by Adam Blake
‘That’s a pity. They’re staying right here, along with the rest of me. Along with Leo.’
Diema’s impatience made her reckless. She slapped Kennedy hard across the face.
Kennedy’s response, before she’d even registered the pain of the blow, was to slam her fist into Diema’s jaw. Diema took the blow without a sound, without even wincing.
‘Your pain,’ Diema said, feeling the thin trickle of blood running down from the corner of her mouth, ‘and my pain. Are they the same?’
Kennedy had stepped back, arms raised, readying herself for a fight. It didn’t seem to bother her that it was likely to be a very short fight. But the question troubled her. She dropped her hands again, nonplussed. Then after a moment she shrugged it off, making a gesture of disgust and dismissal.
‘Please get out of here,’ she told Diema. ‘Let me see Leo, or get out. I’ve got nothing for you.’
‘Answer the question. Your pain—’
‘How do I know if they’re the same?’ Kennedy yelled. ‘I’m not inside your mind, am I? I don’t know what you feel. Or if you feel. I don’t know anything about you except your name, and even that’s kind of a grey area.’
‘But we’re all the same,’ Diema said. ‘Under the skin. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’
Kennedy stared at her, angry and incredulous. ‘Never mind what I believe. It’s not what you believe. You believe in a separate creation – your people and the rest of the world. The chosen ones and the dregs at the bottom of the barrel.’
‘So which of us should care the most about a million dead?’ Diema asked.
She didn’t expect an answer, but she was pleased when the woman reacted – a succession of emotions appearing briefly in her face, like a slide show. At home in Ginat’Dania, Diema was used to saying what she thought, and even more used to refusing to do so. But in the Adamite world, talking was like fighting. You said what would give you advantage.
‘You don’t need me,’ Kennedy said. ‘You’ve got everything you need.’ But there was no conviction in her voice, and a moment later she spoke again. ‘Did you manage to take one of Ber Lusim’s people alive, after all? Have you been interrogating him all this time?’
Diema was certain that she’d won, but she didn’t let that awareness show in her face or her tone.
‘There’ll be a meeting,’ she told Kennedy, ‘in half an hour’s time. By then, the equipment I’ve asked for will have arrived and we’ll be ready to go in. I’d like you to be there. You can make a final decision when you’ve heard me out.’
She left, nodding to the Elohim to lock the door behind her. There was no need to talk any more.
Except to Nahir, who was still uncertain about what she was asking him to do and would need to be argued with. And to the boy, who would just have to do as he was told.
The boy.
Ronald Stephen Pinkus, risen from the grave yet again to haunt and torment her.
‘We set up an ambush, but it didn’t work. In fact, we got ambushed ourselves.’
Diema’s voice rang out, almost too loud in the small, crowded room. Along with Nahir, there were more than forty Messengers, many of whom were recently arrived. They sat in silence on folding chairs, flimsy things of stainless steel and black plastic, dressed in the hand-woven linen of their home. They were vectors of terrible violence, eerily suspended. Birds of prey, somehow brought to earth and persuaded to pose for a group photograph.
In their midst sat Kennedy and Rush, ringed by empty seats. Nobody wanted to sit next to the rhaka, the wolf-woman, and take the taint of her proximity.
Diema stopped, alarmed, and cleared her throat. There had been a shrill, rising note to her voice. She sounded like an idiot. Worse, she sounded like a child. The palms of her hands were hot and moist.
For all the things that she had done, and had had done to her, over the last three years, she had never been called on to speak in public. She feared now that it might lie outside her skill set.
She tried again. ‘The idea was to lure one of Ber Lusim’s Messengers into trying to capture Heather Kennedy – as they’d already tried to do in England – by making it appear that we might know where their base was.’ She looked from one grave face to another. ‘That part worked. Except they didn’t just come for Heather Kennedy, they came for all of us. And they didn’t send one Messenger. They sent many.’
‘They only sent one after me,’ Rush said. ‘Turned out to be a mistake.’ Given the state of his face, and the fact that his muffled, distorted voice was coming out of one side of a hideously swollen jaw, it could only have been intended as a joke. Forty Elohim, with no sense of humour when it came to their holy calling, stared at him in grim silence.
