be with her daughters, to see them safe, but when she got there she found the teachers reluctant to let her take the girls away.

‘Our instructions are to keep them all together here,’ the headmaster said, ‘until the trucks come. They will all be taken to a place of safety, far away from the bombs. The whole school is to go, we teachers also. We don’t know yet where we are going, but we are excited about this great adventure and so are the children. It is best for them, don’t you think? I would think you would be pleased for them, Elena Cornelius. Your girls will be safer with us.’

‘I am their mother and I will keep them safe,’ said Elena Cornelius. ‘Not you. Me. They are coming with me now.’

‘But—’

‘I am their mother and you will not stop me taking them.’

‘On your own responsibility, then,’ the headmaster said. ‘I wash my hands of them. Don’t come crying to me later, and do not expect to bring Yeva and Galina back to this school again when the war is over.’

Elena did not return to Count Palffy’s house in the raion–all their possessions, their home, the workshop, it was all lost to them now–but she went instead with her daughters to her aunt Lyudmila Markova, who had a one-room apartment in Big Side. Aunt Lyudmila had never married. She kept a caged parakeet for company and was reluctant to take in her niece and two girls as well.

‘But there’s only the one bed, Elena! Where would you sleep?’

‘On the floor. I’ll buy a mattress.’

‘I don’t know, Elena. That doesn’t sound comfortable for the girls, and Bolto doesn’t like change. It unsettles him. He doesn’t like strangers coming in and out. He has his own little ways.’ Bolto was the parakeet.

‘We are not strangers, Aunt,’ said Elena. ‘And I’ve got a hundred roubles at the workshop. You’ll be glad of the help when the war comes. Things will get expensive.’

‘All this talk of war, I don’t like it, Elena. It’s nonsense. The Novozhd won’t let anything happen to Mirgorod.’

‘The Novozhd is dead, Aunt. The enemy is coming. There’ll be more bombing. There may be fighting.’

‘Oh no, not here. I don’t think so. They wouldn’t dare. Why don’t you just go home and wait till it all blows over? Bolto and I will be fine.’

‘I can’t go home. Everyone in the raion is being taken away on trains and nobody knows where to.’

‘I thought you were doing well at the Apraksin, Elena? I thought they liked you there? You’ve always said—’

‘It’s not to do with the Apraksin, Aunt. It’s everyone.’

In the end Aunt Lyudmila relented.

‘Just for a couple of days, Elena, until you get yourself settled. I must say I’m disappointed in Count Palffy; it’s very shoddy behaviour to put you out like this. You don’t expect it, not from an aristocrat. The Novozhd always said they were enemies of the people.’

When she heard Rizhin’s broadcast on Aunt Lyudmila’s radio, Elena Cornelius knew she had to do something. She could not go to the raion again, she could not go back to the Apraksin and she could not simply hide away in her aunt’s apartment. Sooner or later she would be found and questions would be asked. The girls had to be safer than that. She had to do what she could to protect them. Immediately. That meant she had to have a role. She had to have a place. She had to have a story.

‘This new man, Rizhin,’ said Aunt Lyudmila. ‘He sounds like a strong man. He’ll sort out this nonsense about a war.’

That same evening Elena went to the Labour Deployment Office and filled in a form. Where it said address, she put Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment in Big Side. She waited in line for two hours and handed the form to a woman at a desk.

‘My name is Elena Schmitt,’ she said.

‘Would I be in this job if I couldn’t read?’

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘Of course not.’

The woman studied the form carefully. She had close-cropped fair hair and colourless eyes in a dry, sunless face, striated with fine lines. She must have been about forty. Her fawn uniform blouse was fresh and spotless. Crisp epaulettes. Sharp creases down the outside edge of her sleeves. Elena thought that, close to, she would smell of laundry. The woman pulled out a file and paged through sheets and sheets of typescript.

‘This is your address?’

‘Yes. Well, it is my aunt’s apartment. I live with her.’

‘How long?’

‘I’m sorry? I don’t understand?’

‘How long have you lived there?’

‘Two years.’

‘You’re not listed at that address.’

‘I came to Mirgorod two years ago,’ said Elena. ‘To work at Blue’s. Before that I lived with my parents. At Narymsk, and before that Tuga. Look, I want to work, citizen. I want to do something. For the city.’

‘So. And what can you do, Elena Schmitt?’

‘I am a carpenter. I have my own tools. I have a school certificate in mathematics and a diploma in bookkeeping.’

‘Can you dig?’

‘What?’

‘Can you dig? Can you use a pick and a spade?’

‘I make furniture. Cupboards. Wardrobes.’

‘When the Archipelago tanks arrive, should we put them away in a cupboard?’

‘No. But surely—’

‘There is a requirement for more workers on the inner defence line. People who can dig. Can you dig frozen soil with your fingers on a quarter-pound of black bread a day?’

‘If that is what the city requires of me then I will try, citizen. I will do my best.’

The woman filled in some details on a pink card, stamped it with an official stamp and gave it to her.

‘Report at six o’clock tomorrow morning.’

Aunt Lyudmila had already gone to bed when Elena Cornelius got back to the apartment, and the girls were asleep together on the floor, curled up under an eiderdown on cushions from the couch. Elena found a packet of tea in the cupboard, boiled a kettle on the paraffin stove and made herself a pot. The label on the tea packet had a drawing of ladies in high lacy collars with a samovar on a tablecloth, and underneath was written in curly script:

It was an old saying, some kind of joke or pun. It was traditional. Elena had always wondered what it meant.

She sat in a wicker chair in the window, the curtains drawn back, a blanket wrapped round her shoulders. It was too cold to sleep. The moons bathed the city in a bone-white glare, monochrome and alien. Mirgorod looked like the capital of some other planet. Silent searchlight beams swept the skyline and flashed across the soft silver hulls of barrage balloons. A remembered phrase from childhood came into her mind and would not leave. The beneficence of angels.

At midnight the Archipelago bombers came. Tiny bright anti-aircraft shells crackled and flowered briefly in the dark. Searchlights slashed at the raiders but didn’t hold what they caught. Within an hour huge fires were burning on the horizon. Elena watched flames lick high into the air: arches and caverns, sheets and waterfalls of flame. Whirling flame tornadoes. Hurricanes of fire. It was all happening several miles away. She imagined she could feel the heat of the fires against her face, though she could not.

59

Lom had never driven anything like a ZorKi Zavod limousine before. He liked it. Eight cylinders, automatic transmission, the flat empty road at night. He pressed his foot down and watched the needle climb smoothly to fifty. The car must have weighed a couple of tons, but the engine scarcely rose above a quiet purr. The bonnet stretched ahead of him like the boiler of a locomotive, pennant flickering. All he had to do was keep his foot on the throttle and his hand on the wheel and follow the patch of lamplit road that skimmed ahead of him, always just beyond arrival. Except for the interior of the car, smelling of leather and polish, and the splash of lamplight on the road, there was nothing anywhere but blackness under a vast black sky. Forward motion without visible result. He kept the window open an inch to let the wind touch his face. When small snowflakes began to speckle the windscreen he found the switch for the wipers and set them sweeping back and forth: a quiet click at the end of each cycle, clearing twin arcs in the sparse accumulating snow.

Lom put his hand to his forehead and felt for the lozenge-shaped wound socket. It was just the right size to accommodate the tip of his forefinger. He touched the smooth newness of young skin covering the uneven rim of cut skullbone, soft-edged and painless. It was a blind third eye, pulsing faintly with the restful rhythms of his beating heart, a life sign, part of him now, absorbed, healed, no longer conspicuous. A mark of freedom. A badge of honour. A legacy of ancient hurt. When he took his finger away he could feel the coolness of the wind pressing against the place with gentle insistence. A nudge of conscience. A memory just beyond the frontier of recollection.

Hours passed. The road stretched on ahead, drifting slightly to right and left. The ZorKi swept along at a steady fifty miles an hour. Villages rose ahead and fell behind. Mostly they were too small for names: just clusters of buildings glimpsed and gone, straggling settlements barely registering against the emptiness. No lights showed: they might as well have been deserted. The needle on the fuel gauge had been creeping round to the left all night, and now it was ominously close to empty. Lom pulled up and got out to relieve himself. Legs and back stiff from the long drive, he walked self-consciously a few yards off the road to a scrubby stand of brush at the foot of a telegraph pole. When he got back to the car, Florian was awake, easing himself upright and rubbing his face

‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘We came through Zharovsk a while back,’ said Lom. He looked at his watch. It was coming up towards three in the morning. ‘We’re running short of fuel.’

‘There’s more in the back.’

Florian went round to the boot of the car, opened it and dragged out a couple of jerrycans. He found a funnel and began to fill the tank. When he’d done, he stowed the empty cans. Then he brought out a suitcase and changed his uniform for a neat and sober suit, produced his astrakhan hat and chucked the officer’s cap on the back seat.

‘I’ll drive from here,’ he said.

An hour or so later Florian slowed the car at a crossroads and turned off the highway onto a rough track between trees. There was no sign: nothing to mark the turning. The woods closed in around them and the ZorKi was suddenly bouncing and slithering through soft rutted mud. Florian handled the car effortlessly.

Eventually, the track emerged abruptly onto the edge of a lake and turned left to follow it. The road, if you could call it that, was almost too narrow for the car. On the driver’s side trees pressed in close and overhanging branches clattered and scraped against the windows. To the right the crazily jolting headlamps showed glimpses of a narrow strip of muddy shore: scraps of low mist and the carbon glitter of black water.

They swung round the end of a narrow headland and climbed a slight rise. As they crested the rise, a low wooden building appeared in front of them. It looked halfway between a cabin and a barn. There was a jetty, and a small seaplane moored on the water.

Florian pulled the car in close to the edge of a low stone wharf and killed the engine. On Lom’s side there was a three-foot drop to the water. He could hear the quiet lapping of water against stone, the wind in the trees, the breathy wheezing of disturbed waterfowl.

‘Wait here,’ said Florian. He left the door open and walked towards the building, taking care to stay clearly visible in the glare of the head-lamps. ‘Lyuba!’ he called into the darkness. ‘Lyuba! It’s Florian!’

A woman’s voice answered from the darkness, ‘You’re late. You said yesterday.’

The voice didn’t come from the building, but from somewhere away to the left under the trees. Lom realised that Florian had been facing that way before she spoke. He’d known where she was, out there in the dark.

‘There was some delay leaving Mirgorod,’ Florian said. ‘But I am here now. Is everything ready?’

‘There’s someone else in the car.’

‘A friend. He’s travelling with me.’

‘You didn’t say anything about passengers.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Passengers are extra. The deal didn’t include passengers.’

‘Of course. Can we discuss this inside? We’ve come a long way.’

The woman stepped out into the headlamps’ glare. She was short and solidly built: not fat, but heavy, and wearing a bulky dark knitted sweater, the kind seamen favoured. Thick curly hair spilled out from under a peaked seaman’s cap.

She was carrying a shotgun loosely in the crook of her arm.

Lom got out of the car.

‘This is Vissarion,’ said Florian. ‘Vissarion Lom. Lyuba Gretskaya.’

Gretskaya looked him up and down.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘If you say so.’

Florian took a satchel from the boot of the ZorKi.

‘Anything of yours in the car?’ he said to Lom.

Lom leaned into the back, picked up his woollen cap and crammed it down on his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’

Florian reached in and released the handbrake, leaned his right shoulder against the car and, with his hand on the steering wheel, turned it slowly to the right and pushed it off the edge of the wharf. When the front wheels went over, the fenders crashed and scraped on the stonework. The headlamps dipped below the surface and spilled murky subaqueous yellow-green light. Florian flicked them off and gave a heave with his shoulder that levered the whole massive car, all two tons of it, up and forward. The limousine plunged off the edge of the wharf into the lake, leaving oily swirls of disturbance.

60

Lyuba Gretskaya lived in a single room that did her as a workshop and a kitchen. It smelled of pine and tobacco and engine oil. There was a single bed along one wall. A metal cot piled with blankets. Maps and charts. Racks of hand tools. A lathe.

‘Breakfast, gentlemen?’

Lom realised he hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please. That would be great.’

He watched Gretskaya cut thick slices off a piece of bacon and fry them on an oil stove in the corner. Her face, lit by a single lamp hung above the stove, was broad and round and weathered to a dark polished brown, with a small stub of a nose. Her bright small eyes were a pale, pale grey, almost lost in the creases of her face.

‘Is that your own plane?’ he said for something to say.

‘Yup,’ said Gretskaya, not looking round.

‘Where did you learn to fly?’

‘Where did you learn to ask questions?’

Lom caught Florian’s eye. He was trying not to smile.

‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Sorry. Just making conversation.’

The bacon was nearly done. Gretskaya threw some chunks of black bread into the pan to fry in the bacon fat and made a pot of coffee. They ate in silence, rapidly, and when they’d finished she cleared the plates, spread out a chart out on the yellow deal table and lit a cigarette. Her fingers were stubby and brown and stained with oil.

‘The Kotik will do eight hundred miles on a single tank,’ she said. ‘We cover more ground if the wind’s with us, less if it’s not. Maximum speed is one three five, but for efficient cruising I don’t go much over a hundred. With a safety margin, that gives us, say, five or six hours airtime before we need to refuel.’ She jabbed at the chart with her cigarette, spilling ash. Brushed it away. ‘The first leg is straightforward. North-east to Slensk. Refill at the pier head. From Slensk, we have a choice.’ She sketched out the options on the chart. ‘We can follow the coast to Garshal–see that island there? There’s a whaling station, I’ve used it before–or we follow the river inland’–she traced the course of the Northern Kholomora with her finger–‘and stop at the portage head at Terrimarkh. We’ll decide which course to take when we get to Slensk. It’ll depend on the weather, mainly: maybe we’ll be able to get a forecast at Slensk. Either way, from Garshal or Terrimarkh it’s a five-hundred-mile hop to Novaya Zima. I’ll have you there tomorrow afternoon.’

Florian lifted the satchel onto the table, undid the buckles and pulled out thumbed and grubby bundles of ten-rouble notes.

‘A thousand,’ he said. ‘I think that’s what we agreed.’

‘Plus a passenger.’

‘So? How much?’

Gretskaya glanced at Lom. ‘Has he got travel papers?’

‘No—’ Lom began.

‘Sure,’ said Florian. He threw a passport across the table towards him. ‘Here. Name of Vexhav. Stanil Vexhav, age thirty-three. You’re a former policeman interested in setting up as a timber merchant. But only if anyone asks. Don’t volunteer information about yourself. People with nothing to hide don’t do that.’

Lom picked up the passport and turned the pages. It looked convincing. The green cover was creased and stained with use, and its pages were spattered with the internal visas and crossing marks of a man who’d been travelling the rivers and ports of the north for the last couple of years. His own face looked out at him, the version of two or three years ago, stern and monochrome, eyes hooded with fatigue. Hair flopped across his forehead to obscure the angel seal.

‘You got a photograph of me?’

‘It’s not you. It’s me.’

Lom glanced across at Gretskaya.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘He pays. I fly. Another two fifty for the passenger,’ she said to Florian. ‘And you pay to fill the tanks. Also other expenses.’

‘Expenses?’

‘We’ll need to eat. Maybe sleep. Maybe bribe a harbour clerk here and there.’

Florian made a sour face but nodded and counted out the money without protest.

‘When do we start?’ said Lom.

Gretskaya ignored him. She gathered up the roubles, disappeared with them into a back room and came back with an armful of leather jackets, sheepskin gloves, fur hats, scarves.

‘Put these on,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be cold.’

Gretskaya went ahead and turned on the cockpit lamp and the navigation lights. Lom recognised the aircraft: he’d seen one like it moored at the Yannis boatyard in Podchornok. It was a Beriolev Kotik biplane, the clumsy reliable workhorse of the northern lakes. The boat-shaped hull, dented and water-stained, wasn’t much bigger than the ZorKi limousine. Beneath the centre of the upper wing was a single stumpy engine nacelle, its two-bladed wooden propeller facing backwards. The lower wings stuck out from behind the cockpit, a canoe-shaped stabilising float slung beneath each one. The wings looked feeble, like arms raised in surrender or despair, like they’d snap off under the weight of the fuselage. Lom remembered the immense sleek bombers of the Archipelago roaring low across Mirgorod. Machines from a different world.

Florian clambered up into the cockpit and ducked down into the cabin behind.

‘He always travels below deck,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Straps himself in and keeps his eyes screwed shut. You take the co-pilot seat.’

She swarmed neatly up the side of the hull and over the windscreen. Lom followed awkwardly and squeezed himself into the tight space beside her. The cockpit was crude and industrial: lime-green steel with canvas bucket seats. No concessions. In front of the pilot’s seat was a flat black panel of gauges, dials, knobs and switches, and a small three-quarter wheel on a green steel column thick as an arm. Gretskaya taped several layers of red cellophane across the cockpit lamp, dimming the interior to near darkness, made a few adjustments to her instruments, then stood up in her seat so she could reach behind to start the engine. It burst into life with a reek of oil and smoke. The whole airframe began to vibrate.

Gretskaya slid the cockpit canopy forward and closed them in.

‘You flown before?’ she said, pulling on her gloves.

‘No.’

‘Don’t touch anything. If you feel like you’re going to puke, well, don’t.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Lom.

Gretskaya opened the throttle and eased the plane away from the jetty, swinging its nose to point across dark open water. Lom looked at his watch. It was half past five. Still three hours to dawn.

The engine bellowed and the machine surged forward, bumped two or three times as it hit the swell, and then… nothing. It took Lom a moment to realise they were airborne. Gretskaya pulled back sharply on the column. Lom’s weight pressed him back into his seat as the Kotik, trembling with the surge of its engines, its airframe creaking alarmingly, climbed steeply into darkness. While they were still pushing upwards at a steep angle, Gretskaya took her hands off the stick and gripped it between her knees. She tested the lamps and added another layer of red cellophane. She saw Lom watching her and grinned.

‘Night vision,’ she said. ‘Don’t want to be dazzled by the interior lights. Don’t worry, there’s nothing up here to crash into.’

Lom grunted and stared out of the side window. The ground below was a broadening, sliding patchwork of barely legible darkness: the foggy glimmer of the lake and the spreading inky absolute blackness of trees, threaded by a dim paler line that must have been the road they came in by. A sudden flash of light outside the starboard window at his shoulder startled him. It was followed by another longer flash, a flicker, and then a trail of intermittent, vaporous brightness was streaming backwards from the wingtip lamp, which until then had been invisible under the wing. The temperature dropped precipitously and the landscape below them disappeared. Lom realised they were flying into cloud. The plane lurched sideways, caught in turbulence. Gretskaya steadied her and kept on climbing. As they reached the upper fringes of the cloud the wingtip lights seemed to flash on and off again, more and more rapidly, and suddenly vanished.

They emerged into clear dark space. Above them, drifts and scarves of stars glittered in blackness. The moons on the horizon illuminated the oceanic cloud below and pinned the tiny aeroplane to it with a bitter mineral glare.

Gretskaya levelled off, balancing the Kotik by gyroscope. Wrapped in the cockpit’s companionable little pocket of blood-red dimness, Lom watched the thin radium line of the artificial horizon rise and settle. The dials on the instrument panel breathed slowly. The engine quietened and the aircraft droned onwards, chasing its own mist-haloed shadow on the cloud below. The sky above the clouds was a beautiful, desolate, endless, frontierless world.

Lom had felt the beautiful ache of immensity before–a silent afternoon in a train crawling across continental moss, a night walk among birch trees in the Dominions of the Vlast. Simplification. Purification. Humbling. The mortification of the self. But never anything like this. Never anything to compare with these dangerous, darkly shining, planetary, abyssal eternities. Up with the moons the angels swam. Words he hadn’t heard since childhood rose up out of the accumulated silt in the bottom of his mind and tugged at him like rusalkas pawing a tiring swimmer. Trying to grab his attention. Trying to pull him under.

What you must do, said Baba Roga, is climb down inside the hollow tree until you come to a cave. Inside the cave there are three doors. If you open the first door, you will find a dog with eyes the size of dinner plates, guarding a treasure of copper. If you open the second door, you will find a dog with eyes the size of millstones, guarding a treasure of gold. And if you open the third door, you will find a dog with eyes the size of moons, guarding a treasure of blood and earth. What do you think of that, my beautiful boy?

I think the eyes of the dogs are moons, Provost. And the dogs are angels.

All angels are terrible.

And all the rusalkas had Maroussia’s face.

Images of Maroussia crowded his mind. Maroussia’s dark serious eyes. Maroussia walking straight-backed away from him down the street. Maroussia’s cold work-reddened hands. Maroussia asleep, breathing in the dark. The scent of her hair. The brush of her face against his cheek. Maroussia tied to an iron chair and Chazia leaning over her, running her tongue across her lower lip in concentration. Chazia with a knife in her hand.

61

Lavrentina Chazia watched the Shaumian girl return slowly to consciousness. She stirred. Groaned. Opened her eyes. Vomited. Tried to sit up and vomited again. Her eyes were confused. Unfocused. Whatever Bez Nichevoi had done to subdue her, it had left her feeble, trembling and feverish. No matter. There was time now. Plenty of time.

Chazia had propped her up against the wall of the otherwise empty freight car. Her wrists were cuffed with leather bands, connected by chains to a bar bolted to the floor. The chains, no more than dog leashes really, were long enough for her to move but not to stand. In her present condition she could not have stood unaided anyway. Chazia squatted beside her and held out a cup of water.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Drink.’

The girl shook her head.

Chazia smiled. ‘You think I want to poison you?’ she said. ‘Of course I don’t.’ She drank the cup herself. ‘Look, it’s fine.’ She poured another. ‘Please. Drink. You need it. I don’t know what Bez did to you, but I apologise for it. I’m sure it was both unnecessary and unpleasant.’

This time the girl took the cup and swallowed the water in one gulp. Choked and coughed half of it back out, soaking her chest. She leaned back against the rough plank wall. The freight car swayed as it rounded a curve.

‘Where am I?’ she said. ‘This is a train.’

Chazia poured another cup.

‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty more. And food, when you’re ready.’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket and held it out to her. ‘Here. Clean yourself.’

The girl shook her head.

‘I am Commander Chazia, but you should call me Lavrentina. We are going to be friends.’

‘I know who you are. And we are not friends.’

‘No,’ said Chazia. ‘Perhaps not exactly friends. Associates, then. Colleagues. We have something in common.’

‘No. We don’t.’

‘Of course we do. Together we are going to open the Pollandore.’

Maroussia Shaumian sank back against the wall and closed her eyes.

62

The stars spilled across the sky like salt on the blade of an axe. The broken moons sank away, subsiding into the horizon, leaving the cloud floor dark. Erasing it. The Kotik hung suspended over nothing at all. Only the vibration of the hull suggested, despite appearances, forward motion. Silent and freezing in their dimmed red cockpit, Lom and Gretskaya might as well have been crossing interplanetary space.

And then the world began to separate. Muted discriminations of darkness and lesser darkness. A new sedimentary horizon silting out. A dark line dividing the clouds below from the sky above. The line seemed to be getting further away, as if the aircraft was going backwards. Or shrinking. The last stars swam and trembled, dissolving.

The sky grew grey like the clouds but cleaner, deeper and more still. The banks of vapour beneath the plane thickened and the sky thinned and dilated into purple then green then white then pale immensities of blue. A fingernail of misty brilliance just starboard of the Kotik’s nose became an arc of fire, burning steadily at the clouds’ rim, pulsing incandescent blazing bars of pink and gold. And then the world was blue and clean and empty and went on for ever, oceans of air above dazzling oceans of cloud. Air that was filled to the brim with an astonishing purity of bright and perfect light. Simplified, wordless, unmappable. Lom felt the coldness of it burn his face. He looked across at Gretskaya.

‘How high are we?’

She tapped the altimeter with a stubby gloved finger. The needle rested steadily at 10,000 feet. Lom did the maths.

‘That’s almost two miles,’ he said.

Gretskaya grinned.

‘You want to go higher?’ she said. ‘We’ll go higher.’

She pulled back on the stick. Lom felt the pressure again in the small of his back. Up and up the tiny aircraft climbed–12,000–14,000–16,000–18,000–into a rarefied indigo world. Lom was aware of the air growing thinner. Sparser. It was more difficult to fill his lungs. His pulse rate quickened. He felt it fluttering in the centre of his forehead.

The air grew thinner but the light did not. Every detail of the cockpit and the wings at his shoulder burned itself on Lom’s retinas with crystal clarity. Every fold and scuff on the sleeve of his leather jacket was magnified, brilliant and intense. The jacket was translucent. Inside the sleeves, every fine hair on his arms glistened. His skin itself was translucent. The light shone through him like the sun seen through leaves. The organs of his body were sunlit pink and clear. His veins, his bones, his lungs sang with light. He wasn’t breathing air, he was breathing illumination.

More slowly now, but still the machine bored upwards. At last the altimeter registered 20,000 feet, and the nose of the machine sank a little until it was on an even keel. Gretskaya gave him the thumbs up and settled back in her seat. Urging on three tons of vibrating metal with her shoulders. Her eyes, creased almost shut against the over-brimming of the light, had seemed grey in the lamplight of her cabin but now they were the same clear clean watery blue as the sky.

Lom searched on the instrument panel for the compass and found it. The needle was pointing steadily north-east. Four miles below, at the bottom of a crevasse in the clouds, he glimpsed the glitter of creased dark water. A lake, or perhaps by now the sea of the Gulf of Burmahnsk.

63

Maroussia struggled into consciousness. There was a foul taste in her mouth. She felt dizzy and sick. Chazia was looking down at her, smiling, her hair backlit with the glare of the single caged bulb in the wooden ceiling. Her skin was blotched with patches of smooth darkness.

‘Good,’ said Chazia. ‘You’re awake.’

Chazia was holding the solm. She held it up for Maroussia to see. The ball of twigs and wax and stuff looked tawdry and dead in her skewbald palm.

‘I know the paluba was looking for you,’ said Chazia, ‘and it found you. It brought you the key to the Pollandore. I think this is it. This is the key. It is, isn’t it?’

Maroussia shook her head. The movement made her dizzy. Acidic bile rose up in the back of her throat. She turned her head aside to vomit.

‘I’m not going to help you,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘Not ever. Not with anything.’

‘You need to understand your position, Maroussia darling,’ said Chazia. ‘You really do. You are in my world now. There is no hope and no protection for you here; there is only me. I can turn you inside out. It’s not a metaphor, sweetness. I can dig around in you. I can pull the guts from your belly and hold them up for you to see. I can do anything I want. And afterwards I can give you to Bez Nichevoi.’ Chazia knelt in front of her and took her hand. Her gaze was warm and bright, compassionate and mad. ‘I can do this to you, Maroussia,’ she said. ‘You do believe me, darling, don’t you?’

