The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  ‘This Ber Lusim is a monster,’ the girl said, her throat still tight and sore from the acid she’d forced back down.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Kuutma sighed heavily. ‘After this atrocity, we spoke the hrach bishat, the execration, over him. As you know, that curse was once reserved for those thought to be possessed. It meant that Ber Lusim was henceforward to be considered a demon, rather than a man. He had finally earned the title that had already been accorded him.’ Kuutma seemed to hesitate. ‘Tell me, little sister, when you were growing up, in the orphan house, did you ever experience cruelty, or discrimination, on account of your origins?’

  The girl stared at him, false-footed by the sudden change of topic. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, at last. And then, ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘The other children called you names?’

  The girl thought back. Yes, of course they had, but it had meant very little. It was the teacher-nurses who’d hurt her, by their coldness and contempt. Until she learned to find the place inside herself that they couldn’t touch – and to love colour and tone and texture and pattern more than she loved people.

  ‘What did they call you?’ Kuutma asked.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ the girl said again.

  ‘But you remember, I’m sure,’ he prompted her.

  ‘They called me bastard.’ And mixer, by-blow, whore-sore, bleed, drop-in, mongrel, Kelim-fart, crossbreed, Adam’s apple. A hundred things, all variations on the same thing. Your mother went out into the world and spread her legs, waited for some passer-by to impregnate her, and now here you are.

  ‘Ber Lusim was also the child of a Kelim woman. It may be that the abuse he suffered as a result was what hardened his heart against the Kelim.’

  Kuutma raised his glass, as though to take another sip of his water, but then merely stared into it, and for the longest time said nothing.

  ‘Perhaps Shekolni was right, in one respect,’ he murmured at last. ‘Change … change may come to us, whether we want it or not. I’m not even sure that this would be a bad thing. Stagnation is possibly our worst enemy at this point. Stagnation and decadence.’

  He shook off the sombre mood with a visible effort, looked at the girl and raised the glass a little higher in a salute. ‘I shouldn’t speak this way,’ he said, ‘on this day of your triumph. I’ve watched you through your training. I don’t know if you were aware of that?’

  She was very well aware, of course, but she made some modest disclaimer.

  ‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’ve watched you and I’ve been pleased. Proud. Delighted. You’ve suffered all that’s worst in us, and you embody all that’s best. I hope to live to see you rise to the heights you deserve.’

  The girl was uncomfortable with so much praise. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked, both as a way of changing the subject and because she was desperate to know.

  ‘I’m sending you against Avra Shekolni and Ber Lusim,’ Kuutma said simply. ‘I want you to find out how many men now follow them, and where they are, and what they’re doing.’

  ‘And bring them home to be judged?’

  ‘No.’ Kuutma shook his head. There was a sheen of sweat on his bald forehead, which made it gleam even in the room’s dim light. ‘Or at least, not immediately. Ber Lusim is a formidable opponent in his own right, and we don’t know for certain how many others stand with him. You could scarcely hope to prevail against them alone. Consider how you would be handicapped, in any such meeting. Consider how little you could hope to achieve.’

  ‘Then give me helpmeets strong enough for the task,’ the girl said. It never occurred to her to doubt that she’d be the leader of any such team: she didn’t underestimate her own abilities, and in any event Kuutma wouldn’t be talking in this way to a mere footsoldier.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will.’ And as he explained his plan to her, she began to realise why he had offered her the option of saying no to this. But she had no intention of refusing. She knew that Kuutma’s scruples on her behalf were mistaken and that the things he thought would be hard for her would come more easily than he could ever imagine.

  He finished his speech and waited in silence for her to respond.

  ‘I’ll need a new name,’ she said at last.

  Kuutma was taken aback at this apparent non sequitur.

  ‘None of this will work if I tell them who I am,’ the girl explained, holding his gaze to show how little the specifics of her brief had shaken or abashed her.

