The Thousand Emperors

FIVE

The next few hours passed in a blur. Luc had a vague recollection of being lifted out of the building by the two mechants set to guard Vasili’s body. After that there had been a journey by flier, during which he drifted in and out of consciousness.

The next time he really became aware of his surroundings, he found himself looking up at the high ceiling of a circular room that had to be at least thirty metres across. The ceiling was decorated with highly stylized depictions of astronomical symbols and of several Tian Di worlds, all wheeling around a stone pillar at the room’s centre. An iron stairway twisted around the pillar like a braid, rising through an aperture in the ceiling to another floor above. Bright sunlight spilled through an open doorway at the far end of the room, through which he could make out bristling reddish-green flora. Steps nearby led down, perhaps to some basement level.

Luc sat up with a groan, supporting himself with one hand, and found he had been placed on a broad, raised slab. A small wheeled trolley, loaded with trays of sharp-looking surgical instruments, had been placed next to him.

The rest of the room was crammed with cabinets of various shapes and sizes, and pieces of mostly unidentifiable equipment and machinery, as well as an industrial-sized fabricant that took up nearly a third of the room. A mechant hovered by the fabricant’s control panel, suggesting it was engaged in manufacturing its own replacement components.

The rush of agony that had overwhelmed him back in Vasili’s library had now faded to little more than a faint and distant throb. He swung his legs off the slab and the room reeled around him. Catching hold of the edge of the slab, he waited until the worst of the dizziness had passed, then lowered his feet to the ground and stood gently.

He felt too light to be back on Temur. More than likely, he was still on Vanaheim. But wherever he was, the climate was much warmer than it had been on Vasili’s island.

Something went thump on the far side of the room.

Luc tensed, listening, then heard the same sound again after an interval of maybe twenty seconds. It sounded like someone dropping a sack of grain onto the room’s tiled floor.

He moved with caution in the direction the sound had come from, keeping one hand out in case he took another dizzy turn. He stepped past a cabinet at the other side of the room, not far from the exit, and found himself looking at a shaven-headed man standing facing the wall, bent-over as if studying something lying on the floor. His arms hung straight down, knuckles nearly grazing the tiles.

‘Hello?’ Luc asked uncertainly.

No answer.

The man wore a shapeless and filthy smock that reached down to his bare feet, and stood perfectly still, as if his bones had locked into place and he could no longer stand straight.

‘Hello?’ Luc asked again. ‘Can you tell me where I am?’

No answer. Somehow he hadn’t really expected one.

He watched as the bent figure took a sudden step forward, banging his head into the wall with some force.

Despite a burgeoning sense of dread, Luc stepped closer, putting one hand on the man’s shoulder and pulling him around. Instead of eyes, grey metal ovals studded with pin-like extensions protruded from between the man’s eyelids, while much of his lower jaw had been removed entirely and replaced with some kind of machinery with a steel grille built into the front. His flesh was mottled and twisted where it had been fused to plastic and metal.

A moan emerged from the creature’s mouth-grille, full of terrible pain and unfathomable anguish.

Luc stumbled backwards, his heart hammering with shock. The misshapen figure turned away from him once more and resumed ramming its head against the wall.

Luc fled, running through the sunlit exit, desperate to get away from the misshapen creature. But rather than finding himself outside as he had expected, he instead found himself standing at one end of a greenhouse filled with a stunning variety of flora. The air tasted moist and peaty.

He shaded his eyes against the sunlight streaming in through the panes overhead and saw Zelia de Almeida standing further down a narrow path. A mechant hovered by her side, a straw basket incongruously clutched in one of its many manipulators. He watched as de Almeida took a small cutting from the branch of a tree, placing it in the basket.

The tree shivered in response, its lower branches weaving in slow patterns that somehow suggested distress. De Almeida reached out again, grasping hold of a slim branch. It tried to pull away from her, but she had too firm a hold on it. He watched as she snipped the branch off with a small pair of secateurs.

The tree shivered more violently than before, and Zelia murmured something inaudible to the mechant. In that same moment, another faceless monstrosity, identical to the one Luc had just encountered, appeared at the far end of the path, another straw basket clutched in its hand.

Luc watched dry-mouthed as the figure shambled along a connecting path, and out of sight.

‘Ah, there you are.’

He looked back at Zelia. She was peeling off a pair of gloves, dropping them into the mechant’s basket.

‘Where am I?’ he asked.