Maroussia stared at Chazia dumbly. Her head hurt. She could find nothing to say. Whatever the foul creature that abducted her had done to her, it was still in her veins. All the energy had been flushed out of her. She felt as if she was watching herself from a distance, listening to voices at the far end of an echoing corridor. The floor beneath her was tipping sickeningly sideways.

‘You’ve imagined people doing cruel things to you, darling, haven’t you?’ said Chazia. ‘Everyone has. In dark moments. But the reality is much more terrible, and lasts much longer. It continues. Not just for hours or days but for weeks. Months. It gets messy. It’s not good to see parts of yourself being removed. It’s not good to have someone else rummaging about inside your body. Will I be brave? we ask ourselves, but of course nobody is brave, not in the end. Courage only takes you so far.’

Chazia shifted her position. Sat down beside her on the wooden floor, making herself comfortable. Shoulder to shoulder, intimate and companionable.

‘But I don’t want that to happen to you,’ she said.

‘You tried to kill me,’ said Maroussia, ‘You killed my mother.’

‘Oh. That.’ Chazia waved the memory away with a dismissive gesture. ‘That was just a favour for a friend. Before I knew you. I didn’t know then how important you were. And you escaped anyway, didn’t you. That was resourceful of you, though I think you had help. From Investigator Lom, I think. I’ve been underestimating him too. I saw the mess he made in the gendarme station at Levrovskaya Square. Who would have thought that of him?’

‘It wasn’t—’ Maroussia began, but Chazia cut her off.

‘What became of Major Safran by the way?’ she said. ‘I’ve been wondering. Just curious. Did Lom—’

‘I cut his head off. With a spade.’

Chazia giggled like a girl. Her eyes shone.

‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Well done you.’

Maroussia became aware of a prickling edginess in the air around her. A smell of ozone, like the sea. She realised that Chazia was still talking.

‘Ever since the Vlast confiscated the Pollandore from Lezarye,’ she was saying, ‘people in the Lodka have been trying to find out its secrets and use its power, but they never could. Only now there’s me, and now there’s you. The Shaumian woman. That’s what the paluba called you. You have the key and you are the key. Those are the words, or something like them. So. I know, you see. I know it all. And now you can show me how to use the Pollandore. You can give me these secrets.’

Chazia’s face was so close to hers, Maroussia could feel her breath. It was cool, and smelled like damp moss and stone, like the mouth of a deep well, with a taint of meat. Her hair was darkly reddish, cropped short and sparse. The rims of her pale blue eyes were pink, her teeth were small and even and pretty. There was a patch of slate-coloured angel flesh stretching from her left cheekbone almost to her ear.

No! Maroussia was screaming inside. No! She closed her eyes and turned her head away.

‘I’m the one to have the power of the Pollandore,’ said Chazia. ‘It is my destiny. I have a great purpose.’

Maroussia pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them defensively. Her naked feet were cold against the rough plank floor of the freight car. She felt the vibration of its wheels on the rails below.

‘The Pollandore isn’t a power,’ she said.

‘Of course it’s power, darling,’ said Chazia. She rested her hand on Maroussia’s bare knee, and stroked her comfortingly. Their shoulders were touching. ‘And you’re going to show me how to use it.’

Chazia slipped her arm round Maroussia’s shoulder and leaned her head against Maroussia’s head. Maroussia could smell her hair. Clean, with a faint trace of scented soap. The hand on Maroussia’s shoulder gripped gently but firmly. Maroussia felt a numbness there, as if her flesh was disappearing, as if the shoulder were merging with the hand that touched it.

Chazia’s body was starting to join with hers. Melt into her. Maroussia wanted to shake it off. Push her away. But she could not. The feeling was relaxing. Reassuring. There was something intimate about it. She felt they had known each other for ever. Chazia’s presence was so completely familiar. Solid and trustworthy. Two thoughts, one thought. Like oldest friends. Like sisters.

‘After all,’ said Chazia quietly, gently in her ear, ‘what were you going to do with it yourself?’

‘Destroy the angel in the forest.’

‘There you are, you see, sweetness,’ whispered Chazia triumphantly. ‘And you said it wasn’t power.’ Chazia nuzzled her nose against Maroussia’s neck. ‘Have a little sleep now, darling. You need to build your strength. There’s no hurry at all. We’ll have plenty more time to talk before we reach Novaya Zima.’

64

The engine note slowed and deepened. Lom became aware that the Kotik was descending, its nose dipping slightly, the line of the artificial horizon creeping up the face of the dial. He looked at the clock on the instrument panel. It was coming up to eleven. He glanced across at Gretskaya.

‘Going down to have a look,’ she said. ‘See where we are.’

The endless shining oceans of cloud rose to meet them and resolved into detail: rolling vaporous hillscapes, valleys and canyons. Lom braced himself, though he knew it was pointless. The floats under the wings ploughed into the thickening mist, tearing it up like cotton wool. Then fog closed round the machine, so thick the wing tips were lost in it. The Kotik did not appear to be moving forward. Nor did it seem to get any lower, although the altimeter needle was swinging leftwards all the time and the light was fading into subaqueous gloom.

The muffled roar of the engine died as Gretskaya throttled right back. The nose sank lower and the seaplane began to glide. The only sound was the hum of air passing through the slowly turning propeller and over the surface of the machine. The cockpit became suddenly fragile, cosy and close. A den to hide in. Heavy droplets of rain splashed against the windscreen and spread in trembling threads and trails. From north to south, straight across their path, lay a dark uniform green and purple wall. Not a wall. A mouth. Lom noticed that the wing at his shoulder was flexing and bouncing. Agitated water beads danced back across the lacquered surface towards the trailing edge and disappeared into grey fog.

Gretskaya sat quite still, her eyes glued to the altimeter. Lom watched the pointer creep backwards: 4,000–3,000–2,000. The machine plunged on through a mist of drenching, driving rain. 1,000–500. Lom sensed beneath them, blotted out by the foggy gloom, the heaving, queasy belly of the sea.

The engine abruptly roared into life. Gretskaya pulled the stick back, climbed to a thousand feet, and began to circle.

‘Trouble?’ said Lom.

Gretskaya shook her head, but she looked grim.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not immediately. There’s forty-five minutes left in the tank, and we’re not that far off Slensk. But I need to see where we are and the cloud’s too low. We can’t stay circling up here.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Go down and wait for the weather to clear,’ she said. ‘Only I don’t know what’s down there, and I daren’t go any lower to find out. Could be sea. Could be land. Trees. Hills. Hills would be bad.’

‘It’s water,’ said Lom. ‘Open sea.’

Gretskaya looked at him sceptically.

‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘There was nothing to see.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Absolutely. I know.’

Gretskaya went quiet, thinking. Minutes passed.

‘You can’t know,’ she said at last. ‘But the odds are on your side, and if we stay up here we start to run out of options.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’ll go a little further west, just to be sure, then drop down and take a closer look.’ She opened the throttle, pushing the airspeed indicator up till it was nudging a hundred, and let it run. Ten minutes later she cut it again. Gliding into a shallow descent, she pulled on her goggles and hauled open the cockpit lid. The icy rain in their faces. The noise of the wind.

The altimeter counted down: 500–400–300. Lom wiped the rain out of his eyes and held his breath. Still there was nothing to see but rain and fog. Gretskaya was leaning out of the cockpit, staring down.

A dark indistinct mass loomed up beneath them. The engine roared and Gretskaya snatched the stick and held it level. The aircraft flattened out and the dark mass disappeared in mist. Then it was back, ink-black and flecked with straggles of foam. Gretskaya hauled the stick right back into her stomach and the Kotik lurched and fell out of the sky. It smacked heavily into the sea, bounced and came down again, throwing up walls of spray. It seemed impossible to Lom that it wouldn’t tear itself apart or tip tail over nose into the wall of water.

For thirty seconds the machine forged on, then it slowed and came to rest. Gretskaya flicked off the ignition switch and pulled the cabin cover shut against the rain. The propeller stopped its rhythmic ticking and silence fell.

‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Fuck.’

The plane had become a boat, rising and falling on the long, queasy swell. They were in a circle of mist. Rain pitted and rebounded from the dark green striated skin of the sea.

‘OK,’ said Gretskaya. ‘So now we wait.’

Lom twisted in his seat as Florian clambered up from the cabin and stuck his head into the cockpit. He looked tired, haggard and slightly green. He contemplated the scene beyond the windscreen for a moment–the rain, the mist, the narrow circle of purple-green sea–and grunted.

‘Not Slensk then,’ he said.

‘Letting the weather clear,’ said Gretskaya.

‘So where are we?’

Gretskaya shrugged.

‘The Gulf of Burmahnsk. At a guess, somewhere between twenty and fifty miles offshore. At a guess.’

Florian grunted again in disgust and disappeared back into the cabin. Lom wondered what he was doing in there. Most likely strapped in a cot trying to sleep. Travelling evidently wasn’t his thing. Gretskaya settled back into her seat and closed her eyes and Lom stared out of the window, watching the sea. The Kotik lifted and fell with the swell, dipping one float then the other in the water. In the cockpit it was bitterly cold. Lom’s heart sank. Fifty miles of deep dark fogbound icy ocean.

65

Elena Cornelius, crouching knee-deep in an anti-tank ditch, hacked at the solid black earth with a gardening trowel. The wooden handle had split and fallen away, but she gripped the tang in her blistered palm. She was lucky: many women of the conscript artel scrabbled at the ground with their fingers, numbed and bleeding, tearing their fingernails and the skin off their hands. Fresh snow had fallen in the night and the churned mud bottom of the tank trap was frozen iron-hard, sharp-ridged and treacherous, but her cotton gabardine kept out the worst of the wind and the digging was warm work.

Black earth rolled away from her in all directions, level to the distant horizon, skimmed with a thin scraping of snow. In front of her the rim of grey sky was broken only by sparse hedges and clumps of hazel, a line of telegraph poles, the chimneys of the brickworks where they slept. Between her and the sky rolled a wide slow river, crossed by a bridge: steel girders laid across pillars of brick, a surface of gravel and tar. The bridge was why they were there. The retreating defenders would cross it and then it would be blown. But for a while the bridge would have to be held.

At her back the sound of distant explosions rumbled. Every so often she straightened and turned to watch the flickering detonations and the thick columns of oily smoke rolling into the air. The bombers were over Mirgorod again.

The ground they were working was potato fields, harvested months before, but from time to time the diggers turned up an overlooked potato. Most were soft and black with rot, but some were good. Elena stuffed what she found into her pockets and underclothes for later, for Yeva and Galina and Aunt Lyudmila. She ate handfuls of snow against the thirst. It was OK. Survivable.

‘Here they come again!’ Valeriya shouted.

Elena looked up. Three aircraft rose out of the horizon in a line and swept towards her, engine-clatter echoing. They were fat-nosed, like flying brown thumbs suspended between short, stubby wings.

Bullets spattered the earth and snow in front of her, and three yards to her left the top of a woman’s head came off. Elena had known her slightly. She had been a teacher of music at the Marinsky Girls Academy.

While the planes circled low to make another pass, Elena and the others ran for the river. Breaking the thin ice at the water’s edge they waded waist-high into the current, feet slipping and sinking in the silt, and waited, bent forward under the low bridge, for the planes to drift away elsewhere. Oilskin-wrapped packages of explosives clustered under the bridge, strung together on twisted cables that wrapped and hung like bindweed.

Elena saw something in the water out near the middle of the river: a sudden smooth coil of movement against the direction of the current. It came again, and again, slicker and more sure than the wavelets chopping and jostling. She glimpsed a solid steely-grey oil-sleeked gun barrel of flesh. Blackish flukes broke the surface without a splash. A face rose out of the water and looked at her A human face. Almost human. A soft chalky white, the white of flesh too long in the water, with hollow eye sockets and deep dark eyes. The nose was set higher and sharper than a human nose, the mouth a straight lipless gash. The creature raised its torso higher and higher out of the water. An underbelly the same subaqueous white as the face. Heavy white breasts, nipples large and bruise-coloured, bluish black. Below the torso, a dark tube of fluke-tailed muscle was working away.

While she rested upright on her tail, the rusalka was using her arms to scoop water up onto her body. She rubbed herself down constantly, smoothing her sides and front and breasts as if she were washing them, except it was more like lubrication. She smoothed her hair also, though it wasn’t hair but flat wet ribbons of green-black stuff hanging from the top of her head across her back and shoulders. While she washed herself, the creature’s face watched Elena continuously. There was no expression on her face at all. None whatsoever. Elena gripped the arm of the woman next to her.

‘Valeriya!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Do you see it? Out there! A rusalka!’ But when she looked again there was nothing but a swirl on the surface of the water.

After the planes had gone the women waded out from under the bridge and slipped and scrabbled up the bank. A thin bitter wind was coming up from the south. They stood shivering and shedding greenish river water from their skirts. There was a flash on the horizon, the dull thump of an explosion, and one of the brickworks chimneys collapsed in a cloud of dust. Two more explosions followed and the whole building crumpled.

Seven heavy tanks were rolling towards them across the potato fields.

‘Our boys,’ said Valeriya. ‘Running home to mother.’

More muzzle flashes, rapid fire. The chatter of machine guns sounded dry and quiet, like twigs crunching. In the distance behind the tanks long lines of men were coming towards them, making slow progress across the levels of frozen mud.

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘Those aren’t us. The enemy is here. We have to run.’

When she got back to Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment it wasn’t there. The building wasn’t there. The whole of the street was gone. Sticking out from the rubble among the smouldering beams and spars was a leg, pointing its heel at the sky. Small enough to be a child’s. A girl’s. It was black like burned meat. A charred flap of shoe hung from the foot.

66

The rain in the Gulf of Burmahnsk was definitely beginning to ease. Slowly the area of visible sea around the aircraft widened until it was possible to see a mile or more in every direction. Lyuba Gretskaya stirred and opened her eyes. Lom wasn’t sure she had ever really been asleep. She slid back the canopy, letting in a blast of freezing spray and the smell of the ocean, stood up precariously in her seat and reached up to jolt the engine into life.

She took off and climbed steeply to a thousand feet, swung round and headed east. After about fifteen minutes they crossed the coastline: a wide shallow lagoon behind a long sandspit. Drab dunes and brown scrub grass dusted with snow. The Kotik swung north to follow the shore. Bays and lagoons. Small scattered settlements tucked a mile or so back from the sea. The fuel gauge lapsing closer and closer to empty.

They came up on Slensk from the south where it hid from the weather in the lee of a low headland. As Gretskaya swung a loop to port, Lom found himself looking down on a tumble of bleached grey rooftops divided by a broad river. Wharfs and piers edged the river, fronting an extensive patchwork of timber yards. Beyond the docks the river frayed, splitting into a threadwork of rivers and streams across a widening triangle of tawny brown mud streaked with veins of livid orange. The Northern Kholomora reaching the sea.

The Kotik swung out over the delta, descending gently, and turned back to touch down neatly in the middle of the river. Gretskaya taxied across to the nearest jetty and found a berth between a rusting hulk and two big pitch-caulked barges roped together side by side. She eased the plane nose first against a solid wall of pine trunks blackened and streaked with lichenous green, and cut the engine.

A giant was sitting on the edge of the wharf, studying the aircraft with frank curiosity. He caught the line Gretskaya threw up to him and looped it neatly round a stump. Lom, stiff and awkward after nine hours cramped into the tiny cockpit, hauled himself up the rusting iron ladder and stood a little unsteadily, relishing the stability of the heavy weathered planking under his feet. He breathed deeply. The cold prickled the back of his nose. It was much colder here than Mirgorod, and the sky was bigger. The air smelled of grasslands and smoke and river mud and the resinous tang of cut timber. It flushed the staleness and engine fumes from his lungs.

He glanced across at the giant and nodded.

‘Where do you come from in that?’ the giant said. His accent was thick. Consonants roughened and elided. Vowels formed deeper in the back of his throat than a human larynx allowed.

‘Mirgorod,’ said Lom.

The giant considered him for a while. Though he was sitting with his legs over the edge of the jetty, his massive head was level with Lom’s. His thick hair was tied back in a pony tail and the dark glossy skin of his face was covered with an intricate pattern of tattoos. A lacy knotted profusion of thorns and leaves and berries, stained brown and purple like bramble juice, spread up into the roots of his hair and wound down his neck, disappearing inside his shirt. His eyes were large as damsons, bright damson-black, and showed no whites at all.

‘I heard Mirgorod is burning,’ he said.

‘The people are getting out,’ said Lom, ‘those that can. Like us. The government is moving. There is to be a renewal in the east. The Vlast reborn in Kholvatogorsk.’

The giant shrugged and spat into the sea.

‘And where do you go?’ he said. ‘East also?’

‘North,’ said Lom.

The giant stiffened, suddenly alert and wary. His nostrils flared. He was looking past Lom at something behind him. Lom glanced back. Florian had appeared at the top of the ladder, wearing his astrakhan hat.

‘You keep wild company,’ the giant muttered, ‘for a Mirgorod man.’

Lom and Florian left Gretskaya to secure the cockpit and sort out the refuelling of the Kotik.

‘We must restore our spirits,’ said Florian, setting off towards the town. ‘Coffee, I think. Cherry schnapps. Pastries. Honey.’

Lom looked sceptically at the subsiding weather-bleached frontages. Cherry schnapps and pastries?

Slensk was a timber town. Timber was the only trade, and all the buildings were made of wood–old, warped, much repaired and weather proofed with tar. Boardwalks were laid across mud, woodsmoke leaked from tin chimneys. There were as many giants as humans in the streets of Slensk. Giants were the timber trade. They came out of the forest hauling barges with their shoulders or riding herd on thunderous rafts of red pine logs: down the Yannis, across Lake Vitimsk, then the Northern Kholomora to the sea. The logs were boughs and branches only, never entire trunks, though they were thicker, stronger and heavier than whole trees of beech or oak. When the giants had delivered their charges, some stayed in Slensk and laboured in the sawmills, where they hefted timbers five men couldn’t shift, and some travelled onward with the seagoing barges or drifted south and west, itinerant labourers, but most walked back to the forest. Giants tended to observe human life from a height, detached and unconcerned, indifferent to detail. They went their own way and rarely got involved. City people treated them with a mixture of fear and contempt, which bothered the giants, if they noticed it at all, about as much as the scorn of cats. But the giants were noticing Florian. They watched him warily. They bristled.

On a bleak corner a door stood open in a lopsided old house. A tin sign read PUBLIC ROOM. You ducked under a low beam to get in, and stepped down into a room of long benches and sticky tables, wet muddy floorboards, a log stove and a fug of strong tobacco. No coffee, no cherry schnapps. Florian ordered for both of them: big wooden bowls of cabbage soup with blobs of sour cream dissolving in the middle, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a bottle of birch liquor and two glasses. The bottle was brown and dusty. LIGAS DARK BALZAM. The thick black liquor burned Lom’s throat. It left a thick oily film down the inside of the tumbler. At the next table a group of seamen were playing cards.

Florian took one of the boiled eggs from the plate and crushed it gently between finger and thumb until the shell cracked. He began to remove the broken pieces one by one.

‘The giants are bothered by you,’ said Lom.

‘Are they?’ said Florian.

He finished peeling the egg, and held it up to examine it in the light. It was shiny white and elliptically perfect.

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘You make them nervous.’

Florian tossed the peeled egg into the air, and with an impossibly fast movement seemed to lean forward and snap it out of the air with his jaws. He swallowed the egg whole. It was over in a fraction of a second, almost too fast to see. It was the most inhuman gesture that Lom had ever seen a human make. Only Florian was not human of course.

Florian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘And what about you, Vissarion?’ he said. ‘Do I bother you?’

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘Absolutely.’

‘I see,’ said Florian. ‘Well. OK.’ He took a sip of birch liquor, made a sour face and sat back as if he’d made an incontrovertible point.

67

Gretskaya turned up at the bar half an hour later, her sheepskin rain-soaked, her thick curly hair heavy with water.

‘You tracked us down,’ said Florian.

‘Where else would you be? There is nowhere else. Give me some of that.’ She picked up Florian’s balzam glass and emptied it, then slid in alongside Lom on the bench. ‘There’s heavy weather coming in from the north. It reached Garshal this morning, bad enough that they telephoned a warning to the pier head here. That’s not normal. We’ll stay here tonight and let it blow through, and start again in the morning.’

‘We could go east,’ said Lom. ‘Follow the river to Terrimarkh, like you said. Keep south of the weather.’

Gretskaya shook her head.

‘I will not risk the Kotik over that country,’ she said. ‘It is a wilderness. Bad weather in daylight over the ocean is one thing. Bad weather at night over 250,000 square miles of moss and rocks and scrub is something else again. But…’ She paused and frowned and looked across the room. A corporal of gendarmes had ducked in under the low doorway. He was standing at the edge of the room, letting his eyes adjust to the light.

When he saw them he came across. He was young, not more than nineteen or twenty, narrow-shouldered and wide-hipped. A velvet moustache, a full moist lower lip, a roll of softness swelling over his belt. The holster on his hip looked big and awkward on him.

‘You are the aviators?’ he said. ‘That is your seaplane at the jetty? The Beriolev Mark II Kotik?’

‘It is,’ said Gretskaya.

‘And you are the pilot?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are required to register a flight plan with the harbour authorities. This is your responsibility, yet no such plan is registered.’

‘I don’t have a plan. Not yet. We were just discussing that. There is a problem with the weather.’

The boy was staring at Lom and Florian.

‘And these are your passengers?’ he said. ‘Two men?’

‘As you see.’

‘Cargo?’

‘None.’

‘This can be checked. The aircraft will be searched.’

‘There is no cargo. It is a passenger flight.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘I am exploring possibilities in the timber business,’ said Lom. ‘Naturally, we came to Slensk.’

‘But you are not remaining here. You come from Mirgorod, and only the weather detains you. Correct? So your destination is where?’

‘We are going north along the coast,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Garshal. We leave tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. There is no hurry. Not until the storm blows through.’

The gendarme held out his hand.

‘Papers,’ he said.

‘The logs and registration documents are in the plane. If you want to—’ Gretskaya began, but the gendarme cut her off impatiently.

‘My concern is with persons only. Personal identification. Documents of travel.’

Gretskaya handed over her passport. Florian and Lom followed suit. The gendarme looked through them slowly and carefully, page by page. Then he put all three in the back pocket of his trousers.

‘Hey!’ said Gretskaya.

‘I have certain enquiries to make concerning these documents,’ said the gendarme. ‘Confirmations I intend to seek. You may collect them from the gendarmerie tomorrow, in the afternoon, and until then you will remain in Slensk. This will be convenient for you, no doubt,’ he said to Lom. ‘You will have more time to pursue your commercial interests.’

‘That decides it,’ said Florian. ‘We have to leave now, straight away, and not for Garshal but east.’

‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It’s not a flight to try at night, even without bad weather. Not without a navigator. The only sure way is to follow the river. If we lost the river–it’s a wilderness: no features, no landmarks–we’d circle till the fuel ran out, and if we had to go down, no one would come to look for us. No one would know where we went. It would take us weeks to walk out of there.’

‘If it’s a matter of additional payment…’

‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Not that. Anyway, why the hurry? We’ve got till tomorrow afternoon.’

Florian shook his head. ‘He could send a wire tonight,’ he said. ‘He could be on the telephone now.’

‘Who’s he going to call to check out a passport?’ said Lom. ‘The Lodka’s not open for business, not any more. Anyway, he’s not waiting for ID confirmation.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Gretskaya.

‘How many gendarmes are there in a place like Slensk? Two or three at the most. My guess is he’s on his own. And he’s worried about us. He didn’t buy our story and he didn’t like the odds, so he’s calling for help. Reinforcements. Only he knows nobody can get here before tomorrow. Fuck, he’s almost begging us to run.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Gretskaya.

Florian looked at Lom. ‘Let him decide,’ he said.

Lom emptied his balzam glass. The liquid seared his throat and left his mouth dry and rough. He didn’t need to think. Somewhere Chazia’s train was rolling north towards Novaya Zima with Maroussia and the Pollandore. It was a race, and nothing else mattered, and the train was moving, and they were not. At the thought of Chazia, Lom felt a tight surge of anger and purposeful violence. The iron aftertaste of angel stuff mixed with the balzam. There would be a reckoning there.

‘We leave,’ said Lom. ‘We leave now.’

Gretskaya poured another tumbler of Ligas Balzam, drank it down, and tucked the bottle inside her sheepskin jacket.

‘Then let’s go,’ she said.

68

In the war against his own people Colonel-General Rizhin’s weapons were of necessity crude. When Chazia evacuated the Lodka and removed or destroyed the intelligence files it contained, she decapitated, at least so far as Mirgorod was concerned, the system of informers and secret police that had held the Vlast solid for four hundred years. Rizhin took a more direct approach. It suited him better. He declared martial law. A curfew. Looters and stockpilers were to be summarily shot. Citizens were conscripted to worker battalions and assigned their tasks, and shirkers were shot. If there were no shirkers, some people were to be shot anyway, the weakest and least capable. What mattered was that people were shot.

Spies and saboteurs were captured and their confessions led to further arrests. In quarters where dissent was strongest, collective measures were taken. Reprisals. The citizens of Mirgorod, the newspapers reported, were shocked at the extent of the enemy’s penetration of their city and glad that Rizhin was there, relentless and vigilant, to protect them.

Against the enemy without, he ordered concentric circles of defence to be thrown together. Twenty miles out from the centre of the Mirgorod, Rizhin’s labour armies of women and children raised earth-works with their bare hands, excavating trenches and tank ditches, building breastworks and redoubts, laying barbed wire and mines even as the Archipelago air force strafed and bombed them. They carried away their own dead, and buried them when and where they could.

The outer ring of defence was expected to delay but not stop the advance. Rizhin’s main focus was on preparing the streets of the city itself for the fighting to come. He ordered that all the bridges should be wired with explosives. Machine-gun nests were to be built on high roofs and towers, the blocks around them demolished to provide clear fields of fire. Artillery and anti-aircraft batteries appeared in the parks and squares of the city. Air raid shelters were to be dug and public buildings camouflaged. The Armoury spire was painted grey.

Residents came out to barricade every street with anything to hand: tramcars and overturned carts were pushed across the roads and filled with earth, building rubble, gravestones uprooted from the necropolis gardens. Street nameplates and road signs were removed. All maps, street plans and guidebooks to the city were confiscated, and anyone found with one after that was arrested. Summary execution. Every house and apartment was prepared to be its own fortress. Its own last stand. Strips of paper were stuck across windows to prevent shattering and splinters. Attics were filled with sand. In every office barrels filled with water stood ready, along with spades and beaters and boxes of sand.

