Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 26

Brother, I am racing to you! Brother, call again and I will come!

He has scarcely the strength for it. Mile by mile the connecting cord back to his rock-lump-grinding-carca.s.s in the forest lengthens and thins. The thread grows weak and spider-fine.

In the deep concrete cistern under the Mirgorod Sea Gate, Safran-in-mudjhik pummels the imprisoning wall with shapeless fists. His mind is dark with anger at his fall.

Lom pushed him in there.

He cannot get out.

Six years.

The endless surging weight of water, the whole force of the River Mir, pins him on his back. The noise of it fills his head and deafens him. The lost mind of Safran huddles in a silent corner, curled and foetal, wanting only the sound and the shouting and the hopelessness to cease.

Hairline fractures are opening in the concrete.

Two thousand days ago an aircraft of the Archipelago returning from a raid emptied its bomb bay, dumping its unspent load across the White Marshes. Two bombs fell against the dam. No visible damage done, but in the secret places, in the dark interior of immense solid walls, weakened bonds began to shear and slip.

Predator-Archangel plummets from height, daggering into the mind of Safran-in-mudjhik and taking possession with a shriek of triumph. Instantly he expands to fill the s.p.a.ce. Scoops the remnants of the weaker mudjhik mind from their runnels and crannies with a spoon and eats them all.

Sorry, brother.

Archangel glows with satisfaction and joy. He has a worthy body now in Rizhin world. He flexes. He samples. He trials his goods.

In a dark corner he finds Safran cowering and hauls him out wriggling and retching by the ear.

What use are you? he wonders briefly, rummaging with clumsy fingers through the maddened Safran mind before crus.h.i.+ng it for ever out of existence.

Deep in the endless forest the Seer Witch of Bones is the first to discern the gap in the wall. She shrieks in dismay, 'Close it! Close it! The angel is through!'

Maroussia Shaumian walking under the trees, preoccupied with the child in her belly and Vissarion Lom, reluctantly turns her attention to the call. She traces the fine connecting threadway. It is weak and she is strong, invested with the Pollandore. It costs her no more than a tussle with the weakened and attenuated angel mind. She pinches her fingers and the cord is cut.

The forest is secure.

But the archangel fragment in the mudjhik, isolated from the depleted mother hill, clings on to life and purpose. In the mudjhik carca.s.s he is strength and fire and brilliance like nothing has been in a donkey workhorse mudjhik ever before.

Slowly Archangel-mudjhik rises to his feet against the power of the crus.h.i.+ng river and puts his shoulder to the wall. Shoves and batters and kicks against the weakening concrete.

Brute force does it. Boulders come tumbling down, the river is unleashed and Archangel-mudjhik is swept out, twisting and floundering in a torrent of broken concrete and white water, out into the deeper colder darkness of the bay.

Chapter Ten.

They all believed their happiness had come, That every s.h.i.+p had reached harbour, And the exhausted exiles and wanderers Had come home to bright s.h.i.+ning lives.

Aleksander Blok (18801921)

1.

They changed cars at a small fis.h.i.+ng port ten miles east along the coast from Anaklion, ditching the Narodni for a s.p.a.cious pre-war Tsvetayev with cloth-covered seats, more tractor than automobile, and drove back to Mirgorod. By the direct north-east route it was only nine hundred miles, but it took them five days of doubling back and taking less-used circuitous routes. They a.s.sumed they were being searched for. Trains and flights were out of the question, even if they'd had the money for that.

There were five of them in the car: Lom and Elena, Maksim and Konnie and Kistler. They left Vasilisk at the fis.h.i.+ng port, where Maksim had arranged a place for him on a boat. He would work his pa.s.sage south and disappear. As they were leaving, Vasilisk shook hands with Maksim and snapped a military salute.

'He was in my unit,' was all Maksim would say afterwards. 'In the war.'

They drove long hours on ill-made roads, sharing the driving and sleeping in the car, picking up food where they could and stopping as little as possible. North of the Karima mountains they skirted the hungerland. What they saw was bad and the rumours were worse. Ruined and abandoned farmland, the people of the towns gaunt, grey-faced, weak, watching them pa.s.s through with sullen hopeless eyes. Villages where there was n.o.body at all, only crows and pigeons and packs of dogs that circled, heads down, ribcages, dirty l.u.s.treless coats.

'I didn't know,' said Konnie. 'None of us knew about this.'

They ran into a roadblock in a birch wood: a tree across the road and five men in rags with staves and a shotgun rising from a ditch. An attempt to steal the car: fuel and food and a way out. Maksim had to shoot two of them. The rear window of the Tsvetayev was broken.

Maksim had been wary of Lom since the incident of the gate. Lom felt himself watched. By Konnie too. Maksim tried to ask him about it once, but Lom didn't answer. Where to begin and what to say? The atmosphere was strained.

