Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  Vishnik was sitting at the desk nursing a glass. He looked thin, almost gaunt. His hands were still trembling, but his eyes were warmer now, filled with the dark familiar ardour, missing nothing. It was the same clear serious face, illuminated with an intense intelligence. There was something wild and sad there, which hadn’t been there when they were young. But this was Raku Vishnik still.

  ‘You gave me a fright, my friend,’ Vishnik was saying. ‘I was ungracious. I apologise. I spend too much time alone these days. One becomes a little strung out, shall we say.’

  ‘What about your work?’ said Lom. ‘The university.’

  Lom had gone with Vishnik to see him onto the boat, the day he left Podchornok for Mirgorod. Vishnik was going to study history at the university, while Lom was to stay in Podchornok and join the police. Vishnik had dressed flamboyantly then. Wide-brimmed hats and bright bow ties. The fringe longer and floppier. They’d exchanged letters full of cleverness and joking and the futures that awaited them both in their chosen professions. Vishnik was going to become a professor, and he had. But the correspondence dwindled over the years and finally stopped. Lom had settled into the routine of the Provinciate Investigations Department.

  ‘The university?’ said Vishnik. ‘Ah. Now they, they are fuckers. They don’t let me teach any more. My background became known. My family. Someone let the bloody secret out. Aristocrats. Nobility. Former persons. Some of the darling students complained. And then of course there was the matter of my connections with the artists. The poets. The cabaret clubs. I used to write about all that. Did you know? Of course not. Criticism. Essays. Journalism. The magazines could never afford to pay me, but sometimes they gave me a painting.’ He waved clumsily at the walls. ‘But that’s all over. It appears I became an embarrassment to the authorities. The hardliners run the show now, on matters of aesthetics like everything else. These pictures are degenerate. Fuck. They closed the galleries and the magazines. The painters are forbidden to paint. They still do, of course. But it’s dangerous now. And I am silenced. Forbidden to publish. Forbidden to teach.’

  He emptied his glass and filled it again. Poured one for Lom.

  ‘That’s tough,’ said Lom. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was lucky. Not completely cast into the outermost darkness. I think some of my fucker colleagues did have the grace to feel a little ashamed. They have made me the official historian of Mirgorod, no less. In that august capacity I sit here before you now. There’s even a small stipend. I can afford to eat. Not that anyone wants a history of Mirgorod. I doubt it will ever be published. I’m not spoken to, Vissarion, not any more. And I’m watched. I’m on the list. My time will come. I thought it had, when you came banging at the fucking door. They always come in the night. Never the fucking morning. Never fucking lunchtime. Always the fucking middle of the fucking night.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think—’

  ‘Fuck it. Fuck them, Vissarion. Tell me that you haven’t changed.’

  ‘I haven’t changed.’

  Vishnik raised his glass.

  ‘To friendship, then. Welcome to Mirgorod.’

  Archangel studies his planet, his prison, his cage. He assembles the fragments, the minds he has sifted and collected, and comes to understand it better. The planet has a history, and history is a voice. The people of the planet serve their history as photons serve light, as agglomerations of massiveness serve gravity. The voice of history is a dark force.

  And Archangel comes to understand that the voice of this planet’s history is broken. In the future that is coming and has already been, the future that re-imagines its own antecedence, a catastrophic mistake is made.

  And he learns something else, which is a danger to him. Cruel and immediate danger. Somewhere nearby there still exists a well of old possibility. The vestige of an older voice. The lost story that can no longer speak is tucked away somewhere in silent obscurity. It does not exist in the world but it is there. Beside it. In potential. A seed dormant. A storage cell untapped.

  And this encapsulation of failed futurity is ripening, and breaking, and beginning to leak. It is beginning to wonder: maybe what is done will yet be undone?

  Archangel roars.

  ‘THAT CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!’

