The Demon Code (17 page)

That seemed unlikely. He was Kuutma, after all. He was one of the names, and he held the fate of the People in his hands. Uncertain what to say, the girl simply shook her head.

‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I do. On behalf of the last Kuutma. You were assessed and the results were impressive. You should have been called into service, as your brothers were called. Your mind and temperament fit you well for it. You have the resilience to survive outside Ginat’Dania. To adapt, among the unchosen, without losing yourself to their ways. You also have, very obviously, a powerful imagination that will enable you to innovate in situations for which your training has not adequately prepared you. In any event, I called for you today to right the omission that has allowed you to languish here, unused.’

The girl’s heartbeat suddenly became perceptible to her, rising from unfelt background to a heavy hammering in her chest. It was hard to draw a breath.
Not the Kelim
, she prayed, to a God she seldom troubled.
Please, please, not the Kelim. Don’t let my life go the way of my mother’s life.

‘I feel that what I do here is valuable,’ she said, in a voice that sounded in her own ears despicably weak, almost pleading.

‘Of course,’ Kuutma said, still gentle. ‘That’s in your nature. Wherever you are, and whatever you do, you will find a way to be useful. But there are places where you’re needed more than you’re needed here.’

Please.

‘And so I have decided that you will become one of my
Elohim
.’

Almost, the girl shuddered. Relief flooded her, and then joy. She was called – and to a vocation to which she could give herself without reservation. The
Kelim
served the People with their womb alone, and in the process were lessened (though everybody pretended otherwise). The
Elohim
served with hearts and minds and hands. A knife or a gun, she imagined, was only like any other tool – like the brushes she used when she painted, except that they were limited to the one effect, the one colour. She wasn’t afraid of violence. Painting was already violence. She was full of violence, as far as that went.

Her acceptance wasn’t required: she was being informed of a decision, not an offer. But still she said, ‘I accept, Kuutma. I accept with joy.’

‘I’m pleased,’ Kuutma said solemnly. ‘These are not joyful times. We are uncertain, and divided. But it may be, little sister, that you’ll be the one to raise us up again.’

‘Only tell me what I have to do,’ the girl said.

Kuutma smiled at the urgency in her tone, not a patronising smile, but a recognition – an acknowledgement – of the passion that filled her. ‘First, you must be taught,’ he said. ‘And that’s no small thing. Then … well, I have a plan, and you are a part of it. When you’re ready, I’ll explain it to you. And then I’ll send you out.’ He stood, and indicated that she should follow, but for a moment she couldn’t move.

‘If it please you, Kuutma,’ she asked him. ‘Send me where?’

He regarded her with a complex, unreadable expression. He took her two hands in his and pressed them together as though he were conferring a blessing, or else inviting her to join him in prayer.

‘To your ordeal, little sister,’ he said solemnly, even sadly. ‘To the task and the testing that is yours and yours alone.’

17

Kuutma had said that the training would be no small thing. In fact it was an ordeal that almost broke her.

The girl discovered, as she had expected, that neither the mechanics nor the ethics of killing were daunting. She’d always preferred a solitary life, with few and fleeting human attachments: she had the sense that not many things lasted, and that romantic and familial loves were either comforting illusions or self-consciously played games. So it was possible for her to learn – in exacting detail – a great many ways of ending lives, without her emotions or her conscience becoming engaged. It was all theory, so far, but it was theory to which she applied herself with guiltless enthusiasm.

The physical demands of the training were another matter. The girl had to endure seventeen-hour days of drilling and practice, of gym and exercise regimens, of classes in sabotage, use and maintenance of weapons, infiltration, unarmed combat systems, battlefield survival, tracking and surveillance.

Then these lessons would stop and another sequence would start: world history, politics, languages, psychology, sociology, non-verbal communications, even fashion. The girl knew the purpose of these soft and seemingly trivial disciplines, and she didn’t protest. When another of the students made some contemptuous comment, the trainer, Ushana, made him stand up in front of the other recruits and rebuked him mercilessly.

