Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  Above the massacre the sky tipped crazily. Out of the low leaden cloud another sky was breaking through, bruised and purple. An orange sun was tumbling across it like a severed head, its radiance burning in the cloud canyons. Behind the muted grey and yellow facades of the familiar buildings in the square there was another city now. High, featureless buildings rising against the livid sky. One immense white column of a building dwarfed all the other blocks and towers. Ten times taller than the tallest of them, fifty times taller than the real skyline of Mirgorod, it climbed upwards, tier upon tier, half a mile high, its lower flanks strengthened by fluted buttresses that were themselves many-windowed buildings. The top quarter of it was not a building at all, but an enormous stone statue of a man five hundred feet tall. He was standing, his left foot forward towards the city, his right arm raised and outstretched to greet and possess. He was bare-headed, and his long coat lifted slightly in the suggestion of wind. Although the statue was at least a mile away across the city, Lom could make out every detail of the man’s lean, pockmarked face. His eyes were fixed on the visionary distance yet saw every detail of the millions of insect-small lives unfolding beneath his feet. He would be visible from every street in Mirgorod. He would rise out of the horizon to lead incoming ships. He was uncle, father, god. The city, the future, was his.

  The statue was the man he had seen weaving his way through the demonstration that morning. The man whose more youthful face gazed confidently into the camera in the photograph in Krogh’s file. Josef Kantor.

  Tucked in its pocket of no-time and no-space, the Pollandore feels the nearness of the deaths in the Square of the Piteous Angel. Feels the footfall of mudjhiks, the spillage of blood. The panic.

  To the Pollandore it is a hardening, a sclerosis… and a loosening of grip. Something slipping away. Its surface growing milky and opaque. The silence that surrounds it darkening into distance.

  From its well of silence the Pollandore reaches out.

  Lom stood for a long time at the window, staring at the immense white statue of Kantor half a mile above the blocky, featureless city. What he was seeing, he knew, wasn’t there. Not yet. It was a city that wasn’t there, but could be. Would be. He could feel it taking shape and solidifying. He was seeing for himself one of the glimpses that Maroussia and Vishnik had talked about last night. A scene from one of Vishnik’s photographs. But this was different: Vishnik’s was a city of soft possibilities, sudden moments of opening into inwardness and truth; this city was hard and cruel and silent. Closed up. Uniform. A city of triumphal fear. The city of the whisperers and dominion of Kantor, imperial and immense. Mirgorod was a battleground, a contention zone: two future cities both trying to become. The hard city was winning.

  And which side was he on?

  But that wasn’t question, not yet. The question was, what were the sides? Kantor was an enemy of the Vlast, yet his statue presided over the dragoons at their murderous business in the Square of the Piteous Angel. Vishnik and Maroussia were feeling their way towards the softer city under the iron and stone of Mirgorod, and went in fear of the Vlast’s police. Fear of him. The feel of his uniform against his skin disgusted him. What kind of policeman was he? He pushed the question aside. Of one thing he was sure. Kantor had to be stopped, and that was his job. Lom turned away from the window. He had made a decision. He had something to do.

  When he came back down the stairs from the gallery window, the great reading room was almost empty. Only a few had stayed at their desks, head in hands, or staring into space, or pretending to work, trying to ignore the sounds of killing. Shutting it out. None of them was going to take any notice of him.

  Instead of turning left at the bottom of the staircase and going back to his own desk, Lom went right, following the perimeter of the reading room until he reached a door of varnished wood. It was inset at face height with small square windows of rippled glass.

  CLOSED ARCHIVE! AUTHORISED ACCESS ONLY!

  He pushed through the door and let it close quietly behind him. His hands were sweating.

  The corridor beyond was empty. Lit with dim electric bulbs in globes suspended from the high ceiling, it was lined with more doors, each with a small square of card in a brass holder with a hand-written number. Occasionally a name. Lom went slowly down the corridor reading them. It took for ever.

  CMDR L Y CHAZIA.

