Diema dropped her hands to her sides and waited. She recognised Hifela’s voice, of course: recognised it twice over, from the tapes she’d studied in Ginat’Dania and from the shouted command she’d heard when she sang her blessing from the top of the fig tree that she should be killed, no matter who she was or where she came from.
So she knew what was about to happen, apart from the precise details. The gun was pressed into the hollow at the base of her skull, perfectly positioned for an execution shot.
‘I have a question,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ Hifela told her, his voice relaxed, almost casual. ‘Two questions, in fact. How did you find us and who else knows? Obviously we’ll ask the rhaka the same things, at greater length and with more emphatic punctuation. But since we have this moment, little sister, answer me truly. Are the four of you alone here or will I have to kill again tomorrow?’
‘We’re alone.’
Hifela made a half-swallowed sound like a snort or a chuckle. ‘Fascinating. Perhaps we should have let you come, then, and visit us at home. It might have been cheaper, in terms of lives lost.’
Diema stiffened. ‘I killed no one,’ she blurted.
‘Not you. But your burly friend killed at least one of the men I sent against him and maimed another. And the grenade that failed to kill you took down one of ours. So. Now I’ve got half an answer. The other half, please. How did you find us?’
‘The frontispiece of Toller’s book. It showed this hill. We guessed the rest.’
‘A prodigious guess. But yes, I see. There is a trail of logic there and we should not have placed ourselves so squarely at the end of it. Elegantly done, sister. Your question, now, before I fertilise this soil with your bone and blood and brains.’
‘You’d do that?’ It sounded weak, childish even, like a plea for mercy. But it wasn’t, it was a plea for the world to make sense and be as it was meant to be. But then, perhaps only a child would expect that.
‘Didn’t this soldier do as much, when he killed himself?’ Hifela asked her. ‘Didn’t his life, his death, weigh as much as yours?’ Diema saw the flaw in that reasoning, but with her mind in turmoil, she couldn’t articulate it. Hifela didn’t seem to need an answer. ‘In growing older,’ he said, as though he’d read her mind, ‘I’ve become impatient of excess baggage. The sacred, the solemn, the binding, these things are terrible weights. I travel lighter now. So yes, I’ll kill you without a thought. I’m a killer, after all. Why set limits to such a clean and simple thing? And now, this is your last chance to ask your question.’
‘I withdraw my question,’ she murmured.
‘Really?’ For the first time there was something like interest in the man’s voice. ‘Then tell me, little girl, just for the sake of curiosity, what would it have been?’
‘It would have been this. Why did you follow him? Why did you go with Ber Lusim when he spat on his duty and forsook his people? Did you really think his conscience outweighed the whole of Ginat’Dania? But I think you already answered me. If nothing is sacred, what would stop you from doing those things?’
‘Ah, but I didn’t say that nothing was sacred.’ Hifela tapped her lightly on the nape of the neck with the barrel of the gun, as if he was a teacher rebuking a thoughtless child. ‘Did I?’
She turned her head, very slowly. She knew this might provoke him to shoot her, but since he was going to shoot her anyway she didn’t feel as though she had very much to lose — and she wanted, perhaps because of that contemptuous tone, that contemptuous tap, to stare him down as she died. ‘Then that can be my question,’ she said, trying to find the same tone, trying to spit at least a little of his contempt back in his face.
He tilted his head a little to one side, but the gun — now pointing at her throat — didn’t waver by so much as a millimetre. He frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘What’s sacred to you, Hifela?’
‘Ah.’ He smiled — a sad, bleak smile, a little twisted at the corner. ‘I thought that was obvious. He is, of course.’
The moment lengthened. Diema closed her mouth, which had fallen open. Hifela laughed out loud — and though when he smiled he was mocking himself, now he was mocking her. ‘Oh, child, if you’d lived longer, you’d have had a lot to learn. But perhaps God lets us die when he thinks we’ve reached the end of our learning. When our minds close, and all we can do is live, the way animals and vegetables do. Shut your eyes.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘If you close your eyes, it will be easier.’
‘Then you close yours,’ Leo Tillman suggested.
The boom of a single gunshot, from very close, deafened Diema all over again.
56
If Tillman had been shooting with his right hand — if his right hand had still been functioning — he would have tried for the kill shot, even though Diema and the cadaverous killer were so close together that they were practically touching.
He’d approached the two of them from down the slope, from the direction of the hotel. He had the GPS signal to go on — Diema had kept the pellet in her pocket when she gave him the tracker — but even without that, the shredded foliage, bullet-torn bark and spilled blood made a trail that an idiot could have followed. Twice he’d encountered seriously wounded Messengers, crippled by leg shots but still in the fight, and twice he’d had to exchange fire with them, leaving them dead behind him.
Once he was close enough, he tracked Diema by the sound of her voice, and the other voice that was speaking to her. Tillman had learned stealth in the jungles of three continents, and besides, Diema and the pale man were thoroughly engrossed in their conversation. They didn’t hear his approach.
But he was carrying — in his left hand — a gun he’d never fired. Only a lunatic would have relied on a weapon like that when friend and foe were standing cheek by jowl. So he got in as close as he could without alerting the skull-faced man to his presence, fired into the air and threw himself forward in a headlong charge.
The gunshot did what it was meant to do. It told the assassin there was a clear and present danger, shifting his attention from the girl to Tillman.
But there were still ten feet of ground to cover. Enhanced by kelalit, Hifela brought his gun around and fired before Tillman had travelled half that distance.
Enhanced by kelalit, Diema slammed the heel of her hand into the assassin’s wrist, pushing the gun even further in the direction in which it was already moving. The shot went wide.
Then Tillman hit Hifela like a tank.
But in the split-second before that impact, Hifela had assessed the changed situation and, it seemed, made a decision. He had two enemies now, instead of one. Order of preference had become an issue.
He dipped and pivoted, and though Diema saw the kick coming she couldn’t do much more than roll with it. The heel of Hifela’s foot struck her in the side of the head, slamming her backward and down the slope in an uncontrolled sprawl.
There was a price to pay. Hifela was off-balance when Tillman hit him and had to take the big man’s attack head-on. Tillman’s left hand swept down, clubbing the gun loose from Hifela’s grip and he followed up with a scything blow to Hifela’s stomach. The Messenger simply endured it, noticing that his opponent’s fist had slowed in the instant before impact, suggesting some sort of injury to his right arm. With Tillman now well within his reach, he hit back hard and fast.