For all its physical stillness, Safran sensed the mudjhik’s eagerness to rush forward and attack. It enjoyed human fear and death. It fed on it. Some of the mudjhik’s bloodlust leaked into Safran’s mind. It made him hungry to charge and stomp and crush. He fought to keep the urge in check. He hadn’t anticipated the presence of the giant. It could be done, of course, but the position was not without risk. It needed thought.
His target was Lom. Chazia had been clear on that. And the Shaumian woman, if he found her there. There had been no mention of others, human or giant, but the strategic purpose of his mission was to draw a line. No loose ends. No continuation of the story. What that meant was without doubt. Leave none alive.
Mentally he checked through his equipment: a heavy hunting knife; two incendiary grenades; the revolver that Chazia had given him (a brand new model, the first production batch, a double-action Sepora loaded with .44 magnum high-velocity hunting rounds, power that would stop a bear mid-charge). The Sepora should be enough to handle the giant. And then there was the Exter-Vulikh, a stocky and wide-muzzled sub-machine gun with a yew stock, modified to take hundred-round drum magazines, of which he carried four.
The Vlast employed killers who prided themselves on the precision and refinement of their technique: they affected the exactitude of assassins, with high-velocity long-range hunting rifles and probing needle blades. But Safran was not one of those. He preferred brutally decisive weapons, muscular weapons that did serious, dramatic damage. Handling the Exter-Vulikh gave him powerful gut feelings of pleasure. He liked the weight and heft of it, the fear it provoked, and the noise and mess it made. Just thinking about using it stirred a feeling in his belly like hunger. Desire. And with the mudjhik, it was even better: the strength of the mudjhik was his strength, its power his power. The fear it caused was fear of him. Safran loved the mudjhik, with its barrel head and reddish brown stone-hard flesh. It was the colour of rust and dried blood, but it could glow like warm terracotta in the evening sun.
Years of training and long experience had built the connection between Safran and his mudjhik, until their minds were so closely intermixed there was no longer a clear distinction between them. Most mudjhiks passed from handler to handler and brought traces — stains — of their previous relationships with them, including the memories of deaths, fears, failures, human aging; but Safran’s had been a virgin, the last of them. Another reason to love it. But he feared it, too. Sometimes he dreamed it was pursuing him. In his dreams he tried to run and hide. In empty streets it followed him. Crashing through walls. Pulling down houses. Wherever he went it found him. In one dream he took refuge inside the Lodka itself, and the mudjhik was beating on the ten-foot-thick walls of stone, trying to break through. The boom-boom-boom of its heavy blows made the ground he stood on shake and tremble. He knew the mudjhik would never stop. Each blow chipped a fragment of the wall away. Hairline fractures opened and spread through the immense walls.
A mudjhik was tireless. If the man ran, the mudjhik would follow. Relentless and for ever. It was only a matter of time. There was no escape.
‘You’ll go alone,’ Chazia had said. ‘Travel light. Move fast. It’ll be better.’
The march had taken longer than expected. The mudjhik kept sinking into the soft ground and floundering in streams and shallow pools. Safran had become confused about direction, distance, time. The territory seemed larger than was possible. A day’s travel seemed to bring them no nearer the target. As time passed, Safran had felt his mind merging more and more completely with the mudjhik. He had thought they were close before, but this was overwhelming, as if the mudjhik were using him, not the other way round. It was a good feeling. He embraced it. He felt the Vlast itself, and all its authority and power and inevitability, flowing through him. He was not a single person any more. He was history happening. He was the face of the hammerhead, but it was the entire force of the arm-swing of the hammerblow that drove him forward. He didn’t have questions, he had answers. And, at last, after uncountable days of arduous marching, the onward flow of angel-sanctified history and the piece of angel stuff he held in his hand like a thread brought him to the isba.
The mudjhik was restless, knowing its quarry was close. It wanted to wade in and crush his skull and stamp his ribs in. Now. Even in the dark it would not miss. But Safran was tired after the long days of marching. His hands trembled with cold and fatigue. He would not fail, he could not, yet he knew the dangers of overconfidence. Once again he surveyed the lie of the operational zone.
The isba stood, stark in the moonshine, on a slightly raised shoulder of ground in a clearing about a hundred yards across. On the far side of the clearing from where Safran stood some kind of canal or nondescript river was running. With the mudjhik’s senses, he could smell its dark, cold and slow-moving current. On every other side of the isba there were thickets of thorn and bramble and low trees, cut through with narrow wandering pathways. Safran was satisfied that the targets could not escape. They could not cross the open ground without him knowing. In daylight, if they tried, he could cut them down with the Exter-Vulikh before they reached the cover of the trees. But in this light? The cloud cover was thickening, the last moonlight fading.
Working only by feel, Safran stripped down the Exter-Vulikh and reloaded the drum magazines one more time.
Wait. Let them sleep.
74
Lom was dreaming, dark, ugly, disturbing dreams of gathering hopelessness and death, and when the giant woke him he found them hard to shake off. Slowly he focused on the giant’s heavy hand on his shoulder, the huge figure leaning over him, the dim face close to his, the deep soft voice whispering in the stove-light.
‘The enemy is come. Wake up.’
‘What?’
‘You must go quickly. Both of you.’
‘What? I don’t…’ He struggled to separate reality and dream.
‘There is a hunter outside in the trees. A killer. An enjoyer of death.’
‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I know.’
And he realised that he did know. He’d felt the presence of them in his dream, and he could still feel it now.
‘There are two of them,’ he said.
‘He has a follower with him. A thing like stone.’
A mudjhik? Could that be?
Lom, fully awake now, climbed down from the bed on top of the stove.
‘You must make no noise,’ said the giant. ‘They listen hard.’
It was viciously cold. Lom stood as close to the stove as he could. He had the slightly sickened feeling of being awake too early. Maroussia was preparing with pale and silent efficiency.
‘My cloak?’ whispered Lom. ‘Where is it?’
Aino-Suvantamoinen had it ready and handed it to him. Lom wished he could have felt the weight of the Zorn in its pocket, but that was still somewhere in the Lodka, presumably, where Safran and the militia would have left it when they brought him down. He’d lost his cosh too.