Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  Chazia’s face came into his line of view. He saw the fine blade in her hand, but it was only when she placed it against the skin of his forehead that he realised what she was going to do.

  Repel! Repel!

  He drove his mind against her with all his strength, trying to ball up the air in the room and throw it at her.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘The vyrdalak reported that you could do that,’ said Chazia. ‘No wonder Savinkov sealed you up.’ She touched the stone rind in her face and smiled. ‘Quite useless here, of course.’

  He felt her begin to cut.

  Chazia didn’t find it easy to get the embedded piece of angel stone out of his forehead. She had to dig and gouge and pry with considerable force. She tried several different implements. The pain went on for ever. Lom choked and fought for breath and closed his eyes against the blood that pooled in their sockets and seeped under the lids. He might have screamed. He wasn’t sure.

  At last it stopped. Kantor released his hold on Lom’s head and let it fall forward. Lom was gasping for breath. His eyes were blinded with blood and his nose was filled with it, but his hands were bound at his sides and he could do nothing about that. He hadn’t fainted while it was happening, and he didn’t faint afterwards. Fainting would have been easier, but it didn’t come.

  Kantor was leaning over him.

  ‘Is that the brain in there?’ he said to Chazia.

  Kantor’s finger probed the hole in his forehead.

  ‘It’s firmer than I would have thought.’

  He jabbed harder. Lom felt no pain, only a deep, woozy sickness.

  ‘Don’t, Josef,’ said Chazia. ‘Don’t damage it yet.’

  Then Lom fainted.

  62

  ‘Now we must try again,’ Chazia was saying, somewhere far away. Nothing had changed. It must have been only minutes. Seconds, even. ‘Quickly, before we lose him.’

  Still blinded, he felt the glove of angel substance on his face again, and this time there was nothing he could do to defend himself. She came right inside him, roughly. Invading. Violating. He was naked and broken.

  He gave Chazia everything.

  She was in there, inside his mind, and she knew. Nothing could be hidden from her. She went everywhere, and he gave it all up. Everything that had happened. Everything he had heard. Everything he knew. Krogh. Vishnik. The Archive. The massacre. The whisperers in the square. The Crimson Marmot. Petrov. Safran. The mudjhik. Maroussia. Everything.

  ‘He desires her, Josef!’ Chazia crowed with genuine wonderment and pleasure. ‘The poor idiot desires her.’

  And then — how much later was it? how much time gone? nothing seemed to take very long –

  ‘He knows nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing. He’s of no use at all. Kill him.’

  They left him alone in the interrogation room, still tied to the chair. After an unmeasurable amount of time it seemed that other men came and released him. He might have been sick. One of the men might have been Safran. He might have imagined that.

  They were leading him along corridors. He could see from one eye: linoleum, worn carpet, flagstones, his own feet. It didn’t matter.

  A shock of cold and space and early morning light. The smell of water. A bridge. They were crossing a bridge.

  He jerked himself out of the grip of the men, who were holding him loosely by the arms, and lurched away from them towards the bridge’s low parapet.

  For a moment, a half-second, no more, he looked down at the dark, swollen current. He wanted the water to wash the blood and mess and memory away. A clean, cold, private death. He tipped himself over the edge.

  The water reached up to take him as he fell.

  The moment between tipping over the parapet and hitting the water seemed to go on for ever. Lom hung head downwards in air. The surface of the river rose slowly to meet him, freighted with the debris of the flooded city. The water had a particular smell: dark, cold, earthy, cleansing.

  He crashed into green darkness and the noise churned in his ears. The shock of the cold seized his lungs in ice fists and squeezed. Bands of freezing iron tightened around his head and his chest.

  He tried to scrabble his way to the surface of the river, not knowing the direction where the surface was. His clothes, water-heavy, wrapped round his body. The weight of his boots pulled at his legs, slowing their struggle to a nightmare of running. His mouth fell open in a silent O.

  And yet he was happy.