‘You might live among the unchosen for ten years,’ Ushana said, ‘and kill once. So tell me, child, how you would allocate time between combat and infiltration.’

The girl kept her head down and applied herself assiduously to the learning of things that seemed both foolish and impenetrable, the nonsense syllables of an alien language. And gradually the dead ground between the disparate facts filled up with more facts. Pathways of logic opened up through the mad hinterlands and she began to see the wider, Adamite world outside Ginat’Dania for what it was: a horrifically distorted reflection of the real world in which she lived.

Also – and this was the only thing that actually frightened her – she was brought to see the differences of scale. The People lived in a space a handful of miles across and many levels deep – a great city that for most of them was in effect the whole world. But they knew that there was another world, which God had gifted to the children of Adam, but had promised in the fullness of time to render to his true chosen.

What the girl had never appreciated up until then was just how much bigger that other world was than the world she knew. As she explored it in wide games that began in the immediate environs of Ginat’Dania and then took her further and further afield, she saw the truth of it. The world was so big that it seemed to go on for ever, country opening on country and then on further countries into a distance that her mind was, at least at first, simply unable to fathom.

Kuutma told her, later, that this was common and far from trivial. Many young men and women in Messenger training experienced a sort of conceptual paralysis when they first stepped out of Ginat’Dania into the immensity of the Adamite nations. Some never got over it, and therefore were never able to join the
Elohim
. Some seemed to adapt, but then descended into psychosis once they were outside. It was a problem that seemed, if anything, to become more acute with each generation – perhaps because the gulf between Ginat’Dania and the world of the unchosen became ever greater over time.

The girl survived the existential crisis by looking at the world as an aesthetic composition. Scale was a device that an artist could deploy in the service of an effect. How great was God, then, who had painted on a canvas so huge that thousands of millions of men and women could live out their lives upon it.

The teaching continued. Each week, each day, it seemed she drew further and further ahead of those she trained with. In unarmed combat, she routinely humbled opponents much bigger and stronger than her. Her will was like a wire wound over and back on itself a million times within her compact body, so that her smallness concealed a great, unyielding immensity.

She excelled in use of weapons.

She excelled in tactical and strategic thinking.

She excelled in stamina.

She excelled in intelligence and in the retention of information.

It became, for her classmates, a matter of extreme pride to keep pace with the girl in anything. To best her, even temporarily, was an achievement to be boasted about for months.

Many of the boys in the group expressed a romantic interest in her – and many of the girls, likewise, since the People had no taboos about what the Adamites called homosexuality. The girl made it clear in every case that these attentions were unwelcome. In fact, she feared intimacy as others seemed to fear loneliness. To let someone into her life and into her bed, to speak unguarded thoughts in the heat of unguarded acts – it was an idea that thrilled her and nauseated her in equal measure. But close up, as soon as she felt any quickening of interest in anyone, boy or girl (more usually boy), the nausea overwhelmed the excitement. She could imagine the physical act of sex, the rest was too unnerving to contemplate.

When she finally gave herself, it seemed more an act of violence than of love. She was on the third and last day of a competitive field test, matched against a superior team that had had them outmanoeuvred from the start. If the girl herself had been team leader, she knew she could still have pulled things together – forced a victory or at the very worst a draw. But the leaders had been chosen by random lot, and her team’s, an impulsive and excitable boy named Desh Nahir, was not equal to the task.

So on the third day, the girl’s squad was trapped in an indefensible position at the bottom of a shallow gully and wiped out by a sustained enfilade attack that left them covered from head to foot in the red paint that was standing in for blood.

Subsequently, the girl had to spend three hours lying still in the place where she’d been shot, before the whistle sounded for the end of the day’s combat.

