Radiant State Read online

  Lom pulled from his pocket the VKBD pistol he’d acquired in Pir-Anghelsky Park. There was no time to think. Just react. The door crashed open and Lom fired.

  The shot probably hit the man in the chest, but Lom never knew for certain because Moth swept past him noiselessly, knocking him aside, and took the man’s head off with a slash of a pale-bladed hand. The detached head thudded against the wall as the body collapsed. Moth leaped over it and flew on into the darkened corridor beyond.

  In the reading room the vyrdalak sisters were making thin papery screams of triumph and delight.

  Hunder Rond got only a vague impression of what had destroyed Vrebel before the lieutenant’s head flew off and his torch fell to the floor, but it was enough. He knew what it was. He knew it was coming for him next.

  He emptied his entire magazine in the direction of the approaching vyrdalak. Seven blinding muzzle flashes in the dark. Seven deafening explosions. Somewhere among the noise he heard a high-pitched shriek and a stumble. Then he turned and ran back into the corridors of the private archives.

  13

  Moth, struck by seven bullets from the pistol of Hunder Rond, collapsed in a heap on the corridor floor. Lom crouched over her. Moved her hair aside to clear her face.

  She hissed and pushed his hand away.

  ‘Hole in my chest,’ she said. ‘Harmless. Piece gone from my leg. I’ll be a limper for a while.’

  ‘Is there pain?’ Elena was there. ‘Let me see. You must be bleeding. I can try to stop it.’

  Moth began to haul herself upright. Lom put a hand under her arm to help her. There was almost no weight at all.

  ‘No bleeding,’ she said, leaning her back against the wall. ‘No blood to bleed. As for pain, there is pain sometimes. Existence hurts. This will pass.’

  ‘Can I leave her with you?’ Lom said to Elena. ‘I need to go after the one that escaped.’

  ‘Leave the Streltski for my sisters,’ said Moth. ‘When they have finished with the others they will hunt him. Pigeon and Paper will bring him down. You come with me and look at Lavrentina’s papers.’

  It was ten minutes before Moth was ready to move. The vyrdalak sisters had gone into the shadows, leaving the torn and ruined bodies of the dead Parallel Sector men where they lay. Lom collected their torches and switched them off to save the batteries, all but one for Elena’s benefit.

  ‘This way,’ said Moth when she was ready, and set off limping towards the lobby. She was halting and slow. ‘We will have to go by corridors and stairs.’

  For twenty minutes at least they climbed, slowly and circuitously. Lom recognised the backwater corridor where his brief office had been, buried among cleaning cupboards and boiler rooms, when he was Krogh’s man. His typescript card was still tucked into the slot on the door, yellowing and faded now. INVESTIGATOR V Y LOM. PODCHORNOK OBLAST. PROVINCIAL LIAISON REVIEW SECRETARIAt. He stuck his head inside. The same desk and coat rack were still there but the placard on the wall had gone.

  Citizens! Let us all march faster

  Through what remains of our days!

  You might forget the fruitful summers

  When the wombs of the mothers swelled

  But you’ll never forget the Vlast you hungered and bled for

  When enemies gathered and winter came.

  Someone had remembered the old Vlast well enough to take that away. Lom wondered if it had been Pavel.

  In the mazy unlit corridors behind the reading room there was no panic for Hunder Rond, though he knew he was vyrdalak-hunted. There was fear–there was horror in the dark–but he knew that panic would kill him. The vyrdalaks would come fast; they would not lose him in the passageways; they would not give up. They would come and come, quick and silent and relentless in the darkness. Out of shadows and ceilings and lift shafts they would come. He had seen the remains of vyrdalak kill. He had heard the screams.

  He had also seen vyrdalaks burn. He knew how that sounded. How it smelled. How it felt.

  Hunder Rond moved on at a slow even pace and put aside terror for later. Stored it up for a better time and place. This was his forte, his talent, advantage and pleasure: clinical self-restraint–ice and iron–primitive emotions under unbreakable control to be retrieved for private release when he chose. The trembling hot sweat, delirium, anger and screaming could be brought to the surface then, and satisfied in his way. Not now. Later. There was energy and pleasure to be had from it then. A heightening.