Zelia gestured to the mechant, and it moved down the path away from him. ‘I brought you to my home,’ she replied, stepping towards him. ‘Call me paranoid, but I didn’t want to take a chance somebody might have interfered with you.’

She placed one hand on his shoulder and guided him back through to the circular room he had just come from.

‘Back up, please,’ she said, leading him back over to the raised slab. Her manner was brisk and business-like.

Another thump echoed from across the room, but Zelia showed no sign of even being aware of it.

‘What the hell is that thing?’ Luc demanded, unable to hide his revulsion.

‘What thing?’ asked Zelia.

‘The man with no eyes.’

She glanced behind her with mild puzzlement, then back at him. ‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just an experiment.’

‘An experiment,’ Luc repeated. ‘What kind of experiment?’

‘One that needn’t concern you,’ she replied briskly. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve already treated us both for radiation damage.’

He gestured back in the direction of the eyeless thing. ‘But . . .’

She flashed him an angry look. ‘We’re not here to discuss my private research,’ she snapped. ‘I want to find out what happened to you back there at Vasili’s. How much do you remember, from when you collapsed?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘One minute everything was fine, the next . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well . . . something like it happened to me back on Temur, just after they brought me back from Aeschere.’

She nodded, as if this had been the answer she had been expecting. ‘I checked your records as soon as I had the chance, but the medicians attending to you couldn’t identify a cause for that first seizure. Is that correct?’

He nodded.

she scripted at him, her gaze unblinking,

Luc stared at her, unsure how to respond.

A look of grim satisfaction spread across her face. did know what we were all saying to each other back in Vasili’s library, didn’t you?>

Luc swallowed.

Luc felt his shoulders sag. ‘Pretty much all of it,’ he said out loud.

She stared at him with frightening intensity. ‘I could have you killed. Tell me, how did you do it?’

‘I don’t know. I just . . . picked up everything. It wasn’t anything I did, it just happened.’

‘I felt sure of it, from the moment you stepped inside that miserable hovel of Sevgeny’s.’

‘You already said your security networks might have been compromised in some way,’ he reminded her. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s not it.’

Luc made an exasperated sound. ‘Look, I have no idea how I could have picked up what you were all scripting to each other. I mean, I realized I wasn’t meant to at the time, but how could I have told any of you? I was too . . .’ Too frightened.

‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But only because I’m scanning you on a number of levels right now, all of which tell me you’re not deliberately obfuscating the truth.’

‘Okay then, so how could I have picked up everything you were saying?’

She raised both eyebrows. ‘That’s a question that can’t have anything but an interesting answer. For instance, would you care to tell me exactly who put an instantiation lattice inside your skull?’

Luc gaped at her dumbly before answering. ‘No one. I don’t have any such thing.’

She smiled enigmatically. ‘Oh, but you do, Mr Gabion. Look.’

Images of the interior of a skull – his skull, he guessed – blossomed in the air around them. One showed a lump of pinkish-grey flesh encased in fine silvery lines, while another depicted a messy tangle of pulsing blue light rendered in three dimensions, overlaid with a secondary, more orderly grid of red.

‘That,’ said Zelia, ‘is what an instantiation lattice looks like, in the very early stages of settling into its owner’s cortex – your cortex, to be precise. I had my house AI remotely analyse the inside of your head as soon as I realized what you had in there. But there are differences between this and any other kind of lattice I’ve ever seen.’

‘Differences?’

‘What you’ve got in there, unless my AIs are sorely mistaken, is more advanced than anything used even by the members of the Council, including myself. It has . . . functions I can’t begin to decipher.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head, her eyes bright and feral. ‘The question, then, is how the hell did it get inside your head?’

Antonov.

Luc’s blood ran cold and he knew, in that instant, that everything he remembered from Aeschere was real, and not a hallucination. Antonov had done something to him: booby-trapped him in some way, placed a ticking bomb inside his head for reasons he hadn’t bothered to explain beyond a few cryptic statements.

He shuddered to think of what might have happened to him if he’d fallen into the hands of Victor Begum or Karlmann Sandoz following his seizure in the library or – even worse – Cripps. He might well have disappeared into some Sandoz stronghold, never to be seen again.

Not that he was necessarily any safer in de Almeida’s hands, he reminded himself. Unlike Cripps or Karlmann Sandoz, she was still an unknown quantity.

‘I swear to you, I have no idea,’ Luc replied, almost begging.

Zelia glanced towards the projections as he spoke, her lips twisting into a thin line. ‘Now you are lying, Mr Gabion: it’s all there in the flow of blood in your capillaries, and the unconscious reactions of your autonomic nervous system.’ She studied him with angry eyes. ‘If you lie to me again, I’ll know straight away. Think you can get that through your head?’

