He knows the prize to be won, and that the risk of failure is death, but he is dead already, so what does it matter? And he is strong, stronger now than he was, and stronger than Archangel knows.
Josef Kantor hurls himself at the Archangel root shard. Pushes his fist into Archangel mouth.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen, will happen. I am nobody’s prophet and nobody’s labouring hand.
Archangel screams shock and indignation and turns on the sudden enemy within. Crushing. Squeezing. Smashing. He is speed beyond perceiving, strike and strike and strike again: he is the lancing burning blade and the crushing stamping heel. Burst upon burst of hammer-blow force. He is the turner-to-stone and the acid lick of a fire mouth. He is the bitter adversary against whom nothing stands.
Archangel! Archangel!
He is warrior nonpareil; his birthright is all the stars.
Josef Kantor goes down before him like a blade of dried grass under the wheel of a strong wind. Archangel burns him and he flares, weightless and brittle, crumbling to ash and dust. He vanishes into instant vapours of nothing like a scrap of paper in the belly of the white furnace.
The brevity of his destruction cannot be measured in the silence between tick and tick. Josef Kantor is simply instantaneously gone.
But Josef Kantor returns.
Every time Archangel destroys him he returns.
Archangel’s force is fabulously, immeasurably, gloriously greater. He extinguishes Josef Kantor instantaneously every single time–blows him into nothing like a candle flame–but this is not a contest of force, it is a contest of will and nothing else. Archangel-fragment fights for pride and dignity and purpose, because he is Archangel and cannot fail; that cannot be conceived. But Josef Kantor fights because he will not die.
Study what you fear. Learn and destroy, then find a stronger thing to fear. Endlessly, endlessly, until the fear you cause is greater than the fear you feel. This is the dialectic of fear and killing.
Even before birth it began for Josef Kantor, the triumphant twinless twin spilling out onto the childbirth bed, accompanied by his shrivelled and half-absorbed dead little brother. Josef Kantor does not let rivals live. He doesn’t share space in the womb.
All night long the mudjhik stands without moving on the bank of the river, and when morning comes the archangel-conscious fragment is dead.
Josef Kantor explores his new body, and oh but it is an excellent thing! Senses of angel substance show him the world in all its surge and gleam and detail, alive in a thousand ways he knew nothing of before. Mudjhik strength is power beyond dreaming: with a flick of his arm he splinters trees. This is the eternal body Khyrbysk dreamed of! Tireless, impervious, unfailing, free of death.
I have died once. I will not die again.
And yet this mudjhik body is imperfect. It has no face. No voice. No tongue with which to speak. It is a crude and clumsy roughed-out template of massive earthy red. So Josef Kantor does what no mudjhik dweller ever thought to do before, nor ever had the wilclass="underline" he begins to reshape the mudjhik clay from within. He gives it mouth. He gives it tongue (a fubsy lozenge of angel flesh, awkward now but he will learn). He gives it teeth and lips and palate for the enunciation of sibilants and plosives and fricatives, and all other equipment and accoutrements necessary for the purpose of making voice.
He gives its massive boulder head a face.
Josef Kantor’s face.
Josef Kantor made of angel flesh the colour of brick and rust and drying blood and bruises.
Josef Kantor dead and immortal now and twelve feet high.
Josef Kantor in the warmth of the morning walking east towards the forest.
Find the thing you fear and strike it dead.
This is my world and I will not share it.
4
Thousands of miles to the east, on the edge of the endless forest, Archangel feels himself in the mudjhik die. He knows that Josef Kantor has killed him, this one little piece of him sent out wandering across the world, and he knows what that means.
Archangel opens himself out like an unfolding fern and shouts at the oppressing sky of this poisonous world in absolute and ecstatic joy.
For Josef Kantor is strong!
Stronger than Archangel had ever guessed. The will of Kantor is harder than iron; his purpose is stronger than the heart rock of the world; his heat burns hotter than the sun. The strength of his arm grinds the wheels of time faster and faster.
Archangel knows and has always known that without Josef Kantor he is a dumb mouth shouting, a blowhard bully trundling about for ever in the forest, spilling futile anti-life: a liminal and ineffectual pantoufflard grumbling at the margins of history, claiming primacy but in clear-sighted truth merely scratching an itch.
And Josef Kantor without Archangel, one-time emperor of the Vlast though he may be, is brief-lived and tractionless. A powder flash in the pan.
But together!
My champion! My ever-burning sun!
It is Archangel who is the generator of power and endurance, Archangel the ever-spinning dynamo of cruel expansive energy, Archangel the permission and the totaliser. But it is Josef Kantor who is the conduit, the bond, the channel that lets Archangel reach out into the world and seize the bright birthright. Kantor is the face on the poster and the arm that wields the burning sword that turns the skies to ash.
Josef Kantor, freed now of his organic bodily chains, a will and a voice and a mind released into history and driving an angelic body, is coming to the forest with a mind to kill him, but there will be no need for that.
Faster and faster Archangel grinds towards the edge of the forest.
Kantor will come and break down the border.
Kantor will let him loose in the world.
Run my champion Josef Kantor faster and faster, run as I run towards you. Carry to me the banners of victory. The time is short and our enemies are upon us.
Archangel returns to his work with fresh vigour. There is much to do. His champion generalissimo needs a new army.
5
Aweek after the fall of Osip Rizhin, Vissarion Lom woke hollow and drenched with sweat from a dream of trees and Maroussia, and knew by the feeling in his belly and heart, by the anger and the anxiety and the desperate desolation, by the need to be up and moving, by the impossibility of rest, that it wasn’t any kind of dream, no dream at all.
Maroussia was different–older, wiser, changed–she saw things he didn’t see, she was distant, she was… august. She was something to be wary of. Something of power and something to fear.
Kantor is making for the forest. The angel is calling him there. Nothing is over yet, nothing is done. Come into the forest, darling, and I will find you there.
Helping. Answering the call. That was Lom. That was what he did.
In his dream that was no dream at all he’d seen the living angel in the woods. Seen the trail of poisoned destruction and cold smouldering crusted earth it left in its wake as it dragged itself, an immense hill the colour of blood and rust and bruises, towards the edge of the trees. A cloud of vapours burned off the top of the angel hill, cuprous and shining. Energy nets like pheromone clouds, dream-visible, dream-obvious. The soldiers of the Vlast were crawling about on its lower slopes like ants, digging and dying.