Bez Nichevoi returned to his body at nightrise. He came back into it gradually, curled in its nest of earth and leaves and moss and chewed-over bones high among the roof beams of an empty warehouse in the city. As the planet turned its continent-face slowly away from the sun, the netted nerve-threads of his body snagged the touch of darklight and twitched and quietly sang. The settled sump of its blood unthickened, the secretions of its glands began to seep, interstitial lymph condensed like honeydew and capillaries, deconstricted, stirred. Ligatures of skeletal articulation re-clenched. In the slack pale slubs of jelly in the chambers of its skull, synaptic pathways undissolved. Bez Nichevoi warmed slowly through. And took breath. The body jack-knifed, spasming, choking, retching, vomiting acidic slews of gluey, gobbetty brown stink across its mushroom-pale and bone-thin chest. The waste products of a day of death.
Awakened, he lay back and opened his eyes, drinking in the beautiful darkness like water. The air around him was freezing. His first breaths hung in pale ghosts above his face, slowly dispersing. He surrendered himself to the pleasures of his nest, sweet and warm and crumbly-rotting, matted with perfumed fungal threads. The familiar musty smell of crusted salt and hawthorn blossom, rotting fruit and strong meat. A smell to awaken desire and dark, hidden feelings. Parts of his body were covered with skin-like papery stuff. He picked and peeled it carefully away with his fingernails and ate it.
When he was fully warmed through he rolled lazily out of his nest, swung himself up to the ceiling and skittered across it to the skylight, slipped through and climbed onto the lead of the roof. Naked, he squatted under the sky, bathing in starlight. There was something new on the air. The night was wired with it. The residue of burned city and upturned earth, the traces of two thousand deaths. The touch of war.
Bez Nichevoi, light of heart, unstrung the bundle of clothes he’d left hidden in the lea of a chimney stack, dressed, and set off across the rooftops to the Lodka, to read the file of papers Iliodor had left for him on Maroussia Shaumian.