‘Yes,’ he replied carefully.

‘Good.’ Her shoulders relaxed a little. ‘Now tell me how this came about.’

‘Antonov implanted it inside me. We were on Aeschere hunting for him, when our mosquitoes turned on us, killing all of—’

‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped, interrupting him. ‘I’m already familiar with everything that took place on Aeschere.’

‘Not everything that happened is in the official report.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Luc took a deep breath. ‘When I told Director Lethe of SecInt what really happened, he warned me he was going to leave some of the details out of the official report.’

‘Why?’

‘He was worried that what I told him might give an investigative committee reason to call my sanity into question, especially since I couldn’t prove much of what I said happened down there.’

She folded her arms. ‘Then I take it back. Start from the beginning, and tell me what really happened.’

He told her everything that had taken place after he had found his way to the lowest level of the Aeschere complex, leaving nothing out.

‘And when you encountered Antonov on the ship, he was still alive?’

Luc nodded. ‘He managed to take me by surprise and knocked me out. When I came to, he was in the process of putting some kind of mechant inside me.’ He shuddered at the memory. ‘It was tiny, like a metal worm. It crawled in through my nose and dug its way through my skull.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Delightful.’

‘So what happens after I finish telling you all this?’ asked Luc miserably. ‘Are you going to hand me over to the Sandoz for more questioning?’

‘Let’s just keep all this between the two of us for now.’ She paused, looking thoughtful. ‘What happened next?’

Luc remembered terrible pain. ‘As soon as he was done, Antonov put me back under. The next time I came to, he was dead. I did what I had to do in order to get out of the complex and save my own life.’

‘And then they brought you to Temur, where they found no trace of your instantiation lattice?’

Luc nodded.

Zelia regarded him speculatively, then made a gesture. In response, the floating images around them blurred and shifted, and were replaced by new ones, this time of Luc’s body in the hospital’s regeneration tank shortly after his return from Aeschere. He winced at the sight of his seared and ruined flesh.

She glanced back to him with an expression that almost bordered on sympathy. ‘They had to do a lot of work on you, didn’t they?’

‘When I had that first seizure, they ran scans on me to see if there were any abnormalities in my skull. But they found nothing. The medicians told me everything looked like it should.’

‘I’d agree with you that the worm-like mechant you described must be the means by which Antonov got the lattice inside your head. But if that’s the case, it doesn’t answer the question of why it showed up on my machines, but not those at the hospital . . .’

Her voice trailed off, and she leaned back against a table, drumming her fingers against its edge. ‘Instantiation lattices are just about the single most advanced form of technology in the whole of the Tian Di, apart from the transfer gates. Theoretically, a sophisticated enough lattice could fool certain analytical devices into thinking it wasn’t there. I can’t think of anything else that could possibly make sense. But it also begs the question – why would Antonov want to place such a sophisticated piece of technology inside your head?’

She looked at him as if he might be able to give her an answer.

‘If I could tell you the reason,’ he said, ‘I would.’

She nodded to the images floating around them. ‘Whatever Antonov had in mind for you, it wasn’t for your benefit. You’ve already had two serious seizures in a row, and I’d be an idiot not to think that lattice of yours is the reason why. Is there anything else you should be telling me?’

Luc told her about his strange dream-encounter with Antonov.

‘But you’re saying it wasn’t a dream?’ asked Zelia, once he’d finished.

‘I don’t know what it was, but he told me that if I survived, I had to open a specific record in Archives and make a small alteration to it.’

De Almeida nodded, her face neutral. ‘Go on.’

Luc shrugged. ‘He told me I had to add in a line about calling in a favour, then save and close the file.’

‘And did you?’

Luc nodded. ‘I wanted to see if it was real. If it didn’t exist, then that would have proved the whole damn thing really was just some terrible nightmare.’

‘What was the file’s reference?’

‘Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow.’

She breathed out through her nose, her mouth making a chewing motion. ‘Tell me what you found in the file.’

‘It described an incident on Thorne more than a century ago – some kind of illegal biotech research that brought about a number of deaths.’ He glanced at her. ‘You were the Director in charge of Thorne at the time.’

‘You’ve been looking into me?’

‘Not as such, but your name was attached to the file.’

‘I remember that investigation all too well,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Mr Gabion, have you discussed the details of this file or how you altered it with anyone else?’