  Archangel must return to the space between the stars, which is his birthright and his stolen domain. Not merely return to it, but seize it, consume it, become it. Become the stars. Become the galaxies. Better than before. He sees how it can be done. This planet can do it for him.

  ‘Let the voice of the planet be my voice. Let the voice of its history be mine. A fear voice. A power voice. Make the voice of history be my larynx. Retell the broken story in a new way. Make the expression of the world unfolding be the planning, cunning, conscious, necessary, unequivocal expression of me, Archangel, voice of the future, voice of the world, speaking through all people always everywhere.

  ‘Let the people take flight from this one planet to all the stars, all the galaxies, all the intergalactic immensities everywhere always — and let them speak me! A billion billion billion people always everywhere in glittering crimson ships across the black-red-gold recurving energy-mass-time seething scattered shouting me. The perpetual unfolding flowering of the voice of me. All filled with the angelness of me.

  ‘So it will be.

  ‘But first, for this to happen, that fatal other source — the fracturing egg of other possibilities that impossibly continues — must be destroyed.’

  This then is the first syllable of the first word of the first phrase of the first sentence of the voice of Archangel.

  ‘DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!’

  14

  Lom woke early the next morning. As the first greying of the dawn filtered through the gaps in the curtains in Vishnik’s study, he lay on his back on the couch, turning the question of Kantor over in his mind. How to find him. How to even begin. Krogh had told him he would have no help, no resources, no official support from the immense intelligence machine of the Vlast. Krogh’s private secretary would fix him an access pass for the Lodka, and an office there, under cover of some suitably bland pretext to account for his presence, but that was all.

  He had read Krogh’s file of clippings on Kantor late into the night. It was an accumulation of robberies, bombings, assassinations. There was no pattern that he could find. The targets were indiscriminate, the victims seemingly random: for every senior official of the Vlast or prominent soldier or policeman killed, there were dozens of innocent passers-by caught in appalling eruptions of destructive violence. There was no clear purpose: responsibility for each attack was claimed by a different obscure and transient dissident grouping, or by none, and none of the perpetrators had ever been taken alive.

  He had spent a long time staring at the photograph of the young Josef Kantor that Krogh had given him. He tried to find in that face the lineaments of calculating cruelty that could drive such a murderous campaign. But it was just a face: long and narrow, scarred by the pockmarks of some childhood illness, but handsome. Kantor looked into the camera with dark, interested eyes from under a thick mop of dark hair, uncombed. Although the picture must have been taken in an interrogation cell, there was the hint of a smile in the turn of his wide mouth. This was a confident, intelligent young man, a man you could like, even admire. A man you would want to like you.

  Of course, the photograph had been taken two decades ago. Twenty years at Vig would change anyone. Because of this man, an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust and lurking incipient panic had settled on Mirgorod. Lom felt it in the newspaper accounts. He noticed also how in recent months, alongside the official condemnation of the atrocities, there was a growing tendency to criticise the authorities for failing to stem the tide of fear. And this criticism, though it was couched in carefully imprecise language, was increasingly directed towards the Novozhd himself. The hints were there: the Novozhd was old, he was weak, he was indecisive. Was he not, perhaps, even deliberately letting th
e terror campaign continue, as a means to shore up his own failing authority? These attacks on the Novozhd were always anonymous, but — in the light of Krogh’s accusations — Lom felt he could sense the presence of an organising, directing hand behind them.

  One thing was certain. Lying on the couch thinking about it would get him nowhere. He pushed his blanket aside. He need to move. He needed to start.

  In Vishnik’s bathroom the plumbing groaned and and clanked and delivered a trickle of cold brown water into the basin. Lom shaved with his old cut-throat razor. Through a small high casement came the sounds of Mirgorod beginning its day: the rumble of an early tramcar, the klaxon of a canal boat, the clatter of grilles and shutters opening. He breathed the city air seeping in through the window, mingling diesel fumes, coal-smoke, canal water and wet pavements with the scent of his shaving soap. The city prickled and trembled with energy, humming at a frequency just too low to be audible, but tangible enough to put him on edge.