  He smiled grimly in the dark as he cleared and focused his mind and considered his situation from every angle with dispassionate accuracy. He had one spare magazine for his pistol, which was now empty. That was not sufficient, but then no number would have been. Bullets rarely killed a vyrdalak, though a lucky shot might give it pause. Seven cartridges were better than none. He ejected the empty magazine, inserted the spare and loaded the first round into the breech.

  And he had a map.

  That was foresight. That was efficiency. Cool administrative imagination.

  There was no point blundering around in the dark and getting lost. He switched on his torch and unfolded the floor plan of the Lodka.

  Century by century the interior of the Lodka had evolved to meet the needs of the day. Corridors and stairways were closed off and new ones opened. Cables and heating were installed. Angel-fall observatories, and radio antennae in attics. Rooms knocked together and repartitioned and requisitioned for new purposes. Subterranean railway access opened and abandoned. A vacuum-pipe internal postal system. Every few years the superintendent of works sent expeditions into the building to update the master survey, but the results were obsolete before the work was complete, and the edges and margins, the heights and depths, remained ragged and obscure. For the core areas and the zones in regular use, however, the map was reliable enough. The Gaukh reading room and the layout of the main archives hadn’t changed much. They were near the public door that used to open onto the Square of the Piteous Angel, now Victory Square.

  Rond studied the map and chose his way out. It wasn’t far. Ten minutes in the passageways and across two wide hallways should do it. He refolded the map and jogged forward at a steady sustainable pace, vyrdalak-horror and primal prey-animal fear tucked away in a closed interior filing system of his own.

  Moth led Lom and Elena higher, up narrower stairwells. There was more light up here: more windows, and the yellow moons were shining, nearly full, low and sinking towards the western skyline. Lom switched off the dimming torch. There was no need for it now. They were passing along some kind of high covered gangway. Narrow windows to their right looked across the Lodka’s tumbled inner roofscape–slopes of lead and slate, dormers and gables and oriels, downpipes and guttering, naked abandoned flagpoles–and through to their left Mirgorod spread out towards the sea. Dawn was breaking pink and green. Traffic was moving slowly along the eight-lane Rizhin Highway. The sun-flushed thousand-windowed sky-rise towers–the Rudnev-Possochin University, the Pavilion of the New Vlast, the Monument to National Work–heaved up from the plain. Warm-glow termite nests.

  ‘Here,’ said Moth at last. She stopped and pushed open a door. The sudden wave of cloying enclosed air that escaped from the room made Lom take a step back. Elena Cornelius put her hand across her mouth.

  ‘Oh god,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Oh god, what have they been doing?’

  Hunder Rond was within sight of the threshold, the door he’d left open, when the two vyrdalaks rose at him from the shadows of a downward stair.

  The light of early morning spilled through the doorway, and the sound of the waking city. Day already? Rond had thought. It was barely an hour since he’d come this way the evening before with Lieutenant Vrebel and the others now dead.

  The vyrdalaks closed on him with impossible speed. He heard a gasp of pleasure and smelled the age and mustiness of rags. The sickly sweetness of unhuman breath.

  Rond’s panic box broke wide open then. He felt the shriek from his own throat, the hurt of
it; it wasn’t his voice but it was him. He turned into the attack and pulled the trigger of his gun, and as he spun he slipped on dusty polished marble and fell. The charge of the day-blinded vyrdalaks missed him. He felt a slicing tear across his upraised forearm and that was all. The crash of his shot echoed impossibly loud in the airy space as the bundle of screeching vyrdalaks skittered across the floor. Rond scrabbled to his knees and jabbed at the trigger again and again until the mechanism clicked empty, and then he hurled the gun at them and threw himself headlong scrambling towards the door into air and sunshine, and he was outside and he was safe and free.

  Rond’s car was where he’d left it the previous evening (scarcely an hour ago). He was trembling. Focus. Focus. His left arm was numb, the jacket sleeve ripped open and wet with blood, his forearm opened above the wrist, an oozing superficial tear. Drive one-handed then. How hard is that? He needed to clean himself up. Get the wound dressed quickly. Vyrdalak strikes fester.

