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.
Truth and Fear Page 24