Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  ‘This is not right,’ he said. ‘I just need to sit down. Sort myself out. Could you? Find me somewhere? You can leave me there.’

  ‘No,’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Yes,’ said Florian. ‘Really.’ He leaned against the wall, took off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and put them back on. His face was papery white, his forehead beaded with sweat. ‘I’ll be fine. In a minute.’

  ‘You’ve been shot,’ said Maroussia.

  ‘True,’ said Florian. And for a second his face seemed to readjust itself. Looking at Maroussia, he reflected her own face back at her, mirroring her expression. Concern. Indecision. Shock. The dark bright eyes widening. He gave her a pained, sympathetic grin. ‘I am in some pain. And so for now I cannot walk. I must sit down. Or lie down. Even better. You can leave me. You need to go.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Lom.

  ‘Vissarion—’ Maroussia began.

  ‘It’s true. We can’t take him with us. He can’t walk in that condition.’

  ‘But… we can’t just leave him here.’

  ‘No. So we need transport. And we need somewhere he can stay while we find it.’ Lom turned to go. ‘Wait here.’

  Near the exit from the gully was a wide high wooden gate, peeling black paint, with a small wicket door set into it. Lom tested the wicket. It was unlocked, and opened into a wide linoleum-floored passageway. Bare electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling cast a bleak light on a clutter of stacked boxes and pallets. Shuttered entrances, grilles, closed doors. A porter’s trolley. A service entrance for the Apraksin market. There was no one about. Lom was thinking two minutes ahead. Maximum. Get through that. Then worry about the next. The only thing now was to get off the street.

  Twenty feet into the passageway was a half-glazed door. Small panes of frosted glass. No light showing. Lom tried the handle but it was locked. He smashed a pane with his elbow, reached in past the sharp broken jags and unlatched it. Inside was a room for the porters, something like that: several tables and chairs littered with unwashed mugs and plates. In the corner was a small sink and an urn for hot water. He hustled back out into the alley.

  ‘I’ve found somewhere,’ he said.

  Florian was drowsy, unsteady on his feet. Lom didn’t like it. A bullet in the gut was a killing wound, not immediately, but soon: bleeding out or infection, death either way.

  They got him into the porters’ room somehow. Florian sat in a chair at one of the tables, his face pale, his eyes wide and dark behind their lenses. Sweat slicked his forehead. He took off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. Blood smeared his ribs, matted the thick hair on his chest, gathered in the thin folds of his belly. The entrance wound was a dark ominous leaking hole. His face tight with pain and concentration, Florian pushed his finger inside it and poked around, hooked something out and placed it on the table. A distorted fragment of brass sticky with blood. A bullet.

  ‘You got it out?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Bad idea to leave it in,’ said Florian. ‘It hurt. A lot.’

  He hauled himself to his feet, staggered and leaned against the table.

  ‘If you could just… pass me my coat.’

  Maroussia hesitated.

  ‘You can’t…’ she said. ‘You don’t look—’

  ‘I am quite well.’ He shrugged the coat on painfully. ‘Thank you. I will go now.’

  He took a step forward and slumped to the floor, sending the chair crashing over.

  Between them Lom and Maroussia hauled Florian, a heavy dead-weight, awkwardly up into a chair and let him slump forward across the tabletop, head cradled on folded arms. To a cursory glance he would look like someone sleeping.

  Working quickly, Lom went through his pockets. There was a handful of coins, a leather wallet with a few rouble notes, a fountain pen and a soft leather notebook, the kind with an elastic strap to hold it shut and a thin black ribbon to mark the page. The pen was expensive, a squat and solid turquoise Wassertrau. Nothing else. No identity papers.

  ‘Vissarion!’ hissed Maroussia. ‘Hurry!’

  ‘One second.’

  The astrakhan hat had a purple silk lining and a maker’s crest, a double-headed eagle. A tag sown into the crown said, ‘Joakim Sylwest. Superior Outfitters. 144 Ulitsa Zaramalya. Koromants.’ Lom riffled the pages of the notebook, but there were only illegible scribbles and scrawls.

