Part 29 (1/2)

Archangel opens himself out like an unfolding fern and shouts at the oppressing sky of this poisonous world in absolute and ecstatic joy.

For Josef Kantor is strong!

Stronger than Archangel had ever guessed. The will of Kantor is harder than iron; his purpose is stronger than the heart rock of the world; his heat burns hotter than the sun. The strength of his arm grinds the wheels of time faster and faster.

Archangel knows and has always known that without Josef Kantor he is a dumb mouth shouting, a blowhard bully trundling about for ever in the forest, spilling futile anti-life: a liminal and ineffectual pantoufflard grumbling at the margins of history, claiming primacy but in clear-sighted truth merely scratching an itch.

And Josef Kantor without Archangel, one-time emperor of the Vlast though he may be, is brief-lived and tractionless. A powder flash in the pan.

But together!

My champion! My ever-burning sun!

It is Archangel who is the generator of power and endurance, Archangel the ever-spinning dynamo of cruel expansive energy, Archangel the permission and the totaliser. But it is Josef Kantor who is the conduit, the bond, the channel that lets Archangel reach out into the world and seize the bright birthright. Kantor is the face on the poster and the arm that wields the burning sword that turns the skies to ash.

Josef Kantor, freed now of his organic bodily chains, a will and a voice and a mind released into history and driving an angelic body, is coming to the forest with a mind to kill him, but there will be no need for that.

Faster and faster Archangel grinds towards the edge of the forest.

Kantor will come and break down the border.

Kantor will let him loose in the world.

Run my champion Josef Kantor faster and faster, run as I run towards you. Carry to me the banners of victory. The time is short and our enemies are upon us.

Archangel returns to his work with fresh vigour. There is much to do. His champion generalissimo needs a new army.

5.

Aweek after the fall of Osip Rizhin, Vissarion Lom woke hollow and drenched with sweat from a dream of trees and Maroussia, and knew by the feeling in his belly and heart, by the anger and the anxiety and the desperate desolation, by the need to be up and moving, by the impossibility of rest, that it wasn't any kind of dream, no dream at all.

Maroussia was differentolder, wiser, changedshe saw things he didn't see, she was distant, she was... august. She was something to be wary of. Something of power and something to fear.

Kantor is making for the forest. The angel is calling him there. Nothing is over yet, nothing is done. Come into the forest, darling, and I will find you there.

Helping. Answering the call. That was Lom. That was what he did.

In his dream that was no dream at all he'd seen the living angel in the woods. Seen the trail of poisoned destruction and cold smouldering crusted earth it left in its wake as it dragged itself, an immense hill the colour of blood and rust and bruises, towards the edge of the trees. A cloud of vapours burned off the top of the angel hill, cuprous and s.h.i.+ning. Energy nets like pheromone clouds, dream-visible, dream-obvious. The soldiers of the Vlast were crawling about on its lower slopes like ants, digging and dying.

The living angel was recruiting an army of its own, infesting a growing crowd of dark things: bad dark things coming out from under the trees. Men and women like bears and wolves. Giants and trolls from the mountains and moving trees turned to ash and stone and dust. Lom's dream heart beat strangely when he saw the men like bears. The living angel found them in the forest and took their minds and filled them with its own. He gave them hunting and anger and desire and pleasure in death. He gave them bloodl.u.s.t and greed and berserking. The smell of blood and musk. There were not many yet but more each day, and the nearer it got to the frontier of trees the more it found.

Lom heard faintly, insistently, the voice of the living angel in his own mind. It pulled at him like gravity, seeped through the skin, and polluted the way he tasted to himself.

I will not be silenced. I will not be imprisoned. I will not be hara.s.sed and consumed and annoyed and troubled and stung. I am Archangel, the voice of history and the voice of the dark heart of the world. My birthright is among the stars and I am coming yet.

Lom felt the living angel's attentive gaze pa.s.s over him and come to rest, returning his regard as if it knew it was watched. As if it knew its enemy and disdained him. It came to him then, dream knowledge, that he was Maroussia watching. He was seeing with Maroussia's eye. Alien Maroussia Pollandore, preparing to kill this thing if she could.

It was still dark when he woke but there was no more sleeping. In the first light of dawn Lom went to see Kistler, and then he went to find Eligiya Kamilova, who was back in her house on the harbour in the shadow of the s.h.i.+p Bastion. That house was a survivor. Eligiya was there, and so were Elena Cornelius and her girls, Yeva and Galina. Rising for the day. Having breakfast.

I bring your children home to you Elena, Kamilova had said that day in the street. I have looked after them as well as I could. You can stay in my house until you find your feet.

What I owe you, Eligiya, said Elena, it's too much. It can't ever be repaid.

When he came for Kamilova in the early morning, Lom found Elena's girls just as he remembered them from when he and Maroussia stayed at Dom Palffy six years before. They had not grown. Not aged at all. That was uncanny. It disturbed him oddly. Kamilova was dark-eyed, thin and haunted. She had a faraway look, as if she felt uncomfortable and superfluous, marginal in her own home.

'I want you to come with me into the forest,' Lom said to her. 'Bring your boat and be my guide.'

Kamilova was on her feet immediately. Face burning.

'When?' she said.

'Now. Today. Will you come?'

'Of course. It is all I want.' She turned to Elena Cornelius. 'Keep the house,' she said. 'It is yours. I give it to Galina and Yeva. There is money in a box in the kitchen. I will not be coming back. Not ever.'

For all of the rest of her life Yeva Cornelius carried an agonising guilt that she hadn't loved Eligiya Kamilova and didn't weep and hug her when she left, but felt relieved when Kamilova left her with Galina and her mother. It was a needless burden she made for herself. Kamilova didn't do things out of love or to get love. She did what was needed.

Lom and Kamilova had the rest of the day to make arrangements. Kistler had arranged a truck to come for Kamilova's boat. The Heron. It was to be flown by military transport plane, along with Lom and Kamilova and their baggage and supplies, as far east as possible. As near to the edge of the forest as they could get.

Lom spent the time with Kamilova in her boathouse. She knew what she needed for an expedition into the forest and went about putting it all together while he poked about in her collection of things brought back from the woods. He felt excited, like a child, anxious to be on his way. He'd been born in the forest but had no coherent memories of life there. All his life he'd lived with the idea of it, but he'd never been there. And now he was going. And Maroussia was there.

When it was nearly time for the truck to come, Kamilova looked him up and down. His suit. His city shoes.

'You can't go like that,' she said.

She found him heavy trousers of some coa.r.s.e material, a woollen pullover, a heavy battered leather jacket, but he had to go and buy himself boots, and by the time he got back the truck had come and the boat was in the back and Kamilova was waiting.

Elena and the girls were there to see them off.

'You're going to look for Maroussia, aren't you?' said Elena.

'Yes,' said Lom.

'You're a good man,' she said. 'You will find her.'

She looked across the River Purfas towards the western skyline where the sun was going down. The former Rizhin Tower, now renamed the Mirgorod Tower, rose dark against a bank of reddening pink cloud. It was still the tallest building by far, though the statue of Kantor was gone from the top of it. The new collective government with Kistler in the chair had had it removed and dismantled.