The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  The girl survived the existential crisis by looking at the world as an aesthetic composition. Scale was a device that an artist could deploy in the service of an effect. How great was God, then, who had painted on a canvas so huge that thousands of millions of men and women could live out their lives upon it.

  The teaching continued. Each week, each day, it seemed she drew further and further ahead of those she trained with. In unarmed combat, she routinely humbled opponents much bigger and stronger than her. Her will was like a wire wound over and back on itself a million times within her compact body, so that her smallness concealed a great, unyielding immensity.

  She excelled in use of weapons.

  She excelled in tactical and strategic thinking.

  She excelled in stamina.

  She excelled in intelligence and in the retention of information.

  It became, for her classmates, a matter of extreme pride to keep pace with the girl in anything. To best her, even temporarily, was an achievement to be boasted about for months.

  Many of the boys in the group expressed a romantic interest in her – and many of the girls, likewise, since the People had no taboos about what the Adamites called homosexuality. The girl made it clear in every case that these attentions were unwelcome. In fact, she feared intimacy as others seemed to fear loneliness. To let someone into her life and into her bed, to speak unguarded thoughts in the heat of unguarded acts – it was an idea that thrilled her and nauseated her in equal measure. But close up, as soon as she felt any quickening of interest in anyone, boy or girl (more usually boy), the nausea overwhelmed the excitement. She could imagine the physical act of sex, the rest was too unnerving to contemplate.

  When she finally gave herself, it seemed more an act of violence than of love. She was on the third and last day of a competitive field test, matched against a superior team that had had them outmanoeuvred from the start. If the girl herself had been team leader, she knew she could still have pulled things together – forced a victory or at the very worst a draw. But the leaders had been chosen by random lot, and her team’s, an impulsive and excitable boy named Desh Nahir, was not equal to the task.

  So on the third day, the girl’s squad was trapped in an indefensible position at the bottom of a shallow gully and wiped out by a sustained enfilade attack that left them covered from head to foot in the red paint that was standing in for blood.

  Subsequently, the girl had to spend three hours lying still in the place where she’d been shot, before the whistle sounded for the end of the day’s combat.

  As soon as she was able to move, she found her team leader disrobing in the locker room and tackled him. She didn’t punch or kick or slap him, she just pressed her body against his so that his uniform would be saturated with the red paint and he’d be obliged to take a share of the dishonour that was by rights his, not hers.

  But the tumult of her feelings, though it was dominated by anger and frustration, had other components, too. The pressure of her body against Nahir’s began to arouse feelings that were not entirely unpleasant, and when he kissed her, tentative, terrified of her rebuke, she responded.

  Their relationship lasted for five weeks, long enough for the girl to decide that she’d been right in the first place: the annoyances and provocations caused by letting someone get that close to you far outweighed any possible pleasures. She told Nahir that it was over, much to his chagrin, and when he so far forgot his dignity as to plead with her, she walked away.

  There was another fling, with a girl four years older than her, which she undertook in order to make sure that she hadn’t just picked the wrong someone. The results were much the same, although that relationship lasted a little longer and ended a little more stormily.

  The girl trained for three years. It wasn’t, in any sense, long enough, but she knew that time was short. She could tell this from the way their teachers drove them, and from the fact that sometimes when she looked up from her exercises in the arena or in the classroom, she would see either Kuutma himself or one of his two angels watching her closely, with a grave, absorbed expression.

  The teachers were not troubled by the high rates of attrition. One by one, the students fell away after failing this or that test, or else simply stopped attending classes for no reason that the girl could see.

  As the third year wore on, they began to take the drug, kelalit. The first time the girl took it, letting just a tiny drop of the clear liquid fall from the eye-dropper onto her tongue, it was like being splashed across the brain with liquid nitrogen. Everything became incredibly sharp-edged, incredibly clear – and incredibly slow. She felt both strong and dead, as though what had been her body had been filled with molten metal, which had now cooled and hardened into some terrible machine in her exact shape.