‘Hell, no.’ He laughed nervously, wondering if she had any idea how terrified he really was. Almost certainly, he decided. His palms were clammy with sweat, his heart thudding in his chest. ‘If I’d told anyone what I just told you, they’d have locked me up and thrown away the key.’

Zelia nodded and stepped around to the other side of the slab, looking thoughtful. She reached up to brush a strand of hair back from her face. As she did so, Luc noticed her hand was shaking very slightly.

He glanced towards the sunlit door, beyond which lay the greenhouse. ‘If the others found out what I’ve just told you,’ he asked her, ‘what would happen to me?’

‘To you? To be brutally frank, Mr Gabion, dissection would be the first obvious step. Molecular tools would be used to tease your lattice apart, atom by atom, and highly invasive scanning routines would be used to try and decrypt whatever data or auto-suggestive routines Antonov might have implanted inside you. Assuming, that is, he hadn’t also booby-trapped the lattice to kill you the instant anyone tried to fool with it in any significant way.’ She shrugged. ‘To put it even more bluntly, Mr Gabion, I would not expect you to live for very long.’

Luc got halfway to the greenhouse entrance, his shoes slapping loudly against the tiles underfoot.

Something flashed past him in a blur, and the next thing he knew he was looking up at the outline of a mechant, hovering directly between him and the painted ceiling.

Zelia stepped over, gazing down at him with an expression of contempt.

‘Promise me,’ she said, ‘that you won’t waste any more of my time with stupid stunts like that.’

‘You just told me I’m going to have my brain picked apart,’ Luc groaned. ‘What the fuck would you do?’

‘I already told you nothing would happen to you so long as nobody else found out you were in possession of a lattice.’ She gestured towards the mechant, and it drifted back out of the way. ‘I keep my word, Mr Gabion.’

‘You’re serious?’ He pushed himself up into a sitting position on unsteady hands, staring up at her with desperate hope. ‘You’re not going to hand me over to them?’

‘I want to know just what Antonov was up to when he gave you that lattice. If I shared what you’ve told me with Father Cheng or anyone else in the Council, the first thing they would do is take the matter out of my hands. However, I have very good reasons for not wanting that to happen.’

He decided not to ask her what those reasons might be. There was something unsettling about her eyes, about her whole demeanour, the way she carried herself as much as the way she looked at him, as if he were an object rather than a human being.

‘So what happens now?’ he asked.

‘Nothing for the moment, Mr Gabion,’ she said, her eyes bright, ‘except that you’ll finish the job I brought you to Vanaheim to carry out. And if you ever – ever – think of telling anyone about our conversation here, believe me when I say there would be consequences.’

‘You’re not exactly giving me much choice.’

‘No, I’m not.’ She reached out a hand and he took it, standing up. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

‘Now that we’re clear on our relationship,’ she said, ‘I want to know if there’s anything else you want to tell me. Any other apparent hallucinations or memories you think might be pertinent.’

‘Nothing that really made any sense to me,’ he admitted.

The mechant drifted closer to him, instruments unfolding from its belly.

‘Tell me anyway,’ said Zelia, her eyes slitted like a hungry cat.

Luc stared at the mechant and licked his lips. ‘Okay. I had this dream a couple of times where I found myself looking into a mirror – or what I thought was a mirror, at first, but turned out to be a mask someone wore over their face. Except instead of seeing my own reflection in the mirror, I saw Antonov’s.’

De Almeida stared at him intently. ‘You’re certain of this?’

Luc shook his head helplessly. ‘How can I be certain about anything? It was just some crazy nightmare. But it felt . . .’

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘Real. It felt real.’

‘I think Antonov planted some of his own memories in your head,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. Once a lattice is in, it’s in for good, and the means by which Antonov placed it inside you strike me as extremely crude compared to how it’s usually carried out. The whole process has to be carefully monitored under laboratory conditions from beginning to end, and it can take weeks, even months, for a lattice to properly meld with the surrounding tissues. But what he did to you will almost certainly kill you, probably within weeks, sooner if left unattended.’

Luc nodded dumbly. ‘Isn’t there some way to, I don’t know, reverse the process? And if I’ve got an instantiation lattice in my head, doesn’t that mean you’d be able to create a backup of my mind?’

‘A backup couldn’t be made at this early a stage of your lattice’s growth, no. It simply wouldn’t work. And a mature lattice is precisely what will kill you. But in return for your aid in finding Sevgeny’s killer, I’ll do my best to reverse any damage brought about by your lattice until I can figure out some other, more long-term solution. The whole affair will remain our secret, yours and mine alone.’