Barrage balloons drifted low and pale and fat, their cables invisible against the sky. And every day the beleaguered citizens of Mirgorod waited for the Vlast’s own air force to appear overhead. They looked up, expecting and then hoping to see Hammerheads and Murnauviks scattered across the sky, twisting, buzzing, deadly; stinging the lumbering, triple-bellied Archipelago craft out of the air. But the air force of the Vlast did not come. It was delayed elsewhere. After the first attacks on the city, the Archipelago’s bombers arrived alone: their fighter escorts no longer bothered to waste fuel by coming along for the ride.

All night and all day Rizhin worked. He planned, he terrorised, he cajoled. He did what he could, but he knew it would not be enough. He needed soldiers. Armies. Guns and tanks and aircraft and ships. And these he did not have. Not enough.

The armour of the Archipelago rolled through the unfinished outer defensive line in a dozen, twenty places, moving fast, and behind the heavy tanks came massed motorised infantry in half-tracked carriers and on motorbikes. Radio operators. Artillery tractors. Rocket trucks. Engineers to rebuild roads and bridges and lay out airfields and telephone cables. And following along behind them, more slowly but in unstoppable numbers, came columns of horse hauling supply wagons, field guns and four-ton mitrailleuses. Cavalry regiments. Division after division of foot soldiers marching.

At certain points, randomly, the armies of the Vlast attempted to make a stand. Men and women in their thousands advanced on the enemy at walking pace. Rifles and bayonets against tanks, artillery and machine guns. Wave after wave the men and women of the Vlast came on, the later waves slowing to pick their way across shell craters and over the mounded corpses of the dead. The attacks faltered, faded, resumed, hour after hour until the machine guns of the Archipelago were too hot to handle and their operators were depressed and sickened by the tedious, grinding slaughter. The awful noise of it dulled their hearing and frayed their nerves. The freezing air was clotted with the stink of hot metal and oil, mud and piss and the leakage of ripped-up and burst-open human bodies. Some of the Vlast infantry reached the enemy: they fought with bayonets and knives when their pocketful of bullets was gone.

The Archipelago covered the last twenty miles to the outer suburbs of Mirgorod so quickly that whole Vlast divisions were simply bypassed and cut off from retreat. Crouched in woodland scrub and shallow swampy depressions, they hid in desperate silence while the enemy marched past. More often than not, Archipelago skirmishers found them by the smell of uniforms stale with tobacco and sweat, the tang of disinfectant and the sickly sweetness of Sauermann’s Lice-Off.

When the Archipelago columns reached the Ouspensky Marshes on the eastern outskirts of Mirgorod they halted. They were within sight of the dull red hillock of the Ouspenskaya Torso, the remains of the first angel that fell dead from the sky: the place to which the Founder had travelled, four hundred years before, and where he had ordered the building of the city. The place where the Reasonable Empire had first become the Vlast. And, from her temporary headquarters in the Ouspensky Marshes, General Alyson Carnelian, Archipelago commander of the Mirgorod Front, sent a message into the city. It was an invitation to discuss surrender terms.

Against the advice of his officers, Rizhin didn’t send a representative but went to meet General Carnelian himself. The meeting was held in a single railway carriage that had been rolled out to the middle of the Bivorg viaduct and left there, suspended a hundred feet above the scrappy gardens and straggling suburban streets of Vonyetskovo Strel. It looked isolated. Marooned.

The carriage was a plush observation car appropriated from the Edelfeld-Sparre Line, thickly carpeted and furnished with red leather sofas, its vintage luxury somewhat faded by time. The walls were panelled in dark varnished wood, and the soft yellow light of electric chandeliers made the sky beyond the windows look wintry and bleak. Photographs on the walls showed sunlit southern landscapes: a slope of olive groves, a sun-bleached corniche above a strip of glittering sea. Places where Rizhin had never been. A small diesel generator was humming quietly somewhere.

General Carnelian was a tall heavyset woman of about fifty, uniformed in crisp olive green, greying blond hair cut short under a peaked red cap heavy with braid. Her face and hands were deeply tanned.

‘Some coffee?’ she said. ‘A cake perhaps?’ There was a plate of fancy patisseries. The kind you couldn’t get in Mirgorod, not any more.

‘No,’ said Rizhin. ‘Let’s get on with it. Say your piece.’

She fixed him with small hard green eyes. She is a soldier, thought Rizhin. Of course she is. The flannel with the coffee and the crude trick with the little sugar cakies is misdirection, only that.

‘We can take your city, General Rizhin,’ said Carnelian quietly. ‘Be in no doubt of that. Our bombers will flatten it. All of it. Every house and apartment, every school, every hospital, every bridge. I have six hundred Bison tanks. Each one weighs ninety tons. They will not bother to use the streets, they will drive straight through the buildings and grind the rubble to dust under the steel treads of their tracks. We will fill your rivers and canals and sewers with coal oil and ignite it. We will fill the cellars and underground shelters with heavy green gas that shreds the lungs of anyone who inhales it. Explosive gas. Once released, it lingers and drifts in ground-level clouds for days. Mirgorod will burn, and all the millions of people who live here will burn. All of you. There will be such death as you cannot possibly imagine.’

She paused to let Rizhin absorb the force of what she had said. The inevitable truth of it.

‘However,’ she continued, ‘I would prefer not to do this. I am a humane person, and I will avoid this cataclysm if I can. The city is already ours, in every sense that matters, but there is a choice, General Rizhin, and the choice is yours.’

Rizhin looked at her, smiling faintly, but said nothing.

‘Will you hear my terms?’ she said.

Rizhin sat back in his chair and gestured for her to carry on. ‘It would be interesting,’ he said.

‘If you capitulate,’ said Carnelian, ‘The city will be spared. It will not be destroyed. And I will go further. I am authorised to offer Mirgorod the status of an open city. Renounce all ties of allegiance to the Vlast and Mirgorod may establish its own civilian government and become a neutral bystander in the war. We offer diplomatic recognition of the city as an independent state. We offer advice and supply. We offer Mirgorod a seat in the Governing Parliament of Archipelagal States, with a status equal to any of the smaller Out Islands.’

‘And for me?’ said Rizhin. ‘What would there be for me? I mean me personally, of course.’

‘An honourable retirement, General. A small estate somewhere. Froualt, perhaps? And a reasonable pension. We might say two thousand roubles a year, something in that region. There would be limits on your future travel and communication, naturally, but for all practical purposes you would be free to live out a quiet and prosperous end to an illustrious career.’

‘These are reasonable terms,’ said Rizhin. ‘Very attractive.’

‘I expect you’ll want time to consider,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to discuss your answer with your colleagues, I understand that, and we would of course need to be assured that yours was a collective answer. A reliable agreement. But…’ She paused. ‘I would advise you against consulting with your masters who have fled. It’s easy to spend other people’s lives from a distance. I urge Mirgorod to make its own mind up. I can give you twenty-four hours. No more.’

‘There is no need for time,’ said Rizhin. ‘I speak for Mirgorod. That’s why I’m here.’

‘Good. Excellent. So, what do you say, General?’

‘I say you’re full of shit.’

‘I assure you—’ Carnelian began, but Rizhin held up his hand for silence.

‘You and I,’ he said, ‘what we’re fighting for here is a city. A capital city. If Mirgorod is not the capital of the Vlast it is nothing, it is meaningless, it no longer exists. You won’t burn it. What use to you is a million stinking corpses? What use to you is five hundred square miles of ash and rubble in a marsh on the edge of a northern ocean? This threat of burning is nothing. It’s shit. I could burn it myself, more easily than you could. Fuck, I would burn it myself, to stop you having it. But to destroy it is to lose it. You burn Mirgorod and you obliterate the idea of it, and it’s the idea of Mirgorod we’re fighting over here, not some piss and vinegar diplomatic compromise.’

Rizhin stood up to go.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You want my city, you come and get it. You fight for every inch, or you fuck off somewhere else and let the Archipelago find themselves a general who can.’

‘You can’t save the people of Mirgorod, General.’

‘You haven’t been listening,’ said Rizhin. ‘You should pay attention. I don’t want to save the people of Mirgorod, they are of no interest to me. What I want is a victory. And I’m going to have one. You’re going to give me one.’

69

For three hours out of Slensk, Lyuba Gretskaya followed the Northern Kholomora upstream, flying low through steady drizzle. The river slid beneath them, wide and slow and dark. Carpets of leafless birch and moss gave way to plains of tawny scrub grass and miles-long streaks of bare yellow earth. Twilight was thickening into night when the storm clouds rose from the north, clotting the horizon. Rags of wind buffeted the Kotik, sending it scrabbling and skittering across the surface of the air.

‘We’ll have to lie up overnight,’ said Gretskaya. ‘I’m going down while there’s still light to land by.’

‘Go a few miles north,’ said Lom. ‘Out of sight of the river. Just in case.’

Gretskaya nodded and swung the Kotik to port. After a couple of minutes she eased off the throttle and began to descend in a wide flat spiral. She pulled a handle and Lom felt the thunk as the landing wheels dropped into position. Almost imperceptibly the nose came up as the aircraft flattened out, engine silenced, gliding. The wind whistling through the struts, the creak of the airframe, the rain against the windscreen, the tick and sweep of the wipers. Even in the dusk and rain the grass was visible underneath them now, not flat and smooth as it had appeared from height, but rough and tussocky and dotted with low clumps of shrub and thorn. Gretskaya flew on, thirty feet above the ground.

And then a wall of scree rose out of the ground in front of them.

Gretskaya hauled back on the stick, dragging the nose up steeply, and raced the throttle till it screamed. They must have cleared the top by a matter of feet. Inches. They were flying over a stretch of gravel and small stones. Patches of illumination from the wing-tip lamps raced alongside them. The ground was so close, Lom felt he could have reached over the side and brushed it with his hand.

The tail dropped, the wheels touched and bounced and touched again, and they were down and trundling, wheels crunching and jolting across the stony surface. The whole aircraft strained as Gretskaya applied the brakes. It skidded and slewed to the right. Suddenly they ran out of gravel and bounced into long grass. A shadowy clump of thorns loomed out of the darkness and smacked into the wing almost at Lom’s shoulder. With a screech of protesting metal they lurched to a sudden halt.

Gretskaya cut the engine instantly.

‘Shit,’ she said quietly. ‘That didn’t sound good.’

Gretskaya opened the cockpit and climbed down to have a look at the damage. Lom followed. A thin bitter wind tugged at his trousers. Rain flattened his hair and streamed down his face. The right under-carriage wheel was tangled in a mess of thorny branches. The struts, to Lom’s inexpert eye, looked bent and twisted awry. Despite the wind and the rain, he could smell an acrid industrial taint on the air. Something was leaking. Gretskaya bent down and dabbed at the mechanism, then sniffed her fingers.

‘Brake fluid,’ she said. ‘Nothing too bad, if that’s the only damage. I can fix it up in the morning.’

Florian appeared beside them. His eyes were shining happily.

‘I’m going to take a walk,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up.’

Lom looked at him in surprise but Gretskaya only grunted indifferently.

‘Come,’ she said and clapped Lom on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get inside and finish this balzam and get some sleep.’

Antoninu Florian slid down the scree and found a place where he could tuck away his clothes. He pulled them off hastily, shivering happily as the rain drenched the bare skin of his body. He wrapped them in his jacket and stashed the bundle under a thorn tree. He marked the place with his scent so he could find it again.

All around him for hundreds of miles there was spaciousness and weather and, apart from the two left behind inside their stale metal box, no humans. None at all. And no cramped enclosing constructions of stone and brick. No stench of coal and iron. No thundering of engines and petrol fumes. No noise at all but the wind in the grass and the rain. How long? How long since such a moment, a true wolfnight? Too long. Too many years. But now. Now. The joy of it made him want to howl and shout.

Florian ran, and as he ran he stretched out his body, re-articulating bone and cartilage inside their hot tendon sheaths, feeling his muscles bunch and reach and work themselves warm and free, pushing out his ribcage and filling his unfolding lungs deeply, deeply, with the night-freighted air: the smell of crushed herbs, broken twigs and wet earth. At full pelt he tipped himself sideways into the brush and rolled over and over, growling, yelping, laughing. He came to a stop and thrust his face into the ground, just to breath it, just to rub his muzzle against the fragrant wet grass.

Then he picked himself up and stood for a moment, still, the fur on his back raised thickly, mouth open, panting hot breath that steamed on the air, simply listening to the hot blood of his own veins.

He was wolf and he was strong and hungry and he ran. He ran a long way, covering mile after mile, darkly, silently and very fast.

70

Lom woke in the grey light of dawn and climbed stiffly down from the cockpit. The Kotik was canted slightly sideways. Gretskaya’s legs were visible, sticking out from under the hull. A toolbox open beside her.

‘OK?’ said Lom.

‘Couple of hours. No problem.’

‘Need a hand?’

‘No.’

Some yards away Florian was crouching over a small fire, feeding it with brittle clumps of scrub. The herb flared into spitting heat and burned away instantly with an acrid fragrance and almost no smoke. He had a couple of cat-sized creatures impaled on sticks and propped over the fire. They were elongated, sinewy, unrecognisable: narrow fragile heads burned to black, eyes closed slits, carbonised lips stretched back from small sharp chisel-teeth. Threads of fat dripped from the burning meat and spattered into the fire with little explosions of bitter vaporous soot. Lom almost trod on their torn pelts, dropped on the gravel a couple of feet away. Grey bloody rags.

Florian looked up and grinned.

‘What the hell are those?’ said Lom.

Florian shrugged happily.

‘Surok,’ he said. ‘Ground squirrel.’ He held up a chunk of half-cooked meat. ‘Breakfast. Want some?’

‘No,’ said Lom quickly. ‘No. Thanks.’

He drifted off by himself, heading away from the aircraft. His footsteps crunched echoless in the silence. It was bitterly cold. Away from the reek of Florian’s fire the air smelled faintly of dry cinders and some kind of crushed herb he thought he recognised but couldn’t name. Something like sage. Or rue. Scraps of freezing mist hung low on the ground. His face was chilled to the bone: stiffened and numb, skin stretched too tight over his jaw and his skull. The yellow-grey steppe stretched beyond the flat horizon, hundreds of miles in every direction of nothing at all.

The plane had landed on some kind of raised plateau, uplifted some yards above the surrounding grassland. Last night’s rain had already evaporated in the thin wind. Lom found he could scuff away the sparse dry gravelly soil with his shoe, scraping down to virgin rock. The herby scrub had virtually no roots at all. When he had been walking for fifteen minutes or so, he began to notice that the ground was scattered at wide intervals with curious slivers, shards and fist-sized stones, ranging in colour from pale pink and rusted blood to bruise-dark purple, some rough and sharp, some rounded and polished to a glassy shine. He picked up a couple at random and cupped them in the palm of his hand, hefting their surprising weight. He knew exactly what they were. Raw fragments of the flesh of a fallen angel. They tingled in his hand, their almost-aliveness calling to him, and the stain of the old angel implant still lingering in his own blood stirred in response. It was like fine wires in his veins tightening and humming faintly. Follow, they urged, whispering. Follow.

It took Lom more than an hour to find the carcase of the angel itself: a small one, a minor malakh, nothing compared to the red grandeur of, say, the Ouspenskaya Torso. Keeping fifty yards distance, he walked all round it in five or ten minutes: a surprising, impossible crag of deep reds and purples. The angel had not been quite dead when it fell: three starfish pseudo-limbs extruded from one flank and flowed across the shallow crater floor, spreading fringes that trickled away and dissolved into the surface rock. Angels often survived their fall by hours, sometimes days, seeping liquefaction, scrabbling in sad confusion at the ground as the last intelligence drained out of them. But this one was certainly dead now, and had been dead for centuries: long enough for dusty wind-blown soil to gather deeply in the folds and depressions of its body. Even from such a mass as this, Lom sensed nothing but the vague, vestigial after-trace of dissipated sentience.

He was surely the first human to see this thing since it had fallen. The Vlast Observatories paid wealthy bounties for such a find, and failure to report one was a serious crime, but if it had been reported, the angel-miners of the Vlast would have come, hacked and sliced away its substance and hauled it away in slabs. They would have swept up every scattered pebble and strand and web for miles around. But this one had lain unseen and undisturbed since it had fallen, untouched by anything except the abrading weather. It called to him. He wanted to go closer. To touch it. Sheer curiosity. Never before had he been close to more than a mudjhik-sized lump of angel substance, though he had carried a sliver of it embedded in his skull for most of his life.

As Lom slipped down into the shallow crater and walked towards it, the small dead angel loomed over him like the hull of a battleship. The atmosphere sang and prickled against his skin. An ozone reek. He went right up against the flank. Close to, the angel’s flesh was dull and pitted, but marbled with streaks of dark translucence, seamed within by dim threads and striations of blood and midnight blue. Lom pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to it. Probing. Deeper and deeper into the dizzying mass. The answering wires in his veins snapped taut, leaving him dizzy, breathless, heart pounding.

An echo of proud intellectual hunger reached out and gripped him, tugging him further down and deeper in. The angel wasn’t a solid bulk, it was an open mouth. A fathomless well. He was standing on the fragile edge of terrifying, vertiginous, depths and staring, rapt and self-surrendered, into infinite emptiness: the space between galaxies and stars, not dark and cold and filled with death, but alive, a beautiful shining limitless windfall home. He wanted to fall into it. Fall and fly. The way up and the way down the same. It was his birthright, his just entitlement, his more than human destiny: the everlasting, ever-expanding future to which his history, all human history, was prologue. Just one step more. The flesh of the dead angel opened, a warm inviting gate, parting comfortably to fold around him and take him in.

No! Not this! Not ever this again!

Lom fought it.

Repel! Repel!

But he could not pull away. He screamed and yelled. Choking. Desperate. He hit out and pushed and kicked and bit and screamed. He coughed and vomited. Sour spittle spilled down his chin in gluey strands. Pulling away was appalling and impossible, like drowning himself, like holding his own breath till he died. He was murdering the thing he loved completely, loved more than himself: he was wilfully choosing his own bereavement. The dead angel suffused him and clung to his mind with needle-hooked claws. It was pulling the brain and spinal cord out of his body through the top of his skull. For Lom to withdraw was sickening death and extinction.

No! Not after all that’s happened, not this! Was it his own voice or the angel’s that screamed this horrified determination, this defiance of despair? It was both. There was only one voice.

And then Lom was out of the dead angel’s grasp and stumbling back across the ground, sobbing and vomiting, his lungs heaving desperately for clean cold breath.

Florian found Lom wandering, exhausted and confused, miles from the Kotik. Florian wiped the dried vomit and spittle from his face and made him sit on a rock and gave him water and meat. Lom ate a little but he could not speak. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and swung his head from side to side, trying to shake it clear.

‘Take your time,’ said Florian. ‘No rush. None at all. Gretskaya is waiting. The aircraft is repaired. She is anxious to make Terrimarkh before dark.’

‘Before dark?’ said Lom. ‘What… what time is it, then?’

‘It is almost three in the afternoon. You were gone for eight hours.’

‘An angel…’ Lom groaned and turned aside and vomited again. ‘It was dead… It…’

‘I have seen it,’ said Florian. ‘When you didn’t come back I followed your trail. I found what you found but I didn’t go close, not like you did. I could not have. What made you…?’

He paused but Lom said nothing. He could not.

‘I picked up your path again,’ said Florian, ‘on the other side of it. You were wandering.’

There was a hammering pain behind Lom’s eyes. He tried to focus on Florian but flashes of coloured brightness sparked and drifted across his vision.

‘How close?’ said Florian. ‘How close did you go?’ His voice reached Lom from far away. Lom jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. It only made things worse.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Think I’m going to—’

He jerked his head aside and vomited once more. He felt himself toppling slowly, endlessly forward. The world slid sideways into easy and comfortable darkness.

71

Maroussia Shaumian sat alone in a compartment on Chazia’s train. Her own private travelling cell. The door was locked, the windows barred. The bars were painted dark purple to match the Edelfeld-Sparre coachwork: slender steel uprights, but solid. Immovable. She had tried them, as she had tried the door, a dozen times.

Her clothes had been taken from her on the first night while she slept, when they moved her from the freight car. She had woken to find herself in a simple dress of heavy grey linen. Her hair had been washed and she was barefoot, her left ankle chained to a strut beneath the seat. The cuff was padded leather, and gave her no discomfort. A silent woman came three times a day to bring her food–always a wrapped packet of heavy bread, with sausage or cheese, never both–and to take her to the washroom at the end of the corridor. On washroom trips Maroussia saw no one. The other compartments in the carriage had their blinds drawn or were empty. The linoleum was cool under her feet, the water in the bathroom hot, the towel fresh and rough. The bathroom window was barred. All the windows of the carriage were barred. It seemed she had the entire carriage to herself. The woman who came, the provodnitsa, would answer no questions.

The first time, after the washroom, Maroussia had refused to let her leg be shackled again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not that.’ She kicked viciously at the provodnitsa’s hand.

The woman shrugged and left her. Later, Maroussia slept, and when she woke she was chained again. Next time the provodnitsa came, she brought with her an enamel pot and put it on the floor in the corner behind the door.

‘You are to let me put the chain back on afterwards,’ she said, ‘or stay in here always.’

Maroussia stared at her for a long time, considering the hot water, the towels, the feel of the linoleum cool underfoot, then nodded and held out her leg for the chain to be removed. Apart from that one time, the provodnitsa was neither unkind nor kind, and never spoke at all.

Maroussia slept long and often, during the days as well as at night, and woke feeling sluggish and dull. She wondered if her food was drugged, or more likely the tin cups of sickly fruit juice out of a can, which had a metallic taint. But probably she was simply exhausted. A floor vent fed engine-warmed air into the compartment and she could not open the window. There was a large mirror above the opposite bench. Whenever she looked at it her own face gazed back at her, dark-eyed and alone. As much as she could, she avoided it. Avoided catching her own eye.

She wondered what Vissarion was doing, what had become of him, if he was even alive. She remembered lying next to him, freezing cold and wet in the bottom of the skiff, folding his unconscious and desperately injured body in her arms as they were carried down the swollen surging Mir. Trying with her own warmth to not let him die when he had been tortured for her sake. She remembered the smooth cold feel of his skin. The smell of the river water and blood in his hair. He was a good man. He met the world with an open face, not closed up hard like a fist as so many did. She felt obscurely guilty, as if she had abandoned him. And in a way she had.

When the track made long sweeping curves Maroussia could see the rest of the train. There were two armoured engines at the front and two huge guns, each on its own heavy truck, one behind the engines and one at the very back. Long barrels canted to the sky. Four more wagons with thick steel plating lined with firing slits carried gun turrets. The bulk of the train was unmarked freight wagons and a dozen passenger cars, looking tiny and incongruous in the Edelfeld-Sparre purple. Between the turreted fighting cars and the freight wagons was a specially widened truck which carried a shapeless bulk, high and wide as a house, shrouded in pale grey camouflage sheeting.

She knew what it was. She could feel its presence. The Pollandore. She tried to reach out towards it with her mind. There was nothing. No response. On a ledge at the front of the Pollandore’s truck a mudjhik stood, motionless and sentinel.

The train seemed to be going east, as far as Maroussia could tell, and perhaps a little north. Sometimes they roared along at speed, sometimes they slowed to a crawl, little more than walking pace. Occasionally the train would halt, never in a station but always in a deserted siding or marshalling yard, some with a surrounding cape of township. Maroussia drank in the names when she could see them, and pinned them to her memory, though they meant nothing to her. Ortelsvod. Thabiau. Sarmlovsk. Novimark. Bolland. Malovatisk. Ansk. She tried to see who came and went from the train. Figures passed in and out of view in early mist or evening darkness. People must have seen her face at the lit carriage window but nobody came near.

On the second day out of Mirgorod, shortly after dawn, the train came to a long shuddering stop with a screaming of brakes and the guns began to fire. The turret muzzles rattled viciously and the big ordnance boomed salvoes. The whole train shifted in the tracks with the recoils. Her face pressed tight against the window bars, Maroussia could see muzzle flashes and drifts of black smoke, but what they were firing at she had no idea. After fifteen minutes or so the firing ceased, but it was several hours before the train moved on.

Time divided itself between periods of trees and periods of lakes. The trees were needle-leaved spars of spruce and pine rising from a carpet of moss. The lakes were leaden grey interludes in a featureless plain of sandy scrub and grass. Flat horizons deadened all sense of forward motion. Days and nights merged one into another.

And then one morning Chazia came to Maroussia’s compartment. She looked drained. Exhausted. She filled the compartment with sour staleness and sweat. She sat on the opposite bench under the mirror, swung her legs up onto the seat, and stared at Maroussia. Her pale reddened eyes were unnaturally wide and bright, the skin of her face pallid, grey and dry. She curled up her legs on the seat, cosy and intimate.

‘Are you comfortable, darling?’ she said. ‘Are you sleeping? It must be tedious for you to be so much alone. I will send you books.’

Chazia shifted restlessly in the seat, scratching at the dark patches on her arms and hands, tugging at the skin of her cheek. She was holding the solm of twigs and wax and stuff gently, like something delicate and precious, but in her hand it looked drab and stupid. A bunch of litter. Dead.

‘This little thing,’ said Chazia. ‘It’s so fragile. See? You could stick in your thumb and break it apart. It’s ephemeral. We need to be quick.’

She winced and scratched vigorously at the skin on the inside of her elbow. There were scabs and wound tracks there. A little fresh blood was oozing. She saw Maroussia looking and smeared the blood away.

‘See what it’s doing to me?’ she said. ‘It’s making the ants worse. Tiny awful ants. You can’t see them, they’re too small, but they’re there under my skin and I can’t get them out. The forest put them there. I went too near the trees at Vig. They’re in my arms now, but the face is worse. I can’t sleep then. Not at all.’ She stopped scratching and looked at Maroussia. Her blue eyes were hot and sore. ‘You can’t destroy the angel, Maroussia. It isn’t destructible. It’s too strong. It’s beautiful. It spoke to me once, at Vig, and it will speak to me again.’

‘Where’s this train going?’ said Maroussia.

‘Novaya Zima,’ said Chazia. ‘I told you.’

‘I don’t know where that is.’

Chazia gestured vaguely. ‘North.’

‘We’re not going north.’

‘Not yet. We’ll turn north when we can.’

‘There was shooting yesterday,’ said Maroussia. ‘Was that the Archipelago? Are you losing the war?’

