Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘I wasn’t expecting you, Josef,’ she said.

‘Of course not. You sent me no word, Lavrentina. Since the Novozhd died I have heard nothing from you. Nothing at all.’

‘Were you expecting to? I am busy. I have many new responsibilities now.’

‘Responsibilities? You are a bureaucrat. This Colloquium was not the plan.’

‘It is temporary,’ said Chazia. ‘Fohn’s position is stronger than I had anticipated, but this phase will pass. Everything is in hand.’

Kantor pulled out a chair and sat down in front of her.

‘This was not the plan,’ he said again.

‘There is no need for you to be concerned, Josef. I keep my promises. Let’s talk about you, since you’re here. You need a change, my friend. You played your part well, but you’ve lived too long among thieves and terrorists. I’ve been thinking about you. I have an offer for you: land colonel of Vassaravia. The current incumbent is insufficiently diligent. You would be a good replacement.’

‘ Vassaravia! A flat empty landscape three thousand miles away. Horse meat and wool.’

‘It is in the south, yes. But to be land colonel in such a place is no small thing. A population of two million, and Kirtsbergh is a substantial capital. You would have scope to flourish there, Josef. There is work there for a man of your quality. The Donvass cavalry is wavering. The defences are unprepared. If Vassaravia fell, the whole of the Pienau river basin would be open.’

‘The armies of the Archipelago are half a continent from the Donvass and the bulk of their navy is already off the Bight of Gatsk. They wouldn’t waste a single gunboat on Kirtsbergh. They have no need.’ He leaned forward. ‘I won’t be shuffled off to Vassaravia, Lavrentina.’

‘Then name your oblast, Josef. What about Stari-Krasnogorsk? Or Munt? Land colonel is a handsome offer. Or would you prefer a less public role? Munitions production in Susaninograd is 60 per cent behind target—’

‘I will remain here. In Mirgorod.’

‘But distance is necessary, Josef! We’ve talked about this before. You are the great Kantor, king of terrorists! You cannot take a place in public among us. It is impossible. You can’t be—’

Kantor waved the objection away.

‘That is being dealt with,’ he said. ‘Josef Kantor will disappear and the people who know my face will die. Is this not so? Did we not agree?’

‘Josef…’

Kantor paused. Looked at her sharply.

‘The girl,’ he said. ‘The Shaumian girl? The bastard daughter of the whore who was my wife? You have done this, Lavrentina? It matters . It is important .’

‘Yes.’ Chazia lied with facility. It was a talent of hers. ‘Yes. It is done.’

‘You found her? And the Investigator? Lom? They are cleared away? They are killed?’

‘Yes. Of course. I have told you.’

‘Good. I will take a new name. An alias. A sobriquet. A nom de guerre . I’m thinking of Rizhin . Rizhin the red man. The crimson man. Rizhin. I think the name has a ring to it. Rizhin . What do you think?’

‘I think we must go more slowly, Josef.’

‘ Slowly? Everything with you is always slowly ! This is not satisfactory, Lavrentina. Do you know where you are going?’

Chazia glared at him.

‘And do you share your plans with me, Josef?’ she said. ‘No. You do not.’

Kantor leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

‘You’re making heavy weather of this, Lavrentina. You seem tired. You grow weak when the moment has come for strength. You delay when the time has come to act.’

‘Be careful, Josef. Remember who you are speaking to. I have made you a good offer. A very fair offer. You should take it.’

Kantor’s gaze locked with hers. His expression didn’t change, but in his dark brown eyes she saw black earth burning.

‘I’m beginning to think,’ he said, ‘that you’re not the right person for the angel’s purpose.’

Chazia felt her face grow hot.

‘You wave this angel at me like a shroud!’ she said, slapping her hand hard against the tabletop. ‘Yet it hides itself from me. Why, Josef? Why does it not speak to me ? It spoke to me once at Vig but never again.’

‘I will remain here in Mirgorod, Lavrentina. As Rizhin. And you, you will arrange it. You will make me a general. You will make me Defence Commissar.’

‘City Defence Commissar? I am offering you an oblast of your own!’

‘I will remain in Mirgorod. As Defence Commissar.’

‘But Mirgorod is lost. It can’t be defended, the Novozhd saw to that. The Archipelago will take it, and soon. Mirgorod is worth nothing now.’

‘Then give it to me.’

Chazia shrugged.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘If you wish. It means nothing to me. I will be leaving the city soon. You are welcome to it.’

Kantor stood up.

‘It is settled then,’ he said.

Once they were clear of the gendarme station, Maroussia led the way. Lom followed. It was her city. She set a fierce pace, striding in silence. Lom loped along beside her with a steady, comfortable rhythm. The violence of what had happened in the gendarme station was a third presence between them, strange and raw and dark. A gap in the world had opened up and something new had reached through it and touched them: something sourceless and reckless and inexplicable. It set Lom on edge. It was like a thin whining noise in his ear: pitched too high for hearing, it reached into his unsettled belly and clenched there, an uneasy knot, a fist. An unspoken, liminal intimation of blood fear. He could sense that Maroussia felt it too, but they didn’t speak of it. The shadow of a separation walked between them.

And then Lom realised what the separation was. There was something else that he was feeling: not fear, but something deeper than fear; the nameless, surprising visceral exhilaration of violence, and a taste in his mouth that reminded him of mudjhiks: the aliveness of angel flesh.

They walked on through the city, keeping to side streets and quiet backwaters because away from the main thoroughfares and intersections there would be fewer gendarme patrols. The temperature was still dropping fast. A front of freezing air was rolling straight in off the Cetic Ocean. The freezing wall of atmosphere came on slowly, rolling through the streets, pouring into alleyways, folding round buildings and spilling in through open doors and windows. Meeting the residual warmth of the city, it condensed in tongues and low thin drifting pillars of fog. A crisp delicate edging of frost formed on lamp posts and railings and wet sandbags stacked in doorways.

Mirgorod felt different. Something had changed. Where before the carapace of the city, its chitinous exoskeleton, had been hard and shiny and black, subject to sudden fractures, now everything was softer, more elastic. Fluid shifting changes of grey. Currents of possibility and change rippled and collided and slid across one another. There were tiny openings everywhere. Nothing was fixed. Apparent reality felt like a thin skin easily torn. Lom felt the watchfulness of the tenuous drifting fog. Wakeful, attentive presences inhabited it. Ice-cold fingers brushed his cheek and investigated the opening in his forehead. Sifting river voices whispered in his ear. The speech of strange tongues.

And he felt something else, something not of the cold air and the soft rain and the city. A hot animal pressure. An urgent attentive hunter’s gaze drilling into the small of his back, dangerous, intelligent and wild.

Lom spun round suddenly but there was nothing to be seen, only warehouses and alleyways and solitary pedestrians hunched and muffled against the frosting cold.