Rond’s car was where he’d left it the previous evening (scarcely an hour ago). He was trembling. Focus. Focus. His left arm was numb, the jacket sleeve ripped open and wet with blood, his forearm opened above the wrist, an oozing superficial tear. Drive one-handed then. How hard is that? He needed to clean himself up. Get the wound dressed quickly. Vyrdalak strikes fester.
But then, when he’d done that, he would come back and he would burn them. Burn the vyrdalaks. Burn the foulness. Burn their nests. Burn whatever archives were still inside that should have been burned years ago. Burn the whole fucking Lodka to the ground.
14
Moth led Lom and Elena into the broad interior of some kind of tower. For five or six floors it rose above them, but wide jagged holes were broken through all the floorboards and plaster ceilings so they could see all the way to the roof. Dust-ridden daylight splashed in through pointed-arch windows. The tower was some kind of library. It was also a beautiful attic nest.
The vyrdalak sisters lived among chambers of sweetness. The whole of the inside of the tower was hung with great webs and pockets and caverns of chewed paper and fruit. Rotting-fruit-and-paper extrusions. Files and books and sea charts, centuries of memoranda and reports–diplomatic letters, records of surveillance, interrogation and betrayal–they ate them all. Masticated and regurgitated them to make hundreds of comfortable translucent compartments the colour of ivory and bone. The floor was uneven papier mâché, matted and lumpy with stalagmites of eaten newsprint and maps and confessions under torture, and all crusted with a yellow-brown craquelure of age.
The whole construction had a perfect, proportioned elegance. It was like standing inside dried egg casings. The sea-worn honeycombed interiors of bone. Wasps’ nests like lanterns under eaves. It was the work of centuries and it was beautiful.
‘We read and read,’ said Moth with quiet pride, ‘and as we read we chew.’
Half-eaten fruits–long ago dried to leathery sweetness–and rotting foraged stores were tucked away in cavities and corners.
Hunder Rond returned to the Lodka with men in trucks. They threw a safety cordon around the building and Rond sent in six two-man burning teams, one for each of the half-dozen main public entrances. Pressurised fuel tanks strapped to their backs, they penetrated as far as they dared, leaving themselves escape runs, and began to spray arcs of fire.
The Lodka burned. Oh yes, it burned. The desks, the chairs, the conference tables, the books and files and carpets, the pictures on the walls, the beams, the floor boards, the staircases, all tinder-dry and hungry for combustion.
At the first licks of flame up the walls, the firestarters turned and ran. They took up fallback positions outside the doors, flame-throwers ready for anything that tried to escape.
Moth led Lom and Elena into side rooms off the main tower. There were libraries within libraries, collections and cabinets of curiosities, some small as cupboards with cramped connecting ways, some large as salons. Dormers and airy roof constructions. Moth swept ahead, motley fabric train swishing bare floorboards and fading patterned rugs. Lom and Elena followed more slowly, lingering by items shelved, ranged and museumed with their own mysterious logic.
The sisters had picked up and hauled back home things they had found in tunnels and the city and the Lodka itself: detached fragments of the old Vlast and its predecessors. Flotsam from the wreckage of forgotten worlds. They had gathered furniture and papers, pieces of porcelain and pottery, broken and not, astronomical instruments, components electrical and mechanical. There was a whole wing for works rescued from Vlast storerooms of confiscated art.
Lom paused over aquatints and engravings and photographs of vanished cities. He glanced through the correspondence of margraves, landgraves, electors and county palatines. Accounts of coats of arms, lineages and uniforms. Canvas bags still bearing the brittle broken seals of the corps diplomatique. Orders of battle for campaigns of which he’d never heard. The Yannis River Advance. Battles on frozen lakes. Cavalry charges against artillery. The repulsion of the northern dukes. A Model Village Prospectus on the New Rational Principle. Schools Not Guns Will Feed Our People. Displayed under glass were ancient undated maps of the continent. Small countries Lom had never heard of remained like ghosts, a stained patchwork of counties and princedoms. All maps ended in the east with forest.
The sisters had hung their collection with tiny pieces of other people’s privacy: combs and portrait lockets; the headcloths and bast shoes and tin cups of the nameless. The more Lom lingered there, the more aware he became of beginnings that had had no continuation, lines cut off and possibilities unrealised. Ways and places these beginnings might have gone but never did. It was a museum that told no story except absence.
A circular window gave a view across the sky-rise city: Rizhin Highway, Rizhin Tower. It was perpetual zero hour–null o’clock–in the real world outside. All the things that might have happened (some of them good, some bad, some beautiful) did not happen. They did not happen because this happened instead.
Moth came bustling worrisome back for him.
‘This way,’ she said. ‘This way. Hurry.’
The sisters had lovingly recreated Lavrentina Chazia’s private archive in every detail. The green-painted walls. The empty desk. Floor tiles lifted from downstairs and relaid. Rows of steel-framed racks holding files and boxes of papers. Every shelf brought up, placed and labelled as it had been; every file and box exactly where it should be according to the former commander of the secret police’s own scheme.
‘We took them away and hid them,’ said Moth. ‘We kept them safe for when Lavrentina came back.’
Lom found what he wanted, exactly where he had found it once before. The lavender folder for Josef Kantor was in its place on the K shelf. It was fat and full. He took it and pushed it inside his jacket.
At that moment the echo of shrill distant screeching reached them. It found them even here, even in this quiet archive of an archive.
‘What’s that?’ said Elena.
Moth stiffened and screamed. Her sisters crashed in through upper windows, flew down and scuttled, rattling, in circles around them.
‘Fire! Fire! They are burning us! Fire!’
Throughout the Lodka the fires were roaring now, blinding vortices of flame and heat. Flames crawled along the walls and floors of corridors, meticulous and thorough, spilling into every room. Floor by floor, shaft by shaft and stair by stair, ignition spread. Rooms unopened for centuries popped into sudden combustion. Thick worms and blankets of smoke flowed across ceilings. Whirlwinds of burning paper. Billowing flakes of fire. Caves of red heat. Explosions and backdrafts sucked whole floors in. Fire smouldered against locked doorways and burst through, searing irruptions, sucking whole annexes into the hot mouth.
Paint blistered. Pigments boiled off canvases and the canvases burned with their frames. Countless linoleum acres bubbled and stank to sticky residual ash. Inkwells boiled dry in burning lecterns. Typewriters buckled and twisted, their ribbons burned, the enamel licked away. The immolation of code books and cipher machines. A fire-clean forgetting of four hundred years of lost secrets.