It was a terrible thing. Unlike the beatings, it could not be overlooked. No gloss of decency could be put on it. The best that Ber Lusim could hope for would be to be stripped of his post as Summoner. If it was found that he had killed Orim deliberately, with full intent, he would never leave Ginat’Dania again. His life would be lived out in a windowless cell, a foot longer and wider than he was tall.
But when he was recalled to be tried, he disappeared. And his Messengers went with him.
‘So that’s who we’re dealing with,’ Tillman said, when Diema had finished her story. His face was cold and inexpressive, but his fists were still clenched and pressed down hard against the table. Kennedy knew how deeply that story would have penetrated into him and how much blood it would have drawn.
And what about Diema? Her own mother had been one of these women. Was that what had moved her or had it been something else? She remembered the girl in action, taking on the two Elohim in Izzy’s bedroom, beating them down and leaving them for dead.
Leaving them for dead. Not killing them. Since when did the Elohim not finish the job?
An answer to that question came to her very suddenly and the more she thought about it, the more she felt it had to be right. It explained so much. It explained that unlikely mercy. It explained why Diema had broken off her story so abruptly just then. And most of all, it explained the impossibly tenuous chain of chance or destiny that had drawn first Emil Gassan, then her and then Tillman into this deepening, thickening mess. Tillman had said you went with coincidence or you surrendered yourself to megalomania — that there was no third way. But there was. And it took her breath away with its sheer simplicity — its almost indecent obviousness.
‘The enemy we face,’ Diema said solemnly, ‘is those renegade Elohim, commanded by Ber Lusim. There is another man — Avra Shekolni — who joined them recently and has become their spiritual leader and teacher. We think that Shekolni has strengthened Ber Lusim’s extremism. Made him even less inclined to compromise than he was before.’
‘Wait,’ Rush said. ‘If this Shekolni is new on the scene, is he why they went after the book? Was that his idea?’
Diema stared at him thoughtfully for a second or two. She seemed to be deciding whether or not answering a former hostage’s questions would compromise her dignity. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We think it was Shekolni’s idea.’
‘They didn’t just steal that one copy of the book, did they?’ Kennedy broke in. ‘There were ashes in the box at Ryegate House.’
Diema turned her head to stare at Kennedy. The intensity of her attention was unsettling. It was as though, when she looked at you, the rest of the room, the rest of the world, disappeared. ‘Tephra,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The ashes of a sacrifice are called tephra.’
‘Whatever.’ Kennedy couldn’t keep the impatience out of her voice. ‘They stole every copy of the book they could find. They burned all but one of them. They were taking the holy word out of the hands of the unbelievers.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why is it the holy word? It was written only a few centuries ago, by — what would you call him? — a heretic? A turncoat? An escapee? It’s not your gospel. It’s late-breaking news from a religious lunatic.’
Diema nodded. ‘Toller’s words were lost because we didn’t think they were worth keeping,’ she agreed. ‘It was a long time before anyone even realised that he might have been of the People. One of our Messengers went astray, at that time, and was looked for but never found. It was within my lifetime that a scholar of the People saw the correspondences in Toller’s book and came up with the idea that our missing brother had taken a new name and preached to the Nations as Johann Toller.’
‘Then why would his word be revered?’ Kennedy demanded. ‘Why would it even be read, any more?’
‘Toller was the first to leave the People without the People’s blessing or sanction. Until Ber Lusim and Avra Shekolni, nobody else followed his example. Not in all of the three hundred and seventy years in between.’ Diema reached into her shirt and drew out the knife she kept there — the strange, asymmetrical blade that the Judas People called the sica. ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked them. Before she spoke, before she’d even completed the movement, Tillman once again had the gun in his hand. But the girl didn’t acknowledge the threat or seem to notice it.
‘Take that as a yes,’ Rush suggested.
‘But you don’t really know what it is,’ Diema insisted. ‘To you it’s just a weapon. To us, it’s two and a half thousand years of history. We carried it and killed with it when we were subjects of the Romans. Now we carry it and kill with it as free men and women.’
‘What’s your point?’ Kennedy demanded. ‘And can you make it without that filthy thing in your hand?’
Diema set the knife down on the table, beside the typescript of Toller’s book. ‘I suppose my point is that we stick to our traditions. Change isn’t something that comes naturally or easily to us. Perhaps Avra Shekolni was already interested in Johann Toller before he left the city. Or perhaps not. Now, we know, he’s obsessed with the man. Toller is his only real precursor — a man of religion who went alone into the world, carrying what he thought was a great message.’
‘So?’ said Kennedy.
‘So Shekolni believes in that message.’
‘But Toller was predicting the end of the world back in the 1660s. It didn’t end,’ said Rush. ‘Or does Shekolni think it did and now we’re all living in the Matrix?’
‘You don’t understand,’ Diema said.
Rush flushed slightly. ‘No, I don’t. That’s sort of what I just said.’
‘Johann Toller,’ Diema said, enunciating the words with the care reserved for deaf people, foreigners and imbeciles, ‘said the world would end after all his prophecies were fulfilled.’
‘That part I got.’
‘Then what would you do if you wanted the world to end?’
Rush stared at her. ‘If I …?’ he repeated.
Then he stared some more. Tillman and Kennedy were staring, too.
‘The time of the bargain came,’ Diema said. ‘And then it went. God didn’t appear to us. But over such a very, very long time, mistakes and misunderstandings are possible — not on the part of the Holy Name, but on our part. The Sima, our high council, argued for patience. God’s plan would reveal itself, if we waited.
‘But Shekolni, who had a voice in that council, disagreed. He said God had never, ever expected us just to wait. That to do nothing was the last thing He wanted from us. After three thousand years, our time would come. But it was exactly that — our time. It was up to us to act. And God had already told us what to do.’
‘Through Johann Toller,’ Kennedy said.
Diema gave a brusque shrug. What do you think?
‘That’s what they’re doing.’ Kennedy felt an acute sense of vertigo. ‘They’re making it happen by making all the signs and wonders happen first. They’re ringing in the Second Coming.’
‘And the signs and the wonders will only get bigger and bloodier,’ Diema said. ‘Unless you stop them.’
‘Unless we stop them?’ Rush blurted. ‘Why is this down to us?’
Diema pointed at Kennedy, and then at Tillman. ‘I meant them,’ she said. ‘Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for.’
‘And we were?’ Kennedy said, jumping on the words. She was right. She had to be right.
‘The boy raises a good point,’ Tillman growled, getting to his feet. He didn’t seem to have registered Kennedy’s words. ‘This is your business, not ours. Something you and your people vomited into the world. Why in the name of anything you want to swear by would you come to the very people you despise and hate, and ask them to clear up your mess?’