and far away, the yell of its anger. And feels its fear.
In his room on the Ring Wharf, Josef Kantor felt Archangel rip a hole in his mind and step inside. Archangel’s voice filled his head. The cold immensity separating stars. He fell.
THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY LIVE!
KILL THE TRAVELLERS! DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!
As soon as he was able to stand and wipe the spittle from his face and stem the blood that was spilling from his nose, Kantor went to find a telephone. He needed to speak to Chazia.
69
Night came, a thick and starless black. Inside the isba the smoke from the burning bog-oak in the stove and the fumes from the boiling-pot made Maroussia’s head swim. Afraid she would be sick, she tried to retreat into the shadows at the edge of the room and would have squatted there, watching, but the noises from outside drove her back. There were voices outside in the dark, voices that barked and growled and called like birds and argued in unintelligible words. The skin covering of the isba shook as if something was pounding on it and tugging at the door covering. She crawled back towards the centre of the room and crouched as near to the iron stove as she could get. Blue fire was burning hot and hard as a steam-engine’s firebox, roaring heat into the air.
‘Do not be alarmed by anything you see or hear,’ Aino-Suvantamoinen had said. ‘But do not touch me. And do not go outside.’
Yet now he lay on the floor, immense, like a felled bull. His arms and legs trembled as if he was having a fit: their shaking rattled and clattered the antlers, vertebrae, pieces of amber and holed stones tied to his coat. The hood of the coat hid his face, but she could still see his eyes. They were open, but showing white only, as sightless and chalky as seashells. He’d put a piece of leather between his teeth, and now his mouth dripped spittle as he chewed and ground on it with an unconscious concentration that seemed like blank rage.
Lom lay on his back in the centre of the floor.
‘No matter how bad it gets,’ the giant had said, ‘you can do nothing. Understand? Nothing. Whatever happens, do nothing. and do not touch me.’ Yet he had been like this – collapsed, growling, fitting – for… how long now? Half an hour? An hour?
The wall of the isba bulged inward, as if some heavy creature outside had thrown itself against it. There was a screech of anger. Surely whatever was outside would break in soon. The carvings on the central pillar flickered in the fierce firelight as if they were alive and moving.
Five minutes. Five more minutes, and if nothing has changed…
Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom is lying on his back in the sea, looking up into the night sky. He feels the gentle pull of the moons in his belly. All around him the sea glows with a gentle phosphorescence. A fringe of luminousness borders his body. Light trickles down his arms when he holds them in front of his face.
The hole in the front of his head is open to the starlight. A little cup of phosphorescence has gathered there. So much has flowed in, and so much flowed out, washing across the folds of his cerebral cortex. He is merging with the sea. His pulse is the endless passing of waves. His inward darkness is the darkness of the deep ocean.
Time is nothing here.
He hears the sound of splashing. Rhythmical. Sweep, sweep, through the waves. It is a sound he remembers, but he cannot place it now. The drift of water through the kelp forests below him is more interesting.
Idly, with the last remains of merely human curiosity, he turns to look. Something very large and human-shaped, an outline darker than the sky, a starless mass against the stars, is wading towards him. That is what the sound is. Legs. Wading through water. Did he not once do such a thing himself?
The wading person is growing larger and larger as he comes closer. He is watching. He has a purpose. His purpose is to bring Lom back.
But Lom doesn’t want to go back.
He gathers the weight of the sea and throws it against the giant in immense curling waves that crash against him. Lom fills the waves with the teeth and jaws of eels and the stings of rays. He tangles the giant’s feet