Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 31

On the path back to where they had left the Heron they heard riders approaching. The footfall of horses. The clanking of bridles and gear. The scuffing of many feet through mud and forest litter. No voices. There was a quiet wind moving among the trees, but Lom could hear them coming.

'Get out of sight,' he said. 'Quickly.'

They crouched behind low thorn and briar. There was movement visible now through the trees.

Kamilova put her face next to his ear. 'Did they see us?'

'I don't know.'

He pulled off his pack and crawled forward on his belly, turning on his side to squeeze between thorn-bush stems. A root in the ground dug into him. He felt the spike of it gouging into his flesh, dragging at him. It hurt. He eased himself slowly forward across it, his face pressed close to the earth. Thorns snagged in his hair and grazed the skin of his scalp. A strand of briar hooked itself across his back. He reached back to pull it away and inched himself forward until he could see the track. He scooped a lump of earth and moss and rubbed himself with it, smearing it on his forehead and round his eyes, working it into the stubble on his face. The scent of it was strong and sour in his nose. He was sweating despite the cold.

Kamilova squeezed up next to him. The sound of her ragged breathing. He didn't look round.

There were three riders at the front, and men walking behind, strung out and silent. Lots of men, dirty and ill dressed. More riders followed, the horses dragging long heavy bundles wrapped in cloth. The bundles were heavy, deadweight, trailing furrow-paths through the leaves on the path. The horses pulled slowly against the weight.

The riders were bulky and hooded, soiled woollen cowls shrouding their faces, their heads heavy and too large. They rode alert, scanning the trees. Lom felt the pressure of their attention pa.s.s across him. It made him feel uneasy. Exposed. He inched his way cautiously backwards under the thorn.

'Don't move,' Kamilova hissed in his ear. 'There's one behind us.'

Lom lay on his back, face turned up, looking into the close tangle of the leafless bush. Outriders scouting the trail. Fear made his heart struggle. He wanted to breathe clear air. He forced himself to lie still and wait. Let them pa.s.s.

Long after the last sound of their pa.s.sing had gone, the two of them lay without speaking under the thorns. The touch of the riders' eyeless gaze stayed with them, a taint breath, a foulness in the mind. They listened for any sign of more following or the scout returning, and when that purpose faded they still didn't move.

'What were they?' said Kamilova. She didn't look at him but stayed lying on her back, watching a spider moving slowly among the branches.

'I don't know.'

'Did you feel...?'

'Yes.'

'That wasn't... normal. That wasn't right.'

'No.'

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

'We should go,' she said at last. 'We should move on.'

'Yes.'

Stiff and cold, they picked up their packs and began to walk.

'Perhaps we should stay off the track,' she said. 'There might be more coming.'

'We have to get back to the boat,' said Lom. 'We have to keep going.'

It began to rain. Sheets of wind-driven icy water soaking their clothes. The noise of it was like an ocean in the trees. The track led them between shallow green pools, rain-churned and murky.

Lom didn't hear the splas.h.i.+ng charge of the bear-man over the noise of the rain. Didn't smell it through the rain and the mud and the drench of the leaves. But he felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision that drove the air from his lungs, crunched the ribs in his chest and hurled him off the path into the water, cras.h.i.+ng his spine against the trunk of a beech tree.

He could not raise his arms. He could not move his legs. The water came up to his waist. Propped against the slope of the tree root, he watched the grey-hooded figure turn and come back, wading towards him through the mud-swirled green pool. Its cowl was pulled back off its head.

Lom smelled the bear-man's hot sour breath on his face, on his wide staring eyes. He saw deep into the dark red mouth as its jaws widened to clamp on his face. The mouth reeked of angel. He observed with detached and distant surprise that half its head was made of stone.

Lom punched the side of the half-stone head with closed-up forest air, boulder heavy and boulder-hard. A swinging fist of rain and air. The bear-weighted bear-muzzled skull jerked sideways, crushed and broken and dead in a sudden mess of blood and bone.

5.

The bear-man, the angel rider of horse, opens his mouth to scream out the shock and outrageous surprise of his death, his death out of nowhere. He is instantaneously silenced. Cerebral cortex sprayed on the air like a smashed fruit.

But the screaming instant is heard.

Archangel, O Archangel all-surveying, connected by iron filaments of Archangel mind to all the doers of his willall the absorbed living syllables through which he gives voice, all the soldiers in the army he is building for his brother in arms Josef KantorArchangel hears and feels the killing of the bear and knows it for what it is. It is familiar. Anomaly and threat.

And there is something else.