  He dried his face on the threadbare corner of a towel and went back down the corridor to Vishnik’s room. Vishnik was sitting at his desk. He had the newspaper spread open — the Mirgorod Lamp — but he was looking out of the window, sipping from the blue and white mug, his left hand fidgeting restlessly, tapping a jumpy rhythm with slender fingers.

  Lom had laid his uniform out ready on the couch: black serge, silver epaulettes, buttons of polished antler. He pulled on his boots, also black, shined, smelling richly of leather. He stripped and cleaned his gun. It was a beautiful thing, a black-handled top-break Zorn service side-arm: .455 black powder cartridges in half-moon clips; overall length, 11.25 inches; weight 2.5 pounds unloaded; muzzle velocity, 620 feet per second; effective range, fifty yards. Like most things in Podchornok, it was thirty years out of date, but he liked it. He worked carefully and with a certain simple pleasure. Vishnik watched him.

  ‘Vissarion?’ he said at last. ‘Just what the fuck is it that you are doing here, my friend?’

  ‘Ever hear of Josef Kantor?’

  ‘Kantor? Of course. That was a name to remember, once. A Lezarye intellectual, a polemicist, young, but he had a following. He knew how to please a crowd. A fine way with words. But he was silenced decades ago. Exiled. I assume he’s dead now.’

  ‘He isn’t dead. He’s in Mirgorod.’ Lom told Vishnik what Krogh had said.

  ‘There’ve always been sects and cabals in the Lodka,’ said Vishnik. ‘The White Sea Group. Opus Omnium Consummationis. The Iron Guard. Bagrationites. Gruodists. Some wanting to liberalise, some to purify. But why are you telling me this?’

  ‘You asked.’

  ‘Sure, but—’

  ‘I need help, Raku. Someone who knows the city, because I don’t. And I need somewhere to stay.’

  ‘That’s a lot to ask. A very fuck of a lot to ask, if I may say so.’

  Lom reassembled the gun, put it in the shoulder holster and strapped it on.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So,’ said Vishnik eventually. ‘OK. Sure. You are my friend. So why not. Where do you start?’

  ‘I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. Find a thread and pull on it. See where it takes me.’

  He picked up Vishnik’s paper. It was that morning’s edition. Idly he turned the pages, skimming the headlines.

  GUNBOATS POUND SUMBER. ARCHIPELAGO ADVANCE STALLED OUTSIDE HANSIG. BACKGAMMON CHAMPION ASSASSINATED: LEZARYE SEPARATISTS CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY: LODKA PROMISES REPRISALS.

  TRAITORS MUST BE SMASHED BY FORCE! the editorial thundered.

  The verminous souks and ghettos where these vile criminals are nurtured must be cleaned up once and for all. Our leaders have been too soft for too long. Yes, we are a civilised folk, but these evil elements trample on our forbearance and spit on our decency. They are a disease, but we know the cure. We applaud the recent speech by Commander Lavrentina Chazia at the Armoury Parade Ground. Hers is the attitude our capital needs more of. We urge…

  Like Krogh’s file of clippings, the paper was filled with traces of terror, of war, of Kantor and the nameless forces working against the Novozhd. But there was other stuff as well. Other voices, other threads, omitted from Krogh’s selective collection.

  An inside spread described new plans for massive monumental ossuaries to hold the corpses of the fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Archipelago War: ‘On the rocky coast of the Cetic Ocean there will grow up grandiose structures… Massive towers stretching high in the eastern plains will rise as symbols of the subduing of the chaotic forces of the outcast islands through the disciplined might of the Vlast.’ They were to be called Castles of the Dead. There were artist’s impressions, with tiny, lost-looking stick families wandering in the grounds, inserted for scale.