  After the first rush of panic, he felt his pulse-rate slowing. The icy river reached inside his ribs with cool gentle fingers and cupped his heart kindly. Calmness returned. This was now, and he was alive, and the river was his friend.

  He let the dark and freezing absolution of the Mir wash away the stink and shame and failure of the interrogation room. The river let him understand.

  There is no blame. There is no judge but you. Forgive yourself.

  He had been… violated… by alien, brutal intruding fingers. The fat, poking stubs of Kantor, Chazia’s in her foul dead-angel glove. He had given up nothing. It had been ripped out and taken, that was all. And that was not the same.

  The waters cleansed the hole in the centre of his forehead where the piece of angel stone had been ripped away and the river now entered. He felt the cool currents of its touch directly against the naked cortex of his brain, bursting long-dead synapses into light and life. Unplugged at last, for the first time since childhood, Vissarion Lom perceived the world as it was, fresh and new and timeless, flooded with truth. He smelled the light and tasted the space between things.

  The Mir was filled with watchful awareness and intelligence. Lom opened wide his arms and felt himself rising. He broke the surface into early morning air. His cloak unfolded and spread itself around him like a huge black lily pad, rotating slowly in the current. His face, upturned in the cloak’s dark centre, was the lily’s pale flower, opening to the grey light. Breathing.

  The river was in full spate. As he turned slowly, tilted upwards, he saw the wharves and quays and rooftops of Mirgorod passing against the cloud-grey sky. Nearer to his face, pieces of wood and broken things came with him. He was the flagship of a debris flotilla, being carried towards the edge of the city and beyond it the sea, on the surge of the withdrawing flood.

  Waves splashed against his face and trickled into the open hole in his forehead.

  The sentient water had a voice that was speaking to him. It told him that the city was an alien tumorous growth, formed around the plug with which the Founder had tried to stop the river’s mouth. Yet there had been a time before the city, and there could be such a time again: when it was gone, when trees grew up between the buildings, and moss and black soil breathed the air again.

  The kindly waters of the Mir brushed against his skull and reached inside to calm his heart and whisper reassurance. The voice was telling him who he was. He was a man of muscle and lung and love and understanding. He was a vessel and a flowering on the seaward flow. There were people it was right to love and there were people it was right to loathe and bring to destruction.

  Yes, if I have time. I need more time.

  Only there was no more time.

  As he rotated slowly on the current, the ice-cold waters of the river were draining all the feeling from his body. Lom no longer knew where his arms and legs were, or what they were doing. The muscles of his face were numbed into immobility, his mouth frozen in its permanent open O.

  Helplessly, from a great distance, he observed the rippling water work at the bulges and pockets of air that had been trapped in the folds of his cloak. The movement of the river was easing them slowly to the edges of the heavy fabric. One by one they bubbled out and surrendered themselves to the sky.

  There was nothing he could do.

  What his lily-pad cloak was losing in buoyancy it gained in weight, and slowly it was sinking, and taking him down with it. The river was already lapping at his chin and spilling over into the waiting uncloseable O. />
  The river brimmed against his nostrils and covered them over. At last he inhaled the cold waters deeply and sank for the second and last time. It felt like sleep. As he closed his eyes he saw against the shadows the face of Maroussia, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him hugely out of the sky, like the moon made whole.

  Close by (so close!) — but also not — neither in this world, nor very far away at all — the other O — the pocketful of second chances, the waiting second mouth, the tongue of different lives — is listening to the river, listening to the rain.

  63

  Maroussia Shaumian found Lom’s body floating face down, lodged against a squat stone pillar of the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge among planks and branches, lost shoes and broken packing cases. She tried to pull it into the boat but she could not. Several times she almost tipped herself into the river before she gave up and knotted a line to his leg and towed him, an inert, lifeless weight, to a place where there were stone steps in the embankment. All the time she worked, she expected the shouts, the bullets, to start.

