I thought of the Advocates I knew, and the one in particular I had never liked. “Was Fescue among them?”
“Yes,” Burdock said. “He was one of them. No love lost there, I see.”
“Fescue is a senior Advocate,” Purslane said. “He’s tried to keep Campion and I apart. It could easily be that he knows we’re onto something. If anyone has the means…”
“There are others besides Fescue. I needed to know who it was. That was why I started asking questions, nosing around, trying to goad someone into an indiscretion.”
“We noticed,” I said.
“Obviously my idea of subtle wasn’t their idea of subtle. Well, it proves I was onto something, I suppose. At least one of our line has to be involved.”
I tapped a finger against my nose. “Why didn’t they just kill you on the island, and be done with it?”
“It was your island, Campion. How would they have killed me without you noticing it? Administering a poisonous agent was simpler—at least that way they didn’t have a body to dispose of.”
“Do you know about the impostor?” I asked.
“My ship kept a watch on the island. More than once I saw myself strolling on the high promenades.”
“You could have signalled us,” Purslane said. “Made your ship malfunction, or something like that.”
“No. I thought of that, of course. But if my enemies had the slightest suspicion I was still alive, they might have attacked the ship. Remember: they poisoned me not because I knew what had happened, but simply because I was asking too many questions. It’s entirely possible that they’ve done this to other line members in the past. There might be other impostors on your island, Campion.”
“I’d know,” I said automatically.
“Would you? Would you really?”
When he put it like that, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t in the habit of looking inside the skulls of other line members, just to make sure they were really who I assumed them to be. Mental architecture was a private thing at the best of times. And a strand was a strand, whether it was delivered by a thinking person or a mindless duplicate.
“You could have sent a message to one of us,” Purslane said.
“How would I have known you were to be trusted? From where I was sitting, hardly anyone wasn’t a possible suspect.”
“Do you trust us now?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” Burdock said, with not quite the conviction I might have hoped for. “Does it look like I have a great deal of choice?”
“We’re not implicated,” Purslane said soothingly. “But we are concerned to expose the truth.”
“It’s dangerous. Everything I said still holds. They’ll take this world apart to safeguard the Great Work. Unless you can organise a significant number of allies and move against them quickly… I fear they’ll gain the upper hand.”
“Then we’ll just have to outplay them, so that they never get a chance.” Easier said than done, I thought. We had no more idea who we could trust than Burdock himself.
“Whatever we do,” Purslane said, “it’ll have to happen before Thousandth Night. If there’s any evidence pointing to a crime now, it’ll be lost forever by the time we return here.”
“She’s right,” I said. “If Gentian Line is implicated, then whoever’s involved is on the island now. That gives us something. We’ve at least got them in one place.”
“Thousandth Night would be a good time to move,” Purslane mused. “If we leave it until then—the last possible moment—they’ll probably have assumed nothing’s going to happen.”
“Risky,” I said.
“It’s all risky. At least that way we stand a chance of catching them off guard. There’s only one thing anyone ever thinks about on Thousandth Night.”
“Purslane may have a point,” Burdock said. “Whoever the perpetrators are, they’re still part of the line. They’ll be waiting to see who wins best strand, just like the rest of you.”
I noticed that he said “you” rather than “us.” On his deathbed, Burdock had already begun the process of abdication from Gentian affairs. Knowing he would not see Thousandth Night, let alone another reunion, he was turning away from the line.
Abigail valued death as much as she valued life. Though we were all technically immortal, that immortality only extended to our cellular processes. If we destroyed our bodies, we died. Gentian protocol forbade backups, or last-minute neural scans. She wanted her memories to burn bright with the knowledge that life—even a life spanning hundreds of thousands of years—was only a sliver of light between two immensities of darkness.
Burdock would die. Nothing in the universe could stop that now.
“When you witnessed the crime,” I said, “did you see anything that could tell us who was responsible?”
“I’ve been through my memories of my passage through Grisha’s system a thousand times,” he said. “After I rescued Grisha, I caught a trace of a drive flame exiting the system in the opposite direction. Presumably whoever deployed the machines was still around until then, making sure that the job was done.”
“We should be able to match the drive signature to one of the ships parked here,” I said.
“I’ve tried, but the detection was too faint. There’s nothing that narrows down my list of suspects.”
“Maybe a fresh pair of eyes might help, though,” Purslane said. “Or even two pairs.”
“Direct exchange of memories is forbidden outside of threading,” Burdock said heavily.
“Add it to the list of Gentian rules we’ve already broken tonight,” I said. “Falsification of Purslane’s strand, absence from the island during a threading, breaking into someone else’s ship… why don’t you let me worry about the rules, Burdock? My neck’s already on the line.”
“I suppose one more wrong won’t make much difference,” he said, resignedly. “The sensor records of my passage through Grisha’s system are still in my ship files—will they be enough?”
“You had no other means of witnessing events?”
“No. Everything I saw came through the ship’s eyes and ears in one form or another.”
“That should be good enough Can you pass those records to my ship?”
“Mine as well,” Purslane said.
Burdock waited a moment. “It’s done. I’m afraid you’ll still have some compatibility issues to deal with.”
A coded memory flash—a bee landing on a flower—told me that my ship had just received a transmission from another craft, in an unfamiliar file format. I sent another command to my ship to tell it to start working on the format conversion. I had faith that it would get there in the end: I often set it the task of interpreting Prior languages, just to keep its mental muscles in shape.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Make what you will of it. I’m afraid there are many gaps in the sensor data. You’ll just have to fill in the holes.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Purslane said. “But if we’re to bring anyone to justice, we have to know what this is all about. You must tell us what you’ve learned of the Great Work.”
“I only know parts. I’ve guessed most of it.”
“That’s still more than Campion and I know.”
“All right,” he said, with something like relief. “I’ll tell you. But there isn’t time to do this the civilised way. Will you give me permission to push imagery into your heads?”
Purslane and I looked at each other uneasily. Rationally, we had nothing to fear: if Burdock had the means to tamper with our heads, he could have already forced hallucinations on us by now, or killed us effortlessly. We willingly opened our memories during each threading, but that was within the solemn parameters of age-old ceremony, when we were all equally vulnerable. We already knew Burdock had lied once. What if the rest of his story was a lie as well? We had no evidence that Grisha was authentic, and not just a figment created by the ship.