Elena Cornelius just wanted to get back to the city. She'd been away too long, She was terrified that her girls had come home and she had missed them.

Kistler recovered slowly. They cleaned him up and fed him, found him fresh clothes and let him sleep most of the day. He had lost weight in Rizhin's interrogation cell. His eyes were dark, blank and anxious, and for long hours he sat in the back of the car next to Elena, pressed up against the door, leaning forward, hands on his knees, staring at nothing. Every few minutes he would open his mouth to speak but say nothing. On the second day tears came, silent tears soaking his face. He didn't wipe them away.

Lom feared he was permanently gone, that they'd lost him for ever in Rizhin's interrogation cell, but slowly with the pa.s.sing of the days some of Kistler's fire and energy returned, though not like before. When Lom had first seen Kistler he was a master of the world, filled to the brim with confident a.s.surance. The smooth sheen of real power. It had been there in his voice, in his gaze, in the way he moved. Now he was coming back, but darker, more determined, altogether more dangerous. His hurt and his fall, the shock of his humiliation and psychic destruction at the hands of Rizhin and Hunder Rond were raw and near the surface and he was vengeful. His face was thinner and he glared at the world through dark-hooded eyes.

'I should thank you,' Kistler said on the third day. 'All of you. I know what I owe, and I will not forget.'

'We came because we need you,' said Lom. 'I went to Vitigorsk as you suggested. I've got information you can use. If you want it. If you feel you still can.' Lom paused. 'Or my friends can help you get far away, if that's what you want. To the Archipelago, even. That is possible. It can be done.'

'Yes,' said Konnie from the front seat. 'We can arrange that. We've done it before, for others. It's what we do.'

Kistler said nothing. He looked for a long time out of the window: there was dry gra.s.s out there, dull grey lakes and low wooded hills in the distance.

'We would understand,' said Lom, 'if you decided to go. No shame in that.'

Kistler didn't look round.

'Liars,' he said. 'You people didn't risk yourselves just to let some sick old f.u.c.ker go free. Certainly not a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and a criminal like me.'

Kistler's eyes followed a young girl leading a horse across a hill, until they left her far behind. Lom thought he wasn't going to say any more. Long minutes pa.s.sed before Kistler spoke again.

'I'm going to bring the f.u.c.ker Rizhin to his knees,' he said. 'And I will do whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to make that happen. I want to see him broken. I want to see him hurt. I want to see him crawling on the floor in his own s.h.i.+t and p.i.s.s and puke and blood. I would die to make that happen and be glad. I would suffer and howl till the end of f.u.c.king time, as long as it was him and me there together. So tell me. What have you got?'

'Pull over,' said Lom to Maksim, who was driving. 'I'll get my bag from the back.'

As they drove on, Lom told Kistler about the vast construction plants at Vitigorsk. The plans for a fleet of atomic-powered vessels to go to the planets. The experiments in resurrection and synthetic human bodies. The aspiration to abolish death.

'Insane,' said Kistler, 'insane, but-'

"That isn't all,' said Lom. 'It's just the beginning.'

He opened his bag and brought out the papers from Khyrbysk's office.

'They are building vessels of two kinds,' he said. 'There was a conference a couple of years ago. A hotel on a lake. Rizhin was there, and Khyrbysk, and the chief engineer. Others too. Some names you know. Papers were circulated and minutes taken. All most efficient, and Khyrbysk kept a copy.'

He spread a folder open on his knee.

'They are constructing two kinds of vessel,' he said again. 'One, a fleet to go to the planets and the stars. Five years, they think, ten at the most before they are ready. Resources are no obstacle. Rizhin promised them whatever they need. They will be arks. Transport s.h.i.+ps to carry pioneers and the equipment they will require. It's all planned. They'll select the people carefully. Even two years ago they'd begun to draw up criteria and candidate lists. They are gathering scientists, artists, writers, athletes. The best of the armed forces and the finest workers.'

'Let me see,' said Kistler. 'Show me the names.'

'They need huge amounts of angel matter to power the craft,' said Lom. 'More than all the carca.s.ses can supply. But there is a living angel in the forest and Rizhin says it's huge. Immense. An angel mountain. He's going to find it and excavate its living flesh. Army divisions are already in the forest searching.'

Kistler was still looking at the lists. The people at the conference.

'I don't recognise these names,' he said. 'None of the Central Committee is here. No one from the Presidium or the ministries. Only Rond.'

'They don't know,' said Lom. 'None of them know about it because they're not going. They're not invited to the stars. But the arks are just part of it. There's another kind of vessel design. These are for low planetary orbit only, and there are to be thirty of them. They're also building bombs. Huge atomic bombs. Emperor Bombs. The power of these weapons can't be understated, it can't even be imagined: a single one would have the power of sixty million tons of high explosive, big enough to flatten entire cities and destroy half a province on its own. They expect them to set the air itself on fire. The orbital craft, the second design, will be artillery platforms. Flying guns.h.i.+ps, each one equipped with twenty Emperor Bombs. That's six hundred of them. The dust will blacken the skies for years. Five years of darkness and winter. Clouds of poisonous elements will cover the continent, raining disease and death. The atmosphere of the world will burn away.'

