‘I hear,’ he grunted, ‘that you wish to confess.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m willing to admit all charges if you release my friends. They’re innocent. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Ah.’ The captain laid down the disc with a grimace. ‘All charges, you say?’
‘Yes. As you know, I defaulted on my indenture and ran away to a Nurian Freehold. I came back here in the hopes of rescuing the Kion. But I must stress that I worked alone, without the approval of the Freehold judges. They didn’t break the terms of their treaty: this was all my idea. I wouldn’t listen when they tried to dissuade me. I needed help here in the city, so I recruited my schoolmate, Bolas. He only agreed to assist me because of our past friendship. Masha just happened to be in the room — that’s God’s green truth.’
‘Ah,’ said the captain, again. ‘Funny thing, the truth. Has this way of coming out, doesn’t it?’
He nodded to the sergeant, who pushed a sheet of paper over the desk toward Tymon.
‘This is an indicator of your good faith,’ he continued. ‘Sign the declaration. It says you admit to all counts made against you by the seminary and will pay the price for your crimes. Your friends will then go free. We’ll prepare a full statement later.’
Tymon barely glanced at the wording of the document. He took the reed pen on offer from the sergeant without hesitation, dipped the nib in a pot of ink and scrawled his name across the bottom.
‘Why later?’ he asked, perplexed. ‘I can write the confession now.’
‘Your presence is requested elsewhere.’ The captain gave a cold smile, retrieving the signed sheet. ‘Word from the Saint himself. He thinks you ought to attend the heretic’s execution, to remind you of the error of your ways.’
It was not quite the same, Samiha ruminated, as she waited in the room under the bells. She had Seen it all of course, heard those voices chanting on the quays, the tramp of the guards’ feet on the stairwell echoing through her dreams. The general sequence of events leading up to the execution was no surprise to her. But there were other, apparently insignificant discrepancies. The desk was empty of papers, her work done. The candle had not been relit since it was blown out the night before. She sat staring up at the slivers of light in the rope apertures. It was all different. Something small but infinitely important had changed.
‘Tymon,’ she whispered to the empty room.
Samiha rose from the table and walked to a corner, picking up a small bundle of grey cloth lying there. She removed the clean white shift she was wearing, let it puddle on the floor at her feet and lie unheeded. Slowly, with great reverence, she unfolded the ugly grey pilgrim’s tunic and slipped it over her head. The soldiers’ feet mounted the ladder leading to the trapdoor, making the floorboards tremble. Samiha’s heartbeat quickened in time with their tread.
The wind was raw on the air-harbour quays. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun had reached its zenith, though that made little difference to the folk gathered on the boardwalk, in the freezing gale. They had stood there almost half an hour, awaiting the arrival of the prisoner and the Saint. They were bored and cold, and ready to eat lunch. Yet still the raised podium reserved for Fallow remained empty, the priests drifting along the boardwalk to congregate at its foot. It was of some comfort to the citizens of Argos to see that their august masters suffered the cold alongside them that day.
The dock singled out for the execution stood some fifty yards from the podium, jutting out in lonely isolation over the West Chasm. Access to it had been sealed off by soldiers and the vessels normally moored there moved to different locations. There was no sign of the prison cart bringing the heretic to her doom. The other vehicle parked by the gates, the one containing the young man, held no more than a passing interest for the people on the quays. Over the course of the morning the urchins of the city had warmed their chapped fingers by pelting its occupant with a few rotten vegetables. But they soon grew tired of the pastime, and did not waste their precious ammunition on the nameless stranger sitting despondently in a corner. His lack of importance in the grand scheme of things was evident. They kept their blackened tubers and shrivelled fruit pressed to their chests like lover’s bouquets, ready to throw at the heretic queen.
Tymon wiped frogapple peel off his face as he crouched in the cage. He had been left by the gates for almost three hours, and was stiff with cold under the rough blanket the guards had thrown at him. His ankle throbbed dully. It occurred to him, with bitter amusement, that in all his encounters with this type of vehicle, so omnipresent in his home town, he had never imagined himself on the inside. It was oddly fitting that he should end up in the exact spot where he had glimpsed the Sending of Ash so long ago.
