‘I don’t understand.’
‘There’s nothing to understand,’ Kate said crossly. And there wasn’t. Life happened and then someone got left to clean up the mess. Someone like her. How difficult could comprehending that be?
Just before the track climbed the steepest part of the lower valley towards Escondido it branched off, the main track kept on up to the ramshackle monastery, a narrower path headed downwards again through undergrowth towards the mute roar of falling water.
‘Through there?’ momaDef demanded when Clone reined in his horse.
The big man nodded, jerking his heavy chin towards the narrower path.
‘You go first,’ momaDef told him. ‘Any problems I’ll shoot you, understand?’
What the tongueless Clone grunted might have been agreement but sounded more like an insult. And then he kicked his bleeding feet heavily into the flank of his horse and crashed away through the bushes, remembering just in time to duck as he went under a snaking branch.
‘Dumb fuck.’ momaDef was after him even before her fat sergeant had realised what was happening. It took the handful of conscripts a second to work out what the sergeant was shouting about and then they jogged after the fat woman, snubPups snagging on every branch despite being held tight to their chests like regulations demanded ...
Get lucky, thought Axl, kill each other. Which would at least save him the effort. Not that he was bothered by the grunts. But taking out defMoma, momaDef and Colonel Emilio was going to be a pleasure if the chance ever arose.
Tracking Clone was effortless. He’d signposted his passing in branches on both sides of the path which were snapped back to white bone and in leaf mould churned deep with hoof-marks.
All the same Axl took his time, not wanting Kate to reach Clone too early. Because whatever the lieutenant would do to the big man when she finally caught up with him was likely to be slow and nasty. . . And Axl wanted to avoid Kate having to watch that. There was enough anguish built up behind her troubled dark eyes already. He’d seen the way her head jerked and her shoulders hunched every time someone mentioned the dead pope by name.
By hanging back Axl hoped to stop Kate seeing Clone tortured and killed. Only, when Kate and he finally reached the mountain pool, it seemed the lieutenant had blown her chance to do either. Clone took the dive himself, taking momaDef with him, from a point on the path that dropped fifteen metres into the ice-cold waters of the foss pool below.
All of this Axl put together as he and Kate walked down to the water’s edge. He based it mostly on bloody footprints he’d seen back up the path. That had been where Clone dismounted to whip his horse into the distance, the man’s spoor track climbing the path’s upper edge just high enough for him to be able to turn, hide in bushes on the slope above and hurl momaDef off her horse down into the foss pool as she galloped past.
Primitive undoubtedly, but hard to counteract.
But putting it together from clues wasn’t really necessary, obvious ones or not. Because the fall suddenly imprinted onto Axl’s vision. The roar of the tumbling waterfall mixing abruptly with crashing synth, the fierce exaltation written on Clone’s face. Then a splash, silence and the darkness of deep water.
Axl shook his head quickly. He’d arrived at the edge of the foss and the huge sergeant was waiting for them.
‘You did this.’ She stood in front of Kate, her words stripped raw with emotion, and that emotion wasn’t just fury. Tears filled the woman’s eyes and real sorrow was in her round face. A muscle tugged at her jaw with almost cartoon-like regularity.
‘It’s your fault,’ she insisted, fists clenched. The only thing that stood between Kate and the grief-stricken defMoma wrapping her hands round Kate’s throat, was Axl, and his head was still spinning from the snapshot replay of Clone’s fall. But what he wanted to say was ...
‘Her fault? How the fuck do you work that out?’ The words were ripped from his head, spoken in a hard metallic rasp that sounded far away, though it came from where Rinpoche scrabbled up between two rocks. ‘She wasn’t even here, was she? You stupid fuck.’
Rinpoche steered Axl and Kate firmly away from defMoma and then busied itself with folding sodden wings tight against its back. ‘United in death,’ Rinpoche said with a grim smile. ‘Well, at least they’ll have no trouble bringing them up together.’
‘Oh and you’d better have this,’ the monkey dropped a cold glass blade into Axl’s hand, ‘Call it a present. . . You know,’ the silver monkey added suddenly. ‘I like this place. Really like it. In fact, I’m planning to stay. You, on the other hand, shouldn’t stick around. And as for her…’ Ruby eyes flicked towards Kate, then towards a handful of conscripts improvising ropes and hooks to drag the pool. Rinpoche shrugged. ‘It’s your shot,’ it said. ‘But I really wouldn’t waste it.’
Rinpoche shook water from his fingers and passed Kate a black ring made from beaten iron. ‘I figured, what the fuck, this might have some sentimental value?’
‘Jesus,’ said Kate.
‘Yeah,’ Rinpoche grinned, showing gold canines, ‘that’s what it’s got engraved around the inside. Of course…’ The silver monkey paused, ‘don’t take it wrong, but for myself, these days I’m Tibetan Bon Buddhist.’
The little shit wasn’t joking either, Axl realised. It had come down with Turing Syndrome. Make machine artilect and before anyone knows it, your gun’s gone pacifist, the chill cabinet’s vegetarian and the house AI’s campaigning for the reintroduction of zoning regulations.
The tension levels didn’t improve when Colonel Emilio turned up to oversee the retrieval of momaDef’s body. For a start the Colonel had serious problems with the fact Kate Mercarderes had her head buried in Axl’s shoulder and the Cardinal’s pet killer was slowly, absentmindedly stroking her long black hair.
‘Lovely couple,’ said Rinpoche.
The Colonel glared at Rinpoche, at Kate and Axl and then finally back at the silver monkey—and didn’t like any of what he saw.
‘You,’ he said, nodding to Kate. ‘You’re not required here.’
Axl shrugged insolently, to save her the effort. That was how the neat, green-eyed Colonel made him feel. But then Axl figured if you’ve been thrown together from what was left in the bottom of the slop bucket, impressing buttoned-down establishment wannabes was never going to be an easy option.
And besides, Axl was right out of sympathy. The lieutenant deserved everything that happened. In fact, as far as Axl was concerned Clone had simply saved him from having to do the job.
‘We’ll stick around,’ said Axl as casually as possible. ‘She’s with me and I’ve got work to do.’
Colonel Emilio didn’t like that either, but then Axl hadn’t wanted him to. For better or worse—though probably the latter—Axl was the Cardinal’s man. There might be no contract, no formal indenture, and it was true he appeared on no lists of humans, ghosts or AIs employed by VaticanMexico, just as no house agreement covered him for cloning insurance or rebuild, but that wasn’t the point.
Axl shook his head.
What was between the old bastard and him wasn’t written down or recorded, it was etched into memories, most of them bad. As for Colonel Emilio, given a face-off was inevitable, Axl would rather it came sooner than later.
There was something badly wrong with the arm that finally broke the surface, waved once and splashed back out of sight. It had taken the conscripts three trys to snag anything at all and on the fourth go the snagged body had fallen off its hook halfway to the surface, so they’d been forced to start dragging the bed of the foss pool all over again.