The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  Tillman was the brilliant Adamite tactician who had once found Ginat’Dania and forced it to flee from him. But now his insights, squeezed out of him by Kuutma’s merciless interrogation, served Kuutma’s agenda and the People’s. They had been instrumental in switching the main thrust of Elohim activity from concealment to white noise and disinformation.

  It was a new age, and Leo Tillman was a prized resource.

  Within the Elohim, it was known that he was also a hostage for the good behaviour of the rhaka, Heather Kennedy. And for the killer of Ber Lusim, Benjamin Rush. These two had saved the city in its hour of greatest need and so were allowed to live out their lives among the Nations, as an act of sublime mercy on Kuutma’s part, on condition of profound and eternal silence. If they spoke a word of what they’d done, or what they’d seen, Tillman would die on the instant.

  ‘Over time,’ Kuutma told Diema, ‘we’ll adjust the emphasis, little by little. We’ll say that the light of truth, the power of the word, can pierce even a darkness as profound as Leo Tillman’s. We’ll say that he works for us willingly, seeing the value of what he builds and the error of his former ways. We’ll say he wants to be remembered for good, not for evil, and hopes to buy some small degree of redemption by serving something greater than himself.’

  Diema understood the strategy, but was impatient of ever seeing it implemented. Kuutma moved so slowly, seeming content to defer the decision from month to month while he sounded the waters of public sentiment in an endless, open-ended process of triage. ‘When can I see him?’ she asked, on the occasion of each brief, inconclusive progress report.

  ‘Soon,’ Kuutma said each time.

  But not yet. That Tillman had been an out-father, and that his child still lived in the city, was the most problematic, the most scandalous aspect of his being there at all. What if he came to learn of the child’s existence? What if he tried to assert some imaginary right of access, of guardianship? What if – God forbid! – the child should accidentally come into contact with him?

  So not yet. The People were contemplating, now, many things that would once have been anathema to them. But there were still some lines that could not, must not, be crossed.

  She wrote him letters, though words had never come easily to her. Then, once she’d heard that story from Alus and Taria about him demanding windows, she began to send him pictures. Imaginary landscapes. Woods and fields, desert mesas, mountains. And a vast lake stretching to the horizon, with islands floating in its grey, choppy waters.

  She dreamed, some nights, of the two of them walking there, on its endless, contested margins. Talking about the past until the past lost its power to hurt them and the shoreline turned into a bridge that took them home.

  She waited to meet him.