  Lom gripped the brass doorknob, turned and pushed. It was locked. He shoved, but it didn’t shift. He thought of trying to kick it down, but the door was solid and heavy. The noise would bring someone. In his pocket he had a bunch of thin metal slivers. His hands were clumsy, slick with sweat. It took him three, four attempts to pick out the right tool. He had to bend down and put his ear close to the door so he could hear what he was doing above the sound of blood in his own ears.

  At last the tumblers slipped into place.

  He closed the door before he flicked the light switch. Illumination flared dimly. Green-painted walls, an empty desk, rows of steel-framed racks holding files and boxes of papers. Lom forced himself to move slowly down the aisles between the racks, reading the file cards. It wasn’t hard to find what he was looking for. Chazia had been methodical. The lavender folder for Josef Kantor was in its place on the K shelf. It was fat and full. He took it and pushed it inside his tunic.

  As he was leaving, something made him turn back and go round to the L shelf. It was there. A much slimmer folder, pale pink. LOM, VISSARION Y, INVESTIGATOR OF POLICE. He stuffed it inside his tunic next to Kantor’s.

  He was halfway across the still-deserted floor of the reading room, almost at the exit, before he realised he hadn’t switched off the light inside the room. An archivist was watching him curiously. No way to go back.

  Lom stepped out into the square. The snow had stopped falling, leaving the air damp with impending rain. The smell of burned cordite and the dead.

  People were moving across the square, alone or in small groups, pausing to look at each body, searching for a familiar face, hoping not to find it. Their feet splashed and slipped across cobbles wet with slush and blood. The dragoons had gone, and the militia, uncertain what to do, were ignoring the searchers. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The grey whisperers were there still. Walking by on their own withdrawn, secretive purposes.

  But a couple of blocks away everything was normal. People pursued their business. Trams came and went. Lom boarded one, taking the Vandayanka route, heading for Pelican Quay. When he got there, he stopped at a chandlery to buy a small rubberised canvas sack with a waterproof closure. Then he wandered over to a bench and sat watching the boats at their moorings, idly kicking at the pavement. When he’d managed to loosen a cobble stone, he bent down casually to prise it out of the ground. And slipped it into his pocket.

  28

  Half the city away, in a room in the House on the Purfas, the paluba sat at the end of the table under the gaze of the Inner Committee of the Secret Government of Lezarye in Exile Within. The windwalker stood behind her, filling the air with woodland scents, ozone and leaf mould and cold forest air.

  The five men of the Committee were drinking clear amber tea from glasses in delicate tin holders, waiting for her to begin. They waited patiently, taking the long view, as their fathers had, and their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Their room, their rules. They were the ones who carried the weight of the past. Theirs, the great duty to keep the traditions. One day they would overturn the Vlast and bring back the good ways. The rebellions of Lezarye, the Birzel among them, were theirs. They worked and thought in centuries, but their day would come, and they would be ready.

  ‘Madam,’ said the man at the far end of the table. Elderly, white hair clipped short and thick, a gold pin in the lapel of his thick dark suit. ‘Please. It’s been many years since we were honoured by an emissary from the forest. We are anxious to hear your news.’

  ‘Stasis,’ said the paluba. ‘Balance. Archipelago. Continent. Forest.’

  Her voice was quiet, leaves st
irring in the wind. The men leaned forward slightly to catch her words.

  ‘For centuries,’ she continued, ‘balance has prevailed.’

  White hair nodded. ‘This Novozhd is weak,’ he said. ‘His position is attacked from without and from within. He is losing his war with the Archipelago. Our moment is coming.’

  She knew he was a liar. Stasis is good, that was what he meant. Balance is satisfactory.

  The paluba rested her hand of twigs and earth and wax on the table. It settled like a moth on the pale surface of polished ash and drew their eyes.

  Take it away, she felt these men thinking. This is a foul and horrible thing. Get it off our table.

  Pay attention to me! That was what she wanted the hand to say. I am the Other, the Unlike You. But I am here. Listen to me. Your world is not what you think.