‘There were more than a dozen in all,’ Diema said, hastily pulling their attention back to her. ‘We can’t say for sure how many, because they waited until we were separated and attacked us in smaller groups. The last to fall was Hifela, who all of you know, or at least have heard of.’
The room was suddenly sibilant with a dozen whispered conversations. Diema waited them out. She’d used that phrasing deliberately and she wanted her countrymen to reflect for a moment on what it meant – that twelve Elohim had been sent against three Adamites, two of whom were sitting in front of them, still breathing.
‘We fought Hifela, on the slope of Gellert Hill,’ she said. ‘By we, I mean myself and … and Leo Tillman, known to the People because he was once …’ Her throat was dry and she had to clear it again. ‘Known to the People in other times, and other contexts. Hifela fought hard and might have won. Some of you have seen his body, so you know. It took a dozen bullets to kill him.
‘And as he lay on the ground, beside us, he spoke these words. “Bilo b’eyet ha yehuani. Siruta muot dil kasyeh shoh.”’
More murmurs around the room. Most of the Messengers looked puzzled or disconcerted. Nahir frowned. ‘He cannot have said that,’ he told Diema.
‘I was ten feet away from him, brother. I tell you what I heard.’
‘Then he meant the teacher. The apostate, Shekolni. The ground where he walks.’
‘That’s not what he said.’
‘Some of us,’ Kennedy said, cutting in loudly, ‘are Aramaically challenged. If there’s any point in our being here, someone’s going to have to translate.’
Nahir glanced at her once, coldly appraising her, then turned back to Diema. ‘Is there?’ he asked. ‘Any point in their being here? Many of us have wondered.’
Diema answered Kennedy’s question, ignoring Nahir’s. ‘Hifela said, “Take me to my Summoner. Let me die on holy ground.”’
‘And why is that significant?’ Kennedy demanded.
‘Because the only holy ground is Ginat’Dania,’ Diema said.
There was a sense, rather than a sound, of the assembled Elohim drawing in their breath, of the tension in the air ratcheting itself up a notch more, and then maybe another notch on top of that. Diema met Kennedy’s gaze. The boy would be clueless, but the rhaka would know how thin this tightrope they were walking was – as thin as the edge of a blade. You didn’t talk to the children of Adam about Ginat’Dania. Out of all the things you didn’t do, it was perhaps the one you didn’t do the most. In a society that lived at the cusp of the catastrophe curve, the instinct for self-preservation ran very deep, and subsumed all other instincts.
‘In spite of the latitude granted to you,’ murmured Nahir softly, ‘you will be careful what you say.’
Diema looked him in the eye, without flinching. This was a moment that had to be walked through, the way you walk over fire. ‘The woman, Heather Kennedy,’ she said, ‘and the man, Benjamin Rush, already know that Ginat’Dania exists. Moreover, they know that it used to exist here. It was necessary to tell them these things in order to follow Ber Lusim’s trail as far as we have – which you, Nahir, for all your resources, weren’t able to do.’
‘I have a knife,’ a woman in one of the rear ranks of the Messengers calle
d out. ‘And a conscience. Tell me why I shouldn’t exercise them both.’
The woman was sitting directly behind Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t look round: she knew this was Diema’s play, and she had better sense than to get in the way of it.
‘Exercise your brain, sister,’ Diema said coldly. ‘That’s the part of you that you’re neglecting. The woman knew for years and Kuutma spared her. More. Kuutma sanctioned her involvement in this. She has Kuutma’s blessing – the first Adamite in a hundred lifetimes to be so blessed. All you have is a wish that things could be like they used to be in the old days. But the old days are dead. And if you cling to them now, you’ll die, too.’
It wasn’t – quite – a threat. It was hard to say what it was. The Messenger opened her mouth, but closed it again without speaking. Blood had rushed to her face, and she bowed her head to hide it, discomfited.
