Lom woke in the grey light of dawn and climbed stiffly down from the cockpit. The Kotik was canted slightly sideways. Gretskaya’s legs were visible, sticking out from under the hull. A toolbox open beside her.
‘OK?’ said Lom.
‘Couple of hours. No problem.’
‘Need a hand?’
‘No.’
Some yards away Florian was crouching over a small fire, feeding it with brittle clumps of scrub. The herb flared into spitting heat and burned away instantly with an acrid fragrance and almost no smoke. He had a couple of cat-sized creatures impaled on sticks and propped over the fire. They were elongated, sinewy, unrecognisable: narrow fragile heads burned to black, eyes closed slits, carbonised lips stretched back from small sharp chisel-teeth. Threads of fat dripped from the burning meat and spattered into the fire with little explosions of bitter vaporous soot. Lom almost trod on their torn pelts, dropped on the gravel a couple of feet away. Grey bloody rags.
Florian looked up and grinned.
‘What the hell are those?’ said Lom.
Florian shrugged happily.
‘Surok,’ he said. ‘Ground squirrel.’ He held up a chunk of half-cooked meat. ‘Breakfast. Want some?’
‘No,’ said Lom quickly. ‘No. Thanks.’
He drifted off by himself, heading away from the aircraft. His footsteps crunched echoless in the silence. It was bitterly cold. Away from the reek of Florian’s fire the air smelled faintly of dry cinders and some kind of crushed herb he thought he recognised but couldn’t name. Something like sage. Or rue. Scraps of freezing mist hung low on the ground. His face was chilled to the bone: stiffened and numb, skin stretched too tight over his jaw and his skull. The yellow-grey steppe stretched beyond the flat horizon, hundreds of miles in every direction of nothing at all.
The plane had landed on some kind of raised plateau, uplifted some yards above the surrounding grassland. Last night’s rain had already evaporated in the thin wind. Lom found he could scuff away the sparse dry gravelly soil with his shoe, scraping down to virgin rock. The herby scrub had virtually no roots at all. When he had been walking for fifteen minutes or so, he began to notice that the ground was scattered at wide intervals with curious slivers, shards and fist-sized stones, ranging in colour from pale pink and rusted blood to bruise-dark purple, some rough and sharp, some rounded and polished to a glassy shine. He picked up a couple at random and cupped them in the palm of his hand, hefting their surprising weight. He knew exactly what they were. Raw fragments of the flesh of a fallen angel. They tingled in his hand, their almost-aliveness calling to him, and the stain of the old angel implant still lingering in his own blood stirred in response. It was like fine wires in his veins tightening and humming faintly. Follow, they urged, whispering. Follow.
It took Lom more than an hour to find the carcase of the angel itself: a small one, a minor malakh, nothing compared to the red grandeur of, say, the Ouspenskaya Torso. Keeping fifty yards distance, he walked all round it in five or ten minutes: a surprising, impossible crag of deep reds and purples. The angel had not been quite dead when it fell: three starfish pseudo-limbs extruded from one flank and flowed across the shallow crater floor, spreading fringes that trickled away and dissolved into the surface rock. Angels often survived their fall by hours, sometimes days, seeping liquefaction, scrabbling in sad confusion at the ground as the last intelligence drained out of them. But this one was certainly dead now, and had been dead for centuries: long enough for dusty wind-blown soil to gather deeply in the folds and depressions of its body. Even from such a mass as this, Lom sensed nothing but the vague, vestigial after-trace of dissipated sentience.
He was surely the first human to see this thing since it had fallen. The Vlast Observatories paid wealthy bounties for such a find, and failure to report one was a serious crime, but if it had been reported, the angel-miners of the Vlast would have come, hacked and sliced away its substance and hauled it away in slabs. They would have swept up every scattered pebble and strand and web for miles around. But this one had lain unseen and undisturbed since it had fallen, untouched by anything except the abrading weather. It called to him. He wanted to go closer. To touch it. Sheer curiosity. Never before had he been close to more than a mudjhik-sized lump of angel substance, though he had carried a sliver of it embedded in his skull for most of his life.
As Lom slipped down into the shallow crater and walked towards it, the small dead angel loomed over him like the hull of a battleship. The atmosphere sang and prickled against his skin. An ozone reek. He went right up against the flank. Close to, the angel’s flesh was dull and pitted, but marbled with streaks of dark translucence, seamed within by dim threads and striations of blood and midnight blue. Lom pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to it. Probing. Deeper and deeper into the dizzying mass. The answering wires in his veins snapped taut, leaving him dizzy, breathless, heart pounding.
An echo of proud intellectual hunger reached out and gripped him, tugging him further down and deeper in. The angel wasn’t a solid bulk, it was an open mouth. A fathomless well. He was standing on the fragile edge of terrifying, vertiginous, depths and staring, rapt and self-surrendered, into infinite emptiness: the space between galaxies and stars, not dark and cold and filled with death, but alive, a beautiful shining limitless windfall home. He wanted to fall into it. Fall and fly. The way up and the way down the same. It was his birthright, his just entitlement, his more than human destiny: the everlasting, ever-expanding future to which his history, all human history, was prologue. Just one step more. The flesh of the dead angel opened, a warm inviting gate, parting comfortably to fold around him and take him in.
No! Not this! Not ever this again!
Lom fought it.
Repel! Repel!
But he could not pull away. He screamed and yelled. Choking. Desperate. He hit out and pushed and kicked and bit and screamed. He coughed and vomited. Sour spittle spilled down his chin in gluey strands. Pulling away was appalling and impossible, like drowning himself, like holding his own breath till he died. He was murdering the thing he loved completely, loved more than himself: he was wilfully choosing his own bereavement. The dead angel suffused him and clung to his mind with needle-hooked claws. It was pulling the brain and spinal cord out of his body through the top of his skull. For Lom to withdraw was sickening death and extinction.
No! Not after all that’s happened, not this! Was it his own voice or the angel’s that screamed this horrified determination, this defiance of despair? It was both. There was only one voice.
And then Lom was out of the dead angel’s grasp and stumbling back across the ground, sobbing and vomiting, his lungs heaving desperately for clean cold breath.
Florian found Lom wandering, exhausted and confused, miles from the Kotik. Florian wiped the dried vomit and spittle from his face and made him sit on a rock and gave him water and meat. Lom ate a little but he could not speak. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and swung his head from side to side, trying to shake it clear.
‘Take your time,’ said Florian. ‘No rush. None at all. Gretskaya is waiting. The aircraft is repaired. She is anxious to make Terrimarkh before dark.’
‘Before dark?’ said Lom. ‘What… what time is it, then?’
‘It is almost three in the afternoon. You were gone for eight hours.’
‘An angel…’ Lom groaned and turned aside and vomited again. ‘It was dead… It…’
‘I have seen it,’ said Florian. ‘When you didn’t come back I followed your trail. I found what you found but I didn’t go close, not like you did. I could not have. What made you…?’
He paused but Lom said nothing. He could not.
‘I picked up your path again,’ said Florian, ‘on the other side of it. You were wandering.’
There was a hammering pain behind Lom’s eyes. He tried to focus on Florian but flashes of coloured brightness sparked and drifted across his vision.
‘How close?’ said Florian. ‘How close did you go?’ His voice reached Lom from far away. Lom jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. It only made things worse.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Think I’m going to—’
He jerked his head aside and vomited once more. He felt himself toppling slowly, endlessly forward. The world slid sideways into easy and comfortable darkness.