Radiant State

1

The sky above Mirgorod was a bowl of luminous powdery eggshell blue, cloudless and heroic. Enamel-bright coloured aircraft buzzed and twisted high in the air, leaving trails of brilliant vapour-white. The loudspeakers were broadcasting speeches and news and orchestral music at full distorted volume. The production of steel across the New Vlast exceeded pre-war output by 39 per cent. The cosmonaut-heroes continued to orbit through space.

Citizens! Today is Victory Day! Congratulate yourselves!

From all across the city hundreds of thousands of people were making their way towards Victory Square on buses and trams and trains for the celebration parade. Hundreds of thousands more were coming on foot. Already an inexhaustible river of people was moving up the wide avenue of Noviy Prospect (newly paved and freshly washed before dawn that morning). Half the population of Mirgorod must have been there, going in a slow tide between the towering raw new buildings of the city centre. Vissarion Lom, less than twenty-four hours back in Mirgorod, sat at a café table under a canopy on a terrace raised above the sidewalk, nursing a cooling birch-bark tea, and watched them pass: more people in one place than all the people he’d seen in the last six years put together. Sunlight glared off steel and glass and concrete fresh out of scaffolding; glared off the flags and banners that lined Noviy Prospect; glared off the huge portraits of Papa Rizhin and the lesser portraits of other faces Lom could not name.

Lom disliked crowds. Even sitting somewhat apart and watching them made him uneasy. Edgy. Even anxious. The noise. The faces. He couldn’t understand how it was that most people could merge into a throng so readily, so gladly even. To him it felt like submersion. Surrender. Drowning. He couldn’t have done it even if he’d wanted to. But he saw the woman with the heavy canvas bag on her shoulder.

He almost missed her. She was moving with the crowd, one small figure in the uncountable mass, going in the same direction as everyone else. Someone else might not have noticed her or, if they had seen her, wouldn’t have understood what it meant. It would have been a coincidence, nothing more. But because he was Lom, not someone else, he saw her, and recognised her, and knew what she was doing.

She was just another slight ageing woman in shabby sombre clothes: there were dozens like her, hundreds, shuffling along among the uniformed service personnel, the families, the classes shepherded by harassed teachers, the young women workers in blue overalls and sneakers, the salaried fellows in shirtsleeves and fedoras, the limping veterans, the veterans in wheelchairs and the tight little groups of short-haired and pony-tailed Young Explorers in their blue shorts, grey shirts, red neckerchiefs, knee-length woollen socks and canvas shoes. The women in dark clothes walked alone or in twos and threes. They had their special place that day: they were the widows, the childless mothers, come to watch and remember on bittersweet Victory Day. Lom’s gaze passed across the one with the canvas bag on her shoulder and moved on. But something about her caught his attention and he looked again.

People in a large slow crowd surrender themselves to it. They all have the same purpose, all heading for the same destination. Simply being part of the crowd is itself the occasion and the only reason for being there. There’s no rush. They have no need to do anything except move along at the crowd’s speed and take their cues from the crowd. So they look around and take in the sights and talk, or absorb themselves in their own thoughts. Some bring drink and food and eat as they go. They won’t miss anything. They’re already where they need to be.

But this one woman was different. There was a tension and separateness about her. Something about the way she held her head and looked around: an obsessive, exclusive watchfulness that snagged his attention, raw and jangled as his nerves were by the numbers of people everywhere. She was making her way through the crowd, not moving with it, and she was alert to her surroundings as those around her were not. She knew where the security cordons and the crowd watchers were, and kept away from them. She tracked her way forward, intent on some private purpose.

And then there was the bag. A drab and scruffy canvas bag, nothing remarkable except Lom could tell by the way she carried it that it was heavy, and the object inside was long and protruded from the top. The thing in the bag was wrapped in a bright childish fabric, which was clever because it attracted attention but also disarmed suspicion. It looked like something that belonged to a child, or used to. The kind of thing an older woman might carry for her grandchild. Or keep with her for ever and never lay down, to remember the dead by. Only this woman seemed a little too young and a little too strong, and it wasn’t easy to guess what sort of childish thing this long heavy object was. It scratched at Lom’s crowd-raw nerves.

As she passed near where Lom was sitting, the woman with the bag glanced sideways at something, and as she turned Lom glimpsed her face in profile. And recognised her. Six years had changed her. She was leaner, harsher, a stripped-back and sanded-down version of the woman who’d once given Maroussia and him shelter in the Raion Lezaryet, but still he knew instantly that this was Elena Cornelius: Elena, who used to have two girls and live in an apartment in Count Palffy’s house and make furniture to sell in the Apraksin Bazaar.

He watched her move on through the crowd. She was good but not that good. Intent on her work, she was just a little too interesting. Too noticeable. Too vivid. She made use of sightlines and available cover for protection. She made small changes of pace. She was moving instinctively as a hunter did. Or a sniper. But snipers move through empty streets, not crowds. In a crowd she was conspicuous. If he could spot her, so could others. Like for instance the security operatives, who were no doubt even now scanning Noviy Prospect from upper windows, though he could not see them.

Lom got up from the café table and followed. He moved up through the crowd to get closer to her, working slowly, cautiously, so as not to be noticed himself and above all not draw the attention of other watchers to her. He felt her vulnerability and her determination. He wanted to protect her, and he owed her his help, but he couldn’t let her do what she was going to do. She had to be stopped.

She made a sudden move to the right, picking up speed and making for the ragged edge of the moving crowd. Lom tried to follow, but his way was suddenly blocked by a knot of loud-voiced broad-backed men. They had just spilled out from a bar and stood swaying unsteadily and squinting in the glare of the sun. They smelled of aquavit. By the time Lom got past them, Elena Cornelius had disappeared from view.

2

The meeting room of the Central Committee of the New Vlast Presidium was painted green. The conference table was simple varnished ash wood. There were no insignia in the room, no banners, no portraits: only the smell of furniture polish and new carpet. There is no past; there is only the future. Each place at the table had a fresh notepad, a water jug, an ashtray and an inexpensive fountain pen. A single heavy lamp hung low above the table, a flat box of muted grey metal shedding from its under-surface a muted opalescent glow. The margins of the room where officials and stenographers sat were left in shadow.

On the morning of the Victory Day Parade the Committee gathered informally, no officials present, to congratulate their leader and President-Commander General Osip Rizhin, whose birthday by happy chance it also was that day. At least, according to the official biography it was his birthday, though of course the official biography was a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end.

All twenty-one committee members were present: twelve men and eight women, plus Rizhin. Sixteen were makeweights: bootlickers, honest toilers, useful idiots, take your pick–placeholders just passing through. Apart from Rizhin there were only four who really mattered, and they were Gribov, Secretary for War; Yashina, Finance; Ekel, Security and Justice; and Lukasz Kistler. Above all, Lukasz Kistler.

Kistler was a shaven-headed barrel of a man, boulder-shouldered, hard not fat, his torso straining at the seams of his shiny jacket. Kistler liked money, drank with workers and didn’t care about spilling his gravy. His shirt cuffs jutted six inches beyond his jacket sleeves. But the intelligence in his small creased eyes was sharp and dangerous as spikes. Kistler was never, ever tired and never, ever got sick and never, ever stopped working. His energy burned like a furnace. He had made huge amounts of money before he was thirty out of iron and oil and coal, anything big and dirty that came out of rock and was hard to get. He was a digger and a burrower and a hammerer. When Rizhin found Kistler he was turning out battle tanks from a factory that had no roof. It had been bombed so often Kistler had stopped rebuilding and left it a ruin in the hope the enemy would piss off and bomb something else. Within half an hour of their first meeting Rizhin put him in charge of producing battle tanks for the whole of the Vlast. Since the war ended, Kistler had expanded into oilfields, gasfields, hydro turbines, petroleum refineries, atomic power. Energy. Energy. Energy. Lukasz ‘Dynamo’ Kistler made Papa Rizhin’s Vlast burn brighter and run louder and faster every day.

And Lukasz Kistler was a clever, subtle, observant and far-sighted man. He saw that Rizhin knew how to spend money and people but had no idea where such resources actually came from. Rizhin didn’t know how to turn dirt into cash or people into workers. Rizhin grabbed and stole to spend, and spent what he could not make, and in the end he would spend the whole of the world until he had nothing left. Kistler suspected that one day he and Papa Rizhin would come to blows.

Kistler was watching Rizhin now. Rizhin was on his feet and prowling behind the seated committee members in his soft leather shoes. He liked to walk behind them. It made them uncomfortable. And today Rizhin was wielding a sword. He gripped it in his swollen fist and made experimental swipes at the air as he prowled. (Rizhin’s hands fascinated Kistler: hard, thickened, stub-fingered hands, butcher’s hands, raw-pink hands that looked like they’d been stung by bees. Long rough work on stone in ice and cold could make such hands. Many years in labour camps. That was something not in Papa Rizhin’s official biography.)

The sword was ridiculous. The Severe Sword. The Southern Congress of Regions had presented it to him that morning as a birthday gift. Its blade was inscribed on one side SLASH THE RIGHT DEVIATION! and on the other SLASH THE LEFT DEVIATION! and on the hilt it said PUMMEL THE CONCILIATOR!

‘They give me a sword?’ Rizhin was saying. ‘And what are we to make of that? I give them jet engines and atomic space vessels and they give me a sword. What am I to do with a sword? What does a sword say? You see how riddled we are with aristocrats and peasants still? Fantasists. Nostalgists. Am I to ride out on a fucking horse like a khan? Do they mean me to butcher my own people? Well, if there is butchery to be done, let us start with the Southern Congress of Regions.’

‘The sword is an emblem, Osip,’ said Yashina. ‘That’s all.’

‘Everything is an emblem,’ said Rizhin. ‘A generator is an emblem. A sky rise is an emblem. Those fuckers need to get better emblems.’

Rizhin laid the sword on the table and sat down, slumping back in his chair. He picked up a pen and began to scrawl doodles on his notepad.

‘The people call me Papa and sing hymns about me,’ he said. ‘“Thank you Papa Rizhin. Glory to our great commander.” It’s laughable. I’m not Papa Rizhin; I’m a simple man. I am Osip, a worker and a soldier just like them.’

He paused and looked around the table, fixing them one by one with his smiling burning eyes.

‘Even you, my friends,’ he said, ‘even you do this to me. You want me to walk out there today on that platform and let you make me Generalissimus. Do I need this? No. Does Osip the simple industrious man need such empty titles? No, he does not. I do not. I will not accept it. I give it back to you. Take it back, I beg you, and make someone else your Generalissimus, not me.’

There was silence in the room. Everyone froze. Everyone looked down. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch stared glassy-eyed at the sword on the table in front of him as if it would leap up and stab him in the neck. Rizhin doodled on his pad and waited.

For one horrifying moment Lukasz Kistler thought the idiots were going to accept. It’s a test! he screamed inwardly. A loyalty test! If someone didn’t speak soon he would have to do it himself, and that would be no good. He wasn’t on trial–everyone knew he was Rizhin’s dynamo–but if he had to step in and repair the situation it would be the end for some of them.

It was Yashina who rescued them in the end. Smooth, calm, cultured Yulia Yashina.

‘We’re nothing without you, Osip,’ she said quietly. ‘No one else could step into your shoes. It is unthinkable.’

They all swung in behind her then. General acclamation, a clattering of fists on the table. Rizhin sighed and straightened himself up in his chair.

‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘If you insist… I do not like it, you hear me. I protest. Let the record show that. Well… let’s get this over with, and get back to our real work.’

Lukasz Kistler glanced down at Rizhin’s notepad as they filed out of the room. There was a jagged black scribble in the corner of the top sheet: the scrawled angular face of a wolf glaring out at him from a wall of dark trees. The wolf’s jaw was open, showing its teeth.

3

Elena Cornelius climbed the concrete stairwell in near-darkness, counting floors as she went. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. The light filtering through fluted glass panes in the landing doors was enough to climb by, but too dim to read the floor numbers. It didn’t matter. She could count. She knew how many storeys up she needed to go. The key to the service entrance of the New Mirgorod Hotel was in her pocket. Vesna Mayskova, a floor attendant at the New Mirgorod, had got it for her, and she’d left a bucket of dirty water and a mop in the alley outside, the signal that the area was clear of militia patrols.

On the twenty-second floor of the New Mirgorod Hotel, Elena Cornelius stopped climbing and shoved open the door onto the second-tier roof. The sudden daylight was blinding: the shock of air and sky and the noise of the city after the dim stairwell. Elena held the door open with her foot, swung the canvas bag off her shoulder and rummaged in it for a small sliver of wood. Panic rose for a moment when she couldn’t find it, but there it was. Putting the bag on the ground, she let the door almost close and slipped the wooden sliver between the edge of it and the jamb. From the stairwell it would look shut, but there was just enough edge left proud of the surround to wrench it open again from outside with the tips of clawed fingers.

She turned and looked out across the roof. Taking stock. Considering. Checking. She had been here before–a rehearsal run–but nothing must be taken for granted. Check and check again. That’s what had kept her alive in the siege.

She was trembling from the effort of the long climb, but that was OK: she knew that it would pass and her hand would steady. There was plenty of time. The impersonal oceanic murmur of the crowd in Victory Square twenty-two floors below was oddly restful. It didn’t sound human but like the power of waterfalls or the wind in forest trees.

There was no chance of being seen from below as long as she kept back from the edge. Only the newly built Rizhin Tower on the other side of Victory Square was tall enough to overlook her, and that was still unoccupied. If she were in charge of security, she’d have posted an observer with binoculars in one of the deserted rooms high in the Rizhin Tower. Maybe somebody had, but the architect who designed the three-tiered edifice of the New Mirgorod Hotel had set thirty-foot bronze allegorical figures at the roof corners of every stage. He hadn’t worried that he was giving cover for shooters.

The final tier of the New Mirgorod Hotel rose dizzyingly high behind her, casting a deep shadow all the way to the parapet. There was a risk of being seen from one of those upper windows, but she’d checked the angles when she scouted the location. The danger was only when she crossed the roof. Once she was in firing position the hut-like lift mechanism housing would hide her, as long as she kept low.

The roof crossing was only half a dozen paces. Crossings were always a risk, and there was no point in waiting. Elena Cornelius picked up her bag and went. In the cover of the lift housing she crouched low. Knelt. Lay flat, stomach to the ground, face inches from the mix of rough gravel and tar that coated the roof. The waist-high parapet was five yards in front of her.

During the siege she had crawled on her belly every day. Now she crawled again, hauling herself, knees and elbows and belly across the rough surface, dragging the canvas bag, until she was in the shelter of the parapet. Then she moved right until she was tucked in under the plinth of the bronze statue in the corner.

The statue was a woman in military uniform facing out across the city, a rifle held at an angle across her breast. Above her huge bronze military boots her calves swelled, shapely and muscular. Elena scrabbled into a sitting position and pressed her back against the parapet wall. She was in a safe high place, a vantage point to hide and watch from and not be seen. She knew how to do this. It was familiar. It was a kind of home. She didn’t think about why she was there, what had led her to this point. All the decisions were already taken. When you were at work, you worked. That was how you survived.

She unwrapped the Zhodarev rifle, checked the magazine and banged it into position with the heel of her hand. Found the telescopic sight at the bottom of the bag, polished the optics with her sleeve and pushed it onto the rail, easing it forward until it clicked solidly. Then she folded the faded pink towel with the lemon-yellow tractors into a thick sausage, reached up and laid it on the parapet for a barrel rest. Raising herself into a kneeling position, she propped her left elbow on her left knee and raised the rifle, made sure the barrel sat good and solid on its towel rest, settled the stock into her shoulder, pressed her eye to the scope and adjusted the focus.

The VIP viewing platform jumped into view, crisp and clear, down and to the left of her firing position. Tiers of empty seats. They hadn’t started to arrive yet.

It was a long shot. She could have done with a more powerful scope, but she didn’t have one. She checked the adjustment of the graticule. It was unchanged from how she’d set it that morning before she left home. The range was six hundred and fifty yards–she’d paced it out a week ago plus some simple geometry to allow for height.

The warm morning air rested gently against her cheek. Windage, zero.

Nothing to do but wait and watch.

4

Lom had lost sight of Elena Cornelius at the top of Noviy Prospect just before it opened into Victory Square. He tried to find her again, but it was hopeless: there were any number of alleys and doorways she might have taken, or she could have switched direction and ducked past him back down the avenue against the flow of people without him seeing. He hesitated. Considered abandoning looking for her. After all, it was possible he was wrong about what she was doing. Maybe she’d just come to see the parade.

But he didn’t believe that.

He made his way out onto the fringe of Victory Square. The open space, laid out on what had once been the much smaller Square of the Piteous Angel, was staggeringly vast. Block after block of streets and buildings (Lom remembered them) had been demolished to make room for it. Rivers and canals had been covered over, the city completely reoriented. And now it was completely filled with people come for the Victory Parade. It was impossible to estimate how many were there: half a million? A million? There were high terraces for seating, and crowds of people standing shoulder to shoulder in the gaps between. He could see across to the raised platform where Rizhin would take his place. The VIP seats were beginning to fill up.

Not far from the platform the Lodka still stood, the dark and many-roofed headquarters of the old Vlast, no longer on an island between river and canal, occupying one small corner of the square. The Lodka had survived siege bombardment and aerial bombing raids, but now–eviscerated when Chazia removed the great archives and burned most of the contents, overtopped by the surrounding sky rises of concrete and granite and glass with their wedding-cake encrustations and monumental bas-reliefs–the huge cliff of a building looked isolated and diminished. Smartened-up but mothballed. A museum piece.

And next to the Lodka, dwarfing it, climbing higher–far higher–than any other building in the city, rising tier upon tier of stark grey stone, fluted, slender and almost weightless against the sky, was the Rizhin Tower, which was to be formally declared open that day. The top of the tower, constituting one tenth of the total height of the building, was an immense and gunmetal-grey statue of Papa Rizhin. He was in civilian clothes, standing bare-headed, his long coat lifting behind him slightly in a suggestion of wind. He was stepping forward towards the city, his back to the sea, his right arm raised and outstretched to greet and possess. The statue’s civilian clothing puzzled Lom. Not the military tunic and shoulder boards of the standard Rizhin portrait, it struck an odd note.

Then the truth struck him. This dizzying and mighty behemoth was not a statue of Rizhin at all; it was a statue of Josef Kantor. Kantor the agitator, the plotter, the revolutionary orator, the killer, the master terrorist.

Josef Kantor had transformed himself into Papa Rizhin at the siege of Mirgorod. He kept his origins secret, hidden, suppressed. All hints of his former self were ruthlessly obliterated. But here in Victory Square in the heart of Mirgorod–in plain sight, in the most visible, most spectacular place of all, full in the face of the whole of the Vlast–Rizhin thrust the truth of himself at them all, and nobody could see it, or if they did they dared not say. The Rizhin Tower was an act of the most astonishing hubris: a challenge, a yell, a dare, a spit in the eye of the world.

At that moment a strange noise started to swell and grow in Victory Square. Lom had heard nothing like it before. It began as a low clatter and hum and grew to a great roaring, deafening buzz. It was the sound of the crowd rising to greet the arrival of Papa Rizhin, who had stepped out onto the raised platform. It wasn’t cheering. It was a vibration of excitement like the agitation of a billion bees. The extraordinary noise reverberated around the square and echoed, magnified, off the surrounding buildings.

Lom turned his back on it. He shoved and threaded his way back into Noviy Prospect, which was almost deserted now, its flags and banners and portraits of Rizhin stirring in a gentle rising breeze. Everyone who was going to Victory Square had found their place; the parades and speeches were about to begin. But where was Elena Cornelius?

5

Eligiya Kamilova walks once more the five level miles, the long straight stony road south out of Belatinsk and back to Nikolai Forshin’s dacha. The dacha of the Philosophy League. Keeping her eyes down, no longer even consciously hungry, she walks with slow and fierce determination. One step. One step. One step. All her attention is fixed on her dust-yellowed boots and the pale stalks that are her shins.

To either side of her, electricity pylons march away across bare earth and dried yellow grass, level to the encircling blued horizon. Grey wooden sheds and grey corrugated-iron roofs. Dust and bone sunlight. The pylons carry no cables. The pylons are built, but the gangs that bring the cables have not yet come.

Kamilova notices none of this. Not any more. Every day the same. Nothing changes.

One step. One step.

She has done this walk every day for a week. Five miles out and five miles back. She wonders how much longer she can.

