CHAPTER 12

Grim woke up late.

He’d been dreaming about the kamikaze soldiers trundling the gas bomb into the smoky haze, and the men playing reed pipes strolling after them. They were playing incredible music, extremely simple, but filled with such great sadness and power that Grim surfaced out of sleep in tears. It seemed as if he remembered all the time that the lads had died long ago – but in the dream it turned out that it only seemed that way, and in actual fact they were still trundling their trolley towards the target in some strange fashion that was entirely incomprehensible on this earth, and no battle cameras could hinder them any longer. Although the further away the dream drifted, the harder it became to remember what exactly he had seen and understood.

Grim didn’t feel like getting up. He lay under the bedspread for a few minutes, examining the discoursemonger’s secret refuge.

He didn’t really like the room all that much – everything bore the imprint of someone else’s life and habits. Probably he could get used to it in time, but so far the surrounding space reminded him of the void inside a shoe taken off somebody else’s foot.

Chloe wasn’t there beside him. He could hear sounds coming from somewhere – first a croak, then a shrill howl. At first Grim thought it was moles celebrating their wedding under the floor, but then he made out words in one of the howls and realised that it was Chloe talking to Bernard-Henri.

Well, well, he thought, first thing in the morning. Never offend a girl’s finer feelings … I wonder if she felt it was worth it, would she give me the same treatment?

Grim suddenly recalled the barracks – the lads from his draft looking up at the sky and the red barrel with the word ‘sand’ on its side, old fag ends soaking in it. Then he recalled the priest Goon, who gave him the divinatory book.

But there is another secret meaning – it is said that you will be aided by spirits, and that you will be able to write songs and poems …

Somehow the spirits weren’t in any great hurry to come to his aid. And no poems or songs were springing up in his heart either.

But maybe, thought Grim, I really can write them, I just don’t know about it? Maybe I should try?

He found a notepad and a pencil on the windowsill. One page was filled with housekeeping calculations – he thought it was Chloe’s handwriting. Grim went back to the bed, turned over the page, moved the pencil close to the paper, and the first line suddenly appeared in his head completely out of the blue.

When the prosecutor public with the pierced earlobe …

It was clear enough that the prosecutor was Chloe’s father. But the phrase written on the paper acquired some kind of profound, universal meaning, as if it was about all the public prosecutors who had ever lived on earth … It was exciting. Grim tried writing a second line. That came out well too. Then he wrote a third one. And then a fourth. If he just read them out loud, he started getting the feeling that a smoothly purring motorenwagen had driven by.

Grim couldn’t understand how he had managed to do it – and to check on himself, he wrote another quatrain, followed by a few more. He had to cover a lot of paper with scribble. Not everything came out smoothly – a few of the stanzas simply refused to be locked into shape, and that meant he needed to set out the meaning more precisely. What was missing was the kind of ancient nobility and simplicity that animated, for instance, certain passages of The Book of Orkasms. But Grim already understood that later he would be able to come back to what he had written and make it much, much better …

While he was writing, Bernard-Henri stopped screaming – as if the poetic vibrations reaching him through the floor and the wall had brought him some solace in his misfortune. And a minute after that Chloe walked into the room.

Grim closed the notepad and put it in the pocket of his trousers, which were lying beside the bed.

‘What’s that you’re writing?’ asked Chloe.

‘Nothing much,’ Grim said casually. ‘Poems. You wouldn’t be interested.’

Chloe nodded, and Grim realised that she really wasn’t interested. He felt hurt.

Apparently, Chloe sensed that his feelings were bruised.

‘What, want to be a priest, do you?’ she asked, running her fingers down past her face to suggest the fringe of wisdom.

‘I don’t know,’ Grim answered. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘Do you think you’ll get paid for your poems? No one knows who you are.’

‘They will, though,’ Grim muttered.

‘And what are we going to eat until they get to know you?’

Grim was so outraged by that ‘we’ that he didn’t even answer. It looked like Chloe had already made new plans for life, plans in which he was allotted a very definite place – and she’d done it without asking him his opinion or apologising for her own multistage betrayal. He could just write a new poem right now.

