Текст книги "The Bone Clocks"

Автор книги: David Mitchell

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 40 страниц)

“Sure. Ed always said I’ve got this nosy streak. Which was brassnecked of Mr. Journalist, mind you.” She takes a coin from her purse. “Heads or tails?”

“Throw me a heads.”

She flips the coin. “Tails. Once I’d’ve known that.” Holly lines up her shot and breaks. The cue grazes the pack, bounces off the bottom cushion, and floats back up to the top.

“I’m guessing that wasn’t beginner’s luck.”

“Brendan, Jacko, and me played at the Captain Marlow, on Sundays when the pub was shut. Guess who usually won?”

I copy Holly’s shot, but play it less well. “He’d been playing since the 1750s, remember. More recently, too. Xi Lo and I played daily on this very table, for most of 1969.”

“Seriously? On this very table?”

“It’s been reupholstered twice since, but yes.”

Holly runs her thumb along the cushion. “What did Xi Lo look like?”

“Shortish, early fifties in 1969, bearded, Jewish, as it happened. He set up comparative anthropology at NYU. There are photos in the archives, if you’d like to see him.”

She considers the offer. “Another time, when we’re not off on a suicide mission. Xi Lo was male back then, too?”

“Yes. Sojourners often have a gender they’re most at home in. Esther prefers being female. We Returnees alternate gender from one resurrection to the next, whether we like it or not.”

“That doesn’t screw your head up?”

“It’s odd for the first few lives, but you get used it.”

Holly hits the cue ball off the side and bottom cushions, and into the loosened pack. “You say things like that as if it’s so … normal.”

“Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted. To your ancestor in 1024, your life in 2024 would seem equally improbable, mystifying, full of marvels.”

“Yeah, but … it’s not quite the same. For that ancestor and me, when we die, we die. For you … What’s it like, Marinus?”

“Atemporality?” I rub blue chalk dust onto the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb. “We’re old, even when young. We’re usually leaving, or being left behind. We’re wary of ties. Until 1821, when Xi Lo and Holokai found me, my loneliness was indescribable yet had to be endured. Even now, what I’d call the ‘ennui of eternity,’ if you will, can be debilitating. But being a doctor, and an horologist, gives my metalife a purpose.”

Holly readjusts her moss-green head-wrap, half removing it, to reveal a scalp of trimmed tufty down. She hasn’t done this in my presence before, and I’m touched. “Last question: Why do Atemporals exist? I mean, did Returnees and Sojourners evolve this way, like the great apes or whales? Or were you … ‘made’? Was it something that happened to you, in your first life?”

“Not even Xi Lo has an answer to that. Not even Esther knows.” I hit the orange 5 ball into the bottom left. “I’m spots, you’re stripes.”

AT TEN-FIFTY, HOLLY pots the black to beat me by a single ball. “I’ll give you a rematch later,” she says, picking up her daypack. We walk upstairs to the gallery, where the others are assembled. Фshima lowers the blinds. Holly goes into the kitchen for a glass of tap water —Only tap water, I subcall after her. Don’t touch the bottled water. It could have been tampered with, I subwarn her—and she returns a minute later, strapping on a small daypack, as if we’re going for a short hike in the woods. I lack the heart to ask her what she’s packed—a flask of tea, a cardigan, a bar of Kendal mint cake for energy? This just isn’t that sort of expedition. We look at the paintings. What’s left to say? We discussed strategy to the saturation point in Unalaq’s library; sharing our fears at this point is unhelpful, and we don’t want to fill the last moments with small talk. Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Timecalls me over. Xi Lo told me he regretted never switching it for the copy in London, but he couldn’t face all the Acts of Suasion, skulduggery, and subterfuge needed to right the wrong. Fifty years later I stand there with the same regret. For Atemporals, our tomorrows feel like a limitless resource. Now I’ve none left.

“The Aperture,” Unalaq says. “I feel it.”

Six of us look around for the unzipping line …

“There,” says Arkady, “by the Georgia O’Keeffe.”