‘Losing it?’ said Chazia. ‘Of course we can’t lose it. The war is good. It is history in action. The old Vlast was stale and tired. Silted up with careerists. They had no energy. No purpose. No imagination. The Archipelago will clear all that away for us. They want Mirgorod? So? Let them have it. Mirgorod is not the Vlast. Mirgorod is one city, yesterday’s city. Let them have it. The Archipelago will consume our corruption like maggots in a wound, and for now we let them do their work, and when they have finished we’ll brush them away.’

‘What if their armies follow you east?’ said Maroussia.

‘At the time of my choosing I will destroy them,’ said Chazia. ‘All their armies will count for nothing. They will burn, they will all burn, and the winds of their burning will blow the ashes of the Archipelago from the face of the planet.’

As she talked she was turning the solm over and over in her hands, looking at it from every direction. Cupping it protectively. Holding it up to her face.

‘It doesn’t do anything,’ said Chazia. ‘Nothing at all.’

Maroussia felt something moving inside her head. A surreptitious, intrusive touch, like careful fingers probing gently, cool and sly. A secretive violation. It made her feel dizzy and sick.

‘What are you doing to me?’ she said.

Chazia looked up from the solm.

‘You were going to use this,’ said Chazia, ‘against the Vlast. Against the angel. Against me. You thought you were going to change the world. You thought you could free the planet of angels by the deed of your own hand. You thought you’d got some kind of hero’s task.’

‘No—’

‘It is an interesting form of individualistic delusion. One person does not change the world. History is huge, colossal, unturnable. Look at me. I am building a new, better, cleaner Vlast. By my own efforts I will do this. But I don’t think I’m a hero. I know I am not. I reject the concept. I am a conduit, a facilitator. I ride the wave of history but the wave has its own momentum and I go this way because it is inevitable. If I turn aside and try to find my own independent path I will certainly be destroyed. The world is as it is and will be as it will be.’

‘Everyone makes their own world,’ said Maroussia. ‘I will do what I have chosen to do. Because I have chosen. Even if what I do makes no difference to anyone but myself, I’ll still have done something that matters.’

Again Maroussia felt faint sickening touches inside her mind. Needle probes and clumsy fingers grubbing around. She tried to focus on what was happening but could not.

‘But that is such rubbish, sweetness. Can’t you hear yourself? Absolute shit. Did you choose the Pollandore, or did it choose you? You don’t know anything about what you’re dealing with, except what the people in the forest have told you. You’re a move in a game, that’s all. Someone else’s game.’

‘No!’

‘So what is the Pollandore? What does it do? What is it for? Can you tell me?’

‘Take this chain off my leg,’ said Maroussia.

Chazia laughed.

‘You’re stubborn,’ she said. ‘Determined. I understand what Lom sees in you.’

‘You opened his head with a knife.’

‘It was a chisel. A fine chisel.’

‘You hurt him. You tried to kill him, but it didn’t work: it made him better and stronger.’

‘He desires you, did you know that?’ Maroussia looked away. ‘Ah,’ said Chazia. ‘I see you do. And you desire him? You are lovers perhaps? Are you lovers? Tell me, darling, are you?’

‘I want to get off this train,’ said Maroussia.

Chazia ignored her.

‘There will be time for personal life,’ she said. ‘One day. We might even live to see it. But not yet, not now, and perhaps for you and me not ever. It cannot be indulged. Now there is work to do, and what is required is clear-sightedness, hardness and resolve in the doing of what is necessary. That will be our gift to the future. Our sacrifice.’ Chazia leaned forward and took Maroussia’s hand in hers. Stroked it. ‘Help me here, darling. Work with me. Help me to use the Pollandore. I don’t want to hurt you. I like you.’

‘I’m never going to help you. You know that.’

‘You will know me better, Maroussia darling, by and by.’

Later that same afternoon the train halted on the shore of an immense and nameless lake. Maroussia watched damson-coloured, damson-heavy cloud heads rise out of the distance and roll towards them, bruising more and more of the sky and darkening the surface of the water, erasing all reflection. Slowly the storm advanced, bringing the closing horizon with it as it came, until the train was enfolded in ominous dim purple-green light. Maroussia stood up in excitement and gripped the window bars. At last fat raindrops splatted on her window, singly at first, but faster and faster, harder and harder. Machine-gun bullets of rain. Water sluiced down the glass in a continuous rippling flood. There might have been arcs of lightning and shattering thunder crashes, or it might have been the glitter and roar of the rain.

Maroussia’s shouts of joy were lost in the noise.

And then a crack opened in the world, the rain and the storm split down the middle, and a different sun was shining through the carriage window: splashes of warmth and spaciousness and the quietness of an afternoon in early summer. The sourness in her mouth was gone, and her heart was big and calm with the possibility of happiness.

The Pollandore reached out and touched her face, and for the first time Maroussia felt how close it was, how near in time as well as distance. There had been bad things–bad things that happened and bad things she had done–but she and the Pollandore were travelling together now, and their paths were slowly converging, and the moment would come: the moment of meeting, when good things would be possible again. She could not have said exactly what the good things coming were, but that didn’t matter. It made no difference at all.

72

The Pollandore’s massive detonation of possibility and different sunlight sweeps outwards across the continent from its epicentre on Chazia’s train. It roars like an exploding shock wave through the certainty of things, gathering momentum as it goes, and the world of history unfolding stumbles, brought up suddenly smack against the truth of human dream and desire. In the trenches of the war and the bitterness of drab town streets the air is suddenly, briefly, rich with the smell of rain on broken earth; another voice is heard, not in the ears but in the blood, and for the brief unsustainable duration of the moment of the Pollandore’s passing, nothing, nothing anywhere dies at all.

The surge of change and otherness rolls across the continent and into the endless forest, where it passes from root to root and from leaf-head to leaf-head. It is leafburst. It is earth-rooted rain-sifting burning green thunder. It crashes against the steep high flanks of Archangel like an ocean storm against the cliffs of the shore.

And Archangel is appalled, because in his delight at his own movement he realises that he has made a terrible mistake.

He has forgotten to be afraid.

For a moment his painful grinding progress across the floor of the forest pauses, and for miles around him there is nothing but silence and a second of waiting.

He gathers. He centres. He focuses.

He remembers this thing.

How is it that he had forgotten? That never happens, but it has happened. This thing has been hiding from him! It has woven a forgetting around itself, but now it has made itself known.

This is a powerful and dangerous threat.

Archangel traces the path of the passing of the Pollandore moment back to its source. Examines. Analyzes. Knows what he must do.

73

Mirgorod, war city.

Elena Cornelius survived alone. Elena’s Mirgorod was zero city, thrown back a thousand years, order and meaning and all the small daily habits of use and illusion scorched and blasted away, the concepts themselves eradicated. Money wasn’t money any more when it had no value and there was nothing to buy. Food was what you found or stole. Clothing against the cold and the night lay around free for the taking on the unburied corpses of the dead. Homes weren’t security, shelter and belonging: they were broken buildings, burned and burst open to the elements, the intimate objects of interior domestic life scattered on the streets. Apartments were boxes to shut yourself in and wait for the bomb blasts, the fires, the starvation.

She kept moving, ate scraps scavenged from bombed buildings, drank water from rooftop pools and melted snow. She risked being shot for a looter, which she was, and she hid from the conscripters. She existed day by day in the timeless zero city, alien, unrooted, a sentience apart, belonging to nothing. Herself alone. She felt ancient. Places to hide and sleep were plentiful among the cellars and empty streets. When she slept, she dreamed of the rusalka in the potato-field river. She dreamed of her girls. Yeva and Galina. Mornings she woke early into fresh disorientation, the appalling daily shock: always she felt like she had survived a train crash in the night, a bridge that had crumbled beneath her, a house that had fallen down. Life had broken open, and everything was raw and clear. Every day she looked for her girls. Perhaps they had survived. Perhaps they were existing also somewhere, looking for her.

There were no longer newspapers, but the MIRINFORM bulletin was posted on walls and telephone poles daily. ‘No sooner had Volyana fallen under our fire than the Archipelago soldiers jumped out of the windows with their underwear down and took to their heels. With cries of hurrah the battalion fell upon the slavers. Grenades, bayonets, rifle butts and flaming bottles came into play. The effect was tremendous.’ Increases in rations were reported. The city held stockpiles of grain and dried fish in reserve, ready to be distributed if the need arose. Courage, citizens. One more push, and victory will be ours. Nobody believed, but everybody gathered to read when a new edition was posted. It did not say that the cemeteries were full and there was no fuel for the mortuary trucks.

Elena walked out to the edge of the city until the way was barred by fighting. Three times she probed the outskirts in different directions, but always it was the same. Cleared firing zones. Shell holes filled with corpses and refuse. Charred skeletal buildings. The clatter of tank tracks and the rattle of gunfire. On her third attempt a sniper’s bullet skittered through the broken bricks at her feet like a steel lizard.

Elena knew she was tiring. The effort of keeping moving all day was almost beyond her. She should choose a place to be her permanent home, but she had to keep moving, walking twenty or thirty miles in a day. Looking for her girls.

On the third night the snow came again, a silent softness of feathers thickening the air. She had collected nothing. Her food bag was empty. She broke open the door of an empty house on the edge of the firing zone, drank the last of her water bottle, lit a fire in the grate, laid herself out on the floor and slept.

She was woken by someone kicking her leg. The dazzle of a flashlight in her eyes.

‘Stand up! I said stand up!’

Two young men were looking down at her. Well fed bare-headed boys. Waist-length pea coats. Black trousers and heavy black boots. Elena knew what they were. They were the Boots, and they were the worst. She had always known that one day she would be too tired, too hungry, not careful enough, and it would be finished. But she stood up to face them.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What?’

Rizhin had co-opted the semi-organised, semi-militarised thugs of the Mirgorod Youth and Student Brigade to support the militia in the war against defeatists, hoarders, looters, racketeers, saboteurs and spies. They were kept fed and left to do as they would. Autonomy without discipline. And what they did was rob and torture and rape and kill. People said that even the VKBD found the Boots excessive. Repellent. Elena had heard the Boots roamed the places near the fighting, but she had been too tired to remember.

The Boots were holding rifles. Bayonets fixed to the muzzles. The one with the flashlight turned it off and put it on the floor. The light from the fire was enough.

‘Take off your scarf,’ he said. ‘Let’s see your face.’ His friend was grinning.

Elena let the scarf drop to the floor.

‘Now the coat.’

She unbuttoned the heavy greatcoat and let it fall.

‘And the sweater.’

The two boys were both staring at her now. Not grinning any more. Focused. Eager. Elena saw one of them swallow hard.

‘Take off the shirt,’ he said.

‘And the trousers. Turn around.’

‘Go on. Don’t stop. Show us. Let’s see what you’ve got. Let’s see it all.’

The Boots had laid down their rifles and were opening their own clothing. Fumbling with their belts and flies.

‘No,’ said Elena. She stopped, her right hand behind her back. She was trembling. Her hands were shaking. ‘No.’

‘Bitch.’

One of the Boots lunged forward to push her down, his trousers open and falling round his thighs. Elena pulled out the kitchen knife she kept tucked in the back of her trousers and shoved it into his belly. The boy gasped and stopped in surprise, looking down at his stomach. Disbelieving. Elena took a step back, pulled out the knife, swept it upwards and sliced the blade laterally under his chin. Blood spilled out and splashed to the floor. The boy stared at her. He made a small gurgle in his opened throat.

The other one was scrabbling for his rifle.

‘Drop it. Now.’

The Boot swung round. A VKBD officer was standing in the doorway, a pistol in his hand.

‘Piss off, Brosz,’ said the Boot and raised the rifle muzzle, pointing the bayonet towards him. The officer shot him in the knee and he fell, screaming.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said the officer. ‘You’re such a fucking pair of pigs.’

He walked over to the screaming boy and shot him again. In the face.

The other boy, the one Elena had cut, was still standing in the middle of the room. He was cupping his throat with one hand, trying to catch the blood. The other hand was pressed against the wound in his belly. He was weeping.

The officer raised his pistol at arm’s length and fired. An execution shot.

‘This your place?’ he said to Elena. She was standing half-undressed in the firelight, the kitchen knife in her hand, held low at her side.

‘No.’

‘Then you’re looting.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a hanging crime.’

‘Yes.’

The VKBD officer studied her for a moment.

‘How long have you been scavenging?’

‘Always.’

He nodded.

‘And you’re still alive. More than that, you’re still strong. And a good fighter.’

‘If you’re not going to shoot me,’ said Elena Cornelius, ‘I’m going to put my coat back on.’

‘Ever used a rifle?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Come with me. We’ll teach you. You’ll be more use than a roomful of these pigs.’

‘I’m better off on my own.’

‘It isn’t a choice. It’s that, or I string you up in the morning.’

Conscripts to the Forward Defence Units got a day’s firearm training and, if they were fortunate, a weapon. Elena Cornelius turned out to have an aptitude for marksmanship. The sergeant took her aside.

‘You. You will be a sniper,’ he said. ‘A woman is good for sniping. You are small. You are flexible. You stand the cold better than a man.’

She was issued with felt overboots, a thick tunic, a fur shapka, the kind with flaps for the ears. A printed booklet with tables that set out how to adjust the aiming point to take account of the ballistic effects of freezing air. And a bolt-action 7.62mm Sergei-Leon rifle with a side-mounted 3.5x Gaussler scope, the one with two turrets, one for elevation and one for windage: effective range 1,000 yards with optics. The modified Sergei-Leon was exclusive to the VKBD; the regular army never had the funds for such precision firearms.

‘You learn by doing,’ the sergeant said. ‘We send you out with someone who knows what they’re doing.’

Elena was paired with a woman called Rosa, a student of history until the Archipelago came.

‘I volunteered,’ said Rosa. ‘I was a good shot already. I used to hunt with my father on Lake Lazhka. Wildfowl are harder to hit than soldiers.’ Rosa already had seventeen confirmed kills. ‘We’ll go in the afternoon,’ she said. ‘Firing into the east, you don’t want to shoot in the morning.’

Rosa led to the way a place near a machine-gun post on the roof of a factory. The enemy were only three hundred yards away.

‘Shoot when the machine gun is shooting,’ she said. ‘They won’t even know we’re here, never mind spot us.’

They were up there for nine hours. When they had finished and returned to the barracks, Elena Cornelius packed her things into a kitbag, slung her rifle over her shoulder and walked away, back into the city to look for her girls.

74

Alone in her private carriage in the dark hours after midnight, Lavrentina Chazia lay, fully clothed and sleepless on her bunk, listening to the rumble of the train wheels on the track. She was exhausted, but she knew she would not sleep: she rarely slept any more, the ants under her skin made it impossible, with their creeping and crawling and the sting of their tiny bites. The patches of angel stuff on her arms and face itched and burned.

After a fruitless day attempting to break through the shell of the Pollandore using various mechanisms of her own devising, she had spent the evening with the Shaumian woman, and even for Chazia, who was hardened to such things, the experience had not been pleasant. Frustrated by the lack of progress, she had concluded it was time to abandon the subtle approach in favour of more direct methods. Maroussia Shaumian was stubborn to the point of stupidity, and after their last talk she had become even more recalcitrant, almost confident. Chazia sensed that something had changed, but she didn’t know what and she didn’t care: it was a matter of breaking the girl’s will, and she knew how to do that. She had decided against using the worm, for fear of doing some damage to the girl’s mind that would prevent her doing whatever needed to be done with the Pollandore, so the work had been noisy and messy.

The process was still not complete, but Chazia had grown tired and faintly disgusted, so she’d left the girl to the professional interrogators and withdrawn to her compartment. She needed to find rest: her mind lacked edge and speed, and her spirits were low. She was bored, restless and above all frustrated. The power of the Vlast was within reach, but she had not yet quite grasped it: still there was Fohn, and the feeble Khazar. The power of the Pollandore was within reach but she could not get there, she didn’t know how to use it and the Shaumian woman was giving her nothing. Chazia was coming to doubt she had anything to give. And the living angel, the greatest power of all, had never come to her again. All she heard was silence.

In her sleepless solitude Chazia began to wonder if perhaps, after all her efforts, she was going to fail. Maybe she was simply not good enough to do what she had set out to do. She felt the need for power, any power, in her belly like a hunger. She was incomplete without it. She was made for power, she was capable of it, she deserved it. She had worked so hard for so long. She had made sacrifices. She had given her life to the Vlast unstintingly. She had served. When she held her hands stretched out before her in the darkness, palms open, they felt empty, with an emptiness ready to be filled. And yet…

Chazia sat up abruptly and turned on the lamp. She swung her legs off the bunk and stood up. Her self-pity disgusted her. Such moods came upon her when she was alone with nothing to do but think. That was why she must always be working. Never be inactive. Never. Keep moving, keep trying, keep going forward. Always choose the difficult thing. Always choose to dare.

She went through to the next compartment, where she kept the suit of angel flesh that she had made. The uncanny watchfulness of the thing made her uneasy. She realised for the first time that she was frightened of it, in the way you’re frightened to get back on a horse that’s thrown you several times. But the reluctance, the fear in her stomach, that was the reason to do it. She took the headpiece from its shelf and put it on. She felt it reach out and clamp onto her, plunging invasive tendrils deep into her mind. It was eager, it was ready, and now so was she. Fresh excitement stirred in her belly. Her mind began to turn faster. It was better already. This was what she needed.

Awakening angel senses trickled information into her mind. She felt with prickling clarity the many lives on the train, the energy of the engine working, the miles and miles of passing trees and snow. The Pollandore. She felt the Pollandore by its absence. Its impossibility. It was a strange blankness. It told her nothing.

She called out to the living angel in the forest.

Where are you? Speak to me. I am here.

Again and again she called into the emptiness, as she had done a hundred times before.

And this time the angel answered.

At last it answered!

When the angel had spoken to Chazia at Vig, it had almost destroyed her. It had come roaring into her mind, a crude appalling destroying storm of sheer inhuman force, as infinite and absolute and cold as the space between the stars, pounding and pouring into her, stronger and more powerful than she could bear, until her head burst open and her lungs heaved for breath but could find none. But this time it was different. Perhaps it was because of the casket of angel flesh enclosing her head, or perhaps it was because she was stronger now, and better prepared, more equal to the encounter. It did not occur to her that the angel had learned subtlety and control.

I see what you’re doing, darling, the angel whispered, and its voice in her head was Chazia’s own voice, Chazia speaking to Chazia, intimately, the lover speaking to the one it loves. I see that thing you’re bringing, and I see what you want to do with it. You’re so brave, my beautiful, so brilliant and so brave. It really is remarkable. But you will not do this. It will not be done.

‘No,’ said Chazia. ‘No. I want it.’

I am so sorry, Lavrentina. I left you alone for so long. Too much time has passed. It was wrong of me, I made a mistake, I see that now, and I’ve come back. Can you forgive me, Lavrentina?

Her name! It was using her name. It knew her, it had always known her! Chazia had been right: it had been there watching all along, but silent, so cruelly silent.

I understand you so much better now, darling. You felt abandoned and alone and you turned to this other thing to comfort you. I understand that. But I’m back now. You don’t need the other thing, not any more.

The angel went everywhere inside her, turning everything over, Chazia’s angel-enhanced senses flared incandescently. It was overwhelming. She felt the strength of her body and the force of her will magnified a hundred, a thousand times. Nothing was impossible.

Is this not what you want, Lavrentina? Am I not enough and more than enough? Am I not all that you would ever need?

‘Yes.’

We just need to destroy that thing you’re bringing. You don’t understand it, Lavrentina. It has deceived you. It’s a terrible, repellent thing. We have to get rid of it and then, together, just you and me, we can do… anything!

‘I don’t want to destroy it. We can use it. Once I have learned—’

I know what you want, darling, and I will give it to you. I will give you everything. The whole world will see what you are. Just do this for me. The thing must be destroyed. Destroy the disgusting repellent thing. Let it burn.

‘I don’t want to do that,’ whispered Chazia.

But we need to destroy it, my love.

75

Lom woke to grey daylight and Antoninu Florian looking down on him, his hand on his shoulder.

‘Vissarion?’ Florian was saying. He looked concerned.

‘What?’ said Lom, warm and reluctant. He was comfortable. There was a pillow. Sheets. Florian’s head was framed in a wide square of leaden sky.

It was a window. There were thin lemon-yellow curtains, pulled open.

Lom hauled himself upright in the narrow steel cot. Springs protested under his weight. The walls of the room were corrugated tin on a timber frame. There was a table under the window. A desk. Empty.

‘Where are we?’ said Lom. He had been dreaming of water and trees. The encounter with the dead angel was a distant and receding darkness, a stain of metallic fear on the horizon. He didn’t want to think about that.

‘The aerodrome at Terrimarkh,’ said Florian. ‘How do you feel?’

Lom thought about it.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Hungry. And I could do with coffee. A lot of coffee. And a piss.’

‘OK,’ said Florian. ‘Good. And then we leave.’ He hesitated. ‘Can you do that? Are you well?’

‘Of course. Why?’

Florian handed him a razor.

‘You might want to shave while you’re in the bathroom.’

Lom ran his hand across his chin and felt a thick rough growth of beard.

‘Shit. How long—’

‘We have lost much time. You were delirious, confused, and then you slept very deeply. We couldn’t wake you at all. Gretskaya is fretting to be away.’

‘How long has it been?’

‘We have lost three days.’

‘Three days!’

Lom pushed back the covers, hauled himself out of the bed and walked unsteadily across to the window. Standing was a shock. The bare linoleum chilled his feet. His legs felt feeble. Shaky under his weight. He looked out on bleak expanses of concrete and asphalt under a threadbare dusting of snow. Hangars and huts, low and widely separated. Fuel tanks. A water tower. And beyond the aerodrome, nothing: no house, no hill, no road, no fence, no tree, only the weight of the sky, draining the world of colour. The single runway, swept clear of snow, stretched black into the distance. The Kotik stood ready. There were no other aircraft visible. No sign of life at all.

Three days! Maroussia! Shit!

‘How soon can we leave?’ he said.

‘Get dressed. I’ll find you something to eat. Then we’ll go.’

Two hours later they were airborne and on their way north to Novaya Zima. Gretskaya stayed below the cloud bank. The altimeter showed a steady 2,000 feet. She found the railway and followed it north. The track cut straight across monochrome tundra, mile after mile, hour after hour, parallel with the low hills on the starboard horizon, misted grey with distance. Drifts of leafless birch trees rolled away behind them, and white expanses of snow pitted with circular lakes. The lakes, not yet entirely frozen, were fringed grey with ice at the shore. The dilated coal-black waters stared sightlessly back at the sky.

At last the coast fell suddenly away behind them and they were over the sea, but the railway plunged on, carried on concrete piers. The track stretched ahead of them, cutting low and arrow-straight across the dark waters to the distant vanishing point. Squadrons of seabirds swept low over the waves, floated in speckled rafts, and lined the concrete parapets of the endless viaduct, roosting.

‘That is the Dead Bridge,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It was built by penal labour. Men, women, even children worked on it. There are hundreds of bodies under the water, thousands maybe, all drowned, frozen, starved, dead of exhaustion. The eels and the fishes get fat on the bodies and the birds get fat on the fish.’

Ahead of them there was no horizon. The sea merged with the sky, diffuse and indeterminate and in the deep distance the Dead Bridge narrowed and faded as if into the air. The Kotik roared on.

After half an hour or so, above the place where the railway viaduct still disappeared into the distance, a paler colourless wash came slowly forward, separated itself from the sky and resolved into a distant mountain, its peak buried in cloud, its base lost in mist.

‘That’s it,’ said Gretskaya. ‘That’s where we’re going. Novaya Zima.’ She swung the Kotik away to the north-east, climbing until the railway was out of sight, then turned round, dropped down to a hundred feet and cut the throttle.

And then they were gliding, the wind hissing through the struts, the rotor blades turning slowly. Lom could see small scattered rafts of ice floating on the water below them, rising and falling with the swell.

‘I’ll come in low and quiet,’ Gretskaya said. ‘No one will know we’re there.’

The island of Novaya Zima was a spine of dark hills ridged with snow, rising higher to the north, towards the still-distant mountain. The lower slopes were covered with trees: a dark monotonous woodland that rolled away from the hills until it met the shore. The seaplane skimmed onwards. The black wall of trees widened and rose to meet them. Gretskaya dropped the tail and they came down, bouncing a couple of times off the swell and settling in a long subsiding skid across the water. She opened the throttle slightly and motored towards the narrow shoreline, a ten-yard strip between the water and the edge of the woods. The seaplane’s nose beached gently a couple of yards out.

Gretskaya slid the cockpit open. She kept the engine running.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘Quickly. Go.’

Lom climbed out, dropped to his waist in freezing pine-green water and waded ashore. It was a steep climb, soft mud sucking at his feet. He almost lost his shoes. The beach was an unstable mass of twigs and mouldering needles and leaves, thickly matted with rotting seaweed. His feet broke the surface with every step, dislodging an appalling stench and clouds of tiny black flies that buzzed angrily at his face and neck. He stumbled and fell forward, plunging his hands elbow-deep into the high tideline.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ It was bitterly cold.

He turned when he reached the trees. Florian was coming up the beach behind him, a small canvas knapsack slung from one shoulder by a narrow leather strap. Gretskaya had already pulled the Kotik back and was swinging it round to face out to sea. The roar of the engine rolled along the shore as she raced away, leaving a widening wake, and lifted into the sky.

76

The woodland was a dim, perspectiveless, muted labyrinth of widely spaced birch and pine. Resinous. Twilit. Snow-carpeted. Directionless. Florian seemed to know where he was going: he set off quickly, moving in as straight a line as was possible, away from the sea.

Lom followed.

‘We must get clear of the landing place,’ said Florian. The moss and the snow and the trees drained all echo, making his voice sound drab and flat. ‘We cannot light a fire until it is dark.’ He fished a twist of paper out of his pocket. It was filled with solid dark pieces of sugar. ‘Here,’ he said, holding one out. ‘Eat this. We go west until we strike the railway. Then we follow it north wherever it goes. OK?’

‘How far?’ said Lom.

‘To the railway? Ten or twenty miles. Not more. After that, who knows? We follow the track to its end, wherever that is. The south island is a hundred and twenty miles long and fifty wide at the waist, but I doubt we will have to go so far.’

‘What we’re looking for is on the south island? Why not the north?’

‘I think not the north. This island sits across a current of warmer water that flows from the west; the north island does not. It is under permanent ice, glaciers come down from the mountains.’