  They put her into the arena and sent three opponents against her at once – all Elohim like herself, but without the benefit of the pharmacon. The fight lasted nineteen seconds.

  Afterwards the girl puked her guts up, and then lay awake for most of the night, trembling and sweating.

  ‘It’s poison,’ the teacher Ushana told her, when she asked. ‘The exact formula is known only to the chemists who make it, but all of its nearest cousins are utterly lethal. Adamites take them for pleasure and become addicted to them. They take larger and larger doses, and in the end their minds and bodies are destroyed by the cumulative effects of the toxins.’

  The girl was shocked and afraid in spite of herself. Loss of control was high on her personal list of deadly sins. ‘How is the way we use the drug different?’ she asked, hoping to be reassured.

  ‘We take no pleasure in it,’ Ushana said.

  No, Kuutma told her later, there’s more than that. The drug we take, kelalit, the curse and the blessing, is not a single substance. It’s a compound, made of many drugs, and some of them are at war with each other. The core compound induces a rush of euphoria, a feeling of omnipotence, but it clouds the mind and dulls the senses. Kelalit, by contrast, heightens the senses and speeds up physiological processes. The flow of information through the nerves of the body is hugely enhanced, which means that both perception and action are much quicker. Of that core sense of power and joy, meanwhile, enough is maintained to make the user shrug off pain that would normally distract or even incapacitate. Out of a filthy and shameful indulgence, the craftsmen of the People had fashioned a warrior’s tool, flexible and powerful.

  But still deadly. Most of the Elohim who died out among the Nations did so from the cumulative effects of kelalit.

  Over weeks and months, the girl became habituated to the use of this double-edged tool, this treacherously mixed blessing. By the summer of the third year, she could endure a full dose of kelalit, despite her relatively small body mass, and function at the heightened level of perception and action for hours at a time. She grew more adept, also, at handling the physiological and emotional crash that always followed.

  Once again, she was the example held up to all the others, the model they followed and fashioned themselves upon. When another trainee, Esali, died of a kelalit overdose, and her stiff, grey body was brought through the dormitory in a deafening silence of disbelief and denial, the girl realised that being top of the class had its downside. Esali had been trying to become more like her.

  The girl kept to herself more than ever after that. She hadn’t ever encouraged her classmates’ cult of hero worship, but now she repelled all advances with deliberate rudeness. She wanted no more deaths queuing up at the gates of her conscience, no matter how strongly those gates were defended.

  She endured. She won out. She took all that her teachers could give her, internalised it, and like a spider gave it back as a single thread of woven silk. Only the oldest teacher, Rithuel, who taught some of the psychology classes, gave her a less than exemplary mark. In fact, he gave her a fail. When the girl sought him out to ask him why, he was blunt but – to the girl’s mind – enigmatic.

  ‘To make you pause,’ w
as all he said.

  ‘To make me pause in what?’ she demanded.

  Rithuel opened his palms and held them out to her, empty. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then—’

  ‘Inaction can be as important as action. The pause before you act is filled with many things, and one of them is truth.’

  ‘But I didn’t fail your tests,’ the girl protested. ‘I answered every question. I don’t believe I made any significant errors.’

  ‘You made no errors at all. That was precisely what troubled me. I think it may help you, some day, to know that you’re not perfect. To be so close to perfect can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Dangerous for the soul, I mean.’

  And there was yet one more test, one about which all the students exchanged wild rumours, empty speculation and tasteless jokes. It would come when they least expected it, the students mostly agreed. And you could fail it by a single word or movement out of place.

