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.
&nbs
p; 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 aga
in. 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.
Truth and Fear Page 34