Peter Higgins: Wolfhound Century

Lom spread the crumpled telegram out on the table, trying to flatten the creases with the side of his palm. A flimsy sheet with blue printed strips pasted down on it.

INVESTIGATOR VISSARION LOM MUST MIRGOROD SOONEST STOP ATTEND OFFICE UNDER SECRETARY KROGH STOP 6PM 11 LAPKRIST STOP LODKA STOP MANDATED REPEAT MANDATED ENDS

Lom read it three times. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened. A provincial investigator summoned halfway across the continent to the capital. They never did that. Never.

‘Maybe they want to give you a medal, Vissarion Yppolitovich,’ Ziller said.

‘Or shoot me in the throat and dump me in the Mir.’

‘Don’t need to go to Mirgorod for that. There’s plenty here would do it, not only Lasker, after what you did to Laurits.’

‘Laurits was a shit,’ said Lom. ‘I saw the room where she was found. I saw what he did.’

‘Sure. Only she was a non-citizen and a tart, and Laurits was one of our shits. He had a wife and daughters. That makes people feel bad. You’re not a popular guy any more.’

‘It wasn’t a career move.’

‘Better if it was,’ said Ziller. ‘They’d understand that.’

‘I did it because he was a murdering bastard. That’s what policemen do.’

‘You shouldn’t joke about this, Vissarion. Things could get serious. People have been asking questions about you. Turning over files. Looking for dirt. You should be careful.’

‘What people?’ said Lom.

Ziller made a face. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘People.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, Vissarion,’ he said. ‘I like you. You’re my friend. But if they come after me, I won’t stand up for you. I can’t. I’m not that kind of brave. I won’t risk Lena and the children, not for that. It might be a good thing to be away for a week or two. You know, let things settle down.’

Lom folded the telegram and put it in his pocket. A trip might be good. A change of scene. There was nothing here he would miss. Maybe, just possibly, in Mirgorod they had a job for him. A proper job. He was tired of harassing students and checking residence permits while the vicious stuff went on in this very building, and they fucked you over if you did anything about it. He looked at his watch. There was time: an hour to pack, and he could still catch the overnight boat to Yislovsk.

‘You can take the Schama Bezhin file,’ he said to Ziller. ‘Call it temporary promotion.’

Ziller grinned. ‘And I thought you didn’t appreciate me,’ he said. ‘Don’t rush back.’

A messenger was standing near the back exit of the Sviatopolk, white-faced, gripping his bicycle. Kantor dragged the machine out of his hands and rode off in pursuit of the dying horse, the money and the giant. He found them in a lane off Broken Moons Prospect. Vaso had begun to unload the satchels of roubles, stacking them neatly in the gutter. The horse was dead. Vaso was inside the back of the car, filling it almost completely. Kantor leaned his bicycle against the wall and peered in.

Vaso looked back over his shoulder.

‘They were waiting for us,’ he said. His huge blue eyes peered into Kantor’s face as if from deep under water. ‘Inside the bank. They knew we were coming.’

‘Yes.’

Kantor looked away a fraction too late. In some odd instant of rapport, some unprotected momentary honesty, there was a flash of communication between the giant and the man which neither had intended. Kantor saw the start of it in the giant’s huge eyes and the changed way he held his massive shoulders.

‘You,’ said Vaso. ‘ It was you that told them.’ He began to pull himself backwards out of the strong-car.

‘Vaso,’ said Kantor quietly, ‘wait. It’s not how you think.’

But even as he spoke, Kantor had already taken the grenade from his pocket and shoved it hard into the crevice between the thighs of the giant.

Three pounds of explosive filler encased in a sphere of brittle iron.

The release lever of a standard grenade is held in place by a pin. Once the pin is removed, only the grip of the bomber prevents the lever from springing open, firing the primer and igniting the fuse, which detonates the main charge with a ten second delay. But when Kantor thrust the grenade between Vaso’s legs, it was squeezed tight. The lever couldn’t spring open.

Vaso, alarmed but uncertain what had happened, hastily tried to back out. Kantor retreated until he was pressed against the wall of the building behind him, watching the giant reversing into the light. At the last moment, the bomb dropped free, rolled forward into the vehicle, and exploded. The force of it struck Kantor like his father’s fist used to. It cracked his skull backwards against the wall and the world slipped sideways. When it righted itself, the remains of Vaso were on the ground in front of him. The giant’s head, as big as a coal bucket, was smouldering. There was no skin on his face, but his lidless eyes still had life in them. He looked up mutely at Kantor and the big gap of his mouth moved slightly.

Kantor reached inside his coat for the revolver tucked in his belt. He brought it out, showed it to the giant, and fired two shots into his head.

The light of the broken moons, circling one another in their slow, wobbling dance, floods the forest. Archangel dominates the empty landscape, a thousand feet high, like a solitary hill. The huge slopes of his body have accumulated a thick covering of snow. When he struggles to move, he dislodges avalanches and rumbling slides of ice, but he cannot shift himself. His body is irredeemably stuck, the lower part of it plunged many more hundreds of feet deep into the heart-rock and permanently fused there by the heat of his fall. The blast of his impact burned the trees flat for miles around, but new trees are growing through the ashes. Fresh snowfall carpets the floor of the shallow crater ten miles wide whose centre is him.

Call him Archangel, though it’s not his name, he has none. He is what he is. But call him Archangel. It is… appropriate. The duration of his existence unfolds from everlasting to everlasting, measured by the lifespan of all the stars.

At least, that was how it seemed, until, in one impossible moment, the shadow fell across him. Now he’s as you see him, caught, unable to escape, stuck hard in the planetary crust, at the bottom of the uncertainty well. He cannot adjust his density. He cannot extrude any part of himself by even a few inches. He cannot move at all. Only his perceptions can travel, and even that only within the limits of this one trivial, cramped, poisoned and shadowed planet. He is bound in a straitened prison, scarcely larger than his own self.

And he’s afraid of dying.

He examines his fear carefully. Pain and surprise are its flanking attendants, but it is the fear that intrigues him. So this is what fear is like. It could be useful. If he is to live.

His attentive gaze, vast and cool and inhuman, moves restlessly across the surface of the planet, sifting through the teeming profusion of minds that populates it. So many minds. He opens them up, first one and then another, looking for what he needs. And he draws his plans.

Lom took the overnight steamer down the Yannis and reached the rail terminus at Yislovsk just after dawn the next day. There was an hour to wait for the Mirgorod train. The waiting room was crammed with fresh conscripts for the southern front, crop-haired and boisterous, so he bought a bag of pirogi and settled on a bench outside, sheltered from the blustering sleet. He shivered inside his heavy black woollen cloak, his feet numb, the pirogi warm in his hands. Stevedores, sacking tied round their shoulders against the rain, were unloading barges. Passengers wandered across the wet quay, picking their way across the rails, squeezing between trucks and wagons. A crane arm swept the sky, the grind of its winch engine competing against the sound of the rain and the wash of the river against the quayside. The first warning bell rang. Fifteen minutes to departure. On a whim, Lom went across to the telegraph office and wired ahead to Raku Vishnik, hoping to save himself the cost of a room in Mirgorod.