‘Bernard-Henri’s croaked,’ Chloe told him.

‘It’s your own fault.’

‘What do we do with him now?’

‘Do whatever you like,’ said Grim. ‘I don’t want him.’

‘He said he had some kind of little device inside him. If he dies, they’ll see it immediately in the Green Zone. Was he lying, do you think?’

‘I think he was,’ Grim answered. ‘If not, then why haven’t they found him yet?’

‘Nobody’s looking for him, because after the war everybody’s busy with heaps of stuff. But when they realise, they’ll find him all right, straight from the air. He said that was dead easy for the people, only they’re all busy right now.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘He also said “what a philosóphe is dying”.’

‘Philósopher,’ Grim corrected her.

‘He said “philosóphe”. Okay, let’s go.’

‘Where to?’

‘Home for the time being,’ Chloe said sadly. ‘I can’t go to the Green Zone now. I don’t know anyone else there. And then, what am I going to say if they ask about him?’

Grim felt like getting out of this house too. He got dressed quickly.

Chloe walked over to the door, opened it a crack and looked outside. Grim was about to step out after her, but Chloe suddenly slammed the door shut and backed away from it, running into him. Grim seemed to feel her heart pounding in fright inside his own chest.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Ssssssh,’ said Chloe, putting a finger to her lips. ‘There’s an ambush out there.’

‘Where?’ Grim whispered. ‘Did you see it?’

‘No,’ said Chloe. ‘But they’re very close.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Ganjaberserks.’

‘Are you quite sure about that?’

Chloe nodded.

‘I can smell dope. I’ve known that smell since I was a kid. Sage and cannabis.’

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Grim.

‘Can you drive a motorenwagen?’

‘I probably can,’ said Grim. ‘If it’s like a moped. But where will we go?’

‘First we have to get out of here.’

‘Maybe we ought to tell them that …’

‘You fool,’ Chloe interrupted. ‘If they catch us, nobody will even bother to listen. Can you imagine what you’ll get for one of them in peace time? Especially for a discoursemonger. The new regime will lick their arses right up until the next war.’

Grim sighed. Chloe was right – he hadn’t expected such mature judgement from her. Presumably it was the effect of associating with Bernard-Henri.

‘They’ll never catch a motorenwagen,’ Chloe went on. ‘We’ll get well away from Slava and dump it in the forest.’

‘But they’ll find out it’s us, won’t they?’

‘How? Who can tell whose skulls he’s been polishing up here? And there are the bones buried in the corner here too … Let them search.’

Why did I bother to come, thought Grim. She could have sorted out herself all those bones of hers …

He looked at Chloe. Chloe smiled miserably and shrugged.

‘Are you upset?’ she asked.

‘That’s not the word for it,’ Grim answered. ‘Welcome back from the war.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.’

‘I know,’ said Grim

‘So, shall we go then?’

Grim nodded.

‘Let’s climb out here,’ said Chloe. ‘They can’t see us here behind the bushes.’

She cautiously opened a side window and drew the air in through her nostrils. Apparently it was all clear on this side of the house – she climbed out into the yard. Grim followed her, trying not to make any noise.

The car was close, but they had to cross several metres of open space to get to it. Grim closed his eyes and tried to imagine that he was still on Orkish Slava. But the soldier’s indifference to life and death refused to return to his heart. If he had been alone, he would have got stuck like that in the bushes.

But Chloe was with him. She pushed him in the back.

‘Forward!’

Grim ran to the jeep, opened the door and climbed into the seat behind the wheel. A second later Chloe was in the passenger seat.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘The right pedal’s for getting speed on. The left one’s for braking. And this black handle’s for changing direction. Got it?’

‘Got it,’ Grim answered. ‘But how do I switch the engine on?’

Chloe pressed a button on the instrument panel and the engine started growling quietly.