  Kuutma appeared to consider. ‘No,’ he allowed. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘So I’ll be Diema,’ the girl said. It meant sycamore seed, something light that travels a long way on the wind. She meant it both literally and ironically. She would be going a long way, but she intended to move by her own volition.

  She’d never liked the name Tabe, in any case. It reminded her too much of her mother.

  18

  Diema went among the Nations and she learned their ways. She thought she already knew them, but there was a difference, she now found, between the self-contained trips conducted by her teachers and this – she searched for a word – this odyssey, this great journeying into the unknown.

  To survive in the Adamite world, completely alone for much of the time, Diema had no choice but to match velocities with it – which was bruising and existentially terrifying. She immersed herself in random encounters, casual social gatherings, loose and trivial connections. Self-help groups, speed-dating parties, karaoke nights, business seminars, rock concerts, evening classes, public meetings and prayer circles: she shot through them like an exotic particle through a bubble tank, accreting mass and spin, learning her role.

  Being young and (it seemed) fairly attractive, and not yet entirely in control of the social signals she was sending, she found herself more than once in situations where she might have been in danger of rape or assault. But she was adept at curbing the men who threatened her and judicious in her response, leaving them damaged but not crippled. Each of these incidents was a learning experience. She had never guessed how important sex was as social currency among the Nations, how large a part of their everyday interaction was based on it.

  This part of Diema’s task, which Kuutma had called acclimatisation, was open-ended. It was up to the girl herself to decide when she was ready to move on. She took three months. Part of her rebelled against the loss of time and impetus, but she’d learned from her teachers how crucial it could be when you fought to have a firm footing. If you leaned outside of your centre of gravity, even a weak adversary could topple you. She wasn’t going to make that basic mistake.

  Or perhaps she was just stalling. Some of the things she’d discovered out here, in the wasteland that was the Nations, affected her in wholly unexpected ways.

  Television, for example. The first time she turned on a TV in a hotel bedroom, feeling the need for some background noise, and found herself staring at a stylised cat chasing a stylised mouse through a house that was magically endless, she stood there for five minutes like somebody hypnotised. How could these anarchic, insane little masterpieces exist? What idiot savants made them?

  Cartoons became Diema’s one vice. Whenever she had to kill time in any place where there was a TV, she’d flick through the channels until she found some children’s network and sit for hours, guiltily but thoroughly absorbed in this world of talking rabbits and ducks, bombs labelled BOMB, non-permanent death, tragicomic peripateias and the wonderful Acme company, which made everything you could ever want and sent it to wherever you were.

  The cartoons were a barricade, sometimes successful and sometimes not, against the nightmares. She dreamed most nights about killing the boy (whose name, Ronald Stephen Pinkus, she could not make herself forget). Except that in her dreams, his death was a Sisyphean labour that always had to be begun again as soon as it was done. She woke with tears on her face and hated herself for them. They were the visible sign of some terrible inner flaw, that she had to isolate and eradicate. Ronald Step
hen Pinkus had set some tiny part of her at war with the rest. But she was strong, and resilient, and she was confident she could defeat that rogue fragment. She would know she’d won when the dreams stopped coming.

  And eventually, nightmares aside, she decided she was ready. She had read the briefing documents that Kuutma had given her – endlessly and obsessively, until she had them by heart – and she’d chosen her entry point.

  The foremost sacrament of the Messengers was the taking of kelalit. Ber Lusim and his followers would not have forgone it, and though they could obtain weapons and supplies from anywhere they liked, the base ingredients of the lethal, indispensable pharmacon were very hard to source. Diema considered a number of merchants who Ber Lusim would know and picked one – one known for his discretion and who had been used by Kuutma-that-was in the days when Ber Lusim was still among the chosen.

  That first choice bore no fruit, and nor did the second. But the magic of threes worked in her favour. At the third house, in Paris, she hadn’t been watching a week when she saw Ber Lusim’s messenger (a man known to her from Kuutma’s files) come to collect a purchase. Following him at a distance, she found the building site whose portakabin huts housed the Demon’s French residence.

