The Demon Code (33 page)
The girl turned to Tillman. ‘And you?’ she asked him.
He shook his head. ‘Nobody.’
‘Swear it.’
‘My word’s good, girl.’
‘Your word is water. Swear it. Swear it on something that matters.’
Tillman thought about that for a moment. Then he pointed past her out of the window. ‘You mentioned the blood I spilled here. I swear on that blood. I’ve never told anyone about your people or about Ginat’Dania.’
Diema’s face went blank, then filled with powerful, chaotic emotion. She tried several times to speak, and Kennedy tensed, ready to step in, because it looked for a moment as though the girl were going to fling herself on Tillman. But she got herself back under control.
‘Why should I believe that blood matters to you?’ she asked him, her voice thick. ‘You shed it easily enough.’
‘They were young men,’ Tillman said simply. ‘Very young men. And I had to kill them because somebody had filled their heads full of rancid crap. I hated to do it. But if you don’t believe that, I’ll swear on something else.’
Diema made a formless, unreadable gesture. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I swear – on the same blood – you’ll never tell anyone else. Take that any way you like.’
‘Well, I’m inclined to take it as a threat,’ he said unhappily.
‘For the love of Christ!’ Rush interjected. ‘It was me that was tied up and gagged and wired to a fake bomb. Can we drop this and get to the bloody point?’
‘I agree,’ Kennedy said quickly, pulling them both away from the danger zone. ‘Diema, this meeting was your idea. What is it you want?’
The girl crossed to the hayloft doors and brought back the chair that was there. She set it down in front of her, but didn’t sit. ‘I want us to share information,’ she said. ‘And then I want us to discuss strategy.’
‘I’ll need some convincing,’ Tillman said, ‘that either of those is a good idea.’
Diema didn’t seem to have heard him. She was addressing herself to Kennedy again. ‘This was my mission long before it was yours,’ she said. ‘But I can’t make you trust me or cooperate with me. I suggest you pool what you know. Now that you’ve read the book of Johann Toller, you probably know a lot. Call when you want me. I’ll tell you what I was told, and what I’ve found out for myself, and I’ll answer any questions you have. I’ll do that without asking you to do the same. I can’t think of anything else I can offer. I’ll wait in the truck.’
‘Which is full of—’ Tillman began.
‘In the
cab
. You’ll be able to see me from here. Wave, and I’ll come back up.’ Now she turned to look at him, and the depth of her hate was there in her face, for all of them to see. ‘Do you know how the
Elohim
are bound, Tillman? Did Kuutma, who is called the Brand, ever explain it to you?’
‘You’re not bound at all,’ Tillman said. ‘You’re free to kill whoever you like. Your priests give you absolution up front.’
‘Free to kill, yes. Or to maim. Or to torture. To steal, where necessary. To damage and destroy whatever might need to be damaged or destroyed, if it will help the People. But not to do any of those things for our own pleasure or profit. And not to lie. So I tell you again that I’m not here to kill you. God kept you alive for this long so you could be useful. So you could be the stick that chastises his enemies. When your work is done, then you’ll be free to die.’
She descended the ladder, making no sound at all. A moment or so later, they saw her cross to the truck and climb into the cab, where she sat, arms folded, in the passenger seat.
‘Where do we start?’ Kennedy asked.
‘By checking for listening devices,’ Tillman answered quietly.
Diema remembered very little about the father of her flesh. Her mother had taken her back to the People before her third birthday, and of course she’d never seen him again after that homecoming. Three years was long enough for some memories to have stuck, but belonging as they did to another world, another life, there was less and less in her mind for those memories to adhere to. So they faded, slowly at first, then quickly and finally. But there were a few isolated moments that had stayed with her:
In one of them, she was sitting at a long, low table, sitting on the ground, so it must have been very low indeed – probably a coffee table of some kind. She was drawing with coloured pencils. Drawing a lion in a jungle. The pencils were new, and excitingly unfamiliar to her hand. They were entirely full of themselves, in her memory; almost luminous with their
thisness
, as new things are to a child.
And she was almost done with her picture, but there was a feeling of urgency in her mind, of a time drawing to its close. Then big, enfolding hands closed around her waist and she felt herself lifted, her legs kicking slightly, off the floor, gathered up into arms too strong to resist.