The city gates were thrown wide on this occasion to expose the vault beyond: he watched as the urchins who had mocked him congregated impatiently by the mouth of the tunnel, in anticipation of the prisoner’s arrival. The paupers of Argos had little to look forward to but the misery of others. Snow began to fall, spattering the boardwalk; the white flakes floated by to settle on the children’s pinched faces. They shrieked to each other in glee as footsteps echoed in the vault. To their disappointment, it was only another group of Fathers who emerged from the darkness. But the two figures bringing up the rear of the party were well known to Tymon.
Father Lace strode out of the gates, accompanied by Wick. The Envoy did not deign to notice the young man sitting in the cart barely twenty feet from him. But Wick evidently wished to savour his moment of victory. He whispered a request in his master’s ear, glancing in Tymon’s direction. Lace seemed disinclined to listen, and only reluctantly stopped when the acolyte plucked at his elbow. He answered in a normal voice, perfectly audible to Tymon.
‘That course may not be in your best interests, acolyte.’
‘Please, sir.’ Wick’s tone was eager, pleading. ‘He should be taught a lesson. He gets away with it every time. It isn’t fair.’
Lace shrugged. ‘Do as you wish. But you’re on your own.’ With that, he turned and walked briskly after the other Fathers toward the podium.
‘Well, here we are again,’ remarked Wick, strolling up to Tymon in his cage. He was wrapped in a warm winter cloak, smirking beneath his fur-lined hood. ‘Welcome home. I trust you found the reception to your liking. We reap what we sow!’
‘Why are you here, Wick?’ sighed Tymon. ‘Haven’t you had enough of gloating over me?’
Wick’s mouth twitched. He was sweating beneath the hood and seemed excited, filled with a strange, febrile energy. He stretched out his neck to whisper savagely through the bars of the cage.
‘I haven’t even begun gloating over you, Ty,’ he spat. ‘I’ve looked forward to this moment ever since you tricked me into signing that treaty, and abandoned me in the wilds of the Eastern Canopy. I can’t wait to see your face when your heretic sweetheart gets dumped into the Void. It’s going to make my day.’
‘I’m glad someone’s happy,’ observed Tymon. ‘And I didn’t abandon you, Wick. I asked specifically for Admiral Greenly to pick you up. I see that you’re on your own today, though. Where’s our friend, Jedda?’
‘Jedda?’ His former schoolfellow was taken aback a moment, licking his lips nervously before collecting himself. ‘You mean Jed? What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing. I just wondered. I saw the two of you together at the temple.’
Though he spoke without rancour, his answer seemed to infuriate Wick.
‘It’s not your place to wonder about things, traitor,’ he snarled. ‘You’re going to watch your whore-queen die. Then you’re going to be sent off to a plantation where you’ll be a slave for the rest of your life. No more strutting about like you’re better than everyone else. Does that suit you?’
The people standing close by glanced at Wick in surprise as he choked up his bile. Tymon stared at his old schoolmate, amazed at the fury in his expression, the sheer vindictiveness in his tone. Wick’s features were consumed wi
th anger — he fairly shook with it. It struck Tymon that his companion looked ill, as if he were in the grip of a delirium.
‘Why do you think I’ve been strutting about?’ he asked the acolyte, genuinely mystified by the accusation.
But Wick simply turned on his heel with a flick of his fur-lined cloak and stalked off. The snow had collected in a white film on the boardwalk: his passage left dark marks, quickly erased. He hurried to join the huddle of green-robed figures by the podium. Tymon saw that almost all his former tutors were present in that gathering. He recognised the eternally sour Rede, as well as Mossing, cocooned from head to foot in a furred mantle. The erstwhile members of the Council were there in the front row, the oldest and most senile ensconced in chairs and fortified with blankets against the weather. He identified the brooding silhouette of Lace, hovering in the background like a cloud.