Her legs are so thin it frightens her. These fleshless wasted sticks are not hers; they are the legs of one who died long ago. How do they carry her without the shifting contour of muscle? Dried knots and tendons only, visibly working. Her knees are crude obtrusions, like the stones in the unmade road. Her own hands startle her: demonstration pieces of skeletal articulation for the instruction of anatomists.

My face is gone. I have transparent skin. I have forgotten how to be hungry.

All day Eligiya Kamilova has stood in line in Belatinsk, Galina’s ration card in her pocket. (Galina has found a job running messages at Lorschner’s. The wage is pitiful but the ration card is more valuable than platinum and silks.) She didn’t know what she was queuing for. People in line in Belatinsk hold tight to the belt of the one in front to keep their place. Too weak to stand alone, they lean against strangers and do not speak.

All day Kamilova’s line waited and did not move. In the afternoon the shopkeeper closed up.

‘Fuck off now,’ he screamed at them. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off. There’s nothing here.’

So Kamilova turned away and walked back out through the town.

Belatinsk was everywhere silent, subsided under dugouts, shacks and shanties of rusty iron, planks, cardboard, wire, glass and earth. There was no water, no electricity, no sewerage. Paved streets were dug up for scraggy allotments where nothing properly grew. Everything wood–benches, hoardings, fences, boardwalks–had been ripped up and burned. Vermin everywhere and no repairs to anything.

She passed a scrap of municipal garden behind iron railings. Sign on the gate: DIG NO GRAVES HERE.

No cars or trucks on the road out of Belatinsk to Forshin’s dacha. On the verge a mare had died, her body swollen hard. Black lips stretched off yellow teeth in a snarl. Black jewel flies were sipping at her eyes and crawling over the blue fatness of her tongue. Kamilova wanted to sit in the dust and lean against her like a couch, just for a while.

One step. One step. One step.

She does not know how many more days she can do this. Hunger is not the absence of food. It is a big black rock you carry that fills the sky. It crushes you while you sleep.

Yet things are better now at Forshin’s dacha than they were on the road.

The evening after they buried the twice-killed soldier, Kamilova stole a boat from the village at Yamelei. She still felt bad about the boat, but the village would survive and the girls could not walk. Not so far, not all the way. The equations of necessity.

So Kamilova had taken the boat, and in her they crossed the lake above the sunken city. Still purple waters at twilight and the sound of a distant bell.

The soul of the people is forever striving to behold the sunken city of Litvozh.

Kamilova knew boats. All night she let the chill wind take them west, and in the dawn they followed the shore to where the westward river flowed out.

‘What river is this?’ said Yeva.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kamilova, ‘but it’s going the right way.’

Low wooded hills and scraps of cool dawn mist. The girls slept under dewy blankets in the shelter of the gunwales, and the river took them into strange country. Unfamiliar hunting beasts called to one another across the water. Dark oily coils surged and rippled, and the backs of great silent fish broke the surface of the river. Kamilova sat in the stern with the gun across her knees and steered a course clear of the black bears that swam slow and strong and purposefully from shore to shore. They passed through a city ruined in the war. Nobody was there. Not anybody at all.

The end of day brought them across the sudden frontier out of slow memorious places into the hungerland.

In the deep past and in remoter places even now families and villages might fall into hunger and all of them die. That was one thing. In the towns and cities of the Vlast a wretched person sick and alone without a kopek might starve in a gutter. That was another thing. A ragged inconvenience. But when entire regions, millions of people, conurbations and suburbs and the penumbra of organised rural production, plunged into sudden and total desperate famine, that was something else. That was something never seen before.

That was the hungerland.

The boat came to a weir. A tremendous white-water fall. Nothing for it but to sleep and in the morning leave the boat and walk.

Kamilova, thinking the house on the edge of the nameless town empty, broke in the door. The family was gathered in darkness, curtains drawn against the day. The smell was bad. There were puddles of water on the floor.

Two chairs were pushed together, and across them lay the corpse of the boy. He might have been fourteen but starvation aged you. You couldn’t tell. The baby was propped in a pram, head to one side on the pillow, dead. The mother on the bed was dead. The daughter sat beside her on the stained counterpane, rubbing at the mother’s chest with a linen towel.

‘Where is your father?’ said Kamilova. ‘Did he go for help? For food?’

The girl glanced up at her without expression and carried on rubbing the dead woman’s chest. The smell of embrocation.

Kamilova took from her bag a piece of hard dry bread and a handful of potatoes brought from Yamelei and laid them on the bed. The girl didn’t look. The food just lay there on the counterpane.

When Kamilova reached the door she stopped and turned back, picked the food up again and put it back in her bag. The equations of necessity.

The girl didn’t glance up when Kamilova left the room.

Days rose dark in colourless sunshine and set in bleakness. The hungerland walk was one long unrelenting road. Aftermath, aftermath. Deadened days after the end of the world.

Slowly they realised how late they were. The distortions of slow time in the memorious zone. Here in the hungerland six years had passed, the war was over and this was Rizhin country now.

‘Mother will think we forgot her,’ Galina said. ‘She must think we are dead.’

‘She is waiting,’ said Yeva. ‘She would never stop waiting.’

‘I will take you home,’ said Kamilova. ‘I promise. We’re going there as quick as I can.’

The girls wrote letters and posted them when they came to towns. We are OK, Mother. We are alive and fine. Not long now. We’ll be with you soon.

Silence, horrible silence, settled across the hungerland. Livestock, cats and dogs, all dead. Birds and wild things all hunted or driven away. The only sound in the early morning was the soft breath of the dying. The footfalls of carrion eaters on patrol.

A woman in a garden held up her baby as they walked by.

‘Please. Take him, take him. I beg you take him. I cannot feed him. They will eat him when he dies.’

The child had an enormous wobbling head. A swollen pointed belly. He was already dead.

They studied starvation and became connoisseurs of hunger. Darkened faces and swollen legs were the symptomology of famishment. Corpse faces with wide and lifeless eyes, skin drawn skull-tight and glossy and covered with sores.

First your limbs grew weak, then you lost all physical sensation. The body became a numb and burdensome sack. The circulation of the blood grew sluggish until the unnourished muscles of the heart, unable to shift their own weight any more, simply failed to beat. By then you no longer had the energy to care.

People died working at their desks. They died as they walked the streets.

There was a shape to it, a pattern of progression. The speed of it surprised them. A few weeks was all it took before the people started dying. Those died who refused to steal or trade their bodies for food. Those died who shared their food with others. Parents who made sacrifices for their children died before them, and then their children died. Those died who refused to countenance the consumption of the most forbidden flesh. In the end it made no difference because everyone who didn’t escape the hungerland died.

The hungerland was spreading westward, and Kamilova and the girls walked in the same direction. Sometimes they took a lift in a truck and sometimes they got ahead of the hungerland wave. Behind them the cannibal bands were coming. Mobile platoons of mechanised anthropophagi grinding their butchering knives.

Kamilova shot two men with her gun to save the girls. The equations of necessity. Five shells left.

All three of them were growing weak. Kamilova knew the signs.

A cart brought them to Belatinsk one morning, and there they were stuck. Yeva and Galina could walk no more.

‘How far to go to Mirgorod?’ Kamilova enquired.

‘Twelve hundred miles,’ said the post office clerk. ‘Fifteen maybe.’

The only way out was the railway.

‘Sixty-five roubles,’ said another clerk at another window. ‘Third Class. One way. Each.’

Kamilova had money, scavenged from the bodies of the roadside dead. Money didn’t help in the deep hungerland, not unless you ate the paper. She had a sheaf of roubles in her pack. It was not enough.

She sat on a bench by the station in Belatinsk with Yeva and Galina. She had simply reached the end. She didn’t know what to do.

And then she saw the gleaming domed brow and wild flowing hair of Nikolai Forshin, six foot three and swinging an opera cane, come to the station to enquire about the arrival of a parcel of journals expected from the printers at Kornstadtlein.

‘Eligiya? Eligiya Kamilova?’ he called across the road. “Is that you?’

Not all the members of Forshin’s Philosophy League were happy at the arrival of three extra mouths. Some of the wives were the worst. But Forshin decided, boom-voiced disputatious Nikolai Forshin of the purple bow tie and the hard bright visionary eye. Forshin led. Forshin prevailed. It was Forshin’s dacha and Forshin’s crazy hopeless League.

At the dacha there was a clear stream for water, a few scrawny chickens that didn’t lay and a meagre vegetable patch. Potatoes were coming on. It was something but not enough. Not nearly enough. Kamilova gave her share to Galina and Yeva, though the girls didn’t know it.

Forshin’s League was growing fearful. They looked to their defences. There were rumours of gangs in Belatinsk and a trade in human flesh. Starveling packs had already approached the dacha more than once. Stick-people stood in the road and looked. The hungerland was coming, and the walls of Forshin’s dacha were not strong enough to hold it back.

Eligiya Kamilova reaches the end of the road and turns into the track to the dacha.

This is the last return. I cannot do that fruitless walk again. It will kill me.

Forshin himself is standing on the veranda smoking his pipe and watching her come. He is excited. He steps out to meet her, waving a piece of paper in his hand.

‘A letter, Eligiya! A letter from Mirgorod is come! The winds are changing. Rizhin himself has made a wonderful speech. “Times of Enlightenment”, that’s what he calls for. We are invited back! The League is to go home, I’m sure of it. We are to have a meeting this evening to resolve the matter. Come with us, Eligiya Kamilova, and bring your bright wonderful girls. Come! It will be a treat for them. Would they not adore to see the streets of Mirgorod again?’

6

Elena Cornelius couldn’t get a clean shot. The head of the woman sitting next to Rizhin–Secretary for Finance Yulia Yashina, long neck, aquiline nose, grey hair pulled tight back off a long pale face–floated in the centre of the scope’s optic, and behind her Rizhin’s nose and shoulder.

That was OK. Eventually he would stand and come forward to the microphoned lectern to speak. Elena Cornelius could wait.

Marching formations and rumbling military vehicles were passing interminably under the viewing platform. A huge cheer–the kind that used to greet the earth-shaking trudge of the old Novozhd’s platoon of forty-foot war mudjhiks–rose at the sight of atomic bombs on wide flatbed trucks. To Elena they looked ridiculous, like elephantine boiler-plated pieces of plumbing equipment.

The fresh-painted weaponry of the Vlast–battle tanks, mobile artillery and radar vehicles, rocket launchers–was followed by a display of captured enemy war machines looking battered and drab. Then came the March of the Heroes of Labour. Smiling blond men in overalls. Women in skirts and white ankle socks, waving. To pass the time, Elena let her telescope sight climb the endless rising walls of the Rizhin Tower. Since she could not see Rizhin himself, except one shoulder, she scanned the statue instead. It wasn’t stone or bronze but steel, constructed by armaments engineers from the melted-down ships and guns and shell casings of the enemy. In her scope she could see the polished, shaped sections riveted together. The welding scars like patchwork.

She got the eye of the statue in her cross hairs.

Lom had lost time and found nothing. It was hopeless. He couldn’t find her by wandering and randomly looking, not if he had a week. He wondered if he was wasting his time and taking an unnecessary risk by lingering here. He was beginning to feel visible, and if something was going to happen he was probably already too late to prevent it. Elena Cornelius had most likely just joined the crowd to see the parade. But that’s not what he’d sensed when he watched her, and he’d learned to trust feelings like that.

If I was a sniper, he thought, where would I choose? Where would I go?

The only way to find her was to think like she thought. Work it out from first principles. Narrow down the options and make a throw of the dice. It was fifty-fifty: choose right or choose wrong. Except it wasn’t fifty-fifty. How many high buildings looked across Victory Square? How many rooftops? How many windows? There were a thousand options, and all of them wrong except one.

Think it out. Narrow the odds. You’re a lucky man. Things work out for you. Yeah, right.

The criteria were: a clear shot, access to the shooting position, inconspicuousness, an escape route.

The first was useless. It didn’t narrow the field. Any building on three sides of the square would give a clear shot from the fourth floor up. The last was useless too: he had no information. And maybe she didn’t intend to escape. That was possible. So he was left with access and inconspicuousness. Access. That was the key. That had to come first. She’d choose a building she could get into, then look for a shooting position, and she’d only abandon it and move on to the next one if there wasn’t a place to fire from.

But that was no good either. Access to anywhere in the vicinity today was a nightmare. Places were either locked down tight and shuttered, or they had people crowding every window to get a view of the parade. There were police and militia everywhere. Regular sweeps and patrols. There must be a way in somewhere–he knew that because he knew she’d found it–but there was no possibility that he could spot it or guess. Not today.

Not today.

Of course not today. But it wasn’t today that mattered. Today she’d have come already knowing where she was making for. She must have scouted the place out beforehand, on another day. She must have poked into corners, looked for vantage points, worked out lines of sight and ways in and out. Preparation. Planning. That meant that, wherever she was now, she’d have had to go there at least once before with plenty of time to look around. The access that mattered wasn’t today but any other day. Any normal day.

He was getting somewhere. Maybe. He could rule out offices and residential buildings. You couldn’t wander around places like that without attracting attention–not unless you worked or lived there. Well maybe she did. But if so he was defeated: he had no chance. So rule all those buildings out anyway. Which left public places: shops, hotels, museums. And say the place she’d chosen wasn’t too far from where he’d lost her. There was no reason to think that, except that when he’d noticed her she was in the open, visible and vulnerable, and he could assume she’d expose herself as little as possible. It was likely he’d lost sight of her because she’d ducked in somewhere. Not certain, but the odds were in his favour. And this was all about odds.

He looked around, scanning the buildings. There were three good possibilities: two hotels and the Great Vlast Museum. The museum was closed. She might be in there, but if so he couldn’t follow. Not quickly. Perhaps not at all. That left the two hotels. He was back to fifty-fifty.

He chose the bigger, which was also nearer to where he’d last seen her. It was a thirty-storey three-tier granite cake. The entrance was guarded by two militia men and cast iron bas-reliefs of steelworkers with bulging forearms and collective farmers brandishing ten-foot scythes.

Lom took stock of himself. When he arrived yesterday he’d had a shave and a haircut and bought himself a suit. In his pocket he had a thickish wad of rouble notes and ID papers in the name of Foma Drogashvili, which he’d been using on and off for several years. So how did you get to look around inside the New Mirgorod Hotel? You went up to the desk and asked for a room.

Elena Cornelius watched the aircraft fly past low in the brilliant early-afternoon sky. The bass rumble of slow ten-engined bombers. The screaming of new-made jets trailing coloured vapour. Parachutists spilled from a lumbering transport plane and drifted down under brilliant blossoming canopies of red and yellow, alighting with perfect precision in the space in front of the viewing platform.

Twisting, ducking fighters enacted dogfights against the warplanes of the Archipelago. One enemy bomber spouted oily smoke and flame and sank lower and lower as it limped from view. When it was out of sight behind the Rizhin Tower there was a loud flash and a white pall rose into the sky as if it had crashed. Perhaps it had. Elena remembered no such dogfights during the siege of Mirgorod. Then, the bombers had come day and night unopposed.

Gendarmes had thrown a cordon across Karolov Street. On the other side of it a battered old delivery truck was propped up on a jack at the kerb, one wheel off. Two bearded young men lay on the ground, spreadeagled, rifles pointed at their heads. The back of the truck was open, being searched. And beyond the truck was the side entrance to the New Mirgorod Hotel. Lom had a choice: wait, or retrace his steps and try the front entrance on Victory Square.

He didn’t want to keep going over the same piece of ground. If there were watchers–and there surely were–he would be noticed. He made a quick calculation. Something would be found in the truck or it would not. Either way, within five minutes the situation here would change. But for ten long edgy minutes he waited and nothing was different. He turned back the way he had come.

The dark-panelled lobby of the hotel, when he finally reached it, was almost deserted. Ornate gilt-framed mirrors. Empty leather sofas under glowing chandeliers. The doorman was settled at a low marble table, cap off, drinking tea. Lom rang the bell at the desk. Waited. Rang it again. He could feel the eyes of the doorman on his back. From the room at the back came a radio commentary on the parade unfolding outside. He wished the doorman would just step outside and take a look.

Finally the reluctant clerk appeared.

‘A room?’ he said, raising his eyebrows sceptically. It was as if no one had ever asked him for such a thing before. ‘Regrettably, that is not possible. Naturally for Victory Day all our rooms are taken.’

‘All of them?’ Lom laid a stack of roubles on the table. The clerk scowled at him.

‘Of course all of them. Tomorrow you can have a room. Today, not.’

‘Then perhaps someone could just bring me coffee.’

‘Now?’

‘Now. Yes, now. Thank you. And a newspaper.’ Lom indicated a low sofa against a pillar near the entrance to the lifts. ‘I’ll be over there.’ He went across and sat down to wait. The clerk, scowling, spoke into the telephone on the counter then returned to his back room.

Minutes passed and Lom’s coffee did not come. He knew he should get out of there. He’d drawn attention to himself. If the clerk hadn’t been calling for tea, who had he been talking to on the phone? And Elena had already had plenty of time: if anything was going to happen it would have happened by now. But he stayed and waited. Eventually the doorman stood up with a sigh from his table by the window, set his cap on his head and went out through the plate-glass doors to take up his position outside on the steps.

Lom moved.

Elena Cornelius heard a roar from the crowd twenty-two floors below. An amplified voice was crashing out across the city, carried not only by the loudspeakers in Victory Square but also by every tannoy and radio in Mirgorod. Rizhin had come to the lectern and was speaking.

The vast crowd hushed, but the hush had its own noise, like waves over shingle. Rizhin’s amplified speech bounced off the wall behind her. The echo confused sense. She could only make out fragments.

‘… life has become better, friends, life is happier now… remember yesterday’s sacrifices, yes, but look to tomorrow… a greater victory to come…’

She re-settled the rifle. Pulled back the bolt with the outside of her hand to drive the first cartridge into the breech. One should be enough, but there were nine more in the magazine. She let the cross hairs move along the line of faces on the platform. You. You. You. The graticule came to rest clear and steady in the middle of Papa Rizhin’s head.

‘… our vessels explore the cosmos, but we must master our own planet also… inevitably the Archipelago will crumble and fade… the force of history will do our work… the forest… no more dark areas of superstition and myth… this time we will not be prevented, we will take a strong grip…’

In the siege she had shot without thought or conscience. The whole city then was filled with a loud dinning noise that made everyone always deaf. Sleepwalkers. The invaders wore blank masks. This, today, was different: the face in the cross hairs the focus of all the world and more familiar than her own. A killing imagined a thousand times. Long sleepless years. Her heart beat faster. Perspiration on her forehead. In the roots of her hair.

She breathed in and breathed out slowly, emptying her lungs. Calling up calm. She reached back to wipe her hand dry on her skirt. Cocked her wrist into the firing hold she had practised till it came easy and smooth. Began to squeeze her obtuse finger gently. Taking up the slack. A breath of wind kissed her sweat-damp cheek.

Lom pushed open the door onto the hotel roof and stepped out into dazzling glare. The rooftop was empty. There was nobody there and nothing to see but parapet and sky.

He heard the sound of a single rifle shot. It was unmistakable. And it had come from somewhere above him.

Not the first-stage roof, the second.

Shit.

He spun round, went back inside and ran up the darkened staircase, taking the steps three at a time.

Elena Cornelius saw the bullet strike the cushioned seat of the chair behind Rizhin. It must have passed his skull by inches, but he didn’t react. Didn’t pause. Didn’t flap a hand at the zip and crack by his ear, like she’d seen people do. He’d heard nothing above the amplified echoes of his own speech.

Lukasz Kistler was staring, puzzled, at the hole that had been punched in the seat beside him. In a second it would dawn on him what it meant.

She lined up the cross hairs on Rizhin again, took a deep slow breath, exhaled and fired again. Rizhin’s face disappeared in a puff of soft pink. The energy of the bullet snapped his whole body backwards. He went down as if someone had smashed him full force in the temple with a baseball bat.

Even in the dim stairwell Lom heard the horrified moan of the crowd. It was like the lowing of a stricken herd. He pounded on up the stairs, floor after floor.

He almost ran smack into Elena Cornelius coming down, the rifle held delicately in splayed fingers, pointing at the floor.

‘It’s me, Elena. You know me. Vissarion. Vissarion Lom.’

Her eyes were wide and unblinking, glassy bright in the shadows.

‘I’ve killed him,’ she said.

It was like a punch in Lom’s stomach. All the air went out of him. Less than a day in Mirgorod and he had failed. Mission over.

He took the rifle from her awkward grasp and propped it against the wall.