She stepped a little closer to him. ‘But while you’re searching for Vasili’s killer, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can hold anything back from me. Not anything – is that clear?’

‘That’s clear,’ he said. ‘But if I’m going to do what you want me to, I need to be able to speak candidly with you, and without fear of repercussion.’

‘Why? Was there something you had on your mind?’

‘I need your reassurance first.’

She sighed and waved a hand. ‘Fine. Go on.’

‘It doesn’t take any great skill to work out that some of your fellow Councillors think you’re guilty as hell when it comes to Vasili’s murder. Based on what I heard back in that library of Vasili’s, you’re one of the few people around with the necessary access to Vanaheim’s security systems and the expertise to be able to carry it off.’

‘I can give you my personal reassurance that I did not kill Sevgeny. For one, I have no possible motive – as I believe I already pointed out to Ruy Borges.’

That remains to be seen, thought Luc. ‘Nobody got round to telling me what would be a good motive. Why would someone want to kill Sevgeny Vasili?’

‘A desire to hinder Reunification,’ she said immediately.

‘There are people in the Council who would go that far?’

Her face coloured slightly. ‘The fact of Sevgeny’s murder suggests that some might. Sevgeny was the architect of Reunification with the Coalition worlds, but most of his fellow Eighty-Fivers stood against it. Cheng put him in charge of the process of negotiation once he and the Eighty-Five were forced to concede to Reunification, under pressure from the general members of the Council.’

‘Could that be why one of them might have murdered him? Because they were against Reunification?’

She sighed. ‘It can’t be ruled out.’

‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How do you feel about Reunification?’

She glared at him. ‘What does my opinion of it matter?’

‘I just want to get a sense of where everyone stands,’ he said.

Her answer was hesitant, and reminded Luc vividly of just how very, very old people like Zelia de Almeida really were, appearances to the contrary. ‘Back in the days before the Schism, I thought completely severing contact with the Coalition was a mistake. It wasn’t like they were taking chances with any of the advanced technology they found in the Founder Network, so there was no risk of another Abandonment. Instead they were taking a slow and cautious approach, studying everything they discovered in situ and only allowing it back through the transfer gates to their own worlds once they were absolutely sure they properly understood what they had.’

‘But people had reason to be scared, didn’t they? The human race came very close to extinction because of the things we’d discovered in the Founder Network.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But I think reunifying with the Coalition is a good thing, even necessary.’

‘Why?’

She stared off into the distance before answering. ‘It’s my belief that without Reunification, the Tian Di is in serious danger of becoming stagnant. Perhaps dangerously so.’

Luc nodded, thinking. ‘Can you think of any other motives Vasili’s killer might have had apart from a desire to stop or slow down Reunification?’

She smiled humourlessly. ‘That’s for you to figure out, Mr Gabion, isn’t it?’ She stepped away from him, her manner suddenly brisk as she made towards the raised slab he had earlier found himself on.

‘Before we go any further,’ she told him, ‘I need to interrogate your lattice. Hopefully I can counteract its growth process by reconfiguring some of its basic functions.’ She indicated the slab. ‘Please.’

Luc nodded and walked back over, taking a seat on the edge of the slab. Zelia’s mechant followed close behind, reaching out with a steel and plastic proboscis that weaved and twisted in the air before his face.

‘What’s it doing?’ he asked nervously.

‘It’s allowing me to talk to your lattice,’ de Almeida replied, her expression intent, eyes focused on something Luc couldn’t see. He felt a slight tingling in his scalp.

‘All right,’ she said as the mechant retracted its proboscis and moved back. ‘I’ve set up neural blocks that should help retard the lattice. Now you can go home, Mr Gabion. You have your work to return to, and an investigation to carry out.’

‘How can I do that from Temur?’

‘Remember I have Father Cheng’s permission to bring you here as and when necessary. When I need you, I’ll call on you. In the meantime, you can return to your work in Archives. Now follow me.’

She led him down the length of the greenhouse and through tall doors at its far end. The sky had darkened, the air outside only slightly cooler than it had been inside de Almeida’s laboratory. Pale filaments of nebulae, perhaps only a few light-years away, rose above the horizon.

A flier dropped silently down onto a broad concrete apron close to the greenhouse. Luc glanced back and saw tall, sand-coloured towers surrounding the circular building he had just emerged from, side by side with a tile-roofed mansion. Beyond the buildings, cultivated gardens segmented by gravel paths had been planted with gently rustling trees of the same species as those in the greenhouse.

