And beneath the portrait, halfway down one side of the table, sat the Novozhd himself, in his familiar collarless white tunic, drinking coffee from a small cup.
There was a shout from across the room.
‘Hey! You! Who are you?’
Kantor looked across to see what was going on. It was Petrov. He was pushing past flustered functionaries, his shaven head moving among them like a white stone. He was wearing an oddly bulky greatcoat and there were fresh scarlet markings on his face. He was right on time. Kantor stepped back towards the wall. He needed to be as far away from the Novozhd as possible.
Petrov paused and surveyed the room for a moment.
The militia who lined the walls, watchful, were not approaching him. Those nearest him were retreating. Giving him room. They were Chazia’s Iron Guard, every one: they would not interfere.
A diplomat near Kantor took a step forward. ‘What is that man doing—?’ he began.
‘Stay where you are!’ hissed Kantor. The diplomat looked at him, surprised, and seemed about to say something else. Kantor ignored him.
Petrov had seen the Novozhd, who had risen from his seat, cup in hand.
High functionaries were murmuring in growing alarm. A stenographer was shouting. There was rising panic in her voice. ‘Someone stop him!’
Petrov moved towards the Novozhd, blank-faced and purposeful.
The ambassador from the Archipelago was on her feet, trying to push through a group of Vlast diplomatists who did not know what was happening and would not make way. She was shouting at the guards: ‘Why won’t you do something!’ But the guards were moving away, as Kantor knew they would.
Petrov made inexorable progress through the crowd. When he got near the Novozhd, his arms stretched out as if to embrace him.
And the explosion came. A muted, ordinary detonation. A flash. A matter-of-fact thump of destruction. A stench. The crash of a chandelier on the table. Silence. More silence. Ringing in Kantor’s ears.
Then the voices began: not screams — not shouts of anger — just a low inarticulate collective moan, a sighing of dismay. Only later did the keening begin, as the injured began to realise the awful permanent ruination of their ruptured bodies.
Pushing through the crowd, stepping over the dead and dying, Kantor found himself looking down at the raw, meaty remnants of the Novozhd, and Lakoba Petrov fallen across him like a protective friend. Petrov’s head and arms were gone, and some great reptilian predator had taken a large bite of flesh from his side. The Novozhd, dead, was staring open-mouthed at the ceiling that was spattered with his own blood and chunks of his own flesh. His moustache, Kantor noticed, was gone.
Someone touched his arm, and Kantor spun round. He knew the guards would not bother him, but there was always the possibility. But it was only Chazia.
She leaned forward intimately, speaking quietly under the din and panic of the room. Her blotched fox-face too close to his.
‘Good, Josef,’ she said. ‘Very good.’
Kantor took a step back from her in distaste. There was too much of angels about her. It was like a stink. She was rank with it.
‘I do my part, Lavrentina. You do yours. What about the girl, and Krogh’s man? Lom?’
‘That’s in hand,’ said Chazia. ‘It is in hand. Though I don’t understand why you set so much store—’
Kantor glared at her.
‘I mean,’ Chazia continued, ‘after today—’
‘The angel needs them dead, Lavrentina,’ Kantor heard himself say, and struggled to keep the self-disgust out of his voice. It uses me like a puppet. A doll. A servant. He was getting tired of the angel. More than tired. He feared and hated it. The situation was becoming intolerable.
I am bigger than this angel. I will make it fear me and I will kill it. I will find a way. I have killed the Novozhd and I will kill the angel. Kill Chazia too.
But now was not the time. He needed to prepare. He needed to focus on the future. Only the future mattered.
‘Just get rid of them,’ he said. ‘Lom and the girl. Don’t foul it up again.’
‘I told you,’ said Chazia. ‘It’s already in hand.’
72
It was night outside the isba, under clear stars. Aino-Suvantamoinen was a massive dark bulk crouching over the flickering wood-fire. It was crisply, bitterly cold, and the light of the moons was bright enough to see the shreds of mist in the trees at the edge of the clearing. A hunter’s night. Lom sat wrapped in sealskin, drinking fish stew from a wooden bowl. He’d slept all day — a proper, resting, dreamless sleep.
‘I can’t stay here,’ Maroussia was saying. ‘I have to go back. To the city. There was a paluba. And someone else. She… showed me…’
The giant shifted his weight. ‘You saw a paluba?’
‘Yes.’
Lom watched her as she talked. She held herself so straight and upright, her face shadowed in the firelight. Lom saw her now as she was, a point of certainty, uncompromised, spilling the flickering light of possibilities that surrounded her. She was clear, and defined, and alive. She rang like a bell in the misty, nightfall world. She was worth fighting for.
‘I have to do this thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a choice.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not right. I do have a choice. And I’m choosing. ‘
She lapsed into silence, watching the fire.
‘Maroussia?’ said Lom.
‘Yes?’
‘I wanted to thank you.’
‘What for?’ she said.
‘You came back for me, didn’t you? You didn’t have to.’
She didn’t look round. ‘You didn’t need to help me either. But you did. Twice.’
‘I’ll come back with you to Mirgorod,’ said Lom. ‘If you want me to.’
She turned to look at him then.
‘Would you do that?’ she said quietly.
‘Yes.’
73
Major Artyom Safran stood at the edge of the trees by the giant’s isba, watching it from the moonshadow. Muted light spilled from a gap in the skins draped across its entrance. His quarry was inside. The mudjhik was motionless at his side, a shadow-pillar of silent stone.
Safran held the fragment of angel stuff that Commander Chazia had cut from Lom’s head tight and warm in his hand. Using the mudjhik’s alien senses he felt his way along the thread that still joined it to Lom until he touched the other man’s mind with his own. He felt the faint, startled flinch of an answering awareness and hastily withdrew. Lom was unlikely to have known what the contact meant, if he had even registered it, but it was better to be cautious.
There were three of them, then. Lom, a woman — the woman, it must be — and something else: a strange, complex, powerful, non-human presence. He put himself more fully into the mudjhik, inhabiting its wild harsh world. The mudjhik needed no light to see by. It had other senses through which Safran felt the hard sharpness of thorns, the small movements of leaves on branches, the evaporation of moisture. Bacteria thrived everywhere, and the mudjhik was studying them with simple, purposeless curiosity. Something had died and was decomposing near their feet, under a covering of fallen leaves.
Safran felt the watchfulness of small animal presences pressing against him. One in particular was close by, drilling at him with a hot, bitter attention. A fox? No, something smaller and crueller. A weasel? Its mind was like strong, gamey meat. Every mind had its own unique taste, that was one thing he had learned. And here, in the wetlands, it was not only animals: ever since he and the mudjhik had entered the marsh territories, Safran had been aware of the semi-sentience of the trees themselves, and the rivers, even the rain. There was a constant, vaguely uncomfortable feeling that everything around him knew he was there and did not welcome his presence. He ignored it, as did the mudjhik, which disdained trees and water as beneath its notice. Safran, through the mudjhik’s senses, probed the interior of the isba. The third presence was a giant, then. That too was unexpected.