A vertical black slit draws itself in front of the horizontal yellows and pinks of the New Mexico dawn. A hand appears, the line widens to a slash, and Elijah D’Arnoq emerges. Softly, Holly mangles a swear word and says, “Where did hecome from?”and Arkady mutters, “Where we’re going.”

Elijah D’Arnoq needs a shave and his wiry hair looks unkempt. Yes, the strain of being a traitor ought to show. “You’re punctual.”

“Horologists have no excuse for being late,” replies Arkady.

D’Arnoq recognizes Holly. “Ms. Sykes. I’m glad you were rescued the other day. Constantin regards you as unfinished business.”

Holly can’t yet speak to the man who steps out of thin air.

“Ms. Sykes will join our demolition party,” I tell D’Arnoq. “Unalaq will channel her psychosoteric voltage into the cloaking operation.”

Elijah D’Arnoq looks dubious, and I wonder if this might jeopardize the Second Mission. “I can’t guarantee her safety.”

“I thought you’d covered all angles?” says Arkady.

“War has no guarantees. You all know that.”

“And Mr. Dastaani here,” I indicate Sadaqat, “will also be joining us. I presume you are familiar with our warden at 119A?”

“Everybody spies,” says D’Arnoq. “What’s Mr. Dastaani’s role?”

“To park his ass,” says Фshima, “halfway up the Way of Stones and unleash a force-ten psychoferno if anyone wanders up after us. Temporal, Atemporal—anyone in the conduit will be ash.”

D’Arnoq frowns. “Is a psychoferno a Deep Stream invocation?”

“No,” says Фshima. “It’s my word for what happens if the bomb made of N9D—the famous Israeli-made nano-explosive—currently in Mr. Dastaani’s backpack goes off inside the Way of Stones.”

“It’s insurance against an attack from the rear,” I say, “while we’re taking apart the Chapel.”

“A smart precaution,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, looking impressed. “Though I pray to God you don’t have to use it.”

“How do you feel?” Фshima asks D’Arnoq. “Defection’s a big step.”

The 128-year-old Carnivore regards the eight-centuries-old Фshima with defiance. “I’ve been party to decades of indiscriminate evil, Mr. Фshima. But today I’ll also be party to stopping it.”

“But without your Black Wine,” Фshima reminds him, “you’ll age, you’ll fade away, you’ll die in a care home.”

“Not if Pfenninger or Constantin stop us before we’ve smashed the Chapel of the Dusk, I won’t. And so. With no further ado?”

ONE BY ONE, we slip through the dark Aperture onto the round floor of rock ten paces across. The unflickering, paper-white Candle of the Dial stands as tall as a child. I’d forgotten the dual claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the smell of locked spaces, and the thin air. Residual color and light from the gallery filters in through the Aperture, held open like a drape by D’Arnoq now for Holly, now for Sadaqat, with his explosive backpack. Sadaqat’s face is a study of nervous awe, while Фshima, the last to enter, is a study of sulky nonchalance. “This isn’t the Chapel, is it?” Holly mutters. “And why’s my voice so quiet?”

“This is the Dial of the Way of Stones,” I reply. “The first of the many steps that climb up to the Chapel. The edges of the Dial absorb light and sound, so raise your voice a little to compensate.”

“There’s no color,” observes Holly. “Or is it me?”

“The Candle’s monochrome,” I answer. “It’s been burning for eight centuries.” Behind us, Elijah D’Arnoq is sealing the Aperture. I catch a brief glimpse of Bronzino’s Venus, lightly holding her golden apple, before our way back is gone. No dungeon was ever so secure. Only Esther or a follower of the Shaded Way can unseal the Aperture and get us home. I suffer a jabbing flashback to my last time on the Dial, incorporeally, my and Esther’s souls unraveling, Joseph Rhоmes hard on her heels and gaining. Esther, nestled and hidden in Фshima’s head, is no doubt remembering too.

“There are letters cut into the stone,” Holly remarks.

“The Cathar alphabet,” I tell her. “No one can read it now, not even heresiologists. The alphabet is descended from Oc, a language older even than Basque.”