‘You have to lose this,’ he said. ‘Leave it. The bag too. Lose it. We need to get out of here.’

She didn’t resist. She didn’t move. He took her by the arm and led her down the stairs.

7

On a broad front the divisions of the New Vlast army entered the endless forest. Fleets of barges up the wide slow rivers and under the trees.

The forest is woods within woods, further in and further back. It has an edge but no central point and there is no end to going on. Deeper and deeper for ever. Strange persons live there. It is not safe.

As long as the divisions kept to their barges on the rivers they made progress, but five yards back from the bank all was impassable: layers of dead wood, luxuriant undergrowth, lake, bog and hill. Oak, ash, elm, maple and linden tree. Thorn and fir. A trackless catalogue of all the forests of northernness and east. Disoriented compass needles swung. Radios sucked in static. Green noise.

The forest removed irony. It was the place itself. Woodland and shadow and the lair of wild beasts. Every divisional commander was on his or her own. One by one each hauled up on some bend of their nameless river and disembarked and began to burn. Petrol-driven chainsaws ripped resinous raw avenues. The noise echoed down the river valleys. Trundling battle tanks pissed arcs of singeing ignition, the soldiers’ smut-grimed sweat-shone faces gleamed dull and lurid orange, and every day the churned and stinking ash-carpeted swathes extended deeper into the interior of the forest. Fingernails scraping at the heart of green silence. A war against the world.

The rivers became supply lines for the beachheads. Barge trains shuttled fuel day and night from New Vlast base camps at the forest edge.

In a week the black smoke had darkened the midday sky.

Divisions encountered waterlands that would not burn, marshes that sucked at the tracks of wallowing tanks. Engineers sank to the waist in bog and floundered. Horses drowned. Methane pockets burst and burned behind them. Divisions came to sudden rising cliffs and turned aside. Divisions reached the brink of mile-wide bottomless mist-rimmed holes in the ground. Trolls blundered out of the thickets, roaring, hair on fire and blackened blistering skin.

The advancing swathes of engine-driven desolation drifted left and right, circling round to rejoin themselves, beginning to lose direction, tracing mazy aimless scribbles on the margins of elsewhere under the trees.

1

Dead shock pulsed out across Mirgorod from the head of Papa Rizhin obliterated in a pink flower. His poleaxed fall punched the city in the face.

There was a spontaneous attempt to put a roadblock across Noviy Prospect, but the tide of dazed and weeping spectators rolled down out of Victory Square and swept on through, and nobody seriously tried to stop them. Militia patrols gathered in stricken leaderless huddles. Officers with panic in their eyes jogged between them barking orders no one seemed to hear.

Elena Cornelius pulled herself together quickly. She dropped her dark coat in an alleyway. In a white short-sleeved blouse she was taller and ten years younger, narrow shoulders and pale muscular arms, almost unrecognisable as the woman of the morning crowd. From six years back Lom remembered a rounder, fuller face, but she was all bone structure now. Nose pushed askew and night-blue eyes. The lines of a mouth long kept pressed tight shut to keep words back. Lom noticed her damaged hands. Fingernails not grown properly back.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘Helping you,’ said Lom. ‘Two are less visible than one.’

They walked among the stricken, the shocked, the wandering. Not fast, not slow, catching no one’s eye. Gendarmes were hauling people from the crowd. Pushing them against the wall. Spilling the contents of pockets and bags onto the pavement.

‘I don’t need you,’ said Elena. ‘I’m better alone.’

‘I’m good at this kind of thing.’

Bright banners fluttered in the strengthening wind. Rizhin’s huge smiling face watched over them. Rizhin’s face–Josef Kantor’s face–the man Lom had known, become a monstrous bullying avuncular god. The death of him left the world strangely deflated and pointless. Not the world, thought Lom. Only me.

‘Were you following me?’ said Elena. ‘Were you looking for me?’

‘Later,’ said Lom. ‘We’ll talk later, when we’re clear.’

‘What were you doing there? How could you know?’

‘I didn’t know. I saw you in the street. You were pretty obvious. But I lost sight of you, and by the time I found you again it was too late.’

‘Too late? For what?’

‘Too late to stop what you did.’

She left him then. Turned on her heel into a side alley, a narrow chasm between high windows and steep blank walls. Lom thought of hurrying after her. Catching up. What happened to you? How are you become this? But he let her go and watched her until she reached the far end of the alley and turned to the right. She didn’t look back.

Then he followed.

2

Elena Cornelius was going east. The streets were almost empty. She took a low underpass beneath the thundering Rizhin Highway: a urinous pillared human culvert.

She was easy to follow. Lom trailed her across waste and cratered rubble-lands and through pockets of still-standing bullet-pitted soot-grimed war damage. She led him into a wilderness of elephantine newness: concrete apartment buildings hastily thrown up among the ruins, already stained and dispirited and bleached colourless in the watery afternoon desolated sun. Lom logged the meaningless street names and recognised nothing at all, but he always knew where he was: wherever you went in Mirgorod you could tell your position by the Rizhin Tower. The skied statue of dead Josef Kantor was a beacon. A steering star.

He remembered the old city, the shifting rain-soft city, layered with glimpses, haunted with strange perceptiveness, turnings and doorways alive with contending futures, but now the triumphant future was here, and if the city was littered with shards and broken images, they were dry bone fragments of the past. Angels and giants were gone, rusalkas also: the waters had closed over them and people behaved as if they had never existed.

The blank blinding sky on concrete and asphalt made him squint. He was thirsty, and heavy with obscure guilt. He had made a mistake somewhere, taken a wrong turning, this future now and in Mirgorod his fault. His intentions were good, but history judged only results, and all his choices so far had been bad. The world around him had come out wrong. One day back in Mirgorod and here he was, trailing across wasted ground after a damaged and solitary woman who had killed a monster and made things worse. He didn’t know why he was here, except there was nothing better to do.

He kept following Elena Cornelius. She entered an apartment block indistinguishable from the others except by a name. KOMMUNALKA SUBBOTIN NO. 19.

Lom waited in a doorway across the square to see if she would come out again, but three hours later she had not. He turned away then, back towards the clustered sky rises under the reaching steel arm of the Rizhin statue.

3

General-Commander Osip Rizhin held himself rigidly upright in the chair while the doctor leaned in close and did his work. Papa Rizhin stared at the desk in front of him and focused his mind on the pain. He held himself open to it and felt it to the full.

His right eye was swollen shut but his left eye was good. Water streamed from it, not tears but cleansing salt burn, and when the doctor offered him morphine Rizhin cursed him. He had borne worse, in other chairs in other rooms, chairs with straps in rooms with barred high windows. Pain was a good harsh friend. An honest friend. Pain was strength and focus. Everyone who had ever leaned over him in a chair and caused him pain was dead now, and he was still here, the survivor, the indestructible.

The whole of the right side of his face was a swollen, shifting, stiffening map of numbness and pain. Every fresh insertion of the needle, every tug of thread, every application of the burning antiseptic pad, brought its own unique and individual new agony. Rizhin paid attention to the particularity of them all, the thing that made each pain different from every other pain he had ever felt. Pain magnified the right hemisphere of his head until it was bigger than the whole of the rest of the world, but Rizhin knew all the intimate topography of it. Carefully, attentively, he traced across it every new event in the intricate history of hurting.

The collar and back of his dress-uniform tunic were drenched with cold sticky blood. Fragments of human meat and bone. Most of the blood and all of the fleshy mess was not his but Vladi Broch’s. The sniper’s bullet had deeply furrowed Rizhin’s cheek as it passed on by and entered the seated Broch on a downward trajectory, finding the soft gap between left shoulder and neck. A trajectory that took the top of Broch’s spine out through a hole in his back.

The doctor straightened up and dabbed at his handiwork on Rizhin’s cheek with an iodine cloth. He washed his hands in a bowl of soap and then took a clean handkerchief from his pocket to polish his round-rimmed spectacles. The doctor had soft subtle hands. He wore his thinning hair combed back.

Trust no doctor, that was Rizhin’s iron rule. Doctors were the cunning eunuch viziers of the modern world. Mountebank snake-oil alchemists. Obfuscating cabalists of a secretive knowledge. Master superciliists. All surgeons and physicians played you false. In comfortably upholstered rooms they wove their mockery and plots.

Doctor, respected doctor, fear your patient.

‘There will be a scar, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve been as neat as I can.’

He began to prepare a dressing pad.

‘A battle scar is a source of pride,’ Rizhin growled at him through lopsided tongue and uncooperative mouth. ‘A million of our veterans bear far worse than this, and they’re the lucky ones.’

4

Nikolai Forshin convenes a conference of the Philosophy League at eight in the evening to consider the letter from Mirgorod.

‘Of course you must come to our meeting, Eligiya Kamilova,’ he says. ‘You are one of us, and I may need your support.’

They gather in the principal room of the dacha, part salon, part library: a room of divans and cretonne and canework chairs, threadbare rugs on a parquet floor. Forshin has left the doors to the veranda open, admitting sullen lilac evening. The birch avenue flimsy and skeletal.

Everyone is there: Forshin himself, standing tall and wild-haired at the fireplace, brimming with enthusiasm; the economist Pitrim Brutskoi; Karsin the lexicographer; Olga-Marya Rapp, novelist of the woman’s condition; the historians Sitzenvaldt and Polon; Likht the architect and tiny birdlike Yudifa Yudifovna, one-time editor of the short-lived New Tomorrows Review. Wives and husbands and lovers are crammed into the room too, squeezing onto sofas, propping cushions on the floor. Here are all the members of Forshin’s odd ad-hoc league of the self-exiled and self-appointed intelligentsia, withdrawn into obscurity when the air of the Writers and Artists Union began to chill against them. One by one they got out before the cycle of denunciation, ostracism and arrest got an unbreakable grip. Forshin recruited them. Encouraged them. Gathered them in. Told them they were awaiting better times. At Forshin’s dacha they could work and write and plan. There were schemes and journals to be prepared for publication when the wheel turned.

All are thin now, gaunt, their clothes worn thin and polished with age and overuse.

We are the last of the last of the cultured generation, Forshin had said to each of them tête-à-tête over tea and petit-beurre biscuits in a quiet corner of the Union. Confronted by horrors on such a scale, such a massiveness and totality of alien attitude, our cultured souls can have no response. There is no place for us here. We are numbed. We are enfeebled. We are without resources. We are exiled from the world itself. Our own country no longer exists, so we must learn to breathe in a vacuum and float three feet above the earth. We must withdraw from the world and wait for other times, until the call comes–as one day it will–for us to return.

But now–this very day–that call has come. So Forshin believes. Pacing in front of the mantelpiece he reads to them once more extracts from Pinocharsky’s momentous letter.

‘Come back to the capital, Nikolai! The times are changing, and much for the better. Now is the moment for the Philosophy League to step into the light.’

Pinocharsky told in his letter how Rizhin himself had commissioned him to found a great new institution, the House of Enlightened Arts!

‘We are to have our own new building,’ Pinocharsky wrote. ‘A splendid and beautiful place. A true monument of modernity! The plans are already drawn. I have seen them, Nikolai! Rizhin himself had a model before him on his desk when he spoke to me. Oh, you should have heard him speak, Nikolai. He is a surprisingly cultured man. Not crude at all. He speaks our language. I did not expect this at all. I remember his exact words. “Get me writers, Pinocharsky!” That’s what Rizhin said to me. “Get me musicians. Artists. Intellectuals. Build me a palace of culture. What we need now is people who will look at life clearly and show us its truth. Intellectuals will produce the goods we require most of all. Even more than power plants and airplanes and factories, we must forge strong new human souls.”

‘I must confess I was reserved at first. I played my cards close to my chest, as you can imagine. Factories are important too, I said wisely. But Rizhin leaned towards me and touched my arm. “I myself,” he said, “I myself wrote verse in my youth. You doubt me but I did. I respect poetry. I respect art. I am myself a creative man. I am your brother and your friend.”

‘I declare, Nikolai, that Papa Rizhin had tears in his eyes! “Do you mean this?” I said to him. (I wanted him to see I was a canny operator. A fellow with something about me.) “Let there be an amnesty,” that’s what Rizhin said then. “A great homecoming welcome for our finest minds, and past disagreements forgotten: that was then, this is now; we had to be tough, but now it is time to be kind.” ’

Forshin finishes reading the great letter aloud, stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket with a flourish and pauses to light his pipe.

‘And there you have it, friends,’ he says, effortless powerful voice booming. ‘We have no choice; our duty is clear. Our country and our people need us now and so we must return to Mirgorod. And the call has come none too soon, for frankly the conditions here are worsening. Belatinsk is no longer safe for us.’

‘I agree,’ says Brutskoi. ‘We can do more for Belatinsk in Mirgorod than here. We can speak up for the provinces in the capital. We can protest against the inefficiency of this neglect.’

‘Indeed,’ says Forshin. ‘If Pinocharsky is right, we will have the ear of Rizhin himself.’

‘Colleagues,’ says the miniature, frail Yudifa Yudifovna quietly, ‘I cannot believe you are falling for this transparent shit. Do you not know a trap when you see one?’

‘No, no, Yudifa!’ Forshin protests. ‘This is no trap. What about that speech of Gzowski’s that Pinocharsky enclosed?’ He quotes a part of Gzowski’s speech from memory. ‘We are in danger of destroying the spiritual capital of our people. We risk breeding a new crop of brutal and corrupt bureaucrats and a terrible new generation of cruel and lumpen youth. The New Vlast needs poetry and culture and art fit for our great aspirations. The people themselves call for it. Such words could never have been printed without sanction from the very top. It’s is as if Rizhin himself had spoken directly in public to us. This is no trap. This is enlightenment.’

‘Well I’m too old to fall for that crap again,’ says Yudifovna. ‘I’d rather take my chances here with a temporary shortage of beans than risk ending up in a VKBD cell. I’ve been there already. I’ll wait here and see how you get on.’

‘I think Yudifa is right,’ says Sitzenvaldt. ‘Pinocharsky is overexcited and misled. What he describes will never be permitted. We should stick together. If you leave us here we are too few to defend ourselves, and I for one know nothing of chickens.’

‘But how much longer do you think we can hold out here?’ says Polon. ‘One day the mob from Belatinsk will come for us, and what can people like us do then? We cannot fight.’

‘These shortages are a natural corrective mechanism,’ says Pitrim Brutskoi. ‘There will be a rebalancing before too long, you’ll see. The human soul is basically sound, and economic society is naturally efficient. I’m sure our fellows in Belatinsk will sort themselves out soon enough: all they need is systematic collective organisation.’

anisation.’‘Well I’ve had enough of hiding in the country!’ cries Olga-Marya Rapp. ‘Personal safety is secondary. We must see what is happening and write about it. My duty as an artist requires me to share whatever faces the women of the capital and report on it fearlessly!’

‘Are there no women in Belatinsk?’ mutters Yudifovna. ‘Is what’s happening here not worth writing of?’ But only Kamilova hears her.

And so, to Forshin’s dismay, the League divides. Some are for Mirgorod, and some are for staying at the dacha and waiting out the famine.

‘And what about you, Eligiya Kamilova?’ says Forshin at the end. ‘Will you and the girls come with us to Mirgorod? Surely you will? You’d be safe with us. You’d be travelling under the protection of the League.’

Kamilova hesitates.

‘All we want to do is go home to Mirgorod, Nikolai,’ she says, ‘only we cannot afford the tickets.’

Yudifa Yudifovna leans across and puts a hand on Kamilova’s arm.

‘How much do you need, Eligiya?’ she says.

‘Ninety roubles. But—’

‘I will give you all of that,’ says Yudifovna. ‘I’ll give you a hundred if you will sell me your gun.’

5

Lom spent a broken night between unclean sheets in his room in the Pension Forbat overlooking the Wieland Station and rose late and ill slept to the news that Papa Rizhin had survived the attempt on his life. He stared at the newspaper headline blankly, too stupid-tired and slow to take it in. His mind was still stuck with the noise of night trains shunting. The clank of points and signals. The echo of klaxons. Porters calling. An arc light splashing bone-sharp shadow across his wall. The empty wardrobe with the door that wouldn’t close.

Unshaven and only half awake he went out into the morning and bought black coffee and cigarettes in a railway workers’ café-bar on the corner by the pension. Laid the paper out on the table in front of him. Lit a cigarette with a cardboard match from a match book on the bar marked LOCOMOTIVE STAR. The unaccustomed smoke tasted bad and caught in his throat. His chest clenched. He ground the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray and lit another. Scooped sticky sugar into his coffee and swallowed the whole cup to take the taste away. Got another. That was breakfast.

The paper still said the same thing, which wasn’t much. Some minister for agriculture was dead and Rizhin was not. There was a photograph of Rizhin at his desk and in command, a wad of cotton stuck on where the bullet had grazed his face. Rizhin glared straight into the camera, purposeful, confident. Burning with determination undimmed. No day’s work lost for the man they couldn’t kill. Lom felt that the picture was meant for him personally: the dark energy of Rizhin’s gaze locked eyes with him. It was a challenge. See what I am? See what I can do? Did you think I could be stopped? Then think again. What’s it like to be alone?

Lom got a third coffee.

In the sleepless watches of the night he’d lit the dim bedside lamp and read again the official biography of Osip Rizhin. There was a copy in every guest house, pension and hotel room across the whole of the New Vlast. It went with the head-and-shoulders portrait on the wall. In the night the book had been an obituary, the shadowed Rizhin face above the dresser a funerary mask, but in the morning the man had climbed out of his grave, fresh and ready for the day.

You couldn’t kill a man who wasn’t there.

When Lom read the biography of Rizhin, what he saw was nothing. Gaps. Elisions. Lacunae. Imprecision covering emptiness. The testimony of witnesses who were not there. It was a life that had not happened. All the hardness and roaring industrious speed of Mirgorod and the New Vlast were a tissue of words laid across nothing at all.

And two other simple words, one name spoken out loud, a double trochee on a single breath of air–JO-sef KAN-tor–would scatter the whole construction and blow it all away.

Don’t kill him, Maroussia had said. Bring him down. Destroy the idea of him. Ruin him in this world, using the tricks of this world, and ruin this world he has created.

For centuries the Vlast had wiped histories away. The stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen created unpersons out of lives and made ruined former people the unseen, unheard haunters of their own streets.

So there it was.

Turn the weapon on the wielder of it. One name spoken would turn Osip Rizhin into another empty unperson.

JO-sef KAN-tor.

Lom’s heart was beating faster. He shifted in his seat with excitement. He wanted to be moving again. He had seen the way. He could do that, and he would.

What was needed was proof.

6

President-Commander Osip Rizhin had at his disposal the entire security machinery of the New Vlast. Two million police and militia men and women, their agents and informers and surveillance systems. Interrogators, analysts, collectors and sifters of intelligence. Torturers, assassins and spies. Rizhin had all of that, but trusted none of them because he of all people knew what kind of thing they were, and knew they must themselves be watched and kept in fear.

And so Rizhin had created the Parallel Sector. The Black Guard. The Streltski.

The Director of the Parallel Sector was Hunder Rond, and Rond was Rizhin’s man. Narrow-shouldered and diminutive, Rond had the cropped grey hair and brisk featureless competence of a senior bank official. In the brief civil war against Fohn and his crew, Rond–then a colonel of militia–had shown himself assiduously and unflamboyantly effective as an eliminator of the less-than-committed within Rizhin’s own camp. As an interrogator he was imaginatively destructive. He had certain private desires (which he gratified) that Rizhin disliked and documented, but in Rond he overlooked them. He needed someone, and Hunder Rond met the requirement as no one else. When Rond entered a room he brought darkness with him.

‘Keep that doctor locked up for now,’ Rizhin told Rond. ‘I want no blabbing from him.’

(Did Rizhin trust Hunder Rond? He did not. But he was sure Rond had no involvement in yesterday’s sniper attack. Rond had no friends, no allies because Rond hurt everyone–Rizhin made sure of that. Rond had no independent means of support and wouldn’t survive a week with Rizhin gone. Rond would not have tried to cut off the branch he sat on.)

‘Grigor Ekel’s outside,’ said Rond. ‘He’s been sitting there for two hours in a pool of his own piss and sweat. As secretary for security he is most distraught at this failure on the part of others outside his control. He wishes to abase himself and name the negligent.’

‘Have the fucker sent away,’ said Rizhin. ‘Tell him he’s lucky he’s not already under arrest. And tell him he’s got better things to do than lick my arse. Like find the fucker who shot me.’

