“Congratulations on the new job, Sadaqat.” Arkady’s sincerity is flawless. “ ‘Soul-harvester.’ Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Sadaqat sneers: “Fancy your servile little Pakistani butler spotting your subtle Arkadian irony.”
Ōshima asks, “What’s your hipster new name going to be, Sadaqat? Major Integrity? Mr. Snitchfink? Judas McJanus?”
“Here’s what my name is not—Mr. Don’t-Worry-About-Sadaqat-He’s-Happy-to-Have-the-Privilege-of-Blowing-Himself-Up-on-the-Stairs-to-Save-Our-Pious-Atemporal-Asses.”
“Sadaqat’s played his part,” I tell Pfenninger. “Let him go.”
Pfenninger flicks his bow tie. “Don’t pretend to know my mind, Marinus. You’d not knowingly nurture a spy.”
“Fine, I had no idea. He followed your orders. Spied on us. Threw away his ten kilos of Blu Tack. Let him go.”
Sadaqat snarls in a way he hasn’t done since I first treated him at Dawkins Hospital in Berkshire, England: “It wasn’t Blu Tack! It was N9D. Hyperexplosives, which you as good as strapped to my chest!”
“Actually, Marinus, he’s half right,” Arkady tells me. “The Blu Tack people make it, but technically its brand-name is White Tack.”
Sadaqat stands on the bench. “Liar! You dragged me along as your human land mine!”
“Three times I tried to persuade you not to join the Second Mission, Sadaqat,” I remind him.
“You could’ve suasioned me, if you cared so much. And Mr. Pfenninger isn’t going to ‘let me go’! I’m the Twelfth Anchorite.”
“Forgive me for raising the specter of race,” Arkady says, “but look at Anchorites One through Eleven. Any ethnic commonalities jump out at you?”
Sadaqat is immune to doubt. “I’ve been recruited to improve the — the — the balance of the Anchorites.”
Arkady’s snorting laugh turns into a cough. “Sorry, a bit of saliva went down the wrong way. And why did the All Whites choose you?”
“My psychovoltage is off the scale, is why!”
“You poor sap.” Ōshima yawns. “I’ve eaten trays of dim sum with more psychosoteric potential than you.”
“I’m curious, Marinus,” says Immaculée Constantin. “Your pet schizophrenic just sold you down the river. Will nothing make you despise a person?”
“Homicide and animacide work just fine. But I blame you for bending Sadaqat’s fear of dying into treachery. I’m sorry, Sadaqat. It’s the War. I had to let them believe you were their ace in the hole. Thank you for the garden, at least. This won’t change that.”
“I am the Twelfth Anchorite. Tell them, Miss Constantin, what you told me. About my potential as a follower of the Shaded Way.”
“You have the potential to whinge people to death, Sadaqat.” When Constantin’s tone turns maternal I know time’s running out. “No. Psychosoterically speaking, you fire blanks. Worse, you’re a traitor. A talentless, chakraless, brown traitor.”
Sadaqat looks round at the tall white Anchorites disbelievingly. I can barely look at his changed expression, but I owe him this. Then, mercifully, he turns his back to us to take a few shaky steps towards the Umber Arch. Two of the rearguard block his way. Sadaqat flees for the exit but Pfenninger psycholassos him, reeling him in with mighty pulls, then kinetics him twenty feet high. I can’t intervene. The Second Mission depends on us preserving every volt for the coming duel. Constantin hand-symbols an Act of Violence, and Sadaqat’s head is twisted through 360 degrees. “There,” purrs Constantin. “We’re not such sadists, are we? Nice and quick. Chickens suffer more when you wring their necks, don’t they, Holly?”
Sadaqat’s broken body drops onto the ground, and a lesser Anchorite kinetics it through the east window, like a trash bag of household waste. His soul, at least, will find its way to the Last Sea, unlike those of other “guests,” who are brought here to be psychodecanted.
They’re about to attack, Unalaq subwarns me.
Feeling like a conductor raising his baton for the Orchestra of All Hell Breaks Loose, I say, “Now.”
