‘But—’ Lom began.
Kistler held up a hand to silence him.
‘There is a way, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Let me finish. There’s something going on that my colleagues and I have sensed but cannot see. It makes us uneasy and afraid. Rizhin has created a state within a state. The Parallel Sector. We are blind to Hunder Rond and his service, but it is vast, its influence everywhere. And Rizhin has secrets. A plan within a plan. Resources are still being diverted, just like in Dukhonin’s day. Funds. Materials. Workers. The output of the atomic plants at Novaya Zima is far greater than we see the results of. Whole areas on the map are blank, even to us.
‘A man in my position can’t ask too many questions. I have my resources but I can’t use them: the Parallel Sector’s reach is too deep and the penalty for being caught is, well, immediate and total. But for you, Lom, it’s different. I think you might just be the man for the job. I’ll tell you where to look. I’ll give you money. Whatever you need. If you fail, if you’re caught, I’ll deny all knowledge of you. No, I’ll have you killed before you can implicate me at all. But if you find me something I can really use, then we’ll be in business. You bring me back the weapon I need, Lom. This will be our common task.’
‘I don’t work for anyone but myself,’ said Lom. ‘I’m not a policeman. Not any more.’
‘Ego talk,’ said Kistler. ‘I’m offering you an alliance, not fucking employment. Call it cooperation in the mutual interest. Call it a beautiful friendship. A meeting of minds. Call it whatever soothes your vanity–I don’t care. I don’t need you. I was going along just fine before you came, but now I see an opportunity that’s worth an investment and a risk. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? What the fuck else are you going to do?’
4
Lieutenant Arkady Rett of the 28th Division (Engineers) left his division behind and led his men deeper into the forest. The division had become hopelessly bogged down. They were going in circles.
‘Take a small party, Rett, and scout ahead,’ the colonel had said. ‘Three or four can travel more quickly. Find us an eastward path. Find us solid ground and somewhere to go.’
Rett chose two men, Private Soldier Senkov and Corporal Fallun, and walked out of the camp with them. Behind them the sky was black with the smoke of burning trees, and ahead lay woods within woods, always further in and further back, deeper and deeper for ever. There was no end to going on.
Rett had thought that entering the deeper woods would mean disappearing into darkness. He’d imagined a densely packed wall of trees. Impenetrable thorn-thicket walls. Endless columns of tall trunks disappearing up into gloom, and beneath the canopy nothing but silence. But the reality was different: open spaces filled with grass and fern and briars and pools of water; occasional oak and ash and beech, singly or in small groups; hazel poles so slender he could push them with one hand and they would bend and sway like banner staffs. Ivy and moss and sticky mud and fallen branches underfoot. The forest was the opposite of pathless; there were too many paths, and none led somewhere.
‘Paths don’t make themselves,’ said Senkov.
The compass was useless. After the first day he didn’t get it out of his pack.
On the second day Rett woke feeling small. The world was inexhaustible and he was one tiny thing alone. There was no human scale: hostile, featureless, relentless, the forest defeated interpretation. Rett was a constructor of bridges, a worker with tools, a rational man: he looked for pattern and structure and edge, and found none here. His mind filled the gaps, the spacious lacuna of unresolvable chaotic plenitude, with monsters. There were faces in the trees. Movement in the corner of the eye. Presences. Watchfulness. The nervous child he no longer was returned and walked alongside him.
Senkov and Fallun fell silent, sour, but the invisible child talked. The child saw the shadow-flanks of predatory beasts between the trees: witches and giants and forgotten terrors returning; the fear of being forever lost and never finding home again; men that were bears, stinking eaters of flesh. Trolls crowded at the edge of consciousness, importuning attention at the marginal twilit times. Dusk and dawn.
The 28th had crossed the edge into the trees at the start of summer, but it was chill and autumnal here. Mushrooms and mist and the damp smell of coming winter. There was always a cold wind blowing in their faces. The wind unsettled them: they didn’t sleep well, tempers were short, always there was a feeling something bad was about to happen.
As they penetrated deeper into the trees Rett saw signs of ancient construction: overgrown earthworks; lengths of wall and ditch built of huge boulders, shaped by hand and smooth with moss and age, collapsing unrepaired; broken spans of bridge; tunnel entrances; empty lake villages rotting back into shallow green waters. Shaggy-haired grazing beasts, wisent and rufous bison, faded into further trees at their approach.
On the fourth day they came to the edge of an enormous hole in the earth’s crust: not a canyon or a rift but a gouge, dizzyingly immense, approximately circular, about half a mile across. It was like a great throat, a punched hole, a core removed from the skin of the world. It was terrifying to stand at the brink and lean over, staring down into bottomless darkening depths. It seemed to Rett that there were faint distant points of light down there. It was as if they were stars, and he was seeing through to the night on the other side of the world. More than anything else he wanted to jump off and fall for ever. It cost him tremendously to tear himself away.
Rett and his men skirted the edge of the great gouge and pressed on. Deeper into the inexhaustible forest. They hacked white strips in the bark of trees to mark their way back out. On the eighth day Rett woke early, before the others. He woke in confusion out of stupefying dreams, a thick heavy pain in his head, his mouth dry and fouled.
Hard frost had come in the night. Mist–damp, chilling, faint, insidious, still–brushed against his face, filled his nose and lungs, reduced the endlessness of the surrounding trees to a quiet clearing edged by indeterminacy. His boots crunched on brittle, whitened grass and iron earth. The sound was intrusive. Loud and echoless. The trees seemed suddenly bare of leaves, sifting a dull and diminished light through the monochrome canopy of branches.
The intense cold made his fingers clumsy. Breath pluming in small clouds, he fumbled the tinder, dropped it, couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work to get a fire started. The water was frozen in the bottle and the pan felt clumsy, and fell, spilling chunks of ice across the hearth. It took an age to coax a meagre, heatless flame into burning. There were a few dusty grains, the last of the coffee. He scattered them across sullen water. It didn’t boil. He built up the fire with thick stumps of log and put a neat pile of others ready. The heat chewed at the wood, smouldering, strengthless, with occasional watery yellow licks of flame the size and colour of fallen hazel leaves. Smoke hung over it, drifting low, thickening the mist. Clinging to his hair.
Rett left Senkov and Fallun to sleep and climbed the shallow rise they’d chosen last night for shelter. The trees were awake. The many trees, watching. The weight of their attention pressed in on him, sucking away the air. It was so cold. His ankle was hurting. His limbs were stiff from too much walking.