Immediately, as if that press of the button had summoned them, four Ganjaberserks in urban camouflage appeared in front of the car. In their hands they were holding short iron truncheons.

‘A-a-a-ah!’ Chloe screamed through the open window. ‘Wha-a-a-a-a-a-ah!’

Her scream pulsated so piercingly that one of the warriors even dropped his weapon in surprise.

The Berserks started squinting strangely at each other, and Grim noticed that their hands and their heads were trembling, and the trembling was getting stronger and stronger. It looked as if they were nodding to each other very, very fast, reminding each other about some important arrangement – and agreeing not to forget about it no matter what, putting more feeling into their agreement with every second.

The spasms seemed to be impossible to control – one of the Ganjaberserks sat down on the ground right there, putting his hands over his ear. The other three shuffled off, staggering, towards the bushes from which they had emerged.

But Chloe kept on screaming, and her scream was so unbearably ear-splitting that a shiver ran down Grim’s back.

Chloe nodded at the gates without closing her mouth and he slammed the pedal down to the floor.

The gates flew off their hinges and the motorenwagen was out in the street. Chloe finally stopped screeching. At first Grim was delighted – and then he saw the horsemen with spears in the street.

He looked round.

In one direction the dirt road was blocked off by an immense Daimler Motorenwagen dump truck – the kind that were assembled in the Yellow Zone for the northern mines. Lying in a ribbed furrow from the broad tread of a tyre, right in front of the truck’s blunt nose, was a pig, following the action very closely – as if it had known about the performance in advance and had taken its seat in the front row of the stalls early in the morning. It occurred to Grim that the dump truck was unnecessary – there was a dead-end behind it, and the jeep couldn’t have got through anyway. And there were soldiers standing there as well.

Grim turned in the other direction.

But there were the horsemen.

The mounted Ganjaberserks were the spitting image of the warriors who had escorted Torn Durex – they were wearing camouflage fatigues and black armour. There was a second line of horsemen behind the first, and another dump truck was standing further back. Foot soldiers with truncheons were waiting beside it.

‘Can you screech again?’ asked Grim.

‘No, I’ve strained my voice.’

‘Then it’s the end.’

‘What end?’

‘Death,’ Grim gasped out.

And the moment he uttered the word, Death actually appeared – as if it had been hiding somewhere close by, waiting to be called.

Death looked exactly the same as the last time.

It wove itself out of emptiness right in front of the jeep’s windscreen and peered at Grim with the multicoloured wall-eyes of its lenses.

The camera had the same strained, attentive look as the pig lying in front of the dump truck, and it occurred to Grim that, like him, life sometimes tried its hand at writing poems – and rhymed them painstakingly. He laughed. Chloe looked at him in amazement, and then she saw the camera too.

With a flash of its red-tattooed flank, the camera swung round and soared upwards. Now they could see its matt-black belly with the air trembling under a host of different-sized nozzles. Then two plates swung out from the belly and in the cavity revealed between them Grim saw beautiful red and white rockets.

The camera was shrouded in smoke and three freakishly curving white streaks detached themselves from it. The rockets followed a very strange trajectory – first they zoomed up steeply into the sky, then they swung round and came hurtling downwards. Grim had time to realise that each rocket was homing in on its own target – and straight after that three huge fiery black trees sprang up on the road ahead. Grim’s seat lurched under him. Then a stone clattered against the windscreen.

When the fine debris thrown up by the explosion settled, Grim saw that the dump truck wasn’t in front of them anymore. It was lying at the side of the road, pointing its ribbed wheels up at the sky. There were no more Ganjaberserks on the road either. Now there were only two dead horses lying there – everything else had been scattered all around and it no longer resembled either horses or men. The power of the explosions was so great that the wall of one of the nearby houses collapsed, exposing the interiors of the rooms – a red carpet with a portrait of Loss Liquid in profile hanging on a wall, a green sofa, a nightstand with a shabby-looking manitou, and other Orkish household details.

The camera swung round towards the car and performed an intricate movement – but the meaning of it was as clear as if it had been a human gesture: they should move forward.

