city, scouring the foundations of the Halsesond martello forts as it came. The rivers and canals of Mirgorod were already high and swollen, pregnant with weeks of rain and snow. Inside Cold Amber Strand the column of brackish tidal waters confronted and commingled with the rivers in flood. In Mirgorod the waters rose quickly when they came.
49
The rain pounded the city and darkened the sky. Soaked, Vishnik stepped out of the shabby crowded street and closed the louvred door behind him, and the House on the Purfas enfolded him in its familiar melancholy civilised quietness. The entrance hall was faded, airy, spacious. Empty but for dust motes, pools of shadow and the sweetness of wax polish and age. Grey window-light and the sound of rain. Somewhere a clock was ticking slowly. Doorways and corridors opened in all directions, and a wide staircase climbed upwards into indistinctness.
Now, the House on the Purfas was home to the Lezarye Government in Exile Within, but once it had been the Sheremetsny Dom, a low expansive sprawl of wood and brick, skirted with peeling loggias and leaking conservatories. The country estate for which it was built had disappeared long ago under the tenements and courtyards of the expanding city, but for Vishnik the corridors of the House on the Purfas led away into the lost domain of his childhood. If he could go deeper into the house, he felt, he would be back among it all. Back in his own boundless childhood house at Vyra, with its world of passages and stairs. Daylight slanted in through high narrow windows panelled with stained glass, splashing lozenges of colour across dusty floorboards and threadbare rugs. The tall furniture and heavy fabrics of drawing rooms, salons, dining rooms, bedrooms, box rooms and attics. The strange devices and spiced air of kitchens, pantries and sculleries. If he went to a window in the House on the Purfas and looked out, he was sure he would see, not the Moyka Strel, but balustraded pathways, formal parterres, weathered statuary, great heaps and mounds of foliage overgrowing walls of old brick and, in the furthest distance, a slope of wooded hills.
There was a brass hand-bell on a side table. Vishnik picked it up and rang it. A woman in a black dress and a white cape came.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Sir?’
A domestic servant. Another dizzying time-tumble. The whole place was a museum. A case of butterfly specimens, dried out and pinned; their dusty wings spread under glass in a parody of summer flight, but if you opened the glass and picked one up it would crunch and collapse between your fingers.
In the centuries after the coming of the Founder, the people of Lezarye had learned to accept the end of their annual migrations and settle into the static life of the Vlast. The elder families had absorbed the ways of the aristocrats, a choice that was only the latest in the long history of tragic turns and counter-turns that left them with nowhere to go when the Novozhd gripped power and the aristocrats fell.
‘I need to see Teslom,’ said Vishnik to the woman.
‘Will you wait in the library, please, Excellency.’
Teslom was the Curator of Lezarye. He kept the records of the old families and tended the artefacts, regalia and memories that survived from their proud ancient days of hunting and herding, and the long slow rhythms of their decline: the systole of assimilation, the diastole of segregation and pogrom. Although Vishnik had visited the House on the Purfas to consult Teslom several times before, he had never been admitted to the Curator’s collection. No one who was not born into the long families ever was. The exclusion irked him. Lezarye had few enough friends in Mirgorod.
The room he was put in to wait was not part of the Collection, it was only the Secular Library. It was a dim quiet place of heavy bookcases shut away behind glass doors and curtains. Vishnik opened one of the cases and looked at the spines of the books. The ones here were merely miscellanea, marginal outriders of the true library, but still there were some things here that could be found nowhere else in the Vlast.
Lyrics From The Moth Border
Hunting Cold Beasts
Peace Of Mind Among Cold Beasts
Pigments, Tints
Life On The Water Ways
The Geometry Of Clouds, Steams and Vapours
Jurisprudence In The Archipelago
Vishnik took a book from a shelf, carried it across to a table and opened it. Shaw’s