‘If you really want me to find out who killed Vasili,’ he said as they approached the flier, ‘I’m going to need to talk to people. And you need to show me just what went wrong with your security systems.’

‘Nothing went wrong with them.’

Luc frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Cheng said that someone must have compromised—’

She regarded him with wide, angry eyes. ‘Unfortunately, Bailey Cripps was quite correct in his assessment when he said there was nothing whatsoever wrong with Vanaheim’s security systems. I spent the last few days taking them apart in order to come to that conclusion.’

‘But in that case—’

‘Whoever did this, Mr Gabion, wants to make me appear to be the guilty party.’

‘You think someone’s trying to frame you?’

She nodded.

‘That could make your case very difficult.’

‘That goes without saying. Who exactly do you need to talk to?’

‘Everyone.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyone. Councillors, certainly.’

She sighed. ‘I thought you might say something like that. But it could prove difficult.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re not a Councillor yourself. None of them have to talk to you, unless Father Cheng tells them otherwise.’

‘But Cheng agreed to your running this investigation, didn’t he? Surely they have to obey him.’

‘You’d think so, but to be frank, it took a lot of persuasion to get Father Cheng to agree to letting you come to Vanaheim. None of them really care about Vasili, they only care whether their neck’s next on the block. And what Cheng wants most of all is for all of this to go away before the Reunification ceremonies begin.’

Luc reached out, putting one hand on the side of the flier’s open hatch. ‘I’d like to take another look at Vasili’s body.’

She frowned. ‘You’ve already seen it.’

‘That was more of a quick glance. Plus, I need to interrogate Vasili’s home security system. And take a second look around that island.’

She nodded tiredly and gestured to the flier. ‘I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime . . .’

Luc nodded and climbed on board.

‘One last thing,’ he said, turning to look down at her. ‘Were you aware that Bailey Cripps came to visit me at my home before I was even brought to Vanaheim?’

Her eyes widened in shock. ‘What?’

‘He had,’ said Luc, ‘concerns about my loyalties.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said I was just as much a suspect, though he didn’t specify what I was a suspect of.’

De Almeida stared off to one side, her nostrils flaring in the same way they had on Vasili’s island. Then she turned back to him. ‘Thank you for sharing that with me, Mr Gabion.’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you need my help just as much as I need yours.’

Fire flashed in her eyes. ‘And how do you figure that?’

‘You brought me into this because you thought I was good at my job. In that case, I can tell you I’m pretty sure the rest of the Council, or at least those I met today, are getting ready to hang you out to dry.’ He felt the conviction of his own words as he spoke. ‘That’s assuming you’re telling me the truth, and you really didn’t kill Vasili. But even if you didn’t, the odds are stacked against you. I didn’t get the sense you were well liked by any of those others I met – quite the opposite, in fact.’

‘You’re speaking out of turn, Mr Gabion,’ she said, her voice low and dangerous.

‘I told you I need to be able to speak candidly. I can’t be afraid of speaking to you, and those are the facts as I see them.’

‘Any other nuggets of wisdom you’d care to share with me?’

‘I think your bringing me to Vanaheim was a move of desperation on your part. You thought if I could work out who really killed Vasili, it would keep the rest of them from turning you into a scapegoat.’

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I may have underestimated you, Mr Gabion. I see that now.’

‘As for Cripps, my best guess is he came to me because he thought I was in league with you in some way. You told me you’d all left Vasili’s body where it was for a couple of days; time enough for you to wonder when they were going to start accusing you of his murder and look for ways to prove yourself innocent. That’s why you approached Cheng, seeking his permission to bring me here. And it’s obvious Cripps thinks you are guilty, because as soon as he got wind of that decision, he decided maybe I was working with you to cover things up.’

She thought about this for a moment. ‘You’re sure about that?’

Luc shrugged. ‘Alternatively, maybe Cripps was trying to throw me off for some other reason.’

‘Perhaps he did it.’

‘Maybe he did,’ Luc agreed. ‘He certainly acted like a frightened man, and he really doesn’t trust you.’

She let out a small laugh. ‘The one thing I and Bailey Cripps have in common is that we don’t trust anyone. It’s an essential trait for a long career in the Temur Council. I’ll be in touch, Mr Gabion. I’ll do my best to arrange interviews with anyone who might be able to throw some more light on this whole sorry mess.’

Luc watched her turn and stride up the path without another word, then stepped back, the hatch folding back into place.