Rond nodded. If he noticed that Rizhin spoke more slowly and emphatically than normal, through swollen lips that barely moved–if he observed Rizhin’s tunic soaked with blood, Rizhin’s face half-hidden under bandages, the slight tremor in Rizhin’s right hand–then Rond gave no sign. He was reassuring efficiency, only there to serve.

‘And there has been nothing?’ Rizhin was saying. ‘No further moves? No claims of responsibility?’

‘Nothing,’ said Rond. ‘Nobody seems to have been prepared for this. Everybody is watching everybody else and waiting to see what happens. The situation is drifting. Perhaps we should make a public statement? You could make an appearance. Reassert control. Vacuum is the greater risk now. Nerves are shot. We need to worry about the whole continent, not just Mirgorod.’

‘Not yet,’ said Rizhin. ‘Keep it vague a few more hours. And watch. Someone may still make a move.’

Rond made a face.

‘I think the time for that’s gone,’ he said. ‘We’d have seen something by now. The more time passes, the more likely it is that this was a lone wolf.’

Rizhin looked at him sharply.

‘A wolf? You say a wolf?’

‘Someone working alone,’ said Rond. ‘A grudge. A fanatic. A private venture. It was always a possibility. It’s the hardest threat to see coming and protect against.’

‘Nothing comes from nowhere,’ said Rizhin. ‘I want to know who did this, Rond. Find the shooter. Find them all. I want them disembowelled. I want them swinging in the wind and screaming to be let die.’

7

Lom passed the morning in a ProVlastKult reading room among stacks of newspapers six years old. The whole of the story was there if you knew how to read it.

There was the assault on Secetary Dukhonin’s residence in Pir-Anghelsky Park: Dukhonin and all his household butchered by a terrorist gang who then themselves all died at the hands of the militia, including their leader the notorious agitator Josef Kantor. The papers gave a surprisingly full account of Kantor’s history: his involvement with the Birzel plot; his twenty-year confinement in the labour camp at Vig; his death in a hail of bullets as he tried to escape the Pir-Anghelsky charnel house. There was no photograph of Kantor though, not even a prison mug shot. Of course there wasn’t.

And then the very next day after Dukhonin’s death, the Archipelago bombers had come for the first time and Mirgorod began to burn. The government withdrew and it seemed the city would quickly fall. But there was Colonel-General Osip Rizhin, suddenly come from nowhere, an unknown name (there were no prior references in the index, none at all) to lead the city’s defence. To stem the enemy advance and hold the siege. To conjure out of nowhere atomic artillery shells, a whole new way of killing, and turn the tide. Step forward Papa Rizhin, father and begetter of a new and better Vlast. Times are better now, citizens.

What Rizhin stood for was never made clear. If there were principles they were not spoken of. It was all about racing ahead. Dynamism. Taking the future in hand. A fresh beginning. Victory and peace and a bright widening tomorrow. Papa Rizhin works on the people, an editorial read, as a chemist works in his laboratory. He builds with us, as an engineer builds a great bridge.

In the early weeks and months after Rizhin’s first appearance in the world the papers had carried vague and inconsistent accounts of who he was and where he’d come from. Stories came and went, made little sense and did not stick until the publication of the little pamphlet An Account of the Life of Osip Rizhin, Hero of Mirgorod, Father of the New Vlast. Ten million copies of a little book of lies.

But who knew the truth? Hundreds must have known. Thousands. People who would have seen the portraits of Osip Rizhin and recognised Josef Kantor. For a start there would be those who knew him from his childhood among the families of Lezarye. Lom turned cold. He went back to the newspapers from the first days of the siege and read again a passage he had seen there. The whole of the Raion Lezaryet had been cleared and every last person of Lezarye ‘relocated in the east’. There was no reference to Lezarye in the journal index after that. No account of the place or its people ever again. He felt dizzy. Sick.

Of course there would have been others who could identify Kantor as Rizhin. Fellow inmates in the camp at Vig, for a start. But how easy it would be to reach out from Mirgorod and silence them if you had already removed an entire city quarter.

Josef Kantor knew who knew him, and Osip Rizhin could kill them all.

Lom went through the list in his mind. Under-Secretary Krogh (who knew because Lom had told him) was dead: his obituary was there in the paper, a eulogy to a lifetime’s service cut short by heart failure in his office a week before war came to Mirgorod. Raku Vishnik was dead. Lavrentina Chazia was dead (not killed by Kantor because Lom had saved him that trouble). Kantor’s wife, Maroussia’s mother, was dead: Lom had seen her shot down in the street in front of him. They had come to kill Maroussia herself more than once. And they had tried to kill him, Lom, as well.

Who else? Who else? Was there anyone left at all, apart from Maroussia and himself, who had been so comprehensively lost to view that Rizhin could not find them?

Lom racked his brain. There was one more face he remembered, a wild-eyed prophet of the new arts, standing green shirt half unbuttoned in the rain in the alley outside the Crimson Marmot. The painter Lakoba Petrov. He knew Josef Kantor. He was one of Kantor’s gang. Kantor the crab, Petrov had called him. Josef Krebs. Josef Cancer. Nothing but shell, shell, and lidless eyes on little stalks staring out of it, like a crab. Lom remembered Petrov swaying drunk in the red glow of the Marmot’s sign, oblivious of the rain in his face. And shall I tell you something else about him? Petrov had said, speaking very slowly and clearly. He has some other purpose which is not apparent.

Lom went back to the index and searched for Lakoba Petrov, painter.

For the second time he turned cold. Sick and dizzy with disbelief. Following a couple of references to reviews of Petrov’s paintings, there was one last entry: ‘Petrov, Lakoba: assassination of the Novozhd; death of.’ Petrov had blown himself up and taken the Novozhd with him. The papers presented it as some mad kind of anarchist artwork, the ultimate product of a degenerate corrupted mind. But Petrov’s act had paved the way for Chazia, and ultimately Kantor, to seize the Vlast, and Petrov was Kantor’s man.

Lom ripped the page from the newspaper, stuffed it in his pocket and walked out of the library in a daze. Sat on the steps in the early-afternoon sunshine and lit a cigarette. There were still a couple left in the packet.

The story was there in the archive to be read if you knew what to look for, but everyone who could have known even part of it… Papa Rizhin had raked the Vlast with a lice comb and killed them all, every one, as he would kill anyone who came forward with a rumour or began to ask around. There was no proof. And what would proof look like anyway? What were the chances of finding a police file with Josef Kantor’s photograph and fingerprints neatly tagged and docketed?

But there had once been such a file. Lom had held it in his own hands. He’d stolen it from Chazia’s personal archive in the Lodka: the file that contained Chazia’s account of her recruitment of Kantor as an informant and conspirator, and of her contact with the living angel in the forest. That file was proof enough to bring Rizhin down. But it was gone. Lom remembered how he’d left it hidden in the cistern in the bathroom of Vishnik’s apartment, but he knew the militia had searched the building when they killed Vishnik. They looked all over, the dvornik had told him. The halls. The stairwell. The bathroom. They pulled the cistern off the wall.

That surely meant they had found it, and the file was gone. But it had gone somewhere. Where? Back to Chazia presumably. The efficient paper handling of the old regime.

It came back to him now. There had in fact been two files in the folder he hid in the cistern: Chazia’s folder on Josef Kantor, and Lom’s own personnel record, which he’d also lifted from Chazia’s archive and brought away to read. Lom remembered the manuscript note on the second file from Krogh’s traitorous private secretary, who’d extracted it from Krogh’s office and passed it to Chazia.

Lom felt a sudden waking of excitement and hope. The private secretary. He was Chazia’s man, and he’d known something, perhaps a lot. He’d certainly known all about Lom’s mission to track down Kantor. But Kantor almost certainly would not have known about him.

Lom could still see the private secretary’s face.

His name? What was his name?

It was there somewhere, neatly lodged away in his long-unused policeman’s brain.

Find it. Find it.

Pavel!

Pavel. First name only, but it might be enough.

Lom raced back up the steps and into the library again. In the reference section next to the newspaper index he’d seen the long rows of annual volumes of the Administrative Gazette Yearbook, which among much other turgid information listed the ministers and senior officials of the Vlast. Including details of their private offices. Heart pounding, Lom pulled down the volume of the Gazette he needed and flipped through the pages until he found the one he needed. And there it was, in small italic typeface under the name of Krogh himself: ‘Private Secretary: Antimos, Pavel Ilich’.

It was a lot to hope that Pavel Antimos had survived: survived the siege, survived the war, survived Rizhin’s lice comb; survived it all and continued to work for the government of the New Vlast. A lot to hope for but perhaps not too much. Men like Pavel did survive. They even kept their jobs. He might still be there.

The long unbroken run of the Administrative Gazette Yearbook had gold lettering on blue spines fading to grey as the years receded to the left. Tucked in at the right-hand end of the last shelf were five volumes with the same gold lettering, but the spines were green and shining new. Administrative Gazette Yearbook, New Series. Lom took the last one, the most recent volume. Antimos, Pavel Ilich had not only survived but his career had flourished. He was an under-secretary now, in the Office for Progressive Cultural Enlightenment, with a private secretary of his own.

Lom didn’t want to approach him in his office. Better to do it in the evening, at home. Pushing his winning streak for one last throw, he scouted around for a Mirgorod residential telephone directory. He found it. And Pavel Antimos was in it. Lom memorised the address. It was a tenuous lead but the only one he had.

Pull on a thread. See where it takes me.

Just like the old days.

8

Maroussia Shaumian feels small beyond insignificance. The trees spread around her in all directions, numberless, featureless and utterly bleak. A still, engulfing, unending tide of blankness. The skin between her and the forest is permeable: she wants to spill out into it, a scent cloud dispersing under the branch-head canopy. The forest tugs and nags at the edges of her. Pieces of her snag on the trees and pull free.

She is walking again. Walking.

When it rains the rain clags the mud and makes the forest hiss and whisper. Mud clumps and drags and weighs on her boots. Every time it rains the rain gets colder and there are fewer leaves on the trees. Winter seems coming too soon, but she has boots and blankets and she will be OK.

Towards the end of the day she finds a dry rise of ground and a heavy oak tree, half fallen, its root mass torn from the earth. With her axe she hacks off some branches, props them against the fallen tree’s side and weaves thinner stem-lengths through to make strong, shallow, sloping walls. When the walls are solid she heaps leaves on top, pile on pile, until it swells, a natural earthy rising of the ground, skinned with leaves an arm’s length deep, at one end a low dark mouth. She rests another layer of branches across the outside, for the weight of them, to hold the leaves in place, and crawls inside, dragging more leaves after her, the driest she has found. Spreads them deep across the ground and packs the far end until she has a narrow earth-smelling tunnel scarcely wide enough to lie in. With more leaf-heavy branches she makes a door to pull in place behind her.

She works quickly but the light is failing.

The forest is too dark to see beyond the fire circle but she feels its presence. Trees rolling without end or limit, their roots under the earth all touching and knotting together, root whispering to root as branch brushes against branch. Connected, watchful, they merge and make one thing, the largest animal in the world. Night-waking. Watchful. It knows she is there.

There are stars in the gaps between branches, and a deeper purple-green shining blackness.

Maroussia crawls into the enclosing darkness of her leaf-and-branch cocoon. Her hiding, her little burial, her dream time, her forgetting. Deep beneath her in the earth the fine tangled roots sift and slide and touch each other. They whisper.

The shelter has its own quiet whispering too, a barely audible shifting and settling, the outer layer flickering and feathering in the night breeze. She hears the rustle and tick of small things–woodlice, spiders, mice–burrowing in the canopy. The shelter absorbs her, mothering, nurturing. Hiding her away.

The blanket is wrapped tight around her, rough against her face. Knees pulled up tight against her belly, feet pressed against the solid weight of her pack, head pillowed on her arms, she breathes with her mouth, shallow, slow breaths. Breathing the warmth of her own breath. The smell of leaves and earth and moss. Woodsmoke in the blanket and in her clothes and hair.

This isn’t right. This isn’t what I meant at all.

She is a rim of troubled consciousness encircling immensities without and immensities within. Sustaining it hurts. Her fragility and capacity for fracture terrify her.

A hand of fear in the darkness covers her face so it is hard to breathe. Fear grasps her heart inside her chest and squeezes out breath. Everything inside her is tight. Tight like wires. The trees she cannot see in the night prickle with the same fear. She wants to dig herself into the ground and be buried.

One break and I could lose myself for ever.

The Pollandore speaks its presence softly all the time, a voice inside her that sounds like it is outside, whispering dangerous promises. It swells and grows. The spaces inside her are as measureless as the forest and less human. Maroussia-Pollandore holds the green wall shut: the forest is withdrawn from its borders and does not leak. It holds no traffic with the human world, not any more. She feels the human world grow hard and quick and dying, and she is the engine of that. She is the separation and the holding back. She is the border patrol.

I wanted the opposite of this. I chose to open the world not close it. This is not me. My name is Maroussia Shaumian. When the angel in the forest is gone, then I can go home.

All she has to do is keep on walking. Keep it clear and simple, that is all she has to do. Be hard and strong and clever, and somehow she will keep the darkness from her. Somehow she will do that.

Trees in the forest walk, but slowly, year by year. Inching.

She will outrun them yet.

9

Lom had never heard birdsong in Mirgorod before. Never smelled new-cut lawn.

The lindens on the street where Pavel Ilich Antimos lived must have been planted fully grown. The fragrant asphalt, the raked gravel, the clipped laurels, they were all fresh out of the box, but those late-afternoon-sun-kindled shade-breathing linden trees would have taken fifty years to reach the height they were. They cast a kind of quiet privacy over Voronetsin Heights that made you feel like an intruder, just being in the road.

Atom House, the residence of Pavel Ilich Antimos, was a low-rise apartment building in walled grounds. A pleasant low-key fortress. The gate in the wall was wrought iron, painted to a gleam like broken coal. Lom watched the block for fifteen minutes. He saw domestic staff and deliveries checking in and out; wives coming back from shopping; children being driven home from school. The gate opened for them and closed behind them, and no way was the woman in the kiosk going to open that gate, not unless she knew you or you had an appointment and you were in her book.

Thus lived the List–the managers, the lawyers, the officials, the financiers and architects and engineers of Rizhin Land–spending different currency in different stores.

Lom went round the corner out of sight of the kiosk, jumped to hook his fingers on the coping ridge, hauled himself up till he could scrabble over the wall and dropped on the other side. The soft earth of a rose bed. A quiet formal garden in the slanting sun.

Pavel’s apartment was at the end of a short corridor, top floor back. It felt like an afterthought in the building. Single occupancy, one of the less expensive units, not a family home. Lom hoped so. He didn’t want to find Pavel’s wife at home. Or children. That would complicate things. The only other door in the passage was a cleaner’s storeroom. Lom checked it. Empty. Smelling of bleach and musty mops.

He knocked on Pavel’s door, brisk and businesslike. The door felt solid. His knocking sounded dull and didn’t carry. There was no bell push.

He knocked again.

‘Hi!’ he called. ‘Residence Antimos! Is someone at home? Open please!’

Nobody came. No matter how long he stared at it, the door stayed shut. It had a solid Levitan deadbolt lock, heavier than was normal for domestic use and fitted upside down to make it more awkward to pick.

Lom had spent his time productively since leaving the ProVlastKult library that morning. From a dusty shop by the Wieland Station (broken clocks and watches on velvet pads in the window) he’d bought a basic lock-picking kit: a C-rake, a tension wrench and short hook, all wrapped in a convenient canvas roll. He’d also acquired a neat small black rubber cosh in a silk sheath, with a plaited cord lanyard. The cosh was expensive but the proprietor sewed an extra pocket for him in his jacket sleeve. No extra cost. You had to know how to ask.

He popped the Levitan deadbolt without too much trouble. The door was solid hardwood a couple of inches thick. It took weight to open it.

‘Hi,’ he called again quietly. ‘Pavel, old friend? Are you there?’

The place was cool and dim and still and obviously empty. Lom stepped inside, pulled the door shut behind him and relocked it. On the inside it was fitted with two heavy bolts and a chain. Lom looked around. It was a single man’s apartment: kitchen, bathroom, sitting room with one armchair and a desk, a bedroom with a single bed. Pavel didn’t get many visitors obviously. Didn’t seem to spend much time at home at all.

Lom moved from room to room. Everything was neat. Possessions carefully put away. There was a phonogram cabinet in the sitting room, the lid closed. A shelf of recordings arranged in alphabetical order of composer. On a low glass-topped table with splayed tapering legs Pavel had stacked some literary magazines–New Cosmos, The Forward View–and three days’ worth of newspapers, crisply folded. In the bedroom there were books, also carefully arranged, the spines unbroken, on a low shelf under the window. The food in the kitchen was brightly coloured packages and tins–fruit juice, condensed milk, rye bread, caviar–all high quality List Shop brands.

There was something about Pavel’s apartment that was odd. It took Lom a moment to realise what it was. Nothing in the whole place was personal: nothing was old or well used or could possibly have had sentimental value. The pressed dark suits, the careful ties, the white shirts folded in drawers, the carpets, the curtains, the coverlet on the bed, the gramophone recordings of new composers singled out for favour by the Academy of Transformational Artistic Production (chairman, Osip Rizhin). Pavel had kept nothing that was made before the inception of the New Vlast. Nothing that deviated from post-war cultural norms. Pavel had accepted Rizhin’s world utterly, immersed himself in it, acquired with the obsessiveness of a connoisseur the top-rank artefacts of its material culture and surrounded himself with them. This was the apartment of an exemplary fellow, New Vlast Man to the core, from whose life all vestiges of the past had been removed with surgical thoroughness. Pavel was a chameleon, a caddis fly. He raised the art of blending in to new pinnacles of ruthless ostentation.

In a drawer of Pavel’s desk Lom found a travel agent’s confirmation of a booking for one–two weeks at the Tyaroga Resort Hotel on the Chernomorskoy Sea, single-berth rail sleeper included. He also found a carton of small-calibre shells and a diminutive pistol. A Deineka 5-shot Personal Defender. It looked like it had never been fired.

Lom loaded the gun, slipped a round into the chamber and put it in his pocket. Then he went into the kitchen, opened a packet of Pavel’s Oksetian Sunrise coffee, filled Pavel’s coffee pot and put it on Pavel’s stove. When the pot hissed and bubbled he poured himself a cup, picked up a book from the kitchen counter and went back into the other room to wait for Pavel to come home. The window was slightly open, letting in a stir of warm early-evening air. The quiet sound of distant traffic. Liquid blackbird song.

The book from Pavel’s kitchen was the Mikoyan Institute’s Home Course of Delicious and Healthy Food. Lom flicked through the pages to pass the time. Monochrome photographic plates displayed smiling family faces and crowded tables: meat loaf canapés filled with piped mayonnaise; bottles of sparkling Vlastskoye Sektwine and shining crystal goblets; a platter of pike in aspic decorated with radish rosettes. There were recipes for crab and cucumber salad; vinaigrette of beetroot, cabbage and red potato; crunchy pork cutlets; mutton aubergine claypot. Papa Rizhin himself had provided a foreword. ‘The special character of our New Vlast,’ it began, ‘is the joyousness of our prosperous and cultured style of life.’ There were no grease spots on the herb-green cloth binding. No spills. No stuck-together pages. Pavel didn’t have any favourite recipes then. Pavel Ilich Antimos would eat them all with equal relish. Anything that Papa Rizhin recommends. Lom looked at his watch. It was well past six o’clock. He hoped Pavel wasn’t working late or dining out.

Lom got another coffee and occupied himself with the pictures on Pavel’s walls. The pictures people put on their walls told you as much about them as their books–more, because they were meant to be seen. This is what I like. This is my mind. This is who you should think I am. Pavel’s visual world was framed prints advertising exhibitions of art promoted by the Office for Progressive Cultural Enlightenment. He’d probably picked them up free at work. There was a jewel-bright painting of a Mirgorod Airways Skyliner over snow-capped mountains. Dancers in a town square. The storm-beset factory ship VV Karamazov riding glass-green churning foam-flecked waters under a purple thunder-riven sky (Recall Our Heroic Sailors of the Merchant Marine!). Pride of place went to a large colourised photograph of the Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept climbing on a column of fire into a cloud-wisped sky.

Three hours later it was getting dark outside when Pavel Antimos let himself into his own apartment with his own key. Lom heard him lock the door behind him, drive the bolts home top and bottom, safe and sound, and hook the chain in place for the night. He let Pavel find him in the sitting room. In his armchair. Reading his books. Drinking his coffee. From his mug.

‘Pavel,’ he said, ‘it’s been too long, old friend. How’re you doing? Working late tonight? You’re looking well. You haven’t changed.’

