Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 25

Everything was different. Everything was changed.

Of their mother Elena Cornelius there was of course no sign at all. They waited a while, pointlessly. It was futile. They were simply causing themselves pain.

Eligiya Kamilova wondered what to do. It was only now she was here that she realised she had no plan for what came next, no plan at all.

'We'll come back again tomorrow,' said Galina to Yeva. 'We'll come every day.'

8.

The next morning, early, Lom went up into the mountains with Maksim, Konnie and Elena. Konnie had rented a boxy grey Narodni with a dented near-side wheel arch. The interior smelled strongly of tobacco smoke. There was a heaped ashtray in the driver's door. The streets climbed steeply out of Anaklion into scrub and scree and dark dense trees. No sun yet reached the lower slopes.

They drove in silence. Lom, squeezed onto the scuffed leather bench-seat in the back next to Elena, watched out of the window. The Narodni struggled on the steep inclines and Konnie swore, fis.h.i.+ng for the second gear that wasn't there. The back of Maksim's head sank lower and lower between his shoulders.

After forty-five minutes Konnie pulled off the road onto a rough stony track. Out of sight among boulders and black cypress she killed the engine.

'This is it,' she said. 'You walk from here.'

Maksim, Lom and Elena left her with the car and started up a steep narrow hunting trail. Elena carried a rifle slung across her back. When they crested a ridge and clear stony ground fell away to their right, she broke away on her own. Two minutes later Lom couldn't see her at all.

It took him and Maksim another hour to work their way around to the thick woodland above and behind the gatehouse of Dacha Number Nine. Maksim picked his route carefully, stopping to look at his watch. He seemed to know what he was doing. Once he had them crawl on their bellies in under thick green spiky vegetation.

'Patrol,' he hissed.

The sun was higher now, kindling scent from crushed leaves and crumbling earth. Slow pulses of purple and blue rippled across the cloudless sky. A liminal solar breathing.

Lom's every move and step was a startling noise in the thin motionless air.

They crouched in the shadow of a pine trunk. The roof of the gatehouse was fifty feet below them, and beyond it the closed gate itself. Maksim checked his watch again and put his face close to Lom's ear.

'Now we wait,' he whispered. 'I will tell you when.'

9.

Lukasz Kistler was lying on a low cot bed in his cell. Every part of him was in pain. He followed the pa.s.sing of days and nights by the rectangle of sky in the high window, but he didn't count them. Not any more. He divided time between when he was alone and safe and when he was not, that was all.

When the key turned in the lock and the door opened he wanted to open his mouth and scream but he did not. He knotted his fingers tight in his grey blanket and pulled the fabric taut: a little wall of wool, a s.h.i.+eld across his chest. A protection that protected nothing at all.

Vasilisk the bodyguard stepped inside and padded across to the bed. Looked down on Kistler impa.s.sively with sleepy half-closed eyes.

'Please,' said Kistler. His mouth was dry. 'Not any more. There is no more. It's finished now.'

'You've got friends outside the dacha,' said Vasilisk. 'They're coming to take you away.'

Kistler tried to focus on what he was hearing. He couldn't get past the fact it was the first time he had heard Vasilisk speak. His voice was pitched oddly high.

'They're going to try to blow up the gate,' he said. 'Stand up. You have to come with me.'

'I refuse,' said Kistler. He pressed himself deeper into the thin mattress. The springs dug into his back.

'You refuse?' Vasilisk looked at him with faint surprise, like there was something unexpected on his plate at dinner.

'I refuse,' said Kistler again. 'Absolutely I refuse. No more. I will not come again. Not any more. I'm finis.h.i.+ng it. Now.'

Vasilisk bent in and hooked a hand under Kistler's shoulder, iron fingers digging deep into his armpit, hauling him up. Kistler resisted. Pulled away and tried to fall back onto the mattress.

Vasilisk leaned forward and jabbed him in the solar plexus.

Kistler screamed and retched and tried to bring his knees up, curling himself into a protective ball, but the last of his strength had gone. Rizhin's bodyguard yanked him to his feet and held him upright, though his legs failed him and he could not stand.

Kistler heard a strange sound and realised it was himself sobbing.

'Shut up,' said Vasilisk and jabbed him again.

On the slope above the guardhouse Maksim nudged Lom in the ribs and gestured with his chin.

Go! Go!

Vasilisk the bodyguard half-carried, half-dragged the unresisting semi-conscious Kistler through the rose garden and past the swimming pool. There was no one there. From half past ten to half past twelve there was tennis.

Iced tea at half past eleven.

Rizhin's car was parked in the courtyard and Vasilisk had the keys in his pocket. He checked the time on his watch: 10.51.

He opened the rear door and bundled Kistler inside. Pushed him down into the footwell. Kistler groaned and retched again, spilling sour vomit down the front of his s.h.i.+rt.

Vasilisk took his place in the driver's seat and settled down to wait.

Lom eased open the door of the gatehouse. Maksim entered first, pistol in his hand. The guards swung round in surprise: one reached for his holster, the other made a grab for the telephone receiver.

Maksim fired twice. Neat and precise.

Lom ripped the phone cable from the wall.

At 10.55 Rizhin himself came round the corner of the veranda into the courtyard. Vasilisk followed him in the rear-view mirror. Saw him glance across at the car and see his bodyguard in the driver's seat. Puzzled, Rizhin started to come over.

Vasilisk turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred into life. He slipped the car into gear and headed for the tunnel entrance. A cool dark mouth in the rock. In his mirror he saw Rizhin standing in the middle of the courtyard watching him go.

Vasilisk increased the weight of his foot on the accelerator pedal.

The car roared forward. The barrier was down but the car weighed nearly three tons.

