Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  He let the winding narrow streets take him where they would. There was a shape and rhythm to them that was not human. He saw openings and followed them. Narrow corners at acute angles he had to squeeze through sideways. Gateways too low for adults to pass through without bending. Gaps and gratings whose purpose he could not grasp. Rounding the bends of wandering alleyways he felt himself entering localities of awareness: attentive, watchful presences shadowing his, though he could see nothing. Frustrated, he felt himself walking along the edge of something. On the borderline of some discovery he could not make. Nightside. The only sounds were small ones: a latch rattling in the wind, the slump of snow disturbed in a gutter, and once the shriek of a street-scavenging fox. Crossing a wider cobbled square in a splash of moonshadow, he caught a trace of something different. A taint on the air. An intrusion. His stomach tightened. His neck prickled. Something sharp, cruel and disgusting had passed that way. An edge of panic began to scratch away at the edge of his mind and did not stop.

  Three times during the night he returned to the house to see if Maroussia had come back. He roused Elena Cornelius and the Count and together they combed the building from cellars to attics. It had obviously occurred to both of them, though they did not say it, that Maroussia had gone. Slipped away. Abandoned him. Left the city. It was in their faces as they helped him search the house. Elena at least thought it would have been a good move. But Lom didn’t believe it. He went to Kamilova’s house and banged on the door, but no one came.

  When dawn came and the Purfas Gate opened, he took the first tram of the day into the city, to the Lodka, on the possibility that Maroussia, unable to sleep, had decided to go there alone, to check it out, to be nearer the Pollandore, perhaps even to look for a way inside. It seemed unlikely, but he had no other ideas. None at all.

  51

  The wide open space in front of the Lodka, the immense Square of the Piteous Angel, was full of people, the atmosphere muted, determined, grim. Long lines had formed at temporary recruiting booths. Clerks took names under crude and blocky rust-coloured posters of comrades-in-arms charging with out-thrust bayonets, the men square-jawed, the women full-breasted, their hair like sheaves of corn. Those too old and infirm to sign up waited patiently to hand over their kopeks, their cutlery, their watches and chains and little pieces of jewellery at collection kiosks. The wind threw bitter scraps of snow in their faces.

  A man came and stood next to him. Together they watched the slow-moving queues in silence for a while. The stranger glanced sideways at Lom.

  ‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘In other cities they lined the streets when the Archipelago came. But not us. Not here. Not Mirgorod. You understand that?’

  Lom looked at the man sharply. Middle-aged, with faded thinning hair, the lenses of his glasses smeared, a day’s worth of dark red stubble on his chin and sagging neck. He wondered if he was a provokator. But there was a puzzled sadness in his face. He looked lost. He was just talking.

  ‘It’s their city,’ said Lom. ‘Their homes. Their families. They’re frightened.’

  The man shook his head, as if he was trying to clear his mind. Bring things into focus. ‘Of course this isn’t everyone,’ he said. ‘This is the ones who came, not the ones who didn’t. There’s more will have stayed at home. And people are leaving. Lots are leaving. Did you hear that?’

  ‘It makes sense,’ said Lom. ‘If they’ve got somewhere to go.’

  ‘You?’ the man said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You joining up?’

  ‘I’m looking for someone,’ said Lom. ‘I thought she might have come here. I didn’t know it was going to be like this.’

  The man nodded. He understood that.

  ‘My wife’s gone somewhere,’ he said. ‘She took the girls. Our house is gone. When I got back there was just this hole, and the back wall sticking up out of a pile of bricks. You can see our wallpaper. The kitchen up in the air. It looks small. Seemed bigger when we were in it.’ He rubbed his hand down across his face as if he was wiping something away. ‘You haven’t seen her, have you? Her hair’s grey. Cut short. Like this.’ He touched the back of his neck above the collar. ‘She’s not so old, only forty-three, but grey. Not white, grey. A nice iron-grey. She would have had the girls with her.’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I haven’t seen them. Sorry.’

  ‘I waited the night but they didn’t come. We always said we’d move to the country. You know, if the war came here. They must have gone ahead, but I don’t know where. They’ll send word. When they’re settled.’

