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  ‘Hey, boy,’ Father Sylvester pulled a handful of coins from his pocket and rattled them before returning them there.

  Without word, the boy turned back, his face still sullen. He was gripping the hoe with both hands but it was unmoving now.

  ‘Cocheforet?’

  Mai wanted to cry out, to warn the Tibetan boy, but she couldn’t. Her lips were sewn shut with surgical thread. Surgical so the tiny puncture wounds wouldn’t get infected. She’d already tried ripping her mouth open but the agony was too great. And the only time they’d stopped in the last twenty-four hours was when they’d passed through a village and she’d fainted with the pain of trying to shout for help.

  He’d rabbit-punched her in the ribs then, once when no one was looking: adding to the bruises already inflicted by the animal’s hoofs and her fall. She believed without hesitation that he would do exactly what he’d threatened to do if she tried it again, so she hadn’t. All the same, a part of her wanted to warn the boy? The tiny bit not already kicked into submission. That ember which no one had ever quite kicked into submission, despite all that had happened to her in the short ugly space of her life.

  ‘Cocheforet?’ repeated the priest.

  The boy looked doubtfully at the man’s black stallion. The metal bit in its mouth was flecked with foam and the animal’s flanks radiated steam like a wet blanket drying too close to a fire. He held up four fingers, then changed it to five and shrugged.

  Three, Father Sylvester decided. That was how many days they would take. Stamina and willingness weren’t what kept his horse going, the secret was 0.25 mg/kg of ketamine every two hours, mixed with crystalMeth and blasted through the animal’s thick hide into its neck using an industrial-strength BayerRochelle subdermal gun. The priest had doped up the animal so often that now his mount took the injections without even breaking its stride.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Father Sylvester as he pushed one shaking hand deep into his pocket and closed his fingers clumsily around a blade, ‘you’ve been very helpful.’ The stubby glass knife caught the boy in the throat, severing his vocal chords. For a second—as the boy stood there swaying, eyes glazed and mouth slack with shock—it looked as if the priest might have to climb down from his horse to finish the job, but then the boy pitched forward and Father Sylvester caught him by his long damp hair.

  A blade so sharp the makers claimed it was honed to a single molecule sliced once across the boy’s neck and oxygen-rich blood spurted from a severed artery. With a hiss of regret, the priest dropped the boy into a heap and watched his blood stain the thin grass.

  Chapter Eight

  Dying to Schedule

  Three and a half days later Father Sylvester unlocked the nanetic cuffs that bound Mai’s wrists together. Three and a half days, because that was what it took to cross the high plateau and navigate the pass that let them enter the valley of Cocheforet, while black kites circled overhead and bharal, Himalayan blue sheep watched listlessly as they rode past.

  And all that time his shakes got worse and his concentration less certain. But he remembered to tidy up after himself all the same. The last thing Father Sylvester did before beginning to descend the gravel track that led down from the pass to the valley floor was kill his horse.

  The animal had stopped on a steep spur where angry rock stuck through thin red gravel like broken bone. On top of the rock someone had built a rough stone cairn and daubed it with paint as red as the gravel. The goat’s skull on top of the cairn was weathered to a yellowing ivory.

  To the left of the cairn was a small gully with steep sides dotted with wind-stunted scrub juniper. And at the bottom was what looked like an old cartwheel buried under scree that frost and rain had cracked from the gully’s sides; three of the wheel spokes were broken.

  Ahead of them was the long narrow valley of Cocheforet and across the valley was his destination. A monastery with red walls and a tiled roof set low on distant rhododendron-covered slopes that rose so high they were eventually swallowed by cloud.

  But first there was his horse to deal with. Shooting the poor animal would be easiest. But guns upset Tsongkhapa. And upsetting an infinitely-parallel Buddhist AI with the personality interface of a Bon demon wasn’t a risk Father Sylvester was prepared to take. Getting the unconscious girl and his medical kit through customs had been a miracle of discreet diplomacy and outright bribery, to have risked carrying an unlicensed gun would have been blindingly stupid, and that was something Father Sylvester had never been.