  One evening, after eating her evening meal in the refectory, the girl was sought out by a runner who said that Ushana was waiting for her in the gymnasium. When she got there, she found the teacher waiting in the dark. At her feet there knelt a man – a boy, rather. His hands and feet had been fastened with short lengths of chain to the tallest of the vaulting horses, where iron rings had been set – presumably, the girl now realised, for this purpose. The boy was her own age, but with the white-blond hair almost never seen among the People. He was slightly overweight, and dressed outlandishly in short trousers and a sleeveless tunic that bore the meaningless legend HOME-BREWED FOR FULLER FLAVOUR! He was terrified, the marks of recent tears on his cheeks.

  The girl knew at once what was expected of her, but she said nothing. She presented herself to her teacher with a respectful bow, ignoring the boy utterly, until Ushana nodded in his direction. ‘That is Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ she said. ‘Say hello to him, in his own language.’

  ‘What is his language, Tannanu?’ the girl asked. She knew better than to assume that the boy spoke English, just because that was the language of the words on his shirt.

  ‘English,’ Ushana said. There was approval in her tone.

  The girl turned. ‘Good evening to you, Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ she said.

  The boy’s face underwent a convulsion of surprise and hope. ‘Shit,’ he yelped. ‘You speak English! Oh, thank God! Listen, there’s been some kind of a mistake. They think I’m someone else, but I’m not anybody. They took me right off the street, and it’s like – I don’t know. I don’t know what they want.’

  The girl turned from him again, looked to Ushana.

  ‘Kill him,’ Ushana said.

  The girl bowed her head in acquiescence, but she didn’t move. She wanted to be sure. ‘For what crime?’ she asked.

  The boy had no idea what was being said. He looked from her to Ushana and back again. Perhaps he thought that she was passing on what he’d said to her.

  ‘For no crime. Kill him because I tell you to.’

  And she did. With her bare hands, because no weapon had been specified. Afterwards, though she wept, she wept in silence, and nobody in the dormitory had any inkling of it.

  Ronald Stephen Pinkus was not of the People. It was wrong to cry for him, and it was shaming. Next time, she promised herself, she would do better.

  And so, in due course, she was sent back to Kuutma, with a note from her teachers that was notable for its brevity: ‘She’s ready.’

  He welcomed her with a fatherly embrace, expressing great satisfaction in her accomplishments. The girl thanked him graciously. Neither of them mentioned the mark that Rithuel had given her for psychology, and so she was saved from the necessity of criticising one of her teachers.

  Kuutma gave her fresh fruit and water spiced with cloves and cinnamon. He offered her wine, too, but the girl wasn’t fond of wine. Alcohol interfered with her body’s uptake of kelalit, slowing it down unpredictably.

  They sat in companionable silence for a while, in the same room in which they had met, three years before.

  That meeting was on Kuutma’s mind, too. ‘I told you once that I had a plan for you,’ he said to her. ‘It’s time, now, for that plan to be put into effect.’

  The girl experienced a moment of very pleasurable disorientation, a shifting of her mental perspectives sudden enough to induce mild vertigo. If Kuutma had summoned her here to command her into action, then she was now a Messenger. Those simple words were her graduation ceremony, her induction into the ranks of his Elohim.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’ He filled her glass with water, then his own. The wine, it seemed, had been brought only in case she wanted it. ‘But you need to know that this is an unusual assignment – an unusual situation, in every respect – and you’ll be within your rights to refuse it.’

  The girl nodded. She wondered what Kuutma could possibly ask of her, in the name of the city and the People, that she would refuse – or would even hesitate before accepting.

  ‘You know that one of the elders has left us. An elder, I should say, in name only. He is younger than me, in fact.’

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said. And then, ‘Of course.’

  ‘He was the Yedimah,’ Kuutma said. ‘The Seed. The one who, in the sittings of the Sima, is deputed to look to the future and argue in favour of change. But he has forfeited that position, of course, and the name. He is who he was. Avra Shekolni.