'Even if they could build such weapons,' said Kistler, 'they could never use them. We know the Archipelago has its own atomic weapons now. We would destroy each other.'

'No need for the Archipelago to do that,' said Lom. 'Rizhin's...o...b..ting guns.h.i.+ps are intended to do it all. Burn the Archipelago, burn the Vlast, burn the endless forest too. Burn it all. Scorched earth. Leave the planet a smoking cinder.'

Kistler stared at him. Lom saw growing understanding in his eyes.

'I see,' said Kistler. 'Rizhin and his arks will leave the planet and destroy it behind them so no one can follow, so no such s.h.i.+ps are ever built again.'

'That's part of the reason,' said Lom, 'but also so that no one who goes with Rizhin to the stars can ever dream of coming home again.' He took the note of the conference and found the page he needed. 'Rizhin's own words were recorded verbatim.'

He handed the paper to Kistler.

'We must leave nothing behind us. No before-time. No happy memory. No nostalgia for golden age and home. And above all, no one to come after us. We will be the first and the last. There is no past, there is only the future.'

Kistler read it over several times. Shaking his head.

'A single man might think this,' he said, 'but that others should follow, and help him, and do his work...?'

'Khyrbysk for one didn't care,' said Lom. 'Nor did the chief engineer. There are letters between them that Khyrbysk kept.'

Lom quoted a pa.s.sage. He had it by heart.

'"Where death is temporary, a million deaths, a billion, ten billion, do not matter. When we have mastered the science of retrieving memory from atoms we can come back here for the dust, if we have need of the ancestral dead to fill the planets we find."

'I'm not sure if Rizhin believes the resurrection stuff himself,' he added. 'You can't tell that from these papers.'

'But,' said Kistler, 'can they really do this? Could they actually build these things? Could they truly hope to travel to the stars?'

'For our present purposes,' said Lom, 'that doesn't really matter, does it? It hardly makes any difference at all. Rizhin intends it. He has corresponded with KhyrbyskI've got letters in his own hand here. The project has begun.'

Kistler stared at him.

'f.u.c.k,' he said. His face flushed. 'f.u.c.k. You're right. Hah!' He reached across and put his hand on Lom's knee. Squeezed it affectionately. 'Of course you're right, you marvellous f.u.c.king marvellous man. It doesn't matter at all.'

'So did I get you what you need?' said Lom.

'You did,' said Kistler. 'You b.l.o.o.d.y well did. Get me back to Mirgorod and I'll tear the b.a.s.t.a.r.d down. I'll bury him.'

2.

As soon as he was back in Mirgorod, Lukasz Kistler went to work. It took time. There were no phone calls. No letters. No traces. Kistler travelled across the city only by night, with the a.s.sistance of Maksim and the Underground Road, and by day he lay up in hiding and slept and prepared himself for the next night. He visited every single member of the Central Committee. In secret he came to them, unannounced and unexpected, when they were alone and at home. Each one was shocked by the thinness of his body, the new lines in his face, the black energy burning in his eye.

But you were dead, Lukasz. We all thought you were dead.

He sat with them, whispering into the early hours of the morning in studies and bedrooms while the households slept, and told them his story. He showed them the doc.u.mentary proofs that Lom had brought back from Vitigorsk. The notes of meetings. The lists. The letters to Khyrbysk in Rizhin's own scrawl.

And as he spoke, they saw the intact intelligence in his face. They understood the clarity of vision, the urgent determination: this was not Kistler broken and made mad by fear and detention and loss of power; this was Kistler commanding. Kistler on fire. Kistler the leader they had been waiting for.

And one by one in the watches of the night each man and woman of the Central Committee made the same response to what he told them, as Kistler knew they would. He knew his colleagues. He knew the stuff of their hearts.

What shocked and horrified them most was not the plan Rizhin had put into effect; it was that they were not in it. They were not included.

I am not on the list! He was going to leave me behind. I was to burn. My husband, my wife, my children, all were to burn.

One after another Kistler reeled them in. Stroked their vanity, fed their fear, bolstered their courage and swore them to secrecy. And when he had them, he convened a secret meeting at two in the morning at Yulia Yas.h.i.+na's house, and presented them with his proposal.

'We must all be signed up to this,' he said. 'Absolute and irreversible commitment. Every single one without exception. You must understandyou already know this well, of course you dothat if one of us falters we are all, all of us, doomed. The man or woman who loses courage now, who believes that he or she can gain advantage by moving against the rest of us: that betrayer is the one Rizhin will kill first. You all know this as I do. Concerted collective decisive action, this is the only way. One swift and irresistible blow!'

3.