“Pfenninger told me,” says D’Arnoq, “the letters are a prayer to God, requesting His help to rebuild Jacob’s Ladder. That’s what the Blind Cathar believed he was building, apparently. Don’t touch the walls. Whatever it’s made of, it and atomic matter”—he produces a coin from his pocket—“do not get on.” He tosses the coin out of the Dial’s perimeter. It vanishes in a blink of phosphorescence. “Don’t lose your footing on the Way of Stones.”

“Which is where?” asks Фshima.

“It’s cloaked,” D’Arnoq shuts his eyes and opens his chakra-eye, “and moving, to keep out the riffraff. One moment.” He takes short, slow steps to the edge of the Dial, symboling in the staccato manner of the Shaded Way and mumbling an Act of Reveal. Keeping his back to the Candle, he shuffles sideways around the perimeter. “Got it.” Off the edge of the Dial and about one foot higher, a stone slab appears, as long and wide as a table. A second slab leads up from the first, and a third, and a fourth, higher into the blackness.

“Marinus,” Holly asks in my ear, “is this technology? Or …”

I know the missing word. “If you’d cured Henry the Seventh’s TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour’s access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you’re not yet used to.”

“ Ifthe professor of semantics wouldn’t object,” says Фshima, “perhaps she’d finish her seminar later?”

ELIJAH D’ARNOQ GOES first, I follow, then Holly, Arkady, Unalaq, and Sadaqat, with ten kilos of N9D in his bag, and last Фshima as our rear guard. On the fifth or sixth stone I look back over my companions’ heads, but the Dial is already out of view. Even the Way of Stones’ irregularity is irregular. There are stretches where the steps twist upward, sharp and steep, a stairway in a spire. There are stretches where long slabs of stone form a gently climbing road. There are even places where the climber must jump across from slab to slab, like stepping stones in a river. Better to ignore thoughts of slipping. Soon I work up a sweat. Visibility is poor, akin to climbing a narrow mountain track at night, in grainy fog. The stones glow with a pale light, like that of the Candle of the Dial, but only as we approach, creating an illusion that the Way is building itself as we make our ascent. The darkness all around is oppressive, and seems to conjure up voices from my metalife. I hear my birth father, explaining in vernacular late Latin how to feed a dormouse to a kestrel. Now it’s Sholeetsa, an herbalist of the Duwamish tribe, scolding me for overboiling a root. Now the corvine cackle of Arie Grote, a warehouseman on Dejima. Their bodies were compost long ago, their souls passed to the Last Sea. We Horologists agreed not to subspeak, for fear of being overheard, but I wonder if the others also hear voices from their past lives. I don’t ask in case I distract them from where they’re putting their feet. Who falls off the Way of Stones falls into nothing.

·   ·   ·

WE ARRIVE AT the only triangular slab on the whole climb. It is concave in its center and large enough for all six of us to stand on. “Welcome to the Halfway Station,” says D’Arnoq, and I recall Immaculйe Constantin naming it in the same way to Jacko on the First Mission. “I think we’ve found our lookout point for you, Sadaqat,” says Фshima. “The line of sight looking down is as good it gets. Lie in this hollow, here in the middle, and you’ll see any visitors before they see you.” Sadaqat nods, looks at me and I nod back. “Very good, Mr. Фshima.” With due diligence, Sadaqat sits down and takes from his backpack a heavily adapted iCube and a thin metallic cylinder. He places the iCube towards the “downhill” corner of the slab.

“Is that the firebomb?” D’Arnoq asks with professional curiosity.

“It’s a Deep Stream cloak generator,” Sadaqat flips open the cuboid’s air-screen and scrolls through options, “and a soul alarm. This noise sounds”—a wild-goose signal honks repeatedly—“when it detects an unidentified soul, such as yours, Mr. D’Arnoq …” Sadaqat’s fingers sidescroll and the air-screen throbs as D’Arnoq’s brain signature is stored. “Now it will know friend from foe.”

“A wise gadget,” says D’Arnoq, “and a clever one.”