‘Ginat’Dania,’ Diema said, to the room at large, ‘the living and eternal Ginat’Dania, is far away from this place, and from Adamite eyes. But three hundred years ago, Ginat’Dania stood here. In the caves under Gellert Hill and Castle Hill, and under the river Danube itself. That’s where Hifela was asking to be taken. That’s where Ber Lusim has set up his house – in a maze of tunnels and chambers vast enough to house a million people. It’s the perfect hiding place, if you’re hiding from Adamites. But not if you’re hiding from us. We have maps of the city dating back to the time when it was alive and we can mount a search that will bring them into our hands.’
‘I thought your hands had to be empty.’ Ben Rush shrugged in mock-apology as the holy killers all turned to stare balefully at him again. ‘I mean, I thought that was the point. Human lives are expendable, but you can’t kill each other. And you don’t have Tillman to hide behind any more. So what, did you push through a rule-change? You’ve got a hunting licence now?’
Diema ignored the sarcastic inflection: the boy’s jibe was as good a set-up line as anything she could have scripted.
‘The Adamite mind,’ she said to the Elohim, smiling, inviting them to smile at Rush’s idiocy. ‘You see how little they can grasp, even when we put the answers in their hands? This is why we don’t have to be afraid of what they know. In the end, what they know always adds up to nothing.’
‘I know this much—’ Rush blurted, but Kennedy’s hard grip on his arm stopped him right there.
‘No hunting licence,’ Diema said, opening one of the boxes and reaching into it. ‘The rules – the rules that actually mean something – don’t change. But when a new situation arises, we apply the rules in different ways.’
She showed them the dart-rifle – the bigger, meaner brother of Kennedy’s Dan-inject – and how it worked. She told them that it would topple Ber Lusim’s Elohim without any risk of killing them. She omitted to mention the fact that the bullets that had slain Hifela had been fired by her, rather than Leo Tillman, that she’d already breached that final taboo.
Once they learned that, her life would be over.
59
Ber Lusim was grieving, alone in his room – a monastic cell carved into solid granite, without a window and with only a natural fissure in the rock for a door.
His Elohim absented themselves from his grief, recognising that it was not their property; not part of their leader’s public self at all, but an outpouring from his innermost soul.
Avra Shekolni showed less compunction. He came to the door of the cell and sat down there, with his back to the wall, tapping at the rock with his silver-ringed hand in a simple, repetitive rhythm.
After some little while, Ber Lusim came out to him.
‘Avra,’ he said, ‘I’m poor company right now. Please, take your music and your consolations somewhere else, for a while, and I’ll come to you when I can.’
Shekolni looked up at him from under lowered brows, stern and humourless. ‘Have I offered you consolation, Ber Lusim?’ he asked.
‘Blessed one, you have not. I assumed you came here—’
‘Because you’ve lost your friend and you find the loss hard to bear,’ Shekolni said. ‘Yes, of course. But it doesn’t follow, Ber Lusim, that I came to tell you how to bear that loss.’
Ber Lusim was puzzled and unnerved by this speech, and by the tone in which it was delivered. He didn’t know from which direction to approach it. ‘Hifela was not my friend,’ he said at last. ‘He was my servant, and the first among my Elohim. I relied on him in everything.’
‘He was your friend,’ Shekolni snapped. ‘Ber Lusim, God is not a lawyer or a politician. He knows the love you felt for Hifela, and he knows that his loss weakens you as a man, not just as a leader of men.’
The prophet’s voice rose, and he rose up with it, climbing to his feet to face Ber Lusim, with one hand raised as though he were preaching in a pulpit.
‘But to mourn him? To mourn him now? Are you mad, Ber Lusim? Has this loss turned your brain?’ He clamped his hands on Ber Lusim’s shoulders, stared with wide eyes into his.
Ber Lusim drew a deep breath. ‘Avra, I know my duty. Nothing that has happened today will stop me from completing—’
‘No! You misunderstand me!’ In his exasperation, Shekolni shook the Elohim Summoner as a mother shakes a child. ‘Think about what we’re doing, my dear friend, and what will come of it when we’re done. In ordinary times, to cry for a dead friend, a dead wife or husband, these things make sense. Even for someone who believes in the reality of heaven – you weep for the separation, and for how far away heaven is.’
