Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  When she got back to the jetty she kicked the severed head over the side. It fell in the water with a plop and disappeared. Then she put her clothes back on and prepared the skiff to leave: laid the oars ready in the rowlocks; made sure the lines were loosely tied so one tug would release them. She would give Lom till dusk to find her, and if he had not come, she would go alone. She drank a little water and wished there was something she could eat. She had not felt so hungry for days. But that was tomorrow’s problem. For the moment it was enough to sit with her back against a jetty post and wait.

  She tried to keep her eye on the edge of trees that enclosed the wide clearing, watching for any sign of movement that would signal the coming of Lom. Or the mudjhik. But her gaze kept being drawn back to the burned-out remains of the isba. The outward sign of her desolation and grief. Killing the militia man had not healed that. Not at all. Desultory snowflakes appeared, skittering in the grey air.

  And then the wreckage of the isba erupted. It was as if a shell had fallen, or a mine exploded. A column of dark earth and roots and stone and the remains of the isba spouted ten — twenty — feet up and slumped back down in a crump of dust. She saw the giant’s stove bounce and break open. A wave of dust-heavy air rolled over her, smelling of the raw, damp underground.

  As the air cleared she saw something, a man-shaped figure, climbing up out of the earth. Its face was a mess of dirt and blood. A heavy cloak hanging from its shoulders. It stood for a moment as if dazed, looking around slowly, then it began to walk slowly towards her.

  ‘Vissarion?’ she said. ‘Vissarion? Is that you.’

  The figure stopped to wipe its face with its sleeve. It was Lom. He looked lost, disoriented, stunned. She saw that the wound in his forehead had opened. It was seeping blood into his eyes and down across his mouth. He kept wiping at his face, vaguely, again and again.

  ‘Maroussia?’ said Lom. ‘There’s dirt in my eyes. I can’t see properly.’

  ‘What… what happened? Was that another grenade?’

  Lom wiped his face again and looked at her, blinking.

  ‘That?’ he said. ‘That was me.’ He paused, and she saw that he was grinning at her. Grinning like a child. ‘This is going to be fun.’ Then his legs crumpled and he sat down heavily beside her with his hand to his forehead. ‘Ow,’ he said, looking at her balefully. ‘My head hurts. You haven’t got any water I could drink, have you?’

  ‘Vissarion?’ said Maroussia. ‘Where’s the mudjhik?’

  79

  Artyom Safran wondered where he was. Dead, certainly. But also… not. As the terrible flat blade had begun to slice into his neck and he knew that he would certainly die there, he made one last reckless throw of the dice. He grabbed at the mental cord connecting him to the mudjhik and hurled himself along it, all of himself, wholeheartedly, holding nothing in reserve. It was easy and instant, like jumping from a window to escape a fire. The mudjhik had been pulling at him insidiously for years, and the pull had been growing stronger all the time they were in the wetlands. More than once in the last few days he had felt himself slipping away, and it had required an effort of will to hold himself separate. Now he stopped trying, and threw himself instead at the door, and it was open, and he stumbled through. The mudjhik, reacting instantly, pulled him inside. Greedily. It felt like a great hunger being fed at last. In the last moment of his separateness, Safran had felt a surge of crude, ugly, inhuman satisfaction enfolding him.

  What have I done?

  It was his last purely human thought.

  He was not alone. Dog-in-mudjhik came at him hard, scratching and tearing and spitting, before he had a chance to find his balance. Dogin-mudjhik would tolerate no rival. It was a territory thing. Only the death of the interloper would do.

  Safran tried to put up some sort of defence, but he had no time to work out how. He tried curling himself into a tight ball with his back against Dog-in-mudjhik’s ripping jaw. Hugging himself to protect his vital organs. But it was the merest persiflage. Dog-in-mudjhik cut through all that. Dog-in-mudjhik was shredding him, tearing him off in chunks, snarling. Dog-in-mudjhik made himself as big as a house and started to dig. Safran was going to die a second time.