Grim did as he was told.

After negotiating, with some difficulty, the section of road smashed by the explosions, he stopped. If any Ganjaberserk was still combat-capable, he was in no hurry to boast about it.

The camera turned towards the car and rose up above the road, keeping its chalky wall-eyes fixed on Grim.

‘Looks like it’s our turn …’ Chloe began.

The camera was wreathed in smoke again. Grim squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his head against the driving wheel. A second went by and he heard three explosions that merged into each other – but the sound came from behind him. Several lumps of earth thudded onto the roof and silence descended. Grim opened his eyes.

The house they had just left no longer existed. There weren’t even any bushes or fence – only a cloud of dust and smoke billowing outwards. The second dump truck was heaped over with mud and the pig lying in front of it had disappeared. It had probably engaged its camouflage, thought Grim.

‘Oh,’ Chloe whispered. ‘We got out just in time … You know what … I think he wants us to follow him again.’

‘I’ve already realised that,’ Grim replied. ‘Close your window.’

‘What for?’

‘So everyone will think it’s the discoursemonger driving along. With a camera escort. No one will bother us again.’

As soon as Chloe did what he’d said, he pressed down on the pedal and the motorenwagen set off up the slope of the street.

The surviving Orkish soldiers huddled back against the fences. No one tried to stop the car any more. A Ganjaberserk black with mud, wearing the skulls of an ensign, saluted as the tinted windows glided past. Grim thought it must be because he was concussed, but when they reached the next patrol, all the soldiers saluted.

‘Just imagine it,’ said Chloe, ‘riding about like this every day.’

‘Where to?’

‘The Yellow Zone, at the least. Or even the Green one.’

‘I’d soon get sick of it,’ Grim replied.

‘But I could do it all my life.’

Grim looked at her with a mixture of disbelief and fear.

His fingers were still trembling and he had to squeeze the steering wheel hard to drive the motorenwagen. But Chloe seemed to have managed to calm down already – she was looking out curiously through the window, drinking in the Orkish glances that were slipping over it. Grim could have sworn that what she wanted to do more than anything else in the world was lower the tinted pane of glass to show the public who was sitting behind it.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Chloe. ‘To the Green Zone?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Grim replied, squinting at the camera. ‘Listen, what happened to the Berserks when you started screeching? Did you deafen them somehow?’

‘No,’ said Chloe. ‘They just started to get the worries.’

‘And what’s the worries?’

‘They also call it the horrors, or the frights. It’s this horrible fear that shrill sounds give them when they’re smoked up. Before battle they plug their ears with a special resin, because in war they can hang you for cowardice. But the war’s over now. And they didn’t have any plugs in their ears.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘My father’s a butt, isn’t he?’ said Chloe. ‘Or did you forget that? And my granddad was a Berserk too – he fought in three wars in blocking detachments. The first time was back under Losses. And he lost one eye and two fingers.’

‘He was wounded in a blocking detachment?’ Grim asked incredulously.

‘They do get hit sometimes.’

‘And did your father ever fight a war?’

‘My father’s a civilian Ganjaberserk. He got hooked in his job. He started in the tax department, and they smoke five times a day there. He used to flog me with his belt, but then I learned how to screech to make him get the worries, and sometimes even the whities. Nowadays when he has a smoke he hides from me in the happiness room.’

Grim thought dully that the upper people might be interested in a military secret like this. After all, the Ganjaberserks were the main bulwark of the regime, and if they knew their weak point … But for some reason this idea failed to interest even him and departed uncompleted into the mists of forgetfulness.

He slowed down at a crossroads, waiting for a sign from the camera. The camera ordered him to go straight on.

‘No, we’re not going to the Green Zone,’ said Grim. ‘If that was where we’re going, we’d have turned right.’

‘Where, then?’

‘To the market. Or … to Orkish Slava. That would be good, by the way.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no one will stick their noses in there after us. It’s a demilitarized zone. There’s nothing there but corpse wagons. Just as long as we can get in through the gates. There’s a security detail and a barrier there now.’

