Half a second after she fired, the glass in the windscreen shattered. From where she was it seemed to collapse and dissolve. The Parallel Sector saloon swung wildly to the left, crashed against the rock face and spun twice.
The jeep, following close behind, had nowhere to go and no time to stop. It crunched sickeningly into the side of the saloon. The men in the back of the jeep were thrown out. They landed badly.
Elena shifted the scope back to the driver. He was folded into the jeep’s steering wheel, his head pushed through broken glass in a mess of blood.
She watched a man stagger from the back of the saloon. Limping. He pulled at the driver’s door. It wouldn’t open. None of the men from the jeep was moving at all. The two crashed vehicles together completely blocked the road.
She shouldered her gun and slid backwards away from the ridge, stood up and began to move, half running, half sliding down through the trees. This route would cut off a mile of road. In seven minutes she would be back at the track where Konnie would be waiting with the boxy grey Narodni.
10
Archangel hurls himself across the continent, Rizhin world. He is a fisted pocket of certainty crashing from mind to mind–land and pause and look and leap again–leaving a crumb trail of sickness and fall. Hunting the only angel trace still left in Rizhin’s New Vlast.
Brother, I am racing to you! Brother, call again and I will come!
He has scarcely the strength for it. Mile by mile the connecting cord back to his rock-lump-grinding-carcass in the forest lengthens and thins. The thread grows weak and spider-fine.
In the deep concrete cistern under the Mirgorod Sea Gate, Safran-in-mudjhik pummels the imprisoning wall with shapeless fists. His mind is dark with anger at his fall.
Lom pushed him in there.
He cannot get out.
Six years.
The endless surging weight of water, the whole force of the River Mir, pins him on his back. The noise of it fills his head and deafens him. The lost mind of Safran huddles in a silent corner, curled and foetal, wanting only the sound and the shouting and the hopelessness to cease.
Hairline fractures are opening in the concrete.
Two thousand days ago an aircraft of the Archipelago returning from a raid emptied its bomb bay, dumping its unspent load across the White Marshes. Two bombs fell against the dam. No visible damage done, but in the secret places, in the dark interior of immense solid walls, weakened bonds began to shear and slip.
Predator-Archangel plummets from height, daggering into the mind of Safran-in-mudjhik and taking possession with a shriek of triumph. Instantly he expands to fill the space. Scoops the remnants of the weaker mudjhik mind from their runnels and crannies with a spoon and eats them all.
Sorry, brother.
Archangel glows with satisfaction and joy. He has a worthy body now in Rizhin world. He flexes. He samples. He trials his goods.
In a dark corner he finds Safran cowering and hauls him out wriggling and retching by the ear.
What use are you? he wonders briefly, rummaging with clumsy fingers through the maddened Safran mind before crushing it for ever out of existence.
Deep in the endless forest the Seer Witch of Bones is the first to discern the gap in the wall. She shrieks in dismay, ‘Close it! Close it! The angel is through!’
Maroussia Shaumian walking under the trees, preoccupied with the child in her belly and Vissarion Lom, reluctantly turns her attention to the call. She traces the fine connecting threadway. It is weak and she is strong, invested with the Pollandore. It costs her no more than a tussle with the weakened and attenuated angel mind. She pinches her fingers and the cord is cut.
The forest is secure.
But the archangel fragment in the mudjhik, isolated from the depleted mother hill, clings on to life and purpose. In the mudjhik carcass he is strength and fire and brilliance like nothing has been in a donkey workhorse mudjhik ever before.
Slowly Archangel-mudjhik rises to his feet against the power of the crushing river and puts his shoulder to the wall. Shoves and batters and kicks against the weakening concrete.
Brute force does it. Boulders come tumbling down, the river is unleashed and Archangel-mudjhik is swept out, twisting and floundering in a torrent of broken concrete and white water, out into the deeper colder darkness of the bay.
Chapter Ten
1
They changed cars at a small fishing port ten miles east along the coast from Anaklion, ditching the Narodni for a spacious pre-war Tsvetayev with cloth-covered seats, more tractor than automobile, and drove back to Mirgorod. By the direct north-east route it was only nine hundred miles, but it took them five days of doubling back and taking less-used circuitous routes. They assumed they were being searched for. Trains and flights were out of the question, even if they’d had the money for that.
There were five of them in the car: Lom and Elena, Maksim and Konnie and Kistler. They left Vasilisk at the fishing port, where Maksim had arranged a place for him on a boat. He would work his passage south and disappear. As they were leaving, Vasilisk shook hands with Maksim and snapped a military salute.
‘He was in my unit,’ was all Maksim would say afterwards. ‘In the war.’
They drove long hours on ill-made roads, sharing the driving and sleeping in the car, picking up food where they could and stopping as little as possible. North of the Karima mountains they skirted the hungerland. What they saw was bad and the rumours were worse. Ruined and abandoned farmland, the people of the towns gaunt, grey-faced, weak, watching them pass through with sullen hopeless eyes. Villages where there was nobody at all, only crows and pigeons and packs of dogs that circled, heads down, ribcages, dirty lustreless coats.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Konnie. ‘None of us knew about this.’
They ran into a roadblock in a birch wood: a tree across the road and five men in rags with staves and a shotgun rising from a ditch. An attempt to steal the car: fuel and food and a way out. Maksim had to shoot two of them. The rear window of the Tsvetayev was broken.
Maksim had been wary of Lom since the incident of the gate. Lom felt himself watched. By Konnie too. Maksim tried to ask him about it once, but Lom didn’t answer. Where to begin and what to say? The atmosphere was strained.
Elena Cornelius just wanted to get back to the city. She’d been away too long, She was terrified that her girls had come home and she had missed them.
Kistler recovered slowly. They cleaned him up and fed him, found him fresh clothes and let him sleep most of the day. He had lost weight in Rizhin’s interrogation cell. His eyes were dark, blank and anxious, and for long hours he sat in the back of the car next to Elena, pressed up against the door, leaning forward, hands on his knees, staring at nothing. Every few minutes he would open his mouth to speak but say nothing. On the second day tears came, silent tears soaking his face. He didn’t wipe them away.