13
Moth, struck by seven bullets from the pistol of Hunder Rond, collapsed in a heap on the corridor floor. Lom crouched over her. Moved her hair aside to clear her face.
She hissed and pushed his hand away.
‘Hole in my chest,’ she said. ‘Harmless. Piece gone from my leg. I’ll be a limper for a while.’
‘Is there pain?’ Elena was there. ‘Let me see. You must be bleeding. I can try to stop it.’
Moth began to haul herself upright. Lom put a hand under her arm to help her. There was almost no weight at all.
‘No bleeding,’ she said, leaning her back against the wall. ‘No blood to bleed. As for pain, there is pain sometimes. Existence hurts. This will pass.’
‘Can I leave her with you?’ Lom said to Elena. ‘I need to go after the one that escaped.’
‘Leave the Streltski for my sisters,’ said Moth. ‘When they have finished with the others they will hunt him. Pigeon and Paper will bring him down. You come with me and look at Lavrentina’s papers.’
It was ten minutes before Moth was ready to move. The vyrdalak sisters had gone into the shadows, leaving the torn and ruined bodies of the dead Parallel Sector men where they lay. Lom collected their torches and switched them off to save the batteries, all but one for Elena’s benefit.
‘This way,’ said Moth when she was ready, and set off limping towards the lobby. She was halting and slow. ‘We will have to go by corridors and stairs.’
For twenty minutes at least they climbed, slowly and circuitously. Lom recognised the backwater corridor where his brief office had been, buried among cleaning cupboards and boiler rooms, when he was Krogh’s man. His typescript card was still tucked into the slot on the door, yellowing and faded now. INVESTIGATOR V Y LOM. PODCHORNOK OBLAST. PROVINCIAL LIAISON REVIEW SECRETARIAT. He stuck his head inside. The same desk and coat rack were still there but the placard on the wall had gone.
Someone had remembered the old Vlast well enough to take that away. Lom wondered if it had been Pavel.
In the mazy unlit corridors behind the reading room there was no panic for Hunder Rond, though he knew he was vyrdalak-hunted. There was fear–there was horror in the dark–but he knew that panic would kill him. The vyrdalaks would come fast; they would not lose him in the passageways; they would not give up. They would come and come, quick and silent and relentless in the darkness. Out of shadows and ceilings and lift shafts they would come. He had seen the remains of vyrdalak kill. He had heard the screams.
He had also seen vyrdalaks burn. He knew how that sounded. How it smelled. How it felt.
Hunder Rond moved on at a slow even pace and put aside terror for later. Stored it up for a better time and place. This was his forte, his talent, advantage and pleasure: clinical self-restraint–ice and iron–primitive emotions under unbreakable control to be retrieved for private release when he chose. The trembling hot sweat, delirium, anger and screaming could be brought to the surface then, and satisfied in his way. Not now. Later. There was energy and pleasure to be had from it then. A heightening.
He smiled grimly in the dark as he cleared and focused his mind and considered his situation from every angle with dispassionate accuracy. He had one spare magazine for his pistol, which was now empty. That was not sufficient, but then no number would have been. Bullets rarely killed a vyrdalak, though a lucky shot might give it pause. Seven cartridges were better than none. He ejected the empty magazine, inserted the spare and loaded the first round into the breech.
And he had a map.
That was foresight. That was efficiency. Cool administrative imagination.
There was no point blundering around in the dark and getting lost. He switched on his torch and unfolded the floor plan of the Lodka.
Century by century the interior of the Lodka had evolved to meet the needs of the day. Corridors and stairways were closed off and new ones opened. Cables and heating were installed. Angel-fall observatories, and radio antennae in attics. Rooms knocked together and repartitioned and requisitioned for new purposes. Subterranean railway access opened and abandoned. A vacuum-pipe internal postal system. Every few years the superintendent of works sent expeditions into the building to update the master survey, but the results were obsolete before the work was complete, and the edges and margins, the heights and depths, remained ragged and obscure. For the core areas and the zones in regular use, however, the map was reliable enough. The Gaukh reading room and the layout of the main archives hadn’t changed much. They were near the public door that used to open onto the Square of the Piteous Angel, now Victory Square.
Rond studied the map and chose his way out. It wasn’t far. Ten minutes in the passageways and across two wide hallways should do it. He refolded the map and jogged forward at a steady sustainable pace, vyrdalak-horror and primal prey-animal fear tucked away in a closed interior filing system of his own.
Moth led Lom and Elena higher, up narrower stairwells. There was more light up here: more windows, and the yellow moons were shining, nearly full, low and sinking towards the western skyline. Lom switched off the dimming torch. There was no need for it now. They were passing along some kind of high covered gangway. Narrow windows to their right looked across the Lodka’s tumbled inner roofscape–slopes of lead and slate, dormers and gables and oriels, downpipes and guttering, naked abandoned flagpoles–and through to their left Mirgorod spread out towards the sea. Dawn was breaking pink and green. Traffic was moving slowly along the eight-lane Rizhin Highway. The sun-flushed thousand-windowed sky-rise towers–the Rudnev-Possochin University, the Pavilion of the New Vlast, the Monument to National Work–heaved up from the plain. Warm-glow termite nests.
‘Here,’ said Moth at last. She stopped and pushed open a door. The sudden wave of cloying enclosed air that escaped from the room made Lom take a step back. Elena Cornelius put her hand across her mouth.
‘Oh god,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Oh god, what have they been doing?’
Hunder Rond was within sight of the threshold, the door he’d left open, when the two vyrdalaks rose at him from the shadows of a downward stair.
The light of early morning spilled through the doorway, and the sound of the waking city. Day already? Rond had thought. It was barely an hour since he’d come this way the evening before with Lieutenant Vrebel and the others now dead.
The vyrdalaks closed on him with impossible speed. He heard a gasp of pleasure and smelled the age and mustiness of rags. The sickly sweetness of unhuman breath.
Rond’s panic box broke wide open then. He felt the shriek from his own throat, the hurt of it; it wasn’t his voice but it was him. He turned into the attack and pulled the trigger of his gun, and as he spun he slipped on dusty polished marble and fell. The charge of the day-blinded vyrdalaks missed him. He felt a slicing tear across his upraised forearm and that was all. The crash of his shot echoed impossibly loud in the airy space as the bundle of screeching vyrdalaks skittered across the floor. Rond scrabbled to his knees and jabbed at the trigger again and again until the mechanism clicked empty, and then he hurled the gun at them and threw himself headlong scrambling towards the door into air and sunshine, and he was outside and he was safe and free.