“The generator prevents a psychosoteric from using an Act of Suasion to make me deactivate the N9D.” Sadaqat unscrews the top of the metallic cylinder. “And the detector alerts me to the fact that someone has tried—and that it is time to detonate the firebomb, which, of course, is this.” Tripod legs shoot out from the lower end of the cylinder and Sadaqat stands it up. “Ten kilos of N9D have been compressed into this tube—sufficient to turn the Way of Stones into a conduit of flame at five hundred degrees Celsius. If the goose goes ‘honk,’ ” Sadaqat looks at D’Arnoq, “psychoferno.”

“Stay alert,” says Фshima. “We’re depending on you.”

“I have made my oaths, Mr. Фshima. This is what I am for.”

“You have a loyal lieutenant,” D’Arnoq tells me. “Ready to make a … the ultimate sacrifice.”

“I know how lucky we are,” I say to Sadaqat.

“Don’t look so grim, Doctor!” Sadaqat stands and shakes hands with us all. “We’ll see each other soon, my friends. I am sure it is Scripted.” When he reaches me he slaps his heart. “Here!”

WE KEEP CLIMBING, stone after stone after stone, but it’s difficult to track how high or how far we’ve come since the Dial of the Way, or how many minutes have gone by since we left Sadaqat on sentry duty at the Halfway Station. We left our devices and watches at 119A. Time exists here but it isn’t easily measured, even in an Horologist’s mind. My resolve to count the steps has been sidelined by the voices of the long-dead. So I just follow Elijah D’Arnoq’s back, staying as alert as I can until at last we come to a second circular slab of stone, identical in most features to the Dial at the base of the climb. “The Summit, we call this one,” says D’Arnoq, visibly nervous. “We’re here.”

“Isn’t this where we came in?” asks Holly. “The candle, the circle, the stone circle, the engravings …”

“The stone inscription differs,” I say. “Mr. D’Arnoq?”

“Never studied it,” admits the defector. “Pfenninger is big into philology, and Joseph Rhоmes used to be as well, but for most of us, the Chapel’s a … sentient machine that we have a deal with.”

“ ‘Don’t blame me, I’m only the little guy’?” says Arkady.

D’Arnoq looks worn thin. “Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe that iswhat we tell ourselves.” He rubs imaginary dust from his eye. “Okay, now I’ll unseal the Umber Arch—the way in—but first a warning: The Blind Cathar should be safely in stasis, in his icon, in the north corner. You’ll sense him. He shouldn’t sense us. So—”

“ ‘Shouldn’t’?” queries Фshima. “What’s this ‘shouldn’t’?”

“Deicide has its risks,” D’Arnoq scowls, “or it wouldn’t be deicide. If you’re afraid, Фshima, go and join Sadaqat down below. But here are three don’ts to reduce the risk: Be wary of looking into the Blind Cathar’s face on the icon; don’t make any loud noises or sudden movements; don’t perform any acts of Deep Stream psychosoterica, not even subspeech. I can invoke Shaded Way acts without disturbing the Chapel, but the Cathar’ll detect psychosoterica from the far side of the Schism. Your 119A is fitted with alarms, shields, and cloaks; so is our sanctum, and if the Blind Cathar is aware of Horologists in the house before the walls come tumbling down, the day will end badly for all of us. Understood?”

“Understood,” says Arkady. “Dracula can be safely awoken only when the stake’s already in his heart.”

D’Arnoq barely hears as he evokes an Act of Reveal. A modest, trefoiled, man-high portal shimmers into being at the edge of the Summit Stone. The Umber Arch. Through it we see the Chapel, and inwardly I recoil, even as I follow Elijah D’Arnoq forwards. “In we go,” somebody says.

THE CHAPEL OF the Dusk of the Blind Cathar is the body of a living being. One senses it, immediately. Taking the Umber Arch as south, the rhombus-shaped nave of the Chapel is maybe sixty paces along its north-south axis, thirty paces from east to west, and loftier than it is long. Every plane points to, refers to, or mirrors the icon of the Blind Cathar, hanging in the narrow “northern” corner, so one must concentrate hard on not gazing at the icon. Walls, floor, and pyramidal ceiling are all crafted from same milky, flint-gray stone. The Chapel’s sole furnishings are a long oaken table placed along the north-south axis, two benches on either side, and one large picture on each wall. Immaculйe Constantin explained the gnostic paintings to Jacko last time: the Blue Apples of Eden at Noon on the Eighth Day of Creation; the Demon Asmodeus, tricked by Solomon into building the King’s Temple; the true Virgin, suckling a pair of infant Christs; and Saint Thomas standing in a rhombus-shaped chamber identical to the Chapel of the Dusk. Floating below the roof’s apex is a writhing snake wrought in chatoyant stone, in the circular act of consuming its own tail. The Chapel’s blockwork is flawless and fused and creates the illusion that the chamber was hewn from inside a mountain, or that it was crystallized into being. The air here is not fresh or stale or warm or cool, though it carries the tang of bad memories. Holokai died here, and despite what we’ve allowed Holly to hope, I have no proof that Xi Lo didn’t.

