And he was, in that moment, completely and absolutely alive.
Inside the tiny bathroom Maroussia locked the door. She looked at her face in the mirror hung on a hook above the sink. She looked tired and sick. Bruise-blue shadows under her eyes. A pink graze across her face. There were angry raised welts on her wrists and arms where Chazia’s straps had rubbed and cut. She felt sick. She would not think of that. Not now. Not ever. She would not remember.
She wrapped a towel around her hand. Then she lifted the mirror off the wall and smashed it against the sink.
‘Hey!’ called the lieutenant. ‘What are you doing in there?’ He tried the door. ‘Fuck,’ he said, but quietly so that Chazia would not hear. He didn’t want her to know. He began to bump his weight against the door, but hesitantly. He would make no more noise than he had to.
Maroussia picked up the biggest shard of broken mirror. Gripped it tight in her towel-wrapped palm. Settled the edge of it firmly in her hand. A vicious, pointed shard of glass about five inches long.
The thumping against the door fell into a predictable rhythmic pattern. The bolt was beginning to give. With her free hand Maroussia slid it quietly back.
At the next crash of the lieutenant’s weight, the door burst open and he stumbled in, surprised. Unbalanced, he took a couple of stuttering steps forward. Maroussia stepped in behind him, put the dagger of glass against the side of his throat and pushed. She had to push hard. Two, three times she sawed the jagged edge back and forth. There was a lot of blood. When she let the lieutenant drop to the floor he was not dead. He was trying to shout and scream. He had two mouths now, both of them gaping open and spilling blood, but neither had a voice. Only a desperate bubbling wheeze.
She dropped the towel and knelt beside him, the warm pool of his blood soaking into the skirt of her dress. She went through the pockets of his jacket, searching, hoping what she was looking for was still there, where she had watched him carelessly shove it the night before. It was. Her fingers touched the broken pieces. She pulled out the fragments of the solm her mother had been bringing when she died, gripped them tight in her palm and stood up, careful not to slip on the blood on the floor.
Maroussia left the lieutenant still moving weakly in the growing pool of his own mess. She went out the back of the blockhouse into the dark and the snow.
89
Lom was still several hundred yards from the cluster of huts, moving slowly and cautiously, crouching to keep off the brightening skyline, when Florian appeared suddenly beside him as if he had risen up out of the snow.
‘Maroussia?’ said Lom. ‘Did you find her?’
Florian looked at him strangely for a moment and said nothing.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Lom. ‘Is she there?’
‘She is there,’ said Florian. ‘She has been hurt but she is alive. She is very strong.’
Lom felt a desperate knot of tension suddenly dissolve. He hadn’t realised how dark his world had grown since he’d lost her. He wanted to throw his arms round Florian and hug him but did not. Florian looked grave.
‘What?’ said Lom. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ said Florian. ‘Nothing.’
‘Then let’s go.’
‘Yes. But cautiously. There are two huts. One with soldiers. VKBD. Seven. Maroussia is in the other. Chazia is also there, and one soldier, and men who are not soldiers. Scientists. Technicians. Nine.’
Lom pushed his elation aside. Focus on now. They needed to get Maroussia out and away. He considered the position. They had two Vagants between them. Full chambers but no spare ammunition. Eight soldiers, plus Chazia herself, who would not be negligible if it came to a fight. And if they could get Maroussia safely away, what then? They were in a snowfield a hundred miles or more on the wrong side of the mountain, on an island in a freezing sea. But then they had Florian. Lom had seen what he could do.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Could be worse.’
‘It is,’ said Florian. ‘They have a mudjhik.’
‘No,’ said Lom. He looked towards the distant huts. ‘Surely not. I’d feel it by now.’
‘It is there. Not a large one. Ten feet tall perhaps. It seems inactive. I was not aware of it until I got close. Its presence startled me.’
‘OK,’ said Lom again. ‘Anything else?’
‘Outbuildings for storage. A diesel generator. An overhead rail car like the one we came in on. And there’s a single railway track, away to the left over there. It runs on into the north. Towards the Pollandore.’
Lom felt a tightening in his stomach. His mouth was dry.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said.
90
Lom was less than a hundred yards from the blockhouses. Florian had slipped away and disappeared, circling round to the left. Lom scrambled forward across the snow until he could see the mudjhik. It was standing upright, motionless, a squat statue of solid brick-red taller than the concrete blockhouses, arms at its side, its head, an eyeless faceless mass, turned towards the north. Lom let his mind drift towards it cautiously, reaching out for a contact, probing delicately, looking for a way in. And found it.
The mudjhik was not dormant. It was absorbed in studying the snow. With angel senses, not sight but precise acute awareness, it was examining individual crystals of snow. Sifting from one to the next with absolute patience, it traced their intricate hexagonal symmetry. The ramification of columns and blades of ice. The uncountable variety. It found the broken ones and tested the edges of their fractures. It teased the nested clumps, the accidental fusions. It followed the prismatic refractions of muted light down beneath the mute mirror-glitter surface as the greyness broke into spectrum fragments, growing green then blue then dark. To the mudjhik’s patient watchfulness the snow was as deep and mysterious as oceans.
Long slow inches below the surface the mudjhik touched solid compacted ice and sank its attention in. Ran its mind along faults and pressure lines and the million captured imperfections of grit and dust. The mudjhik found it all infinitely, endlessly satisfying. The ice and snow was beautiful and it was happy.
Lom traced the faint cord of connection from the mudjhik to its handler. The line was almost not there at alclass="underline" the handler’s focus was elsewhere, on something inside the building. It had been the same for hours, the mudjhik almost forgotten. Gently, gently, Lom squeezed the connection closed, cut it off entirely, and slid in behind it. The mudjhik was his.
Lom made himself known.
The mudjhik sprang to life. It was like an inward eye opening. Glaring and hot. It opened its thoughtless sentient mind like a dark hot mouth, gaping and hungry. Tried to grasp at Lom and swallow him and haul him fully inside. But Lom was strong. He knew what he was doing. The angel stain in his own blood answered the mudjhik’s assault with a fierce roaring.
No, said Lom-in-mudjhik, I am not yours. You are mine. You are mine. You are mine.
Lom forced himself through every part of the mudjhik’s body, occupying it entirely. Taking possession. He found the animal brain and spinal column of nerves buried deep inside, felt the sparking of dark red electricity along lifeless-alive synapses and alienated neurones, understood and mastered them. Lom-in-mudjhik felt the strength and blazing awareness of the mudjhik. His strength. His awareness.
Go! he screamed. Go! Go!
His own human body was nothing to him now: a squatting shell leaning against a wall of snow, slumped, head down, sightless and breathing shallow and rough. Lom-in-mudjhik was moving fast towards the blockhouse where the soldiers were.