As soon as she was able to move, she found her team leader disrobing in the locker room and tackled him. She didn’t punch or kick or slap him, she just pressed her body against his so that his uniform would be saturated with the red paint and he’d be obliged to take a share of the dishonour that was by rights his, not hers.

But the tumult of her feelings, though it was dominated by anger and frustration, had other components, too. The pressure of her body against Nahir’s began to arouse feelings that were not entirely unpleasant, and when he kissed her, tentative, terrified of her rebuke, she responded.

Their relationship lasted for five weeks, long enough for the girl to decide that she’d been right in the first place: the annoyances and provocations caused by letting someone get that close to you far outweighed any possible pleasures. She told Nahir that it was over, much to his chagrin, and when he so far forgot his dignity as to plead with her, she walked away.

There was another fling, with a girl four years older than her, which she undertook in order to make sure that she hadn’t just picked the wrong someone. The results were much the same, although that relationship lasted a little longer and ended a little more stormily.

The girl trained for three years. It wasn’t, in any sense, long enough, but she knew that time was short. She could tell this from the way their teachers drove them, and from the fact that sometimes when she looked up from her exercises in the arena or in the classroom, she would see either Kuutma himself or one of his two angels watching her closely, with a grave, absorbed expression.

The teachers were not troubled by the high rates of attrition. One by one, the students fell away after failing this or that test, or else simply stopped attending classes for no reason that the girl could see.

As the third year wore on, they began to take the drug, kelalit. The first time the girl took it, letting just a tiny drop of the clear liquid fall from the eye-dropper onto her tongue, it was like being splashed across the brain with liquid nitrogen. Everything became incredibly sharp-edged, incredibly clear – and incredibly slow. She felt both strong and dead, as though what had been her body had been filled with molten metal, which had now cooled and hardened into some terrible machine in her exact shape.

They put her into the arena and sent three opponents against her at once – all
Elohim
like herself, but without the benefit of the pharmacon. The fight lasted nineteen seconds.

Afterwards the girl puked her guts up, and then lay awake for most of the night, trembling and sweating.

‘It’s poison,’ the teacher Ushana told her, when she asked. ‘The exact formula is known only to the chemists who make it, but all of its nearest cousins are utterly lethal. Adamites take them for pleasure and become addicted to them. They take larger and larger doses, and in the end their minds and bodies are destroyed by the cumulative effects of the toxins.’

The girl was shocked and afraid in spite of herself. Loss of control was high on her personal list of deadly sins. ‘How is the way we use the drug different?’ she asked, hoping to be reassured.

‘We take no pleasure in it,’ Ushana said.

No, Kuutma told her later, there’s more than that. The drug we take, kelalit,
the curse and the blessing
, is not a single substance. It’s a compound, made of many drugs, and some of them are at war with each other. The core compound induces a rush of euphoria, a feeling of omnipotence, but it clouds the mind and dulls the senses. Kelalit, by contrast, heightens the senses and speeds up physiological processes. The flow of information through the nerves of the body is hugely enhanced, which means that both perception and action are much quicker. Of that core sense of power and joy, meanwhile, enough is maintained to make the user shrug off pain that would normally distract or even incapacitate. Out of a filthy and shameful indulgence, the craftsmen of the People had fashioned a warrior’s tool, flexible and powerful.

But still deadly. Most of the
Elohim
who died out among the Nations did so from the cumulative effects of kelalit.

Over weeks and months, the girl became habituated to the use of this double-edged tool, this treacherously mixed blessing. By the summer of the third year, she could endure a full dose of kelalit, despite her relatively small body mass, and function at the heightened level of perception and action for hours at a time. She grew more adept, also, at handling the physiological and emotional crash that always followed.

Once again, she was the example held up to all the others, the model they followed and fashioned themselves upon. When another trainee, Esali, died of a kelalit overdose, and her stiff, grey body was brought through the dormitory in a deafening silence of disbelief and denial, the girl realised that being top of the class had its downside. Esali had been trying to become more like her.