  ‘Everything is different now,’ she said aloud, looking around the table and fixing each man in turn with the sockets where her eyes would have been. ‘Your stasis is broken. An angel has fallen in the forest, and lives. It is alive.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘It is injured. It cannot move, though it struggles to free itself and may yet succeed. It is the strongest there has ever been. By far.’

  ‘There hasn’t been an angelfall for eighty years,’ said the man on White Hair’s right. ‘And none has ever survived the impact. The war in heaven is over. Even some in the Vlast’s own council say so.’

  ‘Wait, Efim,’ said White Hair. ‘Let her speak.’

  ‘The angel’s power flows from it into the rock that holds it. It is killing the forest. The greater trees are failing.’

  ‘Even if this is true—’ said Efim.

  The paluba ignored him. ‘But the angel is frightened,’ she said. ‘It feels itself weakening. Failing. It has been looking for a way to defend itself. Or escape.’

  ‘Peder! Surely we’re not going to listen to this?’

  ‘And now the angel has found a way,’ said the paluba. ‘It is building an alliance. Here in Mirgorod.’

  Another man leaned over to speak in White Hair’s ear. ‘Can’t we get rid of these awful creatures? The smell…’

  The paluba could hear the whisper of a moth’s wing.

  ‘Efim’s right,’ said a small man in a waistcoat. ‘We don’t have time for this. Tomorrow we’ll have thirty million in our hands.’

  ‘I’ve already said we shouldn’t touch that money,’ said another, a soft, round, moon-faced man in spectacles. ‘Kantor’s Fighting Organisation is too vicious, too wild. Our reputation suffers by association.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ said the man in the waistcoat. ‘This is war! We can’t afford to be fastidious. While we do nothing our people are dying. Pogroms are growing worse. Show trials. Executions. Whole streets are being cleansed while we sit here and talk and do nothing.’

  They were voices, just voices, so many useless, chattering, indistinguishable, male, redundant, broken voices. The paluba hardly troubled to hear them. She already knew that she had failed here. She had known it when she saw the little glass of amber tea and smelled the fear in the room. Nonetheless, she must not give up. Everything must be attempted.

  ‘There is no time!’ said the paluba. ‘None at all. We can stop what is coming. But we must move now. Now! The alliance of Lezarye and the forest—’

  ‘And what are we to do, exactly?’ said Efim. ‘Send in the Fighting Organisation? Could they blow this angel up with their grenades?’

  ‘The answer lies in the Pollandore.’

  Efim stood up. ‘I’ve had enough of these fairy tales. And of these disgusting… things. Call me when this rubbish is over.’

  The paluba felt the finality of the room turning against her.

  ‘The Pollandore is stirring,’ she said. ‘It is beginning to have effects. It is beginning to spill, perhaps even to break apart. Even in the forest we have felt it.’

  ‘The Pollandore is nothing. More stories. More nonsense.’

  ‘The time has come.’ The paluba was whisper-roaring at them. ‘Open the Pollandore. This is the message from the forest. The time is now. You have to open it.’

  ‘What you ask is impossible. Even if we knew how to open it — whatever it is.’

  ‘Even if it existed, even if this wasn’t all absolute rubbish…’

  ‘I bring you the key,’ said the paluba. ‘I offer it to you now. This is my message to you, the gift I bring you from the one who sleeps.’

  ‘The Pollandore is in the keeping of the Vlast,’ said Peder. ‘Unless they have already destroyed it. I’m sorry, madam. We cannot help you in this. Not at all.’

  She had failed. She had known it as soon as she came in, and it had proved to be so. But there was another way. The Shaumian women. She had hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. It was not… reliable. That had been shown already, many times. But she would have to try. If there was time.