  ‘Shekolni took his writ too far with the rest of the Council of Elders, bringing into question the most profound and sacred of the principles by which we live. His premise, essentially, was that the People have misinterpreted the nature of the bargain God made with us – that our entire way of life is founded on a misunderstanding. God promised us the Earth, Shekolni said, but He didn’t promise to deliver it to us: He expected us to take action ourselves to accomplish His will. You see the problem with this position, sister?’

  The girl did, and said so.

  ‘Then expound it for me.’

  ‘The Adamites outnumber us by many thousands to one. And their history is one of uninterrupted war, so their weapons are advanced far beyond anything we can match. That’s why we hide. If we tried to fight, we couldn’t possibly win. So we wait. We wait for God’s judgement.’

  ‘An excellent summary,’ said Kuutma. ‘And the council spoke to Shekolni in that wise, seeking to correct his thinking. But, as you know, he wouldn’t take correction. He was expelled from the Sima. And then he left Ginat’Dania itself. It’s not known how he was able to get out of the city without sanction or permission, but it’s certain that he did. We’ve searched far and wide for him since, but found no trace.’

  The girl nodded, but didn’t speak. She would ask questions only if she was invited to.

  ‘Bad as this was,’ Kuutma went on, ‘we now know that there is worse. Shekolni made contact, out among the Nations, with a Messenger – or rather a Summoner, a commander of Messengers – who seems to share his unsanctioned views. The commander in question, Ber Lusim, was a great man in his time – so formidable, and I might venture to say, so cruel a warrior that he was sometimes called, by those who knew him, the Demon. The previous Kuutma relied on him absolutely. But then, perhaps ten years ago, Lusim fell into disgrace. He failed in his sacred duties. There were deaths – from among our number, not Adamite deaths – that could have been avoided.

  ‘The old Kuutma called Ber Lusim back so that he could be punished, but he refused to come. When Messengers were sent to recall him, he disappeared. It was only then that we realised how strong a cult of personality had grown up around him – for a great many Messengers who knew him and had sojourned with him among the Nations now followed him into exile. They dropped from our radar – went native, we thought, although if anything the truth seems to be the opposite of that. They hold themselves aloof, still, from the Adamites, even though they’ve foresworn all contact with the People and with Ginat’Dania. Theirs must be an intolerably lonely existence
.

  ‘But somehow, as I said, Avra Shekolni found Ber Lusim. At first this was only a guess: Shekolni disappeared so completely, we theorised that he must have had help. Then Ber Lusim contacted us himself and said that Shekolni had been sent to him and his followers by God – and he thanked us for being instrumental in the forwarding of that gift. He warned us not to look for Shekolni and he told us – I quote exactly – to hold ourselves ready for judgement.’

  Kuutma paused for a moment and took a sip of his water. He swirled it in his mouth, as though trying to rid himself of a sour taste. Then he swallowed.

  ‘I sent a reply to Ber Lusim,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Or at least, I sent forth one of my Elohim at a time and in a place where I guessed – correctly – that Ber Lusim would be sure to intercept him. I warned Lusim that Shekolni was a heretic. And I urged him to come back into Ginat’Dania, among the People, where he belongs.’

  ‘He ignored the summons,’ the girl guessed.

  ‘Yes, he did. But more. This will distress you, sister. Remember that God ordains all things and brings forth good from evil. Ber Lusim scarred the face of my emissary with blades and hot irons, making him so hideous that all who saw him flinched and looked away. Branding my servant in this way was an insult aimed at me. This innocent man’s face was only the paper on which Lusim chose to write his message.’

  The girl was inured to violence, but this still shocked her to the core. Her stomach convulsed and her gorge rose sour in her throat. She missed some of Kuutma’s words as she struggled to regain her equanimity.

  ‘—of course impossible, now, for that man to go back out into the world. He was forced to forsake his calling. And beyond that, the shame is very great. He’s asked leave to kill himself, but I’ve told him to reflect a little and to spend time with family and friends. I hope that will be enough to draw him back into the normal business of life, which has an enormous healing power in itself.’