And Pavel hadn’t changed, hardly at all. Some thickening at the neck and shoulders, maybe. A suggestion of jowl under the chin. A darkening around the eyes, the pallor of long office days.

He blinked. But only once.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re Lom.’

‘You remembered.’

‘I’m efficient. What do you want?’

Lom saw his eyes flick to the desk. To the drawer left open where the gun had been. A small loss of hope. You had to know it was there to see it.

‘I want a talk,’ said Lom. ‘About Josef Kantor.’

Pavel’s eyes widened. Not so missable this time.

‘Who?’

‘Please don’t spoil it,’ said Lom, ‘the memory thing. Let’s talk Papa and Joe. The Rizhin–Kantor nexus. Identities.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘He never knew about you, did he?’ said Lom. ‘You were never on his list. You’ve been lucky. It’s been a long time now, and you’re in the clear unless somebody mentions you to him. An anonymous note would be enough; a phone call would be better. He might even remember your name then, and if he didn’t he might check it out, but probably he wouldn’t bother. It wouldn’t make any difference. He’d err on the safe side. That would be bad for you. And I can make that happen, Pavel. Maybe I will.’

Pavel didn’t flinch. No bluster. No threats. No visible emotion of any kind. He absorbed the position and adapted to it. Instantly. It was a masterclass in how to survive.

‘This is wasting time,’ he said. ‘I understand you perfectly. You have information dangerous to me, and you come to my home to threaten me because you want something in return for your silence. I do not like this but I accept the inevitability of it. Well, I am listening. So what do you want?’

‘I want proof,’ said Lom. ‘I know that Rizhin is Kantor, but I want evidence. Photographs. Police files. Intelligence reports. Identification.’

‘Like I said, you’re insane,’ said Pavel. ‘You really are. Fortunately for both of us, what you’re asking for is impossible. The Lodka archive is long gone. Most of it was burned when the Archipelago came, before the siege.’

‘Only most of it?’ said Lom.

‘Some papers were sent to Kholvatogorsk, but Rizhin has been there. He’s been everywhere. You won’t find any files on Josef Kantor; they’re all gone, and everybody who might have dealt with such information is dead or disappeared into a labour camp.’

‘Has he been to Vig too?’ said Lom. ‘The courts? Provincial stations? There must have been a lot of paper on Kantor. A lot of people who would recognise his face.’

‘All of it,’ said Pavel. ‘He’s been everywhere, you can be sure of that. He’s a thorough man.’

‘Even Chazia’s personal archive?’ said Lom.

Pavel missed a beat. ‘What?’

‘Chazia had her own private papers,’ said Lom. ‘She kept them in a room in the Central Registry. I saw them. And they wouldn’t have been burned or shipped off to Kholvatogorsk. No way. Chazia would have made arrangements to keep them separate and safe.’

‘I know nothing about this,’ said Pavel.

‘Don’t you?’ said Lom. ‘Well you should. Chazia had papers there with your name on, Pavel. Papers that you passed to her from Krogh’s office, including papers about me and how Krogh wanted me to find Kantor. I saw them, Pavel, and you don’t want Rizhin finding them, do you?’

Pavel sat down. He looked suddenly diminished.

‘What do you want from me?’ he said.

‘I want the same thing you want for yourself. I want you to retrieve those papers.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’

‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, Pavel. You’re going to find out what happened to Chazia’s archive, then you’re going to find it and you’re going to get the file on Kantor from it and bring it to me. It’s there. I’ve read it. What you do with the rest is up to you.’

‘What if I can’t do this?’ said Pavel. ‘The archive could have been lost or destroyed by now. And even if it still exists, who will know where it is? I can hardly ask.’

Lom shrugged.

‘I don’t care how you do it. These are your problems, not mine. They’re administrative problems, the kind you’re good at solving. If you bring me the Kantor file, you won’t hear from me again. If not, well… I don’t like you, Pavel. I don’t like the kind of person you are, and I remember how you pissed me about when I was working for Krogh. I’m not your friend.’

‘Look,’ said Pavel, ‘OK. I’ll try to find it, but it may not—’

‘I’m not interested in intentions,’ said Lom. ‘Only outcomes. I’ll come back for it this time tomorrow. Have it ready.’

‘No,’ said Pavel. ‘One day isn’t enough. And you are not to come to my home again. Not ever again.’

‘Two days then,’ said Lom. ‘But no more.’

Pavel nodded. He looked sick.

‘There’s a konditorei on the lake in Kerensky Gardens,’ he said. ‘If I can get what you want, I’ll be there. I will arrive at 10 p.m. and I will wait till eleven.’

10

Night in the city, and Mirgorod celebrates the survival of Papa Rizhin the unkillable man. Lamps project the immense face of Rizhin all ruby-red against the underbelly of broken scudding cloud. Moon-gapped, star-gapped, streaming, he fills a quarter of the sky and floods the city with dim reflected redness.

In the rebuilt Dreksler-Kino, Ziabin’s greatest work, The Glorification of Time Racing, makes its triumphant premiere before an audience of twenty thousand. Oh, the ambition of Ziabin! Two thousand performers fusing music, dance and oratory! He will unify the arts! He will raise humankind to the radiant level! New instruments constructed for the occasion emit perfumes and effusions of vaporous colour in accordance with Ziabin’s score, and the auditorium reverberates to wonderful sounds previously unheard. Towers and mountains rise from the floor and cosmonauts descend thunderous from the sky, waving and smiling as they join the chorus in polyphonic harmony. Across the enormous cinema screen roll images of Rizhin country against a backdrop of galaxies. And all in glorious colour! The roars of wonder of twenty thousand watchers echo across the city, new gasps of rapture in perfect time with the long under-rhythms of Ziabin’s scheme. A synchronised crescendo every seventh wave.

Rizhin himself is there at the Dreksler-Kino, seated in a raised box. The wound on his face is agony but his chair is gilt, the walls of his box padded and buttoned velvet. Like a brooch in a jeweller’s box, he says to Ziabin. It is not a remark intended to put the great artist at his ease. Haven’t we shot you yet?

11

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept tumbles slowly, describing twenty-thousand-mile-per-hour corkscrew ellipses of orbiting perpetual fall. The cosmonauts ride in silence, having nothing to do. Sweeps of shadow and light. Cabin windows crossing the sun. Nightside passages of broken moon. The internal lighting has failed.

The frost of their breath furs the ceiling thickly.

Hourly they flick the radio switch.

‘Chaiganur? Hello, Chaiganur? Here is Proof of Concept calling.’

Universes of silence stare back from the loudspeaker grille.

In Mirgorod the twenty-foot likenesses of cosmonauts in bronze relief carry their space helms at the hip. In bright mosaic above the Wieland Station concourse they look skyward with chiselled confidence, grinning into star-swept purple. Our Starfaring Heroes. Mankind Advances Towards the Radiant Sun.

On the giant screen in the Dreksler-Kino wobbling smoky rockets descend among rocks and oceans out of strange skies. Bubble-cabin tractors till the extraplanetary soil, building barracks for pioneers. The audience roars and stamps its forty thousand feet. All children know their names from the illustrated magazines.

Our Future Among the Galaxies.

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept, two-thousand-ton extraplanetary submarine, makes a shining white mote against the nightly backdrop of the stars. It slides on smooth invisible rails across the sky. You can set your clock by it. It is clean and beautiful and very sad.

Silent the cosmonauts, eyes wide and dark-adapted, having nothing to do.

The turning of the cabin windows pans slowly across vectors of the lost planet, blue-rimmed, beclouded, oceanic. Shadow-side campfire towns and cities glitter. Ant jewels. The shrouded green-river-veined darkness of forest. Lakes are yellow. Lakes are brown. The continent is a midriff between ice and ice. Glimpses of the offshore archipelago.

Complex geometries of turn bring the snub nose of the Proof of Concept round to face the world. It’s a matter of timing. Her fingers stiff with cold and lack of use, Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova engages console mechanisms. The distant tinny echo of whirr and clunk. The magazine selects a charge.

Her companions observe unspeaking with heavy-lidded eyes and do not move.

‘I’m going home now,’ she says and pushes her thumb into the rubber of the detonation button.

The response is a distant bolt sliding home.

A half-second delay.

The tiny silent star-explosion of angel plasma smashes them in the small of the back. They do not blink.

Vera Mornova jabs her finger into the rubber button again and again.

Her aim is true. Proof of Concept surges forward into burning fall. The world in the window judders and bellies and swells.

The melting frost of their breath on the ceiling begins to fall on them like rain.

12

After leaving Pavel’s apartment, Lom took a night walk on the Mir Embankment. The Mir still rolled on through the city, carrying silt and air and the remembering of lakes and trees, but it was silent now and just a river. Everything was hot and open under the Rizhin-stained sky. He didn’t want to go home, not if home was a room in the Pension Forbat.

He was looking for something. Shadows and trails of what used to be. Old wild places where the forest still was. Giants and rusalkas and the dry ghosts of rain beasts in a wide cobbled square. There must be something left, something he could work with. But he was the only haunter of the new ruined city, caught between memory and forgetting, listening to the silence of dried waters. The city had turned its back on the Mir, and he was on the wrong side of the river.

In the very shadow of the Rizhin Tower, almost under the walls of the Lodka, he crossed into a small field of rubble. Mirgorod was aftermath city yet, and the heal-less residuum of war still came through. Stains under fresh plaster.

Lom stepped in among roofless blackened walls propped with baulks of timber. Night scents of wild herb and bramble. The smell of ash and rust and old wood slowly rotting. A grating in the gutter and running water down below–moss and mushroom and soft mud–the Yekaterina Canal paved over and gone underground.

Follow. Follow.

Gaps and small openings into blackness everywhere. Subterranea.

He kicks aside a fallen shop sign. CLOVER. BOOKS AND PERIODICALS.

Down he goes into old quiet tunnels and long-abandoned burrowings. There is no light down there, no lurid Rizhin glow, but he is Lom and needs no light to find his way.

1

The Lodka, sealed up and abandoned by Papa Rizhin–New Vlast, new offices! Sky rise and modern! Concrete and steel and glass!–stands, a black stranded hulk on Victory Square, doors locked, lower windows barred and boarded, the silent and disregarded River Mir at its back. Papa Rizhin refuses to use it at all. It is a mausoleum, he says. A stale reliquary. It stinks of typewriter ribbons and old secrets and the accrual of pensions. Four hundred years of conferences and paper shuffling and the dust of yesterday’s police. Will you make me breathe the second-hand breath of unremembered under-secretaries? Titular counsellors who died long ago and took their polished trouser seats with them to the grave? Fuck you. I will not do it.

And so the panels of angel flesh were removed from the Lodka’s outer walls to be ground up for Khyrbysk Propellant, and the vast building itself–its innumerable rooms and unmappable corridors, its unaccountable geometry of lost staircases and entranceless atria open to the sky, its basement cells and killing rooms–was hastily cleared out and simply closed up and left.

Inside the Lodka now an autumnal atmosphere pervades, whatever the external season. Time is disrupted here, unforgetting and passing slow. Many windows are broken–shattered bomb-blast glass scattered on floors and desks–and weather comes in through opened oriels and domes. Paint is flaking off leadlights. In the reading room the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine stands motionless, canted two degrees off centre in its cradle by an Archipelago bomb that fell outside. Animals have taken up residence–acrid streaks and accumulations of bird shit–bats and cats and rats–but they do not penetrate more than the outermost layers, leaving undisturbed the interior depths of this hollowed-out measureless mountain. Only shadows and paper dust settle there, little moved by slow deep tides of scarcely shifting air.

In the inner core of the Lodka, unreached by traffic noise and the coming and going of days, the silence of disconnected telephones drifts along corridors and through open doorways, across linoleum, tile and carpet. Nowhere here is ever completely dark: bone moonlight sifts and trickles eventually through the smallest gaps. Dim noiselessness brushes against walls painted ivory and green and the panels of frosted glass in doors. Quietness drifts along empty shelving and settles like ocean sediment inside deed boxes, cubbyholes, lockers and filing cabinets, the drawers of desks. Chairs still stand where they were left, pushed back. Abandoned pens rest on half-finished notes and memoranda. Jackets hang on coat stands in corners. Spare shoes are stowed under cupboards. Muteness insinuates itself into the inner mechanisms of typewriters, decryption machines, opaline desk lamps and heating boilers. Tiny fragments of angel flesh, inert now, lie where they fell on workroom floors. Obscurity preserves in grey amber the strangely intimate and homely office world of government. The Lodka is an ungraspable archaeology of administration. Surveillance. Bureaucracy. Interrogation. Death. Suspended and timeless. An unfathomable edifice. A sanctuary. An abysm.

Vissarion Lom found his way into the abandoned Lodka by subterranean ways. Following passages till recently used by only the most secretive of confidential agents of the secret surveillance police, he crossed the barely tangible time-slow frontier into memorious residuum, and long hours he wandered there, a warm attentive ghost. There was endless freedom in the Lodka now. It was the one free place in Rizhin’s new city. Free of everything but memories and a strange nostalgia for faded old oppression. It suited Lom better than the Pension Forbat.

But about one thing he was wrong.

The abandoned Lodka is not empty.

The vyrdalak sisters are light and fragile, almost weightless. They dress in brittle patchwork fabrics of subtle colour unlike anything in Rizhin world, and they have wide nocturnal lovely eyes. Inside them is very little body left at all. They are not of the forest but older and stranger than that.

Lom, entering the Lodka, spilling bright perfumed pheromone clouds of forestness all unawares, drew the hungry vyrdalak sisters to him like a warm candle flame.

‘He’s beautiful,’ said Moth. ‘I’d almost forgotten the good smell of trees.’

‘But he stinks of angel also,’ said Paper. ‘Violence is coming back.’

‘We should go to him,’ said Pigeon. ‘One of us must go.’

‘Let it be me then,’ said Moth. ‘Let me. I will go.’

2

Under-Secretary Pavel Ilich Antimos had a natural talent for dealing with complex administration, matured by years of experience. He was subtle, clever, far-sighted, cautious and patient, and he grasped the elegant beauty inherent in meticulous precision and detail. He had been around a long time in large institutions and knew instinctively how to make his way.

Lom’s appearance in his apartment had put Pavel in an uncomfortable place, caught between risk and risk. Through a long evening and sleepless night he weighed up options, measured the balance of danger and reward, and by the time he rose in the morning he had decided to do as Lom suggested. He would find the private Chazia archive. It was a dangerous project, but who could tackle it better than he could, and do it without attracting notice? He knew the ways of government offices: the harmless word in the corridor, the enquiry hidden inside the request, the flicker of reaction, the silent tell. The oblique and traceless passage through a filing list.

By the first afternoon Pavel was beginning to feel he was getting somewhere. There was a book of cancelled requisition slips in a box under a counter at the former address of the Ministry of Railways, a building located out towards the old Oxen Quarter and now occupied by an outpost of the Catering Procurement Branch. If certain papers were not there, if a certain circuit of communication had not been closed, he would be several steps nearer the missing archive, which he was increasingly certain did actually exist.

He made a good job of it, a brilliant job actually–Pavel Antimos was a genius at that kind of thing. But Hunder Rond was better, and Rond had had years to prepare, so Pavel had no way of knowing that, when he put in a chit for a particular registry number, a tag on the file triggered a clerk to marry a pink perforated slip with its other half and slide them both into a manila envelope addressed only to a box number. The arrival of the same envelope some hours later in a post room halfway across the city led to a telephone call, which led to another call, to the Parallel Sector, to the office of Hunder Rond.

‘It could be nothing,’ the caller said. ‘A random coincidence.’

‘We have anything on this Antimos?’ said Rond.

‘No. Nothing at all. He has an exemplary record.’

Rond took a decision.

‘Let’s pick him up,’ he said. ‘Collect him now.’

‘Shall I talk to him?’

Rond looked at his watch.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave him to me.’

And so, at the end of the day, when Pavel called in at the Catering Procurement Branch on his way home from work, two women in the black uniform of the Parallel Sector emerged from a side room and took him into custody with little fuss. Pavel showed no rage. He was not distraught. It was a moment he had prepared himself for, many years before, and when it happened he went along with them, numb and automatic. The only thing that really surprised him was how little his arrest actually mattered to him, now that it had finally come. He hated his life. He hated his apartment. He wouldn’t miss anything at all.

‘You don’t need to hurt me,’ Pavel said to Rond in the interrogation room. ‘I will tell you anything you want. I will say whatever you ask me to say. Let me be useful to you. I help you, and you keep me alive. Yes?’

He was half right anyway. One out of two.

3

Lom encountered the vyrdalak Moth in the reading room of the Central Registry. She came down silently, weightlessly, out of the moon-dim lattice, the glass-broken rust-scabbed ceiling dome, the strut and gondola shadows of the Gaukh Engine. (The Gaukh Wheel! Stationary and permanently benighted sun wheel, ministering idol of information now burned, ash-flake-scattered, released to rain.) Out of the wheel Moth came to him, face first, noiseless and beautiful. Her presence brushed across his face like settling night-pollen. Quiet vortices of neck-prickling wakefulness. She was young with the freshness of ageless moonlight. Youngness is the oldest thing there is.

Close she came and tipped at the air near his face with a quick dry tongue.

‘You smell sweet,’ she said, wide dark eyes shining. ‘Foresty. Earth and trees.’ Her sunless skin was warm, her wide mouth purple-dark. ‘I’m Moth,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name’s Vissarion.’

She sniffed.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

‘I thought no one was here,’ said Lom. ‘The giants and rusalkas have left, the river’s gone silent, but you’re still here?’

‘The forest is closed, but we’re not of the forest. We’ve always been here.’

‘We?’

‘Three sisters, all nice girls. I’m the one that wanted to come. My sister Paper thinks you’re dangerous, name’s-not-Vissarion. She says you stink of angel like Lavrentina. I say you stink of angel like nothing else does now, but not like Lavrentina; you’re also sweet. I say you’re liminal compendious duplicitous. I say you’re beautiful but violent and you’ve hurt and killed much in your time but you’re not dangerous. Which is right, name’s-not-Vissarion? Say whether Moth or Paper.’

‘Lavrentina?’ said Lom when finally she took a breath.

‘Changing the subject?’ said Moth. ‘That’s an answer of a kind. Do you know Lavrentina? She said she was coming back but she hasn’t come back yet. Do you know where she is?’

‘What do you have to do with her?’

‘Oh, she knew us! There were more of us then and some of us she used for purposes and missions and death. Some liked it. It was purpose. Bez liked it a lot but he hasn’t come back either. The word that Lavrentina liked was coterie but we didn’t like all that my sisters and me. We kept from Lavrentina far away. Keep to the rafters when Lavrentina’s about! Come down when she’s gone! The rest of us have gone away but not the three sisters we like it here. Is Lavrentina ever coming back?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Lom.

‘So answer the question then name’s-not-Vissarion are you a danger thing?’

‘Are you?’

‘Not to you.’

‘Then Moth,’ said Lom. ‘The answer is Moth.’

She laughed.

‘I like you name’s-not-Vissarion even if I don’t believe you even if you bring us fire and death.’

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I don’t.’

She frowned.

‘We’re not stupid,’ she said. ‘Listen this is how it is. The days pass slowly here it’s quiet and cool there’s shade and moonlight and the sun doesn’t reach in here. There are other places like this across the city. But no giants, no rusalkas. No wind walkers. They’ve all left the city and gone far to the east under the trees. The Pollandore drew things to itself while it was here including us but all those ways are closed now. We consider ourselves abandoned the new city has no time for us they would hate us if they knew. This red man Kantor has no time for us Kantor you know Kantor? Has a new name but still the same we know we’re memory. Ask us what we do here all the time I’ll tell you what we do here all the time we read a lot. They took much but they didn’t take it all away there’s lots still here to read.’

She leaned in confidentially to whisper something in his ear, as if it was a secret.

‘The libraries,’ she said, ‘have libraries in them.’

She paused.

‘Do you understand anything I’m talking about?’ she said. ‘Anything? Anything at all?’

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I do. I understand it all.’

‘I think you do,’ said Moth. ‘There’s noise and fire in the city anxiousness hunger bombs it has not stopped yet it goes away but it doesn’t it never stops. We go out sometimes to the city to forage. That’s better now. More for us. No! Not killers idiot! The bins at the back of the market. You can stay here with us if you want. You’ll find plenty to read. Stay out of the basements though the corpses in the mortuary make a lot of noise they thrash about but they can’t get out and anyway there’s nowhere else for them to go.’ She paused again and gazed deeply into his eyes. Hers were warm dark waters. ‘I’d like to kiss you, name’s-not-Vissarion, you smell good.’