‘And then what?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Here, put this on,’ said Chloe.

Grim saw a baseball cap with the word ‘CINEWS’ on it in her hand.

‘Is that the discoursemonger’s?’

Chloe nodded.

‘Maybe you’ll get a bit smarter,’ she said.

Grim didn’t believe it was very likely, but the checkpoint was coming up, and he put the cap on his head.

When the car drove into the market square, Grim started feeling afraid again.

Stretchers with wounded men on them had been set out everywhere, and he thought the Orks might overturn the discoursemonger’s car, or at least pelt it with stones. However the exact opposite happened – the sullen men from the row of butchers’ stalls, mobilised to maintain order, quickly cleared the road for him, pulling aside the men lying in his way. No one as much as raised their eyes to the motorenwagen’s tinted windows.

The Gates of Victory were still standing open. The Ganjaberserk on sentry duty spoke with someone on his mobile phone and raised the boom.

It cost Grim a great effort to drive slowly under its red jib. But as soon as the wall of the Circus was behind him he performed a nervous zigzag, as if he was trying to cover his tracks – first driving to the right, and then to the left.

Fortunately there was no one around to whom this could have appeared suspicious. After driving well away from the gates, he stopped the car and lowered his window.

The camera was nowhere to be seen – it had either activated its camouflage or flown away.

Grim looked round the boundless field.

Far away to the right, at the site of the battle with the metal giants, a crowd of Orks was levelling out the ground – he could see barrows of turf and little figures with spades and rakes. The work was being supervised by several mounted Berserks – they were unarmed, with white armbands on their sleeves.

There were corpse-wagons with yellow Spirals of Resurrection and grey canvas covers creeping across the field. The corpse-wagons were quite numerous – if he just screwed up his eyes, they started looking like ships with markings on their sails, sailing over a green sea.

There were still corpses lying in the grass. They were already badly swollen – over and over Grim was catching the repulsive smell of decomposition.

‘Killed like pigs,’ Chloe whispered in disgust.

Grim suddenly recalled the pig lying by the wheels of the dump truck that had blocked off the road. He pulled the notepad out of his pocket and wrote a couple of lines in it.

‘Writing poems again?’

Grim nodded.

He waited a few seconds for Chloe to ask him to read out at least a little bit, but she didn’t say anything. Then he put the notepad away and slowly drove to the centre of the field, trying to steer round the Orkish remains as carefully as possible. Sometimes it was difficult. Chloe looked around and whistled some song or other.

The closer the car drove to the Hill of the Ancestors, the more black craters there were on all sides – left from strikes by the people’s weapons. There weren’t any dead Orks here, because those had already been cleared away from the centre of the field, but they often came across fragments of bodies – hands, clumps of red and blue entrails, mutilated heads, shoes filled with rotting flesh. And there were a lot of Orkish weapons too.

They also came across traces of events that were hard to understand, which must have taken place in secluded corners and dead ends behind the flying walls.

Little stakes drifted past the jeep, with black and yellow off-limits ribbons stretched between them, bearing a message in small letters: ‘s.n.u.f.f. line – please don’t cross’. Lying in the fenced-off square was a white-silk sheet, coloured cushions and champagne bottles, one of them with a pink condom stretched onto it. The bottles were unopened and the gold labels suggested that they were quite expensive. Grim realised that the Ganjaberserks supervising the clean-up hadn’t dared to pick them up because they didn’t know if the prohibition on crossing beyond the striped ribbon was still in force.

Near the Hill of the Ancestors stood a car and a machine that belonged to the upper people – a motorenwagen, exactly the same as Grim and Chloe’s, and a yellow excavator with glittering scoops on a long boom. To be on the safe side Grim gave them as wide a berth as possible, but did take the risk of driving close by the deep and narrow pit that the excavator had already dug out beside the Hill. Inside, a team of Orks was at work, throwing earth over a long trench filled with corpses: there weren’t enough spademen, and grey wagons had formed up in a queue for the quarry. They were burying the fallen in several layers – saving space.

