there was always the possibility. But it was only Chazia.
She leaned forward intimately, speaking quietly under the din and panic of the room. Her blotched fox-face too close to his.
‘Good, Josef,’ she said. ‘Very good.’
Kantor took a step back from her in distaste. There was too much of angels about her. It was like a stink. She was rank with it.
‘I do my part, Lavrentina. You do yours. What about the girl, and Krogh’s man? Lom?’
‘That’s in hand,’ said Chazia. ‘It is in hand. Though I don’t understand why you set so much store—’
Kantor glared at her.
‘I mean,’ Chazia continued, ‘after today—’
‘The angel needs them dead, Lavrentina,’ Kantor heard himself say, and struggled to keep the self-disgust out of his voice. It uses me like a puppet. A doll. A servant. He was getting tired of the angel. More than tired. He feared and hated it. The situation was becoming intolerable.
I am bigger than this angel. I will make it fear me and I will kill it. I will find a way. I have killed the Novozhd and I will kill the angel. Kill Chazia too.
But now was not the time. He needed to prepare. He needed to focus on the future. Only the future mattered.
‘Just get rid of them,’ he said. ‘Lom and the girl. Don’t foul it up again.’
‘I told you,’ said Chazia. ‘It’s already in hand.’
72
It was night outside the isba, under clear stars. Aino-Suvantamoinen was a massive dark bulk crouching over the flickering wood-fire. It was crisply, bitterly cold, and the light of the moons was bright enough to see the shreds of mist in the trees at the edge of the clearing. A hunter’s night. Lom sat wrapped in sealskin, drinking fish stew from a wooden bowl. He’d slept all day – a proper, resting, dreamless sleep.
‘I can’t stay here,’ Maroussia was saying. ‘I have to go back. To the city. There was a paluba. And someone else. She… showed me…’
The giant shifted his weight. ‘You saw a paluba?’
‘Yes.’
Lom watched her as she talked. She held herself so straight and upright, her face shadowed in the firelight. Lom saw her now as she was, a point of certainty, uncompromised, spilling the flickering light of possibilities that surrounded her. She was clear, and defined, and alive. She rang like a bell in the misty, nightfall world. She was worth fighting for.
‘I have to do this thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a choice.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not right. I do have a choice. And I’m choosing. ‘
She lapsed into silence, watching the fire.
‘Maroussia?’ said Lom.
‘Yes?’
‘I wanted to thank you.’
‘What for?’ she said.
‘You came back for me, didn’t you? You didn’t have to.’
She didn’t look round. ‘You didn’t need to help me either. But you did. Twice.’
‘I’ll come back with you to Mirgorod,’ said Lom. ‘If you want me to.’
She turned to look at him then.
‘Would you do that?’ she said quietly.
‘Yes.’
73
Major Artyom Safran stood at the edge of the trees by the giant’s isba, watching it from the moonshadow. Muted light spilled from a gap in the skins draped across its entrance. His quarry was inside. The mudjhik was motionless at his side, a shadow-pillar of silent stone.
Safran held the fragment of angel stuff that Commander Chazia had cut from Lom’s head tight and warm in his hand. Using the mudjhik’s alien senses he felt his way along the thread that still joined it to Lom until he touched the other man’s mind with his own. He felt the faint, startled flinch of an answering awareness and hastily withdrew. Lom was unlikely to have known what the contact meant, if he had even registered it, but it was better to be cautious.
There were three of them, then. Lom, a woman – the woman, it must be – and something else: a strange, complex, powerful, non-human presence. He put himself more fully into the mudjhik, inhabiting its wild harsh world. The mudjhik needed no light to see by. It had other senses through which Safran felt the hard sharpness of thorns, the small movements of leaves on branches, the evaporation of moisture. Bacteria thrived everywhere, and the mudjhik was studying them with simple, purposeless curiosity. Something had died and was decomposing near their feet, under a covering of fallen leaves.
Safran felt the watchfulness of small animal presences pressing against him. One in particular was close by, drilling at him with a hot, bitter attention. A fox? No, something smaller and crueller. A weasel? Its mind was