had to pass to reach the moment on the other side of now. Behind him was the hunter. Ahead of him… calling him, wanting him as much as he wanted it… the safe hiding. The dark place. The mothering belly. The hole in the ground.
Lom hunched in the souterrain. He was sweating and shaking with cold. Thick darkness pressed against his eyes and seeped into his skin. He could smell his own blood, smeared on his hands and face; he could smell the damp earth and stone; and he could smell his own fear. Fear, and despair. Where was Maroussia? For the third time he did not know. For the third time he had left her to face her enemies alone. Vissarion Lom, protector of women. His own death would surely come and find him here. The mudjhik would sniff him out and dig. Drag him out and snap his neck. He had a little time to wait. But no hope. The souterrain was not a refuge but a trap. A dark hand reached inside his skull with stone fingers and squeezed his brain in its palm. Cruel and stupid and certain. I am coming. I will be with you soon. Again Lom felt the prickling clumsy numbness in his fingers and the gut-loosening dread. It will not be long.
He repelled the touch with all his force and slammed his mind shut against it. He had more strength than he had expected. This was something new. He felt a moment of surprise, his adversary’s mental stumble as he lost his footing, and then… silence. He was free of it.
Only when it was gone did Lom realise how long it had been there: the fear, the lack of confidence, the constant unsettling feeling of alarm and threat moving at the barest edge of his awareness. It had been with him ever since he’d woken in the giant’s isba, but it was gone at last. He’d driven it out. He was stronger than he thought. Stronger than his enemies knew.
Lom waited a moment, collecting his strength. He took stock. The hunters knew where he was, and he couldn’t keep the mind-wall in place for ever. But it was a chance. And Maroussia might be alive. She was alive. He was sure of it, though he couldn’t have said how he knew. Somehow he could feel her presence out there somewhere in the woods.
It was time to fight back.
When he was ready, Lom called back all the feelings of defencelessness and despair. He let himself be defeated, hopeless, hurt. Bleeding and weeping and broken in the dark.
It is finished. Over.
He let the one thought fill his mind.
I am finished. No more fighting. No more running. Everything hurts.
And deliberately he lowered his defences and let the mudjhik in. He felt its touch flow into his mind, and let it feel his defeat.
And then – when he had it, when he felt its triumph – Lom began to edge away within his mind.
Carefully, slowly, reluctantly, so it would feel to the mudjhik like energy and will draining away, he slipped beneath the surface of his own consciousness, retreating behind a second, inner, hidden wall he had built there. Barely thinking at all, moving by instinct only, he began to crawl away down the souterrain passage, further and deeper into the earth.
76
Maroussia watched the militia man step past Aino-Suvantamoinen’s body with relaxed, fastidious indifference. He was another uniform, another gun. After the mudjhik had lumbered off under the trees in pursuit of Lom, he had stepped out of cover. Coming for her.
He was casually confident now, the squat ugly weapon slung from his shoulder and held across his body, pointing to the ground. He stopped for a moment to look at the dead giant. A defeated humiliated hill of flesh. The carcase of an immense slaughtered cow. She could tell by the way the man held himself that he was pleased. Gratified by the demonstration of his own power. He was walking across to where she lay. Not hurrying. She was no threat to him. Simply a matter of tidiness. A job to finish neatly. An injured woman to kill, while the mudjhik hunted down the fleeing man. He was a man who had succeeded.
She saw him close up. He was bare-headed. She could see his pale, insipid face. Fine fair hair, close-cropped, boyish. A piece of angel stone in the centre of his head. Then it came to her. Like a blow to the head.