  Besides, getting into trouble with Tsongkhapa would be a disaster, which wasn’t an idle consideration. After the girl was delivered… That was a whole other matter but since Father Sylvester would be dead by then he wasn’t prepared to waste energy or thought on it.

  Not now.

  Despite what the girl thought, Father Sylvester wasn’t instinctively a cruel man. Being harsh took effort and finding the energy to make that effort was becoming more and more difficult. He was even fond of the horse.

  There were three ampoules of ketamine left and with clumsy fingers Father Sylvester blasted all three into the neck of the glazed-eyed stallion. And when the animal was still trying to catch its breath after the climb, the priest led it to the edge of the gully.

  Father Sylvester opened his wallet and carefully extracted a curl of molywire. Flicking it once aligned the molecules so that the wire suddenly became rigid. One hand gripped the other, to steady it and then-without pausing for thought-Father Sylvester rammed the wire in through the animal’s eye and swivelled his wrist, pulping its brain.

  Even as the stallion tried to shy away from him its knees buckled and the animal crashed over the edge of the gully, crushing anaemic saplings as it rolled to the bottom. Broken legs kicked briefly and then stilled. Dust to dust, flesh into earth. It was a ritual so old as to be almost pagan.

  Over Father Sylvester’s head crows wheeled in alarm, like a dying twister until still squawking they came to land in the spindly branches they’d left. No one would find his animal until it started to stink, five days at least in this temperature, maybe longer. And even then they wouldn’t find it unless they were looking for it, which they wouldn’t be.

  The priest had worked hard to cover his tracks since leaving Vajradala, taking a minor road away from the city, riding through forests rather than take obvious paths round them, avoiding tourist towns as much as possible. No little silver Aerospats had followed him or hung above crossroads to report back what they saw, Father Sylvester felt certain of that.

  ‘Now you,’ said the priest. He pulled the glass knife from his pocket and stepped towards the girl who scrambled backwards, hands stretched out in front of her as if they’d be enough to keep him away.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ promised Father Sylvester, but she didn’t pause until she reached the edge of the gully and then she had to stop anyway. Mai winced when he brought up the blade and she tried to scramble away again, almost slipping over the edge in her panic.

  Dried blood. Father Sylvester sucked at his teeth in irritation and wiped the glass blade on the sleeve of his black jacket. Grabbing Mai, he twisted his fingers into her hair until she was unable to move her head and then jabbed the blade between her lips, severing the stitches.

  ‘Shit head.’ The girl tried to spit at the priest, but her blood-streaked saliva caught in the surgical thread still looped through her swollen lips. So instead of spitting at her captor, the half-Japanese girl made do with pulling the stitches from her mouth, one thread at a time. It might have been worse, Mai thought grudgingly. The bastard could have used plastic skin or cloneDerm… Both of those would have grafted her lips shut, leaving her mouth scarred and in need of real surgery.

  Mai knew all about cloneDerm, she’d had her virginity rebuilt a dozen times when she first went to Madame Sotto’s, until she got too acquiescent for it to be convincing.

  No one had been around when Father Sylvester had sewn her mouth shut in the VIP lounge at Alicante because
they’d had the whole room to themselves. And the priest had issued firm instructions that they weren’t to be interrupted. From the disapproval on the face of the VIP steward it was obvious what the designer-droid thought Father Sylvester would be doing with the weirdly-dressed young girl. But it hadn’t made a fuss. After all, the man had reserved a secure lounge for his own exclusive use and that took serious credit. Father Sylvester hadn’t been doing that at all, of course. Merely pumping Mai full of every antitoxin he knew and feeding her glucose through a straw pushed between her sewn-shut lips. And when that was done he’d put her to sleep for forty-eight hours. Not waking her until after they’d landed on Samsara.

  The priest had a strong belief that Mai hadn’t even realised she was off planet.

  Head down, still picking surgical thread from her bottom lip, Mai heard Father Sylvester call her and stubbornly ignored him. It was the wrong name anyway. You’d have thought he’d have realised that by now.

  ‘Joan!’