Her father’s face, square-jawed and bristle-chinned, smiled down at her, his basso voice rumbled at her that it was time for bed, and she was taken away from the pencils and the almost-complete, almost-incarnate lion to be tucked up in white sheets in another room. Probably, being a child’s bedroom, it contained things and colours and textures, but in Diema’s memory it was white like the sheets, empty like her grieving hands.
Despite the vagueness of the memory, she knew this beyond any possibility of a doubt: she never held the pencils again; the drawing was never completed. That trivial, wonderful thing had been stolen from her.
The father of her flesh was synonymous with loss, even then.
She kept her eyes fixed on the open doors of the hayloft, where nothing moved. She waited for them to call her. And for the lion to be delivered at last.
‘Ben Rush, this is Leo Tillman. Tillman, Rush,’ Kennedy said.
She turned the photocopied sheets so that they faced the two men.
‘If we’re going to do this,’ she said, ‘I think we should start with Toller’s book. Alex Wales came to Ryegate House to steal this, and then stayed to get a list of everyone who’d read it, going back about sixty or seventy years. The ones that were still alive aren’t alive any more.’
Kennedy was standing, both men were sitting – side by side on the same side of the table, facing her. Tillman pulled out the sheaf of paper from the bundle in front of him and read aloud, with Rush peering over his shoulder. ‘
And the False word wille die, and the True worde live. As on the threshing Floor, when Chaff is sorted from Wheat, that all who worke dilligently and earn their Hire may finally eat …’
Tillman looked up at Kennedy. ‘Any chance of a summary?’
‘It’s pretty much all like this,’ she said. ‘Three hundred and seventy two prophecies over sixty or seventy pages – all the signs and wonders that come right before the end of the world.’
‘Like in the Book of Revelations,’ Rush said.
‘Thank you, Rush. I knew I could rely on a good Catholic boy like you to make that connection.’ Still chafing under the weight of his earlier humiliations, Rush blushed, and glanced at Kennedy sharply to see if this was sarcasm. ‘Exactly like the Book of Revelations,’ she confirmed. ‘Except that Toller goes into a lot more detail. Look at a few of the prophecies at random, you’ll see what I mean.’
Tillman turned the pages and he and Rush both read for a while in silence.
‘Why is the book significant?’ Tillman asked at last. ‘To the Judas People, I mean? Why do they care who reads this? It’s not their scripture, is it?’
‘Yeah, I think it is,’ Kennedy said.
There was a silence while Tillman absorbed this. ‘But we
read
their scripture,’ he said. ‘You did, anyway. It was much, much older than this nonsense – first- or second-century. And it was about the bargain Jesus made with Judas.’
‘Which was what, again?’ Rush asked.
‘Judas helped Jesus to die,’ Kennedy said wearily. ‘In return, God gave Judas and his kindred the earth. But they would have to wait three thousand years to inherit. Thirty pieces of silver – standing for thirty centuries.’
‘So where does this come in?’ Tillman asked, jerking his head at Toller’s book.
‘I think Toller was one of the Judas People,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think he came out of their hidden city into the world and started or joined a cult called the Fifth Monarchists. They preached an apocalyptic version of Christianity. They were waiting for the fifth and last empire – Christ’s – to start, which would bring about the end of history, the end of earthly kings and dominions, the end of the world as we know it.’
‘Wait,’ Rush said. ‘Is this what all the Judas People think or just Toller?’
‘They all think it’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘But Toller thought it was going to happen right then, at the end of the seventeenth century. And he went out and spread the word among the heathens, which really isn’t the Judas tribe’s MO at all.’
‘So Toller was what, a kind of Judas People heretic?’
‘Good a word as any,’ Kennedy said. ‘But what matters for us is that he appears out of nowhere in the middle of the seventeenth century and starts to preach and write …’
‘After an accident,’ Rush said.
Kennedy and Tillman both looked at him.
Rush seemed a little uncomfortable with the attention, but he went on. ‘Toller fell down a ravine in the Swiss Alps. Then an angel started talking to him about the time to come. It was after he came back to England that he started prophesying.’
‘Some sort of near-death experience,’ Tillman mused dourly. ‘You could see where that might change the course of his life. Make him feel like there was something else he needed to be doing.’
