fend for himself.
Jacob reached out slowly and put a hand on Kulic’s shoulder, patting it. From here on in, he was going to have to improvise.
‘If you ever again mention any of the details of my mission out loud,’ Jacob said quietly, ‘I will gut you and garland your village with your intestines. Do you understand me?’
The old man’s mouth worked. ‘I – I’m sorry,’ he managed to mumble. ‘I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.’ His eyes darted here and there, almost as if he thought someone might be hiding behind a tree or bush and listening. ‘But you could take me home with you,’ he added in a hoarse whisper. ‘Take me back to Temur, where there are at least real people, and not . . . monsters.’
‘Perhaps I could,’ Jacob replied with as much fake sincerity as he could muster.
The old man’s gratitude was rapidly becoming wearing. Jacob had him wait there in the clearing while he went back to the cave in order to fetch the case he had retrieved from the ship. Then he allowed Kulic to lead him back through the woods to a horse and cart waiting on a dirt path less than a kilometre away. The horse whinnied gently at Jacob’s approach, its hoofs pawing nervously at the dirt underfoot.
‘Why not use motorized transport?’ Jacob asked Kulic, as he climbed into the rear of the cart, which contained nothing but bags of dried hay and a large, tattered carpet with a faded pattern woven into it.
‘The Edicts,’ Kulic replied, as if that told Jacob everything he needed to know, before taking the reins and coaxing the horse into a gentle trot. They began to move at a steady pace, but Jacob could feel every bump where he sat crouched in the rear.
For the first time since he had stumbled out of his ship and watched it dissolve to nothing, Jacob allowed himself a faint sliver of hope. There was still a chance – small, but real – that he could find the weapon Father Cheng required him to locate, and carry it back to Temur.
Just days from now, and he, Jacob Moreland, would earn his place as one of the greatest heroes of the Tian Di. Millions might die as a result of his actions, but – as all truly good men knew – history was a tapestry necessarily woven from the bodies of the innocent.
EIGHT
At first, Luc thought Cripps had returned when he awoke to find a figure once again lurking in the darkness of his bedroom. But when it stepped closer, he saw instead that it was de Almeida’s data-ghost.
He had been dreaming that he was making love to her. He remembered clearly the way her lithe frame had moved above his in a room whose contours were unfamiliar to him. He recalled with astounding clarity the warm scent of her skin and the taste of her lips and tongue, and the urgent thrust of her hips against his own. It had felt so entirely real that upon seeing her data-ghost standing before him, he felt momentarily disoriented, not quite sure if he was awake or not.
‘Mr Gabion,’ she said, her voice low. ‘We need to talk.’
He sat upright amidst the tangled sheets of his bed, irritated and embarrassed, as if she had somehow been privy to his thoughts.
He waved a hand and the window de-opaqued, letting in the pre-dawn light. At least he was alone this time; Eleanor had spent most of the previous evening neck-deep in preparations for a pre-tribunal hearing concerning Aeschere.
‘What is it?’ he asked, making no attempt to hide his irritation.
‘It’s Sevgeny Vasili’s murderer,’ she said. ‘They’ve found him.’
His fatigue drained away. ‘Where?’
‘Downtown, here in the capital,’ she said. ‘Dead, unfortunately. Alive would have been better. Do you know Kirov Avenue?’
‘Yeah.’ Kirov Avenue was in one of the oldest districts of the city, an area heavily populated by Benareans like himself.
‘Meet me there,’ she said, flashing an address to him before vanishing.
Kirov Avenue was lined by tall apartment buildings that hailed from the days of vat-based architecture, when construction materials had been formed from slabs of fullerene grown in tanks of engineered microbes. There had been a scandal when the buildings had started sagging just a few decades after their construction, causing their once-gleaming facades to slowly melt. The internal skeleton of one fluted tower was clearly visible where the outer cladding had crumbled away. After that, Benareans dislocated by the repercussions of the uprising there had moved in, while everyone else had moved out.
Luc had been one of those Benareans – one of thousands of refugees who had scattered across the Tian Di in the wake of the Battle of Sunderland. It had not, at first, been an easy existence. Orphaned in the wake of the rebellion, he had been given over to the charge of a Benarean family. His adoption had not gone well, and he had only rarely returned to this part of the city since.
He arrived there just over an hour after de Almeida summoned him, stepping out of an Archives flier to find himself confronted by half a dozen armoured Sandoz cars arrayed outside a building whose walls curved gently as they rose towards a peak sufficiently lofty that he couldn’t quite make it out.
Several data-ghosts conferred with each other beside one of the Sandoz vehicles, while a few steps away, SecInt mechants kept a small crowd of a dozen or so civilian onlookers at a distance from the building.
Luc decided to keep his own distance until Zelia made her appearance. The data-ghosts, all of which had their