  She did and said nothing. Just waited to get hit again. Only this time he kept his fists to himself and merely watched her. Had Mai known the word political agenda, she might have understood that Father Sylvester was working to a plan. But she didn’t, so instead she dismissed him as some shit-head psycho and put the shaking fits down to a trade-off for the all the drugs he took.

  And it was a trade-off too, but not the way Mai thought. Father Sylvester had nanetic C3JD, the network of his brain unravelling and disconnecting as tiny, molecular-level assemblers made a mockery of their name and slowly disassembled every active axon and dendritic nerve in his cortex. His memories and his life were coming apart snip by snip.

  A single line of poisoned cocaine, taken carelessly through a rolled prayer sheet had started the rot. By the time he realised it was more than stress that kept him upset and restless it was too late to do anything. Although, as the Surgeon General of the Jesuits had pointed out, it had probably always been too late.

  ‘Joan,’ he called it again but Mai wouldn’t answer or turn round. Somewhere in what was left of his mind he even sympathised but history didn’t have time for the niceties of an underage Japanese whore trying to hang onto her identity.

  Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, Father Sylvester began to pick his way down the steep path towards the distant village below. And after a few seconds, the girl followed. They were halfway down before the priest remembered to put back her cuffs, only this time he left her hands at the front in case she fell. It was as close as Father Sylvester would ever come to showing her a kindness.

  Chapter Nine

  Cold Like Water/Sharp Like Glass

  ‘This is Joan?’ The small fat man who stood at the top of the stone steps leading up to the monastery sounded doubtful and Father Sylvester tried to look at the shivering child with fresh eyes. He couldn’t. Too few memories were backed up in what was left of his brain for him to see anything clearly.

  Father Sylvester nodded abruptly. ‘This is the girl.’ He pushed Mai forward, then gripped her shoulder when she stumbled. ‘And her name is Joan.’ When Mai opened her mouth to protest the fingers became vicelike, digging hard into a nerve in her neck.

  ‘Release her.’ The words that interrupted him were firm: not cross or bullying, just spoken by a woman who was used to being obeyed, and obeyed immediately. She spoke Spanish.

  Father Sylvester released his grip.

  ‘Good.’

  The woman came slowly down the steps towards them, tall and black-haired and somewhere in her late twenties. If she was shocked at Mai’s filthy clothes she didn’t let it show, though her smile faded when she looked at Mai’s face and found dark pupils dilated with drugs, fear or fever. Damaged goods weren’t what Kate Mercarderes needed.

  Sweat had stained under the arms of Mai’s canvas jacket and the now-tattered crepe bandages on her legs were obviously soiled. But it was the bruises darker than lipstick around her mouth that sparked fury in the woman’s eyes.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He sewed my mouth shut,’ said Mai sensing an ally, ‘with a needle.’

  The tall woman looked at Father Sylvester and though his face hardened he couldn’t quite meet her gaze. ‘It was necessary,’ he said. ‘You know it was necessary.’

  ‘And her wrists?’ Katherine Mercarderes said abruptly. ‘Was that necessary too?’

  ‘He thought I might escape,’ said Mai. She held her wrists out to the woman. ‘Please, my fingers hurt...' She swallowed a sob. ‘Everything hurts.’

  ‘Life does,’ said Kate, then caught herself and forced a smile. ‘Still, Louis can find you new clothes, a bath, some food…’ She nodded to the small fat man still stood at the top of the steps who beetled back inside the house, head down.

  A bath? Father Sylvester wanted to howl but restrained himself. Surely Kate realised… There wasn’t time to pamper the brat. Kate had to realise that. Besides, all they needed was the brat’s body and they didn’t need that for long…

  ‘Patience,’ Kate ordered.

  ‘I don’t have time for patience,’ said Father Sylvester. ‘I’m dying.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ Kate said. ‘You think I’d forgive you this if you weren’t?’ She nodded at Mai, who stood swaying with exhaustion. And then Kate caught herself again and touched the priest gently on the shoulder. Seeing someone she’d known since childhood. Someone she’d loved as a child and trusted as much as she’d trusted the Pope. But also someone she was planning to betray.