  MOTHER MURDERS LITTLE ONES. A lawyer, Afonka Voscovec, had suffocated her three children with a pillow and hanged herself. She’d left a note. ‘The floors keep opening,’ she’d written. ‘Will no one stop it?’

  Lom was about to throw the paper aside when he noticed a small piece in the social columns. A photograph of an officer of the militia shaking hands with the Commissioner of the Mirgorod Bank of Foreign Commerce. ‘Major Artyom Safran, whose brave action defended the bank in Levrovskaya Square against a frontal terrorist assault, receives the congratulations of a grateful Olland Nett. Major Safran is a mudjhik handler.’ Levrovskaya Square was, according to Krogh, Kantor’s most recent atrocity. If this Major Safran had been there, that meant he had seen Kantor or at least his people. It was a connection.

  Lom studied the photograph carefully. The legs and belly of the mudjhik could just be made out in shadow behind the Major’s head. And in his head, in the middle of his brow, was a seal of angel flesh, the twin of Lom’s own.

  He stood up. It was time to go.

  He took the lift down to the exit. The dvornik was in his cubbyhole. If the uniform impressed him, he didn’t let it show. There was a cork board behind his head, with notices pinned to it: the address of the local advice bureau, details of winter relief collections, blackout exercises, changes to social insurance, a soap rationing scheme.

  ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘I’m going to be staying here for a few days. With Professor Vishnik.’ Lom showed his warrant card. The dvornik glanced at it. Still not impressed. ‘My presence here is authorised. By me. The Professor is under my protection. You are to report nothing. To no one. The fact that I am here — when I come — when I go — that’s up to me. You notice nothing. You say nothing. You remember nothing.’

  The dvornik had his tin cup in his hand. He took a sip from it and shrugged. Barely. Perhaps.

  ‘Understand?’

  ‘Whatever you say, General.’

  15

  Lom found the office Krogh’s private secretary had fixed for him at the Lodka. One office among thousands, a windowless box on an upper floor among storerooms, filing rooms, cleaning cupboards, boilers. It took him half an hour wandering corridors and stairways to track it down. There was a freshly typed card in the slot by the door handle: INVESTIGATOR V Y LOM. PODCHORNOK OBLAST. PROVINCIAL LIAISON REVIEW SECRETARIAT.

  In the office there was a chair, a coat rack, a desk. Lom went through the drawers: stationery lint; a lidless, dried-up bottle of ink. Somebody had hung a placard on the wall.

  Citizens! Let us all march faster

  Through what remains of our days!

  You might forget the fruitful summers

  When the wombs of the mothers swelled

  But you’ll never forget the Vlast you hungered and bled for

  When enemies gathered and winter came.

  He laid out his notepad and sharpened his pencils. He gave the room two more minutes. It felt about a minute and a half too long. Do something. Do anything. Make a start.

  Lom left the office behind and set himself adrift in the mazy corridors of the Lodka. There were floor plans posted at intersections, but they were no help: the room numbers and abbreviations in small print, amended in manuscript, bore little relations
hip to the labels on doors and stairwells. He knew that the place he wanted would be down. Such places were always near the root of things. Tucked away. Like death always was.

  He came into a more crowded part of the building: secretaries in groups, carrying folders of letters, talking; porters wheeling trolleys of files and loose papers; policemen, uniformed and not; civil servants arguing quota and precedent, trading the currency of acronyms. The placards on committee room doors were syllables in a mysterious language. Hints and signs.

  CENTGEN.

  COMPOLIT.

  GENCOM.

  INTPOP.

  POLITCENT.

  He half expected someone to stop him and ask him what he was doing there, so he prepared a line about the urgent need to improve liaison with the Eastern Provinciates. He found he had a lot to say on the subject: it was an issue that actually did need attention. He began to think of improvements that could be made to the committee structure and lines of command. Perhaps he should write a memo for Krogh? He started to take out his notebook to write some thoughts down.