Grim let Chloe glance down, then stepped on the gas and didn’t stop until the Hill of the Ancestors had been left far behind.

‘That was where the Kagan’s barge had been moored,’ he said. ‘I was on it too.’

He was expecting questions, but all Chloe said, casually, was:

‘So it’s not a lie then.’

‘What’s not a lie?’

‘About the bones of our ancestors under the Hill. There must be a lot – look how close they’re laying them … Oh, what’s that?’

Grim saw a brown mound. At first he thought it was earth, flung up by a powerful explosion. But the outline of the hill was way too strange and there was some kind of yellow pipe sticking out of it.

‘Let’s take a look!’ Chloe said to him.

There were no Orks or people anywhere near. Grim swung the car round.

‘It’s an elephant!’ Chloe whispered when they got closer. ‘A brown elephant!’

‘Not an elephant, a mammoth,’ Grim corrected her. ‘They sent them in against us from the left flank. Many brave lads laid down their lives here.’

The mammoth was lying on its side. The grass around it was covered with black, baked mud – Orkish blood, mingled with soil. The crushed bodies had already been cleared away. Judging from the size of the dark patch, the mammoth had trampled on the infantry entirely at will. Grim drove round the patch slowly, trying not to ride onto it.

The mammoth’s belly was slashed open. Evidently it had slipped in the bloody slurry and fallen on its side, and then the Orkish heroes had managed to reach its guts.

The guts, though, had proved too robust. Some scraps of red biofabric, corrugated tubes and wires were protruding from the long hole in the shaggy belly, and visible behind them was a dark metallic underpan, on which the Orks’ weapons had only been able to leave a few scratches.

Then the mammoth’s head came into sight, with its lifeless trunk and rakishly curved tusks. Its eyes were open and somehow they looked so alive that it was frightening to peer into them.

And then Grim saw the battle platform attached to the mammoth’s back.

The warriors were still there, in their little gondola decorated with shields. They were dressed in leather armour faced with iron plates, and iron helmets. Their faces and arms were covered with wounds from Orkish steel and congealed blood that looked very much like the real thing, but to call them dead would have been an exaggeration.

Instead of tumbling out of their cabin onto the ground, the warriors were protruding from it shamelessly, like huge nails hammered into the back of the electrical beast. Clearly they and the mammoth were a single whole. One of the warriors was still preparing to throw a spear and another was reloading a crossbow, while the head of the third one had been torn off, and some kind of plastic tubular ribbons – with metal inserts and red strands – were dangling out of his neck.

Grim drove away from the mammoth and stopped the car.

‘Where to now?’ he asked.

‘Let’s go over that way,’ Chloe replied. ‘See, where there’s something red jutting up.’

‘That’s where the central front was,’ said Grim, pressing on the pedal.

In the central sector, traces of the battle was especially frequent – the ground had been all ploughed up and he had to drive carefully to avoid having a wheel drop into a crater.

Grim skirted round a line of soldiers lying on the ground in their tall hats and bright-red tunics. The soldiers were small dummies, connected together by a frame with an electrical hose. They were crudely made and looked like a fence blown over in a storm. The line had once been mounted on little spiked wheels that were positioned after every third dummy. Grim guessed that this was where the infantry square he had heard about fought, and the stormtroopers had managed to tear the front row off the overall structure at the cost of inconceivable casualties.

In the central sector, the density of fire had been so great that several battle cameras that happened to be in the shells’ trajectory had been shot down. It wasn’t likely that any of the Orkish heroes who fought here had survived.

Several ruined vampire’s nests drifted past the jeep. They could see the vampires in them, half-risen from under the ground – their power must have been cut off just at the moment when they were preparing to jump out onto the surface. The people’s shells were to blame for this too – they had severed the cable. The vampires had big yellow eyes that looked like the rear lights of a jeep. Complicated levers and springs could be divined under their black cloaks. They were still spine-chilling to look at even now, but in the smoke and semi-darkness they must really have driven Orks out of their minds.

