Maroussia said nothing when they emerged from Eligiya Kamilova’s boathouse. They walked in silence along the harbour edge and began the ascent back up towards the Ship Bastion.
Lom kept pace alongside Maroussia. Leaving her space. Letting her think. He wasn’t sure, himself, what they had learned from Kamilova. In Kamilova’s presence he’d felt the forest, its realness and closeness, its watchfulness, its urgency. But… perhaps there wasn’t anything else to know. Perhaps it wasn’t about learning, but doing. The Pollandore was in the Lodka, right in the cruel stone centre of the Vlast. Bring Maroussia to the Pollandore and… it would happen. Something would happen. Trying to learn, trying to explore, trying to figure out what she had to do when the moment came and what it might mean: that was nothing, only passing time. An avoidance strategy. A rationalisation of fear. The task was simpler than that.
Maroussia stopped and turned to face him.
‘What Kamilova said…’ she began. ‘About the people who sent the paluba having a purpose of their own, that I couldn’t know…’ She paused. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? None of that matters. The angel in the forest is real. The Pollandore is real. The rest of it doesn’t matter. There are only two sides, and everyone has to choose. I’m not trusting the paluba, I’m trusting myself. It’s about feeling and instinct and knowing what to do, when the time comes.’
‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I guess that’s right.’
‘We have to get into the Lodka and find the Pollandore. What happens after that… that’s something else. We just have to get there.’
You can’t just walk into the Lodka, thought Lom, but he said nothing. That was his problem, not hers. Getting her inside, that was his job. What happened afterwards would be up to her.
Consider the question in its widest aspect.
The Lodka: it was where the Pollandore was, and it was where Chazia was. And Josef Kantor. The Lodka was the last place Lom had seen Kantor. Kantor was more than a terrorist. Much more. Lom didn’t fully understand Kantor’s connections with Chazia and the Lodka, but he knew that Kantor was deeply and intricately meshed in it all. That made Kantor a way in. So. Find Kantor. It was back to that.
They climbed back up the winding covered steps to the Ship Bastion and emerged into winter light. The sky was pale powder-blue, airy and vertiginous, wisped with sparse cloud-feather, achingly elsewhere, achingly high. They leaned on the parapet and looked out across the city. Mirgorod, spreading out towards the horizon under an immensity of height and air, seemed almost small. A humane settlement. Containable. A place where people lived. The winter sun, already westering, burned with a blinding whiteness that gave no heat. There was something wrong. A buzzing in the air, an edgy vibration, like unseen engines racing. Too quiet and distant to be a sound, you heard it with your skin, your teeth, the bones of your skull.
‘Look,’ said Maroussia ‘Look.’
She was squinting towards the sun.
Lom looked but saw nothing. The sun was cold and dazzling. When he shut his eyes against it, colour-shifting after-images and shadow-filaments floated across the blood-warmth inside. When he looked again, some of the specks were still there. Strings of dots across the sun in wavering horizontal lines. Faint punctuation.
Others had stopped to watch them. Nobody spoke.
More and more rows of specks resolved out of the sun. Coming into focus. Dozens. Scores. Hundreds. Coming in pulses. Waves. Formations.
The noise escalated to a thundering, rattling roar, not from the west where Lom was looking but from behind. He jerked his head round. The aircraft was low and descending and coming straight for them. It was immense. Three fat-bellied fuselages hung from wide, thick wings. Each wing carried eight–no, ten–propellers. The fuselages were as large as ships. The bomber was so big it seemed to be suspended in the sky, an impossible motionless thing. It was descending slowly straight down onto them, onto the rock hill on which they stood. It was going to crash.
At the last moment the plane lifted its nose fractionally and roared slowly overhead. They saw its swollen triple bellies of unpainted metal. Lettering on the underside of its wings. The insignia of the Archipelago. It was low enough to see faces looking down from its windows as it trundled over them and sailed out across the city, its engine noise climbing to a roar beyond hearing, its array of speed-blurred propellers chopping and grinding the air.
A trail of insignificant silver shapes spilled from its triple belly mouths.
A pause. A suspended moment. Maroussia’s hand was gripping Lom’s arm so tight it hurt.