‘What?’

‘Weren’t you listening? I thought you were listening. I want to kiss you. Can I do that? Only once to see what it is like. You’re very fierce and warm.’

‘If you want,’ said Lom. ‘If you want to, yes.’

Moth’s mouth on his was dry and cool and dark as a well and tasted faintly of fruit. Something inside her was buzzing lazily like a wasp in a sunlit afternoon window.

‘What time is it now?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lom.

‘No you don’t because the clocks don’t work any more. Clocks tell you something, but it’s not the time.’

Lom stayed in the Lodka, walking and thinking, long after Moth had left him alone. There was water in the basins and when he tired he went back to the reading room and slept. Better than in the Pension Forbat. Morning sun flooding the broken dome woke him. He didn’t want to go back out into the city, but he went.

4

There were three of them in Rizhin’s office: Rizhin himself, Hunder Rond, Director of the Parallel Sector, and Secretary for Security and Justice Grigor Ekel.

‘We are making good progress, Osip,’ Ekel began. He opened a folder and consulted his notes. ‘All my best people are working on this. Nothing is more—’

Rizhin held up his hand. ‘Rond,’ he said. ‘Rond first.’

‘The rifle that was used to shoot you,’ said Rond, ‘was a Zhodarev STV-04. Military sniper issue. It was found in the stairwell of the Mirgorod Hotel.’

Ekel jerked forward in his chair. ‘You have it?’ he said. ‘You have the weapon? Why wasn’t I told of this?’

Rond ignored him. ‘Two sets of fingerprints,’ he continued, speaking without notes. ‘The majority belong to a woman. Name, Cornelius. Trained as a sniper by the VKBD but deserted. Operated as a lone shooter during the siege. History of involvement with dissident elements. Arrested. Deep interrogation. Two years in the Chesma Detention Centre.’ He glanced at Ekel. ‘Released. Disappeared. Presumed to have left Mirgorod. Evidently did not. This is your shooter, Generalissimus.’

‘We must find this woman!’ said Ekel. ‘Why have the militia not been informed?’

‘They have the name, Grigor,’ said Rond. ‘Didn’t they tell you?’

‘Two,’ said Rizhin quietly. ‘You said two sets of prints,’

‘Yes. The other gave us a little trouble, but we tracked them down. They belong to a former senior investigator of the Political Police. A career in the eastern provinces. Effective but insubordinate, made no friends, under investigation for antisocial attitudes when he came to Mirgorod six years ago and immediately got into trouble with Chazia. There’s been no trace of him since. The assumption was, he was killed on Chazia’s orders. His name—’

‘Lom,’ said Rizhin. ‘Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom. From Podchornok.’

Rond looked at Rizhin in surprise. ‘You know of him?’

Rizhin was sitting upright and leaning forward intently. ‘Is he back, Rond?’ he said. ‘Is it him?’

‘He was in the Hotel Mirgorod at the time you were shot. A clerk and a doorman identified his photograph. The same man took a room at the Pension Forbat the night before Victory Day under the name of Foma Drogashvili. He took the room for a week, stayed there two nights but has not returned since.’

Ekel’s face was chalk. Neck flushed pink. The sheaf of papers in his hands trembled. A leaf in the breeze. He glared at Rond.

‘None of this was shared—’

‘There is more,’ Rond said to Rizhin, taking no notice of Ekel. ‘I had a conversation recently with an under-secretary in the Office for Progressive Cultural Enlightenment. Antimos. A man with a hitherto blame-free record who suddenly upped and started to search for some old files. Highly sensitive old files. During my conversation with Antimos he mentioned this same Lom. There was a history between them.’ Rond glanced at Ekel meaningfully. He was about to enter into topics which Ekel must guess nothing of. ‘It concerns a certain six-year-old mission that Lom has apparently reactivated. A certain former intelligence target.’

Rizhin nodded. Expressionless. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Please go on.’

‘Lom was blackmailing my friend Under-Secretary Antimos,’ said Rond. ‘He wanted Antimos to find and bring him files that were closed long ago.’

‘Thank you, Rond,’ said Rizhin. ‘That’s enough for the moment. I congratulate the Parallel Sector again.’ He turned to Ekel. ‘And now, Grigor, what do you have for me? Your report please? Tell me, what have the VKBD, the gendarmes, the militia and the secret police done to clear up after the attempt on my life you failed to prevent?’

Ekel was quivering with frustration and rage. Also fear. Primarily fear. He addressed Rizhin but he could not tear his eyes from Hunder Rond.

‘This is a stitch-up! My people have done their best, Osip!’ Ekel’s voice was becoming more high-pitched and nasal. ‘I have done my best! But you see what I am up against? Obstruction… hiding evidence… deliberate betrayal! Fuck!’ He turned to face Rond. ‘I will not let you do this to me! I will not be hung out to dry!’

‘Someone must be,’ said Rond quietly. ‘In circumstances like this, it’s an inevitable necessity. You know that, Ekel.’

‘But not me, you fucker! Not me! You see, Osip, see how he’s trying to protect himself, that’s all! But I know you see through him, like I do.’

‘No, Grigor,’ said Rizhin. ‘It is you. I smell conspiracy on you. It’s on your breath. You stink of it.’ He put his right hand–five fat fingers–on his heart. ‘You hurt me, Grigor, here. Just here. I gave you all you have. I gave you my trust, and you repay me how? You are complicit in this attempt on my life. There is no other explanation.’

‘No! Osip, please! I have been more than just loyal. I like you, Osip. I’m not like the others. I love you. As a man I am your friend.’

‘We will have the names of your gang out of you, Grigor. Then we will see.’

‘The thing is,’ Rond said to Rizhin after Grigor Ekel had been taken away, ‘we think the archive Lom is looking for may actually exist. But we don’t yet know where it is.’

‘Archive?’

‘Lavrentina Chazia kept her own personal files, and it seems they have not been destroyed. They are still out there somewhere. Antimos was on their trail but he hadn’t found them yet. They’re likely to contain compromising material.’

‘Of course they’d be compromising. That mad old vixen Lavrentina Chazia was a cunning poisonous bitch. Find what she kept, Rond, and bring it all to me.’

‘Of course,’ said Hunder Rond. ‘We’ll find the Cornelius woman too.’

Rizhin shrugged. ‘Naturally, but she won’t be anything much. Find Lom. He’s the one that matters. Him I want alive. Him I want to talk to.’

5

The railway station at Belatinsk is crowded for the departure of the Mirgorod train. Forshin’s Philosophy League has booked an entire carriage. They struggle with chests and suitcases full of books and papers. The atmosphere is grim determination under a bleak grey sky. Dusty wind whips at their clothes.

‘I put on a mask of good cheer for the others,’ says Forshin to Kamilova, ‘and perhaps above all for myself, but I do not underestimate the task ahead.’

There are forms to be filled out in triplicate. Municipal officials search their luggage for what they can confiscate. Brutskoi’s wife weeps and protests at the loss of all her roubles and silver. A gendarme ruffles Yeva and Galina’s hair in search of hidden jewels.

‘Let us exult in leaving this place, comrades,’ says Forshin, waving his cane at the lowering sky. ‘We carry with us the flame of our people’s future. No customs officer can confiscate that!’

Kamilova and the girls climb aboard at last. They have no baggage. Yeva and Galina huddle together, looking out of the window. The locomotive trembles. Steam is up.

‘Don’t worry, Galina,’ says Yeva. ‘You know we’ll see our mother soon.’

6

Lom reached Kommunalka Subbotin No. 19 early and ran up the steps two at a time in fresh midsummer Rizhin-morning sunshine. There was a fresh efficient woman in the glassy walled lobby cubicle: patterned cardigan, horn-rim spectacles, blond hair tied back, young and cheerful, not unsmiling, ready for the day.

‘What is the number of the apartment of Elena Cornelius, please?’ he asked her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There is nobody of that name. Not here.’

‘Perhaps she left recently?’

‘I’ve worked here ever since the building opened. Eleven months. I know all the residents. There is no Cornelius here and there never has been. I’m afraid you have the wrong address.’

It was not yet eight o’clock. Lom waited on a bench with a view of the exit. Perhaps she was using another name. Perhaps she had married again. It was possible.

Forty minutes later he saw her come out alone, in her dark clothes again, intense and purposeful, not looking around. She was coming his way. When she got near he rose to meet her.

‘Can we talk?’ he said. ‘Not here. Is there a place?’

‘I have to be at work.’

‘Say you were sick.’

‘I’m never sick.’

‘Then they’ll believe you.’

She hesitated.

‘Please,’ he said.

‘All right then. OK.’

She took him to a workers’ dining hall. Long wooden benches and sticky chrome-legged tables. Yellow-flecked laminate tabletops. The floor was sticky too. The place was crowded with people taking breakfast–young women mostly, girls in sneakers and overalls with tied-back hair. Sweet smells of make-up and scent at war with the black bread and apricot conserve, tea and coffee and steam. The din of cutlery and crockery, the chatter of women with the workday ahead.

Lom and Elena found a space at the end of a bench, near a wide window which looked across an empty paved square to an identical dining hall on the other side.

‘Where’s Maroussia?’ said Elena. She held her cup awkwardly in clawed, broken hands.

‘I lost her.’

Elena nodded. In the aftermath of war, when half the world, it seemed, was lost, you didn’t ask. People told you or they did not. The stories were always more or less the same.

‘I lost my children,’ Elena said. ‘Galina and Yeva. You remember them?’

‘Of course,’ said Lom.

‘The building they were in is gone, built over now, but I go there every day, and when they come back they’ll find me waiting. They’re not dead, I know that at least. Of course I’d know if they were killed. A mother would feel that, wouldn’t she? In her bones? They were taken away but nobody would tell me who took them or where. They all denied knowing anything about it–Taken away? Nobody was taken away–but some of them were lying, I could see. There’s a post office box in my name, so when Galina or Yeva writes me a letter it should go there. The system is very reliable and good, everyone says that.’

‘Is that why you want to kill Rizhin?’ said Lom quietly. ‘Because of what happened to Galina and Yeva?’

‘Not his fault,’ said Elena. ‘Before him, that. That was others. Rizhin came later.’

‘What happened to your hands, Elena?’ said Lom.

‘These?’ She shrugged.

‘Did they do that in the camps? Did they interrogate you?’

‘These are nothing, not compared to what they did to others… not compared to…’ She stopped. Looked out of the window.

‘They hurt someone you knew?’ said Lom.

‘What good is this doing? Talking never does any good. None at all.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He was trying to make a new start,’ she said, still looking out across the sunlit concrete square. ‘New ideas. A better world after the war. Some of us believed in that. We tried… We wanted to… Why would I tell you this? You wanted to stop me killing Rizhin. You were trying to save him. Weren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘And now I’m trying to stop you trying again.’

‘But… why?’

‘Because simply killing Rizhin is no use at all. It’s worse than useless: it would be disastrous. It’s the idea of him that needs to be destroyed. Killing the man will only make the idea of him stronger. Things will only be worse if you kill him. Much, much worse. ’

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘You’re wrong. Why do you think that?’

‘I don’t think it,’ he said. ‘I know it.’

‘What do you want from me? Why are you here?’

‘I want your help. I want to bring Rizhin down. Not kill him, but worse than kill him. Destroy him. Ruin him. Ruin his memory. Make it so people will hate all his plans and all he wants to do, and never do any of it simply because it was what he wanted.’

‘How? How would you do this?’

‘With information. With proof of what he really is.’

‘And you have this?’

‘Not yet. I should have it tomorrow. But I’ll need help to use it properly. That’s why I came to see you. I thought you might know people. You could put me in contact—’

‘What kind of people?’

‘Like you said. People with new ideas. Do you know people like that? People I could talk to?’

‘Maybe. Perhaps they would talk to you. You could show them what you have.’

‘I’d need to meet them first, before I brought them anything.’

Elena looked hard at Lom. Her thin dark face. Her broken nose. Eyes burning just this side of crazy.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But Maroussia trusted you.’

‘And this is Maroussia’s work I’m doing. Unfinished business.’

Elena moved her head slightly. That connected with her.

‘Is it?’ she said.

‘Yes, it is.’

She took a deep breath. ‘OK. Come with me. I’ll take you there now.’

7

Maroussia Shaumian walks in the forest and as she walks she picks things up. Small things, the litter of forest life that snags her gaze and answers her in some instinctive wordless way. Smooth small greenish stones from the bed of a stream. Twigs of rowan. Pine cones. Galls and cankers. Pellets and feathers of owl. A trail of dark ivy stem, rough with root hairs. A piece of root like a brown mossy face. The body of a shrew, dead at the path-side, a tiny packet of fur and frail bone, the bright black drupelet of an open eye. She stops and gathers them and tucks them in her satchel.

When she rests she tips the satchel out and sorts through them. Holds them one by one, interrogates them, listens, and shapes them. Knots them together with grass, threads them on bramble lengths, fixes them with dabs of sticky mud and resin smears. She is making strange objects.

Each one as she makes it becomes a tiny part of her, but separated off. Each one is an expression, a distillation, a vessel and an awakening: not the whole of her, but some small and very specific part, some particular and exact feeling, one certain memory that she separates from herself and makes a thing apart. Some don’t work. The investing doesn’t take, but slips through the gaps and fades. Those, the emptied ones, the ones that die, she buries under earth and moss and leaves. But many do take, and she knows each one and gives it a name. Lumb. Hope. Wythe. Frith. Scough. Carse. Arker. Haugh. Lade. Clun. Mistall. Brack. Lund. In the evenings she hangs them at intervals around her camp. They dangle and twist and open themselves to the night, to watch and listen while she sleeps.

No one showed her how to do this, not Fraiethe or the father or the Seer Witch of Bones. She found her own way to it.

She comes to where a wide shallow beck crosses the path, running fast and cold, spilling across mounded rocks. Trees on either side lean across it, leaf-heads merged, darkening the water. She drinks a little from the stream and sits a while on the bank. Makes a leaf boat, pinned in shape with thorns, weighted with pebble ballast.

When the leaf boat is ready she reaches for one of the figures she’s made. Brings it close to her eye and studies the tiny striations on the twig bark, the exact complexity of grass-stem knots, the russets of moss, the lichen maps like moth wings. She tries to feel her way into it, curious to find what part of herself it is that the object holds. But it is opaque now and keeps its own counsel. She puts it in the boat.

Holding the boat in one hand, carefully, raising it high, she makes her way out into the beck to a dark wet flat of rock. Downstream of the rock the stream has dug a pool, dark brown, slower turning. She crouches and leans out to set the leaf boat on the water and let it go. It turns a while, uncertain, listing, testing the way, then settles and rights itself. The water carries it clear of the matted litter on the bank. It wobbles and turns, tiny under the trees, until it goes beyond where she can see.

It is not a message, not even a messenger, but an explorer: a voyager sent ahead where she can’t yet go.

All morning the ground climbs under her feet and the trees grow sparser, lower, more widely spaced, until in the middle of the day she crests a rise and finds herself on a scrubby hilltop among hazel and thorn, looking across a wide shallow valley. The grey-brown canopy of leaf-falling woodland spreads out at her feet. Solitary hunting birds circle below her on loose-stretched flaggy wings. A range of low hills on the further side rises into distance and mist. Without trees above her she can see the sky.

Smirrs of mist hang over thorn and bramble scrub, pale and cold, motionless and patient, like breath-clouds: the trees’ breathing. The finger-touch of damp air chill is on her face. Her hands are bunched in her pockets for warmth. She is walking on a thick mat of fallen leaves and wind-broken tips and twigs, bleached of colour. It crunches underfoot. There is winter coming in this part of the forest. Every edge and rib of leaf has a fine sawtooth edge of frost.

The body of the lynx lies on its side in a shallow pool as if it has drowned. Maroussia crouches beside it to look. The pool is dark and skinned with ice: forest litter is caught in it, and tiny bubble trails. The lynx is big like a large dog: sharp ears, a flattened cat-snout, ice-matted fur. She puts out her hand to touch its side. It feels cold and hard. She closes her eyes and reaches out with her mind, groping her way, and touches a faint distant hint of warmth. A last failing ember. A trace. Life, determined, hanging on.

She isn’t dead. She isn’t gone. Not yet.

Maroussia feels her way cautiously into the cold-damaged body. The sour smell of death is there: an obstacle, an uneasy darkness she has to push through. She feels the death seeping into her and pushes it back, trembling with revulsion.

‘Get out,’ she whispers aloud. Get away from me.

She is feeling her way inside the lynx, looking for the core of life, reaching out to it. Here, she is saying. I am here. Where are you?

The lynx barely flickers in response, so faintly that Maroussia doubts at first that it is there at all. But it stirs. She catches a weak sense of lynx life.

Who are you? she says to the lynx life. Who are you?

Leave me. I am death.

No. Not yet. Not quite.

I am tired and death. I am the stinker. The rotting one.

Not yet. Take something from me. I want to share.

It is too much and I am death.

I have life. Share some.

I am lynx and do not share.

The lynx is faint and far away. Drifting. Maroussia pushes some of her self into it, shoving, forcing like she did with the objects she made, but stronger. Harsher. Until it hurts to do it.

Who are you? she says again to the lynx.

Leave me alone.

Who are you? Remember who you are.

Maroussia pushes more of herself into the lynx, feeling the weakening of herself, the draining of certainty, the forest around her grow fainter. The sound of death is like a river, near. She will have to be careful. But the lynx is stronger now. Maroussia can see her, as if the lynx is at the back of a low dark cave. There is something behind her that she cannot quite see. A shadow moving fast across the floor.

Who are you? says Maroussia again.

Plastered fur and soaking hair.

More than that, says Maroussia.

Weakness and all-cold all-hungry and wet and full of dying cub. All strength gone.

More than that!

I am shadow-muzzle, dark-tooth, wind-dark and rough. Faintness and lick and dapple, and pushing, and bloody hair. I am mewler and swallower and want, the shrivelled one, the suckler. I do not need to share.

Take it then. Because you can. Maroussia pushes again. Who are you?

Meat-scent on the air at dusk. Salt on the tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood. I am the eater of meat. I do not share. I do not need to share.

No, you don’t.

I am shit in the wet grass. Milk on the cub’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the bitch’s lust for the dog I do not need. I am the abdomen swollen full as an egg, the pink bud suckler in the dark of the earth den.

Yes.

I am the runner hot among the trees. Noiseless climber. Sour breath in the tunnel’s darkness and teeth in the badger’s neck. The crunch of carrion and the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet blood-or-is-it-milk. Shrew flesh is distasteful, and so is the flesh of bears. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I do not share!

No. But you can take.

I am the lynx in the rain with the weight of cubs in my belly. Cub-warm sleep under the snow, ice-bearded. I am life and I am called death. I am the answer to my own question, and if you look for me, I am the finding. Leave me alone now. I am not dying but I want to sleep.

Eat something first. Then I will carry you and you can sleep.

My teeth are sharp. My claws are sharp.

Don’t bite me.

I do not share.

OK.

Maroussia sits on the ground and lifts the animal into her lap. Holds a piece of pigeon to its mouth. Lynx glares at her but takes it and chews at it warily. Resentfully. Maroussia sees the needle-sharp whiteness of teeth.

The Pollandore inside her gives an alien grin. The growing human child in her belly stirs and kicks. She is alone and very far from home.

8

The place Elena Cornelius took Lom to was a wide field of broken concrete and brick heaps and hummocks of dark weed-growth. It rolled to a distant skyline of ragged scorched facades.

Such landscapes were everywhere in Mirgorod. Lom had seen other war-broken towns and cities that were all burned-out building shells and ruined streets–grids of empty windows showing gaps of sky behind–but during the siege of Mirgorod the defenders had pulled the ruins down and levelled the wreckage, creating mile after mile of impassable rubble mazy with pits and craters, foxholes and rat runs and sniper cover, all sown with landmines, tripwire grenades, vicious nooses, shrapnel-bomb snares and caltrops. Trucks and half-tracks were useless. Battle tanks beached themselves. The enemy had to clamber across every square yard on foot, clearing cellar by cellar with flame-throwers and gas. Artillery and airborne bombardment could not destroy what was already blasted flat.

Elena led him through pathless acres of brick and plaster and dust. A girl emerged from one of the larger rubble piles and passed them with a smile, neat and clean and combing her hair. Two men in business suits came up a gaping stairwell. A woman in a head cloth with a market basket. Patches of ground had been cleared for cabbage and potato. There was woodsmoke and the smell of food cooking. Soapy water. The foulness of latrines.

