I see what you’re doing, darling, the angel whispered, and its voice in her head was Chazia’s own voice, Chazia speaking to Chazia, intimately, the lover speaking to the one it loves. I see that thing you’re bringing, and I see what you want to do with it. You’re so brave, my beautiful, so brilliant and so brave. It really is remarkable. But you will not do this. It will not be done.
‘No,’ said Chazia. ‘No. I want it.’
I am so sorry, Lavrentina. I left you alone for so long. Too much time has passed. It was wrong of me, I made a mistake, I see that now, and I’ve come back. Can you forgive me, Lavrentina?
Her name! It was using her name. It knew her, it had always known her! Chazia had been right: it had been there watching all along, but silent, so cruelly silent.
I understand you so much better now, darling. You felt abandoned and alone and you turned to this other thing to comfort you. I understand that. But I’m back now. You don’t need the other thing, not any more.
The angel went everywhere inside her, turning everything over, Chazia’s angel-enhanced senses flared incandescently. It was overwhelming. She felt the strength of her body and the force of her will magnified a hundred, a thousand times. Nothing was impossible.
Is this not what you want, Lavrentina? Am I not enough and more than enough? Am I not all that you would ever need?
‘Yes.’
We just need to destroy that thing you’re bringing. You don’t understand it, Lavrentina. It has deceived you. It’s a terrible, repellent thing. We have to get rid of it and then, together, just you and me, we can do… anything!
‘I don’t want to destroy it. We can use it. Once I have learned—’
I know what you want, darling, and I will give it to you. I will give you everything. The whole world will see what you are. Just do this for me. The thing must be destroyed. Destroy the disgusting repellent thing. Let it burn.
‘I don’t want to do that,’ whispered Chazia.
But we need to destroy it, my love.
75
Lom woke to grey daylight and Antoninu Florian looking down on him, his hand on his shoulder.
‘Vissarion?’ Florian was saying. He looked concerned.
‘What?’ said Lom, warm and reluctant. He was comfortable. There was a pillow. Sheets. Florian’s head was framed in a wide square of leaden sky.
It was a window. There were thin lemon-yellow curtains, pulled open.
Lom hauled himself upright in the narrow steel cot. Springs protested under his weight. The walls of the room were corrugated tin on a timber frame. There was a table under the window. A desk. Empty.
‘Where are we?’ said Lom. He had been dreaming of water and trees. The encounter with the dead angel was a distant and receding darkness, a stain of metallic fear on the horizon. He didn’t want to think about that.
‘The aerodrome at Terrimarkh,’ said Florian. ‘How do you feel?’
Lom thought about it.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Hungry. And I could do with coffee. A lot of coffee. And a piss.’
‘OK,’ said Florian. ‘Good. And then we leave.’ He hesitated. ‘Can you do that? Are you well?’
‘Of course. Why?’
Florian handed him a razor.
‘You might want to shave while you’re in the bathroom.’
Lom ran his hand across his chin and felt a thick rough growth of beard.
‘Shit. How long—’
‘We have lost much time. You were delirious, confused, and then you slept very deeply. We couldn’t wake you at all. Gretskaya is fretting to be away.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘We have lost three days.’
‘Three days!’
Lom pushed back the covers, hauled himself out of the bed and walked unsteadily across to the window. Standing was a shock. The bare linoleum chilled his feet. His legs felt feeble. Shaky under his weight. He looked out on bleak expanses of concrete and asphalt under a threadbare dusting of snow. Hangars and huts, low and widely separated. Fuel tanks. A water tower. And beyond the aerodrome, nothing: no house, no hill, no road, no fence, no tree, only the weight of the sky, draining the world of colour. The single runway, swept clear of snow, stretched black into the distance. The Kotik stood ready. There were no other aircraft visible. No sign of life at all.
Three days! Maroussia! Shit!
‘How soon can we leave?’ he said.
‘Get dressed. I’ll find you something to eat. Then we’ll go.’
Two hours later they were airborne and on their way north to Novaya Zima. Gretskaya stayed below the cloud bank. The altimeter showed a steady 2,000 feet. She found the railway and followed it north. The track cut straight across monochrome tundra, mile after mile, hour after hour, parallel with the low hills on the starboard horizon, misted grey with distance. Drifts of leafless birch trees rolled away behind them, and white expanses of snow pitted with circular lakes. The lakes, not yet entirely frozen, were fringed grey with ice at the shore. The dilated coal-black waters stared sightlessly back at the sky.
At last the coast fell suddenly away behind them and they were over the sea, but the railway plunged on, carried on concrete piers. The track stretched ahead of them, cutting low and arrow-straight across the dark waters to the distant vanishing point. Squadrons of seabirds swept low over the waves, floated in speckled rafts, and lined the concrete parapets of the endless viaduct, roosting.
‘That is the Dead Bridge,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It was built by penal labour. Men, women, even children worked on it. There are hundreds of bodies under the water, thousands maybe, all drowned, frozen, starved, dead of exhaustion. The eels and the fishes get fat on the bodies and the birds get fat on the fish.’
Ahead of them there was no horizon. The sea merged with the sky, diffuse and indeterminate and in the deep distance the Dead Bridge narrowed and faded as if into the air. The Kotik roared on.
After half an hour or so, above the place where the railway viaduct still disappeared into the distance, a paler colourless wash came slowly forward, separated itself from the sky and resolved into a distant mountain, its peak buried in cloud, its base lost in mist.
‘That’s it,’ said Gretskaya. ‘That’s where we’re going. Novaya Zima.’ She swung the Kotik away to the north-east, climbing until the railway was out of sight, then turned round, dropped down to a hundred feet and cut the throttle.
And then they were gliding, the wind hissing through the struts, the rotor blades turning slowly. Lom could see small scattered rafts of ice floating on the water below them, rising and falling with the swell.
‘I’ll come in low and quiet,’ Gretskaya said. ‘No one will know we’re there.’
The island of Novaya Zima was a spine of dark hills ridged with snow, rising higher to the north, towards the still-distant mountain. The lower slopes were covered with trees: a dark monotonous woodland that rolled away from the hills until it met the shore. The seaplane skimmed onwards. The black wall of trees widened and rose to meet them. Gretskaya dropped the tail and they came down, bouncing a couple of times off the swell and settling in a long subsiding skid across the water. She opened the throttle slightly and motored towards the narrow shoreline, a ten-yard strip between the water and the edge of the woods. The seaplane’s nose beached gently a couple of yards out.
Gretskaya slid the cockpit open. She kept the engine running.