Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  Find the thing you fear and strike it dead.

  This is my world and I will not share it.

  4

  Thousands of miles to the east, on the edge of the endless forest, Archangel feels himself in the mudjhik die. He knows that Josef Kantor has killed him, this one little piece of him sent out wandering across the world, and he knows what that means.

  Archangel opens himself out like an unfolding fern and shouts at the oppressing sky of this poisonous world in absolute and ecstatic joy.

  For Josef Kantor is strong!

  Stronger than Archangel had ever guessed. The will of Kantor is harder than iron; his purpose is stronger than the heart rock of the world; his heat burns hotter than the sun. The strength of his arm grinds the wheels of time faster and faster.

  Archangel knows and has always known that without Josef Kantor he is a dumb mouth shouting, a blowhard bully trundling about for ever in the forest, spilling futile anti-life: a liminal and ineffectual pantoufflard grumbling at the margins of history, claiming primacy but in clear-sighted truth merely scratching an itch.

  And Josef Kantor without Archangel, one-time emperor of the Vlast though he may be, is brief-lived and tractionless. A powder flash in the pan.

  But together!

  My champion! My ever-burning sun!

  It is Archangel who is the generator of power and endurance, Archangel the ever-spinning dynamo of cruel expansive energy, Archangel the permission and the totaliser. But it is Josef Kantor who is the conduit, the bond, the channel that lets Archangel reach out into the world and seize the bright birthright. Kantor is the face on the poster and the arm that wields the burning sword that turns the skies to ash.

  Josef Kantor, freed now of his organic bodily chains, a will and a voice and a mind released into history and driving an angelic body, is coming to the forest with a mind to kill him, but there will be no need for that.

  Faster and faster Archangel grinds towards the edge of the forest.

  Kantor will come and break down the border.

  Kantor will let him loose in the world.

  Run my champion Josef Kantor faster and faster, run as I run towards you. Carry to me the banners of victory. The time is short and our enemies are upon us.

  Archangel returns to his work with fresh vigour. There is much to do. His champion generalissimo needs a new army.

  5

  Aweek after the fall of Osip Rizhin, Vissarion Lom woke hollow and drenched with sweat from a dream of trees and Maroussia, and knew by the feeling in his belly and heart, by the anger and the anxiety and the desperate desolation, by the need to be up and moving, by the impossibility of rest, that it wasn’t any kind of dream, no dream at all.

  Maroussia was different–older, wiser, changed–she saw things he didn’t see, she was distant, she was… august. She was something to be wary of. Something of power and something to fear.

  Kantor is making for the forest. The angel is calling him there. Nothing is over yet, nothing is done. Come into the forest, darling, and I will find you there.

  Helping. Answering the call. That was Lom. That was what he did.

  In his dream that was no dream at all he’d seen the living angel in the woods. Seen the trail of poisoned destruction and cold smouldering crusted earth it left in its wake as it dragged itself, an immense hill the colour of blood and rust and bruises, towards the edge of the trees. A cloud of vapours burned off the top of the angel hill, cuprous and shining. Energy nets like pheromone clouds, dream-visible, dream-obvious. The soldiers of the Vlast were crawling about on its lower slopes like ants, digging and dying.

  The living angel was recruiting an army of its own, infesting a growing crowd of dark things: bad dark things coming out from under the trees. Men and women like bears and wolves. Giants and trolls from the mountains and moving trees turned to ash and stone and dust. Lom’s dream heart beat strangely when he saw the men like bears. The living angel found them in the forest and took their minds and filled them with its own. He gave them hunting and anger and desire and pleasure in death. He gave them bloodlust and greed and berserking. The smell of blood and musk. There were not many yet but more each day, and the nearer it got to the frontier of trees the more it found.

  Lom heard faintly, insistently, the voice of the living angel in his own mind. It pulled at him like gravity, seeped through the skin, and polluted the way he tasted to himself.

  I will not be silenced. I will not be imprisoned. I will not be harassed and consumed and annoyed and troubled and stung. I am Archangel, the voice of history and the voice of the dark heart of the world. My birthright is among the stars and I am coming yet.

