Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

There are pools in the forest: pools and lakes of still brown water; streams and slow rivers, surrounded on all sides by brown and grey columns that disappear upwards into shadow and leaf. Ivy and moss. Fern. Liverwort. Lichen. Mycelium. Thread. There are no landmarks, only the rising and falling of the ground, and trees becoming dark in the distance. Low cloud and morning mist: breaths of cool air moving, chill and earthy and damp. There is rustling and sudden small movement. There are broad hollow ways, paths and side paths, ways trodden clear. Large things walk there: boar and aurochs, wisent and wolf. Lynx and wolverine. Elk and sloth and woolly rhinoceros. War otter and cave bear. Dark leopard and fox.

Somewhere in the forest it is winter. The long night settles; predators bury carrion in the snow; bear sows sleep with their cubs and the old fighting males wander in the dark. And somewhere in the forest it is spring, with the deep roaring of rutting deer, the air filled with the musk of females in season, and trees, trembling and flaring with blossom, pouring out scent and colour, ignited with life.

The forest is larger than the world, though the world thinks the opposite. Going in is easy: it’s coming out that’s hard. Time stops in the forest. People walk into the forest and never come out. They feel lost. They drift. They walk round in circles. They stop wanting.

The forest is the first place, original, primeval, primordial, primal. It is the inexhaustible beginning, direct, instinctual, unmediated, real. The land before the people came. This land. Old and bright and dark and full of dreams and nightmares. It is not an empty place. People live here, human and not so: free giants and tunnel dwellers; windwalkers, rusalkas, vyrdalaks, shapeshifters, hamrs, fetches, man-wolves; disembodied watchful intelligences, wild and cruel, that might be called witches and trolls. Many things are lost and buried in the forest: old things, perdurable, and new things, potential, unrealised yet, and waiting. All things are possible here, and here is everything. Growth and change. Here everything freely, abundantly begins, and becomes itself: the multiplicity, variousness, potential, myriadness, wanderability, wellspring and wilderness of forest. The trees are sensitive to light and earth. They taste and listen. Their roots go deep, and touch, and interweave. They spill pheromone language on the air. The trees are watchful. The rain, the air, the earth are watchful. The forest is borderless mind. It is aware.

Across the forest Archangel grinds his way, immense and alien and poison.

Minister of Armaments and General Secretary of the Colloquium Steopan Dukhonin’s car took him home after the Novozhd’s funeral. From a window in the building opposite, Bez Nichevoi watched the long ZorKi Zavod saloon arrive. It rode low, weighed down by two tons of steel plate. Assassination-proof. Bez could make out Dukhonin’s head in the back, a dim featureless shape behind two inches of hardened glass. An underwater profile, bowed forward as if he were absorbed. Reading. The car pulled up at the wide double gates and the driver spoke into the intercom grille. The gates swung open to let the ZorKi edge through and closed behind it. Bez knew the routine. Dukhonin would not leave again before morning.

The house was a squat stone block, blank-windowed, in its own grounds, an enclave carved out of Pir-Anghelksy Park. The driver would ignore the steps up to the front door. He would follow the gravel driveway round to the back and into the courtyard. Walls within walls. One of the indoor guards would be waiting. The driver would see Dukhonin inside, then take the ZorKi across to the garage, lock it in for the night, and go into the house himself. Dukhonin would go to his study and work there until the early hours of the morning. He would have supper brought to him on a tray. Dukhonin worked prodigiously. Secretively. Since becoming one of the Four he had given up his office in the Lodka and worked solely from home.

Apart from the driver and the housekeeper, there were two guards inside the house and two in the grounds. And dogs. Lean, black, heavy-jawed killers left to roam free within the outer wall. Dukhonin also had a private secretary, a new man, Pavel, who arrived at 7.30 every morning and normally remained until 7.30 in the evening, but he was not in the house. He had been at the funeral, and Dukhonin had told him he wouldn’t be required again until the morning. Dukhonin liked to observe such niceties–they were of consequence to him.

That evening’s leave of absence was a propriety Pavel would come to appreciate. It had saved his life.

It took Bez five minutes to walk to the place where he could cross the perimeter wall without being seen from the street. The wall was ten feet high, but he climbed it without difficulty. His body was light as a small child’s. He dropped to the ground inside the compound. There was fifteen yards of clear space before the laurels began, snow-mounded in the gathering darkness. The snow was falling thickly. It blurred his senses a little, muffling sound and muting scent, but he could feel the presence of the dogs nearby, three of them. They had his scent. He felt their alertness, the way they moved a few paces towards him, heads up, but they were hesitating, the strangeness of his smell making them uncertain. No sign of the guards.

Bez stood with his back to the wall and waited. It would be better if the dogs came to him. Neater that way. Simpler. He opened his mouth and let out a long plume of breath. A visible steam-cloud on the snow-thick air. He put into it the taint of carrion. Death. That would bring them, curious and eager but not alarmed. A few moments later the dogs broke through the laurels and saw him, not the dead thing they were expecting but a tall man standing.

When they came for him Bez killed them quickly. He absorbed their small deaths and started towards the house. He was leaving a trail of footprints, but it didn’t matter. It would make no difference.

Because of the snow, the guards were within thirty yards of him before he was aware of them. They were not alert. Just a routine patrol. Bez dropped on them from the low branches of a fir tree, taking the head of one and piercing the eyes of the other, spearing his brain. He allowed himself a moment to digest their deaths and moved on. Entered the house through an upstairs window.

Inside, he took his time, walking through cool shadows, looking into all the empty rooms. Running his hands across tables and along the backs of chairs. Sharing in the quiet of the house, unbroken but for the slow ticking of a clock on a landing and the distant murmur of a radio. He found what must have been the housekeeper’s sitting room. A chintz-backed armchair next to a purring stove. A shelf of china figures. A postcard from Lake Tsyrkhal. Nice things.

Dukhonin was in his study, at his desk, working on papers. He was smoking, a bottle of aquavit open at his elbow, a single glass. The radiogram in its cabinet against the wall playing quiet music. Absorbed, Dukhonin didn’t see Bez Nichevoi watching him from the doorway.

Bez left him there for the moment. The others–the indoor guards, the driver, the housekeeper–were downstairs in the kitchen, gathered at the table, drinking tea. None of them noticed Bez until he was in the room with them, and by then it was too late. For them it had always been too late.

Now it was only him and Dukhonin in the house.

As Bez was going back upstairs, he heard a small sound. A door quietly opening. Dukhonin was on the move. Slowly. Bez sensed something uneasy about him. An edge of tense energy. Fear. He must have heard, or half-heard, what had happened in the kitchen. The housekeeper’s interrupted scream. Bez moved soundlessly into the shadow of a doorway and waited.