  Lom didn’t have anything to say. After a while the man drifted away. ‘You take care now,’ he said as he went.

  A murmur moved across the square, a turning of heads like wind across a lake. Lom smelled smoke. Somewhere fires were burning. From the direction of the Lodka a thick pall was rising and spilling across the crowd. Scraps of burned paper in the wind. He joined the drift of people moving towards the place. Worked his way to the front.

  There was a huge open space in front of the Lodka filled with bonfires. There must have been fifty or sixty at least, set out in neatly spaced ranks. Some were already burning, spilling fierce licks of flame thirty or forty feet high, but most were still being built. Endless lines of soldiers and uniformed officials were filing out of the Lodka’s main entrance and down the steps, pushing trolleys and carrying document crates for the growing stacks. To one side a fleet of drays and olive-green trucks was drawn up. Some crates were being diverted towards them and loaded up, but those they did not plan to take, which was most of them, they were burning. The space around the fires was kept clear by lines of conscripts, pale-faced in their ill-fitting greatcoats, steel helmets strapped to their backpacks. Bayonets fitted, they avoided the gaze of the watching crowd.

  Behind the fires, the Lodka itself was closed up like a fortress. There was no way in. All the raisable bridges were raised, and the Yekaterinsky Bridge and the Streltski Gate had checkpoints watched by mounted dragoons and sandbagged mitrailleuse positions. The thousand-windowed frontage, rising high above the smoke, was hung with banners, the roofscape forested with flags. Emblems of the Vlast in its pride, red, black and gold, raised in wind-tugged defiance under the low leaden sky.

  But the Lodka was evacuating. The scale of what was happening was dumbfounding. The files and documents of a dozen ministries of government and police. The correspondence of diplomats and provincial land captains. Four hundred years of intelligence reports and observation records. The shrill denunciations and sly whispered secrets of informers. Confessions signed on blood-smeared paper. The transcripts of secret trials. The arraignments and sentences of every exile and prisoner in the Dominions. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of shelving. All the vast archives of the Registry, presided over by the towering Gaukh Engine. It would take weeks to burn it all. Months. An immense, tireless beacon to guide the bombers of the Archipelago to their target by night and day. The Vlast was spectacularly killing itself, and would surely take Mirgorod down with it. The watching crowd was beginning to mutter and grumble.

  Engines were started. A convoy was moving out. There were angry shouts as the conscripts cleared a path for the trucks and horse-drawn wagons loaded high with crates. They trundled and lumbered through at walking pace. Where were they going? Somewhere far away and safe from the war. South? Unlikely: too near the incursions of the Archipelago. North? They couldn’t get far enough, not with winter closing in. It must be east, then, somewhere east, somewhere in the thousands of miles between Mirgorod and the edge of the endless forest.

  A thought struck Lom. Hard. The Pollandore. They wouldn’t leave it to be found by the Archipelago if the city fell. They would take it with them. Shit.

  If he could think of that, so could Maroussia. She would have. If she had come here, if she had seen the evacuation beginning, she would have asked the question. Hours ago. She would have tried to find the answer. She would have followed.

  He needed to kno
w where the convoys were heading.

  He paced along beside one of the trucks at the back of the convoy edging its way through the crowd. There was only the driver in the cab. He reached up and opened the passenger-side door. Swung himself up and into the seat. Pulled the door shut behind him.

  ‘Hey!’ said the driver. ‘What the fuck—’

  Lom jammed the muzzle of the Blok 15 hard against his thigh.

  ‘Just drive,’ he said. ‘Like you were, everything normal.’

  ‘You must be fucking—’ the driver began.

  ‘There is a gun against your leg. It won’t make a hole, it will blow your leg away. Maybe both of them. Shatter the bones. Sever the main arteries. You’ll bleed empty in minutes. So just keep looking ahead and driving normally. Don’t mind me, I’m only along for the ride.’

  The driver, hands gripped tight on the wheel, knuckles white, kept his eyes fixed on the horse-drawn wagon in front. He tried to swallow but his throat was dry and he coughed. The truck stayed in the long line, nosing slowly through the city.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Lom.