  ‘We need transport,’ said Lom when he had finished. ‘There must be trucks or wagons somewhere near a place like this.’

  ‘I know someone who works here,’ said Maroussia.

  Lom looked at her doubtfully. He didn’t want to involve anyone else, just find what he needed and steal it. But that would take time, and how much did they have before the place was crawling with militia? Not enough.

  ‘Who?’ he said.

  ‘A friend. She works here on the fourth floor,’ said Maroussia. ‘I trust her.’

  Lom hesitated.

  Get though the next two minutes.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s find her.’

  25

  Lavrentina Chazia worked the pulleys and lifting chains that swung the heavy angel skin away from the wall and into position. Stood on a stool to reach the headpiece, unhook it and bring it down. When she put her head inside it the weight of its edge cut into her shoulders. Enclosing, suffocating darkness. The iron-and-ozone tang of angel flesh in her mouth.

  She waited.

  Nothing.

  Chazia opened her mind, greedy and desperate, hunting for the link, the connection that didn’t come.

  Nothing.

  She had put her head inside a casket of stone meat. That was all.

  But she could not fail. She needed not to fail.

  Her legs were weak and trembling. She knelt on the ground and bent forward, resting her head against the stone to relieve the weight, stretching her arms out to the side. Closed her eyes. Focused all her attention on the dark purple surging inside her.

  And waited.

  And felt the barest touch of something at the back of her head, moving under her scalp. Like cool, tapered fingers brushing the surface of her mind. Tentatively feeling their way. Pausing. Teasing. Waiting.

  Chazia screamed.

  Hot blades stabbed deep into the core of her brain. The burning needle-bite of jaws snapped shut. Her body spasmed. Rigid. Jerking. She was on her back, staring unseeing up towards the roof, and the rock, and the earth, and the piled up floors and roofs of the Lodka, and the vaporous open sky. Her senses caught fire and burst into strange, alien life. The world poured into her.

  She knew every contour and texture of the walls and the ground beneath her. Every object in the workshop. She sensed the tunnel leading away, its slight downward gradient. She was aware of Mirgorod around and above her, the weight and structure of its buildings. She felt the flow of the river as a surge of brown light. A heavy solid sound. She perceived the presence of people. Fuzzy patches of sentience. She could distinguish them from dogs or cats or birds. It was like a taste. They offered themselves up to her, all those teeming, unprotected, vulnerable points of life: they were naked before her alien angel gaze. She could have reached out and plucked one of them for herself, like a fruit from a bush. The sharp, dark, edgy points of meat scuttering away down the tunnel, those were rats. There were other things underground as well: ways and chambers unconnected to the tunnel, and lives inhabiting them. Older, stranger lives she could not identify, which felt her touch and slithered and shied away. And below her, deep and going down for ever, was the warmth and torsion and slow pressure of planetary rock. Sedimentary silt of seashell and bone. Extrusions of heart-rock: seams of granite and lava, dolerites, rhyolites, gabbros and tuffs, all buckled, faulted, shattered and upheaved under the weight of their own millennial tidal shifting.

  It was uncontainable. Tumbling overwhelming floods of perception. In some detached and peripheral corner of her mind Chazia noted that it might be possible to master this torrent of percipience. With
practice, it might be ordered and arranged into some approximation of consistent conscious understanding. But that was for another time. She didn’t even try to control it. She didn’t want to perceive: she wanted to be perceived.

  She pushed back against the deluge of incoming sensation. Trying to use the power of it. She gathered together all the yearning and loneliness and frustration and humiliation and desire for power and control that she had carried inside her for so long. For always. All her will and purpose. Her sense of self, her towering, essential, unignorable self. She gathered it all into a tight ball and hurled it upwards and outwards into the world, powered by the energy pouring into her. A yelling, shrieking scream.

  I am here! Notice me!

  Recognise me! See what I have done!

  Speak to me again! Speak to me!

  Touch me!

  Time after time she spurted and jetted herself out into the world. She was a blade of light stabbing up through clouds into the bright emptiness beyond. She was a loud voice calling above the storm. A scream of demand rolling across the continent. Again and again she shouted, until she was empty. Drained. Exhausted. And when she could do no more she stopped and listened.