The prophet’s eyes burned and Ber Lusim felt something within him take fire from that fire. ‘But now,’ Shekolni growled, ‘heaven is imminent. Heaven hangs just above our heads, like fruit on the lowest branch of a great tree. Do you cry, because Hifela has walked before you into the next room? Then how absurd your tears become! Hold faith now or Hifela will laugh you to shame when you meet next.’
Such was the force of the words that Ber Lusim saw, as though in life, the face he knew so well staring at him from the heights or depth of some interior space. He nodded, blinking to clear his dazzled eyes.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right, Avra. You’re right. What must I do?’
‘I’ve already told you what to do,’ Shekolni said more gently – more like a man to another man, and less like the voice of God or Fate. ‘Enact the last prophecy and take your reward. The reward of God’s most faithful servant.’
The words struck home. It was – almost – all that Ber Lusim had ever wanted.
Rapid footsteps on stone made both men turn. The man who ran into view, full of urgency that bordered on panic, was Lemoi, the youngest of those who’d been foresworn with Ber Lusim and followed him into exile. He stumbled to a halt in front of them, made the sign of the noose to the prophet, but addressed his words to Ber Lusim.
‘Commander, the scouts in the lower levels … The alarm has been raised. There’s a breach!’
‘What kind of a breach?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Speak clearly, Lemoi. Is it Adamites? You’re saying the city authorities have found us?’
‘Not Adamites,’ Lemoi blurted. ‘Elohim. It’s an army! They’ve brought an army against us!’
60
Diema’s Messengers, with Kennedy and Rush in tow, entered the Gellert caves through a doorway built into the back of a house.
Rush was in the rear as they descended the stairs into the house’s sub-basements. Not all the way to the back, obviously. There were armed Messengers behind him, their guns casually at the ready, and more on either side of him, subtly conveying the suggestion that he was fine so long as he didn’t stop, slow down, take a wrong turning, or look too much like an Adamite.
The house had stayed in Elohim hands ever since the city’s medieval heyday, so nothing had been changed. In the lowest cellar there was a hand printing press, which looked like a rack waiting for a customer, and on the wall beside it a massive wooden compositor’s frame, with hundreds of pigeonholes for movable lead type.
Diema’
s Messengers slid the frame aside, with some effort because the iron tracks on which it had been mounted had rusted almost solid in the damp air. As the pale men and women put their drug-boosted backs into it, there was a sound like the bellowing of bulls – and gradually, an inch at a time, the frame was moved aside and the dark tunnel beyond opened itself to their eyes.
Each of Diema’s Messengers wore an AN/PVS autogated night-vision rig that turned midnight into cloudless noon. And each of them had been equipped with the new guns, in both rifle and handgun configurations.
Rush had been given a flashlight and an apple.
On the whole, he was kind of touched by the apple. Unlike the paint-bomb, it was an insult that Diema had put some thought into. She would have had to go out somewhere and buy it, or at the very least pick it up off a plate in passing and save it for him. It did something to help his bruised ego recuperate after the briefing session.
‘So the flashlight’s for finding my way in the dark, obviously,’ he said to her now, as the Elohim opened the gate. ‘And the apple’s for if I get hungry. So what do I use for a weapon?’
The girl fixed her dark, intransitive gaze on him. ‘The apple,’ she said, ‘is to remind you that you don’t have a weapon. Which in turn is to remind you that you’re not here to fight. If you find yourself about to get into a fight, look at the apple and it will jog your memory.’
‘And then?’
‘Go and hide somewhere until the urge goes away.’
As Diema turned away, Rush saw Kennedy checking the action on the M26 – the gun Diema had carried during the hotel raid. But Diema now had one of the new guns. Only Kennedy, out of all of them, had a regular handgun and Diema’s permission – under certain very strictly defined circumstances – to use it.
‘It’s okay for you,’ Rush muttered.