The cartoons were a barricade, sometimes successful and sometimes not, against the nightmares. She dreamed most nights about killing the boy (whose name, Ronald Stephen Pinkus, she could not make herself forget). Except that in her dreams, his death was a Sisyphean labour that always had to be begun again as soon as it was done. She woke with tears on her face and hated herself for them. They were the visible sign of some terrible inner flaw, that she had to isolate and eradicate. Ronald Stephen Pinkus had set some tiny part of her at war with the rest. But she was strong, and resilient, and she was confident she could defeat that rogue fragment. She would know she’d won when the dreams stopped coming.
And eventually, nightmares aside, she decided she was ready. She had read the briefing documents that Kuutma had given her — endlessly and obsessively, until she had them by heart — and she’d chosen her entry point.
The foremost sacrament of the Messengers was the taking of kelalit. Ber Lusim and his followers would not have forgone it, and though they could obtain weapons and supplies from anywhere they liked, the base ingredients of the lethal, indispensable pharmacon were very hard to source. Diema considered a number of merchants who Ber Lusim would know and picked one — one known for his discretion and who had been used by Kuutma-that-was in the days when Ber Lusim was still among the chosen.
That first choice bore no fruit, and nor did the second. But the magic of threes worked in her favour. At the third house, in Paris, she hadn’t been watching a week when she saw Ber Lusim’s messenger (a man known to her from Kuutma’s files) come to collect a purchase. Following him at a distance, she found the building site whose portakabin huts housed the Demon’s French residence.
She went in, cautiously and slowly. She took nothing for granted. She watched and tabulated and bided her time. She was a soldier, now, and her heart rejoiced in the task that had been set her.
Over several months, she built up a picture of Ber Lusim’s network.
It was much smaller than Kuutma’s network, of course: it had to be, since it consisted mainly of the members of his own cell who’d broken away from the People at the same time as him.
Diema learned about that schism by listening to their conversations. She had a US Army ScopeNet directional amplifier, jacked with layer after layer of intelligent noise filters. She could adjust the settings to correct for two or three intervening walls and windows, and for her own angle to each new speaker. She did most of her eavesdropping lying on her stomach on the roof of Ber Lusim’s various safe houses and waystations, eyes closed, shutting out the world, focusing herself down to the fluting, sussurating soundscape.
She got what she needed.
She mapped Ber Lusim’s command structure, which was massively decentralised. The troops at his disposal numbered far fewer than the numbers of the legitimate Elohim, though still more than she’d guessed. Shockingly, he’d been able to recruit other Messengers previously thought faithful. Evidently, Shekolni was far from alone in his dissatisfaction with the new Ginat’Dania.
She learned that Ber Lusim relied very heavily on two lieutenants — Elias Shud, who was as blunt and brutal and dangerous as a runaway train, and Hifela, the ‘Face of the Skull’, who was a great deal more dangerous again and almost as fast as Ber Lusim himself.
She learned about Toller’s book, which perhaps ought to have come as no surprise. Toller was known to the Elohim already, and his appeal to a mind like Ber Lusim’s was obvious.
But it wasn’t Lusim who was driving this. It was Shekolni, the disgraced elder (although Lusim and his people referred to Shekolni simply as ‘the prophet’). Lusim seemed to have been relegated to the lesser role of taskmaster, with his own consent, and the perverse but fierce loyalty of his own followers had been transferred to the other man. Shekolni’s word had come to them, when they needed it. They treated him with hungry reverence, and they obeyed his every word.
The astonishing thing was what he was telling them to do.
Diema went back to Kuutma and told him what she’d discovered. That the renegade Elohim were burning every copy of Toller’s book that existed in the world, except their own, and killing everyone outside their ranks who might have read it.
Kuutma didn’t even pretend to be surprised. ‘We’ve done similar things to protect our own scriptures,’ he reminded her.
‘To protect them, yes,’ Diema agreed. ‘This goes far beyond protection.’ Then she told him what it was that Shekolni was doing and what he hoped to achieve by it.
And Kuutma laughed. But it was a bitter, incredulous laugh. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘So many thousands, at one stroke. Millions, perhaps. He dares God to intervene, even while he pretends to bow to God’s word. It’s a game of chicken, played against heaven.’
‘A game of what?’ Diema asked. And Kuutma explained to her the rules of that game. How two men embark on a course of action that will destroy both of them — for example, driving cars towards one another, at a speed great enough for a fatal crash. And the loser is the one who swerves aside.
‘I don’t believe that God plays chicken,’ she said grimly.
‘Little sister,’ Kuutma said, ‘he most assuredly does. But he does not drive the car himself. He chooses proxies. At this point, let there be no misunderstanding, he has chosen you.’
‘You chose me, Tannanu.’
‘True, as far as it goes. But the circumstances that made you the right choice? That wasn’t my doing, nor yours. Providence moves through us, in its own direction, which is so much at odds with our directions that — good and evil alike — its passage can hurt us past saving. We can only hope to be whole, when His will has been done. We can’t ask to understand.’
He was looking at Diema closely and thoughtfully. ‘You’ve achieved great things, in a relatively short time.’
‘Thank you, Tannanu.’
‘But one thing that you’ve done does not make me happy, little sister. It fills me with alarm.’
Diema kept her face impassive, though her stomach clenched. ‘I’ve done nothing to compromise your plan, Tannanu,’ she said — a minimal defence, at best.
‘Of course you haven’t,’ he agreed. ‘But at certain points, in your travels, you’ve stepped aside from your task to look into a matter that has no relevance.’
Diema bowed her head, partly to hide her face so he couldn’t read her guilt in it, and partly out of genuine shame.
‘It won’t happen again,’ she said tightly.
‘Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ Kuutma said, placing audible gaps between the three words of the name. ‘The boy you killed. You’ve been investigating his family. His parents, and his surviving sister. Why would you do such a thing?’
Diema forced herself to meet Kuutma’s gaze. ‘Out of an idle interest, only,’ she said. ‘Nothing more. Our teachers taught us to be curious about how systems work, in the Adamite world. The boy’s family is a system. My action changed it. I wanted to see how it had reacted to that change.’
‘No more than that?’
‘No more than that, Tannanu.’
Kuutma nodded. ‘You named yourself the sycamore seed,’ he reminded her. ‘Study it. Lightness is the virtue that will serve you best. To float through their lives, without touching or being touched. I say this not to chide you, but to help you.’
‘What do I do now?’ Diema asked, desperate to change the subject.
‘Bring your team together,’ Kuutma said briskly. ‘All of them, in the prescribed pattern and order, as we discussed.’
And she did. She let Providence do its work.
She let the hammer meet the nail.