Now for Cale the after-battle surge, the beating heart and rush of blood. The courtyard before him seemed to move, now closer now farther away: the dying look of horror on a Redeemer’s face, a Materazzi guard holding his stomach trying to keep his guts from falling on the floor; the almost whispered “Yes! Yes!” of another celebrating the fact of life, of winning, that he had come through without disgrace, and the young face of a Redeemer, his skin as pale as holy wax and knowing he was about to die as a Materazzi came to stand over him. And still for Cale the sense of something utterly wrong. He tried to call out for the Materazzi guard to stop the blow of grace, but all that emerged was an exhausted squeak that could not prevent the hideous cry and the foot shivering in the dirt.
“Are you all right, son?” said a guard. Cale gasped and breathed in deeply.
“Tell them to stop.” He pointed at the Materazzi going among the wounded and finishing them off. “I need to talk to them. Now!” The guard shouted and moved off to do as he was told. Cale sat on the low wall and stared at a moth settling on the edge of a black puddle of blood, testing it carefully and, finding it satisfactory, beginning to feed.
“What’s your problem?” said Kleist as he swaggered up to Cale. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“Something’s wrong.”
“You forgot to say thank you.”
Cale stared at him. “Go and see if there are any survivors.”
Kleist was about to ask him what his last slave died of, but there was something odder than usual about Cale and he thought better of it.
Vague Henri had already started checking the bodies, counting the bolts and hoping to God that his victims were dead. He noticed that Kleist was doing the same, although the Materazzi had quickly finished off anyone who was still moving.
“Cale! Come and see,” shouted Kleist as he turned over a body with one of his arrows in its back. Vague Henri watched as Cale approached but hung back, uneasy. “Look,” said Kleist. “It’s Westaby.” Cale stared at the dead face of an eighteen-year-old he had seen every day at the Sanctuary for as long as he could remember. “Here’s one of the Gaddis twins,” said Vague Henri. There was a short silence as he pulled a body next to it onto its front. “And his brother.” From the far end of the courtyard, near the manhole cover, there was a burst of shouting and four Materazzi started kicking and punching a Redeemer who’d been lying low. The three boys rushed over and started pulling them off, but the Materazzi kept trying to shove them aside until Cale pulled his sword and threatened them with vile dismemberments if they didn’t back off. Kleist and Vague Henri dragged the Redeemer away as the Materazzi looked on in a bad temper. The evil mood was broken by another Materazzi guard who walked up to the four holding a sword bent into an L-shape. “Would you look at this?” he kept saying. “Would you look at this?” Slowly Cale backed away and went over to Kleist and Henri, still keeping his eye on the four Materazzi.
Cale, Kleist and Vague Henri stood over the Redeemer lying unconscious with his back against the palazzo wall, his face swollen, lips fat, teeth missing.
“He looks familiar,” said Vague Henri.
“Yes,” said Cale. “It’s Tillmans, Navratil’s acolyte.”
“Redeemer Bumfeel?” said Kleist, looking down at the unconscious young man more closely. “Yeah, you’re right. It is Tillmans.” Kleist snapped his fingers in Tillmans’s face twice.
“Tillmans! Wake up!” He shook him by the shoulders and then Tillmans groaned. Slowly his eyes opened, but they were unfocused.
“They burned him.”
“They burned who?”
“Redeemer Navratil. They roasted him over a griddle for touching boys.”
“Sorry about that. He was decent enough, all said and done,” said Cale.
“As long as you kept your back to the wall,” said Kleist. “He gave me a pork chop once,” he added, a memorial as close to a eulogy as Kleist was ever likely to give a Redeemer.
“I couldn’t bear the screaming,” said Tillmans. “It took nearly an hour to finish him. Then they told me they’d do the same to me if I didn’t volunteer to come here.”
“Who was watching you on the way?”
“Redeemer Stape Roy and his cohort. They told us when we got to this place, there’d be God’s spies to fight with us, and if we did well, we’d get a fresh start. Don’t kill me, Boss!”
“We’re not going to hurt you. Just tell us what you know.”
“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”
“Who were the others?”
“I don’t know-just like me, not soldiers. I want…”
Tillmans’s eyes started to move oddly, one losing focus, the other looking over Cale’s shoulder as if he could see something in the distance. Again Kleist snapped his fingers, but this time there was no response, except that Tillmans’s gaze became more unfocused and his breathing more erratic. Then for a moment he seemed to come to-“What’s that?” Then his head fell to one side.
“He’s not going to last the night,” said Vague Henri. “Poor old Tillmans.”
“Yeah,” said Kleist. “And poor old Redeemer Bumfeel. What a way to go.”
He had been told to report at three to the chancellor’s office and keep his mouth shut. When he was finally shown in, Vipond barely looked at him.
“I have to admit that I had my doubts when you predicted the Redeemers would try an attack on Arbell in Memphis. I wondered if perhaps you weren’t making it up in order to give yourself and your friends something to do. My apologies.”
Cale was not used to anyone in authority admitting they were wrong-especially when they were right-and so he just looked shifty. Vipond handed Cale a printed leaflet-on it was a coarsely drawn picture of a woman with her breasts exposed and above this the headline: THE WHORE OF MEMPHIS. The leaflet went on to describe Arbell as a notorious defiler and shaved-headed whore who prostituted herself and all innocents in mass orgies of devil worship and sacrifice. She is a sin, declared the leaflet finally, crying out to heaven for vengeance!
There were hammers working in Cale’s brain trying to figure all this out.
“The attackers outside the walls left these pamphlets all along their trail of attack,” said Vipond. “There’ll be no keeping a lid on it this time. Arbell Materazzi is widely considered to be whiter than snow.”
While this was clearly no longer entirely true, the grotesque lies of the pamphlet were as deeply puzzling to Cale as to Vipond.