‘Something must come along, one way or the other.’
Lom turned the skiff and began to row against the stream.
The mudjhik understood what they were doing instantly. It stopped loping forward and began to jog up and down on the spot, stamping heavily. Then it bent forward and began to pummel the ground with its fists. For a moment Lom thought it was raging impotently, but it straightened up with a large chunk of stone in its hands and lobbed it towards them.
The first throw fell short. A boulder as large as a man’s torso whumped into the canal, jetting up a column of white water. Short, but close enough for them to feel the sting of the spray on their faces. The ripples reached the Sib and set her rocking. The next shot was closer. The mudjhik was finding its range.
‘Shit,’ said Lom and turned the boat again.
As soon as the boat started heading downstream, the mudjhik halted its bombardment and went back to pacing them along the embankment.
‘It’s herding us,’ said Lom. ‘It could sink us anytime, but it wants to get in close.’
I will not let you touch her. Weak as he was, he tried to force the thought towards the mudjhik, against the flow of its onslaught. I will bring you down.
They heard the sea gate before they saw it. The light was failing. Twilight brought sharp fresh squalls of sleet off the sea. There were gulls now, wheeling inland to roost. The Ship Canal swung round the shoulder of a small hill and narrowed, channelling the flow of the Mir in flood into a bottleneck of concrete, and ahead of them rose the great barrier. On one side, the left as they approached it, were the lock gates themselves, three ship-breadths wide, and to the right a roar of gushing water hidden in a cloud of spray. The grand new hydroelectric turbine, turning the pressure of water into power to light the streets of Mirgorod.
The immense lock gates were shut against them. They could make out the silhouette of the Gate Master’s hut at the far end, between the lock and the turbine, but no light showed there. Of course not. Night was falling. No shipping traffic would come now. None, probably, till the spring. They were alone except for the mudjhik, standing in plain sight next to the massive stubby gate tower, waiting for them.
Lom fought the surging water with the oars, but there was nowhere to go. The skiff would either be brought up hard against the bottom of the gate or carried into the turbine’s throat.
‘A ladder!’ Maroussia shouted above the noise of the water. ‘Over there.’
Lom could just make out in the gathering gloom a contraption of steel to the right of the turbine, away from the mudjhik, designed to give access to the weir at water level. All he had to do was take the Sib across the current without getting dragged into the churning turbine mouth.
He could see nothing of what happened under the curtain of spray. There would be a grating, probably, to sift detritus from the canal. Maybe that’s what the ladder was for. To clear it. But even if there was a grating, the boat would surely be smashed against it. The whole weight of the river was passing through there: the force would be tremendous; nobody who went into that churning water would come out again.
He let the current carry them forward and tried to use the oars to steer a slanting course across it, aiming for a point on the embankment just upstream from the bottom of the ladder. His arms ached. His head was pounding. There would be no second chance. The mudjhik was attacking his mind hard, not constantly but with randomly timed pulses of pressure, trying to knock him off balance.
The skiff crashed against the wall, caught her bow on a jut of stone and spun stern-first away from the embankment towards the deafening roar and dark, blinding spray. Lom dug in with the left-hand oar, almost vertically down into the water, and turned the skiff again. She crashed against the foot of the ladder and Maroussia grabbed it. The boat kept moving. Lom crouched and leapt for the ladder. The impact jarred his side numb, but he managed to hook one arm awkwardly round a steel strut. He had slung the Exter-Vulikh across his back by its webbing strap and the Sepora was in his pocket. The Sib continued sliding away