  ‘The railway. The marshalling yards by the Wieland station.’

  ‘And after? Where are they taking all this stuff?’

  The driver shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know. I just turn around and come back for another load. Look. I don’t want any trouble. You need to get out now. When we get there, there’ll be—’

  ‘Just shut up and drive.’

  The convoy turned into Founder’s Prospect. There were crowds there too. The shops were being cleared out. People hauling bags and even handcarts piled high with bread and meat and oil. Anything. Some establishments were trying to operate some kind of rationing system. Two loaves per family, fifty kopeks. Eye-watering prices. There were long queues outside post offices and pawn shops,. A bank near the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge was trying to close its doors. There was shouting. Things getting ugly.

  At the corner near the Great Vlast Museum they got snarled in traffic. Another convoy was drawn up at the foot of the museum’s wide marble steps. Museum staff were carrying out rolled carpets and tapestries, bronze heads, tundra carvings, crates and boxes stuffed with straw, paintings still in their frames. Nothing properly packed. Treasures beyond price being dumped in the back of waiting vehicles.

  The truck lurched ahead a few feet and stopped again. The driver was staring at a group of militia watching from the top of the steps. He shifted in his seat, trying to move his leg away from the Blok’s muzzle.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Lom. ‘Sit still. Keep looking ahead.’

  It would have been quicker to walk, but as soon as he left the cab the driver would be shouting his head off. Lom slumped lower in his seat and tried to look bored.

  At last the convoy cleared the museum and picked up to a steady walking pace again. When they slowed at a crowded interchange Lom opened the door and slid out.

  ‘I’d keep quiet about what just happened,’ he said, ‘if I were you.’

  ‘Fuck you, arsehole,’ the driver muttered and gunned the throttle. The truck lurched a few feet forward.

  Lom’s back itched as he walked away, adrenaline pumping, waiting for shouts, ready to run. But nothing happened. Twenty seconds later he slipped down an alleyway and out of sight.

  52

  The Wieland marshalling yards were raucous chaos. Locomotives in full steam, whistles shrieking. Shunting engines stalled among crowds of citizens. Families picking their way across the tracks, dragging their luggage, desperate to find places on trains that were already spilling people out of the doors. Railway officials pushing, shoving, yelling and screaming. Crackling tannoy announcements. Citizen passengers must use station platforms! Access here is forbidden! No one was listening. There was no way through the heaving mass. No hope of finding Maroussia here, and no sign of the convoys from the Lodka.

  Lom skirted the crowds and came to a chain-link fence. Beyond it was another expanse of railway tracks, water towers, mobile cranes and what looked like freight cars raised on iron stilts. He climbed the fence painfully, gripping the wire with fingers numbed with cold, scrabbling for footholds against the stanchions. He rolled over the top and dropped awkwardly on the other side, picked himself up and ran.

  He sprinted across the open ground and ducked between two trains. There were more trains beyond: wooden wagons as long as barns and high as houses with six-foot-diameter wheels; the twelve-foot-gauge behemoths of the intercontinental freight lines. He went further in, following the lines of high-sided wagons that stretched away into the distance in both directions. From time to time he clambered through the space between two cars, only to find himself in another identical corridor between identical trains. It was a labyrinth and there was nothing to see. A narrow ladder at the end of each wagon climbed up to the roof. Lom chose one and went up the rungs until his head was clear and he could see across, but there were only the roofs of more wagons. No end to the rows of trains. Hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of identical wagons all lined up ready to go.

  He dropped to the ground and took a closer look at the car he’d climbed. There was a tall sliding door along one side. Padlocks looped through iron latches, but they weren’t locked. The bottom of the door was at head height, but there was a handle. He hauled at it and the door trundled back, running on small wheels in iron grooves. Greased, nice and easy. He opened up a four-foot gap, jumped and pulled himself up over the edge. Crawled on hands and knees in rough dusty straw. Inside was airy dimness and an overpowering smell of tar, disinfectant and straw. Cattle wagons. Empty. Only there were shadowy structures inside that didn’t look like cattle stalls.