At last the signs of battle came to an end. Grim drove on and soon the sky was partially obscured by the wall that enclosed the Circus. Right in front of it there was a strip of old concrete, with grass growing out of the cracks in it. They had driven right across Orkish Slava.

‘What are those pieces of paper lying around everywhere?’ asked Chloe.

‘Documents for bloodstaining,’ Grim replied. ‘Only they’re useless …’

He couldn’t take his eyes off the wall. There was no Orkish plasterwork on it here, and its original rounded form was visible – the wall was like a gigantic wave, frozen an instant before it hit the shore. This fall had been going on for many centuries: the grey concrete was covered in cracks, but so far time had not been able to do anything to it.

Grim couldn’t even imagine the gigantic machines capable of constructing something like that. True, at school someone had told him that in ancient times construction work wasn’t performed by machines, but by tiny little beetles invisible to the eye, and to an onlooker it seemed as if the walls were growing by themselves. But no one knew if this was true or not, because the only thing left of the ancient buildings was their vitrified foundations. And the Orks themselves built with wood and brick. Not so very long ago they had still known how to make decent concrete blocks, but now they turned out worse and worse all the time.

‘That’s it,’ said Grim. ‘Now what, shall we go back?’

Chloe thought a bit.

‘Get out,’ she told him.

‘What for?’

‘Let’s wave our arms about. The camera directed us in here for some reason.’

‘Which direction shall we wave them in?’

‘Just upwards. Only straighten up your cap.’

‘What for?’

‘Bernard-Henri used to say that a modern man – if he’s not an Ork, of course – should be sizing up the way he looks all the time, and act as if he’s being filmed. Because the shooting can start at any moment.’

‘What makes you think there’s a camera up there?’

‘There might not be one,’ said Chloe. ‘But we have to act as if there is one. And then they’ll definitely come for us.’

‘It’s kind of stupid,’ Grim muttered.

‘And you’re so very smart,’ replied Chloe. ‘But where would we be now if I’d listened to you?’

Grim could have said a lot about that, but he decided not to argue. He opened the door and got out of the car.

Walking over to him, Chloe put her arm round his shoulder and told him:

‘Now raise you head, smile and wave your hand.’

Grim squinted at her.

There was already a smile on Chloe’s face – such a wide, toothy smile that there was no point in asking if it was sincere or not. She looked into the grey cloud and waved her hand. Grim tried to copy her smile (it didn’t turn out all that well, of course) and also waved his open hand through the air a few times. He felt like a total idiot and soon lowered his hand, but Chloe hissed through her smile:

‘Wave, you dimwit!’

After another minute even Chloe got fed up of waving. Grim saw the bewilderment and anguish in her face.

And then a miracle happened.

Right in front of them a triangular door suddenly opened, then flipped downward, turning into a short ramp. The ramp led into mysterious semi-darkness. In there, beyond the slightest possible doubt, a new world began. And the entrance to it had been hidden in mid-air, only a metre above the ground – hidden so well that Grim could easily have banged his head against it if he had taken another couple of steps.

Standing on the threshold of the new world was a very fat man, his arms round a huge bunch of flowers. He was dressed in a broad, brightly coloured dressing-gown, and he had the same kind of baseball cap on his head as Grim, with a silver knot and the word ‘CINEWS’ on it. His genial face radiated happiness. He looked as if he was terribly glad to see Grim and Chloe – or he simply knew that he was being filmed by several invisible cameras at the same time.

The first thing he did was make a strange, extremely energetic movement – throwing his arms apart and sort of nudging the flowers with his belly. Grim and Chloe were showered with a fragrant, multicoloured rain.

‘Hello, my friends!’ said the fat man. ‘Greetings, Chloe! Greetings, Grim! My name is Damilola Karpov and we have been acquainted with each other at a distance for many, many days. You were promised that you would live among people. Did you think you had been forgotten? But people always keep their word. Welcome to Big Byz!’