  But the mudjhik’s angel stuff knew what it needed, and it was not dog thoughts any more. In the gap between two instants the space inside the mudjhik that Dog-in-mudjhik occupied ceased to exist. It closed up completely, solid where space had been. Dog-in-mudjhik went out like a snuffed candle. Dog-in-mudjhik was extinguished, leaving only a faint and diminishing smell of dog mind in the air.

  What had once been Safran lay still, curled up tight, quivering like hurt flesh. Trying to close himself off. Trying too late to renege on the deal. Far too late. The angel-stuff encompassed him, fitting itself around him until there was no space between them. Then it moved in.

  Safran-in-mudjhik felt sick and dizzy with horror. He was in a cold red-grey world. Seeing without eyes, hearing without ears, overwhelmed and confused by the mudjhik’s alien angel-senses, he couldn’t grasp where he was. Or who. Or what. But even then, in the moment of his profoundest and most appalling collapse, he began to feel something else. A new kind of triumph. He sensed the first glimmerings of an immense new power. The angel stuff was feeling it, but so was he. He was going to be a new thing in the universe. A first. A best. Immortal. Safran-in-mudjhik was strong.

  Experimentally he swept an arm sideways. It cracked against a tree and broke it. The tree toppled towards him and he fended it off effortlessly. A long-eared owl, half-stunned and dislodged from its roost, struggled to get purchase on the air with its wings. Safran-in-mudjhik caught it in flight and smashed it against his own stone chest. Felt it break. Felt it die. So good. This would be fun. There were so many things to do. Sweet freedom things.

  First and sweetest, revenge.

  Safran-in-mudjhik began to explore his new self. There were angel-senses here, and angel memories that Dog-in-mudjhik could perceive nothing of. The bright immensity between the stars. Existence without time. He could remember. He belonged there. And now he was on his way back.

  Somewhere in the rust-and-blood-red corridors of his new mind he could feel the connection with Lom. Faint but still there. He fumbled towards it, but he was still too clumsy to hold on to it. He couldn’t get it clear enough to know where Lom was. Not yet. But soon. Finesse would come. In the meantime, he certainly knew where she was. The Shaumian woman. The Safran-slicer. Creator of Safran-in-mudjhik. Kill her first. He turned towards the isba clearing and the creek. It was going to be a good first day.

  80

  The swollen river surged ahead, thick and brown and heavy. It carried the skiff onwards and widened as it went. Lom, cradling Safran’s sub-machine gun, stared mesmerised at the surface. It was scummed with ragged drifts of foam, littered with dead leaves and matted rafts of grass and broken branches. He felt drained. His head hurt. The new skin across the hole in his skull had split, and though a crust of dried blood had formed, it throbbed in time with his pulse and wept a clear sticky liquid. It was sore, and all the muscles of his body ached. The effort of pushing his way out of the souterrain had exhausted him, and the world around him felt diminished, distant and separate. He wondered if such easy power would ever come back to him again.

  Maroussia handled the oars. She had little to do but steer the skiff with occasional touches, avoiding the larger obstacles floating along with them and keeping them clear of eddies and backwaters.

  ‘The waters are rising,’ said Lom. ‘It must have been raining in the hills.’

  Maroussia shook her head.

  ‘The giant is gone,’ she said. ‘Without him to work the sluices, the waters are running wild. All this wetland will go. There’ll be nothing left but the city and the sea.’

  A dark mossy floating lump of tree nudged heavily against the bow and rested there, travelling alongside them in the current. Lom stared at it. It was a mass of little juts and elbows of branch-stump and bark canker. Every c
rook and hole was edged with a dewy fringe of spider’s web. Lom shifted the weight of the gun, which was pressing into his leg. The death of Aino-Suvantamoinen, and the weight of all the other deaths before him, had left him feeling numbed and stupid. The boat was taking them into a darker, emptier future.