Florian, in his sombre suit, dark overcoat and astrakhan hat, the knapsack on his back, moved with fast and sure-footed noiseless grace. Lom jogged and stumbled behind him. The Blok 15 was a solid weight in his pocket. He carried nothing else. Shallow streams crossed their path, ice-fringed water running fast over mud and gravel, turning aside and deepening into moss- and root-edged pools. They drank and washed the stinking smears of the shoreline from their clothes. Lom plunged his face into the freezing water and sluiced his matted hair, then sat on a fallen trunk to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. When he looked up he saw the wolves. They were moving under the tree-shadow, silent and indistinct as moths. One turned its face towards him. Wolf eyes. Unhurried, considering.

‘Wolf,’ he called to Florian in a low voice.

He would fight, if he had to. Wolf mouth on his face, his arm in a wolf mouth, fingers in a wolf throat, digging. Dragging his revolver from his pocket, firing it into wolf belly. Firing again. Blood and blood. Without hope, he would turn and fight.

‘I see them,’ said Florian. ‘There are others behind us. They are following.’

Lom jerked round but there was nothing to see.

‘Why didn’t you say before?’

‘They will not trouble us while I am here,’ said Florian. ‘They are not hunting, they are curious, that’s all. But do not go far alone. Not without me.’

All afternoon and into the evening they pushed on through the trees, Florian moving fast and confidently, Lom struggling to keep up. From time to time he looked for wolves but did not see them again.

They broke out onto the edge of the railway track suddenly, without warning. It stretched away to right and left, twin parallel rails. The massive sleepers and ten-foot gauge of a major freight line. On either side of the track the trees had been cut down and cleared five yards back from the line. It was freshly done work, the toppled trees stacked neatly, the ground scattered with raw yellow axe chippings, the scent of fresh-cut timber in the air. An inch-deep covering of snow. It made the going easier. They turned right and began to jog along beside the rails.

They had been going steadily for about an hour when Florian stopped suddenly.

‘Train,’ he said. ‘Do you hear? A train is coming.’

‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Lom. He was breathing hard. Heart pounding in his chest.

‘Get out of sight,’ said Florian urgently.

Lom followed him into the dimness under the trees and they hunched down low to wait. Eventually he heard the rumbling in the rails, rising in pitch to a squeal as the train got closer. It was approaching from behind them. He could hear it now, a locomotive under full steam. The train roared into view and thundered past, close enough to see the moustache glistening on the engineer’s face in the firebox glow and catch the smell of hot iron and burning coal. Iron wheels high as a man is tall. Truck after truck followed the engine, ten, twenty, thirty of them, wooden-sided, windowless, each as long as a barn. Lom recognised them. The long trains. He had seen such trains, hundreds of them, waiting in rows in the Wieland marshalling yards. They looked like cattle trucks but they weren’t for carrying cattle.

They walked on, following the railway track. There were no landmarks. No horizon except the vanishing point of the track. Walking brought them no nearer to anything and no further away. Motion without movement. The birch trees receded in all directions, endlessly repeating mirrors of trees, misting into brown and grey, dimness and snow. Numberless, featureless and utterly bleak.

‘We’ll camp here,’ said Florian when the light began to fail. They had reached nowhere in particular.

They left the railway and pushed three or four hundred yards in under the trees, to a place where a heavy spruce had fallen, tearing its root mass from the earth, making a small clearing where scrub and thorn had taken root. Florian fished a small bag from his pocket and gave it to Lom. It held a fire steel and a clump of dry tinder: moss and leaves and small twigs, all dry and sweet.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Keep the fire small. We should be far enough from the track, but we should take no risks.’

Lom gathered a bundle of branches and set them by. He scraped a patch of earth clear with his foot and checked the ground for shallow-buried roots that could catch and smoulder underground. There were no stones to make a hearth. He took a handful of tinder from the pouch and laid it ready: a tight clump in the middle, outside pieces pulled looser to let the air in. When the tinder was set he held the fire steel close above it and struck a shower of sparks. He got it first time, sweet, like he always did, and bent low to breathe on the faint smoulder. Gentle. Gentle. Encouraging the little flicks of flame to come alive. Breathing in the faint smell of woodsmoke.

The wood he had gathered was all damp. He chose a few of the smallest, driest pieces and set them round the smouldering tinder one by one, carefully, to shelter the frail young flame, to barely touch it and take it into themselves. He fed it with a little extra tinder when it started to fail and felt the first brush of heat against his face. A little cup of life in the gathering dark. When he was sure of the small fire, he picked out some of the larger branches from the pile and set them in a careful pyramid around the tiny fire, closing it in like a tent frame. The heat and smoke would dry them out.

Lom sat back for a moment and watched. A bitter breeze had risen as the light faded. The legs of his trousers were still soaked, and now he had stopped moving the cold of it chilled him. But the fire had steadied. It was breathing. He watched the lick of small quick colours, the sparks in the smoke, the heart of it growing stronger.

While Lom made the fire, Florian took a small hand axe from his knapsack and hacked an armful of larger branches from the fallen spruce. He propped them against the side of the tree and wove thinner stem-lengths through them to bind a strong, shallow-sloping wall, on which he piled deep armfuls of brush and damp earth, until he had made a low, dark tunnel closed at one end, with a mouth at the other. He took some branches still heavy with needles and cut them to size, to make a door for the entrance which could be pulled shut once you were inside.

When he had finished, he came across to the fire. Considered it with approval.

‘It’s good,’ he said.

He pulled a little pan from his knapsack and set it on the fire. Used the axe to cut a fist-sized chunk of pork into slices and dropped them in. ‘I raided the kitchen at Terrimarkh,’ he said. ‘The shelter is for you. You should spread more leaves inside on the floor.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have no need. I will not sleep.’

When they had eaten, Florian set some water to boil in the pan and scattered it with coffee grounds. Dropped in a small pebble of sugar. He set the pan aside to cool and then they drank from it in silence, alternating sips. The drink was dark and bitter and sweet and good. Night thickened between the darkness and the trees.

Lom sat quietly and stared out into the darkness, taut as wire.

77

Hundreds of miles to the south Eligiya Kamilova lay on her back on a narrow shelf in a crowded stinking cattle wagon. The train had been stopped for hours. There was the noise of other trains outside, shunting and moving slowly past. Shouted orders. Men talking. Narrow shafts of bright arc light beamed in through the gap near the top of the wall and splashed across her face. She did not know where they were. She was no longer hungry or thirsty. That had passed. She was not waiting. The time would come when it was ready to come. There was nothing to wait for.

The freight car door rolled open with a crash and light spilled in. Electric light and cold night air which smelled of bitumen and naphtha and trees. More people were being shoved inside, though there was no room. VKBD men swore at them as they hesitated. A woman started to shout and scream. Eligiya Kamilova couldn’t understand what she was saying. A young boy in uniform smashed her in the face with the butt of his rifle. That quieted her. Kamilova turned away, staring at the pitch-soaked wooden ceiling close above her face. It would be bad if she were seen looking.

When the door was rolled shut and locked again, she took another look at the new arrivals. They brought with them nothing. No bags. No coats. No food or water. They stood or crouched in the shadows. Some of the men on the lower shelves were jostled. They swore at the newcomers in low vicious voices and pushed them away.

There were two young girls in school clothes standing together near her, close and side by side, their faces drawn and scared in the harsh shadowy light. They were looking for somewhere to go, somewhere to be out of the way. Kamilova recognised them. It took her a few seconds to recollect their names.

‘Hey,’ she called across to them quietly. ‘Galina. Yeva.’

The girls looked round, trying to find where the voice was coming from.

‘Over here,’ said Kamilova. ‘Up here.’ The girls stared at her. They didn’t move. They had learned not to trust the friendly voice. The invitation. ‘You are Elena Cornelius’s girls aren’t you. Do you remember me?’

‘No,’ said Yeva.

‘Yes,’ said Galina.

‘It is Eligiya,’ said Kamilova. ‘I know you. I know your mother. From the raion. I am her friend.’ She swung herself awkwardly down from the high shelf and squeezed her way towards them, stepping over the tightly packed people sitting on the floor.

‘Is your mother with you?’

‘No,’ said Galina.

‘Do you know where she is?’

‘No. She was left behind.’

Hours later, Kamilova lay on her shelf listening for the sound of movement outside the train. There was none. For half an hour, as well as she could judge, there had been none. The arc lights still burned. It must have been nearly dawn. She climbed slowly, carefully down and went to find the girls. They were sitting together on the floor, backs against the door. Yeva was asleep. Galina was watching her with wide blank eyes.

Kamilova knelt down and nudged Yeva gently awake.

‘Get ready,’ she whispered. ‘I am going now and you’re coming with me.’

‘Where are we going?’ said Galina.

‘Do you want to stay on the train?’

‘No.’

‘Then it’s time to get off.’

Kamilova stood up and pulled the girls to their feet. They looked uncertain and confused but they did it.

‘When I say,’ said Kamilova, ‘run. Stay together and stay with me and run as fast as you can. Whatever happens don’t stop. Don’t listen to anything else but me. Don’t look back and don’t stop running unless I say.’

She turned to face the doors, closed her eyes and took a breath.

Calm. Calm. Think only of the night and the air.

The timbers of the massive heavy door screamed. The wood fibres ripped as it bowed and bellied outwards and split and burst and sprang from its rails and crashed to the ground below.

Kamilova jumped down and turned to catch Yeva and Galina.

‘Now!’ she screamed at them. ‘Run! Now! Run with me! Run!’

78

Every night at midnight General Rizhin gathered his city defence commanders together to hear their reports, review the day just finished and make plans for the next. In the early days of the siege, when they first understood that Rizhin intended to make a stand, the commanders he appointed had attacked their tasks with a fierce commitment and determination. Few among them thought they could actually succeed in driving back the overwhelming force of the enemy, but there was honour, and for some a fierce joy, in fighting not running. A week of bloody resistance was worth more than a lifetime of capitulation, and every day that Mirgorod did not fall was a day stolen from inevitability by their own determination and will. Rizhin had chosen them because that was how they felt, and he’d chosen well.

But now, as Rizhin’s gaze moved round the table, examining first one face and then another, he saw tiredness, lack of confidence, reluctance, even despair. One by one they gave their reports, and none of the news was good. Every day the enemy’s forces made some small advance, and the best that Mirgorod ever achieved was not to lose more. Defeat was only a matter of time, and the longer it took, the more grindingly desperate, even humiliating the resistance became. Rizhin knew that his commanders were beginning to feel this, and some were even willing quietly and privately to say so. A shared collective opinion was forming among them, in the way that such opinions do, without any one person leading it, that to continue the battle further was to impose pointless suffering on the people of the city. And so, this midnight, Rizhin called the city commanders together, grey-faced and dusty with the struggles of the day, in a different room, one end of which was separated off by a wide, heavy curtain.

When they were assembled, Rizhin took his place at the head of the table, relaxed and smiling, and spoke to them in a quiet voice.

‘Colleagues,’ he said, ‘friends, I know how tired you all are. You are fighting bravely, you do wonders every day, but I see in your faces that some of you don’t trust the struggle any more. Perhaps some of you think I should have accepted the enemy’s terms of surrender—’

‘No!’ shouted Latsis, loyal Major Latsis, and some round the table joined in the murmurs of denial, but others kept silent, and Rizhin noted for later who they were.

‘I know that some of you are thinking this,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Where are we going with this bitter, grinding resistance? That is what you ask each other. What is the purpose? What is the strategy?’ He leaned forward and skewered them one by one with his stare. None of them would meet his eye. ‘Do you think I don’t know how you whisper among yourselves?’ he continued. ‘Do you think I don’t hear it all? Do you think it does not reach my ears, this cowardice and doubt? This backsliding? This revisionism?’

Rizhin let the uncomfortable silence grow and spread round the table.

‘I don’t need to hear it,’ he added. ‘I can smell it in the room.’

‘General Rizhin—’ began Fritjhov, commander of the Bermskaya Tank Division.

‘Let me finish,’ said Rizhin, his voice quiet, reasonable.

‘No!’ said Fritjhov. ‘I will have my say! You call us cowards? Cowards! Our soldiers fight for the city, and they will fight to the bitter end, they will fight and die for Mirgorod. But they cannot fight and win. We cannot fight without munitions, and munitions do not come. We cannot advance without air cover, and our air force does not come. The Vlast has abandoned Mirgorod to the enemy! The enemy knows this, and do you think our soldiers don’t?’

Rizhin poured himself a glass of water. The clink of the jug against the tumbler was the only sound in the room.

‘Munitions?’ he said. ‘Air cover? There’s only one weapon that wins wars, Fritjhov, and that is fear. Terror. If the enemy think they are winning, it’s because they smell the stench of your fear.’

Fritjhov bridled.

‘I am a soldier,’ he growled. ‘I am not afraid to die.’

Rizhin shrugged.

‘Then you will die, Fritjhov,’ he said. ‘What I need are commanders who are not afraid to win.’ He fixed the room with his burning, fiery glare. Holding them with all the relentless force of his will and the strength of his imagination. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking to them now. ‘There are new forms in the future, my friends,’ he said, ‘and they need to be filled in with blood. A new type of humankind is needed now: individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that makes motion invisible. We here in this room are the first of mankind, and this city is our point of departure. There is no past, there is only the future, and the future is ours to make. Our imminent victory in Mirgorod will be just the beginning.’

‘There isn’t going to be any fucking victory here, man,’ said Fritjhov. ‘As senior commander it is my duty—’

Rizhin smiled.

‘Victory is coming, Fritjhov my friend. Victory is nearly here.’

‘What—’

‘A train is coming from the north-east, bringing a consignment of artillery shells.’

‘One shipment of shells?’ said Fritjhov in derision, looking round the table for support.

‘Shells of a new type,’ said Rizhin. ‘You will need to prepare your guns. I will give you instructions.’

Fritjhov jumped to his feet, sending his chair clattering.

‘No more instructions, Rizhin, not from you.’

Rizhin was a restful centre of patience and forbearance.

‘Just sit down a moment, would you, Fritjhov,’ he said, ‘and I will show you what is coming.’

Rizhin stood and walked across the room. He drew back the heavy curtain to reveal a projector and a cinema screen. He started the projector whirring and turned off the lights.

79

Lom woke in the quiet before dawn and lay still in the cocoon of branches and leaf mould, knees pulled up tight against his belly, head pillowed on the warm knot of his own folded arms. He didn’t want to move.

He breathed with his mouth, shallow slow breaths. Breathing the warmth of his own breath, inhaling pine and earth and moss, the smell of damp woodsmoke in his clothes and his hair. He listened for sounds from outside the shelter, but there was nothing: the thickness of the shelter absorbed sound as it absorbed light. Yet the shelter itself had its own faint whispering, a barely audible movement of shifting and settling, the outer layer flicking and feathering in the breeze, and sometimes the rustle and tick of small things–woodlice? spiders? mice?–in the canopy. The shelter was a living thing that had settled over him, absorbing him, nurturing. Deep beneath him in the cold earth the roots of trees, the fine tangled roots, sifted and slid and touched one another. They whispered. They were connected. All the trees together made one tree, night-waking and watchful. It knew he was there.

Twice in the night Lom had heard the long trains passing.

He had done a terrible thing and the guilt of it weighed him down. He had lost Maroussia. He had not been there. He could hear the sound of her voice in his head, but not the words.

Reluctantly he sat up and pushed the entrance branches aside and let in the dim grey dawn and the cold of the day. Harsh frost had come in the night, and now mist reduced the surrounding forest to a quiet clearing edged by indeterminacy. When he crawled out of the shelter the mist brushed cold against his face and filled his nose and lungs, and when he walked his shoes crunched on brittle, snow-dusted iron earth.

Florian was sitting nearby, almost invisible in shadow until he moved. He had left a hare skinned and ready by the remains of the previous night’s hearth, and next to it was a small heap of mushrooms and a handful of clouded purple berries.

‘I think we could risk a fire,’ he said. ‘Before the mist clears.’

Lom started on the fire. The intense cold made his fingers clumsy: he fumbled the tinder, dropped it. He couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work properly. He found that the water had frozen in the pan. He went for fresh.

Dawn greyed into morning, sifting darkness out of the mist-dripping branches, condensing detail. Pine needle, twig and thorn. When they had eaten, they went back to the railway track and started to walk north again. Through gaps in the trees they could see the mountain ahead of them, rising pale grey and snow-streaked into the cloud. At one point Florian paused to reach up and pulled a snag from the side of a birch trunk. He studied it, then held it out to Lom.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘It is not right.’

Lom studied the sprig. The leaves were grown too large, and some were misshapen. Sickle-edged. Distorted.

‘And here,’ said Florian. ‘I found this also.’ A small branch of pine, the needles long but floppy and fringed with edges of lace. ‘They are not all like this, but some. And more near here than when we landed.’

After an hour they found the body of the wolf. Or most of it. Its belly was ripped open and empty and one of its hind legs was gone, torn out at the hip. The wolf carcase was impaled on a broken branch at head height, the sharp-splintered stump of wood pushed through the ribcage and coming out, blood-sticky, from the base of the throat. Its head hung to one side, eyes open. Gibbeted. A warning? Or a larder?

‘Was that you?’ said Lom.

‘No,’ said Florian. ‘Of course not.’

‘I had to ask,’ said Lom.

At mid-morning the rain came in pulses, wind-driven, hard, grey and cold, washing away the covering of snow and turning the path to a thick clag of mud. The noise of the rain in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain horses.

Lom’s clothes were soaked. They smelled sourly of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of his body. Rain numbed his face and trickled down his neck and chin. Rain spattered across the brown surface of rain-puddles. He kept his head down and walked against it, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Everything distant was lost in the rain.

A wisent stepped out of the trees into the clear way ahead of them. When it saw them it stopped, head bowed, nostrils flaring, watching them with its dark eyes. Lom saw the massive rain-slicked wall of its shoulders, the rufous shaggy fall of hair, thick from neck to chest and down its muzzle from the crown of its head, the fine stocky inward-curving crescent horns. Lom and the wisent faced each other, watching. The wisent tested the give of the mud with a fore hoof and flicked the rain with its ears. Then it turned and walked on across the rails and faded between the trees.

The rain passed, and they came to a place where a stream was running in a ditch alongside the railway track. Lom knelt to drink but Florian put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.

‘Don’t,’ said Florian. ‘Look. Over there.’

Half-buried in the bank of the ditch, where a birch tree had canted over, roots unearthed, was a human head. It was blackened, damp and rotting, and wrapped in a length of mud-brown hair. The face stared blackly sideways without eyes, and brown-stained teeth showed in its lopsided sagging mouth. And near the head a human arm reached out from the mud sleeved in sticky green. At first glance the arm had looked like the root of a tree. Too far from the head to be attached to the same skeleton, it trailed mushroom-white and mushroom-soft fingers in the flowing water.

Walking between the railway and the stream, Lom and Florian saw more like that. Pieces of human body. When the stream turned aside from the ditch and retreated under the trees it was a relief.

And then something happened that shook the world.

A silent snap of blue-white light reflected off the clouds and left after-images of skeleton trees drifting across Lom’s eyes. Many seconds later he felt the sound of it in the ground through his feet, a roll of noise too deep to hear. Ahead of him Florian stumbled, and would have fallen had he not steadied himself against a stump. A tremble of movement disturbed the underside of the cloud bank like wind across a pool. The trees prickled with fear: the nap of the woodland rising, uneasy, anxious. They stood, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The clouds settled into a new shape.

‘What was it?’ said Lom.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It came from the north.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Florian. ‘I think it was everywhere.’

The railway track began to sink into cuttings and rise to cross embankments and small bridges. Every few hours one of the long trains came through, heading for the mountain or coming away. Away from the cleared trackside, the going was harder. The trees were sparser now, and they had to push through scrub and thorn and accumulations of snow. They were climbing slowly, the mountain to the north growing clearer and more definite against the sky. Rock and scree. Ice and snow.

They disturbed a parcel of dog-crows gathered on a ragged dark bundle. The birds were a heavy drab and loose-winged black, with unwieldy bone-coloured beaks too heavy for their heads. They carried on picking at the thing on the ground and watched them come. Lom picked up a stick and threw it among them.

‘Go on! Get away!’

The crows glared, but moved off a few feet with slow ungainly two-footed jumps. A couple hauled themselves up on flaggy wings to squat low in the trees and stare.

The body on the ground was small and had no head. The crows had picked at its neck and shoulders, spilling red pieces of stuff, and parted the clothes between trousers and shirt to open the belly.

‘It’s a child,’ said Lom. ‘Just a boy.’

Florian had walked some way off. Lom thought he was looking away, so as not to see. But he had found something else.

‘Not a boy,’ said Florian. ‘A girl.’

The head was hanging from a branch by the tangle of her hair.

Something was passing near them. Lom felt the woods stir and bristle. The alien watchfulness of what was passing brushed over him, rippling across his mind like rain across a lake. He felt the bigness of it, its steady earth-shaking tread. The top of a distant tree trembled faintly, though there was no wind.

‘Mudjhik patrol,’ he hissed. ‘Coming this way.’

‘We separate,’ whispered Florian. ‘Hide yourself.’ He crouched and slipped away. Lom caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the trees, loping from bush to bush, bounding low across the ground.

Lom flattened himself against the ground under a thorn bush and lay quiet, breathing shallow slow breaths. Covered his mind with woodland. Focused his thoughts into a pointy vixen snout, thought vixen thoughts, calm and tired and waiting, warm and cold in the daylight, in a waking sleep. Keeping low. Pass by. Pass by. The mudjhik’s awareness skimmed across him and moved away, but Lom lay on, vixen-still and thoughtless, faintly stomach-sick, dulled and aching and hungry behind her eyes as if she had not slept at all.

The mudjhik’s awareness jerked back, swung round and pinned him. A blank hunter’s glare.

I see you. I have sniffed you out. I am coming.

There was a sudden crashing through the trees. Branches breaking, heavy limbs thumping the ground. The mudjhik was rushing towards him. It was still several hundred yards off, but running was not an option and he could not hide.

In panic, reflexively, Lom slammed up a wall against the mudjhik. It was like holding up his hand. Stop!

The mudjhik stumbled and fell to its knees.

Lom was stronger now, much stronger. He felt the current flowing between him and the charging alien weight, the mudjhik’s alien substance connecting with something tense and fizzing in his own bones and flesh. Lom felt wired and burning. The link between the mudjhik and its handler was a feeble shadowy thing by comparison, a tenuous thread. Lom knew what to do. He broke the handler’s cord. Squeezed it closed and ripped it out at its root. Felt for a second the handler’s surprise as he lost connection.

The mudjhik was on its feet again, confused and clumsy, rumbling and roaring silently, lashing out at tree trunks with its fists. It was at a loss. Lom pushed himself deeper inside it, feeling for the animal part of it, the inserted mammalian brain. He found it and crushed its awful half-existence out. The mudjhik’s mind clouded. Sensation without motion. Without desire. A lump of sentient rock.

Late in the afternoon Lom and Florian crested a rise and found themselves on a low hilltop looking out across a wide shallow valley. The railway plunged out across a viaduct above the grey-brown leafless canopy of trees. Five or ten miles away, on the far side of the valley, the mountain was a wall across the sky. And in the plain of the valley floor between them and the foot of the mountain lay the closed township of Novaya Zima.

80

From a distance Novaya Zima looked like a complex device with its back removed–a radio, a telekrypt machine–laid bare amid birch trees and snow. The township hummed and rumbled quietly. No smoke. No chimneys. It was a rectangular grid about three miles square, a compound in the wilderness surrounded by a double fence and a perimeter road. The streets formed blocks, and the blocks were buildings, orderly and rectangular, mostly concrete, ten or fifteen storeys high. Every part of the town was wired to every other part by a network of cables slung between roofs and from tall wooden poles. In the centre of the town, wider streets–avenues, prospects–converged on a spectacular cluster of taller buildings, slender constructions of steel and glass, reflecting the lead-grey sky. Motor vehicles moved with orderly precision along arterial boulevards. Pedestrians, rendered tiny by distance, anonymous and without characteristics, moved along pavements and crossed open expanses of concrete. Raised above the streets on piers of iron, an overhead railway carried snub-nosed carriages. And on the far side, beyond the town and a couple of miles of scrubby trees, the mountain climbed sheer and almost vertical into low cloud. Dark grey rock and scree and streaks of snow. It was like a wall across the world, diminishing east and west into misted distance and further mountains.

Lom and Florian watched from the cover of the trees. It was a town for thousands of people, tens of thousands, freighted in piece by piece across the continent, secretly, and assembled by dying slaves.

‘And the labour is still coming,’ said Lom. ‘There were half a dozen trains yesterday, at least. So where are they? The town’s not for them. That’s not housing for penal labour. I don’t see camps. I don’t see factories. I don’t see cranes and holes in the ground. So where do they go?’

The rail track crossed the valley floor on viaducts and embankments, bisected the township, cut though an expanse of marshalling yards to the north, and plunged on into a low dark mouth in the mountainside.

‘The mountain,’ said Florian. ‘They go into the mountain.’

There was a gate where the railway entered the township. An asphalt road came out and looped away into the trees to circle the town. The gate stood open, the guard post deserted. It was the middle of the afternoon.

‘No security,’ said Lom. ‘Lazy.’

‘Isolation,’ said Florian. ‘Who could find their way here? And who could leave? Where would they go?’

‘We got here,’ said Lom.

There was a sign at the gate. A huge billboard meant to be read from incoming trains.

They walked into the town unchallenged. It seemed colder in the streets than it had been under the trees. Colder than Mirgorod, but not the same cold. Mirgorod cold had an edge of ocean dampness, but the air in Novaya Zima was dry. Lom felt its bitterness desiccating his face, as if his lips would crack. His breath wisped drably away. The snow on the pavement crunched underfoot. Dusty snow, like crystallised ash.

For the first ten blocks or so the streets were given over to huge communal barracks for collective living. Kommunalki. Lom had read about such new-style buildings–embodiments of a new, less individualistic mode of life, the basis for modern developments in the industrial belt to the south–but he hadn’t seen any, not till now. The buildings were new but already stained and shabby: hastily thrown up to a uniform pattern, the concrete blistered and bled rust where the steel reinforcing rods were too near the surface. Street-level heating vents breathed steam clouds across the pavements. On the ground floors there were public dining halls, public laundries, public baths. They walked past a school with street-level windows. NOVAYA ZIMA JUNIOR LYCEUM FOR THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF WORKERS.

Workers? Lom studied the people in the streets. They had neat sombre clothes and smooth white hands. They were clerks, administrators, secretaries, teachers, junior white-collar engineers: more than half were young women. They looked efficient. Nobody was poor and nobody was old and everybody was moving along, eyes down, unspeaking, each in their own small sphere of inwardness and temporary privacy. The rail transit rumbled overhead on its single track.

