‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where’s the Pollandore?’ He didn’t know what he was expecting the Pollandore to look like, but nothing he could see seemed likely to be it.
‘It’s not far,’ said Chazia. ‘I need another key.’ She switched on a lamp at a work table and began to search through drawers. ‘I haven’t needed this for a while.’ The table she was searching was spread with small implements, scraps of paper and chips of stone. Its centrepiece was a large brazen ball with tiny angled spouts protruding from its dented, fish-scaled skin. It floated in a dish of some heavy silver liquid that might have been mercury. Its surface shimmered and rippled faintly in the lamplight.
‘So what is this place?’ said Kantor.
Chazia glanced up. Light from the lamp glinted in her foxy eyes and slid off the dark marks on her face and hands. Did they cover her whole body, Kantor found himself wondering. He was beginning to feel uneasy. He felt for the revolver in his pocket.
‘This is my private workplace,’ said Chazia.
The lamp threw light into some of the nearer shadows. Kantor started. He thought he had seen someone else in the room, standing watchful and motionless against the wall. It was a shape, draped in oilcloth, almost seven feet tall. Curious, Kantor went across to it and pulled the sheet away.
At first the thought he was looking at a suit of armour, but it was much cruder, larger and heavier than any human could have worn and moved in. There was some kind of goggle-eyed helmet and clumsy-fingered gauntlets with canvas palms that made the effect more like a deep sea diver’s suit. The whole thing was a dull purplish red. He realised it was constructed from pieces of angel flesh. The woman had made herself a mudjhik! But one you could climb inside. One you could wear. He had underestimated her. Badly. His mind began to work rapidly. What you could do with such a thing, if it worked. If it worked.
‘Come away from that,’ said Chazia sharply.
She didn’t want me to see this. So this is what she does. This is her dabbling.
‘You wear this?’ he said. ‘You put yourself inside this thing?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Chazia. ‘Come away from it. Do you want to see the Pollandore or not? We haven’t much time. I need to get back. Come, it’s this way.’
She led him to an iron door in the side wall, unlocked it and went through. Kantor followed her and found himself standing on a narrow iron platform suspended over space.
Whatever he had expected, it was not this. They were looking across a wide circular pit, a cavern, and in the middle of it was a wrought iron structure. It must have been a hundred and fifty feet high. In the depths of the Lodka. An iron staircase climbed up round the outside. There were viewing platforms of ornate decorative ironwork, pinnacles and spiracles, and within this outer casing an iron helix spiralling upwards. It reminded Kantor of a long thin strip of apple peel. And inside it, held in suspension, touching nowhere, the Pollandore.
The air of the cavern crackled as if it was filled with static electricity. It made Kantor’s head spin. The Pollandore hung in blankness, a pale greenish luminescent globe the size of a small house, a cloudy sphere containing vaporous muted light that emitted none. Illuminated nothing. A smell of ozone and forest leaf. It revolved slowly, a world in space: not part of the planet at all, though it was following the same orbit, describing the same circumsolar trajectory, passing through the same coordinates in space and time, tucked in its inflated sibling’s pocket but belonging only to itself. There was no sound in the room. Not even silence. The Pollandore looked small for a world, but Kantor knew it wasn’t small, not by its own metrication.
He turned to say something to Chazia, who was standing beside him staring across at the uncanny, terrible thing. Kantor opened his mouth to say something to her, but nothing came out. The space in the cavern swallowed his words before they were spoken. He grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly back off the platform and pushed the door shut.
‘We must destroy it,’ he said. ‘Get rid of that repellent thing.’
‘Don’t you think,’ said Chazia, ‘don’t you think we have tried?’
47
Maroussia Shaumian sat on the slush-soaked ground under the trees at the end of her street, leaning her back against