Lom’s clothes were soaked. They smelled sourly of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of his body. Rain numbed his face and trickled down his neck and chin. Rain spattered across the brown surface of rain-puddles. He kept his head down and walked against it, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Everything distant was lost in the rain.
A wisent stepped out of the trees into the clear way ahead of them. When it saw them it stopped, head bowed, nostrils flaring, watching them with its dark eyes. Lom saw the massive rain-slicked wall of its shoulders, the rufous shaggy fall of hair, thick from neck to chest and down its muzzle from the crown of its head, the fine stocky inward-curving crescent horns. Lom and the wisent faced each other, watching. The wisent tested the give of the mud with a fore hoof and flicked the rain with its ears. Then it turned and walked on across the rails and faded between the trees.
The rain passed, and they came to a place where a stream was running in a ditch alongside the railway track. Lom knelt to drink but Florian put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.
‘Don’t,’ said Florian. ‘Look. Over there.’
Half-buried in the bank of the ditch, where a birch tree had canted over, roots unearthed, was a human head. It was blackened, damp and rotting, and wrapped in a length of mud-brown hair. The face stared blackly sideways without eyes, and brown-stained teeth showed in its lopsided sagging mouth. And near the head a human arm reached out from the mud sleeved in sticky green. At first glance the arm had looked like the root of a tree. Too far from the head to be attached to the same skeleton, it trailed mushroom-white and mushroom-soft fingers in the flowing water.
Walking between the railway and the stream, Lom and Florian saw more like that. Pieces of human body. When the stream turned aside from the ditch and retreated under the trees it was a relief.
And then something happened that shook the world.
A silent snap of blue-white light reflected off the clouds and left after-images of skeleton trees drifting across Lom’s eyes. Many seconds later he felt the sound of it in the ground through his feet, a roll of noise too deep to hear. Ahead of him Florian stumbled, and would have fallen had he not steadied himself against a stump. A tremble of movement disturbed the underside of the cloud bank like wind across a pool. The trees prickled with fear: the nap of the woodland rising, uneasy, anxious. They stood, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The clouds settled into a new shape.
‘What was it?’ said Lom.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It came from the north.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Florian. ‘I think it was everywhere.’
The railway track began to sink into cuttings and rise to cross embankments and small bridges. Every few hours one of the long trains came through, heading for the mountain or coming away. Away from the cleared trackside, the going was harder. The trees were sparser now, and they had to push through scrub and thorn and accumulations of snow. They were climbing slowly, the mountain to the north growing clearer and more definite against the sky. Rock and scree. Ice and snow.
They disturbed a parcel of dog-crows gathered on a ragged dark bundle. The birds were a heavy drab and loose-winged black, with unwieldy bone-coloured beaks too heavy for their heads. They carried on picking at the thing on the ground and watched them come. Lom picked up a stick and threw it among them.
‘Go on! Get away!’
The crows glared, but moved off a few feet with slow ungainly two-footed jumps. A couple hauled themselves up on flaggy wings to squat low in the trees and stare.
The body on the ground was small and had no head. The crows had picked at its neck and shoulders, spilling red pieces of stuff, and parted the clothes between trousers and shirt to open the belly.
‘It’s a child,’ said Lom. ‘Just a boy.’
Florian had walked some way off. Lom thought he was looking away, so as not to see. But he had found something else.
‘Not a boy,’ said Florian. ‘A girl.’
The head was hanging from a branch by the tangle of her hair.
Something was passing near them. Lom felt the woods stir and bristle. The alien watchfulness of what was passing brushed over him, rippling across his mind like rain across a lake. He felt the bigness of it, its steady earth-shaking tread. The top of a distant tree trembled faintly, though there was no wind.
‘Mudjhik patrol,’ he hissed. ‘Coming this way.’
‘We separate,’ whispered Florian. ‘Hide yourself.’ He crouched and slipped away. Lom caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the trees, loping from bush to bush, bounding low across the ground.
Lom flattened himself against the ground under a thorn bush and lay quiet, breathing shallow slow breaths. Covered his mind with woodland. Focused his thoughts into a pointy vixen snout, thought vixen thoughts, calm and tired and waiting, warm and cold in the daylight, in a waking sleep. Keeping low. Pass by. Pass by. The mudjhik’s awareness skimmed across him and moved away, but Lom lay on, vixen-still and thoughtless, faintly stomach-sick, dulled and aching and hungry behind her eyes as if she had not slept at all.
The mudjhik’s awareness jerked back, swung round and pinned him. A blank hunter’s glare.
I see you. I have sniffed you out. I am coming.
There was a sudden crashing through the trees. Branches breaking, heavy limbs thumping the ground. The mudjhik was rushing towards him. It was still several hundred yards off, but running was not an option and he could not hide.
In panic, reflexively, Lom slammed up a wall against the mudjhik. It was like holding up his hand. Stop!
The mudjhik stumbled and fell to its knees.
Lom was stronger now, much stronger. He felt the current flowing between him and the charging alien weight, the mudjhik’s alien substance connecting with something tense and fizzing in his own bones and flesh. Lom felt wired and burning. The link between the mudjhik and its handler was a feeble shadowy thing by comparison, a tenuous thread. Lom knew what to do. He broke the handler’s cord. Squeezed it closed and ripped it out at its root. Felt for a second the handler’s surprise as he lost connection.
The mudjhik was on its feet again, confused and clumsy, rumbling and roaring silently, lashing out at tree trunks with its fists. It was at a loss. Lom pushed himself deeper inside it, feeling for the animal part of it, the inserted mammalian brain. He found it and crushed its awful half-existence out. The mudjhik’s mind clouded. Sensation without motion. Without desire. A lump of sentient rock.
Late in the afternoon Lom and Florian crested a rise and found themselves on a low hilltop looking out across a wide shallow valley. The railway plunged out across a viaduct above the grey-brown leafless canopy of trees. Five or ten miles away, on the far side of the valley, the mountain was a wall across the sky. And in the plain of the valley floor between them and the foot of the mountain lay the closed township of Novaya Zima.
80
From a distance Novaya Zima looked like a complex device with its back removed–a radio, a telekrypt machine–laid bare amid birch trees and snow. The township hummed and rumbled quietly. No smoke. No chimneys. It was a rectangular grid about three miles square, a compound in the wilderness surrounded by a double fence and a perimeter road. The streets formed blocks, and the blocks were buildings, orderly and rectangular, mostly concrete, ten or fifteen storeys high. Every part of the town was wired to every other part by a network of cables slung between roofs and from tall wooden poles. In the centre of the town, wider streets–avenues, prospects–converged on a spectacular cluster of taller buildings, slender constructions of steel and glass, reflecting the lead-grey sky. Motor vehicles moved with orderly precision along arterial boulevards. Pedestrians, rendered tiny by distance, anonymous and without characteristics, moved along pavements and crossed open expanses of concrete. Raised above the streets on piers of iron, an overhead railway carried snub-nosed carriages. And on the far side, beyond the town and a couple of miles of scrubby trees, the mountain climbed sheer and almost vertical into low cloud. Dark grey rock and scree and streaks of snow. It was like a wall across the world, diminishing east and west into misted distance and further mountains.