Nearer the centre of town the buildings were taller and better built. Polygons of steel and glass, each set back in its own apron of concrete and paving. Benches. Kiosks. Cafés. Parks behind railings, leafless and wintry. A deserted outdoor skating rink. An open-air swimming pool with a green and white tiled façade under a low curved roof. Scarves of steam drifted across the surface of the water. Swimmers in bathing caps ploughed steadily up and down the lanes. RESTORE YOURSELVES, CITIZENS! LEISURE REBUILDS! HEALTH IS A PLEASURABLE DUTY!

Florian stopped outside a restaurant with a wide glossy vitrine. the magnetic bakery. Shining tables of polished yellow deal on legs of tubular chrome. It was almost empty.

‘We should split up,’ he said. ‘We need to know when Chazia is coming. It’ll be easier if I go alone.’

‘Why?’ said Lom.

‘Because one person is better,’ said Florian.

‘So why you not me?’

‘Because they will tell me what we need to know.’

‘You’re just going to walk into a VKBD station and ask them?’

‘No,’ said Florian. ‘Captain Vorush Iliodor will ask them. Captain Iliodor is Commander Chazia’s aide-de-camp. I carry his identification and warrant cards.’

‘Out of uniform and without Chazia? They’ll want to know what you’re doing here. They’ll want to know why you don’t already know her plans better than they do.’

‘They may wonder,’ said Florian. ‘In my experience they will not ask.’

‘Do you even look like this Iliodor? What if somebody there knows him?’

Florian raised an eyebrow quizzically.

‘Oh,’ said Lom. ‘Of course. Sorry.’

‘We’ll meet back here,’ said Florian. ‘Give me a couple of hours. Three at most.’ He gave Lom his knapsack. ‘You’d better keep this. It’s out of character for Iliodor. There’s money in the side pocket.’

81

Lom wandered the streets aimlessly, angry and frustrated. For days he had been a passenger, a tagger-along, abandoned now to his own devices. He saw the force of Florian’s logic but he didn’t like it. He’d left Mirgorod thousands of miles to the south and west, burning on the edge of war, and he felt Maroussia’s loss as an emptiness next to him. I’ve just been pissing about, he thought. And I’m still just pissing about.

He found himself in a shopping street. Modistes sold suits and gowns and patent shoes at impossible prices. Bright-lit displays offered cameras, radios, gramophones, perfumes, chocolate, southern sparkling wines, but it was all garish, ersatz and shoddy, and nobody was buying. He walked on up Dukhonin Prospect–six lanes wide, almost empty of traffic–and into the blustery immenseness of Dukhonin Square. The square was lined with gleaming new buildings. The Polytechnical College. The Institute of Metallurgy. The Faculty of Mathematical Design. The Engineers’ Euharmonia was giving a concert that night at the House of Culture: a poster next to the entrance promised Zoffany’s PSYCHO-INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY FOR VOICE AND NEW-STYLE ORCHESTRA, WITH THEATRE OF PUPPETS.

Absences worried at Lom. Absences frayed his patience. They made him edgy. The absence of Maroussia. The absence of Chazia. The absence of trainload after trainload of conscript workers. Stolen persons. Thousands of them. They went on north, through the town and into the mountain and disappeared.

Lom wanted a closer look at the mountain.

There was a station on Dukhonin Square. The ticket hall was a brightly lit lofty palace. Stainless-steel arches. Walls of marble and malachite. Chrome fittings. Electric chandeliers. The size and solidity of the place dwarfed the few travellers passing through. Bronze bas reliefs on the walls represented the achievements of science and industry: dynamos and hydroelectric dams; Magnitograd; the Novozhd Factory; mining engineers drilling and excavating the torso of a huge fallen angel. Slogans carved in marble shouted: THOUGHT IS LABOUR! PRIVILEGE IS SACRIFICE! CONTRIBUTION IS FULFILMENT! CADRES DECIDE EVERYTHING! CITIZEN, YOU ARE THE CONDUIT TO THE FUTURE!

With money from Florian’s bag, Lom bought the most expensive ticket. Two roubles for all day and all stops. There was a sign that said FOUNDATION LINE NORTH. He bought a coffee in a paper cup and took it up the granite staircase to the platform overhead. A transit car was waiting. It was like a tramcar, but low and round-shouldered, and there was no overhead electric cable. Power came from the single steel rail itself.

KEEP OFF THE RAIL, CITIZEN! DANGER OF DEATH!

Lom took a corner seat. The coffee was good, not so good as Count Palffy’s, but sweet and bitter and hot. He took slow sips, making it last, as the train carried him slowly north. Beyond the carriage window the office blocks, parks and squares of the town centre gave way first to a few streets of elite housing–individual homes with yards and gardens–and then more communal blocks. Through the lighted and uncurtained upper-floor windows Lom could see cramped apartments separated by paper-thin partitions, shared bathrooms and shared kitchens. A new world had begun here, a world yet unseen in Mirgorod or Podchornok. Collective endeavour in a place without a past.

Novaya Zima, deposited ready-made in the middle of a wintry wilderness, drained the past. It soaked the life of memory away. There was only now, and an avid, echoing, hungry future. Lom found it drab and ugly and brutal.

The overheated car carried on trundling slowly northwards, stopping every minute or so. The route zigzagged across the town, making the most of its unnecessary existence. The overhead transit was a superfluous municipal showpiece–you could have walked the breadth of Novaya Zima in an hour–but people seemed to use it. Passengers came and went. Without exception they wore thin coats and carried briefcases. The men had knitted ties, the women wore blouses buttoned to the neck.

Lom finished his coffee and propped the empty paper cup on the seat next to him. A young woman, hair tied severely back, was watching him from across the aisle, her face a mixture of disapproval and curiosity. Lom realised how out of place he looked. He grinned at the woman cheerfully and she looked away. She had a pale thin face.

Lom got up and went across to sit beside her. She glanced at him in surprise and looked away. Shifted herself as far as she could along the bench away from him.

‘Does this train go all the way to the mountain?’ he said.

‘Foundation Mountain?’

‘Is there another one?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not.’ She was staring straight ahead. ‘This train doesn’t go there,’ she added.

‘So, if I wanted to get to the mountain, how would I do that?’

‘Why? Why would you want to?’

Lom shrugged.

‘To have a look. Curiosity.’

‘Are you assigned to work in the mountain? This is the wrong train. You should have been told… Why are you asking me this? What is your work?’

‘I’m new,’ said Lom. ‘I don’t have any work. Not yet.’

‘Nobody comes here without an assignment. How could you even get here?’

‘I flew,’ said Lom. ‘And I walked.’

The woman’s cheeks burned. She glanced around the carriage, looking for help, but no one was sitting near. She didn’t want to make a scene. She turned and glared into Lom’s face.

‘Are you drunk or something? If this is some crude attempt at seduction, citizen, then I should tell you—’

The car pulled into a station. The woman stood up. She was trembling.

‘This is my stop,’ she said. ‘Get out of my way, please.’

Lom twisted round to make room for her. She pushed past, holding her briefcase tight against her chest, not looking at him. Her legs brushed against his awkwardly.

‘I only want—’ he began.

‘Piss off,’ she hissed over her shoulder. ‘Don’t follow me. I’ll call the police.’

82

When the train reached the end of the line, Lom stayed aboard and came all the way back, continuing on south past Dukhonin Square till he was near the place where he was to meet Florian. Back on the emptying streets the freezing air smelled of engine fumes. Lighted windows shone with a bleak electrical brilliance. From everywhere Foundation Mountain was visible, a darkened wall against the northern sky. Lom thought he could hear a long freight train rumbling through the town, making the pavement tremble. But he wasn’t sure.

The Magnetic Bakery was still open but there was no sign of Florian. Office workers were drinking tea and reading newspapers. The radio played band music. Lom ordered an aquavit and grabbed an abandoned paper from the next table. The Vlast True Reporter. It was yesterday’s edition. He started to read it, just to pass the time till Florian came.

The man called Fohn, whose name he’d seen on various announcements in Mirgorod and who was now apparently the president of the Vlast, had made a speech in the new capital, Kholvatogorsk. So Mirgorod wasn’t the capital any more? And where the fuck is Kholvatogorsk? Lom had a dizzy feeling that the whole world had changed and shifted while he’d been flying across the landscape in Gretskaya’s Kotik.

Fohn’s speech was full of dull good news: industrial targets would be exceeded in the coming quarter, despite the recent upheaval of relocation, and steel production was heading for an all-time high. Shock workers had risen to the challenge. Lom skimmed the rest of the paper. Working hours were to be increased again. About the war there was almost nothing: inconclusive skirmishes on the southern front; Seva recaptured from the Archipelago yet again. There was a small inside paragraph about the stalwart resistance of encircled Mirgorod, with extracts from a fierce speech of defiance from a General Rizhin, who was Commissar for City Defence. Reading between the lines, it seemed that Mirgorod was doomed and the Vlast had decided it didn’t care. The piece was accompanied by a smudgy photograph of Rizhin. Lom almost ignored it, but something about the long narrow face caught his attention. His heart missed a beat.

It was Kantor. General Rizhin, Commissar for Mirgorod City Defence, was Josef Kantor.

When Florian came, Lom was nursing his untouched aquavit and watching his own reflection in the darkened window. Florian sat opposite Lom and put his astrakhan hat on the table between them. He looked worried. A waitress bustled over but he waved her away.

‘Chazia is here already,’ he said. ‘The train arrived last night. Late. We must have heard it pass. It didn’t stop in the town. They went straight through and into the mountain. Travelling at speed.’

For the second time in an hour Lom felt the bottom drop out of his world.

‘Maroussia?’ he said. ‘What about Maroussia?’

‘I don’t know. Somebody said there was a woman travelling with Chazia. It could be her.’

‘We have to get into the mountain,’ said Lom. ‘We have to do that now. Tonight.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘We haven’t got time to figure this out for ourselves,’ Lom continued. ‘We need some assistance here.’

‘Yes,’ said Florian.

‘Someone who can get us past whatever security they have out there. Someone who can take us right to Chazia.’

‘The name of such a person,’ said Florian, ‘is Yakov Khyrbysk. Professor Yakov Khyrbysk, director of the Foundation for Physico-Technical Machines. Professor Khyrbysk spends his days working inside Foundation Mountain but he has an apartment in the Sharashka district, in a building called the Foundation Hall. It’s not more than a mile from here. By this time of the evening he will be at home. He is not married and lives alone. I have his address. He is not expecting us. I do not suggest we telephone ahead.’

83

The Foundation Hall where Khyrbysk had his apartment was the tallest building in Novaya Zima: a tall slender blade of steel and glass, a triangular sliver of black ice speckled with bright-burning windows. In the snow-crusted square in front of the Hall stood a floodlit construction of crimson-painted steel: a single swooshing curve reaching hundreds of feet high, a steeply climbing arc of power and ambition and freedom and speed, hurtling up. It looked like nothing so much as the track of a rocket launching into the dark sky, and at the point of the curve, where the rocket might have been, was a squat, massive snub-nosed bullet-shape. It was speeding away from the planet. Escaping the gravity well. Lom remembered the hoarding at the gate into the town: THE VLAST SPREADING OUT ACROSS THE STARS.

Lom and Florian took the wide shallow apron of concrete steps two at a time and pushed open the wooden double door. Inside was a spacious entrance hall panelled with rich dark wood and thickly carpeted in plush brick red. A woman of about fifty in a crisp dark blue uniform tunic was watching them from behind a reception counter. She had short iron-grey hair and her face was powdered. She sat in a cloud of lavender eau de toilette and watched them suspiciously. Behind her on the wall was a noticeboard, a painting of the mountain in sunshine, the tubes of a pneumatic mail system and a large plate-glass mirror without a frame.

‘No visitors without an appointment,’ the woman said. ‘Do you have an appointment?

Florian went up to the counter, confident, purposeful. He was Captain Vorush Iliodor. He held out his warrant card for inspection.

‘We are here for Professor Khyrbysk,’ he said. ‘Commander Chazia requires his presence urgently. You will call him down for us.’

The woman frowned.

‘It is late,’ she said. ‘The professor does not receive visitors at home. He starts early in the morning. You may leave a message with me.’

‘We are not visitors,’ said Florian. ‘He is required. Now.’

The woman glared at him, pale grey eyes blazing, points of pink flushing her cheekbones. In the mirror behind her Lom could see the electric switch under the counter.

‘The professor is unavailable,’ she said, reaching for the telephone. ‘Someone else will assist you. I will call Dr Ferenc. He will—’

Lom pushed past Florian, lifted the counter lid and stepped quickly through. Put his left hand down to cover the emergency call switch before she could get to it.

‘We have no time for this,’ he said. ‘I am an investigator of the Political Police. My colleague is Captain Iliodor of Commander Chazia’s personal staff. You will take us to Professor Khyrbysk’s apartment. You will do this yourself. You will do this now. You will call nobody. You will trigger no alarms.’

‘You cannot order me! Where are your uniforms? Where is your police warrant? There are procedures. You have no authority here. The professor—’

‘The authority of the Vlast is everywhere,’ said Lom. ‘The Vlast is authority. There is no other. What is your name, citizen?’

The woman hesitated.

‘Tyrkhovna,’ she said. ‘Zsara Tyrkhovna.’

‘You will take us to the professor immediately, Zsara Tyrkhovna. Instantly.’

Still she hesitated.

‘You would prefer to join one of the long trains, perhaps?’ said Lom. ‘Would you like to take a journey into the mountain, Zsara Tyrkhovna? That can be arranged. We could give you that choice perhaps. Choose now.’

Tears were coming to Zsara Tyrkhovna’s eyes, though they weren’t there yet. She didn’t know what to do.

‘Loyalty is creditable,’ said Lom. ‘Defiance and stupidity is not.’

Her shoulders slumped. She looked ten years older.

‘Come with me,’ she breathed.

They took the mirrored and chrome-plated lift to the top floor. The twentieth. More thick carpet in the hall, recessed lighting, pot plants and paintings on the walls: abstract constructions of circles and cones in primary colours, slashed across by thin black straight lines. This is the future! they said. The total universal truth of form and speed! No people and no skies!

There was only one door. It opened almost instantly at Zsara Tyrkhovna’s tentative knock. The man who appeared in the doorway was wide and bulky. He had a broad creased face with a heavy stub of a nose, an imposing brow and a mat of wiry black curly hair cut short. Small pale blue eyes appraised Lom and Florian with sharp, watchful intelligence. He was wearing a dark blue dressing gown over a white shirt open at the collar. The gown looked like it was made of silk: real silk, not some petroleum-derivative substitute.

‘I’m so sorry, Yakov Arkadyevich,’ said Zsara Tyrkhovna. ‘These men… they say they are the police. They insisted. They threatened me… I didn’t know what to do. I shouldn’t have—’

Florian produced his identification.

‘Commander Chazia requires Professor Khyrbysk to come with us now,’ he said. ‘It is a matter of urgency. She cannot wait.’

Khyrbysk took Florian’s card and studied it carefully for a moment. Considered it and came to a conclusion. He nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to himself, as if some hypothesis of his own had been confirmed.

‘Don’t upset yourself, Zsara,’ he said. His voice was deep and complex. ‘Everything is in order. You’ve done all that you should, and more. I am grateful. You can leave us now.’

‘Should I telephone someone?’ she said. ‘I should tell Shulmin what is happening. No, Shulmin is not here. Ferenc then. I will call Ferenc. He will come.’

‘There’s no need to trouble Leon, Zsara. Really no need. Everything is fine here. Go back to your work.’ He stood back from the door. ‘Please, gentlemen, come in.’

They followed Khyrbysk into his apartment. It was over-warm and brightly lit, and the white walls were hung with certificates of academic distinction and more paintings. The floor was covered with a thick light blue carpet. There were a few pieces of expensive-looking furniture and rugs in the modern geometric style. The curtains were drawn shut across wide windows.

Khyrbysk indicated a low sofa in the middle of the room. There was a polished oval coffee table in front of it, empty except for a bowl of dried fruits.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Please. You are my guests. Perhaps you would like some wine?’

‘There is no time,’ said Lom.

Khyrbysk ignored him.

‘Captain Iliodor,’ he said to Florian. ‘We have corresponded, have we not? And spoken on the telephone, I think. A pleasure to meet you in person at last. Also something of a surprise. I was expecting to meet you yesterday with Lavrentina when she arrived, but you were not with her. Indeed, she mentioned that you had disappeared during a bombing raid on Mirgorod. She was concerned for you. There was some suggestion that you might have been injured. Or dead.’

Florian gave him a quick untroubled smile.

‘As you see,’ he said, ‘I am not dead; I was merely delayed. I arrived in Novaya Zima some hours ago.’

‘We can talk as we go,’ said Lom. ‘Get your coat, Professor. Let’s be on our way.’

Khyrbysk turned towards him, small eyes narrow in the slab of his face.

‘And who are you, please?’ he said. ‘I know who your associate says he is, but you have not yet accounted for your presence here.’

‘My colleague—’ Florian began.

‘I am an Investigator of the Vlast Political Police.’

Khyrbysk sighed.

‘Oh, really, must we continue this charade?’ he said. ‘I know you are not what you say you are. Whatever you might have told poor Zsara, you are evidently nothing to do with Lavrentina, and you are certainly not from the police, so let us waste no more time on tedious diversions. Spare me that. I am not surprised you have come. I have been expecting you, or someone like you, for a long time.’

‘Who do you think we are?’ said Lom.

Khyrbysk shrugged.

‘Precisely?’ he said. ‘Precisely, I have no idea at all. Spies? Agents of the Archipelago? The specifics hardly matter. You are outsiders. People from elsewhere, come to find out what is happening here in Novaya Zima. As I said, I have been expecting that someone like you would come eventually. Our achievements were bound to attract such attention, though frankly I thought there would be a more subtle approach. A less frontal assault, shall I say? Well, no matter. You are here, and I have nothing to hide, so let us be civilised. Share my wine and tell me what you want from me.’

Khyrbysk’s manner was smooth and urbane but there was hard calculation in his eyes. He’s playing with us, thought Lom. Playing for time. But there is no time.

‘You met Chazia when she arrived?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said Khyrbysk.

‘There was a woman with her. Early twenties. Five foot nine. Black hair cut short at the neck.’

For the first time, Khyrbysk looked surprised. Genuinely surprised.

‘I couldn’t say. I don’t recall seeing such a woman. Lavrentina’s entourage was large. I did not meet them all. Of course not.’

Lom’s patience had reached its limit. He pulled the Blok 15 from his pocket and pointed it at Khyrbysk’s belly.

‘Where is Chazia now?’ he said.

Khyrbysk glanced briefly at the gun and looked away. Dismissed it from his attention.

‘When I left Lavrentina earlier this evening she was in the mountain. She had work to do. She is a woman of remarkable energy.’

‘You’re going to take us to her,’ said Lom. ‘You’re going to take us into the mountain and vouch for us with your security. Tell them we are your guests. Take us to where Chazia is.’

‘Of course,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘If that’s what you want.’ He glanced at the gun. ‘Your argument is persuasive.’

‘Don’t over-focus on the gun,’ said Lom. ‘You should worry more about my friend there. I certainly would.’

84

They went out of the Foundation Hall and across the floodlit square. The sky-aspiring sculpture cast three long black gnomon-shadows. Lom walked on one side of Khyrbysk, Florian on the other. The square was deserted. It was almost nine.

‘No transport?’ said Khyrbysk, looking around.

‘No,’ said Lom.

‘You don’t have much of a plan then.’

‘The plan’s simple,’ said Lom. ‘If there’s any trouble from you we kill you and think of something else.’

‘I see. You have no transport. Well, I’m afraid my driver has gone home for the night, but if we go back inside I could get Zsara to telephone for a car.’

‘We’ll walk,’ said Lom.

‘Five miles in the night?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Partly across open country? Better to take the train.’

There was a transit station at the corner of the square. The system was still running. They didn’t have to wait long for a northbound service. There were a couple of solitary passengers–night workers going on shift–but Khyrbysk led them to seats at the other end of the car.

‘The city is beautiful at night,’ he said, looking out of the window, ‘but you should see it in the long summer days. It is the northern jewel of the Vlast.’

‘You call this place a city?’ said Lom.

‘Yes, certainly Novaya Zima is a city. A city is defined by importance rather than size. By centrality to the culture of the coming times. Novaya Zima is not an agglomeration of buildings, it is a machine for living. A machine for making the future. And it is a metaphor. A work of art.’

He sat back in his seat and unbuttoned the fawn camel-hair coat he had put on over his shirt. It was hot in the carriage. He seemed inclined to talk. Perhaps it was nerves, but Lom didn’t think so. Khyrbysk didn’t seem too bothered about his predicament at all.

‘Take the building where I live, for instance,’ Khyrbysk was saying. ‘The Foundation Hall. It is made from steel and glass. Above all, glass. What better metaphor than glass for the future we are building? Millions of separate grains of sand, weak and uncohesive when separate, fused together under a fierce transmuting heat to form a new substance. And the new substance is perfect. Unblemished, transparent and strong. This is how we shall reforge humanity. The progress of history is inevitable. It is happening already. The individual is losing his significance–his private destiny no longer interests us–many particles must become one consistent force…’

Khyrbysk paused.

‘You smile,’ he said. ‘But I assure you, what I am saying is a clear-sighted expression of fact. Novaya Zima signifies. Everything you see in Novaya Zima, the fine architecture, this mass transit system of which we are so proud, it all signifies.’

Florian grunted. ‘You have a fine apartment,’ he said.

‘You sound censorious,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘You want to make me ashamed of my privileges while others labour hungry and the Vlast is at war?’

‘The thought occurred to me,’ said Florian.

‘But I am not ashamed,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘The fact that others forgo essentials so we can live like this, that is what drives us on. It shows our strength of purpose. The Vlast may suffer hardships, Novaya Zima says to the world, but we can still do this.’

‘This place tells the world nothing,’ said Florian, ‘because the world doesn’t know it exists.’

‘Not yet perhaps,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘but when we are ready it will.’

Lom remembered the smell of the empty trains at the Wieland marshalling yard. The ranks of empty trains. He was surprised by the heat of his own anger

‘You’ve built a comfortable utopia for you and your friends on the bones of slaves.’

‘You’re trying to provoke me,’ said Khyrbysk blandly, ‘but I will not rise to it. I am merely a worker in my own field, as are we all. There is no egotism here, only I becoming We: the clear and perfect simplicity of glass.’

‘And the workers under the mountain? Do they see it like that? I’ve seen the trains.’

‘Certainly they do. Most of them. Physical labour is redemptive. Many request to stay on when their terms are complete. They ask for their families to join them.’

Lom turned away in disgust. He caught his own reflection in the window looking back at him. And through his own face he saw the lighted windows of kommunalki buildings moving past. For a moment it was as if he was stationary and the buildings were sliding away, leaving him behind.

‘The quality of our city,’ said Khyrbysk, oblivious to Lom’s reaction, or ignoring it, ‘expresses the supreme importance of the work we do.’

Florian leaned forward intently.

‘What work?’ he said. ‘What is happening here? What is all this for?’

‘The Foundation for Physico-Technical Machines,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘is the greatest concentration of human intelligence the world has ever seen. The whole city exists to support our work. There is more brilliance lodged in Foundation Hall, in that one single building, than… There is no comparator. No precedent. It is our academy. We have sacrificed our careers to be here, all of us. We do not publish, at least not under our own names. We get no fame for what we do, none of the mundane rewards. But the future will know us by our work.’

They stopped at a station and the last passengers left them alone. Shortly after the train restarted, the buildings outside the window disappeared, leaving nothing but blank darkness. Lom realised they had crossed the northern boundary of the township and were heading across open country towards the mountain.

‘What work?’ said Florian again. ‘What is the work?’

‘Our work?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘We look up at night and see a universe of stars and planets teeming with life, and angels swimming the cosmic emptiness like fish. Only the emptiness between the stars is not empty; it teems with life and vigour just as the planets do. It merely does not shine so brightly.’ There was a light in Khyrbysk’s eye that was not entirely sane. For all his craggy bulk, his thick grizzled curls and cliff-like face, he was a prophet burning with the incandescence of a vision. ‘That is where history is leading us,’ he continued. ‘Humankind spreading out across the galaxies in the endless pursuit of radiant light. Only there will we find space enough to live as we are meant to live. It is inevitable. It is the will of the universe.’

Lom could see nothing but blackness outside the carriage window. The reflection of the bright interior obliterated everything. He could see himself, and opposite him a mirror-Khyrbysk and a mirror-Florian. There was less of Iliodor in Florian’s face, he thought: more angularity, more darkness. An effect of mirror and harsh shadow, perhaps.

‘There are practical problems to be solved, of course, if humankind is to escape from this one cramped planet,’ Khyrbysk was saying. ‘That’s what we are doing here. New means of propulsion, new techniques for navigation, new technologies for sustaining life outside the atmosphere and beyond the light of the sun. And new designs for humankind itself. Crossing the immensities of space will take immensities of time. Our present bodies are too short-lived. They decay and fail. But even this problem will be solved. We know that angel flesh can absorb and carry human consciousness: all that’s needed is refinement of technique.’

‘There are thousands of workers here,’ said Lom. ‘They aren’t engaged in cosmological hypothesising.’

‘Not hypothesising!’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Practicalities! There are a hundred real and specific problems to be solved. Problems of science, engineering and design.’

‘That is not enough,’ Florian’s voice was a snarl. ‘There is something more. Something else is happening here.’

‘Not enough! I’ve shared more truth and vision with you in the last ten minutes than you can possibly have heard in the whole of your life up to this moment.’

Khyrbysk’s pale blue eyes were narrow and predatory.

‘You think I’m afraid of you?’ he said. ‘You think I’m your prisoner? I am no such thing. You will not kill me, but I will take you to Lavrentina, and she will surely kill you.’

85

There was a burst of noise as the transit car hurtled straight into the side of the Foundation Mountain and entered an unlit concrete tube barely wide enough to accommodate it. The light from the car’s lamps flickered along the uneven wall, illuminating snaking power cables and gaping black side shafts. Ten minutes later they emerged into dazzling fluorescent brilliance and came to a sudden stop. Khyrbysk opened the door and they stepped out onto an iron platform.

They were in the middle of an immense cloister carved out of solid rock, hundreds of feet long and fifty feet high, supported by a field of wide columns: trunks of raw rough stone, left in place when the solidity of the mountain was cut away, sleeved in squared-off concrete for the first twenty feet of their height. Thousands of lighting tubes threw daylight-blue shadowless brightness across gleaming asphalt. The air was body-warm, dry to the point of desiccation and smelled faintly of naphtha. Not air at all but breathable suffocation, it moved in a steady current across Lom’s face. Glancing up, he saw rows of ventilation shafts in the rock ceiling and wide rotor fans behind grilles, turning slowly. He felt the terrible weight of the dark mountain overhead, inert, world-heavy, impending.

