so the Fransa free cities, which belonged neither to the Archipelago nor to the Vlast, existed. Sealed off from the dominions by guarded perimeters. Everyone was stateless there, everyone was free, money and information the only power. Spies and criminals and refugees of every kind gravitated to such places – if they could get in, through the wire or over the walls. Exiled intellectuals gathered there to plot and feud, and she had heard of other, stranger figures, not human, forced out of the ghettos, margins and northern wildernesses of the Vlast, who found places to live in the older, darker corners of the Fransa exclaves. Ones who might understand about the Pollandore and help her.
The nearest Fransa port to Mirgorod was Koromants. Maroussia had seen a photograph once of the seafront there: a wide boulevard of coffee shops and konditorei looking out over clear dark waters, and behind it, rising against the sky, the sheer jagged mountains of the Koromants Massif. There, she had decided, that was where she would go, when the time came. Though how she would get there she didn’t know.
Maroussia decided not to take her identity card. It would be no help where she was going. She placed it carefully on the table in clear view, for the police to find when they came. It was time. She had delayed too long.
She turned towards the doorway and saw the figure of madness and death standing there, regarding her with shadowed fathomless eyes.
‘Maroussia?’ it said. ‘Maroussia. Are you ready?’
The paluba’s voice was thin and quiet in the room, a breeze among distant trees. The air was filled with the scent of pine resin and damp earth. Flimsy brown garments shifted about the creature, stirring on a gentle wind. There was a mouth-shape in the hooded shadows that moved as it spoke.
The creature stepped forward across the threshold. Only it wasn’t a step. The thing seemed to fall slowly forward and jerk itself backwards and upright at the tipping point. It appeared flimsy, held together by fragile joints. Its limbs were articulated strangely. Behind the creature another one came, its follower, its companion double, more shadowy, more shapeless, more airy, more… nothing. Just a shadow, waiting.
‘What are you?’ said Maroussia, at the ragged edge of panic. And hope.
‘I can smell wounds here,’ the paluba said. ‘You’re bleeding. You’ve been hurt.’
‘Who are you?’ said Maroussia again. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘You don’t have to be frightened,’ the voice said. ‘I am your friend. Your mother’s friend. But your mother wouldn’t listen to me. Did she tell you nothing?’
‘She’s gone now. She’s dead. The police killed her.’
‘Oh.’ There was a moment’s stillness in the shadow where the paluba’s face was suggested. Maroussia thought she could hear grieving in its voice. ‘She took what we left for her. Did she give it to you?’
‘No. She gave me nothing.’
‘It was an invitation. A key. Your father sent it.’
‘I never had a father.’
‘Of course you did. Everyone does.’
‘My father was a lie. I come from nothing.’
‘Did she tell you that? Poor darling, it wasn’t so. Do you want to know?’
‘Know what?
‘Everything.’
‘Yes.’
The paluba reached up and pushed back her thin hood, showing her beautiful, terrible face. Her waiting mouth
‘Kiss me, Maroussia.’
‘What?’
‘Kiss me.’ In the shadow the companion stirred. ‘Kiss me.’
Maroussia stepped forward and rested her hand on the paluba’s slender shoulders. Sweet air was drifting out of its upturned mouth. It tasted of autumn. Maroussia put her own dry mouth against it, slightly open, and drank.
In the paluba’s kiss there were trees, beautiful complex trees, higher and older than any trees grew, and everything was connected.
Maroussia was walking among them. She placed her hand on the silent living bark and felt her skin, her very flesh, become transparent. She became aware of the articulation of her bones, sheathed in their muscle and tendon. Eyes, heart and lungs, liver and brain, nested like birds in a walking tree of bone. A weave of veins and arteries and streaming nerves that flickered with gentle electricity.
She heard the leaves and branches of the trees moving. Whispers filling the air with rich smells. The trees reached their roots down into the earth like arms, and she reached down with them, extending filament fingers, pushing, sliding insistently, down through crevices in the rock itself.
And breaking through.
The buried chamber of the wild sleeping god was furled up tight but immense beyond measuring. The restless sleeping god, burdened with tumultuous dreams, had extended himself outwards and inwards and downwards,