Kantor tried to speak but the muscles of his face were stuck and his throat was blocked with the inert flesh of his tongue. He tried to drive out the thing that had torn open his mind and come inside. It was like trying to push his face through raw and solid rock.
There must be fear. There must be war. There must be death. Everything is weak. Everything will shake. I will put this world in your hands. And others. Many many others. And you will do one thing for me. One small thing.
Destroy the Pollandore.
8
The platforms of the Wieland Station, enclosed under a wide, arching canopy of girders and glass, roared. Shrill whistles, shouts, venting steam, the clank of shunting iron. The smell of hot oil, hot metal, stale air, dust. The roof glass, smeared with sooty rain, cast a dull grey light. Train lamps burned yellow. Raucous announcements of arrivals and departures punctuated the ‘Tarsis Overture’ on the tannoy.
Lom collected his valise from the luggage car himself. It was heavy and awkward, a hefty oblong box of brown leather, three brass-buckled belts and a brass clasp. He’d dressed for the cold, his cap pulled down tight down over his forehead, but the station was hot and close. By the time he’d hauled his baggage down the wide, shallow marble staircase into the concourse, he was hot with sweat and the din was ringing in his ears.
He let the crowds part around him. Guards and porters shouted destinations. Droshki and kareta drivers called for business. A giant lumbered past, hauling a trolley. Everyone was in uniform, not just the railway workers, drivers, policemen and militia, but students and doorkeepers and concierges and clerks, wet nurses and governesses, messengers and mail carriers. The only ones not in uniform were the wealthy travelling families, the labourers in their greasy jackets and the civil servants in their dark woollen coats. Lom scanned the passing faces for Raku Vishnik. There was no sign of him. Maybe the telegram hadn’t reached him. Maybe, after fourteen – no, fifteen – years, Vishnik had read it and thrown it away.
‘Clear the way there!’
Lom stepped aside. A ragged column of soldiers was shuffling through the central hall and up the shallow stairs to the platforms. The smell of the front came with them: they stank of herring, tobacco, wet earth, mildew, lice and rust. The wounded came at the rear. The broken-faced, they were called. It was a literal term. Men with pieces of their heads missing. One had lost a chunk out of the side of his skull, taking the ear with it. Another had no jaw: nothing but a raw mess between his upper teeth and his neck.
At the end of the column two privates were struggling to support a third, walking between them, or not walking but continually falling forward. Trembling violently from head to foot, as if he was doing some kind of mad dance, as if his clothes were infested with foul biting bugs. He had a gentle face, bookish, the face of a librarian or a schoolteacher. Apart from his eyes. He was staring at something. Staring backwards in time to a fixed, permanent event, an endless loop of repetition beyond which he could neither see nor move.
Lom felt his stomach tighten. The war was far away. You tried not to think about it.
The veterans went on and up, absorbed back into the crowd. Lom looked at his watch. It had stopped. He’d forgotten to wind it on the train. The station clock stood on a pillar in the centre of the concourse, its minute hand five feet long and creeping with perceptible jolts around its huge yellowed face. Ten past six. He was late for Krogh.
9
It took him an hour to get across the city to the Lodka. When he got there, he leaned on the balustrade of the Yekaterinsky Bridge, looking up at it. The momentous building, a great dark slab, rose and bellied outwards like the prow of a vast stationary ship against the dark purple sky, the swollen, luminous stars, the windblown accumulating rags of cloud. Rain was in the air. Nightfall smelled of the city and sea, obscuring colour and detail, simplifying form. Lom felt the presence of the angel stone embedded in the walls. It called to the seal in his head, and the seal stirred in response.
The Lodka stood on an island, the Yekatarina Canal passing along one side, the Mir on the