feet splashed and slipped across cobbles wet with slush and blood. The dragoons had gone, and the militia, uncertain what to do, were ignoring the searchers. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The grey whisperers were there still. Walking by on their own withdrawn, secretive purposes.
But a couple of blocks away everything was normal. People pursued their business. Trams came and went. Lom boarded one, taking the Vandayanka route, heading for Pelican Quay. When he got there, he stopped at a chandlery to buy a small rubberised canvas sack with a waterproof closure. Then he wandered over to a bench and sat watching the boats at their moorings, idly kicking at the pavement. When he’d managed to loosen a cobble stone, he bent down casually to prise it out of the ground. And slipped it into his pocket.
28
Half the city away, in a room in the House on the Purfas, the paluba sat at the end of the table under the gaze of the Inner Committee of the Secret Government of Lezarye in Exile Within. The windwalker stood behind her, filling the air with woodland scents, ozone and leaf mould and cold forest air.
The five men of the Committee were drinking clear amber tea from glasses in delicate tin holders, waiting for her to begin. They waited patiently, taking the long view, as their fathers had, and their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Their room, their rules. They were the ones who carried the weight of the past. Theirs, the great duty to keep the traditions. One day they would overturn the Vlast and bring back the good ways. The rebellions of Lezarye, the Birzel among them, were theirs. They worked and thought in centuries, but their day would come, and they would be ready.
‘Madam,’ said the man at the far end of the table. Elderly, white hair clipped short and thick, a gold pin in the lapel of his thick dark suit. ‘Please. It’s been many years since we were honoured by an emissary from the forest. We are anxious to hear your news.’
‘Stasis,’ said the paluba. ‘Balance. Archipelago. Continent. Forest.’
Her voice was quiet, leaves stirring in the wind. The men leaned forward slightly to catch her words.
‘For centuries,’ she continued, ‘balance has prevailed.’
White hair nodded. ‘This Novozhd is weak,’ he said. ‘His position is attacked from without and from within. He is losing his war with the Archipelago. Our moment is coming.’
She knew he was a liar. Stasis is good, that was what he meant. Balance is satisfactory.
The paluba rested her hand of twigs and earth and wax on the table. It settled like a moth on the pale surface of polished ash and drew their eyes.
Take it away, she felt these men thinking. This is a foul and horrible thing. Get it off our table.
Pay attention to me! That was what she wanted the hand to say. I am the Other, the Unlike You. But I am here. Listen to me. Your world is not what you think.
‘Everything is different now,’ she said aloud, looking around the table and fixing each man in turn with the sockets where her eyes would have been. ‘Your stasis is broken. An angel has fallen in the forest, and lives. It is alive.’
‘Impossible.’
‘It is injured. It cannot move, though it struggles to free itself and may yet succeed. It is the strongest there has ever been. By far.’
‘There hasn’t been an angelfall for eighty years,’ said the man on White Hair’s right. ‘And none has ever survived the impact. The war in heaven is over. Even some in the Vlast’s own council say so.’
‘Wait, Efim,’ said White Hair. ‘Let her speak.’
‘The angel’s power flows from it into the rock that holds it. It is killing the forest. The greater trees are failing.’
‘Even if this is true—’ said Efim.
The paluba ignored him. ‘But the angel is frightened,' she said. 'It feels itself weakening. Failing. It has been looking for a way to defend itself. Or escape.’
‘Peder! Surely we’re not going to listen to this?’
‘And now the angel has found a way,’ said the paluba. ‘It is building an alliance. Here in Mirgorod.’
Another man leaned over to speak in White Hair’s ear. ‘Can’t we get rid of these awful creatures? The smell…’
The paluba could hear the whisper of a moth’s wing.
‘Efim’s right,’ said a small man in a waistcoat. ‘We don’t have time for this. Tomorrow we’ll have thirty million in our hands.’
‘I’ve already said we shouldn’t touch that money,’ said another, a soft, round,