  She went in, cautiously and slowly. She took nothing for granted. She watched and tabulated and bided her time. She was a soldier, now, and her heart rejoiced in the task that had been set her.

  Over several months, she built up a picture of Ber Lusim’s network.

  It was much smaller than Kuutma’s network, of course: it had to be, since it consisted mainly of the members of his own cell who’d broken away from the People at the same time as him.

  Diema learned about that schism by listening to their conversations. She had a US Army ScopeNet directional amplifier, jacked with layer after layer of intelligent noise filters. She could adjust the settings to correct for two or three intervening walls and windows, and for her own angle to each new speaker. She did most of her eavesdropping lying on her stomach on the roof of Ber Lusim’s various safe houses and waystations, eyes closed, shutting out the world, focusing herself down to the fluting, sussurating soundscape.

  She got what she needed.

  She mapped Ber Lusim’s command structure, which was massively decentralised. The troops at his disposal numbered far fewer than the numbers of the legitimate Elohim, though still more than she’d guessed. Shockingly, he’d been able to recruit other Messengers previously thought faithful. Evidently, Shekolni was far from alone in his dissatisfaction with the new Ginat’Dania.

  She learned that Ber Lusim relied very heavily on two lieutenants – Elias Shud, who was as blunt and brutal and dangerous as a runaway train, and Hifela, the ‘Face of the Skull’, who was a great deal more dangerous again and almost as fast as Ber Lusim himself.

  She learned about Toller’s book, which perhaps ought to have come as no surprise. Toller was known to the Elohim already, and his appeal to a mind like Ber Lusim’s was obvious.

  But it wasn’t Lusim who was driving this. It was Shekolni, the disgraced elder (although Lusim and his people referred to Shekolni simply as ‘the prophet’). Lusim seemed to have been relegated to the lesser role of taskmaster, with his own consent, and the perverse but fierce loyalty of his own followers had been transferred to the other man. Shekolni’s word had come to them, when they needed it. They treated him with hungry reverence, and they obeyed his every word.

  The astonishing thing was what he was telling them to do.

  Diema went back to Kuutma and told him what she’d discovered. That the renegade Elohim were burning every copy of Toller’s book that existed in the world, except their own, and killing everyone outside their ranks who might have read it.

  Kuutma didn’t even pretend to be surprised. ‘We’ve done similar things to protect our own scriptures,’ he reminded her.

  ‘To protect them, yes,’ Diema agreed. ‘This goes far beyond protection.’ Then she told him what it was that Shekolni was doing and what he hoped to achieve by it.

  And Kuutma laughed. But it was a bitter, incredulous laugh. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘So many thousands, at one stroke. Millions, perhaps. He dares God to intervene, even while he pretends to bow to God’s word. It’s a game of chicken, played against heaven.’

  ‘A game of what?’ Diema asked. And Kuutma explained to her the rules of that game. How two men embark on a course of action that will destroy both of them – for example, driving cars towards one another, at a speed great enough for a fatal crash. And the loser is the one who swerves aside.

  ‘I don’t believe that God plays chicken,’ she said grimly.

  ‘Little sister,’ Kuutma said, ‘he most assuredly does. But he does not drive the car himself. He chooses proxies. At this point, let there be no misunderstanding, he has chosen you.’

  ‘You chose me, Tannanu.’

  ‘True, as far as it goes. But the circumstances that made you the right choice? That wasn’t my doing, nor yours. Providence moves through us, in its own direction, which is so much at odds with our directions that – good and evil alike – its passage can hurt us past saving. We can only hope to be whole, when His will has been done. We can’t ask to understand.’

  He was looking at Diema closely and thoughtfully. ‘You’ve achieved great things, in a relatively short time.’

  ‘Thank you, Tannanu.’

  ‘But one thing that you’ve done does not make me happy, little sister. It fills me with alarm.’

