looked up from their work. Lom searched for the cause of the commotion.
‘They’re charging!’ the voice called again. And then Lom saw where it was coming from: somebody was leaning over the balustrade of the upper gallery, where the high arched windows were. He was waving frantically. ‘The dragoons are charging!’ he was shouting. ‘They’re going to kill them all!’
Lom ran up the gallery stairs. The upper windows of the Archive, under the dome, were crowded with people watching the demonstration. He squeezed in among them and looked out across the rooftops, through grey air filled with scrappy lumps of snow.
A line of dragoons was moving out across the square, the mudjhiks loping forward, drawing ahead of the riders. Some of the demonstrators broke away from the crowd and started to run for the side streets but stopped in confusion, seeing more troops emerging from there. The dragoons had them bottled up tight. A strange collective tremor passed through the demonstrators as the horsemen picked up speed and raised their blades and whips. Then the heads of riders and horses were moving among the crowd, arms high and slashing downwards. The mudjhiks, moving with surprising speed, waded into the thick of it, striking with their fists and stamping on the fallen.
The dragoons withdrew, circled around and attacked again. And again. Lom saw a group of men grab hold of one of the riders and pull him down until his horse was forced to stumble. Once they had him on the ground, they kicked him and stamped on him and hacked at him with his own sword.
And something else was happening, though nobody but Lom seemed to see it. There were too many people in the square. Among the demonstrators and the dragoons, Lom could see others walking there: a sifting crowd, soft-edged, translucent, tired and unaware of the killing all around them. They were not old, but their hair was already turning grey. Their shoulders were frail, their faces drawn unnaturally thin and their skin was as dry and lifeless as newsprint. If they spoke at all, they spoke only when necessary; their voices had no strength, and didn’t carry more than a few paces. Whisperers. The dragoons rode through them as if they weren’t there at all. Because they weren’t.
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