“Give me a minute,” murmurs D’Arnoq. “I need to revoke my Act of Immunity, so we can merge our psychovoltage.” He closes his eyes. I walk over to the oblique-angled west corner, where a window offers a view over one mile or a hundred miles of Dunes, up to the High Ridge and the Light of Day. Holly follows me. “See up there?” I tell her. “That’s where we’re from.”

“Then all those little pale lights,” whispers Holly, “crossing the sand, they’re souls?”

“Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time.” We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of Dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. “And that’s where they’re bound.” We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one.

Holly asks, “Is the Last Sea really a sea?”

“I doubt it. It’s just the name we use.”

“What happens to the souls when they get there?”

“You’ll find out, Holly. Maybe I will, one day.” Today?

We return to the center, where D’Arnoq is still inside himself. Фshima points up to the apex of the Chapel, and traces an invisible line down to the north corner where the icon appears to be watching us. I shut my eyes, open my chakra-eye, and scan the ceiling for the crack mentioned by Esther …

It takes a moment, but I find it. There, starting at the apex and curving down to the shadows in the north corner.

Yes, it’s there, but it’s a terribly thin crack on which to gamble five Atemporal metalives and one Temporal life.

“Is it me,” Holly is asking, and I close my chakra-eye and open up my physical eyes, “or does that picture … sort of … reel you in?”

“It’s not you,” replies Elijah D’Arnoq, who is now back with us. We look at the icon. The hermit wears a white cloak, his hood draped about his shoulders to expose his head and a face with blanks instead of eyes. “But don’t stare at him,” D’Arnoq reminds us. On the Way of Stones, sound was muffled so you had to speak twice as loudly. Here in the Chapel, whispers, footsteps, and even the swish of our clothing sound amplified, as if collected by hidden microphones. “Look a way, Ms. Sykes. He may be dreaming at present, but he’s a light sleeper.”

Holly forces herself to look to one side. “It’s those empty eye sockets. They drag your eyeballs into them.”

“This place has a sick mind,” remarks Arkady.

“Then let us put it out of our misery,” says D’Arnoq. “The Act of Anesthesia is done. As per the plan, then: Marinus and Unalaq, you hiatus the icon to ensure he won’t wake while Arkady, Фshima, and I psychoflame the icon with every volt we’ve got.”

We approach the northern corner, where the eyeless figure gleams pale as a shark’s underbelly. “So all you have to do to bring down this place,” Holly asks me, “is trash that painting?”

“Only now, at this point in the cycle,” D’Arnoq answers on my behalf, “while the Blind Cathar’s soul is housed inside the icon. At other times he resides in the fabric of the chapel, and then he would have sensed our intent and melted us like plastic figurines in the flame of a blowtorch. Marinus: Begin.”

If Elijah D’Arnoq is betraying us, he’s keeping up a convincing act until the last minute. “You take the left,” I tell Unalaq, “I’ll take the right.” We stand in front of the Blind Cathar and shut our eyes. Our hands intone in synchronicity. Xi Lo taught Klara Marinus Koskov the Act of Hiatus in Saint Petersburg, and as my Indian self, I taught Unalaq. To strengthen and deepen the act, our lips recite it, silently, from memory, like a pianist’s eye navigating a complex but familiar musical score. I sense the Blind Cathar’s consciousness rise to the icon’s surface, like a swarm of bees. We push it back. We succeed. Partly. I think. “Quickly,” I tell Elijah D’Arnoq. “It’s more a local anesthetic than a deep coma.”