  But then, when he’d done that, he would come back and he would burn them. Burn the vyrdalaks. Burn the foulness. Burn their nests. Burn whatever archives were still inside that should have been burned years ago. Burn the whole fucking Lodka to the ground.

  14

  Moth led Lom and Elena into the broad interior of some kind of tower. For five or six floors it rose above them, but wide jagged holes were broken through all the floorboards and plaster ceilings so they could see all the way to the roof. Dust-ridden daylight splashed in through pointed-arch windows. The tower was some kind of library. It was also a beautiful attic nest.

  The vyrdalak sisters lived among chambers of sweetness. The whole of the inside of the tower was hung with great webs and pockets and caverns of chewed paper and fruit. Rotting-fruit-and-paper extrusions. Files and books and sea charts, centuries of memoranda and reports–diplomatic letters, records of surveillance, interrogation and betrayal–they ate them all. Masticated and regurgitated them to make hundreds of comfortable translucent compartments the colour of ivory and bone. The floor was uneven papier mâché, matted and lumpy with stalagmites of eaten newsprint and maps and confessions under torture, and all crusted with a yellow-brown craquelure of age.

  The whole construction had a perfect, proportioned elegance. It was like standing inside dried egg casings. The sea-worn honeycombed interiors of bone. Wasps’ nests like lanterns under eaves. It was the work of centuries and it was beautiful.

  ‘We read and read,’ said Moth with quiet pride, ‘and as we read we chew.’

  Half-eaten fruits–long ago dried to leathery sweetness–and rotting foraged stores were tucked away in cavities and corners.

  Hunder Rond returned to the Lodka with men in trucks. They threw a safety cordon around the building and Rond sent in six two-man burning teams, one for each of the half-dozen main public entrances. Pressurised fuel tanks strapped to their backs, they penetrated as far as they dared, leaving themselves escape runs, and began to spray arcs of fire.

  The Lodka burned. Oh yes, it burned. The desks, the chairs, the conference tables, the books and files and carpets, the pictures on the walls, the beams, the floor boards, the staircases, all tinder-dry and hungry for combustion.

  At the first licks of flame up the walls, the firestarters turned and ran. They took up fallback positions outside the doors, flame-throwers ready for anything that tried to escape.

  Moth led Lom and Elena into side rooms off the main tower. There were libraries within libraries, collections and cabinets of curiosities, some small as cupboards with cramped connecting ways, some large as salons. Dormers and airy roof constructions. Moth swept ahead, motley fabric train swishing bare floorboards and fading patterned rugs. Lom and Elena followed more slowly, lingering by items shelved, ranged and museumed with their own mysterious logic.

  The sisters had picked up and hauled back home things they had found in tunnels and the city and the Lodka itself: detached fragments of the old Vlast and its predecessors. Flotsam from the wreckage of forgotten worlds. They had gathered furniture and papers, pieces of porcelain and pottery, broken and not, astronomical instruments, components electrical and mechanical. There was a whole wing for works rescued from Vlast storerooms of confiscated art.

  Lom paused over aquatints and engravings and photographs of vanished cities. He glanced through the correspondence of margraves, landgraves, electors and county palatines. Accounts of coats of arms, lineages and uniforms. Canvas bags still bearing the brittle broken seals of the corps diplomatique. Orders of battle for campaigns of which he’d never heard. The Yannis River Advance. Battles on frozen lakes. Cavalry charges against artillery. The repulsion of the northern dukes. A Model Village Prospectus on the New Rational Principle. Schools Not Guns Will Feed Our People. Displayed under glass were ancient undated maps of the continent. Small countries Lom had never heard of remained like ghosts, a stained patchwork of counties and princedoms. All maps ended in the east with forest.

  The sisters had hung their collection with tiny pieces of other people’s privacy: combs and portrait lockets; the headcloths and bast shoes and tin cups of the nameless. The more Lom lingered there, the more aware he became of beginnings that had had no continuation, lines cut off and possibilities unrealised. Ways and places these beginnings might have gone but never did. It was a museum that told no story except absence.

