slid away, vertiginously. The blackness and ripple of the water detached itself from the river and slipped upwards, filling the air, and everything changed. The night was thick with leaking possibilities. Soft evaporations. Fragments and intimations of other possible lives, drifting off the river and across the dirty pavements. Hopes, like moon-ghosts, leaking out of the streets.
The barges, swollen and heavy-perfumed, dipped their sterns and raised their bows, opening their mouths as if to speak, exhaling shining yellow. The porpoises threw their mist-swollen, corn-gold lamp-globes against the sky. The cobbles of the wharf opened their petals like peals of blue thunder. The stars were large and luminous night-blue fruit. And the gendarme in his kiosk was ten feet tall, spilling streams of perfume and darkshine from his face and skin and hair.
Everything dark shone with its own quiet radiance and nothing was anything except what it was. Maroussia felt the living profusion of it all, woven into bright constellations of awareness, spreading out across the city. She looked at her own hands. They were made of dark wet leaves. And then the clouds closed over the stars and it started to rain in big slow single drops, and Mirgorod settled in about her again, as it always did.
12
It was late when Lom got out of Krogh’s office. The streets about the Lodka were deserted. Shuttered and lightless offices. The wind threw pellets of rain in his face. Water spurted from downpipes and spouts and overflowing gutters, splashing on the pavements. Occasionally a private kareta passed him, windows up, blinds drawn.
In his valise he had a folder of newspaper clippings – accounts of attacks and atrocities attributed to Kantor and his people, Krogh had said – and one photograph, old and poorly developed, of Kantor himself, taken almost twenty years ago, at the time of his transfer to Vig. And he had a mission. A real job to do. At last. Mirgorod spread out around him, rumbling quietly in the dark of rain and night. A million people, and somewhere among them Josef Kantor. And behind him, shadow people. Poison in the system. The ache in his head had gone, but it had left him hungry. He needed something to eat. He needed a place to stay. He needed a way in. A starting point. He wished he’d asked Krogh about money.
In his pocket he had Raku Vishnik’s address: an apartment somewhere on Big Side. He had a vague idea of where it was, somewhere to the north, beyond the curve of the River Mir. Not more than a couple of miles. He had no money for a hotel, and he didn’t want to pay for a droshki ride, even if he could find one. He would go to Raku. Assuming he was still there. Lom buttoned his cloak to the neck and started to walk. A fresh deluge dashed against his face and trickled down his neck. A long black ZorKi Zavod armoured sedan purred past him, chauffeur-driven, darkened black windows, the rain glittering in its headlamp beams. White-walled tyres splashing through pools in the road. Lom hunched his shoulders and kept moving.
The hypnotic rhythm of walking. The sound of water against stone. As he walked, Lom thought about the city. Mirgorod. He’d never seen it before, but all his life he had lived with the idea of it. The great capital, the Founder’s city, the heart of the Vlast. Even as a child, long before the idea of joining the police had taken shape, the dream of Mirgorod had taken root in his imagination. He remembered the moment. Memories rose out of the wet streets. He was back in Podchornok, at the Institute of Truth. Seven years old. Eight. It was another day of rain, but he was in the library, looking out. He liked the library: there were deep, tall windows, their sills wide enough to climb up onto and crouch there. Although it was grey daylight, he pulled the curtain shut and he was alone: on one side the heavy curtain, and on the other the windowpane, rain splattering against it and running in little floods down the outside of the glass. Beyond the window, the edge of the wood – not the forest, just an ordinary wood, rain-darkened, leafless under a low grey sky. And him, reading by rainlight.
He even remembered the book he had been reading. The Life of our Founder: A Version for Children. The chapter on the founding of Mirgorod. There was an