He has seen it now. Resolved out of endlessness and trees it has locality. The eye of his surveillance has pinned it, and this time it is close and he can reach it.

She shows herself and he has found her.

Everything comes together in the forest, and out in the forest hunting now is his racing engine, his destroyer, his fraternal champion and his pride.

Kill them all. Kill them quickly. Do it now.

Archangel calls and his champion runs them down.

6.

'They were riding for the angel,' said Lom. 'I think we're coming closer to where it is.'

There was strain in Kamilova's eyes. She was watching him warily again. There was always a separateness about her: a wordless watchfulness, a lonely, withheld and self-postponing patience, doing what she must and waiting for the dark times to go.

'It was going to kill you,' she said. 'Then it was like its brain exploded.'

They were back at the Heron, and the rain had pa.s.sed leaving watery afternoon suns.h.i.+ne. Lom had wiped the dark bear blood off his face and neck but still he felt unclean. The angel-residue in his own blood was strung out taut like wires in his veins again. He didn't like Kamilova's scrutiny and wanted to be alone.

'I'm going for a swim,' he said.

He followed a game trail up to the crest of a low slope and looked down on dark green water. The trail took him down to the edge of it, a stillness fringed on the far side with dense bramble. A fallen tree dipped a leafless crown and branches like arms into the mystery of the pool. Goosander gave muted echoless mews. Lom took off his rain-damp clothes and waded out. The water, cold against his s.h.i.+ns, was moss-coloured, icy, opaque. He felt the thick cool of silt sliding between his toes and up over his feet. It felt like darkness.

After a few steps the lake bottom fell away steeply and he slipped, half-falling and half-choosing, into a sudden clumsy dive. The water closed over his head. How deep it might be he had no idea and didn't care. Bands of iron cold tightened round his skull and bruised ribs, squeezing out breath. He opened his eyes on nothing but pale thickened green light.

Floundering to the surface he swam with cramped clumsy strokes, arms and legs working through the cold. Broken twigs and fallen leaves littered the surface: he nosed his way through.

Once the first shock of the chill subsided, he immersed himself in the wild forgetful freedom of swimming in the forest, was.h.i.+ng the sourness of killing and angel from his skin and hair. He took breath and dived for the bottom, reaching his arms down for it, but couldn't touch it, and surfaced, gasping. Floating on his back he watching the canopy of trees turning slowly overhead against the heavy sky.

He swam until the icy bitter cold of the water returned to the attack, then hauled himself up onto the bole of the fallen tree and lay there for a long time, face down, the bark's hard roughness against his skin, the air of the forest resting against his naked back. Lazy and reluctant to move he watched the pool opaque and green below him.

When he was dry he crawled back along the tree and swung himself down onto the bank, and she was there, her eyes brus.h.i.+ng across him, bright and dark and happy.

Maroussia.

She put her hand against his chest, tracing the rise and hollow of his ribs. His hands and face were weather-brown, his body pale. The warmth of her fingers was on him. He smelled the sweetness of her breath.

'Is it you?' he said. 'Not a shadow but you?'

'You're cold,' she said. 'Your skin is rough and hard and cool like stone.'

She looked into his face and opened her mouth a little, and he kissed her, his arms around her shoulders awkwardly, uncertain. She tasted like hedge berries, and she leaned in and pressed herself against him. The scent of woodsmoke and forest in her hair. She took his hand and pressed it against her belly gently.

'Do you feel our child moving?'

For him it had been six years and more, but for her hardly any time at all.

7.

It was late afternoon when Lom and Maroussia walked together back down the trail to the river where the Heron was moored.

Eligiya Kamilova received Maroussia with quiet reserve. She was generous and fine, but Lom could see her withdrawing. She was displaced again: having done her part she was finding herself edged to the margin of other people's reunions and plans. Lom found himself feeling slightly sorry for her. It was guilt that he felt, he knew thathe'd brought her here, he'd used her as his guidebut it was the path she'd chosen. The solitary traveller. She'd wanted to come. The forest was her travelling place, but she'd come back and found it an emptier, harsher place than before.

Kamilova had caught a fish in her trap. A pike. She shared it with them. The smoke of the cooking fire hung about in the still air of evening, clinging and acrid. It stuck to their skin. The flesh of the pike tasted muddy and was full of fine sharp bones. Not pleasant eating. Maroussia said little and ate less.

The sliver of an ominous new hill had appeared above the trees in the west. It glowed a dull rust-red in the last of the westering sun, and above it dark shapes circled like flocks of flying birds.

'I'm sorry, Eligiya,' said Maroussia.

Kamilova frowned.

'Sorry? Why?'

