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 ver
y 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.
Truth and Fear Page 35