  She had found the boat — an open, clinker-built, tapered skiff, her oars neatly stowed on board — bumping against the wall at the end of Pelican Quay. Ignoring the oars, she’d crouched in the bottom and edged it slowly, hand over hand, along the house-fronts until she came in sight of Vishnik’s building, and she’d watched from the shadows as Lom was taken into the militia vessel. When the police boat left, its searchlight stabbing the night, raking darkened street frontages and swirling water, she followed it all the way to the Lodka, and moored against a telegraph pole.

  Cold and wet and shivering, she waited. She could have left, but she did not. Lom had saved her twice. She thought of Vishnik, his ruined body and his terrible lonely death. She thought of her mother, shot in the back in the street. She would not let the Vlast take another. Not if she could prevent it.

  When dawn began to seep across the city and other boats began to appear, she felt it would be less conspicuous to be moving, and so she started a slow patrol, circling the Lodka through flooded squares and across re-emerging canals. It was sheer luck that she saw, from the cover of a stranded fire-barge, the uniforms come out of a side door, and Lom stumbling along in the middle of them as if he was drunk. She saw his lurch for the parapet and heard the warders’ shouts and the splash when his body hit the water. But she couldn’t go to look for him straight away. She had to wait, watching the killing party linger near the bridge, shouting to each other and shining torch beams on the dark water. It was fifteen minutes before they gave up and another fifteen before she spotted the sodden hump of his back floating low in the water among the rubbish.

  She dragged the body up the steps and laid it on its back. Water seeped out and puddled on the stone. The eyes were open and glassy, the pupils darkly dilated. In the dim grey dawn the face and hands were tinged an ominous blue. She made a desperate, rushed examination. There was no pulse at the wrist or neck, and no breath from the stiffened, cyanotic mouth.

  ‘He’s not gone,’ she said to herself. ‘He’s not gone.’ She was surprised how much it mattered.

  With a desperate energy Maroussia pumped the lifeless chest with the heel of her hand and forced her own breath into the waterlogged lungs. Every time she paused to rest, she saw the ragged-edged hole in Lom’s forehead. It oozed a dark rivery fluid.

  She worked and worked, pounding the inert chest, forcing breath into the cold mouth. At last she collapsed across him, her chest heaving.

  It was no good.

  But at that moment Lom gave a powerful jerk and twisted out from under her weight. He rolled over onto his side, retching and vomiting black river water.

  Emptied of the river, Lom sank back into unconsciousness, but he was breathing now, and the blue of his face began to flush faintly in the rising light of morning.

  Somehow she managed to heave him back into the boat. There was nothing else to do. She could not carry him, and she would not leave him.

  She unshipped the oars and pushed the boat free of the landing place and out into the current. Pulling out into midstream she felt the force of the current seize her. The subsiding flood waters were pouring out of the city, down towards the marshes and the sea. The boat took its place among the detritus, the floating wreckage and the crewless vessels drifting, bumping and turning on the dark foam-flecked current. There was no need to row. It would be better — less conspicuous — if she did not. But Lom’s body was icy to the touch. He needed warmth, and quickly, or he would die.

  Maroussia pulled Lom’s cloak over his head, stuffed it away at the stern, and got his shirt, boots and trousers off. His body, naked but for his underclothes, was white as chalk. She took off her own coat and dress and lay down next to him, pulling the clothes over them both and taking him in her arms like a lover. His body was cold, clammy, inert, like something dead, and the cold seeped from him into her. She shivered uncontrollably, but she pushed herself closer against him and closed her eyes.

  The Mir surged forward in the cold of the morning, taking their small vessel in its grasp, carrying them onward, downstream on turbid waters under a dark pewter sky, past the waterfronts of the waking city.

  Archangel probes a sudden strangeness, and realisation almost shatters him.

  He is appalled.

  He is brittle.

  A new fact bursts open, flowering into his awareness, staining it with a rigid poison.

  Blinded by the profusion of the millions — he has not noticed — not until this moment — the faint, brushing touches — the trails — the spraints — of those he cannot see. There are time streams, and people in them — story threads, small voices — that are not part of his future.

