Lom had been walking for six hours, looking for Maroussia. All night an uneasy windstream had bundled high dark cloud mass eastwards across the sky. Ragged clearings opened across patches of fathomless star-speckled darkshine. Moon-glimpses dilated and closed. Sometimes Lom knew where he was and sometimes he was lost. The steep intricate streets, courtyards and passageways of the Raion Lezaryet defeated system and pattern. As he walked he tried to make sense of Maroussia’s disappearance, but he could not. She had woken in the night. She had not dressed–her clothes were still in the attic–but she had taken the solm and a coat, and gone out into the dark and disappeared.
He climbed the Ship Bastion to see if she was there. He went down to the Purfas Gate, which was closed and barred and unattended. Taking a different route back, he passed the blank darkened windows of a watch repairer, a tailor, a bookseller showing lonely yellow lamplight in an upstairs room. A night reader. The streets of the raion smelled wild and ancient–old woodsmoke, damp stone cellars, pig yards and open drains. The snow, the river mist and the sky. A pony grunted and shifted uneasily on the other side of a fence. A bat flickered close past his face, an indistinct smudge of fur. Lom flinched as if it had touched him, but it had not.
He let the winding narrow streets take him where they would. There was a shape and rhythm to them that was not human. He saw openings and followed them. Narrow corners at acute angles he had to squeeze through sideways. Gateways too low for adults to pass through without bending. Gaps and gratings whose purpose he could not grasp. Rounding the bends of wandering alleyways he felt himself entering localities of awareness: attentive, watchful presences shadowing his, though he could see nothing. Frustrated, he felt himself walking along the edge of something. On the borderline of some discovery he could not make. Nightside. The only sounds were small ones: a latch rattling in the wind, the slump of snow disturbed in a gutter, and once the shriek of a street-scavenging fox. Crossing a wider cobbled square in a splash of moonshadow, he caught a trace of something different. A taint on the air. An intrusion. His stomach tightened. His neck prickled. Something sharp, cruel and disgusting had passed that way. An edge of panic began to scratch away at the edge of his mind and did not stop.
Three times during the night he returned to the house to see if Maroussia had come back. He roused Elena Cornelius and the Count and together they combed the building from cellars to attics. It had obviously occurred to both of them, though they did not say it, that Maroussia had gone. Slipped away. Abandoned him. Left the city. It was in their faces as they helped him search the house. Elena at least thought it would have been a good move. But Lom didn’t believe it. He went to Kamilova’s house and banged on the door, but no one came.
When dawn came and the Purfas Gate opened, he took the first tram of the day into the city, to the Lodka, on the possibility that Maroussia, unable to sleep, had decided to go there alone, to check it out, to be nearer the Pollandore, perhaps even to look for a way inside. It seemed unlikely, but he had no other ideas. None at all.