‘How many men and where?’ said Lom.
‘Two with the woman in the reading room under the wheel and two in the locked corridor nearby where they look for Lavrentina’s private archive. I heard them say that.’ She grinned, a wide dark gaping slash of mouth. ‘But they will not find what they want it is not where they look.’
‘Lavrentina’s archive?’ said Lom. ‘I want that too. I need that very much.’
Was it possible the papers he needed were still in the Lodka? That Chazia hadn’t moved them before she left for Novaya Zima with the Pollandore? In the chaos of the withdrawal and burning of that day, it could have happened.
‘My sisters are right,’ said Moth. ‘It’s because of you the Streltski are come here where we were forgotten and safe.’
‘Moth?’ said Lom ‘Do you know where Lavrentina’s papers are?’
Her wide nocturnal eyes flashed in the darkness.
‘The black uniforms will not find them,’ she said. ‘However long they search. We took them to be safe. Lavrentina will want them when she comes back.’
‘Lavrentina isn’t coming back,’ said Lom. ‘She’s dead. It’s Rizhin who wants her archive now. He must know I’m looking for it, and that’s a danger to him. He wants to find it first. ’ Poor Pavel. And Chazia’s papers here all the time. ‘That’s why he sent the Parallel Sector here–I mean the Streltski.’
‘Oh?’ said Moth. ‘Lavrentina is dead?’ She reacted to that with the incurious indifference of the non-human who measure their lives in centuries. Then he felt her gaze in the darkness harden and grow colder. Dangerous. ‘And now you want to take Lavrentina’s papers away from us? You didn’t say.’
‘One file, Moth. Only one file. Lavrentina had papers about Josef Kantor that I need to find. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t think the papers were still here.’
‘Kantor papers? Papers that endanger Kantor? Kantor whose Streltski drive us out and burn us ’
‘Yes.’
Lom felt Moth smile. A malevolent smile. A playful smile with rows of pin-sharp blade-edge venomous teeth.
‘I could take you there,’ she said. ‘My sisters, though…’
‘Elena first,’ said Lom. ‘The men with the guns.’
12
Hunder Rond swept his torch across empty shelves.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘This is the correct room,’ said Lieutenant Vrebel. ‘There’s no mistake.’
‘So where are the fucking papers?’
‘According to the register they should still be here. Permission to remove them was issued to a Captain Iliodor but the completion slip was never matched. He did not come for them. They were never released.’
‘This Iliodor,’ said Rond. ‘Who is he?’
‘He was Commander Chazia’s aide,’ said Vrebel. ‘He went missing the first day of the withdrawal, and he was presumed killed in the first bombing raids though no body was found. The paperwork is clear. Chazia commissioned him to remove her archive to some other place but he never did. That’s what Pavel Antimos was on to when we took him.’
Rond played his torch over the emptied shelving again. ‘So where are Chazia’s files now?’
‘I cannot say, Director Rond. I do not know.’
‘Do you understand,’ said Rond, ‘how dangerous those papers could be? Who knows what poison that woman stored away for her own use and protection. If such an archive falls in the hands of antisocial elements, or rivals for the Presidium… This archive must be found, Vrebel. It has to be destroyed. Our lives depend on this now. Rizhin knows of its existence, and if we can’t bring it home—’
He broke off suddenly and spun round, his torch skipping wildly. ‘What the fuck!’
From somewhere down the corridor behind them came the sound of gunshots. A man screaming and screaming in terror. Pain. Screams without hope.
Lieutenant Vrebel pulled out his gun and ran.
‘Vrebel! Wait!’ called Rond.
Too late. Vrebel was disappearing down the corridor towards the reading room.
‘Idiot,’ said Rond quietly. Hunder Rond was no kind of coward but he understood caution. Circumspection. Explore and comprehend your position, test your enemy, discover your advantage, then exploit it with surprise and overwhelming deadly force. Survival is the first criterion of victory, and in the end the only one. He switched off his torch, drew his pistol and began to follow Vrebel’s jerky flashing beam.
Lom watched the attack of the vyrdalaks on the Parallel Sector men from an upper gallery of the Lodka reading room.
Moth had led him there. Together they had crept out onto a balcony from where, by the starlight spilling through the broken panes of the dome, he could look down on the rows of reader’s desks that radiated out from the insectile bulk of the motionless great wheel. He’d seen Elena Cornelius sitting at one of the desks, upright and fierce. Men in black uniforms were sitting on desks either side of her, swinging their legs. Relaxed. Waiting for the others to return.
‘Let me take them,’ he had whispered to Moth. ‘I’ll do it quietly. No fuss.’
‘Too late,’ she’d hissed. ‘See! My sisters are vengeful. Blood for the burnings at the Apraksin!’
Two dark uncertain shapes were swarming head-first at silent impossible speed down the gantry of the great wheel. White mouths in the moonlight. Lom felt the fluttering shadow-memory of vestigial papery wings brush against his face. Liminal whisperings. He remembered Count Palffy’s collection in the raion. The glass cases mounted on the wall, the pinned-out specimens, some drab, some gaudy. My specialism is winter moths. Ice moths. Strategies for surviving the deep winter cold.
The Parallel Sector men had also felt movement above them and looked up, swinging their torch beams. They saw what was coming.
‘Elena!’ Lom had yelled. ‘Run! They don’t want you. Get clear! Run!’
He’d started to run himself then, racing for the iron spiral stairway down to the reading room. But before he reached the head of the stairs there were shots and then the screaming began.
When the vyrdalak sisters attacked her guards, Elena Cornelius had backed away, retreating to the edge of the room. Lom made his way across to her between the desks.
‘Keep back out of the way,’ he said. ‘This isn’t for us.’
There was a flash of light in the frosted pane of the doorway behind her. Lom sensed someone was coming fast. Another one of the Streltski. He felt the man’s fear. He was coming for a fight.
Lom pulled from his pocket the VKBD pistol he’d acquired in Pir-Anghelsky Park. There was no time to think. Just react. The door crashed open and Lom fired.
The shot probably hit the man in the chest, but Lom never knew for certain because Moth swept past him noiselessly, knocking him aside, and took the man’s head off with a slash of a pale-bladed hand. The detached head thudded against the wall as the body collapsed. Moth leaped over it and flew on into the darkened corridor beyond.
In the reading room the vyrdalak sisters were making thin papery screams of triumph and delight.
Hunder Rond got only a vague impression of what had destroyed Vrebel before the lieutenant’s head flew off and his torch fell to the floor, but it was enough. He knew what it was. He knew it was coming for him next.
He emptied his entire magazine in the direction of the approaching vyrdalak. Seven blinding muzzle flashes in the dark. Seven deafening explosions. Somewhere among the noise he heard a high-pitched shriek and a stumble. Then he turned and ran back into the corridors of the private archives.