Lavrentina Chazia worked the pulleys and lifting chains that swung the heavy angel skin away from the wall and into position. Stood on a stool to reach the headpiece, unhook it and bring it down. When she put her head inside it the weight of its edge cut into her shoulders. Enclosing, suffocating darkness. The ironand-ozone tang of angel flesh in her mouth.
She waited.
Nothing.
Chazia opened her mind, greedy and desperate, hunting for the link, the connection that didn’t come.
Nothing.
She had put her head inside a casket of stone meat. That was all.
But she could not fail. She needed not to fail.
Her legs were weak and trembling. She knelt on the ground and bent forward, resting her head against the stone to relieve the weight, stretching her arms out to the side. Closed her eyes. Focused all her attention on the dark purple surging inside her.
And waited.
And felt the barest touch of something at the back of her head, moving under her scalp. Like cool, tapered fingers brushing the surface of her mind. Tentatively feeling their way. Pausing. Teasing. Waiting.
Chazia screamed.
Hot blades stabbed deep into the core of her brain. The burning needle-bite of jaws snapped shut. Her body spasmed. Rigid. Jerking. She was on her back, staring unseeing up towards the roof, and the rock, and the earth, and the piled up floors and roofs of the Lodka, and the vaporous open sky. Her senses caught fire and burst into strange, alien life. The world poured into her.
She knew every contour and texture of the walls and the ground beneath her. Every object in the workshop. She sensed the tunnel leading away, its slight downward gradient. She was aware of Mirgorod around and above her, the weight and structure of its buildings. She felt the flow of the river as a surge of brown light. A heavy solid sound. She perceived the presence of people. Fuzzy patches of sentience. She could distinguish them from dogs or cats or birds. It was like a taste. They offered themselves up to her, all those teeming, unprotected, vulnerable points of life: they were naked before her alien angel gaze. She could have reached out and plucked one of them for herself, like a fruit from a bush. The sharp, dark, edgy points of meat scuttering away down the tunnel, those were rats. There were other things underground as well: ways and chambers unconnected to the tunnel, and lives inhabiting them. Older, stranger lives she could not identify, which felt her touch and slithered and shied away. And below her, deep and going down for ever, was the warmth and torsion and slow pressure of planetary rock. Sedimentary silt of seashell and bone. Extrusions of heart-rock: seams of granite and lava, dolerites, rhyolites, gabbros and tuffs, all buckled, faulted, shattered and upheaved under the weight of their own millennial tidal shifting.
It was uncontainable. Tumbling overwhelming floods of perception. In some detached and peripheral corner of her mind Chazia noted that it might be possible to master this torrent of percipience. With practice, it might be ordered and arranged into some approximation of consistent conscious understanding. But that was for another time. She didn’t even try to control it. She didn’t want to perceive: she wanted to be perceived.
She pushed back against the deluge of incoming sensation. Trying to use the power of it. She gathered together all the yearning and loneliness and frustration and humiliation and desire for power and control that she had carried inside her for so long. For always. All her will and purpose. Her sense of self, her towering, essential, unignorable self. She gathered it all into a tight ball and hurled it upwards and outwards into the world, powered by the energy pouring into her. A yelling, shrieking scream.
I am here! Notice me!
Recognise me! See what I have done!
Speak to me again! Speak to me!
Touch me!
Time after time she spurted and jetted herself out into the world. She was a blade of light stabbing up through clouds into the bright emptiness beyond. She was a loud voice calling above the storm. A scream of demand rolling across the continent. Again and again she shouted, until she was empty. Drained. Exhausted. And when she could do no more she stopped and listened.
Listened to the echoless silence. The unresponding emptiness behind and below the world.
She does not know that she has been noticed. That from nearby she is watched.
The Pollandore–enclosed in its little room but not enclosed–a world–a sphere of perfumed light–earth and leaf and forest air–turning on its quiet axis in no-time and no-space–the Pollandore knows what she is.
And senses what she could be.
Sees the trails of future possibilities spilling like ghosts around her.
And stirs uneasily in its patient waiting.
Deep inside it something that was balanced, slips.
Something that was silent, calls.