‘Mm, bad start, Tanner. But please continue.’
I thought about giving Chanterelle the sanitised version of my story — before realising that there was no sanitised version. So I explained about about my soldiering days, and how I had fallen into Cahuella’s orbit. I told her that Cahuella was a man of both power and cruelty, but not genuinely evil since he was also a man of trust and loyalty. It was not hard to respect him and to want to earn his respect in return. I suppose there was something very primitive about the relationship between Cahuella and me: he was a man who desired excellence in everything around him — in his surroundings; in the accoutrements he collected; in the way he chose his sexual partners, like Gitta. He also desired excellence in his employees. I considered myself a fine soldier, bodyguard, liege, man-at- arms, assassin; whatever label suited. But only in Cahuella could I measure my excellence against any kind of absolute.
‘A bad man, but not a monster?’ Chanterelle said. ‘And that was enough reason for you to work for him?’
‘He also paid pretty well,’ I said.
‘Mercenary bastard.’
‘There was something else, too. I was valuable to him because I had experience. He wasn’t willing to risk losing that wisdom by placing me in situations of undue danger. So a lot of the work I did for him was purely advisory — I hardly ever had to carry a weapon. We had real bodyguards for that; younger, fitter, stupider versions of myself.’
‘And how did the man you saw in Escher Heights come into it?’
‘The man’s name is Argent Reivich,’ I said. ‘He used to live on Sky’s Edge. The family name’s rather well established there.’
‘It’s also an old name in the Canopy.’
‘I’m not surprised. If Reivich already had connections here, that would explain why he managed to infiltrate the Canopy so quickly, when I was still getting soaked down in the Mulch.’
‘You’re getting ahead of yourself. What brought Reivich here? And you, for that matter?’
I told her how Cahuella’s weapons had fallen into the wrong hands, and how those wrong hands had used them against Reivich’s family. How Reivich had traced the arms back to my employer, and his determination to exact revenge.
‘That’s rather honourable of him, don’t you think?’
‘I have no quarrel with Reivich about that,’ I said. ‘But if I’d done it, I’d have made sure everyone died. That was his one mistake; the one I can’t forgive him for.’
‘You can’t forgive him for leaving you alive?’
‘It wasn’t an act of mercy, Chanterelle. Quite the opposite. The bastard wanted me to suffer for failing Cahuella.’
‘Sorry, but the logic’s just a little too tortuous for me.’
‘He killed Cahuella’s wife — the woman I should have been protecting. Then he left Cahuella, Dieterling and me alive. Dieterling was lucky — he looked dead. But Reivich deliberately left Cahuella and me alive. He wanted Cahuella to punish me for letting Gitta die.’
‘Did he?’
‘Did he what?’
She sounded like she was about to lose patience with me. ‘Did Cahuella do anything to you afterwards?’
The question seemed simple enough to answer. No, obviously, he hadn’t — because Cahuella had died afterwards. His injuries had eventually killed him, even though they hadn’t appeared particularly life-threatening at the time.
So why did I find it difficult to answer Chanterelle? Why did my tongue stumble on the obvious, and something else come to mind? Something that made me doubt that Cahuella had died?
Finally I said, ‘It never came to that. But I had to live with my shame. I guess that was a kind of punishment in its own right.’
‘But it didn’t have to have happened that way; not from Reivich’s perspective.’
We were passing through a part of the Canopy now that resembled a solid map of the alveoli in a lung: endlessly branching globules, bridged by dark filaments of what might have been coagulated blood.
‘How could it have been otherwise?’ I said.
‘Maybe Reivich spared you because with you it wasn’t personal. He knew that you were just an employee and that his argument wasn’t with you but with Cahuella.’
‘Nice idea.’
‘And just possibly the right one. Has it occurred to you that you don’t have to kill this man at all, and that you might owe him your life?’
I was beginning to tire of this particular line of debate.
‘No, it hadn’t — for the pure and simple reason that it’s completely irrelevant. I don’t care what Reivich thought of me when he decided to let me live — whether it was intended as a punishment or an act of mercy. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that he did kill Gitta, and that I swore to Cahuella that I’d avenge her death.’
‘Avenge her death.’ She smiled humourlessly. ‘It’s all so conveniently mediaeval, isn’t it? Feudal honour and bonds of trust. Oaths of fealty and vengeance. Have you checked the calendar recently, Tanner?’
‘Don’t even pretend to understand any of this, Chanterelle.’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘If I did, I’d start worrying about my sanity. What in hell’s name have you come here for — to satisfy some ridiculous promise, an eye for an eye?’
‘Now you put it like that, I don’t see it as being particularly laughable.’
‘No, it’s not remotely laughable, Tanner. It’s tragic.’
‘To you, maybe.’
‘To anyone with an angstrom of detachment. Do you realise how much time will have passed by the time you get back to Sky’s Edge?’
‘Don’t treat me like a child, Chanterelle.’
‘Answer my damned question.’
I sighed, wondering how I had let things get so far out of control. Had our friendship just been an anomaly; an excursion away from the natural state of things?
‘At least three decades,’ I replied, as if the time I was expressing was of no consequence at all, like a matter of weeks. ‘And before you ask, I’m well aware of how much could change in that time. But not the important things. They’ve already changed, and much as I wish they would, they won’t change back. Gitta’s dead. Dieterling’s dead. Mirabel’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘I said Cahuella’s dead.’
‘No, you didn’t. You said Mirabel’s dead.’
I watched the city slide by outside, my mind buzzing, wondering what kind of state my head must be in for a slip of the tongue like that. That wasn’t the kind of mistake you could easily ascribe to fatigue. The Haussmann virus was clearly having a worse effect on me than I’d dared assume: it had gone beyond simply infecting my waking hours with shards of Sky’s life and times and was beginning to interfere with my most basic assumptions about my own identity, undermining my perception of self. And yet… even that was a comforting assumption. The Mendicants had told me their therapy would burn out the virus before too long… yet the Sky episodes were becoming more insistent. And why would the Haussmann virus bother making me confuse events that had happened in my own past, rather than Sky’s? Why did it care if I confused Mirabel with myself?
No. Not Mirabel. Cahuella.
Disturbed — not wanting to remember the dream I’d had, of the time when I’d been looking down on the man in the white room with the missing foot — I tried to recapture the thread of the conversation.
‘All I’m saying is…’
‘What?’
‘All I’m saying is, that when I get back, I’m not expecting to find what I left. But it won’t be any worse. The people who mattered to me were already dead.’