  A circular window gave a view across the sky-rise city: Rizhin Highway, Rizhin Tower. It was perpetual zero hour–null o’clock–in the real world outside. All the things that might have happened (some of them good, some bad, some beautiful) did not happen. They did not happen because this happened instead.

  Moth came bustling worrisome back for him.

  ‘This way,’ she said. ‘This way. Hurry.’

  The sisters had lovingly recreated Lavrentina Chazia’s private archive in every detail. The green-painted walls. The empty desk. Floor tiles lifted from downstairs and relaid. Rows of steel-framed racks holding files and boxes of papers. Every shelf brought up, placed and labelled as it had been; every file and box exactly where it should be according to the former commander of the secret police’s own scheme.

  ‘We took them away and hid them,’ said Moth. ‘We kept them safe for when Lavrentina came back.’

  Lom found what he wanted, exactly where he had found it once before. The lavender folder for Josef Kantor was in its place on the K shelf. It was fat and full. He took it and pushed it inside his jacket.

  At that moment the echo of shrill distant screeching reached them. It found them even here, even in this quiet archive of an archive.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Elena.

  Moth stiffened and screamed. Her sisters crashed in through upper windows, flew down and scuttled, rattling, in circles around them.

  ‘Fire! Fire! They are burning us! Fire!’

  Throughout the Lodka the fires were roaring now, blinding vortices of flame and heat. Flames crawled along the walls and floors of corridors, meticulous and thorough, spilling into every room. Floor by floor, shaft by shaft and stair by stair, ignition spread. Rooms unopened for centuries popped into sudden combustion. Thick worms and blankets of smoke flowed across ceilings. Whirlwinds of burning paper. Billowing flakes of fire. Caves of red heat. Explosions and backdrafts sucked whole floors in. Fire smouldered against locked doorways and burst through, searing irruptions, sucking whole annexes into the hot mouth.

  Paint blistered. Pigments boiled off canvases and the canvases burned with their frames. Countless linoleum acres bubbled and stank to sticky residual ash. Inkwells boiled dry in burning lecterns. Typewriters buckled and twisted, their ribbons burned, the enamel licked away. The immolation of code books and cipher machines. A fire-clean forgetting of four hundred years of lost secrets.

  A column of fire surrounded the leaning skeleton of the Gaukh Engine, heat and smoke pouring with the hurtling updraft through the broken dome and into the outside air.

  In the basement mortuary the restless corpses thrashed and subsided. Fir
e tongues licked the cell-floor bloodstains clean.

  Rats and bats and cats and mice and birds escaped or died. Shelves of forgotten files burned unread. Fire touched the hem of the vyrdalak sisters’ beautiful galleried nest and it exploded. Libraries within libraries, their long careful centuries’ archives and collections, the last secret memories of absence and what did not happen, burned.

  Moth and her sisters took Lom and Elena across rooftop gangways and down through the most central heart-stone stairwells and unopened passageways of the Lodka where the fire had not yet reached.

  The burning was a distant roar, a smell of searing, heat on the face and the thickening of smoke clogging the chest. The vyrdalaks skittered and jumped and flew short distances on vestigial fabric wings. At lift shafts they carried them down: Moth scooping up Lom in her weightless bone-strong arms, one of her siblings with Elena. They jumped into space and leaped from stanchion to bolt, barely touching, barely slowing their plunge. Dull orange glowed far below and a cushion of heat rose from it.

  Somebody screamed. Lom wondered if it might have been him, but he doubted it. He kept the lavender folder grasped tight to his chest: the truth he saved from the burning building.

  Down and down they went into the closing heat, racing against it.

  The outer walls of the Lodka were a crumbling sooty crust enclosing cubic miles of roaring roasting heat. Quiet crowds gathered at the cordon to watch the ancient building burn.

  The Lodka’s thousand exterior windows glowed baleful red. Panes burst and shattered and rained glass on the margin of Victory Square. Fragments splashed into the River Mir. Smoke cliffs, orange-bellied and flecked with whirling spark constellations, billowed above the collapsing roofscape and darkened the eggshell sky. Smuts and ash scraps drifted and fell far across Mirgorod. The whole city smelled of burning.