  ‘You have the relic?’

  The what… Father Sylvester looked briefly puzzled and then nodded, pointing to the bead-and-feather talisman round the girl’s neck.

  Kate raised her eyebrows but she didn’t say anything further and she made no attempt to touch the precious soulcatcher. No matter how much she wanted to, Kate didn’t dare.

  ‘Release her hands.’

  The priest muttered something in Latin and the cuffs dropped to the ground like lifeless plastic snakes. They were two-use only, the kind issued to airlines, not supposed to he used for anything longer than a ten hour flight.

  Red weals ran around Mai’s wrists, oozing clear liquid. In any other situation, Kate would have fired up a medical Drexie box or relied on mediSoft to brief proprietary assemblers. As neither of these existed in Cocheforet she’d have to make do with what she’d brought with her, which was a bit all-purpose.

  ‘Salve, I suppose,’ Kate said thoughtfully. What she meant was that in a tiny vacuum-sealed pot she kept a colony of BayerRochelle spiders that could stitch shut the thread holes at a molecular level, clearing away dead white blood cells and repairing torn flesh. But she made it sound like she was offering Mai some ancient herbal extract mixed with pig fat.

  ‘Come with me,’ she put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and steered her towards the steps.

  ‘Wait...'

  The woman stopped but she didn’t turn round and she didn’t let go of the girl’s shivering shoulders. ‘She’s having a bath and then she’s getting some rest. Look at her! You think we can work with her in this state?’ Together, Kate and Mai began to climb the steps.

  ‘Take some rest,’ Kate said to Father Sylvester over her shoulder. ‘Your job’s done.’

  * * * *

  Done, was it? She had to know it wasn’t… Whatever she told him.

  The water was cold as glacial melt, the splash of a high waterfall echoing off the rock face that surrounded the deep mountain pool. Above Father Sylvester the sky was dark and starless. A black arc of nothing that stretched across the heavens like void. No people could have looked up at that night sky and imagined it held eternal mementoes of ancient heroes. No angels hung silent and unseen overhead listening to the celestial music of the spheres.

  It was an absence made absolute. No place could be more fitting for him to die. Father Sylvester had spotted the foam-flecked foss, the thin fall of water, on his ride up to Escondido and though he couldn’t see where it fell
to earth, he’d guessed rightly that there’d be a mountain pool. Cold and private, like the few thoughts left in his mind.

  The girl was his legacy to Kate and she could make of the foul-mouthed child what she would. Whether it was success or failure no longer worried him. He wouldn’t be alive to see either.

  And the child wasn’t much, but she was all they had.

  Father Sylvester had hoped to be present to see Mai give up the dreams he’d put into the child’s head, but if Kate wanted to move at her own speed then she had that authority. Though her speed was too slow for an old man with only hours to live. So he’d come here to die, lead by Clone who understood the need for these things.

  Clone wasn’t a friend of Father Sylvester’s, but he was no longer an enemy. The mute and tongueless ox of a man had long since made his peace with Father Sylvester just as he had reached resolution with Joan, may God overlook her undoubted sins.

  Using his glassblade, Father Sylvester shaved off his beard and cut away his hair and greying ponytail as grief demanded. Ashes he’d already had enough of to last a lifetime. He wore no jewellery. And his steel cross of five nails crudely brazed together was where he’d left it, on the pillow of his bed for Kate to find.

  The gutting out of the Vatican bank accounts had been Joan’s secret and his doing. He set up the discreet shell companies and blind trusts, switched money from account to account, using everything from Bajan datahavens to free-trade orbitals.

  Between them they’d dug out the foundation of gold on which the Papacy had always stood and quietly spent it as the money always should have been spent. On food for the poor, on medicine, but mostly in airlifting the destitute and starving out of warzones and into transit camps where they could be shipped to Samsara. And while there were still ‘fugees in need, Joan had kept spending money to ship them and Tsongkhapa had kept receiving their numbers until the money was gone. And by then WorldBank and the IMF were already closing in.