The Envoy appeared as eager to avoid him now as he had been ready to confront him in the Veil, thought Tymon grimly. Perhaps it was because he sensed that an Oracle’s apprentice would no longer be swayed by his lies. The young man’s blood boiled as he remembered the cowardly attack on Pallas. He had little doubt that Lace was responsible for what had happened to his friend: what mere acolyte would have the power to tamper with a man’s memory? The Envoy might have been a ‘shadow', as the Oracle had called him, living off the energy of others, but he still wreaked real harm in the world.
Tymon had neither seen Pallas, nor spotted a single member of Jocaste’s troupe that morning on the air-harbour. He would have dearly loved to ask the Jays whether they had had word of the scout, or found the precious bundle hidden under the bleachers. But it seemed that he was destined to go without good news of any kind. Despite his stoic acceptance of his own fate and his willingness to compensate for the trouble he had caused Bolas and Masha, he found the Envoy’s victory galling. He wondered if the retrieval of Samiha’s papers was worth the pain and trouble of the past few days. His efforts to help the Kion seemed paltry now, mere froth and fume in the relentless march of events. Lace had always been one step ahead. How could Samiha’s execution be ordained by the Sap, as it should be, and yet play so neatly into his enemy’s hands?
Unless, he thought wearily, shivering on the floor of the cart under his threadbare blanket — unless there was still something in all this that he had not Seen, and that the Envoy had missed, too. Something that would happen after the execution, a consequence or corollary that justified everything. He had never finished Reading the Kion, he remembered belatedly. He had torn himself loose during that last session with the Oracle, fallen into the Veil because he could not bear to see Samiha die. There is no triumph without loss, no power without weakness. The words glimpsed in the sheaf of papers returned to him unbidden.
A jarring sound broke through his musings, and he peered up through the swirling snow at the far-off spike of the bell-tower with an involuntary shudder. For the first time in many days, the seminary bells were tolling. They clanged out from the temple buttress, an infinitely louder and more irritating version of the witnesses’ gongs. He bowed his shoulders and plugged his ears in the prison cart. After what seemed an eternity, the tumult stopped. The pause that followed was filled with the thud of marching feet. The heralds’ horns gave a shrill blast and the Saint emerged from the gate-tunnel, travelling in a covered litter carried by his personal guard.
A hand-held litter was not a mode of transport common in the Central Canopy. Argosians had been used to associating such frippery with the defunct Empire of Nur; it had been a point of honour in the old days for the Fathers to walk among the people, affirming brotherhood with all. Such concerns evidently no longer moved the Saint. There was an awkward gape, a frozen moment of astonishment before a dutiful cheer rose up from the crowd. The voices grew louder as the litter halted by the podium and Fallow emerged, assisted onto the platform by Mossing. The crowd recovered form by the time the heretic’s cart rolled through the gate in the wake of the All-Father, and people surged forward, finally able to rain their insults and their rotten vegetables on a satisfactory target. Tymon stood up in his own vehicle, wincing at the pain in his ankle, and peered through the bars to catch sight of Samiha. She swept by, a small grey silhouette in her cage. Grey? he thought in confusion. In his visions she had always worn white.
Father Fallow wrapped his ermine cloak tightly about him as he gazed down in distaste at the woman standing on the quay. The heretic waited patiently outside the cart, flanked by two guards with long pikes. her wrists tied with rope. If she felt the cold in her thin tunic she was determined not to show it. She had refused the regulatory prisoner’s garb of white shillee’s wool, insisting instead on these ugly pilgrim rags. She might as well have asked for a crimson cloak, too, and turned her punishment into a Sacrifice. It had caused a delay in the proceedings. In the end it was Fallow himself who had waived the rule and granted this peculiar last request. He could not care less what the troublesome heretic wore to her execution. He simply wanted her dead.
And he was about to have his wish granted. The crowd by the podium had fallen silent in anticipation of his last words to the Nurian queen. He was supposed to say something important for their benefit, which would cement his own advantage. He had prepared an entire speech. But his teeth were chattering, and the wind threatened to whip his hat off. He clapped his hand impatiently on the brim.
‘Do you repent before paying the final price? Will you at least save your soul?’ he snapped, scowling down at her.
