Jon Grimwood - redRobe

When the woman finally came downstairs Axl got a chance to swear at her to her face, but he might have been as mute as Clone for all the response his insults got. When she spoke it was to dismiss him.

‘I don’t know who you are,’ Kate’s voice was glacial, colder even than her face. ‘But you’re a coward and a liar. I don’t believe you were ever one of us. To abuse Juanita like that, a child…’

‘Her name’s Mai,’ said Axl hotly, ‘and the kid’s a whore.’ He wanted to add, and what’s with this us? But it was already too late.

Kate gave Clone an abrupt nod and the huge man bundled Axl outside into the ever present, early-evening drizzle that was such a feature of Cocheforet’s microclimate. It took the Clone and Axl forty minutes to reach the inn and the Clone didn’t take his knife point out of Axl’s back the whole way.

And now the drizzle was gone, the air was thinner, Cocheforet was a morning’s ride behind him and Axl still wasn’t sure which cut deepest, being accused of abusing a kid or being told he was a coward and liar. And he had no intention of stopping to wonder why both insults hurt so badly.

Somewhere ahead was the carrion ground. Which, given the Clone’s permanent snarl as he rode beside Axl, wasn’t a reassuring thought. The man’s wide face was set hard like concrete and Axl had a nasty feeling that if Clone got his way, he’d be joining those other bodies. And the crude-looking revolver that Tukten, the Tibetan boy from the Inn, carried in one hand was the weapon for the job.

The sullen Tibetan brat did nothing but look at the revolver and whistle tunelessly. That Tukten distrusted Clone was obvious, but the boy made it clear he liked Axl even less. And from the way Tukten stared around him, nervously scanning the sky or peering ahead of him across the high plateau it was equally obvious the boy would rather be anywhere than where he was and doing anything except whatever it was he was doing.

But it wasn’t until the three riders were far enough onto the bleak plateau for the swirling black specks in the grey sky ahead to be identifiable as vultures that Axl worked out that Tukten was terrified of the scavenging ground. Which explained all that tuneless whistling.

A couple of hours was what it took Axl to reach that conclusion. A couple of hours during which his bladder grew tight as a drum, cold wind leached warmth from his face and the air got thinner and the vegetation ever more sparse, if that was possible. But still they rode a narrow track, in silence except for Axl’s abortive attempts to talk to the boy. It would have been easier to empathise with a stone.

Empathising with the Clone wasn’t an option. Clones didn’t do empathy any more than they acknowledged blood ties. How could they, without getting landed with sending 3000 birthday vid-mails every month? And if you were a clone of a clone, what was the relationship to whoever held the ur-genetic template? Axl didn’t know ... He made a point of not watching the daytime newsfeeds.

You’re wandering, Axl told himself. No surprise really. Too much chang maybe or the after-effects of poppy potion, those were the options that looped through Axl’s mind. That it was lack of oxygen meeting exhaustion and exertion didn’t occur to him. And as for last night’s vision. That was seriously somewhere Axl wasn’t allowing himself to go.

His own mare was struggling to draw breath. Yet the other two rode animals unaffected by the thin air. Small dirt-grey ponies with thick coconut-matting coats that stank of oil. He’d half expected them to be riding yaks.

‘I need to stop,’ Axl told Clone who said nothing, just wrapped his huge hand tighter round the bridle of Axl’s mare and yanked so hard the animal almost stumbled.

‘Can’t you do something,’ Axl asked Tukten. ‘I have to stop.’

Axl couldn’t manage the boy’s trick of standing in the saddle, unbuttoning and pissing against his horse’s neck so steam sprang from its skin, but pissing wasn’t the only reason he wanted to dismount. The fact was Axl couldn’t think properly with the mare’s spine banging into his arse with every step. And Axl needed to think and quick, if only because what he was refusing to think about kept pushing itself to the surface.

Mostly, what he needed to get his head round was what Kate, Clone and Louis had been looking for. And not just them. Ketzia, too, she’d been looking. He’d stumbled down the valley track from Escondido into Cocheforet, passing under dark tangles of rhododendron grown so thick that there was only just room for one person to pass at a time and the path was black as night. The Clone was behind him as always. And when the man’s eyes weren’t boring into the back of Axl’s neck they were scanning the gravel as if the key to everything might just be lying there.

And then there was the ‘vision’. Axl didn’t believe in real visions, his own or those seen by others. Schizophrenia, B-alvarius specials, fucked-up levels of serotonin, neural flares that flamed the fern-like structure of the cerebellum with dazzling corona, faulty REM. mechanisms that overlaid real life with narcoleptic fantasies. Those he believed in. And then there were the mechanical kind…

Delivered by Clone to the inn, Axl had slammed his way through the front door, pushed past the bearded landlord and stamped up the rickety steps to his attic room, slamming the door behind him so hard that plaster flaked off the damp chimney breast.

It didn’t make him feel any better.

The shutter was open, the fire was out and his mattress was soaked with drizzle that had come in through the unprotected window. A maggot-white lump of dried yak cheese stood crusted on a plate by the bed, his uneaten supper from days before. The bread that went with it was already spored green with mould.

Axl wouldn’t miss Cocheforet but life wasn’t as simple as just leaving. The Cardinal would have spies on Samsara. It wouldn’t be that long before the hip and run of rumour told him Axl had failed. Not long enough, anyway. Not nearly long enough…

Aware just how close he was to screwing up big-time, Axl stood in his attic room and kicked the two main problems round in his head. No hint that Kate knew anything about the missing money or was planning to set up some little papal court in exile. Nothing worthwhile to offer His Excellency as a counterweight to failure.

Added to which, he was hungry, cold and in deep shit with the villagers. Not a good place to be. And the only problem he could deal with immediately was hunger. Axl dug into his pocket for his knife, planning to scrape mould from the bread. Only its blade caught on Mai’s soulcatcher, scratching one of the memory beads.

And Axl found salvation.

The shock threw him across the room so hard Axl slammed sideways into the far wall, almost dislocating his shoulder. Invisible bands bound his chest so tight he couldn't draw breath and his heart froze with shock. He was dropped into darkness so cold that every muscle locked solid.

The woman had skin that shone white and her head was thrown right back, nostrils flared wide, her mouth open in prayer or ecstasy. Blank eyes turned blindly to some gilt heaven. She was…

St Teresa d’Avila.

A statue which didn’t really rate approval, no matter that it was famous.

And then the marble figure and the knowledge were gone.

He stood in a city at the top of a flight of stone steps and the air was heavy with incense and honeysuckle. And the world was briefly in colour again.

‘Michaelangelo was so kitsch,’ said the voice in his head. ‘Or maybe it was Paul Three.’

Behind was the empty floor of del Campidaglio, a circular Renaissance piazza paved in marble. A white wolf in a gold cage stood to the left, the symbol of Rome, shaded by a myrtle bush. And below the steps, stretching so far the eyes he was looking through couldn’t focus on the far edge, a silent crowd waited expectantly. The little silver insect hovering near his mouth wasn’t an insect, Axl realised. It was a microphone.