‘Follow me,’ said Khyrbysk and set off at a smart pace. His shoulders were broad and bulky. Grizzled wiry curls came down over his collar. He seemed to have forgotten he was being marched along at gunpoint.

‘Slow down,’ growled Florian. ‘Be aware.’

Khyrbysk ignored him and hurried on. Lom and Florian followed him down a wide clattering staircase onto the cavern floor. A complex of temporary huts serving as offices clustered around the base of the nearest column. There was a canteen, open but deserted, a telephone exchange and an operator hub for the pneumatic mail system. Further away, on a low concrete platform, a powerhouse of whirring massive dynamos hummed and buzzed. There were few people about: the night shift, quietly efficient at their business. Men dwarfed by the dynamos stood before expanses of winking signal lights, dials and gleaming bakelite controls. Walkways between the columns were marked by coloured lines painted on the asphalt. They led off in every direction towards square tunnel mouths.

Khyrbysk stopped and waited for them to catch up.

‘This is a side entrance,’ he said. ‘A vestibule, you might say. There are two hundred miles of tunnels under the mountain, and hundreds of chambers, many larger than this one. There are lift shafts, conveyor belts, railways, winches and hauling engines, underground water-courses. All of it permanently lit, ventilated, heated and dehumidified. Workshops. Factories. Laboratories. Storage and stockpiling facilities. We construct most of the machine tools and technical instruments we require right here, ourselves. The city under the mountain is larger than the city outside. It operates in twenty-four-hour daylight, wholly unaffected by winter and summer. It is the most efficient industrial complex the world has ever seen. This part may look deserted but there are tens of thousands of workers here. Most of them are in the mines, of course. The mines are why we are here, not elsewhere. The mountain is full of uranium. Riddled with it. It’s all around us, like raisins in a cake. Nowhere else has it been discovered in such abundance.’

It was as if he was giving them a guided tour. As if they were dignitaries on their way to a lunch. Lom had to admire him. He had a will of iron.

Khyrbysk set off again.

‘Follow, please,’ he said.

Lom and Florian fell in behind him. They had reached an unspoken agreement to let the man have his head and see where he took them. He would surely lead them to Chazia, one way or another.

Khyrbysk bounded up another iron staircase. Another rail car waited there, a rounded oblong box with windows, painted in the same colours as the transit carriages but much smaller, designed to carry up to six passengers with a small luggage bay behind. It hung suspended from an overhead rail and swayed slightly when they climbed in. Khyrbysk went to the front and switched on the power. Interior lamps flickered into life and floor-level vents began to breathe heated air into the cabin. The floor was covered with stippled rubber, the steel walls and ceiling were painted cream, the seats upholstered in green leather. A chrome handrail ran the length of the wall on both sides. The interior smelled strongly of rubber and hot engine oil.

A lectern-like brown bakelite panel was set at an angle under the forward window, marked out with a complex map of radial and intersecting lines. There was a tiny switch and light bulb at each labelled node. Some of the nodes bore names–RAILHEAD, POLISHING, REFECTORY IV, CENTRIFUGE, NORTH GATE EXIT–but most were designated by short, impenetrable alphanumeric sequences.

‘This is a plan of the entire complex?’ said Lom.

‘Correct,’ said Khyrbysk.

He set the panel with practised speed and the car lurched into life. The last node he activated was labelled EDB/CENTRAL.

‘What’s EDB?’ said Lom.

‘You’ll see.’

The car rattled through narrow tunnels and swept out high above underground chambers. They saw women in overalls and headscarves worked at assembly lines, operating lathes and welding machines. They passed the slopes of sour-smelling slag dumps. Furnace doors clanged open beneath them, belching blasts of heat and disgorging planks of glowing molten metal onto conveyor belts. A gently descending tunnel took them past honeycomb stacks of artillery shells painted a garish yellow. Notices on the racks warned, with perfect superfluity, DANGER! HIGH EXPLOSIVE!

‘Armaments?’ said Lom.

‘Certainly,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘We must satisfy our benefactors. The iron law of economics. The Foundation must wash its own face.’

They swung out across a dim shoreless lake of milky-green water reeking of naphtha, its surface wreathed with scraps and scarves of steam. Hard-hat gangers clambered across half-built scaffolding and tramped in silent groups on perilous unrailed walkways. Then, after ten more minutes of featureless tunnel, the rail car lurched to a stop alongside two identical carriages.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN BUREAU.

EDB.

Khyrbysk led them through double swing doors into another world. The oppressive scale of the underground complex was gone, replaced by green corridors. Fire extinguishers. Noticeboards. Wall-mounted telephones. The muted clatter of distant typewriters. Linoleum floors squeaked underfoot. Half-glazed doors opened into offices and meeting rooms. SURVIVABLES. LENSING. CENTRIFUGE. DEPLETION. STAGING. NOÖSPHERE. PROJECT WINTER SKIES.

A few people were working late. Men in shirtsleeves and sleeveless pullovers. They sat alone or gathered in small huddles, rumpled, smoking, arguing earnestly in quiet voices. Many of them nodded to Khyrbysk as he passed and he greeted each one by name.

Lom noticed that Khyrbysk’s creased heavy face was damp with perspiration. For the first time he looked tense. But there was something about the way he was walking that wasn’t nervous, but the opposite: a kind of bravado in the way he carried himself.

‘Nearly there,’ he said.

Now we are coming to it, thought Lom. He tightened his grip on the gun in his pocket. Beside him he sensed Florian ready himself for action. Clever Khyrbysk has fooled us all. So he thinks.

Khyrbysk veered suddenly to the right, pushed open a door and entered a large hexagonal room overlooked by two mezzanine tiers. The central floor was occupied by a circular plotting table twenty feet in diameter, the green baize surface laid out with maps and charts. In the corner a telekrypt whirred and blinked. Up on the mezzanines women in uniform whispered intently into telephones. Half a dozen VKBD officers in pale red uniforms looked up when they entered.

Khyrbysk stepped sharply away from Lom and Florian.

‘Draw your weapons!’ he barked. ‘Lieutenant Gerasimov! Arrest these men! They are spies. They are terrorists. They are assassins. Lock them away somewhere and inform Secretary Chazia immediately. I put them in her hands.’

The VKBD men snapped to their feet, a dozen revolver muzzles covering Lom and Florian.

‘The Secretary is not here, Director Khyrbysk,’ said Gerasimov. ‘She took the observation car to the testing zone. She wanted to witness it herself.’

Khyrbysk frowned.

‘Gone already? But the test is not till dawn. I was to travel with her. That was the plan.’

‘We could telephone, but… She will not welcome a trivial interruption. She took the woman with her.’

‘The matter is of no relevance to me. But she must deal with this, Lieutenant. I want to hear no more of these men. And Gerasimov, I have made representations before about the lax security in the city. I will be doing so again, depend on it.’

As he turned to go Khyrbysk threw a contemptuous glance at Lom and Florian.

‘Idiots,’ he muttered.

86

When Khyrbysk had gone, Lieutenant Gerasimov detached two of the VKBD–heavy grey-faced men with broad dull faces, early forties, running to fat–to take Lom and Florian to the detention area.

‘Wait with them there till Chazia comes.’

The VKBD men looked bored and resentful. They didn’t like being dragged away from bothering the women working the telephones. Vagant revolvers in hand, they shoved and hustled their captives along the corridors. People glanced at them curiously and quickly looked away, avoiding the eye of the VKBD. Lom shuffled along passively, eyes to the floor, looking defeated. Florian walked with as much dignity as he could muster, bareheaded, holding his astrakhan hat in his hand.

When they reached the transit car, Lom watched carefully as one of the guards set the control panel. The man worked slowly, concentrating on each move. The operation was simple: there was a button under the counter to turn on the power, then you selected your route and flicked the switches of the points you wanted to pass through. If you made a mistake, you flicked the switch the other way to cancel the instruction. The guard made several mistakes. Lom guessed the VKBD had arrived with Chazia the previous day.

The car rocked and settled and lurched into life.

No point in waiting. There won’t be a better time.

Lom glanced at Florian, who was watching him with glittering, rapacious amusement. Florian raised an eyebrow. It was a question. An invitation.

‘Leave it to me,’ said Lom. ‘No need to rip their heads off.’ He regretted the loss of his Blok 15, which the VKBD had taken. But it didn’t matter. It made no difference.

The guard nearest to him frowned.

‘Keep your fucking mouth shut—’

Lom stepped in close, inside the gun hand, and crunched his right elbow into the man’s face. Felt his nose burst and his head jerk back. In the same movement with his left hand he gripped the Vagant and the fist that held it and twisted. Hard. Felt the trigger finger snap. The gun fired, deafening in the enclosed space. The bullet punched a hole in the wall.

If the other guard had been watching properly, and if he’d been trained, and if he’d practised so much that he didn’t need to think, he might have realised what was happening and responded effectively in, what, two seconds? Maybe less. But he wasn’t trained, and he hadn’t practised, and he didn’t have two seconds. He was still standing in the same position with a puzzled look on his face when Lom’s right fist, holding the Vagant, powered by the momentum of his charge and with the full two hundred pounds of his weight behind it, crashed into the side of his head. The guard staggered sideways. His gun slipped from his fingers and skittered across the floor. Lom recovered his balance and aimed a vicious kick at the man’s kneecap. He screamed and fell. Lom kicked his head again just to be sure. It felt good. The angel taste was in his mouth again.

Both VKBD men were down and not moving. Lom stepped over them to the control panel. The schematic showed the NORTHERN GATE and a single straight line leading away from it, out of the mountain: the furthest terminal was labelled FIELD TEST OBSERVER STATION. He flicked switches, programming the most direct route avoiding major intersections. The car halted, hesitated, and started back the way it had come.

87

For an hour they passed through tunnels and shafts and caverns, climbing steadily. There was less activity in the northern area of the mountain. At first they half-expected the car to seize up and stop, the power cut. Security procedures kicking in to isolate and capture them. But it didn’t happen. Florian spread himself out on a passenger bench and closed his eyes but Lom stayed on his feet at the panel, leaning forward to stare through the front window, following their progress. Tiny lamps winked out as they left the nodes behind. The unconscious guards, propped at the back of the car where Florian had dragged them, were breathing noisily.

Lom brought the car to a stop at an empty platform. He and Florian bundled the inert guards out: deadweights smelling of sweat and sour breath and blood. They kept the guns.

The last twenty minutes underground were a long haul down a shallow incline, an unlit featureless tunnel bored through raw rock. They seemed to be speeding up. Then, without warning, they burst out into the night on the far side of the mountain. The rattling echoes of the tunnel ceased. The car travelled on in near-silence. There was only the electric hum of its motor and the wind splitting against the overhead rail. It was coming up to four in the morning.

Lom stood at the front of the railcar. Leaning forward, feet slightly apart. Hands gripping the chrome bar so hard it hurt. The rail ran on ahead into the darkness. It was carrying them towards Maroussia. Ahead of them, somewhere, she was there. He was sure of that. Other possibilities were not admitted. Not considered. She was there and he would find her. He would get her back. But the car wasn’t moving fast enough. He leaned into the bar as if he would push it onward faster with his own force of will.

Behind him he heard Florian shift in his seat.

‘What time is dawn this far north?’ said Lom, not looking round.

‘Late,’ said Florian. ‘Nine? Ten? We have time.’

‘We need a plan,’ said Lom.

‘We should get there first.’

They cruised on through total darkness. Only the light spilling from their own windows showed the unbroken carpet of trees. The snow was thicker to the north of the mountain.

Hours passed. Nothing changed. Lom tried to calculate their speed by his wristwatch, counting the trees passing beneath them and the regularly spaced pylons that carried the overhead rail. He repeated the measurement again and again. Somewhere between thirty and fifty miles an hour. Perhaps. It was something to do.

The trees grew sparser, pine and spruce replacing birch, and the snow was getting thicker all the time, mounding the tree-heads and piling in drifts. The small capsule raced on over frozen lakes, snow-crusted and black. The hour hand on Lom’s watched crept round the dial. Five o’clock. Six. Always the single rail stretched ahead of them, pylon after pylon.

They flashed through an unlit platform stop. Rows of vague regular shapes were passing underneath them. Humped shadows. They were aeroplanes. Hundreds of large aircraft parked in neat rows under tarpaulins. Mothballed. Snow-covered runways. A control tower in darkness. Then came two minutes of trees and another wide clearing. A mile-wide expanse of nothing surrounded by a perimeter fence. And then there was a splash of bright light ahead of them. A brilliant pool of arc light bright enough to reflect off the underside of the cloud. The car rose and swept past what seemed like a domed mound, too regular and polished and perfect to be natural. It glimmered dark brick red and was surrounded by a circular blackness. Lom had time to realize he was looking at the top of something rising from a pit several hundred yards across, surrounded by shadowy gantries and lumps of broken concrete. Then it was gone.

As they left the oasis of brilliant light behind, they passed through another empty platform. Lom read the sign as it flashed past the window.

COSMODROME: WINTER SKIES.

There was an emblem: a simplified version of the soaring steel sculpture in front of the Foundation Hall. The rising discus. THE VLAST SPREADING OUT ACROSS THE STARS.

Antoninu Florian sat in silence, flexing taut aching muscle, sinew, flesh. Working his bones with infinitesimal shifts of size and shape. He had been holding this human shape in place too long, and every part of his body was sore: a dull rheumatic ache from his face to his feet, cramped inside their tightly laced boots. He shifted in his seat, though it brought him no comfort, and watched Lom leaning on the handrail and staring out through the forward window at the empty landscape that rolled up to meet them. The intensity of Lom’s focus on Maroussia was a tangible tension in the air. It hummed like taut wire in the wind.

For the hundredth time, the thousandth time, Florian studied him. Lom was a vessel of the beautiful forest, all unaware, but he was also saturated through and through with dark angel stuff. The wound Chazia had made in his head had become an opening, a shining perfumed breach, but the angel mark had left its indelible stain. Florian had observed Lom’s growing violence in the last few days. The angel stuff was part of what made Lom what he was: an unexpected possibility, an open, borderless, compendious man, the joining together of what could not be joined. In the unsolvable equation of forest and angel and Vlast and Pollandore, the complex impossible strength that just might resolve it was Vissarion Lom.

Unless the Shaumian woman was lost.

Florian was certain that Maroussia was alive and somewhere ahead of them. He could not sense her, but he could sense the Pollandore. It was close and they were closing with it, and so was the Shaumian woman. Florian felt the Pollandore calling her. And he still didn’t know what he would do when he caught up with her. The indecision hurt worse than the tension in his distorted bones. Futures contended. All outcomes could be ruinous. When the time of crisis came, then he would know what to do. Then he would decide.

The frozen lakes became larger and more numerous. They were crossing more ice than trees. And then they were suddenly travelling low above the sea. Ten feet below them thick black water rose and fell, viscid and streaked with foam. It was as if the ocean was breathing gently. Rafts of ice, almost perfectly circular, gleamed in the yellow cabin light that raced across them. The floor-level heating vents hummed loudly, struggling to warm the inflow of freezing air. And failing. The cold pinched Lom’s face. He felt his hands and feet growing stiff and numb.

Seven o’clock.

They crossed the shore of the north island at 7.45 a.m. The sea fell away behind them and they were riding low over level tundra. Flat expanses of snow and ice. The first hint of daylight was touching the eastern sky. A faint diminishing of darkness. Condensation was frosting on the inside of the window, forming spidery crystal webs. Lom rubbed it away. Metronome pylons ticked past.

At ten past eight they saw the lights ahead of them. A cluster of low buildings in the pre-dawn greyness, dark against the snow. Lom cut the power, plunging the cabin interior into silence and gloom. The car rattled on, slowing. It took several minutes to come to a complete halt, swinging and creaking in the wind.

Florian pushed the door open and let in a blast of freezing air. They were fifteen feet above the ground. The snow looked thick and soft beneath them. He leaped out and landed neatly in a crouch, knee deep.

Lom took a breath and followed. He landed hard and rolled. Ended up on his back in the snow, winded, staring up at the sky. It hurt. He stood up slowly. Stiffly. Testing.

He was OK.

He looked round for Florian and saw him racing silently away across the snow. Within fifty yards he had disappeared. Faded into grey and dropped behind a ridge.

‘Fuck,’ said Lom quietly to himself. ‘Fuck.’

Slowly and painfully he began to follow.

88

In darkness and snow and windswept ice at the centre of the North Zima Expanse, the Pollandore rests in its own uninterpretable space, touching nothing, a slowly turning globe. Worlds do not stand on the framework of flatbed trucks. Worlds do not hang by hooks and cables from a makeshift gantry. Worlds fall. They are always and only falling. Endless ellipses of fall, from no sky towards no frozen ground, turning and tumbling as they go. And everything else falls with them, unaware.

Towering over the Pollandore on its own framework of girders, the swollen samovar–the uranium gobbet in its bulging belly, the uranium seed sleeved in its high-explosive kernel–awaits its moment in the sun. Uncle Vanya’s big fat beautiful cousin. Cables snake away across the ice.

Several miles from the Pollandore’s crude gantry, in a concrete bunker with walls three feet deep and one thick panoramic window, Ambroz Teleki was handing out tubs of sunscreen and aviator glasses with dark-tinted lenses. Lavrentina Chazia waved him away.

‘I’m not staying cooped up inside this hutch,’ she said. ‘I’m going out to feel the hot wind on my face.’

Teleki was horrified.

‘But that’s impossible! Secretary Chazia, you do not appreciate the danger… the strength of the blast… Even at this distance—’

Chazia silenced him with a look.

‘At dawn,’ she said, ‘there will be a new sun. Am I not to bask in its warmth?’

She turned to the corner where the Shaumian girl sat watching her with dark resentful eyes.

‘And you, Maroussia darling,’ said Chazia, ‘you will see the flash on the horizon and know the moment for what it is. The destruction of the Pollandore. I’m glad you’re here to see it, it’s only right you should. That thing has been a source of delusion for us both, in our different ways. To be released from it will be a great step forward. You’ll see things in their true relations then.’

Chazia had been reluctant to destroy the Pollandore after investing so much in it for so long. She had wanted to carry out the angel’s instruction, but the thought of doing it was deeply painful. She had continued to put up inward resistance until rigorous self-examination and the guidance of the angel had gradually opened her eyes to the truth. It had taken time, but at last, freed from false consciousness by a better teaching, she’d come to realise what a beguiling cipher the Pollandore was: a meaningless emptiness, a zero mirage into which she’d been led to pour her desires, against her true interests and the reality of things as they were. The Pollandore had woven subtle nets of illusion to protect itself while it exploited her, just as it had ensnared Maroussia.

‘Make sure she watches,’ Chazia said to the SV lieutenant standing guard at Maroussia’s side. ‘Make her stand there and see.’

Maroussia glared at her but said nothing.

‘The pain will pass,’ said Chazia kindly. ‘Truth hurts but better understanding sets us free.’ Then she turned away and went through to the other room, the office. She opened the crate that held her suit of angel flesh and began to put it on.

The excitement of anticipation made her tremble.

Wolf-Florian galloped low across the surface of the snow, stretching his limbs in the relief of being wolf again, bounding over raised drifts. He could sense the Pollandore ahead of him. It was below the horizon but its call burned behind his eyes like he had never felt it before, and the calling pulsed with a desperate joy. He was running through the shadows of invisible trees. The flat disc of ice across which he ran was forested with the ghosts of ancient trees.

Ahead of him was the Pollandore and behind him was Lom, a perfumed beacon spilling his beautiful headstuff into the freezing air, all unaware of what he was and what he could become. And between them–Florian was closing on her now and could sense her presence–was the Shaumian woman.

Florian still did not know what to do.

The woman was change and the woman was desperate threat. A door in the world stood slightly open, which she might fling wide or slam shut. And he did not know which.

He would kill her before she could reach the Pollandore.

With his last dying breath he would carry her safely to it, so she could do what she would do.

When the time came he would know what to do.

But for now, still, even as he ran towards her, he did not know, and the not-knowing hurt. It hurt more than the desperate working of his heart as he pushed himself on at the extremity of his body’s capacity across the hardened crunching snow.

A flake of Archangel watchfulness settles upon the gantry of Uncle Vanya’s big fat cousin and flexes its fragment-wings of sentience like a bird. Archangel bird is come to taste the joy of destruction.

He observes with pin-sharp joy the diminished, fragile, vulnerable sphere beneath him. Here is the Once Great Threat. Here is the Pollandore. How pathetic Archangel finds it now, so feeble and tiny amid the wastes of ice, and bound with chains to a barrel of death!

To think that in his hurt and wounded beginning on this confining world he–he! Archangel!–once had feared this useless thing! Feared this excremetal node of weaknesses! He does not fear it now.

Destruction time coming.

Pleasurable anticipation thrills.

He lets the time of its coming run slowly. Tasting it.

He will crush this disgusting thing under the heel of his triumph. He will abort it. Soon this trivial gap will be closed, and a new roaring radiant gate will be thrown open.

Archangel-fragment throws back his bird head and crows at the approaching dawn. It is a mighty banner-shout unfurling across the glittering immensities of what will come to be.

When Chazia had gone, Maroussia got up from her chair by the window and went over to the SV lieutenant.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I would like to visit the bathroom.’

The lieutenant looked at her with relaxed contempt. Memories in the back of his eyes. Memories of what he’d seen Chazia do to her, and what he himself had done. Maroussia pushed the thought away. She wouldn’t think of that. Not now and not ever.

‘Sit down,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Wait.’

‘Please,’ said Maroussia. ‘Please. It is urgent. I have to go now.’

The lieutenant swore.

‘Come then,’ he said. ‘But for fuck’s sake be quick.’

Lom ploughed on alone through the snow, following the line of the overhead rail. The cluster of huts was at least half a mile away. It was slow going. He hunched his face into his collar against the bitter cold. Stuffed his hands into his pockets, flexing his fingers to keep them mobile. His breath plumed steam clouds. What had seemed flat terrain from the rail car was undulating ridges and dips, crests and berms. The circle of the half-visible around him grew inexorably wider, the twilight before dawn inching towards grey. But there was nothing to see: only the levels of rolling tundra, indistinct under thin drifting mist.

He was holding tight to the idea–the unsurrendered certainty–that Maroussia was there in that cluster of huts half a mile ahead. He had no plan. That didn’t matter: plans never lasted thirty seconds when the action started. Here in subarctic near-darkness, alone and driving himself forward, chest heaving, heart pounding, across the sharp crusted snow, he knew what he had to do, the only thing he could possibly do, and he was doing it.

There was nothing else in the world but him and the half-mile of ice between him and Maroussia. It all came down to that. He had chosen this. He had made his decisions and chosen the path that brought him here. He was absolutely responsible and absolutely free and he would not fail; he would not be too late and he would not die, because to fail was to fail Maroussia, and that he would not do.

And he was, in that moment, completely and absolutely alive.

Inside the tiny bathroom Maroussia locked the door. She looked at her face in the mirror hung on a hook above the sink. She looked tired and sick. Bruise-blue shadows under her eyes. A pink graze across her face. There were angry raised welts on her wrists and arms where Chazia’s straps had rubbed and cut. She felt sick. She would not think of that. Not now. Not ever. She would not remember.

She wrapped a towel around her hand. Then she lifted the mirror off the wall and smashed it against the sink.

‘Hey!’ called the lieutenant. ‘What are you doing in there?’ He tried the door. ‘Fuck,’ he said, but quietly so that Chazia would not hear. He didn’t want her to know. He began to bump his weight against the door, but hesitantly. He would make no more noise than he had to.

Maroussia picked up the biggest shard of broken mirror. Gripped it tight in her towel-wrapped palm. Settled the edge of it firmly in her hand. A vicious, pointed shard of glass about five inches long.

The thumping against the door fell into a predictable rhythmic pattern. The bolt was beginning to give. With her free hand Maroussia slid it quietly back.

At the next crash of the lieutenant’s weight, the door burst open and he stumbled in, surprised. Unbalanced, he took a couple of stuttering steps forward. Maroussia stepped in behind him, put the dagger of glass against the side of his throat and pushed. She had to push hard. Two, three times she sawed the jagged edge back and forth. There was a lot of blood. When she let the lieutenant drop to the floor he was not dead. He was trying to shout and scream. He had two mouths now, both of them gaping open and spilling blood, but neither had a voice. Only a desperate bubbling wheeze.

She dropped the towel and knelt beside him, the warm pool of his blood soaking into the skirt of her dress. She went through the pockets of his jacket, searching, hoping what she was looking for was still there, where she had watched him carelessly shove it the night before. It was. Her fingers touched the broken pieces. She pulled out the fragments of the solm her mother had been bringing when she died, gripped them tight in her palm and stood up, careful not to slip on the blood on the floor.

Maroussia left the lieutenant still moving weakly in the growing pool of his own mess. She went out the back of the blockhouse into the dark and the snow.

89

Lom was still several hundred yards from the cluster of huts, moving slowly and cautiously, crouching to keep off the brightening skyline, when Florian appeared suddenly beside him as if he had risen up out of the snow.

‘Maroussia?’ said Lom. ‘Did you find her?’

Florian looked at him strangely for a moment and said nothing.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Lom. ‘Is she there?’

‘She is there,’ said Florian. ‘She has been hurt but she is alive. She is very strong.’

Lom felt a desperate knot of tension suddenly dissolve. He hadn’t realised how dark his world had grown since he’d lost her. He wanted to throw his arms round Florian and hug him but did not. Florian looked grave.

‘What?’ said Lom. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Florian. ‘Nothing.’

‘Then let’s go.’

‘Yes. But cautiously. There are two huts. One with soldiers. VKBD. Seven. Maroussia is in the other. Chazia is also there, and one soldier, and men who are not soldiers. Scientists. Technicians. Nine.’

Lom pushed his elation aside. Focus on now. They needed to get Maroussia out and away. He considered the position. They had two Vagants between them. Full chambers but no spare ammunition. Eight soldiers, plus Chazia herself, who would not be negligible if it came to a fight. And if they could get Maroussia safely away, what then? They were in a snowfield a hundred miles or more on the wrong side of the mountain, on an island in a freezing sea. But then they had Florian. Lom had seen what he could do.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Could be worse.’

‘It is,’ said Florian. ‘They have a mudjhik.’

‘No,’ said Lom. He looked towards the distant huts. ‘Surely not. I’d feel it by now.’

‘It is there. Not a large one. Ten feet tall perhaps. It seems inactive. I was not aware of it until I got close. Its presence startled me.’