  As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he stood up and looked around. There were no windows but narrow slatted gaps ran along near the roof, letting in thin strips of dusty light. The whole of the carriage was lined with slatted wooden racks, like bunks but wider, three tiers high, the top tier four feet under the tarred wooden roof. Each tier was packed with a layer of straw. Lidded barrels lined the narrow aisle that ran between them the length of the wagon. Lom opened barrels at random. Most of them held only water, but from every third one came acrid disinfectant fumes. In the far corner he found a couple of mops and shovels and a stack of galvanised buckets.

  They were cattle trucks, but for people. As Lom got used to the air inside the wagon, he picked out other smells under the overpowering reek of disinfectant. Urine. Excrement. Sweat. The trains had been used before, and they’d been cleaned up ready to be used again.

  Lom dropped to the ground and eased the door closed. All around him the high blank walls of identical railway trucks blocked out the sky, and each one could carry hundreds of people, jammed in side by side in acrid, excremental shadow. He kept on cutting sideways between them, ducking under or climbing across the heavy couplings. After four or five more he chose another ladder and took another look across the roofs.

  He was almost at the edge. A couple more lines of wagons, and then a stretch of dead ground, and beyond that, set apart within its own high perimeter fence, was a long military train. He was pretty much level with its two massive locomotives coupled in series, crudely plated with thick blue steel. Behind them was an anti-aircraft gun on a flatbed truck and a couple of slope-sided armoured wagons with firing slits for windows and roof-mounted gun turrets. The muzzles of twin twenty-pounders at rest, tilted skywards. The rest of the train as far as he could see was mostly made up of freight cars interspersed with passenger carriages, incongruously neat and fresh in their purple livery. The only exception was one flat truck about four or five hundred yards from Lom’s position, at the point where the train curved out of sight. It was wider than the rest of the train, and it had been fitted with what looked like wide iron trestles and a high canopy. Soldiers were draping it with grey camouflage netting. Somewhat apart from them, waiting patiently, arms at its side, observing, stood a crudely human-shaped figure. It was broad and squat but taller than the wagons.
A mudjhik, formed from a solid block of dull reddish-purple angel flesh.

  Lom felt the touch of the mudjhik’s awareness brush lightly across the surface of his mind, pass on for a second and flick sharply back. Its sightless head turned in his direction. The full force of its attention gripped him hard like a fist. He tried to close his mind against it and push it away, but the dazzling floodlight crash of its glare pinned him. He was naked and exposed, alone in a wide empty space, his shadow stretching out behind him, inky black and infinitely long. The mudjhik took a step in his direction, then another, gathering pace, opening its legs wider, relaxing into a steady loping jog.

  Lom slid down the ladder, crashing his shin painfully against the train coupling, and turned and ran. The long passage between the trains was a tunnel, a trap. He turned and scrambled between the carriages, crossed the narrow space and scrambled through again, and again, heart pounding, fighting panic, desperate to put as many trains as possible between himself and the approaching mudjhik. Repeatedly he slipped and stumbled, crashed bruisingly into couplings and the iron edges of the freight cars.

  The mudjhik knew where he was. Never for a moment did the grip of its awareness shift or falter. Lom felt the hunger of its desire to seize him, to pinch the cage of his ribs between its thumbs and squeeze. Somewhere at the margins of that fierce desire Lom sensed the mudjhik’s handler fighting to keep some measure of control. It was like trying to dig fingers into polished granite.

  The mudjhik could not pass between the railway wagons, it was too large, so it crashed through them, one after another, splintering the wooden superstructures and stepping over the iron chassis.

  Run. Lom heard the mudjhik’s mind in his. Run, little man, run. I am coming.

  The wagons could not stop the mudjhik, but they slowed it. When Lom broke through into open space on the other side, it was still a couple of hundred yards behind him. Ahead of him lay the waste ground he’d crossed before, the wire fence, and then the crowds hustling for places on the passenger trains out of Mirgorod. People there were looking his way. There were shouts and screams. They’d seen the out-of-control mudjhik smashing its way towards them through the cattle wagons. Lom sensed their rising fear. He launched himself towards them in a desperate sprint.