Unalaq and I step aside. D’Arnoq stands before his ex-master, or his current master, I do not know, and holds out his hands at his sides, palms up. To his left and his right, Arkady and Фshima press their palm-chakras against D’Arnoq’s. “Don’t even thinkabout getting off on this,” mumbles Фshima.

Pallid and sweaty, D’Arnoq shuts his eyes, opens his chakra-eye, and channels the ember-red light of the Shaded Way at the throat of the Holy of Holies.

The Blind Cathar is no longer dreaming. He knows he’s being attacked. Like a drugged giant, like my house in Kleinburg in the grip of an Arctic gale, the Chapel strains and struggles. I stagger, I think I blink, and the Blind Cathar’s mouth is twisted into aggression. His chakra begins to dilate, a black spot appearing on his forehead, growing like an ink stain. If it opens fully, we’re in severe trouble. An earthquake is trapped in the Chapel walls, and Elijah D’Arnoq is making a high, inhuman sound. Channeling so much psychovoltage is killing him. His defection must be genuine; this will kill him. I think I blink again and the icon is firelit and smoking and the depicted monk is roaring with agony, as two-dimensional flames burn him alive, his chakra-eye flickering here and not-here, here and not-here, here and …

GONE. SILENCE. THE Blind Cathar’s icon is a charcoal square and Elijah D’Arnoq is heaving, bent over double. “We’ve done it,” he gasps. “We’ve bloody well done it.”

Wordlessly, we Horologists consult with one another …

… and Unalaq confirms it. “He’s still there.” Her words are our death sentence. The Blind Cathar has merely left the icon and fled to the floors, walls, and ceiling. We have been participants in a charade to allow the Anchorites time to stream up the Way of Stones. Their arrival is imminent. D’Arnoq’s defection was indeed a trap, and the Second Mission has become a kamikaze attack. I’d subsend an apology to Inez and Aoife if I could, but their world is out of range. “Holly? Stand behind us, please.”

“Did it work? Is—is—is Jacko going to … appear?”

I’d like to hiatus her now so she won’t die hating me. The Script has failed us. At Blithewood Cemetery I should have turned around, called Wendy Hanger, explained there’d been a mix-up, and gone back to Poughkeepsie station. “I don’t know,” I tell Holly the mother, sister, daughter, widow, writer, friend. “But stand behind us.”

Message from Esther, subreports Фshima. She’s started the Last Act. She’ll need up to a quarter hour.

“We had to try,” Unalaq says. “While there was hope.”

Elijah D’Arnoq is still pretending: “What are you talking about?” He even smiles. “We’ve won! The Blind Cathar’s dead. Without him to maintain the Chapel fabric, where we’re standing will all be Dunes and Dusk within six hours.”

I look at what, in spy-novel terms, is an old-fashioned double agent. I don’t even need scansion to be sure. Elijah D’Arnoq isn’t as skillful a liar as he believes. For part one of the deception, at my house outside Toronto, he had indeed been “turned” into a genuine penitento, but at some point in the last few days, Pfenninger or Constantin turned him back to the Shaded Way.

“May I, Marinus?” asks Фshima. “Please?”

“As if mypermission ever mattered to you. But yes. Hard.”

Фshima fakes a sneeze and suckerkinetics D’Arnoq along the table, clean off the end. He comes to a halt only at the Umber Arch.

Xi Lo did the same to Constantin, I subremark, though he only managed to bowl her about halfway down the table.

“D’Arnoq’s more of a lightweight,” says Фshima. “It’s an obvious play: long, smooth, table; annoying person. Who could resist?”

“I … guess this means he’s not one of us,” says Holly.

“You,” Elijah D’Arnoq picks himself up and is shouting from the far end of the Chapel, “you,” he points, “will smoulderand shrivelin the heat!” Nine men and a woman melt from the air around him.