UNALAQ INVOKES A shield from wall to wall, closing off the northern quarter of the Chapel. Even at thirty paces, its force shoves Pfenninger, Constantin, Hugo Lamb, and D’Arnoq back a few feet. The shield is rooted in Unalaq’s raised palms, and shimmers, a blue lens of Deep Stream force. Pfenninger and Constantin look on from the outer edge of the shield with condescension. Why? Elijah D’Arnoq makes a megaphone of his hands and shouts at us. His words take a few seconds to penetrate Unalaq’s shield, and arrive fragmented but discernible: “It’s behind you!”
I look behind us. Sickeningly, the charred icon of the Blind Cathar is restoring itself. The monk’s skin is emerging, and the gold halo is starting to shine. Worse, the black dot of the chakra-eye’s returning. Once it’s fully dilated, the Cathar will be able to decant us one by one.
Pfenninger taunts us: “See who you’ve locked yourself in with!”
“This one’s mine,” Ōshima calls out. “Marinus, Arkady, keep the shield up. Goodbye Esther.” Esther’s soul egresses from Ōshima, transversing to one side, pulsing with her evocation of the Last Act. Then the grizzled warrior turns, grips the edges of the icon, and holds his head one foot away from the Blind Cathar’s. He shuts his physical eyes and pours Deep Stream voltage from his own glowing chakra straight at the black pupil on the icon’s forehead. Ōshima cannot win against this incorporeal generator of the Shaded Way, but he might win us a precious extra minute.
Pfenninger sees the stowaway soul, however, and barks an order. The Anchorites advance towards our shield, two rows of five on either side of the table, hands symboling furiously. Constantin’s voice reaches me: “Smash that shield and kill the stowaway first!” Arkady, Unalaq, Holly, and I are knocked back by a barrage of jagged emberfire, laser-whiplash, and sonic bullets. I feel Unalaq’s nervous system scream with every impact. Arkady and I fire back, our Deep Stream projectiles passing from our palm-chakras through Unalaq’s shield. Those that hit their targets will hiatus, sedate, or redact an Anchorite out of the battle, but Shaded Way psychoincendiaries will fry our flesh. The Anchorites have flamethrowers, while we have tranq darts and a riot shield, a riot shield beginning to crack. Through the oscillating blaze I see that Arkady and I have scored a couple of lucky strikes. Cammerer, the Eighth Anchorite, crumples and Osterby, the Sixth, is hiatused off-balance and topples over like a side of pork, but now Du Nord enacts a Shaded Way shield to prevent further losses.
We’re still outnumbered nine to three, penned in with a malign demigod whom Ōshima surely cannot occupy for much longer. Holly crouches by the wall. I don’t have time to guess what she’s thinking. Unalaq shudders as the enemy’s red shield slams into hers with the force of a freight train and the shriek of an angle-grinder. The Deep Stream blue turns a leprous purple at the point of contact, and Unalaq is shoved back a pace, and another, another, another, reducing our little triangle of territory to a few square meters. I don’t have time to check that Holly has shuffled back with us to stay on Horology’s side of the shield, because two more Anchorites now raise their palm-chakras and, through a rattle of psychobullets, I hear Constantin’s cry: “Crush them like ants!”
Arkady now pours his voltage into Unalaq’s shield, which bolsters it temporarily, but the Anchorites’ cascade of fire doubles, trebles, quadruples in intensity. The psychoduel becomes too magnesium-bright to look at, so it is through my chakra-eye that I see the long table rise ten feet into the air, hang there for a second like a bird of prey, then hurtle straight at Arkady and Unalaq. On reflex, I handsign the fastest countermand of my life, and stop it a fist’s width from Arkady’s clenched face, the two ends of the table on either side of the jammed-together shields. Now begins not a tug-of-war but a push-of-war, in which Pfenninger tries to bludgeon Unalaq or Arkady and so knock out the shield, while I try to stop him. We wrestle for control of the table for a long, slippery moment, but fresh Anchorites join Pfenninger, and suddenly I’m overpowered and the table smashes into the head of Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. Luckily, the table has fallen on our side of the shield so it can no longer be used as a weapon, but my body’s skull is half staved in so I egress before my brain shuts down. Cause of death: flying table. That’s a first and, after I die-die in the Dusk, a last.