They left him alone in the interrogation room, still tied to the chair. After an unmeasurable amount of time it seemed that other men came and released him. He might have been sick. One of the men might have been Safran. He might have imagined that.
They were leading him along corridors. He could see from one eye: linoleum, worn carpet, flagstones, his own feet. It didn’t matter.
A shock of cold and space and early morning light. The smell of water. A bridge. They were crossing a bridge.
He jerked himself out of the grip of the men, who were holding him loosely by the arms, and lurched away from them towards the bridge’s low parapet.
For a moment, a half-second, no more, he looked down at the dark, swollen current. He wanted the water to wash the blood and mess and memory away. A clean, cold, private death. He tipped himself over the edge.
The water reached up to take him as he fell.
The moment between tipping over the parapet and hitting the water seemed to go on for ever. Lom hung head downwards in air. The surface of the river rose slowly to meet him, freighted with the debris of the flooded city. The water had a particular smell: dark, cold, earthy, cleansing.
He crashed into green darkness and the noise churned in his ears. The shock of the cold seized his lungs in ice fists and squeezed. Bands of freezing iron tightened around his head and his chest.
He tried to scrabble his way to the surface of the river, not knowing the direction where the surface was. His clothes, water-heavy, wrapped round his body. The weight of his boots pulled at his legs, slowing their struggle to a nightmare of running. His mouth fell open in a silent O.
And yet he was happy.
After the first rush of panic, he felt his pulse-rate slowing. The icy river reached inside his ribs with cool gentle fingers and cupped his heart kindly. Calmness returned. This was now, and he was alive, and the river was his friend.
He let the dark and freezing absolution of the Mir wash away the stink and shame and failure of the interrogation room. The river let him understand.
There is no blame. There is no judge but you. Forgive yourself.
He had been… violated… by alien, brutal intruding fingers. The fat, poking stubs of Kantor, Chazia’s in her foul dead-angel glove. He had given up nothing. It had been ripped out and taken, that was all. And that was not the same.
The waters cleansed the hole in the centre of his forehead where the piece of angel stone had been ripped away and the river now entered. He felt the cool currents of its touch directly against the naked cortex of his brain, bursting long-dead synapses into light and life. Unplugged at last, for the first time since childhood, Vissarion Lom perceived the world as it was, fresh and new and timeless, flooded with truth. He smelled the light and tasted the space between things.
The Mir was filled with watchful awareness and intelligence. Lom opened wide his arms and felt himself rising. He broke the surface into early morning air. His cloak unfolded and spread itself around him like a huge black lily pad, rotating slowly in the current. His face, upturned in the cloak’s dark centre, was the lily’s pale flower, opening to the grey light. Breathing.
The river was in full spate. As he turned slowly, tilted upwards, he saw the wharves and quays and rooftops of Mirgorod passing against the cloud-grey sky. Nearer to his face, pieces of wood and broken things came with him. He was the flagship of a debris flotilla, being carried towards the edge of the city and beyond it the sea, on the surge of the withdrawing flood.
Waves splashed against his face and trickled into the open hole in his forehead.
The sentient water had a voice that was speaking to him. It told him that the city was an alien tumorous growth, formed around the plug with which the Founder had tried to stop the river’s mouth. Yet there had been a time before the city, and there could be such a time again: when it was gone, when trees grew up between the buildings, and moss and black soil breathed the air again.
The kindly waters of the Mir brushed against his skull and reached inside to calm his heart and whisper reassurance. The voice was telling him