‘People live here?’ said Lom.

‘They must live somewhere,’ said Elena. ‘There aren’t enough apartments, not yet, and what there is is far away, and there are so few buses… For many people, this is better.’

She pulled aside a sheet of corrugated iron and went down broken concrete steps. Knocked at a door.

‘Konnie? Konnie? It’s Elena.’

The door opened. A woman in her early twenties, vivid red hair straight and thin to her shoulders, green eyes in a pale freckled face. A clever face. Bookish. Intense. Interesting. She looked like a student. When she saw Elena her eyes widened.

‘Elena! Shit!’ She grabbed her by the arm and pulled her forward. ‘Come in quickly. Maksim is here. We can help. Maksim!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘It’s Elena! Elena is here!’ Then she saw Lom and frowned. ‘Who’s this?’

‘A friend,’ said Elena. ‘It’s OK, Konnie. He’s a friend.’

‘Oh.’

‘I trust him,’ said Elena. ‘I want you to help him.’

Konnie hesitated.

‘OK,’ she said ‘Then you’d better come in.’

Lom followed the women through the entrance into a low basement space. Bare plaster walls lit by a grating in the ceiling with a pane of dirty glass laid across it. The room was divided in two by a tacked-up orange curtain. It smelled of damp brick. The part this side of the curtain had planks on trestles for a table. There were two chairs, a sagging couch, a single-ring gas stove on a bench in the corner.

‘You have to get away, Elena,’ Konnie was saying. ‘The militia have your name. They know it was you that shot Rizhin. They’re searching for you. You have to leave the city.’

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘I’m not leaving. Never. My girls—’

‘Maksim!’ Konnie called again.

There was a stack of books on the table. Lom glanced at them. Drab covers with ragged pages and blurry print. Wrinkled typescripts pinned with rusting staples. Dangerous thinking, circulated hand to hand. He scanned the titles. The Ice Axe Manifesto. Bulletin of the Present Times. Listen, We Are Breathing. Someone– Konnie presumably, it was a woman’s handwriting–had been making pencil notes in a yellow exercise book. Lom picked it up. ‘ALL GOVERNMENT,’ she had written, ‘rests on possibility of violence against own citizens. Cf Jaspersen!–Principles of Interiority Chap 4. Apeirophobia.’

‘Hey!’ said Konnie. ‘Put that down.’

‘Sorry.’

Maksim came out, buttoning his shirt, from behind the orange curtain, where presumably there was a bed. His hair was long and tangled. He was tall, taller than Lom. He looked as if he’d just woken up.

‘Elena?’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’ He saw Lom and Konnie glaring at him. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s OK, Maksim,’ said Elena. ‘He’s a friend.’

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘I’m looking for advice,’ said Lom. ‘Maybe some information. Elena said you might—’

‘What’s your name?’ said Maksim. He was trying to get the situation under control. An officer, used to command.

‘Lom.’

Konnie frowned.

‘I know that name. They’re looking for you too.’

Lom looked at her sharply. ‘Who is?’

‘The militia. They have two names for the shooting of Rizhin: Cornelius and Lom.’

‘No!’ said Elena. ‘Not him. He wasn’t there.’

‘How do you know this?’ Lom said to Konnie.

Konnie shook her head. ‘We know.’

‘I was on my own,’ Elena was saying. ‘He only came later.’

‘I let them see me in the hotel. I put my prints on the gun.’

‘You did that deliberately?’ said Elena.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘To make things happen. To get their attention. To get involved.’ Pull a thread. See where it leads. ‘They’ve done well. I thought it would take them longer.’

‘That’s insane,’ said Maksim.

‘It was quick,’ said Lom. ‘I can’t do what I do from the outside looking in.’

‘And what exactly is it you do?’ said Maksim.

Lom looked him in the eye. ‘I’m here to bring Rizhin down.’

Maksim pulled the outside door shut.

‘You’ve put us in danger coming here,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Elena. ‘I didn’t know. About the militia. The names. I’d never have come here if I’d known.’

‘You have to get out of the city quickly,’ said Maksim. ‘Both of you. We have a car. Konnie, you will drive—’

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘I’m staying. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t leave Mirgorod. It’s impossible. I must be here when Galina and Yeva come home.’

‘Elena, it’s not safe,’ said Konnie.

‘They won’t find me at the Subbotin. I am Ostrakhova there.’

‘They’ll come for you. They always find you in the end.’

‘The VKBD will hunt you down,’ said Maksim. ‘You cannot imagine. You cannot begin to imagine how they will hunt you now.’

‘You have no children, Maksim. I will not abandon my girls.’

‘Six years, Elena, it’s been six years. I hope they survived the bombing, but even if they did… They’re not coming back. You must know that.’

‘My girls are not dead. They were taken but they will find their way back.’

‘You must disappear now,’ said Maksim. ‘If they capture you, if they question you… you will endanger us all, Elena.’

Konnie put a hand on Maksim’s arm. ‘Please. Enough.’

‘You don’t need to leave the city,’ Lom said to Elena. ‘You can come with me. I know a place. They won’t find you there, and you can stay as long as you want. You’ll be safe.’

‘With you?’ said Maksim. ‘Who the fuck are you anyway? Where did you come from? We don’t know you.’

‘I trust him, Maksim,’ said Elena. ‘I want you to help him. That’s why we’re here.’ She turned to Lom. ‘Maksim is an old friend,’ she said. ‘A comrade. He was in the army, an officer, a good fighter. After the war he was one of the ones who wouldn’t go back to the old ways.’

‘You’re right to be cautious,’ Lom said to Maksim. ‘I would do the same. But I just need some advice, that’s all. We’re on the same side.’

‘Side?’ said Maksim. ‘What side is that?’

‘The side that Rizhin’s not on.’

Maksim studied him. Weighing him up. ‘Were you in the army?’

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I was with the Political Police.’

‘The police?’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Maksim,’ said Elena, ‘I’m only asking you to listen to what he’s got to say.’

‘But…’ Maksim let out a long slow breath. ‘Oh shit. OK. You’re here now. So what do you want?’

‘If you had proof of something that could bring Rizhin down,’ said Lom, ‘if you had documentation which, if it was used properly, would expose him and empty him out and turn the world against him, would you know what to do with it?’

‘What kind of proof?’ said Maksim. ‘Proof of what?’

‘Later,’ said Lom. ‘Say there was such proof, what would you do with it? How could it be used? Do you have the means? Are you prepared for this?’

Maksim thought for a moment.

‘It’s good, is it?’ he said. ‘This proof? It’s something dangerous? Something big?’

‘Yes. It would be explosive. It would make Rizhin’s position impossible. Everyone would turn against him. Everyone. He’d be finished. He would fall.’

Maksim’s eyes gleamed.

‘That would be a great thing indeed,’ he said. Then he frowned. ‘But no. We couldn’t use it. We wouldn’t have a chance. We haven’t the means. We are too few.’

‘We know journalists,’ said Konnie. ‘The newspapers—’

‘The papers wouldn’t print it,’ said Maksim. ‘Never.’

‘The Archipelago then. We have friends at the embassy.’

‘If it came from the Archipelago, who would believe it? It would be dismissed as propaganda and lies.’

‘Then wouldn’t you need…?’ Konnie began and trailed off.

‘Yes?’ said Lom.

‘Someone in the government. Someone big, with power and influence, who isn’t afraid of Rizhin. Someone who could step in and push him out.’

‘They’re all Rizhin’s creatures,’ said Maksim. ‘They’re all terrified of him, and anyway whoever ousted Rizhin would be just as bad, or worse.’

‘All of them?’ said Lom. ‘Is there no one?’

‘Well.’ Konnie paused. ‘There’s Kistler. You hear things about him. There are rumours. He has connections… Kistler could be worth a try. Maksim?’

‘Maybe,’ said Maksim. ‘Maybe Kistler. Possibly. He’s stronger than the others. He has an independent view–sometimes, apparently.’

‘Do you have a link to this Kistler?’ said Lom. ‘Are you in communication with him?’

‘No,’ said Konnie. ‘Nothing that firm, but there is talk about him. Like I said, you hear things.’

‘How would I reach him?’

‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Maksim. ‘I wouldn’t trust Kistler more than any of the others. But… we have the address of his house. We have all of them. We know where they live.’

‘Give it to me, please,’ said Lom. ‘I’ll go and see what this Kistler has to say.’

He was flying blind. Throwing stones at random, hoping to hit something. But he didn’t know another way.

‘Like I said, it’s just a rumour,’ said Konnie. ‘A feeling. You shouldn’t place any weight on what I say.’

‘It’s the best lead I’ve got,’ said Lom. ‘The only one.’

‘Do you have this proof, then?’ said Maksim as Lom and Elena were leaving. ‘Really?’

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘Not yet. But tomorrow, I hope so. I should have it on Wednesday.’

Maksim looked puzzled. ‘But today is Wednesday,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ said Lom. ‘Is it?’

The clocks tell you something, but not the time.

9

Rizhin had not yet appointed a successor at the Agriculture Ministry for the unfortunate Vladi Broch, killed by the assassin’s bullet meant for another, so Broch’s deputy, an assiduous man named Varagan, was summoned in his place to the weekly meeting of the Central Committee.

For Varagan this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. His chance to step out from the shadows and demonstrate his quality. Poor Varagan. A man of prodigious administrative capacity and earnest zeal, he had profoundly mistaken his purpose, having got it firmly (and regrettably) fixed in his head that it was his job as Under-Secretary for Food Production to identify and address the causes of growing starvation in the eastern oblasts of the New Vlast.

When Rizhin called on him to speak, he rose and hooked his wire spectacles behind his ears, cleared his throat nervously and began to introduce his report. He was a freshly washed sheep among wolves.

‘Everywhere the population shows the demographic impact of war,’ he began. ‘Six hundred men for every thousand women, and worse among those of working age. The rebuilding of our factories proceeds far too slowly. Water, electricity and sewerage everywhere are in an abysmal condition. Above all the prices for agricultural producers are ruinously low, though the prices in shops still rise—’

Rizhin raised a hand to interrupt. ‘Is it not your own ministry, Varagan, that fixes these prices?’

‘Precisely, sir. I have recommendations which I will come to. I am sketching the background first. The rural populace has fled to the cities. They eat dogs and horses and the bark of trees. In many of our towns we see black-marketeering. Gangsterism. Bribery. The rule of this committee in such places is nominal at best.’

Rizhin sat back in his chair, doodling wolf heads as he listened with half-closed eyes.

‘Steady, Varagan,’ said Kistler quietly. ‘Remember where you are.’

But Rizhin waved Varagan on. ‘Let the man speak,’ he said. ‘Let us hear what he has to say.’

The committee looked on in silence as Varagan methodically ploughed his furrow.

‘Grain is exported to the Archipelago even as our own people starve,’ he said. ‘Our errors are compounded by poor harvests. Famine is widespread and growing. Deaths are to be counted in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, and—’

‘But surely,’ said Rizhin, raising his eyelids and looking round the table, fixing them one by one with a stony gaze, ‘this is not right? Did not our old friend Broch tell us just the other week that this talk of famine was a fairy tale? Am I not right, colleagues? He said so often. And you are telling us now, Varagan, that Vladi Broch’s reports were false?’

Varagan looked suddenly sick, as if he had been punched in the stomach.

‘I…’ he began. ‘I…’

‘Who drafted Vladi’s reports for him?’ said Rizhin. ‘Who produced those false statistics?’ He made a show of riffling back through old papers in his folder. ‘Come, Varagan, I want the name.’

Poor Varagan was shaking visibly now. He was beginning to understand what he had done. The pit he had dug for himself with his own honest shovel. His face was blood-red. His mouth opened and shut soundlessly. Kistler wondered if he might collapse.

Varagan snatched at a glass of water and drank it down.

‘But people are dying,’ he said, struggling to speak. Mouth dry, voice catching. ‘I have ideas for saving them. I have drawn up a programme…’

‘And yet,’ said Rizhin, ‘week after week we have had reports to the precise contrary. Tables of figures. I have them here.’ He lifted a file from his pile. ‘Figures from the Secretariat of Food Production. Signed by your own hand, Secretary Varagan. How do you account for this? How do you explain?’

‘I…’ said Varagan again, eyes wide in panic, and snapped his mouth shut.

Rizhin threw the file down on the table.

‘There is no famine in the New Vlast,’ he said. ‘It is impossible. What there is, is pilfering and theft. Corrupt individualism! Starvation is the ploy of reactionary and deviationist elements. Our enemies hate our work so much they let their families die. The distended belly of a child is a sign of resistance. It is good news. It confirms we are on the right track that our opponents grow so desperate.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Varagan, casting desperately around the table for support, but no one caught his eye. ‘Of course. I see clearly now. I have misinterpreted the data. I have made a mistake. An honest mistake.’

Rizhin was suddenly trembling with anger.

‘Mistake?’ he said. ‘Oh no, I think not. This is a power play, Varagan. Transparent viciousness. You wriggle now, oh yes, you squirm. That is always the way of it with men like you. First you come here and throw accusations at your own dead boss, yes, and at others around this table, honest hard-working fellows, and now you row backwards. I know your type, my friend. You are ambitious! You would rise! You ache for preferment, and you cover your tracks. You are at fault and blame everyone but yourself. Well I see now that there is someone to blame, and it is you.’

‘No,’ whispered Varagan. ‘I wished only—’

Kistler leaned across to him. ‘Leave the room, man,’ he said quietly. ‘This agenda item is closed.’

Varagan nodded. Wordless and methodical, shaking like a leaf, he collected his papers. Unhooked his wire spectacles from his ears and popped them into the top pocket of his jacket. Rose, turned, pushed back his chair and went out slowly into the lonely cold.

10

After sundown in the balmy nights of summer the well dinnered families of the List, Rizhin’s plush elite, take to the paths of the Trezzini Pleasure Gardens in the Pir-Anghelsky Park. Entering the blazing gateway of crystal glass–lit from within by a thousand tiny flickering golden lights–they move among pagodas and boating lakes. Arched bridges, tulips and water lilies. Straight-haired girls walk there with mothers sleekly plump. Awkward boys with arrogant blank eyes wince as father calls to father with penetrating voice. There is music here. Sugared chestnuts and roasting pig and candyfloss. Take a pedalo among enamel-bright and floodlit waterfowl! Visit the Aquarium and the Pantomime Theatre! Ride the Dragon Swing! The Spinner! See the pierrot and the dancing bear!

The List regarded their pleasures coolly, with the assurance of natural entitlement. They were the experts. The competent ones. You would not know that a handful of years ago none of them was here. No old money in Papa Rizhin country! But the polished faces of the List reflect the coloured lamps strung among wax-leaved dark exotic trees. Their soaps and perfumes mingle with evening-heavy blossom.

Lom stayed in the darkness under the trees. Pavel had chosen this meeting place to make a point–This is the coming world. Here it is. I’m at home and familiar among these people. I belong here, and you, Lom, you ghost, you do not–but also because the konditorei was on an island in the shallow lake reached by a causeway. Light blazed from the filigreed iron glasshouse and blazed reflections off dark waters. Within, the List at white-linen-covered tables ate pastries from tiered plates and drank chocolate from gleaming china jugs. The gilt-framed mirror behind the central counter showed the backs of master patissiers and konditiers: their crisp white tunics, shaved necks, pomaded hair.

The narrow causeway was the one way in and the one way out.

Pavel Ilich Antimos was achingly visible, sitting alone at a table in the window. Lom had watched him for half an hour and he had not moved. He might as well have been under a spotlight. Here I am. See me. Come to me. He stared at the untouched chocolate in front of him, twisting a knotted napkin, his injured right shoulder hunched up against his neck. He never looked up. Never looked around.

The konditorei was crowded but the tables near Pavel were empty. Perhaps the customers had been warned away; more likely they shunned him through instinct: the unerring sense of the List for avoiding the tainted. The untouchable. The fallen. Even from across the lake Lom could detect the sour grey stink and sadness of the already dead.

Ten feet from Lom, in the dark of the lakeside trees, a corporal of the VKBD was also observing Pavel Antimos. From time to time he scanned the brightly lit approach to the causeway through binoculars. There were three other VKBD at intervals in the shadow near Lom, and no doubt there were more on the other side of the lake. Probably they had a team in the konditorei as well. Lom couldn’t see them but they would be there.

Poor Pavel. He wouldn’t have gone to the VKBD with his story –he’d have known that was suicidal–so they must have caught him with his fingers in the drawer. And they’d taken the trouble to keep him alive and use him as bait. So they wanted Lom too. That told Lom something. That was information.

He could have simply slipped away, back in under the rhododendron trees, and left the VKBD to their watching, but the corporal ten feet from him had a pistol on his hip and Lom wanted that. He needed to broaden his options.

He waited till the brass orchestra in the bandstand reached the finale of ‘We Fine Dragoons’. They made a lot of noise. The corporal didn’t hear him coming.

11

An hour later, with no secret Rizhin file from Pavel Antimos but a VKBD pistol in his pocket, Lom re-entered the Lodka by underground ways. He came up past empty cells and interrogation rooms into the tile-floored central atrium. There was no moonlight. He felt the corridors, the stairwells, the doorways, the ramifications of office and conference room as spaciousness and slow currents in the air. Opened up, arboreal and dark-adapted, Lom scented out his way. Forest percipience. He knew the difference between solid dark and airy dark. He felt the invitation of certain thresholds, the threat beyond others; he heard the echo of entranceless passageways on the far side of walls, and the restless shuffling of the basement mortuary dead.

This forest-opened world was not like seeing; it was knowing and feeling. Everything–absolutely everything–was alive, and Lom shared the life of it. Raw participation. The boundaries of himself were uncertain and permeable. Shifting frontier crossings. He felt history, watchfulness, weight and presence.

And there was something else. Another spectrum altogether. Liminal angel senses came into play, the residuum of the coin-size lozenge of angel flesh fitted into his skull in childhood and gouged out by Chazia; the residuum also of Chazia’s angel suit, its substance seared into him and joined with his by Uncle Vanya’s atomic starburst at Novaya Zima. Angel particles and angel energies had soaked through him to the blood-warm matter at the heart of bone. Synapses sparkled with alien angel speed and grace. By the faint afterglow of the Lodka’s radiating warmth, Lom saw with a crisp and prickling non-human clarity that needed no more light.

Always at some level he was these two things: the heart of the forest and the heartless gaze of the spaciousness inside atoms, the spaciousness separating stars. He saw further and better in the dark. Darkness simplified.

In the Lodka’s cool central atrium (a huge airy space lined by abandoned reception desks, a plaza of echoing linoleum, a node for wide staircases heavily balustered and swing-door exits, surfaces dust-skinned and speckled with the faeces of small animals) Moth was waiting for him. She had sensed his perfumed brightness coming, and he knew she was there: from several floors below he had felt her agitation.

‘Men are here!’ she hissed. ‘They have lamps and guns. We know the black uniforms they wear, my sisters and I. They are Streltski!’ She spat the word. Anger and hatred. ‘They have your friend. Some threaten her; others look for papers.’

Lom had brought Elena Cornelius to the Lodka before he went to look for Pavel in Pir-Anghelsky Park. She is my friend, he’d said to Moth. She’s here under my protection. He’d thought she would be safer here than at her apartment.

‘It’s bad the black Streltski are here,’ Moth was saying. ‘We remember them from long ago, but Josef Kantor who is Papa Rizhin brought them back. Streltski burn us! If they find us they burn! Two of us they roasted in the Apraksin. My sisters blame you for bringing them here and for bringing this woman here, and they blame me for this because of you. There will be a bad end of things now.’

‘How many men and where?’ said Lom.

‘Two with the woman in the reading room under the wheel and two in the locked corridor nearby where they look for Lavrentina’s private archive. I heard them say that.’ She grinned, a wide dark gaping slash of mouth. ‘But they will not find what they want it is not where they look.’

‘Lavrentina’s archive?’ said Lom. ‘I want that too. I need that very much.’

Was it possible the papers he needed were still in the Lodka? That Chazia hadn’t moved them before she left for Novaya Zima with the Pollandore? In the chaos of the withdrawal and burning of that day, it could have happened.

‘My sisters are right,’ said Moth. ‘It’s because of you the Streltski are come here where we were forgotten and safe.’

‘Moth?’ said Lom ‘Do you know where Lavrentina’s papers are?’

Her wide nocturnal eyes flashed in the darkness.

‘The black uniforms will not find them,’ she said. ‘However long they search. We took them to be safe. Lavrentina will want them when she comes back.’

