Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘Go a few miles north,’ said Lom. ‘Out of sight of the river. Just in case.’

Gretskaya nodded and swung the Kotik to port. After a couple of minutes she eased off the throttle and began to descend in a wide flat spiral. She pulled a handle and Lom felt the thunk as the landing wheels dropped into position. Almost imperceptibly the nose came up as the aircraft flattened out, engine silenced, gliding. The wind whistling through the struts, the creak of the airframe, the rain against the windscreen, the tick and sweep of the wipers. Even in the dusk and rain the grass was visible underneath them now, not flat and smooth as it had appeared from height, but rough and tussocky and dotted with low clumps of shrub and thorn. Gretskaya flew on, thirty feet above the ground.

And then a wall of scree rose out of the ground in front of them.

Gretskaya hauled back on the stick, dragging the nose up steeply, and raced the throttle till it screamed. They must have cleared the top by a matter of feet. Inches. They were flying over a stretch of gravel and small stones. Patches of illumination from the wing-tip lamps raced alongside them. The ground was so close, Lom felt he could have reached over the side and brushed it with his hand.

The tail dropped, the wheels touched and bounced and touched again, and they were down and trundling, wheels crunching and jolting across the stony surface. The whole aircraft strained as Gretskaya applied the brakes. It skidded and slewed to the right. Suddenly they ran out of gravel and bounced into long grass. A shadowy clump of thorns loomed out of the darkness and smacked into the wing almost at Lom’s shoulder. With a screech of protesting metal they lurched to a sudden halt.

Gretskaya cut the engine instantly.

‘Shit,’ she said quietly. ‘That didn’t sound good.’

Gretskaya opened the cockpit and climbed down to have a look at the damage. Lom followed. A thin bitter wind tugged at his trousers. Rain flattened his hair and streamed down his face. The right under-carriage wheel was tangled in a mess of thorny branches. The struts, to Lom’s inexpert eye, looked bent and twisted awry. Despite the wind and the rain, he could smell an acrid industrial taint on the air. Something was leaking. Gretskaya bent down and dabbed at the mechanism, then sniffed her fingers.

‘Brake fluid,’ she said. ‘Nothing too bad, if that’s the only damage. I can fix it up in the morning.’

Florian appeared beside them. His eyes were shining happily.

‘I’m going to take a walk,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up.’

Lom looked at him in surprise but Gretskaya only grunted indifferently.

‘Come,’ she said and clapped Lom on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get inside and finish this balzam and get some sleep.’

Antoninu Florian slid down the scree and found a place where he could tuck away his clothes. He pulled them off hastily, shivering happily as the rain drenched the bare skin of his body. He wrapped them in his jacket and stashed the bundle under a thorn tree. He marked the place with his scent so he could find it again.

All around him for hundreds of miles there was spaciousness and weather and, apart from the two left behind inside their stale metal box, no humans. None at all. And no cramped enclosing constructions of stone and brick. No stench of coal and iron. No thundering of engines and petrol fumes. No noise at all but the wind in the grass and the rain. How long? How long since such a moment, a true wolfnight? Too long. Too many years. But now. Now. The joy of it made him want to howl and shout.

Florian ran, and as he ran he stretched out his body, re-articulating bone and cartilage inside their hot tendon sheaths, feeling his muscles bunch and reach and work themselves warm and free, pushing out his ribcage and filling his unfolding lungs deeply, deeply, with the night-freighted air: the smell of crushed herbs, broken twigs and wet earth. At full pelt he tipped himself sideways into the brush and rolled over and over, growling, yelping, laughing. He came to a stop and thrust his face into the ground, just to breath it, just to rub his muzzle against the fragrant wet grass.

Then he picked himself up and stood for a moment, still, the fur on his back raised thickly, mouth open, panting hot breath that steamed on the air, simply listening to the hot blood of his own veins.

He was wolf and he was strong and hungry and he ran. He ran a long way, covering mile after mile, darkly, silently and very fast.

Lom woke in the grey light of dawn and climbed stiffly down from the cockpit. The Kotik was canted slightly sideways. Gretskaya’s legs were visible, sticking out from under the hull. A toolbox open beside her.

‘OK?’ said Lom.

‘Couple of hours. No problem.’

‘Need a hand?’

‘No.’

Some yards away Florian was crouching over a small fire, feeding it with brittle clumps of scrub. The herb flared into spitting heat and burned away instantly with an acrid fragrance and almost no smoke. He had a couple of cat-sized creatures impaled on sticks and propped over the fire. They were elongated, sinewy, unrecognisable: narrow fragile heads burned to black, eyes closed slits, carbonised lips stretched back from small sharp chisel-teeth. Threads of fat dripped from the burning meat and spattered into the fire with little explosions of bitter vaporous soot. Lom almost trod on their torn pelts, dropped on the gravel a couple of feet away. Grey bloody rags.

Florian looked up and grinned.

‘What the hell are those?’ said Lom.

Florian shrugged happily.

‘Surok,’ he said. ‘Ground squirrel.’ He held up a chunk of half-cooked meat. ‘Breakfast. Want some?’

‘No,’ said Lom quickly. ‘No. Thanks.’

He drifted off by himself, heading away from the aircraft. His footsteps crunched echoless in the silence. It was bitterly cold. Away from the reek of Florian’s fire the air smelled faintly of dry cinders and some kind of crushed herb he thought he recognised but couldn’t name. Something like sage. Or rue. Scraps of freezing mist hung low on the ground. His face was chilled to the bone: stiffened and numb, skin stretched too tight over his jaw and his skull. The yellow-grey steppe stretched beyond the flat horizon, hundreds of miles in every direction of nothing at all.

The plane had landed on some kind of raised plateau, uplifted some yards above the surrounding grassland. Last night’s rain had already evaporated in the thin wind. Lom found he could scuff away the sparse dry gravelly soil with his shoe, scraping down to virgin rock. The herby scrub had virtually no roots at all. When he had been walking for fifteen minutes or so, he began to notice that the ground was scattered at wide intervals with curious slivers, shards and fist-sized stones, ranging in colour from pale pink and rusted blood to bruise-dark purple, some rough and sharp, some rounded and polished to a glassy shine. He picked up a couple at random and cupped them in the palm of his hand, hefting their surprising weight. He knew exactly what they were. Raw fragments of the flesh of a fallen angel. They tingled in his hand, their almost-aliveness calling to him, and the stain of the old angel implant still lingering in his own blood stirred in response. It was like fine wires in his veins tightening and humming faintly. Follow , they urged, whispering. Follow .

It took Lom more than an hour to find the carcase of the angel itself: a small one, a minor malakh, nothing compared to the red grandeur of, say, the Ouspenskaya Torso. Keeping fifty yards distance, he walked all round it in five or ten minutes: a surprising, impossible crag of deep reds and purples. The angel had not been quite dead when it fell: three starfish pseudo-limbs extruded from one flank and flowed across the shallow crater floor, spreading fringes that trickled away and dissolved into the surface rock. Angels often survived their fall by hours, sometimes days, seeping liquefaction, scrabbling in sad confusion at the ground as the last intelligence drained out of them. But this one was certainly dead now, and had been dead for centuries: long enough for dusty wind-blown soil to gather deeply in the folds and depressions of its body. Even from such a mass as this, Lom sensed nothing but the vague, vestigial after-trace of dissipated sentience.