Lom brought the car to a stop at an empty platform. He and Florian bundled the inert guards out: deadweights smelling of sweat and sour breath and blood. They kept the guns.
The last twenty minutes underground were a long haul down a shallow incline, an unlit featureless tunnel bored through raw rock. They seemed to be speeding up. Then, without warning, they burst out into the night on the far side of the mountain. The rattling echoes of the tunnel ceased. The car travelled on in near-silence. There was only the electric hum of its motor and the wind splitting against the overhead rail. It was coming up to four in the morning.
Lom stood at the front of the railcar. Leaning forward, feet slightly apart. Hands gripping the chrome bar so hard it hurt. The rail ran on ahead into the darkness. It was carrying them towards Maroussia. Ahead of them, somewhere, she was there. He was sure of that. Other possibilities were not admitted. Not considered. She was there and he would find her. He would get her back. But the car wasn’t moving fast enough. He leaned into the bar as if he would push it onward faster with his own force of will.
Behind him he heard Florian shift in his seat.
‘What time is dawn this far north?’ said Lom, not looking round.
‘Late,’ said Florian. ‘Nine? Ten? We have time.’
‘We need a plan,’ said Lom.
‘We should get there first.’
They cruised on through total darkness. Only the light spilling from their own windows showed the unbroken carpet of trees. The snow was thicker to the north of the mountain.
Hours passed. Nothing changed. Lom tried to calculate their speed by his wristwatch, counting the trees passing beneath them and the regularly spaced pylons that carried the overhead rail. He repeated the measurement again and again. Somewhere between thirty and fifty miles an hour. Perhaps. It was something to do.
The trees grew sparser, pine and spruce replacing birch, and the snow was getting thicker all the time, mounding the tree-heads and piling in drifts. The small capsule raced on over frozen lakes, snow-crusted and black. The hour hand on Lom’s watched crept round the dial. Five o’clock. Six. Always the single rail stretched ahead of them, pylon after pylon.
They flashed through an unlit platform stop. Rows of vague regular shapes were passing underneath them. Humped shadows. They were aeroplanes. Hundreds of large aircraft parked in neat rows under tarpaulins. Mothballed. Snow-covered runways. A control tower in darkness. Then came two minutes of trees and another wide clearing. A mile-wide expanse of nothing surrounded by a perimeter fence. And then there was a splash of bright light ahead of them. A brilliant pool of arc light bright enough to reflect off the underside of the cloud. The car rose and swept past what seemed like a domed mound, too regular and polished and perfect to be natural. It glimmered dark brick red and was surrounded by a circular blackness. Lom had time to realize he was looking at the top of something rising from a pit several hundred yards across, surrounded by shadowy gantries and lumps of broken concrete. Then it was gone.
As they left the oasis of brilliant light behind, they passed through another empty platform. Lom read the sign as it flashed past the window.
COSMODROME: WINTER SKIES.
There was an emblem: a simplified version of the soaring steel sculpture in front of the Foundation Hall. The rising discus. THE VLAST SPREADING OUT ACROSS THE STARS.
Antoninu Florian sat in silence, flexing taut aching muscle, sinew, flesh. Working his bones with infinitesimal shifts of size and shape. He had been holding this human shape in place too long, and every part of his body was sore: a dull rheumatic ache from his face to his feet, cramped inside their tightly laced boots. He shifted in his seat, though it brought him no comfort, and watched Lom leaning on the handrail and staring out through the forward window at the empty landscape that rolled up to meet them. The intensity of Lom’s focus on Maroussia was a tangible tension in the air. It hummed like taut wire in the wind.
For the hundredth time, the thousandth time, Florian studied him. Lom was a vessel of the beautiful forest, all unaware, but he was also saturated through and through with dark angel stuff. The wound Chazia had made in his head had become an opening, a shining perfumed breach, but the angel mark had left its indelible stain. Florian had observed Lom’s growing violence in the last few days. The angel stuff was part of what made Lom what he was: an unexpected possibility, an open, borderless, compendious man, the joining together of what could not be joined. In the unsolvable equation of forest and angel and Vlast and Pollandore, the complex impossible strength that just might resolve it was Vissarion Lom.
Unless the Shaumian woman was lost.
Florian was certain that Maroussia was alive and somewhere ahead of them. He could not sense her, but he could sense the Pollandore. It was close and they were closing with it, and so was the Shaumian woman. Florian felt the Pollandore calling her. And he still didn’t know what he would do when he caught up with her. The indecision hurt worse than the tension in his distorted bones. Futures contended. All outcomes could be ruinous. When the time of crisis came, then he would know what to do. Then he would decide.
The frozen lakes became larger and more numerous. They were crossing more ice than trees. And then they were suddenly travelling low above the sea. Ten feet below them thick black water rose and fell, viscid and streaked with foam. It was as if the ocean was breathing gently. Rafts of ice, almost perfectly circular, gleamed in the yellow cabin light that raced across them. The floor-level heating vents hummed loudly, struggling to warm the inflow of freezing air. And failing. The cold pinched Lom’s face. He felt his hands and feet growing stiff and numb.
Seven o’clock.
They crossed the shore of the north island at 7.45 a.m. The sea fell away behind them and they were riding low over level tundra. Flat expanses of snow and ice. The first hint of daylight was touching the eastern sky. A faint diminishing of darkness. Condensation was frosting on the inside of the window, forming spidery crystal webs. Lom rubbed it away. Metronome pylons ticked past.
At ten past eight they saw the lights ahead of them. A cluster of low buildings in the pre-dawn greyness, dark against the snow. Lom cut the power, plunging the cabin interior into silence and gloom. The car rattled on, slowing. It took several minutes to come to a complete halt, swinging and creaking in the wind.
Florian pushed the door open and let in a blast of freezing air. They were fifteen feet above the ground. The snow looked thick and soft beneath them. He leaped out and landed neatly in a crouch, knee deep.
Lom took a breath and followed. He landed hard and rolled. Ended up on his back in the snow, winded, staring up at the sky. It hurt. He stood up slowly. Stiffly. Testing.
He was OK.
He looked round for Florian and saw him racing silently away across the snow. Within fifty yards he had disappeared. Faded into grey and dropped behind a ridge.
‘Fuck,’ said Lom quietly to himself. ‘Fuck.’
Slowly and painfully he began to follow.
88
In darkness and snow and windswept ice at the centre of the North Zima Expanse, the Pollandore rests in its own uninterpretable space, touching nothing, a slowly turning globe. Worlds do not stand on the framework of flatbed trucks. Worlds do not hang by hooks and cables from a makeshift gantry. Worlds fall. They are always and only falling. Endless ellipses of fall, from no sky towards no frozen ground, turning and tumbling as they go. And everything else falls with them, unaware.