'A bad thing is coming and I am bringing it here. I show myself now to draw it out before it gets any stronger. It may already be too strong.'

Maroussia turned to Lom. She was almost a stranger, fierce and strong. Her hair was black, her eyes were dark and wide. She was carrying his child. He hadn't even begun to absorb the truth of that yet.

'Are you ready?' she said.

'Ready for what?' said Lom, but he knew.

He'd felt it coming for some time: the pulsing rhythm of blood in his head was the rhythm of a heavy, pounding footfall cras.h.i.+ng through the trees, growing louder and coming closer. The hairs on the back of his neck p.r.i.c.kled as he felt the touch of the avid hunter's tunnel-narrow gaze. He saw that even Kamilova was feeling it now: a faint drumbeat in the ground underfoot.

'Kantor is coming,' said Maroussia. 'I'm sorry. There is no time to prepare. It has to be now. Kantor is here.'

'Oh,' said Lom. 'Oh. Yes. I see.' A sudden sick lurch of fear. 'OK. Well there's no time like now.'

The mudjhik stepped out from the grey twilit birches, dull red and ma.s.sive, balanced and avid and bulky and strangely beautiful and as tall as the trees it stood among. Its eyesit had eyestook them in with a gaze of confident relaxation and intelligence. Its expression was almost elegant and almost amused. It had grace as well as size and power. It was a perfectly realised angel-human giant of stone the colour of rust and blood and bruises, a new thing come into the world, and it had the face of a hundred million posters and portraits and photographs. The face on the statue at the top of the Rizhin Tower. The face of Papa Rizhin. The face of Josef Kantor.

And when it spoke it had the voice of Kantor too, warm and expressive, loud and clear among the trees. You heard it in your head and you heard it in your ear. Tall as the trees, it had a tongue to speak.

'So it is you, my Lom, my investigator, my troublesome provincial mouse, my annoyance still and always,' said the voice and face of Josef Kantor. He looked from Lom to Maroussia. 'And here is the trivial b.i.t.c.h-girl not my daughter too, my betrayer's b.a.s.t.a.r.d whelp, the spill of my cuckolding. You stink of the forest like your mother did. Both of you stink of it. Well the mother is dead and I will destroy the daughter also, and the man. You run and you wriggle and you hide, you sting me and skip away, but I have you cornered now.'

Kantor-in-mudjhik took a pace forward and spread its arms wide, arms with a suggestion of muscular flow. Fists opened flexing fingers. It had fingers. Thick stubby fingers. Josef Kantor's hands.

'I'm going to make quite a mess. Dog crows will clean it up.'

While the mudjhik Kantor spoke, Lom felt the dark electric pressure of angel senses pa.s.sing across him, probing and examining. The touch of it, obscene and invasive, brought a surge of anger and hatred, a knot of iron and stone in his belly like a fist.

The mudjhik stopped mid-stride and gave a bark, a sudden laugh of surprised delight. Its blank pebble eyes glittered with warmth and pleasure.

'And there is a child!' the voice of Kantor said. 'How perfect is that? Good. Let me kill it too. Let it all end now, and then I will take the bl.u.s.tering b.a.s.t.a.r.d angel down and be on my way out of these trees and get my world back. This triviality has gone on long enough.'

Lom felt surge after surge of anger and desperation and the wired strength of his own angel taint welling up, overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g and bursting walls inside him. The taste of iron, a hot suffusion in the blood. He was the violence. The smasher. The fist. He was defender. He was bear.

That was the secret of his birthing. Fathered by a man-bear in the deeps of the forest, he was the blade-toothed muzzle, the gaping tearing snout, the heavy carnivore with heavy paws to break necks. He felt himself unfurling into bear and killing, and let it come. Let it come! Barriers and frontiers dissolving, he was coming into the myth of himself, he was the man-bear with angel in his blood.

Lom felt the power of the angel substance tugging at his mind, a hungry undertow pulling and hauling him out of his body, dizzying and disorientating. The forest sliding sideways. Peripheral vision darkening. Connection with reality slipping away.

It wasn't Kantor doing that, it was the thing his mudjhik body was made of.

Lom didn't resist. He threw himself into the pulling of the current and went with it into the mudjhik, leaving his soft body fallen behind, taking the war onto Kantor's own ground to kill him there.

All power is done at a price, but the price is not paid by those who wield it. It is paid by the victims. Kantor was human and he was not, and there was an end to it.

Lom in the mudjhik found Kantor there and fell on him, tearing and snarling, a blood-blind frontal killing a.s.sault of unwithstandable fierceness. To end it quickly before Kantor could react.