‘Lavrentina isn’t coming back,’ said Lom. ‘She’s dead. It’s Rizhin who wants her archive now. He must know I’m looking for it, and that’s a danger to him. He wants to find it first. ’ Poor Pavel. And Chazia’s papers here all the time. ‘That’s why he sent the Parallel Sector here–I mean the Streltski.’

‘Oh?’ said Moth. ‘Lavrentina is dead?’ She reacted to that with the incurious indifference of the non-human who measure their lives in centuries. Then he felt her gaze in the darkness harden and grow colder. Dangerous. ‘And now you want to take Lavrentina’s papers away from us? You didn’t say.’

‘One file, Moth. Only one file. Lavrentina had papers about Josef Kantor that I need to find. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t think the papers were still here.’

‘Kantor papers? Papers that endanger Kantor? Kantor whose Streltski drive us out and burn us ’

‘Yes.’

Lom felt Moth smile. A malevolent smile. A playful smile with rows of pin-sharp blade-edge venomous teeth.

‘I could take you there,’ she said. ‘My sisters, though…’

‘Elena first,’ said Lom. ‘The men with the guns.’

12

Hunder Rond swept his torch across empty shelves.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘This is the correct room,’ said Lieutenant Vrebel. ‘There’s no mistake.’

‘So where are the fucking papers?’

‘According to the register they should still be here. Permission to remove them was issued to a Captain Iliodor but the completion slip was never matched. He did not come for them. They were never released.’

‘This Iliodor,’ said Rond. ‘Who is he?’

‘He was Commander Chazia’s aide,’ said Vrebel. ‘He went missing the first day of the withdrawal, and he was presumed killed in the first bombing raids though no body was found. The paperwork is clear. Chazia commissioned him to remove her archive to some other place but he never did. That’s what Pavel Antimos was on to when we took him.’

Rond played his torch over the emptied shelving again. ‘So where are Chazia’s files now?’

‘I cannot say, Director Rond. I do not know.’

‘Do you understand,’ said Rond, ‘how dangerous those papers could be? Who knows what poison that woman stored away for her own use and protection. If such an archive falls in the hands of antisocial elements, or rivals for the Presidium… This archive must be found, Vrebel. It has to be destroyed. Our lives depend on this now. Rizhin knows of its existence, and if we can’t bring it home—’

He broke off suddenly and spun round, his torch skipping wildly. ‘What the fuck!’

From somewhere down the corridor behind them came the sound of gunshots. A man screaming and screaming in terror. Pain. Screams without hope.

Lieutenant Vrebel pulled out his gun and ran.

‘Vrebel! Wait!’ called Rond.

Too late. Vrebel was disappearing down the corridor towards the reading room.

‘Idiot,’ said Rond quietly. Hunder Rond was no kind of coward but he understood caution. Circumspection. Explore and comprehend your position, test your enemy, discover your advantage, then exploit it with surprise and overwhelming deadly force. Survival is the first criterion of victory, and in the end the only one. He switched off his torch, drew his pistol and began to follow Vrebel’s jerky flashing beam.

Lom watched the attack of the vyrdalaks on the Parallel Sector men from an upper gallery of the Lodka reading room.

Moth had led him there. Together they had crept out onto a balcony from where, by the starlight spilling through the broken panes of the dome, he could look down on the rows of reader’s desks that radiated out from the insectile bulk of the motionless great wheel. He’d seen Elena Cornelius sitting at one of the desks, upright and fierce. Men in black uniforms were sitting on desks either side of her, swinging their legs. Relaxed. Waiting for the others to return.

‘Let me take them,’ he had whispered to Moth. ‘I’ll do it quietly. No fuss.’

‘Too late,’ she’d hissed. ‘See! My sisters are vengeful. Blood for the burnings at the Apraksin!’

Two dark uncertain shapes were swarming head-first at silent impossible speed down the gantry of the great wheel. White mouths in the moonlight. Lom felt the fluttering shadow-memory of vestigial papery wings brush against his face. Liminal whisperings. He remembered Count Palffy’s collection in the raion. The glass cases mounted on the wall, the pinned-out specimens, some drab, some gaudy. My specialism is winter moths. Ice moths. Strategies for surviving the deep winter cold.

The Parallel Sector men had also felt movement above them and looked up, swinging their torch beams. They saw what was coming.

‘Elena!’ Lom had yelled. ‘Run! They don’t want you. Get clear! Run!’

He’d started to run himself then, racing for the iron spiral stairway down to the reading room. But before he reached the head of the stairs there were shots and then the screaming began.

When the vyrdalak sisters attacked her guards, Elena Cornelius had backed away, retreating to the edge of the room. Lom made his way across to her between the desks.

‘Keep back out of the way,’ he said. ‘This isn’t for us.’

There was a flash of light in the frosted pane of the doorway behind her. Lom sensed someone was coming fast. Another one of the Streltski. He felt the man’s fear. He was coming for a fight.

Lom pulled from his pocket the VKBD pistol he’d acquired in Pir-Anghelsky Park. There was no time to think. Just react. The door crashed open and Lom fired.

The shot probably hit the man in the chest, but Lom never knew for certain because Moth swept past him noiselessly, knocking him aside, and took the man’s head off with a slash of a pale-bladed hand. The detached head thudded against the wall as the body collapsed. Moth leaped over it and flew on into the darkened corridor beyond.

In the reading room the vyrdalak sisters were making thin papery screams of triumph and delight.

Hunder Rond got only a vague impression of what had destroyed Vrebel before the lieutenant’s head flew off and his torch fell to the floor, but it was enough. He knew what it was. He knew it was coming for him next.

He emptied his entire magazine in the direction of the approaching vyrdalak. Seven blinding muzzle flashes in the dark. Seven deafening explosions. Somewhere among the noise he heard a high-pitched shriek and a stumble. Then he turned and ran back into the corridors of the private archives.

13

Moth, struck by seven bullets from the pistol of Hunder Rond, collapsed in a heap on the corridor floor. Lom crouched over her. Moved her hair aside to clear her face.

She hissed and pushed his hand away.

‘Hole in my chest,’ she said. ‘Harmless. Piece gone from my leg. I’ll be a limper for a while.’

‘Is there pain?’ Elena was there. ‘Let me see. You must be bleeding. I can try to stop it.’

Moth began to haul herself upright. Lom put a hand under her arm to help her. There was almost no weight at all.

‘No bleeding,’ she said, leaning her back against the wall. ‘No blood to bleed. As for pain, there is pain sometimes. Existence hurts. This will pass.’

‘Can I leave her with you?’ Lom said to Elena. ‘I need to go after the one that escaped.’

‘Leave the Streltski for my sisters,’ said Moth. ‘When they have finished with the others they will hunt him. Pigeon and Paper will bring him down. You come with me and look at Lavrentina’s papers.’

It was ten minutes before Moth was ready to move. The vyrdalak sisters had gone into the shadows, leaving the torn and ruined bodies of the dead Parallel Sector men where they lay. Lom collected their torches and switched them off to save the batteries, all but one for Elena’s benefit.

‘This way,’ said Moth when she was ready, and set off limping towards the lobby. She was halting and slow. ‘We will have to go by corridors and stairs.’

For twenty minutes at least they climbed, slowly and circuitously. Lom recognised the backwater corridor where his brief office had been, buried among cleaning cupboards and boiler rooms, when he was Krogh’s man. His typescript card was still tucked into the slot on the door, yellowing and faded now. INVESTIGATOR V Y LOM. PODCHORNOK OBLAST. PROVINCIAL LIAISON REVIEW SECRETARIAT. He stuck his head inside. The same desk and coat rack were still there but the placard on the wall had gone.

Someone had remembered the old Vlast well enough to take that away. Lom wondered if it had been Pavel.

In the mazy unlit corridors behind the reading room there was no panic for Hunder Rond, though he knew he was vyrdalak-hunted. There was fear–there was horror in the dark–but he knew that panic would kill him. The vyrdalaks would come fast; they would not lose him in the passageways; they would not give up. They would come and come, quick and silent and relentless in the darkness. Out of shadows and ceilings and lift shafts they would come. He had seen the remains of vyrdalak kill. He had heard the screams.

He had also seen vyrdalaks burn. He knew how that sounded. How it smelled. How it felt.

Hunder Rond moved on at a slow even pace and put aside terror for later. Stored it up for a better time and place. This was his forte, his talent, advantage and pleasure: clinical self-restraint–ice and iron–primitive emotions under unbreakable control to be retrieved for private release when he chose. The trembling hot sweat, delirium, anger and screaming could be brought to the surface then, and satisfied in his way. Not now. Later. There was energy and pleasure to be had from it then. A heightening.

He smiled grimly in the dark as he cleared and focused his mind and considered his situation from every angle with dispassionate accuracy. He had one spare magazine for his pistol, which was now empty. That was not sufficient, but then no number would have been. Bullets rarely killed a vyrdalak, though a lucky shot might give it pause. Seven cartridges were better than none. He ejected the empty magazine, inserted the spare and loaded the first round into the breech.

And he had a map.

That was foresight. That was efficiency. Cool administrative imagination.

There was no point blundering around in the dark and getting lost. He switched on his torch and unfolded the floor plan of the Lodka.

Century by century the interior of the Lodka had evolved to meet the needs of the day. Corridors and stairways were closed off and new ones opened. Cables and heating were installed. Angel-fall observatories, and radio antennae in attics. Rooms knocked together and repartitioned and requisitioned for new purposes. Subterranean railway access opened and abandoned. A vacuum-pipe internal postal system. Every few years the superintendent of works sent expeditions into the building to update the master survey, but the results were obsolete before the work was complete, and the edges and margins, the heights and depths, remained ragged and obscure. For the core areas and the zones in regular use, however, the map was reliable enough. The Gaukh reading room and the layout of the main archives hadn’t changed much. They were near the public door that used to open onto the Square of the Piteous Angel, now Victory Square.

Rond studied the map and chose his way out. It wasn’t far. Ten minutes in the passageways and across two wide hallways should do it. He refolded the map and jogged forward at a steady sustainable pace, vyrdalak-horror and primal prey-animal fear tucked away in a closed interior filing system of his own.

Moth led Lom and Elena higher, up narrower stairwells. There was more light up here: more windows, and the yellow moons were shining, nearly full, low and sinking towards the western skyline. Lom switched off the dimming torch. There was no need for it now. They were passing along some kind of high covered gangway. Narrow windows to their right looked across the Lodka’s tumbled inner roofscape–slopes of lead and slate, dormers and gables and oriels, downpipes and guttering, naked abandoned flagpoles–and through to their left Mirgorod spread out towards the sea. Dawn was breaking pink and green. Traffic was moving slowly along the eight-lane Rizhin Highway. The sun-flushed thousand-windowed sky-rise towers–the Rudnev-Possochin University, the Pavilion of the New Vlast, the Monument to National Work–heaved up from the plain. Warm-glow termite nests.

‘Here,’ said Moth at last. She stopped and pushed open a door. The sudden wave of cloying enclosed air that escaped from the room made Lom take a step back. Elena Cornelius put her hand across her mouth.

‘Oh god,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Oh god, what have they been doing?’

Hunder Rond was within sight of the threshold, the door he’d left open, when the two vyrdalaks rose at him from the shadows of a downward stair.

The light of early morning spilled through the doorway, and the sound of the waking city. Day already? Rond had thought. It was barely an hour since he’d come this way the evening before with Lieutenant Vrebel and the others now dead.

The vyrdalaks closed on him with impossible speed. He heard a gasp of pleasure and smelled the age and mustiness of rags. The sickly sweetness of unhuman breath.

Rond’s panic box broke wide open then. He felt the shriek from his own throat, the hurt of it; it wasn’t his voice but it was him. He turned into the attack and pulled the trigger of his gun, and as he spun he slipped on dusty polished marble and fell. The charge of the day-blinded vyrdalaks missed him. He felt a slicing tear across his upraised forearm and that was all. The crash of his shot echoed impossibly loud in the airy space as the bundle of screeching vyrdalaks skittered across the floor. Rond scrabbled to his knees and jabbed at the trigger again and again until the mechanism clicked empty, and then he hurled the gun at them and threw himself headlong scrambling towards the door into air and sunshine, and he was outside and he was safe and free.

Rond’s car was where he’d left it the previous evening (scarcely an hour ago). He was trembling. Focus. Focus. His left arm was numb, the jacket sleeve ripped open and wet with blood, his forearm opened above the wrist, an oozing superficial tear. Drive one-handed then. How hard is that? He needed to clean himself up. Get the wound dressed quickly. Vyrdalak strikes fester.

But then, when he’d done that, he would come back and he would burn them. Burn the vyrdalaks. Burn the foulness. Burn their nests. Burn whatever archives were still inside that should have been burned years ago. Burn the whole fucking Lodka to the ground.

14

Moth led Lom and Elena into the broad interior of some kind of tower. For five or six floors it rose above them, but wide jagged holes were broken through all the floorboards and plaster ceilings so they could see all the way to the roof. Dust-ridden daylight splashed in through pointed-arch windows. The tower was some kind of library. It was also a beautiful attic nest.

The vyrdalak sisters lived among chambers of sweetness. The whole of the inside of the tower was hung with great webs and pockets and caverns of chewed paper and fruit. Rotting-fruit-and-paper extrusions. Files and books and sea charts, centuries of memoranda and reports–diplomatic letters, records of surveillance, interrogation and betrayal–they ate them all. Masticated and regurgitated them to make hundreds of comfortable translucent compartments the colour of ivory and bone. The floor was uneven papier mâché, matted and lumpy with stalagmites of eaten newsprint and maps and confessions under torture, and all crusted with a yellow-brown craquelure of age.

The whole construction had a perfect, proportioned elegance. It was like standing inside dried egg casings. The sea-worn honeycombed interiors of bone. Wasps’ nests like lanterns under eaves. It was the work of centuries and it was beautiful.

‘We read and read,’ said Moth with quiet pride, ‘and as we read we chew.’

Half-eaten fruits–long ago dried to leathery sweetness–and rotting foraged stores were tucked away in cavities and corners.

Hunder Rond returned to the Lodka with men in trucks. They threw a safety cordon around the building and Rond sent in six two-man burning teams, one for each of the half-dozen main public entrances. Pressurised fuel tanks strapped to their backs, they penetrated as far as they dared, leaving themselves escape runs, and began to spray arcs of fire.

The Lodka burned. Oh yes, it burned. The desks, the chairs, the conference tables, the books and files and carpets, the pictures on the walls, the beams, the floor boards, the staircases, all tinder-dry and hungry for combustion.

At the first licks of flame up the walls, the firestarters turned and ran. They took up fallback positions outside the doors, flame-throwers ready for anything that tried to escape.

Moth led Lom and Elena into side rooms off the main tower. There were libraries within libraries, collections and cabinets of curiosities, some small as cupboards with cramped connecting ways, some large as salons. Dormers and airy roof constructions. Moth swept ahead, motley fabric train swishing bare floorboards and fading patterned rugs. Lom and Elena followed more slowly, lingering by items shelved, ranged and museumed with their own mysterious logic.

The sisters had picked up and hauled back home things they had found in tunnels and the city and the Lodka itself: detached fragments of the old Vlast and its predecessors. Flotsam from the wreckage of forgotten worlds. They had gathered furniture and papers, pieces of porcelain and pottery, broken and not, astronomical instruments, components electrical and mechanical. There was a whole wing for works rescued from Vlast storerooms of confiscated art.

Lom paused over aquatints and engravings and photographs of vanished cities. He glanced through the correspondence of margraves, landgraves, electors and county palatines. Accounts of coats of arms, lineages and uniforms. Canvas bags still bearing the brittle broken seals of the corps diplomatique. Orders of battle for campaigns of which he’d never heard. The Yannis River Advance. Battles on frozen lakes. Cavalry charges against artillery. The repulsion of the northern dukes. A Model Village Prospectus on the New Rational Principle. Schools Not Guns Will Feed Our People. Displayed under glass were ancient undated maps of the continent. Small countries Lom had never heard of remained like ghosts, a stained patchwork of counties and princedoms. All maps ended in the east with forest.

The sisters had hung their collection with tiny pieces of other people’s privacy: combs and portrait lockets; the headcloths and bast shoes and tin cups of the nameless. The more Lom lingered there, the more aware he became of beginnings that had had no continuation, lines cut off and possibilities unrealised. Ways and places these beginnings might have gone but never did. It was a museum that told no story except absence.

A circular window gave a view across the sky-rise city: Rizhin Highway, Rizhin Tower. It was perpetual zero hour–null o’clock–in the real world outside. All the things that might have happened (some of them good, some bad, some beautiful) did not happen. They did not happen because this happened instead.

Moth came bustling worrisome back for him.

‘This way,’ she said. ‘This way. Hurry.’

The sisters had lovingly recreated Lavrentina Chazia’s private archive in every detail. The green-painted walls. The empty desk. Floor tiles lifted from downstairs and relaid. Rows of steel-framed racks holding files and boxes of papers. Every shelf brought up, placed and labelled as it had been; every file and box exactly where it should be according to the former commander of the secret police’s own scheme.

‘We took them away and hid them,’ said Moth. ‘We kept them safe for when Lavrentina came back.’

Lom found what he wanted, exactly where he had found it once before. 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 jacket.

At that moment the echo of shrill distant screeching reached them. It found them even here, even in this quiet archive of an archive.

‘What’s that?’ said Elena.

Moth stiffened and screamed. Her sisters crashed in through upper windows, flew down and scuttled, rattling, in circles around them.

‘Fire! Fire! They are burning us! Fire!’

Throughout the Lodka the fires were roaring now, blinding vortices of flame and heat. Flames crawled along the walls and floors of corridors, meticulous and thorough, spilling into every room. Floor by floor, shaft by shaft and stair by stair, ignition spread. Rooms unopened for centuries popped into sudden combustion. Thick worms and blankets of smoke flowed across ceilings. Whirlwinds of burning paper. Billowing flakes of fire. Caves of red heat. Explosions and backdrafts sucked whole floors in. Fire smouldered against locked doorways and burst through, searing irruptions, sucking whole annexes into the hot mouth.

Paint blistered. Pigments boiled off canvases and the canvases burned with their frames. Countless linoleum acres bubbled and stank to sticky residual ash. Inkwells boiled dry in burning lecterns. Typewriters buckled and twisted, their ribbons burned, the enamel licked away. The immolation of code books and cipher machines. A fire-clean forgetting of four hundred years of lost secrets.

A column of fire surrounded the leaning skeleton of the Gaukh Engine, heat and smoke pouring with the hurtling updraft through the broken dome and into the outside air.

In the basement mortuary the restless corpses thrashed and subsided. Fire tongues licked the cell-floor bloodstains clean.

Rats and bats and cats and mice and birds escaped or died. Shelves of forgotten files burned unread. Fire touched the hem of the vyrdalak sisters’ beautiful galleried nest and it exploded. Libraries within libraries, their long careful centuries’ archives and collections, the last secret memories of absence and what did not happen, burned.

Moth and her sisters took Lom and Elena across rooftop gangways and down through the most central heart-stone stairwells and unopened passageways of the Lodka where the fire had not yet reached.

The burning was a distant roar, a smell of searing, heat on the face and the thickening of smoke clogging the chest. The vyrdalaks skittered and jumped and flew short distances on vestigial fabric wings. At lift shafts they carried them down: Moth scooping up Lom in her weightless bone-strong arms, one of her siblings with Elena. They jumped into space and leaped from stanchion to bolt, barely touching, barely slowing their plunge. Dull orange glowed far below and a cushion of heat rose from it.

Somebody screamed. Lom wondered if it might have been him, but he doubted it. He kept the lavender folder grasped tight to his chest: the truth he saved from the burning building.

Down and down they went into the closing heat, racing against it.

The outer walls of the Lodka were a crumbling sooty crust enclosing cubic miles of roaring roasting heat. Quiet crowds gathered at the cordon to watch the ancient building burn.

The Lodka’s thousand exterior windows glowed baleful red. Panes burst and shattered and rained glass on the margin of Victory Square. Fragments splashed into the River Mir. Smoke cliffs, orange-bellied and flecked with whirling spark constellations, billowed above the collapsing roofscape and darkened the eggshell sky. Smuts and ash scraps drifted and fell far across Mirgorod. The whole city smelled of burning.

The Lodka–for four hundred years the dark cruel heart and flagship memory ark of the Vlast, the crouching, looming survivor of bombs and siege–the Lodka was ceasing to be, and that was a good thing happening.