  29

  When Lom got back to the apartment, Vishnik was out. Lom turned on the lamp, poured a glass of aquavit and opened the dossier on Kantor. The early stuff was standard: student records, informants’ reports of domestic life, associates and contacts. There was an extracted account of the Birzel Rebellion court proceedings and the Executive Order of Internal Exile. Notes on the subject’s conduct in the camps. Something about a wife. She had followed him to the camp, but once there she had become pregnant by another man, abandoned Kantor and come back to the city.

  Lom read the whole file through from cover to cover, but the papers only filled out what Krogh had told him without adding much, until he got to the end. In a separate pouch at the back, attached with a string tag, were some loose pages with manuscript notes on them in a tight, spidery hand. Some of the notes were initialled. LYC.

  Lavrentina Chazia.

  Lom sat up and began to read more carefully. This was something else. There was an account of Kantor’s repeated escape attempts. Violent attacks on other inmates. He had crushed an informant’s hand in a vice. ‘A resourceful man,’ Chazia had scribbled across it. ‘He dominates the camp. The guards fear him. Commandant reluctant to discuss the case.’

  On another page, in a different ink, were the words ‘Spoke to Kantor today. He has agreed.’ Attached to the same report with a paper clip was a single sheet of lined paper torn from a bound notebook. It was covered in Chazia’s scrawl, apparently written in haste, in pencil, and in parts illegible. It took him a long time to puzzle out the words, and some whole passages defeated him. ‘It spoke to me at Vig! It is an angel, a living angel! There can be no doubt of it. We are acknowledged, we are acceptable. The power of it! The power is…’ The next few lines were not readable. ‘…hands trembling. I can’t hold it all…’ Illegible. ‘…write before it fades. Not words — ideas, impressions, understandings — roaring floods of light. Much lost…’ Illegible. ‘…magnificent. This is the day! The new Vlast begins here. It speaks to Kantor also. It does.’

  There were a few more notes in Chazia’s scrawl. They seemed to record further meetings with Kantor, but they were undated. Only a few unconnected words and figures. Lom could make nothing of them. Chazia had written across the bottom of one, ‘It speaks to him. Always to him. Never to me.’

  30

  There was a way to enter the Lodka revealed only to the most secret and trusted servants of the Vlast. It was a small shop, occupying the ground floor of a grimy brick house. The shop window, glazed with small square panes of dirty glass and lit by dim electric bulbs, displayed photographs of naked dancing girls. Books in plain yellow covers. Packets in flimsy paper wrappers marked with prices in spidery brown manuscript. The dried-out carcases of flies and moths.

  The proprietor was a fat bearded man in gloves and striped shirtsleeves, known only as Clover. If you spoke certain words to this Clover, he would nod, lift the partition in the counter and show you through a dusty glass door into the back parlour. From there you went through a curtained back exit, across an interior courtyard and down a narrow stair
way into a mazy network of tunnels and cellars. It was easy to lose yourself in that subterranean labyrinth, but Josef Kantor knew the way well.

  It was an unpleasant route. Kantor disliked it and used it as rarely as he could. The way was damp and dark, and stank of stale river-water. The tunnels and passageways were faced sometimes with stone, more often with rotten planks, and always with slime and streaks of mud. The floor was treacherous with dirty puddles and scattered rubbish. These underground passageways extended under much of inner Mirgorod. They were remnants of the original building work, if not — as some said — remains of some much more ancient settlement that predated the coming of the Founder. Kantor tended to believe the latter. Sometimes he heard things — the shuffle of slow footsteps, mutterings and echoes of shouting — and saw the trails of heavy objects dragged through the mud. Not all the original inhabitants of the marshlands had been driven away by the coming of the city, and some that had left had returned. He wasn’t nervous, threading his way through the maze, but he found it… distasteful.

  He came eventually to a locked metal gate that barred the way. He had a key, and let himself through onto an enclosed walkway slung beneath one of the bridges that crossed to the Lodka. Out of sight of the embankment and the windows of the building, it led into the upper basements of the vast stone building. Once inside, Kantor traced a circuitous route that led him gradually upwards, through unused corridors and by way of service elevators and blank stairwells, to the office of Lavrentina Chazia.