‘There’ll be a meeting,’ she told Kennedy, ‘in half an hour’s time. By then, the equipment I’ve asked for will have arrived and we’ll be ready to go in. I’d like you to be there. You can make a final decision when you’ve heard me out.’
She left, nodding to the Elohim to lock the door behind her. There was no need to talk any more.
Except to Nahir, who was still uncertain about what she was asking him to do and would need to be argued with. And to the boy, who would just have to do as he was told.
The boy.
Ronald Stephen Pinkus, risen from the grave yet again to haunt and torment her.
‘We set up an ambush, but it didn’t work. In fact, we got ambushed ourselves.’
Diema’s voice rang out, almost too loud in the small, crowded room. Along with Nahir, there were more than forty Messengers, many of whom were recently arrived. They sat in silence on folding chairs, flimsy things of stainless steel and black plastic, dressed in the hand-woven linen of their home. They were vectors of terrible violence, eerily suspended. Birds of prey, somehow brought to earth and persuaded to pose for a group photograph.
In their midst sat Kennedy and Rush, ringed by empty seats. Nobody wanted to sit next to the rhaka, the wolf-woman, and take the taint of her proximity.
Diema stopped, alarmed, and cleared her throat. There had been a shrill, rising note to her voice. She sounded like an idiot. Worse, she sounded like a child. The palms of her hands were hot and moist.
For all the things that she had done, and had had done to her, over the last three years, she had never been called on to speak in public. She feared now that it might lie outside her skill set.
She tried again. ‘The idea was to lure one of Ber Lusim’s Messengers into trying to capture Heather Kennedy — as they’d already tried to do in England — by making it appear that we might know where their base was.’ She looked from one grave face to another. ‘That part worked. Except they didn’t just come for Heather Kennedy, they came for all of us. And they didn’t send one Messenger. They sent many.’
‘They only sent one after me,’ Rush said. ‘Turned out to be a mistake.’ Given the state of his face, and the fact that his muffled, distorted voice was coming out of one side of a hideously swollen jaw, it could only have been intended as a joke. Forty Elohim, with no sense of humour when it came to their holy calling, stared at him in grim silence.
‘There were more than a dozen in all,’ Diema said, hastily pulling their attention back to her. ‘We can’t say for sure how many, because they waited until we were separated and attacked us in smaller groups. The last to fall was Hifela, who all of you know, or at least have heard of.’
The room was suddenly sibilant with a dozen whispered conversations. Diema waited them out. She’d used that phrasing deliberately and she wanted her countrymen to reflect for a moment on what it meant — that twelve Elohim had been sent against three Adamites, two of whom were sitting in front of them, still breathing.
‘We fought Hifela, on the slope of Gellert Hill,’ she said. ‘By we, I mean myself and … and Leo Tillman, known to the People because he was once …’ Her throat was dry and she had to clear it again. ‘Known to the People in other times, and other contexts. Hifela fought hard and might have won. Some of you have seen his body, so you know. It took a dozen bullets to kill him.
‘And as he lay on the ground, beside us, he spoke these words. “Bilo b’eyet ha yehuani. Siruta muot dil kasyeh shoh.”’
More murmurs around the room. Most of the Messengers looked puzzled or disconcerted. Nahir frowned. ‘He cannot have said that,’ he told Diema.
‘I was ten feet away from him, brother. I tell you what I heard.’
‘Then he meant the teacher. The apostate, Shekolni. The ground where he walks.’
‘That’s not what he said.’
‘Some of us,’ Kennedy said, cutting in loudly, ‘are Aramaically challenged. If there’s any point in our being here, someone’s going to have to translate.’
Nahir glanced at her once, coldly appraising her, then turned back to Diema. ‘Is there?’ he asked. ‘Any point in their being here? Many of us have wondered.’
Diema answered Kennedy’s question, ignoring Nahir’s. ‘Hifela said, “Take me to my Summoner. Let me die on holy ground.”’
‘And why is that significant?’ Kennedy demanded.
‘Because the only holy ground is Ginat’Dania,’ Diema said.
There was a sense, rather than a sound, of the assembled Elohim drawing in their breath, of the tension in the air ratcheting itself up a notch more, and then maybe another notch on top of that. Diema met Kennedy’s gaze. The boy would be clueless, but the rhaka would know how thin this tightrope they were walking was — as thin as the edge of a blade. You didn’t talk to the children of Adam about Ginat’Dania. Out of all the things you didn’t do, it was perhaps the one you didn’t do the most. In a society that lived at the cusp of the catastrophe curve, the instinct for self-preservation ran very deep, and subsumed all other instincts.
‘In spite of the latitude granted to you,’ murmured Nahir softly, ‘you will be careful what you say.’
Diema looked him in the eye, without flinching. This was a moment that had to be walked through, the way you walk over fire. ‘The woman, Heather Kennedy,’ she said, ‘and the man, Benjamin Rush, already know that Ginat’Dania exists. Moreover, they know that it used to exist here. It was necessary to tell them these things in order to follow Ber Lusim’s trail as far as we have — which you, Nahir, for all your resources, weren’t able to do.’
‘I have a knife,’ a woman in one of the rear ranks of the Messengers called out. ‘And a conscience. Tell me why I shouldn’t exercise them both.’
The woman was sitting directly behind Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t look round: she knew this was Diema’s play, and she had better sense than to get in the way of it.
‘Exercise your brain, sister,’ Diema said coldly. ‘That’s the part of you that you’re neglecting. The woman knew for years and Kuutma spared her. More. Kuutma sanctioned her involvement in this. She has Kuutma’s blessing — the first Adamite in a hundred lifetimes to be so blessed. All you have is a wish that things could be like they used to be in the old days. But the old days are dead. And if you cling to them now, you’ll die, too.’
It wasn’t — quite — a threat. It was hard to say what it was. The Messenger opened her mouth, but closed it again without speaking. Blood had rushed to her face, and she bowed her head to hide it, discomfited.
‘Ginat’Dania,’ Diema said, to the room at large, ‘the living and eternal Ginat’Dania, is far away from this place, and from Adamite eyes. But three hundred years ago, Ginat’Dania stood here. In the caves under Gellert Hill and Castle Hill, and under the river Danube itself. That’s where Hifela was asking to be taken. That’s where Ber Lusim has set up his house — in a maze of tunnels and chambers vast enough to house a million people. It’s the perfect hiding place, if you’re hiding from Adamites. But not if you’re hiding from us. We have maps of the city dating back to the time when it was alive and we can mount a search that will bring them into our hands.’
‘I thought your hands had to be empty.’ Ben Rush shrugged in mock-apology as the holy killers all turned to stare balefully at him again. ‘I mean, I thought that was the point. Human lives are expendable, but you can’t kill each other. And you don’t have Tillman to hide behind any more. So what, did you push through a rule-change? You’ve got a hunting licence now?’