  Lom felt the living angel’s attentive gaze pass over him and come to rest, returning his regard as if it knew it was watched. As if it knew its enemy and disdained him. It came to him then, dream knowledge, that he was Maroussia watching. He was seeing with Maroussia’s eye. Alien Maroussia Pollandore, preparing to kill this thing if she could.

  It was still dark when he woke but there was no more sleeping. In the first light of dawn Lom went to see Kistler, and then he went to find Eligiya Kamilova, who was back in her house on the harbour in the shadow of the Ship Bastion. That house was a survivor. Eligiya was there, and so were Elena Cornelius and her girls, Yeva and Galina. Rising for the day. Having breakfast.

  I bring your children home to you Elena, Kamilova had said that day in the street. I have looked after them as well as I could. You can stay in my house until you find your feet.

  What I owe you, Eligiya, said Elena, it’s too much. It can’t ever be repaid.

  When he came for Kamilova in the early morning, Lom found Elena’s girls just as he remembered them from when he and Maroussia stayed at Dom Palffy six years before. They had not grown. Not aged at all. That was uncanny. It disturbed him oddly. Kamilova was dark-eyed, thin and haunted. She had a faraway look, as if she felt uncomfortable and superfluous, marginal in her own home.

  ‘I want you to come with me into the forest,’ Lom said to her. ‘Bring your boat and be my guide.’

  Kamilova was on her feet immediately. Face burning.

  ‘When?’ she said.

  ‘Now. Today. Will you come?’

  ‘Of course. It is all I want.’ She turned to Elena Cornelius. ‘Keep the house,’ she said. ‘It is yours. I give it to Galina and Yeva. There is money in a box in the kitchen. I will not be coming back. Not ever.’

  For all of the rest of her life Yeva Cornelius carried an agonising guilt that she hadn’t loved Eligiya Kamilova and didn’t weep and hug her when she left, but felt relieved when Kamilova left her with Galina and her mother. It was a needless burden she made for herself. Kamilova didn’t do things out of love or to get love. She did what was needed.

  Lom and Kamilova had the rest of the day to make arrangements. Kistler had arranged a truck to come for Kamilova’s boat. The Heron. It was to be flown by military transport plane, along with Lom and Kamilova and their baggage and supplies, as far east as possible. As near to the edge of the forest as they could get.

  Lom spent the time with Kamilova in her boathouse. She knew what she needed for an expedition into the forest and went about putting it all together while he poked about in her collection of things brought back from the woods. He felt excited, like a child, anxious to be on his way. He’d been born in the forest but had no coherent memories of life there. All his life he’d lived with the idea of it, but he’d never been there. And now he was going. And Maroussia was there.

  When it was nearly time for the truck to come, Kamilova looked him up and down. His suit. His city shoes.

  ‘You can’t go like that,’ she said.

  She found him heavy trousers of some coarse material, a woollen pullover, a heavy battered leather jacket, but he had to go and buy himself boots, and by the time he got back the truck had come and the boat was in the back and Kamilova was waiting.

  Elena and the girls were there to see them off.

 
‘You’re going to look for Maroussia, aren’t you?’ said Elena.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lom.

  ‘You’re a good man,’ she said. ‘You will find her.’

  She looked across the River Purfas towards the western skyline where the sun was going down. The former Rizhin Tower, now renamed the Mirgorod Tower, rose dark against a bank of reddening pink cloud. It was still the tallest building by far, though the statue of Kantor was gone from the top of it. The new collective government with Kistler in the chair had had it removed and dismantled.

  ‘They should call it Lom Tower for what you’ve done. People should know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like that,’ said Lom. ‘I’d hate it. Nothing’s done yet. It’s just the beginning.’

  Kistler had found jobs for Konnie and Maksim, working for the new government, and he’d sent out word to look for Vasilisk the bodyguard–Kistler was a man to repay his debts–but so far he could not be found. There was trouble brewing: many people had done well out of Rizhin’s New Vlast, and not everyone was glad to see the statue gone. There were Rizhinists now. Hunder Rond had disappeared.