As the barrier splintered it occurred to Vasilisk in an abstract way that he was probably beginning the final two minutes of his life.

Lom walked up to the ma.s.sive gate across the tunnel and pressed the flat of his hand against it, feeling the dry solid wood. Its grain and fine flaws. The bars of iron within it. The blackened studs. The wide sunlit air. The scent of cypress and resinous southern pine. Feeling and remembering.

In the dark time, after Maroussia went, Vissarion Lom moved fast across ice fields and raced through the snow-dark birch trees. Part man, part angel, part something else, body and brain saturated with starlight and burn, all the dark months of winter he ran the ridges of high mountains.

He pushed his fists deep into solid rock just to feel it hurt.

Ten days and more he had stood without moving on the thick frozen surface of a benighted lake. Cold dark fishes slid through darkness far below him and bitter black wind scoured his face with particles of ice.

Lom-in-burning-angel counted the needles on pine trees and ignited them one by one with an idle thought. Little bright-flaring match flames.

He had forgotten who he was and he didn't care.

But slowly he had been moving south, and slowly the star-fire faded from the angel skin casing Lavrentina Chazia had made. In the early sunlight of that first spring five years ago Vissarion Lom shed his angel carca.s.s and pushed it off a rock into the river.

He squirrelled the recollection of that dark inhuman time deep in the secret fastnesses of the heart where bitterness festers, and guilt. Kept it there, locked under many locks, along with the memory of all the winter slaughtering Lom-in-burning-angel did, or could have done and thought he might have. The iron smell of blood on ice.

After that long inhuman winter in the north without the sun, Vissarion Lom wanted to be nothing more than simply human again, but secretly he knew he never could be quite that. Possibly he never entirely had been: the earliest roots of himself were buried in oblivion and inexhaustible forest. As everyone's are.

'Turn your back and cover your face,' Lom said to Maksim. 'Splinters.'

Lom focused. Tried to drive all other thoughts and memories from his mind. Tried to calm the rising anxiousness and the beating of his heart.

There was only him and the gate.

He probed. Pushed. Nothing happened.

Changing direction, he gathered all the urgency, the growing white panic inside him, squeezed it all into a tight ball and forced it out from him. Hurled it into the timbers, deep into the corpse limbs of forest trees.

Burst open by the pressure of tiny air pocketsthe desiccated fibrous capillaries suddenly and violently expandingthe heavy wooden planks of the gate exploded loudly from within, split open and shattered.

The rock tunnel behind the broken gate was dark and silent. It smelled like the mouth of a well.

'What the f.u.c.k?' said Maksim. 'What the f.u.c.k did you do?'

'Later,' said Lom.

Where the h.e.l.l was Kistler's car?

They stood side by side for thirty long slow seconds.

'Where is he?' said Lom. 'He's not coming.'

Engine roar echoed, and the sound of gunfire.

The long black limousine was racing towards them. Lom glimpsed a face behind the thick windscreen as he scrambled aside. A tanned impa.s.sive handsome face. Cropped yellow hair.

The limousine slowed to a crawl. Maksim pulled open the front pa.s.senger seat.

'Get in the back!' he yelled at Lom.

Lom slid in alongside the collapsed form of Kistler, who was crouched on the floor. Dirty s.h.i.+rt and soiled trousers. Unshaven face grey. He looked up at Lom with gla.s.sy eyes. No recognition. There was a smell of urine and vomit in the car.

The driver didn't look round but gunned the engine and raced off down the mountain.

The heat of the sun, now high in the sky, beat against the side of Elena Cornelius' face. She could feel her skin burning. Insects buzzed and clattered in the gra.s.s, crawled across the back of her neck, sunk tiny probes into her arms and her ankles. She fought back the urge to scratch. All movement was dangerous.

She was still. She was nothing but eyes watching. She was part of the rock.

From five hundred yards she saw the gate shatter and the limousine emerge, slow to pick up Maksim and Lom, and hurtle away down the hill, jumping culverts, taking the hairpin too fast, sc.r.a.ping its side along the crash barrier.

The racing of the engine and the squeal of tortured metal echoed off cliffs and scree.

Elena Cornelius waited. Less than a minute later two vehicles came charging out of the tunnel mouth: a black Parallel Sector saloon and an open VKBD jeep with three men cradling sub-machine guns on their knees.

Elena moved the rifle slowly, sliding the graticule smoothly along the road, catching up with the windscreen of the leading pursuit car. The driver's head was a shadow. She moved the scope with the saloon for a moment, matching speed for speed, then s.h.i.+fted her aim three car lengths ahead and lifted it half an inch.

Squeezed the trigger gently.

Half a second after she fired, the gla.s.s in the windscreen shattered. From where she was it seemed to collapse and dissolve. The Parallel Sector saloon swung wildly to the left, crashed against the rock face and spun twice.

The jeep, following close behind, had nowhere to go and no time to stop. It crunched sickeningly into the side of the saloon. The men in the back of the jeep were thrown out. They landed badly.

Elena s.h.i.+fted the scope back to the driver. He was folded into the jeep's steering wheel, his head pushed through broken gla.s.s in a mess of blood.

She watched a man stagger from the back of the saloon. Limping. He pulled at the driver's door. It wouldn't open. None of the men from the jeep was moving at all. The two crashed vehicles together completely blocked the road.

She shouldered her gun and slid backwards away from the ridge, stood up and began to move, half running, half sliding down through the trees. This route would cut off a mile of road. In seven minutes she would be back at the track where Konnie would be waiting with the boxy grey Narodni.

10.

Archangel hurls himself across the continent, Rizhin world. He is a fisted pocket of certainty cras.h.i.+ng from mind to mindland and pause and look and leap againleaving a crumb trail of sickness and fall. Hunting the only angel trace still left in Rizhin's New Vlast.