Diema ignored the sarcastic inflection: the boy’s jibe was as good a set-up line as anything she could have scripted.
‘The Adamite mind,’ she said to the Elohim, smiling, inviting them to smile at Rush’s idiocy. ‘You see how little they can grasp, even when we put the answers in their hands? This is why we don’t have to be afraid of what they know. In the end, what they know always adds up to nothing.’
‘I know this much—’ Rush blurted, but Kennedy’s hard grip on his arm stopped him right there.
‘No hunting licence,’ Diema said, opening one of the boxes and reaching into it. ‘The rules — the rules that actually mean something — don’t change. But when a new situation arises, we apply the rules in different ways.’
She showed them the dart-rifle — the bigger, meaner brother of Kennedy’s Dan-inject — and how it worked. She told them that it would topple Ber Lusim’s Elohim without any risk of killing them. She omitted to mention the fact that the bullets that had slain Hifela had been fired by her, rather than Leo Tillman, that she’d already breached that final taboo.
Once they learned that, her life would be over.
59
Ber Lusim was grieving, alone in his room — a monastic cell carved into solid granite, without a window and with only a natural fissure in the rock for a door.
His Elohim absented themselves from his grief, recognising that it was not their property; not part of their leader’s public self at all, but an outpouring from his innermost soul.
Avra Shekolni showed less compunction. He came to the door of the cell and sat down there, with his back to the wall, tapping at the rock with his silver-ringed hand in a simple, repetitive rhythm.
After some little while, Ber Lusim came out to him.
‘Avra,’ he said, ‘I’m poor company right now. Please, take your music and your consolations somewhere else, for a while, and I’ll come to you when I can.’
Shekolni looked up at him from under lowered brows, stern and humourless. ‘Have I offered you consolation, Ber Lusim?’ he asked.
‘Blessed one, you have not. I assumed you came here—’
‘Because you’ve lost your friend and you find the loss hard to bear,’ Shekolni said. ‘Yes, of course. But it doesn’t follow, Ber Lusim, that I came to tell you how to bear that loss.’
Ber Lusim was puzzled and unnerved by this speech, and by the tone in which it was delivered. He didn’t know from which direction to approach it. ‘Hifela was not my friend,’ he said at last. ‘He was my servant, and the first among my Elohim. I relied on him in everything.’
‘He was your friend,’ Shekolni snapped. ‘Ber Lusim, God is not a lawyer or a politician. He knows the love you felt for Hifela, and he knows that his loss weakens you as a man, not just as a leader of men.’
The prophet’s voice rose, and he rose up with it, climbing to his feet to face Ber Lusim, with one hand raised as though he were preaching in a pulpit.
‘But to mourn him? To mourn him now? Are you mad, Ber Lusim? Has this loss turned your brain?’ He clamped his hands on Ber Lusim’s shoulders, stared with wide eyes into his.
Ber Lusim drew a deep breath. ‘Avra, I know my duty. Nothing that has happened today will stop me from completing—’
‘No! You misunderstand me!’ In his exasperation, Shekolni shook the Elohim Summoner as a mother shakes a child. ‘Think about what we’re doing, my dear friend, and what will come of it when we’re done. In ordinary times, to cry for a dead friend, a dead wife or husband, these things make sense. Even for someone who believes in the reality of heaven — you weep for the separation, and for how far away heaven is.’
The prophet’s eyes burned and Ber Lusim felt something within him take fire from that fire. ‘But now,’ Shekolni growled, ‘heaven is imminent. Heaven hangs just above our heads, like fruit on the lowest branch of a great tree. Do you cry, because Hifela has walked before you into the next room? Then how absurd your tears become! Hold faith now or Hifela will laugh you to shame when you meet next.’
Such was the force of the words that Ber Lusim saw, as though in life, the face he knew so well staring at him from the heights or depth of some interior space. He nodded, blinking to clear his dazzled eyes.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right, Avra. You’re right. What must I do?’
‘I’ve already told you what to do,’ Shekolni said more gently — more like a man to another man, and less like the voice of God or Fate. ‘Enact the last prophecy and take your reward. The reward of God’s most faithful servant.’
The words struck home. It was — almost — all that Ber Lusim had ever wanted.
Rapid footsteps on stone made both men turn. The man who ran into view, full of urgency that bordered on panic, was Lemoi, the youngest of those who’d been foresworn with Ber Lusim and followed him into exile. He stumbled to a halt in front of them, made the sign of the noose to the prophet, but addressed his words to Ber Lusim.
‘Commander, the scouts in the lower levels … The alarm has been raised. There’s a breach!’
‘What kind of a breach?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Speak clearly, Lemoi. Is it Adamites? You’re saying the city authorities have found us?’
‘Not Adamites,’ Lemoi blurted. ‘Elohim. It’s an army! They’ve brought an army against us!’
60
Diema’s Messengers, with Kennedy and Rush in tow, entered the Gellert caves through a doorway built into the back of a house.
Rush was in the rear as they descended the stairs into the house’s sub-basements. Not all the way to the back, obviously. There were armed Messengers behind him, their guns casually at the ready, and more on either side of him, subtly conveying the suggestion that he was fine so long as he didn’t stop, slow down, take a wrong turning, or look too much like an Adamite.
The house had stayed in Elohim hands ever since the city’s medieval heyday, so nothing had been changed. In the lowest cellar there was a hand printing press, which looked like a rack waiting for a customer, and on the wall beside it a massive wooden compositor’s frame, with hundreds of pigeonholes for movable lead type.
Diema’s Messengers slid the frame aside, with some effort because the iron tracks on which it had been mounted had rusted almost solid in the damp air. As the pale men and women put their drug-boosted backs into it, there was a sound like the bellowing of bulls — and gradually, an inch at a time, the frame was moved aside and the dark tunnel beyond opened itself to their eyes.
Each of Diema’s Messengers wore an AN/PVS autogated night-vision rig that turned midnight into cloudless noon. And each of them had been equipped with the new guns, in both rifle and handgun configurations.
Rush had been given a flashlight and an apple.
On the whole, he was kind of touched by the apple. Unlike the paint-bomb, it was an insult that Diema had put some thought into. She would have had to go out somewhere and buy it, or at the very least pick it up off a plate in passing and save it for him. It did something to help his bruised ego recuperate after the briefing session.
‘So the flashlight’s for finding my way in the dark, obviously,’ he said to her now, as the Elohim opened the gate. ‘And the apple’s for if I get hungry. So what do I use for a weapon?’
The girl fixed her dark, intransitive gaze on him. ‘The apple,’ she said, ‘is to remind you that you don’t have a weapon. Which in turn is to remind you that you’re not here to fight. If you find yourself about to get into a fight, look at the apple and it will jog your memory.’