  Maroussia pulled hard at the oars, skewing the Sib sideways. She rowed in silence, looking at nothing. Lom watched her hands on the oars. Large, strong, capable. She’d pushed back her sleeves. Her hands were reddened but her forearms were pale and smooth. He could see the tendons and muscles working as she rowed. Her black hair was slicked with river mist: it clung to her face and neck in tight shining curls.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Lom.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The giant. It was Safran that killed him. Not you.’

  ‘He tried to help,’ said Maroussia.

  ‘He thought it was important. So did Raku.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it is important.’

  For a long time Maroussia didn’t say anything. She just kept rowing. Then she looked up at him.

  ‘I’m going to find the Pollandore,’ she said. ‘The angel is destroying the world. The Pollandore can stop that.’

  Lom noticed how thin she was, though her arms were strong. As she rowed, he watched the shadow play on the vulnerable, scoop-shaped dip at the base of her throat. The suprasternal notch. She was human and raw and beautiful. She rowed in silence for a long time. Lom watched the empty mudbanks pass by. He wiped his weeping forehead.

  ‘Vissarion?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That thing in your head…’

  ‘It’s gone now.’

  ‘What was it? How did it get there?’

  ‘I was young. I don’t know how old. Eight maybe. Eight or nine. A child.’

  ‘That man I killed…’

  ‘Safran.’

  ‘He had one the same.’

  ‘Savinkov’s Children. They call us that. Ever heard of Savinkov?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should have. Everyone should know about Savinkov.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘He was provost of the Institute at Podchornok when I was there. Vishnik went there too. He was my friend.’

  ‘But he didn’t… he didn’t have anything like that.’

  ‘No. Only a few of us. Before he came to the Institute, Savinkov was an technician of angel-flesh. His specialism was the effect of it on the human mind. Putting a piece of it in direct contact with the human brain.’

  ‘They put that stuff in people’s heads?’

  ‘And the other way round.’

  ‘You don’t mean…’

  ‘It’s common practice with mudjhiks to put in an animal brain: naturally they tried with human brains too, but it doesn’t work that way. The mudjhiks become uncontrollable. Insane. But there are less dramatic methods than full transplant. Angel flesh has a sort of life. Awareness. It affects you. And it encourages loyalty. The sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the whole. It’s a way of binding you to the Vlast.’

  ‘But… you… They did it to you when you were a child.’

  ‘That was Savinkov’s subject. His research. Were children more or less susceptible? Did the effect grow or diminish with time? How could you measure and predict it? The skull insertion technique was Savinkov’s invention. It used to go wrong a lot. The children died, or… well, Savinkov put them to work. In the gardens. The stables.’

  ‘But… the parents?’

  ‘We didn’t have parents. None of us did. Savinkov used to take waifs and strays into the Institute for the experiments. I never knew who my parents were.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘Savinkov saw nothing wrong with it,’ said Lom. ‘He had some successes too. Some of them became excellent mudjhik handlers and technicians with the Worm. Servants of the Vlast of great distinction.’

  ‘But not you.’

  ‘No. I was one of Savinkov’s disappointments in that respect.’

  Walls rose on either side of the river. The channel narrowed. A roar of rushing water. The skiff rolled and yawed, rushing ahead out of control.

  ‘Hold on!’ yelled Lom.

  Maroussia almost lost the oars as the Sib pitched over a low weir and spun out into wide grey water. The Mir Ship Canal. The skiff settled, drifting slowly with the current.

  It was a bleak, blank place after the edgeless mist and mud of the wetlands: a broad channel cut dead straight between high embankments of stone blocks and concrete slopes, wide enough for great ships and ocean-going barges to pass four or six abreast. Featureless. There was nothing natural to be seen, not even a gull in the sky. The trees were out of sight behind the great ramparts and bulwarks built by armies of giants and serfs. Built by the Founder on their bones. The water was deep: Lom felt it fathoming away beneath them, dark and cold. A bitter wind, freighted with flurries of sharp sleety snow, was pushing upstream off the sea, smelling of salt and ice, slowing their progress. It had been autumn when they entered the wetlands. It felt like winter coming now.