  Diema kept her face impassive, though her stomach clenched. ‘I’ve done nothing to compromise your plan, Tannanu,’ she said – a minimal defence, at best.

  ‘Of course you haven’t,’ he agreed. ‘But at certain points, in your travels, you’ve stepped aside from your task to look into a matter that has no relevance.’

  Diema bowed her head, partly to hide her face so he couldn’t read her guilt in it, and partly out of genuine shame.

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ she said tightly.

  ‘Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ Kuutma said, placing audible gaps between the three words of the name. ‘The boy you killed. You’ve been investigating his family. His parents, and his surviving sister. Why would you do such a thing?’

  Diema forced herself to meet Kuutma’s gaze. ‘Out of an idle interest, only,’ she said. ‘Nothing more. Our teachers taught us to be curious about how systems work, in the Adamite world. The boy’s family is a system. My action changed it. I wanted to see how it had reacted to that change.’

  ‘No more than that?’

  ‘No more than that, Tannanu.’

  Kuutma nodded. ‘You named yourself the sycamore seed,’ he reminded her. ‘Study it. Lightness is the virtue that will serve you best. To float through their lives, without touching or being touched. I say this not to chide you, but to help you.’

  ‘What do I do now?’ Diema asked, desperate to change the subject.

  ‘Bring your team together,’ Kuutma said briskly. ‘All of them, in the prescribed pattern and order, as we discussed.’

  And she did. She let Providence do its work.

  She let the hammer meet the nail.

  PART THREE

  THE HAMMER

  19

  Southampton Row at half-past seven in the morning was already busy. Shops had their shutters half-raised so employees could limbo underneath and start stacking shelves. Upmarket cafés and breakfast bars were packed with early birds heading for the shops and offices of the West End, cheaper ones with tired cleaners and security staff clocking off from night shifts.

  Kennedy walked between them, a transient, belonging neither to the night world nor the day. Fatigue and fretfulness distanced her from everything. She felt as though the surface of her brain had been roughly polished up with a scouring pad, and that this process had loosened it enough in her skull for it to jar when she walked.

  She’d left Izzy’s the night before with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. Both of her
attackers were still profoundly unconscious, and Samal in particular looked like he’d need a lot of medical attention if he was ever going to play the piano again – or form a sentence with more than one syllable in it. But Kennedy’s nerves were shot and she couldn’t bring herself to pack a suitcase with the two men lying there, stepping over their inert bodies as she hunted out her own blouses and slacks from among Izzy’s cocktail dresses and sexy lingerie.

  So she just got out of there, locking the door behind her.

  She made a quick pit-stop at her own apartment on the floor below, where she threw some underwear and shirts into a shoulder bag.

  She’d told Izzy about the need to break her own pattern. When you were being hunted, the worst thing you could do was to stick to known contacts and established habits. Otherwise, sooner or later, at a bend in some familiar path there’d be a tripwire and a pit with sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom. She took her own advice. She walked half a mile from the apartment before grabbing a taxi.

  ‘Where to, love?’ the cabbie asked.

  ‘Where did you pick up your last fare?’ Kennedy asked him.

  ‘Eh?’ The cabbie seemed to find something sinister in the question.

  ‘Whoever was in here last. Where were they coming from?’

  ‘Talbot Square, innit. Out by Paddington Station.’

  ‘Great. Take me there.’

  It was a good choice, as far as that went. Talbot Square opened off Sussex Gardens, where every second house was a hotel. Kennedy grabbed some emergency supplies from an all-night mini-market on Praed Street, then checked into one of the hotels, reassuringly named the Bastion, with mildewed pilasters framing the door and a sign jammed into the lower corner of the window that promised FREE WIRELESS INTERN. Presumably an E and a T were hidden by the angle of the frame.

  She paid for her room with cash. The desk clerk wanted to see some ID in the name of Conroy, which was the name Kennedy had given, but she deflected his curiosity in that regard with a couple of twenties.