The Demon Code (46 page)

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 called 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.

Kennedy smiled, without a trace of humour. ‘We’re going to fight in a cave, Rush,’ she said. ‘Against people who’ve lived in caves their whole lives, and have probably had years to fortify this particular cave against anything we can bring against it. So “okay” isn’t the word I’d use, exactly.’

She tucked a couple of spare magazines into her belt, the gun into its holster inside her jacket. ‘Diema is right, though,’ she said.

‘About what?’ Rush demanded.

‘About this fight. It’s not yours, and it’s not mine. Our time is going to come, and it’ll be soon, but I don’t think it’s going to be today. So we should both of us hang well back and let them do what they’ve got to do’

‘Then how come you get a gun and I get an apple?’

‘Because I know how to shoot and you don’t. Stay close to me.’

‘Why?’ he grunted. ‘So you can patronise me some more?’

‘Because you’re the only one who won’t be tempted to cut my throat in the dark,’ Kennedy said. ‘We can watch each other’s backs.’

The gate was open now, the heavy wooden frame pulled all the way to the side to reveal a wide corridor that sloped down into the ground at a shallow angle. The first few yards were lined with royal blue tiles that shone with a faint, rich lustre even in the dim light of the cellar. Beyond that, there was bare granite.

Diema raised her hand in a pre-arranged signal. Six
Elohim
launched themselves into the dark at a rapid, even jog-trot.

Diema gave them thirty seconds, then signalled again. More assassins peeled away from the mass and stepped through the gate.

Rush positioned himself off to one side and watched them go. The sight made his skin prickle, and when he tried to swallow he found his mouth was dry. What was so scary about them? Or rather, what was scarier about them now than when he was in that room, surrounded by them, and they were looking at him like they were trying to decide whether killing him merited the trouble of cleaning the blood off the floor afterwards? Maybe it was the night-vision goggles, which made them look like armoured owls. But no, he realised, it was something else.