The inspiration hit him when it was almost too late to be of any use. He still had a second or two before the assassin turned the corner and saw him again. He staggered right up to the nearest stall, which was selling sweet and savoury strudels, held the grenade above his head and pulled the pin. ‘Debreceniiii!’ he yelled, his voice ragged. ‘Debreceni are a load of bollocks. Polecsik is a wanker. Liverpool shagged you up the arse!’
The grenade kicked in his hand and the world went green.
The gunfire was coming from at least three directions and Diema could only think of one way to respond. She couldn’t return fire: she couldn’t even see where the shots were coming from, and if she fired at random she might kill one of her own race — the sin that would bar her from ever going home.
So she kept on dropping and sliding down through the branches of the tree, hiding herself from one shooter or another, trying to find a space that would offer her cover from all quarters. As a strategy, it was only a little bit better than praying.
As soon as that thought crossed her mind, she realised that she had at least one more option.
Diema began to sing. She knew a hundred blessings, and most could be sung as well as spoken. She started with the funeral hymn, which for obvious reasons was uppermost in her mind. Forgetting cadence and harmony, she shouted it at the top of her voice, hoping that it would carry to where Ber Lusim’s Elohim were.
The gunfire slackened and then stopped.
Yes, Diema thought. Home-town girl. Now you know.
Somewhere close by, a shrill, rising voice screamed out an order in bastard Aramaic. ‘Y’tuh gemae le! Net ya neiu!’ The order was utter blasphemy: never mind who she is, complete your mission. For a moment, and then another, nothing happened. But the speaker had pronounced Diema’s death sentence.
The branch she was squatting on was barely able to support her weight — but the one above it, to which she was clinging with her hands, was longer and thicker. As the shooting began again, she hauled herself up onto it, found her balance and began to run.
She was still maybe ten feet above the ground — clearly visible from below now as she broke out of the tree’s thickest canopy into semi-open air. But these trees were old: centuries ago, they’d linked arms in solidarity against the city’s incursions, tying their extremities into a lovers’ knot.
At the end of the branch, Diema jumped. She wasn’t aiming for any particular part of the neighbouring tree, just using its foliage to soften the impact and then its branches to allow her to complete her controlled fall to the ground.
She landed on her feet, which was a welcome miracle. There was a man directly in front of her, already turning — a rifle in his hands. Diema shot him in both legs, and then as he toppled towards her she swung the handgun up to meet him, driving the butt into the side of his head. He was unconscious when he hit the ground.
She took the man’s rifle and retreated up the hill, darting quick glances into the trees around her. There was movement there, and another shout: ‘Be hin et adom!’ Yes, Diema thought. She’s on the ground. Maybe you’ll be a bit less free and easy with the rifle fire when you might hit one of your own.
Meanwhile, her own rifle fire would sound like theirs and make it harder for them to track her. It also lent itself very well to her new tactics. She cut another man off at the knees with a short, sweeping burst, and left him screaming — then she waited until one of his comrades came to check the damage, and shot him too. She was happy to keep this up until Ber Lusim didn’t have a single Messenger left who could walk.
She kept on moving, always upwards — which she hoped would draw the Elohim along with her, away from the others. The plan was moot now, but they still needed a living Messenger to question. Kennedy had the Dan-inject, so she had the best chance of landing that fish.
Of course, the slopes of Gellert Hill were now full of Elohim who were in no fit state to walk away, but their comrades would collect them as soon as they’d dealt with Diema, and for all her efforts that couldn’t take long now.
Even as she was thinking that, she heard a soft, thudding impact on the ground close by. Looking down, she saw a grenade rolling to a halt against her foot. She kicked it away down the hill and threw herself flat on her stomach.
Or started to.
She was still in mid-air when the shockwave took her.
Kennedy had encountered the Elohim before and survived the experience — mostly by means of luck or outside help, and once (in Santa Claus, Arizona) by the time-honoured device of bringing a gun to a knife fight. She knew enough to be certain that if she let this man get in close to her, she was probably finished.
As he advanced, she took the Dan-inject out of her bag. Then she threw away the bag, dropped her free hand to her side like a duellist in a Victorian novel, and took aim with the flimsy, almost weightless device — one-handed and with her arm straight out in front of her, a stance she’d never have used with an actual gun. But this wasn’t a gun, it was a modified version of the dart-launchers that zookeepers use to sedate dangerous animals. Instead of bullets, it fired flechette darts with a payload of three millilitres of fentanyl. Recoil would be minimal, too small even to feel.
The assassin was on Kennedy in three strides. In that time, she fired off both of the pre-loaded darts, aiming for his chest. But the darts were slower than bullets, as well as lighter. The Messenger, whose addiction to the drug kelalit profoundly altered his perceptions of the world, walked around them, tilting his body first to the left and then to the right.
Which kept his mind occupied while Kennedy brought up the jabstick and stabbed him in the shoulder.
The jabstick was manufactured by the same company that made the dart gun. It was gas-and-spring loaded, modifiable to release the sedative payload either automatically or on depressing a trigger. The one Kennedy was carrying — illegally customised and cut down from its original two-metre length to just under five inches — was set to automatic. And because it was a weapon of last resort, it carried five millilitres of fentanyl instead of three. The assassin’s eyes registered a momentary shock as the drug hit his system.
But he didn’t break stride. He swatted the jabstick out of Kennedy’s hand and at the same time punched her hard in the stomach.
She didn’t see the punch coming, so she had no chance of leaning into it and lessening the impact. She doubled up, the breath leaving her in a huffing bark of agony. The follow-up blow to the back of her head made her crash down onto her knees, her sight strobing black and white.
Fentanyl was a relatively recent addition to the line-up of commercially available sedatives, a synthetic ethyl compound discovered in the 1960s and at first used almost exclusively for emergency pain relief. Its spectacularly quick action made it perfect for use by paramedics on burn and trauma victims, and that instant knock-out effect was one reason why Diema had chosen it. The other was a chemical oddity that the drug’s inventor had noted enthusiastically at the time: even long-term drug addicts whose habit had made them too tolerant of opioids to be treated with morphine would respond to fentanyl.
But long-term users of kelalit seemed to be able to shrug it off with impunity. The Messenger was on top of Kennedy now, rolling her onto her stomach and twisting her arms behind her. He was much stronger than her and trained in immobilising techniques. He held both of her hands in one of his, and his grip didn’t even seem particularly tight, but she couldn’t move an inch without searing agony shooting up her arms.