Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

There was a huge open space in front of the Lodka filled with bonfires. There must have been fifty or sixty at least, set out in neatly spaced ranks. Some were already burning, spilling fierce licks of flame thirty or forty feet high, but most were still being built. Endless lines of soldiers and uniformed officials were filing out of the Lodka’s main entrance and down the steps, pushing trolleys and carrying document crates for the growing stacks. To one side a fleet of drays and olive-green trucks was drawn up. Some crates were being diverted towards them and loaded up, but those they did not plan to take, which was most of them, they were burning. The space around the fires was kept clear by lines of conscripts, pale-faced in their ill-fitting greatcoats, steel helmets strapped to their backpacks. Bayonets fitted, they avoided the gaze of the watching crowd.

Behind the fires, the Lodka itself was closed up like a fortress. There was no way in. All the raisable bridges were raised, and the Yekaterinsky Bridge and the Streltski Gate had checkpoints watched by mounted dragoons and sandbagged mitrailleuse positions. The thousand-windowed frontage, rising high above the smoke, was hung with banners, the roofscape forested with flags. Emblems of the Vlast in its pride, red, black and gold, raised in wind-tugged defiance under the low leaden sky.

But the Lodka was evacuating. The scale of what was happening was dumbfounding. The files and documents of a dozen ministries of government and police. The correspondence of diplomats and provincial land captains. Four hundred years of intelligence reports and observation records. The shrill denunciations and sly whispered secrets of informers. Confessions signed on blood-smeared paper. The transcripts of secret trials. The arraignments and sentences of every exile and prisoner in the Dominions. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of shelving. All the vast archives of the Registry, presided over by the towering Gaukh Engine. It would take weeks to burn it all. Months. An immense, tireless beacon to guide the bombers of the Archipelago to their target by night and day. The Vlast was spectacularly killing itself, and would surely take Mirgorod down with it. The watching crowd was beginning to mutter and grumble.

Engines were started. A convoy was moving out. There were angry shouts as the conscripts cleared a path for the trucks and horse-drawn wagons loaded high with crates. They trundled and lumbered through at walking pace. Where were they going? Somewhere far away and safe from the war. South? Unlikely: too near the incursions of the Archipelago. North? They couldn’t get far enough, not with winter closing in. It must be east, then, somewhere east, somewhere in the thousands of miles between Mirgorod and the edge of the endless forest.

A thought struck Lom. Hard. The Pollandore . They wouldn’t leave it to be found by the Archipelago if the city fell. They would take it with them. Shit .

If he could think of that, so could Maroussia. She would have. If she had come here, if she had seen the evacuation beginning, she would have asked the question. Hours ago. She would have tried to find the answer. She would have followed.

He needed to know where the convoys were heading.

He paced along beside one of the trucks at the back of the convoy edging its way through the crowd. There was only the driver in the cab. He reached up and opened the passenger-side door. Swung himself up and into the seat. Pulled the door shut behind him.

‘Hey!’ said the driver. ‘What the fuck—’

Lom jammed the muzzle of the Blok 15 hard against his thigh.

‘Just drive,’ he said. ‘Like you were, everything normal.’

‘You must be fucking—’ the driver began.

‘There is a gun against your leg. It won’t make a hole, it will blow your leg away. Maybe both of them. Shatter the bones. Sever the main arteries. You’ll bleed empty in minutes. So just keep looking ahead and driving normally. Don’t mind me, I’m only along for the ride.’

The driver, hands gripped tight on the wheel, knuckles white, kept his eyes fixed on the horse-drawn wagon in front. He tried to swallow but his throat was dry and he coughed. The truck stayed in the long line, nosing slowly through the city.

‘Where are you going?’ said Lom.

‘The railway. The marshalling yards by the Wieland station.’

‘And after? Where are they taking all this stuff?’

The driver shook his head.

‘I don’t know. I just turn around and come back for another load. Look. I don’t want any trouble. You need to get out now. When we get there, there’ll be—’

‘Just shut up and drive.’

The convoy turned into Founder’s Prospect. There were crowds there too. The shops were being cleared out. People hauling bags and even handcarts piled high with bread and meat and oil. Anything. Some establishments were trying to operate some kind of rationing system. Two loaves per family, fifty kopeks. Eye-watering prices. There were long queues outside post offices and pawn shops,. A bank near the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge was trying to close its doors. There was shouting. Things getting ugly.

At the corner near the Great Vlast Museum they got snarled in traffic. Another convoy was drawn up at the foot of the museum’s wide marble steps. Museum staff were carrying out rolled carpets and tapestries, bronze heads, tundra carvings, crates and boxes stuffed with straw, paintings still in their frames. Nothing properly packed. Treasures beyond price being dumped in the back of waiting vehicles.

The truck lurched ahead a few feet and stopped again. The driver was staring at a group of militia watching from the top of the steps. He shifted in his seat, trying to move his leg away from the Blok’s muzzle.

‘Don’t,’ said Lom. ‘Sit still. Keep looking ahead.’

It would have been quicker to walk, but as soon as he left the cab the driver would be shouting his head off. Lom slumped lower in his seat and tried to look bored.

At last the convoy cleared the museum and picked up to a steady walking pace again. When they slowed at a crowded interchange Lom opened the door and slid out.

‘I’d keep quiet about what just happened,’ he said, ‘if I were you.’

‘Fuck you, arsehole,’ the driver muttered and gunned the throttle. The truck lurched a few feet forward.

Lom’s back itched as he walked away, adrenaline pumping, waiting for shouts, ready to run. But nothing happened. Twenty seconds later he slipped down an alleyway and out of sight.

The Wieland marshalling yards were raucous chaos. Locomotives in full steam, whistles shrieking. Shunting engines stalled among crowds of citizens. Families picking their way across the tracks, dragging their luggage, desperate to find places on trains that were already spilling people out of the doors. Railway officials pushing, shoving, yelling and screaming. Crackling tannoy announcements. Citizen passengers must use station platforms! Access here is forbidden! No one was listening. There was no way through the heaving mass. No hope of finding Maroussia here, and no sign of the convoys from the Lodka.

Lom skirted the crowds and came to a chain-link fence. Beyond it was another expanse of railway tracks, water towers, mobile cranes and what looked like freight cars raised on iron stilts. He climbed the fence painfully, gripping the wire with fingers numbed with cold, scrabbling for footholds against the stanchions. He rolled over the top and dropped awkwardly on the other side, picked himself up and ran.

He sprinted across the open ground and ducked between two trains. There were more trains beyond: wooden wagons as long as barns and high as houses with six-foot-diameter wheels; the twelve-foot-gauge behemoths of the intercontinental freight lines. He went further in, following the lines of high-sided wagons that stretched away into the distance in both directions. From time to time he clambered through the space between two cars, only to find himself in another identical corridor between identical trains. It was a labyrinth and there was nothing to see. A narrow ladder at the end of each wagon climbed up to the roof. Lom chose one and went up the rungs until his head was clear and he could see across, but there were only the roofs of more wagons. No end to the rows of trains. Hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of identical wagons all lined up ready to go.