Lom pushed open the door onto the hotel roof and stepped out into dazzling glare. The rooftop was empty. There was nobody there and nothing to see but parapet and sky.
He heard the sound of a single rifle shot. It was unmistakable. And it had come from somewhere above him.
Not the first-stage roof, the second.
Shit.
He spun round, went back inside and ran up the darkened staircase, taking the steps three at a time.
Elena Cornelius saw the bullet strike the cushioned seat of the chair behind Rizhin. It must have passed his skull by inches, but he didn’t react. Didn’t pause. Didn’t flap a hand at the zip and crack by his ear, like she’d seen people do. He’d heard nothing above the amplified echoes of his own speech.
Lukasz Kistler was staring, puzzled, at the hole that had been punched in the seat beside him. In a second it would dawn on him what it meant.
She lined up the cross hairs on Rizhin again, took a deep slow breath, exhaled and fired again. Rizhin’s face disappeared in a puff of soft pink. The energy of the bullet snapped his whole body backwards. He went down as if someone had smashed him full force in the temple with a baseball bat.
Even in the dim stairwell Lom heard the horrified moan of the crowd. It was like the lowing of a stricken herd. He pounded on up the stairs, floor after floor.
He almost ran smack into Elena Cornelius coming down, the rifle held delicately in splayed fingers, pointing at the floor.
‘It’s me, Elena. You know me. Vissarion. Vissarion Lom.’
Her eyes were wide and unblinking, glassy bright in the shadows.
‘I’ve killed him,’ she said.
It was like a punch in Lom’s stomach. All the air went out of him. Less than a day in Mirgorod and he had failed. Mission over.
He took the rifle from her awkward grasp and propped it against the wall.
‘You have to lose this,’ he said. ‘Leave it. The bag too. Lose it. We need to get out of here.’
She didn’t resist. She didn’t move. He took her by the arm and led her down the stairs.
7
On a broad front the divisions of the New Vlast army entered the endless forest. Fleets of barges up the wide slow rivers and under the trees.
The forest is woods within woods, further in and further back. It has an edge but no central point and there is no end to going on. Deeper and deeper for ever. Strange persons live there. It is not safe.
As long as the divisions kept to their barges on the rivers they made progress, but five yards back from the bank all was impassable: layers of dead wood, luxuriant undergrowth, lake, bog and hill. Oak, ash, elm, maple and linden tree. Thorn and fir. A trackless catalogue of all the forests of northernness and east. Disoriented compass needles swung. Radios sucked in static. Green noise.
The forest removed irony. It was the place itself. Woodland and shadow and the lair of wild beasts. Every divisional commander was on his or her own. One by one each hauled up on some bend of their nameless river and disembarked and began to burn. Petrol-driven chainsaws ripped resinous raw avenues. The noise echoed down the river valleys. Trundling battle tanks pissed arcs of singeing ignition, the soldiers’ smut-grimed sweat-shone faces gleamed dull and lurid orange, and every day the churned and stinking ash-carpeted swathes extended deeper into the interior of the forest. Fingernails scraping at the heart of green silence. A war against the world.
The rivers became supply lines for the beachheads. Barge trains shuttled fuel day and night from New Vlast base camps at the forest edge.
In a week the black smoke had darkened the midday sky.
Divisions encountered waterlands that would not burn, marshes that sucked at the tracks of wallowing tanks. Engineers sank to the waist in bog and floundered. Horses drowned. Methane pockets burst and burned behind them. Divisions came to sudden rising cliffs and turned aside. Divisions reached the brink of mile-wide bottomless mist-rimmed holes in the ground. Trolls blundered out of the thickets, roaring, hair on fire and blackened blistering skin.
The advancing swathes of engine-driven desolation drifted left and right, circling round to rejoin themselves, beginning to lose direction, tracing mazy aimless scribbles on the margins of elsewhere under the trees.
Chapter Five
1
Dead shock pulsed out across Mirgorod from the head of Papa Rizhin obliterated in a pink flower. His poleaxed fall punched the city in the face.
There was a spontaneous attempt to put a roadblock across Noviy Prospect, but the tide of dazed and weeping spectators rolled down out of Victory Square and swept on through, and nobody seriously tried to stop them. Militia patrols gathered in stricken leaderless huddles. Officers with panic in their eyes jogged between them barking orders no one seemed to hear.
Elena Cornelius pulled herself together quickly. She dropped her dark coat in an alleyway. In a white short-sleeved blouse she was taller and ten years younger, narrow shoulders and pale muscular arms, almost unrecognisable as the woman of the morning crowd. From six years back Lom remembered a rounder, fuller face, but she was all bone structure now. Nose pushed askew and night-blue eyes. The lines of a mouth long kept pressed tight shut to keep words back. Lom noticed her damaged hands. Fingernails not grown properly back.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘Helping you,’ said Lom. ‘Two are less visible than one.’
They walked among the stricken, the shocked, the wandering. Not fast, not slow, catching no one’s eye. Gendarmes were hauling people from the crowd. Pushing them against the wall. Spilling the contents of pockets and bags onto the pavement.
‘I don’t need you,’ said Elena. ‘I’m better alone.’
‘I’m good at this kind of thing.’
Bright banners fluttered in the strengthening wind. Rizhin’s huge smiling face watched over them. Rizhin’s face–Josef Kantor’s face–the man Lom had known, become a monstrous bullying avuncular god. The death of him left the world strangely deflated and pointless. Not the world, thought Lom. Only me.
‘Were you following me?’ said Elena. ‘Were you looking for me?’
‘Later,’ said Lom. ‘We’ll talk later, when we’re clear.’
‘What were you doing there? How could you know?’
‘I didn’t know. I saw you in the street. You were pretty obvious. But I lost sight of you, and by the time I found you again it was too late.’
‘Too late? For what?’
‘Too late to stop what you did.’
She left him then. Turned on her heel into a side alley, a narrow chasm between high windows and steep blank walls. Lom thought of hurrying after her. Catching up. What happened to you? How are you become this? But he let her go and watched her until she reached the far end of the alley and turned to the right. She didn’t look back.