  Listened to the echoless silence. The unresponding emptiness behind and below the world.

  She does not know that she has been noticed. That from nearby she is watched.

  The Pollandore–enclosed in its little room but not enclosed–a world–a sphere of perfumed light–earth and leaf and forest air–turning on its quiet axis in no-time and no-space–the Pollandore knows what she is.

  And senses what she could be.

  Sees the trails of future possibilities spilling like ghosts around her.

  And stirs uneasily in its patient waiting.

  Deep inside it something that was balanced, slips.

  Something that was silent, calls.

  26

  Maroussia led Lom to the far end of the passageway and up the stairs at the end. Swing doors at the top opened into the Apraksin: four levels of balconies and shopfronts rose around a wide central atrium crowded with stalls and bathed in blazing electric light. There was nothing you could not find in the Apraksin. Rugs, shoes, papers and inks, sheaves of dried herbs, spice boxes, taxidermy, mirrors, telescopes and binoculars, caged parrots and toucans. Fruit. But today there were few customers, and nobody seemed to be buying. It was a paused, subdued mortuary of commerce. Quiet funereal music played from the tannoy. Massed male voices singing from Winter Tears. Many concessions had closed for the day, and the bored stallholders who remained watched incuriously from behind their counters. They all wore black armbands.

  On a fourth-floor balcony, squeezed between a leather stall and a tea counter, was a concession filled with wardrobes, cupboards and dressers of reddish brown wood. There was rich smell of wax polish and resin. A sign said CUPBOARDS BY CORNELIUS. The furniture was tall and solid and carved with intricate patterns of leaves and bunched berries. Doors were left open to show off shelves and drawers, rails and hooks. Compartments. Cubbyholes. On a side table was an arrangement of smaller boxes made of the same red wood, with lids carved and pierced and polished to a high shine.

  ‘I don’t see Elena,’ said Maroussia, looking round. ‘Shit. Where is she?’

  A voice called across to them.

  ‘Maroussia? It is you!’

  A woman came across from the tea counter, wiping her hands. She was about thirty. Dark blue work clothes. A tangle of thick fair hair roughly cut. Her eyes were full of life and intelligence but she looked tired. Harassed.

  She gave Maroussia a hug.

  I’m so glad you came,’ she said. ‘I was worried. Your mother… I heard. I’m so sorry. I went to your apartment, but you weren’t there and nobody knew where you’d gone. Are you all right? You look pale…’ She glanced curiously at Lom.

  ‘Elena,’ said Maroussia. ‘This is my friend Vissarion.’

  The woman held out her hand.

  ‘Elena Cornelius. Pleased to meet you. ‘

  Then she saw the blood on his coat. And on Maroussia’s.

  ‘Maroussia?’ she said. ‘What’s going on? Are you hurt?’

  ‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘But—’

  ‘You’re in trouble. What’s happened?’

  ‘Elena, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come. I wouldn’t have, but we… There wasn’t anywhere else to go, and I thought…’

  ‘What do you need?’ said Elena.

  ‘Transport,’ said Lom. ‘A cart or something like that.’

  ‘There’s someone else,’ said Maroussia. ‘We left him downstairs. He’s hurt. He’s been shot. It was just outside here, in the alleyway.’

  ‘Shot?’ said Elena. She looked hard at Lom. ‘Shot by who?’

  ‘The militia,’ said Maroussia. ‘They shot my mother and they’re trying to kill me. They’ll come here looking for us.’ She stopped. ‘Elena, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come. I’ve brought you trouble. I wasn’t thinking straight. We’ll go. They won’t ever know we were here.’

  She turned to go.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Elena. ‘We can use my cart. I can take you somewhere. I can take you home.’

  Maroussia shook her head.

  ‘I can’t go home. Not ever.’

  ‘Then come to my place,’ said Elena.

  ‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘No, I couldn’t. I can’t ask you that. I’m sorry I came.’

  ‘Just for now. Until you have a plan.’

  Maroussia shook her head.

