He slips his hand into his pocket and folds his fat fingers round the tiny warm piece of angel flesh he always carries there. Always. He is never without it and never was.
He lets the last of Osip Rizhin drift away and dissolve on the air.
There is no past, there is only the future.
There is no defeat, there is only victory.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen, will happen.
There is a movement in the currents of the Mir, a disturbance at the near embankment. A roiling and rising stain of yellow sedimentary mud. An obstruction in the green flow.
The brutal faceless head and shoulders and torso of Archangel-in-mudjhik lifts itself out of the river, a blood- and rust-coloured thing of stone flesh spilling water as it punches holes in the embankment wall and hauls itself higher and higher, climbing towards the terrace of the Victory Hall.
Archangel tears open Josef Kantor’s mind and pours himself in, flood after flood of vast glittering black consciousness, the voice of the shining emptiness between galaxies.
You remembered, my son, while I was gone. You remembered me and did well. You have built me ships for the stars.
Archangel! Archangel! Archangel!
I come for you now so that you can come for me! Carry me out from under the poisonous trees and bring me home!
It begins, oh it begins!
The voice of Archangel singing among the suns!
The foundations of the Victory Hall shook as Archangel-in-mudjhik, twelve-foot-high lump of mobile dull red angel flesh, climbed the embankment up towards the terrace, smashing through the skin of brick and gouging hand- and footholds in the concrete beneath. The waters of the Mir sluiced from him. The parapet crumbled and crunched under his weight as he heaved himself over.
Josef Kantor stood and faced him. He could not speak, his throat was stopped, but he did not fall.
The voice of Archangel filled his mind.
Join with me, faithful, beautiful son. Come inside me now and I will carry you.
Josef Kantor felt the mudjhik mind opening like a flower. It was a deep, scented well and he was on the brink. He was in a high and lonely place and desired only to fall.
Josef Kantor felt his body dying. His heart in his chest burst open, a dark gushing fountain of blood. His lungs collapsed. His ribs flexed and his throat gaped but no air entered. He was drowning in sunlight. His own name separated from him and drifted away.
Archangel-in-mudjhik pulled him in.
Vissarion Lom, running through the corridors of the Victory Hall, felt the irruption of Archangel into the world. A shattering rearrangement of the feel of things. A detonation of total and appalling fear.
He ran, and as he ran he felt the piledriver-pounding and -shaking of the floor. He was near and getting closer.
He ran.
There was no time and it was too far to go.
Lom shoved open the heavy bronze doors and burst onto the terrace. The paving stones were cracked and shattered, pieces of parapet broken and scattered across the ground. A corpse in a crumpled white uniform curled on the floor, leaking dark blood from mouth and nose. Lom looked over the wall down into the river. He could see nothing but he knew what was in there, moving eastwards, pushing strong and fast against the stream.
2
The River Mir is strong and green and brown. The last mudjhik in the world walks submerged, shoulder against the flow, up the river towards the forest. The archangel fragment, small and lonely and triumphant, is going home.
The river is a strong brown word, endlessly spoken, driving back towards the sea, but the mudjhik is stronger: every mighty footfall stirs puffs of silt. The dark voice of the river is loud: it is a hand against his chest, pressing. It ropes his feet and erodes the ground from under them. Eddies and water vortices stir and turn behind him, sucking him back, tugging him off balance. Thick mud in water whorls. The water ceiling just above his head glimmers and ripples.
Gravity operates differently here: he has no weight. All the forces shove and shear sideways and backwards, lifting and toppling, pushing back against archangel will.
Slip and fall. Tumble and roll. The strong brown river voice is running heavy. It turns everything over and over, slowly. Carries all away through city and marsh towards the ocean.
The river knows mudjhik is there. The river is a watchful, purposeful water ram. The river, the ever-speaking voice of the inland forest, opposes.
But mudjhik resists. Slow-motion walking like a brass-helmed diver in canvas and rubber, leaning forward into the slow conveyor of the water-wind, he hauls his clumsy mud-booted feet up and over lumps of half-buried concrete, brick and stone. Clambers clumsily over the weed-carpeted black and broken spars of a sunken barge, where worms and shell creatures rout and gouge the softening wood and frond gardens stream with the stream.
The engined hulls of riverboats lumber past his shoulder. He strokes their iron and timber with his palm and edges them gently aside. Eels and lampreys slide and flick, feeding in the silt clouds the mudjhik’s feet kick up. Mudjhik pays attention to their slick dark mucus gleam. They flash like muscles of lightning in the paunch of storm clouds. They are bright marks of hungry life. Avid. Their needle teeth are sharp.
Larger fishes watch from shadow and darkness, curious, circumspect, holding themselves effortlessly in position against the force of the stream.
Mudjhik admires fish. Fish brain is cold, intent and unconcerned: the pressure of water currents is the book the fishes read. They trawl the turbid water with cold tongue. With cold and dark-adapted eye. They know what the river is: where it has come from, where it goes; the taste of earth and forest, lake and rain, and the fainter shadow-taste, the dangerous killing taint of oceanic salt. The river is their living god, and they are part of it, and there is nothing else and never was.
Josef Kantor knows that he is underwater in the river, and he knows that he is dead. The will of Archangel, heart and brain and total mudjhik commander, is a hot red fire that burns him. The overwhelming intent of Archangel drives all other thought away. Archangel is inexhaustible and unending dinning shout, all on a single note.
Archangel! Archangel! Archangel!
Archangel is bands of iron and wires of steel. Archangel is thunderous wheels on rails. Archangel is the blinding brilliance of internal suns. Archangel is the only force that drives. Archangel is…
Joseph Kantor is dumb with it.
3
Mudjhik climbs from the river and stands in the evening sun to dry. The city is far behind him, a murmur in the wind, a skyline stain.
Archangel is well satisfied.
You remembered and did well, my son. You were my voice in the silence and prepared for me the way home. Walk with me now, back to the mountain under the trees. Be my voice a while and I will yet show you the light of the stars.
Josef Kantor is fist. All fist. He rises from the quiet floor (which smells of dead dog and stinks of dead Safran still) and fights.
I am nobody’s son.
All the long day, all the river walk, Kantor has been watching from the shadows, crouching, growing tired of the taste of defeat and death. He has been gently, silently, testing the boundaries of Archangel, weighing strength against strength, will against will. He knows now that this Archangel is fragment only, stretched thin and small and far from home.