‘No, Diema, he is not. He’s only—’
‘He is the father of my flesh and the father of my spirit. He is the only father I acknowledge. I cleave to him, as his daughter, and I will stand by him. The hand that’s raised to hurt him becomes, with that act, my enemy’s hand. On Gellert Hill, he fought for me and would have died for me, though we had but an hour’s acquaintance. I knew then that he had loved the child he lost, and that therefore he could not knowingly have killed my brothers. That was some terrible mistake, as the rhaka Kennedy told me it was. The monster whose death I assented to never existed — and to my father’s death, Tannanu, I do not assent.’
Kuutma listened to this speech with a look of sombre concern. When it was finished, he said nothing for a long time.
Finally, he reached out and put a hand on Diema’s shoulder.
‘I’ve done you no service,’ he said heavily. ‘I see that now. I love you and honour you, Diema, but I put you in the way of this hurt, and now I don’t see how to make it pass from you.’
‘Let them live.’
‘I can’t do that. I’m not free to choose.’
‘Then neither am I,’ Diema said. She drew a sica from its sheath against her breast and placed it so that the tip of the blade touched her stomach. ‘Kill Leo Tillman and I’ll die, too.’
Kuutma’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Diema,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘You can’t mean it.’
‘I mean it.’
Many emotions crossed Kuutma’s face. The one that was most clearly visible was pain. ‘A blasphemy,’ he said.
‘I’m damned already. On Gellert Hill, I shot Hifela, of the Elohim, and watched him die. And I lied to you in Budapest, Tannanu. I’m not pregnant. I said that to save the boy, and the boy just saved us all.’ She wrestled with words, with reasons, trying to explain something that had come to her without the benefit of either, as a rising tide of revelation. ‘If I let them die,’ she said, ‘I become less than they are. Less than I thought they were, when I didn’t know them.’
Kuutma’s face still bore the same expression of dismay and suffering. ‘I could disarm you,’ he pointed out.
‘Possibly. But you couldn’t keep me disarmed.’ She put the knife away, to reinforce the point. ‘I don’t have to die here or now, Tannanu. I’ve got all the time in the world. If I decide to kill myself, the only way to stop me is to kill me first.’
Silence fell between them. They stared at one another, intransigent, immovable.
With no more sound than a whisper of fabric, Alus and Taria appeared to either side of Diema.
‘Desh Nahir will live,’ Alus said.
‘And he has withdrawn his execration,’ Taria added. ‘He wishes no harm to Diema Beit Evrom.’
Kuutma nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Secure Diema Beit Evrom and confiscate her weapons.’
The two women did as they were told. Diema made no protest and she didn’t struggle, as Alus held her hands behind her back and Taria methodically searched her for weapons. The tall woman’s eyes met hers and she could see how little they liked to treat one of their own in this way.
‘Guard her,’ Kuutma said.
Taria nodded. ‘Yes, Kuutma. What about the rhaka and the others? Should we—’
‘Do nothing,’ Kuutma said. ‘I wish to speak with Leo Tillman.’
Following Kuutma’s curt instructions, his Messengers overturned one of the plastic tubs, tipping out the thin paste at the bottom of it, and rolled it to a distant corner of the room, far from the others. Tillman was half-dragged and half-carried across and set down on the tub, where in due course Kuutma joined him.
Tillman was still in a great deal of pain, but Alus’s medical skills had once again been called into service. She had made up a cocktail of drugs designed to help him manage the pain and stay conscious. His fully dilated pupils and the morbid tension of his posture suggested that they were just starting to kick in.
Kuutma stared down at the Adamite, with the puzzled frown of a mathematician considering a problem in formal logic.
‘I had a plan,’ he said, ‘that included your death. Yours, and the woman’s.’
Tillman nodded.
‘It’s true that your death was only a detail,’ Kuutma continued. ‘It was a way of dealing with a situation that my predecessor had allowed to arise. The main thrust of the plan related to much clearer and more present dangers.’
He hesitated a moment, then sat beside the Adamite man. It enabled him to lower his voice a little further: all of the Messengers present had recently taken prodigious doses of kelalit, which enhances the senses, so there was a possibility, despite the discreet distance, that they were being overheard.
‘I wish,’ Kuutma said, ‘that I’d killed you first and found some different way to solve my remaining problems.’
Tillman laughed shortly — a single snort. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well, that just sums you people up, it seems to me. You always over-think these things, and you always make the same mistake.’
Kuutma scowled, but kept his tone even and controlled. ‘And what mistake is that, Mr Tillman?’
Tillman ran a hand over his sweating face and blinked several times, rapidly. The drugs he’d been given were interfering with his perception, or his thought-processes, or both.
‘She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?’
‘What?’ Kuutma asked, thrown.
‘My little girl. She’s a real piece of work. I’d hazard a guess that maybe that goes for all the women in her family. She reminds me a lot of my wife.’
‘Rebecca Beit Evrom was not your wife.’
‘No?’
‘No. The relationship between a Kelim woman and an Adamite out-father is not characterised as marriage, in our laws. What mistake is it that you think we make, Mr Tillman?’
Still blinking, Tillman turned his head to stare at Kuutma. ‘There’s a kind of a proverb. You must have heard of it. It says if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything looks like a nail.’
‘I’m familiar with that observation.’
‘You’ve spent two thousand years killing anyone who gets onto you or gets too close to the truth about you. Playing ducks and drakes with history.’
‘We do what we have to do.’
‘No,’ Tillman said, his voice slurring a little. ‘You do what you already know how to do. You don’t change your repertoire, even when you can see that it’s not working.’
‘It’s worked well enough so far,’ Kuutma said.
Tillman laughed again. ‘Then why do you even exist? If it worked, Kuutma, if it had ever worked, they wouldn’t need you. Thousands of years of surreptitious murder, and every time, every damn time … as soon as you finish one operation it’s all got to be done again. Hundreds of Elohim with their ears to the ground, all across the world, trying to keep track of a whisper line with seven billion voices on it. Of course you’re going to make a pig’s breakfast out of it.’
‘You’re saying there’s a better way?’ Kuutma asked sardonically.
‘Yes.’
‘Teach me, Tannanu Tillman.’
‘Well, for starters,’ Tillman said, ‘you don’t squash the story. You shout it. Flood the world with rumours about the Judas People, about Ginat’Dania. Tell everyone about the secret book, the lost gospel. Tell them if they read it, pale men who weep blood will find them and kill them with knives that were last seen twenty centuries ago. Tell them about the beautiful women who’ll sleep with you and then disappear, leaving you to grow crazy with searching for them. Tell them about the underground city, and all the rest of it.’