The statue was the man he had seen weaving his way through the demonstration that morning. The man whose more youthful face gazed confidently into the camera in the photograph in Krogh’s file. Josef Kantor.
Tucked in its pocket of no-time and no-space, the Pollandore feels the nearness of the deaths in the Square of the Piteous Angel. Feels the footfall of mudjhiks, the spillage of blood. The panic.
To the Pollandore it is a hardening, a sclerosis… and a loosening of grip. Something slipping away. Its surface growing milky and opaque. The silence that surrounds it darkening into distance.
From its well of silence the Pollandore reaches out.
Lom stood for a long time at the window, staring at the immense white statue of Kantor half a mile above the blocky, featureless city. What he was seeing, he knew, wasn’t there. Not yet. It was a city that wasn’t there, but could be. Would be. He could feel it taking shape and solidifying. He was seeing for himself one of the glimpses that Maroussia and Vishnik had talked about last night. A scene from one of Vishnik’s photographs. But this was different: Vishnik’s was a city of soft possibilities, sudden moments of opening into inwardness and truth; this city was hard and cruel and silent. Closed up. Uniform. A city of triumphal fear. The city of the whisperers and dominion of Kantor, imperial and immense. Mirgorod was a battleground, a contention zone: two future cities both trying to become. The hard city was winning.
And which side was he on?
But that wasn’t question, not yet. The question was, what were the sides? Kantor was an enemy of the Vlast, yet his statue presided over the dragoons at their murderous business in the Square of the Piteous Angel. Vishnik and Maroussia were feeling their way towards the softer city under the iron and stone of Mirgorod, and went in fear of the Vlast’s police. Fear of him. The feel of his uniform against his skin disgusted him. What kind of policeman was he? He pushed the question aside. Of one thing he was sure. Kantor had to be stopped, and that was his job. Lom turned away from the window. He had made a decision. He had something to do.
When he came back down the stairs from the gallery window, the great reading room was almost empty. Only a few had stayed at their desks, head in hands, or staring into space, or pretending to work, trying to ignore the sounds of killing. Shutting it out. None of them was going to take any notice of him.
Instead of turning left at the bottom of the staircase and going back to his own desk, Lom went right, following the perimeter of the reading room until he reached a door of varnished wood. It was inset at face height with small square windows of rippled glass.
He pushed through the door and let it close quietly behind him. His hands were sweating.
The corridor beyond was empty. Lit with dim electric bulbs in globes suspended from the high ceiling, it was lined with more doors, each with a small square of card in a brass holder with a hand-written number. Occasionally a name. Lom went slowly down the corridor reading them. It took for ever.
Lom gripped the brass doorknob, turned and pushed. It was locked. He shoved, but it didn’t shift. He thought of trying to kick it down, but the door was solid and heavy. The noise would bring someone. In his pocket he had a bunch of thin metal slivers. His hands were clumsy, slick with sweat. It took him three, four attempts to pick out the right tool. He had to bend down and put his ear close to the door so he could hear what he was doing above the sound of blood in his own ears.
At last the tumblers slipped into place.
He closed the door before he flicked the light switch. Illumination flared dimly. Green-painted walls, an empty desk, rows of steel-framed racks holding files and boxes of papers. Lom forced himself to move slowly down the aisles between the racks, reading the file cards. It wasn’t hard to find what he was looking for. Chazia had been methodical. The lavender folder for Josef Kantor was in its place on the K shelf. It was fat and full. He took it and pushed it inside his tunic.
As he was leaving, something made him turn back and go round to the L shelf. It was there. A much slimmer folder, pale pink. LOM, VISSARION Y, INVESTIGATOR OF POLICE. He stuffed it inside his tunic next to Kantor’s.
He was halfway across the still-deserted floor of the reading room, almost at the exit, before he realised he hadn’t switched off the light inside the room. An archivist was watching him curiously. No way to go back.
Lom stepped out into the square. The snow had stopped falling, leaving the air damp with impending rain. The smell of burned cordite and the dead.
People were moving across the square, alone or in small groups, pausing to look at each body, searching for a familiar face, hoping not to find it. Their feet splashed and slipped across cobbles wet with slush and blood. The dragoons had gone, and the militia, uncertain what to do, were ignoring the searchers. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The grey whisperers were there still. Walking by on their own withdrawn, secretive purposes.
But a couple of blocks away everything was normal. People pursued their business. Trams came and went. Lom boarded one, taking the Vandayanka route, heading for Pelican Quay. When he got there, he stopped at a chandlery to buy a small rubberised canvas sack with a waterproof closure. Then he wandered over to a bench and sat watching the boats at their moorings, idly kicking at the pavement. When he’d managed to loosen a cobble stone, he bent down casually to prise it out of the ground. And slipped it into his pocket.
28
Half the city away, in a room in the House on the Purfas, the paluba sat at the end of the table under the gaze of the Inner Committee of the Secret Government of Lezarye in Exile Within. The windwalker stood behind her, filling the air with woodland scents, ozone and leaf mould and cold forest air.
The five men of the Committee were drinking clear amber tea from glasses in delicate tin holders, waiting for her to begin. They waited patiently, taking the long view, as their fathers had, and their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Their room, their rules. They were the ones who carried the weight of the past. Theirs, the great duty to keep the traditions. One day they would overturn the Vlast and bring back the good ways. The rebellions of Lezarye, the Birzel among them, were theirs. They worked and thought in centuries, but their day would come, and they would be ready.
‘Madam,’ said the man at the far end of the table. Elderly, white hair clipped short and thick, a gold pin in the lapel of his thick dark suit. ‘Please. It’s been many years since we were honoured by an emissary from the forest. We are anxious to hear your news.’
‘Stasis,’ said the paluba. ‘Balance. Archipelago. Continent. Forest.’
Her voice was quiet, leaves stirring in the wind. The men leaned forward slightly to catch her words.
‘For centuries,’ she continued, ‘balance has prevailed.’