“GUESTS, GUESTS, GUESTS!” Baptiste Pfenninger claps his hands and smiles. The First Anchorite is a tall man, utterly at ease in his well-toned, well-dressed body. He sports a fastidiously trimmed, silver-tinged beard. “How the old place loves guests, and so many!” I’d forgotten his bass, actorly voice. “One per quarter is the usual quota, so today’s a very special occasion. Our second very special occasion.” All the men are wearing dinner jackets of various cuts and fashions. Pfenninger’s looks Edwardian. “Marinus, Marinus, welcome. Our only repeat visitor in the Chapel of the Dusk’s history, though, of course, last time you’d left your body back on earth. Фshima, you’re looking old, burned, tired, and in need of a resurrection. It won’t occur. Thank you for killing Brzycki, by the by; he was showing signs of vegetarianism. Who else? ‘Unalaq’—do I pronounce it correctly? It sounds awfully like a brand of superglue, however one says it. Arkady, Arkady, you’ve got taller since I last sawed your feet off. Remember the rats? Dictators really were dictators in the days of Salazar’s Lisbon. Seventy-two hours you took to die. I’ll see if I can’t beat it with Inez, eh?” Pfenninger clicks his tongue. “A pity L’Ohkna and Roho can’t be here, but Mr. D’Arnoq,” the First Anchorite turns to his double agent, “netted the fattest fish. Good boy. Oh! Last and least, Holly Sykes, mystic lady author turned Irish egg farmer. We’ve never met. I’m Baptiste Pfenninger, interlocutor of this miraculous”—he gestures at the walls and dome—“engine, and, oh, titles, titles, they drag behind one like Marley’s chains, Jacob’s not Bob’s. Two of our number are even more thrilled than I to see you here at last, Holly …”

Dressed in a black velvet gown and gratuitous webs of diamonds, Immaculйe Constantin steps forwards. “My singular young lady is all grown-up … menopausal, cancerous, and fallen in with quite the wrong sort. So. Do I match my voice?”

Holly looks at this faceless girlhood figure, speechless.

Constantin’s smile fades, though it was never sincere. “Jacko could carry a dialogue. Only he wasn’t really Jacko by then, was he? Tell me, Holly, did you believe Marinus when she claimed your brother just happened to die of natural causes while Xi Lo was hovering nearby, mmm?”

Seconds pass. Holly’s voice is dry. “What are you saying?”

“Oh, my.” Constantin’s smile fades into pity. “You didbelieve them? Forget everything I said, I beg you. Gossip is the devil’s radio, and I shan’t be a broadcaster, but … try to put two and two together before you die. I’ll take care of Aoife, too. Just so, you know, she won’t miss you. In fact, why not go the whole hog and kill Sharon and Brendan and collect the full Sykes family set? As it were.”

Esther’s had about three minutes. The Sadaqat denouement should take five, if Pfenninger’s feeling voluble. I calculate our chances for when the psychoduel begins. The newest three Anchorites shouldn’t cause us too much trouble, but the Chapel is devoid of projectiles to kinetic and eleven against four is still eleven against four. We’ll need to buy Esther about seven minutes. Can we hold them off that long?

“You willregret threatening my family,” Holly’s saying. “I swear. I swear to God.”

“Oh, you swear, do you? To God, no less?” Immaculйe Constantin looks concerned. “But God’s dead. Why don’t we check if I’ll regret my promises with our friends the Radio People, shall we?” She cups her diamonded ear and pretends to listen. “No, Holly, no. You’re misinformed. I’ll regret nothing; you, however, are going to writhewith remorse that you deserted your secret friend Miss Constantin when you were sweet, seven, and psychic. Think about it. Only one Sykes would have died, instead of five Sykeses plus a Brubeck. You’ll positively screamwith regret! Well, Mr. Anyder? Was this brittle-boned widow a screamer in her pliable, pheromonal days?”

Hugo Lamb steps into view. Cleft-chinned, his body preserved at twenty-five years of age, and scornful-eyed. “She was the silent type. Hello, Holly. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. “What did they doto you?”

Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. “They”—he looks about the Chapel—“cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug … a veined, scrawny, dribbling … bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.”

“ ‘Betrays’?” Pfenninger steps up. “A segue, Marinus. Did you know we have a supergrass among your Inner Circle?”

I resist the temptation to say, “Yes, we’ve known for a year now.”