“Holly’s been tough,” I say. “We should let her go now.”
Esther runs Unalaq’s ruby thumbnail up the stem of a purple tulip. “You miss purple, after a few years …”
When Esther dodges a question, I worry. “Holly’s paid enough, Esther. Please. She deserves to be left in peace.”
“She does,” says Esther. “But it’s not that simple.”
“According to the Script?” asks Фshima.
Esther fills Unalaq’s lungs and slowly exhales. “There’s a crack.”
None of us understands. Arkady asks, “A crack in what?”
“A crack in the fabric of the Chapel of the Dusk.”
THE LIBRARY IN Unalaq and Inez’s apartment is a deep square well, walled with bookshelves. Its parquet floor has just enough room for the round table, but a corkscrew staircase winds up not to one but two narrow balconies that give access to the upper bookshelves, and the Monday-morning sunshine enters through a skylight twenty feet above us. It illuminates an oblong of book spines. Фshima, Arkady, Esther-in-Unalaq, and I sit around the table and talk about Horology business until there’s a knock at the door and Holly enters, fed, freshly showered, and dressed in baggy clothes borrowed from Inez. Her new head-wrap is deep blue, scattered with white stars. “Hi,” says the tired, lined woman. “I hope I haven’t kept you all waiting.”
“You hosted me for forty-one years, Ms. Sykes,” says Esther-in-Unalaq. “A few minutes is the least I owe you.”
“Make it Holly. Everyone. Wow. Look at all these books. It’s rare to see so many, these days.”
“Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the late 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.”
Holly asks, “Is that, like … an official prophecy?”
“It’s the inevitable result,” I say, “of population growth and lies about oil reserves. But please. This chair’s for you.”
“What a beautiful table,” remarks Holly, sitting down.
“It’s older than the nation we’re in,” says Arkady.
Holly runs her fingers for a moment over the grain and knots of the yew wood. “But younger than you lot, right?”
“Age is a relative concept,” I say, rapping my knuckles on the old, old wood.
Esther-in-Unalaq pushes back Unalaq’s bronze hair from her face. “Holly. Years ago you made a rash promise to a fisherwoman on a jetty. You couldn’t know the true consequences of that promise, but you kept it anyway. Doing so pulled you into Horology’s War with the Anchorites. When Marinus and me egressed from you earlier, your first role in our War ended. Thank you. From me, from Horology. I owe you my life.” The rest of us signed our agreement. “The good news is this. By six o’clock tomorrow evening, according to the world’s clocks, the War will be over.”
“A peace treaty?” asks Holly. “Or a fight to the death?”
“A fight to the death,” answers Arkady, raking his fingers through his lush hair. “Poachers and gamekeepers don’t do peace treaties.”
“If we win,” says Esther-in-Unalaq, “you’re home free, Holly. If not, we won’t be able to stage any more dramatic rescues. We’ll be dead-dead. And we won’t lie. We can’t know how our enemy’d respond to victory. Constantin, specially, has a long memory.”
Holly’s troubled, naturally. “Aren’t you precognitive?”
“ Youknow precognition, Holly,” says Esther. “It’s a flicker of glimpses. It’s points on a map, but it’s never the whole map.”
Holly considers this. “My first role in your War, you just said. Implying there’s a second.”
“Tomorrow,” I take over, “a high-ranking Anchorite named Elijah D’Arnoq is due to appear in the gallery at 119A. D’Arnoq proposes to escort us to the Chapel of the Dusk and to help us destroy it. He claims to be a defector who can no longer stomach the moral evil of decanting innocent ‘donors.’ ”
“You don’t sound as if you believe him.”
Фshima drums his fingers on the table. “ Idon’t.”
Holly asks, “Can’t you enter the defector’s mind to check?”
“I did,” I explain, “and what I found backed his story up. But evidence can be tampered with. All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.”
Holly asks the obvious: “Then why take the risk?”
“Because now we have a secret weapon,” I answer, “and fresh intelligence.”
We all look at Esther-in-Unalaq. “Back in 1984,” she tells Holly, “on what we call our First Mission to our enemy’s fastness, I detected a hairline crack running from the apex to the icon. I believe that I … may be able to split this crack open.”
“Dusk,” I explain further, “would then flood the Chapel, and destroy it. The Blind Cathar, whose half-sentient vestiges reside withinthe Chapel, would perish. Any Anchorites touched by the Dusk would die. Any Anchorites elsewhere would have lost their psychodecanter, and be as susceptible to the aging process as the rest of humanity.”
Holly asks the less-than-obvious: “You said the Blind Cathar was a genius, a mystic Einstein who could ‘think’ matter into being. Why didn’t he notice his masterpiece has a chink in its armor?”
“The Chapel was built by faith,” replies Esther. “But faith requires doubt, like matter requires antimatter. That crack, that’s the Blind Cathar’s doubt. It dates from before he became what he later became. Doubt that he was doing God’s work. Doubt that he had the right to take the souls of others so that he could cheat death.”
“So you plan to … stick dynamite into the crack?”
“Nitroglycerin won’t scratch the paintwork,” says Фshima. “The place has withstood the Dusk for centuries. A nuclear explosion might do the job, but warheads aren’t very portable. What’s needed is psychosoteric dynamite.”
Esther clears Unalaq’s throat. “That would be me.”
Holly checks with me: “A suicide mission?”
“If our defector is fake, and his promise to show us how to safely demolish the Chapel is a lie and a trap, then that contingency is real.”
“Marinus means yes,” says Фshima. “A suicide mission.”
“Christ,” says Holly. “So are you going up alone, Esther?”
Esther shakes Unalaq’s head. “If D’Arnoq is luring the last Horologists up the Way of Stones, he’ll want allof the last Horologists, not just one. If the Second Mission isan ambush, I’ll need the others to buy me time. Detonating your soul isn’t a beginner’s party trick.”
I hear the piano, faintly. Inez is playing “My Wild Irish Rose.”
Holly asks, “So ifEsther has to blow up this—enemy HQ, say, and assuming she succeeds …” She looks at the rest of us.
“Dusk dissolves living tissue,” says Фshima. “The End.”
“Unless,” I venture, “there was a way back to the Light of Day that we don’t yet know about. One built by an ally. On the inside.”
Half a mile above us, a cloud passes between our skylight and our nearest star and the oblong of sunshine fades away.
Holly reads me. “What is it you still haven’t told me?”
I look at Esther, who shrugs Unalaq’s shoulders: You’ve known her the longest. So I say what I won’t be able to unsay later: “On the First Mission, neither I nor Esther actually saw Xi Lo die.”
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind. Holly shifts in her seat. “What did you see?”
“Not a lot in my case,” I say. “I was pouring all my psychovoltage into our shield. But Esther was next to Jacko when Xi Lo’s soul egressed and …” I look at my colleague.
“And ingressed the chakra-eye on the icon of the Blind Cathar. He wasn’t being dragged like a victim. Xi Lo transversed in, like a bullet. And … the instant before he vanished, I heard Xi Lo subtell me three words: I’ll be here.”
“We don’t know,” I admit, “if this was a spur-of-the-moment act, or a plan that Xi Lo hadn’t shared, for reasons of his own. If Xi Lo hoped to sabotage the Chapel, he failed. One hundred and sixty-four people have lost their lives and souls in the Chapel of the Dusk since 1984. One poor man was abducted from a secure psychiatric ward in Vancouver only last week. But … Esther thinks that Xi Lo has been preparing the way for the Second Mission. Holly? Are you okay?”