‘Is there anything else we know about him?’ Kennedy asked Rush.
Rush shrugged. ‘We know when he died. And we know that he had this weird way of doing the sign of the cross that was more like he was rubbing his stomach.’
‘The noose,’ Kennedy said. ‘The Judas People use the sign of the noose the same way Christians use the sign of the cross. It means the same thing to them. Because some of the early accounts of Judas’s life have him dying by hanging.’
‘It’s circumstantial evidence,’ Tillman said.
‘But Toller also talks about three thousand years being given to the four kingdoms of Man before Christ returns. It’s a close match to the Judas tribe’s belief that they get to inherit the world after the children of Adam rule it – for three millennia. Okay, Leo, you asked why Toller’s book matters. Why it matters now, to us and to the Judas People. And here’s where we get to it. Look at the prophecies on the first page of Toller’s book.’
This time it was Rush who read – flatly, without expression. ‘“The Infidels who soile the Holy Worde will bewaile their Blindness, and repent. Even in the House of the faithlesse Soldier they will repent. And in Münsters Churche, so, and likewise, they will repent. But such repentance wille come too late and Helles Fires will take holde on them
.
”’
‘The faithless soldier is Thomas Fairfax,’ Kennedy said. ‘One of the generals in the English Civil War. He was sympathetic towards Toller’s Fifth Monarchists for a while, but then he dropped them. From their point of view, betrayed them.’
‘Still sounds like ancient history,’ Tillman said dryly.
‘Doesn’t it?’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But a few weeks ago, Fairfax’s old country seat, Nunappleton Hall, was burned to the ground. Hell’s fires, if you want to be melodramatic, in the house of the faithless soldier.
‘And Münster’s church went the same way. Toller meant a specific church – the Überwasserkirche, which was the site of a famous uprising. The day after the fire at Nunappleton, someone planted and detonated a bomb in the Überwasserkirche. Again, a firebomb.’
Both men were staring at her in grim, perturbed silence, trying to figure out what this could mean. But they hadn’t heard anything yet, and Kennedy couldn’t spare their feelings.
‘With me so far? Okay, look at prophecy number two. “Gods Angel will stand over Zion with a flaming Sworde outstretched in his hand, ready to doe Execution.” One of God’s angels was called Azrael – I think he might have been the angel of death, but don’t quote me on that. When I got home four nights ago, I turned on the TV and heard about an incident where an Azrael ground-to-air missile was fired over Jerusalem. The Israeli government blamed it on an accident. It exploded in mid-air, thank God – no deaths, this time. But the prophecy goes on to say that the angel won’t strike with his sword because it isn’t the time yet.’
Kennedy paused for a second, waiting for them to challenge her. What she was saying sounded so much like madness, even to her, that she couldn’t imagine anyone else swallowing it for a moment. But when Tillman spoke, it was to ask a very practical and logistical question.
‘So the order of these incidents,’ he said. ‘Is the same as the order in which the prophecies occur in the book?’
‘Always. I went back and checked. The abortive missile strike was the same day as the Münster bombing, but if you correct for local time, it happened two hours later.’
She looked at the book again. It had almost developed a personality for her by this time, its riddles and ellipses part of a sick game, its dire promises full of psychopathic enthusiasm.
‘“Where the Highest bled,”’ she read, ‘“the Lowest wille likewise bleed. Even the vermin, that all shunne and disdaine
.
” When the Civil War was over, Cromwell’s Parliamentarians sentenced Charles the First to death by decapitation. He was executed on Whitehall, in front of a building called the Banqueting House.
‘An hour and a half after the Azrael incident, a beat cop found about a thousand rats on the steps of the Banqueting House – all with their heads cut off. Take the king to be the “Highest”, and the vermin bled right where he bled. They even died in the same way.’
She met Tillman’s gaze, then Rush’s, and shrugged. ‘And “Ister” is the River Danube. It ran red a couple of hours after the rats were found – not with blood, with aniline dye, but then the prophecy only says “
as
with blood”.
‘And so it goes on. I didn’t manage to match all of them up, but as near as I can tell, we’re three-quarters of the way through the book. Toller’s prophecies are all coming to pass, one by one, in order.’