The Demon Code (35 page)

‘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?’

Diema was silent. With all their eyes on her, she shrugged again. This time the gesture seemed to say she’d made her case and they could take it or leave it. ‘It’s true that we want Ber Lusim’s network closed down,’ she said. ‘His beliefs are heresy – abomination. And besides, what he’s doing puts us at risk. It’s too visible. It makes people ask questions and look for patterns. So that’s why I was sent. That’s why I’m here, now, talking to you.

‘But I’d say the stakes are higher for you than for us. Lots of people have already died. But if Ber Lusim gets to the last prophecy, many, many more people will die.’ Diema’s gaze met Kennedy’s. ‘You read the book. Toller talks about the thousand thousand who are going to be sacrificed. A million people. I can’t believe you want that to happen.’

‘But that’s not why you came to us,’ said Kennedy. ‘You don’t give a damn how many people die, so long as it’s our kind and not yours. We’re no better than cattle to you. And the stakes? How could the stakes be higher, exactly? Secrecy is an iron law to you people. Anything that threatens the big secret, you rip it right out of the world. And you want us to believe that this – these maniacs running around loose, making all this noise – is no big deal for you?’

Diema pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing a little. ‘I expressed myself badly,’ she said, with stolid patience. ‘Of course this concerns us. But there’s a parable – about a traveller who is set on by robbers as he sits by his campfire at night. He takes a stick out of the fire to fend them off. Then, when his enemies are beaten, he throws the brand back into the flames and lets it be consumed.’

‘And we’re the stick?’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s sweet. And it’s a lot closer to the truth. But you gave yourself away, girl – when you were talking about the death of the woman and her children, and all of a sudden you had to go to the window and breathe some sweet, fresh air. So why is it so hard for you to say?’

‘To say what?’ Tillman asked. ‘What am I missing?’

Diema glanced at him for a moment, then lowered her gaze to the ground.

‘You’ve seen how they fight, Leo,’ Kennedy said, her voice sounding harsh and hateful in her own ears: because she really did hate this. The big unspoken lie, the sin of omission. She hated everything that was behind it. ‘You’ve seen how casually they kill.’

‘Seen it right up close,’ Tillman agreed. ‘Like you.’

‘But when Diema here dismantled the two Messengers who were about to torture me, she left them both alive. Concussed, bleeding, beaten to a pulp, but alive. And you said at the warehouse …’ She let the sentence tail off.

‘Same thing,’ Tillman confirmed.

Kennedy leaned forward, her face right up close to Diema’s. Like a scolded schoolgirl, Diema kept her head bowed and her eyes down. ‘You can’t kill your own, can you?’ Kennedy said. ‘You put us through all this because you can’t do it yourself. There’s one commandment you can’t break. You’re not allowed to shed the blood of the blessed.’

They held the tableau for a few seconds longer.

‘Answer me!’ Kennedy yelled.

Diema looked up at last. ‘You’re right,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘There are two commandments that can’t be broken – for which the punishment is exile, for ever. And one of them is … what you said. We can’t do this without you. We can find Ber Lusim and we can help you to stop him, but …’

The silence lengthened.

‘But you need us to pull the trigger on him,’ Tillman said.

Diema drew herself up to her full height, which was a head shorter than his. She stared up at him, her arms at her sides, as unbending as the upright of a cross. ‘It should come naturally to you,’ she said. ‘You talk about how easily we kill. But we kill for survival. You’ve killed for much less important things, like money, for example.’

Tillman seemed taken aback by the barely contained fury in her tone. He opened his mouth to answer, but Diema hadn’t finished. ‘The only question,’ she snarled, ‘is whether you want to work with me and use what I know or cut me loose and go your own way. Either way, I’ve said what I came here to say. And even though you’re my enemies, I never treated you as enemies. I gave you more respect than you gave me.’

A single red tear ran down the girl’s cheek. She didn’t move to wipe it away.

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s not the only question. Before I decide whether I can work with you – whether I can even bear to be in the same room with you – I want an answer on something else.’

The girl looked at her in stolid silence.

‘What’s eating you, Heather?’ Tillman asked. Clearly, he could see from her face that it was something big.

‘We thought there were only two kinds of emissary,’ Kennedy said. ‘The soldiers and the mothers. But suppose there was a third kind? Not fighters, exactly, but fixers. People who make things happen. People with connections and resources, who plant themselves in the Adamite world and do with money what the
Elohim
do with knives. Protect the Judas People and serve their interests.’

‘Why,’ Diema asked quietly, ‘would you suppose that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. How about because the Validus Trust put Emil Gassan in place to deal with the theft of Toller’s book from Ryegate House. Then Gassan brought me in and I met you, and I went to Leo. None of that was chance, and none of it was destiny. It was planned. You just said as much, right now. Someone set us up like dominoes. Anticipated our every move and the money of the Validus Trust was the first domino. Everything else flowed from that.’

Diema didn’t confirm or deny the hypothesis, and nobody else spoke. They were all staring at the girl.

‘Tell me that didn’t happen, Diema,’ Kennedy said. ‘Tell me we weren’t recruited.’

‘They’re called
Nagodim
,’ Diema said at last. ‘And they work in exactly the way you just described.’

Kennedy shook her head slowly. The certain knowledge that she’d been manipulated filled her with mixed emotions of outrage and relief. Outrage, because she was being moved around like a playing piece in a complicated game. Relief, because she was being moved around by some ordinary man or woman, not by Nemesis or Fate or God.

All the same, two men had
died
because of these manipulations. Jesus, they’d probably been behind the fortuitous stroke that had taken out Emil Gassan’s predecessor. Sooner or later, there had to be a reckoning. Kennedy said that to the girl with her eyes.

Aloud, breaking the heavy silence, she said, ‘You haven’t earned my trust. Nothing like. I still think your people are a kind of creeping poison, but this has to be stopped. So I say we work together.’

‘I agree,’ Tillman said. ‘With the same reservations. We pool our resources until we’ve done what we’ve got to do. Beyond that, we don’t make any promises or any assumptions.’

‘Do I get a vote?’ Rush asked.