  ‘It’ll be easy from here on,’ said Lom. ‘Downstream to the sea lock. We can leave the boat there and walk back along the Strand to the tram terminus. Let me take the oars for a while.’

  Maroussia wasn’t listening. She was staring over his shoulder up towards the embankment. He followed her gaze. The mudjhik was standing on the crest, a smudge of dried blood and rust against the grey sky. Grey snow. Grey stone. It was watching them. As the current took them downstream, the mudjhik began to lope along the top of the high canal wall, keeping pace. Lom looked for an escape. On either side of the canal the embankments rose sheer and high. No quays. No steps cut into the stone. Nowhere to go. The mudjhik had only to follow them.

  ‘Maybe we’ll find a place on the far side where we can get out,’ he said. ‘It can’t cross the canal before the sea lock. We can be miles away by then.’

  As if in answer, he felt the dark touch of the mudjhik’s mind in his. It felt stronger than before, much stronger, and different now. There was an intelligence there that had been absent before, with a sickening almost-human edge to it. It was almost a voice. No words, but a cruel demonstration of existence and power. It was a voice he recognised. Safran. But it wasn’t quite Safran: it was something more and something less than he had been. Lom felt he was being touched intimately by something… disgusting. Something strong but inhuman, broken and foul and… wrong. A mind that stank.

  He slammed his mind-walls closed against it. The effort hurt. His head began to ache immediately. He felt the pulse in the socket in his forehead flutter and pound.

  ‘We have to destroy that thing,’ he said. ‘Somehow. We have to end it. Here.’

  Safran-in-mudjhik considered the pathetic little rowing boat sitting there helplessly, a flimsy toy on the deep flowing blackness. The two frail lives it carried, cupped in its brittle palm, flickered like match-lights. He had shown himself deliberately so he could taste their fear. Their deaths would be… delicious. Especially hers. The one that had taken his head when part of him was in the man.

  That part of him wanted to be back in the man. It wasn’t happy any more. But it would learn, or he would find a way to silence what he did not need. The angel-stuff was coming awake. Learning to remember. Learning to think. Now it had learned it could soak up human minds, absorb them, grow, it wanted to do it again. The first one had come willingly. More than that, it had come by choice, pushed its way in. Regretted it already, though. Would have preferred extinction. Too late! Too late, impetuous companion! Stuck with it now. But willingness was not essential. There were many minds here. Take them. Harvest them. Fed with such nutriment, what could angel-stuff not become? It remembered swimming among the stars. Why not again? But better. Stronger. More dangerous.

  Start with the two in the boat. There was history there. Bad blood.

  81

  Lom pulled hard on the oars, racing the skiff seaward, scanning the
far embankment for a scaleable escape. There was none. His head was hurting worse: tiny detonations of bright light flickered in his peripheral vision; waves of giddiness distracted him. He couldn’t maintain his defences indefinitely. He hadn’t the strength.

  Maroussia went through Safran’s equipment. There was the pistol, useless against the mudjhik, but not negligible.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You’d better have this. I don’t know how to use it.’

  Lom put it in his pocket.

  There was also the Exter-Vulikh that had cut down the giant. Its magazine was half full and there were two more besides, but it was nothing that would worry a twelve-foot sentient block of angel flesh, not even for an instant. Maroussia laid it aside with an expression of distaste.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just stopped?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We could wait. I know we can’t make headway upstream, but we could try to hold our position out here. Or maybe we could make the boat fast somehow against the far embankment. Sooner or later a ship will come along.’

  Lom considered.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘If there is a ship. We haven’t seen any. Don’t they try to clear port before the freeze? I think the season’s over.’

  ‘Something must come along, one way or the other.’

  Lom turned the skiff and began to row against the stream.

  The mudjhik understood what they were doing instantly. It stopped loping forward and began to jog up and down on the spot, stamping heavily. Then it bent forward and began to pummel the ground with its fists. For a moment Lom thought it was raging impotently, but it straightened up with a large chunk of stone in its hands and lobbed it towards them.