The Demon Code

16

It had never occurred to the girl that she would be chosen. Once, perhaps, she had toyed with the possibility, back when she was still in the usual age range for such things. People she knew had been taken at twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

But she reached sixteen, and nobody came. And then there was the great upheaval, the y’siath, when the People left the place where they’d lived for seven generations and travelled to the new city.

Once there, they unpacked their things again and tried to make it be home. But it wasn’t home. The girl herself, along with all the People she knew (she didn’t know all that many; she was solitary by nature), felt restless and unsettled. Everything seemed to have ended and nothing seemed to have begun again. Life’s rhythms, which in the end are life itself, had been interrupted.

The girl had tried to express that feeling in the paintings and sculptures she made — and she’d waited for the normal sense of things, the unbroken skein of thoughts and associations and actions that made up her world, to heal her.

Chaos in the Sima, the council of elders. Voices raised in the Em Hadderek, the place of gathering. Normality circled at a distance, like a bird that has left its nest because of some perturbation and now can’t settle again.

The girl was armoured against the chaos around her, at least to some extent, but it was hard not to be troubled when wise man and fool shouted anger at each other and everyone voiced disdain for the elders. Love was both the foundation of society and its mortar: if that failed them, what would be left?

The dissenting voices said that the People shouldn’t have left Ginat’Dania, the Eden Garden that had been their home, that God hadn’t sanctioned it. This led on inexorably to debates about what exactly God had sanctioned, and about the failings of the Messengers, or rather of their supreme shepherd and commander, Kuutma-that-was. He had betrayed the People, the rumours went, by falling in love with a woman in his charge, and by mourning her too much when she was dead. His judgement had become infected. He had let the enemies of the People live and grow stronger, and ally with one another. Until finally he himself had fallen in battle against the strongest of those enemies, the out-father Leo Tillman and the rhaka, the she-wolf Heather Kennedy. It was because of these failures that the People had had to move, in a caravan of sealed trucks, from their old home beneath Mexico City to the present Ginat’Dania thousands of miles north and east of that place.

The new Kuutma stood aloof from such allegations, mindful of the dignity of his office.

But the rumblings of protest grew, and finally they split the Sima itself. One of the three council elders had voiced the most terrible of heresies, the abomination of abominations. His peers had had no choice but to expel him from the chamber, and later that day it was learned that he had left the city — had gone out into the world, unsanctioned, unaccompanied, without name or blessing or commission.

Whereupon the city rocked crazily, like a boat when someone has stepped from its belly onto the shore and left it too light, too high in the water. The People were frozen and breathless, listening to echoes from a sound no one had heard.

And then, inexplicably, long after she’d stopped thinking of such a thing as being possible, the girl was summoned. Not by the council of elders but by Kuutma himself, known as ‘the Brand’ — the leader and commander of the Elohim, who held all truth in his heart and all vengeance in his hand.

The summons came at a time when she was least prepared to answer it. She was working on a massive canvas, the largest she had ever attempted. Standing at the top of a ladder, spattered and splotched with paint from head to knees, she was painting an angel’s face when two angels appeared to her.

They were Alus and Taria, Kuutma’s own personal attendants, and bodyguards. Their sudden arrival in the girl’s studio almost made her fall off her ladder with shock.

‘You’re wanted,’ Alus said simply.

They waited in silence while she washed herself, nervous and a little ashamed to be naked before them.

Walking between the two women, through the busy streets around the Em Hadderek, and then down the massive stairway beyond, the girl looked shyly but yearningly first at one and then at the other.

‘See anything you fancy?’ Taria asked her brazenly.

The girl blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘I’d like to paint you,’ she said. ‘Your muscles are so beautiful.’

The angels thought that was hilarious, and said that they might consider sitting for the girl some day when they were free. But then in a more serious tone Alus reminded her that it was Kuutma she was going to see, and it would be better right now to keep her thoughts focused on that.

They took her to Kuutma’s quarters, on the city’s lowest level — which in the street argot of the People was sometimes called het retoyet, ‘the dregs’. Kuutma had a modest apartment there, far less than he was entitled to. But like his predecessor, he was a man of modest tastes.

He was, moreover, a warrior, who had lasted in the ranks of the Elohim longer than most, and had the scars to prove it. Not on his body: though this Kuutma had been called on to kill many in the world outside, he had never (so far as anyone knew) taken wound or hurt. The scars were on his soul and the girl could see them there when first she looked into his eyes.

He was a solid, compact man, a little under average height but broad across the shoulders and with a sense of massiveness about him that, like the wounds, was not purely or even primarily physical. True, his hands were huge, and his forearms roped with muscle: but his broad, flat face — unusual among the People, and perhaps suggesting a Slavic out-father somewhere in his ancestry — had about it the stillness of profound meditation. He was bald, as the last Kuutma had been, but what had seemed martial in his predecessor looked on this man like the askesis of a monk or a hermit: a humbling of bodily pride, a stripping down to basics.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said to the girl. His voice had a curious accent to it, the vowels forward and elongated — probably a survival from his last field posting, which would fade soon enough now that he was at home again among the People.

‘Of course,’ the girl said, blushing a little, caught unawares by Kuutma’s gentleness and consideration.

What he said next surprised her even more. ‘I owe you an apology.’

That seemed unlikely. He was Kuutma, after all. He was one of the names, and he held the fate of the People in his hands. Uncertain what to say, the girl simply shook her head.

‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I do. On behalf of the last Kuutma. You were assessed and the results were impressive. You should have been called into service, as your brothers were called. Your mind and temperament fit you well for it. You have the resilience to survive outside Ginat’Dania. To adapt, among the unchosen, without losing yourself to their ways. You also have, very obviously, a powerful imagination that will enable you to innovate in situations for which your training has not adequately prepared you. In any event, I called for you today to right the omission that has allowed you to languish here, unused.’

The girl’s heartbeat suddenly became perceptible to her, rising from unfelt background to a heavy hammering in her chest. It was hard to draw a breath. Not the Kelim, she prayed, to a God she seldom troubled. Please, please, not the Kelim. Don’t let my life go the way of my mother’s life.

‘I feel that what I do here is valuable,’ she said, in a voice that sounded in her own ears despicably weak, almost pleading.

‘Of course,’ Kuutma said, still gentle. ‘That’s in your nature. Wherever you are, and whatever you do, you will find a way to be useful. But there are places where you’re needed more than you’re needed here.’

Please.

‘And so I have decided that you will become one of my Elohim.’

Almost, the girl shuddered. Relief flooded her, and then joy. She was called — and to a vocation to which she could give herself without reservation. The Kelim served the People with their womb alone, and in the process were lessened (though everybody pretended otherwise). The Elohim served with hearts and minds and hands. A knife or a gun, she imagined, was only like any other tool — like the brushes she used when she painted, except that they were limited to the one effect, the one colour. She wasn’t afraid of violence. Painting was already violence. She was full of violence, as far as that went.

Her acceptance wasn’t required: she was being informed of a decision, not an offer. But still she said, ‘I accept, Kuutma. I accept with joy.’

‘I’m pleased,’ Kuutma said solemnly. ‘These are not joyful times. We are uncertain, and divided. But it may be, little sister, that you’ll be the one to raise us up again.’

‘Only tell me what I have to do,’ the girl said.

Kuutma smiled at the urgency in her tone, not a patronising smile, but a recognition — an acknowledgement — of the passion that filled her. ‘First, you must be taught,’ he said. ‘And that’s no small thing. Then … well, I have a plan, and you are a part of it. When you’re ready, I’ll explain it to you. And then I’ll send you out.’ He stood, and indicated that she should follow, but for a moment she couldn’t move.

‘If it please you, Kuutma,’ she asked him. ‘Send me where?’

He regarded her with a complex, unreadable expression. He took her two hands in his and pressed them together as though he were conferring a blessing, or else inviting her to join him in prayer.

‘To your ordeal, little sister,’ he said solemnly, even sadly. ‘To the task and the testing that is yours and yours alone.’

17

Kuutma had said that the training would be no small thing. In fact it was an ordeal that almost broke her.

The girl discovered, as she had expected, that neither the mechanics nor the ethics of killing were daunting. She’d always preferred a solitary life, with few and fleeting human attachments: she had the sense that not many things lasted, and that romantic and familial loves were either comforting illusions or self-consciously played games. So it was possible for her to learn — in exacting detail — a great many ways of ending lives, without her emotions or her conscience becoming engaged. It was all theory, so far, but it was theory to which she applied herself with guiltless enthusiasm.

The physical demands of the training were another matter. The girl had to endure seventeen-hour days of drilling and practice, of gym and exercise regimens, of classes in sabotage, use and maintenance of weapons, infiltration, unarmed combat systems, battlefield survival, tracking and surveillance.

Then these lessons would stop and another sequence would start: world history, politics, languages, psychology, sociology, non-verbal communications, even fashion. The girl knew the purpose of these soft and seemingly trivial disciplines, and she didn’t protest. When another of the students made some contemptuous comment, the trainer, Ushana, made him stand up in front of the other recruits and rebuked him mercilessly.

‘You might live among the unchosen for ten years,’ Ushana said, ‘and kill once. So tell me, child, how you would allocate time between combat and infiltration.’

The girl kept her head down and applied herself assiduously to the learning of things that seemed both foolish and impenetrable, the nonsense syllables of an alien language. And gradually the dead ground between the disparate facts filled up with more facts. Pathways of logic opened up through the mad hinterlands and she began to see the wider, Adamite world outside Ginat’Dania for what it was: a horrifically distorted reflection of the real world in which she lived.

Also — and this was the only thing that actually frightened her — she was brought to see the differences of scale. The People lived in a space a handful of miles across and many levels deep — a great city that for most of them was in effect the whole world. But they knew that there was another world, which God had gifted to the children of Adam, but had promised in the fullness of time to render to his true chosen.

What the girl had never appreciated up until then was just how much bigger that other world was than the world she knew. As she explored it in wide games that began in the immediate environs of Ginat’Dania and then took her further and further afield, she saw the truth of it. The world was so big that it seemed to go on for ever, country opening on country and then on further countries into a distance that her mind was, at least at first, simply unable to fathom.

Kuutma told her, later, that this was common and far from trivial. Many young men and women in Messenger training experienced a sort of conceptual paralysis when they first stepped out of Ginat’Dania into the immensity of the Adamite nations. Some never got over it, and therefore were never able to join the Elohim. Some seemed to adapt, but then descended into psychosis once they were outside. It was a problem that seemed, if anything, to become more acute with each generation — perhaps because the gulf between Ginat’Dania and the world of the unchosen became ever greater over time.

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,’ was 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.’

‘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 Stephen 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.