The bombs splashed into the upturned face of the city and flowered into small blossoms of flame and smoke puffs.
And then came the sound.
The world lurched sickeningly and Lom’s stomach with it. A new door had opened and everything was utterly changed.
Wave after wave of huge triple-fuselaged bombers unloaded their cargoes. The engines roared relentlessly and the detonation-thuds burst in short fast shattering series. Fat columns of black oily smoke rose everywhere and drifted in low, thickening banks. The smell of it reached them: an industrial smell, like engine sheds and factories. Hot metal and soot.
Higher in the sky, smaller wasp-like aircraft circled, buzzed and droned, drawing tracks and spirals of vapour trail.
‘Which ones are ours?’ said Maroussia. ‘Can you tell?’
‘None,’ said Lom. ‘None at all.’
Twenty thousand pounds of high explosive per minute, minute after minute after minute, spilled out of the sky in sticks and skeins of bombs. Whistling formations of aerodynamic tubular steel casing. A spattering rain of incendiary parcels. When their bays were empty, the heavy bomber squadrons swept round again for a fresh approach. They lumbered in low. Autocannons in fishbowl noses and underbelly gun-pods punched out 50mm phosphorus shells at thirty rounds per minute. The disciplined, practised attacks concentrated on the wharfs and harbour yards to the west of Mirgorod and the steelworks and factories to the south, but the seeds of destruction and burn were scattered widely.
A stick of two-thousand-pound bombs splashed across Levrovskaya Square: three crashed through the roof of the Hotel Sviatopolk and erupted inside, two more hit in the square itself. Shockwaves swept through the Teagarden, smashing rubble and fragments of traffic and restaurants and people through the citizens taking tea. The blast buckled the heavy bronze doors of the Bank of Foreign Commerce and shattered the plate windows of Rosenfeld’s, blowing a hurricane of tiny glittering blades through customers and staff. Lacerating the polished mahogany panels and counters.
A five-thousand-pound barrel of explosive demolished the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge. The river erupted, drenching the Square of the Piteous Angel and leaving the riverbed temporarily naked. The shock waves rocked the Lodka: glass and stone from its high roof-dome crashed down on the readers in the hall of the Central Registry and the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine canted six inches sideways, its motors seized up and screeching.
Incendiary clusters set the roofs of the Laughing Cockerel Theatre and the Dreksler-Kino burning.
Vanko’s Uniform Factory was a crater of rubble and dust.
Mirgorod, city burning.
Fire-flakes licked at blistering paint and smouldering furniture and blew from house to house and street to street on gusting breezes of fire. Fire-clusters spread and merged and sucked in streams of air. Roads became channels for fire-feeding streams of air, hurricane inflows that reached the burning centre and columned up, high swaying pillars of uproarious flame. The walls of high buildings burning within toppled forward and came crashing down in billowing skirts of dust and flying brick and glass.
Rusalkas screamed and giants stumbled in the streets with burning hair. People saw other people hurt and die. Hurt and died themselves.
The warehouses and shipyards of the Ring Wharf burned. The timber yards and oil storage tanks and coal mountains burned. The bales and barrels and pallets in the lading sheds burned. The fires of the Ring Wharf roared like storms of wind and merged into one great fire, half a mile across: one bright shivering dome of burning under a thin canopy of smoke. The smoke-shell glowed from within as if it was itself on fire. Wavering curtains of orange-red flame opened and closed across the blinding heart of outrageous glare. Firefighters, walled off from the central blaze by bastions of heat, scrabbled at the outer edges of the Ring Wharf fire. They sucked water from the canals and harbour basins and pumped it in feeble arcs of spray that turned to steam on the air. If they got too close, their clothes and hair caught fire.
Josef Kantor, his own room gone, stands among the firefighters at the Ring Wharf, warming himself in the glow of the dockyards burning. Sweat greases his face. His skin is smeared with soot-smuts. He watches the thick column of oil-black smoke rising mile-high into the sky. A signal fire to the future. Heat and shadow flicker across his face, and the voice of Archangel whispers in his ear. Archangel has learned to whisper now.