  Kistler had offered to find a job for Elena Cornelius but she had refused.

  ‘What will you do?’ said Lom.

  Elena smiled. ‘I’m going to make cabinets again.’ She hugged Lom and kissed him on the cheek. ‘When you find Maroussia, bring her back here and see how we have done.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lom. ‘That would be good.’

  He swung himself up into the cab of the truck next to Kamilova and the driver.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  6

  The plane carrying Lom and Kamilova and the Heron landed at a military airfield at the edge of the forest: three runways, heavy transport planes coming and going every few minutes. Soldiers and engineers and their equipment were everywhere: rows of olive and khaki tents in their thousands; roadways laid out; jetties and pontoons and river barges clogged with traffic; the smell of fuel and the noise of engines. Huge tracked machines churned up the mud and eased themselves onto broad floating platforms. It was an industrial entrepôt, the base camp of a massive engineering project and the beachhead for an invasion, all combined in one chaotic hub and thrown now into reorganisation and dismay. Orders had been changed: the collective government under Lukasz Kistler required the living angel not mined for its substance but destroyed. Eradicated. Killed. The order came as a signal, unambiguous and peremptory.

  Destroy it? the commanders of the advance said to one another. Destroy it? How?

  A few miles east of the airfield low wooded hills closed the horizon: rising slopes of dark grey tree-mass which stretched away north and south, unbroken into the distance, shrouded in scraps of drifting mist. Westward was clear summer blue, the continental Vlast in sunshine, but a leaden autumn cloud bank had slid across the sky above the forest like a lid closing, a permanent weather front coming to rest at the edge of hills.

  In hospital tents men and women on low cots stared darkly at the ceiling. Others slumped in wheelchairs, legs tucked under blankets, or hobbled and swung on crutches, aimless and solitary, muttering quietly. Bandaged feet. Arms, hands and faces marked with chalky fungal growths and patches of smooth blackness.

  ‘Have you seen this before?’ Lom said to Kamilova.

  ‘No. This is not the forest doing this.’

  ‘The angel then,’ said Lom. ‘They’ve found it.’

  Out of the trees through a gap in the low hills the broad slow river flowed, turbid and muddy green. An unceasing traffic of barges and motor launches and shallow-draught gunships cruised upstream, heavily laden and low in the water, and came back downstream riding higher, empty, bruised and rusting.

  ‘There’s another way,’ said Kamilova. ‘The old waterway joins the river downstream of here.’

  The Heron and their gear was loaded on a flatbed truck. Early in the morning, before their liaison officer was up and about, Lom and Kamilova drove out of the camp alone. Nobody questioned them at the gate.

  A day’s sailing downriver and the sinking sun in their eyes was gilding the river a dull red gold when Kamilova swung the boat in towards the left bank under overhanging vegetation. Lom saw nothing but a scrubby spit of land until they were into the canal and nosing up slow shallow waters clogged with weed. Disgruntled waterfowl made way for them, edging in under muddy banks and exposed tree roots, or rose and flapped away slowly to quieter grounds.

  ‘This way is navigable?’ said Lom.

  ‘It’s a few years since I was here,’ said Kamilova.

  Ruined stonework lined the water’s edge: low embankments, mossy and root-broken and partly collapsed, the stumps of rotted wooden jetties, rusted mooring rings. Back from the canal edge were low mounds and rooted stumps of standing stone. Broken suggestions of fallen ruins lost. Earth and grass and undergrowth spilled in a slow tide across ancient constructions and slumped into torpid water.

  ‘It’s an old trader canal,’ said Kamilova. ‘It connects with another river over there beyond the hill. In the time of the Reasonable Empire, when the Lezarye families were hedge wardens and castellans of the forest margin, you’d have seen a town here. Trading posts. Warehouses. Of course the trade was already ancient when the Lezarye came. There was always trade into the forest and out of it.’

  ‘Timber?’ said Lom. ‘The canal seems too narrow.’