  He begins to sense them now. He detects — faintly, peripherally — the tremor of their passing and knows what it means for him. Suddenly, disaster is near. At the very moment of his triumph, failure is becoming possible.

  In the forest he heaves and struggles, desperate to release the embedded hill of himself from his rock prison. He pulls and shudders, straining at the crust of the earth. Stronger now, he feels the give of it, just a little, a fraction, and the snow roars and slides off his shoulders. For a moment he believes he might succeed. But it is not enough. He cannot move, he cannot rise, he cannot fly.

  He sends his mind instead, the whole of it, the entire focused armoury of his attention forced down one narrow beam, ignoring everything except the hint of one small boat and its impossible cargo of change.

  He cannot see them, he cannot find them, not himself: they are somehow hidden. But they are there, and there are — he reasons — others who will be able to see them with their jelly-and-electromagnetism oculars.

  He bursts his way into first one human mind, then another, and another, a roaring angel voice.

  WHERE ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY?

  A sailor falls, bleeding from the eyes. Archangel jumps to another.

  WHERE ARE THEY?

  A typist collapses to the floor, fitting, speaking in tongues. Archangel jumps to another.

  WHERE ARE THEY?

  An engineer splatters vomit across the floor and tears at his ears until they hang in tatters and bleed. Archangel jumps to another.

  Archangel leaps from mind to mind, faster and faster, finding nothing. Yet they must be found. Now. Before it is too late.

  Part Two

  64

  The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen lay on his back on the soft estuarial river-mud of the White Marshes. It was almost like floating. It was more like being a water-spider, resting on the meniscus of a pool, feeling the tremor of breezes brushing across the surface. He kept his eyes closed and his hands spread flat and palm-downward on the drum-tight, quivering skin of the mud. He was listening with his hands to the mood of the waters, feeling the way they were flowing and what they meant. He drew in long slow lungfuls of river air, tasting it with his tongue and nose and the back of his throat. There was ice and fog and rain on the air, and the exhalations of trees.
He knew the savour of every tree — he could tell birch from alder, blackthorn from willow, aspen from spruce — and he could taste the distinctive breath of each of the great rivers as they mingled in the delta’s throat: the Smaller Chel, the Mecklen, the Vod, and above all the rich complexity of the Mir, with traces of the city caught like burrs in her hair. Everything that he could taste and hear and feel spoke to him. It was the voice of the world.

  He was floating on the cusp — the infinitesimal point of balance — between past and future. The past was one, but futures were many, an endlessly bifurcating flowering abundance of possibilities all trying to become, all struggling to grow out of the precarious restless racing-forwards of now.

  Aino-Suvantamoinen sat up in the near-darkness — his heart pounding, his head spinning — and scooped up handfuls of cold mud. Cupping his palms together, he buried his face in the slather for coolness and rest. There was something on the Mir that morning such as he had never known before. The river was excited, it was strung out and buzzing with promise. In three centuries of listening, no other morning like this one. A boat was coming, the river told him: a boat freighted with significance, freighted with change. New futures were adrift on the Mir, and also — astonishingly — he’d never felt, never even conceived of anything like this — a new past.

  The giant picked himself up from the mud. He had to hurry. He had to reach the great locks and set his shoulder to the enormous ancient beams. He had to open the sluices and close the weir gates before the rushing of the flood carried everything past. Before it was too late.

  65

  Maroussia lay in the bottom of the skiff, wet and cold, holding the unconscious Lom in her arms. The boat rocked and turned in the current, colliding from time to time with other objects drifting on the flood: the bodies of drowned dogs and the planks of Big Side shanties. Maroussia kept her face turned towards the wooden inside freeboard, staying low and out of sight, risking only occasional glances over the gunwale. If anyone saw the skiff, it would look like one more empty boat adrift from its moorings. Lom was breathing loudly, raggedly, the terrible wound in the front of his head circled with a fine crust of dried blood and weeping some cloudy liquid.