‘OK,’ said Lom again. ‘Anything else?’

‘Outbuildings for storage. A diesel generator. An overhead rail car like the one we came in on. And there’s a single railway track, away to the left over there. It runs on into the north. Towards the Pollandore.’

Lom felt a tightening in his stomach. His mouth was dry.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said.

90

Lom was less than a hundred yards from the blockhouses. Florian had slipped away and disappeared, circling round to the left. Lom scrambled forward across the snow until he could see the mudjhik. It was standing upright, motionless, a squat statue of solid brick-red taller than the concrete blockhouses, arms at its side, its head, an eyeless faceless mass, turned towards the north. Lom let his mind drift towards it cautiously, reaching out for a contact, probing delicately, looking for a way in. And found it.

The mudjhik was not dormant. It was absorbed in studying the snow. With angel senses, not sight but precise acute awareness, it was examining individual crystals of snow. Sifting from one to the next with absolute patience, it traced their intricate hexagonal symmetry. The ramification of columns and blades of ice. The uncountable variety. It found the broken ones and tested the edges of their fractures. It teased the nested clumps, the accidental fusions. It followed the prismatic refractions of muted light down beneath the mute mirror-glitter surface as the greyness broke into spectrum fragments, growing green then blue then dark. To the mudjhik’s patient watchfulness the snow was as deep and mysterious as oceans.

Long slow inches below the surface the mudjhik touched solid compacted ice and sank its attention in. Ran its mind along faults and pressure lines and the million captured imperfections of grit and dust. The mudjhik found it all infinitely, endlessly satisfying. The ice and snow was beautiful and it was happy.

Lom traced the faint cord of connection from the mudjhik to its handler. The line was almost not there at all: the handler’s focus was elsewhere, on something inside the building. It had been the same for hours, the mudjhik almost forgotten. Gently, gently, Lom squeezed the connection closed, cut it off entirely, and slid in behind it. The mudjhik was his.

Lom made himself known.

The mudjhik sprang to life. It was like an inward eye opening. Glaring and hot. It opened its thoughtless sentient mind like a dark hot mouth, gaping and hungry. Tried to grasp at Lom and swallow him and haul him fully inside. But Lom was strong. He knew what he was doing. The angel stain in his own blood answered the mudjhik’s assault with a fierce roaring.

No, said Lom-in-mudjhik, I am not yours. You are mine. You are mine. You are mine.

Lom forced himself through every part of the mudjhik’s body, occupying it entirely. Taking possession. He found the animal brain and spinal column of nerves buried deep inside, felt the sparking of dark red electricity along lifeless-alive synapses and alienated neurones, understood and mastered them. Lom-in-mudjhik felt the strength and blazing awareness of the mudjhik. His strength. His awareness.

Go! he screamed. Go! Go!

His own human body was nothing to him now: a squatting shell leaning against a wall of snow, slumped, head down, sightless and breathing shallow and rough. Lom-in-mudjhik was moving fast towards the blockhouse where the soldiers were.

Lom-in-mudjhik lashed his fist against the concrete wall. Smashed the wall again and again. Men were in there. Men to hunt and kill.

Lom-in-mudjhik remembered how satisfying it was to burst a human skull between his hands. The sudden splash of warmth as the life went out. The blockhouse was filled with the reverberations in the air that humans made with lungs and mouths. Steel implements made their familiar small explosions. Lom-in-mudjhik traced the path of the small projectiles: some of them struck his body, their kinetic energy becoming gobbets of heat to feed his core. A couple that were going to miss him he slapped out of the air for fun. Lom-in-mudjhik killed the men with methodical deliberation, one by one.

When there was only one left he let it scrabble out through the door and start to run. Waited a moment for the pleasure of the chase. He knew what this one was: his former handler. He began to lope after him slowly, following along as the man raced and skidded and fell, making reverberations with his mouth. Lom-in-mudjhik knew that man’s dreams and nightmares, how he had imagined and feared just such an unwinnable race as this.

Slowly, gradually, patiently, Lom-in-mudjhik came up alongside the running man and fulfilled his dreams.

The Pollandore watches Maroussia coming north across the ice. She is wearing nothing but a dress and thin shoes and the front of the dress is soaked in blood which is not hers. The blood is freezing on her dress. Bright crimson crystals stiffen the cotton. The crystals are thin and brittle and sometimes they crack and fall.

Maroussia is so cold that she will die if she does not get warm.

Ahead of her in the dark Uncle Vanya’s cousin is waiting.

She will be warm enough soon.

Wolf-Florian sniffed at Maroussia’s trail in the snow. Picked up pace and followed it for a while, then slowed and hung back. He circled, a grey prowling shadow in an agony of uncertainty. He paused. Testing whether the time had come.

It had not come.

Wolf-Florian turned away and ran back towards the perfumed breathing beacon that was Vissarion Lom.

Archangel sees him.

Archangel-fragment-bird is alert. Even as his moment of triumph approaches he is monitoring the peripheries. He does not overlook the danger. Archangel has outgrown mistakes.

Archangel sees the wolf. And, following the threads, scanning the environs, he finds the abandoned, dormant body of Vissarion Lom. Archangel perceives the tiny possibility of threat, the hairline crack at the margin of his domain.

Archangel acts.

He tears a hole in the preposterous angel-suit and crashes screaming into the mind of Lavrentina Chazia, who is waiting on the ice for the moment of ignition, when Uncle Vanya’s big cousin kindles into cataclysm.

DESTROY THE TRAVELLERS! THEY ARE COMING!

CRUSH THEM! BREAK THEM! DESTROY THEM NOW!

Lavrentina Chazia burned with ecstatic joy at the coming of the Archangel voice. Her belly exploded with detonations of pleasure. Hot with the obedience-thrill of Archangelic power and purpose, encased in angel substance and gravid with Archangel harvest, she turned and began to run.

91

Lom-in-mudjhik felt a sharp blow across his face. It stung. But it was not Lom-in-mudjhik’s face that hurt: it was the face of his old useless abandoned human body. Some creature was leaning over it. Shaking it. Making the air reverberate with quiet urgency. The creature was like a human but not. A hunting beast. A new thing.

A thing to kill, then.

Lom-in-mudjhik began to run.

The creature’s reverberations had some faint meaning that percolated down through Lom-in-mudjhik’s understanding. To part of him they meant something, to part not. Because Lom-in-mudjhik was two parts now, not one.

Vissarion! Vissarion!

Florian was hissing his name in his ear.

Lom opened his eyes and coughed. Retched sour liquid down his chest.

‘Vissarion!’

Florian put his hand under his chin and lifted his head. Lom opened his eyes and brought Florian’s face into focus. A pain in the front of his head pounded mercilessly. He puked again.

‘You killed them,’ said Florian. ‘All of them.’

‘I thought…’ Lom shook his head to clear the pain a little. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Not me. Not me that killed them. It. I thought I could control it…’ He snapped his head up abruptly, looking around. ‘Maroussia? Where is Maroussia? Where is she?’

‘She wasn’t in the building. She slipped away. Escaped. But she’s gone north. Towards the Pollandore. Towards the bomb.’

‘Bomb? What bomb?’

‘Khyrbysk’s bomb. The one that sets the world on fire.’

‘What?’

‘The bomb is the other thing,’ said Florian. ‘Fucker Khyrbysk’s other thing. I knew… He was hiding it. I should have pressed him harder. I should have… I have made mistakes, I have done everything wrong.’

Lom struggled to think. The aftertaste of the mudjhik’s mind was still in his, dark red and confusing.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Maroussia. Why has she gone there?’

‘Because the Pollandore is there. Chazia is going to destroy it with the bomb. Maroussia… she has gone there for the Pollandore.’

Lom struggled to his feet. He felt dizzy and weak.

‘How do you know?’

‘About the Pollandore?’

‘About the bomb!’

‘The technicians were only too happy—’

‘We have to follow,’ said Lom.

Florian grabbed his arm.

‘You can’t help her, Vissarion. The bomb will detonate in…’ He grabbed Lom’s wrist and looked at his watch: 8.33. ‘We have twenty-seven minutes. Not enough. Even here we are not safe outside the bunker. The bomb is the largest they’ve made. The technicians are not happy about being even this close. They are leaving.’

As Florian was speaking they heard the sound of an overhead rail car starting into life. It trundled away to the south as they watched.

‘The detonation cannot be halted from here,’ said Florian. ‘The operations control room is elsewhere.’

‘I’m going after her,’ said Lom.

‘You can’t. It will destroy you.’

‘I’m going after her. You get away while you can. There’s no need for you—’ He stopped suddenly. ‘Chazia,’ he said. ‘Where is she? Did you—’

‘Somewhere out on the ice. I could not find her. She has a protective suit. She thinks it will keep her safe against the effects of the blast, but the technicians—’

Florian broke off. His head jerked round suddenly and he leaped aside, landing ten feet away in a crouch. His body longer, thinner, whiplash strong.

The mudjhik was lumbering fast towards them over the ice.

No! Stop!

Lom slammed up a wall in front of the mudjhik. It was like a word spoken. A sheer instinctive act of will. The mudjhik crashed into it and fell to its knees. Dazed. Lost.

There, said Lom-in-mudjhik gently, letting his mind run smooth and quiet across his own anger. Calm. Patience. Look at the snow. Look. Look at the snow. Together we are better. Together we are calm. Together we are still.

Vissarion Lom was a separate watchfulness, inside Lom-in-mudjhik but not lost there.

I’m getting better at this. I can do this now.

Lom-in-mudjhik let his awareness run wider, yard by yard, out across the ice. The sky was a widening bowl of grey cloud, filling now with iron day. Blades of wind sifted the surface crystals, moving them into new patterns. Florian was there, tense and watching, crouched ready to run or fight. Florian his ally. Florian his friend.

And there was someone else coming up behind him, moving fast. It was Chazia.

Lom-in-mudjhik knew the taste of Chazia’s mind well enough. All too well. He remembered… But this was Chazia different. Chazia something else. Chazia, like a mudjhik but not, with a size and energy not her own. She stank of angel mind and angel flesh. She was coming across the ice with more than human strength, bearing down on Lom’s abandoned and defenceless human body and his Florian-friend.

Chazia on fire with angels and coming to kill.

Florian sensed her racing towards him, swung round and leaped at her, rising high and coming down on her shoulders, scrabbling at the crude covering that masked her face. She shook him off. He fell to the ground and twisted and jumped to his feet, snarling, changing, more wolf than man, but hampered by his human clothes and struggling to get a purchase on the snow. Chazia picked him up by the scruff of his neck with one hand and punched his body with the other. Florian felt his body snap and jerk. He kicked at her desperately with both feet. The collar and back of his coat tore in her grip. He twisted free and collapsed to the ground again, panting with pain, moving awkwardly, smearing blood across the snow. His ribs were badly smashed. He needed to get clear and repair the damage.

Lom-in-mudjhik watched the strange half-human, half-angel contraption that Lavrentina Chazia had become as she turned towards Lom’s inert abandoned human body. Felt the surge of anticipation as Chazia prepared to destroy him.

I am not there, said Lom-in-mudjhik, forcing the thought with ease into Chazia’s angel-cased head. I am behind you. Look at me. I am here.

Chazia jerked round and stared at the mudjhik.

Lom?

I have been coming for you. I told you that I would.

So you came, said Chazia. I’m glad you are here. I will enjoy your death. And then the Pollandore will die. Maroussia will be released from illusion and taste the bitterness of truth and then she will die. And the living angel will see it all and know that I am strong and deserving of acceptance.

A part of Lom that was only Lom, not Lom-in-mudjhik, lurched in pain when it heard Maroussia’s name, and Chazia felt the hurt. It was an advantage and she drove it home.

I have spent much time with Maroussia, Lom, she said. We got to know each other very thoroughly. You should have been there. You should have come sooner.

I am here now.

Chazia was edging away towards a space of flat open snow where she would have room to move. She thinks there is going to be a fight. She thinks she is going to fight a mudjhik.

It was time to kill her.

Lom-in-mudjhik drove swiftly forward, sure-footed across the ice. He swept his fist forward and crashed it into the side of Chazia’s head inside the angel carapace. Always the head is best. Heads are fragile. Heads are weak.

Lom-in-mudjhik felt Chazia’s sharp, sickening explosion of pain and confusion. Her world skidding sideways. Lom-in-mudjhik felt triumph and joy. He knew that this human was weak inside her angel shell. She did not know how to wear it: she was in it but she was not it. She was Chazia and Suit, not Chazia-in-suit, and it protected her no more than a skin of tin. Lom-in-mudjhik could kill her inside it. No problem. Don’t damage the suit. I need the suit. She doesn’t know how to use it. But I do.

Lom-in-mudjhik stepped round in front of Chazia. She was on her hands and knees, crawling away. He could feel her pain and fear. She had realised the truth of what was going to happen to her. Commander of killers, torturer, trespasser-invader of lives and minds, Lavrentina Chazia knew she was going to die, and Lom-in-mudjhik was glad she knew. He stepped forward and leaned over her scrabbling form. With precise and delicate fingers–fingers that could separate a snowflake unbroken from the rest and pluck its star points one by one–Lom-in-mudjhik unbuckled the headpiece and removed it from Chazia’s head. Then he took hold of her body with one hand under her arm and lifted her up until she was level with him. Bloodshot, panicking and helpless. she stared into his rough-shaped blank and eyeless face.

Lom-in-mudjhik brought Chazia closer and closer to him. His free hand was behind her head, cupping it in his palm. He tangled his mudjhik fingers in her hair and brought her face close against his face, touching her brow against his face of angel rock, touching her mouth to where his mouth should have been if a mudjhik had a mouth.

It was like a kiss.

Sweet kiss.

She was the torturer, the killer, the Vlast, and this was revenge.

With his hand that was behind her head, Lom-in-mudjhik pressed Chazia’s face into his. And pressed. And pressed.

Until her head broke against his like a warm, spilling egg.

Lom withdrew himself from the mudjhik more easily than before and left it contemplating snow. Back in his own human form–none too soon, he had begun to feel it slipping away and beginning to die–he crouched beside Chazia’s body and began to remove the angel skin. It was heavy, awkward work. He felt empty and sick. He wanted to think the mudjhik had done the thing like that, not him. But he knew differently.

Florian limped up beside him, pale and drawing shallow rasping breaths, wincing as he worked at his chest with his fingers. He looked and said nothing. There was no need.

Lom had no time to think about what he had done. Something else to do.

‘Help me,’ said Lom. ‘Help me get this on. Quickly, for fuck’s sake. It can take me nearer the bomb. Chazia knew that; I felt her think it.’

Piece by piece they removed the angel casing from Chazia and wiped it clean in the snow, leaving churned-up places smeared with blood and brain and fragments of bone. Lom was afraid it would be too small for him, but he felt each element adjust itself to him. It was as if the suit wanted him to put it on. He felt it sliding along his skin, stretching and folding itself around him, becoming warm. It felt natural, like sliding into water at body heat. He knew how to do it. What am I doing? What’s happening to me? What is this thing I am becoming? He pushed the thought aside. Later.

92

Maroussia was so cold she no longer felt cold. She had no feeling at all. She wanted to lie down in the warm soft welcoming snow and sleep. She wanted to swim in the comforting snow and float in its amniotic warmth. Wash away the marks and stains and stickiness of what Chazia and the lieutenant had done to her. She wanted to still her memory for ever.

Soon she would do this. Soon, but not yet.

Inside its carapace of angel flesh, Vissarion Lom’s human body ran, and the strength of angels carried him over snow and ice. Racing lightly across the surface, scarcely breaking the crust, he moved faster than he had ever moved before. His senses were angel senses and human senses too. The wind was in his face and every crystal of snow on North Zima Island was sharp and crisp and distinct.

Lom ran.

Somewhere ahead of him in the distance, beyond the horizon, he was aware of something waiting. A point of impossibility. Present in the world but not of it. The Pollandore. It pulsed like a heart beating. It knew he was there and called him on. It had location but no shape and no certain size. Sometimes it was a tiny particle, one more grain of snow. Sometimes it swelled to absorb the sky. It was alive and changing. But he could not find Maroussia. He could not do that.

Alongside him Florian ran, easily keeping pace. He was a grey wolf running, and he was Florian, who could have run the other way and might have saved himself, but did not.

Wolf-Florian ran in heart-bursting despair, his still-tender ribs sending bright jabs of pain shooting through his chest. The Shaumian woman was too near the Pollandore. He would not reach her now. He would not prevent her. She would get there.

He might have stopped her when he had the chance. But he had not decided, and that had become in the end his decision.

He would live with the consequences.

If only for a short while.

The Pollandore is in front of Maroussia. Neither close nor far away. It hangs in no time and no space. Waiting for her. Inviting her to go on. The gap that separates her from the Pollandore is not a gap in this world. It is the gap between worlds. Unbridgeable. Unmeasurable by any planetary metrication. Worlds apart and not apart at all. Uncrossable.

Maroussia crossed.

Miles away a technician flicked a switch on a control panel. A jolt of electrical current surged along the long rubber-sheathed cables that snaked for miles across the snow. The current reached Uncle Vanya’s big fat cousin and gave him a nudge.

Detonation.

A star ignited and the world broke open into light.

The angel suit that carried Vissarion Lom knew what this was. This was home. The angel flesh surged. It flowered. It was itself a skin of woven light. Against the storm of starlight it stood, made itself of light, not moving but moving, pace against pace, light into light, going nowhere. For one moment of eternity time itself slowed and paused. Lom, held safe within the cohesive web of light, was everywhere and nowhere, now and for ever.

The snow was gone and the whole country was lit with an intensity brighter than any midday sun. Gold and purple and blue. Sheets of rock lit with more than planetary clarity. There were mountain ranges in the distance, low on the horizon, he had not seen before. Every fold and gully and snow-covered peak was clear and vivid and scarcely beyond the reach of his hand.

Then the light passed.

Lom was running again, running against the burning wind towards an enormous ball of fire that churned and rolled towards him, and churned and rolled up into the burning sky. Climbing for miles. Lemon. Crimson. Green. The cloud of fire rolled over him like a wave and gathered Lom in.

The wind of light from the new star brushed grey-wolf-Florian-running out of the world in a stream of particles too small for soot.

Archangel screams in the consummation of his joy.

Lom ran. The ground itself was boiling. A roaring column of heat and dust and burning earth lifted the huge flower of fire from his shoulders and carried it up. High overhead the explosion cloud boiled and swelled and spread, blocking out the sky, shedding its own darkening light: a hard rain falling.

The Pollandore was ahead of him, turning gently on its own orbit, following its own parabolas of fall, there but not there, a sphere of greenish milky brightness the size of a small house. It was a survivor. He ran towards it.

Lom stopped in front of the Pollandore and stood there, braced against the howling winds of desolation. He reached out to touch it. It moved with gentle resistance at the pressure of the Lom-in-angel hand and swung back into position.

He was trembling.

Maroussia was not there.

Maroussia had gone into the dark.

Lom felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Vissarion?’

Her voice. He didn’t want to turn and look. It wouldn’t be her.

He turned.

‘Yes?’ he said.

Maroussia was standing there, hesitant, smiling. Her eyes were different. She wasn’t the same. Standing in sunlight under a different sky.

‘It isn’t you,’ he said.

‘Yes. It is.’

She was in sunshine and he was under dry burning rain, encased in angel light. But none of it was there. He put his arms around her and smelled woodsmoke and summer warmth in her hair. He kissed her mouth and felt her hand pressing against his back.

Then she drew away from him. The distance between them was widening rapidly though neither of them had moved. The Pollandore was changing now, the interior pulsing with milky light to the rhythm of a slow inaudible heart. It was shrinking, condensing, diminishing, falling into itself, and the fall was a very long way and no distance at all.

Maroussia’s expression changed. Darkened. Her gaze turned inward.

‘Oh,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh… I see… I see what I have done… I didn’t know.’

‘What is it? Tell me.’

She shook her head. Her eyes were wide and dark.

‘I have to go now,’ she said.

‘Wherever you go,’ said Lom ‘whatever comes next, I will find you.’

‘No… I’m sorry, no… you can’t follow, not where I’m going, nobody can, not any more. The way is shut now and must be held shut. I didn’t think it would be like this… but there’s no choice… I’m so sorry…’

Smaller and smaller and further away the Pollandore went. It had not moved, but it was separated from Lom by a great and growing distance. It was a mark of misty brightness on a far horizon, small as a fruit. He could have reached out and held it in his hand.

And Maroussia was not there at all.

The Pollandore folded in upon itself until it was nowhere, until it occupied no space and no time, until it was a concentrated singular point of unsustainable possibility balanced on the imperceptible edge between now and not.

And then it exploded, and the explosion passed through him like it was nothing at all.

The shockwave flashed outwards from the unsustainable zero point–not light, not heat, not sound, not energy of any kind, but a cataclysm-detonation of consequence and change–and nothing was like it had been before, and everything was the same, except that Lom was there, in the star-burned wastes of Novaya Zima at the foot of Uncle Vanya’s twisted gantry, a frozen cooling torsion-structure under the desultory falling-to-earth of radioactive rain, and Maroussia was not there at all.

Archangel screams again. He sees the implication of what has been done. This time his scream is not for joy.

Lom stood in the cooling ground zero of the exploded Pollandore and the future spread out round him, a carpet unrolled in all directions at the speed of light. Whether Maroussia had done it, or whether it had been done to Maroussia, for good or for ill, it was done, and what came afterwards would all be consequence of that.

‘I will come looking for you,’ he said aloud to the echoless aftermath world.

93

The world was changed, changed utterly, and the world still felt the same, because it was the same, except that time was all clockwork and inevitable now. History roared on like a building wave across the open ocean, like an express on a straight and single track roaring ahead into an obvious future. Like the train rolling at full speed from Novaya Zima towards Mirgorod, hauling its cargo of a hundred yellow 180mm calibre atomic artillery shells and Hektor Shulmin in the solitary passenger car.

There was a second telephone on the desk in Rizhin’s office in the Armoury. He’d had it installed the day he arrived, with instructions that it should be given a certain number, which he provided. The number was of the utmost importance. Nobody was to know that number and nobody was to call it, not ever: Rizhin was quite clear on that point. He left precise instructions with his staff on what to do if it rang when he was not there.

‘That telephone must always be watched,’ he said, ‘always, twenty-four hours a day, never left unattended, and if it rings the call must be taken. Nothing is more important than this. The caller will not ask for me, he will ask for the Singer. Check this. Be precise. If the caller does not ask for the Singer, say nothing and hang up immediately. But if he does ask for the Singer, you must ask him what the arrangements are and note everything he says, everything, note every detail precisely. And I must be told immediately, wherever I am, without delay.’

Every day Rizhin watched that telephone and every day it did not ring. Nevertheless, the top of the raion hill was cleared. All the buildings surrounding the Ship Bastion were razed to the ground. The cobbled square was dug up and replaced with a new concrete foundation, a wide straight way was driven up to the peak and three huge guns were hauled up and set in place there: three two-hundred-pounders from the battleship Admiral Irtysh which was currently blockaded in the naval yard. The long muzzles of grey steel pointed silently out across the city. Rizhin had the Ship Bastion scattered with rubble, the guns covered with grey camouflage netting and a circle of anti-aircraft guns emplaced in bunkers to surround and protect them.

The enemy drew its noose tighter round the city as winter closed in. Two weeks passed. The guns on the Ship Bastion did not fire.

One morning when Rizhin was in his office alone the long-silent telephone rang.

‘Yes?’ said Rizhin.

My name is Shulmin. Is this the Singer please? Are you the Singer? Get him for me please. I must speak to him, only to him.

‘I am the Singer. Do you have what I need?’

Yes, but there is a problem. The voice on the end of the line sounded exhausted. Frightened and full of stress.

‘Problem?’ said Rizhin.

The city is surrounded by the enemy. There is no way through.

‘Of course. Where are you now? Where is the consignment? Is it with you?’

It is with me. It is safe. I’m at a railhead on the north shore of Lake Dorogha but the train can go no further, they’re talking of turning back, the enemy is close. We can hear shooting.

‘Do not turn back,’ said Rizhin. ‘Do not allow that. Shoot the driver if necessary.’

I don’t have a gun.

‘Improvise. The train must not turn back.’

There was a long silence on the end of the line.

What should I do? said Shulmin at last.

‘Do nothing,’ said Rizhin. ‘Wait. Wait there. Someone will come.’

The enemy was taken by surprise by the sudden breakout through the siege lines to the north of Mirgorod, a concerted night attack against a weak point in the salient. In the confusion of battle there were reports that three heavy trucks had raced through at speed and disappeared into the darkness. Some said battle-tanks had cleared the way and gone ahead, but this was dismissed as fanciful: the Vlast had no battle-tanks in Mirgorod. Some said a giant man of red stone had come out of the night and wrought appalling damage. They said the giant knew where the snipers were and pulled down the buildings they were in, stove in their chests and crushed their skulls. Whatever the truth of what happened, it came quickly and it was over before anyone in the enemy command was sure exactly what had occurred. After the first flurry of discussion the Archipelago officers paid the event little attention: it was a small breakout and of no consequence.

Three days later it happened again but in reverse: another sudden, confusing and ferocious night attack on a different part of the line. And this time the muddled reports spoke of trucks racing into the city.

The following morning Rizhin gathered his commanders and the city administrators around him on the Ship Bastion. Shulmin was there to oversee the firing. It was ten in the morning, Mirgorod time.

‘One shot will be enough,’ said Shulmin. ‘One will send the message. They will see.’

‘Ten,’ said Rizhin. ‘Send them ten.’

The two hundred pound guns of the Admiral Irtysh spoke and spoke again. One by one, ten seeds of blinding light were sown along the horizon to the south of Mirgorod, illuminating the underbelly of low grey cloud. A flicker of distant summer warmth on the air. A grove of mushroom clouds cracked and burst and reformed on the skyline and dry thunder rolled back across the city, re-echoing the dying roar of the guns behind them.

‘Send a runner to Carnelian,’ said Rizhin. ‘I will accept her unconditional surrender this evening at six.’

He turned to the dumbfounded watchers at the parapet blinking away their retinal burn. Their faces were reddened and sullen with shock.

‘And so I give you back your city, my friends.’ he said, ‘the first prize of many yet to come. Stay with me now and watch me clear the mess away and set the Vlast in order. We will build a New Vlast, stronger than before. We have a long way to go. Further than you imagine.’

All the rest of that day Rizhin listened out for the voice of Archangel thundering in his head but it did not come. For more than two weeks now it had not come. I am free of it then, he said to himself. Free of it and alone. I am the voice of history. I am the mile high man.