‘I am content with the will of the Sap,’ she answered.
Fallow resisted the urge to roll his eyes at this statement. ‘Then prepare to sue for God’s grace in the Void,’ he declared. ‘For nothing else can avail you.’
He waved the soldiers on. It was an opportunity lost, perhaps, but the wind now carried blinding flurries of snow and snatched the words from his mouth. He retreated from the podium to the shelter of his litter, watching from behind thick curtains as the heretic was marched past the booing crowd and onto the execution dock.
She had Seen it all before, but now she felt it. She felt the snow crunching beneath her thin shoes as she walked along the planks. She felt the cold flakes brush against her face, and the sting of the wind through the thin tunic. She felt the blood coursing in her veins and the pulse of each artery. Her limbs trembled slightly as she walked, because at the end of those planks over the edge waited the vast unknown. It waited for her, and for all those present on the quays. It would swallow each and every one of them at last, though they would rather not admit it. She stumbled on.
Tymon fixed his eyes on the Kion’s slight form through the rapidly descending flakes, her pilgrim’s garb a soft grey brush-stroke against the snow. The chants of the spectators had grown muffled on the quays. He pressed up against the bars of his cage, not knowing whether it boded well or ill that the execution did not quite resemble the familiar scene of the Reading. He only knew that precious moments were slipping by, irreplaceable, irretrievable. He would have given his soul at that instant just to hold Samiha in his arms. The need was visceral, banishing all other considerations. He no longer cared if the Envoy attacked him. He no longer worried that he might be driven mad or become a danger to his friends. Nothing but Samiha mattered.
‘In weakness find strength,’ he whispered, through the bars.
He had barely completed the phrase before he found himself standing on the dock, a shimmering, insubstantial Sending. The pain in his ankle had vanished and the world was once again filled with the pulsing heat of the Sap. Red and purple flames leapt up from the crowd on the quays, dancing over the Kion and her guards. Samiha seemed to burn brighter than any, a white-hot figure on the planks. Tongues of colour darted high into the sky above the city. The Sap collected in a bright cloud over the bell-tower, just as he had seen it collect above the Doctor’s orah-chair, during his last Reading with the Focals.
In this instance, however, he did not have the luxury of worrying about the behav
iour of the Sap. Unlike his last Sending, time did not slow down. Samiha walked on ahead of him unchecked; he hurried after her. He felt he must catch up with her before she reached the end of the dock. He knew that she could not see or hear him in his current form, but was consumed by the need to look into her face one last time.
He did not have the chance. Before he could reach the Kion, a knotty shape, a barking, snarling thing on all fours, bounded onto the dock between them.
‘You think you can just do whatever you want, don’t you?’ it growled, as it slithered to a halt on the snowy planks.
The creature was an aping replica of the Beast-that-was-Lace, though it still possessed a head. There was no mistaking its distorted but familiar features. Tymon stared in horror at the human being rearing up before him on grotesque hind legs. ‘It’s time you were put out of your misery,’ sneered Wick.
Tymon darted a brief glance toward the podium. His former schoolmate’s body was plainly to be seen, kneeling motionless on the quay by the foot of the Saint’s platform. He had emerged on the dock in his trance-form. If Lace was aware of them there, if he Saw them from his post behind the other Fathers, he made no move. His last warning to Wick rang in Tymon’s memory. The acolyte was not acting on his master’s advice.
‘Don’t try and stop me,’ he blurted to Wick, grasping the danger even as his adversary closed on him. ‘If you do, you’ll die.’
For he had recognised the scene playing out between them, belatedly identified the Oracle’s prophecy. Too late: he was now perilously close to engaging in the fateful fight he had anticipated with the Focals. He must have gone wrong after all, he thought, panicking, run afoul of the Sap just as the Oracle had predicted. He had not realised that the events she foretold could take place in a trance. He backed away from his opponent.
‘Don’t do it!’ he cried. ‘I’ve Seen this future: you won’t survive!’
‘Oh, spare me your concern,’ snapped the beast-that-was-Wick.
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