Peter Higgins - Wolfhound Century

‘But… the parents ?’

‘We didn’t have parents. None of us did. Savinkov used to take waifs and strays into the Institute for the experiments. I never knew who my parents were.’

‘Oh…’

‘Savinkov saw nothing wrong with it,’ said Lom. ‘He had some successes too. Some of them became excellent mudjhik handlers and technicians with the Worm. Servants of the Vlast of great distinction.’

‘But not you.’

‘No. I was one of Savinkov’s disappointments in that respect.’

Walls rose on either side of the river. The channel narrowed. A roar of rushing water. The skiff rolled and yawed, rushing ahead out of control.

‘Hold on!’ yelled Lom.

Maroussia almost lost the oars as the Sib pitched over a low weir and spun out into wide grey water. The Mir Ship Canal. The skiff settled, drifting slowly with the current.

It was a bleak, blank place after the edgeless mist and mud of the wetlands: a broad channel cut dead straight between high embankments of stone blocks and concrete slopes, wide enough for great ships and ocean-going barges to pass four or six abreast. Featureless. There was nothing natural to be seen, not even a gull in the sky. The trees were out of sight behind the great ramparts and bulwarks built by armies of giants and serfs. Built by the Founder on their bones. The water was deep: Lom felt it fathoming away beneath them, dark and cold. A bitter wind, freighted with flurries of sharp sleety snow, was pushing upstream off the sea, smelling of salt and ice, slowing their progress. It had been autumn when they entered the wetlands. It felt like winter coming now.

‘It’ll be easy from here on,’ said Lom. ‘Downstream to the sea lock. We can leave the boat there and walk back along the Strand to the tram terminus. Let me take the oars for a while.’

Maroussia wasn’t listening. She was staring over his shoulder up towards the embankment. He followed her gaze. The mudjhik was standing on the crest, a smudge of dried blood and rust against the grey sky. Grey snow. Grey stone. It was watching them. As the current took them downstream, the mudjhik began to lope along the top of the high canal wall, keeping pace. Lom looked for an escape. On either side of the canal the embankments rose sheer and high. No quays. No steps cut into the stone. Nowhere to go. The mudjhik had only to follow them.

‘Maybe we’ll find a place on the far side where we can get out,’ he said. ‘It can’t cross the canal before the sea lock. We can be miles away by then.’

As if in answer, he felt the dark touch of the mudjhik’s mind in his. It felt stronger than before, much stronger, and different now. There was an intelligence there that had been absent before, with a sickening almost-human edge to it. It was almost a voice. No words, but a cruel demonstration of existence and power. It was a voice he recognised. Safran . But it wasn’t quite Safran: it was something more and something less than he had been. Lom felt he was being touched intimately by something… disgusting. Something strong but inhuman, broken and foul and… wrong. A mind that stank.

He slammed his mind-walls closed against it. The effort hurt. His head began to ache immediately. He felt the pulse in the socket in his forehead flutter and pound.

‘We have to destroy that thing,’ he said. ‘Somehow. We have to end it. Here.’

Safran-in-mudjhik considered the pathetic little rowing boat sitting there helplessly, a flimsy toy on the deep flowing blackness. The two frail lives it carried, cupped in its brittle palm, flickered like match-lights. He had shown himself deliberately so he could taste their fear. Their deaths would be… delicious. Especially hers. The one that had taken his head when part of him was in the man.

That part of him wanted to be back in the man. It wasn’t happy any more. But it would learn, or he would find a way to silence what he did not need. The angel-stuff was coming awake. Learning to remember. Learning to think. Now it had learned it could soak up human minds, absorb them, grow, it wanted to do it again. The first one had come willingly. More than that, it had come by choice, pushed its way in. Regretted it already, though. Would have preferred extinction. Too late! Too late, impetuous companion! Stuck with it now. But willingness was not essential. There were many minds here. Take them. Harvest them. Fed with such nutriment, what could angel-stuff not become? It remembered swimming among the stars. Why not again? But better. Stronger. More dangerous.

Start with the two in the boat. There was history there. Bad blood.

Lom pulled hard on the oars, racing the skiff seaward, scanning the far embankment for a scaleable escape. There was none. His head was hurting worse: tiny detonations of bright light flickered in his peripheral vision; waves of giddiness distracted him. He couldn’t maintain his defences indefinitely. He hadn’t the strength.

Maroussia went through Safran’s equipment. There was the pistol, useless against the mudjhik, but not negligible.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You’d better have this. I don’t know how to use it.’

Lom put it in his pocket.

There was also the Exter-Vulikh that had cut down the giant. Its magazine was half full and there were two more besides, but it was nothing that would worry a twelve-foot sentient block of angel flesh, not even for an instant. Maroussia laid it aside with an expression of distaste.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just stopped?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We could wait. I know we can’t make headway upstream, but we could try to hold our position out here. Or maybe we could make the boat fast somehow against the far embankment. Sooner or later a ship will come along.’

Lom considered.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘If there is a ship. We haven’t seen any. Don’t they try to clear port before the freeze? I think the season’s over.’

‘Something must come along, one way or the other.’

Lom turned the skiff and began to row against the stream.

The mudjhik understood what they were doing instantly. It stopped loping forward and began to jog up and down on the spot, stamping heavily. Then it bent forward and began to pummel the ground with its fists. For a moment Lom thought it was raging impotently, but it straightened up with a large chunk of stone in its hands and lobbed it towards them.

The first throw fell short. A boulder as large as a man’s torso whumped into the canal, jetting up a column of white water. Short, but close enough for them to feel the sting of the spray on their faces. The ripples reached the Sib and set her rocking. The next shot was closer. The mudjhik was finding its range.

‘Shit,’ said Lom and turned the boat again.

As soon as the boat started heading downstream, the mudjhik halted its bombardment and went back to pacing them along the embankment.

‘It’s herding us,’ said Lom. ‘It could sink us anytime, but it wants to get in close.’

I will not let you touch her . Weak as he was, he tried to force the thought towards the mudjhik, against the flow of its onslaught. I will bring you down.

They heard the sea gate before they saw it. The light was failing. Twilight brought sharp fresh squalls of sleet off the sea. There were gulls now, wheeling inland to roost. The Ship Canal swung round the shoulder of a small hill and narrowed, channelling the flow of the Mir in flood into a bottleneck of concrete, and ahead of them rose the great barrier. On one side, the left as they approached it, were the lock gates themselves, three ship-breadths wide, and to the right a roar of gushing water hidden in a cloud of spray. The grand new hydroelectric turbine, turning the pressure of water into power to light the streets of Mirgorod.