  ‘Why not?’ said Elena. ‘Have you got anywhere else to go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then come with me.’ Elena Cornelius paused a beat, then she added, ‘Both of you. For now. We’ll work something out.’

  Lom studied Elena Cornelius. He liked her. She was sensible. Purposeful. Tough.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he said.

  ‘The Raion Lezaryet.’

  Lom let it happen. The next two minutes. The raion was as good a place as any. Better than most. Gendarmes didn’t patrol the raion.

  He nodded.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  Elena ignored him.

  ‘Where’s the one who’s hurt?’ she said.

  Maroussia told her.

  ‘This way,’ said Elena. ‘There’s a service elevator.’

  She took Maroussia by the hand. It was an instinctive, almost motherly gesture.

  When they reached the porters’ room the chair was on its side, the table and the floor smeared with blood. Florian was gone.

  ‘Somebody must have found him,’ said Maroussia quietly.

  ‘Or he got up and walked away,’ said Lom. ‘Either way, we need to get out of here. Now.’

  Elena Cornelius kept her cart in a place that was part warehouse, part garage, part stables: a cavernous shadowy space with a flagstone floor scattered with wisps of straw.

  ‘You ride up front,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk with the pony.’ She found a grey woollen blanket and insisted that Maroussia wrapped herself in it against the cold. It smelled of fresh-cut wood. ‘Sorry about the sawdust.’

  She pushed open the heavy sliding doors onto the street. Grey snow was shawling thickly out of a darkening sky. She took the pony’s halter and said a word in her ear. The cart lurched forward and they were out and moving. There was hardly any traffic. It was freezing cold. A bitter wind whipped snow into their faces.

  27

  Thousands of miles east of Mirgorod, beyond the continental plain, the endless forest begins. The forest that has no centre and no farther edge. The absolutely elsewhere, under an endless sky.

  There are pools in the forest: pools and lakes of still brown water; streams and slow rivers, surrounded on all sides by brown and grey columns that disappear upwards into shadow and leaf. Ivy and moss. Fern. Liverwort. Lichen. Mycelium. Thread. There are no landmarks, only the rising and falling of the ground, and trees becoming dark in the distance. Low cloud and morning mist: breaths of co
ol air moving, chill and earthy and damp. There is rustling and sudden small movement. There are broad hollow ways, paths and side paths, ways trodden clear. Large things walk there: boar and aurochs, wisent and wolf. Lynx and wolverine. Elk and sloth and woolly rhinoceros. War otter and cave bear. Dark leopard and fox.

  Somewhere in the forest it is winter. The long night settles; predators bury carrion in the snow; bear sows sleep with their cubs and the old fighting males wander in the dark. And somewhere in the forest it is spring, with the deep roaring of rutting deer, the air filled with the musk of females in season, and trees, trembling and flaring with blossom, pouring out scent and colour, ignited with life.

  The forest is larger than the world, though the world thinks the opposite. Going in is easy: it’s coming out that’s hard. Time stops in the forest. People walk into the forest and never come out. They feel lost. They drift. They walk round in circles. They stop wanting.

  The forest is the first place, original, primeval, primordial, primal. It is the inexhaustible beginning, direct, instinctual, unmediated, real. The land before the people came. This land. Old and bright and dark and full of dreams and nightmares. It is not an empty place. People live here, human and not so: free giants and tunnel dwellers; windwalkers, rusalkas, vyrdalaks, shapeshifters, hamrs, fetches, man-wolves; disembodied watchful intelligences, wild and cruel, that might be called witches and trolls. Many things are lost and buried in the forest: old things, perdurable, and new things, potential, unrealised yet, and waiting. All things are possible here, and here is everything. Growth and change. Here everything freely, abundantly begins, and becomes itself: the multiplicity, variousness, potential, myriadness, wanderability, wellspring and wilderness of forest. The trees are sensitive to light and earth. They taste and listen. Their roots go deep, and touch, and interweave. They spill pheromone language on the air. The trees are watchful. The rain, the air, the earth are watchful. The forest is borderless mind. It is aware.

  Across the forest Archangel grinds his way, immense and alien and poison.