The underground chamber deep beneath the Lodka is lit by the bluish flicker of fluorescent tubes. The gantry stands a hundred feet high and drips with decorative ironwork. Life-size figures of pensive women with long braided hair; plump naked children riding dolphins. An obelisk crowns the dome, and the entire construction is painted burgundy and green. Within the outer framework the alloy containment helix winds upwards like a single strip of orange peel.
Inside the gantry the Pollandore hangs, a perfect globe high as a house, revolving slowly, touching nothing. It glows with is own vaporous luminescence but casts no light. It has no weight. No temperature. Frictionless, it turns on its own axis and follows its own orbit, parallel to but no part of this world, not in this universe but its own, tainting the air of the chamber with a faint smell of lake-water and damp forest floor.
The gantry is almost four hundred years old. It was built soon after the Vlast captured the Pollandore from Lezarye. There was a plan to show it in public–a trophy, a holiday wonder, a kopek to climb to the viewing platform and look down into the heart of strangeness–but this never happened. Perhaps it was never meant to. Perhaps one of the madder descendants of the Founder had the gantry made for his own private pleasure. Perhaps he came down to it alone, at night, driven by some urge to reach out and touch the Pollandore, to run his palm along the underside of another world. And his hand would slide across the skin between alternative possibilities, feeling nothing and leaving no impression.
Whatever. Soon after the gantry was made, the Pollandore was consigned to the lowest basement of the Lodka, its existence denied and redacted from the files. Through the centuries that followed, the Vlast periodically tried to destroy it. The Pollandore survived fire and furnace, explosives, the assault of war mudjhiks. Subtler methods were attempted: corrosives, vacuums, the agonisingly slow insertion of invisibly fine needle-points. Nothing affected it. Nothing at all.
The only thing they didn’t do was take it out to the deepest trenches of the ocean and sink it. They would not do that. If they could not destroy it, the Vlast preferred to know where it was.
And the Pollandore went on turning on its own axis.
Being other.
Being something else.
But now inside the Pollandore planetary currents are stirring. Masses are shifting.
It watches and waits.
Its time is close.