  ‘Not here, that was always big-river trade. In places like this you’d find charcoal burners and wood turners. Fur traders selling sable, marten, grease beaver, miniver, fox, hart. There were markets for dried mushrooms and lichens and powdered barks. Syrups and liquors. Scented woods. Wax and honey and dried berries. Antler and bone. Anything you could bring out of the forest and sell. And there’d have been shamans and völvas and priests. Giants of course, and the other forest peoples would come out this far too. Keres and wildings. This was debatable land then. Marginal. Liminal. A crossing place.’

  They passed under the long evening shadow of a round-towered and gabled building of high sloping walls: red brick and timber, collapsing, overgrown, roofless and empty-windowed.

  ‘A Lezarye garrison way fort,’ said Kamilova. ‘The trade leagues paid the Lezarye to keep the peace and the Reasonable Empire paid them to watch the border and make sure the darker things of the forest stayed there.’

  The pace of the boat slackened as the evening breeze dropped away. There was thinness and a still, breathless silence in the air. Lom felt he was at the bottom of a deep well filled up with ages of time.

  Kamilova shook herself and looked wary.

  ‘Things are slowing here,’ she said. ‘I know the feel of this from when I was with Elena’s girls. We shouldn’t linger.’

  She unshipped oars and began to row, nosing the Heron forward through thickening standing water. Lom watched her muscular arms working. The intricate interlaced patterns on her skin were like winding roots and knots of brambles and young tendrils reaching out across the earth. They seemed fresher and more vivid than he’d noticed before. There was much he wanted to ask her. But not yet. The wooded hills of the forest edge rose higher and denser before them, closer now, catching the last light of the setting sun. A rich and glowing green wall.

  After an hour or so the waterway widened and the going was easier, but the last light of the day was failing. Kamilova tied up the Heron.

  ‘We’ll camp for the night,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go in under the trees.’

  7

  Yakoushiv the embalmer presented himself at the office of Colonel Hunder Rond, commander of the Parallel Sector. Yakoushiv was clammy with sweat. He felt sick. He could hardly speak for nerves. He thought his end had come.

  ‘You did a nice job with the corpse of the old Novozhd,’ said Rond. ‘Very pretty. I have more work for you, if you’re interested.’

  Yakoushiv’s legs trembled with relief. He almost fell. He felt as if his head had become detached from his neck and was floating a foot above his
shoulders. He dabbed at his face with a sweet handkerchief.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. His voice came out wrong. Pitched too high. ‘The subject? I mean… who is the…?’

  ‘Come through and I’ll show you.’

  Rond led him through to the other room. Yakoushiv’s eyes widened in surprise. Another wave of sick nervousness and fear. The corpse of the disgraced Papa Rizhin was laid out in Rond’s inner office on a makeshift catafalque.

  ‘You will work here,’ said Rond. ‘You will write me a list of what you need and I will obtain it for you. There is need for great haste. He must be ready tonight. You understand? Is that possible?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Make it your best work ever. And get rid of the scar on his face.’

  Yakoushiv worked as rapidly and as neatly as he could. It was impossible to avoid making a mess in the room. There was… spillage. But when he had finished the corpse of Osip Rizhin was glossy and shining and fragranced with a cloying sickly sweetness.

  When Rond returned he examined Yakoushiv’s work from head to foot.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ he said. ‘You should be pleased, Yakoushiv. Your last job was your best. I hope you can take some satisfaction from that. I’m only sorry you can’t go home now.’

  Yakoushiv turned white. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please. No.’

  ‘There can be no blabbing, you see. No tales to be told.’

  ‘I won’t. Of course. I promise. Please—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Yakoushiv,’ said Rond.

  8

  Next morning Lom woke at the outermost, easternmost edge of the world he knew, he and Kamilova alone in an emptied ancient landscape.

  The sun had not yet risen above the edge of the forest. Close now, the hills were dark shoulders and hogs’ backs of dense tree canopy draped in mist and cloud. Home of ravens. On the lower slopes he could see the relics of long-abandoned field boundaries under bracken and scrub, and out of the scrub rose great twisted knobs and stumps of rock, shoulders and boulders of raw stone. Stone the colour of rain and slate.